I spoke to you yesterday for another two hours. My feelings went from upset, to calm, from loving, to: please, someone make an appointment with a neurologist and find a better cardiologist.
I go to sleep waking frequently from the heat. Arlo begins his howl, begging for release of some kind at 4am. He is right on schedule. Never missing the times he has instinctively set up to punctuate the life he lives.
I didn't have enough time with you. I've returned still unsettled. We are not done yet. I'm having a difficult time separating me from you. Maybe it is not me from you but rather we are in this thing together. All things are a form of life.
I wake up with William Faulkner's, As I Lay Dying seared on my corneas, which instantly brings me back to Jim Case and his comment about Faulkner and the term stream of consciousness. I take the book off my shelf, thumb it, and place it back. I come to my computer and search the book title's meaning and, voila! A piece is made clear.
Agamemnon and Odysseus. "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades". Homer's Odyssey. Everything we want to know about life is already inside us.
You toy with death. Do I make my own coffin? Do I donate my body to science? Maybe I want to enter the ground knowing I will be snuggled next to the people I lived with and knew? I give you the telephone number for the University of Copenhagen's body donation program. I feel an urge to help you get this out of your system. Hurry-up and be done with your dying. You tell me your grandfather lay in bed for four years waiting to die and all I can think of is Addie Bundren and her clumsy, loving family trying to fulfill her last wishes, but you can't, we can't inhale death when we are still living.
What are you trying to understand old friend? Where is it that you want to go?
Addie Bundren. Do you remember when I woke up from my sleep in the dead of night, with you beside me and I said: I have a great title for a book! You laughed and rolled over to re-enter your sleep, but I wrote that title down: What She Thought After She Died. Addie gets to tell her story after she is dead.
We really don't have anything older and still extent than Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey. The Odyssey being how we wander through life itself. The Iliad being a moment in time, a starting point if you will, from where our journey begins. The voyages we make, going here and there, really only wandering towards our eventual death. Distractions all along the way. Distractions of seduction, fear, nothingness, guilt, and then those small reminders of where we were meant to be going, that propel us on our way; towards our death.
Am I Penelope and are you Odysseus? Two people who loved, each facing away to tend to our individual voyage with always a nagging sense that someone was waiting? I know that sounds like some romantic drivel, but I really don't see it as such. I am thinking more along the lines of those two ancient texts, whether one has read them or not, being the cornerstone of our subconscious. With language so archaic we might swear it has nothing to do with us. But what happens from the beginning of time, before recorded time, is with us in the form of a collection. A collection we can neither see nor touch. It is, in part, in literature but most of it lies in our DNA. The Collection of Consciousness.
I talk about the Internet and what you hear, from my understanding of your revolt, is that I am interfering with the natural journey of your life. But you are only human, dear friend. I see you walk across vast fields, marching towards a computer that will get us to Norway. And when you make mistakes you come look for me to help you access it with more finesse. I smile, dear one. I smile with love. You've been touched by the Internet and inadvertently had fun. Sometimes I think you fall back into your dirge of death too easily.
You tell me that I make you feel young again. And then you hurry back to the vernacular of death. I think hard, wondering if it is possible to have a death without life? Why do you talk about your life as though it ended years ago? How do you manage to call me if you are dead? Who was I with in Denmark? Where are you on your voyage? Are you someplace stranded and stuck? Have you been seduced by Calypso? Calypso is a distraction and her sole purpose is to distract us from the knowledge we already have. She also uses distraction to distract herself. Distractions between people sometimes serve two purposes.
And how do I, a derivative of the Moirae; what part do I play in this? I can not stop my dreams nor my visions. You are not a Christian and I do not control the fate of others. But we met and we re-met forty years later, and it means something. We, unbeknownst to us, entered a myth; hold my hand and let us see where it takes us; slouching towards Bethlehem to be [re]born.
I go to sleep waking frequently from the heat. Arlo begins his howl, begging for release of some kind at 4am. He is right on schedule. Never missing the times he has instinctively set up to punctuate the life he lives.
I didn't have enough time with you. I've returned still unsettled. We are not done yet. I'm having a difficult time separating me from you. Maybe it is not me from you but rather we are in this thing together. All things are a form of life.
I wake up with William Faulkner's, As I Lay Dying seared on my corneas, which instantly brings me back to Jim Case and his comment about Faulkner and the term stream of consciousness. I take the book off my shelf, thumb it, and place it back. I come to my computer and search the book title's meaning and, voila! A piece is made clear.
Agamemnon and Odysseus. "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades". Homer's Odyssey. Everything we want to know about life is already inside us.
You toy with death. Do I make my own coffin? Do I donate my body to science? Maybe I want to enter the ground knowing I will be snuggled next to the people I lived with and knew? I give you the telephone number for the University of Copenhagen's body donation program. I feel an urge to help you get this out of your system. Hurry-up and be done with your dying. You tell me your grandfather lay in bed for four years waiting to die and all I can think of is Addie Bundren and her clumsy, loving family trying to fulfill her last wishes, but you can't, we can't inhale death when we are still living.
What are you trying to understand old friend? Where is it that you want to go?
Addie Bundren. Do you remember when I woke up from my sleep in the dead of night, with you beside me and I said: I have a great title for a book! You laughed and rolled over to re-enter your sleep, but I wrote that title down: What She Thought After She Died. Addie gets to tell her story after she is dead.
We really don't have anything older and still extent than Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey. The Odyssey being how we wander through life itself. The Iliad being a moment in time, a starting point if you will, from where our journey begins. The voyages we make, going here and there, really only wandering towards our eventual death. Distractions all along the way. Distractions of seduction, fear, nothingness, guilt, and then those small reminders of where we were meant to be going, that propel us on our way; towards our death.
Am I Penelope and are you Odysseus? Two people who loved, each facing away to tend to our individual voyage with always a nagging sense that someone was waiting? I know that sounds like some romantic drivel, but I really don't see it as such. I am thinking more along the lines of those two ancient texts, whether one has read them or not, being the cornerstone of our subconscious. With language so archaic we might swear it has nothing to do with us. But what happens from the beginning of time, before recorded time, is with us in the form of a collection. A collection we can neither see nor touch. It is, in part, in literature but most of it lies in our DNA. The Collection of Consciousness.
I talk about the Internet and what you hear, from my understanding of your revolt, is that I am interfering with the natural journey of your life. But you are only human, dear friend. I see you walk across vast fields, marching towards a computer that will get us to Norway. And when you make mistakes you come look for me to help you access it with more finesse. I smile, dear one. I smile with love. You've been touched by the Internet and inadvertently had fun. Sometimes I think you fall back into your dirge of death too easily.
You tell me that I make you feel young again. And then you hurry back to the vernacular of death. I think hard, wondering if it is possible to have a death without life? Why do you talk about your life as though it ended years ago? How do you manage to call me if you are dead? Who was I with in Denmark? Where are you on your voyage? Are you someplace stranded and stuck? Have you been seduced by Calypso? Calypso is a distraction and her sole purpose is to distract us from the knowledge we already have. She also uses distraction to distract herself. Distractions between people sometimes serve two purposes.
And how do I, a derivative of the Moirae; what part do I play in this? I can not stop my dreams nor my visions. You are not a Christian and I do not control the fate of others. But we met and we re-met forty years later, and it means something. We, unbeknownst to us, entered a myth; hold my hand and let us see where it takes us; slouching towards Bethlehem to be [re]born.
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