Losing My Sleep (but not my religion)

I can't sleep. I've been going to bed at a good regular time lately, and was on schedule to do so tonight, but... whenever I get things On The Mind... I'm done for. So I'll sit here for a bit, listening to Joan Baez and checking on Gustav's progress.

I went Chenoying with Gilby and The Missus tonight. We got to talking about some old friendships, so now my mind's all roiled up like a Gustav again! It was roiled earlier this week, and I finally unroiled it, and now it's re-roiled. Curses! I have lunch with Maewitch tomorrow, so maybe it can be unroiled again. Darn pathetic fallacy! If this were a movie you'd see me sitting here in the dark with my laptop, a sad Joan Baez song playing, intercut with CNN reports about Hurricane Gustav.

Gilby has an amusing but useful new analogy for friendships. He sees his friends as positions in a company, and sometimes you demote someone, or promote someone, or fire someone etc. If you demote a friend they have less responsibility, so you know, yay for them--but it means less benefits and pay too. Amusing, but pretty true. I'm on Gilby's Board of Directors, so I guess I'm alright.

I think my policy these days is to only hire the best... firings suck, after all. I don't want to let people into my life who might require a Clear Out Your Desk.

Changing Topic: Man... the pictures you can find of people on Facebook when you can't sleep... back when The Boy really was a boy. Now I can picture him starring in Annie.


Changing Topic: Céline Dion sings a song I really like called "On ne change pas." I guess it reminds me of my mother's opinion (after watching my brother and I growing up) that people don't really change from childhood on. Your basic character is right there when you're little, and there it stays. I don't know if people find that discouraging, or comforting. I kind of like it--I like the idea that I'm right here where I put myself. "Oh that's where I left me! It's so obvious, I should have checked here first."

On croit que l'on fait des choix
Mais si tu grattes là
Tout près de l'apparence tremble
Un petit qui nous ressemble
On sait bien qu'il est là

That reminds me of a couple favourite bits of writing. The first is from Joseph Campbell's Hero With a 1000 Faces, speaking of the "infantile unconscious:"

"We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged uo into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life."

How beautiful is that? And his whole point about the hero journey is that life is always sending out these "calls to adventure"--opportunities which, if we take them, will allow us to dig deep and find the "lost potentialities."

His point is illustrated in his interview with Bill Moyers, when he tells the story of Hanuman the Monkey King, from the Ramayana. When Hanuman was a child he had phenomenal powers, but he was michievious and annoying so his elders placed a curse on him so that he would forget his powers, and this is how he grows up. Lord Rama asks for his help to rescue his wife Sita, and it's only through this adventure that Hanuman remembers his powers and uses them to perform great feats. (The story is wonderfully retold in this children's book.)

I'm also reminded of my favourite Matthew Arnold poem, "The Buried Life." The poem is about the way our true selves flow like an underground river, and that loving someone is often about the desire to escape the everyday noise of life, and drop inwards to our true selves.

"Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,

And turn those limpid eyes on mine,

And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
...
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life".

Arnold writes that if we were given free and easy access to our real self, we would fuck it up--it's buried this deep so that we can't capriciously change it.

"Fate, which foresaw

How frivolous a baby man would be--

By what distractions he would be possess'd,

How he would pour himself in every strife,

And well-nigh change his own identity--

That it might keep from his capricious play

His genuine self, and force him to obey

Even in his own despite his being's law,

Bade through the deep recesses of our breast

The unregarded river of our life

Pursue with indiscernible flow its way".

He says we use the everyday noise to distract ourselves--we "demand / Of all the thousand nothings of the hour / Their stupefying power; / Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!"--but that love has the power to push that aside and bring out the truth:

"When our world-deafen'd ear

Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,

And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,

And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know."

That's a pretty interesting way to regard romantic love. Campbell called marriage "a recognition of spiritual identity. ... it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of the ego to a relationship in which two have become one." If you think about it, a serious and committed relationship is one of those calls to adventure; think about how vulnerable you have to make yourself to the other, to get anywhere with it.

I remember when a friend of mine was in the early stages of a relationship, and she was afraid to tell her boyfriend such n' such thoughts (I don't remember the details) because of how he might react. And all I could advise was--that's intimacy. Unless you put yourself on the line, and risk rejection, the relationship won't slip into a deeper, more meaningful and satisfying stage. I think that's why Arnold and Campbell were right about the potential of love to help us unlock the "golden seeds" of childhood.

Wrapping Up: Well my eyelids are droopy... one last check on Gustav... "Gustav is 20 miles from Port Fourchon; 85 from New Orleans."

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"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again."
Joseph Campbell

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