Primarily a writing exercise, this dream journal-inspired blog is a quiet introspective sojourn into the process that we traverse in going from private dream to public art. I see our dreaming as an internalized mythmaking. As I philosophize and expressively exhibit dreams, both private and public, I encourage and delight in creative language as a way to practice experiential metaphors through a “public dreaming." Writing Theory: Creative Dream Fiction

Monday 24 September 2012

Persian Mysteries and the Immortality Rites of Zoroaster

Tower of Silence (Dakhma), Mumbai by Cornelius Brown
“…never age and never die, never decay and never rot, ever living and increasing, being master of its own wish: when the dead will rise, life and immortality come, and the world be restored to its wish.” 

Yasht 19.2.11. James Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, Part II, The Sirozahs,Yashts and Nyayis; Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXIII (Oxford, 1883), p.290
__________

It is 12th century Persia, the continental-temporal mirror image of 21st century Canada. After a lesson on the estate, I a youth of educable age, begin to row across a placid lake with my father. The day is warm, with cool breezes flushing our skin in a mixed haze of natural praise and remorse for the end days of summering. My father, a muscular, bearded intimidation of manhood, speaks with the grazing lurch of intense commanding. As we row, in separate crafts, the waters turn rapid. In that moment, he begins testing me on my learned material. 


The oral literature of the day is mind-bending and terse in its memorable strings of morality, geography and spirituality. I’m able to recall various characters and events, and as I extrapolate, the waters toss and turn unexpectedly. At my wavering voice, my father’s eyes brim with the frosted fire of dark Persian mirth. Yet, as soon as I veer into future’s allusions, spouting the literary names and waves of later centuries unheard, a fire burns in his eyes of serious intent to quiet my youth’s wandering. As he reaches out to grab me into his craft and row back ashore to the consistent presence of historic symmetry, we are both swallowed by the apparition of a waterfall along the other shore, pouring us downward with the turbulent waters in a vein of undone chronology and placeless imagination. 

World According to Avesta by Orijentolog
I call out the names of literary history upwards along the upended future. Until the 21st century’s own dawning, my mind, feckless among the archaic forms of Iranianization, is unceasing in its deliberations on the foreshadowed youth of humanity. I turn and writhe with ancestral might into the sheer unknowable mists. My father has since disappeared, and in that silence I begin to know my name.  
_________
Driving out demons with Masonic symbology
         Over the infinite sands of civilization,
         breathed and created out of time
In the sun’s ravishing corner of a universe,
         un-tempted and forever at a loss
                Between the child’s two eyes
                closing
On death and the holocaust of our forsaken government
         Laughing at the trees’ roots


When stretched to the bottom of India’s or Africa’s wells
         Ousting up the belief in life as a drunken tragedy
                              Yet, be not humourless
                              nor without comic sophistry


In the dance and song
         Come alive by the sexual majesty
                              In theatre’s delicate ways,


To present the creative being
as one with truth’s bold and upheld music
         Reflecting back in the caged mirror
                              A creator anew

- excerpt from "From Behaved Freedom to Absolute Nonsense"



1 comment:

  1. A petit mind-blowing excursion into esoterica. That chart is pretty compelling.

    Your dream calls to mind my song I recently posted to my site as a video.

    ReplyDelete