One morning, however, I enjoyed a pleasant delirium. I found myself using hands and eyes to explore the contours and the softness of the duvet while composing a verse that sought to describe the delights of this experience. Somehow the single words which constituted the verse attached themselves to the gold-glowing duvet and were intermittently visible as the duvet pulsed like a living thing. Reality seemed to intervene when I was unable to find a new word to succeed the last addition, now forgotten, except that it began with "tin-".
The following day I read that the Pope had said Hell didn't exist. Which set me thinking, yet again (See my March 28 post, Long, yes, long), about the nature of Heaven. Not, of course, the Pope's Heaven which always resembled a slightly softened version of West Point or Sandhurst. Rather a state of mind, arrived at via drugs or through one of God's ordinances, that promotes incorruptible pleasure which please the lucky dreamer and harm no one.
Like my happy delirium in fact. In prescribing our own Heaven we tend to depend on earthly delights: long untiring walks for Sir Hugh, the disassembly of some inexplicable machine for MikeM, a vintage motorcycle mystically endowed with 2050 reliability for Avus, and a willing literary agent for me. But such wish-lists lack two engaging qualities: surprise and novelty. My delirium had both, was cheaply achieved, and offered a strong dash of surrealism.
A consummation devoutly to be desired.
There are shades of Coleridge here, RR. According to his Preface to "Kubla Khan", the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. A pity you cannot remember your drug influenced composition. It would have been worth reading.
ReplyDeleteI liked your take on what you thought might be my perception of heaven. But I go along with Fitzgerald's opinions of that, in his "Omar Khayyam":
"Heaven but the Vision of fulfilled Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from shall so soon expire."
We must try to make the most of "here", because there ain't no "there".
Up before dawn on Easter morning, and foremost in my mind is the balky elevator at St. Malachy's. Well...maybe the strong coffee cooling here at bedside ranks higher...maybe TONE DEAF does, for the next few moments...but that MACHINE. The electrical schematics are beyond me, and it's still balky after three visits from the "experts" (@ $80/hr including their driving time from 60 miles away - PLUS mileage fees) So, the church is impoverished, into "Access Solutions" for $1800, and I'll still be standing by to make sure the wealthier but enfeebled elderly can get into the church happily enough to drop a fat check in the collection. It's been working better than it was BEFORE the gougers came, so I haven't dared (or had time) to tear the covers off, yet again, to see what possibly obvious thing is wrong with it. Don't want to make it WORSE for Easter, you know. Bicycles won't be the only machine in my heaven, but the snow grooming machines will be furnished with their own expert mechanics. I will have a complete took set though, just in case.
ReplyDeletethat would be "tool" set
ReplyDeleteAvus: We don't need to believe in Heaven to speculate about its nature. My earlier post was triggered by a leaflet I had received (Where will you spend eternity?) which proved to be irritatingly coy about future benefits for devout Christians. The more you think about such a concept as Heaven, the more you apply your imagination, the harder it becomes to come up with even a quite crude idea which covers every logical eventuality. One may conclude, then, that Heaven is illogical and thus it's a surprise. But can surprises exist in a place where everything is known?
ReplyDeleteAlthough I can't recall the finer detail the pulsing, translucent duvet oscillated back and forward in such a way as to hide and then reveal my contributions to a collection of gilded nouns (mainly ending in -ing and -tion) fixed in space behind the duvet. As the creator of the verse I had the feeling that development of this collection had ceased and I needed a new (and unexpected) noun to get things moving again.
I always felt that Coleridge should have cut his losses and written a poem about the notorious Visitor from Porlock.
MikeM: There I was thinking I'd supplied you with a footstool to Heaven when instead I'd opened the inclined doors of a root cellar down to Satan's domain. But I believe your mind is disturbed because - for the reaons you've outlined - you are not able to take on the job bald-headed. In your heart of hearts (and coincidentally in my hearts of hearts) I suspect you feel you could solve it; that you can almost smell the location with the dirty contacts or the electro-mechanicals out of kilter. Come to think of it, there'll be parts that draw a lot of current (I take it that the elevator is what I'd call a lift) and that sometimes means a capacitor across the switch. Such an arrangement is usually fail-safe in equipment where lives are potentially at risk. Does your took-set include a device for measuriung capacitance?
Let's boil this down to basics. What you really want is to clean the clock of the out-of-town gougers so that you can give up your job as persuader to the enfeebled elderly. Understandable.
Where lives are potentially at risk, I freely admit that I own a multimeter and have very limited knowledge of how to use it. It's a lift, yes - electric chain drive and hydraulic lowering, with a "traveling cable". Much redundancy in the safety department - all of which can easily be accidentally overridden with the covers off. You're right - I know the symptoms exactly now and I'll have the covers off soon enough. I'm sure if I dealt with elevator logic every day my diagnostic skills would improve.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: I'll be with you in spirit.
ReplyDeleteI have written poems in dreams--they are alway so much more beautiful while in the dream--and I've used recollections formed while in morphine.
ReplyDeletePerhaps now you need to fantasize about the New Jerusalem, since you desire something earthy but surprising.
Marly: Have you ever emerged with the whole poem intact? Remarkable.
ReplyDeleteJust Wiki-ed New Jerusalem. Surprising perhaps, but long, oh so long.
Tell you what - I've never cracked New York, I've always been an outsider. How about the Big Apple with the risen shade of Dorothy Parker as guide? But would we ever get any further than West 44th Street? And would we do anything other than drink martinis? There are worse fates...
Yes, I have, occasionally. There was one about riding a horse in long, damp grass with small, insignificant butterflies rising at every step. It was probably okay for 21, but I certainly didn't keep it! But I remember that John Hawkes loved it. There were a few others... The thing about dream poems is that you feel them more intensely than poems in the day, and you often cry in sleep because they seem so beautiful. Fairy glamour, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI made a lot of decisions about the order and shape of "Catherwood" in my sleep. One time I dreamed several chapters and woke up and wrote notes like mad. And I've had other bits of novels show up in dreams. And one summer morning I woke up with "Thaliad" in my head--complete surprise and inconvenient with my children all home, but it wanted to leap out.
I'm not sure how common such experiences are for writers. Maybe lots of people have them. Or not. Through other people, I have learned over time that I am more obsessive and focused than is usual (than is normal, perhaps I should say!), but I did not know that when I began.
Dorothy Parker as Virgil sounds like an interesting foray into the city!
ReplyDeleteMarly: Yes, there have been settings, very occasionally a character. There's a short story I wrote in which a man is transfixed by a word - Tecalemit - he noticed in his youth and which recurs in old age (It's the name of a company which makes humdrum equipment for garages.) The word itself was in and out of my sub-conscious so lingeringly I sometimes didn't know whether I was asleep or awake.
ReplyDeleteBut never anything coherent. The more normal process is covered in the new post, Raw material. Then comes the choice of a name, digging about in the mystical. We are lucky aren't we?