days spent indoors

from B.H. Fairchild, "The Doppler Effect" in Local Knowledge (1991)

When I would go into bars in those days

the hard round faces would turn

to speak something like loneliness

but deeper, the rain spilling into gutters

or the sound of a car pulling away

in a moment of sleeplessness just before dawn,

the Doppler effect, I would have said shrewdly then,

of faces diminishing into the distance

even as they spoke. Their children

were doing well, somewhere, and their wives

were somewhere, too, and we were here

with those bright euphoric flowers

unfolding slowly in our eyes

and the sun which we had not seen for days

nuzzling our fingertips and licking

our elbows. Oh, it was all there, 

and there again the same, our heads nodding,

hands resting lightly upon the mahogany sheen

of the bar. Then one of us would leave

and the door would turn to a yellow square

so sudden and full of fire

that our eyes would daze and we would

stare into the long mirrors for hours

and speak shrewdly of that pulling away,

that going toward something.

spaces of appearance

from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1957)

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. . . . It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

The space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them -- like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity… -- do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.

the revolutionary spirit(s)

from Sean O'Casey, The Plough and the Stars (1926)

(PETER and FLUTHER enter tumultuously. They are hot, and full and hasty with the things they have seen and heard. Emotion is bubbling up in them, so that when they drink, and when they speak, they drink and speak with the fullness of emotional passion [...])

PETER (hurriedly to the BARMAN). Two more, Tom!...(To FLUTHER) Th' memory of all th' things that was done, an' all th' things that was suffered be th' people, was boomin' in me brain....Every nerve in me body was quiverin' to do somethin' desperate!

FLUTHER. Jammed as I was in th' crowd, I listed to th' speeches pattherin' on th' people's head, like rain fallin' on th' corn; every derogatory thought went out o' me mind, an' I said to meself, "You can die now, Fluther, for you've seen the shadow-dhreams of th' past leppin' to life in th' bodies of livin' men that show, if we were without a thitther o' courage for centuries, we're vice versa now!" Looka here. (He stretches out his arm under PETER'S face and rolls up his sleeve.) The blood was BOILIN' in me veins!

the nightly obliteration of being

from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1960) trans. Daniel Russell (1969)

The night dream (rêve) does not belong to us. It is not our possession. With regard to us, it is an abductor, the most disconcerting of abductors: it abducts our being from us. Nights, nights have no history. They are not linked one to another. And when a person has lived a lot, when he has already lived some twenty-thousand nights, he never knows in which ancient, very ancient night he started off to dream. The night has no future. 
...
We become elusive to ourselves, for we are giving pieces of ourselves to no matter whom, to no matter what. The nocturnal dream disperses our being over phantoms of unusual beings who are no longer even shadows of ourselves. The words "phantoms" and "shadows" are too strong. They are still too well attached to realities. They prevent us from going as far as the extremity of the obliteration of being, as far as the obscurity of our being dissolving into the night.

her majesty's a pretty nice girl

from Simon Forman, Diary (1597)

Dreamt that I was with the Queen [Elizabeth], and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready. She and I walked up and down through lanes and closes, talking and reasoning. At last we came over a great close where were many people, and there were two men at hard words. One of them was a weaver, a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily unto her, and at last did take her and kiss her. So I took her by the arm still, and then we went through a dirty lane. She had a long white smock very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind. I took her coat and did carry it up a good way, and then it hung too low before. Then said I, "I mean to wait upon you and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coat out of the dirt." And so we talked merrily; then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. When we were along, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me.