History and Humanity: How Self-Awareness Leads to Reconciliation

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley by George J. Stodart

"No more let Life divide what Death can join together." Shelley

"We cannot continue to be recognizable and survive…if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels," said Terence McKenna in an interview for bOING bOING #10, to hail the oncoming psychic transformation of humanity in the 21st century, also known as the post-2012 New Age eschatology. 

Yet, historically, we have ever been unrecognizable when we look at interrelations between human societies, especially with regard to the European saga of colonialism and the institutionalized racism that followed (and arguably continues) in its wake. People from other continents, the Native, Indigenous peoples of the world, most emphatically Africans, Australians and Native Americans (from both North and South America), were for a considerable portion of history considered an inferior race, a subhuman species likened to earlier primates less developed than the European genus. 

As we have now begun to recognize ourselves wholly, all of humanity included, through science and reconciliation with our inhumane past, the challenge now remains clearer than ever, for it is our own selves, the Self of Humankind that is in need of development, and not any other form of life. So, we might ask, might we grow up from the childish state of irresponsible resource waste and join the community of life on planet Earth, or become extinct. As the human family becomes recognizable, next the whole of life on Earth must be recognized as our own self, as the body of a relative, and until it does, and we remain unrecognizable to ourselves, there is catastrophe as we straddle the line between dominance and extinction. 

Interpreting the above quote by Shelley in the last line of the third to last stanza of Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, essentially reads as "don't let life get in the way of dreaming" where the diversity of life, as it manifests in the human family, a wealth of ethnicities, spiritualities, and physiques can be seen not as a source of division, but of connectivity. And so, as I write, this the capital city in the state of my birth, Boston, has allegedly been bombed. In such times, it is ever paramount to instil the meaning of reconciliation within the human family. Peace studies author and professor George Melnyk recently shared with me the simple notion that "That's what happens in war, you define an enemy." And, so, with our nation(s) at war in the Middle East, and the "enemy" at hand, we can keep vigil with the caution that we should not jump to quick conclusions in our search for vengeance. 

The crossroads of human life in the 21st century divides Humankind between himself and the planet; the potential of nuclear fallout and the immanent ecocide with the unabated burning of fossil fuels. The struggle to survive as one, whole being, as a united humanity, is to be fought at our doorstep, and we must remain strong not to waver from our ultimate direction towards peace through reconciliation. See the documentary by Chris Hedges OBEY, at minute 22, where he writes, "Resentment against a disenchanted secular world will find deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason." Let this unfortunate incident be an opportunity to empathize with those who experience bombings on a regular basis as part of our government's foreign policy, as opposed to perpetuating violence through self-pity and aggression. 

_____________

A stone-bedded homely abode of five rabbis, all with simplicity and humor muttering of their bearded visage, they meander from home to a day’s work in the predawn night. I, a furtive wraith, clandestine in the dim corner, emerge to observe the floor-set scribes and their flowing fountain of wise austerity. The dusty air breathes sanctity unknown to most, yet from the window a flicker of artificial light breaches the soup of mind with Maras of temptation, apparitions of the female sex, flaunting a shadowy tint of flesh. I trudge outside, unencumbered by the pleasures of the intoxicating sights. We are at war.

Titus destroying Jerusalem by Wilhelm von Kaulbach

The direction of sight is clear. The enemy is known, and our targets destructible. The air is thinning of passion and feeling, to make way for hate. The true victim in this war is Earth. The all-out industrial fire has spurred on the makers of enmity under a veil of infinite resource. Brothers, sons and fathers bleed with for the ground on which they are laid to rest. The backdrop is far-reaching. There is a sense of humor in this war.

Toronto Rolling Mills by William Armstrong

Foregrounds blur into modernity, as a civilian is murdered, shot in the back, running towards us. Iraq is not Germany. Civilian and army are a rough and indiscernible duality. The cold smoke of hate becomes the backwash of sanity as soldiers and men secrete their pain into the willful triggers of deadly remorse. I, a photographer, capture the minutiae of existence full-born in the surviving families of Earth-bred singularity. Modern natives, the indigenous, bold eyes of people, now the last grave on which an unmarked praise still glorifies the vanity of war and power. Massive trucks crack and sputter past me, with so much gun, bomb and shell materiel that my knees weigh fierce into the concrete below. Rushing past, the soldiers reveal faces of bleary sweat and stinging tears, flowing from a smiling façade of youth, their graying eyes grow cold with fate as my photos are ignored.

Collateral Damage by James Miller 

When we declared war on Earth in WWII, the invasion of Iraq granted us full impunity as we commit the last atrocity on the only lasting connection humankind might instill from Earth to the mass of societies born and bred of global war. They line up, shaman to farmer, hunter to midwife, storyteller to seer, a community of global wisdom, attuned to the lightness of being, as in the creation stories of practical love. And in their firing squad, they choose to sit, meditating on the gun-barrel of unsightly loss – the drifting eyes of hate and need merge.

___________

After a cumulative process of self-publication, a DIY attitude of writing and publishing often spreads into the realms of experimentation and exploration with all aspects of the creative process and, especially where self-publishing is concerned, into self-innovated and creatively conceived avenues for sustainability.

Art is the "divinely superfluous beauty" as Robinson Jeffers says, however the artist is inherently tied to the whole of life. For this reason, I have decided to experiment with monetary value as a way to further understand my self-published works and the general field wherein I am situated as a self-taught creative artist active in a variety of artistic disciplines, with special regard for the overlap of media, thought and art.

Please join this conversation as society embarks ever on towards greater connectivity between the sacred, the communal and the entrepreneurial; that all three may one day join in a vision of society directed at once toward pragmatic utopia, while mutually creative and destructive, or better worded as discerning, in its ability to see and create potential.

I will still be offering the full collection online for free viewing, however, I have added the option of supporting the artistry exhibited by none other than the Dream Author. Jah!

Cyclical Wordplay by Rusty Kjarvik

Opening the page to experimental, improvised writing which emphasizes and attempts a most strict depiction of the spontaneous nature of mind can be perceived with harrowing aspiration in the realm of continuity, that is flipping the page, and its mystery, that is interpreting the language. As a forewarning of sorts, this collection of writing, as devised for readership, is the result of an editing which has purpose in giving the spontaneous flow of mental activity form. While attempting to convey the refreshing action of letting go, all structure and boundary and, in sense, constructs of mind are dissolved.

Created solely by one human being through "One Shot" intuitive improvisation stylings, Evocations: Cyclical Wordplay is the completion of a creative cycle of renewal, regeneration and return to the primary source of visionary inspiration: voice. With due reverence and respect for the infinite diversity of vocal and verbal forms among the worlds of the living and the dead, I hereby speak directly from the heart. Here, in these soundings, I am re-conceived through the mouth of the pen in all its power to amplify and obscure.

"Evocations" is a practice in contemporary experimental narrative, as opposed to the traditional conventions of spoken word. The poetics of oral storytelling are alive through soundings for the muses of voice in all its forms, whether in the tongues of wood, metal, plastic or flesh. The language of unity speaks through every medium.

Call of the Sacred River: Pather Panchali and Dreams of Varanasi

Wife

"Let's go to Benares. Don't the orators make lots of money?"

Husband

"We can't go. How can we? This is my ancestral home; how can I leave it?"

Wife

"Why not? You were away eight years before. You left me at my father's and never wrote."

Husband

"Then I did not know you sweet you are."

Wife

"Save your compliments. This is my home, too. But look at it; it's like living in the forest. At night the jackals prowl around. There are no neighbours I can talk to. You are not always here and sometimes I'm so depressed. You won't understand these things. You live in your work. Sometimes you're paid, sometimes not. I had dreams, too, of all the things I would do.

Outside Their Door, An Old Lady Beggar Sings:

"Those who came before are gone / I am left behind, a penniless beggar / Day draws to its close, night's mantle descends / Row me across to the other side"

From the film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road)

The same night I look back to Pather Panchali for a few words of wisdom on the experience of human dreaming, I coincidentally happened on the film, "Beyond" by NYC-based photographers Joey L. and Cale Glendening. The quote in the classic 1955 Bengali film Pather Panchali speaks to the luring effect that the ancient city of Benares commands, also known as Varanasi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Indeed, it is impressive to see the holy tradition of sadhus depicted in the light of modern photographic excellence. The final scenes in Joey L.'s film are incredibly touching as a young sadhu teaches about how the world is made for peace, and all must be as the sun, seeing all beings as equals and offering the light of wisdom with an exuberant heart to all indiscriminately. Long Live Mother India! 

_________

As the world turns, dreams often fall into the abyss of earthly shadows and solar illumination 

The Jaws of Life by RK

We Are Not Above Extinction by RK

Light On The Little Road by RK

Bridge Under Serene Sky by RK

All Rivers Sacred by RK

__________

and silence, and nothing, and silence,
and how in silent searching , the wandering fades

a trespasser in the popular living happen-stance of  “honest” life,
stopped,
self-betrayed,
to tarry with biblical heat
and white-skinned eyes

paranoiac doom
in the aftermath of domestic civilization
...

calling back to the childless dream
Earth
...

returning from within
the simplest symbolic stare into the beaten human sigh
pointing downwards

upwards

west and east
with the surest of numbered lies,
telling children to fear death and bless the flesh with ungrateful ears, blocked
to the great mystery
that is not
that I am.

excerpts from "that I am silence"

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

________

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. 

_________

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"

Reflection on "The ABCs of Human Survival" by Arthur Clark

“In a nationalist culture we have a recurrent dream that political leaders and experts will get us out of the cycles of self-destruction. That is a false lead.” Arthur Clarke. The ABCs of Human Survival. Athabaska University Press. 2010. p. 196

It was in the memory of this author's late wife that ultimately sent me to Cairo for my second visit to conduct a full-scale research project with the refugee communities I had worked with two years earlier. I have met the author on numerous occasions, including at his private home for gatherings that would seem to emulate a scene from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel if not for the prototypical ambiance that persists in Calgary in general.

I found many fantastic references and insights from reading this book deliberately. My immediate attention focused on the author's confession that he in fact is guilty of perpetuating old-paradigm thinking, where " we will perish as fools" in the recurrent words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he had never once refused to pay taxes to both the American and Canadian governments during the brutal war with Iraq (including the preliminary imposition of sanctions, which is an act of war). 

His repetitious voice on the ills of militancy and nationalistic ideology resembles that of an elderly person telling you the facts of life with a dry voice and welcoming candour, with its occasional seeds of perennial wisdom planted in your mind as interpretive potentiality. It is of this class of intellectual where with the know-how and the social compunction to organize people, there is proof enough for change, however the sphere of influence is mastered only where the personality of the actor's face is shown. 

With this, you have a new initiative to relegate the institutionalization of principles which somehow call to, once again, the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald, where with Herman Hesse and Theosophical Societies a global call to justice and reconciliation sounds from the bastion of its very corrupted centre. Still, I am optimistic of the efforts of the Calgary Centre for Global Community, as the book exhibits time and again, that optimism is the only way through, and cynicism is the bane of a young society propagating aging youth in this overly materialistic cascade of obscurity; the Western city.

In my mind, it becomes too easy to focus on global entelechy when embedded in social contexts founded on colonial principles, and it becomes too easy to focus on local action when fully empowered as a normalized identity in a welcoming society. That being said, this is not a critique of the book, only my personal reflection on themes which I find are also my life struggle as a member of the community. 

The entire book is available as a PDF from Athabasca University Press

_________

“Where’s the washroom?” I turn my head wolfishly. “Is the door locked?” I break into a cold sweat. It’s early, before opening. I empty two crates of ripe oranges on a display. My head spins with discomfort, beginning my first day at work. “Where’s the washroom?” I’m dizzy, fatigued with lack of sleep. My uniform itches. The ammonium floor is rushing into my head. Crooked tags identify the price of two different kinds of orange. I’ve mixed them all up. They look fresh, enticing, I run to the locked washroom door. The echoing emptiness is cruelly fascinating. Oranges, ripen everywhere, with priceless disillusioning. I wallow sheepish, to forever line the halls with my uncooked thoughts.

________

written in the rocky glove of unsettled wild creative youth,
those two pair,
growing in unseeded soil
as a weed tossed into the vibrant dark matter of infinite bliss
by the great American eagle
flowing into the future of Vietnamese bathroom floors
swept of children and memory

...

the knot stifles truth and freedom in a frantic pause to strengthen terror's wave
crashing in the lonesome authority with tasteless glamour
reflected off the stretched mirrors of the disadvantaged, ugly, poor,
and our fate, unified into first expression,
to cast away all memory
and become plainly seen in the absolute center,
mind's eye of the Pacific, drenched in wandering,
an unworldly guise,
blended into worthless machine-eaten jungles
fried in the oil of littered rubbish
alongside a fixed marriage highway

to an undreamed following,
a place deeper than hell,
frozen in the backdrop imagining
where the burned order breeds asinine judgment
flowering into bitter hate for the lost
who stare remembering at the speechless knot,
held in minds full with blame and newly felt sorrow
for ancestors mourning what's to become of their kin
tied in fate with breathless teachings

- excerpts from "Listen to Your Self" 

     

A Procession of Shared Dreams

Corpus Christi Procession in Hofgastein by Adolf von Menzel

Orthodox Priests in Procession (dreamed by Poet Tree)

I was assigned to write a marketing brochure for Christmas that must include all the esoteric meanings, including the magi, the 12 stages of enlightenment, and the mas/death funerary aspects. This brochure unfolded in my brain as I dreamed, but it was completely lost the moment I woke up, like those Tibetan mandalas that are destroyed the moment they are created.

Transcendental Gadgetry

Apparently I migrated to a "vacant and available
house" somewhere in the middle astral domain. A
20-something guy with dark hair (who, as I later
realized, is in fact one of my very dear friends in
spirit...actually a joint/joined/shared
integration/incarnation of TWO of my very dear
friends...but that's a whole other story!) was walking
about the vacant house with me. We were discussing how
it might be used as a community meeting place.

At one point he said, "Let me check this room
out"...and literally SHOT across the room to look into
what apparently turned out to be an empty bedroom.
After checking it out, he then "reversed motion", and
zoomed back to me -- looking just like a video tape or
film loop being run in reverse! I asked, "Yo, what the
HELL did you just do...and how the HELL did you DO it,
anyway?"

He smiled and said, "Well, this helps!"...and I
noticed that he was holding in his hand something that
looked like the "remote control" to a video or
satellite receiver! I said, "WHAT is THAT"?!

He explained, "It's a time/space loop-around
transponder. It generates an energetic force field
which lets you navigate outside of conventional
time/space limitations, and basically 'fast forward'
to any place where you want to be in space/time, at
least within a bounded local domain such as ours.

Escaping the Primitive

I am with a childhood friend, enjoying the forest. Suddenly, there are wisps of arrow trails cutting through the air. One strikes a tree right next to me. I find my friend is evading an onrush of arrows. There must be at least 15 attackers. The arrows begin to fly in greater numbers. I duck and hide behind thin trees as the arrows pick up and speed and hit the trees around me with great thudding. In the tumult, an arrow strikes immediately next to my shoulder on the tree I'm huddled behind. I move slightly in the opposite direction and an arrow follows me before I can move past the thin tree trunk. I am immediately struck with a rush of adrenaline and bolt out through the forest. My friend seems to have survived, as we scatter leaves with a speed mustered only from animal surivial.

Next, we are on a ship. It seems as a migrant ship carrying immigrants across the sea. I lay back in comfort on the ship's deck. Enjoying cinema, and feeling a great pride at having passed beyond a reputation of near non-existence in a forest of mere survival instinct, enraged by the violent chaos. Soon I find this pride to be empty, and I feel no different than a bestial enemy being hunted in the thick forests of a newfound home. 

A String of Unforgettable Dreaming

Passage of the Iron Gates in Algeria, 18. October 1839 by Adrien Dauzats

Dream Memory 1

I see a map attached to what looks like a conference board display in a war room of sorts. The map has impressions which remind me of old wood stamp envelope seals, however they are marked in a fashion as to resemble blood forced into an array of impassioned fervor, an explosion of red paint or wax fixed on deliberate points on the map. I see the largest impression, which my eyes are drawn to first, is on Indonesia, next on Southeast Asia, there is an very large impression on Chile, on Japan, on Turkey, and then I realize these imprints represent shockwaves and their traces of carnage. Earthquakes and tsunamis are scaled with an imprint of blood on the map. I look closely at the geographic place where I am, in North America, and I see small traces of red. Is this a forecast I wonder?

Dream Memory 2

I am walking through a densely wooded road with my cousins and family friends. We find our way to a cliffside. One of my older cousins, about my age, decides to be risky. He begins walking alongside the cliff very close. I try to one up him, and so I slink on down the side of the cliff, letting myself hang on an overhanging root. I become quite frightened by the implausibility of survival if I were to slip and fall from such heights. My cousin then does me in by lowering himself to a rocky outcrop far beneath our feet at the cliff's edge. I am frightened for him. I can feel his vertigo. Then he falls. It is as if I fall with him. We all act as if he is now dead. After some time passes, I am a presence, with him, though he can not see me. He is lying on his side at the bottom of the cliff. A black man finds him. This man seems to resemble more of an African character than American. Soon, however, we are in what appears to be a gang-ridden neighborhood in Southern California. There is great risk, as people surround us with guns. The rest is clouded.

Dream Memory 3

I am in a Chinese grocery store. It reminds me somehow of the city of Vancouver. I find to my great delight a whole bunch of good items to purchase, however I don't leave the shop for two days. I am in their rummaging through all of the items, without much sense of purpose, and suddenly as I am working on the tile floor, trying to fix it, the owner of the shop points me out. She takes my to go box of orders and begins throwing them out, telling me they have gone bad. I plead with her while each piece of delicious food is bit into, prodded and thrown into the trash. She then kicks me out.