I fell asleep reading DQ last night
It would be nice if this were a prelude to dreaming. I often dream travel dreams – both good and bad, both outdoors and indoors, both gothic horror and trampoline dreams…and more. DQ is kind of dreamy right now. DQ and Sancho are in two different places and Cervantes moves us back and forth between the two of them. As we leave one or another of them, we are always told that there is someone there, a steward, writing…so that when we drift away from Sancho and back to DQ, we will not have missed anything. And time shifts too. It’s two steps forward and two steps back (hopefully with some hip lifts, shimmies and turns thrown in). Is this how memory works? Or psychiatry? Who is my scribe? Who is writing when I’m away so that I know what happened to me when I come back?
Because I’ve been so much with death recently (I was at a wake this past Saturday night too), I can only think of myself as swirling, a little dizzy, turned around. I swear that sometimes I can feel the world turning in my body. None of the people I know who have died in the past year knew each other. But I feel forced to connect them, squeeze them together, just as a way of coping or as a way of creating a pattern that has the potential for disturbance. Maybe I shouldn’t try to do this…
Perhaps we should never have eaten the parabola cookie. It’s a shape and a line and an explanation.
posted by Anne @ 8:19 AM
2 Comments:
I heard this somewhere about the reason for space and time: "Time is so that bad things don't happen all at once, and space is so that they don't all happen to you."
Do you feel sometimes things converge upon us and other times we link things to collect their likenesses?
I feel at the close of "mercury in retrograde" this week - my take on it based on ayurveda and poetry is - heat, inner fire, the light beam behind the dream mind, is faced with overviewing the consequences of events. The ego, which is used to doing the driving, becomes frustrated by a sense of moving backward and "non- achievement." At the end of "mercury in retrograde" communications seem to flood forward, dousing the perceived frustration, washing away the ashes, but possibly with broadened perspective.
Last night I got a call from a friend in LA - searching for his film career but finding conflicts with spiritual, or philosophical concerns. At the same time an email from another friend (I know them both from fillm school) in Minnesota whose life and friends' lives have been irreverseably changed by violence. A baby was shaken to death by his caregiver.
(I looked for and found the story on the internet.)
On the same news page, I read that doctors in England want to allow babies with Muscular Spinal Atrophy to die because they say their quality of life is not worth living. I'm a caregiver, working with Mary, a 47 year old woman with MSA. Practically everyday she has to provide an inventory of her deeds to family and institutional professionals who are perhaps conflicted in their own lives. This is the only factor that depletes "quality of life."
I link this with the errante lectrice's questions about reading and wandering, going away and coming back.
Wow, that's bitter. Poor guy. But he's doing important work right now by speaking publicly about what must be personally painful. He's doing the right thing. This is also what 'quixotic' encompasses, I think. I would advocate for revisiting the term and redefining it in a DQ-positive way. Hoey's still active. There must be something (an ideal?) motivating him and this is completely in keeping with the spirit of DQ.
And on a side note: I don't know much about the CMAJ except that it seemed to have a very progressive and interesting editorial direction. Several years ago, they published a review of an art installation that we (Careless Servant Woman) did about Home Care and the journal generally seemed very interested in exploring cultural perspectives on medicine and public health issues. I was really pleasantly surprised when I looked at the journal that one time.
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