Westward the wave-gleaners

You might feel a passing hatred for me and not understand why

I wonder if talking to a child about the Oedipus complex is an advisable parenting technique for those who can responsibly explain it, or if it just messes the child up further. I think perhaps in a non-terminological way, it is a good thing to remind one’s child that the relationship is a non-competitive one. If I ever have a son I don’t want our love to permanently cool off after a certain age. Part of why I would welcome – favor even – a gay son.

Short-term thinking

Some brilliant professor needs to write a book about the ascendance of short-term thinking over long-term thinking in the last few decades and the generationalism inherent in that. It extends to spending on credit, tax breaks, auctioning off social welfare programs, giving up on labor unions, buying from (multinational) corporate chains, waging preemptive wars, wrecking the environment. I think people over 50 realize on some level that the world is going to hell, but they won’t be around to see it. And their kids can figure it out.

The marriage of true minds

I’ve met someone for whom it doesn’t take a great feat of imagination to see being with for the rest of my life. God give me the mind to win their love every day.

Lucid dream to false awakening

The intricacies of lucid dreaming continue to confound me.

Last night I had a nightmare. A recurring nightmare where I find that my computer or phone is overrun with a malicious virus. I managed to out-think the nightmare, realize the falsity in it, and use lucid dream techniques to turn the dream in my favor. I told myself: “This cannot be real. If you will it strongly enough, you can erase this dream from existence.” Sure enough, it worked.

Or so I thought it did. I woke up but found myself in the very same situation, finding my computer overtaken by a virus. Having just “woken up” I took it for fact.

As it turns out, it was a dream within a dream. A nightmare turned lucid dream within a nightmare.

I wrote before about how dream credulity can be so strong that you lose lucidity because you determine the dream to be real. This now is a further complication, where you use lucid techniques to wake up from a nightmare but only succeed in inducing a false awakening. At that point you no longer have any defenses against the nightmare. Fortunately after one false awakening an authentic awakening is likely to be near.

It’s interesting to note that none of the lucid dreaming books I’ve read touched upon these winding paths of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a strange world, a hall of mirrors where nothing is what it appears to be.

String Sextets Nos. 1 and 2. It was only yesterday that I learned of the concert, and I thereupon went to the music library and checked out a recording of the same pieces. A concert is wasted if the material is not familiar to the listener: there is nothing to sing along to in one’s head. A concert is a serious event and to walk out with anything less than a tear-inducing experience, a deep personal insight, or a lightness in your step that stays with you until you retire that evening, is to waste a rare opportunity. 

The first movement begins, Andante, ma moderato. I begin to lose myself and concentration sets in. Although the movement is slow, it has a strong martial spirit to it. The cellos dig deep, then recoil and breathe, like fatigued but vigorous soldiers climbing steep terrain on their way to a distant battle. I wish to transport myself there, to join the fight, to be there for the afternoon’s final foray. Steel yourself, I hear, steel yourself for war. But no — what war is there for me to steel myself for? Bereft of country, bereaved of God, there are no remaining narratives that can animate this music. It has no meaning. It is just a piece of history, quaintly performed, quaintly observed. Dejected, the music slips from my grasp and my moral initiative dies with it. Brahms without a war cannot be understood. For a music fanatic, music is not the means, but the end. I am not content to experience music in one place only, as one person only. For a moment I envy the insurgent Fin, breaking the back of the Red colonizers, for whom every note of Sibelius’s Finlandia, the supreme patriotic testament of that country, reaches down to and extends through the marrow. For me then, does music exist for the sake of war, or does war exist for the sake of music?  

Music is elusive. Above all, I want to hear it all at the same time. It drives me mad that, try as I might, I cannot monitor the coming and the passing of every note. To hear every note, everything at the same time and in relation to everything that came before it—to hear this is to hear a complete and perfect narrative, a whole life compacted into a single teeming bundle of sound and fury. But at any given moment the mind can only focus on one discrete aspect of the music; of the whole, we are ignorant. I admit I attended today’s show with anxiety, anxiety that I would be unable to hear everything at the same time and leave with frustrated ambitions. That is the risk I take whenever listening to music. It is why I avoid listening to the best music (music that is so otherworldly that the ego and its attendant grievances fade away): I couldn’t bear to have it abandon me: other worlds, other feelings exist, and music allows a glimpse. And so I would look for solutions in music, and they would come, so tangibly in fact, that I may as well have been reading an open book. But I went too far. When I was sixteen I tried to imitate music, tried to become music. Allegoricize, internalize — let the music play out in you as it does in space. Strike out with the nimbleness and cunning of a flute bounding across octaves. There is an instability immanent in sound that cannot be avoided. The medieval churchmen were conceited enough to think they could subject music to their control. By removing every leading tone, every diminished fifth, diabolus in musica, they thought they could exorcize the devil in music, and consequently, the devil in life, that is, its intrinsic instability. Is music life, then? No: unlike men, music never yields. Even the lightest and gayest serenade by Mozart asserts its will and struggles as many men never do. Have you ever heard music slacken, peter out, and allow its eternal nemesis, silence, to sweep over and subdue it, leaving it to contemplate its own futility? Never.

If you asked me to describe utopia, I would describe this. Music. Music for free, music in abundance. This is what the citizens of utopia do. Their chief endeavor in life is to explore art, but when cruel reality strikes, and they realize they must relinquish their merriment and give necessity its due, they put their instruments back in their cases, lock them away in their cabinets, and sing themselves to sleep. I am not alone in this belief; among the scientists of utopia, it is an obvious fact. Will the Utopians make love often? Will they frequently use drugs to see and feel in unusual ways? These points will always be in contention, but one fact is certain: There will be a symphony every day and every night.  In B.F. Skinner’s utopian novel, Walden Two, the organization and high-mindedness of its utopian citizens reaches its pinnacle expression in a concert of Bach’s staggering Mass in B minor. When the piece finishes, the conductor turns to the once-skeptical narrator, and gives him a knowing look that says, “You like it? Our Golden Age? Yes?”   

I disapprove of the cult of the artist, so when the players first came out of stage, I indifferently tapped my pen on my clipboard rather than put my hands together and clap. By the time of intermission, I had realized I was being given music, wonderful music, without cost, by players who may not even be remunerated for their performance. This is music as it should be, I thought; this is a rehearsal of utopia. Who are these nameless players that I watch and hear? Judging by the occasional poorly intonated melody, I assume that they are amateur musicians. I love them then. They give music, and receive nothing in return. To offer music, to provide the opportunity for a listener to transcend himself for just one moment—is the kindest and most sincere gift one can give. That is why I play the piano: I play for a little girl who may or may not be. She calls me daddy and asks me to play the Bagatelles of Beethoven, her favorite, which she dances to. Her mother sits and watches in the corner and tries to hide the tears that well in her eyes. I clap loud and fast with my hands raised. I wonder if they might be citizens of Utopia, here to persuade us to the superiority of their way of life. I am persuaded. The others though, they are not aware that this is it, this is what man was made to do, this is the end of everything. For them, this is not real life: life is outside the music, and there is no music in life. And—can you hear that? Life is calling all of them back.   

In front of me sits a young boy in between his mother and father. Today may be the very first time he’s ever heard a violin, perhaps the very first time he’s ever heard harmony. His mother and father are uncultivated and aging fast; many of their hairs are gray and recalcitrant. Today, they decided, they ought to spend time with the boy. Scanning the newspaper, they see Brahms: Sextets Nos. 1 and 2. This will give the boy an education, and it’s free, they say. Incidentally, it is the only act of parenting they’ve committed that is, in fact, brilliant. There is always a chance, a slight chance, that a deep and precocious maturity will be awakened in the boy and he will be moved deeply by the sensitivity and the muscle of Brahms. Symphony and concerto will guide him through his student years, and he will, ultimately, distinguish himself as a professor of music. He will dote on his three children. His youngest will attend art school, and at twenty years of age, she will receive her first kiss and, for a passing moment, know pure, unadulterated love. And because of that one moment, a moment which owes itself entirely to Brahms, everything hitherto is justified. But more probable is that the boy is uninterested in the music, his parents likely powerless to interpret this strange art for him, as my parents were powerless to interpret it for me, long ago when I was a boy no older than he is now, when we heard a brass band play Christmas music at the library, and I was fascinated by this strange and solemn art that demanded, above all, absolute silence. But the seed will be planted, and perhaps one day, when he is old, bald, and dares not eat a peach, his ears will hearken to the sounds of Brahms, and he will see Mother and Father standing on both sides of him with smiles on their faces. When I was young, my father bought a ten-disc boxed set of classical music, The Top 100 Masterpieces of Classical Music: 1685-1928. For several years it remained untouched – apart from the occasional testing of the fable that listening to Mozart somehow made homework finish itself – but one night when I was sixteen I listened to Albinoni’s Adagio, then it was Wagner, Ride of the Valkyries, and then Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1, and that is the point at which my life really began.

In the second sextet, the scherzo comes early as the second movement. It is a lively movement and contains perhaps the loudest and most driving section in the whole piece, but I feel the restlessness growing in the audience, their patience waning. I think to myself, poor Brahms, though you may be pushing artistic perfection, you cannot hold the attention of the average listener for more than an hour. But no—I am wrong. I correct myself. It is not inattentiveness that stands between the listener and music, it is life that stands between. Life prohibits the experience of music. Life is calling all of them back. When the listener first sat down, the gap between now and later – that gap that always belies unbridgeability – was so great that it was possible to escape life for one moment and sink in to art. I can make a home in art, the listener says as the first allegro reaches its apex, thinking he is the boss of time, and not the opposite.  I will build a fortress in art, one of adamantine stone and sleepless sentries. I will lock myself inside this fortress and fetter myself to the wall, and no hurricane between heaven and hell will move me. But he has forgotten time, and time will cut him down and depose him without hesitation or compunction. As the program pushes past that critical halfway point, the point at which the listener realizes that he is outmatched against the strength of time, the feeling of peace he initially sat down with is replaced with an impatient agitation. As the performers pause and turn their pages to the fourth and final movement, the consensus in the chapel, player and performer alike, is, end this unbearable torture.

Occupy

Occupy was not without a deeply felt reactionary character. It was capitalistic and anti-cultural. What it was not is a socialist movement. It was primarily about corporate malfeasance and unemployment. Jobs are wanted, a “fair shot” at a middle class income, not a cultural revolution upon which the survival of this republic depends.

We still live in an extremely individualistic and narcissistic culture. The occupiers, I sense, want “fair competition” rather than questioning the legitimacy of competition as a way of life itself. Nor do they court an aesthetic that breaks the capitalist mold. Occupy co-opts the language of utopian longing but then feeds on what the culture industry has to dish out. It sooner clings to the false identity bestowed by fandom and the hearty laughter at the failure of the other than it would lose its ego in a mobilized community. The absence of Marxism, feminism, black liberation, gay liberation, body politics, existentialism, and the avant-garde is strongly felt.

Fear of suffocation

I’ve noticed this in my meditation, a faint feeling of urgency in my breathing, that I’m “catching my breath” even when I’ve reached a state of deep and slow breathing. It may relate to my exhalation being more difficult than inhalation. Sometimes exhaling very slowly is difficult and makes me tense. I must feel that I need to hold on to my air, as I hoard it so greedily. Undoubtedly this is a nervous response of mine as well: when nervous I hold my breath. I attempt to withdraw into myself, which extends to keeping my breath nearby so that it touches no one. It is also telling that in my first deep meditation approximating an out-of-body experience I anchored my breathing to such an extent that I left my body behind and felt that I was swimming underwater without possibility of drowning. I felt that I was “breathing water” rather than air. It was wonderful and unnerving.

My breathing is labored. I think too much about it when it should be unthought. Perhaps I couldn’t breath during birth. Perhaps indoor allergies affecting my sinuses so often makes me greedy for oxygen. In any case, I believe my fear of suffocation is subtle to the point of being almost invisible, but does undergird my experience of embodiment and tension in everyday social life.

In meditation, I’ve developed a workaround for fear of suffocation. When I breathe in, I tell myself I am breathing out. When I breathe out, I tell myself I am breathing in. The latter is especially important. It soothes me to think that I am taking in air when, in reality, I am relinquishing it. Exhaling becomes easier and tranquil. I feel less “short of breath” when I imagine I am breathing in. Finally, when “in” and “out” become blurred, they lose their binary status and breathing becomes more a singular, sustaining process.

With the vague, vague feeling of always suffocating in check, I feel at ease and can develop my meditation in new directions.

Acknowledging to myself that a supreme tension exists in me in most “social situations.” But taking this a step further and saying that it prohibits me from being the person I want to be. Despite my diehard misanthropy, I want to spread cheer wherever I can. I want to tell everyone what about them is “beautiful.” But the channels of communication are all debauched, the context of depravity we must place all “unusual” remarks in, the self-interestedness and perversity of every nice gesture. We’ve out-Freuded Freud in our projections of ill will unto all others. I want to be sincere and tender to men, but they don’t deserve it because they’ll think I’m acting “gay.” I want to be sincere and tender to women but they don’t deserve it either, as they’ll impute me with motives I don’t have. And I don’t blame them. The male gaze has collapsed in on itself; the pornographization of interpersonal narratives and the body in general has replaced the old prohibitions with promiscuity, cynicism, and suspicion. Derepression has not been without massive losses in the realm of courtesy and respect between individuals and community. It makes me want to not speak to anyone; it makes my desire to spread around my radiant and benevolent feelings null and void. And I turn my feelings against myself, place my feelings over and above myself and become a sadist to myself, hate myself for feeling in the first place, wish I was either an ascetic master or even at times a part of the flaccid unfeeling herd. And what is more, punishing myself for my acute response to the context of depravity of communicating, blaming myself for not making more friends and influencing more people, feeling that introversion or shyness is a weakness and that it is innate, when, in reality, speaking never occurs in a social vacuum but is an act that always presupposes a totality of meaning and an attentive other. And in rejecting the dominant meanings and having no compassionate and like-minded individuals to elicit the best in me, I can only remain trapped in aphasia, utilizing only the bare minimum of language and rapport to “get by.” In my view, the less sensitive one is to the actual being and sensitivity of other beings, the more “effective” one will be at communication. There are exceptions, but in general it is the dull and self-interested ones that carry the day.

Dreamsigns and reality checks can fail!

I dreamed I was at a church “near Villanova.” It is a sight unrecognizable to my waking-life consciousness. All the same, in my dream it was a place I had been several times before. I exclaimed to my friends, “This is so strange. I dream about this church all the time! And now we are really here!” Um no, stupid, you are just dreaming it again.

The lesson to be learned: dream-credulity is often so high that one encounters dreamsigns or remarks on the impossibility of what is happening – one may even exclaim that this very much resembles a dream! – and yet one does not spring into lucidity. It is often humorous, but still frustrating in that one came so close to a lucid dream but it didn’t quite come off. Perhaps with firm resolution there is a way to anticipate this kind of misapprehension. If nothing else, resolution is the province of a lucid dreamer.

The struggle to understand that one is dreaming can take bizarre forms. I recall one dream in which a green humanoid being told me he wanted to play a game where I had to guess what the secret was. After a few wrong guesses, the secret finally dawned on me. “I am… dreaming?” I asked the green being. He jumped up and down excitedly. “Wait, really?” I asked. “Yes.”

In another instance, I received help “from the outside.” I was in a dream I couldn’t wake up from. At last, a courier on a motorcycle delivered a letter to me. I opened it. I had difficulty reading it but I could make out “…in a dream within a dream.” I still didn’t understand. The courier snatched the letter from me impatiently and spelled it out for me: “It says you’re dreaming.”

How can reality checks fail so easily? How is it that dream credulity can be so high that one doesn’t believe it even when dream-characters are waving it right in front of your face? Perhaps most interesting of all, who are these “assistants” and how do they know what I don’t know if they are aspects of my self? Or are they really “from the outside”? Finally, what is their agenda? Why do they help me?

Lucid dream #15

This was my longest lucid dream. It began in a church-like building. A repeat of the church symbol appearing in my dreams. In order to leave, I must swim in the air through small cracks. This building, seemingly, is only accessible to those who can float, as there are no doors to speak of. Perhaps a metaphor that only the pious, or only the dreamers, may access this citadel. As I’m floating gently back to the ground I realize I have control over my actions and the lucid dream begins.

I do a good deal of flying and exploring. One question occurs to me, “Can other people see me?” I don’t wish to arouse attention by being seen flying through the air. It appears, however, that I am invisible, though that barking dog may be on to me. I am very pleased at how long the dream lasts and how my lucidity does not cause me to wake.

I decide to do an experiment. I am so confident that what I am experiencing is real, I decide to leave myself a message to find later when I wake up. If the message is there, in real life, I will have confirmed that lucid dreaming is, in actuality, an out of body experience. I don’t know where I came up with this outrageous idea, but I applaud my ambitious thinking. And so I draw a star on the top of a very tall shelf, some ten feet high.

It occurs to me that I will never be able to climb so high, so I revise my plan and instead write a letter. I find that I’ve written “I love you” in the letter. Did my dream self really wish to inform my waking self that I am deserving of love? Finally, I realize my clever experiment is gravely flawed. The problem is, I have never seen this room before. How would I ever find it in real life? It is funny that I overlooked this crucial detail after wasting much of my dream on such an experiment.

I take a couple things away from this experience. One is that long lucid dreams are possible. With good control, one can relax and allow the dream to take you places. Asserting rigid control may, in fact, lead to one waking up quickly. Secondly, it is important to have a plan. I didn’t have a plan, and so I improvised. My plan, it turns out, was interesting but rather stupid. My greatest lucid dream to date was one I had planned and rehearsed, when I faced down my recurring freak-wave nightmare and let the wave wash over me. It is, moreover, imperative to have a plan as the total freedom one has in a lucid dream leads to creative paralysis. “What do I do with this magical power?” is a question that always comes up when one is caught without a plan. Before my next lucid dream I hope to have an experiment to try, a question to ask, or a place to go.