June 22

This begins as a wandering through configurations of the past and present. I am caught up in images and sounds of the past...of the past entering my present...of Rilke's journals and poems,...of Pessoa...of Anais Nin...all past...but all vividly making up the now of my experience. We are always assembling the past into the structures of the present...I wander as I wandered in my youth...not knowing if destiny dictates a new direction.

Phaedrus destroyed and resurrected...Phaedrus lost and rediscovered...Phaedrus as a presence...Phaedrus as consciousness...Phaedrus as imagination...Phaedrus as companion to Socrates...Phaedrus as revitalized by Robert Pirsig...Phaedrus as the dilemma of the present poised between what has happened and what will happen...

All of these images flowing in and out of my experience, as I know that Phaedrus is a part of my becoming.

I knew even then that had forgotten myself. I know that even now. Forgetting ourselves opens new possibilities. Had I remembered...had I actually grasped the import of my identity, I would have ceased to exist. So I wandered in search of myself, never knowing why Phaedrus was always there...never thinking to excuse myself from the presence of Phaedrus. Wandering was a safe haven for not knowing. I could somehow deceive myself, even though I knew that somewhere there were words waiting to open my thoughts to new terrain and songs were sung that echoed in deep, aching canyons lost long ago and left unchartered.

June 26

Phaedrus was with me at moments this weekend. I could feel Phaedrus looking over my shoulder as I wrote. Phaedrus was silent, somehow caught up in the eloquence of the quiet stillness that encumbers the essence of our being...a stillness that beckons us to the serenity of ourselves. Yet with Phaedrus there is also an underlying energy that betrays the silence, rendering it distant and irrelevant to the pressures of the moment.

There is a cleavage that rips the silence. Something that challenges us to pursue ourselves into the eye of the storm. Yet even the storm contains the stillness at its center, and as we break through the terror and catastrophic winds, we break into the silence and discover a source that is masked by our own illusions. We struggle for one moment of clarity in which the secret of ourselves may be revealed.

Somehow Phaedrus is lurking at the edge of my own struggles and questions. Where is Phaedrus? Who is Phaedrus? What is the power within the mystery of Phaedrus? I keep vigil in my wanderings, waiting for some word, some recognition that will propel me to discover some inner, unexplored terrain.

June Ending...

Looking through the illusions of Time...seeing the cycles that seduce us into thinking that days come round again...I see that our paths are more linear than circular. The circularity of time comforts us that we are entering familiar territory. Orbits and seasons conspire to bolster our illusions and notions of time, and yet lurking in the infinite reaches of being is the sense that we cannot go back...we are launched on an inevitable trajectory and each moment is impregnated with the germ of a new future...each cell giving birth to that which has never been before.

So I look at June ending, knowing that the demise of one time gives rise to the birth of another. There is something about a renaissance that inspires me with new energy and determination. I am not certain what is ahead...where the paths of this renewal will lead...yet, I know it is time, and I know that Phaedrus is aware of the truth that underlies this adventure, and somewhere Phaedrus is waiting...

July Beginning...

Phaedrus supplies new energy. Perhaps this is because the mystery of Phaedrus seems like a new engagement despite the fact that Phaedrus lurks about in antiquity. Phaedrus seems to be an inner energy that questions the source of myself...an identity that somehow claims me like some lost possession newly restored. In my own schizophrenic delusions Phaedrus is myself, immortal and undaunted, now impatient with my apparent inertia. My inertia stems from activity that in all its accomplishment goes nowhere while the real business of myself remains trapped underneath the debris of present obligations. Every day there is accomplishment on the surface of moment-to-moment activity. Such activity consumes the creative spirit. Such activity distracts us from the reality of ourselves.

Phaedrus speaks in silence, the intonations of a language that obscures the boundaries of consciousness. Phaedrus is consciousness beyond consciousness, an ongoing presence somehow waiting for recognition and alliance...a Being from Nothingness, from the emptiness that defines the silence as eloquence emerging from the blackholes of conscious awareness. This is something transcending the DNA that somehow defines us as a species. For eons and epochs we have been creeping toward the reality of ourselves, scarcely dreaming of all that we really are...distracted by the molecules and atoms of appearance...always focused on the glittering surface of a universe trapped within the brain. Yet, here and there, we have astounding glimpses of something beyond the compressed dimension of the skull, we break into the cosmos with brief revelations that somehow expose the illusions of the boundaries we have imposed.

September ending...

Phaedrus disappeared. For a while, I thought maybe Phaedrus was dead. Yet, quite mysteriously Phaedrus returned like a shadow in the full moon of September. Phaedrus was silent and yet he seemed enveloped in an aura of sound. The sound had the properties of light and hovered around him, obscuring his face. The sound was a music I had never heard. I was mystified that I could see the music...that it was visibly tangible as though I might reach out and touch it, yet somehow experienced as sound. The music seem strangely wedded to silence...it emerged from the silence and disappeared into the silence in a strange cadence that seemed to echo an infinite presencing, a horizon of sound so beautiful and entrancing that Phaedrus appeared transformed. I couldn't recognize him as the mantle of music enveloped him. I saw him listening as though only the music existed, as though music defined his existence. The music parted for an instant, and I could see Phaedrus clearly...and then he disappeared as part of the moonlight...as part of the music.

October beginning...

He was remembering her voice...so many years ago...He remembered the first time he had heard her singing. At first he thought she was being amplified because her voice filled the auditorium like some enormous presence. The sound didn't seem to come from her mouth...it seemed to emanate from her like an aura, a rich, mellow contralto sound like dark chocolate. He couldn't remember what she was singing...it wasn't important now. All that mattered was the exotic lush sound of a voice that floated and flooded the room like a spiritual presence. Hearing her sing transformed him. From that moment on he was attuned to a sense of musical presence that shaped his life, inspired his thoughts, and gave him the gift of wonder. The world of sound, of music was a wondrous place, full of fancy, fantasy, imagination, and power. It was the world. It was his world. Somehow the world of sound was all senses transformed into one...he could see the music, hear the music, touch the music, taste the music...even smell the music....and there were other senses beyond his comprehension to explain that made music so vitally alive...encompassing him and including him in a web of sensuous spirituality. Who was this remembering? Was it Phaedrus? Was it me? Somehow this seemed to be of importance to Phaedrus, but Phaedrus was nowhere to be found. He had vanished days ago, and I wondered then if I would ever see him again.

October 25

The music was what first attracted him. He could hear the music as strands of sound overlapping, something quite different than he had ever heard before. In fact he did not recognize it as music ...at least as what he had learned of music up that moment. This was a music quite unlike the sounds of his past, a music that resonated with what lay ahead for him. He had hovered as a presence...almost as an apparition to this young man. He had wanted to speak to him, to explain why he was there, but he realized that he had only vague notions as to the meaning of his own coming and going. He would vanish from the presence of this person...and then return sporadically, unexpectedly. There seemed to be some purpose to these intervals of emptiness, but he could not extract the significance of these events. There was only the music...the music sounding a presence that somehow called him into being...into becoming something that he could not yet understand. It was as though, in some strange way, he was the music. The music filled the moment, travelling through Time, echoing beyond the boundaries of Now--- always pulling him to the immediacy of this juncture, obliterating the past even as the present was annihilating the future. It was strange. Even though he knew that to the young man, it appeared as though he was vanishing and appearing in his life, it seemed to him that he was stationary and the young man was fleeting in and out of his presence. It was a flickering, transient existence, except for the music, and the music wound around him, entered and transformed his space...fusing space and time as the sounds of infinite rapture. It occurred to him that if the vibrations of the music were to stop, he would cease to exist.

November, beginning...