Last Night's Dream

Last night's dream was a hopeful one.  I don't recall details, but someone had done a study (this time a male figure close to my own age, but not someone I knew personally) that proved that our culture was in great shape. Just the overall level of creativity & sexual energy, all those good things, were in ascendence, and the control of the government by forces that opposed all that didn't matter as much.  In the dream I was in direct contact with the raw energy exposed in the study, so that I accepted his conclusions with great hope and satisfaction, even waking up feeling that way.

Although I cannot agree intellectually with this dream, I feel there is something there.

#4

Cockroach #10,031 was indistinguishable from the other members of his tribe. What was surprising was that one morning he awoke to find himself transformed into a human being. Cockroaches are unsentimental creatures in the first place; that, combined with his new-found human repugnance at his former species, meant that his first significant action as a human was the fumigation of his dwelling place.

You might expect that his subsequent life as a human was exceptional. Yet such was not the case. The toxic combination of arrogance and self-hatred he felt meant he was indistinguishable from the other members of his tribe. The parable ends here, then.    

A Dream

In a dream there was a thing I was involved in at the university in which one had someone else convince oneself of the interest of one's own research. So I had to explain my own research, leave for a few minutes, and then listen to a presentation by someone else about it. The purpose was not clear. At one point, one of the young women involved in the project (they were all young attractive women though this was not explicitly sexual dream) took me to task for aspiring to write a "rough" version of my proposal, in violation of my own principles that you should never produce a rough draft.

#3

False starts, sluggish or jerky

But amid sloppiness and incompetence

Something rising higher

Not even transcending what's below

The old sweet cadence

New Year

I'm making a few new year's adjustments.  Not to call them resolutions.

1) A poem a day for 2017.  Usually, I write it in the shower so it really takes no time.

2) I'm instituting a morning routine.

A. Make bed
B. Check email
C. All the bathroom things you don't need a list of, shaving, etc...
D. Coffee
E. Puzzles
F. Write down poem I've written in the shower on the blog; other blogging as needed
G. Do at least one or two 1st or 2nd tier activity for a fixed period of time: piano playing, cleaning, whatever.

3) I'm making meditation into a first tier activity rather than 2nd tier one.  In other words, it will be done for its self rather than as a support to the first tier.

4) I should also institute a routine for going to the office on teaching days.

#2

And my own work, what refuge can it offer

against the dull hell of other people's writing?

Projects half begun, never finished

Juvenile fantasies of jazz piano

And lipstick ladies?

Lame parodies of Pound's Confucianism

& worse

Addictions to self-improvement

And the memorization of Keats

Always under and overconfident at the same time

Even self-criticism inert, leading only

To more stupid bachelor breakfast tricks

#1

The lute lies rusted in its green case

odor of pines is synthetic; sweeteners artificial; even salt!

our tongues crave something different

translators don't know languages; ignorant even of their own traditions

the policies of the state are greed, hate, ignorance