Reverie

(Beginning today. I promise myself must read and write some before sleep or after wake. More endless ramblings.) Here goes nothing.


Poetic reverie gives us the world of worlds. Poetic reverie is a cosmic reverie. It is an opening to a beautiful world, to beautiful worlds. It gives the I a non-I which belongs to the I: my non-I. It is this non-I which enchants the I of the dreamer and which poets can help us share. More importantly, for my “I-dreamer,” it is this “my non-I” which lets me live my secret of being in the world. (In my dream, am I not all the characters of my dreams?—Cixous) A banal desire to escape the banality of the banal self. What is not banal about this banality, is the desiring. Perhaps. To speak is to be out of one’s self. Speaking, one projects one’s self onto the other, or, to put one’s consciousness into the form of speech, spoken words, thrown outside of the body. I went to him with one question: how to go outside of my self. It doesn’t matter. I have never experienced astral travel or felt my spirit rising above my body, but I believe that it’s possible and was seeking from him an answer. He is a spiritual teacher. He shows people how to cure sicknesses inside the body with the heat generated from an outside body, his body, the healer’s body, or the body of a tree, because every form of body has heat and every body is a healer. We have been talking about the Way, Buddha’s Way, and the a-temporality of time. I didn’t want to talk about time any more. My existence up until then had been a long waiting, nothing but time, so I wanted to move on from it. I wanted to talk about space. I wanted to be in a different place. I asked him, how can I go outside of my self? He answered, Where were you? I have been here. That is, my body was there, in the living room of his house, with his body and the body of my father. But I? Where was I? I was there, I was, that is to say, I existed during those thirty minutes, and my body heard him and responded to him and asked him questions, but, where was I? I’m not sure. I was not in my body. I was not about my body. I was not with my body. I know, because otherwise I would have been clawing at it in my head. Otherwise I would have been cutting it and ripping the cut that I have made in it. Had I been my self in my body, I would have been in isolation, locked inside the epidermis, the muscles, the organs that have long been petrified; my body was sedimentation. I was …just…my voice. I was my voice and I was the questions and the replies and the laughs that came from these cavities inside my body. I wasn’t my body. What a great revelation it was! During moments when I want to escape from myself, because in my everyday responses and thoughts I leaked and gradually I have become an empty bottle bobbing on top of the sea’s currents. I leak because I am permeable. When all that is me has leaked outside of myself, I become empty and my permeability reduces itself until I harden into bounded vacuity. Then I am no longer open to leakages or filtrations. Then I am just bottled space. Substances inside my body…what’s left is dried up, their shells collapse into themselves. But this wasn’t really a revelation. It was just a re-learning of a lesson. I have learned this lesson before, because I am always seeking a vastness enough to contain the whole of my splittings and because I am always seeking this vastness in my splittings, I know what hell is. Splittings. Bachelard says splittings are good. To split a self is also to double a self. To split an already doubled self. Doubled because a self is a coupling of the animus and the anima. But what if the split within the self is not one that belongs to these two genii? What if splittings within the self is not between any two things but just splittings? And what if splittings are not good? What if splittings are undesirable? What if they torture, and they bring hell? There is always that. I record my splittings with extreme caution, because good and bad splittings are indistinguishable, and it is a difference between here and the asylum. Asylums seem to be a place of confinements, but are they? Coehlo doesn’t think so. In asylums his characters get to live outside of the world. They are free of worldly responsibilities and real life constraints. They are free in that house of madness. They get to be. They just have to be in there. So to be free, I have to give up my freedom? No, no thanks. I don’t want my madness to be doctored and ordered. I still want to be in the world. That’s my hell, I think. It’s very boring.