Several Posts and an Etymology

Have you ever mistaken a dream for reality? Because maybe that question's a tired trope but maybe out of dissociation, whether depersonalisation or derealisation or anxiety my memories so often have a completely detached quality indistinguishable at times from the conchoidally fragmented shards of my dreams, but then at times my present also has that detached quality, in fact it all does, my sight seems to recede far behind my retinas, everything is distant and muted, dull echoes of the world spiralling about my skull. And then I get a grip. As if a grip were to be held (haldan), as if there was anything solid to hold onto in the first place - as if that first place existed.
Although I still catch myself heading towards the door for a meeting with a friend I had scheduled until I realised that it was never scheduled, that that friend no longer is around.

But that's not what I came on to write about. More scheduled posts, quite a few. So I didn't recognise those words at first, but a quick google told me that they come from the novel As I Lay Dying. Pretty apt name. Pretty good book as well. The picture was a recent post, I just forgot to tag it, so it blends in with the other old ones. I uploaded it from a scan of of Leaves for someone looking for it in a forum.

I don't know that there's much more to say on the posts. All in all pretty disturbing. I definitely had something about myself in mind when I wrote them - the 'Irrealis' and 'trees' posts that is - and it's not hard to tell what it was. Makes me think of ripples. I think George Eliot remarked on the way every motion of every life will have wider influences; which of course wasn't only her idea (Chaos Theory etc. etc.). But I'm not so sure how much lingers. Did you know that the word 'linger' comes from the Sanskrit dīrghá; to the same root apparently as the Greek ἐν-δελεχής, meaning 'perpetual'? Some people also think it comes via the Gothic tulgus ('firm, persistent'), Old Saxon tulgo ('very'); all of which might connect to the Latin indulgēre ('to indulge'(originally to be 'long-suffering towards'(maybe))). All's very prolix, I'm sorry.


Words linger. I think that much is clear. And I knew that then as I know that now. And even with all that, I know that there is nothing perpetual in lingering.

Is[n't] it t[rue? "It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components--snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is."

There is no ripple but the blink of a phosphene

five mirages grace closing horizons

even as the sun vanishes and the ocean grows black,
sightless
they are there

I'll scatter the seeds of so many trees.

] | Irrealis

Beyond remains, I am remaining.

Don't let me keep you awake. Rest assured that I've known many cavernous nights and this one shall chill me as much as those gone.

I can't sleep tonight. Or at least, I can't will myself into the bed. I don't know why.

 Eros Turannos 

 

 

She fears him, and will always ask

   What fated her to choose him;

She meets in his engaging mask                  

   All reasons to refuse him;

But what she meets and what she fears

Are less than are the downward years,

Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs

   Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity

   That once had power to sound him,

And Love, that will not let him be

   The Judas that she found him,

Her pride assuages her almost,

As if it were alone the cost.—

He sees that he will not be lost,

   And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees

   Envelops and allures him;

Tradition, touching all he sees

   Beguiles and reassures him;

And all her doubts of what he says

Are dimmed with what she knows of days— 

Till even prejudice delays 

   And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates

   The reign of her confusion;

The pounding wave reverberates

   The dirge of her illusion;

And home, where passion lived and died,

Becomes a place where she can hide, 

While all the town and harbor side

   Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been, 

   Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea 

   Where down the blind are driven.

 

 

- Edwin Arlington Robinson

Not even valid

Denial has at least two meanings. The first is a refusal to acknowledge or accept a concept. This is what is meant by being 'in denial'. Secondly, it can be a refusal to accept - though there may be acknowledgement - of something which is offered. While the second implies choice, the ability to turn down a proposal, the implied authority of one's decision; the first dwells on a lack of choice. We deny something that insists, and in denying we do not banish it, merely ignore it. Yet it is still there.

Through Nightmare

Never be disenchanted of
That place you sometimes dream yourself into,
Lying at large remove beyond all dream,
Or those you find there, though but seldom
In their company seated -

The untameable, the live, the gentle.
Have you not known them? Whom? They carry
Time looped so river-wise about their
There's no way in by history's road
To name or number them.

In your sleepy eyes I read the journey
Of which disjointedly you tell; which stirs
My loving admiration, that you should travel
Through nightmare to a lost and moated land,
Who are timorous by nature.

- Robert Graves

Another day, another scheduled post. At least I didn't throw in any Greek.

So, I recognised this - another passage from of leaves, although it's actually quoting Robert Jean Campbell, M.D., Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, 9^th edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 951. That's not the citation given in the text, but I went off and actually found a copy that didn't have brackets slicing through it. They're meant to represent ash littering (marring) the pages. Notice how "patient" is severed into "pati", reminding us of the word's root to the Latin. As Danielewski later writes in the book:

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.” 

I'll drink to that. Or not, seeing as I don't drink any more. Not a good idea with the new combination of meds. Probably just not a good idea for me in general.

Guess it sure seemed like it at the time.

Hm.

“The knight was wrath to see his stroke beguyld,
  And smote againe with more outrageous might;
  But backe againe the sparckling steele recoyld,
  And left not any marke, where it did light;
  As if in Adamant rocke it had bene pight.
  The beast impatient of his smarting wound,
  And of so fierce and forcible despight,
  Thought with his wings to stye aboue the ground;
But his late wounded wing vnseruiceable found.”

That's from Spenser's Faerie Queene, I was reading it last winter. Irony is that I didn't have the patience to read up to the actual end of it (though it was incompletely written, funny that). I suppose I didn't have the patience to get to the end of a lot of things.

["These words coincide-" [] ] [--------------ash?

Robert Jean Cam[ ]ell sums up t[ ]e psych[ ]dynamicsof suic[   ]s as fol[ ]ws:

... sui[  ] or a suicide atte[ ]t is seen most freque[ ]ly to be an agg[ ]sive attack directed against a loved one or against society in ge[  ]al; in others, it may be a mis[   ]ded bid for attention or may be conceived of as a means of ef[  ]ting reunion with the id[]al love-object or m[]ther. That suicide [    ]n one sense a means of relea[]e for aggressive impulses is sup[    ]ed by the change of wartime suicide rates. In Wo[  ] War II, for example, rates among the participating nations fell, [

]times by as much as 30%; but in ne[    ]l countries, the rates remained the same.

In involutional depressions and in the depr[   ]ed type of manic[]depressive psychosis, the following dynamic elements are of[  ]n clearly operative: the d[   ]essed patient loses the object that he depends upon for narcissistic s[  ]lies; in an atte[  ]t to force the object's return, he regre[  ]es to the oral stage and inc[  ]porates (swallows up) the object, t[]us regressively identi[  ]ing with the object: the sadism originally directed against the desert[   ] object is ta[]en up by the patient's sup[  ]go and is directed against the incorporated object, w[   ]h now lodges wit[  ]n the ego; suicide oc[   ]s, not so much as an attempt on the ego's part to esc[ ]pe the inexorable demands of the superego, but rather as a[ ] enraged attack on the in[   ]orated object in retaliation [ ]or its having dese[   ]d the pati[   ] in the first place.

Quantum im]mort[ality ] | "Thine eye darts forth the fire that burneth me, | And were I not immortal, life were done | Between this heavenly and earthly sun"

The way ice lacerates my guts
at your [g]lance
and then melts and burns
leaves me charred
like an uncut diamond.

Though, you cut me quite easily.

'A Dream Within A Dream'

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone? 

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand —

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep — while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

 

 

- Edgar Allen Poe

In fact, I probably wanted to be asleep most when it was day.

Insomnia & The Familiar

That's another Shakespeare quote, I recognised it immediately. It's from his poem 'The Rape of Lucrece', I read it a while ago and those lines always struck me particularly.

Insomnia's a bitch. When you feel like dying every day, you begin to look forward to those hours each night you get to spend in complete oblivion (provided there's no nightmares. Although, at least with nightmares, the fear you have is never really localised. That might be the same with the panic attacks awake, actually, but in the dream you're only so lucid, and if you suffer the suffering rolls over you like a wave. It throws you to your feet, but at least you're too dazed to get properly scared. And maybe fear is the most painful part of pain.).

So when you're up at five and the terribly thin curtains are breached, and things start to move, that's the worst part. Or maybe it's when you realise you won't fall asleep. I don't know. The whole thing is awful. And then in the day you're practically delerious. I guess that might feel like a reprieve, but it's not. It's like an ache all through your skull, and how I was back then, I didn't want to be in too much of a stupor to read, to continue my work.

Not a great poem I wrote, I admit; but then, I must have been half-asleep at the time. Danielewski's new book, The Familiar came out two days ago. I picked it up at a store on the day it came out, but I haven't had a chance to read it since then. I'm excited. It's the first volume of a twenty-seven volume series, and this book alone is 880 pages. It's sat on my desk now. I think I'll start reading, maybe put up a few posts on it.

The book has an awesome trailer which you can see here.

"Now leaden slumber with life's strength doth fight | And everyone to rest themselves betake, | Save thieves and cares and troubled minds that wake"

And I don't wake,
because I don't sleep,
I linger
in this grey
until the curtains are breached by light
which is when I answer
birdsong with groan,
turn, retreat
to nowhere

and nothing's gone out of my reach,
so I look for a new rest,
a quicker way
asleep
to fall.

Two more posts

Fucking fuck, I thought I'd have ran out of scheduled posts by now. I suppose there must be some that I've readied for months or even years in the future, that seems like something I'd do, and I think I even remember doing it.

What really freaks me out is how I talk of myself in the past tense. I can't believe how I really believed that I was going to do this. And that it was right. That by now I wouldn't be here. Well I guess the person I was already is dead, because we change utterly in the blink of a moment and Hume knew that, and I'm thinking of a quote of his involving darkness and something about a pool and memory, but the closest thing I can find is this:

"I desire those philosophers, who pretend that we have an idea of the substance of our minds, to point out the impression that produces it, and tell distinctly after what manner that impression operates, and from what object it is derived."

which I know is close but that isn't it at all. It reminds me of how I felt back then, actually. So many ideas and memories rushing, tearing through my head in a maelstrom and I couldn't hold on to any of it, yet it all was so significant, every scintilla blasting through and out and beyond my reach.

I was am, I am were, I will be not am or even is

And where were you?

Imago [ekphrasis] [A house fixed and strangled with ice in the centre of a frozen lake

Something resolves,
a patch of darkness
curved against a margin,
angled in the palette of a mind,
already so formed like years of minerals
blanketing a riverbed.
Clad in amber,
shrouded in light and memory.

The Fifty Year Sword, Page 62

                                           "and she
felt bleak,
                "as if a thousand
                                            "vengeances
upon vengeances were dicing her
suddenly
                "into hail.

First Quartet

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                                   But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                                   Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush?


-T.S. Eliot

The Creaking Space

Mariana,

I know how much the light dying makes you groan,
how the yellow hues of dusk smother the air of your room,
decay your heart whilst your senses
dilate hideously.

I remember writing this post too. It still holds true, I think. As for the link with Plato and all the Greek, I'm not perfectly sure what idea had formed in my mind with all that. For some context on the 'fig tree' - thank god I can offer at least that - here's the extract from Sylvia Plath's novella The Bell Jar that I had in mind:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

[we recall- ] "write I still all one, ever the same"] [Plato [O] [ | ]

Maybe I should think of writing like Plath's fig tree, and each line, each verse, each word is a seperate snagging branch and I could write a volume of variations on just one poem I am trying to get perfect. And maybe that's what any poetry collection is.

Ἑρμογένης

ἔοικεν.

Σωκράτης

ἴθι δή, ἐπίσκεψαι ποῖ βλέπων ὁ νομοθέτης τὰ ὀνόματα τίθεται: ἐκ τῶν ἔμπροσθεν δὲ ἀνάσκεψαι. ποῖ βλέπων ὁ τέκτων τὴν κερκίδα ποιεῖ; ἆρ᾽ οὐ πρὸς τοιοῦτόν τι ὃ ἐπεφύκει κερκίζειν;

Ἑρμογένης

πάνυ γε.

Σωκράτης

τί δέ; ἂν καταγῇ αὐτῷ ἡ κερκὶς ποιοῦντι, πότερον πάλιν ποιήσει ἄλλην πρὸς τὴν κατεαγυῖαν βλέπων, ἢ πρὸς ἐκεῖνο τὸ εἶδος πρὸς ὅπερ καὶ ἣν κατέαξεν ἐποίει;

Ἑρμογένης

πρὸς ἐκεῖνο, ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ.

Σωκράτης

οὐκοῦν ἐκεῖνο δικαιότατ᾽ ἂν αὐτὸ ὃ ἔστιν κερκὶς καλέσαιμεν;

Ἑρμογένης

ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ.

Σωκράτης

οὐκοῦν ἐπειδὰν δέῃ λεπτῷ ἱματίῳ ἢ παχεῖ ἢ λινῷ ἢ ἐρεῷ ἢ ὁποιῳοῦν τινι κερκίδα ποιεῖν, πάσας μὲν δεῖ τὸ τῆς κερκίδος ἔχειν εἶδος, οἵα δ᾽ ἑκάστῳ καλλίστη ἐπεφύκει, ταύτην ἀποδιδόναι τὴν φύσιν εἰς τὸ ἔργον ἕκαστον;

Ἑρμογένης

ναί.

Σωκράτης

καὶ περὶ τῶν ἄλλων δὴ ὀργάνων ὁ αὐτὸς τρόπος: τὸ φύσει ἑκάστῳ πεφυκὸς ὄργανον ἐξευρόντα δεῖ ἀποδοῦναι εἰς ἐκεῖνο ἐξ οὗ ἂν ποιῇ τὸ ἔργον, οὐχ οἷον ἂν αὐτὸς βουληθῇ, ἀλλ᾽ οἷον ἐπεφύκει. τὸ φύσει γὰρ ἑκάστῳ, ὡς ἔοικε, τρύπανον πεφυκὸς εἰς τὸν σίδηρον δεῖ ἐπίστασθαι τιθέναι.

Ἑρμογένης

πάνυ γε.

Σωκράτης

καὶ τὴν φύσει κερκίδα ἑκάστῳ πεφυκυῖαν εἰς ξύλον.

Ἑρμογένης

ἔστι ταῦτα.

Σωκράτης

φύσει γὰρ ἦν ἑκάστῳ εἴδει ὑφάσματος, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἑκάστη κερκίς, καὶ τἆλλα οὕτως.

Ἑρμογένης

ναί.

Σωκράτης

ἆρ᾽ οὖν, ὦ βέλτιστε, καὶ τὸ ἑκάστῳ φύσει πεφυκὸς ὄνομα τὸν νομοθέτην ἐκεῖνον εἰς τοὺς φθόγγους καὶ τὰς συλλαβὰς δεῖ ἐπίστασθαι τιθέναι, καὶ βλέποντα πρὸς αὐτὸ ἐκεῖνο ὃ ἔστιν ὄνομα, πάντα τὰ ὀνόματα ποιεῖν τε καὶ τίθεσθαι, εἰ μέλλει κύριος εἶναι ὀνομάτων θέτης; εἰ δὲ μὴ εἰς τὰς αὐτὰς συλλαβὰς ἕκαστος ὁ νομοθέτης τίθησιν, οὐδὲν δεῖ τοῦτο ἀμφιγνοεῖν: οὐδὲ γὰρ εἰς τὸν αὐτὸν σίδηρον ἅπας χαλκεὺς τίθησιν, τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἕνεκα ποιῶν τὸ αὐτὸ ὄργανον: ἀλλ᾽ ὅμως, ἕως ἂν τὴν αὐτὴν ἰδέαν ἀποδιδῷ, ἐάντε

 

My breaths are shallow enough to drown in.
I only need an inch of water to stop me breathing,

But you compose an ocean.

His atoms unthread,
disperse.

Perhaps they lost the strength to continue.
Or perhaps, seeing her, they found
that apart, they could catch her rays
like leaves unfurling to the sun.

Okay a new one. I recognised the quote immediately, although it didn't much matter since I actually remember when I scheduled this post to begin with. It's the opening of Danielewski's novella The Fifty Year Sword.

The word 'ghost' comes from the Old Norse geisa to rage, Gothic usgaisjan to terrify (hence we get 'ghast'); outside Germanic the derivatives seem to point to a primary sense ‘to wound, tear, pull to pieces’. It's thought to have pre-Germanic origins but the sources are hazy; the word's haunted by the phantom of some other past, but we don't know the origin. We never do.

It's interesting that the sense 'pull to pieces' comes up. I think of the German der absoluten Zerrissenheit, a phrase Danielewski/Johnny left untranslated in House of Leaves. I also remember the torn up text of the Esau and Jacob chapter, and that old Hebrew word vayitrozzu which comes from the amazing root rzz meaning "to tear apart, to shatter". Finally I remember Sappho, all her destroyed papyrus manuscripts, left littered in rubbish heaps with IOUs and store records, waiting in the dark to be read again, reread in its ghastly half-rotten visage and its fragments, all of which becomes some kind of uncanny beauty that I still can't place my finger on.

Oh, I remember one more thing. A poem I read once, about a ghost in a house , by the sea if I remember. Lingering for days with a friend. More than a friend. More than days. It was a long long time ago. I don't remember any of the words. But I remember having read it, I remember remembering it, and something of that ghost and her house remains or lies dormant or reappears before me now, and I know she never really left me, and she was with me, in every moment, every glance and inhalation, every season, she was always there behind my eyes, on the tip of my tongue, always alone yet never gone.

"Maybe because the history of any ghost story is a ghost story unto itself, which is to say another story completely"[-

Perhaps it is significant that remnant and revenant come so close to touching one anothers' reflections,

                   and find themselves within a memory
so, so long
                                                                                 
                                                                                ago, which takes on some other form, in its half-
resolved indifference, like smog creeping into a
                                                                               forest,
                                                                it distorts.

In a conversation, or a moment, I find such joy or profoundity that I don't want it to end. I suspect the hours ahead, what unravelling or tarnishing they threaten. How can I make this moment last? This moment, I hold onto, in holding gone - as a flake of frost melting in the vice of my grip. I whisper, this moment happens. This moment happened. This is all and this is fixed. Wherever I am, wherever I will be, there will have been this moment. Inviolable. Frozen and never stolen.

But I do not know.

And I wonder, if I died, now, would it last? And if that moment were my last, would it take precedence over all before it, all future breezes that were annexed by its finality? Or would it like a passing day, the ghost of May, go? And would any and all go with it? Or in my cessation the time could be fixed like amber, the world contracted with the close of my eyes, the sound of a thousand tomorrows and yesterdays snagged by a noose just grazing against the bottom of my ears. Something lost, something found, somewhere out there, a world resounds. Is this finality?