Fear, Incorporated: The Transformative Theatrics of Living

"Never ever forget that you are the future of this country…You mustn't be frightened of life, it's a very exciting life because you can make your dreams come true" Pieter-Dirk Uys, from the documentary Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story

“In the end it will be up to audiences each time in the event because they will determine the stories,” says Diamond. “My hope is that we have the courage, in a way, not to look at how to change that thing out there, but how to change ourselves.”

That self-reflexive and socially conscious attitude has defined the theatre company right from its humble beginnings in Vancouver in 1981, and it continues to exemplify creative leadership around the most sensitive topics in contemporary public debate. Diamond’s first prominent role in the company, as associate director of the 1982 production Right to Fight, addressed affordable housing. Later, Diamond wrote The Enemy Within, which satirized B.C. politics in 1986. Two years later, he had his directorial debut for the company with one of its Power Plays, which use theatre games and exercises to explore social issues and create community-specific theatre.

Corporations in Our Heads is one of Diamond’s more experimental works in his effort to reach out to community through art. Based on the work of Brazilian theatre visionary Augusto Boal, creator of Theatre for the Oppressed, Diamond’s new work is an original interpretation of Boal’s Cops in the Head, but takes an entirely different approach. “The rules of the Theatre of the Oppressed, I’ve thrown them right out the window,” says Diamond.

The production asks Calgary residents to reflect on, share, act on and change the dominant messages that influence society . “The reason to do the thing for me is there’s a lot of good work happening out there on how the messages of corporations affect our consuming,” says Diamond. “But I don’t think we’re doing a lot of talking about how those messages affect our own images, not just of ourselves but of our relationships with each other. And it’s at the relationship level, in fact, that our consuming originates.

Corporations in Our Heads will be facilitated by (or “joked by,” as Theatre for Living puts it) Diamond himself, who incites the audience to participate. “The power of it, for me, is that it really is a democratic thing,” he says. “While we are framing the general subject matter, Corporations in Our Heads, the actual content really is going to be determined by the people who enter the room that night. And nobody — not me, not the sponsoring groups, nobody — is going to be able to predetermine the content.”

This article, titled, New theatre work examines corporate psychology, continues where it was originally published on November 7 in Fast Forward Weekly. The piece is a continuity on the theme presented by Pieter-Dirk Uys and his arts activism in South Africa, as David Diamond represents a similar following in social consciousness and public engagement in Canada.

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Chinatown Delight

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Following the trend of the album, Sketches of Style, this sounding is an amalgamation of three instrumental improvisations harmonized and syncopated together with a synthetic rhythm. The beat creeps in, reminding the listener of the abstract organ that touches on soul, as the reeded music blends with darbuka.

Originally published in a comic, the poem that led to the musical expression of the same title, "find Inspiration!" first appeared in Maad Sheep, an illustrated print publication of cartoon and literature that I once found while sitting in an open-air cafe. The issue in which my piece was featured was displayed at a Comic Convention in Canada.

Lyrically, the piece is a foray into the bitter savagery that cooks the great mass of minds; all who are saturated by the consumptive bread of modern life. The challenge of simply being creative in confrontation with the overwhelming burst and pop mirrorscape of infinite self-deception is the subject and of this sketch of style.

The rest of the chapbook is a fourteen page collection of poetry on the subject of gaining respect and appreciation for the superhuman qualities of nature, as more than grandiose, and more than human intellect and possession could ever capture or convey. Many are observational, and drawn from insights into the ground of being as the naked soul of humanity.

Nature’s Supernal Creation

Sky IS the Limit: Sustainable Architects Transform Our Militarized World

"If all of the soldiers in all of the armies in all of the world were to put down their weapons and pick up tools and start making sustainable housing for all the people in the world, life would just begin on this planet." Michael Reynolds, Garbage Warrior, on Democracy Now!

Jorg Ostrowski and his wife Helen are two trained architects who have trail blazed sustainable housing in Canada and around the world. On April 20, Jorg opened his home on Scurfield Drive in northwest Calgary to the public, in celebration of Earth Day, for RecoSolutions, offering free tours on sustainability. “All of my projects since 1972 have been sustainable,” Jorg wrote via email. “We have built with rammed earth, straw bale, stack wall, double log, EcoStuds, prefab, Blackie Block and stick built. I have given ‘hands on’ workshops on rammed earth and straw bale in various provinces, including a 6 day workshop for the David Suzuki Foundation, in BC.” 

Arriving at the doorstep beneath the iconic sunray-painted awning above the front door, Jorg announced, “Transportation is part of the equation,” pointing to two automobiles in the driveway. Behind the Smart Car is a VW Golf that is converted to run on waste vegetable oil as part of a continuing R&D program. Recent trips to Vancouver and back, and cross-country on other excursions have cost zero dollars. People often donate vegetable oil. Japanese restaurants are reputed for the highest-grade waste vegetable oil. "The goal is to download electric and thermal energy into batteries, grid and slab," Jorg wrote. 

Along the outside porch, the most noted sustainability measures are various blue water bins collecting rainwater that goes into a cistern able to store enough water for many months, based on low consumption and average rainfall. An apparatus below the front porch is shaped like an oversized foghorn with a square container fitted inside with a cooking pot. The solar cooker concentrates enough sunlight that even in -25 Celsius on a clear day, the inside temperature rises to 100 degrees centigrade.  

Inside the home, a large office space to the left leads down a short hallway to a cozy living room reception. About ten people attended the ecoTour at three o’clock in the snowy afternoon under unlit LED lights, also fitted throughout the home. With over 140,000 guests so far in its 20-year history, the Alberta home/office is unique in Canada for not using city water, sewer, gas or furnace. The ecoHouse is heated by passive/active solar, internal heat gain and left over waste as backup. 

On any given month, schoolchildren will graduate from the ecoTour given by Jorg Ostrowski himself, chock-full of architectural knowledge (the legacy of a career spanning four decades beginning with an M.I.T. graduate education in architecture) and an astounding display of hands-on examples for small-scale, local sustainability. Beginning in the living room, natural light pours in from all angles, especially south-facing, including an “experimental window” featuring unrivalled five-pane krypton-sealed glass. On the coffee table, a seemingly unimpressive array of likely architectural samples is strewn about. As conversation ensues, each item reveals itself as highly innovative environmentally friendly material or technology, including organic wool carpet, flaxseed Marmoleum flooring, recycled newsprint insulation, and solvent-free adhesive, motorized airtight damper, and the latest LED lights, among many others. 

The moral of the story: making the home airtight is the key to conserving energy. Utilizing natural heat sources like the position of the sun, and even body temperature are integral and often underwritten in the dominant modes of contemporary architecture. A centerpiece of the home is a traditional fireplace and oven common to many European and Asian traditions, known as a Russian Stove, Korean Ondol or Chinese Kang heating systems among many other names. The fireplace is used for central backup heating and cooking, including for heating water. After priming the central heating mechanism before a recent month-long trip during the winter month of March, the empty house only lost about eight degrees centigrade without additional oversight. 

From the living room through a concave hallway into the kitchen, numerous plants line windows and vegetation of all kinds hangs from the ceiling. A beautifully set deadfall tree acts as a post for second floor beams. Allowing live trees is important to continue to absorb CO2. Especially abundant are aloe plants for their exceptional capacity to purify the air and provide a natural source for glyconutrients and medicine. The energy mainstay of the kitchen is the refrigerator. Used for only about six months in the year, an indubitably pragmatic cold closet replaces the need for a refrigerator in the cold climate, substantially reducing kilowatt-hours per year and extending the life cycle of the very energy efficient fridge/freezer right beside it. 

Next, Jorg leads the ecoTour into a personal office space, where small portholes, reminiscent of a ship’s cabin, line the wall. Behind the glass at least six examples of alternative insulation are exhibited, including sheep’s wool, an expensive though probable example. Around the house, vents are fitted to facilitate heat and air circulation, and air-to-air heat exchangers minimize heat loss.

The middle of the home features the dry compost toilets on both levels, with the upstairs fully functional for guests. The system is “not perfect” said Ostrowski, although an exemplary means to recycle human waste, and in addressing a crucial need for water management in mainstream housing infrastructure. All biological waste goes into an engineered multi-purpose year-round composting chamber, combining 3 critical household operations.

1. Major blue box recycling centre and deposit box of the house to receive all biodegradable waste, including all human and kitchen waste                                                                                                                                    
2. Major water conservation equipment to save 200,000 litres of drinking water per year (family of four)                                                                                                      
3. Fertilizer plant to produce healthy earth, and compost tea, a great liquid fertilizer

"In summary, although not perfect, it is the stomach of the house, quite efficient and critical to the sustainable future of the planet," wrote Jorg.       

Upstairs, bedrooms are designed for accessibility. Two smaller rooms on one side have a connecting doorway, to facilitate spatial linkages for small children and potential opportunities for bed & breakfast hospitality or simply an office-bedroom combination. The master bedroom is flooded with natural light from a panorama of south-facing windows tastefully mirrored, with ceiling windows, two hallways, and a catwalk built of metal grating above the living room, offering a distinctly interconnected ambiance between the master bedroom with the rest of the home. Ventilation above the center of the bed draws from the central, water-based heating system. An antique tub is installed in the adjacent ensuite, with consideration for recycling the work and material required to reuse such conventionally obsolete fixtures. With adequate attention, there is natural light enough to grow tomatoes aplenty on the windowsills. A small addition alcove to the master bedroom, located above the greenhouse, provides much needed sanctuary. 

Outdoors, solar panels are fitted on ground level around the ecoHouse with mind to wind, dust and snow that often collects on often poorly conceived roof-installations. Ground placement allows optimal accessibility in maintenance, and effectively the highest degree of energy output. 

All in all, RecoSolutions was a lesson in successful, off-the-grid sustainable housing within the limits of a major city in North America. With a single prime mover, such as the 70 HP power mechanism used in the VW Golf to provide heat and electricity for a long-distance car ride, over one hundred homes in the likelihood of Jorg Ostrowski’s ecoHouse can be sustained. These homes not only sustain renewable energy sources, but also reduce the risks of outgassing from chemicals in standard building materials, contaminants in public water and damage from power outages. Furthermore, the ecoHouse can facilitate the production of energy, exporting power back into the grid. 

The lack of sustainable housing development in Canada, especially when so willfully and ably illustrated as in the RecoSolutions ecoTour in Calgary, only adds to the shameful prerogatives of national priority. Helen Ostrowski, who co-organizes events and activities at the ecoHouse, also active with international development work in the Philippines, China and most recently Iran, among others, commented that when they were starting out in the 1970s, there was no opportunity for young people to be involved with sustainable housing in university programs, or in applying environmentally friendly architectural products as today. When they had built their ecoHouse nearly twenty years ago, the city of Calgary was uniquely open to their alternative housing development with respect to their work as two highly trained graduate architects, active and recognized in the field.    

At the end of the ecoTour, a very intelligent participant was flabbergasted that mainstream society continues to neglect the most important of these very simple and doable measures. Western lifestyle identifies human settlement first and foremost through consumer values. Modern human life is defined by consumerism, and is inextricably linked to the catastrophic waste-chains of urban and suburban housing. In the normative social and political agenda of North America, human existence depends on consumerism. True productivity and actual development does not merely contribute manufactured material to the growing waste stream but reciprocates human life with natural energy cycles.  

In the growing petro-state policies of the federal government of Canada, energy consumption far outweighs energy production. Without public awareness campaigns such as the RecoSolutions ecoTour, ignorance perpetuates the consumer mode of being as the only way of being. Yet, in this the same world as that of increasing urban sprawl, one energy/grid independent, sustainable ecoHouse illustrates how human beings also produce energy and give back to what Jorg named as the three most important points of sustainable living; clean water, healthy earth, and reusable energy. 

On June 1 and June 8, the Calgary ecoHome will be open for public tours.
Please see the Calgary ecoHome website, ASH - Autonomous & Sustainable Housing Inc. AND/OR Contact Jorg Ostrowski at ecojdo@gmail.com for more details. 

This article is also published on The Media Co-op & IndyMedia

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Authentic Greenwash by RK

The Point of Return by RK

Sky Paint by RK

Empyreal Intersection by RK

Gloom & Hollow by RK

Urban Landing by RK

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"I drank in the stupor", founded on the original Latin meaning of the word stupor, as, 'to be amazed or stunned,' the piece draws from an experience during the Day of Lady Guadalupe in Mexico, where I observed my future wife from afar as she street performed music in a city square. The overshadowing presence of Lady Guadalupe breathed the immense breath of the goddess of compassion Kuan Yin, through her Chinese zither music, and both protectresses mirrored their gaze through mine, visually and aurally with a searching heart bursting and blooming with the stupefying gift love. As French writer and philosopher Paul Valery said, "Love is being stupid together."  

Listen in to a sound art vocalization-exclamation of "I drank in the stupor" on my newest album, "Evocations: Exotic Settlers" on www.menachem.bandcamp.com, featuring an epic wave of shakuhachi improvisations. 


In two parts, A Sick Society Amuck features twelve pieces, and three original art interpretations on the theme and collection "Exotic Settlers". Four of these pieces were published in the 29th issue of Steel Bananas Quarterly "how in the year of the rabbit, the pure still need things," "I drank in the stupor," "interpretive direction," and "where is the mind in life?" 

The phrase, "sick in a sick society" is based on the spiritual wisdom of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, who said "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." So follows various observations and expressions supporting and steeped in this wisdom of seeing. Many of the pieces are satires equally on personal and collective health related to addiction and nationalism, where both divide and dismantle the health of human consciousness, which requires holism. Complementary themes of travel and history juxtapose subjection with abjection. 

A Sick Society Amuck by Rusty Kjarvik

The Future of Sharks = The Future of Our Oceans = The Future of Us

Watson and the Shark by J.S. Copley 

The stigma of sharks has been with me since I can remember, having my first memories only a driveway away from the Atlantic coast. I lived under the shadow of Martha's Vineyard and Spielberg's Jaws. The above painting shows the old, now antiquated, adage that sharks are killers and need to be killed. As shown in my previous post (Reflection on "Save the Humans" lecture by Rob Stewart), sharks are not killers, and indeed their threatened survival on Earth due to illegal shark fin harvesting is as crucial an issue as climate change in the continued survival of the human species.

Read my story of activism for a shark fin free world on Media Co-op

Also see related groups Shark Fin Free Calgary & WildAid

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Innumerable anemones, dim at the ocean floor, float and dance in the scintillating deep, a whirlwind of ocean currents spinning tendrils in the wondrous underworld of subconscious, inner space. The beauty of the sea is a palpable silence, a prenatal yearning within the sky’s reflective murder of inanimate light, into the shattered eye of a submerged mountain of a seemingly infinite myriad of species, blooming in the breathable space of instinctual lowering.

Samudramantham (Churning of the Ocean of Milk) by Anonymous 

The eye craves the strength of mammalian fear in the world beyond worlds. Octopi, shark and jellyfish sweep the wobbling invertebrate mind with a bodiless air of unlit terror. A shark darts and flees past in a show of wise defense, and the octopi bleed ink in a haze of warring tests far enough to provoke the mirage-lust end of human sight, and jellyfish, unnervingly absent as the mind’s eye sleeps in a soporific atrophy of inhuman might.

Still Life with Flowers, Shells, a Shark's Head, and Petrifications by Antoine Berjon

Memory entangles my feet with the concrete ingenuity of familial presence. At the opposite stance from my underwater lung, I breathe the damp air of a midsummer day’s stretch aside my grandfather’s elder chair. His sitting comforts me into a warm bottom, a deathless life of generative following, to stare back into the eyes of immortal sight, the human heights of belonging, and I am content, a mind at rest, awake, conscious, and filled with reverberating speech. 

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A dripping hunger instills those following to go beyond sleep and be
       In conscious wonderment, in the living dance
Dream today in a new and timeless breath,
       To stave off the mindless, parasitic asp
Climbing inside mind through dreamless eye-shutters
       Blocked by old-fashioned stone, brick and wooden carved hands

Holding my dancer, lover and beauty
      To the song of my dreams
Woman of my life
      Who holds no passion in sleep, and dreams awake
...
On the pedestal of a forlorn warning
      That no shore is safe in this dreamless state without dance,
Yet to sing and become a new dance and dream anew
      Before naked freedom announces song’s ending

excerpt "Impassioned Road to Being"

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

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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. 

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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)

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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" 

The Universal Energy of Non-Violent Technology

"In the 1950s the scientists who created the atomic bomb offered a promise, by splitting the atom we could have a limitless supply of electricity that could end pollution and bring peace to the world forever, but after the disaster in Japan, that dream has never looked more like a nightmare."

- Narrator in "The Thorium Dream" 

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A map, from overhead, spells a loose bombing pattern over the destroyed ash of a once proud Western city. The doomsday vibe is instilled pervasively, even from twelve thousand feet. I descend. Hooded, disguised in the female clothing of a conservative Iranian Muslim woman, I defy gravity, bounding over farmyards and plains with ghastly unconcern for my step. American, I daydream momentous bravery in the hook of Ali, the most famous American Muslim. Finally, I arrive to a gathering of young people my age. Crowding around a midday fire, we clumsily fiddle with various instruments. Curiously, I see an old friend. People begin to single me out. “Play this! Play that!” They stammer, belligerent with string and reed instruments sounding off into unbroken landscapes, the sobering spring sky presses coldly on my uncovered scalp. Every instrument I touch is in disrepair. Unable to make a clear sound, I move on to alcohol. 

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Ash

"Dreaming of ashes omens woe, and many bitter changes are sure to come to the dreamer. Blasted crops to the farmer. Unsuccessful deals for the trader. Parents will reap the sorrows of wayward children." (iDream)

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nervous mule-packed, people's spread,
glum rising, toward peak's,
unearthed sudden, as an island explosion,
tectonic wires flattening,
the disbelieving abortion!

the worshipped spring,
overloaded with unfound substance,
anonymity, in a human non-being,
a wasted mold, singing on the harmonious road,
to the past, when the all-encompassing now,
expressed self to a universal song

archaic, yet everlasting
and then, always gone,
fizzed out in the solar flare

pop flash, grazed heat from the mythological
drumbeat, groundless vibrations,
mounting birthless, made from dark matter,
living only to the taste,
dust on the wordless tongue,
a silence, encased in an echo
never bound,
we, fortunate,
binge on the profound.

- excerpt from "internet current"

Responding to the Critical Condition of Earth

Chapter 1

“An American oil baron eventually answered the call, building an open-pit mine with an upgrader in the 1960s. He used technology largely funded by Canadian taxpayers. Although the mine lost money for decades, it kept the dream alive.”

Chapter 2

“But neither the Alberta nor the Canadian government has done a thorough energy accounting yet.”

From: Tar Sands by Andrew Nikiforuk

A Response:

Canada is attempting to raise itself up on the shoulders of an entire world dependent on cheap oil resources, in the name of profit and political standing, Canada is dragging this world deeper into environmental degradation and addiction to fossil fuel-dependent, unsustainable life.

As people of this age, whether in Canada or not, we must all move in the direction of re-building our society, to live on this Earth, as focused on what is both local and sustainable as possible, in order to revise our habits of depending on food sources cultivated by the world's poorest, on clothing made by the world's most destitute and on materials and energy for our way of life which depend on the degradation of our environment and the destruction of small-scale and remote human communities. Our housing and transportation technologies are leading us towards inevitable destruction, displacement and complete abandonment of the human community. Why have we chosen to neglect our future generations and remain ignorant about the creative solutions that we know we can achieve to change all of this in our own lives?

The Undeniable Truth...Interpreting the Dreams of Sun Ra

"...human history has not been an inevitable march towards a brighter future, that the world as constructed by Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism of all kinds is indeed doomed to self-immolation, and that man’s only hope is to radically reject the present and to dream of new and previously unimagined futures."

The "undeniable truth" written by OtherPlanesofThere, can be found on an exclusive Sun Ra Blog and on UbuWeb

Journey into the Underworld with My Older Brother

The Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross, detail by Vittore Carpaccio

With my older brother, we take off within what seems as a deep opened chasm within a cave, into a body of water, as if endless. The water extends dream-like with opaque energy into a vast fear. We are on a small raft, a canoe of sorts, with all of our paternal cousins. The raft edges out onto the water and its depth begins to fall under us as a tremendous anxiety takes hold, and suddenly it's as if we are all alone, although together. One of our cousins holds a light out at the front edge of the vessel. Then, I begin to fall into the treacherous dark, depth of cavernous liquid. My brother reaches out to me as I fall overboard, though his arm reaches out too short. His palm opens up with fingers outstretched with a genuine attempt full with the strength of his being unto the ends of his fingertips. Still, in the water, full of fear, I feel a great abandonment. (I remember the time when in a small bay in Massachusetts, I was left to swim for over a half hour while he and friends did watersports, completely forsaken to the water and its full, unforgiving depth of life, I swam, as it were endlessly facing my most shallow of fears.) I begin to swim, however immediately I see a shark's fin. I call out to my brother, yet he is nowhere to be found, the vessel has left without me. The shark fin passes by me and I feel a brief moment of relief, however it then turns around and heads straight for me. I experience the full great depth of fear as the whole vibration of the body of water shakes with my fear unto the ends of the finality in our human mysterium. I grasp hold of a rocky edge. (Suddenly I feel the safety of swimming in one of the sonotes in Yucatan, Mexico.) The rock seems as resin, a sharp and hard-edge crystalline foment similar to the floors of the Chauvet caves in France. I climb atop the cavernous rock, it is as tall as the side of a mountain, yet I edge into its porous underlying texture and finally ascend to the top. I reach a pile-on similar to the Inukshuk in Inuit country, however it is as constructed with the street trash of urban Cairo, Egypt. I observe this pile-on as a marker that I have reached the summit of the cave's own tallest mountain and I seem to be again in the solitude of the fantastical cliffs and mountains of Petra, Jordan, with its piles and collections of small trinkets still bundled up and set on display in the after-hours of tourist visitation. This marker reminds me that I am somewhere, although foreign, that has been visited by human hands prior to my arrival and suddenly I am in the safety of human existence. I continue to forge on, in the absolute opacity of an endless night.

Next, I am driving with my older brother and our father through to a mythic resemblance of Falmouth, Massachusetts, the end of the bay into the open Atlantic ocean. We are driving him to be sent off by ship to the other shore; Europe. He is holding a concert ticket, as if he is going there for music. We are so glad to be seeing him off, and inside I am a little jealous! The sun is bright and it is a green day in what seems like the heart of Spring. In the backseat of the car, I imagine a bird's eye view of us driving through the open roads to carry my brother off to a glorious and resounding destiny filled with music and the brightness of a future fulfilled with mutual Love.

Futuristic Art Militarism and Prehistoric Survivalist Community

Scout Attacked by a Tiger by Henri Rousseau

First dreams of a stitched paper design with penciled flower and writings, common to my writing art idea, however suddenly they are all fixed with images of an androgynous Italian who my wife has grown fond of, as she gawks and dances to his images, shouting Italian phrases and playing Italian music, then I am transported down a highway with McDonalds and other corporate consumer businesses in full color on either side, many of the same businesses are right across from one another on what seems to be a futuristic, yet somehow foreign (European or Asian?) drive down a commercial highway stacked to the fullest with consumer culture venues, and next I find myself at war, in full armed soldier uniform, with backpacks of gear hunching down behind a risen formation on a hillock awaiting the enemy, who suddenly rolls in on big Tonka truck tanks that look almost like construction vehicles, I throw out a grenade but it comes flying back and explodes near our troops though no one is hurt, and suddenly as I’m fiddling through my backpack, only to find culinary knives, the enemy greets us, they are Spanish-speaking and have children with them, I ask one of the children what their name is, speaking in Spanish and it is a long, indiscernible Spanish name, my brother is among the troops, laughing and speaking Spanish as well, all the while I am searching for a pistol in bag

Next dream I am beside a tree in the middle of the open prairie fields in what looks like Southern Alberta, however there are hints of a prehistoric landscape among me, I can sense that there are big animals around, a lion of sorts, a bison, and others in herds somewhere near. I sneak into a dim tavern and I see a whole slew of nationalities and ethnicities. I suddenly feel that I am in Palestine when I see a man with a yarmulke and he is smiling at me, and then I look at the bartender who also has one and I am nervous for them, next I am trying to talk with my friend, a Senegalese musician, but he is on the phone and being uncooperative, yet somehow we are in the middle of a conversation and go to a nearby table, there are people around it, a full table with people drinking, one round man at the end of the table tells me he also plays percussion and enjoys rambutan, laughing at me trying to connect, meanwhile I am at the other end of the table trying to converse with my friend the Senegalese musician, and his African friends, however all I can say is there is never going to be any change ever. I walk out from the tavern and I feel again as if I am in a prehistoric landscape, I imagine pre-ancient man, walking amid the predators and herds of endless animal, fearless, barefoot and with purpose beyond his immediate surroundings, and suddenly I fear the tree that I had just visited, for now it seems to resemble that landscape and I am unable to walk within it.

Wednesday, September 28 2011