Do Not Confuse Transparency With Justice, Interview With Julian Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lays the groundwork for sanity and clarity, two moral imperatives which become severely deluded in our modern economic infrastructure of global monetary exchange and corrupted international hierarchies with regard to law and policy. The transparency is won through the exposure of new facts, and the justice is had in their due measure via civil application on the ground. This is a bottom-up frequency of people intelligence. This is our one and only power in an age where the word, and its unforgivable silence, is one of the most powerfully dominating forces, painting such instances of carnage as the war in Iraq with the "nice" of workaday mindlessness, aloof and yet proverbial. 

Watch, and wonder why human experience has become the greatest challenge to corrupted power. 

"Politically significant leaks will be 'collaboratively analyzed by hundreds of [Wikileaks] editors in a way mainstream media-leaked documents could never dream of...'" Hanna De Jong, Wikileaks spokesperson, "Media/Web site aims to post government secrets"

________

I know this man. The narrowing, shifty corners of his immaculate apartment reek with the anticipated horrors of bachelordom. A homosexual no less, I slither through the tiny, dimly lit space, eyeing the specialty fabrics and delicate cabinetry with suspicion. This man is no frugal spender. He begins to prepare a fish salad. The salmon are now extinct. “Right and fished out all the way down to Caribbean,” he says, as I open a can of tuna.

Adaptation (2004) by César Leal Jiménez

The lights dim to near darkness as I put the last finishing touches on the salad. Lying across from one another on the carpet floor, he asks me how I deal with my oncoming death. I get nervous, as I notice him procuring a crack pipe from the folds of his clothing. I escape into the corridor halls of the apartment complex. Finding a washroom, I clamber downstairs into a basement. A mass of elderly people sits and washes in undivided toilet and shower stalls. Flabbergasted, I am at all odds. “Should I return upstairs?” Blankly, I go anywhere except back.     

________

full with brutish lies
that carefully whispers a song of superiority, stigmatized,
and the random tear, breaking at the seam of the color line
brackets, the argumentative congress
in sparked ruthless struggle

...

in our head and eye
who self-formed, began as a creative laboring
in the strong brush with a peculiar kind of will
that worshipped a diverse issuing of the ten-thousand tongued iris
performing for the blessed worldly guest

...

growing up in the solitary profundity of man, alone with nature,
wherein lies our humane passage
through social obstacles
in desire and the restrictive curse

- excerpts from "None Superior Than No One"

Cuban Youth and Creative Autonomy

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"José Martí said, 'the children are the hope of the world.' He's very well known in Cuba and the rest of the world. And we could also say that youth is the light of the world, the hope of the world...Youth is very important in our society, because they are very well educated and many of them are professionals. Because of the universal right to education and many university graduates. In the last decade, the number of university students has risen five fold.

Today's youth is a population that has grown up after what we call the "Special Period." So, youth has grown up during this economic crisis and under the economic blockade of the United States, by the United States of Cuba. So therefore, they have been subjected to scarcity and economic limitations. And that has made more stumbling blocks and obstacles to the fulfillment of their dreams...They are the protagonists of cultural, community and artistic creativity."

Maria Isabelle Dominguez, sociologist and Director of Psychological and Sociological Research of Havana (1:01:30 of Cuba in Focus 2012: Part I)

"Children are the ones who know how to love." - José Martí

________

An impromptu, Hakim Bey TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), an occupation, a force field of instant creative spontaneous group presence, artist-magicians freeing the spare moment of interconnected spatial continuity in the visceral act of communal play, a boastful pantomime of acknowledgment, an undreamt torrent of sound waves blindly over my urban fate. A walk alongside the river pathway, and I sit with a group of peers, individual revolutionists, spit-shining the nature of mind with DUI grit. They hand me the most unusual instruments I’ve ever seen, self-invented out of sheer devotion to original ingenuity. Experimenting with a four-tiered frame drum, I notice the circle waits, watching for my creative intelligence to light the group momentum in the fire of scintillating freedom, manifest before their innocent eyes.

The next evening, I walk through an Eastern market, an Arabian Nights treasure trove for belligerent desire, fuelled by monetary drive amid strong wafts of perfume, spice, and the kohl-lined female blink into human want. I am saturated with immense apology. A downpour of mental guilt bruises my faded intentions with each step deeper into the dim havoc throughout the winding earth-ground pathways, leading into unlit alleyways, mental obscurity beckons my drowning, swollen self-pity as I lead myself ever deeper into the unknown grave of my found esoteric ecology.

The wares of an instrument seller captivate me. Albogues, duduks and exotic snakeskin frame drums line the wooden frame of a rickety wooden kiosk stand, seemingly unattended. As I stretch my hand out to feel the skin of a drum, an impish sprite, a young, rosy-cheeked tomboy gazes, beatific into a beam of light above my face. I can’t help but notice her unusual countenance, a proud and noble stature from her youthful facial expressions, shining brighter than the floodlight above us. Without speaking, she begins gesturing hands in avian wing patterns, mimicking the tongue, conveying a plethora of human emotion without missing a beat. 

Her play is expert, her storytelling movements well expressed, imbued with commonly understood meaning. A local woman emerges from the opaque shade of the antiques stone building, narrowing the market pathways. “That’s a well-known Aboriginal dance theatre,” she says, confirming the story well told. At the moment of her pausing, my mouth breathless with wonder and admiration, she gathers a small hand drum, only a touch larger than her palm, and taps with a wild energy, a direct speech of rhythmic pulsing. She speaks through the abstraction of form with an artistry not yet experienced by my foggy, nonplussed eyes, still burdened with internal weight. In that moment, I enter the sky, bodiless over sonic clouds, a booming voice silences the air at the cusp of our earthly atmosphere. I have been here before. With her help, I will return. 

________

Dance

"The dance is always a good omen and it foretells many things, such as children dancing signifies that your marriage will produce lively, happy children who are well behaved, older people shows a better business income and if you are enjoying the dance you will receive and unexpected windfall!" (iDream)

Drum

"To hear the muffled beating of a drum, denotes that some absent friend is in distress and calls on you for aid. To see a drum, foretells amiability of character and a great aversion to quarrels and dissensions. It is an omen of prosperity to the sailor, the farmer and the tradesman alike." (iDream)

________

filled. with immediacy
profaning eternity
of now, into secondary manifestation
of everything, into ignorant cries

for an end to all life, and unswayed
the silent mother feeds greater discontent
into the belly of her sanctified martyrdom,
consecrated over the neoclassical demise of New England

sameness, howling European mockery
and second-guessing the entire First History

- excerpt from "where is the mind in life?"

Beloved Cuba: Reflection on "Amada" by Humberto Solas

I chose to watch this film firstly to practice Spanish apprehension, and in turn, out of an enduring captivation with all things Cuban. In 2006, I protested in NYC against the unjust incarceration of the Cuban 5. After an invitation to travel to Cuba illegally for the purpose of providing much needed resources to an isolated people, I developed a lifelong interest in Cuban affairs. Now living in Canada, I may one day be able to legally visit the country. 

That aside, the content of the film, "Amada" by Humberto Solas, draws on the old story of the internal breakdown of classist oppression in the wake of international pressure and domestic corruption. Here the domestic is defined both as the country of origin and the aristocratic residence. The aristocracy implodes by the will of incestuous love, from within the adulterous presidential marriage, for the hand of the revolutionary dreamer. A passionate, creative literacy is at stake as the emotionally unstable protagonist must struggle to emerge from the trappings of her own heart and that of the deviance of her husband's oppressive rule. By the end of the film, she walks through the yellow-fever afflicted impoverished hovels of the common people, as the presidential villa is stormed by hunger strikers from the dispossessed farmers of the countryside. Read a comprehensive film review. 

Reflecting on the film, I've become privy to the fact that hunger strike is not an obsolete word in the Cuban political vocabulary, even today. Under the post-Fidel government, there is reason enough for young, passionate dreamers of new literacy to afflict themselves with terminal struggle. Read Yoani Sanchez's blog on Wilman Villar Mendoza. 

________

Downtown, I walk by the library. Usually a place of hoodlums, corner crows spying deep into the drug-addled core of the urbane West, a nightmare seethes through eyes lit with nostalgia and lost reckoning. I’ve come from old wood houses, family life on the water, foundations on grass and neighborly wildlife, the windy pines. Now, I aspire to music.

I see a group of rough young travelers, Quebecers, stealing across the prairie to a destination unknown to them, as unknown to all, a mystifying crowd, escalating with their sounding drums, a cacophony of cans and djembes, they are wildly talented. Two play a doumbek as well as any world-class percussionist. I join in, highly amused, jamming along with intentional spirit, a community of street languor and silly dope-swung dreams. Though my assumptions spit back at me, a gunpoint stares at my face.

“Do you speak French,” he says, threatening to murder me with nonjudgmental, hawkish eyes. “Merci” I respond. Handing a pocketful of change over and into their busking bowl, I stealthily walk away. Outside the city, back at the calm-winded house, cool riverine breezes blanket my siblings in peaceful naps. Before they wake, I exit, towards a nearby field.

An older woman, a family friend watches from the stoop of the front door. Our eyes meet from afar, speaking numbers unheard from our mouths, I continue on, shakily into the lone moonlit night. Soon, as I pass through a wormhole of overgrown, forested road, I am led into a city with the immediate turn of a spotlight; a bright glare prefigures the polluted sky with the damaged gold of human weakness. It is a native city of the hoodlums who I had an altercation with earlier in the day.

Massive television screens display commerce and public failure, an aspiration to woe, and the sickly art of rectitude. A votive triviality burns every wandering eye. A street-side host clamors with frayed tongues over the spillage of an alleyway tomb, unreasonable crowds fish-eye over ledges and stairways, pleading with the entertainment rite to move in its festering abuse to inhumane ends. Unable to get a word in, demeaned with the unsightly pandering, I turn back.

Soon, I realize the family friend who saw me as I was leaving had followed, together we return back to our house. Through the forested womb on the outskirts of the city, the young bandits meet us, hiding in the shade as we approach. With the instantaneous glint of a knife, we are attacked and at once evade with spritely ingenuity. Followed, the reign over a pillaging burst of hollow mongering, as they ransack churches and elderly communities in their attempts to follow us to our rural homeland. At home, alive, I realize she’s not with me. I tell the rest of the family what’s occurred, and as soon as I do, she walks through the doorway, she had overcome, her eyes speak with the wealth of her matured cry, pouring out into the silent comfort of our haven.

_________

Criminal

"To dream of witnessing a crime indicates that others are wasting or taking over your time, energy, and ideas. To see a criminal fleeing from justice, denotes that you will come into the possession of secrets of others, and will therefore be in danger, for they will fear that you will betray them, and consequently will seek your removal." (iDream)

_________

slumbering amid graves
launched astral fleeting,
stone wrought misdirection to be filled

by the plagued European missed fortune,
a drought opening to ice age fruition
in the holy garden

beneath the tree of Good and Evil and its seeds
browned with a madness,
strong, birthed into a woodland street

low, dim face,
burnt with crazed flesh hunger
to consume a poet's lie,
lips all red

excerpt from "ghost!"