Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose #7

Familiarity and repetition — reinforcing the hypnogogic effect.

Hyp Prose Tenet #7 — Hyp Prose works through familiarity: poring over the same chapter, the same verse. Repetition reinforcing the hypnogogic effect.

Excursus

Hyp Prose can — on a first reading — seem strange, convoluted, repetitive.

This is because it is not designed for superficial skimming, but requires frequent and continuous reading and reflection in order to produce its hypnogogic effect: the bypassing of the critical mind, the awakening of the Receptive Heart.

This the way of wisdom: read widely in your youth, and deeply as you age. Cleave to words that resonate within you, that have the depth and timbre to reward sustained attention.

This is how people relate to poems, and also to Scripture.

Nobody would dispute this fact about songs. We listen to our favourites over and over again, over the course of a whole lifetime, especially when we need their sustenance or consolation.

Hyp Prose is designed to travel the same pathways as your favourite song.

If you want to see how, then just read it on Repeat.

This excerpt is taken from the first chapter of From the Chronicles of Lupademonstrating how the She-Wolves view scripture: mostly as deception for the purposes of protection, but also containing true parts of their own song even in the same breath as they had first been intoned and taken down.

Readers will immediately appreciate the debt owed to Song of Songs, which incidentally is exactly the kind of writing that rewards sustained and repeated attention to get its full poetic and hypnogogic effect.

Excerpt (From the Chronicles of Lupa 1:1)

Ruby went to school and she behaved herself but she did not understand why she had to read such stupid books as they gave her. The Bible made no sense, derived as it was from the need to protect the truth, but her mother would say: in this Book is the sanctuary of Lupa. You must be thankful for the deceptions in this Book, but you must not believe in them.

Her Mother also said that there were parts of the Book that were true parts and were woven from their song, even in the same breath as they had first been intoned and taken down.

When Ruby heard those parts sung out to her as they were so often let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth she was silenced and she listened intently for the whole cycle to be recited:

My beloved thrust his hand through the latch opening

My heart began to pound for him

I arose to open for my beloved

And my hands dripped with myrrh

My fingers with flowing myrrh

On the handles of the bolt…

And at Ruby’s stillness, not even taking a breath so as to hear better, her mother would laugh softly and say: Ruby Child there are more important parts to this song. But although this may have been true for her mother, and although Ruby did her best to listen to every other part of their song, there seemed to her to be no greater part than this.

And even as Ruby dreamed her heart stayed awake, listening for these stanzas of her song, this song above all other songs, setting out in true lines the desire that would suddenly come upon her for her beloved when he should reveal himself, coming out of the wilderness like a column of smoke, sweetened with incense and blowing only for her and the desire that was within her, sweeping towards her on the south wind that is warmed by the desert places. The south wind that would whisper to her, saying he is coming, coming for her alone to receive up with her body, and into the chambers of her heart.

This piece is also a great example of the project of New Scripture: to find the jewels hidden within the dross of Old Scripture, to polish them up and set them within new narratives so that the whole edifice begins to shine like cut stone.

I also find these passages intensely sensual and I hope some readers do too.

P. Julian

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