Dream as Traum-a Lieder

Didja ever have one of those dreams wherein you're on a wide superhighway approaching a bridge over a river the size of the Mississippi and you start to climb but the road gets narrower and narrower? And the grade becomes steeper and steeper as your car gets smaller and smaller and slower and slower?

I didn't think so. But it ends when you almost get to the top and you realize your car is stuck at the top of a grain bin and your superhighway is a tin tube to a deep dark tank--so you must get tanked! "Every grain of wheat must die".....first....a fitful fearful ferment follows sometimes. Even when I wake to full sunshine...hence this late entry.

The old saying, "yeah, but in the long run, we're all dead," may be be apropos here...since all we see is a tiny fraction of what's over the bridge/tube and we never quite get to the top so that we are once again left with wonder, on the plus side, and dread on the other. Notice how these dreams are almost always cut off just before the most spectacular views and/or the most terrible abysses should appear? Maybe our curiousity IS limited? A bit,a bit...

Define death, then! Doth death, like taxes, evade all formats of relativity? One must assume that either biological death is the end; or it's not. If our deaths are final, as most of the Western world lately seems to assume, then as Gordon Liddy says (yeah that Gordon Liddy--but who would know better than a real burglar?), "we're all just worm food." and life is all sensate satisfaction and avoidance of pain,"full of low sounds and silent fury".

I have gone back to reading Joseph Conrad's short stories, such as "The Lagoon", which with all its brooding may have been a precursor or a postlude to "Heart of Darkness" in which all human aspirations are reduced to one low unlit level which is quickly swallowed up by an omnivorous wilderness, without and within.

"Arsat had not moved. He stood lonely in the searching sunshine; and he looked beyond the great light of a cloudless day into the darkness of a world of illusions." Arsat expects himself to go back to a whole world of enemies to avenge his brother's death and to assuage his guilt for not dying with his brother and having caused that same brother's death as well. "In a little while I shall see clear enough to strike--to strike. But she has died, and ....now...darkness."

You see, Arsat was both a feared warlord and a thief of his king's wife, all thanatos and eros which clearly caused the death of the "secret sharer" long before he would be biologically dead. So, if death can come before death, can it not only come after death as well, what is known as "the second death"?

We cannot assume it does not--at least not from evidentiary methods that we have or are likely to develop. "Unless a man die......"

7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777

I see that the subject of suffering strikes a chord among my couple of readers. I would say, "Oh, good!" like Mrs. Fawlty but that might be disrespectful to those billions who do suffer considerably more than the all the three of us thrown together-- that too would be an assumption based on little or no evidence at all except the bits we have shared together thus far. (Thanks to Joyce and Dennis for being semi-public sharers on this bog of a blog:)

My job, for good or ill, requires me to inure myself to the suffering of others as much as it requires me not to faint at the sight of entrails. It's a thin line between these three at least: detachment, empathy, and unacceptable callousness. If we did not have some inborn interpersonal and societal reflexes, this would be impossible to do. Think of Asperger's. Think of the sociopath. Think of the portait of the artist as a young man-- namely Dorian Gray.

"It's Complicated" (maybe unsubsumable)

As Joyce can tell us, I was what we could kindly call a social "retard" as a young man, with lots of squeamishness but very little "outer directedness" (Riesman); only a very blighted, erroneous self-awareness. But are we to call subsequent developments inevitable, the result of hard work, or the Grace of God? Given every man's "heart of darkness" (I dare not speak for the other half of the human race here) what defense or hope can there be? This judgment too I will leave to others--but I will say that esp, this time of year, I see life far more as a Gift and a call to both Grace-i-tude and Forgiveness-hood of the transcendent kind, than as a blow in the face or the results of my trying to build a giant bridge from Hell to Heaven. "Be content with such as you have."; "be ye kind"; and "be ye thankful" are all simple messages from the same author, which are so simple as to be unnatural and hence only possible with tankfuls of Mercy and Grace.

And a larger car? "In your dreams!"

8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 is not great

"Oh Lord woncha buy me a Meeeeercedes Benz............." Applause, pleez.