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AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island
August 2000
23 August 2000
A Reminder of Why We Are Here
Tonight that out-of-nowhere floor-walking mood
is upon me and, even though I have spent the evening working on my book and
am tired, I hope it will translate into a long-delayed entry for this journal.
So many ideas have come and gone and time and energy have not permitted me
to give them full expression. The most urgent of these concerns the
nature of all that is psychic--'psi'--specifically, telepathy. Too
much has happened in my life over the past few years to allow me to question
the reality of telepathy any longer. I cannot quote precise statistics,
but I recall seeing survey results in print that indicate that a majority
of people in the US believe in it as well. Certainly sites dedicated
to all things paranormal are prominent on the Internet, which I have long
suspected is conceptually grounded, quite consciously in the case of some
of its proponents, on telepathy, the instantaneous transmission of the means
of nonphysical communication, a form of communication which usually remains
below the threshold of waking awareness. This essay will be insignificant
to those of you who do not believe that telepathy is as real as the telephone.
I hope the rest of you will give the ideas I am about to attempt to express
some serious thought.
I recall reading a paper by a parapsychologist (I
think I can provide the citation on request) stating that the basis of psi
cannot be physical as it violates the second law of thermodynamics in several
ways. How, for instance, can precognition permit a glimpse of events
which have not yet taken place unless it is based on a mode of transmission
that moves at superluminal speed? My dreams are full of precognitive
glimpses. They are usually unimportant, but they are clear enough that
I have to abide by what my experience has shown me about this capacity of
the mind. The implications of this are staggering enough, but what
about those of telepathy? I always believed that telepathy was real
for other people, long before I was convinced of my own receptiveness, but
in all those years I barely gave a second thought to what it had to teach
us about the world we share. The moment I stopped to ask what it could
mean, I was nearly overwhelmed. We are all in telepathic contact with
at least a few other individuals, and they in turn are in contact with others.
The phrase ’six degrees of separation’ is now famous--everyone in the world
is connected to everyone else by no more than six removes of personal acquaintance,
and there are how many billions of us? The Internet was in existence
on the psychic plane long before computers were invented.
People are of more than one mind about things they
only dimly understand. Once I wrote a letter to a hot-headed atheist
friend that I thought he would find absurd, in which I told him of the uncanny,
probably pre-existing connection I felt with my friend through our work.
He astonished me by writing back that he knew exactly what I meant, had experienced
the same feeling, and thought it extended to artists who were no longer living
as well. How do you resolve this with atheism, I wondered, as I was
fairly certain he believed in philosophical materialism, not merely nontheism.
Somehow the subject never came up again, and I never found out what he thought.
Given the reality of telepathy, however, the notion that artists can be connected
and drawing on a common source is only reasonable. Our sharing on a
subtle level must surely create an idea-pool that is available to all, by
way of dreams and moments of inspiration, just as other forms of telepathy
intermittently make it through.
This of course points to the ‘collective unconscious’.
I have always wondered, how it can be called ’unconscious’ if we are aware
of it in any way? And is it aware of us? Is it conscious of itself?
I don’t mean to assert that ‘it’ is a single self-reflective entity, but
does not the existence of a telepathic web and a pool of common psychic resources,
presumably endowed with all the capabilities of our waking consciousness
such as memory and imagination, suggest that some aspect of it might at times
become available for contact with our individual selves as if it were a communicating
intelligence in itself?
And then what happens? Among other things,
poetry, in the ancient magical sense. That communication--all of it,
telepathy between individuals and between the maker of songs and the depth
mind of us all--provides the form and content of my verses. That is
why we are here, in this place of the ancient signs and symbols of song.
That is the foundation of the meeting-place I call AEAEA, and that is why
song is the primary speech of this island which is Everywhere.
Here is tonight's work in verse from my current
project, Alban. The shining orb is a frequently witnessed form
of psi energy; many photographs of such manifestations are available at paranormal
sites on the Web. Alban lives in the base of a tower. In my work,
thunder-and-lightning storms are always indicative of overwhelming passion.
Alban is contending with a feeling of threat at the approach of a power which
will surely outshine that which he is familiar and comfortable with, even
though it also promises to be a great source of Song.
The Turn of My Hand
So pale and much further away than I wanted to
find it, a grey orb of wavery form
hangs before me and smiles from a distance, my haunted
imaginings’ lunar outline. With the storm
of what must, come what may, be my fate’s cold first
drops of fresh rain on my face, that vague orb will be gone
altogether; but now it still shimmers, the birthmark
of slow morning Moons amid cellular dawns
in a rampant display of celestial devising trapped
under tall stories of igneous rock.
The high-polished lens of my mind, brightly shining
with images cast there, receiving a shock
at first flash of each one, issues endless storm
warnings, but no water falls and the orb merely sways
in the air over terrible spaces. Important
decisions inside me turn song; each one plays
very faintly below my safe range of perception.
My course is determined, but damnably far
from my own waking knowledge. My crowning obsession,
were that splendid orb to appear as a star,
I would struggle toward it to find you there waiting,
my own zenith-angel whose light of renown
would precede and attend me at once through the
places of which I am terrified. Something falls down--
something wet--not a tear of my eye on the fingers
that torment this page with black drops of wet ink,
but a clear liquid sign that the moment that lingered
so long in its elsewhere is now on the brink
of becoming the present your love has created and
most overgenerously laid upon
the corruptible skin of a hand that is shaking.
My fever will flare up and you will be gone,
like the ghost-orb storm lightning will banish.
The ether between its curved surface and this round wet mark
is beginning to churn with potentially lethal disease-ridden
anguished projections that arc
high and radiate. So much careering and motionless
hanging at once--I am dreadfully tired
and yet powerfully anxious to see where I’m going.
The Mark on my hand is still wet. I desired
and was given, and then the full force of your haunting
began to deliver its maiden address.
The orb is transferring itself into wanting all
over again, while the same weariness
still collapses my bones. Yet--my hand has
stopped shaking--the mark is still wet--no, another is here,
and another--now thunder reverberates--maybe quite
nearby. Between strokes of lightning appears
the near place they have gained: It
is my lonely tower. The tip of it glows with the heat of their light.
The Underworld yawns, my one safe place to cower--and
yet I believe I will treasure this sight
as a dear recollection some space in the future away,
one in which we are joyful and calm
and impassioned and wise, a long love set to music.
My hand turns to catching this rain in my palm.
***
31 August 2000
The Gift of Obsession
In my case it was hardly an inborn trait; neither
did it develop of its own as a pathological symptom. Obsession was a
quality I greatly admired in the poets I loved, and I set out to cultivate
that blessed state of being in myself. It took a long, long time.
When it finally truly blossomed into a fully productive way of life, it was
because of something I had never quite believed in, something which overwhelmed
me the more completely because of my being off guard due to disbelief--the
enveloping spiritual ecstasy of perfect romantic love.
Yesterday a friend greeted me with the joyful news,
'Guess what! I’m in love!' She isn’t the sort of person who is
given to making such statements--I have never heard her say anything like
it before. She told me a few of the things she and her lover have done
over the past few days: climbing a nearby mountain and staying there until
dawn and rolling on the ground belly-laughing and reading to each other in
the bathtub. I thought of how different it was for me. The power
around me when I (re-)found my lover was so strong that people coming into
my house told me they could feel it on their skin, but the man himself was
far away and a meeting in the flesh was out of the question for innumerable
reasons. Over the years since then I have wondered many times what
my work would be like today if we had been together physically. I strongly
suspect that little enough would have found its way onto paper; we would
have had too many other things to do. Fate has always favored my work
in the long run, as frustrated as I become sometimes with its status in the
present moment. Nay, my friend was not within mountain-climbing distance;
all I could do was place myself before an empty page and cast the passion
into poetic form.
Truly it was a grand passion. My book Aeaea
is the chief record of its characteristic feature--entire nights of long,
long continuous poetic crescendos that might otherwise have disappeared, leaving
no more behind than very vague memory-traces. Consider that memory
is infamously state-specific, and that love is certainly an altered state.
Memories of love are pale compared to its reality because the state itself
becomes inaccessible over time, even in a relationship that has endured.
I knew this while I was going through the early, absolutely astonishing phases
of this love and I gave myself entirely over to allow it to speak for itself
through me and onto paper. The hugeness of its ecstatic charge is why
I say that writing under its power was like a form of trance possession.
The little self that always imprisoned something much greater, the self that
interests me--and confines me--less and less every day, stepped willingly
far aside and let all the strength of my voice and all the knowledge of the
lore of song that had ever come to me, even below the threshold of awareness,
through the work of other poets and through direct inner-world sources, be
used to its full advantage by the love which was song within song.
My friend was similarly affected and spent his time in similar ways.
The opening of this poetic obsession, after so many
years of longing for a state I knew existed but could not locate in the daylight
world or enter within myself while so much of me resided there, made me feel
at last that I was using and being used by song to the complete extent of
my natural will. Nothing before had ever challenged me in anything
like the right way. My official studies had stretched my nerves to
the breaking point and overloaded my memory until I could almost smell the
fibers smoking, and various jobs had tried my patience until the thread of
it had actually snapped, but the ideal challenge is one that demands the
best one has to offer even as it rewards the effort involved in reaching
and giving that essential substance. My love-song obsession did all
of that and more. Sometimes its power was so huge that I felt the outline
of even my most open spiritual self being blown apart and I was frightened.
I told a friend, a very magical woman, that I was continuing to hear verses
flowing through my head for hours after I was too exhausted to continue writing.
She said, 'That’s not good--that’s how Schubert went mad, you know--he could
not turn off the music'. For a while, at peak intensity, it almost
seemed possible that I might be pushed beyond the point at which I would
leave the world shared by other humans forever and never again be able to
communicate in ordinary terms. I was willing to pay even that price,
provided that I could express every inch of the journey to that place in
written words. I would still pay that price, on that condition, today.
I understood, however, that what I was doing was benign and would involve
self-sacrifice in small ways but would never be self-destructive. Why
I felt so confident is hard to express; my innate view of earthly time is
so long that I have always had a conviction that I would require a fairly
long productive lifetime to create the body of work that I have in me, and
I suppose I credited the levels of self that were most intimately involved
in making decisions at this extraordinary time with sharing that same value.
I have always felt schooled and supervised by a level just a little beyond
my normal mental reach, and it has laid such excellent groundwork and taken
such good care of me overall that my faith has never appeared to be misplaced.
Now I speak of that time and those powers in the
past tense as the feeling of strangeness and newness that was part of what
made it so breath-taking has faded away. The power itself is still
with me, however; I exercise it almost daily. In fact, I actually produce
greater amounts of substantial work now than I did then, when it was at its
peak, because I am able to work steadily without exhausting myself and having
to pause to recover--although I am feeling a great surge of adrenaline now,
merely by placing myself within the stream of it again by writing about it.
That too will wear away in time, but for now this writing of prose has the
power of novelty in itself. The newness of overwhelming erotic love,
alas, is very distant from me now. The spiritual love that underlay
all the ecstasy is as strong as ever, but it is very different in character
and it expresses itself in different ways. Did I not begin by saying
that not all poets base their work on romantic love? I never really
believed I would, until it happened, and now that that phase has drawn to
a close, I wonder what is next. Even if my caring for my friend were
not still too strong to permit me to look around for the next object of passion,
I would hardly expect that same bolt of lightning to strike me twice in one
lifetime. An uncontainable force possessed me and lent me the use of
unlimited reservoirs of magical words to express as closely and as faithfully
as possible that which is essentially ineffable. Now another change
is upon me and I do not know where it will lead me, but I trust that it will
take me into places equally astonishing before this lifework is closed.
Debora, my newly-enamored friend, has been going
through a long and rough transition together with me. That her life
has taken this wonderful sudden turn is a sign to me that my change is also
drawing very near. I can feel it; it is like the charge of a late-summer
storm in the air. Where will I be this time next year? My body
could be anywhere. I won’t be disappointed if it is still right here.
My heart and mind will be more firmly than ever in the grip of song, and
that is truly my greatest love.
P.S.: The joke’s on us--I just checked to make sure it was Schubert who went mad. It was--and it happened because he had syphilis, a venereal disease--a rather literal form of love-sickness! The root of 'venereal' is the name of Venus, goddess of erotic love.
P.P.S: After writing this, I received a message from my one online friend. He had a huge, huge power dream last night, a true spiritual opening. His dream spoke through some of the same imagery as the book I am working on at present. That book is about the friend I fell in love with, who appears in it as the title figure Alban, but it also has a part for a supportive younger friend who is a natural psychic medium and whose role in the story is to help my character come to terms of understanding with Alban. I met that character before I met Micah online, and now new circles are joining. Let us all rejoice--in the somber knowledge that we have come to a bright green glade in what is still a shadow-dark forest.
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