as if from far away

as if from far away

i saw

the little boy

clutching his blanket

fist pressed to his mouth

big eyes

quiet little boy

I watched you walk away

with friends

and I knew

you were growing up

origin of consciousness...

I first discovered "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes when I was 18, sitting on the couch in Mark Maclaine's apartment, flipping through an Omni Magazine. I found a review of this new book, which briefly described Jaynes' thought-provoking theory of an evolving human consciousness, a consciousness that had been altogether different back when Homer wrote "The Odyssey".

Now Mark Maclaine was a breathtaking boy. He was everything any 18-year-old girl could ever want. He was beautiful -- all boy -- strong, gentle. He had a motorcycle, a wallet, an apartment, nice roommates -- not quite as nice as Mark, but not bad -- and he adored me! A girl couldn't really ask for more.

Unfortunately for us both -- and I wasn't sure how it had come about, but at that time, I was literally in a different world. When I looked at Mark, I knew perfectly well how wonderful he was -- I also knew he didn't have the slightest, remotest inkling of the strange alter-dimension I had lately fallen into. Fallen into!! Yes! When Alice fell into the rabbit hole, down, down, down, landing in Wonderland, when the three siblings of "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" passed through a wardrobe into Narnia -- well these are metaphors and apt metaphors at that, for the 'parallel dimension' that exists right here somewhere, right down a rabbit hole, right inside a closet.

Unwittingly, I had fallen in, and I was living in another kind of reality.

So, with all due regret regarding Mark, the new book by Julian Jaynes captured my attention and piqued my interest much more than Mark or any other boy could have.

Although I suspected that I'd gone "crazy", all along I was aware that this 'place' had much much more depth and significance as far as "reality" than the world that Mark Maclaine and everyone else inhabited. The only world I'd ever known up 'til then.

Looking out at Mark and anyone else however, I was disturbingly aware that they knew absolutely nothing of this other place. And that made me very frightened and unsettled, because I didn't know where I was either, I only knew I was as all alone as anyone ever could be.

I resolved to rush out and find a copy of "The Origin of Consciousness" and read it.

Sojourn

Bags under the eyes

piercing encompassing

headache

no-- headache doesn't come close

to the pain of what we refer

to as migraine

no-- migraine doesn't do justice

What we are looking at here

is raw pain

torturous pain

think of Jesus on the cross

the Spanish Inquisition

think of mercilessness

think of marauders, barbarians

genocide

think of the devil having fun

gleeful with eyes bottomless, black

slapping you on the shoulder with a

cloven deformed hand

So you try an assortment of pills

none even approach the land of agony

other people are blank

they don't get it -- so, ok

it's abundantly clear

it's your Sojourn

Why?

God only knows

Once We Laughed Merrily

So many shattered illusions

all of them in fact

sadness disappointment

angst and effort

endless effort

What did it all amount to?

the pretense

the distances

the wishful thinking

How could it have been different?

They didn't know the world would change

the old ways would change

that the ground under our feet

would shift

We had lazy summers

of tennis

and jigsaw puzzles

Now a hazy dream

They didn't know we

needed much more

They didn't know what

or how

And now, broken people we

where once we laughed merrily

over little things

always there was an imperative inside

and always there was an imperative inside that went un-addressed in the outside world and even appeared to be something that Everybody tried, in their busi-ness to avoid, to escape.

She too, had learned better to escape it, because it had a very frightening, lurking kind of appeal, like a bottomless pit, an abyss or a labyrinthine nightmare....