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This dispatch comes to you from the hour of the wolf. 

Not that I can’t sleep, no, the last thing I want to do is fall back to sleep.  My brilliant idea would vanish.  It came to me as I emerged from dreamland.  You know, “when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.”

When the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.*

The Holy Grail of altered states.

Here it is, pre-dawn, black bear still foraging for garbage in the alley below my office window, while my fingers prance around the keyboard as if they’ve broken out of jail. 

The mind is too weak to tell itself lies!  Write quick, PJ!

Conventional wisdom would appear to have no traction in the crepuscular hours.  My principles aren’t up and running yet, they can’t obscure the truth.  You might say that, having not yet showered or checked my email, I’m not quite me.  

Trust me, I’m writing as fast as I can.

If this is an ode to early-morning drowsiness, we should hear from more writers.  Novelist Nicholson Baker likes to arise with the birds because he finds “the mind is newly cleansed, but it’s also befuddled.”  He discovered that he “wrote differently then.”

Joy Williams—I’ve quoted her before—she says,“A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.”  She reminds me of artists who say they see better in the dark. 

Marcel Proust took opium to induce the desired effect.  Charles Bukowski drank.  Some writers practice “morning pages,” streams of bafflegab becoming ever more truthful.  At least that’s the idea.  You shovel hard with great faith—and doubt!—endless shovelfuls of gravel, superficial overburden, tons of it.  Somewhere down there lies the bedrock of meaning.  Maybe. 

What about monks?  Every night at three a.m. the search begins anew for…what?  Meaning? God?  Freedom?  A monk’s life is a Zen koan, a cosmic question.  Never mind an answer—beware the answer!—just show up.  Faithfully.  Doubt keeps us coming back for more. 

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk-poet-existentialist.  Here’s what he says about faith and doubt:

“Faith means doubt.  Faith is not the suppression of doubt.  It is the overcoming of doubt, and you overcome doubt by going through it.”

That’s it, that’s the truth.  We have to push through.  At dawn, my mind is too weak to warn me away.

Ah!  The eastern sky is lightening.  I gotta go. 

An hour from now my best interests will be hijacked by appearances and the everyday mind, and I will be buried under gravel, again.

* “When the mind is too weak to tell itself lies,” is a line from The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paulo Giordano.]