I dreamed last night.  Surely the mental vision happened early morning just before waking.  Dreams are in the “coming to consciousness” phase of sleep.

I found myself in a ruined city, at least it was partially wrecked, decrepit. Some few neighborhoods and thoroughfares were maintained and in use, — the rest, skyscrapers included were abandoned.  I was in company with friends, making our way to a racetrack.  Anything can appear in a dream.  A motorsports facility in a city?  That’s surreal, something you’ll never see.  Anyway we were making our way between, through ruined buildings.  I was excited about being at the track with friends who would experience the sounds, smells and touch of the late industrial age for the first time.  A festival of steel, gasoline, asphalt, crackling exhaust, and speed…  (A child’s first taste of chocolate comes to mind.)  Along with anticipation, I felt fear.  Why fear?  The pathway through ruined buildings was hazardous; I doubted that I had enough strength and agility to safely complete the trek.  I dreamed my current age of 71 years, and not the 30 year old self that I once was.  No question, strength and skill rooted in a fine sense of timing, was but a faded memory.  Leaping across a broken pavement to grasp a handhold, to land on a narrow ledge requires keen eyesight, and a fit body in one’s prime.  But it was only a dream.

I awakened.  The dream remains clearly in memory.  How many of our songs, especially the love songs, and poems are about loss?  A great many are about the bitter-sweet recollection of what we have lost.  Loss is the natural course of things.  In the language of physics, the second law of thermodynamics says that energy dissipates toward equilibrium.  In the language of Buddhism: everything that lives will die.  There are many ways to express a universal truth.  And as a friend reminded me, there are precious few truths which are universal.

---

Here is a poem by one of the greatest German poets of the 20th century.  One of nine poems from The Voices written by Ranier Maria Rilke published in 1906.  The poems were translated by Robert Bly in 1977.

THE SONG THE IDIOT SINGS

They don’t bother about me. They let me be.

They say, “Nothing can happen’.’

That’s good.

Nothing can happen. It all comes and wheels

steadily around the Holy Ghost,

always around that same Ghost (you know) —

No, of course not, one mustn’t think any danger

could come in that way.

Of course the blood exists.

Blood is the heaviest. Blood is heavy.

Sometimes I think I’ve had too much —

(That’s good.)

O, isn’t that a wonderful ball !
Round and red as it all.
Good thing that you created it.
But will it come, if you call?

How strangely the whole thing behaves,

into each other driving, out of each other swimming,

friendly, a touch uncertain.

That’s good.

---

This could be a meditation upon the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, January 6.  The existential viewpoint of any number of armed militia in the crowd of 8,000, pressed around the building, shattering windows, forcing the doors to the chambers of Congress.  Evangelicals, armed with a Bible and a Glock G17, — surging forward are confident they are directed by the Holy Ghost to “take back” their country, a remedy by force for what is believed to have been lost.  Did they have any idea that five people would die on that day?  Five would not return home to their families.  “Blood is heavy.” After all that has been said and done on social media it is impossible “to think anymore–.”

And hours and days later, after the airplane ride home to Texas, or Missouri, or Michigan, “What have I done?”  What “kind of pretty ball is this?”

“It is red, blood red.  Does it come when I call?”

The idiot says, “That’s good.”