The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata
Ep. 4: “Dying Tulip: Dreams”
SCRIPTUM
Intro:
Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. I am a persona as voice. I am paranoia and self-aware construction. I am paranoid by my own anxiety, by the endless self-analyses which go on and on in some less-artful Joycean stream on like a seemingly endless scroll, like the original manuscript for Kerouac’s On the Road. I am an amateur stoic, “wannabe”-stoic, a chunk of driftwood you as the listener cling onto in order to get to a shore which serves as the analog for something like coherence. I am grossly an exaggeration of myself. The me that peers into the distorted fractals of closed eyelids is the me here presenting myself as an imitation of myself, thinking (as always) probably too much about the sentence at hand. Hello. And welcome.
Episodic Germ: Inspiration from a Stoical Visualization: A THOUGHT-TRAIN:
That all this worry, subconscious fear of some vague thought, of simple spectrums, the heart’s rising BPM, is but less than a miniscule fraction of a pixel of the screen reflected in the mind’s eye.
That Doubt could be a positive aspect of your Being when considering the narrow traversals of blind Dogmatism, all this bleak sureness, etc…. That emotional pain to the synaptic firewall of the brain of a learned, practiced stoic is like a venom which depletes itself, in time, in accordance with and relation to the awareness of the stoic: long fingers, taut young skin picking a dying tulip from its withering roots.
That the war of the “call-to-arms for a sojourn into the breach of a battle for the posterity of the English language” (its own little gratuitous verbal stack) will be fought most earnestly by the anti-Dogmatists, who’ve adapted themselves to the world—as opposed to vice-versa. That these anti-Dogmatists are the most valiant because they are the least sure of what they’re fighting for, and they’re sure they’re not sure.
That there are infinite possibilities Out There, and that such a banal truism or cliché (w/h/y) is only reinforced by our understanding of time insofar as it is a concept whose abstractness lends itself to the sort of attention required to maintain a stoic mindset. That, to be truly attending with the mind and metaphorical heart or soul or w/h/y—that these sorts of focus and forms of presentness enhance our capacity to make manifest the relative beauty of human consciousness. That, by choosing to be awake, by intentionally paying (and learning to pay) attention to our immediate surroundings, we become that much closer to our own personhood and the personhood of mankind.
Meat Hammer:
I’ll sometimes ask myself about the nature of reality, of what we perceive as solid, as finite, as the door which holds space behind it. Never so bluntly, but it does come up subconsciously through objective vehicles: the photograph I so cherish of a woman in a white gown on whose outstretched arm a bald eagle perches; the words and play of words of Ginsberg’s landmark poem HOWL; The haunting scenes of Lynch’s film Blue Velvet; and, most frequently, dreams: these exploratory movies with multiple vantage points only I can see. They’re almost like these tiny purgatories outside of time—for (during the experience, as memory states) they feel long, involved, and intricately carried out, whereas (post-waking) they are or become vague semblances of memories highlighted by salient images or moving-images like Gifs of the scene of the experience on like a mental rolodex of the collected thumbnails your capacity for recalling the dreams allows you to hold onto. Sometimes the memories of the dream are so vivid and realistic—as vivid as the dream (during the dream) itself—that it can take me a moment to distinguish the dream’s relationship to this perceived reality.
Meat Shredder:
So what do I think of the concept of the dream, of dreaming? I seem to think very much and very little at the same time. Whereas the intricacies of what feels to me like a complex convolution of details of data manifested as the subconscious mind elude me, the lazy slow-learner, slow-reader, etc., I get these sensations in my gut which tell me what I might think, which my mind then probably registers and molds into a uniquely gut-affected thought-pattern which probably then integrates itself into my own hierarchical-system of thought, some loose chemical action of the initial gut-type reaction still there in the order and structure of things similar to how I possess my mother’s hair or my father’s creased smile. So I don’t personally, according to the current iteration of the evolution of my mental state’s inherent system, believe there is any necessary correlation between dreams and a “greater meaning” or any type of “spiritual significance.” While supernatural phenomena are no stranger to my family, I do not believe that a nightmare of some forthcoming apocalypse is a justifiable cause for concern. I, nearly wholly unread in the deep fields of cognitive neuroscience, do somehow believe that dreams are almost like a kind of mental exercise, the way our stomachs digest food after we have eaten the food, or perhaps the way astronauts work-out their legs when in outer-space, away from the gravity-analog of Earth. I believe it’s part of what’s so special about our capacity for consciousness and sub-: the presence of a subreality we can sense and interact with, our ability to play out imaginary scenarios with the utility of a brain-capacity which can stretch our very perceptions of time. Maybe this is part of the melancholy I feel upon waking: the understanding of the existence of a relative world as it stands w/r/t our objective selves. One of my most prominent coping mechanisms is sleep; as is probably apparent, it generates a kind of emotional feedback-loop for me—sleep for sandess of waking from sleep for sadness of waking from… etc.—one even my waking mind has some trouble escaping.
Meat Processor:
Your original question. The “Q,” as-it-were. What was it? I have you here with me, in your respective setting, listening to my voice. You are to Audio as fly is to hypnotic Dionaea muscipila (Venus Fly Trap). Though this prospect of an idea—hypnotism—somewhat justifies enough substance to warrant an entire episode in its own right, I think perhaps I’ll settle with a set of broad statements: you are being hypnotized. I am being hypnotized. We are all being hypnotized all the time. The obvious question, “by whom?,” is more futile than a question like “for what purpose?,” which I find far more interesting. If I am myself subconsciously or intentionally hypnotizing you by what effects other media have had on me, through hypnosis, then let me ask you a question: who is the hypnotist? Is it one person? Is it multiple? Are you the hypnotist? I think the harder you begin to think about it, the more paradoxical the problem becomes: you may find a few Strange Loops in there, in that thought. The aspect by which we are inclined to smile in any given circumstance is the same as the one which makes us cry during sad movies. Having high suggestibility, being so prone to compassion for fictional persons, may have a lot more to do with this post-dream contempt for reality than a lot of us realize. Perhaps that’s the connection I’m trying to reconcile: connection: dreams to hypnosis. Vuala. Andy Shauf once said, in the lyrics of one of his songs, “Old news, the magician bends the rules.” And how appropriate is that? I hope you can deal with the awareness of all the dark shit better than I. Enhancement of our appreciation for light: all that good stuff.
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