My Soul To Take
Last night I remembered that as a child, I would say my prayers before going to bed:
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
I would then say God bless Mommy and Daddy and all my brothers and sisters, even my Uncles and Aunts and cousins. Perhaps someone I hated that week.
This is what being a “Christian” in the 60’s meant. Thinking a lot about dying before I wake. Why did the Lord want my souls to keep or even worse, to take? I know He works in mysterious ways, but why all this work in the night, leaving me dead without a soul? How was a kid supposed to have a good night’s sleep, worrying about dying? Worrying about a tug-a-war over his soul? What was a soul anyway?
As I was chewing over all that last night, somehow I did fall asleep. My dreams were very strange. Not like when I was a kid. When I was a kid, big kids were always after me, and I would fly away, literally willing myself to fly.
Then the decades of dreams in warehouses, climbing ladders that lead to nowhere. My foot reaching for the next step, only to find it gone. Missing. Not just one step, but multiple steps. A giant gap that my legs could not reach.
Last night I was with my daughter. She was about 6. We were in another place, a foreign country. Waiting for someone to take our order. Finally some old guy comes over and my daughter says she wants the edamame in adobe sauce, or some mixture of vowels and consonants that didn’t make much sense to me. I could find nothing that appealed to me on the menu. It was taking forever. Finally I got up and went over to the man and a woman in the kitchen. The food did not look good. Plates of overcooked vegetables, no longer resembling vegetable, but gray brownish meager lumps on dirty plates. I picked up some kind of rib, trying to pick off the overcooked meat.
The meat was almost gone. What was left was very tough. What kind of animal did this come from? I had the misfortune of watching an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies before going to bed. Granny was making possum roast for Mr. Drysdale’s father-in-law, played by Charlie Ruggles.
We left the restaurant, and even though they never brought us any food, I gave the man a two dollar bill. Two dollar bills disappeared decades ago. Was that before or after the introduction of the metric system?
I have to run now. I have cats to feed for my neighbours, and if time permits, my daughter’s dog to walk.
My soul is still intact, not having been either kept or taken.
Please feel free to analyze my dream or comment. I love to hear your comments. Without comments, I feel I am talking to myself.
I apologize to the fellowship for an overly wordy and exuberant comment, that was supposed to be in response to Dennis' reply to the first comment, and best relayed off thread. I sense you have forbearance for misteps unless they are habitual. The writing here delivers a powerful charge for which my loins need to be girded, lest the sense of significance spurs me to spew like a garden hose until simmering down.
I'll try to start posting on Substack or find you via email so I don't overload your Comments; but I'm burnt out on learning different, not necessarily better ways, to connect online. It's like having to keep tying shoelaces with different knots, when the basic bow worked well enough. Because I started with computers in 1975, research assistant at SFU with the genius mystic Doug Seeley inventing the user friendly interface, then on through the first Macs etc., imagine how many times my procedural memory had to take on board yet a different set of steps to perform the same operation. Now it just goes Pfft when confronted with new icons.
About DETAIL, slagged as devilish, yes. Such paintings are dismissed as "obsessive", and I was branded "unprofessional", for sound reason when the meaning of "professional" became business-like, under a marriage of marketing+academia, that yes enabled art to survive economic changes, while asphyxiating party art. I could only nod, yes, yes. Exactly. Unprofessional. I have nothing to profess. Flares of free spirited culture here keep getting snuffed by the covetous, wielding gobbledygook perversions of social justice campaigning, that has been subdued somewhat under Trump's hail.
For me, ""detail" was on a resolution gradient, that relates to SCALE, which is interesting when in the course of shifting rules become moot. Yay. All of a sudden, When small enough, classical laws can be violated! As above is not as below. Thank goodness, the overlordship so moribund. Something can be everywhere it possibly can be. Time, if operative at all runs forwards and backwards. Reality turns out to be granular, which comes as a relief, dispelling childhood nightmares about infinity, exacerbated by Disney's Fantasia, those endlessly multiplying mops. SCALE has an impact on data, and what physicists call "blurring" at the limit of our power to detect, measure, and it turns out that everything we are and experience happens in that fuzzy, myopic margin of error, on borrowed time. Our reality is illegitimate! Marginal off grid outsiders are more sane than what safely toes the line.
I tried to quit art as impractical, only for it to not quit me, so discovered, giddily, that the premise that art is moot if unseen outside the hovel is false. Trees falling unwitnessed in the forest don't make a sound; they sing. So I got to carry on without, you know, complicating opinions, rules and regulations.
I'll try to contact you through email. I don't have a phone, refused the first mobile device. What? Be tracked and stalked? Nope nope nope. I found Peggy Thompson. There are plans for a show in Vancouver in the fall, and I wondered if you'd be interested in resurrecting party art, just for a night, a Point Zero Eight occasion, punk geezers drumming up Al Neil's spirit, yes, as you put it, dastardly cursing! I squirrelled away a little cash for venue, tek and nurses. You can rock and I'd do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRanxKB9qA&list=PLaDJmj4dAhNfCocyWdlpr5CB_p-F7OOho