Tag Archives: inspiration

Through Hardship to the Stars

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Jack’s Wednesday guest post –

I know that a New Year is meant to be a time of hope and new beginnings. But I look at the incoming year with great foreboding. In the US and Europe reactionary forces are on the march and the progressive ideals with which I was brought up are being marginalized and are on the defensive.

For some reason this poem by Yeats comes to mind –

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Per ardua ad astra? Time to mount the barricades perhaps – – –

Such Stuff as – – –

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Jack’s Wednesday guest post just – almost – makes it in time – –

Who else has weird dreams?

Mine are really off the wall.

One recurring one has me failing to find every car I’ve ever owned. I still have them all and I’ve parked them randomly all over my hometown back in Scotland. I can’t find any of them and I waken up in a sweat every time!

Another whole series has me on impossibly tall structures – ridges, escarpments, skyscrapers – whatever. I’m teetering up there and looking down (never look down!!).

Not so long after my Dad died I had dreams of falling off impossibly high cliffs and he’d catch me in a strange very dark atmosphere (in real life he had really, physically, held me in a scarily high place more than once).

Just last night I had one where Wendy goes on one of these girl scout camp outings. She stumbles on a very rare Elvis Presley recording (a very limited promotional recording) and then another different one from the same session (both phenomenally valuable). There was lots of detective work and some scary stuff as well  – – – –

Then there are disconnected bits and pieces of memories that end up as just that – disconnected bits and pieces that somehow whirl along and make some kind of odd journey.

But the strangest of all –

I hear whole third party narratives (like radio shows) that go on all night (I think) and tell me stories. Usually quite lengthy ones with strangely quirky side turnings – almost like noir dramas!

So – long remembered cars, falling, Elvis, noir dramas and long narratives – – –