HORESHEAD 4 (sketch) & NEVER PUT DESCARTES BEFORE DE HORSE (dreamku) by Roswila

NEVER PUT DESCARTES BEFORE DE HORSE

Descartes declared
“I think therefore I am”
then where am “I”
in those precious times when thought’s
drowned totally in the doing?

and what happens to “I”
when flooded with radical
waves of thought that
totally alter connecting paths
across the dunes of experience?

more important, who or what declares familiar
the “I” reborn from every drowning?


[two tanka and a two-liner on a dream of 6-9-12. This is what I’ve heard called a thinking dream. No kidding! It’s also day residue. I watched a “marathon” of T.V. shows with Stephen Hawking last night on the cosmos, God, origins of life, black holes, consciousness and brains, quantum mechanics, you name it. It was a wonder-filled well thought out soup, which I felt in awe of and occasionally prompted to argue with. (Out loud. With my T.V. screen. On subjects I know little or nothing about. It’s good I live alone.) Descartes’ famous quote was referenced at one point and I clearly continued that particular argument into my sleep. It's an intriguing quote, especially in light of all the (lay person's) reading I've been doing into neurobiology. (Most recently "Icognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman.) Even now, writing these notes, I find myself getting caught up in a conundrum. (Such as "I" being the awareness of the awareness of the world that is "amness." And what is that "amness" to begin with? And what does it arise from? And is the world of which the "amness" is spottily aware really knowable or stable? And how can the "I" answer these questions at all? And so on....) The title to this dreamku? I had come across that funny line in a UCSB student newspaper I read yesterday. It had a picture of Descartes above the first part, and of a horse over the second. So I was primed to do dream battle with Descartes before I even watched the T.V. shows. :-) Sketch above: “Horsehead 4” by Roswila; for a long time I've thought I actually do need to put the horse before Descartes -- take care of the pressing practical matters (to a large degree, let my body lead), and the philosophical searching will follow from that work. Oh, Hawking proclaimed in one of those T.V. shows that philosophy is dead. It must be wonderful to be so certain one has totally understood everything. Sorry, that last sentence is both sarcastic (I envy that certainty) and my true feeling.]

PLEASE NOTE that I never have nor do I now lay claim to having been the first to suggest writing about our dreams in the haiku form. In fact, the haijin (Haiku Masters of centuries ago) sometimes wrote haiku on dreams. But even more importantly, what I have been developing for several years now on this blog is not even truly haiku or tanka or monoku. The ways in which I have been using and experimenting with these forms makes the results more akin to kissing cousins of these small Eastern poetry forms. Therefore, I mostly use the term "dreamku" to distinguish what I do from those traditional forms. Click here for a more in-depth INTRODUCTION than follows below, including links to my THREE PART PRIMER on the basic (most haiku-like) dreamku form.

Also, the photo accompanying a daily dream poem or non-dream based poem is not necessarily meant to illustrate it, but to reflect some small, even slant aspect of the verse -- similar to Japanese haiga (illustrated haiku). I've also recently realized that although the dreamku (i.e. dream based poems) posted here tend not to have metaphor or simile, the accompanying photos almost always act as such.

To write a metaphor or simile into a dream scenario is something I rarely do. It can be confusing: did it really look like a hand, say, in the dream, or am I just being poetic to make my conscious point? As these dreamku act as a dream journal, my over-riding tendency is to try to stay close to the actual dream scenario itself. Admittedly making for a tendency to less "poetic" dreamku. Then why pay attention to any haiku, tanka, or monoku parameters at all when writing about my dreams? Because I find in even attempting to adhere to them I'm making choices that relieve my dream recall of a great deal of chatter so that I can get down to some important dream aspects. Here's a link to THE AREN'TS OF DREAMKU & ACCOMPANYING PHOTOS in which I go into some of the basic parameters for dreamku and the photos chosen to go with them (and with any non-dream based poems I post here, as well).

The archives in the sidebar hold years of the daily dreamku, tanka, monoku and photo posts I've made, grouped in one post by month. As I no longer post dreamku (or non-dream based poems) strictly daily, each post will appear below and then in the archives by the day on which it was posted.

There are many other sorts of posts here, not all dream-based. I indicate which are about or influenced by dreams. Some non-dream focused posts are book reviews, "regular" poems (some by other writers than myself), scifaiku, writing exercises, Tarot haiku, photos, haiga, and so on. However, most of those are in much older posts. There's a listing by month going back to early 2006 in the sidebar.

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‘til next time, keep dreaming,

[aka: Patricia Kelly]
**** If you wish to copy or use any of my writing or poems, please email me for permission (under “View my complete profile”) **** My other blogs: ROSWILA’S TAROT GALLERY & JOURNAL; ROSWILA’S TAIGA TAROT; and OPENING TO THE LIGHT ****