4/29/03, San Francisco

phil,

Part of your letter did get eaten. More likely some nosy, poorly configured firewall somewhere cut off your POST. Mundane explanations for everything, which leads one to conclude that the division between mundane and spiritual is not so useful.

as far as insomnia goes you are in good company. Borges was an insomniac for example. Me I usually sleep the sleep of the blessed although not so long ago I lay in bed absolutely terrified to shut my eyes for fear of an image that came upon me absolutely unexpectedly, some vaguely human, vaguely Loki-like face snapping its jaws open and shut, blood oozing from its eyeballs. Unlike a nightmare in almost every respect and I still don’t know where to place the thing.

Or I do, but… Well, there is nothing better to do here; it’s well past midnight. The rain is here well past its bedtime, rattling around in the cans and gutters out there. The stray cats and I both thought it was summer. I forget what a miserable thing it is to hear rain at night sometimes. Well, as I was saying. Back when I was drawing maps on cigarette papers I had some strange dreams. Travel, mind you, does that sometimes, and I didn’t think much of it. Nor is it all that unusual for me to dream about what bothers me while awake: a perfectly suitable mundane explanation. Why multiply entities uselessly?

No, this is impossible to explain. What if the same world I sought to populate with that useless joss is also what I dream of? Or came to dream of. I think of Klee and his spidery little communiques to/from the underworld. What if your over/underexposed pictures necessitate the existence of glaring little suchlikes. Perhaps you would have to burn them.

All of this medicine is crap, even the kind plopping SARS down under the microscope and sequencing it. Questions of knowledge will never yield answers that don’t conform to existing knowledge. More on that later, though. I am in no mood to sleep but neither to stay in this house for a second longer.

johnny