The Poetics of Resistance: Myths of India and Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait of artist Karnakoski by Aalto, Ilmari

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

Death's Door by William Blake

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

The Indian in his Solitude by N.C. Wyeth

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

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

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

_________

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Realizing our OBJECTION by Rusty Kjarvik

The Value of People: Voices of Struggle and Creation in Western Canada

Crystal Lameman - Conference 2013 from Public Interest Alberta on Vimeo.

"Enbridge is so poor all they have is money." Wet'suwet'en hereditary Chief Na'Moks of the Tsayu (Beaver) Clan

"Living in an impacted community, in the frontlines of the Tar Sands, we get so caught up in our own issues that we forget about human beings, Indigenous people on a global level." Crystal Lameman of Beaver Lake Cree Nation on Treaty 6

The crowd cheered to the tune of ejecting the filthy rich from Calgary proper, the"most unequal city in the country" according to the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute. Well over a hundred people crowded into a sold out hall at Parkdale United Church on a favorably tepid spring night. The beginning of the 11th Annual Public Interest Alberta Conference, “Fighting For Our Future: People Power versus Corporate Control” opened with investigative journalist Linda McQuaig, author of The Trouble with Billionaires. In a bygone era, the audience would have grabbed pitchforks on their way to Mount Royal Village.

McQuaig began by invoking the economic history of Canada. 1940-1980, also known as The Golden Age of Capitalism, when economic growth was widely shared, crystallized in the “social contract” to curb classist polarization through high taxes for social programs. “That’s the period of greatest economic growth in North America that we’ve ever had before or since,” said McQuaig. “Average income was doubling every twenty years.” The result was a society looking forward to increased leisure time.

Before tax cuts for the rich became an institutionalized affair, public wealth was palpable. “There was no trickle down,” McQuaig said referring to the propaganda of the 1% in favor of neoconservative economics. “In fact, there was a gushing upwards. All the income gains since 1980 have gone to the top ten percent, and particularly, of course, the top 1% and the top .01%.” Factoring in the inflation, the median income in Canada is lower than it was thirty years ago.

Where did leisure time go? The Conservative government of Canada has set the retirement age back two years. “That economic dividend went entirely to the top 10% and the top 1%, that’s where you’re leisure time has gone,” McQuaig pointed out assuredly. “Economic equality, the progress has been stopped dead in its tracks.” One solution is a wealth tax, especially in Alberta where the Heritage Fund is $16 billion in comparison to Norway’s at $700 billion. Federally, Canada saves exactly zero dollars for a rainy day.

Research on a “millionaires tax” by The Globe and Mail illustrated how a one percent wealth tax imposed in Canada by 2020 would cover all federal and provincial deficits. The Deloitte Centre for Financial Services projected the number of millionaires in Canada to rise to 2.5 million by 2020. Yet, in contrast to Linda McQuaig’s warning to Albertans that the rich will leave if a wealth tax is implemented effectively, what she did not warn is a far more sobering possibility. “But it’s easier to defer taxable income than to move,” Neil Reynolds wrote on October of 2011 in The Globe and Mail. “When you levy disproportionate taxes on the rich, you serve eviction notices on the poor.”

Referring to the income of the American sub-prime mortgage beneficiary John Paulson, “In what moral universe is that hedge fund manager worth 82,000 nurses, in what moral universe is he worth even one nurse?” McQuaig exclaimed to a bright wave of laughter and applause. “Today’s corporate elite and wealthy elite, has not only the power to wreak havoc on our lives, but to actually destroy the planet, because of the modern technology and the human capacity now for destruction.”

READ MORE (4580 words) @  Public Interest Alberta, The Media Co-op, IndyMedia & Readers Supported News

LEARN MORE @ Tar Sands Healing Walk

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“What’s that smell?” I could see his thoughts writhe like a cold snake. My bedded flesh, wrapped in fallen hair besmirching the unwashed blanket coiled around my nude body. Eyes went crooked. Noses were covered. I stepped barefoot over the austere, carpeted floor, civilly, in line. The teller remained a smile, famously in keeping with the workaday service kitsch of probable positive personality. My own face with mirrored emptiness. “Next.” I bloomed overfull, with gold coins. Prosperity is a mark of weight and valor.

Earthbound by Evelyn De Morgan

“Be stilled.” The Earth shrank under dim folds of burly disgust. The masculine prowess burrowed in the vainglorious poverty of inhuman disguise. Artifice and loss, nature spun with fire and bones fleshed with greed. Concrete paralysis, the wading gush of darkness floods this garden of hate. Alone, I scan the tramcar, brushing past the ire of misbegotten wards, floundering hands warmed in the blue flame of intimate ruin. Silence grounds, but for the rumbling dirge of the railway, clattering like a mad skeleton, of deadly fear. A ghastly presence, my reflection, I turn.

 Casella Rail Stuttgarter Platz by Otto Schmidt

Of large girth, unknown terror unseen, unheard, the unassuming weight of an unreal body: HER. A heavy-set African woman of eyes, sitting, a rock entrenched in my spectral pallor. Looking through staring eyes, the mutual end of oceanic reflection. Hitting through to rock bottom, as the ocean-floor seethes with the volcanic murder of all that rests atop the ground of life, I saw through to a fear; unknowing. There is a fear beyond the nerve, beyond the knock of bones, and the bristle of hair. I have seen her, and vanished before a breath.

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The album, "Evocations: Exotic Settlers" is an evocative musing on the sound language nestled deep within the poetic substance of orated selections from a collection of works under the same title. In continuity with the theme of "exotic settlers", the album is an experimental narrative-sound art exploration into the imagination of a journey of settlement, both archaic and modern.

Here, voice soundings are mixed with one instrument at a time, to convey a sense of the traveler, whose light pack is ideal for the road ahead, and whose voice traverses the simple grandeur of sonic revelry from a single instrumental accompaniment.

Themes of travel are juxtaposed with settlement, both in the settlement of tradition and ecology, and the inner and outer journey to that destination. To settle on one instrument at a time is a metaphor for the inward/outward experience of settlement for the migrant, who eventually becomes an "exotic settler".

Exotic Settlers charts the journey of experiencing the naturally transformative process of ending a period of transitional residence, and beginning to live in one place exclusively. Questions of home, travel and what is foreign are approached creatively through a lens adjusted through self-reflection on these themes, which led to my own "settlement" within. As I have become more permanently resident in a specific place, I have realized that earthly geography flows with the transient impermanence of nature itself, and that the only true settlement is in one's heart.

Exotic Settlers by Rusty Kjarvik

Grandmaster's Fight Against Colonization, Fulfilled.

Source

"In 1967, Grandmaster Ip Man started the Wing Chun Athletic Association to foster the spirit of Wing Chun with a group of like-minded enthusiasts, fulfilling the most cherished dream of his later years. Until now, Wing Chun has become a world renowned branch of Chinese martial arts. The lineage of Grandmaster Ip Man's disciples has exceeded 2 million people...including the most illustrious action star of all, Bruce Lee." - from "Ip Man" the film  

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A full-scale invasion! Be-feathered helmets and Spaniard tempests swing wildly in the bloody aftermath breeze. The mountain jungle air is chokingly humid. The brayed skin and shattered metal splits and shaves with hairless, painted flesh meeting the clunky spillage of wounded Europe, thirsting to murder unearthed prophecy. Silent, I escape. There is no victor, only the great veil of death and havoc, a clean-swept tide foreboding a colony and its inimitable dry heave of personality into the vile mix of disease and one-sided freedoms.

A vented rise of wood and shale offers solace. I meditate with spirited concentration, removed entirely from the bells swinging into their clapper of my inevitably gruesome end. I’ve escaped this history into another world entirely.

My first visit to East Asia! I ride wealthily and untethered down futuristic main streets in South Korea, eyeing Monasteries doubling as military halls. Tokyo films play in the pavement signage. I hear Cantonese and Vietnamese swimming in my head. No, this is Korea! We dance carelessly over the sweet dell of masterful urbanism. There are people to meet, and eagerly we find our way, personified by withdrawn shelter in the sun world east. By midday, I am alone, a vagrant wanderer looking for likelihood in the exotic sky.    

________

Asia

"To dream of visiting Asia is assurance of change, but no material benefits from fortune will follow." (iDream)

________

not leading, trying, attempting,
nor bluntly giving, allowing or assuming,
yet to leave an ear, as offering, sacrificial listening,
to give an ear, affixing a host
who lets their body down to the cured mammal's coat,
whose friendship bore a spiritual communion

- excerpt from "shaped by more hands"

Through The Forest of Infinite Creativity

“I think I’ve created an environment in this forest that allows me to dream and to think. I like to work in that state musically, I’m very happy in that dream-like world…It’s a very internal type of sight, it’s a memory really…There has to be some struggle, I think, to create something of value, so there’s always that searching inwards.” - Howard Shore, composer

_________

The spiraling staircases in the inner lining of the university campus stretch as with poor digestion in the expunging of this semester’s students. It is our final few days. My friend, bound by the head with heavy dreadlocks races down the stairs, his phone falls from his clothing. On the phone, I see his experiments with asemic manuscript art. I am relatively unimpressed yet endeared by his attempts to invigorate this little known art form that I have been so adamantly embracing.

That summer, I board a ship-bound theatre. Is this a re-telling of “Queen of the Nile”? I am unsure as to the exact play. Soon, I begin to befriend those on board the ship in the starlight sun. All are jovial and friendly as the high-spirited waters direct us further into the riverine wilderness, high above atop the luxurious craft. In one scene, there is a procession involving an African woman character as lead. Two African-American ladies on board vie for the part. The scene calls for a booming voice. I console the lady who was denied the part. She receives her secondary well and smiles to me warmly when I whisper into her ear in Spanish. “You are the best to play the African role.”

In a campfire setting, unseen by a gathering of people on the banks of the palm-encrusted river banks, I sit with a Venezuelan friend as the festivities prosper in our midst. He shows me his new guitar, an electric Oud, played also by a Sudanese artist. Quickly, I mention my knowledge of the doumbek, after which he invites me to play with him. Our music is fine and elegant to the ears, as the fire spits rejuvenated glory into the dusky damp canopies above. Shadows flit with gorgeous mystery. 

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Ship

"To dream of ships, foretells honour and unexpected elevation to ranks above your mode of life...If you dream of being on a ship, you should listen to your instincts in waking life - they are powerful allies for helping you deal with everyday problems...if the voyage is calm you should go ahead with your plans."

________

“My home is at war.”

"There is no more to say."

So I said nothing.

When no response is needed, you don’t even show a face.

“There is no room for necessity.

We are past that.

We live for ideology and we have abandoned spirit for the still death of the end.”

Feb. 19 2010

L.A. apartment

Occupy Demonstrator Forced to Immigrate to Egypt

Spring by Abel Grimmer

[In a vivid dream dreamed in my mother's house, the home where I first took flight from the nest, I experience a dream unlike that yet experienced on this visit to the places of my origins.]

I am an Occupy demonstrator; with stereotypical shaggy hair and a wiry beard sparse enough to age me youthfully. At first impression, a fire-born Sagittarius without regret or remorse. I have a taste for the insane rush of amateur denial. A ferocity grows in me to bleed with the public truth of mass suffering at the hand of the few: 1%. I feed off the morning dew before the violent marching of our militant society exhales its smog of consumptive dread over the undreamed folds of a quotidian, earthly stress.

With sudden instantaneous manifestation, my surroundings turn into a punctilious mold of congruent geometry. A seemingly shapeless mass of grey and beige frosts the walls of my interior perception with gross boredom. Enraged, I tear with mad vivacity for a new paradigm. Social dominance does not move astray from my line of sight as it defies internal contemplation and steers ever clearly into the bedrooms of the few: 1%. I give them all the middle finger with raw, open tenacity.

I am reminded of W. Bush; his first trip outside of the U.S. after his term of totalitarian presidency. We geared to angry maximums in a show of torrential defamation at his name.

There is a slump in the public demonstration. The efforts sway to clandestine operation. There is an underground swell of purpose. An optimistic slumber chimes beneath the sidewalk cafes. I am welcomed at a subterranean meeting place. The air is unpredictable. There is a contingent wading in passersby and onlookers who wonder about the end of their movement; it may be nearer than they fear. I have a purpose. I make my delivery and ask desperately for a place to sleep. I need to rest on a surface other than that of concrete smoothed by nylon. The muffled sound of sheets once quelled my silent might and now I am only stirred with the jarring gripes of untrustworthy leaders from this, our autonomous modus operandi of Darwinian survival.

Sleepless, I cower trenchantly outside the walls of an Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. The streets are emptied with sacred failure. The notches of murder scale high across the batons of the street police. I have come here to die to the American Lie. I wait restlessly, dealing with bureaucrats in twilight hours. The Cairo dawn inflames my vital organs with a need to escape this devil-coaxed life of American savagery. I fight for the freedom to move, for my wife and our sanity. We ask only to be awake, and not depraved of a social camaraderie known from collective suffering, shared through speech, and simultaneously lightened through action for one being, our whole. At the same time, we fight for the dignity to rest our heads on a feather of respect in this anthropomorphic hole of modern factory-style life ways.

The struggle continues.