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.

Arts Mediocrity in a World of Change

Muse on Pegasus by Odilon Redon

"Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream."

Source: Nation of Change

_______

She attends a Sikh dance ceremony. Ladies in elaborate jewelry and glorious headdresses dance to an electro-pop Banghra. Three ladies stick out, as they wear differentiating clothing. One is fully covered, from head to toe in black, another appears only through the eyes, and yet another wears a colorful headscarf. This is unusual, as the Sikh women would not be known to wear Islamic hijab or burka coverings. To her, they seem as transformer figures.  

I am in a field that at once changes into a warehouse meant for music rehearsals. Standing across from a legendary local musician, a classical percussionist and kit drummer, he asks me to play drums. “Every American kid must have banged on a drumset, eh?” he asks. To which I respond, “Actually, my brother used to play all day long, I’d only listen. Now he’s graduated from Berklee!” “How do you think he did there” again, he interrogates softly. My mother appears as from nowhere, “He was kind of depressed, so he didn’t do as well as he wished.” My shape-shifting surroundings turn from warehouse to field, as I sit to a small drumset of snare, high-hat and ride, only when I sit down, the snare inches away, and the two cymbals spread far apart. I look down, and all I have for sticks are pieces of asparagus and cilantro, and thin pieces of balsa wood. I try to use this delicate craft wood and these flimsy vegetables, and the musician and teacher begins walking away. He looks at me, trying to navigate this moving drumset in an open field and simply tells me a story of decadence in New York, about a lesbian soiree that he once hosted at his house after a celebrity gig of some kind. 

________

with a most subtle whisper

behind a fantastic passion

eager to express unity

with perfect awe in a world that dreams

Up, a new way to be

for the moment

and its own living mystery,

questioning

“what is before?”

- excerpt from "all rivers have one source"

Caedmon and Dream

Caedmon is the father of English song. The first poet known in written English.

According to an 8th century monk, Bede, "...he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream..." (quote found here.)


In a recent dialogue/discussion on the source of Caedmon's impact in our collective psyche the following has been written:

The first English poetry is directly intertwined with a fascinating way of exploring and/or identifying "dream"
             as inspiration or even a muse
That is so wildly intoxicating its subject

They under the spell found in the likes of Caedmon's song
             need no other medium
             through which to express their musing,
                          not even themselves

When the muse overtakes,
              all that's left is pure inspired expression
                          cast into history from a seed of dream.

How does the original source of written English "dream-speak" if you will, impart to us the wisdom of written poetic expression in the English language?

How do we reunite our written English poetry with that initial spark of dream which so moved Caedmon to inspire the entire forthcoming history of poetic expression in our written language, in our writing, and finally, in writing our dreams?


In an imaginative revisioning of a response by William A. Sigler

The bifurcation of the dream into experience and meaning is one aspect of the fall of man.


(this image is in the public domain, more info can be found here.)

Joseph, the great dream wizard of the Old Testament,
             whose powers got him both sold into slavery and the most trusted advisor of the pharaoh,

             did not distinguish between dream and interpretation.

But dreams have become,
              as Holderlin put it,

             “the all-perceiving abyss”
                      of this “destitute time.”

I sense this wonderful blog idea of yours to be more than a “waking life” journal
              that urges “dreamers unite” to “ease and relieve the burden of dreams”

              but a Holderlin-like journey
                      to the abyss,
                      the spaces between
                                 where the one is concealed and perhaps retrievable

                                 with the purest of poetic word.

Heidegger,
in his remarkable series of essays on Holderlin,

stresses that this dream space is the only trace left of our enlightened state,

the longing in dreams is the only true longing remaining to us
              now that the gods have left,
 and it is the poet’s singular task to recover these traces
              by journeying into the dream abyss with eyes open.

I’m feeling inspired
to take on a translation of Andenken
in honor of your own
transitional and open-ended state.



End Note:

Let's all continue this breathtaking and uniquely inspired dialogue!

What better place to imagine Holderlin's "abyss" than our own shrinking core of internet communications technology as it challenges us to further our reaches into our most hidden of corners in the home of our minds and most loosely tied knots on the docks of our realism.

Free Dream from Thought and Language...so we may enter Dream's innocent purity preceding its existence beside Ego and begin to imagine its refreshingly catastrophic gorgeous mastery over the human intellect!


(link to the source of this inspired dialoge/discussion)