{"id":1743,"count":1,"description":"\r\nDIMMING THE LIGHTS\r\n<em>\r\nThe Western World is giving up its heights, but its long unspoken depths are not so easily put aside\u2026.\r\n<\/em>\r\nThe grandness of day and civilization recede.  We are in the twilight of the gods, now, reentering realms discarded since The Church was the sole authority on science.  Unprepared for the transition, but having thoroughly abandoned reasoned discourse, empirical methodology, and the idealism of Enlightenment systems, we glare into our subconscious with iPhone flashlights\u2014and the litter is a mash of ancient rites and yesterday\u2019s emails that we are wholly unprepared to untangle.\r\n\r\nWe have an incompetence in living with our unconscious depths that will not be easily shaken.  Our politics proscribe forms of wrong behavior, (and prescribe forms of right behavior) without any comprehension, or any attempt to comprehend, the breadth of human experience.  Each side races to shrink hosannas and tragedies into some rigid public liturgy;  any deviance in individual recital is seen as disobedience to the herd norm.  Yet these litmus tests are so narrow and empty they cannot encompass the brainwaves of an amoeba, let alone the million prismatic instances of genius and peril that constitute just a single human life.\r\n\r\nThese are atrocious generalizations, but I feel in desperate need of a map, any map\u2014 and what greater generalizations are there than a map\u2019s North, South, East and West?  These poems begin to reclaim the dark of sleep, the deeps of unconscious material, for the use of individual guidance toward meaning and action in the broader world.  When the buildings have gone down in flames, when the roads are empty, and traffic cops are pointing everywhichway with the feverish inconsistency of spinning tops\u2026well, one must do what one can to re-establish an inner order that hugs the whole of one\u2019s experience.  The inertia of dreams is a good place to begin because they go back in time and temperament to the earliest human societies and circumstances.  Dreams can provide a kind of inertial guidance system for the burnt-out modernist\u2014anyone suspicious of the narrow \u201cnaked truths\u201d on display in every shopfront, on every blogpost, every idiot bumper-sticker slamming its brakes in front of us.\r\n\r\nIn our private dark\u2014sleeping, dreaming\u2014we may still find a way to put our faces toward the dimming light.\r\n\r\nGregg Glory\r\nNovember 25, 2015\r\n","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/category\/poetry\/impossible-mesa\/","name":"The Impossible Mesa","slug":"impossible-mesa","taxonomy":"category","parent":3,"meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/1743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/3"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=1743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}