Call of the Sacred River: Pather Panchali and Dreams of Varanasi

Wife

"Let's go to Benares. Don't the orators make lots of money?"

Husband

"We can't go. How can we? This is my ancestral home; how can I leave it?"

Wife

"Why not? You were away eight years before. You left me at my father's and never wrote."

Husband

"Then I did not know you sweet you are."

Wife

"Save your compliments. This is my home, too. But look at it; it's like living in the forest. At night the jackals prowl around. There are no neighbours I can talk to. You are not always here and sometimes I'm so depressed. You won't understand these things. You live in your work. Sometimes you're paid, sometimes not. I had dreams, too, of all the things I would do.

Outside Their Door, An Old Lady Beggar Sings:

"Those who came before are gone / I am left behind, a penniless beggar / Day draws to its close, night's mantle descends / Row me across to the other side"

From the film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road)

The same night I look back to Pather Panchali for a few words of wisdom on the experience of human dreaming, I coincidentally happened on the film, "Beyond" by NYC-based photographers Joey L. and Cale Glendening. The quote in the classic 1955 Bengali film Pather Panchali speaks to the luring effect that the ancient city of Benares commands, also known as Varanasi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Indeed, it is impressive to see the holy tradition of sadhus depicted in the light of modern photographic excellence. The final scenes in Joey L.'s film are incredibly touching as a young sadhu teaches about how the world is made for peace, and all must be as the sun, seeing all beings as equals and offering the light of wisdom with an exuberant heart to all indiscriminately. Long Live Mother India! 

_________

As the world turns, dreams often fall into the abyss of earthly shadows and solar illumination 

The Jaws of Life by RK

We Are Not Above Extinction by RK

Light On The Little Road by RK

Bridge Under Serene Sky by RK

All Rivers Sacred by RK

__________

and silence, and nothing, and silence,
and how in silent searching , the wandering fades

a trespasser in the popular living happen-stance of  “honest” life,
stopped,
self-betrayed,
to tarry with biblical heat
and white-skinned eyes

paranoiac doom
in the aftermath of domestic civilization
...

calling back to the childless dream
Earth
...

returning from within
the simplest symbolic stare into the beaten human sigh
pointing downwards

upwards

west and east
with the surest of numbered lies,
telling children to fear death and bless the flesh with ungrateful ears, blocked
to the great mystery
that is not
that I am.

excerpts from "that I am silence"

The Poetics of Pindar in the Shadow of Man

Apotheosis of Homer by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
(Pindar is holding the lyre up to Homer - left)

"Things of a day--what are we, and what not? Man is a dream of shadows."

Pindar’s Pythian Ode VIII, lines 92-97 

In the introduction, to this Gutenberg Project, edition, first printed in 1874, the first paragraph reads:

Probably no poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar finds so few and so infrequent readers. The causes are not far to seek: in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty of his language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought, resulting mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt transitions...  

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Extant Odes of Pindar, by Pindar

I feel in resonance with this statement, besides the self-proclamation of my being a "poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar", but in his evaluation of his difficulty, i.e. dense language, obscure thought and allusive and abrupt transitions. I wonder if this is not a symptom of authentic new literature in general. For example, a crucial voice in this realm is Charles Bernstein and his "Attack of the Difficult Poems", read one of the first essays from this book, "Against National Poetry Month As Such" to understand the pertinence.

Truthfully, in dream, as well as in verse, there is a pop culture stagnation on the mind. Should we all sing and listen and read easy lyrics and welcoming verse, while the lucidity of literary interpretation and nightly dreams remain ever so evasive in their pantomime mimesis of psychological form? A lucid awakening plays out over the genera of new and renewed creative seeds blooming as it were infinitely maddening, as the apex of the mind's delicate host.

_________

The haunting seeds of lost friendship and the weak figment of their passing is numb unfeeling silence, unheard. My heart clamors for reconciliation in noetic visions beyond reason, where the rational mind bursts open into a field of images, a broken and pent up rage to a cinder of memory.

Halemaumau, Lake of Fire by David Howard Hitchcock

Their eyes, and the pulsating muscles of my playful cousins, in mid-wrestle at the masculine chest of brotherly camaraderie in this family of blue-eyed men send me past the workman’s vine to a host of health-inscribed thoughts of expatriate exile exhumed from a life brought up to resume the business of American sign language, the ignorant who of excellence in academic abstraction, in social chutes and ladders of wily self-prophecy, and to look upon the face of a sterling-minded mage, whose throat cast a bitter respite onto the quickening of youth into age. I looked for temptation, to tempt me away in rooms of stolen face.

Detail of Lucan Portrait (Scar Eye) by Leonardo da Vinci

There, in the banquet hall, an uppity boast of townsmen saved of our irreligious in-sight, the movers of the day quell the footstep rebellion with damaging drink and superlative plates. I eye a mash-up of delectable fine-tipped cuisine, and sit, as one of them, unseen, inside. Unnoticed, I wade in the cool waters of the riche divide. The veil of misty superstition lifts at my seamless intervention in the realm of immortal fruits, and I finish my serving with a drool.

Dessert by Willem Claeszoon Heda

I see more. As I reach for a dessert at a nearby table, my conspicuity is urged into the fore, and my hand is re-directed, to return to the shale heart of my incising friendship with the embittering death at hand in the nook of an isolated city, dry with meager helpings from the nostalgic bread of a million savage thoughts of implacably naïve blood.  

_________

In an instantaneous recognition at Earth’s bare wonderment,
The stir of our breath
In the wind and pulse of sweat from the face
At true love’s rhyme
Under clouds, glowing with the luster of sky and an atmospheric rain
Bellowing in the blown heat
A thunderous moisture in the kiss from a Columbian Goddess

excerpt from "Bare Wonderment"

At the Romantic Edge, Before the First Impression

The Golden Bough by J.M.W. Turner

"WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients." Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 1

Lake Nemi by J.M.W. Turner

__________

Reclined on plush couches in a generic condo lobby, my friend and I watch a political debate. Angered by a statement by the Prime Minister, he becomes extremely deviant in his manner. “No one should be living in Canada.” The argument goes on to delineate the environmental truths of socio-historical degradation in the wake of our 21^st century fate. Mindless, he unzips the entire leather covering and filches it for a sell. I follow in cheeky amazement.

Blasted knocks deliver crushing blows to the weak door, the hinges creak and splinter. A mass of Jewish men greedily express their intense fury. I unlock the door ever so slightly, leaving the chain lock in place. “Your friend’s killed our boy. A little man is dead.” Their mouths sputter with chainsaw smoke as they charge ultimatums and death threats in the name of my absent friend. “He’s skipped town,” I excuse. Unwilling to confront their standing guard, whose immovable post at the front of my residence is an unwelcoming barrier to my normal life, I flee with no plan to return.

Petworth House, Interior by J.M.W. Turner

After a filthy cheap bus ride, I clamber out upon the beach sand, and peering into the bright daze of lake horizon, I see my friend in a drunken rage at the water’s edge, swinging a heavy sack. As I approach, I see madness in his eyes. He is another person altogether, I sense a body in the leather couch covering. “Why didn’t you sell it?” I yell over crashing waves and turbulent wind. He simply eyes me with confounding disinterest and without a moment’s passing, he flings me headlong into the water, where we are all to drown with the corpse-filled leather covering. I swim, and as he plummets to the lake floor, suicidal and lost to the world, I grab through the heavy seaweed and rocky outcroppings with salt and stone eviscerating my every bit of skin of its human moisture. A whale’s fume stings my side and I feel I am being helped along, a fellow mammal and helper in my midst. And the undertow sucks me ever deeper beyond the shore’s shallow depths out to the plain sea.

Fishermen at Sea by J.M.W. Turner

Marooned on an island, miraculously alive, I am cast over a rocky shoal, where the sea moss hangs in a color scheme of subdued purples and deep greens. A man, of unknown origin, aids me in crossing a hillock, emptied of its cavernous rock, a mere sparsely covered hollow of mossy, volcanic emergence. As we reach out over the pockmarked swill, the entire island’s mass becomes visible, a wonderwork of natural phenomena, indescribable in its wonder: a truly new land.     

_________

in the shamanic din of civilized inclinations
to become the oldest persona of grace, emergent
of land intoxicated by the avian lords
who roam tearfully in landless bush
above the streaming Pacific's current
fanning to seed
atop island exotics
and breach the blind exploration
from nothing

to an essence of discovery
in the learned,
seated life

- excerpt from "Drugged Love, Seated Life"

The Archaic Rape of Earthly Society

"Society is designed so people are free to choose their own interests, develop formerly hidden potential, and pursue dreams without government intervention or financial constraint." (p. 78)

- Final sentence (before the conclusion) in Jacque Fresco's book, "Designing the Future" of The Venus Project

_______

I can see the eye of the storm. The massive plain tumbles and writhes under the violent sky. Winds frost and spit with ferocity over the engulfed earth. With dramatic sweeps, I gesture into the monstrous movement, the land hurricane slows with animated motion with my every beckoning.

In a torrent, I glide effortlessly directly into the eye of the storm. Debris swirls about at lightning speeds, coins engraved with headdress-adorned figures move into my vision with holographic reality.

In a misdirected bout of blind seizing into the frothy gusts, I grab onto a globular orb. A living replica of Earth, the orb is with piercing light, vibrant with enduring mystery. As I begin to recognize continental form within the orb, gazing with absolute absorption, the storm subsides overhead.

I am safe, overlooking a ruined high plain fever of ancient life. Aztec, Mayan and African features bedeck a man and his two women-wives. There is a striking, volatile cruelty in the air; survivors of the apocalyptic storm are moved to a traumatic escalation of end rites. The man is fully armed and adorned in ceremonial dress. He forces one woman to dig in the mud.

As I observe, I feel a heavy weight around my neck. I look down at my breast to find a brilliant necklace, of thick girth, bejeweled with precious, exotic stone, around my neck. The woman, bent over, with bottom up, is penetrated violently by the man, thumping into her so hard that blood streaks down her thighs. She continues to dig at his command, while she is raped.

In horror, no one notices I am present, watching the stubborn abuse, shocked. The man grabs her vagina as he continues to penetrate her, wiping his face in the putrid blood. “This will make me young again! Whore!” he yells in wild abandon.

As the hole she’s dug becomes large enough for her to sit in, he pushes her, laughingly in the subsurface mud. Other men walk over, sick with tortured minds, they lower their loin cloths and ejaculate into the mud pit, as more and more men fill the woman’s pit, others pour in creamy goat’s milk.

The lady, neck-high in the lowering goop, cries in terror, her psychotic eye gleans a ghastly stare into my eyes. She’s the only one who notices my innocent presence. The other lady then climbs atop her head, naked from the waist down; she begins menstruating a gorge of blood into the pit.

Speechless, I race forward with the orb in hand, and leap over the menstruating woman on top, stabbing her in the back. Impaled, the woman immediately becomes a skeleton. All the others follow, becoming the shallow dust of incinerated, skeletal remains. The orb transforms from its metal shaft, on top a gold coin forms.

The entire ritual site is then swept in the height of the storm once more, as I look into the engraving on the gold coin topping the orb, swirls of coins and debris, with feathery headdresses and ancient icons flash and flicker in the fading mud of ground, disappearing below me. 

_______

Rape

"In a dream, as in real life, rape has very little to do with sex. It is about power, control, anger, and other very destructive emotions. In order to understand this dream, you may need to think about the areas of your life that causes you great anxiety and fear. If you are superstitious, take this dream as a warning. Take precautions, protect yourself emotionally and physically and don't engage in careless behaviours. A dream about rape (whether it was you or someone else being attacked in the dream) suggests that you are feeling violated in some way. Something or someone is jeopardizing your self-esteem and emotional well-being." (iDream)

_______

once travel to a foreign country becomes reminiscent of that
one too-many,
that last girl
before profound commitment
to feminine and masculine union

in the outer-penetrated world,
that person must begin anew to create novels;
i.e. the moment's performance in novelty

a historic moment, the duration of time itself,
temporal currency formed and formless together,
emboldening our hands

sweet as the dreaming, unborn child,
in mother's prophetic womb

lit with raw desire
to fill the inward sky with primordial flight
bringing life to a boiling gamble

...

smoothed over with aged, colonial bureaucracy
craving selfless deserts
to be in solace,
yet drained with inhuman night

an eclipse spans this biblical day
cast over a rude Mesoamerican eye

...

a near-rape
whose victimized lover embodied human love
with the animalistic need to survive,

and the virgin blood
glutted in cults

alive with a supernal darkness
unto depths that thrive on the breast milk of Mother Earth's deeply passed esophagus
drawing aphrodisiac urges

to thrill onlooker's gods with human creation,
flooding the universe
as lactations' milk warms the needful infant's belly
still dripping from the inner womb
flowing with primordial goo,
their warmth is the bed in which we feel unprotected

sex

losing grain
as the foreigner's sites are exhausted before the eternal Altar,
whispering "Create!"

- excerpts from "travel to a foreign country" 

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

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

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

My Hanging Drum Falls to its own Beat

Contrasting Sounds by Wassily Kandinsky

A doumbek drum hangs from a thin pine twig, and as I notice, it falls crashing to a strange forest pit beside a pond directly beneath a scraggly ancient tree, an immense figure, an arboreal delight yet demanding a kind of fear in its profound attention of the earth through its girth of roots, and beside the water’s edge, I pick up my drum from the ground, and yet a piece has been cracked off, a square piece, perfectly removed, and yet I still put it to my hip, and suddenly it feels as if a skin has replaced its plastic head and my hands find a delicate touch with rapid rhythmic technique in producing vibration’s adamant trill, a complete sound wave in the full emptiness of a masterful humbling against the unbroken skin of human touch met with the cover of Earth’s delicate heartbeat bringing that fullness to yet another creation of space in the continuous sound, ever unbroken by finger’s brush as a purr unites breath with rest

September 3, 2011

Caedmon and Dream

Caedmon is the father of English song. The first poet known in written English.

According to an 8th century monk, Bede, "...he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream..." (quote found here.)


In a recent dialogue/discussion on the source of Caedmon's impact in our collective psyche the following has been written:

The first English poetry is directly intertwined with a fascinating way of exploring and/or identifying "dream"
             as inspiration or even a muse
That is so wildly intoxicating its subject

They under the spell found in the likes of Caedmon's song
             need no other medium
             through which to express their musing,
                          not even themselves

When the muse overtakes,
              all that's left is pure inspired expression
                          cast into history from a seed of dream.

How does the original source of written English "dream-speak" if you will, impart to us the wisdom of written poetic expression in the English language?

How do we reunite our written English poetry with that initial spark of dream which so moved Caedmon to inspire the entire forthcoming history of poetic expression in our written language, in our writing, and finally, in writing our dreams?


In an imaginative revisioning of a response by William A. Sigler

The bifurcation of the dream into experience and meaning is one aspect of the fall of man.


(this image is in the public domain, more info can be found here.)

Joseph, the great dream wizard of the Old Testament,
             whose powers got him both sold into slavery and the most trusted advisor of the pharaoh,

             did not distinguish between dream and interpretation.

But dreams have become,
              as Holderlin put it,

             “the all-perceiving abyss”
                      of this “destitute time.”

I sense this wonderful blog idea of yours to be more than a “waking life” journal
              that urges “dreamers unite” to “ease and relieve the burden of dreams”

              but a Holderlin-like journey
                      to the abyss,
                      the spaces between
                                 where the one is concealed and perhaps retrievable

                                 with the purest of poetic word.

Heidegger,
in his remarkable series of essays on Holderlin,

stresses that this dream space is the only trace left of our enlightened state,

the longing in dreams is the only true longing remaining to us
              now that the gods have left,
 and it is the poet’s singular task to recover these traces
              by journeying into the dream abyss with eyes open.

I’m feeling inspired
to take on a translation of Andenken
in honor of your own
transitional and open-ended state.



End Note:

Let's all continue this breathtaking and uniquely inspired dialogue!

What better place to imagine Holderlin's "abyss" than our own shrinking core of internet communications technology as it challenges us to further our reaches into our most hidden of corners in the home of our minds and most loosely tied knots on the docks of our realism.

Free Dream from Thought and Language...so we may enter Dream's innocent purity preceding its existence beside Ego and begin to imagine its refreshingly catastrophic gorgeous mastery over the human intellect!


(link to the source of this inspired dialoge/discussion)