"And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be? ... You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there King was to wake you'd go out -- bang! -- just like a candle!"
"Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise."
"Well it's no use your talking about waking him when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."
Del Rio, Texas.***
Happy happy Christmas. I owe many emails to you, but I'm still on the road and online only sporadically. I'd tell you about it if I had more time, but as it is, this desk is needed. Call me, do. Otherwise I'll talk to you next year.
***
Leaving for Morenci. Then: Texas.***
Merton's Seven Storey Mountain to completion--so beautiful--a half-chapter or two of Marie-Dominique Philippe's Retracing Reality (which sentence by sentence requires hard thought and some knowledge of Hegel and Heidegger once he launches into metaphysics in earnest), a cursory dipping into Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk, a serious wrestling with Thomas Dubay's Faith and Certitude, and with my anger, and with my politics, and with my anger again. And a single, uneventful chapter on Descartes and skepticism from Hans Kung's mammoth theological history of philosophical ideas: Does God Exist? That's what. --A friend used to ask when she saw me, what're you reading?
***
"Moreover, that-which-is is concretely in the act of being, it is. Being, however, is a certain formalization. Being per se does not exist. That is why, if metaphysical research begins with being, there is always a risk of idealizing it. In fact, inquiry would then begin with an idea of being" (94). --Marie Dominique Philippe
***
Confusion: what ought to go here?***December 4th Phil spent 3 hours with his gloved hands dipped in ammonia and the two of us talking about miracles. He snipped off a third of my hair and deepened the old brassy pool highlights to something almost as dark as a Brazil nut. My natural color. No one likes it as much but me and Phil, but ya'll are just nostalgic for hair I keep out of laziness and disregard. If you trimmed your hair only twice a year and never did a thing to it but take a brush to it in the morning, you'd have hair down to your tail bone too.***
"only a dream": always the myopic this or that, one or the other, all or nothing, as if everywhere, analogously, it is either snowing or it is not snowing. It is either flat or it is not flat. --All the reality I could bear. And it's true: if you bear with such things as real things, you are prone to accident, and nothing more. ***
My uncle, Daniel Franco, died Saturday, December 8th, at 12:45 p.m. He woke 10 days ago, found himself on a respirator, and demanded, with the strength he had left, to be taken off of it though he knew his heart would give out without life support and that he would die of congestive heart failure. He was not afraid to die. His heart was enlarged, his body was massively swollen with edema, and his colon, they discovered, had developed a brood of untreatable cancerous nodules. He was to be delivered to hospice Saturday to be kept comfortable, but he didn’t want to be kept comfortable. He wanted to go home, to the river, where he belonged. He told us so in writing and in hand gestures on Friday night before he slipped into the last of his morphine-drip sleeps. He was not agitated at that point, but insistent: “HOME,” he wrote. And: “Did it snow in Alpine?” (We all know that if it snows in Alpine, the river rises.) He had not recovered his vocal cords, but he tried to talk anyway, on the phone with one of his daughters, with my brother, with my father. To my father he whispered, “What’s going on, Brother?" I was with him and his wife Angie when he went, and I'm thankful for that, but it's been a blow too. A huge part of my childhood went with him. He was 65.***
I don't remember my dreams anymore, that's why. ***
"and what is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?"
[contact me: ghostwordeffigy@yahoo.com]
