Hyperion

The prime experience is birth. Then, the next shift in consciousness is sleep. Whether infants' argillaceous brains mesmerize them, grant them a trance as passage through the great conduit of beauty and hope that their mothers are or in different terms they are souls endowed with the reflective consciousness we all learn to carry with us I do not know. It seems that the next common event where the psyche shifts is sleep. The measurable and indicated change in brain state must be a sole souvenir of the young person's experience, the only familiarity carried through the maternal love that bears the new adventurer into the world. Instinct and appetites, crying and growth, the efflorescence of the heart that is a purer mind meant to be endowed to any given soul are granted.

For the rest, we learn the game. Somnolence is the sanctuary of both the young and the old. I've heard that no one has ever died from a lack of sleep, but the life never lost has surely become unlivable. And more often than is considered, a man has killed another for sleep. Then a man, driven by desperation and fiendish madness, whether in war or in peace, would be charged to carry his laden conscience through sleep. There are no ways around it.

The alpha state before entering sleep is thought to be supportive of learning and memory. Humans have long been moved by the magical and symbolic experiences they share with themselves in their dreams. So valuable is sleep, like water, air, and light, that there is no earthen thing which I could not relinquish given an ultimatum between any imaginable treasure and to be able to sleep. When one sleeps well, one lives well and the days and nights assume their more vibrant and enriched textures, colors, lights, and sounds. The curse of ethereal days is lifted and gravity becomes more merciful and affectionate.

Love and death are so woven with sleep, with their pedestrian evocations and heavenly invocations, that they can be directly mated with the most innocent and warm-hearted fertilities of humilities. (sure: spectacular vernacular, amazing phrasing, goatherds words(coelho's alchemist)). What is meant is that Love can be sleepy and magical, all synchronicity and auspice when fine, painfully poetic and exhausting when mean. Similarly, Death is directly associated with a great sleep.

One great irony is the one Erik L-V observed: when your sheets are clean, and you are clean, and your bed is so nice you would gladly be its prey if such a predator it were, it's that one can actually resist drifting off to cool and quiet slumber so as not to miss out on the experience of beautiful and perfect comfort, as one exhales their burdens and begins to float lightly in the universe.

Human drama, purveyed for example by Shakespeare's Juliet and Chechen extremists in a theater in Moscow on October 23, 2002, in interests of forms of Love & Death, has established use of instruments to induce sleep. Both Juliet's romantic burden and the Chechen misadventures resulted in death. There is such a broad catalogue of characters and personalities of culture in the great soporific library of history that a list would be a work in its own. Theater is of no unique or articulately exemplary interest in focus or representation of the enormous symbolism of sleep and its arts & sciences, though the thespian superstition of sleeping with a script under one's pillow is a lovely cultural manifestation of the alpha brain state memory aggregation notion.

Whispers and traffic wake me. Dogs and sunlight call for me to come and fight. My own body rebels against my more divine psyche and leaves me reeling with pain, and the anticipation of seeing a dark ceiling causes me to hold my eyes tightly closed and shake and twist with panicked agony. The relief Juliet found was in a dagger. The Chechen brutes were made dead by the strongest variety of narcotic in gas form.

Cleanness and comfort, showering, and knowing that you are secure and sound are great rituals and accommodation necessary for rest of the restorative. Those moments before sleep are the best moments in one of this author's days, and those moments just after are some of the most challenging moments in this author's lifetime.

Somnus quiesco, my friends and enemies, somnus quiesco.

Love & Death

Listening in his head to "Homeward Bound", he considered that love and death are seemingly the most common and terrestrial of muses. Matters of profound mythical and magical significance, they're bandied about like so many pieces of candy on Halloween. Something powerful, bloody, and staged with smoke and mirrors contrasted with a frame of infinite compliment to the experience, love and death are somehow not antipodes in the globe of his mind. They are complimenting each other. One gives birth to hope and renewal, the other subtracts the divinity from the walking man. All his words and all of their boomeranging and gallivanting, this internal dialogue was also mounting an attack of mediocrity. Undermining himself, he too wished he were homeward bound.

The weather: The most satirical of symbols. Even it held some sort of meaning, some representation of the macrocosmos, the scale and scope so calm and cool and clear. The air which betrayed him, abandoned him to some barometric prison at times was taking a breath; it was resting and catching its wind, this air. The sunlight moved through it with a rain of illustrative depth and glinted in his lenses with a sound of pianos. His own psychotica sounded like the resonant and percussive melody that pianos prodouce, like his living was a very well timed and gently played rhythm, one hand meting out time and the other dancing around on it. This orchestra of light, this symphony of energy on all of small, large, and undefined scale and proportion reminded him of the square beliefs that some people espoused so vehemently. There was a magic in life, and it didn't seem to die. Most often, he didn't have to look for it, it found him when he wasn't hiding and left him with the impression that he wasn't very well hidden when hiding so.

Small victories held as much meaning and were of such laughable importance to him as the small defeats which could drain his very heart of blood, though that afternoon he would attest to a revelation that the victories somehow enveloped their defeats. The idea that one of a pair of opposites can not exist without its twin was not a new one, but the great and mystical roles of all that is good and all that is bad seemed to have the surety that they have been attributed for so long. In a way, he was finding the specie for hope of his own. When he read Keats' Hyperion that afternoon it moved him to tears. He was a crying bastard, Mr. Snachron. Mr. Snachron cried at the strangest things. Love and Death, he considered, precipitated so many tears. Yet they were as common as tariffs and as magical as the most epic of triumphs.

The art of not dying.

First, you have to not care. If you want to stay alive, you may end up dead unawares. Second, you need to provoke it, like raising your fist at god on the mast of a swaying sea in the least gentle of storms. Finally, you will fail. Someday you will fail. This is the most important part of the art, the failing. If you learn to fail with perfection you may end up failing at the very moment you're supposed to die and live until, well, the next time. The difficulty you may find is in between those visits from machinery and reapers, in the moments you have to listen to a storm brew in a coffee cup with torrents and gales of caffeine and norepinephrine, with tides and swells of anxiety and serotonin all overwhelming and drowning and leaving you without enough air.
Still, you live. Through every memory, reliving every desperate moment and dark swirl in your teacup of a psyche. Hell is not other people, it is you without air, without peace or breath. You can clutch at your throat, you can blow your nose, and you can open the window but all you will find is city exhaust. The wings of pigeons will blow dirt into the uprise of exhaust, and you will choke on your uvula. And still, you will live.
The quietest part of the night will be too not quiet, and your asphyxiated sleep will be ravaged by dreams where you are one of the pigeons with no legs anymore that must fly with your exhausted fat belly, your pendulous corpse on tired and dirty wings that are broken and torn. You will choose to land in your dream on the river, to find respite in buoyant and iridescent oil but that water will weigh your wet feathers down until you wake up in panic, gasping for air in the tomb that is your room.
This is part of the art of not dying. It has nothing to do with vitamins.

My heart is an apple. There's a worm in the apple. A heartworm. The tell-tale heartworm.

Helen wanted to give her heart to someone or something, but she felt it was too deceitful to share. She'd be embarrassed should someone find out that the worm had finally turned for her, and turned right into her heart.

Of the 4 chambers, it made the upper right atrium a study & library, where it did all of its bookworming. In the upper left atrium, her worm, who was named Annalida, had her home-brewed supercomputer cluster, powered by the natural electric muscle pulses of her heart. The supercluster was named Hermes. She was writing a computer worm that used TCP traffic to store its intentions as memory. This computer worm was named Caduceus. The network she was was experimenting with was named Icarus. She loved the worm enamoured and encircled Caduceus with romantic Icarus wings. She also played a vintage video game called "Snafu" on her supercomputer cluster, which generated randomness for ever changing encryption keys she used to guard her most sleepy secrets.

The lower left ventricle was where Annalida did her epicurean business. She was nearly genocidal about trichina worms. They were the termites of her iron and ironic bloody world. Pork was not allowed in the kitchen. When Helen had bacon, Annalida nearly lost her mind trying to keep all of the bacon fat out of her house. It stuck to the walls and the doors with a grotesque slovenly desperation.

The lower right ventricle was where the magic happened. It was her symbolic opium den, where she scryed the past with her scrying glass. She was her own divining rod for hope. She lived in that midland between wake and sleep, and left her pulsing drumming home on a magical carpet of dreams. She was reading:

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. — They were these:

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly —
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!

That motley drama! — oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forever more,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude! [page 460:]
It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out — out are the lights — out all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

And she felt life was something, in the face of death. Helen could never give her away.