Evocations of the Urban Creator: When No Stars Appear, Voices Are Heard

Evocations: Cyclical Wordplay (album art)

“So, dear state, you are a very nice word from a dream. There are fine sounds in the word, much comfort and much freshness, you grew up in a forest of words…ashtray, match, cigarette butt, an equal among equals, but why state do you feed on people. Why has the fatherland become a cannibal and the motherland his wife…If the states be truly bad then who among us will lift a finger to prolong their dreaming under the blanket forever?” Allen Ginsberg reading the work of Paul Klebnikov’s Manifesto of the Presidents of the Terrestrial Globe

After hearing many songs and stories of the dramatic sights seen by survivors of the great natural disasters of the early 21st century; the tsunamis and earthquakes that buckled cities and civilizations to their knees, I have heard many refer to the reversion to a clear sky.

The clarity of sky is an enduring metaphor for the wildly obscuring potency of modern technological electro-civilization. What has been more subtle, and more dramatic a transition, is how the skies under our human settlements have become opaque and starless over the past century. In my mind, this is more traumatic and in need of reflection.

The stars and constellations are being called into the blinding stretches of the ephemeral; of human memory, abstracted through an archaic imagination. Beginning with the wealth of ecological terror that might strike any human being living in a modern Western city, who looks up to see that not only have they left the stars, but the stars have left them.

We are without higher purpose, the signs directing us to a sense of greater belonging in the universe have since faded into the mindless wash of electro-magnetic consumerism and the ecological disturbance of human egotism; a symptom of our technological worldview.

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Lost by RK

Shadow of Mother Earth by RK

Gutless City by RK 

Wormhole Cafe by RK

Parting the Starless Night by RK

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The voicing, "When No Stars Appear" is an excursion through the faded mind, a search for meaning in the depths of human language, abstracted and diluted by the hotbed movement of inorganic noise, and the harmonious serendipity that emerges with the simple act of listening; the inception of self-knowledge, wherefrom the fog clears to reveal novel human experience, metaphorically illustrated by the final lines in the voicing. At the narrative resolution, a fugitive of modernity emerges from a waterfall consciousness of humility, as a child in a traditional Mayan home, looking up into the vast network of a more universal light. And the sounds of the starlit sky become a nightly renewing gift clarity, humility and strength. "When No Stars Appear" was originally published online by PressBoardPress in September, 2012.



Also featured in this post is the release of the chapbook, "Creating in the City" from the Cyclical Wordplay collection, to commemorate the release of another sound evocation! Enjoy!

Creating in the City by Rusty Kjarvik