3:15

 

As alluded to in an earlier post this month, I wake up every night at 3:15 a.m.

 

So did George Lutz of The Amityville Horror fame – or, rather, infamy!

 

So do many experiencing attacks of the demonic or spiritual crises, as a quick Google search will tell you.

 

As for me, well … I kinda agree, hate to say.

 

Now, I don’t always awaken at 3:15. Maybe every ten days I will wake up at 3:15 on the dot. I see it on the microwave I pass as I make my way in the darkness to the bathroom. And let me tell you, I almost know it’s going to display 3:15 before I get there, and when my suspicion in confirmed, I can’t tell you how eerie it is. Goose-bump eerie. If it happens to you, you know. If not, I can’t convey it in words adequately enough.

 

Most of the time I awake around 3:15. Sometimes I come very close – 3:12, 3:20, 3:08. This morning I woke at 3:40. And it doesn’t matter when I fall asleep. Normally I go to bed around 11:30. On the weekends I go to bed later, midnight or 1 a.m. not being uncommon. Last night I was exhausted from a tough work week and some insomnia and went to bed at 10:15. But no matter when I go to sleep, I wake up near or at 3:15, invariably. Only two or three times a month, at best, do I not wake up at the witching hour.

 

Because that’s what it’s called. The witching hour. The dead hour of night when witches covens are most active and dark spells suffuse through the chilly black air on their evil errands. The hour diametrically opposed to the death of Jesus on the Cross, traditionally held to have happened at 3 in the afternoon, the hour when salvation came to mankind. Evil naturally gravitates, accelerates and accentuates its designs at the hour 180 degrees from God’s saving work in history.

 

Perhaps there could be a more mundane explanation. Long ago I’ve read about the “reticular activating system” in our minds – when we learn something or are pointed towards something, we begin to start noticing that something more often. The best example I heard is if you go to a auto dealership and take a fancy to a car model you’ve never seen before. Suddenly, out on the roads over the next few days and weeks, you’ll suddenly see that car model everywhere. It’s not like they haven’t been out on the roads all this time. It was never called to your attention so you never noticed it.

 

Perhaps it has something to do with that. You hear some creepy weird things about 3:15 a.m. You wake up one random night at 3:15 a.m. and remember that spooky thing you heard about it. Then it happens again next month. Then, sooner. And now you’re a 3:15 a.m. junkie like me, getting your fix every night.

 

Something similar happened to me when I was young. I was fascinated with the time 11:11, and would point it out to anyone within earshot when I caught it on the digital clock. Pretty soon every time I look I see 11:11. Later, as an adult, I would see 9:17 on the clock – my birthday – and tease my little ones, especially Patch, whose birthday is September16. Now it seems every time I see a clock on my phone or laptop or on the microwave, if it’s morning or evening, it will show 9:17.

 

What to do?

 

Well, I’ve read some accounts by individuals afflicted with this odd phenomenon. The “spiritual crisis” thing resonates cuz, well, I’ve been undergoing one of varying magnitudes for most of my adult life. Sure, I’m about 90 percent in the traditional Roman Catholic camp, after many years reading, thinking, puzzling out and experiencing, but I still have the urge to explore. Be it philosophy, Eastern religions, or different shades of Christianity, I seem to never feel safely secure in my traditional Roman Catholic camp. Yeah, it might have something to do with that idiot Pope we’re saddled with. Or maybe it’s my habitual sins I’ve struggled with and can never shake. Or maybe it’s a lack of personal supernatural confirmation from the “out there.” I dunno. But I think this 3:15 thing might be a signal to me.

 

What I try to do is follow some advice I read. Specifically, when I find myself up at that hour of the early morning, I say the St. Michael Prayer:

 

St. Michael the Archangel

Defend us in battle

Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.

May God rebuke him we humbly pray

And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly host

By the power of God

Cast into hell Satan and the evil spirits

Who prowl about the world

Seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

 

And if I can’t remember that or am too befuddled with sleep to get through it, I mutter a Hail Mary under my breath, return to my warm cozy bed, and fall back into my dreams and the darkness.

French Lit > Russian Lit

 

There, I said it.

 

In my humble, genuine, gentle, and amateur-in-the-original-sense-of-the-word way (as in “a lover of the thing for the sake of the thing itself,” in this case, “literature”), I do believe the French lit I’ve read is better than the Russian lit I’ve read.

 

Let me preface to say this is a low-volume sample. In one corner, we have

 

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, also by Victor Hugo

 

representing the French contribution to Hopper’s literary experience.

 

In the opposite corner, representing that Great Bear of Literature, Mother Russia, we have

 

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov, also by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

though in all honesty I only conquered a third of the Karamazov book (of which I will finish one day).

 

So my experience with the French was “better” than with the Russian.

 

French Literature > Russian Literature

 

Hopper, define “better”. Okay. For me, I enjoyed more the reading of the one set of novels opposed to the other. All are deeply philosophical works, of a kind that probably hasn’t been written in English in at least a half a century, if not longer. All feature large casts of characters, and all of those characters spring to life. All kept me guessing, at one point or another or several. All in all, all were worthy reads, and I am grateful for reading them all and probably, in some small way, am a better man for doing so.

 

But, French > Russian.

 

Perhaps it has something to do with translation. I recall reading two books by the Frenchman Jules Verne twenty-plus years ago: From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Center of the Earth. The first was whimsical, LOL-ish, and very joyous to read. The second was the exact opposite: it was only through grim gritty and teeth-grinding determination I finished it.

 

In the case of the six abovementioned classics, however, I discerned no translator creep – er, translation creep. Not creep as in “creepy,” but creep as in a translator inserting his own editorializing instead of staying faithful to the original source material. Probably has something to do with each work’s translation completed in 1992 or earlier, as I do not trust much literature after 2000 or anything after 2015.

 

To ascertain why, I came up with a couple of images.

 

First, I felt the French works more a “right brain” piece of writing and the Russian a “left brain” exercise. That is, the French seemed more artistic, visual, holistic, free-form, to use some hippyisms. The Russian works I found more analytical, more “by the numbers,” logical. This is just a feeling, just a sense of mine.

 

Second, this led me to think that perhaps one can view the French as books written from start to finish, whereas the Russian seemed written end to beginning. What do I mean? Well, the French works seemed to meander along to their conclusions, winding this way and that, seeming to derail but never doing so, inexorably plunging towards their natural climaxes, almost as if discovering their endings. I had the sense that the Russian novels knew exactly what the final page would read, and everything was meticulously outlined and constructed to form logical patterns to fit in to what the authors wanted to say of history or society or the human soul. (This latter way is the way I wrote my two “novels,” or rather, “manuscripts.”)

 

This is not to disparage Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. All three novels were incredible journeys, me some third wheel breaking the fourth wall vicariously and voyeuristically and participating in transcendent and or historic events. I enjoyed them all.

 

But I enjoyed the French style better. Which leads to my third simple point: You bring yourself at your stage of your life to the book you are reading. I think at my age and station in life what I am craving is a little adventure, a little bit of participation in the great threads of history, in that French meandering, winding way. Perhaps I spent too long in too logical a frame of mind, and the right hemisphere is demanding a say in steering the bus (to confuse a couple of brain/personality images).

 

Whatever the true case may be, and to convince you I am really nitpicking here, were I given godlike powers and had to judge these French and Russian writers standing before me novels-in-hand, I’d grade Hugo and Dumas easy 98’s.

 

And I’d give Tolstoy and Dostoevsky solid 95’s.

 

Fantastique

 

So I fell asleep with Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d'un artiste … en cinq parties on the turntable, the 1830 excursion into psychedelia by the maestro Hector Berlioz and dreamt – of all things – that I coached basketball.

 

Now I know nothing of basketball, and basketball knows nothing of me. We had a brutal breakup sometime in the late 70s when I was unceremoniously cut at CYO tryouts. Right off the bat my dreamself felt trapped, triggered, threatened, and soaked in sweat.

 

That grating air horn buzzer signaled the start of the first game of the season. I slowly examined the ensemble of broken downs sulking on the bench, each studying the floor, walls, and ceiling for inspiration. And how was I to inspire a crew like this – ?

 

Ludwig van Beethoven – 5’ 4”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – 5’ 4”

Franz Schubert – 5’ 2”

Richard Wagner – 5’ 5”

Arnold Schoenberg – 5’ 4”

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky – 5’ 3”

 

Have you ever seen such a bunch of sickly sad sacks?

 

Well, just then the record skipped at the fourth movement – Marche au supplice (“March to the Scaffold”) – and I realized I was dreaming, dreaming last night. And as the fog and purple haze dissipated I ordered the boys back into the locker room to change, promise they’d quit hoops forever, and through themselves two hundred percent back into the compositional studies.

 

My arm lurched out for my phone in the early morning darkness, and the numbers “3:15” mocked me, yet again. But that’s the subject of a future post …