Monday, May 19, 2003

I dreamt last night of a building my parents purchased for me in Bloomington, sight unseen. I was working on the roof, putting up elaborately interlaced ceramic tiles, which I then gilded and painted, all for a restoration-oriented local cable access television show. I inadvertantly, climbing through a window, looking for a cat that looked remarkably like Snack, but wasn't, ended up in my tenants huge apartment, which seemed much more like a Venetian villa. They were all IU Law students. They had a staircase they'd never climbed, and they led to the top of an old, abandoned commercial building, with a club house on the very top three floors, and a narrow spiral staircase leading up a tower to a small, rooftop deck, overlooking all of Bloomington. The club house was beautiful, with oak wood panelling. There were even WWII era cigarettes still in their packages behind the bar. I decided it would make a great restaurant, with a bar and smoking area on the second split level, kitchen below, and large restaurant, with rooftop seating, on the middle level. I wonder sometimes if the architectural dreams I have are metaphors for my brain's information architecture. I'm sure dreams themselves are metaphorical representations of those connections, but I wish I could contextualize the experience more concretely, know where to make those connections, know where and how knowledge and experience dwell, find the watersheds below that link all those worlds, and constructs together, or even just the power and sewar grids below. Just recording the geography of my dreamscapes, even in rudimentary form, might begin to give me a conceptual clue, a paradigm for understanding. I bought a set of decent golf clubs at a garage sale on Friday, and they are changing the way I feel about the game. As my Tibetan prayer-wheel equivalent, I sometimes don't even feel as if I've hit the ball, they so effortlessly fill that void between intent and action, the upswing until contact, giving that prayer ongoing utterance with only a single movement. It makes me want to go to the driving range every day, just to watch as the ball floats up, into the air, as if the earth itself birthed it, my club a dowsing rod, a magic wand, calling aerodynamics forth from her womb.   That is, until I get to my longer clubs, and then the drivers. I don't know the metaphysics of the added length, the lowered loft, the greater power, but damn. I don't have enough mojo yet to fill that void. But I'll keep trying. Right now, it's enough to keep from swearing. Maybe that's the crux of the difference between Western and Eastern religion and thought - we've overextended our society, overextended our reach, so that what once was simply meditative and pure is cursing and complexity, requiring great religions and organizational structures to answer the prayer. 1:25:54 PM