In the after-dawn hour of 6AM I fell back to sleep.  As sometime happens I dreamed a nightmare.  The dream “experience” was real enough then.  Upon waking what I dreamed seemed as if an extension of my life.  I dreamed that a post, my comments on social media had provoked outrage from one person in a community of friends.  In my dream I attempted to contain the damage by belatedly changing the post, and then making a phone call.  The attempt was too little, too late.  Then I awakened as if transported to my home country, my bedroom, from a strange and dangerous place.

Apart from this blog, I do not participate in social media.  Somehow this knowledge does not make my dream seem less real.  There is a monster, are monsters that inhabit the dark regions within each of us.

A friend shared this poem with me a few days ago.  Sylvia Plath knew as well as may be known that civilization’s ring of light is surrounded by an ocean of darkness.

Religion is our oldest uttering of incantations to hold back the darkness.  All religion, and all priest craft are brittle and inflexible, asserting that purity somehow matters.  It doesn’t.

The universe couldn’t care less.

THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE

by Sylvia Plath

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness —
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.