Seconds

I drove to Philadelphia on Thursday—the first long journey I’ve made since the accident in June (and, of course, along the same route). I had a tense drive through heavy rain, fog and traffic. In Cumberland, just a few miles from where I was hit, I came upon an accident. The police were preparing to re-route traffic and, somehow, I was placed about fifteen feet from the wrecked car; I sat for twenty minutes watching paramedics remove the driver, place her on a stretcher and leave the scene. I sat watching, remembering, feeling for her. I seem to have an audience with these matters; it was not especially disturbing but it does give me more to consider.

Yet all the trucks and their cargo hurry on; we must ship the products from one place to the other. Hurry.

This week I’m making a promotional video for a non-profit here in the city; they’ve historically worked up and down Germantown Ave. I drove down Germantown yesterday into North Philadelphia; I’ve been away for three years and—I’ve been all over the world—the human condition suffers; we have only seconds remaining to consider it. We are in a vehicle about to lose control on a sliding surface.

I’m just not feeling especially hopeful today; I want to be aware of reality and in many ways I am. Is there a threshold that one should not cross or would the world change its spiritual axis if we were all more so? Which way shall we slide?

Losing my addiction

I drink about four cups of black tea a day (five maximum); that is too much as I seem to have a dependance on it. When I wake in the morning, I have tea right away to activate my brain and body. What I would like to do when I wake up is meditate; but I must have tea first. Of course, I have the tea, read the paper…check e-mail….by the time I’ve completed all that, my mind is filled with matters of the day and not in meditation mode.
This morning, I thought I would have a somewhat less strong cup in the morning and one in the afternoon. By about noon I was very not…functional. I just had a strong cup of Irish Breakfast so I could have the energy to pick up the laptop and press down on the keys. So I think I’ll try strong in the morning and afternoon and work my way down from there.

Several years ago, I had some major surgery that hurt. (It really really hurt; I had a 36cm steel bar inserted under my ribcage). After that I was on several narcotics. I had a doctor specifically for the pain; we had this whole plan for my gradually coming off the medications in order to reduce withdrawal. I basically just stopped cold; it was awful for about a day then seemed to pass. However, if I don’t have tea, my body protests vehemently. This makes me wonder about the whole classification and regulation of drugs; I can start and stop morphine without issue but can’t just cease drinking tea. Tea is something I can purchase at any grocery store, but morphine is a controlled substance (though, granted, narcotics have significant side effects and don’t really help one wake up in the morning. I think it would be probably about the worst idea ever if Starbucks starting selling narcotics to folk on the morning commute—however, that might reduce incidents of road rage).

The Soul's Thought

I’ve read H. Ryder Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines this week (mainly because She keeps appearing in Jung). She is apparently a best-selling but somewhat forgotten book. This is a shame as it’s an imaginative and well presented tragedy. A quote from Chapter XVI The Tombs of Kôr:
bq. Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought.

In an instant the whole thing had passed through my brain, and She was addressing me.

“Behold the lot of man,” said the veiled Ayesha, as she drew the winding sheets back over the dead lovers, speaking in a solemn, thrilling voice, which accorded well with the dream that I had dreamed: “to the tomb, and to the forgetfulness that hides the tomb, must we all come at last! Ay, even I who live so long. Even for me, oh Holly, thousands upon thousands of years hence; thousands of years after you hast gone through the gate and been lost in the mists, a day will dawn whereon I shall die, and be even as thou art and these are. And then what will it avail that I have lived a little longer, holding off death by the knowledge that I have wrung from Nature, since at last I too must die? What is a span of ten thousand years, or ten times ten thousand years, in the history of time? It is as naught—it is as the mists that roll up in the sunlight; it fleeth away like an hour of sleep or a breath of the Eternal Spirit. Behold the lot of man! Certainly it shall overtake us, and we shall sleep. Certainly, too, we shall awake and live again, and again shall sleep, and so on and on, through periods, spaces, and times, from aeon unto aeon, till the world is dead, and the worlds beyond the world are dead, and naught liveth but the Spirit that is Life. But for us twain and for these dead ones shall the end of ends be Life, or shall it be Death? As yet Death is but Life’s Night, but out of the night is the Morrow born again, and doth again beget the Night. Only when Day and Night, and Life and Death, are ended and swallowed up in that from which they came, what shall be our fate, oh Holly? Who can see so far? Not even I!”

Birthday

Today is my birthday—which I would otherwise not note—however, it seems exceptional this year in that I am not dead from the accident just over one month ago.
I see that I share a birthday with Marcel Proust; I’m sort of understanding that ‘living with one’s parents and having no job’ thing he went through…but earnestly hoping I don’t live here till after both my parents die then waste away in my bedroom whist writing a giant novel.

More interesting (or synchronistic?) is that I was born 100 years after C.G. Jung (don’t worry, I’m not going to develop some kind of complex that I’m the reincarnation of Jung—it’s just neat to note).

And, to top it off, today is Nikola Tesla’s birthday; how shocking.

6 September 2009 Update: My mother just noted that I was born a few weeks early; I was due to be born on 26 July 1975…which is 100 years to the day after Jung.