Still With Me?

May 24, 2009

Zen Cattle-Hammer.

With the title above, I offer a natural culling of readers straight-away. I have, more than once, been personally offended that I made the choice to waste my time reading someone’s spoutings based entirely on a clever, but ultimately dishonest, hook and title (and oh-my-god, am I a sucker for cover art and profile pictures). I have even returned to the house of pain a few times (losing more precious minutes), hoping that the author just “had a bad set”, only to discover what I already knew: Nope, this just really isn’t for me.

So, here is the out, twenty seconds in: If you cannot see a meaning of Zen Cattle-hammer behind your eyes, then this blog will probably not appeal to you. If you can, but the image does not move you in some way (whatever that way is), then this blog will probably not appeal to you. If you don’t simply adore an assault of italics every two-dozen words, then spare yourself the conniption. Trust me. I’m a Doktor.

Otherwise, welcome and read on.

But, that said, just what does the title mean? I really don’t have a concise answer. I’ve thought about it… at length… but not until after I made the decision. I merely knew it was time for me to start writing things to be read (rather than spoken, which is my normal method of communicating), and I knew I’d need an umbrella title for those typings, but…

The truth is that I woke up with those five syllables in my spirit and I knew they were the right ones, but to really determine why I’d have to reverse-engineer them a bit. Technically, if I wanted to be as cliche as possible (and why wouldn’t I? [“Hair-lip hair-lip hair-lip!] cliches are, even at there worst, understood by most), then I’d call this blog “Zen Post-Modernist Paradigm Shift.” However, while I am a card-carrying member of the Hyper-Pretentious Intelligentsia, I still do not actually own a basque beret, so am not legally entitled to string the words ‘Zen’, ‘Post-modernist’, and ‘Paradigm Shift’ together in one sentence (or more case-specifically: sentence fragment), under pain of having my smokes and unearned cynicism taken away so fast my head would stop spinning.

Besides, as I typed at the very beginning, Zen Cattle-hammer is more of a picture than set of words. It came in a dream, and dreamspeak is visual rather than verbal (at least in my experience), the rare appearance of the written (and spoken) word in Dreamland wanderings leading more often to ambiguity than clarity. I can see the meaning of ‘zen cattle-hammer’ in my mind more than I can write it, and I’m guessing that you can, too, if you are still with me on this page, dear Schroedinger’s Reader.

Even now, with the digital ink still fresh, an unexpected interpretation of the image is swimming around inside me, twisting my goopy-bits into new knots. Born from the belly of another dream, the new picture hurts and heals more than my original concept did/does.

The dream was an accident, and I pay very close attention to these ‘accidentals’, in the same way that I have learned to take the Lovers card that leaps from the deck during a bad shuffle with even fewer grains of salt (which should be better for the heart, I imagine).

I say it was an accident, because my sleep was interrupted in a very unexpected way and the dream to follow hinged (or, at least, cleverly segued) on that awakening. I’ll not bore you with all the details (I have an entire toolbox full of other ways to bore you), but simply say that the way I tripped over my own feet on the consciousness sidewalk and landed in the Dreamlands was brilliant and jarring. (Good on ye, Brain.) Once there, however, came these images:

A tiny puppy was brought to my home by a barely-known friend of a friend. I picked it up and held it into the crook of my neck as it nuzzled me with little squeaks. Soon I would notice that the puppy was made of wood, cork really, and that it was hollow. I set it down and it grew to be my size. Once it was beyond fully-grown (but still puppy-proportioned), I could see an old crush sitting and weeping, knees to her chest, inside of the head of the Trojan Puppy. She was the blended spirit of my current sweetheart, but in the body of this brief flame from the past, in that disjointed but fully legible language of Dreams.

I opened the unlocked door of the Puppy’s eye and lifted her out, cradling the crying woman in exactly the same way as I’d done the little beagle. Then she braced her feet on my chest and stood up, our hands clasped in a static-acrobatic cirque pose. With one hand she let go of me and leaned out, brushing the ceiling with her fingertips, tears gone and dry.

Then things go wrong. An armed rebellion occurs in the Dreamlands and I and my sweetheart (now fully in her own body) are fortunate enough to be near the Emperor and his entourage when the revolutionaries’ purple and grey-green helicopters come tearing the world apart with rounds the size of a fist. We are shuffled into relative safety with the Emperor and it is quickly determined that we are the less than ideal seeds of the next world, if there is to be one. The ousted leader’s Secret Service breaks our bunch into two lines and makes it clear that the front of each line will face each other and be challenged to a puzzle question. The first to respond correctly, must execute the other. The nonsense question I am given is this:

“What did Janis Joplin do after learing that Michael Blank (something iconically Irish and associated with “The Troubles”, but not Michael Collins) had been killed?”

With a second left on the timer (Go Dream! Way to keep the tension up!), I deliver my answer (which was my very first instinct, but was agonized over for 4 minutes and 59 seconds): “She got drunk.”

I am correct and both I and my ‘opponent’ accept our fates and accompany the Emperor to a parking lot where, presumably, we both shall consummate our respective destinies. I type ‘presumably’, because I woke after kissing my sweetheart (who I am fully confident will survive the culling, given the nature of the puzzles and her proclivities) and begin making my way sadly to the lot, knowing who I am now, but also what the next minutes will make me.

And there it is.

The Zen Cattle-hammer, first imagined as a quick and clean (if brutal) picture of epiphany, is twisted around. Sometimes the blows of spiritual development are so strong and direct they can knock us into a new stage in the blink of an eye. But this dream reminds me that sometimes the Hammer skips at the last second and we are only grazed, leaving us stunned and teetering and hurting and half-blind, not fully being allowed to fall into the next lower circle of understanding.

Epiphany.

Sometimes fast and inevitable. Sometimes nothing more than a spiritual head-wound that we cannot comprehend at this time in our lives.