Dreamtime and the Repatriation of Sacred Letters

Stencil art showing unique clan markers and dreamtime stories symbolising attempts to catch the deceased's spirit

"The source of the word alcheringa is Arunta, an aboriginal language of Australia. Sometimes translated as “the dreamtime,” it refers to a mythic world that existed at the beginning of time and continues to exist in our own time as a parallel world, revealing itself whenever we dream and whenever someone speaks or sings a myth." Dennis Tedlock, An Introduction to the Alcheringa Archive (From Jacket2, also on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems & Poetics) 

In the first edition of "Alcheringa" a quote reads, "He who loses his dreaming is lost", attributed to "Australian Aborigine". In opening of the Autumn 1970 journal, the final "Statement of Intention" reads, "to combat cultural genocide in all its manifestations". That being said, it is curious to read such studies as that printed in the Australian Journal of Media & Culture (vol. 2, no. 1 1987), where an article by Vijay Mishra entitled, "Aboriginal representations in Australian texts" reads, 

Forgotten I lost dreaming
Country I left forgotten lost 

which is epigrammatieally reduced, by the translator T.G .H. Strehlow, to "He who loses his dreaming is lost," is directly related to a failure to perceive the radical difference between oral poetics (the fluid verse translation) and the wrillen text (the epigrammatic reduction). Obviously no one can maintain a total separation of the oral from the written.

Meanwhile, if one searches in the active publications of Australia's Central Land Council, an Indigenous repertoire of activism and scholarship dedicated to principles of sovereignty, there is a very interesting article on the Strehlow, the subject of lost attribution in Alcheringa's English translation from "Australian Aborigine"entitled, "The Strehlow collection of sacred objects" regarding further issues of repatriation, while focusing on the repatriation of sacred object collected by the modern anthropologist, as opposed, in the case of Alcheringa, the repatriation of sacred letters, collected by post-modern anthropologists of world literature.

Headgear worn during dancing (wood, human hair, kangaroo hair, feathers); Arrernte people, Australia

________

My mother visits her perception of my reality. North of here, it gets even colder, earlier, and winter is almost perpetual. I ask her exactly what her interests are. She is unresponsive. There are two streets that accommodate visitor appeal, with cafes and the like. We walk on the frozen sidewalk ground. A haze of white ice sheathes the panorama, compressing the moment into one look of sheer petrification. Walking down the main street, it seems as though no one lives here, the outside aesthetics are drab and unused, mere coverings for the inside hospitality, driven by weathered necessity. As we walk into a café, I realize I have enemies here. In the back hall, awaiting our hot teas, a youth of my age wrestles my muscles and joints in a twisted bout of unwanted pain. Unable to satisfy his need for violence, I ask that we exit the café, and so we return into the cold, sunless ache of our thirsting feet. 

Shoes (made from feathers and human hair); Arrernte people, Australia

Midway through the year, I go south to visit my father, to witness birth. With video camera in hand, I capture my contracting stepmother on the front lawn overlooking the St. Lawrence River. In great joyful upheaval, she cries, “it’s a boy!” as the body emerges. 

Ku-ring-gai_Chase - petroglyph, via Waratah Track (Rock is triassic Hawkesbury Sandstone, 220 million years of age)

That night, sitting lone by the coal-burning fire, I am visited by a presence. A naked Indian, greeting me with the power of a thousand friendships, unites in my melodrama with healing insight. He teaches me the power of the directions, North and South. The cold childless North of human danger and the impenetrable forces of nature, and the warm South of youthful diversion in the over-ritualized haunt of abundant fires. He reaches out to me, to plead with him for the stars to answer in earthly illumination. While with eyes closed, he recounts the bitter tales of repatriation, colonization and the staggering visions of post-genocide rehabilitation, for the entire world. And I wake, alone. The sun, directly overhead in a cloudless sky, is in full eclipse.

________

A presence belied in the soft air aglow with diligent drizzle
         From this, our American lighthouse heaven,
                 Alit with dream
                 in stories told by great-grandmother’s
                          Life lived outside the pages of the “true”
                                      And into the truly earth-quaking
                                      of dream

...

Men whose throats burn with the soil of their unloved mother
        Croaking up agro-fossil drains
                Reaching from modern skylines to prehistory,
                issuing from our Christ-death

...

In the housed mystery of our yet undiscovered world
        Beneath each colonial home
                Shot out of the ugly worldview
                        Misplaced over the moral genealogy

In an ecological philosophy
        To dry the eyes of our spectral hosts
               Who watch and wonder
                        With still unborn eyes

- excerpt from "With Still Unborn Eyes"

The Achuar and the Meaning of an Indigenous Map

“For many years these Achuar communities have dreamt of introducing themselves, their way of life and the beauty of their ancestral lands to the rest of the country and the world. For the Achuar, a dream is not simply a passing, nocturnal illusion without relation to one’s waking life. On the contrary, dreams are gateways allowing communication with the spirits of their ancestors, who come to visit and talk to the living, giving them advice and a vision of their future so that they can tread a clear path in life.” (Source)

_________

North America on a map, tangled in intercalated diagrammatic linearity. A pale shade of red loosely emboldens Native lands. The patchy splotches of coloration on the otherwise black and white delineation of national-political boundary displaces geography with a time-bound worshipping, a cultural veil of truancy, a wakeful respite from truth. Looking at the seemingly random collection of red area follow my eyes as my eyes follow easterly into the heart of New England, my mind is inundated with a series of educational videos on sexual abuse in reserve/reservation communities. Homoerotic visuals tear my stare into blurry remorse for the heady desperation and wasteful racism, looking away from the natural history, the undeserved step over fellow men. As I contemplate the madness of the contemporary imagery presented to me, I turn a corner atop a towering butte in the skyscraping mountainous land, hiking through a valley pass, immersed in the cold sky air, unobstructed by not but stone and hair. 

________

Map

"To dream of a map, or studying one, denotes a change will be contemplated in your business. Some disappointing thing swill occur, but much profit also will follow the change...To dream of following a map means you are going in the right direction in a real life situation. It also symbolizes emotional and spiritual growth...A confusing chart may indicate that you lack a clear sense of direction in your everyday life or are in the midst of changing long term plans." (iDream)

________

to the racist, sexist and conservative religious wine,
intoxicating the West
with a throat climbing upwards
to vomit the female's adam apple,
now so dry, shriveled with frost,
cracked and permanently wasted,
not a thought to re-cycle,
only the Mother (Mater/Matter) abuse,
to forgive latent mindreaders
stating new thought dictionary entries

new, with fresh ink over the staircase travelogue,
leading yet leaderless,
wading in the warm bathwater
fresh and awash with the purest feeling,
drinking earth and swaying so slightly
atop family trees brushing neatly
along the skin-touched pages
leafing soundly into a freed paradigm
lonesome with radical imagination,
to resist the sufferer's cold throne and sleep
instead in the deadly fog of oblivion,
away from the driven masses
who prepare to wake
...
who failed to swear an addiction into existence
over the creator's blue telephone,
hushing the musical light from beyond
into anonymity,
whose authoritarian drug was fixed by the word,
and now silent to the punch,
a subtle dream

slaking the thirst for lucidity to be
in modern consciousness,
say

"it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society" (J. Krishnamurti)

...

a healthy wave reaches sky's peopled shores,
wherein all are recognized within the womb,
unborn demigods come to that awareness,
giving lush expressions to instantaneous action,
rousing impassioned need to flow with an artistic palette,
swimming above extinction in winter's unprepared lulls,
choking the urge toward movement within,
a mental pride

singing zealous
while sad, and diving earnestly
into depression's darkest ignorance

shadow's dust so remote
now only found in greed, sick corners
within a Southerly, Global hate,
trading laws with resistance,
scheming out of natural dependence,
realizing childish humility, and finally
forgiving the precious sources of Love,
kneeling before forests,
swamps, wetlands, rains, fogs,
winds, grasses, bushes, trees,
soils, shores, stones, and all measure of fungal being
as barefoot sleepers,
smiling at the unknown,
unknowingly

- excerpts from "truth, judgment or unknowns"

Speechless Movement of Noetic Sound

"...to use art not as self-expression, but as self-alteration; to become more open." 

"In Zen, they say, if something is boring after 2 minutes, try it for 4, if still boring, try it for 8, 16, 32, and so on. Eventually, one discovers that it's not boring at all, but very interesting."

John Cage

________

At my father’s house, the neighbors are belligerent. They drink in squalor and rev engines in domestic rage, puffing their chests with the heave of self-created poverty, a traumatic school of bundled nerves, fraying and pressed against the hot ice of American dreams. On the road between my father’s and their house, I stare, empathizing with their tragic isolation. As I spin my head around to my father’s lawn, the grass is inundated with naked souls, barefooted and striving with dead honor to lust and feed off each other’s energy. Multi-colored bodies writhe and shake as a spawn of ghosts shrieking wildly in the post-greed high of the stubborn suburb.

Recoiling mad into my private bathroom at my mother’s I freak wryly, drowning my habit in a sore crack addiction. Black pills behind the mirror scream deftly into my ear at all hours. Howls brew, slaking my darkest corner with a dreamless food. Dispassionate and apologetic, I am exposed by my mother, who slowly weans me off the fatal addiction. Re-entering the street, I pass between the spiritual purgatory of population and the isolated wallowing of violent speed.

A time after, I walk carefully through a glowing green brush in the rural vein of the Northeast country. Carrying our instruments, my Love and I meander toward the new home of my father, way out in the bush of Maine. On their property, I play with a friendly cat, shaking a healthy, felled branch over its crooked head, radiant with happy fervor. We are received. I eat a stomach-full of red steak. I haven’t eaten meat in 7 years! The flesh is warm and satisfying. I ask, “Is the steak from Argentina?” The label says, “Made in America” just like any other consumer product. Sitting out by an outdoor hearth in the midday sun, my Love and I begin to play music for the flies. The wind is bright with security and home.

I imagine our next phase, on a bridge in San Francisco, street performing with a lively troupe and befriending a nut seller on our way to public grace.

________

Country

"To dream of being in a beautiful and fertile country, where abound rich fields of grain and running streams of pure water, denotes the very acme of good times at hand. Wealth will pile in upon you, and you will be able to reign in state in any country." (iDream)

Meat

"To see raw meat in your dream symbolizes that there will be many obstacles in achieving your goals. If you dream of cooked meat, this symbolizes that you will see others obtain the object that you have been striving for." (iDream)

________

separation into the unfair glory of a broken now,
embittered jealousy and temptation from the host of a brewing psychic sickness,
guarding the predawn monumental distance among the enchained
battered souls of a deeply entrenched loss
complexified and exponential falsification of death's human mask
still breathing the attuned words of spiritual greed in the crescent boon of a perfect desert sleep,
and involved within an enclosed world all their own,
the forgotten beauty of an intoxicating truth still relieves the air above with its tempting,
yet out of reach and petrified, animalistic burden
feeding on the glow of the moon
and the laughter of pagan lights streaking past the beyond
in pairs of three and nine,
we forever move. 

 

- excerpt from "4 Dreams"