All-Gifted; Hindsight
He was in my dream last night. My Pandora, the one who opened the world to me, gave me access to everything but hope. The Prometheus who made me Phaeton. He was in my dream, as callous and detached as he was in our time together, but in that dream he had a blog, a diary where he listed all the ways and reasons and metaphors he still pined for me. Something about mowing, and about me smelling like eggs — probably the quiche I had last night asserting its gastronomical supremacy. But all of it came down to his longing, to his real and final regret, to his realization that he casually discarded A Good Thing.
And this dream bothers me, because I fear it is wish-fulfillment of the crassest sort, the sort of simple-minded dream that projects our desires for people onto them, that turns them into the automatons we crave. I don’t want to be the sort of person who seeks affirmation in such coarsely gratifying fantasies.
This dream makes me uneasy, also, because of its implications for my own feelings. Because this dream by its nature and texture and feeling implies that I am not over him, that I will never be over him, that I will always carry this damned torch. That this torch will never go out, that it is Promethean fire after all, salvation and damnation flickering on the branch: Fire is what saved man; it is also what doomed him. The gods could never forgive that transgression into their territory, could never forget our encroachment onto the domain of their unique power. In appropriating fire we robbed them of their primacy as the Saviors, as the Givers and Renewers of Life. We became as gods, knowing what is good and what is evil, or at least what leads to living and how to avoid what leads to death. In the drama that divides all parents and children, we took their agency and their secret knowledge and their power. Once humans aspire to godhood we are doomed by our own hubris. And yet enhanced by it, saved. It is the only way to grow.
It is the story of the tribe who received fire; it is the story of Adam and Eve. But what am I to do with this flame? I cannot quench it but I cannot keep it. It illuminates but it also consumes. What happens when there is nothing left to burn? What happens when it consumes the fuel intended for other altars?
