Rush Week

Today I will teach my first solo 45 minutes lesson. I haven't taught a lesson I prepared myself since 2002. I put a lot of time into it. Time rages past. Tons of work, and every siren singing to me to see this city, and I can't imagine what boredom would be like anymore. Not that I believe in boredom--learned long ago how to dream, and how to play--but here in Prague the dreams are all real, and all around. One hardly needs an imagination in this city.

My classmates are all great. We have quite the group, pulled together into these classrooms from all over the states, and even the world. Just meeting everyone would be enough to hold my full & fascinated attention, but we have all this schoolwork! Tonight we'll go out and probably go wild to compensate for the effort we've put in during the week. I haven't run my body like this since grad school. And it feels fantastic.

I don't even have time to let loose with one of my meandering associative imaginative posts. All I can get is that one sentence. And now off to class.

Zita from Slovakia is across the table from me videotaping us all chatting & doing this internet thing. This place is awesome.

In Between Miracles

I am rushing to get this post down--I'm writing from the tefl classroom with a half hour before class starts. I grab internet connections where I can. When I can: I've been running around this gorgeous city for three or four days, non-stop. I'm running too hard and I don't even have the time to count the days.

Last night before bed, in the first span of relaxation I've felt since I arrived, I sat out on my second story balcony and watched the moon shine over the lights of Prague. I can't describe the importance of the sight to my heart except to say it provided the sort of moment I live for. A camera would be futile before such a scene. Everything about this town shines with a light of grace. I walk, joystruck, astounded--every sight strikes my eyes like a miracle.

And apparently miracles don't leave much time for much else. I have to run. Here's a picture:

Pilgrims Dream: a Compendium

Here is a brief-as-possible summary of my work-in-progress, Pilgrims Dream. I'll put a permanent link to this post on the right side of the blog so it can be easily accessed. Though the basic outline of the novel is firm in my imagination, I may update this post as the story evolves.

I begin this summary at an auspicious moment: I am about to move to Prague, and my writing process is about to rise to a new stage. Now is a good time to clarify what I know, and I expect this post will help those who want to better understand other Lightning, Mirror posts in which I discuss Pilgrims Dream.


Cast of Characters

Pilgrims:
Heraclitus Walleye
Laura Cloud
Dudley Wundersprocket
Lux Nadarien
Orestes Herpetulian

Them:
17
Agent Grossberger
Agent Troutslop

Others:
Aleister Von Dirk
Sophia Aurora
Janglebell


Pilgrims: These five meet, by chance, in a coffeeshop in downtown Manhattan. Each has been driven to the coffeeshop by strange and magical sequences of events. Each has arrived in a moment that finds them absolutely open and vulnerable to any message of meaning that life might deliver. Through signs and wonders that speak to each pilgrim individually, they recognize that they are meant to embark together on a journey of discovery. Each is willing and able to temporarily leave their old life behind.

The Pilgramage has no concrete goal: the pilgrims themselves must work out their purpose. The Pilgramage is a secret convention, an underground form of life, in the Wittgensteinian sense: like Fight Club, The Pilgrimage is not to be discussed with those who have never been on one. Anyone who has ventured on a pilgrimage can intuitively recognize fellow travellers. A person may go on only one pilgrimage in his lifetime, or he may go on several. One is called to The Pilgrimage, as if it is desired by the very structure of the universe. The pilgrimage described in Pilgrims Dream will be Heraclitus' tenth journey, which is a record as far as anyone knows: he would be a legend if pilgrims openly communicated about their experiences.

Pilgrims Dream will take our group from the downtown coffeeshop to the unknown depths of the Amazon rainforests. Theirs is a quest in which they seek a recognition of achievement, though they have only a vague notion of what that achievement will look like; along the way, they will chase the mysterious blue flower, El Dorado, and a mythical, lost Indian tribe. They will follow where adventure leads.


Heraclitus Walleye has been on several Pilgramages. In his 40's. Born and raised in St. Louis, Heractlitus has travelled the world and become an unrooted drifter--working here before drifting there. Because of his lack of attachments, Heraclitus has developed an almost preternatural ability to respond to the opportunity of the moment. Conversely, Heraclitus' lifestyle has drained him, and he dreams of the day when he can settle, and rest. By virtue of experience, Heraclitus serves as guide for the others. He has acquired shamanistic abilities and psychological insights that allow him to better direct the mental/emotional/spiritual transformation that forms the essence of the Pilgramage.

Laura Cloud is recently divorced. Late 20's, early 30's. An art major in college, she lost touch with her craftsy side during her marriage. Her husband made a killing in real estate, and they rose into a lifestyle they could barely understand. Now that her husband has split and the life she never felt comfortable with is gone, Laura grieves, processes, and wonders how to fashion her own, individual, best-of-all-possible life. She is visiting New York as a tourist to recuperate and regenerate.

Dudley Wundersprocket is the owner/CEO of Loud Ties, Inc. In his 50's. He has previously been on one pilgrimage, which makes him the only experienced pilgrims besides Walleye. After Wundersprocket's first, he quit his corporate job in the garment industry and opened his own business. He runs Loud Ties as an experiment with democracy in the workplace, and he has developed a reputation as a mad genius. He is a big man with a good heart and a loving wife who isn't altogether happy with her husband's recent tendency to strike off without announcement on some vague adventure. He is in New York on a business meeting that falls through.

Lux Nadarien is a high school student researching colleges. She is brilliant, and learning. She cannot decide whether she would like to study physics or religion. She would like to study a fusion of the two, to discover & explicate a worldview in which all human perspectives are validated and respected. But what major would facilitate such a concentration? At the heart, Lux is a teenage girl about to grow up. She is visiting New York to check out college campuses, research various academic departments, & take care of admission interviews.

Orestes Herpetulian is a sanitation worker at the end of his rope. Early to mid 30's. He had worked as a pharmaceuticals rep before a crisis of conscience forced him to begin his life anew. He works in the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, otherwise known as The Dump. The Dump is populated by a Herd of mutated, gargantuan Dump Rats, with whom sanitation workers engage in armed combat. Herpetulian is at the point of Going Native, Colonel Kurtz style, by moving into The Dump and fighting The Herd--commando style--full time. He lives in a strange world. His visit to Manhattan was his way of seeing the Real World one last time before he abandons everything for the strange realites of The Dump.


They are a secret organization. They are global and powerful. Their exact nature is unclear, as is their purpose. (I want another title for this organization, in addition to Them. Perhaps T.O.P.: the organizing principle? I want an acronym.) They are an ill-defined context.

17 recruits Grossberger & Troutslop & initiates them into Them. He thus reveals that he can navigate The Agency--where Grossberger & Troutslop were employed--with impunity and recruit individual agents out of what should be the highest and most powerful secular authority in the world. Who is he? He doesn't even have a name. He is a post-modern Yoda training initiates for a Jedi that couldn't possibly exist.

Agents Grossberger & Troutslop leave their jobs at The Agency to work out, for themselves if no one else, the mystery of Them. Grossberger, especially, wouldn't have given the existence of Them a moment's thought, except he now appears to be working for Them. G & T want the Truth, which is exactly what they don't have. 17 never tells them enough, and they carry out their missions with faith that eventually they will understand the organization for which they work. They get into misadventures. Picture X-Files meets Laurel & Hardy meets Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. They are bumblers. Their mission is to locate the pilgrims when they meet--seemingly by chance and for the first time--in the downtown coffeeshop; G & T don't know why or what they are supposed to do. 17 takes them into a mysterious base located under the Fort in St. Augustine, where scientific (as well as occult) marvels & secret programs are revealed. G & T are then ordered to track down Aleister Von Dirk. Finally they are once again sent to monitor the pilgrims as they journey into the Amazon.


Others are minor characters of major interest.

Aleister Von Dirk is writing a novel called Pilgrims Dream. The main protagonists of his novel are the pilgrims who meet in the downtown coffeeshop. He somehow imagines a fiction that exactly mirrors a reality unknown to him. He lives in Prague.

Sophia Aurora is a night-walker, seen on the streets of Prague only under moonlight. She seems otherworldly. Heraclitus Walleye ran into her during his brief stint in Prague when insomnia struck him for several months and he took to walking at night. They develop a strange relationship, and Sophia gives Walleye a book that teaches one how to dream. Certain strange facts seem to indicate that Sophia Aurora is a vampire, but that's just ridiculous and impossible.

Janglebell is an anarchist pixie native to Manhattan.

I Heart New York

This is a tribute to the city I come from, the city I will take with me as I journey to Prague.

(insane late nights in Manhattan: colors streak & bleed.)

A friend said no matter how long I'm out of the States, I'll always be an American. I wonder. Not only am I moving to a foreign country, which in itself will probably change me, but I will be living there as an Irish citizen--much less paperwork to deal with. So the dislocation of it all is a bit strange--I'll be Irish, living in the Czech Republic--and I was wondering through it.

(view from The Ferry: the curved glass building always entranced me, even when the Twin Towers stood.)

And I realize I've dealt with dislocation before.

(My father worked in the Twin Towers till I was in high school. They had office Christmas parties there for the little kids, and I remember waking up so early for the commute. Floor 12A: no unlucky 13. I could see them from my front yard in Staten Island, until The Dump got so freaking huge that it obscured the view. As a kid, I would point & say, Dad's there!)

I grew up in New York, but I've spent over a decade living outside of it, in Florida & Long Island. It's not an easy transition. I remember how my anxiety spiked at everyone's slowness, and at the dearth of the night. Certainly the experience has modified my personality. I still have a New York heart; it's just certain behaviors that have dropped off. For instance, I've learned to calmly wait. The only dislocation I can understand is the loss of New York. A New Yorker is a stranger anywhere else in the world, whether it's in America or not. My life since New York has been a getting used to the strangeness of everywhere else.

(Feels like they've been running that Recession Special since I could eat solid food. Hot dog w/onions & papaya juice.)

I never thought of myself as an American. I am a New Yorker who left. I can't identify with America; it isn't visceral. America is just a concept to me, whereas New York is my hometown. I also expect I'd have more in common with a Dublin native than someone who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Or, put me at a table with a Paris native & someone from small-town Arkansas, and it ain't the Parisian playing odd one out.


Last night I watched Woody Allen's Manhattan. So many gorgeous pictures. For all of the brutal necessity & cruel hustle, a New Yorker can still sense in his heart the romance that redeems his hometown. He can still feel the thrill of the speed & the motion in the odd moments when he drops out of his future and into the present. Certainly, he won't stop whatever he is doing, but in that moment he can look around and think, My God, just look at this place. Like Woody Allen said, It's a knockout.

(Washington Square Park: in high school, when I was discovering that I wanted to write, I would come here and dream in my journal. Afterward, I'd walk to Strand, which is heaven.)

There are patterns of thought specific to & common among New Yorkers; I'm not sure the same can be said of Americans. For instance, I wondered how I would title this blog. Just The City would feel most natural--but for too many people, the phrase carries no specific reference. New York, New York--but I've heard that song too many times. So, New York? I wondered if I needed to be more specific and write New York City for the sake of outsiders. This is how my years outside have influenced me--I am now also sympathetic to the perspective of everyone not from the five boroughs, and so I modify my original thought for their sake. So, for all you normal people out there, here's an insight into the mind of all New Yorkers: people in New York City think of it as The City. If you're talking about the New York that exists outside The City, it's called Upstate.

(Thus, Long Island is an unclassified geographical anomaly, and it's best not to think about it too much.)

(I've been to the Empire State Building exactly once, for an interview w/a headhunter. 13th floor. I read Ulysses in the waiting room.)

My point is, I was born into this way of thinking, and it belongs to no one outside of New York. Even if someone real cool & hip from another part of the world decided he was gonna call New York The City, he couldn't possibly understand the full depth of the word. Maybe he would even know that, within the five boroughs, The City refers more specifically to Manhattan. But he could never conceive the world that is The City to every New York native. For The City is the world. It's not like every other city where you hop in a car & drive a half hour to get out. If you want to leave The City, you're in for a journey. It ain't gonna be short, and it ain't gonna be easy. He couldn't possibly feel how Upstate refers to a strange, faraway land where people on the street smile at each other and leave their front doors unlocked. Or all the associations that come immediately upon hearing the word Jersey.

I've left New York, but any kind of change I go through will only be a modification of my New York heart. I'll always be a New Yorker. As far as being an American, I mean, come on, even people from Jersey are American. You expect me to identify with that?

Life, & a Dream

I. Life


By a process I don't fully understand, I've come to associate this plant with my soul. I bought it three years ago when my spirit called for more Life in my room. An image or a voice came to me in meditation, and I knew I had to take care of a plant.

I killed the only other plant I'd owned--back in college. Cactus. Yes, I killed a cactus. It was spectacular. I somehow managed to accidentally drop it out my third story apartment window. You might think it's impossible to accidentally drop a cactus out of a window. But it's like experiencing telepathy, or seeing a UFO--I would've thought it impossible too, until I saw it happen right before my eyes.

This plant that stayed alive was important to me because I wanted to be able to help something live. And: it grew. We had a scare once, when I accidentally dropped it and it spilled all over the carpet. But this is a strong plant, and it came back together. Strangely, that happened during some personal crisis--the details are lost to me. I learned to associate the plant with my soul. The plant's health and growth corresponded with that of my soul. During the crisis (after the fall), it lost half of its leaves. But we came around together, and grew stronger than ever.

I have looked into this plant, and it has spoken to me. Not in human language, to be sure, and not with words, but, despite everything, I am not logocentric. It was some spooky type of plant communication that conveyed beauty without form.

When I bought this plant, I had no idea it was ever supposed to flower. The first flower shocked me. In the three years I've cared for this plant, it has flowered twice before--both times with exactly one flower.

Now, just as I am about to leave and entrust this wonderful plant to the care of my parents, the plant has burst forth. It is an explosion of color! The picture doesn't show it, but at least seven flowers are in some stage of development. It is erumpent! Scarlet and green: fit for a holiday. Once again I sense the correspondence with my soul. We are in a moment of our fullest bloom.

I also feel grateful to this plant because I have the sense that it has thrown up such a glorious display of flowers to say goodbye to me. I'm building this monument to my plant because it brought me into an accord with Life.

II. A Dream


I wake up in my bed in the middle of the night--my actual bed, under my red, black, and gold Celtic knot mandala bedspread--and I'm laying in about three inches of water. I jump to my feet. My bedroom is flooded. The water is above my waist. A clock-radio, normally on my night table (though I don't actually own one), plays some rock n' roll song, floating on the water, and I see through the water to the plug in the electrical socket. I think, My God! I'll be electrocuted! I tell myself I'd better not touch the plug but should instead turn off the radio. Then I think, I shouldn't even touch the radio. Something is preventing it from electrocuting me, and I'd better not mess with it at all.

My bedroom is the only flooded room in the house. The water doesn't spill into my adjoining bathroom or the hall. This makes perfect sense. I resolve to get to work. I will get a bucket and scoop up the water and dump it into the bathroom sink. It will take a long time, so I'd better get started.

Except, when I start to leave my room to retrieve a bucket from the garage, I find my way blocked by stacks of boxes that reach four to six feet high. Just about every inch of my bedroom floor is claimed by the stacked boxes. I climb up on the boxes, calculate the best path up and through the stacks, and make my way to the door.

--

I won't interpret this one. I will only say I think this is a gorgeous dream.

I'll call it The Dream of The Flood and The Columns.

Shout in the Street

--History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

--The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

--That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

--What? Mr Deasy asked.

--A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

. . .

--James Joyce, Ulysses, 34

Today I saw videos posted on Youtube of the Iranian uprising; they sent chills into my soul. The ambient shouts of Allah O Akbar, an entire people shouting, God is Great, from their great crisis--I'm not sure I could withstand hearing such calls and pleas in person. Imagine the faith, and the desperation! This is the human heart. God is Great--the unspoken corrolary being, He will deliver us from this evil.


And the Iranian uprising, like so much else, carries me into Joyce, as quoted above, where the God they shout for is precisely the Shout itself in the streets of Tehran.

It is a powerful shout.

Strong Words

Though everyone is familiar with this, I found it very interesting to read the actual words:

Whereas you, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Gallilei, of Florence, aged seventy years, were denounced in 1615, to this Holy Office, for holding as true a false doctrine taught by many, namely, that the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and that the earth moves, and also with a diurnal motion; also, for having pupils whom you instructed in the same opinions; also, for maintaining a correspondence on the same with some German mathematicians; also for publishing certain letters on the sun-spots, in which you developed the same doctrine as true; also, for answering the objections which were continually produced from the Holy Scriptures, by glozing the said Scriptures according to your own meaning; and whereas thereupon was produced a copy of a writing, in form of a letter which, following the hypothesis of Copernicus, you include several propositions contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scriptures; therefore (this Holy Tribunal being desirous of providing against the disorder and mischief which were thence proceeding and increasing to the detriment of the Holy Faith) by the desire of his Holiness and the Most Emminent Lords, Cardinals of this supreme and universal Inquisition, the two propositions of the stability of the sun, and the motion of the earth, were qualified by the Theological Qualifiers as follows:

1. The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.

2. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.

Therefore . . . , invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence . . . : We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by the Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture, and, consequently, that you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated in the sacred canons and other general and particular constituents against delinquents of this description. From which it is Our pleasure that you be absolved, provided that with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in Our presence, you abjure, curse, and detest, the said error and heresies, and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome . . . .

II. The New Reality

The date for this quaint document is 1630 A.D., midway between Dante and James Joyce.

--taken from Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology, 573-574.

--

First of all, what a powerful frame, that last sentence! The New Reality indeed!

What impressed me most about this document was the legalistic wording. I'd always been trained to think of the Inquisition as a bunch of mad extremists who killed everyone who disagreed with their own opinions. Clearly, they were only lawyers. This sort of thinking is very much alive and well in our contemporary world, though the Inquisition is long gone. One gets the clear sense that Galileo was not brought down because of the intolerant faith of his prosecutors, but because of their legalistic thinking. Indeed, how could the Holy Tribunal release him after they received the considered & legally binding decisions of the Theological Qualifiers? After all, protocol must be followed, due process carried out. And, as far as that goes, in the immortal words of Philip K. Dick: The Empire Never Ended.

(Kafka's drawing from The Trial)

Also, always nice to pick up a new word: glozing. From gloze (v.): to minimize or underplay; gloss.

Galileo marks the midpoint between Dante & Joyce. I think of the evidence & judgment issued throughout The Inferno, and even moreso of the wonderfully surreal trial scene in Ulysses. Some scenes must be universal, if not quite eternal.

Should Pilgrims Dream contain a trial scene? It certainly is a useful metaphor, if an awful reality. Is it possible we are prepared to move beyond such play-acting?

Perceptions of a Golden Destiny

I want to write about something I've learned about myself, about the difference between having faith in one's future, and having a sense of one's destiny.

Regret and fear overwhelmed me last week. It seemed as though my right actions culminated in disaster--in my blindness (is how the feeling went) I thought I followed my best intentions & intuitions, which I had assumed would always lead me right, but some sense of assurance was torn away. Things don't have to work out, I suddenly realized. I could follow my dreams right into the abyss. Indeed, I felt as if I already had. I woke up in a nightmare.

How could I leave my family? How could I quit my job? How could I leave my friends? I can't even trust my own heart. How could I move to a strange land where I don't even speak the language? I'm putting an ocean between myself and everyone I love. How could I move to a city where I will necessarily share an apartment with total strangers?

These doubts had occurred to me before, and I handled them swiftly, but last week, everything came crashing in. It was my first week off from work at the library. Already I missed everyone there terribly. And I had time for those doubts to swallow much of my thought. I drowned.

I thought to express it in a poem about getting caught & pulled out deep by a midnight riptide. It's been years since I've written a poem, and apparently my brain is now wired for prose--the thing clunked.

The feeling passed. I conquered it.

Looking back, I am able to interpret those feelings.

Throughout the attack, I still knew that I was doing the right thing by moving to Prague. I still knew it is an incredible opportunity. I still knew my life could only improve by this adventure. But none of this knowledge quelled my fear. Why?

I learned that though I retained faith in my future, my sense of destiny had fallen away.

By faith, I mean a feeling that "where I am going is where I will want to be". I think it is just my disposition to have this faith. I assume things will work out, and they usually do. I have the luck of the Irish, and I know it. If you want to entertain a magical thought, you might decide that things usually work out for me precisely because I assume they will.

So if I still had this faith, how can I account for the insurgence of doubt and fear?

This is where, I now see, my sense of destiny comes into play. [paused by the difficulty of description] I mean that I can usually feel, here and now, the brightness of my own future. It is not the sense that things will work out, which is both an intellectual and an emotional understanding, but a feeling that the future is good, and I can feel its radiance through some occult, time-warping form of communication. My sense of destiny is not a thought or a feeling, but a perception. It has nothing to do with belief.

I am aware of several heretical metaphysical implications. I must accept them. This is my experience. I must proceed from this.

Somehow, that mode of perception was blocked last week. Was my organ of perception blocked, or did the future itself somehow become clouded? That will remain a mystery. I still had my faith, which is all good and fine, but without that mode of perception, I was susceptible to doubts and fears. When an image came to my mind of some terrible possibility, I could no longer easily dismiss it. Though my faith stood strong and attempted to reassure me, faith alone cannot overcome fear. Though I might have faith that terrible things won't happen, I cannot honestly rule out the possibility. I can only say, I don't think that will happen. My fear responded, But it might. And I had to concede.

Fear cannot stand against my sense of destiny. I don't even get those terrible images now, but if I did, they could be brushed away in an instant. Now that my perception is restored, I can dismiss any terrible thought about the future because I can sense my future here and now. I don't just believe my future will be bright, I know that it already exists, somewhere inside me, and it is golden beyond even my juiced-up imagination.

15 days until Life in Prague.