Mythologies of Freedom and Dreaming: Interpretations and Reminiscences

“Human soul, should it dream of me, Let my memory wakened be.
/ Moon, moon, oh do not wane, do not wane, /
Moon, oh moon, do not wane....” lyrics from Dvorak’s Song to the Moon

“There is no freedom, because we die,” said Winston Churchill in a fated passage through the subtle imagination of nighttime visions – speaking as the personification of death itself. He emerged from the grave of innumerable veteran crosses and stars over unmarked graves lining an immaculately manicured grassy hillside in neat rows. The cemetery is reminiscent of the dead bodies once ordered with haunting linearity in the aftermath of the many battlefields fought over in world war.

The realization of human mortality is the psychological maturation of recognizing freedom as a myth. Even in dream there is limitation; the mortal scars of suffering – destructive emotions and negative repressions – continue into the deepest corners of the subtle mind. As in thinking, the natural mode of an animate and intelligent psyche is to comb through the vast interweaving analytic and creative spawns of experience and memory, as they unfold with newfound insights and revelations. Yet, in that process, the evolutionary cycle naturally spurns most content with the greatest psychological defense mechanism of mortality: forgetting. To release, let go or forget the contents of the mind as they build and diminish is part of the natural breathability of discernment that allows every person to function as a rational agent in both human society and in wild nature. Yet, there is intermittently a thought that recurs, as in dream, that reminds us that thought and the more subtle activities of the mind and of human experience are intricately linked to the repetitive urges of necessity in the libido or the gut, for example. When a thought is forgotten, it was meant to pass, and thus facilitate further emptiness, to clean the slate, or empty the glass, so to speak, so that it may become full with the nourishment of more enduring concerns. Yet, when a thought clings, as with the subconscious content of a recurring dream, it is calling out to be transformed through consciousness. There are many modes of transformation through consciousness, i.e. creativity, reflection, speaking, and action.

Similarly, as the facility of the mind to think filters through generative content towards enduring insights through word, sound, emotion, intuition, and image, the content of dream has like potential as an agent of subconscious “thought”. Yet, where thought is often sound-oriented, as the whisper of words, dream, and specifically dream-writing, entices the mind to reflect on what images endure, and why, through their free-associative interpretation. Those images that endure from dream into the memory of consciousness and daily activity are as thoughts that recur and beg further recognition. Both involuntary, subconscious – dream and thought – are inceptions of creativity that arise from instinctual mechanisms that the body has to self-reconciliation. Recognizing and listening to the inner voice that speaks in the image-language of dream and the sonic subtleties of thought through an internalized intellect form a holistic psychological healing likened to the regenerative quality of the physical body to heal itself.

Former child soldier and international rap sensation Emmanuel Jal uses storytelling and music for social-emotional learning. He says that peace is “equality, justice and freedom for all”. His triad of concepts that can lead to peace – equality, justice and freedom – will be the basis for understanding how dream becomes thought, and thought becomes action.

While there is no earthly, or worldly, freedom after a full recognition and confrontation with the mythology of human dreaming, both consciously and subconsciously, there is equality. In Sufi mysticism, it is said that all of creation essentially began from an image. In Hindu cosmology, the Self, or Atman, sat alone, and pondering a sense of cosmic loneliness, split into two. Thus, seeing a reflection of the Self gave birth to the world. In other traditions the first creation was sound, particularly in dominant Western religious tradition, “In the beginning was the word.” In more acute interpretations based on studying original texts and incipient cultural contexts, sound is understood to mean vibration. From this understanding, great wisdom energy emerges from the fabric of all creation, vibrating with the cosmic equality of being essentially of one substance, from one origin, and to one destination. Also, when people become competitive and separatist in worldly affairs, this sense of cosmic equality is lost. For ultimately, an individual is not born of their accord, nor is their lot in life prescribed by them, but they are subject to the cosmic interdependence of the I-Consciousness of All-Unity. Deep equality is seeing that there is beauty and tragedy, form and emptiness, sophistication and simplicity in every instant and every aspect, in every individual and independent form of being.

On a deep level, freedom and equality are absolutes. There is no true freedom, yet ultimately all are equal. Justice is relative. Time and the fabric of relations temper Justice as it is broken and mended by the conscious action of peoples, animals and all forms and modes of being: ocean and acidification, mountain and mine, consumer and resource, victim and perpetrator, predator and prey. Freedom is a dream that never becomes real. Equality is a reality that does not extinguish by dreaming, and also a dream that does not extinguish in reality. Justice is a dream that may, or may not become a reality, unless dreams are made real through conscious action, and then waking realities can potentially become our greatest dream.  

___________

Barroom fade-out, the groveling aspiration of a few young guts feeding on the fermented sting of a foreigner’s every desire. The walls steam and sweat to the touch of human skin, crowds meander and mingle in a scintillating core of the ruthless dance. The beat of bare feet on the wet soil engraves the trammeled heart of the night onto the soles at every step.

Le bar des Martégales, Marseille by Marcel Leprin

Escaped into the washroom, the narrow claustrophobia is deafening, with a seed of empty remorse, I trudge backwards, to scale the heights of misdirection, and a friendly face peers through the swinging doorway, a member of the female race, she glides back dispassionately. I wade through swinging bodies back to a table, where my friends eye my every movement with a gentle regard for the creative word, emanating like sunlight from my chest like a cross-legged aesthetic seeing visions of outer space. I am warmed, basking in tongues of like entanglement. A live hip-hop act floods the ceiling with the reverberations of bass and rhyme.

Fuge in Rot by Paul Klee

Next morning, the cemetery air is thick with warning. Veteran markers stretch 3,000 deep down a coursing hill, steep with shadow and disbelief. The anger mounts like an unchallenged breeze on the face of the beloved. And I starve for words of remembrance and the final end to the deep finishing hate that swarms and seethes in our bones like the lost blood of too many young men and women. We are guided along by the preeminent Allied emissaries of WWII; Roosevelt, Patton, Eisenhower all emerge from the ground of the lain, and lastly Churchill.

The Cemetery, Etaples, 1919 by Sir John Lavery

Rising from a grave bed, the sparse, delicate grass wakes with air at his emergence. Churchill guides a small tour through the narrow passage between the blinding dizzy-spell of white crosses. After reading the bare bones epitaph of one fallen, slain by the brutal, forsaken. We can almost hear the utter ignorance of speed, metal and waste. Scanning over a generic war axiom, he says with spitting disdain, “There is no freedom on this earth, because we die, because we are mortal, freedom is a dream within a dream.”

The Hat of Freedom by Herman van der Mijn

Freedom is a tear in the cry of eternity.

___________

The mangrove is a peculiar tree, featured most recently in Ang Lee's Life of Pi, the man-eating vegetable is an interesting folkloric attribution to the reciprocity found in nature. "Sour Mangrove" is a piece that uses two types of percussion, doumbek and frame drums together with digitized xaphoon with an atmospheric ethereum of shakuhachi.

This instrumentation breathes with the three minute narrative, an experimental movement that gives voice and embodiment to the numbness of apathy and dogma that drives humanity to unprecedented elevations of ignorance with regard to the environment. With the reduction in the rhythmic pace at the very middle of the track, there is a slight turnaround, where natural objects are at least recognized, yet by the end, there is mere allusion to voice as performance, reduced to mere agency in the creation of an all-consuming, and ultimately cheap contrivance: the public.

The mangrove, a gorgeous and exemplary form of environmental wonder in its sheer aesthetic beauty, and its symbiosis with the ocean (and especial trait that modern humanity lacks) is simplistically reduced to an act of consumption as a disagreeable taste, sour.

This chapbook is comprised of thirteen selections from Cyclical Wordplay under the subtitle, "Sleep Cycle" as they were all written during meta-conscious states of creative emergence. This chapbook release celebrates the music release of the feature piece, "Sour Mangrove" on my bandcamp site, where I upload experimental sound art and different forms of narrative readings. "Jailed Desire" and "Sour Mangrove" were published in "ditch, poetry that matters" on April 24, 2012.

Sleep Cycle

Flightless Dreams and Dark Humour of a Post-W.orld

George W. Bush cartoon with international justice symbol by Galehr

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." — George W. Bush, LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000 (BUSHISM)

I happened to have spent my entire primary and post-secondary education in America during Bush W's regime. My freshman year in High School started with 9/11, and by 2007, I fled to Cairo, Egypt, having had just quite enough of American life under Bush W. In the course of those seven fateful years, I lost a lot of hope in all political righteousness, voting and demonstration included. Our world will never be the same. 

________

Departing from the downtown train, a friend blanks off in another direction, holding her pistol and handing one to my wife. She’s gone to shoot two of my childhood friends. “I’ll only kill one,” she says. All the while, I feel a similar fate between my wife and I. 

One of Four Freedoms Murals by Norman Rockwell

Entering an emptied church in a historic neighborhood, I kneel down on unfinished concrete flooring, bare as my back as I lift my shirt. My wife then raises her pistol and commences to shoot me straight through above my stomach, below my lungs, a perfect shot, just so much that I’ll survive while experiencing the bitter pain of the act and my coursing blood. As we exit the building room, outside on the street corner, our friend rushes over, hiding her pistol in a bag. 

La Chapelle de La Madeleine à Malestroit by Alexandre Bloch

At my feet, I see a broken skull. I can see the smile of my childhood friend eerily emanating from the skinless mouth. Supposedly, the other under our friend’s thumb, my other childhood friend, got away like me, shot clean through the back. 

________

Moment's seasonal greeting, here in Virginia the human weather anticipates unprecedented climactic shift. We are aware, N. Americans, ready? He closes, "I'll be home for Christmas."

- excerpt from "The Pleasant Man"

Do Not Confuse Transparency With Justice, Interview With Julian Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lays the groundwork for sanity and clarity, two moral imperatives which become severely deluded in our modern economic infrastructure of global monetary exchange and corrupted international hierarchies with regard to law and policy. The transparency is won through the exposure of new facts, and the justice is had in their due measure via civil application on the ground. This is a bottom-up frequency of people intelligence. This is our one and only power in an age where the word, and its unforgivable silence, is one of the most powerfully dominating forces, painting such instances of carnage as the war in Iraq with the "nice" of workaday mindlessness, aloof and yet proverbial. 

Watch, and wonder why human experience has become the greatest challenge to corrupted power. 

"Politically significant leaks will be 'collaboratively analyzed by hundreds of [Wikileaks] editors in a way mainstream media-leaked documents could never dream of...'" Hanna De Jong, Wikileaks spokesperson, "Media/Web site aims to post government secrets"

________

I know this man. The narrowing, shifty corners of his immaculate apartment reek with the anticipated horrors of bachelordom. A homosexual no less, I slither through the tiny, dimly lit space, eyeing the specialty fabrics and delicate cabinetry with suspicion. This man is no frugal spender. He begins to prepare a fish salad. The salmon are now extinct. “Right and fished out all the way down to Caribbean,” he says, as I open a can of tuna.

Adaptation (2004) by César Leal Jiménez

The lights dim to near darkness as I put the last finishing touches on the salad. Lying across from one another on the carpet floor, he asks me how I deal with my oncoming death. I get nervous, as I notice him procuring a crack pipe from the folds of his clothing. I escape into the corridor halls of the apartment complex. Finding a washroom, I clamber downstairs into a basement. A mass of elderly people sits and washes in undivided toilet and shower stalls. Flabbergasted, I am at all odds. “Should I return upstairs?” Blankly, I go anywhere except back.     

________

full with brutish lies
that carefully whispers a song of superiority, stigmatized,
and the random tear, breaking at the seam of the color line
brackets, the argumentative congress
in sparked ruthless struggle

...

in our head and eye
who self-formed, began as a creative laboring
in the strong brush with a peculiar kind of will
that worshipped a diverse issuing of the ten-thousand tongued iris
performing for the blessed worldly guest

...

growing up in the solitary profundity of man, alone with nature,
wherein lies our humane passage
through social obstacles
in desire and the restrictive curse

- excerpts from "None Superior Than No One"

Beloved Cuba: Reflection on "Amada" by Humberto Solas

I chose to watch this film firstly to practice Spanish apprehension, and in turn, out of an enduring captivation with all things Cuban. In 2006, I protested in NYC against the unjust incarceration of the Cuban 5. After an invitation to travel to Cuba illegally for the purpose of providing much needed resources to an isolated people, I developed a lifelong interest in Cuban affairs. Now living in Canada, I may one day be able to legally visit the country. 

That aside, the content of the film, "Amada" by Humberto Solas, draws on the old story of the internal breakdown of classist oppression in the wake of international pressure and domestic corruption. Here the domestic is defined both as the country of origin and the aristocratic residence. The aristocracy implodes by the will of incestuous love, from within the adulterous presidential marriage, for the hand of the revolutionary dreamer. A passionate, creative literacy is at stake as the emotionally unstable protagonist must struggle to emerge from the trappings of her own heart and that of the deviance of her husband's oppressive rule. By the end of the film, she walks through the yellow-fever afflicted impoverished hovels of the common people, as the presidential villa is stormed by hunger strikers from the dispossessed farmers of the countryside. Read a comprehensive film review. 

Reflecting on the film, I've become privy to the fact that hunger strike is not an obsolete word in the Cuban political vocabulary, even today. Under the post-Fidel government, there is reason enough for young, passionate dreamers of new literacy to afflict themselves with terminal struggle. Read Yoani Sanchez's blog on Wilman Villar Mendoza. 

________

Downtown, I walk by the library. Usually a place of hoodlums, corner crows spying deep into the drug-addled core of the urbane West, a nightmare seethes through eyes lit with nostalgia and lost reckoning. I’ve come from old wood houses, family life on the water, foundations on grass and neighborly wildlife, the windy pines. Now, I aspire to music.

I see a group of rough young travelers, Quebecers, stealing across the prairie to a destination unknown to them, as unknown to all, a mystifying crowd, escalating with their sounding drums, a cacophony of cans and djembes, they are wildly talented. Two play a doumbek as well as any world-class percussionist. I join in, highly amused, jamming along with intentional spirit, a community of street languor and silly dope-swung dreams. Though my assumptions spit back at me, a gunpoint stares at my face.

“Do you speak French,” he says, threatening to murder me with nonjudgmental, hawkish eyes. “Merci” I respond. Handing a pocketful of change over and into their busking bowl, I stealthily walk away. Outside the city, back at the calm-winded house, cool riverine breezes blanket my siblings in peaceful naps. Before they wake, I exit, towards a nearby field.

An older woman, a family friend watches from the stoop of the front door. Our eyes meet from afar, speaking numbers unheard from our mouths, I continue on, shakily into the lone moonlit night. Soon, as I pass through a wormhole of overgrown, forested road, I am led into a city with the immediate turn of a spotlight; a bright glare prefigures the polluted sky with the damaged gold of human weakness. It is a native city of the hoodlums who I had an altercation with earlier in the day.

Massive television screens display commerce and public failure, an aspiration to woe, and the sickly art of rectitude. A votive triviality burns every wandering eye. A street-side host clamors with frayed tongues over the spillage of an alleyway tomb, unreasonable crowds fish-eye over ledges and stairways, pleading with the entertainment rite to move in its festering abuse to inhumane ends. Unable to get a word in, demeaned with the unsightly pandering, I turn back.

Soon, I realize the family friend who saw me as I was leaving had followed, together we return back to our house. Through the forested womb on the outskirts of the city, the young bandits meet us, hiding in the shade as we approach. With the instantaneous glint of a knife, we are attacked and at once evade with spritely ingenuity. Followed, the reign over a pillaging burst of hollow mongering, as they ransack churches and elderly communities in their attempts to follow us to our rural homeland. At home, alive, I realize she’s not with me. I tell the rest of the family what’s occurred, and as soon as I do, she walks through the doorway, she had overcome, her eyes speak with the wealth of her matured cry, pouring out into the silent comfort of our haven.

_________

Criminal

"To dream of witnessing a crime indicates that others are wasting or taking over your time, energy, and ideas. To see a criminal fleeing from justice, denotes that you will come into the possession of secrets of others, and will therefore be in danger, for they will fear that you will betray them, and consequently will seek your removal." (iDream)

_________

slumbering amid graves
launched astral fleeting,
stone wrought misdirection to be filled

by the plagued European missed fortune,
a drought opening to ice age fruition
in the holy garden

beneath the tree of Good and Evil and its seeds
browned with a madness,
strong, birthed into a woodland street

low, dim face,
burnt with crazed flesh hunger
to consume a poet's lie,
lips all red

excerpt from "ghost!"

The Genocidal Unconscious of America

“The U.S. is a strange society because I think consciously the country wants to believe that it does good and that it has, you know, good intentions around the world and it’s not very in touch with its subconscious self that is a lot meaner and a lot more homicidal than the self that it would like to acknowledge.”

- Charles Abourezk, Supreme Court Justice for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe

___________

With an unusual collection of friends who have never before met in person, including my childhood neighbor and my best friend in Calgary, we all set out on bikes through a nearby forest path to the ocean. We are excitable, older and more aware of our environment than ever. There is a confident appreciation for the anticipated wilderness charm ahead. As we exit the neighborhood onto the main street, still lacking any signage dedicated to non-motored travel, there is a foreboding stimulus from afar as an interrupted vacuity of law overtakes the street-laden, forested horizon. We all stretch our necks backward, blithe with eager enthusiasm to find our way to the secluded ocean vista. As we comfortably engage on our briefly paved portion of the path, a paddy wagon stops in front of us. Lights blazing with ingenious madness; the government insinuation is of madness and futility. Officers exit their vehicle, pursuing our humiliated, fading glory with a clown-faced repertoire of deception and misinformation. One cop hands me a crinkled dollar bill. Hesitant, I grab its frayed edge. As soon as the act of derogation ensues, another cop hands one of my friends, visiting from Canada, a ticket of over one hundred dollars. Sitting down, exasperated with inner frustration, my friend refuses the ticket. I take it for him as to not cause a stir.

The cops press on with deliberation, attempting to get a rise out of us through any and every means at their wicked disposal. Soon, our bikes are in the back of the van. “What have we done?” I ask myself with intensive speculation. The air smells of fish and pig, putrid. Their glares are fuel to the fire. Letting us out at my neighborhood friend’s home only a few paces away by car, as to pour salt on our bleary, wounded minds. One cop asks my friend, “What’s your family background?” He smiles patiently and responds, “Well, I’m English, and ummm…” the silence is emphasized by the piercing stare of the officer denouncing his Asian eyes with an understated slur. “And Dutch!” I say, in support of my friend before the awful reception of the savage, unannounced feigning of America’s pitiful counterterrorism. Defeated, the rest of my friends join my neighbor into his house for drinks and an indoor evening, while I angrily bike down the hill to my mother’s house with the ticket in my pocket. “I’ve got to tell them about the insipid brink of justice coagulating around our neighborhood with such asinine hubris.” I consider introspectively.

Red flashing lights drown the usual calm haze around my mother’s suburban home with inconceivable villainy. As I ride smoothly around the back of the house to peer out into the driveway stealthily, I can’t believe my eyes. “Another police raid, we are innocent! The police are the guilty ones these days.” I curse their heavy hog-head presence on our property. They have torn apart the entire garage. My stepfather stands on his smooth driveway pavement dumbfounded, entrenched in the unwelcome malevolence. Domestic counterterrorism laws have been enacted. To the local police, now in full operation as a military state, no heed is recognized for the delicate peace and earnest honesty attributed to the very population whose lives have been dedicated to their government services. Through force, the government takes full advantage of the interlocking mutuality behind the dual inception of insurmountable trickery. “When will America’s children realize they have only cheated themselves?” I clamber on, to ride myself through the neglected wilderness path. There is an ocean beyond.  

_________

Police

"If the police are trying to arrest you for some crime of which you are innocent, it foretells that you will successfully outstrip rivalry...A dream involving the police means you feel guilty for not honouring a promise or obligation...The police could be addressing Karmic Law as well as the laws in our physical world...Old dream interpretation books say that dreaming about police is an indication that you will obtain unexpected assistance with a current problem." (iDream)

________

Preconception, the snowball effect, and the end of humanity.

Thematic Abuse.
Two Versions (one for public, one unmodified).

Lost familiarity.
Generations.

“What blue fire has been found hidden these last few days?”

“It is the tax of the many on the few”

And the brandished awareness of our single life
followed into the brazen evening with full vigour.

The young woman revealed her teeth
and wore a short vision on her ring
that lacked the ability to forget.

Her rhythmic movements lied agape
to preserve our entrenched faculty
to be remorseful and sick.

We lie in the unbounded grease
of a pandemic conspiracy,
a mass confusion,
ringing clear as the empty sky
before each face, it sings wryly
behind a mask of enraged pain.

“It is a race to the beginning!”

“The thieves of fire are out to lunch today and we have no one left to hear…to see…to be…”

The groundless mire of slick urbanized gore
lets a finishing cackle into the murderous air
as we slink in our beds engrossed
in the contemplative gold of our own breath
…softly giving way to the perfected sleep
that buys dreamless jewelry from the rocks of visceral stress.

“Illiterate, unreliable, lazy mediocrity, feigning humanity"

"Who is that
who cherishes the meaningless fog?

It covers our sanity…”

Animals quiver with stagnant pleas
whimpering in their cages
and blinking tears into the loveless dust
of the meat they will sacrifice
to a mouth blocked with a family honor
so loud it tears to fuck
all the beauty of being one species.

Feb. 20, 2010

The Achuar Awaken the Modern Dreamer

Achuar Chief Peas Peas Ayui visited my city this month. He came to stand before the CEO of a company destroying his homeland, poisoning his children, and tearing from the riverine soils our one community of all Earthly life, the very biodiversity of the Amazon: OUR LUNGS.

Through Pachamama Alliance

The Pachamama Alliance noted that the Achuar have a "Self-Sufficient Dream Culture" who, "In all aspects of their culture reflect a spirituality oriented around dreams and visions. The Achuar have many ancient, and refined rituals to access dreams and integrate them into daily life." (source)


Based on a travel account into Achuar territory, we may learn more about the importance of dreaming:


For Information on the Achuar, Oil "Development" and the Perils of the Modern Dream
Go To AMAZONWATCH