Bohemia Lost

For the last few weeks I have lost control of my dreams. They are too consuming; vivid as waking life.  Scenes heavy with symbols lead me through timelines, unlived but concrete. Shipwrecks. Empty highways. Cramped foreign apartment; the bed unmade. I see fingers woven into mudras, sweating in the Empty Quarter. Signs from a deaf language. They spring me awake at four in the morning. I could blame the flood endogenous DMT, or believe they are prophecies. But neither satisfies. There are messages I am failing to decypher. 

Even in daytime living I can’t help but think about dreams, both the Morpheus plays I remember and the aspirations I once clung too. The taxonomy of what to be. When I imagined being a writer I felt molded to be one of the broken ones who watched the world with orphan eyes. A blue-collar writer like Raymond Carver, escaping the orchards and processing plants of Yakima to return to it always. A beaten down poet like Kerouac shivering in a Colorado railyard, paperback tucked in his too thin workman’s jacket. A bohemian wander like Rilke desperate to be loved, only to die in the arms of his doctor in a sanatorium. 

The last seems least possible now. There is no pause for honest communion. In his life Rilke traveled near destitute across Europe where he met Tolstoy and Pasternak, Nietzche and Rodin. The image of the Bohemian artist, ever journeying to meet his own has been replaced by the immediacy of digital interactions that last no longer than a wink, a wave of the hand. But how can you know another’s art, their heart, if you haven’t heard their voice, eaten their food, or shared their drink? In my bohemian dreams artists would crash on each others’ couches, share work penciled fast onto lined paper, and sing until the streetlights fell dark one at a time. This was romance. And romance, like our highest prayers, is a phenomena of the mind. 

I dream of Lou Andreas-Salome. The forgotten muse who inspired Rilke and Nietzche, who was the center of the mandala from which poets and sculptors leafed and spiraled. The first female psychoanalyst, a prolific author, and a woman who demanded freedom despite the rules of society and the offerings of orchestrals and poetry. For this much is true: no mass movement of creation was ever sparked without the gravity of a woman. Men are too lost, too child at heart, to found a tide of wonder alone. Lou Andreas-Salome. You broke so many hearts, and now a century past, we know how best to break our own.

Listen to this

Friedrich Nietzsche “Hymnus an das Leben”

Read this

Rainier Maria Rilke “To Lou Andreas-Salome”

Watch this

Anais Nin “Talks about Lou Andreas Salome”