After my ineptitude with respect to my recent attempt at relaxation (otherwise known as ending the futz), the next day I returned Ludlum to the library, his masculine melodrama unplumbed, and picked up Poetics of Imagining Modern to Post-modern by Richard Kearney. I just seem to be in a space where the novel cannot participate. Poetry works, and non-fiction of a specific sort, but not the novel.

All I really did for the evening of the futzing post is drift along on a undercurrent of ennui, went to bed, slept, woke snuffling, then spent the next day (yesterday, after the doctor’s visit) drifting, less futzily (nice word don’t you think), on a mixture of poems read and reread, snoozing at the beach in the shade, drinking iced coffee, and beginning Kearney. Sometimes bad moods just have to be let alone to blossom – even if what you get is a milk vetch, dandelion or morning glory vine.

Today has been much of the same. I had a meeting this morning that went rather well, but after that I went to my favourite Greek Taverna for a take-away breakfast (fava beans in a tomatoe-garlic sauce, tabouli and a little black olive tapenade) mixed with some bread and iced espresso (sweet) from the pâtisserie a few doors down – oh my the wonders of being human, having a little money and living in Vancouver. I zoomed off to the beach with my food, sat in the shade, ate, drank and (re)read Sylvia Legris’ iridium seeds (gorgeous!).

After that, I went to another coffee shop, tea this time and Kearney. Hours worth of a lovely breeze, mixed sun and shade, pleasant, mostly smiling faces, an interesting book and no obligation to speak.

The wondrous world of a several-day futz.

The ability to sleep deeply and well is, I suspect, the difference between happiness and angst.

These next weeks I am on a quest to achieve a sleep from which I awake on the lighter side of that duality.

The last few years have damaged me but as of today I am entering into at least a few weeks of, what I hope to be, recuperation. To be more precise, I don’t have to go to work for at least a month and I can still afford to pay rent and eat as well. This halcyon combination may not last but if forced to choose I will buy food and re-enter the homeless state rather than return to the conditions under which the damage occurred.

This choice may not be necessary but it has become clear to me what I simply cannot tolerate and remain something I recognize as myself.

This is good to know.

Over my life I have spent several years (over several different instances) living out – that is, homeless. I was never a druggie or off my meds – there are a lot of North American people who live out for reasons other than those two. A lot of them are women – and more and more – they are older women just like me. I’ve written before about the pull to hop in my car and return to that life. The reasons are multiple for running from the 9-5 life but the one huge reason to stay – medical care for an ageing body. And I am sick. That and the proximity of a clean (more or less) bathroom.

To forestall the urge to flee I have created an outdoor space where I can read/write/think and, in a pinch, also sleep. It was warm today and I sat outside and do love it, especially now that I have more plants. (I got an Oregon grape – I love that plant). Here’s hoping the outdoor living room plan works and I can live outside without having to live out.

For whatever reason videos like this make me feel good about being human. Go figure. They just do.

via Wimp

I am really a North American and not British, despite what my kids say about me occasionally slipping and calling the storage space at the back of the car a boot,  or calling french fries “chips” and soccer “football.” But really, on the occasions I have lived in Britain, I am just as odd there. Just as happens here, I’d slip and call a courgette a “zuchini,” or instead of saying “Feel like takeaway?” I’d say “Takeout anyone?” and there I’d be outed again.

I have a confused heritage in a number of ways but something happened today to make me think again about the things that stick with you, that are so far inside that, even if they rarely see the light, they are there, creating the psychological platform from which many, mostly subliminal, decisions get launched.

I was sitting at my local coffee shop with tea and book in hand I noticed a Victorian bicycle go by with what looked like a Victorian man riding it. The sight was a lot like this, but the guy had on patterned socks and he wore a top hat.

But this is Vancouver and one sees odd things, so I just picked up the book again.

Then there was another big-assed bike and, putting my book down, I noticed another man on a bicycle with an old fashioned woven food cart on the front. There was a stilt-walker and a soldier, both in period clothes. But as I looked more critically, things began to look a little off.  Especially the soldier. I’m no expert on uniforms but there was something about the guy that just wasn’t right. He reminded me of a cross between the home guard and East India Company.

As I watched more people came to light. I was doing fine, assuming a carnival, or circus of some sort, at least until the two women came by. One of them just set me off.

A group of the “Victorians” crossed the road to the corner near where I was sitting. One of the women was gesturing rather broadly and spoke with the worst upper class accent I have ever heard. I don’t think she intended a parody but that is what my subconscious heard.

I was instantly enraged and several flashing thoughts went through my head. The first was “whore.” The subtext running along with it was that “no decently educated woman would act so in public, talk loudly and be so arrogant and condescending. She’s a lower class tart aping her betters.” And in the same instant, coming though my head like a braided stream in full spring run-off, there was the raging hatred that comes with having a great aunt sold as a young girl to one the actual upper class families so the rest of the girl’s kin (my ancestors) had more food. The hatred of the lowers for the uppers is apparently a long lasting deal. And yet there I was, a “lower” feeling deeply offended by this parody of the “uppers.”

Now I have worked as a servant and been treated rather shabbily at that, but even then at 17 I knew I could just walk away and rejoin the 20th century. And I did. Also, I have a decent, if not stellar, education and I even have a chequing account of my own, so why I should react so fast and hard? I can only attribute it to ingrained classism. I guess I learnt more at boarding school than I realized.

Today is the first set of moments after intense pain. These little bits of time are bubbles in a field and each pearly globe contains some effluvia, some exhalation of illness. They burst occasionally, and I waft through the miasma, but mostly today has been the mild haze-pain of the field itself, the bubbles remain largely at a distance, beautiful and alien. The world feels like it is an iridescent garden whose main fruit is inedible.

And it’s hot. So here at the coffee shop sitting in what shade is available, there is a thin skin of sweat on my nose and upper lip. The combination is almost ecstatic. If I move wrong the pain re-members and I feel as if I have been lifted and simultaneously flattened into something resembling a Mary Callery statue.

And tomorrow I am supposed to return to work.

This video is called Small Pleasures. It’s lovely. The narrator’s voice alone is like a warm bath.

via Wimp

A short while ago I had a dream that prophesied some potential problems to come. And what’s true is that one of those “whales” from the dream smacked me nearly senseless as it went by only a few days after I had the dream. I won’t bore you with the details, but what may be of interest is how I cope with such things as “prophecy” given my atheism.

I know enough to realize that while dream images may be random firings of the brain, so, essentially is much else we experience.  The point is what the brain does with those electrical and chemical impulses not just how they originate. There are many theories about how we achieve meaning and while many are interesting, I lean toward embodied cognition. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines embodied cognition this way:

The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities.

In other words, as Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”

(I would add another phrase to make it: “The human body (as it comes to be through trying to accomplish things in the world) is the best picture of the human soul. Not as catchy of course, but more accurate.)

This idea is where I begin thinking about how dreams accomplish meaning. Because language and concepts are so blazingly important in our recent development, they drown out much of our older forms of communication. Things like “my skin is crawling” or “my gut tells me no” are messages now largely consigned to the realm of spirit and intuition. They have become all but inaudible in the time it has taken to move from Erectus to Sapiens. We have developed technologies to listen for those “messages” – meditation and the like – and now, given our conceptual dependence, we create stories to explain their origins. Since those zaps of insight often feel as if they are not like us (i.e. rational and conceptual), those “communications” are often thought to originate in the outside-us — in the spiritual world. I understand the impulse to consign the conceptually unknown to outside-us but I think it unnecessary to posit another world when our own will do as an explanation.

Our bodies, living and developing in the world provides enough of an explanatory net.  Where do dreams come from? The bodily (non-conceptual) systems as they co-develop with the larger set of (non-conceptual) environmental systems.

The body is the model (think of it as a biological non-conceptual framework) which guides the activity of organizing those random impulses into meaningful episodes.  Impulses fired because of events in the body in interaction with its environment, are organized into packets based on past experiences. Like rain flowing down a dry stream bed, where a particular rain drop falls may be random, but the pattern the water creates as it moves across the earth is not. Because those body/brain firings originate and are released into a fairly tightly organized set of pathways, many of which result in (and have been caused by) meaning construction of the waking mind, it seems silly to assume that dreams would not have just as much meaning potential as other waking mental events.

A couple of nights ago I had a dream.  I have escaped from a prison along with a young man.  We are flying over the country side, no control, having been shot out of some sort of weapon. I can see the land streaming under me. We cross the coastal lands and I realize that the arc of our flight is going to dump us in the ocean. As the dream opens I see below me small farms and acreages with rusted-out cars, deep pockets of weeds next to broken wood sheds and other signs of poverty and I feel a sense of comfort from the place. I don’t know this land but I feel comfortable with its apparent freedoms, space and its silence.

As I fly past these coastal lands I see the ocean and below the surface a great many ovoid shapes that I know to be creatures. Whales probably. I get no sense in the dream that these are sharks or other killers but that they are dangerous simply because of our relative size. The fact that they may kill me after I drop amid them would be a matter of impersonal circumstance. I am stoic about this possible fate. This is not something I want but at least falling into the water is not necessarily fatal as falling to the earth would have been.

And then the young man and I are in the water and the point of view changes. I can no longer see the beings below, the water is dark, the grey-brown-green of the sea. I also cannot see the land. I cannot control what may happen in the sea. All I can do is swim. So I turn back toward the way I have just come and begin.

I have worked with dreams since I was a young girl and because it is such a long time, my working with them goes in great arcs.  At the nadir I obsess, write down every image, sensation, colour flare in my sleeping. I list all the elements, translate them into narrative. I compare the symbols to past dreams. Turn them into poems, drawings, song, movement. Interpret.

At the zenith of my psychological bow, I surface inside the dream and it stays with me, gently.  Like balm on sore hands the images remain mostly invisible but work nonetheless. Often – acknowledged but left alone – a friend that needs a period of respectful silence before speaking – the dream will resolve into meaning and present itself as something so obvious, so crystalline and ordered, that one wonders how something so obvious was necessary to be spoken.

But it is necessary and, from experience, there is another, and another, layer of insight that will present itself when the initial action of the dream has been played out in waking life. So for this one, the swim is what I am being called upon to do and once I reach sight of land, or landfall itself, the dream will reappear and I will understand more.

Welding dreams to waking life is an act of art. Interpretation always is. The world has no meaning intrinsic to it, at least not any meaning in the human sense of the word. Meaning as we know it is our creation. Yet despite this, a good meaning, one that works for us in our lives must be linked to the actual world. Meaninglessness has at least two components. One is the obvious fact that humans are the source of human meaning and so there is no outside resource by which we can ascertain the Truth. Humans are not interlocutors between heaven and earth. We are in a dyadic relationship with that which is our source. The earth and its patterns are sometimes the nadir and we the zenith and other times we are beneath our own feet.

The dream I had told me a few things. I am finally out of prison, but I am still not in control. I have been shot out of that terrible place and I am passing over that which was for me. In other words, my job is over and I am temporarily immersed in Rez war and politics. And this has dumped me back into the sea of feeling.

I am not an emotional person and there are whale-sized unresolved issues that swim in my unconscious. I am in pain a good deal and of late I have felt despair, and an understanding of how people wear out, how pain can cause even a strong woman to lie down to die. But here in the dream, despite my lack of personal control – my life’s lack of a apparent navigation device – my natural stubbornness has been restored. Often in my past, in a dangerous situation, my mind narrows, and my focus remains locked on getting to safety. This is the feeling I am left with in the dream. All those dangerous huge creatures below me – there is nothing I can do about that. I may be killed by the vasty size of that which I cannot control. This is true – but meaningless since it is not mine to write. All I can do is swim.

This is key in the dream but so too is direction. At the very end of the dream I am in the water beginning the swim to shore, resolute, fear harnessed to forward motion, but where exactly is shore? And what does it represent in waking life?

The question to be answered by subsequent acts of interpretation: Where in waking life does safety lay?

And what I would really like to know – can I stop being shot out of other people’s guns?