Primarily a writing exercise, this dream journal-inspired blog is a quiet introspective sojourn into the process that we traverse in going from private dream to public art. I see our dreaming as an internalized mythmaking. As I philosophize and expressively exhibit dreams, both private and public, I encourage and delight in creative language as a way to practice experiential metaphors through a “public dreaming." Writing Theory: Creative Dream Fiction

Saturday 11 August 2012

Deathly Assumption of the Premodern Morpheus

Morpheus by Jean-Bernard Restout
The God, uneasy 'till he slept again,
Resolv'd at once to rid himself of pain;
And, tho' against his custom, call'd aloud,
Exciting Morpheus from the sleepy crowd:
Morpheus, of all his numerous train, express'd
The shape of man, and imitated best;
The walk, the words, the gesture could supply,
The habit mimick, and the mein bely;
Plays well, but all his action is confin'd,
Extending not beyond our human kind.

From Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XI (Source

Death and sleep, the fading plea of waking form, dissipating under the thin sheets of human comfort, forlorn, the pain of reality is a realization, that death's blood stains the dying hand. 
________
The creaking wood of the log cabin breeds an authentic woodsy order. Inklings and whisperings from the unheard Northern ecology brew spindly mycelium waves into the tragic human desolation, a stolid break from the bitter taste of city life. 

An original inhabitant, with less design for the transitory fading of desire, hides in groves and pains with the aftermath of winter in this warming escape. Unintentional, with drab face, his emotive instances are bare with unknowable sorrow. The rain burns over the frayed wick of lightless trunks under the whistling canopy. 

He has the air of a murderer, more a serial killer. Thin and over-confident, he swaggers into a common room, his flesh woven in knots, gnarled eyes penetrate the pointed vulnerability of my female companion. The tense noose of our isolation bespeaks unforeseen warning. One night, he feeds.

Gathering my things, a fright of blearing raw insanity, my computers, my bags, the endless compartments within compartments filled with this or that, yet my Love is slaughtered in the white heat of this wooden homicidal mystery. I hear his steps and free myself from the burden of automobile and everything I own, possessing only the random trappings of a turning mind. 

I fall, retching in a golden mud, into a hole of wonder, the driven names sputter and churn in this earthen stomach, heaving and ingesting my whereabouts in a timetable of eternity. Blinking water, dripping in the metallic soil, spurns an awakening as I peer into the soft light of the tunnelling ahead, beckoning me to further escape. The wishy-washy sounds pander in my mind with noxious will. 

A funnel of heat presses its ugly scent into my eyes, as I sink ever deeper through a new hole, fainting with near-death experience, dropped beside a bus. Eagerly, a host of newcomers, young as myself, board the bus with all their things. Stupefied, lost faces daydream an unsayable nightmare, their hollow eyes mirror my own mourning. We’re off to Egypt, to face the sun of the age. 
_______
Murder
"To see murder committed in your dreams, foretells much sorrow arising from the misdeeds of others. Affair will assume dullness. Violent deaths will come under your notice...If you are the eyewitness to a murder this is also a warning, but, one that is alerting you to possible changes in your life that you will not like unless you practice self control and not expect others to order the situation for you." (iDream)
_______
roaming to sacrifice

memories
and the aftermath of a wordless crisis,
vagaries of mind bound by geographic boom
into the obscured continental pole,
driven
estranged to unknown homes,
sacrificed to roaming

1 comment:

  1. "sacrificed to roaming," the diaspora that is how we earn our wisdom...

    I appreciate how Ovid explains how Morpheus in the Matrix movie series has "all his action confin'd, / Extending not beyond our human kind."

    Your dream prose is like William S. Burroughs writing a pulp detective novel. Giddyup!

    ReplyDelete