sublingua

The heart with a mind of its own.

(Be present.)

The mind with a heart of its own.

(It's past.)

The dream that is your waking life.

(Go there now.)

Letter to sophistica
Wednesday, Apr. 30, 2003

Dearest Sophistica,

I've been hiding under my mattress all week. It's been a good week for it. I've been taking those long drives of which you speak, though not at night and not through the desert. No, I've been driving through the valley during the day and looking at all the places that used to be fields of growing things that are now walled off compounds of houses for the rich and I think about change and moving on and how much I hate those kinds of people who live in "gated communities" as though they were a separate and unique form of human being, when we all know otherwise. That's during the day. At night, I've been laying awake, thinking about the whole self-sabotaging paradigm and how I always walk right into a trap even when--especially when--I set it myself. If I'm not laying awake, I'm blanking out the cross-chatter in my head with some otc med designed to make me perform some imitation of sleep for six or so hours. I've been skipping classes and using the time to think instead about dead people I know, which seems important somehow right now. The ghosts are so insistent these days. And sometimes when they're not, I make them up. I make them out to be. Then they refuse to speak and I get sad about that.

What am I saying here? I think it's that passage that we (non-Jews? Jews + non-Jews? ) don't celebrate anymore. The one that ends some season we can't recognize anymore. Things are starting to grow and they're growing right up through you and it makes your soul feel very strange.

I don't think it's an alone thing at all. For example:

I've been working at a dream interpretation recently for one of Max's coworkers. We've been doing this via email, which is a lot like throwing yourself down the side of a mountain and reaching the bottom after several weeks, with time inbetween bouts of rolling and/or tumbling for things like snacks and movies and internet surfing. Last night though, I came home from the studio and found in my email box, in response to one of my queries about a particular part of his dream, an email from him in which he suddenly and unexpectedly disgorged many of his fears about fatherhood. My response to this unpredictable behavior was curious even to me and I had to stop several times while reading it and clear out the cobwebs of the prejudices from the corners of my head (prejudices about computer geeks, about fathers and fatherhood, and, most importantly, about men in general--who I have never quite thought were human beings really, but more like these machines that existed to manufacture loads of foundationless confidence). Then, I finished my snack and hurled myself down the mountain once more, writing to him about the fact that dreams are often your way of talking to yourself about the things that you don't know you know about yourself and how those are the hardest things to uncover really.

But there was also this curious interaction with another woman at the studio last night. She is a Filipino doctor who does this kind of floating thing all over the country, taking assignments wherever she's needed and on one of her jobs came to Abq. to work at Pres. where she met another dr. whose sister is a potter and so they decided to come to Coyote for lessons. That background established, I should also add that she is an outgoing person and gets along with most people, but I always felt, in my limited interactions with her, that I kind of intimidated her or that she really didn't like me very much, and that feeling was compounded by my observations of her with Max, whom she is very taken with--so much so that I would be a little warier if I had the perception that Max had some interest in her as well. So last night, at the studio, she comes over to where I am working and begins talking to me. Not just the usual "how's it going/what are you working on" studio cross-chat, but actually to talk to me as though I were a human being and she were a human being and needed someone to talk to or needed some practice at sentience or something. She talked about her childhood in the Filipines and about the time she spent in training in Boston and how difficult that was for her to be amongst people for whom competition was a lifestyle and about her job and how difficult it sometimes is when one cares about people too much and about her relationship with her mother. And then, realizing that she was pretty much just standing there while I worked (it seemed right for me to continue working and not give her too much pointed attention, seemed to keep her calm somehow), she brought over some of her own work and continued talking while she worked on it. She talked about her desire to move to Abq. and how they conflicted with her responsibility to her mother who lives in VA, and about her fears that she will die before her mother and how she's not afraid to die but that she is afraid that her mother won't be able to handle her death. And it got very late while she was talking, and we were all stifling yawns and she put away her work and we closed up the studio--and most people will say their goodbyes and leave while you're turning out the lights and so on, but she stuck around and walked down the darkened hall with me and Max and then, out in the parking lot, stood a bit, making some observations about the stars.

I came home to the father's dream email and to another email from my friend Rutgirl who lives in Amarillo and who I have known since I was ten years old. I opened it up and found this long email about her fears about our friendship fading over the past several years and how she felt terrible about this and how recent things were making her re-evaluate her relationships and how she wanted more than anything to salvage our friendship from what has come to seem to her to be some kind of wreckage. She brought up this incident from several years ago when she says she snapped at me during a conversation and how, with some meditation, she had come to associate this incident (which I have no recollection of) with the beginning of some kind of ending. She wanted to apologize for this and talked about what she feels she has been doing wrong in her life and about how she wants to rectify things with the people who are most important to her. I sent her back a long, reassuring email suggesting that I felt that certain things were both inevitable and cyclical in the course of a 20+ year friendship and told her that I was willing to work on whatever she feels needs to be worked on so that she can feel confident about our friendship again. (Cue mountain!) Needless to say, there has never been this kind of full disclosure between us or examination at this level of our friendship.

So, the themes in the dream that is waking life seem to be questions and those questions seem to be: What is it? No, I mean: what is it really? Not just, what do you think it is, but, what do your fears mean? What do they mean to you to hold on to them? What might it mean for you to let go of them? And I suppose there is a part b: Why are we so afraid of change and loss when they are so intimately connected with one another and with improvement (and I'm not talking all that self-help crap that's only designed to make you feel better by expressing your desire to want to be better. No, I'm talking about making the changes that mean that you are really a better person and about how those changes must necessarily be accompanied by the feelings of loss that marks transitions in general)? Why do we fear becoming larger things and letting our souls expand? Why are we so afraid of dissapointing others even when our actions have the potential to make things better and are performed with as much love as we have in our hearts? Why do we place such importance on appearances when we know, know in our hearts, that they are all artificial constructs? What is elemental? How do we get back to what is elemental? How do we stay awake and start interpreting the dream that is our waking life?

How indeed?

Your dream has not gone bad, I hope. (Because I'll tell you, dreams going bad = not pretty and quite frightening and the only thing to do then is to wake yourself up out of it and that is particularly difficult when your already existing in this state we call awake. We won't entertain that possibility at the moment then, okay? Okay.) What is it then? What is it really? When I first read your email I thought a lot about a friend of mine, Emile, who used to work for D.M. and how she (Emile) used to hate, hate, hate that D.M. was always trying to give her advice about every single aspect of her life, from scientific matters to choosing classes to life partners). Now, having known D.M. on a personal basis, both from the perspective of student/lab grunt as well as from the perspective of equal (in the art world), I know that she is well-meaning. Annoying as hell, but well intentioned (and sometimes those are the most difficult people to deal with gracefully because all you want to do is pry their sticky, interfering, well-intentioned fingers from your soul and run very fast away to find some purification ritual that will make it all better). But to Emile, who was on the recieving end of this behavior, it was difficult because she was conscious that the attempt was being made to mold her into something new / into a scientist (the conscious aspect of that thought being heightened by the awareness that D.M. is subtle like getting hit by a bus). But it was the molding part of it that offended Emile and the only way she could think to get out of it was by literally getting out of it. And since this was a perennial theme in her life (you know, the desire to choose for yourself who it is that you are becoming and not leave it up to people who don't care about you except to try to make you into them), she was always falling in with those kinds of people (scientists, of which she dearly wants to be one) and always "getting out" which gave her this reputation for being flighty and unable to finish what she started. The truth is that she wasn't flighty. She was actually very dedicated and intelligent and independent. Only, she was unwilling to sacrifice herself and her life to science. She was just one of those crazy people who wanted not to hand over the reins of her life to someone--anyone--else. It made me think about how there are those myths in our culture about becoming and some especially stringent ones about becoming a scientist (especially those about the necessity of isolationism and elitism and about the veneer of community in the so-called scientific community and so on). I guess I'd have to ask you the kind of first question that I ask anyone whose dream I am trying to interpret: does any of what I'm saying seem relevant to you? And, if so, how?

But, then again, do you need to be asked those questions? And, point b: I have faith in you and your abilities. Not just your intelligence, which is obviously considerable, but at your skills at self-interrogation, which are frighteningly (to me) well-developed. So, then the question may be simpler and more complicated too: What does it mean this dream/life of yours? (See above). Where will it take you to answer that question?

I remain your faithful servant--

Sublingua

retreat or surrender

More lies:
Waking Sleeping Demons II - Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011
Waking Sleeping Demons - Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011
time - Friday, May. 20, 2011
- - Wednesday, Oct. 06, 2010
The Return - Tuesday, Oct. 05, 2010

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