Dream of Foresight for the Environment and Our Survival

Detail from Plate 76 of John James Audubon's Birds of America

"In order to see the way forward, we have to understand how we got to this turbulent moment.

We appeared on Earth about a 150,000 years ago in Africa, when there were still Wooly Mammoths in the world, Saber-Tooth Tigers, Giant Sloths. We arose at a time when the savannahs of Africa were filled with animals in numbers and variety beyond anything we know today.

There was little in the early appearance of those humans to suggest the explosive change we would undergo as we left our African birthplace to populate every part of the planet in only a hundred and fifty millenia.

Of course, the secret of our success was that 2 kilogram organ buried deep in our skulls. It was the human brain. It conferred a massive memory. No other animal has the memory capacity of the human brain. It conferred insatiable curiosity and very impressive creativity; qualities that more than compensated for our lack of physical and sensory abilities.

And that brain became aware of itself. It was conscious of our presence in space and time. That brain was capable of imagination and dreams. And drawing in our experience and our knowledge, we dreamed of our place in the world and imagined the future into being.

Foresight gave us a leg up, gave us a huge advantage. And foresight, I believe, brought us to this position of dominance today. And now, foresight, that great evolutionary strategy that has been such a critical part of our success as a species, is warning us that we are undermining the very life support systems that have enabled us and the rest of life to flourish and survive."

"...Now I am uplifted by the amazing story that is emerging from modern science. It tells us from the moment after the Big Bang, as matter spewed forth in an expanding universe, every particle exerted a tiny pull on every other particle.

The universe is not mostly empty space. It is filled with evanescent tendrils of attraction that some people call Love. And that attraction is built into the very fabric of the cosmos. Science informs us that far, far away, way out in the boondocks, is a very undistinguished galaxy: The Milky Way. And among the billions of stars in that galaxy, our sun is a very ordinary one. And on its third planet, Earth, a mere speck in the heavens, life arose in the last quarter of the cosmos' existence. And in the very last moment, something astonishing happened. A creature emerged from nature endowed with self-awareness, dazzling creativity and a capacity for love and wonder, gazing out at a chaotic world, that animal imposed order and meaning in myriad forms and brought humanity to prominence in a cosmic instant.

We are the planet's most recent iteration of life's forms. An infant species, but with a precocity to see our place in the cosmos and dream of worlds yet to come. I believe we are capable of even greater things: to rediscover our home, to find ways to live in balance with the sacred elements, and to create a future rich in joy, happiness and meaning that are our real wealth. I will die before my grandchildren become mature adults and have their own children, but I am filled with hope and I imagine their future rich in opportunity, beauty and companionship with the rest of creation.

All it takes is the imagination to dream it, and the will to make the dream reality. So let's get on with making it happen and show what our species is really capable of."

- David Suzuki

from "Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie"

Statement of L. Caruana

Pandora by Odilon Redon

"Through the endless interplay of art, myth, and dream - and the underlying 'image-language' that they share - I have come to see life as a gradual unfolding of the Sacred.
At night, we speak a more ancient language. During the day, our thoughts are guided by our spoken language, as words fall into subject and predicate arrangements. But in dreams, we think in a much older way, as images fall into enigmatic arrangements which are nevertheless recognizable to us through ancient myth and sacred art."

- L. Caruana

Uninhabited Island of a Friendship's Whispering

On the Volga by Abram Efimovich Arkhipov

My friend shared a dream with me last night:

He said he could hear my voice in the subtle ambiance of a clear Caribbean sky. My friend had returned from the Caribbean only recently in his conscious life. In his dream, he said I encouraged him to move towards an uninhabited island.

You see, he is with the girl who introduced me to my wife. My wife is about his age, and his girlfriend is about my age, my friend and I are both of European ancestry and our better halves are both from Asia. There is an interesting mirror-like quality to our gatherings which resonates with crystalline friendship and mutual love. My friend is almost finished with school, and in the summer will travel with his girlfriend to Europe and China before they live together. This is very much how the relationship grew for my loving wife and I. After finishing school, we sacrificed our living arrangements to travel together to Mexico and return with the intention of living together. In my friend's dream, he hears my footsteps above him, beckoning him forward, to fearlessly transition into a new form of intimacy and trust within his enduring relationship and our circle of friendship.

The uninhabited island is, I think, a symbol for the unknown, a fate of complete originality, a calling to live, without regret, a life of authentic individuality. In his dream, he moves toward it, however awkwardly, with rubber scuba flippers, peddling a small boat over the foreign water. He is almost there.

The Decapitated Head of Benito Juarez

Benito Juarez, Teotihuacan and the mystery of a figure in red shawl....

- Foreground to the Dream (actually lived-in-waking scene):

It is my second day in Mexico. I had only seen this country once in Tijuana almost a decade before just for the afternoon. It is now December, 2008. I am staying weeks in Mexico City. I find myself within the confines of a Zapatista demonstration. We de-board a small local bus, I let a young mother with her child climb out before me. She is dressed in perfect fashion to the trend of social and cultural resistance that has taken places since before the states of Mexico were founded. The atmosphere is young, vibrant and inclusive as I file past a scattered group of policemen, barred from entering the demonstration grounds as per an agreement with the Zapatista movement. The area attracts a united front of Mexican youth and longstanding social activists with the international community, mostly young travelers like myself in happenstance with a resonant ground of truth-seeking and decolonization. After perusing various photo exhibits, circus acts, a music stage and a gargantuan round of booths and cultural presentations from social activist groups, indigenous peoples and the Zapatista themselves, I find my way to a high-perched bleacher to gather perspective. The landscape is cluttered with the reality of living conditions in the Federal District; over 35 million inhabitants, almost as much as the entire country I had arrived from: Canada. The houses barely top two stories as they create a vast landscape buttressed on hillsides in the myriad colors so peculiar to and likeable about the Mexican cityscape. Two Mexican guys decide on sitting only a few feet away from my high vantage point. Laughing, they start lighting a pipe. Marijuana smoke lifts into my nervous system like a cool breeze. I smile at them. Offering me the pipe, I smoke and there is an immediate realization at how strikingly different we are. The only similarity between us three is slight laughter and comraderie of place in this fleeting instant. A mixed, flowing cacophony of sound travels into our minds, bespeaking the slogan of the demonstration: Digna Rabia/Dignified Rage. I hear the Mexican language. Completely unknown to me at that pont, I am enthralled by its fascinating brevity and speed of intonation. At this point I am very high. I look out towards the mountains. In the foreground is an immense statue. How could I have not seen this before? It is a human head. I point to it and look at one of my new friends. "Benito Juarez!" He says indiscernibly, with a thick accent only spoken to someone ignorant of Anglophone ears. I am bewildered by the voice from a peer of my equal age. He knows I don't understand, "Benito Juarez!" he says again. This time I understand. An early President of Mexico. His face becomes as strange as the thickness of his accent. I am taken by his features, which seem to resemble Aztecan myth in their distinct expression. They step down, leaving me to contemplate my surroundings high up above even the neckless head of one of the country's sculpted, public icons, high above the Zapatista demonstration, high above my own mind.

In Dream: I see from this vantage point. The head of Benito Juarez is changed to my imagination for the ruins of Teotihuacan. When I visited Mexico for the first time (and all subsequent times) I never took the chance to see the ruins of Teotihuacan. The grandiose pyramids depicted in the film, "Frida" and Sergei Eisenstein's "Que Viva Mexico!" still reside in my imagination. I can see only about half of one rising to its summit. The steps are gorgeously erected with frequent cracks. A massive field stands to its side. I'm sure there must be pyramids greater in size. In the field, walking in an easterly direction towards what seems to be greater pyramids, what I sense to be a female figure, wrapped in a scarlet shawl slowly walks into an unforgiving wind out of sight.


My backyard gives way to a mythical Mexican beach

In my family house backyard in Massachusetts, I sit with my friends. There is great emotion rising unto the visible empyrean gazing back at us as a smidgeon of existence in the universe. I am with old childhood friends, we trek through my backyard, and their presence is exchanged with that of my cousins. We walk until a downslope hill flushed with a sludge and grime unknown to us. I feel it half-resemble a part of the Tar Sands in Alberta somehow. The endless sludge gathers and quickens below our feet. One of my cousins slips clumsily and knocks into an evil-looking man who seems to hold an authoritarian position with the environmentally hazardous work about us. He eyes me vociferously, changing to a stern, violent expression of cruel intention. He speaks that he will ruin me if we cause any hindrance to his work. He says that he will make my position in Canada even more tenuous and that I will risk my marriage and rights to immigration if I, or any one I know slip up again and cause more trouble. I simply slide past down an aching earth, bleeding with tar.

Next I find myself walking along an unpaved beach sidewalk in a seaside neighborhood. Broken shells lay scattered on the road. As a group of local residents approach on their way inside a house, a mythical deer shoots past me. The animal bears an impressive mane, looking like a cross between an alpaca, a mountain goat, a deer and gazelle. The animal joins its herd, trekking about nimbly. As I follow the unusual herd of unidentifiable animals beyond the horizon, the land opens up into a huge Mexican beach resort. There are electronic billboards littering the oceanfront, as international commerce is exuberantly exhibited with dominance. I duck past the hill's outcropping before the steep cliff turns into beach and follow the animals in a small grove. I feel submerged in a temporary refuge.

A Procession of Shared Dreams

Corpus Christi Procession in Hofgastein by Adolf von Menzel

Orthodox Priests in Procession (dreamed by Poet Tree)

I was assigned to write a marketing brochure for Christmas that must include all the esoteric meanings, including the magi, the 12 stages of enlightenment, and the mas/death funerary aspects. This brochure unfolded in my brain as I dreamed, but it was completely lost the moment I woke up, like those Tibetan mandalas that are destroyed the moment they are created.

Transcendental Gadgetry

Apparently I migrated to a "vacant and available
house" somewhere in the middle astral domain. A
20-something guy with dark hair (who, as I later
realized, is in fact one of my very dear friends in
spirit...actually a joint/joined/shared
integration/incarnation of TWO of my very dear
friends...but that's a whole other story!) was walking
about the vacant house with me. We were discussing how
it might be used as a community meeting place.

At one point he said, "Let me check this room
out"...and literally SHOT across the room to look into
what apparently turned out to be an empty bedroom.
After checking it out, he then "reversed motion", and
zoomed back to me -- looking just like a video tape or
film loop being run in reverse! I asked, "Yo, what the
HELL did you just do...and how the HELL did you DO it,
anyway?"

He smiled and said, "Well, this helps!"...and I
noticed that he was holding in his hand something that
looked like the "remote control" to a video or
satellite receiver! I said, "WHAT is THAT"?!

He explained, "It's a time/space loop-around
transponder. It generates an energetic force field
which lets you navigate outside of conventional
time/space limitations, and basically 'fast forward'
to any place where you want to be in space/time, at
least within a bounded local domain such as ours.

Escaping the Primitive

I am with a childhood friend, enjoying the forest. Suddenly, there are wisps of arrow trails cutting through the air. One strikes a tree right next to me. I find my friend is evading an onrush of arrows. There must be at least 15 attackers. The arrows begin to fly in greater numbers. I duck and hide behind thin trees as the arrows pick up and speed and hit the trees around me with great thudding. In the tumult, an arrow strikes immediately next to my shoulder on the tree I'm huddled behind. I move slightly in the opposite direction and an arrow follows me before I can move past the thin tree trunk. I am immediately struck with a rush of adrenaline and bolt out through the forest. My friend seems to have survived, as we scatter leaves with a speed mustered only from animal surivial.

Next, we are on a ship. It seems as a migrant ship carrying immigrants across the sea. I lay back in comfort on the ship's deck. Enjoying cinema, and feeling a great pride at having passed beyond a reputation of near non-existence in a forest of mere survival instinct, enraged by the violent chaos. Soon I find this pride to be empty, and I feel no different than a bestial enemy being hunted in the thick forests of a newfound home. 

The American Dream is Dying

"Our veterans are committing suicide at an unprecedented rate of one person every 80 minutes and we must help now." (from "The 99 Percent Declaration")

The Achuar Awaken the Modern Dreamer

Achuar Chief Peas Peas Ayui visited my city this month. He came to stand before the CEO of a company destroying his homeland, poisoning his children, and tearing from the riverine soils our one community of all Earthly life, the very biodiversity of the Amazon: OUR LUNGS.

Through Pachamama Alliance

The Pachamama Alliance noted that the Achuar have a "Self-Sufficient Dream Culture" who, "In all aspects of their culture reflect a spirituality oriented around dreams and visions. The Achuar have many ancient, and refined rituals to access dreams and integrate them into daily life." (source)


Based on a travel account into Achuar territory, we may learn more about the importance of dreaming:


For Information on the Achuar, Oil "Development" and the Perils of the Modern Dream
Go To AMAZONWATCH

Dogmatic Mysteries from the French Poetics of Jules Huret

The Revolt in Cairo, detail by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson

"To name an object is to take three-quarters from the enjoyment of the poem, which consists in the happiness of guessing little by little; to suggest, that is the dream."

This quote is taken from Chapter 10 of Leo Tolstoy's book, "What is Art?" wherein he bluntly critiques such French poetics of romantic obscurity. I highly recommend everyone read this book.

For some thoughts on art and money on related subjects read my article!

Egypt and Iran: Two Lingering, Unforgettable Dreams

Two Dreams remain tightly etched in my memory, their content is also woven together within the intricate fabric of our now stirring collective mind, struggling to feel the common breath burn on the backs of our billions enslaved by poverty, war, greed, corruption, hypocrisy, malignancy, and on and on.

1)

I am within the house of my formative years, the beginning of schooling. It is a small house, cornered in an older, character neighborhood embedded in a seaside forest. The basement beckons me inside, yet I forget the actual content of the basement, except for the stairway down. Underneath, there is a flooding, a cesspool of oceanic imagination, swelling and swiftly carrying me into its drift. I see light from outside filling spaces marked by life and activity, those areas not reaching the natural light are dusty, dank and unused corners, filled with heaps of abandoned material. I find myself, as if swimming towards the light, to escape the basement of this house, and this memory.

Emerged, I swim across the surface of a great lake. The water broths and foams beside me, a plethora of life makes itself known beneath my feet treading the water. Then, a great lash as if from the lake floor catapults into the air a fantastic protrusion of flesh from a mythical beast, a loch ness of sorts reveals itself, yet does not harm me. I suddenly begin to see another side to the lake. All of a sudden I am carried in, as if involuntarily by a sweeping undertow.

I reach the other shore finally, though disfigured with fatigue and the nausea of being spun throughout whirlpools of fear and fascination within a lake of dreams. I am at the foot of a great cliff mountain springing up along the back of a cold-looking fortress. Next, I am unconscious, being taken to another basement. In this basement, I feel as if I am in Iran, the waters before me and the landscape prior to my incarceration reminds me of a very recommended film, called the "Lover's Wind" about the ancient civilization of Iran and natural landscapes of Persia. The film's incredible story about how it came to light should be read in complement.

I am imprisoned with other Iranian people, we are to be tortured. The basement windows along the edge of the roof resemble those of my childhood home, only now there are bars and the places of darkness are filled with mirrored rooms stretching as if infinitely, occupied with other prisoners, all of whom wear eyes of tortured pain.

I imagine the blithe reception to this childhood home, returning to its driveway, the neighborhood feel, the flowers and summer air, the large stones to sit on and the humming insects over the plain grass.

2)

My wife and I are in a room that resembles an actor's dressing hall for a theatre. We maintain an air of prestige, as actors or members of a theatre will. The mirrors are lit on their frames with gaudy light bulbs and the rest of the room feels turn of the century French, similar to the era in which Cairo, Egypt's downtown core was built from the ground to honor the architectural culture of its French colonialists.

We step out, led by an eager individual, who masked, invites us to walk with him on the street. As soon as we step out, we are in the midst of Cairo's Abbasia neighborhood, essentially the core of downtown, including Tahrir square and Muhamad Mahmoud Street, the current center of the crisis.

I know this street, this was where I saw a concert by El Tanbura. The mud of this unpaved road is not smooth, it has large bumps and divots, making even walking in it a curious adventure at times. The local youth walk down its narrow lane barefoot, smiling and wondering with mysterious humor. The foreign presence is immediately detected and is a center of fascination which equals my fixation with the imperfect dirt road ahead.

We move out into the street, I find myself edging into a crowd of demonstrators. We are suddenly in the thick of a mob of protesting Egyptians in Cairo's ongoing clashes with police. I feel gripped with fear at having my wife with me. I am separated from my beloved by the zing of a tear gas propeller wafting smoke and the sonic punch of a rubber bullet passes by me following. In the middle of demonstrators and police, I stand crouched low to the ground, reaching out to my wife. Rubber bullets and tear gas continue to rain throughout the quaking ground zero of protest in Egypt.

Skimming past abandoned riot police shields, I grab my wife's hand and we run into a dimly lit government building. I feel I have walked into Trostky's room in Mexico City, there is murder in the air eternal, a chipped skull and stray bullets encase the ambiance with a suffocating, dead air. We wander the halls and rooms only to find remnants of assassinated officials, burned intellectuals, tortured youth maimed beyond recognition. It is a breeding ground of hate. There is no escape.

Petronius' Mortal Dreaming...

Illustration for Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon by Norman Lindsay

Encolpius speaks to the wilderness around him, his friend Ascyltus lies dead.

"Where is all your joy now, your arrogance?

Now you're at the mercy...of fishes and wild beasts, you who bragged...of your warlike innocence.

Come now, mortals! Fill your hearts with dreams!

O Gods, how far he lies from his destination!"

From the penultimate scene in "Satyricon,"  by Frederico Fellini.

Dream of the Kogi

 Anthropomorphical pendant of the Tairona people 

Representing a shaman holding two sceptres, wearing a large nasal ornament and a high headgear with two toucans.

 Lost-wax cast gold with false filigree decoration, 10th-15th century, Colombia. Artist Unknown. 

(Courtesy of Wikipedia.)

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive."

From (http://www.theelderbrother.com/kogi/article.cfm?ObjectID=17)

Dreams from the Ethnosphere

Plains Cree Man from "The Plains Cree: an ethnographic, historical and comparative study" by David G. Mandelbaum

"And in the end then it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?

Margaret Meade, the great anthropologist said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted to this blandly amorphous, generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow and more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities.

And it's humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for 600,000 years, the neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, we created hierarchy, specialization, surplus is only ten thousand years ago, the modern industrial world as we know it is barely three hundred years old. Now that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millenia.

When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it is within that song that we all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples in all gardens find a way to flourish."

from Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures, a TED talk ( http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html#.Tswyaa16evc.facebook )

The "Extinct" Released!

While submerged in moments dreaming, through the night, past dawn without heed to sleep, my wife pieces together a spellbinding gorgeous array of color and texture through rhythmic sound, composed with originality sparked by intuitive improvised sense awareness on midi keyboard, blank canvas of creative recognition in tune with her virtuostic Zheng spectacle woven seamlessly within the elementary modern electronica and Asiatic-influenced sonic currents streaming through her own resonance in ancient to modern forms of music.

Bask in the brilliance of "Extinct" Vi An's follow-up electronic album after "Endangered"

http://vian.bandcamp.com/album/extinct

Cavernous Dreaming, Forgotten

Lions painted in the Chauvet Cave by HTO

French Archaeologist

The first time I entered the Chauvet cave, I had a chance to get in during five days, and it was so powerful that every night I was dreaming of lions and every day it was the same shock for me, it was an emotional shock, I mean, I am a scientist, but a human too, and after five days I decided not to go back into the cave because I needed time just to relax and take time to...

Herzog

To absorb it?

French Archaeologist

To absorb it.

Herzog

And you dreamt not of paintings of lions but of real lions?

Herzog

Of both. Of both definitely.

Herzog

Were you afraid in your dreams?

French Archaeologist

No, I was not afraid. I was not afraid, it was more a feeling of powerful things and deep things, a way to understand things which is not a direct way.

From "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" by Werner Herzog

Dream of the Enlightened Persian

Arriving at an idea upon which all may Dream

Original story of an initial arrival

To Canada! Without place or concrete plan to find one, he begins with the simple purchase of a vehicle, to roam the entirety of this vast nation without foresight or reckoning with fate.

First night in Montreal, a dream;

An Aboriginal elder, playing his frame drum in the dream fog of a striking, celestial presence, tells him repeatedly "...this is the land of the Buffalo." He repeats, "Respect this, the land of the Buffalo."

Out of all destinations, traveling throughout the country, without ever having even known anything about Canada, he arrives in Calgary to live. Calgary is an auspicious place with respect to the Buffalo. The traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes Calgary and the surrounding region, bespeak a plains culture which has honored the Buffalo like none other. The last herds still roam in the northernmost regions of this province.

He goes on to talk about his travails as a boy of only 10 years when the Iranian revolution began. He tells of how he was forced to read in the dim light of a locked vault; a tunnel wherein subversive books were protected by his family. Therein he caused such foment in his mind that would have never been possible in the veiled reality of the Shah's theocratic mental confinements. So, as a true seeker, artist, visionary and dreamer within his growing heart, cultivated by the creation of literary might found in the truth of so many ingenious ghosts unveiled by sanctimonious literary iconoclasm. He remained trapped as it were, underground, with thoughts hailed as mystery in the whisper of a clouded heart.

Yet, his traumatic devotion to the tunnel-enclosed vault gave seed within the dank depths of his early budding mind. With practiced devotion he went to the darkest places in the world, hidden under inhumane truths silenced by war, poverty, corruption, hypocrisy, and censorship. In Canada, specifically in Calgary, he was led to the traditional womb of our Mother Earth among the plains Buffalo culture. Led, as it were, unaware, under the inverted belly of the Buffalo. The hide blanket of the Sweat draped over his unknowing spirit and found in him a place where to confront his mental wound, to rise from that vaulted literary wisdom, and see an inner light reflecting from within his own self as the sensory magic of spiritual knowledge. Upon exiting from the womb, blinded, suffocated, and nearly maimed with the burn of volcanic rocks aflame, his healing journey had commenced, and the vault of his childhood swung wide in the clear open before him as never before as he entered a newfound paradigm of artistic awakening through the dream of a music-theatre production with us all.

As a man who has experienced Sufi tradition in the mountains of Kurdistan, the poetry of my new friend has proclaimed a clear vision directed to all who may listen. In his voice is a uniqueness, an artistic dreaming forged by a soul strengthened and clarified within the tight impasse of as yet unraveled knots of complex human suffering. His voice reminds us of places beset with burdens so immense as to drown many a human heart in endless sorrow. Still, in his voice is a passion enduring with deft creativity and boundless truth-seeking that is infectious and empathetic in its wisdom. He now seeks shared visionary exploration, a lyrical orchestration towards a lasting expression of a public dreaming.   

His story was shared in the name of the passing artist and Sufi healer through the music of Sayed Khalil Alinejad; who was recently killed by the still repressive government in Iran. His murder is an outcry of world shame, an example of absolute heresy against the human spirit by the glowing red eye of a deeply traumatized society, living earnestly, without repose in the recesses of a hellbound subconscious blur. This honest-hearted musician and spiritually expressive man was told before the incident by a fellow Sufi that he would burn in hell, a few weeks later, he was burned in his home with his son. To a person of spirit, we have to wonder, how in life he spoke through music, and how Death became the last tone vibrating through the soul of his forever respectful listeners.

It is said that the character of the American Buffalo, unlike all the other animals and creatures of the North American plains, would charge headlong into an oncoming blizzard, while all others will flee. The American Buffalo will find its way through the worst of storms, earnestly engaged in the collective healing met between the spirit of the storm and the spirit of its own animal nature. With the strength of the Buffalo, he passes through to the bounty of a naked Earth on the other side. We have to wonder if people like Sayed Khalil Alinejad have tasted an ardour similar to that of the American Buffalo, braving the worst of storms, and have become as a message of this near-vanquished Spirit to the people of the Earth and Sky.

Listen here

A String of Unforgettable Dreaming

Passage of the Iron Gates in Algeria, 18. October 1839 by Adrien Dauzats

Dream Memory 1

I see a map attached to what looks like a conference board display in a war room of sorts. The map has impressions which remind me of old wood stamp envelope seals, however they are marked in a fashion as to resemble blood forced into an array of impassioned fervor, an explosion of red paint or wax fixed on deliberate points on the map. I see the largest impression, which my eyes are drawn to first, is on Indonesia, next on Southeast Asia, there is an very large impression on Chile, on Japan, on Turkey, and then I realize these imprints represent shockwaves and their traces of carnage. Earthquakes and tsunamis are scaled with an imprint of blood on the map. I look closely at the geographic place where I am, in North America, and I see small traces of red. Is this a forecast I wonder?

Dream Memory 2

I am walking through a densely wooded road with my cousins and family friends. We find our way to a cliffside. One of my older cousins, about my age, decides to be risky. He begins walking alongside the cliff very close. I try to one up him, and so I slink on down the side of the cliff, letting myself hang on an overhanging root. I become quite frightened by the implausibility of survival if I were to slip and fall from such heights. My cousin then does me in by lowering himself to a rocky outcrop far beneath our feet at the cliff's edge. I am frightened for him. I can feel his vertigo. Then he falls. It is as if I fall with him. We all act as if he is now dead. After some time passes, I am a presence, with him, though he can not see me. He is lying on his side at the bottom of the cliff. A black man finds him. This man seems to resemble more of an African character than American. Soon, however, we are in what appears to be a gang-ridden neighborhood in Southern California. There is great risk, as people surround us with guns. The rest is clouded.

Dream Memory 3

I am in a Chinese grocery store. It reminds me somehow of the city of Vancouver. I find to my great delight a whole bunch of good items to purchase, however I don't leave the shop for two days. I am in their rummaging through all of the items, without much sense of purpose, and suddenly as I am working on the tile floor, trying to fix it, the owner of the shop points me out. She takes my to go box of orders and begins throwing them out, telling me they have gone bad. I plead with her while each piece of delicious food is bit into, prodded and thrown into the trash. She then kicks me out.

Anarchist Egotism and the Dream of Humanity

"Near-quotations from The Ego and Its Own dot the Guntram libretto. Stirner criticizes the "beautiful dream" of the liberal idea of humanity; Guntram employs that same phrase and contemptuously adds, "Dream on, good people, about the salvation of humanity."

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise

Forest Cabin at the Edge of Wild Freedom

Farm by Abraham Bloemaert

Sitting contemplatively, as if with a pipe in hand on a back porch in the midst of the deep greens at the heart of a mountain forest, I rock in a wooden chair.

I sit beside a primitive wooden house. About the edge of the house's property are various other individuals with whom I only interact to partake in uninhibited sexual acts. Within this volatile, untamed crowd on the single home forest settlement is one individual with a huge double-barrel shotgun.

As I veer away from the double-barrel shotgun I find a good portion of the ramshackle wooden deck extends far enough to accommodate a live music band in full swing led by an acoustic bass.

There are people who set off in small groups into the opaque border with wilderness. They charge into obscurity with fierce cries, as if to war, death or a fight for freedom.

Dream of Gerontius

Selections from "The Dream of Gerontius" by Cardinal John Henry Newman

"Gerontius -

And drop from out the universal frame

Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss,

That utter nothingness, of which I came:

           This is it that has come to pass in me;

     

And while the storm of that bewilderment Is for a season spent,

           And, ere afresh the ruin on thee fall, Use well the interval.

Down, down for ever I was falling through

The solid framework of created things,

And needs must sink and sink

           Into the vast abyss.

           
           Soul of Gerontius

          

I  WENT to sleep; and now  I am refreshed.

A strange refreshment: for I feel in me

An inexpressive lightness, and a sense

Of freedom, as I were at length myself

And ne’er had been before. How still it is!

I hear no more the busy beat of time,

No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;

           Nor does one moment differ from the next. I had a dream; yes: — someone softly said 

           “He’s gone;” and then a sigh went round the room.

            Am I alive or dead? I am not dead,
            But in the body still; for I possess
            A sort of confidence which clings to me,
            That each particular organ holds its place
            As heretofore, combining with the rest
            Into one symmetry that wraps me round,
            And makes me man; and surely I could move,
            Did I but will it, every part of me.

           Assure myself I have a body still.
           Nor do I know my very attitude,
           Nor if I stand, or lie, or sit, or kneel.

So much I know, not knowing how I know,

That the vast universe, where I have dwelt,

Is quitting me, or I am quitting it.

Or am I traversing infinity

By endless subdivision, hurrying back

From finite towards infinitesimal,

          Thus dying out of the expansed world?

Another marvel; someone has me fast

Within his ample palm; ‘tis not a grasp

Such as they use on earth, but all around

          Over the surface of my subtle being,

And gentle pressure tells me I am not

          Self-moving, but borne forward on my way.

Angel

Divide a moment, as men measure time,

Into its million-million-millionth part,

Yet even less than that the interval

           Since thou didst leave the body;

And thou art wrapped and swathed around in dreams,

           Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical;

Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;

Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,

           And I will come and wake thee on the morrow."

[these are the ending lines]

*the entire poem can be found here

Forgetting the Words at the Metaphysical Altar of Caucasian Man

The Seven Sorrows of Mary, middle panel, scene of the twelve year old Jesus  in the temple by Albrecht Durer

At a mind/body/spirit gathering. People are discussing peace and harmony in a celebratory manner. What I notice right away is my naked husband laying on a mat. The people consisted of Caucasian middle-aged men and women of various metaphysical traditions. Up to 8 people surrounded him on either side as if beneath an altar. He is covered in beautiful flowers, beads and leaves. He was being utilized as an altar. I was focusing on his navel area. I was amused and bewildered. Everyone was amused and giggling, resting on his lower torso area. Everyone seemed to have forgotten what to say. I felt warm and heard bells. I saw he was also amused. As soon as I saw his face I woke.

Rock Marooned on the Margins of Plains and Desert

Pastures in the Otztal by Albin Egger-Lienz

On a high plateau, a full-on butte in the open prairies meeting with the seemingly infinite sands of the painted desert. Upon the head of the butte I am rock marooned with a close friend, an older lady, maybe my stepmother. There are three children with us, two are dark-skinned, the other a whole lot paler. The pale-skinned child has two horns. She runs like a heated ram from within the center of the butte which is quaintly fitted with a bustling steam of desert dust kicked up into the frighteningly high altitude air by a pen of bison and bull. My stepmother takes one of the more complacent, darker skinned children up into her arms and edges against the end of the butte. The vertigo takes hold of the wide midwestern tip of the desert land on this near-impossible butte formation's unlikely vertical stretch towards the Earth's atmosphere. Suddenly, she finds a humongous cylindrical metal pole bending slightly from just under the butte edge to the floor of the desert in the rest of the butte-filled horizon. There is some leftover rope nearby on the ground of the butte, remnants of the misplaced material culture of ranching. I follow my stepmother who steps off the edge of the butte, sliding downwards, she with two of the children. I have tamed the half bull, half child enough to wrap her in my arms for the descent, my stomach in my chest.

The Mother of Buddha Had A Dream

Thai Buddhist Art by Anonymous

Twenty-five hundred years ago, nestled in a fertile valley along the border between India and Nepal, a child was born who was to become the Buddha. The stories say that before his birth, his mother, the queen of a small Indian kingdom, had a dream.






A beautiful white elephant offered the queen a lotus flower, and then, entered the side of her body. When sages were asked to interpret the dream, they predicted the queen would give birth to a son destined to become either a great ruler or a holy man.

One day, they said, he would either conquer the world, or become an enlightened being—the Buddha.

from "The Buddha" a PBS documentary by David Grubin

Envisioning the Unconscious From The Cusp of the Atmosphere

Rocky Landscape by Ludwig Richter

When I see my dream, I am being lifted. The vapors of an immense hot air balloon warm the cold ground, the icy supermarket lights dim with an apparent lifeless sickening that dies suddenly to the snow-felt covered pavement of a parking lot. I am outside a lowly bowling alley bar where my step-father is playing rock and roll covers from the 70s. I escape outside to the car and am suddenly approached vociferously by wild predators; jungle cats with voracious appetites in the bleak misery of a New England modernized by the corrupted spoils of war, domesticated, yet freed into the all-vanishing gore of human flesh petrified by a society stifled by the categorical satiation of a thankless search for Nothing to entertain nothing. I find my Love with me at my side, she transforms curiously in and out of being my Mother. As she nears the car, I find one of the jungle cats is eating her alive! Yet somehow, she emerges from the carnal End of human being, and steps with me into the car. A rope somehow dangles in front of the car window, the jungle cats swat at the window, breaking and creasing the exposed metal like paper. I grab onto the rope. I am pulled upwards at an incredible rate into the glowing cusp of the atmosphere. I find my loved ones are in the basket of this hot air balloon that is lifting me up to the edge of Earth's last point of life. I begin climbing the rope, however its length is endless. I fall. My chest fills with cool air, and I inhale deeply, surfacing to a waking state in a moment as if floating to air beneath water. Again, I am submerged, into what is now mere mystery.

Dream Memories Fleeing Religion and Hitler Himself

Over the past days, a series of dreams have not left my memory, and for that I wonder about their place within the whole of my Life.  As I continue to reflect on a dream that stays with brutal clarity within the near-reaches of my waking mind, the dreams I have anew continue to resound with equally inescapable clarity while awake.

Snow at Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley

Dream 1

Inside of a large cathedral, with many rows of seats, I stand from a balcony. I look out, and the audience attending seems to resemble that of a large concert hall, stock full with individuals in highfalutin suits, they mostly represent a rich, upper class of solely European ancestry.

I am told by an individual sharing the balcony beside me that all of the congregation is from Brazil. At first, I wonder, am I in the church of the Santo Daime?

Then, suddenly, out of the back hall, a Torah emerges from the crowd, towering to the height of the near ceiling, whereupon the highest balcony leans down to touch the top of the Torah's immense scroll handle, reaching upwards towards the top of the cathedral wherein the light pours with blinding illumination.

As the crowd exits from the cathedral, one man stares at me, he is much darker in complexion, and appears to resemble an individual I had met near the border of Brazil.

Dream 2

I am in what seems to resemble a mechanical tunnel system, similar to that seen in films set within the body of a spacecraft (2001: A Space Odyssey; Star Wars). I am fleeing through the endless tunnels with my wife. We are fleeing from the wrath of Hitler himself! He follows us with a few of his heavy-handed cronies. One catches up with us and strikes my wife on her shoulder with a deadening blow that sends her wildly stretched out into the vacuous space of the concave tunnel. Hitler himself is fast approaching. I look at her shoulder, it is very bruised, and I fear for her ability to continue to play music! Nonetheless, we continue on, fleeing on into the endless tunnel system.

Next, I find my wife is caught behind, she is executed by the wrath of Hitler before my eyes, and disappears. I exit from the tunnel system out into a nighttime snowy landscape. I find that there are people following who are in much better condition. They have guns. I am in the midst of war time. In the middle of a field, I am stunned by the encroaching enemy. Surrounded, I am snuffed out into the deadening silence of nature's own wintry night.

I find Hitler himself is caught within the tunnel system, I have extended myself beyond death and reach into the tunnel system to finalize my own revenge against Hitler and keep him in my newly found giant's grasp. I reach into the tunnel, and what emerges but a violently green bird with a red tuft around the neck. The bird flies away.

The Dream Gamble of Hannah Szenes

She was a heroine of WWII, fought to save her people of her fatherland, the Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz.

Before her death by firing squad at the Hungarian border, 1944, she wrote her final lines of verse (found in her cell after execution)

One - two - three...eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark...
Life is a fleeting question mark
One - two - three...maybe another week
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

- Hannah Szenes


To all those who give their lives to Dream and falter, ask: does the Dream yet live? I have Dreamed it so.

Who we are in Dream; are we in Life?

"Who you are in Dream is not who you are in Life."

I find myself echoing a statement made by Tyler Durden in "Fight Club"

Yet this is my experience: there is a more subtle interplay of consciousness woven through "dream" than in that it simply ends upon waking.

Dream crosses over into our waking consciousness as does our Life into dream. The greater one realizes this, the less important things become which are predicated upon the line where waking becomes sleep and vice versa. The realization that Dreaming is, in a sense, a refined way of living, and that its genuine energy, which makes purely mental creations on us while inwardly fixated on our most natural processes, can occur at any time when the mind is used accordingly. Dream is a finer interpretation of the mundane mind by the human heart.

When Dream crosses over into the awake mind, we are creating music, writing inventively, singing passionately, thinking imaginatively, etc.

Life feeds into our dreaming when asleep, in our most vulnerable state of mind, we involuntarily re-live personal desires, social obligations or anxious occurrences in the guise of the mind's own conceptual spin stripped of normal sensory perception.

So, when one goes beyond mere "lucid dreaming" and interacts with a newfound sense of their Dream, as where the their dreaming is united in all aspects of the mind, whether awake or asleep, that person may be known to adopt strange habits such as going under pseudonyms (such as myself) or more overtly in simply taking their lives into their own hands, speaking their mind and dedicating their time to what they are passionate about, what unites them with an eternally alive Dream, that is at the crux of creation in a profound relationship to something actual as opposed to the appealing to what is currently acceptable in its concave, boxed-in drudgery of a life lived without dreaming. For Dream is Spirit, it is the true Source of Life, and ground within which all life must inevitably resolve.

Busker's Gamble (2)

Busker's Gamble (1)

Busking, Gambling and Escape from the Assured Life

Peasants Playing Cards in a Tavern by Adriaen Brouwer

A dream of two days ago will not escape me. It is ever pertinent, because it lingers still in my memory, and its narrative, symbology and emotional meanings are carried through into my dreams today:

Dream 1

I am running, as a fugitive would run, I run with everything that I am. I seem to be escaping the watch of some unknown authoritative holding. The police, FBI, it could be any of these, or it could be something more abstract. I am unsure, yet I am running.

Next, I find myself busking with a guitar beside a Fire Station in the town of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. This is an odd place to find one's self busking, however I am in the eye of governmental authority. My change bowl clinks with a Canadian loonie and a few pennies. I am enjoying playing the guitar, then I feel as if I am being chased again, the firefighters seem to all glare and approach as if from above, and my whole environment around me seems to do the same.

Dream 2

I at New York University. My step-father is guiding me to sign up for a set of classes with a Master's program as he had always wished for me. I comply with passive-aggressive remarks and actions, thinking in my head one thing while doing another. I sign up for some classes in his presence. Next, he buys me a cheap guitar out on the street. I see him speed off with an unforgivably strange partner, however he is happy, and so I am content.

I visit a friend, we are in a small space, inside what seems to be a bedroom of a trailer. I show the people there the guitar and it seems to be entirely unplayable. It is a cheap piece of trash. We sit awkwardly around the television, wasting time.

I then go down an alleyway which appears similar to the alleyways in and around Cairo, Egypt's downtown midan or squares. In the alleway, I see people busking. They are bringing such authentic vibrations of strength, persistence and genuine enjoyment to an otherwise dull and dreary atmosphere of biological decay and mental stagnance. The street performers are still not well-recognized nor respected well by passerby onlookers. I cheerfully greet these buskers and enjoy their drumming.

Next, I am in what seems to be the inside of a warehouse, it is a filled with the stereotypical busker of the public mind. A recurring dream-character, tall, stout, blonde-haired, bearded with bad complexion. Within the warehouse there is homelessness, deprivation, madness, poverty. I walk through unaffected yet witnessing, somehow removed by unique experience. I have returned to a world filled with inequalities and cheap resolve for a way of life which transforms peoples minds into that of a fugitive.

                                                                    ____________

One day, while reflecting on the act of street performing/busking, I was taken with the notion that busking is in many respects like gambling. And from a crude perspective, the art of pure improvisation is in a way a form of gambling, wherein you anticipate, based on one's knowledge of the variables at hand, the outcome of a certain action. The fact that my experience as a street performer/busker has been through performing completely improvised music further emphasizes my notion that improvised street performing is a kind of gambling, however with the due sophistication of musicianship and the wealth of experiential confidence in playing one's instrument. For further understanding seek: myspace.com/vian and youtube.com/nivsha

JUNO SE MAMA

White Lady of Auahouret by African painter

JUNO SE MAMA came to me
                                           through my father.
He taught me about what it is to be
            Man,         Self,          Strongness,
                        It is a ritual dedicated to
My mother.
          Upon this earth, I want her to see.
I had to understand my father's house
                               before my mother's house.
JUNO SE MAMA is a prayer for all those
           Who have suffered the
                                after effects of Slavery.
Who are we?
      It is also a spiritual for the sick
and poor, light for the blind, comfort
                       to the young and old,
Cradle song for babies,
               Wind...for birds in trees,
The sound of thunder and lightning that
              BURST out over the earth.
It is a rhythm of virtue.
                     When you are all alone,
         Many songs come...in the night,
                                            I am a moon child.
I come from New Orleans
                                    the surge of the bayou.
  In my young life I worked
And dreamed.
                I wanted to sculp,
                                          to squeeze the earth
                        With my hands.
I talk with my hands.
                  Who teach me...no one.
I left my native home, New Orleans.
           My people were not popular with
                                                  the Afro-arts.
           I wanted to build,
                                             to say.
        A first Afro-American art center.
                                 Young boy, with a Man's dream,
             "and a child shall lead them."
                                   JUNO SE MAMA.
While they were running the streets,
                                I
                                  was listening.
I JUNO
             a drummer born. American.
My father
             a tuxedo drummer,
"once a tuxedo drummer, always a
                                         tuxedo drummer."
My mother's father was a captain's
                                                    drummer,
F Company, 84th Regiment, Union Army
        during the Civil war, 1863-6.
For the past 12 years I have been a
                    maker, designer,
                           a Son.....of drums.
My Afro-American Art Center will be
                  a home for the homeless,
                                         Future sons of drums.
Coltrane moves in that direction
                A man who knows
       Directions for the future depend
On how we artists of today
                                    cut the road.
Francis de Erdely, the famous artist
           Made his contribution to my
                                                     art center.
     His sketchings of me see into
                                    and understand
                   Rhythm and Afro art.
The ritual, JUNO SE MAMA, begins in a
                      Mighty cloud burst
And the rippling of the water drum
            begins beating against the
                                         air cups of the world.
Moon children...ready to be born.
                 Signs of sky, earth, water.
One is born called JUNO.
                          His father's house is the bird.
You can hear him teaching his son
                                                       how to fly.
           Fly, till you reach the sky, Float,
Fly,                                                                    Float
                       till you make a boat
           Be strong my son and show your arm.
I'm going to show you your MAMA's home
                                       She lives in the sea.
There is birth in the water
                                       in my mother's house.
No matter what has happened to us,
                  we have to sing.
                          There is always land ahead.
Earth is where it is happening,
     It's where we go from here.
             We have to sound the cry
                                              of the conch shell.
Blow the shell...
                                       blow, blow
                         till you see.
And JUNO blowed and blowed till
                                            he grooved
                                                          and grooved.

JUNO LEWIS, December 1966
       text arranged by jo ann cannon