The Hippocampus and the Sea

In an ongoing series on the brain at our HASCI Drop-In Center, my director, Kay covered the limbic system this week with the hypothalamus, hippocampus and the amydglia.  We did a series of mini scientific experiments, as she always plans, which highlights and makes tangible how the various parts of the brain work. One such experiment was on smell and how they relate to and trigger memory.  (The hippocampus connecting with the emotional cortex). I've always been acutely driven by smells into full blown flashbacks to various times and places, but the one which recurs the most these days is an aroma which arrives on a rare but fragrant breeze.  I've only experienced a few times this summer, when the cold fronts move in, but when it happens, it's so vivid, I can taste the salt in the air. 
Of course I refer to the sea, and I once again return to my frequent longing for the sea, but especially the sea of my youth, that small cove at North (or Rocky as some NH natives call it) in Hampton Village on the New Hampshire coast.  The Isles of Shoals are visible in the distance, the frigid waves (50-60 degrees in midsummer) sometimes  quietly saunter onto the beach, but more often crash upon it, rip tides pulling at your ankles; stones and sea glass tumbling at your toes.  It's the most imperative yearning I've ever experienced and it grows more so with the years.

This yearning grows so strong that frequently check the surf cam at Rocky (North) Beach or get in my virtual car on Goggle maps and drive up Winnacunnet Rd, follow Kings Highway for a while past the surfer hang out, KB Bagels,  then hang a right and drive back down along Ocean Boulevard toward Lupo's.  While I lived in NH for 8 months in 2006, I often walked to both of these places form my mom's little cottage during my 11 mile walking circuit.  When I was without a lot of things we get used to, hot water, stove, TV. I would head to one of these places as my home away from home, my social life and the way I kept up with the world. 
In my mind's eye I then leave the virtual world at Lupo's, go into my memory world and descend the sand covered steps, climb across the boulders and step onto the beach facing Boar's Head.  In my better flash- backs a piece of blue or green seaglass washes up at my feet and I see my friend, Karen, lovingly known as Red Rocket for her intense personality walking towards me form Hampton Beach proper.
Free man, you'll always love the sea — for this,
That it's a mirror, where you see your soul 
In its eternal waves that chafe and roll; --Baudelaire

on Transparency & Ripping the Veil

While on one hand I am entering a period which requires me to be social, on the other, the subconscious calls again.  I will have to maintain balance.  I agree with John Fowles observation that "Time is not a road, it is a room," and as my time fills up with social activities, I am pulled away from the visions, concepts, poems, writing which is bubbling up form the subconscious. Some of it valuable information, it may have taken years to process. some of it which needs to be thought out, recorded in poems, the novels, art. I'm tempted to shut myself away again, become hermit like and create, but it's also a time of reaching out and sharing, meeting and learning from others. What will happen when these new influences converge with the steam of observations, with those little awareness moments?  Will I rebuild, transform, rebirth? As I read the journals of Anais Nin, go back to Fowles and The Magus, and feel pulled to rewatch movies like "Stay" and "The Libertine" (movies where the plot involves an individual who must live outside society, both in their personal extremes. And as society and some of its systems summon, I feel pulled to do just the opposite, retreat into the worlds I know, the second reality, the world behind the world, which so many other authors, poets and artists have seen, Salman Rushdie, Carl Jung, Thomas Moore,  Fowles, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keith Flynn, Anais Nin, Neil Gaiman, Umberto Eco, Brian K.Ladd.  More and more I see the mentions, the hints, the nods, in films, in contemporary novels.  I am just now noticing or are they trying to tell us something beneath the story lines and song lyrics?   
As I embark on my lunar moth series in the novel, poetry and art (the lunar moth as a sign of the veil's transparency,) I go deeper and deeper and like Jung discover even more layers, even after I thought I had gone as far as I could.

Lunar Moth Lessons

In emergence

from hermitage,

I hide behind costumes, hats,

names - run away to

sideways cultures

sub-societies,

only to learn

I’ve taken that first

hard-to-reverse step. Summoned

by yet another system.

I seek the awake moments, 

(as fragile as mist on an Atlantic breeze,

as it dissolves when I look away),

to reteach

me to avoid

such betrayal -

stay handbound

with the subconscious.

Remain aware

by looking in:

deeper than ether.

Reminder:

side step reality’s hypnosis,

indoctrination,

loss of self.

Become transparent

luminous

more illusive

than a lunar moth on a cloudy day.

Only then can one walk through

the glass doors of reality,

                       find the numinous self -

                                                    take wing.