The Poetics of Resistance: Myths of India and Freedom

"Let us arm every song with dreams, in the time of war..." written by Kabir Kala Manch, in support of all artists silenced by imprisonment, poverty and ignorance in India and throughout the World

"Watch carefully,
Poetry burns quickly
Spreading like a forest fire.
Watch more carefully,
Poetry can stir people..."

excerpt from Telugu resistance poet, Varavara Rao, written while in solitary confinement in Secunderabad Jail 1985-89 - republished in Towards a New Dawn

Poetic practice, as a creative tradition in the life of a poet, opens the doorway to perennial creativity through which one may pass towards great, unseen and yet mysteriously innate gifts of passion and truth, gifts of fulfillment and love. SoJourn(al) is truly and essentially about one affirmation, that it is RIGHT to dream and that Dreaming is a Universal Right of not only humans, but of all beings. In the technocratic & plutocratic society of demonic habitual tendencies, towards the mechanization of action, thought and identity, the human qualities of patience, wisdom and devotion are best revealed in the outrageously uncommercial activity of pure poetic invention. Yet, as in the base & fleshly example of sleep, still the metaphor endures, let sleep sleep & dream dream! 

Become dream while the dream is dreamt & known & felt & seen & causing one to rise with the memory of desire & unrest, that the earthly facade of waking is insufficient to fulfill the ecstasy of creative imagination and the waning birth of intuitive creativity, instinctual and whole. Living & ecological self-awareness is the birthright of each human being, as a holistic affirmation attuned to the entire life of all creation, and including all of Earth, in one breath, where especially clear today, as in the interconnected & interdependent worldly techno-communing of peoples globally careers through timeless instantaneity. 

So, each and every life is equally without circumference as with omnipotent centre, as it has been throughout time. In the archaic sphere of psychic knowledge accessed through inborn trust and the sacred flesh of entheogenic presence, all are to be encouraged and passed through the body of the dreamer. Eyeless and seen through self-enacted visions of trust in the inward journeying of mind as matter, experience is simply the wave-form space of sensation in the subtle & internal creative nature of all manifest and unmanifest. The dreamer embraces the nameless mystery of sound & light in its pure & transcendent non-duality of formless emptiness, still forming the pathless direction of each individual stepping on self-made ground. In Algonquin, Sakahàn, to light a fire. 

Continue reading SoJourn(al) for an upcoming article with Unsettling America on the work of Japanese-Samoan artist Shigeyuki Kihara, currently showing artwork at the National Gallery of Canada's "Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art" exhibition, "Fa'aFafine: In a Manner of a Woman" co-written by the Dream Author with Vi An Diep, who shares perspectives on immigrant narratives in relation to indigenous art, theatre-music composition and notes on life as lived by a wildly independent, self-sustaining and vibrant artist of sound, art and love. 

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Emerging from the subterranean byways and thoroughfares of New York, City of Time and Sleepless Courage, Island of All That Is on the shores of America’s worldwide seduction and misplaced trust. The earth howls with tramcars funneling like the charnel trains that veer off and into the silent womb of industry. I walk, heavy with longing, through the unsteady street-side core.

Bird's Eye View of New York City and Environs by John Bachmann

A tidy man notices my ponderous walk, and gifts advice. “To the cafes and hearts,” he moans, irascible with derelict gravity. So, into the consumption I fade with stories of words, with the blank gush of pages unruffled by eyeing hands that stop and see. Yet, the nonplussed wires of change dissipate in the hammered trespass of independence and freedom. I, artist of days and nights spent afraid of death, linger in wallowing holes of unmentionable fortuity as the stares of reason and being break open the head of belonging.

Portrait of artist Karnakoski by Aalto, Ilmari

I cower, defeated into the dark, abysmal aftermath of slavery. The unwelcoming hordes brush past through fissures of smiles and skeletal eyes that careen past my deepest trench. Wavering in the thinning light, I angle around a bent door. The quality of my flesh sinks and curdles with undiminished emotion, with unparalleled fear. I move my hand to the knob, and it opens to opacity, pitch as the darkest matter of universal night. And in I walk, careful to the point of careless.

Death's Door by William Blake

A soundless and gentle presence invites, lowering my knees to the imprisoned, peopled earth. I move with a silenced throaty pause of recognition. Before me sits an extended family of Cree and Blackfoot Canadian First Nations: a lost band of Indian people. Condemned to an underground home, they offer a homely cup of sweet-grass tea. At first sip, steeped in incredulity, my tongue quakes with repose. I speak. “Thank you, Creator.” They bow, and with an opened palm, reddened and browned by the ruddy dearth of light. An elderly woman offers a gift from the people, her smile and dress more brilliant than the gift of sunlight. She hands a wooden sculpture of an ancient elder, with eagle feathers, bundle and headdress, draped in the glory of the Buffalo.

The Indian in his Solitude by N.C. Wyeth

Emerging again from the subterranean underpass, like waking with the memory of a dream, once so displaced with sorrow, now right with order and mind. I eagerly and joyfully share the vision of a totem, materialized in the palm of my hand as a brilliant sculpture, as a wish-fulfilling boon of the People of the Creator. And above-ground, even in the lush awe of the sun, isolated fragments of individuals and nations bleed with the blood of the First People an ignorance, a deathly drowning from within. The soft, modest and lightweight presence of the wooden holy man is nothing to their clouding eyes, to their opaque suits and flushed skins. I am ignored, and so return, only to find the once-known Native shelter, bare of all humanity.

Cave Painting - Bhimbetika (India) - Jumping Horse by Nikhil2789

Alone, with totem in hand, do I rise again to stand in the midst of such delusional darkness as above-ground, in the sky of a damned and cruel society? The uncivilized wade in the laughter of innocence and fame. All the while, the First Peoples dive deeper into inhuman insanity, into eternal retreat in this night of eternal war, while the paradigms of hate move ashore with quickened pace, and the First Peoples burrow, entrenched ever more in the quicksand fate of a lowly paradox. And the wooden man cries, as my palm rests on the burying earth.  

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the forthcoming album "Evocations: district.Columbia" is an experimental narrative sound art exploration into the text of the collection, "district.Columbia" releasing the first single, "New America" to incite the forthcoming album on the inaugural day of Aboriginal Awareness Week in Canada is auspicious and serendipitous in its symbolic import as an album whose narrations were triggered by an inner voice of resistance while in Washington D.C. where I began to dedicate myself to the literary vocation in light of my own personal development in the commission of truth, as in the social justice of 9/11 and Truth and Reconciliation truth commissions addressing political and historical-religious misinformation.

my creative work is in keeping with a lifelong demonstration to voice silenced histories, in honour and recognition of the atrocities committed against first peoples of the land, whose history, while older and more enduring, while land-based and unfathomably rich, is snuffed out by the dominant settler narratives of media and education that continue to ride the oppressive waves of war, colonization and assimilation in the ongoing struggle for american freedom that continues to this day.

"Evocations: district.Columbia" is a sounding directly from the heart, unmediated by the delusional independence of exclusive american identity, for an end to the war on freedom



a narrative of resistance. re-writing the language of american history, to translate the poetics of protest into the harmony of life. here, "New America" is a sound art exploration on the theme of visioning an "exit strategy" in the war for America, in de-institutionalizing and reclaiming the name of the land through the act of breath and proclamation.

using two frame drums (16 & 14 inch diameters) i recall the great conundrum of american life through the sound of modern frame drumming techniques together with a evocation, vocal sounding, on the re-history of colonial ecology into an awareness of self and environment, recognizing, respecting and regarding the singular devastations of american disunity in the wake of 500 years of ongoing struggle.

resistance is often most deeply traversed by artists, creative voices, purified in the air of one new proclamation of independence yet to be heard apparent on the pages of dominant history, and it will not be written, but vocalized, orated, and beaten from the face of a drum.

The chapbook, "Realizing our OBJECTION" is a selection of the first five poems from the larger collection, "district.Columbia". These pieces are reflections on the initial invocation by Percy Bysshe Shelley from Queen Mab, which reads, "For when the power of imparting joy / Is equal to the will, the human soul / Requires no other heaven."

In the context of Realizing our OBJECTION, the meaning is that the artist essentially promulgates the DIY spirit of heartened resistance as the shared co-unity of meaning for all people who identify as "people" and not the maelstrom of mechanized and monetized identities that waver in the brush as the incendiary & violent pages of human history, aflame in the eye of the seer who rewrites self as the self of all kind. "Realizing our OBJECTION" is a critical literary effulgence of a truth, that to be human in today's world is the central coin of resistance art.

Realizing our OBJECTION by Rusty Kjarvik

Music of the Dream Author: Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Release

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Album Art

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I

Winded Keys Duet for Piano & Shakuhachi 

"Winded Keys" alludes to a number of esoteric meanings, the most significant conveys a personification of keys. A key is used to open a doorway, highly relevant for an opening track. The track also relays that in a sense, we are all potentially keys. Through deeply listening to people, they can become as a key, opening the most significant doors. The person speaking at the beginning of this track is a passerby, stranger, and seeming vagrant in a riverine Canadian city. He is a key to Love, yet he is winded by the turmoil of life, and as so, opens the doorway to a key, strung by piano strings, and spinning in the Shakuhachi wind. That key is you while you listen to "Winded Keys".

Northern Shelter 2 Movements for Xaphoon & Percussion

"Northern Shelter" opens with an optimistic frame drum and xaphoon, as a young traveler eyeing the horizon, knowing his loved ones are near, and his bed is made. He traverses the grandiose open that he knows as well as the back of his hand, and with music on his tongue, he enters home. In the north, long stretches of life throughout the year are homebound due to the chronic lack of sunlight, rapid change in weather, and intermittent blistering cold. While under cover of shelter, in the deep, dark of night, an opening of the subtle sky of dream invites human eyes into worlds beyond our greatest imaginative stirrings.

Desert Plains Waves for Darbuka & Xaphoon

"Desert Plains" dramatizes the imaginative soundscapes of any day in the life of a dweller in the "desert plains". The inspiration for this track lives in the landscape. I have spent the last six years travelling between and living in Alberta and Egypt. I have noticed that the desert dry climate is common to both ecologies. The high plains whereon the great civilizations of the Blackfoot Confederation once hunted buffalo and the Sahara desert, wherefrom the ancient glyphs that are the foundation of most living language scripts on earth (except Chinese-derived), are home to an incredible vivacity, enveloped in the mysterious paucity of life. The horizon is grandiose and welcoming, yet equally embracing. "Desert Plains" is essentially in two segments, where at first there is a rhythmic yearning to see beyond the open, and escape the blinding immensity of the seemingly lifeless horizon, then after a time, there is a soulful maturation into the melody of a whole person, rooted in the landscape they call home. In that transition, the harmonic register of the xaphoon alludes to "Caravan" by Duke Ellington, as the traveler sees the mirage of a caravan ahead in the distant horizon of the desert plains, and at once entering the fold, the apparition dissipates. "Desert Plains" is a solemn homage in defence of rootedness, in this our age of heightened mobility.

Inward Flight Sketches for Shakuhachi & Darbuka

At this point in the saga that is "Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I" the desert-plains dweller seeks the gift of a shaman; an end-blown flute. In a clearing, under the starlight of a new moon, the once traveler, now dweller, becomes seeker. At this point, the journey moves from outward-driven to inward-seeking. The journey within is a journey into the infinite. The Self is the immovable point, around which all subjects waver, orbit and grasp in eternal flux. Yet, this is the play of the universe. For the Ancient Hindus, the universe was play, or as they called it, Lila. "Inward Flight" illustrates how the inward journey is playful.

Cold-Blooded River Epic for Frame Drums & Wind

In his inward search, the seeker becomes seer. All that exists on Earth, all that humans have created, the vast plenitudes of universal form in life and art become as ephemeral as an unrecorded improvisation, played aloud to the spirits and muses of a seer rapt in a vision of death. Here, the "Cold-Blooded River" comes into focus, where a visualization not unlike the Ancient Greek River Styx is seen in a vision. As in a buddhist ice hell, the river mists with the deathly cold of a swift and unforgiving seduction. Will the seeker cross the river of death? "Cold-Blooded River" asks the listener that question.

Four Directions Moments for Darbuka, Frame Drum, Shakuhachi & Xaphoon

After making it across the "Cold-Blooded River", that is the river of death and extinction, our spiritual humanity sees the realization that a sense of direction goes beyond the cardinal points of seasonal, ecological and temporal occasion in life's experience. "Four Directions" unites the dream vision, or literal physical manifestation in the mind's eye with a more spiritual vision, which is more like a revelation of insight. In this sense, the "Four Directions" unites four primary instruments; darbuka, frame drum, shakuhachi and xaphoon, where each represents a unique way of seeing, yet no instrument of perception is more clear or true than another. The four directions, or the heart compass is set deep within every mode of will. South, symbolized in the darbuka, is of growth and warmth. The darbuka is the prime origin point of my current growth in music and the creative life. The darbuka is closest to my ancestral heart, as it speaks to Greek and Jewish music, where my blood rests deepest. North, symbolized in the frame drum, is of wisdom and endurance, because it is a humbling instrument, and used in many sacred traditions, for example the Persian Daf frame drum in Sufi ceremonies. West, symbolized in the xaphoon, is of introspection. The xaphoon, also known as the bamboo sax, is a new instrument, invented in Hawaii in the 1970s, yet it follows in the great tradition of reeded instruments. East, symbolized in the Shakuhachi, is of illumination and enlightenment. It is with the Shakuhachi, the renowned end-blown Japanese flute, that I often meet twilight. Breathing through the river-fleshed air, I keep a bit of that sunlight with me as the moonrise enlightens the depths of winter.

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Original concepts formed after hearing the wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman's voice reciting his poem, "America". An impromptu recording of street voices led to creating an atmosphere of the mood, feeling and soul that goes into voice, and the unintended harmonies of using our speaking voice. Instruments are extensions of the subtle body of the spiritual human form. When recognized as such, our voice speaks through them, as through us.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I is the celebration of voice through sound. After my first year as an incipient writer in visual form, my creativity bubbled and erupted with mysterious energy into a realm of creative visual stimuli, of spatial literature, of manuscript art, of asemic writing. Now, as I begin to record the sound of my voice, I first amuse in the imaginative spectrum of voice through instrumentation.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I is the first part of a seven track series, mirroring my process in seeing through a cycle of sevens in the creation of manuscript art and experimental writing. Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II will feature a single LP-length track in four parts. A collage from four of my currently finished manuscript artworks have been used as cover art.

Influences: John Cage, Brian Eno, Duke Ellington, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Jan Garbarek, Godspeed You Emperor, Hossam Ramzy, Vi An Diep, Ai Hagiwara, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, street conversation, birds, wind, clouds, river, silence 

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See other instances of my musical creativity on earlier recordings: 

Dream Music and the Creative Breath

Dream of the Enlightened Persian

Arriving at an idea upon which all may Dream

Original story of an initial arrival

To Canada! Without place or concrete plan to find one, he begins with the simple purchase of a vehicle, to roam the entirety of this vast nation without foresight or reckoning with fate.

First night in Montreal, a dream;

An Aboriginal elder, playing his frame drum in the dream fog of a striking, celestial presence, tells him repeatedly "...this is the land of the Buffalo." He repeats, "Respect this, the land of the Buffalo."

Out of all destinations, traveling throughout the country, without ever having even known anything about Canada, he arrives in Calgary to live. Calgary is an auspicious place with respect to the Buffalo. The traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes Calgary and the surrounding region, bespeak a plains culture which has honored the Buffalo like none other. The last herds still roam in the northernmost regions of this province.

He goes on to talk about his travails as a boy of only 10 years when the Iranian revolution began. He tells of how he was forced to read in the dim light of a locked vault; a tunnel wherein subversive books were protected by his family. Therein he caused such foment in his mind that would have never been possible in the veiled reality of the Shah's theocratic mental confinements. So, as a true seeker, artist, visionary and dreamer within his growing heart, cultivated by the creation of literary might found in the truth of so many ingenious ghosts unveiled by sanctimonious literary iconoclasm. He remained trapped as it were, underground, with thoughts hailed as mystery in the whisper of a clouded heart.

Yet, his traumatic devotion to the tunnel-enclosed vault gave seed within the dank depths of his early budding mind. With practiced devotion he went to the darkest places in the world, hidden under inhumane truths silenced by war, poverty, corruption, hypocrisy, and censorship. In Canada, specifically in Calgary, he was led to the traditional womb of our Mother Earth among the plains Buffalo culture. Led, as it were, unaware, under the inverted belly of the Buffalo. The hide blanket of the Sweat draped over his unknowing spirit and found in him a place where to confront his mental wound, to rise from that vaulted literary wisdom, and see an inner light reflecting from within his own self as the sensory magic of spiritual knowledge. Upon exiting from the womb, blinded, suffocated, and nearly maimed with the burn of volcanic rocks aflame, his healing journey had commenced, and the vault of his childhood swung wide in the clear open before him as never before as he entered a newfound paradigm of artistic awakening through the dream of a music-theatre production with us all.

As a man who has experienced Sufi tradition in the mountains of Kurdistan, the poetry of my new friend has proclaimed a clear vision directed to all who may listen. In his voice is a uniqueness, an artistic dreaming forged by a soul strengthened and clarified within the tight impasse of as yet unraveled knots of complex human suffering. His voice reminds us of places beset with burdens so immense as to drown many a human heart in endless sorrow. Still, in his voice is a passion enduring with deft creativity and boundless truth-seeking that is infectious and empathetic in its wisdom. He now seeks shared visionary exploration, a lyrical orchestration towards a lasting expression of a public dreaming.   

His story was shared in the name of the passing artist and Sufi healer through the music of Sayed Khalil Alinejad; who was recently killed by the still repressive government in Iran. His murder is an outcry of world shame, an example of absolute heresy against the human spirit by the glowing red eye of a deeply traumatized society, living earnestly, without repose in the recesses of a hellbound subconscious blur. This honest-hearted musician and spiritually expressive man was told before the incident by a fellow Sufi that he would burn in hell, a few weeks later, he was burned in his home with his son. To a person of spirit, we have to wonder, how in life he spoke through music, and how Death became the last tone vibrating through the soul of his forever respectful listeners.

It is said that the character of the American Buffalo, unlike all the other animals and creatures of the North American plains, would charge headlong into an oncoming blizzard, while all others will flee. The American Buffalo will find its way through the worst of storms, earnestly engaged in the collective healing met between the spirit of the storm and the spirit of its own animal nature. With the strength of the Buffalo, he passes through to the bounty of a naked Earth on the other side. We have to wonder if people like Sayed Khalil Alinejad have tasted an ardour similar to that of the American Buffalo, braving the worst of storms, and have become as a message of this near-vanquished Spirit to the people of the Earth and Sky.

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