Where is Raed ? has an update from Salam Pax. Lots of first hand reporting about life during the bombardment of Baghdad and in “post-war” Iraq. In honour of the updates, I point you to Walt Whitman’s “Respondez” which starts:

RESPONDEZ! Respondez!
(The war is completed�the price is paid�the title is settled beyond recall;)
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?

And continues, rather scornfully:

Let nothing but copies at second hand be permitted to exist upon the earth!
Let the earth desert God, nor let there ever henceforth be mention’d the name of God!
Let there be no God!
Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!
Let judges and criminals be transposed! let the prison-keepers be put in prison! let those that were prisoners take the keys! (Say! why might they not just as well be transposed?)
Let the slaves be masters! let the masters become slaves!
Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!
Let the Asiatic, the African, the European, the American, and the Australian, go armed against the murderous stealthiness of each other! let them sleep armed! let none believe in good will!
Let there be no unfashionable wisdom! let such be scorn’d and derided off from the earth!

Go read the whole thing.

I was peeking through my usage stats, noticing when people visit this site, and I had this line pop into my head:

“In time zone after time zone, all around the world, evening is dawning.”

From the journals of Rob Horne, an irrigation contractor living near San Diego. He calls his journal “Backward Rain” because once described his work in irrigation that way.

May 6, 1966 – Friday

This trip to Japan must really have shaken me up inside even more than I realize. I�m not really afraid any longer because I�ve gotten used to the idea of moving but something deep down inside seems to be bothering me.

For instance the first night after I found out I was going I had a terrible dream. At first I was asleep and the next moment I was in my mother�s room telling her that she had forgotten to give somebody, I don�t know who, his insulin. I was deathly afraid because I knew whoever it was would die without his shot. Finally mother convinced me that it was a bad dream and I went back to bed.

Lately I�ve found it very hard to sleep and this reflects on my physical characteristics. I�m always tired and run down and my face is a little broken out. I guess this isn�t too unusual, after al anybody would be a little nervous when they�re moving to another country.

Other things that are happening are that I find it harder to talk. When I can think of something to say I have to talk slower or I�ll mix my words up. I could be imagining everything, maybe I�ve been this way all along.

I found this piece by taking today’s date and using this random number generator to come up with a year, and then subjecting the whole lot to Google. Lo and behold, I pull a 37 year old journal entry out of some guy’s online diary and it’s about dreaming.

“I could be imagining everything, maybe I’ve been this way all along.”

Texts on Meditation in the Buddhist Tradition

From alamut:

Oneironautics

Should we not classify web browsing as form of dreaming? Especially disinterested web browsing, web browsing completely unmotivated by greed or desire, where one at best is driven only by a gentle curiosity (or extremely gentle escapism), where browsing means wandering freely down corridors of thought and each web page jogs the soul in a new direction?

Browsing is a form of dreaming, in that dreaming is simply the unfettered journey through links and connections, from one image to another, one impression leading to other impressions. At the end of it we are left with a muddied trace of the journey, having assembled bits and pieces into some deeper coherent picture of our travels and travails.

Dreaming is surfing, on the waves of sleep, on the sweet rhythms of circadian cycles, the eyes rapidly scan the pictures that our brains and souls throw up before us. We can dream in preparation for a hunt, traveling the territory in vision, seeking the game that will come to us and making a pact with it, an appointment, whereupon we will show ourselves to each other and complete the bargain. We can dream for a future, for one of the myriad of options that might be or could have been. We can dream loss, even of those things we never possessed. We can grieve at the traces of light we leave as we fly over the dreamscape. Dream for ourselves or for others. Dream in this world, or outside of it, or, perhaps most frightening, dream on the very edge, with one foot firmly planted in manifested reality and one dangling into the vapour of pure possibility.

Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the earth with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly to and fro.

Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.

— Lewis Carroll, from Sylvie and Bruno