Shelley and the Old Man: A Poetics of Wisdom

The Bard by John Martin (1817)

"...Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought,
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane,
...
By solemn vision, and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air,
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
...
Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe
To speak her love:—and watched his nightly sleep,
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips
Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath
Of innocent dreams arose; then, when red morn
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home
Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.
...
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,
Herself a poet.
...
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues
Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;
He overleaps the bounds.
...
At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness.
...
the infant would conceal
His troubled visage in his mother's robe
In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,
To remember their strange light in many a dream
Of after-times
...
"Vision and Love!"
The Poet cried aloud, "I have beheld
The path of thy departure. Sleep and death
Shall not divide us long."
...
The meeting boughs and implicated leaves
Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as led
By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death,
He sought in Nature's dearest haunt some bank,
Her cradle, and his sepulchre.
...
His eyes beheld
Their own wan light through the reflected lines
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth
Of that still fountain; as the human heart,
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees its own treacherous likeness there.
...
a dream
Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever,
Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now..."

- excerpts from "Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

_________

Family festivity! What a roomful of browning noses and brooding eyescapes bleary and peering into the torn pages of emotive remorse, a frequented gasp into the play of genetic strays. Weary, from this we’re born. There is a host of catastrophic laughter, a smiling malaise, distant, nonplussed and concealed with grief all too human. Yet, I am a cheerful sprite. I skip with light movement in between ready-corpsed waylays, the stench of old age drowns the mind in nude happenstance, a picture-perfect stream of inglorious rage, quieted in the mass of group idiocy, stuffing faces with swine and blush. There are those ready to die, they leave through the front door, on crutches, helped by their offspring followers. My grandfather sits, patient as an ancient boulder beneath an old-growth tree, situated in the midst of a construction site. The virgin forest turns to city, as the violent youth pleads with flashy spirituality around the bloody host of tempting boobs and the freewheeling ghosts of enraged awe in the music of the muse. All know me now. A writer! Proud with inherent jealousy, they retch in the folly of pure floosy. Ear to ear my lips point to the insanity ensued, on the asylum Earth with starlight kin, ever distant, asking, “Who flew?”

________

Old Man
"Carl Jung said that the wise old man is the 'archetype of the spirit' and the 'speaking fountainhead of the soul.' Dreaming about him may attempt to bring the dreamer into awareness of the larger meaning of one's life. Old people in dreams represent wisdom and maturity. They may appear in our dream at times of confusion and lack of direction, or when we need consultation and help in decision-making."

________

Land of the Children

“Where are we?”

“Land of the children...
though we so want to see god in this lawless factory of memory stored overnight
flickering wildly on the cinematic map of a deep sleep dream,
forgotten with ease and well-fed stupidity,

grinning with slick hair and smoking against the fact of a quickly approaching change
to inspire the muse of the Forgotten.”

“Was it a dream?”

“Not all of it…”

706pm. Feb 22.

On a plane to Seattle. Sitting in between two middle-aged men. A delay northward.