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.

________

Lost by RK

Shadow of Mother Earth by RK

Gutless City by RK 

Wormhole Cafe by RK

Parting the Starless Night by RK

___________

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

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II: A Sonic Narrative from the Far West

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I (Album Art Remake) 

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II (Album Art)

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." John Cage

Essentially one album, Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I & II are to be listened to in continuity, as a single expression of seeking through sound as voice and agency for the soul of the word. Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II is conceptually the final track of I, divided into 4 parts for listening.

Experiment with your ear, and look to the bottom of this post for an aural transport to the Far West.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II

On the margins of the vast, interlocking web of technology and nature, with broken instruments (both acoustic and electronic), we are beginners on the road to merging technology with all of life in this the human experience of Earth and the inner world as an evolutionary being of conscious development. 

Imagine sitting at the edge of a fire in the raw, teeming wilderness. The forest is thick. The air is heavy with an unbroken gamut of vegetable breathing. Warming your hands by the fire, under cover of starlight and the faint haunts of a new moon, the mind seeps and seethes with memories, dreams and reflections on the world “out there”. Civilization and its discontented fires of electric madness pour into your brain like an acid flashback. The Earth is still, yet your hands shake. So, before you is the music of the muses, the bare wonderment takes its own course into the heavens and hells of your own nature. Through music, the seeker of solitude purges the concrescence of electro-social distension. Discordant dissonance marries with harmonic essence as the jeering subtle flesh of mad electricity merges in the mind, hand and heart of one in touch with the strings, blood and fire of creative sound.  

Part I - The seeker discovers music as a beginner. The instrument is slightly out of tune, and the playing is imperfect. The melodies are introduced with electronic music, featuring static electric synthetic effects throughout. The seeker gains mental balance by overcoming the first break beyond the shores of civilization into the open expanse of nature beyond, where other, even more trying challenges are to be had in confrontation with the self, exposed and untended.  

Part II – With emboldened consciousness, the instrument and its sound are clearer. A fire has been set and night opens to the gorgeous possibilities of the sonic imagination. Electric distension is transformed into unseen beauty. The grandeur of melodic instrumentation opens up with a new strength of diversity. As the clouds above part to reveal pure sky, memory and reflection are enlightened through joining with traditions of seeking, as with the sonic movement into Middle-Eastern influenced lute music, translated to guitar in creative solitude with the empty awe of all-potent Nature. 

Yet, the seeker soon realizes this is only the beginning of the journey, and there have ever been electric distension scattered throughout the night’s hearth. By the end, the celebratory feel becomes more solemn as the seeker attains the first seed of self-knowledge, and understands the need to set one’s own pace and prepare certain deliberation before embarking on the pathless sojourn ahead. The music ends with the realization that it is dawn, and the horizon welcomes ahead.    

Part III – Reprieve from the journey, alongside a mountain ascent, beneath a cliff. Cool air from a spring entices the cold march of winter’s coming winds to turn and wade in the lush mountain air. Without a fire, music is the warmth. Creative passion warms from the inside with the brightest of flames. At first, blowing hard into the hands and fingers for the warm breath to spread throughout and allow for the wealth of instrumental music to unfold, the seeker stops playing as soon as it begins to rain. As in Taoist tradition, when the rain makes rhythmic motion, and the melodies of the thunderclouds fly with the magical presence of wind, one is to listen, and be humbled by the music of the spheres.  

Part IV – Beginning with a light touch of electronic moments, the music glides atop sounds of weather, especially as the seeker gets closer to the ocean. Following rivers, streams and tributaries, faring flash floods and rain-swept gullies, the seeker emerges from the wilderness with a great boon of discovery. A new instrument to behold! Notice, the music approaches harmonies with the natural way of impermanence and unity, as opposed to listening, where creative interaction with nature breeds a kind of musical kinship among humans and all life on Earth. As the seeker sights the ocean, the new instrument is played, ending the music and the journey. 

The new instrument is the xaphoon. Invented in the 1970’s in Hawaii, the xaphoon, also known as the bamboo sax, is a contemporary single-reed woodwind. The track ends with a homage to Jack Kerouac describing San Francisco, the very edge of the west, to crystallize the final xaphoon improvisation solo; a traversal of the “far west” in sound. 

Influences: Bill Frisell, Hamza El-Din, Vi An Diep, Steve Roach, Brian Eno, stones/minerals, earth, water/ice, winter, landscapes of the North American west, Jack Kerouac, fire, trees, reflection, solitude

See my previous post: Music of the Dream Author: Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Release 

___________

On a clean, medical train through Sudan, my Nilotic companion eyes me with a piercing grin as we pass south of Juba into the New South. We have arrived at his hard-won home, South Sudan. His smile is buried deep within the pain of intergenerational loss, the hellfire of war still sting his reddening eyes as he tears up, the pictures of his innocent family smolders into the soil. The land speaks with his voice.

Southern Nubia by Friedrich Otto Georgi

A number of tourists from Europe and America depart from the train stop, as we all exit to proudly march through the gates of the newly formed customs center. Before I ready myself to stand up and follow in the foreigner’s line, I see the winking horror of rats, spiders and snakes twice the size of my face, gnawing at my brains in the middle of the first night. I’ve read such stories. This is open country for sub-Saharan life-threatening insects and arachnids galore. If only they sold us preventive supplies before stepping foot on the blood-torched burial grounds of a still cold reconciliation between tribes and kin. The first thing I see is a smile, wide and innocent as the all-embracing horizon. Before I entered Sudan, an asylum seeking Sudanese refugee in Egypt told me, “Sudan is the easiest place to kill someone.”

Tornai Man from Sudan by Gyula Tornai

I heave a sigh of relief as the other westerners depart into the folds of pyramidal shopping and freewheeling nature photography. I journey on, to the heart of the people. My friend is ever stoic, silent, basking in the wonders of a new nation in its infancy, victorious after so many losses, after so many needless ends, there is at least one fresh start to be had, and one that all can have a part in. Concrete residential towers spring up almost before my eyes, fresh paint lingers and drips throughout the dry stinging horizon of African sun.

African Riddle by John Mainga

Men work diligently, with the force of triumph, erecting monumental stone structures, for future generations to thrive, for the plentiful, abundant optimism of the future. The complexes are almost identical to the substandard suburban housing of greater Cairo, where many must have returned from as once-neglected refugees, now with a determined hand and proud say in social affairs. They don sun-deflecting head coverings, and traditional footwear made with scarlet fabric and coins. Women are nowhere to be seen.

Battle of Tamai by Geoffrey Douglas Giles

We drive on, deeper into the south. The more south we go, the fresher the earth, the more bare the optimism, the more innocent the smiles. The more south we go, welcomes are heard with more sincerity. The air is full of potential. The energy is warm, and the harshness that once thrived now sees a chance of dwindling beneath the pulsing chests of hard work. My friend dissipates into the sunlight now flooding our vehicle; as the inimitable human spirit washes us clean of fear.  

____________

The completion of this instrumental music project, "Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I & II " sets the ground for the next stage of my creative development, where I feature my experimental writing as spoken word together with my world music instrumentation. More art, music and writing next week! 

Climate Changes Civil Society To Support Dreamers

"This morning Munira Sibai, a Syrian-American student with SustainUs, delivered this speech on behalf of young people (YOUNGO). Although many governments could not be bothered to listen to their citizens, civil society was present in force: supporting Munira and each other in a way that governments can only dream of. Onwards." Earth in Brackets BLOG (Dec. 7 2012)

Tonight, as I drifted away, I read the latest Democracy Now! headlines on climate change. Civil society and democracy are shifting gears for full speed ahead as the human race confronts the most pressing issue yet known to humankind: A Warming Earth. 

Read the latest World Bank Research analysis on the devastating impacts of unheeded climate change warnings. At 4 degrees warmer, the science begins to frighten. 

Earlier tonight, as I cycled home, I met a bewildered fox. Scared and nervous, we approached each other. My fear suddenly transformed as I saw fear in the fox's eyes. I glided past carefully. I witnessed this incredible animal confusedly find an exit from the paved city pathways to the nearby riverbanks. I think of Native proverbs that ask, "who will speak for our beloved animals?" 

________

The candles are now all reconstituted wax. The rain boils and steams before it reaches its earthen ground. The sky is on fire and I need a new name.

In Peril by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Through my window of impoverishment, a sanded frame of dirt, I see tanks spewing the ire of mankind. Fire is the breath of unreason. Violence spreads across the land.

Miniature diorama in the Herat Military Museum by Marius Arnesen

Bombs and machine tracks seed great pocks of holes in the earth. The clouds are dark with soot and anger. Lightning cracks through the smiles of silenced memories. Families are swept away like dust.

Lunshunku battle during the Sino-Japanese war (1895) by Unknown

Fending off the soul-puncturing thunder of war, I flee through the bureaucratic maze of a police state. Warmongers drive their piercing insanity into my eyes, as I feel my way through back entrances and obsolete hallways. The border embassy shakes at the foundation. Our earth will be interminably scarred. We are equally victims and perpetrators of widespread ecological domestic abuse.

The Immaculate Conception, detail: Dragon's Eye by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

In a vile trench of near-death urgency, I climb out, and into the sun of borderlands. Having escaped the eruptive core of my country’s open, bleeding veins of disintegration, I wade in scintillating wetlands. Vibrant green pasture, lily pads and low-lying bogs hydrate my contemplative sight.

Sunset over wetlands by Julian Falat

I can almost see beyond the untimely closure of history. Birds and insects sleep with day, at peace, like me, in restful respite.

_________

"Escalations nerve-wracking, lonely murmurs murmuring

Crescent peaks dangling under bums grateful with uprooted membranous petrified and calcified flesh

Journey to roust the kneeling mind, with the desiring missed find, to be missed by nations feigning the patient behind swollen gum-brain awry, with skull-ache

“kinj moduls vrent speen og”

Desiring missiles
Desired missing
Failing nations

Patient fang"

excerpt from "Cajoled Spine-Tap"

The Twilight of a Psychopathic Civilization

“We also, when building a relationship with people, believe that they are real. What a psychopath does is they weave a picture of a person that’s really a dream. It’s a spirit. It’s not real...When the psychopath is done with you, they leave. They’ve never had a bond with you. It’s all been a game…feeling no empathy…” Paul Babiak, psychologist, author of Snakes in Suits in I Am Fishead

I've showed this film to a friend of mine who has worked in mega corporations, and been subsequently laid off for his personable style of mitigating interrelationships between different interest groups. Simply  put, he was not a megalomaniac nor a psychopath, increasingly necessary prerequisites for keeping one's job in the field of human indecency, the corporate world.

I live in a city where oil corporations run amuck, seen as the life of the party, and there are Fisheads among us here, this is a city ruled by psychopaths, and the status quo lauds them. My friend, mentioned above, who worked for an oil company described their worldview well, "they are a storage and pipeline facility, and their worldview is as narrow as one looking down a pipeline."

________

Arctic light fills the top of the room with a brittle delicacy, like the tooth of a gentle jaw in the unknown hours of a white night. I sit across from a well-known theatre music composer. In his characteristic black jacket, he eyes me with the filling presence of boreal light, as a friend in the mysterious haunts of a northern dream. I’m at work on an essay. The title marks a conscious turnabout towards the psychic rush of art in the unconscious; a memory become prophecy as the light dims and the man disappears with my thought.

Arctic fox in winter mountain by Magne Håland

Leaving my room for the main complex of the northern university, I feel on edge as concave walls cut with sharp angles into grass-laden gardens, while up above the window glass refracts the incessant sun with chilling delight. As I move through a room, I am accosted for passing over an international boundary.

Mikak and Tukauk by John Russell

An Inuit woman breathes with intensive definition as she explains the national boundary, seemingly on the grounds of the school. With a bright empathy, I willingly and pleasantly follow the guidelines and roam across the border daily, with attention and respect for the defense of physical difference. 

________

        Throughout the sanctified fields of one human home
                  Lived to the final digression into creative madness 

The right to be
        As connected as all beings
                  With electric happiness
                          Outside

- excerpt "Lugubrious Background Nearing an Electromagnetic Haze"

To War or To Peace? Dream Meditations of Cicero

The Young Cicero Reading by Vincenzo Foppa

"Here I had the following dream, occasioned, as I verily believe, by our preceding conversation—for it commonly happens that the meditation and discourse which employ us in the day time, produce in our sleep an effect somewhat similar to that which Ennius writes happened to him about Homer, of whom in his waking hours he used frequently to think and speak.

My ancestor Africanus, I thought, appeared to me in a shape, with which I was better acquainted from his picture, than from any personal knowledge of him. When I perceived it was he, I confess I trembled with consternation—but he addressed me, saying, take courage, my Scipio, be not afraid, and carefully remember what I shall say to you.

...put an end to a most dangerous war."

The Reluctance of Scipio by Sebastiano Ricci

From the final surviving fragments of Cicero's Republic, translated by Francis Barham in where Cicero concludes the great struggle encountered by Scipio Africanus or Scipio the African to defend Rome from Hannibal's Carthage, when through his dreaming, he contemplates in himself the rivalries of human glory, outmatched by the revelries of spiritual splendour at witnessing the great battles raging in the firmament above, whose harmonies and glories far surpass the slight human presence on Earth in relative light.

I could not help casting my eyes every now and then on the earth. On which, says Africanus, I perceive you are still employed in contemplating the seat and residence of mankind. Now if it appears to you so small, as in fact it really is, despise its vanities, and fix your attention for ever on these heavenly objects. Is it possible that you should attain any human applause or glory that are worth the contending for?

Through a spiritual humility and an intellectual prowess, Cicero aligns with the famous wisdom of Blake, where he echoes, "all deities reside in the human breast" from Cicero's prose, "Know, then, that you are a god—for a god it must be that vivifies, and gives sensation, memory, and foresight to the body to which it is attached, and which it governs and regulates..."

A Dream by William Blake
___________

Absolutely ridiculous head of hair, a laughable explosion of tangling fibers, uprooted death spindly and matted, and it grows. Within seconds, my entire face is hair and the dimming light of two eyes, buried in a mishmash of unwashed, lifeless ending. My half-toothless smile goes unseen.

Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake

And at the spring, a fellow isolate, pioneer of the mountainous wood, leads me with caution to the entrance of a water-born cave. A sable hollow, overrun with an immense flooding, an abundance of water only rivaled by my superfluous crown. The mountain cliffs, almost as sheer as leant towers of the modern world, embrace my energetic merriment as I peer over the rapid face and into the swallowing gorge ahead. Here, I know the meaning of possibility, losing my reflection over the quickened flow.

__________

What shared outpouring wore down the iris and pupil
of the already blind
          And cut out of the legs from the paralyzed
          street of ghost walkers
                   Who hang onto passerby cars
                   with historical envy and thick desire
                             In the burning legs
                             that carry our men and women home
                                        From the taxes of war
                                        In terrorist fires
                                                  Exploding
                                                  across the Fourth of July

                                                  skies

                                                  Crying for Chinese tears
                                                  to put out the flame
                                                           With workhorse hands
                                                            Bleeding
                                                            over the Maoist grave
                                                                      A permanent red

To divulge in a communal sense of suffering
           With the Islamic world
                     Now enmeshed in divided hatred
                     with their Asian brothers

- excerpt from "Improvisational Brevity in the Public Eye"

U, The Middle Way in AUM (Om)

Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva within an OM, in a Mahabharata manuscript from 1795 by Unknown

"Taijasa, whose field is the dream state, is the second
sound, U, because this is an excellence, and contains the
qualities of the other two. He who knows thus, exalts the flow
of knowledge and becomes equalised...

Internal to the waking consciousness, and pervading the waking consciousness, there is a subtler function of this very same consciousness, which is subjectively known as the dream-consciousness, or taijasa, and universally known as hiraṇyagarba, or the Cosmic Subtle Consciousness...

Neither can the waking experiences exhaust us, nor can the dream experiences completely comprehend our being. We seem to be something that is capable of being a witness of both the states. This witness is not a party either to the waking state or to the dreaming state. We are essentially, a third element altogether, something independent of waking and dream."

- excerpts from Swami Krishnananda's Mandukya Upanishad, pp. 12, 57, 59 [italics mine] 

________

The antique wood, a rocking chair, the once attributed tradition of upright relaxation, buried in the tourist fizz of los sapos market. Cobblestone streets mark the way for foreigners blending with hip-tied drum groups, Hare Krishna propagandists and the local elote vender. The Mexican wine of a Sunday Tianguis gropes at the neck, to smother the chosen speech in a howl of awakened want. 

I shudder behind a sunglass find, the inimitable Huichol hand, weaves a metaphysical mat of mystical enthusiasm, and so we play nonstop, enlightening the mouthed eyes with a music unheard. Nightfall, we are approached by a woman of colonial smiles. She breathes a home into our highest imagining, a place to live, among the cold stone steps of vanquished need and fulfilled sight. Her place is an ideal home, with a small bedroom tucked away into the corner of an empty room, full with the comforting hospitality of a traditional sunbaked Southern welcoming. We decide to continue on, despite the whipped lure of our eyes.

Returning north, I accept the invitation of a friend to ascend the mightiest tower in the world, newly built in our city. Hiking through a golf course, I reminisce on a similarly forged path through dense forest upwards toward the Rocky mountain peaks. Then, I see it. Eye’s nearly gouged by the immensity; I prick myself. 

The conical rise extends upward towards unknown alchemical engineering, and more, an unsupported bridge unites two lower towers from the bottom-center, and direct to the very top! My friend, always acting over-anxious, rushes us towards the bridge to the top. We enter the complex, prefaced by the usual commercial dives, a mall of unreasonable hacks festering like bottom feeders. 

With an upturned stomach, I hold on as we are shot out, gliding over a glass floor, as a rudderless, engineless boat would skim over placid waters. I dare not look down. In the building, the quick mindscape turns into a flood of waning mirth, and mindless havoc beams with unintelligible delight as people squander the golden drug of shameless technology, a great phallic middle finger, flipped by the entire Western world at once! To who? For what? It is directly skyward.

My friend and I quickly exit, having passed through the immense spire of cylindrical unreality, and we pour out onto an uptown street in mid-city. The concrete jungle returns us to the fading glory of a now obsolete infrastructure. 

Ghosts of the past fly like demonic insects through the gut-smattered concrete claustration. I notice a few as my friends, and meet them. On the outskirts of the unsubtle building, a beacon of terror, an insignia of waste, we burrow through an old tunnel system, climbing out into the abandoned system of underground pathways, leading to the base of the alien tower. 

Suddenly arrested by the horror of war, the sky blasts open with the shockwaves of a thousand bombs billowing like hot nails over the soft-fingered ground. As missiles breach the catastrophic abandonment of wires and tunnels ahead and behind, I loathe over remembered imagery from Iraq, Palestine, and endless claims to vengeance on our land, born of blood and built of sand.  

________

choking cry,
the rasping imperfection in ecstatic beauty,
momentous experience beyond human conflict
in the word and sound of a throat-muted music,
the play of life
final and resounding
in a tumult of white haze
around the English nape

croaking in the sharp whispered present,
fuming dry-eyed numberless fingerings
before a trickster’s Goddess tree,
pained to an ink-smeared fire on the blistering urban horizon

sleepless,
gone into aged reason
and the ethos of undreamt madness

- excerpt from "Assimilating America-Asia"