The Waking Dream Predicament

Image from the end of Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass

Still later we learned to stop worrying. Love the predicament? -Yes, we did, but only in bits and pieces, like shells cast upon our simple little beach. This island of possible civilization, European clothing, propriety... an impossible collective of souls upon a small rocky island. From what shall they subsist? What have they to feed themselves with. Did they come from some other place? This place is beautiful but barren, leading the souls back to the infinite potentiality of a dreaming that has become desolate.

Three men sail off at the end of Herzog's screenplay, in search of nothing, or maybe something, or maybe a continent of dry land. And of course the reasoning goes on: are all of us on this beautiful and desolate planet trying to find some better place to live in? Can we make the planet a garden of abundance, or will we pick it clean and die of starvation, a withered sack of bones... and all our cultural understanding will become as nothing. And it really will be nothing in the end.

The Lord of Music of this time, Bob Dylan himself states:

"Seen from up close is a pleasant garden;

climb to a higher place and you will discover plunder and murder."

I do not know why but this waking dream I live in seems to have something profoundly satisfying to it for me. Herzog complains that the images of civilized society are all "aenemic", that they are all somehow profoundly lacking. I do not sense that the images of my life, whether waking or asleep lack any vitality or depth of their condition.

The reason why I called this the waking dream predicament was to indicate that our condition was always already set or stuck in a web of conditions and attachments. Many times when we think our lives or images are satisfying.... then: life will come along and dramatically wrest that reality from you! We wake in a reality removed and more difficult than the one we were sleeping, safely coccooned within.

Predicament: one must always think of an angst filled German Expressionist film... or maybe the writings of Franz Kafka: this is why in many of Kafka's novels the hero wakes one morning to find himself turned into an insect, or placed under arrest. The rest of the novel or story proceeds with a condition that one just finds out about being absurdly set in from the beginning. There is come comfort to the cruelty of any of the "predicaments" we find ourselves in: that somehow what we dream is what we need to be, even in our worst nightmares, but only for us.

So "Wake Up!" -as Jim Morrison might say, the light portending of some pretentious Friedrich Nietzsche. But who am I to tell the sleeping multitudes to awake, when I myself believe that I have barely stumbled into consciousness--- when it is either taken from me by force-- and like some falling Achaean soldier, I feel the terrifying dusk shroud of night surround me.

Or maybe I shall waken again and stumble about, terrified that my pretentions of knowledge were all a pompous and preposterous lie. Things tend to get that way as a rule.

When I stumble round and see what other people have to say on their "blogs" or "web journals" what I seem to ramble on about at this moment appears pompous and dismissable with a shrug by some. Let me apologize for my philosophical cliches. Those who feel there might be something worth reading as I thrash about seeking an idea or a symbol... well let's just play on!