what I meant to write earlier, but didn't have the heart

Sophie got back from Boston yesterday and we got together after my classes, talking late into the night about what's going on in our hearts, our minds. I mostly tried to articulate the many questions that have been circling for days, about community involvement, my reasons and goals for studying myth and literature, the somewhat existential crises I was feeling Sunday night, walking up the back streets of Bloomfield alone, with the dark looming rain clouds and Sigur Ros in my headphones, seeing the sunset reflected in dirty windows and a feather on the edge of a puddle that sent a shiver through my heart. But I was feeling totally ungrounded, adrift in the world, cut loose from community, my dreams, any truly revealing or opening experience. According to Charles Long (whose book Alpha I am reading for class) describes myth as a symbolic ordering which makes clear how the world is present for man, and though I haven't had as clear recall on my dreams these past weeks, they are one of the most consistent places where my world is revealed to me, further deepened by my love of literature, stories that speak to broader realities and make life make sense, the same way Sophie said she finds such peace and place in poetry. But community can do likewise, talking and playing music with other people in a way I haven't in a long time, social rituals which I miss and should seek out, in our ideas for a personal salon, in looking at joining some student organization. But it runs deeper, I have constantly through my life sought out experiences that broaden my reality, which put me in deeper touch with mystery, awe, what is possible. Experiences that are more fully real, with that existential quality of utter wonder and terror, beauty and pain, balanced into one moment. I wonder, is it possible to find such moments of transcendence at all times, a total irruption of the sacred? That mindset of the continual "Yes!" which finds this sacredity not in some external "Other" but in the identification of the self with the whole world, in each indescribable moment...

In all my classes the question of duality keeps coming up, Plato's two causes of Reason and Necessity, Barthe's "Doxology"- cultrually instilled beliefs that cast differences in terms of conflict, even Evolutionary Psychologists trying to find proof for differences in sexual proclivities. In Critical Reading we had the Deconstructionist critique explained as one that tries to get beyond artificial dualities, and in myths we have abstract, primal dualities, a coincidence of opposites, that are necessary to the symbolic ordering of the world, but are ultimately transcended. Kinds of academic or epic yoga, in short. The question aside (for the time being) of how this is all related to sexuality, which has also come up in all these classes, I still fail to see why reality has to be expressed in dualistic terms, or how it is possibe to percieve it otherwise. Certainly there are always grey borders and ambiguities between concepts, certainly I have had many moments that have stretched my consciousness past any individual identification, an acceptance of being intimately part of the whole. And yet, I still hide in my room, don't talk to most people, look for differences, still feel isolated and alien even in groups of joyous and close friends. I still can't grasp how two such primaly opposed forces as Night and Day can be rectified, much less to speak of Life and Death, when they just seem so phenomenologically distinct. Sure, life is a dream, but one tha tfails to convey the same symbolic depth, that sense of chaotic possibility, except in those rare moments of lucidity or hallucination, whereas the death of sleep, even in its most mundane moments, is utterly profound with psycho-spiritual implications. Life of course can also be profound, it does not just have to be these routines, this profanity, the dead hands of history and binary logic, it can be awesome, Real, the day too can show us, and quite symbolically, how we are present in the world. I am not quite there yet though, and most of the time just want people to be quiet so that I can read in peace, and go back to sleep.