more lucid dreaming

 Last night was intense. I was lucid dreaming again. I was amazed at the detail, because I didn't know how my brain could produce that many precise and detailed images in so short a time. I was in bed with ____ and _____ , and we [censored].  After leaving the party, I was walking down the street, invited a random woman to have dinner with me. We walked into a restaurant, and the food was quite bad. Apparently my all-powerful mind could only produce these doughy, unappetizing appetizers. 

The recounting of the dream makes me seem a bit of an asshole. On the street I could randomly levitate someone or make them collapse by pointing at them. Realizing it was a dream made the normal moral consequences of actions moot. It was rather tiring. I woke up at my normal time 7:15 and was again quite exhausted. 

Spicer

NYRB books are publishing Spicer's After Lorca.  I wonder it they will review it?  The name of Jack Spicer has never appeared in the NYRB. They are now reviewing books that they themselves publish, so that would be interesting.  Maybe I should volunteer? 

Some blunt pretense to safety we have

 Someone asked one of our zen teachers about "safety" and he replied that there is not such thing. I won't tell you his full response, but it brought to mind the concluding lines from Ashbery's "Pantoum" 

Some blunt pretense to safety we have

eyes shining without mystery 

for they must have motion

through the vague snow of many clay pipes

I've always been fascinated by this poem, the way it makes vagueness, bluntness, and the absence of mystery into something mysterious after all.  A lesser poet would write "eyes shining with mystery." None of the lines give us anything graspable.  

baby geese

 I looked through my binoculars at some geese, and saw that they had some babies with them, yellowish and looking quite unlike their long-necked parents. I also saw the cormorant again, flying to the same tree as before. 

It struck me that I could be unsure about the identification of a bird, but never unsure about a species that I have seen repeatedly and well.  The "garden variety" birds of everyday are simply too familiar to be mistaken for anything else, but I could easily be wrong about the vireos and warblers that I don't know well at all. Even if I get a very good look at something, I am just too inexperienced with genera and species. 

Underground cartoon mall

In this dream I was in some kind of a subterranean shopping center filled with weird shops, selling mostly unidentifiable items. The colors were saturated and the visual effects were cartoon-like. It was a lucid dream, and I realized that all these vivid and fantastical images were the product of my own imagining mind. Even a quite detailed map of the mall, an architectural drawing far more detailed and precise that I could diagram myself. I looked around for a woman to kiss, but the imagery was not quite life-like enough. After a few failed attempts, I became a bit uncomfortable with the situation and forced myself to awake.

When I did awake, though, I was still in a dream. I was in bed, but surrounded by an unfamiliar household. I had to struggle through this other, grayer dream for a long time before I truly awoke in the morning, quite unrested. 

"A ruthless catalog of sorrows"

 I have mixed feelings about the poem "C.V." in the last NYRB, by Iman Mersal (trans. from Arabic by Robyn Creswell). The first line is arresting and resonant. The topos is "pathé mathos," perhaps, knowledge through suffering (la letra, por la sangre entra). An academic career is based on renunciation of real life. 

At the end, she writes "A life overstuffed with accomplishments / scrubbed free of dirt / proof that she lived / has cut all ties to the earth." I understand the sentiment, and to the extent she is writing about her own experience in the 1st person, I can't argue with it.  

It is the notion of the shadow c.v., all the things left out: "Where are all the wasted days?," she asks. I think of this poem, now, being listed on her C.V.  !! You can imagine the conversation.  

"Hey, my poem just came out in the New York Review of Books!"

"Great! That will look good on your c.v.  What's it  about?"

"Its title is 'C.V.,' actually. It's about the vanity of having a c.v at all."

Where I resist the message of the poem is in my feeling that one ought to own one's accomplishments rather than seeing them as stuff or "stuffing."  

  

Keys to the abundance model of time

 Don't multi-task. You are trying to "save" time by doing it, but each activity requires its own attention. Take your time.  Multi-tasking is cognitively taxing, and even people who think they are good at it are actually not.  

[exceptions: listening to music while cleaning or cooking. You can also think about a problem while walking. I take a walk (exercise) while also looking at birds. We could call this "complementary multi-tasking," where one activity reinforces the other rather than being a distraction.] 

Segment time if you must, but only for a deep purpose. It's fine to set a timer to get the laundry out of the machine, or for meditating for a certain number of minutes. 

Don't fret about time. Impatience means you are undervaluing the moment you are in right now.  

Stay off facebook / twitter for most of the day, or for whole days at a time. You won't miss a whole lot.  

 Festina lente.