To sleep, perchance to dream…

There are so many theories about dreams and what they are. There are also just as many ideas about how to interpret them. Some scientists whom I have heard speak, have commented on the subject, and I think they tend to dismiss dreams as nothing but random discharges of the neurons and we simply ascribe a narrative to them and call it a dream. Frankly, I think that because there is so little that can be empirically verified, the dream experience is dismissed and not dealt with by a great many scientists. You can’t really verify what is in a dream. You can see that the brain is active during REM with an MRI and this is about all you can see. Only the dreamer can tell you what he or she dreamed. The MRI and neuroscience will never be able to verify the existence of a thought or a dream in terms of its content and process. One can only trust what the “observer” the thinker or dreamer says about it. And the observer’s subjective experience is practically worthless to a scientist.

What came first, I wonder, the thought or the neuron charge? Is the thought the result of the neurons discharging as the response to an external stimulus? I don’t think any credible scientist would say otherwise. But I do. The thought, the dream, and the unverifiable invisible person who had the thought, existed before the body or brain reacted to them and their initiative. Then the brain responded to the invisible “observer” and it lights up the MRI scan. The person has had a thought and the body has responded. We are all incarnate. We are all infleshed. But we are something else too. Our existence lies beyond the neurons.

What are dreams? Dreams are sometimes bereft of much meaning. But sometimes they are loaded with profound meaning. We all know this. A great truth or self-revelation lies just under the surface, down in what Freud and Jung first referred to as the subconscious or the unconscious. And it bubbles up to the surface in a dream. We sense meaning in it, we tell it to another who sees the obvious meaning and reflects it back to us. Then we have this epiphany—this revelation experience. We see the truth of the dream and it is often a relief to us.

I have begun to migrate away from the term “subconscious” and say only that there is something there—in the layers of our being--that is very mysterious and that we cannot understand in any scientific terms. There is a part of our self that remains beyond the brain. A self that doesn’t know the very language we use. Language is in the brain. It is mostly trapped in Broca’s area. But the part of the self that doesn’t know English has other means of communication to the infleshed self. This self has observed all that our eyes have seen and ears have heard, but which the brain is too limited in focus to catch. This aspect of our self does not have words but uses a language of image and metaphor. It uses the language of dreams. Dreams are a metaphorical language: series of images strung together in a narrative. That invisible part of us is using the substance of our daily experiences—things we didn’t see “consciously” we say, but that another part of our self picked up on it and sent it back to us in dream metaphor.

I am convinced that when we die and the brain goes, our learned language will go with it, but not the metaphorical language. It is a start—a beginning of a new, yet most ancient language from before the dawn of language itself. And I should say there is yet another language beyond the language of metaphor and that is the language of love. How do we find our way in the underworld? Understand Metaphor. Dante chose Virgil! A Poet! Who else knows the language of the heart? The Metaphor is the poet’s great tool. Let me then use poetry to develop my thought.

Here is yet another selection from Peter the Pirate that perhaps is a better way of stating what I’m after, than I can at this moment in an essay. Forgive a spoiler for a story you may likely never read. This section comes just after the death of Peter the Pirate:



From part 11: The Dreams that Come

Now what is death? And what is life?
And what is time and space?
It is a dream that we all share
A myth that we all chase.

And though life seems so very real
It is a metaphor;
A shadow of the bigger things
That hide behind death’s door.

And when we sleep we dream of things
Too hard to understand.
And harder still to keep those dreams
When daylight’s close at hand.

The things that made us weep at night
Vanish from the mind.
And little heed we give to them,
And to these dreams are blind.

And yet they speak to us, these dreams,
In a language we should learn.
That we should know the way to go
And which way not to turn.

Words we hold within our brains
And when we die they rot
But dreams come from the soul and so
We die, but they do not.

And so the dream of Peter lived
That language he did learn
And thus he knew which way to go
And on which path to turn.

And guides he had, that he knew well,
Who helped him on his way
His heart he had, and life he had
And beauty—that did stay.

Faith, and hope, and love he had
And there were several more
That helped him then through every gate
And every room and door.

A Sea Shanty

I have always enjoyed story poems. In fact one of the first books I ever bought was a collection of story poems when I was in the seventh grade. I was a lousy reader in the seventh grade, and I can’t say that I read all of the poems in the book. I’ll confess I wasn’t quite ready for Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Byron’s Childe Herald, but I did read some of the others.

The oldest of all literature is the story poem, really. The epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Job, the Iliad and the Odyssey are a few examples of what I am talking about. Some of the greatest works of literature are story poems: The Inferno, Paradise Lost, The Aeneid and many more. But, in the west, I can’t say that I have seen a lot of poets striving to create a great epic poem for our times. And I have often thought that it is not a poet that produces great poetry, but it is a culture that writes it through the chosen poets of its time. I have my doubts about the greatness of our current western world and doubts about it being able to produce great poetry, let alone a great epic poem. As for America, I don’t think there is a great epic poem for it, even though America has produced some very fine poets.

I have been working on an epic poem for some time. Not epic in the grand sense of a story for a culture. I won’t even pretend to be a Homer or a Virgil (I am prone to delusion, but I’m not that delusional) but epic in the sense that it is a story of an adventure that takes place over a span of years. I have mentioned this poem before in my blog. It is called Peter the Pirate: the Commodore’s Journey and it is becoming a life-long effort to write. It is going to be the world’s longest ballad, I think. I may have to check the Guinness Book of World Records to see. While Peter the Pirate is in ballad form, I interject a song from time to time, that is not in ballad stanza, to break up the monotony. I thought I might share one of these songs here. It is in italics, because it is one of the ways I distinguish songs in the story from the story itself. And this song is a story poem from a story poem.

Going Home

Now I left a maid in London town
Said, ‘I’ll be back, if’n I don’t drown.
It’s a brand new ship and she won’t go down.’

O, I was at sea for many a day
What did she do while I was away?
Did she think of me, o, and did she pray?

Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.

Off Greenland’s coast we found a whale.
We hauled her in and we then set sail.
But it did no good for the wind did fail.

And after weeks, when we found our wind—
‘Twas a nasty gale, that the wind did send.
It tore the sails, which we had to mend.

Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.

When we came to the coast of Ireland,
We were attacked by a pirate band!
And they drove our ship into the sand.

And since we lost near half our crew.
It took some time to fix our ship anew.
And a single mast would have to do.

Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.

And then with Cornwall’s coast in sight,
‘Twas hard to see for it was night,
And we wrecked for want of lighthouse light.

And so the new ship did go down.
Captain, crew, and I did drown.
Nay, we never came to London town.

Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.
Some day I'm going home.


I realize that some people do not care for the implausibility of a speaker who tells his story from beyond the grave: “How can Moses write about his own death” so to speak. But sea-shanties, such as this, allow for such a thing, I think. And in the context of the story of the Commodore’s journey, the song is sung to a ghost, so why not have a poem by a ghost?

The Song

Every now and then I write a poem and I just don’t care what anyone thinks of it. I don’t care if I don’t follow the rules that make a good poem. But then in poetry there really aren’t any rules, are there? It seems like the moment someone tries to contain it or capture it, as it nears a definition; a poet comes along who bashes their too small container all to hell. And rightly so! Can you build a coffin for God? The Poetry is just too big and too full of life to ever be contained. Poets never do well with rules. They are too crazy, wild and irrepressible, and always have been, to ever follow rules. They are always on the fringe of society and often cross the line. Ovid was exiled for “the Art of Love” and for his womanizing of the wrong women, Percy Shelly left his wife and ran off with a teenage Mary Shelly, the extreme antics of Lord Byron are famous. (Pardon my gross over-generalizations here; I’m trying to make a point here, damn it!) Poets just never accept rules or limits and always have a passion and an awake-ness to living, a kind of intense, intentional desire to live, fully alert, to all the details and sensations of life. And sometimes because that flame burns so brightly and so passionately it burns all that they are, and all that they have in them, in a very short time. They will have it no other way though. They have made Achilles’ choice: it is better to have died young and gloriously.

I agree with Ezra Pound and the imagists that it is images that make good poetry. I also love rhyme, rhythm and lyricism and sounds and sensations. (One of my favorite poets is Keats for his youthful sensuality.) But sometimes I have something to say and an essay isn’t right, a story is too long, and I don’t have a pulpit to preach from anymore, so a sermon is out of the question. So I crank out a short rhetorical poem full of the much maligned use of anaphora, end stops and a deplorable lack of images. And other than the anaphora, I have no meter; neither do I use rhyme, metaphor, simile, or a host of other poetic devices. It’s didactic; it’s just preaching, but at least it is short and to the point. Heck, it isn’t even new or original. That’s the point of the anaphora. It is an echoing of all the voices from beyond time itself that urge us, merge us into life out of our slumber; or liberate us from the slumped shoulders of a life lived according to a notion of how someone else thinks we should live and according to their estimation of who we are.

The Song:

Everyone’s gotta’ song in them to sing.
If only they will listen to it.
If only they won’t compromise it.
Just sing it.
Sing it out.
Out beyond the local laughter
Of the people who know them.
‘cause only strangers can hear the greatness of
That song that is in them
That song that is in you
That song that is in me.
Thus spoke Emerson
Thus spoke Thoreau
Thus spoke Whitman
Thus spoke Ghandi,
Thus spoke Jesus
The Kingdom is in you
Let it out—sing it into the world
Give it birth.
Incarnate it.

Eulogy for a Mouse

I wrote “Eulogy for a Mouse” about three years ago and, in this case, the voice or speaker of the poem is that of my own and the event is real. In writing it, I had every intention of echoing a certain well-known poem by Robert Burns. If I have learned anything from the romantic poets, it is that I must rebel with them against a view of nature that is dominated by cold empiricism. It is a view that says that all matter is just “materials” as Mary Shelly put it in Frankenstein. There is nothing sacred in anything. But Romaticism sees a mysterious sacredness that is present in nature. In Coleridge, for instance, one should note that the Albatross dropped from the ancient mariner’s neck precisely on his epiphany regarding his view nature—when the slimy things of the sea were no longer just slimy things, but beautiful fellow creatures sharing with us in the experience of life itself:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I bless'd them unaware!
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I bless'd them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Being a Black Elk fan, I recall him talking about thanking the animals that were killed for providing food for him. The deer, the bison and all living things are brothers who gave up their lives to provide food for the humans who kill them. And, in a completion of the cycle, when humans die, they also gave life back by returning to the soil, which fertilizes the grass that feeds the bison and the deer. The animal and the material that he is made of are as sacred as the material of our own human composition. We are all cut and carved of the same stuff, and we are all connected, "mitak oyasin" say the Lakota: we are all related.


Eulogy for a Mouse

Overrun with vermin
and their little turds left all over the stove top,
and the holes they would bore in the bread and boxes of cereal,
I started killing them in those little traps that snap,
Hoping that it is a quick and humane death they bring.
I flushed their remains down the toilet without a ceremony
And with about as much remorse as a sociopathic killer,
until I got up early one day and startled one
on the stove coils.
With a wooden spoon in my hand,
I hit her before I really saw her.
Two quick reflexive smacks
terminated all that she was.
No more would she sniff for the bits of bacon
my son left on the table,
or nibble the dried romano cheese crumbs
my wife missed when she cleaned
off the counter from last night’s pasta dish,
nor see, with those dark beads she had for eyes,
the nocturnal visions so familiar to her
along her route behind the back of the refrigerator,
under the cabinets and in the oven.
Vanished were anything resembling thoughts she might have had
of mates, children, or those fearful shadows that pass at night when she was at her most alert.
All that was invisible to me and known only to her kind, all that she knew, sensed, took pleasure in, dissolved.
Her creamy coffee-colored carcass lying still and limber
on the stove top.
Her underside was eggshell white
and complimented the pink of her feet,
The others had been gray or brown or a vulgar color
but she was uncommon in color and form,
In a quick review of my actions
I realized that in her last moment she had looked at me,
had hesitated,
stopped,
stood on her hind legs as if to say,
you took my children
take me too.
Pure anthropomorphic projection on my part and
I should rest in the science that says mice do not think.
But I do not rest,
and I do feel guilt,
and I cannot account for why will not forget her.

Letter to Penelope

The Ides of March have passed, and now we come to the day the world first glimpsed your radiant face! O face more lovely to me than that of Helen to her Paris! O face that sweetly haunts me and compels me to go on in spite of all that I have suffered. Home to Ithica! Home to Penelope! And so I write and cast this letter to Poseidon my enemy who will deliver it. Aye, will sink it to the very depths, as lost and dissolved parchment, but write it I must! What else is my heart to do?


My Dearest Penelope,

For ten long, hard years I battled at Troy, witnessed the heroics of Achilles, and his death by the coward, Paris. I saw, with my own eyes, the deeds and death of Hector, the burning of Troy, the lamenting of Cassandra and the crazed Helen carried off in tears. Nothing but grief! Grief! Grief! And death! Death! Death! And for what? The trysts of a woman?

I was so glad to have started the journey home at long last and I looked forward to nothing more than your fair face and loving arms! Things were going well. The contrary winds were contained in a great bag given to me by the god of the winds, and, in spite of Poseidon’s raging, we made fair sail.

Ithica was in site! And I thought I was safe and could take a moment's rest from guarding that damn bag of wind. But as I slept, curiosity got the better of my men who found a way to open the bag only to find that the winds escaped! And the captive, contrary, angry winds, fed on the milk of Poseidon’s wrath and blew and raged till Ithaca was lost to us and we were driven back, so far back, that I fear it may be another ten years just to find you again.

The Fates are cruel—the hags! I wonder…is there purpose in their spinning, measuring and cutting? Do they think about a man’s life? Or is it whimsy? Do they laugh, light heartedly, as the thread is snipped—unconcerned that the slightest palsy or slip of the hand could rob a man of years from his lifespan? What is it to them? O, to have Ithica in site! The prize and meaning of my life at my very finger tips and to have it snatched away suddenly with such seeming spite!

They say that a man cannot fight the fates! Perhaps it is so. And Yet I will fight them, Penelope, with every last breath that I breathe, my dear heart, that I may return to you. Because you are Ithica to me. You are the land to which I will return. I am no king but for your love. Aye it is your heart for me that makes me king of that land! It is your heart for me that makes me long for Ithica!

Care for Telemacus! I should be there for him. Do you see me in him? He is the promise of my return. Give him my love. Did I say wait for me only until he is man enough to grow a beard? All the more urgency to fight my fate! O Penelope, wait and engage no suitor, for your lord, Odysseus will return!

The Turning of the Page

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is a last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson—Self Reliance

Upon first reading those words, I had lots of questions. How does one know what is right and good? How should one live? What makes a thing right or wrong? Do we believe something is good, bad, right or wrong from what we read in holy books, or what preachers tell us, or from ecclesiastical tradition? Does it come from the general consensus of society? Is it simply a relative and arbitrary set of rules, customs, and mores that can be manipulated by mass media over time?

As I read Emerson, it isn’t any of the above. In his view, whatever is true and good is already there whether we bother to perceive it or not. But certainly Emerson would have contempt for anyone who thinks that the way to know what is good could be known by simply letting someone else dictate it to us. We have to look for it ourselves and perceive it on our own, and then learn to live according to our internal sense—our intuition—of what is there. And we have to trust our intuition in spite of all the flack and pressure to conform to what some book, some preacher, some social group or some tradition dictates. Emerson says in his essay on self-reliance: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” And later he adds: “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.” Perhaps there comes a time when the non-conformist whips back:


The Turning of the Page
March 4, 2008

I turn the page; I turn it good.
I turn the page; just like I should.
I read the words; I read them well.
I read the words; I read like hell.
I sit and think about the page.
And as I think I fill with rage!
Don’t mess with me; don’t bend my brain
Don’t preach at me; don’t threaten pain
Don’t tell me what I ought to do,
Or what to drink, or what to chew.
I think I know what works for me
I think I know how it should be.
So I write words; they are my own
I’ll strip the truth down to the bone!
It’s time for me to preach at you
And tell you off, and what to do!
Then turn THAT page, and turn it good!
And read the words, just like you should
And sit and think about that page!
Then maybe YOU will fill with rage.

Prologue to The Commodore's Journey

I have written a series of stories in ballad form that I have called the Peter the Pirate stories. I have been writing them for many years, long before Johnny Dep hit the scene. Five of these stories are short stories in ballad form, but one is becoming an epic poem called Peter the Pirate: The Commodore’s Journey. I thought I would share the prologue with you all. I should let you know that I have studied Virgil’s Aeneid a bit and couldn’t help but echo his prologue. Any one out there who had to memorize “Arma virumque cano…” will smile at the reference or groan with the horrible memory, but I loved the Aeneid and I love this most ancient means of story telling: the epic poem. Long before writing, there was poetry and story. Whoever first uttered the epic of Gilgamesh, or the book of Job long ago vanished into dust; and their name, once uttered to the winds is now long gone and blown away, but the stories and poems that sprung from their minds are still carried on the winds of time and haunt us even now. They are my teachers, these old ghosts, and they are still my inspiration.

The prologue
Peter the Pirate:Commodore’s Journey


I will sing a sea shanty
About the Mora May
And one who sailed that noble ship
To lands so far away.

And may the muses of the sea
Help me tell my tale,
Of how this pirate lost his ship
And men and mast and sail!

How he endured the mist maid’s wrath
And came to distant shores
And saved his men as best he could
In spite of wounds and sores.

And help me find the words to sing
Just why he went away.
‘Twas not for gold, nor glory gained
That he set sail that day.

‘Twas something deep inside of him
That called him out to sea—
A voice that few men dare to hear
Though it would set them free.

And if it cost him everything,
To follow that strange voice—
His men, his ship, his gold, his life
Then that would be his choice.

Persephone

Gentle Souls,

I thought I would share a poem this week. Being in a far away land where there is no real winter, I kind of miss the experience of spring a bit. Wordsworth felt that poetry should find inspiration from memories that are recollected in a place far from the event in time and place. He discusses this in his intro to Lyrical Ballads.

Tintern Abby is a primary example of what he means by that. I didn’t like the poem when I read it the first time through, but now I love it and consider it one of my favorites. Even so, I thought I would put one of my own poems, recollecting a memory of spring,on my blog. I realize that hardly anyone will ever read the stuff I put here, but all the same, I “send forth filament, filament, filament. Seeking the spheres to connect them.”

Regarding my rather archaic tone, Jared Carter once told me that he wanted to get me into the modern world. My poetry could have been written in the days of the Romantics. (Keats, Shelly, Byron, etc) I have tried to get into modern and postmodern poetry in writing and reading, and I do enjoy it enough, but I keep having relapses. All the same, if you happen to read these words, enjoy.

When the maple tree
Is copper green,
And mushrooms in
The wood are seen,
My soul, she comes alive.

What cruel intrigue
Of the gods,
To which the Lord
Of heaven nods,
Did steal my soul from me?

But green, she comes
From Hades’ caves,
And leaves behind
The frozen graves,
Far brighter than before.