Not everyone who says they are a comrade is willing to go to war for the sake of a dream. The living are all too often foolish and capricious, and will cast aside a better world (whether it be on the grand level of the Soviet dream or a single, golden stanza's spaces) for experience in this one. When one wants assurance of commitment to the pursuit of craft and filament of thought, it is the dead -- who are, after all, nothing more than the dreams and words they've left behind -- who sit through the long dark nights with a single lamp to hold the work. Dead things are convenient like that, latent material in page and pen waiting to become activated by the needs of the fierce and driven.
These are my ghosts, who do not visit in Victorian ectoplasm but are instead faces to furnish the pursuit of all the cathedrals that can be crafted in words. They are muses and proper comrades; names for the forces which compel the creator. Perhaps they are saints; perhaps they are characters; perhaps they are spirits. If any one of these is the case, then what follows are prayers, or descriptions of a dramatis personae, or invocations for a proper summoning. Whatever the word with which you wish to tag this liaison, it is an honor to introduce them to you.
Jim Morrison
Sometimes it's pushing for the sake of pushing that gets you through the day because the dance of bounds and boundaries is so fundamentally illogical that either you or the framework is bound to snap, and it's more fun to bet with yourself on which goes first. Sometimes others see something in you -- what they like to call genius -- and make it into a pretty myth that wreaks a set of violences, a deification harmful to both the god-makers and the made. Sometimes, in an effort to escape the shackles of story, you write yourself one that makes an even more compelling cage.
Lead singer for the 60's rock band The Doors; drunkard and buffoon with the eye of a dreamer; an agent occupying the tense space between true poet and rock god; made so often a leather-clad demon he lost the wan writer who loved Blake.
T. E. Lawrence
Sometimes in service of a greater dream, a liminal occupation, one is taught to play a game of potential: will I and my work be great if this card is played? If this rule is observed? If this dinner is eaten or that word is written? To be consumed by the will to greatness is a cruel thing; it is a malaise which thrives on isolation. Lawrence knows what it is to exist in-between for the sake of a dream; he also knows the sting of potential unrealized, and is able to be good company in the long nights spent consumed by the will to become myth.
Archaeologist; revolutionary; military strategist in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. A dreamer of the day who saw his work to know and empower the Bedouin tribesmen shattered by imperialist machinations.
Maximilien Robespierre
Sometimes the sight of how the world ought to be is so piercing, so saturated, so undeniably precise and elegant in its functioning that all the rents and creakings in the reality we now occupy are unbearable. The minute bureaucratic and corporeal failures, the systemic wrongs of flesh and love and war -- all weigh heavily on the spirit until the temptation to withdraw into the virtuous palace of the mind is strong and throbbing. This way madness lies, but so too does the power to mold the world in the shape of a dream. Sometimes there is no solution but to scream and shake as the frailty of a body and of an existing world fails to hold the universe in the mind.
Does his name need to be defined? French revolutionary; tyrant; rabid dreamer; megalomaniac; sensitive wreaker of wonder devoted to the creation of an earthly utopia. One whose dreams made others bleed, yet he, too, writhed under the weight of the rightness he witnessed in his mind.
Li Bai
Sometimes there is no recourse to the frenetic nature of the dreaming but to elegantly jettison thought. Poetry exists in the pen, but so too does it effulge from the blade which cuts the pen's produce. Li Bai knows that to dance with steel and with ink leads to a breed of solace, for you are enacting the nature of things and finding new ways for your dreams to manifest in the mellifluous architecture of each moment, free from the burden of destiny.
Tang Dynasty-era poet and wielder of the jian, or Chinese straight sword. Composed with the calligraphy brush and the jian to equal effect; caught the frail moment of observation in sinuous, muscular language possessed of the strength of refined existence.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Sometimes the tread of inquiry, simultaneously trundle-tracking its way with slow precision and peregrinating through nonexistent lands with deft brashness, is the means by which we tame the will to power and gain both the discipline and the substrate with which our dreams may be constructed. The many-legged, ever-striding mind of the artist and the scientist is at work in the spaces before dawn to ask why the light hits just so, and then to rest on the scaffold of the question in wonder at the color of the sunrise.
Neuroscientist and artist whose elegant inquiries into and depictions of neural structures laid the foundation for modern study of the brain; a happy sharp denizen of the laboratory whose faculties of inspection and interrogation were generous and unforgiving.