Montparnasse

Back from an exciting three or four day sojourn off down Ohio way, today. There were breakwaters and piglets and owl sanctuaries with foxes. The injury I got from tumbling down the stairs outside by my apartment swished into a lovely big old black and blue bruise which twangs on my ribs like a barking dog when I don't do right by it.

This development forced me to sleep on my right side for the last three (or four) nights which - unexpectedly - makes it easier for me to sleep. I think I have too much freedom to roll around on a normal night, in my normal bed. When I'm camping, or on another's couch and everything is folds and jags, the lack of available options makes it easier to stay still and drop off.

This time it gave me vivid dreams, two nights ago I woke up with the story of Montparnasse still in my head:

Although people think Montparnasse was named after Mount Parnassus, he was in fact a forgotten nobleman who lived a few hundred years ago in France. Count Montparnasse lived in a ponderingly wide stone tower, with drops like wells slicing the center, through which the wind would rush. The tower was old, but mostly solid. He lived there with his wife and daughter, and enough money from his ancestry to support themselves comfortably, but not enough to repair the holes in the tower. He spent his time thinking, and was a respected philosopher.

He noticed how we tend to forget certain things, how we can't remember dreams later in the day, when they were so crisp. How our sensations and histories of everything around us are necessarily and completely subjective. Then, he decided that we have barely any control over how our our perceptions are changed within us. How are heads and hearts hide things from ourselves, and how we don't even realize that it is happening.

He reasoned that our heads altered our reality to make it easier for us to deal with and to process, and that if we were faced with some dreadful, endless, psychological trauma then our brains could mask it and make it into something which seemed pleasant, so that we could carry on. Then he thought: if we can't tell when we are obscuring reality, and if recurring, hopeless situations could appear as something which seemed the opposite - how do we know that it's not happening to us right now? What if the pleasures I think I am experiencing are, in fact, painful? What if my soul is rewriting my agony into pleasurable, passable, situations?

And that drove him insane... he became convinced that the joy he got from his wife and child was nothing more than his own lies to himself, an illusion - and withdrew from them. He wandered the rooms of the tower, and eventually though himself into the well-shaft piercing the tower.

I woke up with that in my head two nights ago. My dad and mum would like it I think... they're psychologists.