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AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island
July 2000
2 July 2000
Who Are You?
A million more things remain to be told about
the way I work and the way I perceive my work; the way it comes, and the way
I guide it or avoid doing so; and what my earthly and unearthly sources
are; but for the time being I am more than half inclined to say, Never mind
to all that. From now on, unless I undergo a great change of mind--a
change of a very different kind from that which I have lately undergone--I
will leave off the kind of prose exposition we have seen such a lot of so
far.
If you were to imagine taking up an item to read,
what sort of item would give you the most pleasure? Would it not be
one of these two kinds: a very personal and favorable letter meant for your
eyes only, or a letter meant for someone else’s eyes, a guilty pleasure to
be indulged in the utmost secrecy? For myself, I doubt that I could
read another person’s letter now, and never could without inordinate suffering
later due to a hyperactive conscience, just as eavesdropping is something
I have learned to avoid. But if the letter were left out in the open
on purpose, just as personal and intimate as ever, but not forbidden, like
the exceedingly rare, really juicy letters that sometimes find their way
into print long after those who wrote them are dead--then the guilt would
be dismissed, while the writing would still be private, affording a fine
second-hand luxuriance.
Not long ago I wrote here that I was beginning to
feel that I was nearing the goal of outgrowing my most recent old set of
ego-bound, exclusively personal emotions, along with the limited identity
they were attached to. Because of the subtle state of mind in which
verses are composed, they speak truly and first, and they have been full of
assurances about such a change. At the same time, I have been growing
more accustomed to the notion of publishing my work almost the instant it
is written, via this Web site, and now that the newness is wearing off, I
have been asking myself, What would I best like this site to be? Of
course, being a dedicated reader as well as writer, I want it to be the sort
of site I would be most delighted to discover and read, a site I could hardly
wait to return to, always hoping for an update, so there is a very casual
expression of something like an ideal to aim at. It will not be attainable
always, if at all, but I shall try. Toward this end, the sort of ersatz
literary criticism that has so far accompanied my verses will probably be
eliminated. The chief reason I have included it up until now is my
fear of being misunderstood, to some extent willfully, because formal verse
is so unpopular with a certain breed of literary functionary, and otherwise
because people in general tend to be so literal-minded that I worry about
the impression I create when I use my preferred vocabulary: spirits
and ghosts and haunting and hands with eyes in them and the Underworld and
so on. By far the greater number of these have been part of the mainstream
literary tradition for time out of mind, but they are exciting and attract
the credulous. When I wrote “Keep Moving”, what I meant to say was,
I don’t even want to try to figure out what to ’believe’; it seems to me
that the best I can do is to try to learn to understand everything, all reality,
as something like a metaphor for itself, and not get caught up in any one
belief system. I just read a paper by Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo astronaut,
entitled “Nature’s Mind: The Quantum Hologram”
( http://www.accessnv.com/nids/articles/naturesmind-qh.html
)
and if we are to talk about reality, the true nature
of what is real, we would have to begin thereabouts. Magic is
real, insofar as anything is real, but how real is anything?
So much for that. I still have a Web site
to work on. You would, I venture, enjoy the lurid thrill of reading
over some unsuspecting author’s shoulder, and I would like to keep my mind
on my ideas as they have already taken such interesting turns. It should
be quite possible to keep us both happy. If you will do me the kindness
of allowing me to write in the first and second person without jumping to
the conclusion that I have become literally caught up in what I am imagining,
I will count you in on the private exchange. Everything I have ever
written has always been addressed to 'You'; so it shall remain. Whoever
you are, please keep reading. But--who are You?
Breath-Catching Pause
The dance has been magic and long--you are panting
a little, but happily. Listen to me:
the faint flaring of blue all about us, the glancing
light touch of the tips of the shaken vine-leaves,
the far echo of music--is this what you hoped for?
Just this, or a further strange dream yet to come?
Lover, nothing is done but the verse about going
to die uninspired and be stricken thus dumb.
Many stanzas remain to be sung; many faces remain
to be seen from before and behind.
We will view them all, hand clasped in hand, forward
straining our eyes to the source of the words we will find
ever lightly engraved on the wind as it listeth our
way from a world so impossibly far,
it has taken forever to reach us--yet this is its
origin, too, this blue flame where WE ARE.
***
13 July 2000
Although I stated earlier that this would not
be an EVERY-day book, I intended to add to it frequently, and yet the better
part of two weeks has passed since the last entry. Do not suppose I
have not been working! Nay, I have something to show for every day
of the interval, but I feel protective and dare not expose my new pages to
scrutiny.
As soon as I can talk myself into it, I will share
some samples of the new work I am doing. I am self-conscious at this
point about the quantity of verse I have published through this Web site,
and the fact that almost all of it is in my personal ‘blank verse’ meter.
How do people read verse nowadays? I have always loved it so much,
and yet others almost seem to avoid it--other poets, anyway. I
tell myself, No one ever complained to any of the great sonneteers, You just
keep using the same form over and over! But do I know that? Perhaps
they did. Time will winnow everything down to its essential core, and
then it won’t matter. I can assure you that the content of the verses
changes, although sometimes slowly, in gradual increments. When I was
in my teens, I remember being struck with the wild thought, What if I were
to write a poem-encyclopedia, a huge poem that documents EVERY SINGLE THOUGHT
I HAVE EVER HAD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE? Not only the pretty, conventionally
poetical thoughts, but all of them, all of the memories, bits of data, associations
between my several minds and the world outside and the world within, absolutely
all of it? I have no wish to create a body of gritty, confrontational
urban realist literature. So much of the intent behind what I do is
to create a real, which is to say realizable, vision of the world as it should
be: the day-world and the inner or imaginal world resolved. This cannot
be attained by wallowing in what is wrong with the day-world now. On
the other hand, reality is not served by denial; neither is spiritual maturity
served by ignorance. Just under the surface of my work, some very unwholesome
truths are proclaiming themselves. I would not silence them; I simply
will not allow them to drain the brighter vision of its force. Nay,
I keep my eyes on what is real to me, to my entire mind and conscience, and
to the extent that any part of it asserts a legitimate claim, I let it speak.
Lately I have been wondering if what I have been working on is not that encyclopedic
poem after all. I am more than half convinced that it is. And
that it is taking the form of my blank verse, well--
The primary speech of this island is song.
***
21 July 2000
How little attention you have received from me
lately, poor journal called AEAEA! My conscience is very heavy, but
only for that reason; otherwise, I have been fairly productive. I am
about 17,000 words into my latest literary project. I cannot
yet publish any samples from it here. It is still gestating, even as little
bits of it see the light every day. I never really know where
I am going in advance. This book is filled with magic, though--I will
admit that much. As was the case with Starling, it has entered
into my dream-life, and thus some of my actual dreams have begun to enter
the text. The form of the book is unlike anything I have written before,
almost--the main exception being this journal. As I envision it, the
printed text will be set up like a bilingual volume of verses, but instead
of--say--French on the left and English on the right, it will have verses
on the left and prose on the right, the prose being very nearly an interpretive
translation of the verses. Either will be complete in itself without
reference to the other, but a much richer will work appear when they are
read together. Will you attend me, Reader? Perhaps I am asking
much.
When you read verses, how do you read them?
Do you pore over them closely, examining every word and image, analyzing as
you go? That is how many teachers train their students to read poetry.
If that is how you do it, little wonder if you prefer small doses or none.
Of course, you would not still be here if you felt a strong antipathy, but
perhaps you are new to these pages and are asking yourself if this is where
you belong. Listen: This is the maker of the verses in this journal
speaking. Please read these verses as I write them, rapidly.
Allow their hypnotic rhythms their full power of influence. Never mind
if their meanings escape your intellectual apprehension. Read them
once, at normal prose speed, and then again, more slowly. Especially
if you find their logic elusive, read them more than once--for the music,
and then for the sentence structure. Perhaps you have cause to regret
that I grew up reading Swinburne and other classically-trained 19th century
poets and authors, and that I majored in Latin. Perhaps I regret it
at times, as I seem to be unable (what I am, truth be told, is unwilling)
to think in simple sentences. Latin poetry favors long, long sentences
with many clauses and few finite verbs. The style that I have derived
from it, by instinct rather than by design, allows full scope for ambiguity
and precision at once; its complexity fosters subtlety. Rather than
try to explain the mechanisms involved, I would rather direct you to the
verses themselves. Note how often sentences begin over here and end
way over there, not merely because they are long, but because the flow of
thought passes through one fairly logical shift after another--and another--until
the thought has shifted indeed, and it has done this by relying on the hidden
powers of grammar: Nothing, barring grave oversight, is actually wrong,
and yet something is frequently slightly out of kilter. The structure
of our language has always been willing to permit this, and yet so few have
reveled in it freely. I want to be a reveler--I think perhaps I am.
Not long ago I wrote here that I would refrain from
critical exercises and take a more intimate tone. At that time, I did
not realize that I was about to begin working on another book-length project.
Now that it is well on its way, I realize that I may wish to save that intimacy
for its pages, and use this journal for a different mode of thought in order
to preserve a sort of balance in my writing life. I say, I may
wish to do so--from now on, remind me to make no grand pronouncements.
If I have done so today, by the act of writing this very sentence, I render
them null and void. This is my journal and I will do as I please.
If you are still here, I think you will like the
new project. It has a number of standard Gothic features, but as always,
no one is allowed to rest with any easy assumptions. Its world, like
that of the daylight, is merely a mental projection; but in this case it
is a projection onto water, so its surface wavers without ever going entirely
out of focus. And--a great part of it is Song.
***
26 July 2000
Thought Within Dreaming
This topic is so complex and has so far been discussed
so little here that I must take special care in introducing the ideas I have
been mulling over tonight. It seems that the general level of public
awareness of dreaming is a good deal higher these days than it was when I
first began to wonder about it. When I was a girl, I was so fascinated
by the few rare dreams I had that seemed to have been struck by lightning
that I thought I would be willing to do anything to encourage more; I soon
found out how limited my interest really was when I came face to face with
the necessity of keeping a dream journal. All the books said it was
an absolute necessity, and I even tried to follow their instructions a time
or two, but the self-discipline required to write down a careful description
of a dream while still half-asleep and wishing only to go back to sleep altogether
was beyond me in those days. A few years ago, the balance shifted in
favor of all kinds of writing, and keeping a thorough dream-journal became
a major activity in my life. I don’t know why it took as long as it
did, but once it got started, it almost took on a life of its own.
Sleep became part of my work routine, and I never wanted to let a night go
by without something to show for my time. Dream interpretation proved
to be entirely different from what I had expected. I had assumed that
I would take note of the more resonant images, figure out their various meanings,
and see what was really going on--a potentially complicated process, but
kid stuff compared with what I found out when I tried to put my theories
into practice. This is just a journal entry, not the introduction to
an exhaustive thesis on dreaming, so here I will try to provide just enough
information to move on to my point for tonight: Dreams are full of
characters, but who are they really? You might think, The main character
in a certain dream was my mother, therefore I was dreaming about my mother.
Long experience has taught me that this is unlikely to be true. Dreaming
is an internal process, a figurative--an imaginative--perspective on many
of the same general themes and preoccupations as waking thought. Because
dreams are so interiorly directed, dream-characters tend to be aspects of
the dreamer, in the guise of the person who most resembles that dream-aspect.
If you dream about your mother, you are usually dreaming about the part of
yourself that assumes authority, that accepts responsibility, gives advice,
perhaps nags--whatever characteristics you most closely associate with your
mother and also see within yourself. If you dislike those characteristics,
chances are your mother is not a welcome figure in your dreams, but don’t
blame your real-life mother. You are a grownup; your life is in your
hands. Your dreams will show you precisely when you are indulging in
the behavior you dislike, and show you how to see a fit of it coming on,
if only you will pay attention and make active use of their help. If
you detect a lecturing tone, I am now playing mother with myself, as putting
my dreams’ counsel into active use has been very difficult for me.
So--dream characters represent one’s own varying facets, except....
Except that there is always the possibility that
a dream is telepathic. Here is an example: Lately I dreamed that
I was standing by a rock quarry in Indiana with my brother. He was
thinking of buying a used washing machine, but I advised against it, and
he ended up not buying it. When I woke up, I wondered, was I dreaming
about facing another decision in the ongoing process of cleaning up after
myself? Were we in 'Indiana' because I had just read a book about Native
American dance? I often dream about a close friend whose name is the
same as that of my brother, and many dreams ostensibly about my brother prove
to be about my friend on closer inspection. Many, many times dreams
about that friend have telepathic content, as he is the most psychically
sensitive person I know and we are very closely attuned. This dream
attracted my particular attention and I started telling myself a story about
it: The person in it is my friend, not my brother; he is from another
continent and all of America is 'Indiana' to him; he and I are digging up
depth material from prehistoric strata; and always, we are interested in
purifying our thoughts and our lives, but in this case, some means of doing
that were rejected. It was a brief and unremarkable dream, and yet
I was compelled to do all that thinking about it. One day later, my
mother sent an email message saying that my brother and his family had moved
to Indiana the previous weekend. It was the first time she had ever
mentioned it; I had had no idea he was even considering it.
This has been a lot of holding forth to reach one
very important point, and we are almost there. Was the telepathic contact
with my brother really the only purpose for this dream? Was my interpretation
rendered irrelevant when I learned about its specific message? The
principles I just described about dream personae are still demonstrably true
most of the time; must I choose between the two different approaches, or
may they not both be true of this dream: that my brother was my brother,
with a message that he had moved to Indiana, and that my brother was also
my friend, showing me that our usual work was continuing, with maybe one
small hitch over whatever the washing machine represented? Let us very
quickly go much further: Was I not still really dreaming of 'myself',
with 'my brother' personifying an aspect of this self, only--this is a slippery
idea, so read with care--is not the real purpose of dreaming, deep down,
not merely to provide insight into our total character AND the opportunity
for telepathic communication to flow without the waking inhibitions that
most people acquire at some time in childhood, but to demonstrate repeatedly,
every time we sleep and dream, until the most important message finally gets
through, that the 'self' is not merely the limited individual personality
but the entire complex of aspects constellated around an individual consciousness
in the form of all the people they are involved with through all means, including
ordinary relationships and psychic overlap? Now add to this the power
of what I call the True Imagination, that faculty that creates dream personae
and also literary and mythical personalities so intensely real that
they seem to take on life--because they are drawn, consciously or otherwise,
from living sources, and tap into new and similar sources in the minds of
those who experience them. Are not our dreams telling us that we
are part of everyone and that everyone is part of us? And
is not the True Imagination the most accessible, most nearly fully-waking
meeting place for all those selves, amid all that consciousness? What
I am trying to do, I freely confess, is to guide you over the threshold of
that place where we all flow together and everything is real if the energy
that created it springs from the same sources as ourselves and our capacities
to perceive. If you are still here, you are surely willing to cross
the threshold of the place that is AEAEA.
Now the key is not merely to stand on one side of
that threshold or the other; the key is to be that doorway: Become
the place where everything merges and all is sentient and nothing bars the
way anymore. Here we are, the ones who stand open--
all doorway and no door.
P.S.: Remind me to tell you why ’The black leaf turns over green.’
***
27 July 2000
This Is Why
The words seemed to form of themselves in my head
one day when I was trying to write through what still seemed to be an insuperable
barrier of absolute writer’s block. When I say writer’s block, I mean
that I had to select my college courses on the basis of how much writing
was required, because even a two-page essay meant that I would be drinking
a bottle of wine to keep my hands from shaking too badly to hold the pen,
and I might still be violently ill, not from the wine but from uncontrollable
anxiety. Oddly enough, or rather, typically enough, as such things
seem to work themselves out in the long run, this served me well, because
it made Latin a much more attractive course of study than English, and I
make much greater use of the philology I learned than I ever would of the
literary-critical drivel that English majors in my school were subjected
to. Anyway, the time came when I had to break through or perish.
Intoxicants were in use to this end, and they aided me greatly. I never
ceased to worry that I had entered into some kind of devil’s bargain, but
I seem to lack the more serious addictive tendencies, and I escaped the worst
consequences. Writing was my reason for deliberately entering altered
states; I kept it uppermost in my thoughts at all times, and never did anything
else while I was under the influence.
What I learned during that time was that I could
distinguish the voices of the fear from the thoughts that were trying to
come through. Some of my early experiences were so striking that I
thought I might be trance-channeling, until a closer look at the texts I
produced revealed the identity of the 'spirit'. It was in one of these
states that I seemed to hear, as if another voice were speaking in my head,
the words 'The black leaf turns over green.' I understood it at once.
This terse expression is so complex that to explain it in full would require
that I provide my full autobiography, but a brief explanation goes like this:
Leaves can appear to be dead, black, and rotting, but that is a transient
stage; when they have rotted all the way, they become food for the tree that
made them, and in time they reappear as new leaves on the same tree.
Nothing is ever really lost; the universe is precisely efficient; even the
ideas that might have been poems years ago but never came to full form are
still there in potential, awaiting the appropriate conditions from which
they will at last emerge. Moreover, everything has at least two faces:
Even things that appear to be completely negative will at length reveal their
other side, just as writer’s block was revealed as the protector of my intellectual
path. I am so far from endorsing any form of black-vs.-white dualism
that I cannot refer to it even indirectly; the decay half of the cycle is
black, in the sense of fullness of the wisdom of the Black Madonna or Black
Tara, Ekajati; the growing half is chlorophyll green. Each word in
this small sentence is thus important and specific: Leaves, again,
are pages as well as signs of cyclicity as viewed through the natural world,
and they turn, turning color and turning their other face and doing it over
and over again.
These are generous and yet secretive words.
If I have anything to teach, it is here. Certainly these words are still
teaching me. A number of years have passed since I first heard them,
and they still echo through my mind. The Black Leaf Turns Over Green.
I have a very dear friend who has studied the blackest of leaves, but the
change, the inscribed green leaf of his future, awaits him. If only
he could be made to see it now.
***
31 July 2000
Lammas Eve
Just a few days ago I noticed a synchronistic
cluster that soon came clear when I remembered that the holiday was almost
here. It seemed that every book I picked up and every Web site I visited--this
computer is still new to me and I am still exploring--mentioned Sirius, the
Dog Star. One magick-oriented Web site even listed a number of possible
references to it in the work of David Bowie. I am not all that sensitive,
but the run was conspicuous enough that I stopped to ask myself why it was
happening. I realized that this is the time of year when Sirius brings
in 'dog days' and the beginning of the harvest season. I think I remember
reading, without being able to provide a citation for it, that Lammas marks
the first appearance of Sirius over the horizon in the Northern latitudes.
Nowadays Lammas is generally celebrated on the first of August, whereas the
actual first appearance of Sirius varies according to the year and where
the viewer is located; like many another festal day, Lammas and its signal
event have come slightly unglued. I hadn’t forgotten about the
holiday, but I too had become unmindful of the celestial event associated
with it.
The rising of Sirius should be a powerful event
for me because several years ago, when I was first learning to track my dreams
and to be acutely aware of hypnogogic visions, I was lying on my bed one
afternoon in a drifting state when I heard someone tell me that the date
for that year would be July 16th. I knew what they were talking about;
I had heard Sirius mentioned earlier. I did not know how the two references
went together, though, until I searched through as many books as I could
find that might provide me with clues. An important personal anniversary
falls between mid-July and Lammas, and I decided to celebrate it for the
full period that year. Accordingly, I notified a friend who shares
that anniversary with me and lives far away. On the night of the 16th,
I went through my usual quasi-ritualistic preparations, as was my custom
then--I brought in fresh flowers and neatened the house a bit, bathed and
put on a clean dress, and lit a candle and incense. I then listened
to some inspired songs in order to open up my own imagination. Remember,
please, that I distinguish sharply between imagination and fantasy.
I wanted to write from vivid and authentic sources, and so I chose songs to
listen to that came from the same level as that which I wanted to enter.
At some point, a very clear mental impression formed that I could see and
hear my friend with a few other people, working in the same way that I was.
I don’t mean that I was actually participating in ritual magick; that is
just what I cannot do, as my inability to be literal-minded about anything
prevents me from entering into the spirit of ritual work to sufficient depth
to make it worth the bother. I am just not a believing person.
Nay--I was just attempting to concentrate and enter an imaginative state of
mind, and there I saw my friend. I mentally said hello and godspeed,
and then I heard a knock at the door. It was very, very vivid and loud,
and completely physical: I felt the vibrations of the percussion as
well as heard the noise, as one does when the source of a sound is close by.
The knocking was at the side door, which could only be approached through
a greenhouse full of raccoons. I knew no one could be there, but I
checked anyway--no one. I checked the front door also, and again, no
one was anywhere near. It was very late, perhaps 1:00 am by then.
The real source of the sound was completely apparent to me, as I had 'seen'
and 'heard' my friend, and then I heard the sound. There was even a
sort of mental 'Hello!' that came with it.
I have had innumerable precognitive and telepathic
dreams, to the point that I finally almost believe in them. This experience
was of a different order, however, because it involved what certainly seemed
to be
my physical senses. I could not confirm, on
examination, that my friend was doing anything in particular to cause the
noise at that moment, but time displacement is quite typical of telepathy
between us, either because we live in different time zones and have completely
different diurnal schedules, or because telepathy proceeds from an essentially
timeless state. He is the person with whom I share the closest psychic
bond, however, and similar things have happened since, although none has taken
place when I was in a completely waking condition as I was then. None
of that is why I am writing this tonight, though. Nay; I am simply
remembering a previous holiday and how a truly inspired friendship made it
magical. Such magic, and even common telepathy, still fall into a category
of experience that I can believe in readily if it happens to another person
but never quite trust when it happens to me. My experiences are convincing
in hindsight, especially when viewed on the whole, but are always hard to
accept when they first occur.
This morning I had an intense dream about a friend
who was carrying out a painful decision to bring a very old relationship to
a permanent conclusion. He was doing the right thing, but it was difficult
to witness because the person he was breaking with was visibly hurt.
I still have no proof that this was more than just a psychological dream,
but I know it was. In time I will hear the story from my friend’s perspective.
For now, this is a holiday, and something like magic is afoot.
Happy Lammas to All
Lammas Eve
The bright new scythe of the early harvest is
whetted--I hear the fine breath of its edge
being drawn along some golden throat where the marks
of a previous sharpness incised in a ledge
from which somebody finally leapt words that rattled
farewell as their falling extended a cry
that its hearer will never cease hearing. Her
hackles erect as a flag of grim warning, she flies
over acres of fields to the place where the leaper
from high overhead ought to strike the hard ground
and she waits there, half angry, half tenderly seeking
to mend what is not altogether unbound
from the frame of its flesh. High above--in
her vision--she saw the carved letters form words rich with hope
to her way of perceiving, and found herself driven
to gather cast hair to plait into a rope
by which she might somehow mount up to that precipice,
read for herself the lines scrawled there, and add
to their number the host of her own lonely messages
sent and received on a level less mad
than devotedly prone to an altitude sickness of
bitter nostalgia for song in the blood
of the throat, be it driven alive by a quickened
heartbeat with the state of the world at full flood
deep within, or arrayed among handfuls of maggots
and bones showing through on a dry leafless plain
where the jaw is unhinged and the head is a bag
of hard leather in which sundry letters form vain
combinations no lover will hear and no mortal, no
matter how many their senses, will read--
bitter words, bitter blessings conveyed past the
bourne of malevolent selfhood while I stand at need
at the foot of this station of grace with a burden
of unexpressed hope and the fine ire of love
that will never uphold disenchantment but learn
of it purely for this select purpose: Above
where I wait, someone stands who has reached a decision.
Mine is the braided-hair rope and the air
of Earth’s counter-attraction to cast it. The
vision dissolves at this point, with the world everywhere,
for as far as my wide eyes can see, turning golden.
Song is so much of me, likely it bleeds
from the heads of shorn wheat my sun-bright hands
are holding. I might be a reader of signs--are these seeds?
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