A truth, a dream, a remembered song, two quotes, an irk, and a ponder

You can’t escape your body. My own body is overly anxious, so I wish I could leave it like one climbs out of a cop car through its window. But even if you choose to commit suicide by insulting a heavily armed street gang and provoking them to open fire on you, so that their bullets riddle your corpse; still, your body will find a way back to you, in the afterlife. Whatever you are — call it a soul or a spirit; a spark of fire — your body will chase you down to the ends of the universe, and force you back inside of it. The body is like a mobile jail cell; like a chamber of torment. I wonder what we did wrong to be cursed with these bodies?

Bodies can also be desirable. Some bodies are beautiful. It seems that certain people have an easy time interacting with the outer world thru their body. That’s called “not being insane” or “not being a lunatic”. I can’t relate to that. But I really admire people who have nice bodies.

Here’s the dream that I had last night. I’m not joking or making this up: I really did have a vivid dream where I was living in my old childhood house in Woodgate; and I looked out the front window and noticed that there were parked vehicles lining both sides of the street — this was strange, for this street is normally quiet and bare. And among these vehicles parked bumper-to-bumper up and down both curbs were many police cars, ambulances, and every imaginable type of emergency vehicle. 

I then looked across the street at my neighbors’ driveway. They had their two cars parked there, as usual. 

Now, as I was gazing at this driveway, a cop car happened to approach and pull into the driveway, and, as it did so, it carelessly banged into both of my neighbors’ cars that were parked there. Then the cop car waited for a moment and pulled back out, banging into the cars again as it left. Soon, two more vehicles — an ambulance and another police cruiser— pulled slowly into the same driveway, and they did the same thing: they hit my neighbors’ cars and each other’s vehicle as well. 

Confused by this behavior, I began trying to reason out why all these official vehicles were being piloted with such rude abandon. Was it because they were trying to send a message? Or were they simply unconcerned about damaging property? — As I began to drift along this line of thought, I was suddenly pulled back to focus on the scene at hand, when additional vehicles arrived in my neighbors’ driveway and banged into each other, pulling in and backing out seemingly aimlessly… 

Then, at some point, the doors of these vehicles must have opened to eject their passengers or drivers, for, when I looked again, now there were individual cops or medical workers standing amid the vehicles, and the other squad cars and emergency vehicles began veering at them, blatantly attempting to run them over. This horrified me. 

Then I noticed that there were individual policemen in the street holding brooms and batting at the ground while shouting to each other. I couldn’t see what it was that they were trying to hit or sweep up with their brooms; so I ran to another window to get a better look: 

Then I saw clearly, in the middle of the road, right in front of one of these broom-holding cops, there was a dark gray crab (it nearly matched the color of the street: that’s why I couldn’t see it earlier); and, although it was regular-sized, there was an abnormal addition to its anatomy: this crab had two long, thin, stick-like legs that unfolded so that it could stand up at about the same height as a human. 

So this standing crab was snapping its pincers at this cop, and the cop was trying to jab it with his broomstick. 

Then the crab leapt forth and clutched and seized onto the cop’s person: its pincers would not let go of the uniform, as the policeman kept panicking and trying to remove it. 

I then thought to myself: Ah, so THAT must be what was causing the erratic behavior and strange, reckless driving of the squad cruisers and ambulances across the street, in my neighbors’ driveway: the vehicles were probably all infested with these mutant crabs, and their movements were the result of intense struggles taking place inside each vehicle. 

Then, as the cop on foot outside was still trying vainly to pry the crab away from his shirt, I looked down and spotted one of these same creatures crouched in the corner of my own room, no more than a single meter away from me. This crab then sprang forward and attached itself to my leg. I quickly grabbed it by its midsection with my hand and flung it away, but it immediately scrambled back toward me. — Then I woke up.

Now, as I lay thinking about this scary dream that I just had, for some reason, one part of the song “Unchained Melody” by Alex North and Hy Zaret started fading into my mind and it kept repeating in my thoughts — it’s the lines that go:

Lonely rivers flow
To the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea.

Lonely rivers sigh
“Wait for me, wait for me”
I'll be coming home; wait for me.

Now, this personification of natural elements attracts me. It instantly brought to mind the famous passage in James Joyce’s FINNEGANS WAKE where he includes all those names of all those rivers; and this in turn caused me to wonder about what Joyce’s next book would have been like, if he hadn’t died so early — because, rumor has it, his idea was to write a novel about the sea. 

But, anyway, since I had just awakened from my crab dream, I knew that I’d be sitting down at my writer’s desk soon; so my first intention was to try composing a giant battle between all the rivers of the world. — But since this present entry already contains so much mayhem in the above dream’s description, I’ll let the impulse pass. Instead I’ll just copy a couple sentences that pleased my fancy when I just read them just a moment ago — for I had to search thru an encyclopedia on the Internet to figure out who wrote the aforementioned song (I would never have been able to recall North and Zaret on my own), and, when I found the desired article, after getting the info that I wanted, I kept reading onward for fun, and I discovered snippets of writing that I thought would be good to quote out-of-context. Here is one:

The man contemplates whether to escape from prison and live life on the run, or to complete his sentence and return to his wife and family.

& here’s another:

A prisoner sings his song, accompanied by another prisoner on guitar, while all the other prisoners listen sadly.

The first of these quotes — or, rather, both of them, now that I think of it — reminds me of my own boring dilemma, as I’m still on-call for jury duty thru next month, and I’m waiting for this interval to pass. For me, this is much like being in prison: I’m faced with the temptation of skipping the summons and living the rest of my existence in fear of being punished, or simply serving my time and then returning to my life as a social misfit. 

To me, receiving a summons to serve on a jury is like when the characters in a novel that you’re writing drag you down into the text with them and force you to live in their world for a span of time. Even if they are kind to you during your stay, it’s still obnoxious to be chained to a name on a page that you’re accustomed to hovering above.

My last thought of the morning has nothing to do with any of the foregoing. At least I assume that it doesn’t. I’m thinking about “poetry, then and now”. How meter and rhyme, so-called formal poetry is now no longer so popular: we don’t require that a text have an A-B-A-B-C-C format to be called a poem; nowadays there’s more of the thing we call “free verse” — but what is this exactly? Is it just an erratic choice about when each line shall end, as opposed to allowing the hard right margin to make that decision automatically as it does in prose? 

People have stripped away a lot of the characteristics of poetry, over the ages — I wonder if there is some essential quality that cannot be eliminated without forfeiting a text’s right to be called poetic. Is it simply imagination that makes a poem a poem? Then why not call all imaginative writings poetry, including political essays? 

I suspect that there are people out there who never accepted the loss of meter and rhyme; they do not raise their voices about it in the academies, but they privately dismiss the idea that writings lacking meter and rhyme are truly poems. 

Also, I’ve been focusing here on the abandonment of formalities within poetry, but isn’t that only true if we start from, say, Shakespeare’s age? Or let’s use Alexander Pope as Year Zero, so that we can consider the timeline of history as consisting of ages before and after Pope — B.P. and A.P. (I choose Pope because he’s considered a master of the heroic couplet, which is a very formal type of poetic composition: rhyming pairs of lines of iambic pentameter; whereas Shakespeare’s all over the map.) — Go forward in time from Pope, and you get to Whitman, who writes free verse that abandons Pope’s formalities. However, now go backward in time from Pope, and look at the poems of the Bible — the Psalms, for instance: they abandon equally Pope’s formalities. (The Psalms sound a lot like Walt Whitman.) So what’s going on here? I love Pope, Walt, AND the Bible — they’re ALL poetry to me. 

I guess I’ll just have to conclude that styles and fashions zigzag like lightning bolts thru the ages, and it’s all very good.