Sexuality and the Self: A Walk Through Chaplin's Dreamland of Innocence

"Dreamland...Sin creeps in...Trouble begins...Innocence...Getting flighty...Jealousy..." concluding titles in Chaplin's The Kid

The penultimate scene in Chaplin's first feature as an auteur filmmaker brings the viewer into "Dreamland" an alternate world parallel to the slums of old America, where all the principal characters from the film are winged angelic humans, swayed by the ear-whisperings of stereotypical devil sprites prancing about unnoticed. Could Chaplin have been privy to the hermeneutical notion that angels and demons are internalized expressions of our inner nature, mirroring social experience within the self-reflective subconscious, a key to an awakening, which resolves such impacting triumphs as the orphan child reuniting with their birth mother? Could Chaplin's narrative insights on film have preceded psychoanalytic depth by seeing the substance of dream as holistic self-projection, and at the same time, maintains unrivaled importance for transforming the collective psyche? 

Alan Watts is famously known for relaying the following psychological narrative, an interrogative entry into the presence of mind, as it wanders through the imaginative hollows of two overarching conceptions, past and future, and their nexus of alternate psychic fruition in the netherworld of dream. 

"Let's suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power, within one night, to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes, you would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say that's pretty great, and now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream that isn't under control. Where something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say, Wow, that was a close shave wasn't it. And you would get more adventurous and you would make further and further out gambles, and finally you would dream where you are now." 

Like a silent film, dream is also suggestive. The act of play is a prerogative of metaphorical truth, and finally, where chaos is a principle which reveals Self as the All-Self, Alan Watts, reminds us, "The whole nature of the Godhead is to play that he is not. In this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality...God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down-basic whatever it is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you are not." Dreaming is a doorway to a revelation of the nature of self as All, where we confront the play-form of creation as an inner process of personal creativity, as the embodiment of a creative mind. 

While we go about our "waking lives" fully immersed in the, "I am not that" attitude, the nightly vigil of our inborn collective life, our subtle creative instinct, bleeds with singular potency throughout the periphery of waking experience. In dream, we remember who, and what, we are: the stuff of play, Lila, in Sanskrit. There is a story of the seeker who goes to a guru and staring into the face of the holy man, meets only a curious smirk, as the holy man thinks, "Oh! Come off it, Shiva."  

____________

Shadows hang with somber repose. My beloved grandparent’s home is empty. And I’ve been away far too long. The dust has settled. The dining table is hollow with a loveless ardor. I can inhale the loss; the forgotten wealth of life lived once for each other now separated by nightfall and age.

Not at Home by Eastman Johnson

A middle-aged man in a black leather jacket stands outside, waiting. I’m hooked outwards. The sky calls me from the dank lament of the abandoned house now friendly to no one except for the wraiths of Death and Time. Who is the middle-aged man? I know him well, as I’ve known myself reflected in the old western visage of distempered exile.  

Devil Priest (credit: Gary Ashley)

I mount a bicycle along the cracked sidewalk curb. A dilapidated car, in the model once owned by my centenarian grandfather, clanks and sputters downwind. Is that my brother at the helm of a rusted, malign vehicle? I glide toward dawn. 

Automobile by Roman M. Semaschkewitsch

The middle-aged man seats himself blankly at the back of my bicycle. Like a burden to its beast, I carry his apathetic and listless indifference throughout the expansive elaborations of my most grandiose ambitions. 

Dynamism of a Biker by Umberto Boccioni

The map of Asia opens with the clarity of a skyline on a cloudless day. Traversing the backcountry of Vietnam, land of my lifelong love, I veer through incandescent bogs and sunbaked farmland. Natural beauty unending, my eyes turn inward, to visions of aspiration and wonder. To Europe, across Mongolia and the bleary maw of central Asia, I carry the burden of age, of settlement, of thought. Silenced, my mind is repressed with a hidden name.  

___________

The pure darbuka/doumbek track behind the voice sounding is essentially a decision to convey the beat-hop sexuality of modern techno-culture, and more, to welcome the sounds of the Arab-Muslim world through one of their traditional instruments, in coordination with a voice to affirm a re-sexualized Earth-bound society in honour of the Feminine - to move beyond what I have called, "monosexuality" a conception in response to our narrow myopia concerning the spectrum of global sexual expression.

Originally published in Poetic Pinup Revue's February 2012 print issue, "monosexuality" is written in the name of all the victims of a sexually repressed society, that being mostly all of us in the modern world. There is an epidemic of masculine dominance. The feminine perverted and repressed through our culture of rape. The lack of feminine empathy extends to the contemporary human relationship with Earth, as PachaMama, Mother Earth. Our birth-rite is to recognize Her.   

"monosexuality" was also my first published poem. Where poetry is conceived as a feminine art, to hell with the macho patriarchal cultural hegemony that diminishes the authentic creativities of our inborn humanity in favour of entitlement propaganda, figuratively illustrated as the "war on sex". Militarism further exacerbates the repressive/oppressive role that sex, in gender, reproduction, and the act of love, has assumed in our increasingly self-destructive society. As with all dualities, masculinity implies femininity.

Public Observance is essentially steeped in the act of 'people watching' with a keen eye for the social imbalances in play on any given occasion. Especial light is thrown on inter-sexual relativity. Included are the poems, "monosexuality" (Poetic Pinup Revue, 2012) and "Preposterous!" (Steel Bananas).

The piece, "Preposterous" makes a point for the significance of anarchical logic, or irrational meaning, and how the formal context of institutional learning delegitimizes the freedom to imagine beyond the bounds of normative thought and reason. It is at once an elegiac and at once celebratory, marking a flight from the institutional walls of predictable learning, towards the more experimental and risky, adventurous dream-education of self-knowledge.

Public Observance by Rusty Kjarvik

The Voice of Nothingness is Not Silent

Keep listening. Repetition is the rhythm of a harmonious narrative.

________

Grandma paces across the massive floor space. Such a humungous house is a crime to live in alone. This is the end, after more than half a lifetime, and he’s gone. The family remembers him well. He used to sit, unmoving, for immeasurable hours in that chair by the fireplace. 

My dad, begrudging this unseemly fact of life, is bent on taking out all the young folk (now almost in their thirties) to the grocery store, “to get whatever you want!” As we board the car, I can’t think of anything more to want than for us all to be together again, though I suppose even the Lutheran God would deem that otherwise. 

When we’ve all gone through the supermarket aisles, I’m left alone, at a loss to find exactly what I’m looking for, I trudge hell-bent through the fruits and vegetables. Everything’s rotten. 

Again, my vegetarianism is marginalized in the family, I can’t choose between swollen cantaloupe and mangled lettuce any more than I can between two cuts of meat, it all seems inedible to me. Everyone leaves the store without me. 

I walk the highways indefinitely, then, finally after a swathe of nights changing traces overhead with sunrays, I am bled of fictitious impersonality before the might of the great city ahead. The parks are filthy, and an ongoing fair only cements the fact. 

At a chess table I find my old friend from Sudan. He is indifferent, though welcoming. We move here and there amid the goings-on, attaining food and drink in our path, as we sight our circumstances and in the usual mode of conversation, dastardly criticize the milieu and technological demonry of our host society, brandishing bitter tongues of aging cynicism and spite. 

I again leave the scene, suddenly struck with a sense of purpose, to see my own Love, first-hand. 

________

In the reared tragedy of common history
Gone from the Irish shores that reach into the heart of a small mayflower
Lore teaching the youth and middle-aged men of their rights
                    And losing fate in the unreasonable song


To play out our entrenched groove that rides into spherical motion,
A dreamless awe maintaining the earthy power to cool enraged throats
                    And impress a soft layer of peace on the back
          An all-escaping flesh
                              Of our siblings who praise the sun
                                         And its ever-flowing majesty

- excerpt from "Along My Own Shore"

Reflection on "Myths, Dreams and Religion" edited by Joseph Campbell

In this collection of eleven essays, edited by Joseph Campbell, I found a wealth of impassioned research into the mystagogy of our literate foundations. My reason for reading this piece of fine literature, was to creatively unmask the roots of a new mythology to re-identify with humankind, i.e. humanity, fashioned by my own literary aspirations. With essays by Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell himself, and other fascinating minds embedded in the culture of mythological literacy, I mainly focused my reading on the traits of human self-identity as it has evolved throughout mythic time. With regard to dreaming, the essays touched on the subject in the light of religious cultural referencing, often comparing Levantine with Indian dream philosophy, as either a visionary or intermediary state burgeoning natural self-transformation; an acorn, if you will, planted in the rough soil of the unconscious by the prehistoric mind of our mysterious bio-archetypal origins. And the perennial quote, from the final essay by Richard A. Underwood, "Myth, Dream, and the Vocation of Contemporary Philosophy" a reference to Heraclitus' Fragments reads, "Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe."

See my reflection on Amazon

Watch Joseph Campbell lecture on the Origins of Man and Myth

_________

Shrapnel of memory in the ephemeral reflection of a broken shard forced up the neck. Checkerboard flooring sprayed with clear blood. I loosened my grip around his slippery esophagus-cored flesh, dripping with the moldy puss in long-neglected balloon, deflated in the workman’s hand. In the dense obscurity where the long way back from the faint escape route memories still linger. Drinkable, luring, the tidal flush of shared pain extorts the constant sleep, the blathering, ongoing consciousness, never put to rest by the wasted highs of an unceasing mind, running off the bare edge of a fleeting freedom to simply be, and not be moved to contemplate homicide and escape in the backdrop imagination of the unreal & surreal & real fire of raw instinctual creativity.    

_________

Strangle/Strangling

"To dream about strangling someone, or being strangled yourself, means you have been hiding an important part of personality - one that you need to express to be happy - just to please someone in real life." (iDream)

_________

of memory and the strange
the lofty touch,
reminiscing beyond the treasured wine of death
as an end to meaning
in the fingertip and pupil
shone lunar and astral
with vanished luck

- excerpt from "hallelujah"

Beyond LSD, Within the Experiment

“The program I was involved was to study the active principles of medicinal plants and one of these medical plants we were studying was Ergot…At the end of the synthesis I was in a very strange psychic situation, a kind of dream world appeared, a kind, a feeling of oneness with the world, a very strange experience which reminded me to some experience I had in childhood.

Sometimes when I was in nature, with the forest and the wood, I had some kind of, I would say, mystical experiences. The feeling of oneness, to be one with nature, the feeling to see now the true aspects of nature, the beauty, and which filled me with happiness.”

- Albert Hoffman

“Could it be that this present, dream-like state was in some way connected with the crystals of LSD that Albert Hoffman was purifying that afternoon. He certainly had not eaten any but his fingers might possibly have brushed against a few traces of the compound. If so, then LSD was a remarkably potent drug. He decided to experiment on himself.”

- Narrator in "The Beyond Within"

Now, listen to Alan Watts on Drugs

________

Dim metallic bursts; silvery orbs bedeck the subdued leather warm of the café tables. Northern Greece, on the western outskirts of Ioannina, the Italian heel clicks in the vibrant waters at the center of the unruly European Earth. The Euro’s devalued to the near-extinction of another ancient peoples, drowned in the eye of the storm, at the height of neo-classical disorder. Ordering a coffee is now rife with the political amalgamation of a dungeon’s dearth. No one’s blinded, caffeinated, nicotine blink minds stutter over the oblivious stupefaction of leadership burned at the seam by the public hulk, dashing their traditional dress of human mockery for a breath of mutual truth. Together with family, we wade in the swampy lighting, in darkness as thick as the Grecian café mark on the silent, burning tongue of lingering potency.

Through a multicolored crest of followers, the warehouse screams with atmospheric delight, a musical haunt for the sacred lives whose energy dreams in smokeless fire. My Love is playing in a professional contemporary Mediterranean music ensemble. A chic audience reclines leisurely over metal chairs. Inside a graffiti’d dome of unfinished concrete, though a stylish rendition of the European artist-squatter paradise. I’m especially proud to see my Love creating wildly refreshing original music within the high standard of such daring quality. A kit drummer with a rig fitting over ten cymbals begins leading a rhythmic introduction of spatial ingenuity, moving the plush sonic stream of consciousness movie of artful belief into the realm of magic. Standing beside the audience, near the well-lit stage, small spotlights injecting funnels of visible dust in the wakeful air, I see her. Gowned in her usual flowing dress, a big explosion of black hair and her glowing skin. I am a martyr of unmade art.

______

Europe

"To dream of travelling in Europe, foretells that you will soon go on a long journey, which will avail you in the knowledge you gain of the manners and customs of foreign people. You will also be enabled to forward your financial standing." (iDream)

______

now transforming
through spiritual marriage
to my near love
whose life casts a benevolent spotlight on my being,
and path
with such wind,
a gusting splash,
refreshing the outer core
that foretells the dead body laughing at me

- excerpt from "society, charities and addictions"