cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dog; Black and Magical Dream I have 3 dogs but I never named any of them. Two of them showed up with names already and the third one appeared to me in a dream the night before I ever met her. She was named Alice in the dream so when I suddenly saw her trotting towards me by the side of the road, I knew who it was and of course she already had the name. It wasn't me who gave it to her. I couldn't tell you who did, but it sure wasn't me. Sacrifice The miracle that I received last year with Simon. He was almost completely paralyzed for several months before his spine was miraculously healed at the exact instant that I shot a deer through the spine. The deer should not have been there. I was sitting in an improvised blind when I had the sudden, irrational sense that if I would only stand up (thus exposing my position) there would be a deer right in front of me. I did exactly that and a mid-sized spike buck was standing only a few yards away, looking straight at me and standing still for no good reason as I deliberately aimed and fired. The sound of the shot startled Simon inside the house and at that very moment he got up and ran into the bathroom. Apparition While my wife was in labor with my daughter, I had a brief hallucination of a very large black dog-like animal lying at the foot of the hospital bed. Understand that I'd not slept in something like 30 hours at that point, as it was a very long labor. I had the overwhelming sense of a protective presence at that moment. Several years later I found about the significance of apparitions of large black dogs in British folklore. Usually the black dog is supposed to be a negative apparition, but in this case it really didn't seem like that at all. I'm cherry-picking here by saying that the closest parallel seems to be with the Gurt Dog of Somerset, England. Everywhere else in the UK the black dog is supposed to be negative but in the Somerset area the black dog is benevolent and believed to protect children in particular. Just to really run with that, let me also point out that my family came to America in the 1640's from Wiltshire, England. I just looked on a map of England and saw that Wiltshire is immediately adjacent to Somerset. Everywhere else the black dog is negative but in this one area around the Quantock Hills the black dog is thought of in the same context in which I encountered it. Even if was pure hallucination from lack of sleep, I did in fact have the experience of encountering it. After writing the above paragraph, I started googling around for more information on Wiltshire mythology. Turns out that Stonehenge is in Wiltshire and the whole county is steeped in all sorts of lore. I ought to re-read Alan Moore's 'Voice of the Fire.' Why am I suddenly thinking about magical shit again? Probably because it is mid-August and hunting season begins in only a few weeks. I saw a flock of Canada geese in a V formation last weekend. Yes, that's it. The geese. The sound or sight of a flock of geese does in fact have a triggering effect on me. The shift in my state of consciousness can be instantaneous. Hunting season is the season for magical thought and behavior. The practice of hunting forces the hunter to change his or her state of consciousness, which opens a whole door right there. You're out there with an immediate relationship between the self and nature and having a very specific and fervently hoped-for outcome in mind. Either the prey appears or it does not. The bullet or arrow strikes the right spot or it does not. At no time is man more superstitious than at that moment when he is rolling the dice. The threshold at which one can rationally affect the outcome is passed and one finds one's self in a position where fate is in the hands of what rational people would call pure chance. At that moment, we can only appeal to Other. God or some other type of diety. Some invisible relationship, direct or otherwise, between the mind and the physical world. When you add the fact of this prolonged dice-rolling to the literal life or death reality of hunting, the result is an experience highly charged with the very definition of magical thought. So back to the geese. The sight of a flock of wild geese in V formation is, in this part of the world, probably the quintessential visual harbinger of autumn and thus of the hunting season. Before the leaves really start to turn, before the days become alarmingly short, the geese are forming up and moving. That's your first cue. And for the hunter, the first sight of geese in this formation necessarily triggers an almost Pavlovian response in which we are subtly snapped into a mode of magical thinking. And now here I am. Back near the edge of who I really am. I have the insane idea suddenly that in November I should literally go hunting for something that doesn't or shouldn't exist. See what happens. Like if I go out into the National Forest not too far away from here and spend a few days in the mountains hunting for an enormous white stag. There is absolutely no such creature in the mountains that I have in mind. No way, no how. But I suspect that if I go out there with the express purpose of hunting an enormous white stag, at the very least some very strange things will happen along the way. Maybe I will meet someone interesting in the forest or stumble across an abandoned homestead with some sort of odd artifacts in evidence. I can pretty well guarantee that some event will take place that justifies the whole exercise. 2:09 p.m. - 2008-08-13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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