cryptomorphology: hidden in the forms

Of course, it’s right when i should be sleeping, that i’m struck with the compulsion to write. which i haven’t felt for days, like the hesitant gearing up of some infernal machine. you’d think i’d be brain dead by now, not sleeping, and waking up still drunk from last night’s birthday festivities. but no. the muses work the night shift. after a slow afternoon working on the hero’s journey notes, i finished huysman’s “against nature” and can finally leave the Decadence aside for a little, and figured i’d take the rest of the evening off. but then i needed to start researching Gnosticism, particularly the emanation of the aeon Sophia from the Pleroma (fullness) of the inexpressible; who in being born without her male twin (syzygy), gave stillbirth to the demiurge, that blind god who created our material world and in not being able to see the greater light cried out that he was indeed the only god. i don’t know where that came from, why i needed to find that info. like a paranoia or obsession, the process of creating a world becomes the object of a focused attention into which everything falls pray. like a black hole, except with an other side. and the strangest quick references latch on as crucial building blocks for the creative task.

so then i picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick’s exegesis, and began reading his account of the mystical experience/ psychotic breakdown that haunted the later years of his life. with the cats prowling at the door and the stillness and buzzing of electronic devices in the room and infinitely tired i started to get those edges of movement in my vision, tinges of other worlds made only more possible by PKD’s surreal yet straightforward narrative of having dead friends and scholars or some alien intelligence speaking greek in his dreams and all around grooming his life. interesting also as a side note, he was born a twin, though his sister Jane C. died a year later. i think the point that struck me was he also related this force to being Sophia (in that the voices were all couched in Gnostic terms), who in that mythology was said to come into the world of forms/ darkness and rescue the shards of light that had gotten trapped here. which Dick went on to relate to Osiris’s dismemberment and subsequent rescue by Isis (another wisdom goddess, on the darker magical side of knowledge).

i had that dream. several years ago after the year long dream storyline of the world ending and civilization crumbling and everyone i know getting put in prison camps, i was coming out of my dark and dreamt one night that my twin brother took me down into a basement laboratory where he chained me to a monolith-machine and proceeded to extract my consciousness from my physical being, so that i was aware as if i was everything around me (foreshadowing my actual experience of this on 8-23-2003). but then he couldn’t get me back into my self and had to find someone who i would recognize and return to my body for. who he found in the glory-sophia figure i had been following around in my unconscious but hadn’t caught yet. he convinced her to come back to the basement and on seeing her i fell back into my body and woke up on a beach, drenched and naked and remembering everything i had been aware of while i was everything.

it could boggle me that i had this dream experience without any prior knowledge of the deeper archetypal occurrences of similar plot-lines, that it is a theme (or mytheme, a term i came on tonight to) inherent in the psyche. placed in the context of the crumbling dream world, and that i was also fighting off a schizophrenic breakdown my twin was going through at the time, this event stands as probably the crucial moment in the whole dream story. and comparing it to other hanged man myths (odin on yggdrassil, Buddha on the immovable spot, christ on the calvary mount…) certainly sets its significance to the myth i’m unraveling in my head.

so i got all jittery, and walked upstairs still catching glimpses out of the corners of my eyes, and suddenly felt like something was following me into the bathroom. and i realized that it’s been a couple years since i’ve felt that, and that that feeling of being stalked or haunted is one i lived under for most of my life. time always looking over your shoulder making you remember this could be it. a healthy dose of paranoia to balance out the pronoia of finding what i was looking for in the texts. probably that gimp death i dreamed the other night finally catching up to his normal place behind my left shoulder. i suppose it means i need to get started on this task soon. not for fear that the work or inspiration will dissipate, for i suspect it is much bigger and longer lasting than i am, but that i might in the mean time. at least, not till after i get a good night’s sleep.