Sunday, September 15, 2013

An Unnatural Split


The Dream: This vaguely remembered dream featured a park with a small adjacent area that held a parking lot and a public toilet. My companion and I are working to get the park commission to incorporate this area into the park.

Scene switch to sex. I feel I should be more sexually engaged, more responsive and demonstrative.

Interpretation:
The park area represents an idealistic, unsullied nature: pure spirit without body. But what about the split off parking lot? It's in the shape of the pubis and contains a toilet. That evokes the passage from Yeat's Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop in which she says that “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.” * This fastidious splitting off of the physical from the spiritual means that my libido, or life force, is not joined to my soul. My inner psychic forces are working to marry the two (they should have sex), and if they don't succeed I'll be parked in the Park, living a half life in an unrealistic place that represents a nature without worms or flies, a place that doesn't exist. Again from Crazy Jane: “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not be rent.”*

*For the rest of the poem as well as an interesting discussion of its meaning, one that is relevant to this dream, see Poetry .

1 comment:

  1. I have been thinking about this dream and I love Yeat's poem and the discussion about it! However, in my dream and in my psyche, these two opposing forces do exist side by side. It's not so much that I need them to be integrated or that they are not joined (body and soul), but rather that I AM able to recognize and accept both sides in myself. Which not too many people are able to do these days. There is a link between the two in the drawing, a pathway, so that shows me I can go from one to the other. It's not either/or but both, for me. On another note, "park commission" - do I have a commission, or a mission that I am not advancing? I have a co-panion and I have a co-mission. To whom do I need to be more responsive and demonstrative to? Myself, someone else? The energy is there, perhaps there's an action, however slight, I need to tweak in my waking life to more fully get my personal message out. And perhaps I literally need a companion to do this, for I cannot do everything on my own!

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