Last night I had a series of dreams that unfolded inside the main imaginary setting of the novel I’m currently writing. While dreaming I experienced intervals of lucidity, aware that I was living inside a fictional realm that I was inventing while awake — like circling around a Möbius loop. I awoke presuming that the dreams were a good omen. Recently while awake and trying to write I’d been seeing that fictional world from a distance, as if it were five feet below the floor and I was looking down at it through a thick barrier of cloudy glass.
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Ktismatics 
No need to consult oneiromantics on that. You hardly know whether you’re the butterfly …. good omen.
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Trying to make a hard decision today, I found my hectic gaze landing on a particular book on the shelf. Page 159 of that book will have a message about this decision, I said aloud. Here’s the first sentence from the first paragraph on page 159:
“Though the circumstances surrounding this encounter became easier to explain later, they were never any clearer than they were at that moment.”
That seems exactly right. While we might eventually come up with a tighter spin on the circumstances leading up to this point, we won’t really understand them any better than we do right now. The quote, by the way, comes from Death Sentence, a novella by Maurice Blanchot. The title too seems ominous.
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That sentence is also like the ‘pre-craft’ and ‘originary sense’ I was talking about on the other post (referring to this one.) The book is very strange. I read it in about 2000, a few year’s before Blanchot’s death. I won’t ever get very involved with him. I read some of Bataille’s small novels around that time too, and think I recall preferring them, esp. Soleil Pourri, which had some Genet-like swing occasionally, although it’s hard to match Mme. D—‘s having to open the windows at the approach of her lover after she has ‘been releasing some of her winds’ in ‘Pompes Funebres’. I once saw a superb French gay porno in about 1977 which is impossible to find again, but it was often elegant, some of it even filmed in NYC. It was called ‘Homologues ou Le Soif du Male’, and there’s much talk of Sade and how ‘the sex among men makes everything impossible’. But there was a jerk-off scene that was horrible: A guy was doing it to a corpse he’d just found. You know, kind of think Susan S. would have just LOVED, since she said Hemingway is so obviously ‘bad’ in her famous ‘Camp’ piece. Idiot.
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And maybe exactly right, but no reason why it would. Very Tarot Cardism, isn’t it? Have you done this sort of thing before, even though you’re obviously being tongue-in-cheek even if you did it?
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Based on the placement of my bookmark, Death Sentence must have been the last piece that I read in this Blanchot compilation, so it must not have generated much readerly momentum for me. Possibly I zeroed in unconsciously on Blanchot because I regard him, like Robbe-Grillet, as a practitioner of literary opacity. The chosen sentence fits that profile. During my Pentecostal phase I would occasionally flip open to Bible verses for guidance; now I’m more attuned to serendipities that happen to fall within my observational sphere. Apparently I still have the Tarot-Cardist knack though — kind of like riding a bike. I can still speak in tongues at will too, though I rarely practice any longer.
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In these cases the opaque, the gnomic is more effective than the clear and direct. It goes deeper. The Vedanta Sutras (Brahma-Sutras) are one of the Triple Canon of Hinduism and they are recognized to be so condensed that many meaning can be extracted out of them. They force gnosis.
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My knowledge of Hinduism is minimal. I just tried to look at a few versions online: “Then therefore the enquiry into Brahman” is followed by so much commentary that I never did reach the next line of actual text. I have an ambivalent relationship with opacity: I believe it can be cleared up incrementally through further investigation, but I also think that in many such endeavors one eventually reaches an unbridgeable gulf or unscalable wall. Ordinarily I’m not one for contemplating irresolvable paradoxes, but I am fond of aphorisms. So I’ll try again to find a less cluttered version of the Vedanta Sutras.
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But I didn’t take Blanchot’s omen to heart, did I? The shape of the encounter was already clear, even if the circumstances surrounding it were not. I should have acted in accord with my understanding of the encounter, rather than trying to probe the situation and the players for better clarity on the circumstances. In short, I should have told this person to fuck off, rather than trying to change the nature of the encounter, which only resulted in this person eventually telling me to fuck off.
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I often dream that I can fly, usually by flapping my arms and extending myself out horizontally in the air. In last night’s dream I was able to descend from heights, safely and gracefully, feet first. I could step from the top of a three-storey building and drop slowly or glide downward, able to control my rate of descent so that by the time I reached the ground I could just step forward and continue my ordinary walking pace, without any jarring impact. In this dream I was aware that only I seemed capable of this maneuver. Others could see me do it but had become accustomed to my abilities sot they didn’t stand there awestruck watching me. A very pleasant dream.
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