Experimental Cave Art: Philosophies in Word, Vision and Sound

Aboriginal Rock Art, Ubirr Art Site, Kakadu National Park, Australia
Photo: Thomas Schoch

“When your night becomes day, then that which is dreamed is on earth. Do not be too high-spirited, but go, and go alertly.” Aborigine Saying

In continuity with the theoretical writings on the natural sleep cycle as expansive beyond the twenty-four hour day, and especially beyond the programmatic workaday cycle, it is not only the activity of waking activity that might define the energy experienced by the mind-body based on sleep cycles but the content of dream itself.

For example, we go through cycles of remembrance and forgetting, this is a fundamental attitude of the cosmos, as we see in the natural tendency to the peek-a-boo gameplay in all children. Similarly, as this is reflected in our conscious and unconscious experience of life, so this is true with the content of our dreaming. We will go through periods where dreams are not remembered, and then after a time, will begin to remember again. These periods of remembering the content of dreams ultimately point to an unresolved momentum of energy building up in the psyche as a consequence of either personal or collective unconscious activity that one becomes susceptible to in their daily life.

Until this mode of consciousness is directly confronted and transformed through creative insight and practical application in thought, reflection and in some basis of continuity in consciousness, e.g. imaginative outpourings based on the theme and nature of dreaming, where all suppressed and repressed energies are focused and shifted into full view, the involuntary sleep or unconscious REM will continue to emerge and take shape in the psyche through imagination, emotion, intellect and every exhaustible mode of subtle activity.

Every time a dream is remembered, the remembered content, whether imagery or emotion or otherwise, is part of a string of remembrance leading back to a source of reflection deep within the whole being of both the individual dreamer and the society throughout the entire spectrum of its history, propaganda, knowledge, media, relationships, etc.

Oftentimes, the strength or immediacy of memory, the lucidity of the dream state as it interweaves through the waking mind, forecasts the urgency of attention to the subconscious. For example, I have experienced lately that the instant I am ready to sleep, as fast as I close my eyes, I see the content of my dreaming, the imaginations is teeming with life and energy, needing to be witnessed, calling out over the margins of consciousness.

The only way to resolve the inception of remembered dreaming is to confront the subtle impulse to emote or inspire a certain inborn expression, metaphorically illustrated in the dream itself. When dream and life are subsumed into wholeness, undivided by the normative values of structured time and analytical thought, the subconscious and the conscious merge into a healthful surrender of the cosmic unconscious faculty of Being, as the great mystery of self-awareness. As reads the motto in Athanasius Kircher chiseled over the alchemist's doorway, originally in Latin, it says, "While Sleeping, Watch'. See previous post: Alchemical Poetry of Terence McKenna

_________

Breathtaking hot night. The empty dark dream of memory. Narrow canals, irrigation trenches in the backyard under a pitch-black sky, a starless new moon. The seizure of domesticity; fencing blinds besiege all passage to horizon’s beginning, and a house cat skits through the mud with a silent flit of dusty soil. A chase begins, until I grab the fickle creature by its muzzle, and in the raw and ruddy brown earth, I tangle its fibrous backbone, cracking the living spine with the brute edge of my wrist. The sky clears like a strong exhale, and the ground takes formless cover of the starless sky above. I drift away from a mind to a life as inert as the swift welcome of death.

An Australian mangrove, ebb tide by WC Piguenit 

Worshipful room of sweat and lust, the emotive spring of music keeps us swinging to a joyful noise, the urban sound of pain alleviated before closed eyes, staring inward to hear the sight of the muses, invoked by the musician hosts sweltering mad before a small though dedicated crowd of movement. And the headline group enunciates first note with strength unseen; the crowd has since escaped into the bleak, old night. A few straggling local friends stand by the stage, amused and apologetic. One song passes in the silent hollow, a space deemed fit for thousands reduced to pin drop nothingness.

Musical entertainment at the spinet by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld

The emptiness is as palpable as the heartless mind, rounding off pales shots into the murderous pangs of repeated history, the bitter angst of adolescence returning in a white noise of a flushed and ruthless voice, the weird ground rumbles and quakes with burning trust; that a future still opens ahead – full and potent with renewing vigor, to wake again, and live the day from the start, even if our rise coincides with dusk. A silent vision unearths our eternal belonging with grace, and the human community within, where the heart is still in its constant beating, in its rhythmic patience with a more sacred trust.

__________

An elegiac satire on split vein of domesticity, as it unravels and spurns the knowledge-creation of a more unstructured style. The home is the centrepiece of domestic life. Yet, for many thousands of years, there is evidence that we were in fact cave-dwellers. "Caveless" muses on nostalgia for those cavernous days through a reading of "Cave! Home", about a time when petroglyphs and charcoal painting were more important than off-white, beige and any number of dull, and sterile wall aesthetics, and the great-image language of visionary rites were outweighed the significance of antique literature. How can we resurrect the idea of the cave in the context of the modern home, with its womb-like contours and living light that curls throughout our waking minds like breath, and infiltrates our dreams like a warm lover enduring a midnight meditation at our feet?

"Placeless Human Society" is also read here to recognize the dramatic shift from our ancestral pre-history as cave-dwellers of imagination and earth, where suburbia (and its non-subordinate counterpart: the city, for that matter) has essentially uprooted us from this inborn life as a dweller from the earth. On a mass scale, we now dwell on earth abstractly, our imaginations have breathed on, yet the umbilical cord to the womb-cave-home from whence we emerged has long been cut.



"Cave! Home" was published in 3:AM Magazine on September 17, 2012 and is also featured in the most recent chapbook, "Creating in the City" which was released with "When No Stars Appear".

"Placeless Human Society" was published in Outward Link on November 7, 2012. The "Caveless" track release marks the release of the chapbook, "Suburbia to Suburbia: America-Egypt".

Suburbia to Suburbia: America-Egypt

Hatsuyume of Peace: First Dream of a New Creative Paradigm

"Hatsuyume (初夢) is the Japanese word for the first dream had in the new year. Traditionally, the contents of the dream would foretell the luck of the dreamer in the ensuing year. In Japan, the night of December 31 was often passed without sleeping, thus the hatsuyume was often the dream seen the night of January 1. This explains why January 2 (the day after the night of the "first dream") is known as Hatsuyume in the traditional Japanese calendar." [Wikipedia]

As in English, the word for dream in Japanese (yume) means both deep aspiration and unconscious visualization. The significance of the post above signals the beginning of an end; the nature of originality. The nuclear age is a sure sign of the paradigm shift in human life on Earth. Until every nuclear arsenal is disarmed and abolished, we are living in an age of mass oppression, global misinformation, and unyielding aggression. 

Over 2000 nuclear weapons have been detonated since the first two that ended World War II.   

And so, on a much smaller scale, I am beginning to transition into a new phase. SoJourn(al) has seen unprecedented readership in the last month, with over 4000+ views, especially attributed to  growing international interest for the post, Dream and Love. 

I will be accepting contributions/submissions from readers, writers, artists, and dreamers of all kinds while I post once a week instead of once every two days, beginning with a professional feature ghost-writer. Meanwhile, I will be republishing more from my experimental writing collection, featuring original musical soundscapes by the Dream Author (also a regularly performing world fusion musician), together with the exhibition of new manuscript artworks to complete the seven-cycle series of manuscript art and experimental writing. 

At the same time, I will be creating another site to support a more singly-dedicated, long-term creative non-fiction writing project. My Hatsuyume, my first dream of the new year, or new cycle of seasonal life on SoJourn(al) is to continue to grow creatively, and to welcome all who are interested to collaborate, connect and unite.

In Solidarity, Peace & LOVE

__________

In continuity with the previous wellspring of visual stimuli, the photographic wavelength of colour turns the mind in an outpouring rush, a quaking truth of Earth on a course of unforeseen exploratory, after all, we are visual creatures 

River Styx Canadiana by RK

On the Other Side by RK

Water-and-Sky Medium by RK

A Way Through by RK

Take The One Less Traveled by RK

 _____________

This smile, these eyes…
Not because it’s you that I enjoy…
Nor your surroundings, and our place in them together…

I smile for what’s inside…
The poetries and open-ended music of Love…
...

Loosening the human rope around the oceanic neck…
The great ring of fire…
Lassoed in spring by the Albertan rains…
Toasting to hot chocolate whispers over Mexican breasts…
Sweetened by the oily touch of American tongues…
Piercing the used flesh of an imperfect dream…
...

In Rusty Kjarvik and his chess logic…
Pinching the Grandfather reality…
In the light of Persian mystical nights…
...

My instinct’s crying bold in the proud deep of North American continental strife…
To transcend the borders of national glory and reach the great peak…
Budding with growing concentration camp Israeli trees…
A miracle as grand as the celebrated synagogue of ancestral lies…
Bearing down hard on the smoky aftermath of the beaten Greeks…
Chained to their swollen shields…
Engraved as the shell of Turtle Island…
Beaming with foresight into the sweeping ancient European imagination…
...

Restitution, despised yet somehow completing our entrenched need…
To be and play forward in the shapeless deep…
The unceasing downpour…
And slow drizzling food of creativity…
To give our most valued offering…
To the smallest most insignificant pull…
Which finds our being necessary…
And in that moment die…
Unafraid to the dream inside…

excerpts from "Why, Autopoietic Eternity!"

The Poppy and the Pride of Death: Interpretations on a Famous War Poem

Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny by Claude Monet

"Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: sleep because of the opium extracted from them, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead." [1]

"Another candidate for the psychoactive drug is an opioid derived from the poppy. The cult of the goddess Demeter may have brought the poppy from Crete to Eleusis; it is certain that opium was produced in Crete." [2]

References

[1] L. Frank Baum, Michael Patrick Hearn, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, p. 173

[2] Karl Kerenyi.Dionysos.Archetypal image of indestructible life.p 24

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie
         In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields. [John McCrae]

The above poem, written by John McCrae, is one of the important war poems in history. Today, it is read aloud by veterans at remembrance ceremonies with solemn intention. The symbol and metaphor poppy, here depicted, is especially relevant for the topic of war. 

The poppy symbolizes death. "In Flander's Fields the poppies blow" would then mean that in Flander's Fields, the dead sleep in peace. The second line further supports this. The last two lines, "We shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flander's Fields" emphasizes the simple metaphor of the poppy as a symbol of eternal rest, however, in this sense, the poem transcends symbolic import and represents the pride of the soldier as immortal, and sleepless in constant struggle. This is a poem to incite emotion for the dead, and where we might once believe they lay in respite from worldly cause, we are wrong. So the poem is a call to action, "Take up your quarrel with the foe". 

Further, it symbolizes how the poppy is a metaphor for the illusory nature of war, as seen from outside the veteran perspective. It uniquely distinguishes the veteran, whether alive or dead, as having an eternal place in the battlegrounds and in the generations of youth to follow. The poppy symbolizes our ignorance as non-military, as we remember the soldiers who fight on. 

And so, in the land of poppies, Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history wages on. Remembrance, in the metaphor of the poppy, can also fog our vision of the dead, and of their eternal struggle for rebirth in the fields where men are laid low. 

Peace author Arthur Clark once said the poppy symbolizes all who die in war, not just the soldiers of one's own nation, but every victim of war, every innocent child, mother, elder, the destroyed lives and communities. The poppy is the drug of pride, and like all drugs, while instilling disillusionment, it reveals truths of the human condition. 

_________

The inborn drug of sleep has yet to bear new visions fruitful and enduring. I travel eastward towards the desolate earth, and find matchless beauty in the serene quiet of petrified earth, the resonance of death lingers like a gentle breeze.  

Westward! (RK)

Son of the Brown Earth (RK)

Hiker's Meadow (RK)

To The Mountaintop! (RK)

The Canyon Calls Me Forth (RK)

__________

An untouched grand awe
Landed finally to rest beside the sickening mildew

Mulch-pressed nude lakes
Praised unto the natural moon

Lowering close over the beached horizon
A thirteenth name

Pleasing those raised on the island to visit their blood
Despite being insane

A malformed genetic waste
Purchasing birth

Towering over the healthy dead, grovelling
Ensnared by the angry temptress who walks entombed in mind

And spiritually blessed beyond our mundane knowledge,
She treasures the feminine life

...

To put to death philosophy, and cursed forms of common language
Now replaced with magic and divinity

Inert
Enough to overact above the spilled heights

Grandiose unity
Frontiersmen who bite at raw flesh and faint under the jeering of native rumblings

In the overcast dusk of Western humanity
Fallen alas to the bitter womb of civilization

And the crass membrane stew of our unalienable forebears
Freaking us out

Into stomachs without mouths
To feed on the juice of the horned phantom

And only lick from inside
The wounds stinging our nameless pride

excerpts from "Untouched Grande Awe"

The Tempest of Shakespeare's Foretold America

Shakespeare's Tempest Title Page, From Walter Crane's Illustrated 1893 Edition

"...like the baseless fabric of this vision, 

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Shakespeare's The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1

Miranda - The Tempest by John William Waterhouse

See Walter' Crane's Engraving for Act 4, Scene 1

This painting from the early 20th century depicts Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, who after being visited by a gathering of dancing nymphs, becomes irate before his children and lets out this oft-repeated quote in the final play solely attributed to this great English master of drama. 

I'd like to imagine that Miranda, alone on the coast of this strange, continental "New World" island, whose fate is the design of familial power, takes these words to heart, and envisions the great catastrophe of human ambition, as with the same vociferous sight as a sail ship torn in the tempests of the besieging, isolating, and finally, humanizing seas. 

I often hear this quote in my head at times, it speaks to me in the volumes as voluminous as the Earth's own oceanic body; a truism for the unconscious, subsurface flesh of all earthly necessity.

__________

At the house of my paternal grandparents, upstate New York, embedded the deep thick of hilly forests, I drift outside the family circle. A lump of earth appears as an ancestral burial ground, laden with the cornerstone of belief in a religious death through a life lived for the proverbial travesty of peaceful rest. 

Cauterskill Falls on the Catskill Mountains by William Guy Wall

In an act outside defiance, towards the inborn will to dream, I flee, bounding beyond the borders of the family lawn towards a new home. My brother, eager to follow in my footsteps, cavorts sheepishly in the pliant mud of earthly selfishness, and looking behind me, I see his devilish eyes smile with ghastly service. He raises a small pistol, and fires. I thumb a ride, and bound tirelessly through traffic, having skimmed the side rails of a merging highway road, a cop notices my automotive thievery, and at once I am caught. In my plea, they capture my brother close behind, warned of his homicidal designs. 

Highway-Byways by Paul Klee

In the police station, a lawyer sees us, and our family soon becomes present. They find him guilty. I’m barred from seeing him, yet the lawyer slips me a note, a suicide drawing, written with a chipped pencil within the frame of a bullet illustration. “Is he portending to war?” I wonder, free to feed my smaller animal the fun-loving pride of colourful satiation.

_________

America! Why have you buried your deepest, darkest secrets in whispers unheard? Yours is a truth disguised in a white blur as brilliant as the green-footed greed of mad industry. Why do you never step lightly off the strength of Europe's forests, onto world mystery reduced to cartography?

What is your name? And since when have you dreamed so shamelessly without thought to the diligent right to be in peace on Earth? Where is your life, if not in the decadent splendor of your shared riches? Why have you become poor with anger, and offered only suicide to your stout-hearted mob?

- excerpt from "America! America!" 

At the Romantic Edge, Before the First Impression

The Golden Bough by J.M.W. Turner

"WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients." Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 1

Lake Nemi by J.M.W. Turner

__________

Reclined on plush couches in a generic condo lobby, my friend and I watch a political debate. Angered by a statement by the Prime Minister, he becomes extremely deviant in his manner. “No one should be living in Canada.” The argument goes on to delineate the environmental truths of socio-historical degradation in the wake of our 21^st century fate. Mindless, he unzips the entire leather covering and filches it for a sell. I follow in cheeky amazement.

Blasted knocks deliver crushing blows to the weak door, the hinges creak and splinter. A mass of Jewish men greedily express their intense fury. I unlock the door ever so slightly, leaving the chain lock in place. “Your friend’s killed our boy. A little man is dead.” Their mouths sputter with chainsaw smoke as they charge ultimatums and death threats in the name of my absent friend. “He’s skipped town,” I excuse. Unwilling to confront their standing guard, whose immovable post at the front of my residence is an unwelcoming barrier to my normal life, I flee with no plan to return.

Petworth House, Interior by J.M.W. Turner

After a filthy cheap bus ride, I clamber out upon the beach sand, and peering into the bright daze of lake horizon, I see my friend in a drunken rage at the water’s edge, swinging a heavy sack. As I approach, I see madness in his eyes. He is another person altogether, I sense a body in the leather couch covering. “Why didn’t you sell it?” I yell over crashing waves and turbulent wind. He simply eyes me with confounding disinterest and without a moment’s passing, he flings me headlong into the water, where we are all to drown with the corpse-filled leather covering. I swim, and as he plummets to the lake floor, suicidal and lost to the world, I grab through the heavy seaweed and rocky outcroppings with salt and stone eviscerating my every bit of skin of its human moisture. A whale’s fume stings my side and I feel I am being helped along, a fellow mammal and helper in my midst. And the undertow sucks me ever deeper beyond the shore’s shallow depths out to the plain sea.

Fishermen at Sea by J.M.W. Turner

Marooned on an island, miraculously alive, I am cast over a rocky shoal, where the sea moss hangs in a color scheme of subdued purples and deep greens. A man, of unknown origin, aids me in crossing a hillock, emptied of its cavernous rock, a mere sparsely covered hollow of mossy, volcanic emergence. As we reach out over the pockmarked swill, the entire island’s mass becomes visible, a wonderwork of natural phenomena, indescribable in its wonder: a truly new land.     

_________

in the shamanic din of civilized inclinations
to become the oldest persona of grace, emergent
of land intoxicated by the avian lords
who roam tearfully in landless bush
above the streaming Pacific's current
fanning to seed
atop island exotics
and breach the blind exploration
from nothing

to an essence of discovery
in the learned,
seated life

- excerpt from "Drugged Love, Seated Life"

Discolored Urban Landscape Sexualized in Youth

Ciudad by Ulpiano Carrasco

The landscape is a discolored, underdeveloped urban setting rising high up, similar to urban sprawl of Cairo, favelas of Brazil and the outskirts of D.F., Mexico, I can see out from a high rise, immediately outside the underdeveloped core are more riche developments that look more like suburban residences in Boston, upstate NY or Washington DC, then after that ring which has a certain brilliance and illuminates in the harsh sunlight much clearer than my immediate surroundings in a somewhat dim vantage point, the most outlying division is a pentagon-looking, round-shaped government-type building similar to the famous MIT hall in Cambridge, yet the building is surrounded, as are all outlying developments, with dense low-lying jungle similar to southern Mexican traditional Maya lands, I seem to have checked into the dilapidated high-rise I'm in, as it is a hotel. I'm with four others, 2 guys and 2 women my age, one of the ladies looks Provencal French with a Roma nose, the group becomes quite sexually aroused and active, altogether, I'm observing with care how they treat the French-looking lady as her naked body is mounted revealing a pointed mass of moving genitals, the group soon disperses with an air of slight dissatisfaction, I seem extremely anxious and leave the building

Sept. 29 2011

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

Snowstorm Homesick Landing

Houses on the Hill (River Bank) by Paul Cezanne

Taking off, looking into front view of plane, seeing a man not so experienced in flying take off into a snowstorm, feel of the engine burning as we land in two different cities, and I appear in my driveway of coastal suburbia, Massachusetts, USA and find in a large cab car, friends from high school who I greet, and we drive off into the night

Fri, May 13, 2011