dream

醒来前在梦里看到了一张照片，或者说，醒来的那一刻只记住了满屏大的照片，一张照片盖住了整整一个梦。照片里是一对父子，爸爸半蹲在依山而建的阶梯上，儿子坐在爸爸的膝上，背后是蔓延的阶梯，满眼的葱绿。他们开心地笑着，笑容那么满，溢出了整张照片。好开心。

Dream

I woke up before the alarm set off. The instant I woke up I knew I had a blissful and warm dream, even if I don't remember the details of it. The feeling of being around me is what I took away from the dream.

an overarching loneliness/negation

Sparkling of thoughts amidst IP review. How did that happen?! Writing these down before I forget.

1. Eliot repeatedly said:
"That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.

That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all"

He put them in almost perfect parallel, with minute variations. Semantically, they are the same. But the flow or the torrent of self-biting emotion is very different. This is also why you can only feel the torrent by reading it out loud.

After listening to Eliot reading this poem, now I think these lines are words of Eliot's fear: What if I misunderstood? What about the embarrassment? What about the total negation of all I have already felt?

2. An overarching negation.
What if, for every narrative, you put a meta-narrative on top of it. Using the meta-narrative as prophet or simply a refute or negation of the content of the narrative. It's the antithesis of fiction and nonfiction. But I yet to figure out the interaction of the meta-negation and the assertion of the content. 

3. A discrete function of language.
Language imposes an artificial compartment on the intertwined polyphonic life. Is language itself a negation? Is language only an approximation to the underlying truth? "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."

4. An iteration within another
When I was listening to Eliot reading the love song, some new revelation hit me. 
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
and for a hundred visions and revisions.

This poem is but one of the indecisions, one of those visions and revisions. Eliot put a metadata or words of prophecy in the very beginning of this poem.

5. An unanswerable question and an unaskable question
Eliot put himself in a dilemma. He wouldn't really start asking his question until he knows the answer to it. But it's a human-made artificial dilemma he creates for himself.  Well understood though.

6. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each ... We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
"In my own case, going back to entropy, I’m most intrigued by its correlation as the loss of available energy in a closed system with stupidity as the corresponding loss of available intelligence in our own political establishment, especially as regards foreign policy and the economy—its collapse that is to say—where Wiener sees physics’ view of the world as it actually exists replaced by one as we observe it, a kind of one way communication."

Before I forget II

In the dream, I was having dinner at a lake-deck restaurant. After I left the restaurant, I realized I left my notebook in the restaurant. It's a yellow-covered notebook, where I keep notes for music I listen to. I rushed back to look for it. The restaurant is very noisy. I stood at the center of the room, raised my voice, and asked people whether they have seen my yellow notebook. It turned out that several people have the similar-looking yellow notebook. One guy in the back shouted out:"why don't you describe the notes you have written in the notebook. So we will know whether it's yours." So I started describing the notes I wrote for each song. New people came in, and I was asked to reiterate what I have said about the notebook. So I repeated the story again and again, each time adding in new details, elaborations, and maybe fabrications. It turned out I spent a whole life in the dream, standing in the middle of a restaurant room, telling stories from my music notebook.

When I woke up, I realized that, hey, it's the tradition of oral poetics....[see Homer]

Before I forget

早上醒来记得自己做了一个梦，在一座大房子里，像福建围屋和徽宅的结合，颜色黑白灰，深浅不一，圈圈层层环绕，中间一个大天井，对面的光不可企及。所有的楼梯都罩着草帘子，风中微动。我坐在一间屋子里，望着对面的一间屋子，里面有一个穿蓝衣服的人，他在看书，奇怪的是，离得很远的我可以看到书上的字。似乎很吵，但是什么都听不清。醒来觉得很累，一点点残片沉到傍晚。

overheard

"I find my diversions, as I always do, but the days are long in this grey place."

In an opinion discussing the privacy of email, the court emphasizes the expected privacy people have in emails, listing various email exchanges, one of which is :"lovers exchange sweet nothings"
"Sweet nothings" tucks the string connected to Roland Barthes 

"Thou hast put me in the lowest pit, In dark places, in depths."

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon gien his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. --- Francis Bacon, Essays, LVIII 

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/392/the-art-of-fiction-no-172-louis-begley 

,

The eye of memory follows a nonlinear fashion. Not meandering nonlinear but hasty or almost greedy,darting-all-over-the-place nonlinear fashion. As if there is a gulf in between every single second, it tries to seize every nano-fragment of it. For the fear of it plunging into the despairing abyss of irretrievable. The inescapable trap of memory. I am confused. No matter how much exertion is used, many fragments slip through and dissipate. What happened at that nano-second? I don't quite remember the details.

But I never forgot it.

A midnight dream.

The road is so long, in a midnight dream.