Malaika! Mama Africa Malaika!

"Little bird, I dream of you, little bird / Little bird, I dream of you, little bird"

- from "Malaika" favorite song of Miriam Makeba, also known as Mama Africa

________

“It all started when we began busking” she eyed me cruelly, feeling distant as ever while my scanning eyes pierce through the dizzying array of salacious bodies. The cutting immensity of decadence harbored on this night pours into our uniquely sized and filled glasses with an escalating temperament, roiling above our heads as a foreboding torrent.

I call into my childhood school from Alberta. Anxious as ever, I need to cover a deadline, before the end of spring. “I will not be present! Count me out!” as my letters turn to poetic dissertations on the finality of my language experiments, careening over a maelstrom of an ill-conceived message.

Back at the opulent restaurant table in Calgary, different sized glasses and their respective bottles and pints adorn our dining area. High end whiskeys, beers and wines flow into the embittered majestic glares at the end of a Canadian winter, survived now in the meager worries of our sex-pampered minds. My wife beside, is marked by an intense anxiety.

Exiting the table, I endeavor through night-fallen passes in these drought-severed western plains. Magically, the air breathes with otherworldly hosts. A threesome of burka-clad young girls strides deliberately from an outstretched grove, slowly needing life to burst through its seams of wintry bark. They disappear at the edge of a mysteriously placed river. The night is confident upon its paramount hour on which it enshrouds the hidden world in a veil of the spectacular above. I find a clearing. The new moon tears into the sky with quiet appeal, yet the starlight and planet’s reflections intermingle upon the wooly grass. The aura of Venus, Source of Love, kisses Jupiter, God of Power. 

_________

Planets

"Dreaming about planets could represent desire to explore either our internal world or the world of our egos (the external or physical world). Planets could also represent deeper things such as the way that we relate to ourselves. They can say something about the relationship that exists between our soul and ego...if what Carl Jung said is true, all dream images bring us back to issues of self-identity and profound understanding of self." (iDream)

_________

“majestic beauty of rushed earth” 

the Arab quest 

rinsed of ritual hatred

town-crier 

ancient as the dust 

gone

sailed 

into the flux of a speedy end

“arisen to stone but failed

shrank to mist and sold mazes for tears”

- excerpt from "Rushed Earth"

Blakean Spires Rise Toward Prehistoric Absolution

Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake

"We are shimmering scales on a snake which flies

 Which flies to the skies

 With a sacred surprise.

 We are feathers in wings

 We are the song which sings

 Of our common dream

 Sacred and sublime

 My breath is your breath

 I Share it with you

 Oh feathered snake

 Awake, awake

 We are ready to BE

 Aware of our divinity"

- excerpt from the feature “Meeting the feathered snake in the Cathedral of Nature” @ Lila.info a fantastic repository of Visionary Art, Contemporary Sacred Art and Outsider Art (permission granted for use)

_________

I read signs, undeniable and in my immediate vision before me. The signs foretell an oncoming fate of humankind with regard to energy resources. The future is a grim façade of a past latching on through the thinly laid dreams of a survivalist upon a bed of bloody nails, a failed magic trick. 

My vision clarifies with the acuity of a fish-eye optic nerve straightening over the bluff of a wide forest hill. The forest seems damaged, almost burnt, with an intense inbound potency of fear and isolation in every direction. 

I am as in the middle of another world, drowned in the trauma of unbridled change, a natural force looms, ever pervading, with another history, another worldview. I seem to move under the low hovering gray of sky when the tantalizing drip of adrenaline stirs in me. 

I feel a wolf near. This wolf seems more ferocious and starved than any I’ve imagined in the world before, this wolf eats human flesh. I move into a patch of dark grove, and with time edge my way off beyond the absolute wilderness of my strange, quiet surroundings. 

Human song echoes across the abandoned suburban neighborhoods. The sounds are of the nature of prayer, chanted and primal. I begin to see smoke rising from a hut made from animal hide and forest wood. 

As I approach, the scene quickly turns into an entirely new mode of experience outside the pale of a direct relationship with the bald face of nature, alone. Human interaction stirs a Medieval predilection. 

As I near the inhabitants of the small family camp, two of my friends soon appear behind me. With swords in hand, we face off with the camp’s inhabitants. My friends are quick to be aggressive and violent, however I seem to be the most nimble with a sword and quickly disarm them so as not to harm the innocent people of the camp. 

There is an air of blind unconcern for any solace in humanity, there is only bare personal need and pack mentality. I saunter off with my friends, who wonder about leaving me behind based on my insubordination, then to their ultimate liking accept me as one of the most skilled in the group. We walk through a completely emptied, silent suburban neighborhood. Once affluent, the residents have long since abandoned this obsolete way of life.    

_______

An outside view 

abundant hovels of eastern North America

"speak!

of a history that cowers with tragic hesitation

in a sick thirst for music

to transform the silent yawning of a near-frozen despair."

On the brink of waterless hours,

the people will their fasting into the deep, 

alone night of elderly decay.

Before the horizon, 

hill dwellers form their beliefs

by the norms of a faraway country.

Inside their habitations,

a strong light pulls warped wooden walls

and shrill metallic roofs

into sporadic gusts

Winds brew utter derangement

before the awe of a clear restitution.

- beginning excerpt from "A Fix in the Mourning"

Caedmon and Dream

Caedmon is the father of English song. The first poet known in written English.

According to an 8th century monk, Bede, "...he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream..." (quote found here.)


In a recent dialogue/discussion on the source of Caedmon's impact in our collective psyche the following has been written:

The first English poetry is directly intertwined with a fascinating way of exploring and/or identifying "dream"
             as inspiration or even a muse
That is so wildly intoxicating its subject

They under the spell found in the likes of Caedmon's song
             need no other medium
             through which to express their musing,
                          not even themselves

When the muse overtakes,
              all that's left is pure inspired expression
                          cast into history from a seed of dream.

How does the original source of written English "dream-speak" if you will, impart to us the wisdom of written poetic expression in the English language?

How do we reunite our written English poetry with that initial spark of dream which so moved Caedmon to inspire the entire forthcoming history of poetic expression in our written language, in our writing, and finally, in writing our dreams?


In an imaginative revisioning of a response by William A. Sigler

The bifurcation of the dream into experience and meaning is one aspect of the fall of man.


(this image is in the public domain, more info can be found here.)

Joseph, the great dream wizard of the Old Testament,
             whose powers got him both sold into slavery and the most trusted advisor of the pharaoh,

             did not distinguish between dream and interpretation.

But dreams have become,
              as Holderlin put it,

             “the all-perceiving abyss”
                      of this “destitute time.”

I sense this wonderful blog idea of yours to be more than a “waking life” journal
              that urges “dreamers unite” to “ease and relieve the burden of dreams”

              but a Holderlin-like journey
                      to the abyss,
                      the spaces between
                                 where the one is concealed and perhaps retrievable

                                 with the purest of poetic word.

Heidegger,
in his remarkable series of essays on Holderlin,

stresses that this dream space is the only trace left of our enlightened state,

the longing in dreams is the only true longing remaining to us
              now that the gods have left,
 and it is the poet’s singular task to recover these traces
              by journeying into the dream abyss with eyes open.

I’m feeling inspired
to take on a translation of Andenken
in honor of your own
transitional and open-ended state.



End Note:

Let's all continue this breathtaking and uniquely inspired dialogue!

What better place to imagine Holderlin's "abyss" than our own shrinking core of internet communications technology as it challenges us to further our reaches into our most hidden of corners in the home of our minds and most loosely tied knots on the docks of our realism.

Free Dream from Thought and Language...so we may enter Dream's innocent purity preceding its existence beside Ego and begin to imagine its refreshingly catastrophic gorgeous mastery over the human intellect!


(link to the source of this inspired dialoge/discussion)