update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/idumea/007.html

@@ -17,20 +17,20 @@
 <p>When at last The Woman returned home, left my home and returned to her own, walked out into the field for a day and then lay down, her mind was aswirl with possibilities and all the various endlessnesses thereof. She felt full. She felt <em>overfull.</em> She felt as though she had had poured into her several depths, oceans of possibilities and each as deep or deeper than the last. She was vast. She was limitless. She was these things, and yet she was infinitely smaller than the limitless endlessness of the void which still lay within and without.</p>
 <p>She returned home after that talk with me and my beloved up-tree, with your humble narrator and The Oneirotect, and she went for a walk and she did that which she is good at: she napped. There, out on the grass, there, she napped.</p>
 <p>My dear, dear friends, the longer I go on, the more I pace around through quiet rooms the more these words swirl around me in some quiet maelstrom, the more I wish that I could do the same. Sleep brings no relief. Within my dreams there are yet more words. The boundary between waking and sleeping is so faint, now — I write even in my sleep! My dreams are of The Woman! My dreams are of me sitting at my desk with my pen in my paw and paper before me, of ink on page and words flowing after like an eager puppy! — the boundary is so faint now that I have more than once awoken from uneasy sleep to found that I had indeed at some point sat down at my desk and written word after word after word, after word and word and word. I have found pages of endlessly repeating phrases. I have found scribbles that are doubtless words and yet which I cannot decipher, and I cannot remember my dreams well enough to say what they may have been.</p>
-<p>Did The Woman dream, we may wonder? Did she lay down and sleep after that conversation and look up to the constellations in the texture of the ceiling, close her eyes, and then let play within her head some scene, some dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, some stream of meaning that the subconscious mind as dreamed by the dreamer of the world?</p>
+<p>Did The Woman dream, we may wonder? Did she lay down and sleep after that conversation and look up to the constellations in the fabric of the sky, close her eyes, and then let play within her head some scene, some dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, some stream of meaning that the subconscious mind as dreamed by The Dreamer of the world dreamed forth?</p>
 <p>I do not know.</p>
 <p>Let us suppose she had, though! Let us take a look at what has made up The Woman so far and extrapolate some perhaps dream.</p>
 <p>When first we began, when first some saner me set pen to paper or claws to keyboard, The Woman was set within her ways. She was set, as with her cocladists within her stanza, as one of those who suffers. She had hopes for moving forward with her life, yes, and dreams, but there was some part of her that fell in alignment with Her Cocladist&rsquo;s assessment that it was her lot in life as a member of the tenth stanza to provide a client for the seventh, those therapists among us. That was the moment when I began this story, telling of who she was, of expressing her as she might express herself, as did Collodi with Pinocchio: once upon a time there was not-a-king.</p>
 <p>For she is our Pinocchio, is she not? She is our Pinocchio in reverse. She is the one who was born into this world too real and yet yearned for some of the stillness of so-called-inanimate wood.</p>
 <p>The Woman then had her inciting incident, did she not? She had that moment when she met with Her Friend and felt after some form of joy that she could not quite put into words, and with that joy, against that joy, she felt the loss of joy over time, the way it was secreted within the treats that she delivered quietly to her cocladists and the way it seemed to trickle out of her life. And the second part of this incitation was the way that this fading of joy was cast against the stasis of her stanza, the suffering supposedly bestowed upon them. It showed to her plainly the impermanence of such joys, and thus, by omission, the possibility of a permanent pleasure.</p>
-<p>She is and we are of a neurodivergent type, and so her approach to hunting for such joy as she imagined was of such a type as that: thorough and curious, methodical and whimsical. She set before herself by rule of fives five investigations: food, sex, entertainment, creation, and spirituality. The first four of these brought joy, and even superlative joy, but not the joy she sought, and before her lay the prospect of spirituality, and yet such a prospect was exhausting before she had even begun.</p>
-<p>And so now we may only guess at the dreams of one such as her, one who lives within our consensual dream, one who is dreamed by the dreamer who was at one point our superlative friend.</p>
+<p>She is and we are of a neurodivergent type, and so her approach to hunting for such joy as she imagined was of such a type as that: thorough and curious, methodical and whimsical. She set before herself by rule of fives five investigations: food, sex, entertainment, creation, and change. The first four of these brought joy, and even superlative joy, but not the joy she sought, and before her lay the prospect of change, and yet such a prospect was exhausting before she had even begun.</p>
+<p>And so now we may only guess at the dreams of one such as her, one who lives within our consensual dream, one who is dreamed by The Dreamer who was at one point our superlative friend.</p>
 <p>Here is my supposition:</p>
-<p>The Woman went walking. In her dream, she went walking, though it was not out on her field, the one we have seen so often. No, instead she went walking out her bedroom and through her secret door, out through the door and onto the street of the city that had become so familiar to her over the years, that city with the brick pavers and the fallen leaves which skittered so anxiously around her feet. She went walking in her dream and made her way through the unnervingly empty city streets, walking and walking and walking. She passed the trolley stops. She passed the coffee shops. She passed, perhaps, the setting sun.</p>
+<p>The Woman went walking. In her dream, she went walking, though it was not out on her field, the one we have seen so often. No, instead she went walking out her bedroom and through her secret door, out through the door and onto the street of the city that had become so familiar to her over the years, that city with the brick pavers and the fallen leaves which skittered so anxiously around her feet. She went walking in her dream and made her way through unnervingly empty city streets, walking and walking and walking. She passed the trolley stops. She passed the coffee shops. She passed, perhaps, the setting sun.</p>
 <p>And at some final point — final! — she came across a square set within the cement of the sidewalk perhaps two meters on a side where the concrete gave way to a metal grate in the form of a sunburst, and in the middle there was a circle of soil, good and clean.</p>
 <p>There, within her dream within a dream within a dream, she smiled. She smiled and she sank slowly to her knees in that ritual circle described in steel and dug her fingers down into the soil. Down and down and down she pushed, and as she did, she felt her fingers lengthen, stretching and twisting, seeking nutrients and water, seeking final — final! — purchase. They twisted and stretched down as roots and spiraling up her arms was a texture like bark and the bones of her neck and back elongated and her eyes sought <em>HaShem</em> or The Dreamer or some greater void and her hair greened to that of leaves and drank thirstily of the sunlight.</p>
 <p>Finally — finally! — with one orgasmic flush of joy, The Woman became The Tree, and there was a joy everlasting in such stillness.</p>
-<p>This is my supposition because this is my dream. This is a world I have seen and a world I have dreamed and it is a world that I have found a way still to love, even after it turned in on itself and ate so many of its own, even as The Dreamer who dreams us all stumbled skinned eir palms and elbows on the brick pavers of this land. Since I have become myself, since your humble narrator was first called Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars, that has been my dream. I have put it in verse. I have put it in prose. I have put it in story — this story. I have dreamed hundreds of times over the centuries that I have lived that I, too, fell to my knees and dug my fingers into the soil and became, in some pleasure-bound process, something still and sky-reaching, something earth-eating and water-drinking.</p>
+<p>This is my supposition because this is my dream. This is a world I have seen and a world I have dreamed and it is a world that I have found a way still to love, even after it turned in on itself and ate so many of its own, even as The Dreamer who dreams us all stumbled and skinned eir palms and elbows on the brick pavers of this land. Since I have become myself, since your humble narrator was first called Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars, that has been my dream. I have put it in verse. I have put it in prose. I have put it in story — this story. I have dreamed hundreds of times over the centuries that I have lived that I, too, fell to my knees and dug my fingers into the soil and became, in some pleasure-bound process, something still and sky-reaching, something earth-eating and water-drinking.</p>
 <p>This is my supposition for The Woman and her dream after she came home from my house, because I think within her all along was that stillness, that sky-reachingness and earth-eatingness and water-drinkingness.</p>
 <hr />
 <p>The longer we live — and, my dear readers, I will remind you that I am now 323 years old! — the more evident it becomes to us that there is a fractally cyclical nature to life: the years spiral up and the months spiral around and the days spiral forward — weeks are a construct borne out of our inherited faith but perhaps they too spiral — and so we live within a fractally cyclical tangle of time.</p>