LoBD

"There are times when hands touch ours, but only send an icy chill of unsympathizing indifference to the heart: when eyes gaze into ours, but with a glazed look which can not read into the bottom of our souls - when words pass from our lips, but only come back as an echo reverberated without replying through a dreary solitude - when the multitude throng and press us, and we can not say, as Christ said, 'Somebody hath touched me:' for the contact has been not between soul and soul, but only between form and form.

...That is a lonely, lonely moment, when the young soul first feels God; when this earth is recognized as an 'awful place, yea, the very gate of heaven;' when the dream-ladder is seen planted against the skies, and we wake, and the dream haunts us as a sublime reality."

-F.W. Robertson

The ugliness of the petrified expressions is, in my experience, that very lack of soul-to-soul contact; the ugliness is not the people's -- not their fear, their humanity, their confusion or sorrow -- for these are moving, the opposite of hideous -- but the face of the reality that they are incapable of extending their souls to us. The ugliness is the feeling of complete isolation; the hopelessness of indefinite solitude, which leaves us with apparently no other option than to get up and leave -- to escape the reminder of this 'sublime reality.'

There is beauty even at the scene of a brutal death, in the sense that there is a gathering of people; a circle of blurry faces can be horrifying, yet it's a circle nonetheless -- an unbroken connection of faces. The ugliness lies, as does beauty, in "the eye of the beholder": And so, to the lonely soul observing this unity, it's ugly -- for the unbroken circle of faces is to that soul not a gathering of humanity, but a mirror reflecting one's own mortality and solitude.

If another soul emitted from one of the faces in the circle and sympathized with us, it would not be nearly as bad, and one might go so far to say that it would be the opposite: A nightmare would turn into a haven, and the degree of relief felt in that, surely, would be greater than that of simply waking up and being alive.

"When you wake up from a nightmare
And it's worse when you're awake
When there's no one you can turn to
And there's nothing you can take
You better ask yourself
Are you real or not?"

-Warren Zevon

On a more personal note, I have to wonder about my feelings right now: Right now I'm typing into this window, commenting on your work, and so establishing a connection with you; I find a break from that 'sublime reality' in doing this.

Is it my soul connecting with yours? -- or, to put it less abstractly, does typing into this box affirm the hopeful idea that we're not alone in the world?

Or is my subconscious playing a trick on me -- do I simply feel as though I'm not alone -- relieved of despair and loneliness -- because I expect you to read this, because my subconscious has been hard-wired to believe that, because contact is made, it will be listened to?

The line between reality and fantasy is hardly clear; such is why this life so often feels like a "nightmare," why our future is comprised of dreams, the past feels unreal, and the present at the mercy of the state of our fantasies, ever-altered and ebbing and flowing as the tides of the ocean to the rhythm of hope and faith: Are my cries heard? Are my feelings known? Is my spirit shared? Am I alone? Am I looking "frozenly at the circle of blurry faces" above me, or am I looking at a mirror that reflects my own fears?

The questions are endless; and yet, reality is not. I believe that past the mass of faces and the petrified looks of horror, there is an underlying unity -- an underlying assurance -- a morning light that dissolves the seemingly insoluble nightmare.

And it's this: You are a human being, just as I am, no different in any inherent way, at the most intrinsic level -- and yet, you're separate from me.

The horrors of nightmares and the seemingly bleak realities of this world only arise when we take glass windows for mirrors; when we see other people and other situations as horrifying in reflecting our own fears, rather than their own entities, as separate from ourselves, and begging unity with ourselves.

When a person knows that soul has met soul, what happens to the body becomes a matter of comparatively little importance.

"I used to live in a room full of mirrors
All I could see was me
Well, I took my spirit and I crashed my mirror
Now the whole world is here for me to see"

-Jimi Hendrix

I can't exactly tell what prompted me to go into this 'mode of analysis,' but I'm sure it has a lot to do with how...weird it feels. "Weird" is an apt word, and I'm glad you used it, for certain.

The other day, I was talking with a guy in an ice cream shop. We got a little ways into a conversation, and we started joking, and then he just gave me this fantastic look and said, quite seriously and with a hint of intrigue, quite factually, "You're weird."

So I suppose that explains my commentary thus far, and justifies it as well (I'm being a jerk and using the strangeness of this entry as a license to be strange myself...and I apologize -- I'm well aware I talk too much, but I leave things in for posterity). I hope you'll excuse me, and I hope you'll take it seriously when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed your entry, and that I hope you have an absolutely fantastic night, if you aren't already having one (and if you aren't, you'd better start now, because...well it wouldn't make me happy to know that you didn't have a fantastic night ).

And don't eat cheese before bed! I've heard that this causes nightmares, and though I haven't had that happen myself, I would advise against it just in case. Consider it a friendly heads-up, yes?

Thank you for sharing.