A sleepy morning after a troubling dream which saw my body of already inferior works ransacked and used as inspiration for even less quality writing. I awoke full of nervousness and nausea, happy to find that it was nothing but fiction. Overtaken by a strong sense of having dodged a bullet, and relief that I still do not have to take responsibility for past mistakes, I decide that I will drink not one, but two pots of coffee this morning.
At around noon, I field a telephone call from MB who wants to chat about current affairs, but my mind is still too stuck on past affairs to be of any use as a conversationalist of the now and present. I tell her that I slept poorly, that I'm not feeling well - that I'll call her later when I'm feeling more with it.
With it? Hanging up the telephone, I wonder what I meant. With what? With the present, I can only guess. In The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, "The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body." And now, lying on the couch, I can feel that corpse's crushing weight, preventing flight, impeding breath, and repressing evolution of the self.
You must throw off
Yesterday's rags
before donning
Tomorrow's new clothes.
It is this verse of which I dream during my sleep in the gauzy afternoon. Diaphanous lines that they are, I can't help but see some modicum of truth in them, while wondering all the while how long ago I wrote them. Which part of my past did my Unconscious loot to come up with such a verse? And just like that, it is ruined; I have been robbed again - this time by myself.
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