Raised in the Institution of Dreaming

[Video: Florence Welch (and — or and not — the Machine), “Free”… featuring Bill Nighy “as her anxiety.” Lyrics here and elsewhere.]

From whiskey river:

Meditations in an Emergency

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

(Cameron Awkward-Rich [source])

Per usual for my Friday posts, for each quotation I found at whiskey river this week I tried to include two links: one to whiskey river itself — credit for bringing it to my attention; and one to the original, “canonical” source of the quotation, in case you want to see the context in which it originally appeared.

Tracking down those “canonical” links can be tricky, because there’s not always an “original source” to be found online — and this leads me down many rabbit holes and side alleys. I generally do a search on (in my opinion) the most striking, original phrase in the passage, to eliminate duplicates as much as possible; for Cameron Awkward-Rich’s prose poem above, I went with the same phrase I’ve used as this post’s title.

Well, I found general blogs which quoted the work in full. I found out that it came from a 2019 collection of Awkward-Rich’s poems, Dispatch. But I couldn’t actually preview the book anywhere… which is why I ultimately just fell back on a non-canonical source.

But along the way, I also searched for the phrase “Meditations in an Emergency.” This led me to Frank O’Hara’s 1957 collection of poems, which took that title from one of his own poems. It led me to a reminder that the O’Hara book was referenced several times in the Mad Men TV series, especially the second-season finale (which also shared the title). And finally, it also led me to a 2022 interview/profile of Florence Welch… which gave me the music video with which this post is topped. (In the interview, she quotes the last few sentences of Awkward-Rich’s poem as one of her “cultural hobbies and passions” of the moment.)

Of course, it helped that the video seems — to me — strikingly appropriate as a lead-in to “Meditations in an Emergency.”

The following, needless to say, does not come from whiskey river but from a book I recently read:

There’s an old story, which I’ve always liked, about a holy man who yearns for an epiphany. So he leaves the city and his rich family, sells everything he owns and gives the money to the poor, and builds a hermitage in the wilderness. For sixty years he lives there on his own, praying and fasting. He’s taken a cartload of books with him—the complete scriptures and all the commentaries—but as the years go by, he stops reading them, because he knows them all by heart. He stops praying too, because he’s said it all so many times that he can’t see the point anymore; either the Invincible Sun has heard him or He hasn’t, and isn’t there a commandment somewhere about Thou shalt not nag the Lord thy God? So he spends most of his time outside in his garden, growing food for himself and the very occasional passerby. He grows cabbages and leeks and turnips and peas and nine different varieties of beans, onions and shallots and carrots, strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants, grapes, cherries, apples, pears, plums, marrows and squashes and pumpkins the size of an ox, though he doesn’t like pumpkin very much, and who can blame him? And one day, God comes by and leans over the gate and stands there for a while, watching the old hermit raking over a seedbed. The hermit notices him and says hello, and they have a nice chat about greenfly and pumpkin blight and what to do about carrot-fly, concerning which the Omniscient turns out to be pretty well-informed, although the hermit’s able to teach Him a thing or two about earthing up fennel. Then He says he has to be getting along and they part; nice chap, the hermit thinks to himself, and not a bit like how you’d expect. And then he dies, but he doesn’t go to heaven because he’s already there.

(K.J. Parker [source])