Requiem For Our Unconscious Friendship With Spirit, a Paradise Lost

In the description to the above post of Zbigniew Preisner's "Requiem for my friend" written to commemorate the death of brilliant filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, a quote from John Milton reads, "Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we sleep and when we awake." From Paradise Lost, Book IV Lines 675-6

"Evil into the mind of God or man
May come and go, so unreproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind: Which gives me hope
That what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream,
Waking thou never will consent to do."

From Paradise Lost, Book V, Lines 117-121

These lines speak to me today, as in yesterday's dream I experienced from myself such burning intense rage as I never feel for anything, never mind, as in my turmoiled sleep, directed at the smile of a new friend. And in the day after, the crooked seething in waking light transformed to deja vu and the peaceable contemplation of homeless sky, observing the street life and empty catharsis of the unreproved recollection of day, gathering myself inwardly to confront the daimonic psyche through an entropy of silence, night and dreams.

See my Reflection on Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

________

Two Latin men, both uncles of the word, they are as family, a safe haven of fraternity. Their abode, in relative disrepair, offers the kind of humble solace for a younger counterpart such as myself. When my family arrives to take me away, I shed tears of remorse for having become so loyal to their gentle friendship. Almost having left with a few of their possessions, they do gift us a curious metal mug, bedecked with silver broaches and a handle of aesthetic opulence. They warn us about a nearby volcano. If we are to mount, they say, we should not mount the East side, as the activity may fuse in a plume in that direction. 

With naïve innocence, adventurous, I lead my parents up the steaming mountain. Near the summit, the rumbling foment cracks the ground in a spray of unwelcomingly hot earth. Racing down to the foot of the mountain, the flowing lava is within earshot as the steam fills our lungs. Before the raging momentum engulfs us in its deathly cast, I raise the mysterious chalice to the sizzling winds and behold, the steam is vacuumed with the power of the entire energy of the volcanic surge into the mug, the handle remaining tepid at the touch. 

________

Interpretation: "Borges on Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious"

________

"that squirrely rascal who defended his money based on numbers and licks,
a body caressed with growing sores,
living excrement fumigating the stringy jewish marriage,
wafting scrawny alzheimer's brains over the stovetop dream,
fanned and purring as the asian lynx,
whose stormy eyes behold the revolution
behind the First Kingdom's daring ring"

...

"where words exist as bones and sculpted mountains
fire myths into the freed air"

- excerpts from "unreliable fortune" 

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"