in dreams we are known
one of those somber, cerebral days. I slept fitfully, inhabiting a feverish, abstract half-world of one prevailing dream. in this dream I was suddenly convinced that some malevolent authority had decreed that my life -- its form, content, its very essence -- would henceforth be enslaved to the task of mirroring the history of southeast asia in toto. that is to say, my life as I lived it from that point on would have to symbolically play out, with unerring accuracy, the true lived past of southeast asia. part of this burden was physical; it involved maneuvering my body into specific shapes and symbols, uttering garbled mantras at just the right time, twisting and turning like a fish in flames ... part of it was mental; every thought that I henceforth had was somehow to correspond respectively to some aspect of southeast asia's past ... and if I erred in any way, the entire region would promptly crumble into dust -- both temporally and spatially -- as though southeast asia, geographically and historically, had never existed.
naturally I slept poorly -- on a razor edge, if you like. I definitely spent a good deal of the night actually thrashing about like said fish in flames.
you may infer from all this that I am dangerously steeped in my reading & must stop :) -- but reading something else does not necessarily help, if that something else happens to be an existentialist commentary on heidegger! -- now I am all dasein, what? and being versus Being, and truth as unhiddenness, the resolute finitude of existence, and the centrality of mortality (Nothingness) to Being -- and now it is 10.15pm and I fear that tonight's sleep is shaping up to be just as troubled.