Actually, though, seriously, the great part is that this unbidden stuff one comes out with at these moments, or hours, is in reality also our own mind, but it is the part that has nothing to do with language, even though it seems just like regular thought.

I can’t tell you how many times words came to me that were so gorgeous I had to run to write them down, but unerringly weren’t there as the pen hit the paper… evaporated like a vivid dream you know you had but cannot recall more than that. It finally came to me, smoking a cigarette on the back steps overlooking a small swimming pool in a swanky neighborhood in Los Angeles, of all the awful places, that this happened to me because those words were not words at all! They were my thoughts without the overlay of language, the very neural impulses, the true intelligence, that gave rise to language to begin with and now are almost completely subsumed by language.

Language is hugely inarticulate! It’s horrifying!

I’d never noticed until that moment that those gorgeous words were not words at all! Since they came to me and I understood their meaning and beauty so well it didn’t occur to me to check that they were actual words or just actual understanding that needed articulating badly… but might well remain impossible for language to cover forever. We do so desperately need to evolve, grow up, live up to ourselves!

I can’t express the intensity of my feeling about this.

“When I am … completely myself, completely alone, and of good cheer — say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I can not sleep; it is on such occasions when my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come I know not, nor can I force them. … Nor do I hear the parts in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.”

It just occurred to me they might be heavily responsible for encouraging my contrarian streak, and my livelong urges and urgings to dig deeper into things.

Well… not, maybe, the latter…. That’s probably my mother’s fault, since she is The Tooth Fairy, obsessed with appropriateness and other dangerously superficial things, but it really is so true that teachers can have a lasting impact on their students. It’s an awesome responsibility, and so I have to admire Mrs. Hinz and H back there in my own pages for not grasping their own ideas and plans so tightly they strangled their students with them.

But there was one of his I always liked, because it spoke of the brutality of essence, or what he took to be essential anyway:

Wind and Window Flower

Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.

When the frosty window veil
Was melted down at noon,
And the cagèd yellow bird
Hung over her in tune,

He marked her through the pane,
He could not help but mark,
And only passed her by,
To come again at dark.

He was a winter wind,
Concerned with ice and snow,
Dead weeds and unmated birds,
And little of love could know.

But he sighed upon the sill,
He gave the sash a shake,
As witness all within
Who lay that night awake.

Perchance he half prevailed
To win her for the flight
From the firelit looking-glass
And warm stove-window light.

But the flower leaned aside
And thought of naught to say,
And morning found the breeze
A hundred miles away.

Emily Dickinson, I felt, and still do, beat the daylights out of him… effortlessly. My favorite of hers:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading–treading–till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through–

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum–
Kept beating–beating–till I thought
My Mind was going numb–

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space–began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here–

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down–
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing–then–

This isn’t a funeral dirge. It’s about real life, a true human, in the world. It blows my mind with its profundity.

In any case, I formed an idea in my youth about why I could not seem to buckle down to anything the way I needed to address the stuff that was vital to me until, like you, about midnight to four or five. I was too sensitive to all the energies of the waking world. Even living alone in my own house, I was not alone. I was too full of all the lives around me. When everyone around was asleep, I could finally function the way I function. That was the only explanation that made sense.

White noise contains way more than just aural over stimulation.

Of course, this is known as a sleep disorder in medical circles, but I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. :-P

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.