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They say God forgives, but I can't learn the same
A couple of years ago now, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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?
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?