A Joycean Saga of Psyche, Muse of Endless Night

Mary Ellen Bute's only feature, "Passages from James Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake'" begins:

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wide-awake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot. (James Joyce)

“History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” James Joyce, from Ulysses

As my sleep cycle changes, I wake later in the day. It is winter. I rise at sundown, fall at sunrise. The sun and I keep a syncopated rhythm of broken and drunken days. My consciousness rains down on my dreams with the lucid bearing of a child at home in the nonsense play of indecision and fear. I listen only to night. I am not a human. I am not adapted to earth. I am not a person. I am not adapted to houses. I am not. I am adapted to mind. I think, therefore I am not. 

_________

a blonde, a young woman, of especial high class, buries herself in the busy sheets of a paid for hotel room as she awaits her dowry, and her parents exit, content with the happening, for she is to be their high dollar ticket, and they are proud 

Blonde Nymph by Paul Emile Chabas

and in the fading night, she switches rooms to bed in a flophouse, the creaking wooden floors spell prostitution and drug rings, alcohol seethes from speakeasy days, and she cowers belligerently in her room, a knock at the door bleeds into her chest with suicidal unction 

Metropolitan angle (angle whore) by Hans Baluschek

as she opens candidly, two brothers of separate age walk in gently, greeting her with an offering of simple company, yet as the night creaks on with their failed step over the late seeds of a youthful calling, their clothes are shed 

Youth in a Blue Coat by Sasha Schneider

and then she is open arms as they both slide neatly under the covers of anonymous life, and as hours pass, they become good friends, while the older brother hangs his head by the window, all are naked and congenial, the two younger playfully brush paint over a great canvas blocking the doorway and most of the wall

Beatrice Addressing Dante by William Blake

she says, “you’re a fucking brilliant painter!” the Blakean shapes form over the imagistic head of the younger brother at play with the feminine creation as he eyes his brother to gain inspiration into the form and build that supports the color and stroke of their altered midnight state of sudden friendship 

Psyche Opening the Door into Cupid's Garden by John William Waterhouse

a hollowing filled with laughter and unending play, and in other rooms, an inkling leaks through the creaking floorboards and drip-coffee ceiling, filters of sound are pierced through with eager ears, willing to join, and finding true human pleasure of heart in the abuses of Psyche’s night 

_________

An irony to amuse
This, my, and our patchwork of brains,
To walk, or march,
Perfectly balanced in dress
With the polluted eye of an urban observer
Taking in the sidewalk trash as the stuff of inspiration
...

In one outlandish, unruly day,
Simultaneously, all vibrations still,
To skeletal ghosts, ravaging the blank canvas of history
With painted cries

In the evil fornication on a wine-lush express
Down each and every late Saturday street
Dead with incestuous chores

In popularized & Westernized dreaming
Gone, gently in the summer prairie heat,
Dealing prostitution’s cape
...

Breeding a kindred sisterhood
In the tall, and greatly embodied community of passionate grace
In today’s great human victory against the undead tyranny
...

Cyclical pain follows in succession
To unchain confederates, bothered,
From American poverty
Filling the sobbing eyes of migrants, sacrificed
To a brutalized ending, motherless & lost

excerpts from "1st Independence"

The Wordless Dream Language of Myth

Chinese Goddess Nuwa by Unknown

"Until we get to dreams, there is a tendency to think of stories as 'words.' In dreams we experience stories as structures and patterns that evoke images and experiences, often without words...In dealing with dreams, such noted authorities as James Hillman have instructed us to "hold the image."By 'Holding the image,' the conscious mind can begin to discern patterns and structures that can eventually reveal rich psychic content...Some have said that, 'Myths are cultural dreams.'" Ontogenic Mythotypes by G. Charles Andersen

What is the relationship between language and dream? Dream is a language in and of itself. Language is mutable to Dream Language, when traditional dream interpretation is foregone, and creative writing is utilized as a means to "hold the image" in the mind of James Hillman. Such psychological import brings to mind the psychoactive artistry of Laurence Caruana and others who have respected the imagination as a prehuman remnant of archaic information. "The world is made of language" says Terence McKenna. And so, in using that language, we may hear our mythic vocation, a calling towards that which we had never dreamed, unearthed as from the unsaid and unconscious mysteries of our own psychic invention. 

__________

What a breath of fresh air! To drink, and see. I could feel my brother’s weeping, his heart caving in his shaking flesh as he triumphed again over a nervous breakdown, carrying him by air through the over-privileged dome of Western skies. And into the darkened haunt of old coast bumhood, and the numbing agents of a musical life amid the New England smile of selfish mockery and divulging swine. The ruthless remark, a self intensified in the bitter alcoholic night, the cobblestone streets, swept of hurricane feet and tires of his once-sickened flight returning.

Lombard Landscape by Fulvia Bisi

At home, lost to the time of his forgetting, he returns, an old man in his distant youth. The tingling respite of belonging in the gutters of Eastern fame, the ruinous gold of a mind enslaved to eternal seeking, he clambered down tumbling steps of creaking wood and linoleum brains, as I stared immobilized into the dark porch silhouette. A large man sat there, with dreadlocks lower than his back, and as he lifted an ember of smoke to his lips, his dark skin shone with the muscular life of a physical laborer on break, alone, a nameless body of the historic present.

Man with a Hoe by Jean-Francois Millet

I could only see him clearly under the bar lighting. The dizzying indoor lunacy of the drinker’s habit, a hovel of bored and roughened life spoke through his bristling mouth. After the rare silence of a few pints, he ended the night with means to see each other again. And like that, he disappeared in the great fog of blackness, opaque as the light-polluted air of a once booming industrial city, now smoking upward with the final ashen gasp of smoky incineration. 

__________

“What grievous horror betook these dumb streets?”

Touched with the unkindness of a meek following
From the near elderly, an old town deemed to inquietude
...
Taking off the English hat of a long gone America
Seeing no one in the mist fired laugh from this war

Breathing ocean
Suffocated by the calm before the storm
...
Clucking behind the chicken wire of suburban fate
...
Gripping for death at the edge of the western, manifest

As nature’s law thrives in disbelief

excerpts from "Calm before the Storm"

Borges On Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious

“The great English writer and dreamer Thomas de Quincey, wrote in some of the thousands of pages of his 14 volumes wrote that to discover a new problem was quite as important as discovering the solution of an old one. But I cannot even offer you that. I can only offer you time-honored perplexities.”

“And in our less beautiful mythology we speak of the subliminal self, of the subconscious, of course those words are rather uncouth when we compared them with the muses or with the Holy Ghost, but still we have to put up with the mythology of our time.”

- Borges, from his 1967-8 lectures "The Riddle of Poetry"

_________

An acquaintance, an intellectual from Latin America sends me an email bursting at the seams of the twenty-five megabyte limit. The prolific backlog of written research, charts, graphs and maps is stunning. He has proved, through simple correspondence, a scenario for the turn of the tide, an epochal shift in the geological age of the planet. The continents will roll, as on a dial, between the ocean currents. Coastal lands will be subsumed one on side by the leeching magma, on the other by tidal waves with enormity enough to swallow entire cities in a heartbeat’s notice. During this time, mythical beasts make themselves known, many from the below, many from above.

The Edge of Doom by Samuel Colman

The swirling aftermath of an ocean-swept city follows us upwards toward the mountain peaks. The shifting plates boom and gush, spitting fire and ash into the sunless sky, raining in metals and the boiling fury of an endless toxic night. We are protected by a subterranean demi-god, hidden to our waking eyes in the days of light. The simian beast grapples a crushing hammer, defeating a swimming ape three times his size emerging from the opaque, deathly soup of ocean water below. The battle is, to our human eyes, a goliath sight, many proportions beyond our own. Greedily, fear seizes as a last hope in the will to life. The blasting mountaintop seethes with equal force as the rising waters. 

________

Volcano

"To see a volcano in you dreams, signifies that you will be in violent disputes, which threaten your reputation as a fair dealing and honest citizen...Volcanic eruptions in dreams usually represent our erupting emotions. Feelings that you may be harbouring during the day might take the form of a volcanic eruption in a dream state. The unconscious psyche might be releasing positive or negative feelings in a safety of a dream (e.g. strong sexual feelings, passion, anger, rage, and fear). Superstition-based dream interpretations say that pouring lava is a warning about poor health. Dreaming about a volcano means the dreamer is in danger of losing a close friendship if she is not honest with that person." (iDream)

________

...
a planetary dissolution,
wavering on the edge,
deemed a wanderer,
stolen soul,
dreamer in artistic wonderland,
or violent binge-seeking parasite,
working miracles inside a silenced freedom,
without home, or conceived place
guiding mundane goals,
roaming vagrant, or seer,
yet still unripe,
recently fallen
from knowledge,
into wish, luck, intuition, and the all ecstatic
passion,
bellowing "good and evil are through"
impaled by the one breath,
strange yet true
...
throughout the known universe,
into the home of a single man,
living atop a mountain,
dreaming in the orbital spawn,
a satellite, the globe itself,
winding round, predictably,
to the course of light,
ending with beginning and finding us along the way
on the way,
all along

- excerpts from "Divorce & Diaspora" 

Dream to Dream

The writing herein identifies dream as not the opposite of waking.

The word "dream" has many meanings, as does "art." Both are words fastened tightly to the hip of creation at its deepest root, and most inlaid core.

Dream can be identified as a phenomenon which overlaps between waking and sleep. What we normally refer to as "dream" or the subconscious activity of mind while asleep, is broadened in this sense to include the imagination, aspiration, desire, and all forms of creativity suspended in mind's eye whether awake or sleeping or somewhere in between, outside of both or nowhere near!

To explore the meaning and place of dreamt expression, we must explore "dream" seamlessly.

In purity, dreamless
Still, mystery pervades

Leaving sleep
And wakefulness

Leaving conscious
And subconscious,

Inverting our self
into the role of one Dream,
united with all the dreaming.

The seamless expression of dream occurs when the verbal/symbolic/metaphoric aspect of dreaming animated by subconscious and involuntary psychic, phenomenal mystery are interfused with the fully conscious and unmistakable urge of a dreamer to create, do, and be a fulfillment of one Dream.

Each entry which falls under dream description will be an anonymous purveyance of an experienced dream, and in keeping an anonymity, begin to draw connections to a single, unified dream of all humankind.

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)