Time and the Demon and the Waste of Time

It is only the judge who says ever that time is being wasted, the rest of the time we are just dreaming of something. The truth that happens when all the colors have run dry is that we simply carry on. Time and the Demon, the Daimon: Milosz writes, again:

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though it's an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.

Poetry that is without soul is poetry that lacks experience, innocent though it may be of its own fleeting magic, we still have to wake up from this sort of dream. "Look, I'm waking. Into what? Being in overwhelming abundance wells up in my heart." (a paraphrase of Rilke's Ninth Duino Elegie, which I would say in itself is insufficient, but it is the best I have to offer in this circumstance as a connecting web, so just please forgive me). We only wake when we know that there is something out there saying to us that we are wasting our time: that we have got to get up and pull that pick axe up again and hoist it high enough to till the ground or to mine for minerals, or something that has to do with our labor: sometimes we wake up and it is hard work. Then there is no more wasting time in some pleasant and perfumed garden. Plunder and murder, the lot of man then is pure labor, it is unforgiving work and it condemns the man who makes it to another twenty years with a pick-axe... now that is hard labor!

But soul makes things more simple: soul makes a dream that comes from the pain. This much is right out of Peter Gabriel:

From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision
From the vision come the people
From the people come the power
From this power come the change

"I do not have the strength to bring these words nor the world quite round," now that is another quote from Wallace Stephens, I seem to be filled with a lot of quotes from a lot of great people, but it is all to say that it is another riff on just how much we have to go, on how long we have to go to make any change whatsoever, and this "change" itself may be too optimistic. How do we know if it is the real change? And what if it is only your change? Then we have the dilemma of so much suffering, that I myself have to find my own way to be liberated, liberated without your change, or your wish or your invocation that welcomes the world about you to change... once again: "oh ever into ourselves, whoever we turn out to be in the end." Yes, whomever we turn out to be. That is a mystery, that is my blues song for the evening, frought with broken glass and the sound of these brass pipes that keep unloading something into my consciousness, this broken consciousness, "ungluckliche Bewustsein" that much Hegel was right: with "unhappy consciousness" even Hegel got the blues.

This is enough, even a Hegel got the blues is a good sign, from now until we set forth into some other starry firmament, some other continent, we will go on living, and writing, and to some this will be a complete waste of time, because it's only writing and it's only thinking. A thought can be part of the waking, that is all.