Running away/leaving

The end part of the dream was rather disturbing because I was in a bookshop, compulsively opening and looking through some very refined and well crafted picture books. However, the sweat on my hands was so intense it soaked the books and I mangled several pages in many of the books I touched. The sales assistant said that I was on their list as a suspect. I didn’t mean to be destroying the books I was touching, but this kept occurring. I even thought I could offer to pay for the one I had more recently mishandled, but then I thought I’d probably end up paying for all of them, which I wouldn’t have been able to afford. There were religious women starting to persecute me, too. One ugly woman got close to me and contorted her face and said, “Deeem….!” I said, “Demon?” She was implying I was demon possessed.

So I just left the bookshop, and I realized I had no baggage to carry at all. No books was good, on one hand, but then I also had no food. I went through a very built-up arcade, which was in a suburb where my parents now live, only way into the future. A woman with a child over her shoulder almost scraped me and I had to sidestep her.

I just wanted to get out of this claustriphobic place as soon as possible, but suddenly the book shopowner, a kind of spy, was running after me. She had always kept me in her sights. She said she just wanted to ask me a few questions, so I said, “yes?”

I was feeling very guilty, so she began playing on that guilt, asking me why I was no longer doing mymartial arts training. That was false, as I was still doing it. I said, “Why do you ask?” She said that when she was 65, she’d like to have a very toned body, and implied that I had the responsibility to think about that. I began trying to run away from the place, but it was like running underwater. I could only make very tiny steps with all my force.

I was trying to get away from middle class people and their concerns, from religious people and their concerns and from a situation where I inadvertently destroy their artefacts.

What I am finding is, all the time, the rejection that what I have to say contains violence. It’s more like I’m suspicious because I mess up the picture book and inadvertently destroy cultural property, but this is more demonic than deliberate. Or something.

But then, to get out of femininity and its mode of suffocation, it has to be deliberate, not inadvertent or out of my control (and in the control of the one who eternally monitors and polices reality to make sure it contains enough of the ascetic ideal).

I suppose, in a way, this hints at my relationship to A, which isn’t really a condition of having totally no power in my case, but has to do with being required to embrace an ascetic ideal, in a way that conforms to social expectations, especially with regard to femininity. For instance, if I make an unusual, because very personal interpretation of a book, the feminine world will say I’ve made a “mistake”, rather than acknowledging that I have expressed myself creatively. The books I was messing up were not language books, but picture books, however. I was destroying pristine and elaborate appearances, just by picking up the books in question. And this is because my hands were very sweaty — probably because I was, yes, still continuing with my martial arts even in the shop.

The feminine world denies my efforts and abilities, whilst policing me and asserting this is something I should be glad about. I feel very, very clumsy in its arena, and mess things up consistently even when I don’t intend to. Then the social police will claim that this occurred because I lapsed from my real nature — in this case accusing me wrongly of no longer thinking about the future by doing martial arts.

This, for me is horror in the realm of A. There are people who are very, very clear about their direction in life, who will not see me as having a different mind than they and a life they haven’t directly observed for themselves. They work on conjecture and with bad premises. For instance, they may assume that I have given up my training because I don’t come across as an ascetic.

In any case, they are picture books, not language books, that I tend to destroy with my fingers. I destory the ornate and beautiful ideas, but still manage language. But my language isn’t good enough to correct the misconceptions or the policing of my being, so I can only run away.