St Patrick's Day 2013

St Patrick's Day 2013 I believe I will remember. I was walking around town and got a grasp of how this is a very open and broad international party, where everyone is welcome. There was a Pipe Band from the New York Fire Department, and other bands and groups from different parts of America even from Louisiana. I spoke with a couple seeking directions, who were from Philadelphia. I saw about five people in traditional Chinese costume, looking more than attractive. I walked along the quays looking for a way that was open for me to go to the district called The Liberties, which is a place I often walk in. And on Meath Street, I was walking past a pub and heard music that is familiar to me, goes right back to my youth, and is very lyrical 'Love is teasing and love is pleasing, love is a pleasure when first is new, but as it grows older, so love grows colder, and it fades away like the morning dew' Strangely, as it turns out I had thought of this song just a day or two ago. And I didn't recognise who was singing and playing this song, and there is a lady standing in the doorway of the pub having a cigarette, and there was a notice on the window advertising Live Music. So I approached the woman and asked her if the music was recorded or Live, and I looked at her and she looked at me and she exclaimed 'John' and I exclaimed 'Karen.' When I had first been married, back in the early eighties I lived with my wife and children in a block of flats in Dun Laoghaire in County Dublin. Karen had been friends with the daughter of my next door neighbour, Janice, and as it turned out, she still is, because after she had finished her smoke we went back into the pub to meet Janice Such a long time I almost didn't want to meet. But we did meet and we exchanged recent histories, and Janice had a younger brother named Paul who very young back then, and whom I babysat a couple of times, and then she told me, he had been murdered when he was 21.

The Reason for the Dream

And when I awoke I changed my mind about who it was that I had been dreaming of. I guess to my mind, she had fitted my dream a bit more. Her hair was the proper colour and her eyes had been giving. I pondered on the idea of the reason for the dream, and I smiled to let myself know that I couldn't know. And somewhere in the wilderness of the mystery of dream there is subjection. It dares to focus on me, in its tantalising way with a certain imprisonment. And the life of the dream dies somehow in the awakening, it may not proceed into the living day. And in the death of the sleep lives the dream, and in the life of my living becomes the death of my dream. And following from the reason for the dream becomes, the reason for the life, and the answer is still the same. I wonder if nature dreams when it is still and at peace with itself, and if the reality of nature is different from its dream. There are no conclusions, and the mind must follow the spirit and the soul. The mind is just a place of delusion ultimately, that leads us on to knowing what we cannot know. I wonder if that is why the mind must dream. Perhaps it must escape from the reality of the futility of itself, to find itself in a credible place.