Dreamworld

Dreamworld

"If I have even just a little sense,
I will walk on the main road
And my only fear will be of straying from it.
Keeping to the main road is easy,
But people love to be sidetracked."
                                  -- Tao Te Ching

                                                        [I]

A twilight settles, for a moment, on those lively, moving shapes--
  softening and alleviating them.
The twilight settles, for a time, dimming and diminishing those shapes;
  allowing us to quite forget that they were there.
The twilight never lifts; the shapes are lost.

      The tides continue rolling,
      Unresponsive to condition;
      The steady, endless rise and fall moves onward, 
      Unconcerned and unaffected,
      Heedful only of the low, eternal hum.

And we gesticulate and gyrate,
      reaching nothing, in the night;
We agonize and bellow,
      saying nothing to the midnight air.
Immured
      and writhing fiercely in our cubicals of anguish       
      (so close upon the silence)
With those twilight shadows growing in our eyes,
  upon our souls,
We only hope to opiate the pain.
        (Serenity...
        A scornful, hopeless dream,
        Soon reduced to an accustomed, irksome tic
        Flashing dully in the fleeting quiet
            leading to unconsciousness.)
...and the twilight figures threaten with eternalness.
 
And yet we stick devoutly to our ways,
Bobbing blithely in those noncommittal dances on a wire,
Pending,
And precariously pedalling, abstracted, in the air,
Between the living, full embrace of something
  just within our grasps
And the lingering preoccupation with those evanescing,
  ever-reappearing arabesques;
Suspended,
In a closet of oblivion and uncommitted time,
Above, beyond the flux,
Secure in the delusion of abiding choice and potency.
        ...while underneath,
        The endless tides continue on, erasing worlds.


                                                  [II]

Amidst a din of light and sound
An unexpected voice is heard.
It says, "I know another world is here."
An echo answers, "Here"
--without a word, or act, or thought,
Is something known, but unfamiliar;
A vision lit in light and shade,
An endless place of solid shapes,
A figure moving easily,
Is known, but not familiar.

And now the voice is raised
With resolution.
A someone rapt in customary toil
Is distracted by an irksome tic
Recurring in the corner of his sight;
A strange and painful crack
Discovering the limits of his sight;
A sudden, gaping void
Undoing the foundations of his world.
And so he stands alone
Without recourse
Confronting endless quiet,
For a moment...
Apalled,
Protesting blankly,
He surrenders
To a deep, consuming darkness
And is lost.
...to awaken, with a start,
Before the thing itself:
A smooth-worn stone
Is resting
In a rippling stream.

The paradox abandoned unresolved.
The mystery unspoken.
The voice superfluous.
The echo plainly dead.
...and someone moving easily,
Before a moving figure;
A smooth-worn stone
Is resting
In a rippling stream.
A moment here
Of infinite becoming
In a still, informing light.


                                                    [lll]

A familiar sense
Of consciousness returning,
An insistence in the body,
A persistence in the mind,
Is the signal of decline.
A tensing of the muscles,
A return to what is known,
To what is safely known,
To what is safely held,
That is to say,
To what is safely held
At bay;
And business, as we say,
Proceeds as usual.

Reluctantly, with baleful looks,
We let the world subside
Without considering the reason why;
And as it slips unceasingly away
We note the fading of the features,
Then the form,
And last, the memory,
And grow afraid.
And so, in aid of restfulness,
We turn to find a refuge
In the dullness,
Idly summoning a life
Retreating steadily away
On tides of senselessness, forgetfulness, and age.
But there are some who still insist
That they're too young
To lose the freedom and the wonder of their youth!
(And some who never are too old
To savor that receding hope.)
But still the tides continue on,
And those who will not move
Are soon confounded
In the depths of former worlds.
So we, the rest who would survive,
Must, finally, contrive
To let the nuisance die away,
And replace it with a show of joy.
We feel the aching still, of course,
But now it is accustomed.
We smile, instead of cry,
At the misery of undiscovered life,
And we laugh at our abandonment,
And frolic in our own decay,
And reconditely fade away.

...awakened only briefly from despair
In those sudden, awful moments
When we catch a fleetng glimpse of what we know
And recoil
From the abiding well of hope.