The Sleeping Man
6-26-06 The Question Of Origins
What is a Sleeping Man? And how does one become such? Good questions. Don't expect clear & definitive answers from me. I'm looking to you as the only map available to me. Or hadn't you noticed? No man has ever seen his own face. The mirror image? Now that is an entirely different kettle of fish. We walk through life you & I & we never ever gain the sights of our own faces as we meander. Never either hear the sound of our own voices except in the shape of an echo as that voice travels out of our lips & takes a long detour before reaching our ears. One advantage I have over you is I do feel whatever it is I feel as a total organism. Now this feeling includes the various sensations I experience based on past bodily experiences that I have kept alive with a memory system that you probably own also of your own bodily experiences. Well, how in the hell did I ever come to be The Sleeping Man? I have certainly been identified as other personages than this one. And in fact nobody has ever notified me that I'm the Rip Van Winckle of my era. Never heard so much as a whisper concerning my nocturnal gifts & my traumatic habits. Women never tell me what's in their minds of any moment for some reason. I assume it is because they need to be wooed into answering intimate queries. And I have no wooing skills. In fact I honestly believe the strongest wooing instinct I possess is to walk away from a woman the instant I note she is preoccupied with something other than herself & me. A very bright young woman told me that once. She said to me do you realize how strong you appear when you casually walk away after making a compliment---as opposed she was saying to waiting around in weak anticipation for instant rewards.
If I asked any woman even a beautiful & discerning one what it means that I am The Sleeping Man I would get no sensible reply. That I know ahead of time & since I am not looking for comic effects I refuse at least for the time being to play games with the ladies on this primordial question of my being. I may have been beaten into it by a series of tragic romances that slammed away at my psyche over the years. It is equally possible that I am merely following my genetic & historical destiny which is coded in my molecules and that thus my status has evolved to its present condition independent of anything I have done. The missed embrace of love thus has nothing to do with my now being The Sleeping Man or He Who Cohabits With The Nocturnal Woman. Don't ask me. I dream my dreams. After all I am The Man of Traumas. I write them down in my notebook. I run them by my Rotary Index Instant Analyzer. And I can't make heads or tails out of them. Once upon a time I visited a doctor who told me dreams are of no consequence. They are merely after-images of the mind's day laborings. No significance there whatsoever. He had extirpated his Freud & Jung & forwarded all his emails to the school of Cognitive Therapy. He loved drugs & advised the use of cocaine if one could afford it. And he believed that drug therapy had eliminated problems from the whole culture of "mental illness." Obviously he had never heard of The Sleeping Man. Though if he did he would summarily indicate a problem solvable by the swallowing of barbiturates or amphetamines. He was himself not a picture of glowing health. How shall the sick help the healthy and the ignorant give wisdom to the innocent?
RLG Copyright 2006
What is a Sleeping Man? And how does one become such? Good questions. Don't expect clear & definitive answers from me. I'm looking to you as the only map available to me. Or hadn't you noticed? No man has ever seen his own face. The mirror image? Now that is an entirely different kettle of fish. We walk through life you & I & we never ever gain the sights of our own faces as we meander. Never either hear the sound of our own voices except in the shape of an echo as that voice travels out of our lips & takes a long detour before reaching our ears. One advantage I have over you is I do feel whatever it is I feel as a total organism. Now this feeling includes the various sensations I experience based on past bodily experiences that I have kept alive with a memory system that you probably own also of your own bodily experiences. Well, how in the hell did I ever come to be The Sleeping Man? I have certainly been identified as other personages than this one. And in fact nobody has ever notified me that I'm the Rip Van Winckle of my era. Never heard so much as a whisper concerning my nocturnal gifts & my traumatic habits. Women never tell me what's in their minds of any moment for some reason. I assume it is because they need to be wooed into answering intimate queries. And I have no wooing skills. In fact I honestly believe the strongest wooing instinct I possess is to walk away from a woman the instant I note she is preoccupied with something other than herself & me. A very bright young woman told me that once. She said to me do you realize how strong you appear when you casually walk away after making a compliment---as opposed she was saying to waiting around in weak anticipation for instant rewards.
If I asked any woman even a beautiful & discerning one what it means that I am The Sleeping Man I would get no sensible reply. That I know ahead of time & since I am not looking for comic effects I refuse at least for the time being to play games with the ladies on this primordial question of my being. I may have been beaten into it by a series of tragic romances that slammed away at my psyche over the years. It is equally possible that I am merely following my genetic & historical destiny which is coded in my molecules and that thus my status has evolved to its present condition independent of anything I have done. The missed embrace of love thus has nothing to do with my now being The Sleeping Man or He Who Cohabits With The Nocturnal Woman. Don't ask me. I dream my dreams. After all I am The Man of Traumas. I write them down in my notebook. I run them by my Rotary Index Instant Analyzer. And I can't make heads or tails out of them. Once upon a time I visited a doctor who told me dreams are of no consequence. They are merely after-images of the mind's day laborings. No significance there whatsoever. He had extirpated his Freud & Jung & forwarded all his emails to the school of Cognitive Therapy. He loved drugs & advised the use of cocaine if one could afford it. And he believed that drug therapy had eliminated problems from the whole culture of "mental illness." Obviously he had never heard of The Sleeping Man. Though if he did he would summarily indicate a problem solvable by the swallowing of barbiturates or amphetamines. He was himself not a picture of glowing health. How shall the sick help the healthy and the ignorant give wisdom to the innocent?
RLG Copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 1:51 PM
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