| Sunday, January 22,
2012 Pondering Phantasms: A Repurpose of Passages
[listen]
I first encountered the specter when I was a fledgling theorist
(in search
of a philosophy) at a conference in Central Europe. At the start of my visit,
I erred as have a few arrogant foreign early 20th Century archeologists have before
mysteriously disappearing from a tomb dig site in Egypt--I angered the spirits.
Fortunately for me, I was on a plane the within a week possessing only certified
souvenirs: conference swag, städtisch logo t-shirts, and a contemporary perfume
bottle for my mother. I noted the encounter in the poem Utterances
in the Night. I had not such another encounter until I was in Tribeca,
New York City. I had a "hands-on" experience with a bogeyman. Nascent
was I with this otherness. Otherness, for me at the time, was an academic term
used to describe the culturally disenfranchised. However, the 'otherness'
I was attempting to disambiguate was a physical being in the abstract sense—perhaps
more like an alter-ego, something like a conscience anthropomorphised: The
Last Night I Dreamt of the Bogeyman (p. 13-14). Clinically, this
type of anthropomorphism could be termed as a hallucination,
due to, in my case, a sleep
disorder. Was my throat occluded by my tongue, thus blocking airflow to my
brain, causing heart palpitations, raising my pulse rate--a seizure perhaps induced
by hazardous medication(s): Hags
and Nightmares. Sleep Paralysis and the Midnight Terror. The
Hidden Shadows. As I have witnessed when my eyes were wide open,
the appearances of the
Velvet Shadow were beginning to harass me when I began my diabetes treatment.
The diabetes unfortunately was a symptom of a greater ghost provocateur: Cushings
Disease. Although curable, the spiking hormonal imbalances allowed me to envision
uncanny motion-stop impressions surreally over-voiced expressions: On
Being Patient #2: Strike or Spike, part II; On
Being Patient #3: Reversion Triggers, part I; On
Being Patient #6: A Philosopher's Progress: (dis)Organization; On
Being Patient #13: Recuperation: the Recovery of a Keen Being. A recount
on the recall, a revisitation, and a hormonal addendum, I curl up in bed, pondering
my “sightings,” thinking funny thoughts--maddening, even as I walk stiffly,
not sternly, painfully stout, frank in my steps from the office to the car, back
to the castle which I refer to as home, then dinner, later withdrawal--haunted
by my writings. |
