Pity the Feeling

~ cafebedouin 
On top of Everest, in my mind,
a dark cloud, lightning blasts, 
a hurricane of controversies, unwind
below, nonsense sea, fish net casts.

The Sherpa is fishing about
prefers an understanding cartel.
Procrustean commodities—easier without 
a heart, a totalitarian Tinkerbell.

Feelings, the repugnant social Other,
are the dream within the dream.
Before we think, we must feel, brother,
a mind | heart alone, cannot reign supreme.

3 thoughts on “Pity the Feeling”

  1. This is the first poem I have read that you have written. “the dream within the dream” so much in there it would take a whole conversation.
    I continue to be astounded at not only the amount of reading you must do but also the varied and interesting subject matter.
    I am still back at the genetic tinkering piece thinking about how to respond and suddenly I am in a Buddhist temple contemplating how I feel about robots. 🙂
    Here is something I just came upon, don’t know if you are familiar…….Jung wrote his “Red Book” and his family only recently (last 10 years?) allowed it to be published. At the same time as Jung was putting down his thoughts and drawing pictures from his/our collective unconscious J.R. Tolkien was writing his own “Red Book” Red Book of Middlemarch the two men were not aware of each other at the time……seeing a comparison of the pictures that were drawn one has to be in awe of how our collective unconcious births appears to birth ideas at the same time and we are free to draw from it.
    The dream within the dream indeed.

    1. The dream within the dream was from Chagdud Tulku, Gates of Buddhist Practice. I only remembered it because I published a reference to it here. cafebedouin is becoming my outsourced memory.It’s a great book, well worth checking out.

      During the course of the year, I write down interesting (or new to me) words or phrases as I read. The last two years worth I put on this blog as Words & Phrases, Year. Lately, I’ve been using them as a starting point for writing poetry, a kind of cut-up, but more of my reading than of a single text. I’m not sure how I feel about them. I do like that they are weird. This is my favorite:
      https://cafebedouin.org/2018/10/17/mutantis-mutandis/

      I don’t know if I read a lot. My reading of books is down, by a lot. It is probably because most of my reading is being driven by my RSS Reader. For example, just this morning I added:

      Feed: https://buttondown.email/chrisbeha/rss
      Example: https://buttondown.email/chrisbeha/archive/7e9d06d1-094f-4837-b33b-c1987216f31b

      It was recommended by another feed, and it is only two newsletters in. But, it looks interesting. And of course, it has a reference to something else, and down the rabbit hole we go.

      I’ve been doing this for, probably a year or two since Google Reader launched, so 12 years or so. Adding, then pruning, and adding some more to the RSS reader, which means I have hundreds of feeds coming in and I just scan headlines looking for things I find interesting. The only thing I really have going for me is dedication to a process over time.

      The collective mind is a really interesting idea. Back in Emerson’s days, the Oversoul was probably more a function of environment and historical moment, with Leibnitz and Newton discovering calculus independently around the same time being the best example I can think of. But, with the Internet, it may be more a function of how tightly we are thinking together, a la Patricia Lockwood’s Communal Mind.
      https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n04/patricia-lockwood/the-communal-mind

      I don’t know either Red Book. I’m not finding the Tolkien book in GoodReads, but the Jung one seems like a lot of people like it, a rating of 4.54! And it looks like an illuminated manuscript, which I have been coming across quite a bit lately, e.g., The Book of Kells was recently redigitized using the best modern techniques. I have a post scheduled pointing to it.

      Thanks for mentioning Jung’s Red Book. I’m definitely going to check that out.

      1. You may not thank me, it is a very difficult nut to crack…..I attended a one day workshop on Saturday with Becca Tarnas. She has done a PHD on the The Red Book and the Red Book,
        we discussed part of Jung’s book and a bit about the history of it being unpublished and the decision by the family to allow it to be published. You might do well to google her and look at a few of her youtubes. Definitely ‘a dream within a dream’ …….. wonderful there are all the puzzles, puzzle pieces and rabbit holes to discover. Makes it all just that much more interesting.:)

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