you know what's twisted, in retrospect? elementary and middle-school magazine drives. seriously, it seems like there should have been some child-labor laws violated there.
but man do those mag companies know how to market their shit - leeching onto cute little kids who need money for field-trip funding~ then rewarding them with toys that probably cost twenty cents to batch up in china. just awful.
April 16, 2009
April 9, 2009
some shadowed places
let me theorize for a moment here. i had a dream the other night that was oddly coraline-esque, in the sense that i was struggling with some dominant monster in the house that i grew up in. i don't remember a lot of the details; i wish i had written closer to the actual event but i haven't been finding the time lately, and it just struck me upside the head with its oddity. i do remember that i was in my parents' bedroom, though as characteristic in dreams it was not so much the same in furnishings, or size, just in relative location and perhaps general shape. this is an energy-center of a house for children, so i can understand why my mind would choose it as a setting of some sort. i'm sure that i also branched, at some point, into my own childhood room, which was just across the hallway...an easy jaunt even if progress was hindered by battle, or whatever~
i'm not really sure where i intend to go with this prelude...it strikes me as, not necessarily unusual, but quite curious that so many of my dreams happen in or around my old house. you would think that my mind would be engaging nightly with newer problems, newer ideas, and setting them appropriately in my new surroundings...but perhaps these are too volatile, in my lack of knowledge of them, to paint adequate pictures for a backdrop. i'm fairly certain that my themes, the ideas that my dreams are really digging their fingers into, hashing out, are more intelligent than they used to be...that they deal with different issues as they develop, as i come across them in my actual experience. but they come as ghosts in my old haunts, which, for my part, was unexpected.
so, the parents' bedroom was unique, usually not a typical setting. there are other places which recur with more frequency...namely the backyard. we had a good-sized backyard at my house in the springs, and i suppose that i spent a good deal of time in it. in the dreams, however, it is permeated with a sense of mystery, of vagueness and enormous, almost incomprehensible, size. i wonder about myself as a child, and in the wonderment i find this charmed recurrence of earlier self. it makes me wonder about the most basic sensations in life....that of the security of the home; the focus of life for everyone that you know. the comfort found inside those walls, and how that is imbued upon a childish mind....what the outside would have meant to me, then. i imagine myself, done up in blue one-piece winnie-the-pooh pajamas, gazing in rapt bewilderment out the glass doors in our main entryway, trying to decipher the strange wilderness, the unexplored depths of our backyard. what does a two-year old think of a tree? of grass and flowers? do they have the same positive valence that we would attribute to them now? part of me thinks that they would be frightening totems (head on pole) of the outside world, of complete loss of control.
of course, to a child, unknowns behave in different ways than they do to us now. our adult selves build up apprehensions based upon our past experiences; they fortify us from the outside world with snowglobe-like bricks, each teeming with motion and memory, each distorting the outside world more and more as we look through them, sometimes not even being able to see past the memories themselves. children become apprehensive, fearful, but only after their base comforts have already been stripped from them. a child misses his mother only once she is gone, not before; a child does not fear being lost until it actually arises. we tangle with these scenarios before they exist, and in that we lose something valuable in our interface with the world - we begin to focus more and more, and ultimately we see less and less.
so here i am, standing with my hands and nose pressed against the glass separating my child self from his house's backyard. squirrels scamper by, and i do not understand them. i wonder what sensations they call to my heart.
if i had to guess (since the time i am describing is before memory), and i am going to infer from my dreams now, i would venture to say that i felt fear. not a gripping terror, but an ambiguous shadow floating just beyond my perception, darkening. i say this, because in my dreams i find this same darkness to it. it has apparently been chosen as the place where i work out most of my unconscious struggles. i wish i had a running count of the number of dreams and/or nightmares which at some point trample through that backyard, which in reality has not a trace of ominousness to it but, who can say what a mind will twist anything into at the end of the day~ different sections of that backyard are honeycombed off in my mind; each attributed with memories and characteristics, properties which are real to me but which never belonged.
additionally, as if that weren't enough, i have an amplification of this wilderness....i have my family's cabin, secluded deep in the woods of kenosha pass. this was the spot for family vacations, an inexpensive spot to get away from it all, and i'm certain that it is tethered to numerous memories for everyone who goes there so it is a logical place to return to. i have spent time at this cabin as far back as i can remember, and always it has been a holy temple to me, an observation of the depths of nature and a retreat from the world as i knew it. this cabin is a fantastic place; perhaps you, reader, will be taken there one day~ but it has also developed, for me, as an extremely psychologically-powerful token. i go to this cabin, in my dreams, in my unconscious mind, when apparently there are mountains of rubble in my head that need to be worked through. almost always this cabin appears to me as a fractured house of the most haunted and haunting capacity possible. always there are deep-seated ghosts, literally; always it is overrun with the raw power of nature, crowned with black, spindly insects, the wardens of what deeper unsettled spirits lie slumbering there. the woods around this cabin host my deepest dreams, my deepest indications of what being 'lost', or pursued by the night, feels like. always it is an incredible adventure just to get to this place, rarely by car as would be expected; typically i must forge my way through snowfields and packs of savage animals, cross extreme conditions and distances in pursuit of something i do not know, at least not consciously. i am never sure what the motivation for returning to this place is, but always there is something drawing me towards it.
i do not know why these nature spots have become the seats for my subconscious psyche. all i can say is that they are bottled with unspeakable things; they reflect a different side of the world, as if i had stood in the middle of them and used the mirror from A Link to the Past. things do not make sense there, and everything is darkened. i thought it notable, towards the goal of figuring myself out a little better...and it always helps me to sort out my thoughts more clearly, this 'writing'.
shhh! listen:
royksopp - "royksopp forever"
i'm not really sure where i intend to go with this prelude...it strikes me as, not necessarily unusual, but quite curious that so many of my dreams happen in or around my old house. you would think that my mind would be engaging nightly with newer problems, newer ideas, and setting them appropriately in my new surroundings...but perhaps these are too volatile, in my lack of knowledge of them, to paint adequate pictures for a backdrop. i'm fairly certain that my themes, the ideas that my dreams are really digging their fingers into, hashing out, are more intelligent than they used to be...that they deal with different issues as they develop, as i come across them in my actual experience. but they come as ghosts in my old haunts, which, for my part, was unexpected.
so, the parents' bedroom was unique, usually not a typical setting. there are other places which recur with more frequency...namely the backyard. we had a good-sized backyard at my house in the springs, and i suppose that i spent a good deal of time in it. in the dreams, however, it is permeated with a sense of mystery, of vagueness and enormous, almost incomprehensible, size. i wonder about myself as a child, and in the wonderment i find this charmed recurrence of earlier self. it makes me wonder about the most basic sensations in life....that of the security of the home; the focus of life for everyone that you know. the comfort found inside those walls, and how that is imbued upon a childish mind....what the outside would have meant to me, then. i imagine myself, done up in blue one-piece winnie-the-pooh pajamas, gazing in rapt bewilderment out the glass doors in our main entryway, trying to decipher the strange wilderness, the unexplored depths of our backyard. what does a two-year old think of a tree? of grass and flowers? do they have the same positive valence that we would attribute to them now? part of me thinks that they would be frightening totems (head on pole) of the outside world, of complete loss of control.
of course, to a child, unknowns behave in different ways than they do to us now. our adult selves build up apprehensions based upon our past experiences; they fortify us from the outside world with snowglobe-like bricks, each teeming with motion and memory, each distorting the outside world more and more as we look through them, sometimes not even being able to see past the memories themselves. children become apprehensive, fearful, but only after their base comforts have already been stripped from them. a child misses his mother only once she is gone, not before; a child does not fear being lost until it actually arises. we tangle with these scenarios before they exist, and in that we lose something valuable in our interface with the world - we begin to focus more and more, and ultimately we see less and less.
so here i am, standing with my hands and nose pressed against the glass separating my child self from his house's backyard. squirrels scamper by, and i do not understand them. i wonder what sensations they call to my heart.
if i had to guess (since the time i am describing is before memory), and i am going to infer from my dreams now, i would venture to say that i felt fear. not a gripping terror, but an ambiguous shadow floating just beyond my perception, darkening. i say this, because in my dreams i find this same darkness to it. it has apparently been chosen as the place where i work out most of my unconscious struggles. i wish i had a running count of the number of dreams and/or nightmares which at some point trample through that backyard, which in reality has not a trace of ominousness to it but, who can say what a mind will twist anything into at the end of the day~ different sections of that backyard are honeycombed off in my mind; each attributed with memories and characteristics, properties which are real to me but which never belonged.
additionally, as if that weren't enough, i have an amplification of this wilderness....i have my family's cabin, secluded deep in the woods of kenosha pass. this was the spot for family vacations, an inexpensive spot to get away from it all, and i'm certain that it is tethered to numerous memories for everyone who goes there so it is a logical place to return to. i have spent time at this cabin as far back as i can remember, and always it has been a holy temple to me, an observation of the depths of nature and a retreat from the world as i knew it. this cabin is a fantastic place; perhaps you, reader, will be taken there one day~ but it has also developed, for me, as an extremely psychologically-powerful token. i go to this cabin, in my dreams, in my unconscious mind, when apparently there are mountains of rubble in my head that need to be worked through. almost always this cabin appears to me as a fractured house of the most haunted and haunting capacity possible. always there are deep-seated ghosts, literally; always it is overrun with the raw power of nature, crowned with black, spindly insects, the wardens of what deeper unsettled spirits lie slumbering there. the woods around this cabin host my deepest dreams, my deepest indications of what being 'lost', or pursued by the night, feels like. always it is an incredible adventure just to get to this place, rarely by car as would be expected; typically i must forge my way through snowfields and packs of savage animals, cross extreme conditions and distances in pursuit of something i do not know, at least not consciously. i am never sure what the motivation for returning to this place is, but always there is something drawing me towards it.
i do not know why these nature spots have become the seats for my subconscious psyche. all i can say is that they are bottled with unspeakable things; they reflect a different side of the world, as if i had stood in the middle of them and used the mirror from A Link to the Past. things do not make sense there, and everything is darkened. i thought it notable, towards the goal of figuring myself out a little better...and it always helps me to sort out my thoughts more clearly, this 'writing'.
shhh! listen:
royksopp - "royksopp forever"
April 2, 2009
today
"friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival."
~ C. S. Lewis
how good to have friends, people that we can merge ourselves with; the refraction of perspectives gives telescopic sight. what we can bounce off of a friend is a concept, a notion of ourselves that we have gathered, and we present it freely...a concept which is taken, and puttied, and molded in another mind, mirrored, until we really begin to get a better idea of what we meant in the first place. they can show us things, they can take us farther...obliterating our boundaries and creating impressions of some unexplored territory to the east. they will notice different things, they will append our own selves until we begin to merge the lines and become confused. and then they position us, they help us to see where we fit within this larger picture. they bring our artisan selves, our works and spirit, to places that we have not physically or emotionally been to. places that we shall not know for some time, but which could alter our way of looking at life.
my friends are powerful forces. for them i would burn my books, my money, my car, my apartment. i would sacrifice these things to do real good for them. time is never 'spent' with them; it is savored thoroughly. it is crafted and shared. to spend time is the function of a job, lathing away wafer-thin slices of us so as to preserve the rest (for what else is the remainder intended?) and in the space with our friends, in nurturing environments, we grow back to our former selves. we relearn skills, we reconstruct our memories which had been partially-stripped. we are the children of our freely-chosen experiences.
so damn, it's great to be here. my people build me up, when i am down; they recall the shapes that i am missing at any given time (which takes a fair bit of analysis and knowledge of myself on their part), conjure them from our shared spaces, energies, and present them to me swathed in new packaging. or forgotten packaging, which is the best sort. i could only hope to do them this same service when it is needed. there is responsibility inherent in knowing someone (if they can be said to be 'known'), that we must keep vigil over them for when they are in a time of need. we all need, at some point. being close, that is really something to be proud of....not independence, which callously walls the heart against hope.
i hope some of that made sense.
"treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
~ Goethe
~ C. S. Lewis
how good to have friends, people that we can merge ourselves with; the refraction of perspectives gives telescopic sight. what we can bounce off of a friend is a concept, a notion of ourselves that we have gathered, and we present it freely...a concept which is taken, and puttied, and molded in another mind, mirrored, until we really begin to get a better idea of what we meant in the first place. they can show us things, they can take us farther...obliterating our boundaries and creating impressions of some unexplored territory to the east. they will notice different things, they will append our own selves until we begin to merge the lines and become confused. and then they position us, they help us to see where we fit within this larger picture. they bring our artisan selves, our works and spirit, to places that we have not physically or emotionally been to. places that we shall not know for some time, but which could alter our way of looking at life.
my friends are powerful forces. for them i would burn my books, my money, my car, my apartment. i would sacrifice these things to do real good for them. time is never 'spent' with them; it is savored thoroughly. it is crafted and shared. to spend time is the function of a job, lathing away wafer-thin slices of us so as to preserve the rest (for what else is the remainder intended?) and in the space with our friends, in nurturing environments, we grow back to our former selves. we relearn skills, we reconstruct our memories which had been partially-stripped. we are the children of our freely-chosen experiences.
so damn, it's great to be here. my people build me up, when i am down; they recall the shapes that i am missing at any given time (which takes a fair bit of analysis and knowledge of myself on their part), conjure them from our shared spaces, energies, and present them to me swathed in new packaging. or forgotten packaging, which is the best sort. i could only hope to do them this same service when it is needed. there is responsibility inherent in knowing someone (if they can be said to be 'known'), that we must keep vigil over them for when they are in a time of need. we all need, at some point. being close, that is really something to be proud of....not independence, which callously walls the heart against hope.
i hope some of that made sense.
"treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
~ Goethe
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