KATABASIS CONSCIOUS OF OUR FALL

WHO AM I?

Deserts are dead lies where only those creatures who have adapted to living in lies amid the dead and dying, can exist. And the deserts are growing. Just go to California. Florida. Nevada. Mexico. Iraq. Saudi Arabia. Dubai. Afghanistan. Sand Land.

Wherever the sand is flowing the lies are blowing and attacking everything that lives beyond the Sand Land. Lies like dust, billow around the Earth. The Sand Land know this and have coped with clouds of dust and blowing sand forever. Deserts are made up of lifeless lies that are blown into waving furrows and then blown again and rearranged forever into patterns that mesmerize and move across the Earth.

Send more troops, many more troops! Bomb them and bomb the rubble. The smoke and ash of burning villages and trucks and bodies swirls with the dust and whips the aroma of burning gasoline, the smell of TNT and burnt flesh up, up into a plume that whirls around us.

A road of ash undulates like a snake, black soot shading tan sand on the top edge of furrows and is moved by the hot breath of an evil wind which sometimes whispers and sometimes moans and sometimes groans.

 

WHY AM I HERE?

We are on the Ash Road of our Century. We are driving each other down an Ash Road because of Truths and the ash of dead Truths are lies of Power, Greed and Fear. Living Truths cannot be killed, and do not die, and cannot die. The lies billow across the world leave dust in our mouths, an acrid taste and bitterness.

People of our time, young men and women walk the Ash Road through the deserts of our Century in order to experience this flattened space in the life of the world. They return to their lives the experience of the worldwide wind which no one controls; the shattering concussions of blasts from combatants; and the sights and smells of death and destruction which will cloud their dream-visions like the fine dust which coats the windows making it forever impossible to look through their eyes without looking through the memory.

 

WHAT DO I WANT?

 We must be conscious of our fall. Our lowering. The Katabasis.

Houses built on shifting sand cannot stand. Politics built on gerrymandered allegiances have no Democracy. We say a lot about killer terrorists and refugees but say nothing about Afghani heroin. Which kills more?

When our way of life falls because we are following Ash roads to Sand Lands and economically tethered to blind Euro-Kings who put their eyes out so that they don’t have to see the Truth. Will the Greek Chorus will run from the wings shouting “Kata basis!”?

Our companies are encouraged, even rewarded, to drive down an Ash Road deep into the Sand Land of Mexico. Where is Pancho Villa to rebel against Yankee domination?  Will a Narco Welcome Wagon bring brown Mexican heroin comes up the East Coast? Will the white dust made down south wind up in our gringo mouths?

The Western drought eases for an instant but the insatiable thirst of cities is on the growing, unsustainable edge of sand.  Sand is flowing and lies are blowing.

     When the only jobs left behind are low-paying or toxic will we FINALLY become Job? After we fall all the way down, we must now suffer. We must sit quietly in the sand and in the ashes and scrape off our sores and wait for the Living Truth. It will come.      

     It always does.

 

© Copyright 2016, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved

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YOU AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DREAM ONE ANOTHER

WHO AM I?

     Writers are dreamers who gather imaginations and fantasies and bring them down to words. When the reader reads what I have written, you read and imagine or experience my dream – and so you dream along with me. You follow along with my thinking and my path through the fantasies to the imaginations.

So, as a writer, I must be aware that the reader and I share an intimate, sacred space. I must be faithful to the reader because you follow my imagination, my interior becomes your interior, my passions, your passions (even if only for a while.) I must be cautious about what I write because it is not only for my self-expression, but what I write goes into your soul.

It all begins with the writer’s dream and the reader’s willingness to dream along with him.

     When William Shakespeare wrote sonnets to his lover, he was a writer gathering imaginations and fantasies and bringing them down to words on paper. Still, the words expressed an intimacy and knowledge of the lover not known to the ordinary reader. And, when his lover read his writing, she dreamt of his dream more secretly. She followed along with his thinking and his path through his intimate fantasies to the imaginations.

     As a writer, Shakespeare was aware that the reader/lover, and he shared a more intensely intimate, sacred space. He was conscientious about what he wrote because the response was just as highly charged and evocative for his lover as it is for him – and only slightly less for we readers hundreds of years later.

 

WHY AM I HERE?

     The reader or dreamer of the writer's dream has what may be called a Night Man Consciousness versus a Day Man Consciousness. The Day Man Consciousness begins when you wake in the morning and drag your emotions and body out of bed and ends when you go to sleep at night. The Day Man consciousness is sense-bound. When the Day Man lays down to rest, the body and energetic self, your Night Man, arises and unfolds. This is a deeper sleeping than the reader's sleep.

The Day Man believes that all of life is measured by its accomplishments – the stuff of your to-do list, what you post on Facebook and tuck into photo albums - the resumes, degrees, awards, milestones along the concentric circles of your life: business trips, family carpooling, small-town worries, shopping, and Starbucks, culminating in a headstone.

The Day Man in space, the Night Man, exists in time. His/Her existence is measured in cycles of time, rhythmical patterns, seasonal revels, festivals, evolution, joy, warm welcomes, canning, gardens, growth, children, and all expressions of love.  The Night reveals a world qualitatively different from the experience of the day.

     Shakespeare’s Sonnet XLIII is the dream in which the dreamer meets the lover in the night – this is dreamer writing the dream in which he describes the Dream Lover.

 

     “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

     For all the day they view things unrespected;

     But when I sleep in dreams they look on thee,

     And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.

     And thou, whose shadows shadows doth make bright,

     How would thy shadow’s form form happy show

     To the clear day with thy much clearer light,

     When to unseeing eyes they shade shines so!

     How would, I say, my eyes be blessed made

     By looking on thee in the living day,

     When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade

     Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay

          All days are nights till I see thee,

          And nights bright days when dreams

          doth show me thee.”

 

     When you now, hundreds of years after it was first written, re-read Shakespeare’s dream of the Dream Lover, a mood of the night remains. A feeling perhaps. Not the stuff of Day Man Consciousness.

    

WHAT DO I WANT?
     We are all sleepers in the dreams of others. Before you were born, lofty spiritual beings dreamed you into existence. Where are they now? Who is dreaming the dream of you? Who is writing your story? Whose ideals or ideas fill your inner world? Where do you go when you sleep? With whom do you commune? Who is it that dreams that “deep and dreamless sleep” as silent stars go by over the Little Town of Bethlehem? When, where and why will we awaken, lose our illusions or become disenchanted? As D.H. Lawrence writes in “The Song of the Man Who Has Come Through”,

 

     What is the knocking?

     What is the knocking at the door of the night?

     It is somebody wants to do us harm.

     No. No, it is the three strange angels

     Admit them, admit them

 

© Copyright 2014, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved

 

I AM DARWIN'S BRAIN

 I AM DARWIN’S BRAIN

 

WHO AM I?

     I am Darwin’s brain. It was I who had phenomenal insights. Everyone said I was brilliant, a genius! That’s true. And, I should know, I am Sir Charles Darwin’s brain. Is it because I am so uniquely designed that I am so special? Well, partially. When I was a child, I played freely in nature. Then, up until age of 30, I had Sir Charles feed me a steady diet of Poetry, and Art and Music! Each week we painted, attended concerts and galleries! And read SHAKESPEARE! It was glorious. And jokes! Lots of jokes and laughter... ANYTHING to nourish me and get me thinking in all different ways. This prepared me for releasing my genius. This was way before neuron theory. But I nourished Sir Charles’ neurons so I was like the young Muhammad Ali of grey matter – lithe and quick and ready to get into the ring with Science!

 

WHY AM I HERE?

     Habit! Dammit, habit! Habits of thinking. Doing what you’re good at over and over is a habit! I hurt myself. Repetitive Thinking Injury (RTI). The professional demands were fierce. Sir Charles has only fed me facts and data, facts and data, FACTS AND DATA for MANY years! Forced me to grind out General Laws, and for General Laws you need LOTS of facts and data. I was forced to crunch the numbers, grind out the laws like a machine that grinds sausage. I believe that such a steady diet of habitual thinking has pumped up certain neural pathways while other parts of me have atrophied! Darwin’s Brain has atrophied because of a conceptual, perceptual habit of thinking – who would have thought?  I certainly didn’t, and I’m Darwin’s Brain!

 

WHAT DO I WANT?

     Joy! Freedom! To feel my toes in the grass like a kid again! Parts of me are GONE, I tell you! Simply gone. The other day I rummaged through some neurons and realized – Darwin’s Brain realizing, can you imagine – that my capacity to think, REALLY THINK, is now limited to only certain types of thoughts?! Love, my feeling life, I’ve misplaced it. And, has anyone seen Darwin’s morality? I hope it’s here someplace under facts and data! I once read Poetry each week, now it makes me nauseous – ESPECIALLY Shakespeare.  I’ve enfeebled myself through disuse. Look, if you gotta make sausage, mix things up! Don’t just make horsemeat sausage, make rabbit sausage! Use ONE horse to ONE rabbit – That’s 50 / 50, right? You’re not laughing. That’s a statistician’s joke. Geez, Darwin’s Brain has lost it.

 

 

© Copyright 2014, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved