Napolean says: From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step

"[Ordinary people are] always master of the present; the [extraordinary] master of the future. The first preserves the world and increases it numerically; the second moves the world and leads it toward a goal. (261)" -Dostoevsky

I'm a ghost man in a ghost town and I don't know how to get out and get up to heaven

"Ghosts are, so to speak, bits and pieces of other worlds, their beginnings. The healthy man, naturally, has no call to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly of men, and therefore he ought to live according to life here, for the sake of completeness and order. Well, but as soon as a man gets sick, as soon as the normal earthly order of his organism is disrupted, the possibility of another world at once begins to make itself known, and the sicker one is, the greater the contact with this other world, so that when a man dies altogether, he goes to the other world directly. (289)" - Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment

Lies <=> Truth

"I like it when people lie! Lying is man's only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie - you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that's honorable in its way; well, but we can't even lie with our own minds! Lie to me, but in your own way, and I'll kiss you for it. Lying in one's own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else's way; in the first case you're a man, and in the second - no better than a bird! The truth won't go away, but life can be nailed shut...In the end we'll lie our way to the truth, because we are on a noble path. (202-204)"

Where You Go I Go Too

I'm sure long before this one I had many other dreams, but this is the very first dream I can remember. It shows me that I haven't changed much in my way of thinking and forming desirous relationships since I was 4 years old. There was a young girl, my age, in my preschool class, blond curly hair. I remember her face generally other than it was like most of the faces belonging to children of a young age; cute and chubby with large eyes. But for me at that time her face possessed a magical quality.

In my dream she was standing on a balcony on the second story of a white colonial house. Her hair was curled in amber ringlets and she wore a blue dress in the style certainly before the civil war of a southern belle adorned with organdy ruffles and exposing her shoulders. What is odd is I am not sure how such details could have come into my mind. At four years old I had little knowledge of time or history yet there she was standing looking out from the picket fence lined portico as I held her in my mind. Nothing else happened.

Truth is I'm sure I hadn't spoken five words to her while we were in the class. Certainly I was too shy and when I did come in contact with her I could do nothing but admire her.

I can understand why my friends say I am a hopeless romantic (even though some haven't actually said it too me). But it makes sense. I've always been this way. Waking up in memories and dreams of thirsting for people I barely know. How to change? How to change? Can I? Do I want to? One thing I am certain of is I will keep this girl with me all of my life. As some kind of archetype. As my first memory of longing and the beginning of my hopeless romance. Where I go she goes too.

Square Foot of Space

"Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet- and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him- and had so stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity, it would be better to live than to die right now! Only to live, to live to live! To live, no matter how-only to live!(158)" - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Bouquet (8/3/2009)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentioning eighteenth century attire has me wondering of floral arrangements. "Her bouquet" what could her bouquet be? Something she wears, supporting her bosom, the flower of her body? She hands me her bouquet - offering me her flesh. A word; possession. It was enough for me not to grab, but rather to hold her by the stems and feel the petals brush against my skin. ("You were always weird that I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now") No expectations. The curves of her body, her energy, I could feel inside her. I felt inside. Yet surrounded her. We danced and laughed, and and pressed out mouths together, we met each other and met ourselves again. The blue lights are bright. We should be the masters of the lights of the world. We speak it and we are.

She offered her bouquet to me and I took only a garland of baby's-breath. 'Tis sweet to leave love wanting more. Take little now. Gain more as they grow. She grows basil and carrots, hyssop-mint and other plants on the fire-escape of her apartment in Brooklyn. Grows them in her garden. To taste those herbs! To hold in my mouth that passion of inspiration, to hold the initial moment she conceived the idea of growing plants then in my mouth now will be my most sought delight. The experience.

The bouquet unfurls from the cleavage of her shirt. The stems are her neck, strong muscular and stretched taut. Careening. The flowers her face, high cheeks, chin, fiery nectar lips and iris eyes of amber glow like sunlight. But I do not possess. For there is very little in life for anyone to. I see. I admire. I am aware of beauty in things, the valuable symbols they possess. Like flowers gathering in my mind, ones already grown and planted somewhere else; those I have conceived without sight. Perhaps she will see them tomorrow in the city street in a bed outside of a building. Perhaps she will see them tomorrow of the next day and think of me.