Novel Liberation: The Humble Postcolonial Wisdom of E.M. Forster

"If I have had any influence, I would be very glad if it induced people to enjoy this wonderful world into which we're born, and of course to help others to enjoy it too."

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

“They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.”

E.M. Forster (the last quote is from A Passage to India)

The British Raj and the Indian Independence movement of the 1920s provide the setting for a poignant story between two principal characters in E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel, A Passage to India. The lives of Aziz, a Muslim doctor and Mrs. Moore, an older Englishwoman, represent themes of social constraint, in contrast with personal relationship. Constrained by title and culture, these characters manage to relate under unique circumstances. Aziz learns to respect Mrs. Moore unlike any Englishwoman he has ever known, while Mrs. Moore is, at first, captivated with the pride of knowing an endearing local closely.

Mrs. Moore, as with Miss Quested, is captivated by Aziz because he represents something of the “real India”, to use the words of Miss Quested. “Try seeing Indians” was the reply of the schoolmaster at the Government College, when Miss Quested asked how one might see their colony in its native authenticity. There is always room for remiss under the social umbrella of Indian-English relations; whether in the surprising first encounter between Mrs. Moore and Dr. Aziz in the mosque, or the arranged party at the tennis lawns, the tea gathering at Fielding’s or the excursion to the Marabar Caves, which, finally, proved more disastrous than any one had expected.

“May I know your name?” Aziz asks to Mrs. Moore, cautiously, in the mosque. His demeanor is one of near-desperation, as someone both protecting his native sphere, as well as struggling to see British humanity. “She was now in the shadow of the gateway, so that he could not see her face, but she saw his, and she said with a change of voice, ‘Mrs. Moore.’” This very revealing sentence emphasizes the obscurity of English presence from local, Indian eyes. In that moment, Mrs. Moore felt safe enough to share her name, the most important object of her title and superiority. Aziz remembers her generosity, as her fitful capacity to speak the truth becomes the apex of her story, truly a minor character in A Passage to India.

When after Dr. Aziz stands on trial for the assault of Miss Quested in the Marabar Caves, Mrs. Moore is decidedly frank in her stance on Aziz’s innocence. “Of course he is innocent,” says Mrs. Moore as Miss Quested begins to question her disillusioned experience on the excursion, all the while Mrs. Moore is quite fed up with India entirely. “She was by no means the dear old lady outsiders supposed, and India had brought her into the open…” writes Forster, who depicts her as a typical elder, uninhibited by the dramas of youth, and quick to speak the truth, even if it is unwanted. At this point, Mrs. Moore is on her way out of India, and the novel, where she soon dies in transit.

Regardless, Mrs. Moore is immortalized by the groundswell of Indian support for Aziz, who soon finds reprieve, as legends of “Esmiss Esmoor” soon manifest in the appearance of folk shrines in dedication to Mrs. Moore’s role in saving Aziz’s life. It is important to add that throughout the entire novel, Aziz is addressed by his first name only, while Mrs. Moore solely by her surname. Mrs. Moore’s name transforms when said by Indian voices. “It was revolting to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu goddess,” thought Ronny, Mrs. Moore’s son, whose experience of India remained superficial, or, more accurately, guarded, throughout

Aziz and Mrs. Moore fail to truly connect in person, because English colonial formalities (and informalities) were too firmly laid beneath the foundations of imperial culture. During a scene of characteristic tension between the colonial masters and their subjects, Forster writes, “Aziz flamboyant, was patronizing Mrs. Moore.” The direct interactions between Aziz and Mrs. Moore are brief and sparse, as they are interceded by English formalities, typically mediation by a male authority – Mr. Fielding in this example. The scene, where Aziz and Mrs. Moore meet in more conventional circumstances, for a tea gathering at Mr. Fielding’s, reveals Aziz’s character (and Forster’s impeccable prose) as someone unable to speak on behalf of India. The scene also reveals the seemingly adventurous minds of Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore, on their search for the “real India” as a mere surface-level novelty.

Mrs. Moore, although agreeing to accompany Miss Quested on her excursion into the “real India” is soon overcome with the fundamental truth of her presence in the faraway land. As the excursion comes to a bitter close, it is said of Mrs. Moore, “…since her faintness in the cave she was sunk in apathy and cynicism. The wonderful India of her opening weeks, with its cool nights and acceptable hints of infinity, had vanished." While, from Aziz’s perspective, “…he agreed that all Englishwomen are haughty and venal.” Mrs. Moore is the stereotypical colonial British woman, whose curiosities for the rare and exotic life of India prove ineffectual to satisfy her experience of authentic India.

Their relationship reveals the meaning of liberation in colonial India, where Aziz’s fate becomes Mrs. Moore’s very undoing from India. For Aziz, he would come to know “…that an Englishwoman's word would always outweigh his own.” Generally, both characters speak well of each other, even if their personal, physical interactions are constrained. Conclusively, such is the larger relationship between the colonial British with India; ideal and positive on paper and second-hand experience, yet up close, absolutely ruinous.

This essay, entitled, "The Relative Liberation of India", was written for an acquaintance as part of his school curriculum. Consequently, I was reintroduced into the magnificent literary treasure troves of E.M. Forster's richly imaginative prose. 

_________

An expanse over the marshland floodplain. The drifting current sways gently through sap-lined pine trunks and decomposed maple leaves. Ahead, the riverbanks motion with unspeakable gratitude, bittersweet, enjoined to the drunk swell of an upraised wetlands. 

Sunset over wetlands by Julian Falat

He speaks, a guide of the ancient St. Lawrence river basin, to reinvigorate the ground with the renewing tides of Mother Earth. She beckons the swallowing of a forgotten landscape. The land is to be reclaimed. Indigenous nationhood reinstated over the American-Canadian divide. 

_________

Featuring a lyrical evocation from the collection, Sketches of Style and chapbook, Muse for the Wounded, Guise of the Beloved expresses thematic tides of visceral belonging amid landscapes both supernatural and inhuman in an age when the human body is more and more experienced only in its violent rending apart.

Yet, musical undertones, both electronic as acoustic, ring clear throughout, simultaneously presenting the source of human life, as our fate. In the commotion of bewildering psychic momentum, there the muse stands patient and waiting to receive the wounded, who with eyes of intoxication and skin of vulnerability, senses a way beyond and through the immense and spectacular Fear of Being.


The six poem chapbook, Muse for the Wounded, is comprised of selections from the larger collection, Sketches of Style. Here, the archetype of the wounded healer is redefined, wherein the muse becomes the healer in the mind of the poet-seer. The one poem, Guise of the Beloved is also featured as a sounding the artful designs of a musical elaboration on the Sketches of Style album

A Muse for the Wounded

For the Love of Humanity: An Essay on the Ecological Auschwitz of Canada

Dostoevsky's notes for chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov

"You see, I so love humanity that—would you believe it?—I often dream of forsaking all that I have...I close my eyes and think and dream, and at that moment I feel full of strength to overcome all obstacles." Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It's a scandal,” environmental activist Tzeporah Berman shouted to an encamped crowd at Indian Beach the night before the Healing Walk. Imagine, each and every CEO to all the employees of the oil and gas industry, blatantly raping their mother and profiting obscenely in the act. The Tar Sands scandal has gone viral. The proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline “is probably the most controversial project in the history of British Colombia other than perhaps Claquoyot Sound logging operations,” said Ben West, Forest Ethics Tar Sands Campaign Director, at a Project Ploughshares event in Calgary on April 27.

It’s been the #1 talked about news story in British Colombia now for two years running. In fact there is a study that was done that shows all the next five stories, in terms of coverage, if you combined all the coverage, still did not get as much coverage as the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline in the last two years.

The entire world is a voyeur to the most heinous crime of physical abuse on Earth today. “All fights, all battles for the planet are important, but some are more important than others. And there is no battle on the face of the Earth more important than what’s going on here in Alberta,” Bill McKibben, climate change scientist and founder of 350.org, said for the outdoor press conference immediately prior to the beginning of the Healing Walk. “There are three or four places on planet Earth where there is enough carbon below the soil, that if it gets dug up and burned, then there is no chance that we’ll ever stabilize this planet’s climate, and this is one of them.”

Yet, since 1967, when the first commercial project began to exploit the Athabasca Tar Sands, the crime intensifies to the benefit of a society corrupted by cheap oil across Canada, and around the world. “From the seven pipeline spills in the last five weeks, we know that oil corrodes, and what we’re just beginning to learn is that it’s not just corroding our pipelines,” Berman asserted. “Oil in Canada is corroding our democracy.”

The 4th Annual Healing Walk, attended by about five hundred demonstrators, sent a clear message: local people matter, have voice and are strongly represented across the country and the world. While international activism often necessitates globalization and fossil fuels to wage peace on the Tar Sands, the First Nations in and around Fort McMurray, the Athabasca Chipewyan and Dene peoples, are leading humankind by simply walking, in prayer to the Four Directions. Because of ancient wisdom and the spirit of traditional ceremony and community, industrial traffic slowed to a near halt as far as the eye could see on July 6 around the 14km Syncrude Tailings Loop.

“When I went into that town of Fort McMurray, you know what it reminds me of, it reminds me of going into the town that’s the ecological equivalent of Auschwitz,” Anishinaabe author Winona LaDuke proclaimed during her keynote speech the night before the Healing Walk.

“The town that’s sitting right next to Auschwitz and saying, ‘Hey, we’re good here, you can get a $35 steak, you can get an $18 hamburger and it’s okay.’ There’s something just psychotically wrong with all that.”

LaDuke’s Auschwitz comparison, especially in the light of modern consumer culture, is significant. Another outspoken critic of power politics, Hannah Arendt, had once led a scandal, transforming international dialogue on the perpetrations of Auschwitz into a parable of modern life. Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” speaks to the mass consumerism that fuels the current destruction of the planet. Status quo consumer society encourages technology and energy overconsumption. One tier of society justifies through intellectual analysis regarding energy, society and the environment, while most are overwhelmed by the unreasonable complicity of leadership.

Therefore, most people remain ignorant of the fact that their immediate, daily actions cause the very atrocities committed against marginalized people and the environment. Espoused in 1961 during the Eichmann Trial, the philosophy behind Arendt’s “banality of evil” teaches how everyday people perpetrate the greatest crimes of humanity, often more so than their leaders. The idea is slowly gaining acceptance among genocide scholars, such as in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Worse Than War.

“If you breathe air and you drink water, this is about you,” Crystal Lameman, Treaty 6 activist of Beaver Lake Cree Nation, declared at the beginning of the Healing Walk at Crane Lake Park. If the great-grandchildren of Canada look back on the current generation, will they see the current society as people of today see Nazi Germany? As the Jews were liquidated for business purposes, so the Earth and its First Peoples are being bought and sold, and killed in the process, for the liquidation of bitumen tar into petroleum gasoline. Every day, Canadians are told that progress must continue and economic growth must never regress for any sake outside of myopic anthropocentricism and politicized Canadian values.

“On the eve of the NEB hearings for the Enbridge pipeline, when our National Minister of Natural Resources put an open letter to Canadians [in the Globe and Mail], calling anyone who opposed these pipelines a terrorist,” Berman reminded demonstrators camped only fifteen minutes away from Fort McMurray. “Essentially saying that if you express concerns then you are acting against Canada’s national interests, that you are an enemy.” When environmentalists and Aboriginal peoples who oppose pipeline development are deemed terrorists, political-economic rhetoric in Canada begins to look more like that of the Department of National Defence.

Dissuading public debate is typically fascist. The undemocratic nature of the petro-state further supports the colonial Eurocentric project of civilization, where marginalized minorities, such as Indigenous peoples, are meant to suffer the growing pains of modernization. Indeed, modern progress is often underhandedly defined by the achievements of warfare and genocide against marginal ways of life.

The Canadian infrastructure, as with much of the world, is dependent on the continued suffering, and the scandalous crimes, of the continued power imbalances from the colonial past. “We’ve got to feed these people that consume a third of the world’s resources. That requires pretty much constant intervention into other peoples’ territories, whether they’re Dene, Anishnaabe, Cree, or whether they’re in Venezuela,” LaDuke said with a voice of experience and reason at the Healing Walk. “Constant intervention into other peoples’ territories to keep up this level of entitlement.”

Today, there is global complicity in the status quo, in the consumers and beneficiaries of non-renewable energy resources, and its concomitant intergovernmental policies. If Canada survives into the future as a memorable entity, people may look back on the country as yet committers of yet a deeper atrocity, against Earth, and as with a genocidal inclination towards the entire human race.

Will others follow in the example of the First Nations of the Athabasca river basin, whose warnings resound with deep socio-ecological truth? Will Healing Walks spring from the people across the Earth, so that in the name and significance of Mother, the destruction stops and healing starts? Are people around the world willing to stop the destruction and walk for the healing of the Earth, to find a path that slows the destructive course of industry (business) as usual and that offers, not one direction alone, but Four Directions, whole and undivided? When will people begin to pray through movement, action, and participation?

Around the same time that unparalleled innovations in alternative energy came to the fore, there was a great leap in Western consciousness of natural philosophy. Contemporary science is providing the world with unprecedented advances in material technology and innovation. “The last two years, we have seen more advances in clean energy, in renewable energy and technology, than the last twenty years,” said Berman, at the close of her keynote speech at the Healing Walk conference at Indian Beach. “The last two years were the first two years in human history where new investment in electricity generation for renewable energy, for wind, for solar exceeded new investment for electricity in oil, coal, and nuclear combined!” Nonetheless, today there is a greater vacuum of innovation, and that is within the human mind. The current struggle for life on Earth is within each and every human being bridging the great rift between modern life and ancient wisdom.

“I think what has to happen is a change in understanding. It’s not a matter of power, or of muscle or of energy,” the late philosopher Alan Watts said in the documentary, Zen.

It’s a matter of the way in which we understand and feel our own existence, not as strangers in a hostile universe, but as integral parts of that universe, as fruits of the universe, in the same way as an apple is a fruit of a tree we are a fruit of this galaxy, we belong to it, we are something it’s doing, but we don’t feel that.

Similarly, in the name of modern physics, the same basic knowledge that allows for the expansion of physical technology offers renewed integrations between ancient wisdom and modern life. The same way of applied thinking – that might destroy life on Earth when derived from philosophies of conquering nature and ethno-cultural assimilation – would also affirm interconnectedness with all forms of life.

Yet, petro-state fascism muzzles scientific inquiry that affirms rootedness, while ensnaring science with political ideology. “The internationally recognized journal of Nature this year, in an editorial, said ‘It’s time for Canada to set their scientists free,’” Berman, author of This Crazy Time, said at the Healing Walk. Science, as a truly inventive field of human inquiry, would logically presuppose the very undoing of its concurrent technological manifestations.

“The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups. The fragmented view is further extended to society which is split into different nations, races, religions and political groups,” physicist and international best-selling author Fritjof Capra wrote in The Tao of Physics.

The belief that all these fragments – in ourselves, in our environment, and in our society – are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological, and cultural crises. It has alienated us from nature and our fellow human beings. It has brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder, an ever-rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy.

Life is without meaning, not because it is despairing, but because it requires no other meaning than itself. Life itself is significant. Life is self-renewing. Modern human life is more and more devoid of a connection to the sources of life, and so, the mind, and its encouraged symbolic outputs, estranges daily existence from the nature of life. Proactive language (e.g. solutions-oriented media), as with the most advanced scientific thinking, gives voice and agency to ways of life that are self-sufficient, yet still recognize the interdependent nature of life.

The First and Original Peoples of Turtle Island, Aboriginal Peoples of Canada, continue to share the fundamental philosophical similarities with the ecological consciousness of wise, ancient cultures from bygone eras and faraway lands. Understandings that had once triggered a revival of interest in the practical philosophies of interdependence and rootedness are not only springing from Western science itself, but are being voiced by the First Peoples of the Land with greater potency. “Science is important but only if it’s governed and held in check by wisdom, and that wisdom that people have been ignoring for hundreds of years on this continent is finally reasserting itself at exactly the moment when it is most needed,” Bill McKibben said to close his speech only moments before the Healing Walk began.

Bad news is good news. Spotlight triggers response, and, at the end of the day, people think as they please, or, more accurately, as is pleasing. Regardless of what it is called, Oil Sands, or Tar Sands, industry gets the lip service. “I don’t want to squander my energy entirely on being reactive, on being reactive to their craziness. Be clear on where we are going,” LaDuke stressed with grounded intensity. “It’s our choice upon which path to embark. One miikanan [path] is well worn but it’s scorched. The other path, they say, is not well worn but it’s green, and it’s our choice. It’s our choice. That’s what our people said about 800-900 years ago.” The ancient wisdom of the Anishinaabe prophecy for the time of the Seventh Fire shared by Winona LaDuke at the 4th Annual Tar Sands Healing Walk offers all a path, or miikana, to a future that is fresh and green, and very simply, to a future.

Beyond pro- and anti-, beyond reaction and action, there is a beginning; a place, from where all people would begin life renewed. That beginning is the elephant in the room; it is every last man, woman and child. In the name of Mother Earth, the Original Peoples along the Athabasca River, and every Healing Walker: All my relations.

This piece is featured in the current print edition of Dialogue Magazine

(If you would like to have a FREE copy of the issue wherein this piece is printed, please notify the magazine or the author)

Also, read my Spotlight piece, "Tales from the tar sands" in the current September/October print issue of This Magazine in an online exclusive at The Media Co-op.  

_______________

blessed horn

entranced night

korean shades

light buddha

sun hat

_______________

The 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 - to address 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

Inspired by the pre-colonial and pre-revolutionist metaphor for America, “Columbia,” a Goddess of Freedom, as an archetypal myth, once proudly personifying poetic optimism through feminine form. Through these writings, I personify the process of mythmaking as a dedication to compassionate awe and voiced protest in the historic confrontation with self and nation. The name Columbia was immortalized immediately before the Revolutionary War in 1775 by Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish her writing, in her poem, “His Excellency, General Washington.”

Written primarily based on a visit to Washington D.C., this collection is a vocal reclamation. These chronicles present a visitor returning to his home country, where visitation is defined by traversing an international land border. I represent my struggle to reclaim and recognize my unique voice. In these pages, I confront the realization that I am, in certain respects, an inheritor of the American way of life. Regardless, the inheritance is fraught with the psychological complexities of exile.

In this reclamation, I throw off vestigial principles of experience. I attempt to revision a new way of being through the living temperance of the written word, and specifically, my own practice of stream-of-consciousness writing. Such revision includes confronting a natural process of self-awareness, whereby self-expression revolutionizes into an identity with nature as a self-perpetuating source of renewal and life.

Spontaneous word creation, or improvisational writing, is a natural activity of the human mind. There is a power within that endless fount, that when regularly tapped as a spiritual practice, unleashes one’s surroundings with an ever-renewing energy. Such a practice motivates one personally, to interact with one’s immediate environment in dynamic ways. The reason for this effect is because in this practice, which actualizes into a way of being, the present moment becomes central. When the present is cherished with just significance, the mundane begins to breathe with new life.

The practice of improvised writing, in this sense, outlines a processional transformation in throwing off sterile notions of self and environment. district.Columbia begins by defining autonomous interactions between self and environment (as to parallel notions of the “New World” for pre-colonial Europeans and pre-revolutionist Americans) and ends with a declarative pronouncement; to create an openness to uninhibited spontaneity in personal creativity and a diverse awareness in social activity in our public spaces (as to parallel the current fomentation of creative social activity blurring the lines of public and personal art).

district.Columbia by Rusty Kjarvik

The Art of Nonintervention: Rumi on Syria and Virtual Exhibit

"Last night I had such a wonderful dream. That today, I feel great and satisfied. You said, 'Go, for you are the king!' True and may I be merry and glad! I am drunk without cupbearer and wine! I am King Ghobad without throne and crown!" Rumi, Masnavi

Last night, I performed music for an Afghani community celebration of the legacy of Rumi. It was a clear night. The sun melted over the horizon an incandescent vermillion azure, and a mountain silhouette graced the starlit west. I accompanied  a dear friend, who plays the Persian santur, with wind and percussion instruments. The audience was cheerful at hearing our unique musical expression of global community, and our hosts delighted. 

One young woman at the event, born in Canada, proclaimed, "I am from Afghanistan." As the Afghani and Persian language commingled in a unity of mind and understanding, the political discussion turned to musical appreciation. Music is the one common language, they agreed, Persian and Afghani, who speak a common language, are not divided by the bounds of modern nationalism, war and custom, because they share culture, language and music.  

Yet, even in Canada, where a military imperialism curses the blood-stained earth of Afghanistan, the people of that country remain proud and honour the sacred unity of their cultural heritage beyond national boundaries, and into the language of unity, peace and wonder. So, as one proponent of Sufism, Rumi and Peace said in Canada to close the June 6, 2012 podcast on World Democracy Discussion speaking in reference to the Iran-Israel Nuclear Crisis: 

"Rumi was sitting was sitting with his students in his academy and one of his students ran to him and said, 'Rumi, two wise men are fighting, come and do something.' Rumi didn't react. The second student came and said, 'Rumi, two wise men are fighting, they are beating each other, come and do something.' The person soon asked, 'You don't care?' And Rumi answered that if they were wise, they wouldn't fight.'"

URGENT: Citizen Response to Syria
Letter to Alberta Members of Parliament

Dear Alberta Members of Parliament,

I am a citizen of Alberta for over five years. I arrived as a resident of Calgary directly from Cairo, Egypt, where I was a student at the American University of Cairo (2007-2008), and then University of Calgary (2008-2010).

Please recognize my plea to all Members of Parliament not to support military intervention in Syria.

In 2010, I returned to Cairo, Egypt and the Middle East through the Consortium for Peace Studies at the University of Calgary. The Consortium was formed in response to Canada's response to the Iraq War of 2003, which Canada did notparticipate in. What has changed in Canada during these ten years?

It is a well-known fact that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) invests in war manufacturing. In effect, the Canadian Federal Government is complicit in war crimes through the investment of such weapons manufacturing as cluster bombs and nuclear arms, in spite of such international agreements as the Global Landmines Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Due to the fact that our tax and revenue system is inextricably tied to the arms industry, every Canadian is complicit. Why are we furthering our complicity in the deaths of 100,000 and the forced exile of over 2 million Syrians?

Why is the Canadian government demonstrating support for the U.S., who used chemical weapons in Fallujah during the invasion of Iraq, and now purports to protect Syrians and the global community from the very same belligerence?

As Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says, "we are of one mind" in promoting America's call for an international coalition to intervene in Syria. Prime Minister Stephen Harper warns of the risks involved in not intervening. As a citizen of America and a permanent resident of Canada, I am embarrassed to be from a part of the world that seeks to undermine international order for the sake of economic investment.

Please regard my concern and stand with the British Parliament in denouncing all support for the mounting American military intervention in Syria.

Respectfully,

Matt Hanson


References:

Syria

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/is-canada-going-to-war-in-syria-here-s-what-our-military-could-do-1.1431117
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/30/headlines#8301
http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/syria-intervention-or-diaspora/16492

CCPIB

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/amy-macpherson/cpp-war-crimes_b_2487424.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taxseason/story/2012/12/21/f-rrsp-2013-cpp-portfolio.html
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article/101709523-cpp-landmine-investments-are-we-breaking-the-global-ban-treaty

General Interest

http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/persian-jews-and-iran-israel-crisis/17264
http://www.ucalgary.ca/md/PARHAD/studentships/student-2010-mhanson.htm

This letter was also posted on The Media Co-op

TAKE ACTION AND CONTACT OFFICES OF YOUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT

 & MORE IMPORTANTLY,

CONTACT OFFICES OF YOUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND TAKE ACTION 

EndNote: 

Alberta is not only the economic engine of Canada, it provides the lifeblood of economic energy for much of the world. Globally, Alberta's oil industry is the third largest in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The U.S. is the largest consumer of Alberta oil. When war is at our doorstep, it is economic investment in energy resources that prop up the debate in the minds of politicians who influence the direction of billions of dollars on a daily basis. Whether from the U.S. or Canada, or elsewhere around the world, we need to remind the Alberta government that their actions, whether to wage war on the Earth (industry) or its people (war), are wrong and obsolete, and must be diverted in providing the means to renewability in energy resources and sustainability in human resources.

____________

northern nights

pastel horizon

Persian-Afghan Rumi

rooted wings

watery spectrums

______________

Education is the lifeblood of our culture. Contemporary miseducation conjures cultural remnants still felt, yet which are now practically nonexistent. As the government slashes the limb of theatre and jazz from the roots of culture - our education - it is the artists, and more accurately, artists' collaborations, that resurrect obsolete forms of creativity. Our art reshapes and polishes the dusty, antique lenses through which other forms of learning, knowledge and truth are remembered and reinvigorated.

This virtual exhibit is interactive, kinetic, visual, aural, and potentially recycles the space and redefines it through an exploration into its space as connected with viewers/participants. The conduit of such activity is the exhibit.

There are three essential aspects to the virtual exhibit before you.

Firstly, the original digital artwork, Mountain Reflection on Cyclical Wordplay is displayed. Below, a listening station plays the album, Compilation Vi An under Mountain Reflection on Cyclical Wordplay.

After listening in and seeing, become the seer of music by using a calligraphy brush and red ink (or creative equivalent) on blank space. Find blank space around you, the unused, neglected, under-appreciated, unassuming areas straddling the bars of existence and nonexistence. Such a space could bet the utilization of your present surroundings, depending on the configurations. However, at the very least, do not draw a blank.  As a participant/viewer, engage with the calligraphy brush and red ink, the acoustic harmonies and naturalistic/vintage aesthetic of the artwork meld to produce an inner ambiance of memory, culture, history, tradition and nature.

Secondly, the original digital artwork, Present Sound, Silent Space is displayed. Through another listening station and a black pen (or creative equivalent) are to be employed. Below, the listening station plays the album, Endangered under Present Sound, Silent Space. As a participant/viewer, engage with the black pen (or creative equivalent).

The melodious electronica beats merge with the technological fragmentation represented in the artwork, instilling a cold, metallic atmosphere of aspiration, impermanence, destruction, chaos defined by 90 degree angles. Virtual attendants to the exhibit are welcome to draw and write on the empty space while listening through the station(s) and using the appropriate material(s) made available.

The visual artworks within the recorded music re-contextualized in this virtual space represent the creativity of local, independent artists as reintroduced a lost branch of independent self-education. The implications draw from a wealth of meaning in relation to institutionalizing (and budget-cutting) culture and education as the final straw in forgetting our even more archaized, unconventional cultural and educational backgrounds.

Returning Home: Teachings of the Priests of Dream

Life is a lying dream, he only wakes / Who casts the world aside 

(from the Atsumori Noh Play, 15th century)

At birth we woke to dream in this world between. What then shall we say is real? 

(Kan’ami Kiyotsugu, 15th century) 

Two awakenings and one sleep. This dream of a fleeing world!

(Tokugawa Ieyasu, 1542-1616)

I know not what life is, nor death. Year in year out - all but a dream.

(Uesugi Kenshin, 1530-1578)

...the proud ones are but for a moment, like an evening dream in springtime.

(Heike Monogatari, 14th century) 

My life / came like dew / disappears like dew 

(Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1536-1598)

To what shall I compare this life of ours? Even before I can say...it is like a lightning flash or a dewdrop...it is no more.

(Sengai, 1750-1837)

What is that note, tone, breath, voice, play, word, motion, thought, desire, way artists, seers, filmmakers, musicians, and spiritual practitioners alike speak to when they intone the vowels, the grammar, the logic, the philosophy, the imagination, the language, the creation, the way of dream? Reflecting, ponderous, contemplative in the way and presence of nature, externalized in the wild, flora, fauna, breathtaking skyscapes, landscapes, seascapes and fascinating magic of ecological wonder, all, as is. To create a place, mode or setting, wherein dream is realized, invoked, intoned, imagined and integrated into life, is essentially the role of the artist, visionary, and seer, as spiritual practitioners of harmony, whether harmony of tradition, presence or ideal. 

Often, in the way of the artist, to create a work that truly evokes the magic of the innate powers of dreaming, truly inherent in all of creation, is the final meaning of the artist's path to holism, completion and a successful conceptual invigoration of idea into creation. Yet, in such as seers, or spiritual practitioners of a way of being, as the komuso, or "Priest of Emptiness" in Japanese history, who led a life of beggary, without identity, and harmonizing the mind with the suizen practice of blowing through a Shakuhachi - bamboo flute - instrument, dreaming in life is not conceived, or imagined, only led, and lived directly. For komuso life itself is dream, not necessarily solely creative conceptions representing life. 

And truly, as the komuso meddled further in the affairs of secular life, navigating rungs of hierarchical power among fellow humankind, corrupting laypeople and spiritual classes alike, the dream fell into the reality, of the fleeting nature of all things.  So, could komuso also be aptly translated as "Priests of Dream" who fulfill the order of dream within the waking spheres of existence, so as to harmonize the subconscious palate with a psychic holism of being? Self-prophesied, the world of dream that so invigorated the komuso into a unique way of living, being and harmonizing with creation, woke to the lightning flash wisdom of illumination beyond the forms of all-recognition, even to themselves. Yet, there still may be the spirit of the komuso wandering about, collecting alms from the wordless eye of longing that still beats the hearts of all things in the nameless anomalies of daily, human existence. 

____________

The wall cracks, sundered by a voice of thunder. An opaque sky churns, vomiting deep green ire with the blooded spires of lightning streaking the fragile heavens. Fled, spiriting off above the splitting stone, I nearly fracture my hand as the quaking Meleke rock fissures and smokes with the dust of an ancient soul leaving. As one, we are exiled. 

Fragment of wall painting with a flying Eros by Unknown

Ancient and medieval backdrops gush with flame and flick with the passion of countless ghouls resurrected at the spiritual death of the Unholy Wall. I clamber down and down, past the bustling, oven-hot Arab village of Al-Khalil. Hijabs and jalabiyas wave in the homely, communal air. Into the steep fold, barefoot on the highway teeming with military checkpoints, my heroic blasphemy fumes with the vainglorious ruse of a timeless lie: the first crime of possession: land. Fugitive of an Israelite childhood, my eyes scan the living ground beyond the vicious plain of stone and fire.

Discussion near a village, from the 43rd maqāmah of the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī

The smoothing grass, plush and soft with the furs of Mother Earth, trails off into the horizon toward the Far East. Cathartic winds blow my mind to perfect suspension. The gravity of our historic failure and the infamy of its lingering pains are momentarily nonexistent. Across a woody bridge, the babbling brooks of a better world shine in the blending sunlight. Sea salt air flecks the caressing breeze as my nostrils fill with aromas delectable and clean. A teahouse sits nested on a wispy, verdant knoll. 

Haboku-Sansui by Sesshū Tōyō

My wife, freshened with the familiar hygiene of the opposite sex, touched with the divine hydration of a natural and ecological grace, she breathes, stimulated with a love-crafted green tea. Her palms, supple as the camellia in spring, yet her fingers are as dry as the fermented leaf ready for brewing. Her presence reaches and receives far into the mind’s dan tien of ecstatic enlightening and inner wholeness. Her Taoist eyes free my insides with an internal repose unknown above. On the high flesh of a stone-wrought, deadening life of the destructive West, I have left my name and memory. Here, belief and need see no conflict, and I speak of dreams within dreams, dreamt in the art of peace. 

Camellia and a Lonely Bird by Zhou Shuxi

Yet, after an eternity of peace and splendor, in the decadent arms of all-embracing Love, I wake, as from a deep vision of suffering. I begin walking. The Earth shudders a breath cold with an early death. The rattle of antlers flutters with the cacophony of nature’s own chaos and war. In a triumph of sight, we lock stares, as antlers, across a dense thicket. Wounded, a stag and doe skip silently, as above a moving fan of grass. As one, we return to the dead old high of the ancient city. 

Wall-paintings of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom on Tangzi Street

Racing with the elegance of divine creatures, extinct water deer of Mediterranean freshwater clarity. Their bones exposed, as light transfixes through gaping, bloodless wounds. I can see clear through the deer torsos into the waking touch of humid, rolling grassland hills. Through a panoramic eye, a lifeless and incendiary pain wears the sepia-toned horizon into a wrinkle of earthly age. We pass, unseen, through the Golden Gate, and we embody Shekhinah in all of her feminine grace. 

The temple entrance by Aert de Gelder

An unpleasant, shivering wind casts over the city, clouded with complex overlain imperialistic landmarks of religious dogma and an historic oppression that explodes mercilessly into the present with a daily shade. Spectral, and at once shimmering an illumined field of stares, we glide past world dignitaries in the central spheres of power. Present to mind our fleshly presence is the leader of our Red and White Nation, who seethes through sociopathic eyes a malevolent taste for the darkening wick of livid silence and unrighteous judgment. And in our moment’s passing, the eyes of our contemporaneous leader of Northernmost America tears, heaving with the burdens of a deep shame. Eyes curling under, his heart beats pulsing his entire flesh of white, flaming anger. His throat, rung in fear, is tied to devious perfection in a self-important red knot. Yet born of compassion, we stir past undeceived by his show of destructive emotion, and on to lead a way towards a better future, of gentle humility and thoughtful pace. 

Landing the future (King William I in Scheveningen)

Bristling with inborn purpose, at once our trio of the living extinct disbands. Our knowledge of the land tested, the White Seers emerge. As ghosts of the sleeping, spectral in the haunting jungles, at home in the phantom light of a dense, forested canopy, they wake, first to our scent. Then, instantaneously, the flat crunch of a skeleton pierces the chilling air. The jaw of a big cat, prehistoric lynxes, tigers of the White North, fanged and cold with searing, yellow eyes, closes again. The deer, devoured. 

A Lion Kills Prasenajit in the Jungle by Unknown

I smell heart, pouring a continuous stream of hot blood nearby. My fearing hand graces the surface of a puddle of cooling plasma. Hunted, adrenaline affixes my intuition under the glow of the moon, southward. Peering into the pitch flood of night, I stumble and curse. They say a tiger sees a man countless times before the first hint of a presence. ‘Had their fill?’ Wondering, overwhelmed with the emotive stress of emergent trauma, blistering from the inside. And it scythes my torso, felt split nearly in two, as a crushed ember spewing unseen flares of heat and ash. Wounded, immobilized, my dilating pupils scan the dark wood with an unfocused and eyeless rush of mortality. 

White Tiger (Bạch hổ) by Unknown

In the burn of a single firefly, the moon perks of the featureless sky. I can see, I can smell, and I taste the White fur of deathly feline gore. The earth rumbles with each footstep, and the oncoming, clawed pads fill my nerves with lungs of raw energy. Moved with the thundering mammalian outburst of muscular flight, a single punch of stolen force, intervention of the High One, runs the cat’s hipbone straight through its blooded organs of night and flesh. 

The Four Continents by Peter Paul Rubens

Tangled with auspicious mystery, flattened with the mourning of a proud death, in a sudden rasp and rattle of a whispering cry, the end of the forest canopy floor reached. An open, under stars of mountains and a wealth of ears, insects roar in the funnel of a circular plain. Whirlwinds and dew sneak into my ears like the healing rain of an exiled land, birthing renewed into an Earth of spring. I wade through the sweet water of an alpine marsh, distant clouds ashore on the far horizon move like celestial birds. Light rain begins to fall, shining through incandescent sunrays, refracting like broken glass over ruddy mirrors. 

Wind and Rain by Ma Yuan 

Awoken, by my own breath, his presence is as the light itself. Herbsman! Bearded aglow with holy eyes, smiling wide as the mountain range afar. His words a waterfall, cleansing and purifying constantly, with the movement of natures’ own lifeblood itself. We sit in a glade, I in the deep meadow, and he over a gathering of lime, emerald and olive-shaded bushes of growing herbs, reaching as to his light, and lengthening at his every movement, touch and word. So, as I. 

Hanuman fetches the herb-bearing mountain

“In the morning, eat of the red corn,” says he, Herbsman. An ear of red corn emerges as with the pleasure of an offering, gift or invocation from the mouth of a ground and tongue of a seed. One kernel, consumed, and my flesh lightens with the bread of fulfillment, and all my wishes humbled with regard to the constant water that flows to the life of all. Cleansed, opened, revived, moved and lifted, I listen with intent respect. “At night, eat of the white corn.” As the morning eye of fire stares into my forehead barely above the horizon, I yet see a vision of the white corn in mind’s eye, unknown on Earth. The Herbsman continues to pour the clear-souled water of natural wisdom through the mystic wine of musical friendship over each and every pour with all movements and messages invoked, intoned, and conveyed with brevity, clarity and unity. 

Indian Corn and Mexican Vase by Cordelia Wilson

The Herbsman’s voices soothe and mend, teaching of Water, the element Carbon, Life in all varying forms and formless ways; how to purify one’s self through knowledge and action, and reason, in seeing as being, for every portion of ground on which one sits as the Ground of All Being. In earnest repose, he guides my mind as a rudder, and we sail, as with the passing life of Creation. In an earthly tradition, the Old Man is believed to have evoked, “Highly evolved people have their own conscience as pure law.” A vision of wisdom is sent from the Old Ones by way of dreaming. As observes an Italian proverb, "Where the river is deepest, it makes the least noise."       

__________

Due to the unplanned nature of returning home in the wake of an unprecedented natural disaster as the solstice floods of Southern Alberta (see previous post: Flood of Creation: A Photo Essay on the Art of a Natural Disaster), I have yet to create space and clear time for an original sound art/musical narrative in concert with the forthcoming, self-published chapbook, "Understanding our Meaning" from the district.Colombia experimental writing gallery. Yet, Kjarvik's experimental galleries are voluminously published for the public eye on Scribd, and previous experimental narrative sound art works are freely shared for listening on Bandcamp. 

I look forward to picking up from where I left off with the previous post, The Poetics of Resistance: Myths of India and Freedom, in the meantime, we celebrate a long-awaited peace only known when waking from a deep and fulfilling night rest at home. So, the second collaborative musical offering from a spirited and festive friendship of three, Welcome Home! completes the initial live mix, Let It Go! which has personified the last weeks of precarious mental and environmental stability.  

The Immortalizing Arts: Contributions by World Music Artist Vi An Diep

Gilgamesh by Samantha from Indonesia

"We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next." - Max More, On becoming posthuman

The search for immortality is as old as humanity itself. The earliest remnants of human history, namely, the Epic of Gilgamesh, among others, speak of the quest for immortality, to find the fruit or fount of eternal youth is part of the perennial epic that is the myth of Man. 

Anu, Bel, and Ea are whispering (wisdom) into his ear.
Ere thou earnest down from the mountain
Gilgamesh beheld thee in a dream in Uruk
....
Gilgamesh sought to interpret the dream;
Spoke to his mother:
'My mother, during my night
I became strong and moved about among the heroes'
...
Gilgamesh said...Tell me, How didst thou come to dwell (here?) and obtain eternal life among the gods?
...
Build a house, construct a ship; Forsake thy possessions, take heed for thy life! Abandon thy goods, save (thy) life, and bring living seed of every kind into the ship

(Epic of Gilgamesh)

Now, it is interesting the way that modern medicine has adopted the principles of "life extension" to the archaic traditions of humanity in the search for immortality. Life Extension is a medical term used to acknowledge the major advancements in modern medicine which have led to the unprecedented increase of the average human lifespan. The logic is that if the lifespan can be extended by some fifty years or so in the last hundred years, why can't we extend life to virtual permanence. 

What are the implications of human immortality on Earth? What comes to mind for me are a few major points. For one, there will be an excited advantage by the keepers of modern scientific medicine, mainly the West. In many ways, this can be seen as the furthering of an egotism that the Western World and particularly the scientific community has, where they feel they prevail over all forms of life, as the dominant form of knowledge-creation in the world today. It is often ignored how steeped in Western European history our modern science is, and that it does have its immoderate faults. Essentially, modern medicine is best in dealing with immediate physical trauma. When it comes to preventive, and long-term medicine, like "life extension" for example, there is less attention to detail. 

Outside of medicine, there is a biological component. One of the foremost proponents of "biological immortality", professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Irvine, Michael R. Rose, PhD, says in the Immortality Institute documentary Exploring Life Extension, "Most people who work on aging do it from a medical standpoint, which means humans, or if not humans, then certainly mammals, and all these organisms that didn't have an aging process were far-removed from mammals." He went on to give examples in non-mammallian life forms, such as anemones, creosotes, juniper, and others that actually do not age. He continues, "...life can be thought of as being divided into three basic stages...that third phase, which has not really been explored by contemporary biology is what interests me now, late life." 

With regard to the biological component of immortality and life extension, and the medical egotism which counter-inuits the state of the world, it seems that if we do not co-evolve immortally with our Earthly ecology, a spiritualistic sense of medical immortality for humanity would only contribute to the degradation of every source of life that the Earth offers to Man, and which Man exploits obscenely. For example, if we innovate major advances in anti-aging and life extension, we ought to transpose that technology into the natural world, into the life that not only lives on earth (us), but is the life of earth (all forms of life and life-giving). 

Finally, my sense is that in the early epics of oral literature, such works as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homeric works such as the Iliad, there is a lesson about the human quest for immortality, which is older than our backbone. The lesson is that only in our mortality, do we know our immortality. I would say this is also truer to Max More's reference to the alchemical tradition, where in the philosopher's stone there is a psychological mastery of the principles of physical life, yet it is in the psyche where the most enduring trial is overcome. Only in dying fully conscious and immersed in the ground of immortal intent, are we immortalized, and traditionally so in the words of the great poets, those of enduring words and pronounced voices to carry the names of certain individuals down the halls of human history. 

___________

First step in the thousand-mile journey by Vi An

Flight over the bridge by Vi An

Enlightenment over Peace Bridge by Vi An

Full Moon City by Vi An

First Light of Dusk by Vi An

____________

Vi An has generously agreed to contribute her musical artistry to SoJourn(al) for this exclusive post featuring original photography. This post celebrates her entry in a CBC music contest, Searchlight. Vote for Vi An!

In future posts, I will be featuring original world instrumental music by none other than the Dream Author. My idea is to feature a full-length album of original electro-acoustic improvisations on darbuka, frame drums, shakers, xaphoon, shakuhachi, guitar, harmonic, etc., then leading up to spoken word collaborations with my instrumental creativity to recollect the creative momentum from my experimental writing gallery usually featured at the end of each post. It is my intention to kick off this new paradigmatic focus of musical creativity with a contribution, and to offer space for photographers and musicians alike to contribute in the future.

Happy readings/listenings/viewings!!

Among all artists of One Love, in solidarity.

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"

A Taoist Mystic-Musician and the Great Awakening

Painting of Tao Yuanming by Chen Hongshou

"By and by comes the Great Awakening, and then we find out that this life is really a great dream. Fools think they are awake now, and flatter themselves...Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who say you are dreams,—I am but a dream myself. This is a paradox. To-morrow a sage may arise to explain it; but that tomorrow will not be until ten thousand generations have gone by." Musings of a Chinese Mystic: Illusions

Possessed by a conflict of opposites, after reading this quote aloud to my wife, she says, "That is totally how I feel." She was raised in a Vietnamese sect of Shamanic Taoism. One day, a local shaman saw her hands before she left Vietnam for Canada. "You have the hands of an artist," said the shaman. As I watch her hands blend with the strings of her instrument, and hear the mystic bent with staggering heart, wrenched from her music of an emotive immensity so tremendous that I am truly floored every opportunity I have to provide her with a rhythmic touch of our in-gathered loving. Through her music she speaks, "listen, and awaken to the source root of creativity." It takes a well-planted seed to take root in such soil, rich with the wisdom of time and its lessons of patience and anticipation. I respond, "let the spontaneity of life sometimes dry, to await the rain, falling not from our own bodies, but from the intuitive atmosphere of our shared life, that to be patient, is a kind of love."

________

pondering the day by the riverside, my mind blends in the heady fray of sun rope tangling with the cloudy sky in a disarray of dizzying color, the viscera of imagination pokes its protruding skeleton in the vine-skinned pathway beside my water-borne home 

as I traverse further on, through riverine thicket dense with the swamp-like craftiness of bitter greenery, filtering the light through a pockmarked memory of filigree lightning, and I remember the Old Man, a Lao Tzu, of my entrenched longing, with such wisdom as unknown by my youthful pride, he walks with me with undeviating eyes, with mind to each thought that arises between our speech of anticipated mentioning 

Sakyamuni, Lao Tzu and Confucius by Unknown

and then he stops to show me a trick of the fatherland, a stick of wisdom, a bone of intelligence, an awakened look into the material fire of all transparent self-knowing, the crooked daze, the unchallenged light sparking his eyes to follow mine in the unfailing instant of his true magic

________

A law for the ancient mind of cultural struggles

To be heard through fallen webs of prehistory

Erected above the books and pleasure-peaked Goddess of man

Who assailed Her tribes with red nations

...

Claiming to break the mold

With word thievery and undreamt savagery

...

In the earth’s hidden sky of traveled time

And her rested eye

excerpt from "The Modern War Machine and his Italian Wife"

This post is dedicated to my wife, Vi An