They say God forgives, but I can't learn the same

[sovay]

A couple of years ago now, cucumberseed asked me to name my least favorite god. I answered:

. . . Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I think I'm going to go with Ares, because if Athene is the stratagems and the weighed cost of war, Ares is its senseless bloodlust, the blind berserker violence, smashing his shield into your face over and over and over again until someone pulls him off the ruin. His sacred animals are dogs and vultures, scavenging the carrion off the field. It's no accident that his most famous children are stark terror (Φόβος) and dread (Δεῖμος), ingredients for a successful rout, qualities that make it impossible to think straight. One of his daughters with Aphrodite is the revenge-goddess Adresteia (Ἀδρήστεια, the inescapable), who rides with him to war: on the one hand awesome, but on the other imagine endless reprisals, blood-feud, the eye-for-an-eye that never ends. Even the Iliad feels ambivalently about him. He is beautiful and insatiable, the hyper-masculine lover of love herself; he is the mad bastard who will get us all killed.

So last night I finally slept for eight hours and I had dreams that were not that sick-stunned hit of a week's worth of REM in fifteen minutes and all stupid nightmares and in one of them I was sitting high up in the casement window of an apartment building somewhere with the skyscraper density of Manhattan and the brownstone aesthetic of Beacon Hill and a woman was speaking from behind me. I don't remember if it was my room or hers. I had thought she was younger than me, in the confusing way that college students now look incredibly young (the crowd of Tuftsies at J.P. Licks on Friday night), but seeing her in heavy ropes and crowns of coin-jewelry like Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea (1969) I thought maybe she was ten or fifteen years older: she had a curving face, neither angular nor classical, and I knew that her hair was supposed to be black, but I remember it with a kind of greenish bronze-rippling sheen, like certain kinds of underwater photography or curtained light in a blue-painted room. There were no explosions in the blocks below, no planes falling out of the sky. I couldn't hear gunfire and it wasn't even a clear day, just a sunny one with skyscraper windows glancing back gold and the edges of roof gardens starting to green with spring. But she said from the other side of the room, where I could have seen her leaning with her arms folded between the mirror and the cracks on the wall (not looking anything like an Alma-Tadema painting, which is how it sounds when I write it out: modern, hip-cocked, genuinely bored), "Why would you want to stop?" and I knew who she was then and I was suddenly afraid I wasn't dreaming.

Jesus, brain, don't you want to try a normal anxiety dream for a change? I mean, I've been having those and I hate them, but wouldn't it be a change if you came up with something subtle?

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Whoa, brain. Seriously.

[sovay]

Whoa, brain. Seriously.

It was not what I was expecting.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Is it... is it ok if I post a link to this entry on the Boston Marathon thread over at Making Light? (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/015012.html#015012)

[sovay]

Is it... is it ok if I post a link to this entry on the Boston Marathon thread over at Making Light?

You have my permission, although I would stress that this is not flash fiction or poetry or any other conscious art made in response to current events; this is really a thing my brain came up with while I was sleeping, because that's something my brain does.

[edited slightly for clarity and courtesy]

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

like certain kinds of underwater photography or curtained light in a blue-painted room.

Weirdly, somewhere in my Internet browsing today, someone was posting just this: underwater photography, an underwater exhibition. Maybe on Facebook somewhere.

I get Adresteia. I get the desire to hit back, and to up the ante until everything is in ruins. But who can love the ruins? I guess Jadis in Charn. But not most of us.

[sovay]

But who can love the ruins? I guess Jadis in Charn. But not most of us.

Poem.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

That was...if not subtle, then at the very least a wonderfully-told image.
Also, I am glad that you slept. ("At least it was a dream. At least he was asleep.")

[sovay]

That was...if not subtle, then at the very least a wonderfully-told image.

Thank you. I referred to it in e-mail with strange_selkie as "the dream that was too gratuitously symbolist to live," but I am glad I wrote it out. I don't think I would have liked it hanging unexpressed at the back of my mind, and I want to remember when my brain comes out with things that weird.

("At least it was a dream. At least he was asleep.")

Heh.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Anxiety dreams tend toward the sledgehammer metaphors, in my experience.

[sovay]

Anxiety dreams tend toward the sledgehammer metaphors, in my experience.

That is useful to know. Mine usually skip the metaphor entirely and go straight for the people I know in real life in anxiety-making configurations, so having a goddess turn up in this one was sort of bonus unsettling.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

If you look at my LJ now, I just put up a dream (locked) which has a classic sledgehammer metaphor.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Whew.

That ... other is elementally real.

Nine

[sovay]

That ... other is elementally real.

She did not show up again when I slept for two hours this evening, which I was fine with. I can't remember what I dreamed then, but I think it was only something about musical instruments.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you got eight hours of sleep. Sorry for the anxiety dream, lovely though your description of it is.

not looking anything like an Alma-Tadema painting, which is how it sounds when I write it out: modern, hip-cocked, genuinely bored

I was thinking of Alma-Tadema as I was reading this, yes. Your description speaks to me, somehow--the garb of an Alma-Tadema figure, but the body language that's nothing like.

I can almost see her, the Inescapable One, but I sincerely hope I never do. In any case, my anxiety dreams run more to warplanes, everything from realistic-looking single seater jets to impossible things whose wings surely wouldn't get them off the ground or keep them up even if they had more airspeed, drifting well below stall speed through the streets and over the highways, at treetop level or at their highest somewhere round the rooftop of an eight storey building like my old undergraduate residence.

You've my sympathy. May she stay away from you. Aphrodite, I pray you ask your daughter to find some other to visit tonight.

[sovay]

May she stay away from you. Aphrodite, I pray you ask your daughter to find some other to visit tonight.

Thinking of Catullus 63:

dea, magna dea, Cybebe, dea domina Dindymi,
procul a mea tuos sit furor omnis, era, domo:
alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I didn't get Alma-Tadema from this, but something out of Sandman - and in my book that's a good thing.

[sovay]

but something out of Sandman - and in my book that's a good thing.

Thank you. Sandman is the one thing Neil Gaiman has written that I unambiguously like, so I'll take it!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Well, you can use that.

I'd wish you gentler dreams, but you could use that. They're not always kind, but you have to take what they give you.

[sovay]

I'd wish you gentler dreams, but you could use that. They're not always kind, but you have to take what they give you.

That was one of the reasons I wrote it down.

Thank you.

[selidor]

Perfect image. I want to see it painted.

I'd almost rather she turn up than Eris, you know.

[sovay]

I want to see it painted.

Can you paint? I really can't. Not the way this dream needs, anyway.

I'd almost rather she turn up than Eris, you know.

Oh, interesting. Because there is no end to Eris, tossing down her bright apples and walking away?

[selidor]

Yes. The sharp smile of unvoiced discontent breaking into let's just burn it all, with Dysnomia following; at least Adresteia follows a rule-book, though it's one she's written herself.