The Waking Moment

[Image: Because of childhood associations, all I can think of when I see this is something like, “Come ON. It’s Saturday morning! Can I watch cartoons yet? Can I can I can I?!?”]

From whiskey river:

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This — holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

Annunciation

Even if I don’t see it again — nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does —
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it — that alone can be like waking up from a dream.

(David Steindl-Rast [source])

Not from whiskey river:

At some point early in our lives, we decide just how conscious we wish to be. We establish a threshold of awareness. We choose how stark a truth we are willing to admit into consciousness, how readily we will examine contradictions in our lives and beliefs, how deeply we wish to penetrate. Our brains can censor what we see and hear, we can filter reality to suit our level of courage. At every crossroads we make the choice again for greater or lesser awareness.

(Marilyn Ferguson [source])

…and:

Then there is the issue of HAL’s death. In the early 1960s at Bell Laboratories I had heard a recording of an Illiac computer singing “Bicycle Built for Two.” I thought it would be good for the death scene especially the slowing down of the words at the end. Imagine my surprise, then, when I recently came upon a 1918 poem, “In the Theater,” about brain surgeon Lambert Rogers operating to remove a brain tumor. Near the end of the poem the patient on the operating table speaks to the surgeon…

I do not know how many actors Stanley interviewed before he settled on Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL; but I am almost certain that one of them was Martin Balsam, who comes to a memorably sticky end in Psycho. Apparently Martin made some recordings but decided the role wasn’t for him. So here is another piece of unknown Kubricana — like the custard-pie fight in the war room of Dr. Strangelove that never made it into the final version. (Did you ever wonder what those tables of goodies were doing at the back of the room?) I still hear Douglas Rain’s silky voice every time I tell my computer to do something stupid and it says reproachfully, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”

(Arthur C. Clarke, on 2001‘s HAL [source])

…and:

In the Theatre

(A true incident)

‘Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake throughout the operation. But in those days–in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser–they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much normal brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it … all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget … ‘

(Dr Wilfred Abse)

Sister saying–‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’
sister thinking–‘Only two more on the list,’
the patient saying–‘Thank you, I feel fine’;
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain.

If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’—
the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go–till the antique
gramophone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ‘
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow.

(Dannie Abse [source])

If you want to talk really seriously about waking up, it’s hard not to reach eventually for that iconic perfect sleeper, Rip Van Winkle. Singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/violin collector David Bromberg cast Rip’s tale in his “Kaatskill Serenade,” never released as a single but included on his great 1976 album, How Late’ll You Play ‘Til? (Lyrics below.)

[Lyrics]

Bob Dylan covered Bromberg’s song (using the more contemporary “Catskill” in the title) for an album, The Genuine Bootleg Series, Volume 4: Fourth Time Around, never officially released in MP3 form. You can find the complete story of this recording at the Nightly Song blog (“Musings on Songs that Strike a Chord Tonight”). The clever proprietor of the Haiku 61 Revisited blog boils the lyrics down for the impatient:

My wife annoys me.
But drinking with these strangers
Annoys me much more.

Ha!