'...the reason we love eden is that we've been expelled from it.'

-- william t. vollmann, the rifles

i wrote this a couple of years ago, and parts of it are universally relevant, i'd like to think, even though it no longer applies to my own situation. i don't get that kind of lonely anymore. my lonely now is an entirely different sort which i describe often, that of bonds forged and lost; also, the more tragic: bonds imagined and never created.

i had a long dream this afternoon which can best be described as an alternative reality nightmare. everything about the setting was different, and it died upon my waking. people and places, vividly rendered, old friends, fading with the reminder that they were never bright in the first place. never real. and what is real fades similarly, which is why i was originally driven to sleep today in the first place.

see, i've been poking at expelled from eden: a william t. vollmann reader and i came across a selection from his book thirteen stories and thirteen epitaphs entitled 'the ghost of magnetism.' i only got as far as the editor's introduction, where, introducing the piece as essentially vollmann's description of a farewell party his friends threw for him, it is described as:

one of the most startling displays in all of vollmann's work of his remarkable powers of memory, 'ghost' simultaneously evokes his tragic awareness of the limits of memory and art. thus even as we witness vollmann's furious effort to give expression (and hence preserve) these precious shards of 'memory flesh' before he forgets them, we recognize he already senses that even his own remarkable powers as an artist are helpless to counter the forces of change and loss-- that everything is already rushing away from him and slipping into the dark emptiness of the undifferentiated past (mccaffery 39-40).

and suddenly, despite the fact that no one was around, i vocalised the following: 'i'm so not ready for this.' sleep instead, even though i haven't had any restful sleep in weeks, such are the dreams. better those than a much stronger authorial voice than my own reminding me of what i already know, the way you get upset when you're already upset and someone tells you to do something you already know you have to do. but in this case the point is there's nothing you can do, and i suppose we all want to be told otherwise. you could argue that there's beauty in the trying. maybe that's all art is.

the world of my dreams, with the neighbourhood i lived in and the friends i had, the place we all spent time together and the five years later when everyone had moved on, all of that faded, just as real life fades-- just as the post i mentioned earlier is merely a dispatch from a time i spent long evenings on the porch in dracut trying to sort out my post-nicole life, listening to a lot of everything but the girl and terrified of the loneliness of sleep, even if i wasn't fully willing to admit it then. i am now, but that will pass as well.