Tag: Humor

Lucid Waking

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Dreaming youth by Ernst Barlach
Dreaming youth by Ernst Barlach by Los Angeles County Museum of Art is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

People talk about lucid dreaming. Just once I’d like to be lucid when I’m awake.

I arose from blessed oblivion again this morning. It’s a shared oblivion that encompasses the origins of the universe itself. We share our beds with galaxies and comets in utero. The oblivion at the core of sleep isn’t the oblivion of lifelessness, nor is it a rejection of earthly existence, but a reunion with the primordial egg of undeceived Being at the heart of earthly life.

Every night we get the chance to recapitulate the origins of the world and awaken with a Big and creative Bang, which is not will, which is not choice, but a spontaneous eruption of something unprecedented in who we are. After all, we can’t choose what exceeds our comprehension.

I love the insistently hinting dreams of early morning. The timeless oblivion of the depths crashing on the shores of waking life, bending the scraps of memory so that they seem like messages in a bottle, warning me of the sleepwalking illusions of “being awake”.

There is a moment in the passage between fluid sleep and the seemingly solid ground of waking when you are neither.  In that suspended space (an eternal space that only appears fleeting when you leave) you realize that the dreams of night were not real after all. And when you turn that same cleansed look towards shore, and peer through all the repetitive dramas of waking life, you see that they are no more solid than the dreams of night.Read More »

A Hidden Optimism: Going On from the Last Essay

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In the last essay I seemed to compare people to primordial mud. Of course, I wrote it as a comedy, which is to say, the entire essay is excessively optimistic about people, and is only making a generously indulged joke on behalf of a gifted species at the verge of developing into a new form of life and intelligence. But if people approach it pessimistically (I don’t see how they can, given the parameters of my essays in general), then it would be received as ridicule. But I was writing this in resonance with Beckett’s approach. He also tempts people to read him pessimistically. But everything he wrote was a double-entendre. A different kind of humor is revealed when you discover his hidden optimism.

These essays presume several optimistic things (and I don’t expect agreement and I’m not looking for debate, only the willingness to entertain the angle of vision as long as it lasts):

1) that human beings are troubled, but gifted animals; and

2) That human beings are at the verge of realizing a new form of intelligence, a new way of being.

Hence, the metaphor of a primordial awakening.

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Giving Up and Going On: Probing the Alchemical Frequency of Beckett’s Comedies (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable)

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Pixabay image

“This cursed first person, it is really too red a herring.”

“Keep going, going no, call that going, call that on”


Dear reader: In your presence, I find a wider vantage point, not just this isolated center drowning in a soup of conflict and useless chatter, which is myself. If I’m only talking to myself I get lost in my Self. But with three of us, there is space enough for reflection.

Writing adjusts the frequency of attention. I don’t believe in myself too literally when I write. I probe rather than believe. The personal voice becomes a transparent drama. So I can see the Self with less vested interest, which means a little more honestly. There, (off the page) the chains of meaning are still too short to be declared a lively intelligence. I’m mostly stagnant immaturities, a primordial ooze. The brain is bubbling with small sentiences, the grim grammar of a force that can’t quite commit to living with a longer attention span.

But here there is space to make these broader linkages and begin crawling to solid ground.

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