Create You: Fearless Artistry and Creative Identity

"I began to dream heavily, violently, every night, and then I learned how to wake up…" 

"Consciously or unconsciously, all writers employ the dream, even when they’re not surrealists. The waking mind, you see, is the least serviceable in the arts. In the process of writing one is struggling to bring out what is unknown to himself. To put down merely what one is conscious of means nothing, really, gets one nowhere." 

Henry Miller 

Creation is life. More, the incipience of creation is the life of the creator. The life of the artist is bound to their creation, in the same way that a mammal survives on each breath of fresh air. As long as the air is fresh, the artist will continue to create, and as long as the authentic substance of heart issues from the core of the artist's own vision, the arist-seer will align and harmonize with all of creation. 

To forego a path without heart is acceptable. The great mystical physicist of our age, Fritjof Capra, began his famed text, The Tao of Physics, with that realization. Yet, on the path of heart, a different narrative runs its course. To remain true to oneself is to hold fast to the consciousness of one's life source as not merely the beginning precepts of one's physical subsistence, but of the visionary path onto which one is led through to the heights of meaning and becoming. 

The proud artists will realize their vision in the instant of a moment, at simply being the processional experience of creation, the ever-beating heart of co-unity with individuality and universality on Earth. To not over-think is the key to strengthen the creative momentum, reminds Henry Miller, the American author with a self-professed Chinese ascetic's nature. 

So, in holding fast, the artist and author of self-creation, is near-shattered, sensitized by the flood of the fleeting that files down the materialism and consumerism of an all-pervasive cultural fear, to belittle the uncultivated mind to ignorant non-being and blind negativity. In this way, the inner sanctum from where the creativity of an artist is strengthened by the water-like ability to be vulnerable, naked, raw and emotive in a full and unbridled formless truth. 

To all artists, and to the Self, I call on you to be strong, and to claim the ideas and visions and dreams in your mind and heart and being as you would claim your rightful place on Earth. For that creativity, and the perfect imagination of its fruition in your life, is your truth, your heart, your mind, your being, your soul, your foundation, your meaning, and all your own, it is you, your nature, your life, all yours, be it and be proud. 

Everyone, as with one mind and one heart, is capable of becoming sensitive to the expression of your truth as an unheard knowledge that only you possess and that is invaluable, necessary in its tragedy, absolute in its humour, refined in its judgment, authoritative in its experience, wild in its reason, cautious in its aspiring, and pure in its love. Create you. 

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Around this circle danced the flame of eternity. In the green spark licked the tongue of heaven. Spring in the Jungle bloomed with effervescent majesty among the ruined foundations of another remote, human wasteland paradise. The veils of fame and belonging passed like a soothing tide, recoiling in the abyss of oceanic depth. We smoked the herb of forgetfulness, harmony and love. 

Ernst Haeckel's 1905 Wanderbilder (Travel Pictures)

The smoke coiled around our lazing necks, floundering amid the slow-moving river, her brown body motioned like a heavy emotion. One among us, an artist of metal and flowers spoke up as paper and marijuana stung our eyes, blinded by the greedy moment, a fleeting light. "Native community leaders announced their wish to use our space. They will hold facilitations, meetings and workshops on the militarization of the Indian people; their War." 

Coolies on the Road near Kalicut, Malabar by Edward Lear

A shade lifted and a heaviness shrank as our hearts wept and our minds faltered along the brink. She, the speaker, high as the azure, fled to the banks, to swim and cleanse in thoughtful reflection. She swung on a low-hanging vine, falling into the naked river, dressed still in paltry coverings, now a resident of the Amazon for well over a decade. Her eyes spoke of what her tongue could not shake. 

Young hunter by Ferdinand Keller

They arrived, and we vacated the area, as a show of respect. And one day, on the top floor, whereon we store our arts, with wood canvases lain and strewn, I saw her. She was not Native. She was a woman of the Old Country. Her heart was cold as a perennial shadow. Her moonlit face eyed me with an inhuman glare, and her blood then boiled, raising her hair, intoning a voice as harsh and ghastly as the screaming bite of a bullet ant. 

14 abril by Yolanda Palomo del Castillo

I ran. And then falling with desperation in the rushing river, we were swept along. In the instant of our near-death, she lunged towards my angular body, stretched out above the surface, in full display of my superior experience on these riverine lands. I watched as the infamous cult leader, impostor of the Cocama ethnic struggle was buried in the open jaw of the current, as her bones cracked in the turbulent stream. Awash, I lay at the edge of reason. 

Giant tree in Brazil's tropical forest by Johann Moritz Rugendas

Then, I saw the body. The tattooed flesh, gouged and lacerated. Two arrows pierced the man's underside, widening a deep, mortal wound. With bowels distended, his blood having since let almost completely of his sunken frame, I cried, lowered to the wet jungle floor, bleary-eyed. Not only had his own turned on him, but the man also suffered bullets. Scarred and mutilated, his body is the story of his people, dead to the world, brutalized and beaten down by the perpetrators of human trust, by invaders and blood alike. 

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How to Listen to the Land: Raincoast Music and the Eye's Awakening

"Right now is the time when we wake up and start paying attention to what we are actually doing. I've always said we can do whatever we want. The question is what do we want to do. And we need a new definition of progress, you know, toward listening to scientists, and toward elegance and beauty. And so we have to get our philosophy right. What way do we want to go forward? And we need a critical mass of people who care deeply in their hearts about nature." Robert Bateman, Canadian artist from the B.C. coast sponsored by Raincoast Conservation Foundation for an Oil-Free Coast

This past weekend, I headed a block over from my apartment to grab my usual afternoon matcha. As I swung my head around to grab a coffee cup lid, my line of sight was crowded with the most peculiar, and at once familiar, beauty. Frame drums, doumbeks, and instruments of all kind, beautifully hand-crafted in the likelihood of natural aesthetics. The clouds of a waking dream parted as I stepped forward to shake the hand of the drum-maker himself. 

From Vancouver Island, Sylvan Temple Drums boasts specially crafted hand-made local woods just south of the Great Bear Rainforest. At first meeting, the key to my city's grandest music festival was gifted, unceremoniously, and with the sincerity of a true friendship. Before purchasing an absolutely gorgeous alder doumbek, I became privy to the music of such as Alabama Shakes, Thievery Corporation, Cat Empire, Caravan Palace, The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, Mamselle, Haram, and on. It was a splendid weekend. The gift of music breathed new life, and as through the wood of our country, the sound reverberated with untouchable magic into my heart and marrow. 

Such as luck would have, the serendipitous vibe of the exchange revealed the marked truth of reciprocity in nature. Human beings are mere messengers, and vessels of light and wisdom, others more naked and bright than the rest. They who are naked and bright are merely known as generous to us more gross souls. And so, in a parable of ancient China, correlative meaning ensues. 

Source: Galen Mongeau

After receiving the great gift, not as from divinity, but from the hands of a fellow man. I was moved to wonder on the spiritual nature of the harvest. In such a world as where the sense of harvest has breached sustainability to egregious excess in exploiting the natural resources of the land, where is the sane harvester of life's great gifts of creation? And from the musical instrument of the trees sings a tale of the potent harmony embedded within the forest, within the land. The land is imbued with the music of life, with the instruments of soul, art and meaning. 

When will we honour right harvesting, as in those who are traditional users of the land since time immemorial, not mere environmentalists, but as local harvesters who depend on the land for their livelihood? Whether it is in the food or the materials, in opening a doorway to family, community and inner fulfillment, our vocation, role and fulfillment is in the land, offering all a place, as a truly honest way of making each our own living. Might we see the hidden inner nature of the Earth as not only our source of physical life, but as our source of grounding and flight, as our source of reciprocal creativity, the inertia of magic and play as the source of harmony itself, as a way to growth, promise, and all our relations?

Learn More about Pipelines:

And the People Protecting Future Generations:
KEEPERS OF THE ATHABASCA

Also, read my Comment on Geist.com on the Energy&Art debates

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A pipeline twice the size of a whale. A gargantuan opening, closing the way through into an opaque, unholy void. The brackish filth of water moves as on its own under our quaking boots. And the spill seeps into the metallic soil below. The Earth shrieks, yet her voice is muted under a dense, resin helmet. Deafened by fortunes of squandered wealth, the murderous cold frays the nerves with blinding speed, and then, all there is to do is work.

Interior of an Ironworks by Godfrey Sykes 

"Give 'em yr bucket." Our manager removes our defecation pails, to be filled with drinking water for the next hour. The only change of the guards is vomit and an empty stomach. Coffee, whisky and blood. The grisly, noxious sky burns with the weight of an Earth turning on its side, looking out through grey eyes, a globular iris of naked waste. The entombed sky wretches as the darkening muck churns and writhes like a cold snake. What was once soil and groundwater, turned to the tar and feathers of the shamed petro-state of Canada.

Cottonopolis by Edward Goodall 

The pipe gargles and spews rasping smoke, as if it were a choking throat, attempting a last word before immobile onlookers. The brevity of life and death makes us motion-sick. There is a sea of greed, corruption and ignorance below these decks of metal and bone. The quiet break the loudest. And at once, as the gushing oil explodes with a merciless fire from the side of frozen metal, men are trapped behind the void. Wading in the flush of a liquid worse than sewage, the brain nauseates, overwhelmed with the job of planetary death.

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In celebration of the filters of raw earth into breathable air. The track "America! America!" is inspired by the forestal creation of a hand-crafted alder doumbek from Vancouver Island, at the cusp of the Great Bear Rainforest, a place that also signifies a cusp of human civilization. So, the sound of the wooden drum, of the local land, is played in conjunction with a Maple Shakuhachi (also indicative of the local country's national tree).


The doumbek and flute seek a passage, of wind and earth, into the waters of being and becoming, towards a sense of grounding (drum) and direction (flute). The vocalization/narrative sounding muses on the exhausting reactionary sense of progress that ensues in the modern world, where people continue to consume and waste, yet there is a lack of listening, and a lack of sheer creation.

The calamity of today is not one of natural resources, it is our state of mind, and as the musical instruments of the natural world teach us, there is much to learn from the shapes and sounds within. As Chuang Tzu said, "What happened was my own collected thought encountered the hidden potential in the wood. From this live encounter came the work that you ascribe to the spirit."


This nine-poem chapbook speaks to the deformed nature of land under the warped perception of consumerist greed and a wholesale corruption of value in life, and unsurprisingly human life. The interludes speak to a frenetic base of experience in the fragmented world of manufactured waste and devastated landscapes that have become the norm, closing our minds and eyes from the truths and repercussions of our noxious way of life.

Through poetry, I affirm and re-encounter all my relations through a sense of the inner community. Creative language inspires an inward journeying to find the root and nature of mind. The place where our whole selves may firmly take root in the most fertile of soil, in the home of universal belonging, and so give back and become one with the self-regulating, self-sustained renewability of life in harmony with all of creation.

Interludes via FREEDOM

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

Sexuality and the Self: A Walk Through Chaplin's Dreamland of Innocence

"Dreamland...Sin creeps in...Trouble begins...Innocence...Getting flighty...Jealousy..." concluding titles in Chaplin's The Kid

The penultimate scene in Chaplin's first feature as an auteur filmmaker brings the viewer into "Dreamland" an alternate world parallel to the slums of old America, where all the principal characters from the film are winged angelic humans, swayed by the ear-whisperings of stereotypical devil sprites prancing about unnoticed. Could Chaplin have been privy to the hermeneutical notion that angels and demons are internalized expressions of our inner nature, mirroring social experience within the self-reflective subconscious, a key to an awakening, which resolves such impacting triumphs as the orphan child reuniting with their birth mother? Could Chaplin's narrative insights on film have preceded psychoanalytic depth by seeing the substance of dream as holistic self-projection, and at the same time, maintains unrivaled importance for transforming the collective psyche? 

Alan Watts is famously known for relaying the following psychological narrative, an interrogative entry into the presence of mind, as it wanders through the imaginative hollows of two overarching conceptions, past and future, and their nexus of alternate psychic fruition in the netherworld of dream. 

"Let's suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power, within one night, to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes, you would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say that's pretty great, and now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream that isn't under control. Where something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say, Wow, that was a close shave wasn't it. And you would get more adventurous and you would make further and further out gambles, and finally you would dream where you are now." 

Like a silent film, dream is also suggestive. The act of play is a prerogative of metaphorical truth, and finally, where chaos is a principle which reveals Self as the All-Self, Alan Watts, reminds us, "The whole nature of the Godhead is to play that he is not. In this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality...God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down-basic whatever it is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you are not." Dreaming is a doorway to a revelation of the nature of self as All, where we confront the play-form of creation as an inner process of personal creativity, as the embodiment of a creative mind. 

While we go about our "waking lives" fully immersed in the, "I am not that" attitude, the nightly vigil of our inborn collective life, our subtle creative instinct, bleeds with singular potency throughout the periphery of waking experience. In dream, we remember who, and what, we are: the stuff of play, Lila, in Sanskrit. There is a story of the seeker who goes to a guru and staring into the face of the holy man, meets only a curious smirk, as the holy man thinks, "Oh! Come off it, Shiva."  

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Shadows hang with somber repose. My beloved grandparent’s home is empty. And I’ve been away far too long. The dust has settled. The dining table is hollow with a loveless ardor. I can inhale the loss; the forgotten wealth of life lived once for each other now separated by nightfall and age.

Not at Home by Eastman Johnson

A middle-aged man in a black leather jacket stands outside, waiting. I’m hooked outwards. The sky calls me from the dank lament of the abandoned house now friendly to no one except for the wraiths of Death and Time. Who is the middle-aged man? I know him well, as I’ve known myself reflected in the old western visage of distempered exile.  

Devil Priest (credit: Gary Ashley)

I mount a bicycle along the cracked sidewalk curb. A dilapidated car, in the model once owned by my centenarian grandfather, clanks and sputters downwind. Is that my brother at the helm of a rusted, malign vehicle? I glide toward dawn. 

Automobile by Roman M. Semaschkewitsch

The middle-aged man seats himself blankly at the back of my bicycle. Like a burden to its beast, I carry his apathetic and listless indifference throughout the expansive elaborations of my most grandiose ambitions. 

Dynamism of a Biker by Umberto Boccioni

The map of Asia opens with the clarity of a skyline on a cloudless day. Traversing the backcountry of Vietnam, land of my lifelong love, I veer through incandescent bogs and sunbaked farmland. Natural beauty unending, my eyes turn inward, to visions of aspiration and wonder. To Europe, across Mongolia and the bleary maw of central Asia, I carry the burden of age, of settlement, of thought. Silenced, my mind is repressed with a hidden name.  

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The pure darbuka/doumbek track behind the voice sounding is essentially a decision to convey the beat-hop sexuality of modern techno-culture, and more, to welcome the sounds of the Arab-Muslim world through one of their traditional instruments, in coordination with a voice to affirm a re-sexualized Earth-bound society in honour of the Feminine - to move beyond what I have called, "monosexuality" a conception in response to our narrow myopia concerning the spectrum of global sexual expression.

Originally published in Poetic Pinup Revue's February 2012 print issue, "monosexuality" is written in the name of all the victims of a sexually repressed society, that being mostly all of us in the modern world. There is an epidemic of masculine dominance. The feminine perverted and repressed through our culture of rape. The lack of feminine empathy extends to the contemporary human relationship with Earth, as PachaMama, Mother Earth. Our birth-rite is to recognize Her.   

"monosexuality" was also my first published poem. Where poetry is conceived as a feminine art, to hell with the macho patriarchal cultural hegemony that diminishes the authentic creativities of our inborn humanity in favour of entitlement propaganda, figuratively illustrated as the "war on sex". Militarism further exacerbates the repressive/oppressive role that sex, in gender, reproduction, and the act of love, has assumed in our increasingly self-destructive society. As with all dualities, masculinity implies femininity.

Public Observance is essentially steeped in the act of 'people watching' with a keen eye for the social imbalances in play on any given occasion. Especial light is thrown on inter-sexual relativity. Included are the poems, "monosexuality" (Poetic Pinup Revue, 2012) and "Preposterous!" (Steel Bananas).

The piece, "Preposterous" makes a point for the significance of anarchical logic, or irrational meaning, and how the formal context of institutional learning delegitimizes the freedom to imagine beyond the bounds of normative thought and reason. It is at once an elegiac and at once celebratory, marking a flight from the institutional walls of predictable learning, towards the more experimental and risky, adventurous dream-education of self-knowledge.

Public Observance by Rusty Kjarvik

Music of the Dream Author: Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Release

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Album Art

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I

Winded Keys Duet for Piano & Shakuhachi 

"Winded Keys" alludes to a number of esoteric meanings, the most significant conveys a personification of keys. A key is used to open a doorway, highly relevant for an opening track. The track also relays that in a sense, we are all potentially keys. Through deeply listening to people, they can become as a key, opening the most significant doors. The person speaking at the beginning of this track is a passerby, stranger, and seeming vagrant in a riverine Canadian city. He is a key to Love, yet he is winded by the turmoil of life, and as so, opens the doorway to a key, strung by piano strings, and spinning in the Shakuhachi wind. That key is you while you listen to "Winded Keys".

Northern Shelter 2 Movements for Xaphoon & Percussion

"Northern Shelter" opens with an optimistic frame drum and xaphoon, as a young traveler eyeing the horizon, knowing his loved ones are near, and his bed is made. He traverses the grandiose open that he knows as well as the back of his hand, and with music on his tongue, he enters home. In the north, long stretches of life throughout the year are homebound due to the chronic lack of sunlight, rapid change in weather, and intermittent blistering cold. While under cover of shelter, in the deep, dark of night, an opening of the subtle sky of dream invites human eyes into worlds beyond our greatest imaginative stirrings.

Desert Plains Waves for Darbuka & Xaphoon

"Desert Plains" dramatizes the imaginative soundscapes of any day in the life of a dweller in the "desert plains". The inspiration for this track lives in the landscape. I have spent the last six years travelling between and living in Alberta and Egypt. I have noticed that the desert dry climate is common to both ecologies. The high plains whereon the great civilizations of the Blackfoot Confederation once hunted buffalo and the Sahara desert, wherefrom the ancient glyphs that are the foundation of most living language scripts on earth (except Chinese-derived), are home to an incredible vivacity, enveloped in the mysterious paucity of life. The horizon is grandiose and welcoming, yet equally embracing. "Desert Plains" is essentially in two segments, where at first there is a rhythmic yearning to see beyond the open, and escape the blinding immensity of the seemingly lifeless horizon, then after a time, there is a soulful maturation into the melody of a whole person, rooted in the landscape they call home. In that transition, the harmonic register of the xaphoon alludes to "Caravan" by Duke Ellington, as the traveler sees the mirage of a caravan ahead in the distant horizon of the desert plains, and at once entering the fold, the apparition dissipates. "Desert Plains" is a solemn homage in defence of rootedness, in this our age of heightened mobility.

Inward Flight Sketches for Shakuhachi & Darbuka

At this point in the saga that is "Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I" the desert-plains dweller seeks the gift of a shaman; an end-blown flute. In a clearing, under the starlight of a new moon, the once traveler, now dweller, becomes seeker. At this point, the journey moves from outward-driven to inward-seeking. The journey within is a journey into the infinite. The Self is the immovable point, around which all subjects waver, orbit and grasp in eternal flux. Yet, this is the play of the universe. For the Ancient Hindus, the universe was play, or as they called it, Lila. "Inward Flight" illustrates how the inward journey is playful.

Cold-Blooded River Epic for Frame Drums & Wind

In his inward search, the seeker becomes seer. All that exists on Earth, all that humans have created, the vast plenitudes of universal form in life and art become as ephemeral as an unrecorded improvisation, played aloud to the spirits and muses of a seer rapt in a vision of death. Here, the "Cold-Blooded River" comes into focus, where a visualization not unlike the Ancient Greek River Styx is seen in a vision. As in a buddhist ice hell, the river mists with the deathly cold of a swift and unforgiving seduction. Will the seeker cross the river of death? "Cold-Blooded River" asks the listener that question.

Four Directions Moments for Darbuka, Frame Drum, Shakuhachi & Xaphoon

After making it across the "Cold-Blooded River", that is the river of death and extinction, our spiritual humanity sees the realization that a sense of direction goes beyond the cardinal points of seasonal, ecological and temporal occasion in life's experience. "Four Directions" unites the dream vision, or literal physical manifestation in the mind's eye with a more spiritual vision, which is more like a revelation of insight. In this sense, the "Four Directions" unites four primary instruments; darbuka, frame drum, shakuhachi and xaphoon, where each represents a unique way of seeing, yet no instrument of perception is more clear or true than another. The four directions, or the heart compass is set deep within every mode of will. South, symbolized in the darbuka, is of growth and warmth. The darbuka is the prime origin point of my current growth in music and the creative life. The darbuka is closest to my ancestral heart, as it speaks to Greek and Jewish music, where my blood rests deepest. North, symbolized in the frame drum, is of wisdom and endurance, because it is a humbling instrument, and used in many sacred traditions, for example the Persian Daf frame drum in Sufi ceremonies. West, symbolized in the xaphoon, is of introspection. The xaphoon, also known as the bamboo sax, is a new instrument, invented in Hawaii in the 1970s, yet it follows in the great tradition of reeded instruments. East, symbolized in the Shakuhachi, is of illumination and enlightenment. It is with the Shakuhachi, the renowned end-blown Japanese flute, that I often meet twilight. Breathing through the river-fleshed air, I keep a bit of that sunlight with me as the moonrise enlightens the depths of winter.

_____________

Original concepts formed after hearing the wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman's voice reciting his poem, "America". An impromptu recording of street voices led to creating an atmosphere of the mood, feeling and soul that goes into voice, and the unintended harmonies of using our speaking voice. Instruments are extensions of the subtle body of the spiritual human form. When recognized as such, our voice speaks through them, as through us.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I is the celebration of voice through sound. After my first year as an incipient writer in visual form, my creativity bubbled and erupted with mysterious energy into a realm of creative visual stimuli, of spatial literature, of manuscript art, of asemic writing. Now, as I begin to record the sound of my voice, I first amuse in the imaginative spectrum of voice through instrumentation.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I is the first part of a seven track series, mirroring my process in seeing through a cycle of sevens in the creation of manuscript art and experimental writing. Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II will feature a single LP-length track in four parts. A collage from four of my currently finished manuscript artworks have been used as cover art.

Influences: John Cage, Brian Eno, Duke Ellington, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Jan Garbarek, Godspeed You Emperor, Hossam Ramzy, Vi An Diep, Ai Hagiwara, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, street conversation, birds, wind, clouds, river, silence 

_____________

See other instances of my musical creativity on earlier recordings: 

Dream Music and the Creative Breath

Hatsuyume of Peace: First Dream of a New Creative Paradigm

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Solidarity, Peace & LOVE

__________

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

River Styx Canadiana by RK

On the Other Side by RK

Water-and-Sky Medium by RK

A Way Through by RK

Take The One Less Traveled by RK

 _____________

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

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

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

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

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

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

excerpts from "Why, Autopoietic Eternity!"

Love is Simple: The Light of Dixieland Music

"Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you, but in your dreams whatever they be, dream a little dream of me." lyrics by Gus Kahn

My favourite duet with Louis Armstrong is with vocalist Velma Middleton singing That's my Desire. I've been listening to this duet recording on cassette tape for years until I found a rare video performance tonight. These old Dixieland jazz standards bring the kind of simple grandeur as understood by the likes of master improviser and jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, who said, "The more experience someone has, the more their simplicity is profound." Their musical simplicity is spacious enough to offer the needful release of Southern jazz artists mixed up in the lowly roil of dominant American prejudice. Music is the teacher, and with the intuitive language of sound, speaks to all indiscriminately, "Love is simple."

_________

She plays an acoustic piano with a Chinese zither in the body. Virtuosic at the keys and the zither strings simultaneously, the stage ignites with the mysterious vibes of a Native World Jazz fusion. Other musicians bend traditional instrumentation with a creative harmony so seamless its enigmatic ingenuity fascinates infinitely. 

Nocturnal Serenade by Jan Steen

The lead musician, a full-bodied older woman, exudes a singular light as the stage dims and the concert hall empties. She stands in redolent awe and reverence for the magic of music. I gaze at the stage, as the musicians remain immobile. Their colourful clothing bespeaks contemporary First Nations traditions. The light outshines my eyes, as I stagger off with a mind unfulfilled by the enduring silence. 

__________

What must you do to stay and decide
When you decide what to do with your life
When you feel you are alive and not as good as dead inside,
A nothing where you hide…
Not just a nothing
Where you lie…
...

One day you realize you must die,
So how to prepare for death,
First step live,
Second fail life with a smile

To see as clearly as your de-fogged morning
Mirror of bright possibility with pure face,
That freedom is a tear
And Death is a gift from the bosom of life herself.

excerpts from "Live life and Die"

 

Atheist Tomb of a Truth-Seeking American: A Plea for Disarmament

Tomb of D.M. Bennett in Brooklyn by Cory Doctorow

"I have learned to modify my prejudices. I am ready to believe Hamlet was right when he assured his friend Horatio that there was in Heaven and Earth many things not dreamed of in his philosophy." D.M. Bennett, as orated in The Truth Seeker 

It is at times like these that we Americans look to our history. Who are we? Where do we come from? How did we get here? What could have led to this? What is happening? 

Those among us strong enough to ask such questions are motivated to seek truth. As the president weeps for the children of the nation, so we must all begin to weep with minds full of emotion, burning with an intelligent self-awareness towards post-political change. We don't need rhetoric. We need new laws on guns. We need free thought to embellish the minds of such substance as founded free press in America. Disarmament is the new abolition, and as long as guns are indiscriminately accessible to immature minds and wounded hearts, we are all slaves to this mortal era.  

__________

The last thing I remembered was the initial feeling of impalement. Careening off a flight of concrete steps, I flew from my bike onto a metal pole. My back cracked in shards. When I came to, the city was dark. A Rastafarian man burned down a hand-rolled cigarette in the shadows. I knew from his countenance, to walk outside would be a bad move. I did anyways.

The Customs Cabin by Ferdinand du Puigaudeau

The street lamps glowed over empty streets. The absence was chilling, yet I could feel a human presence both alarming and alluring. As I made my way down to the riverbanks, the icy shoreline stared at me with two riveting eyes. The male stance was formidable and intimidating. Fear struck. The air breathed of danger. I needed to know why.

Night on the Southern Shore by Nikolay Dubovsky

As I hurried further on down the shoreline, a group of men whispered in the dark. I quickly smelled the entrenched anger, the mortal struggle at hand. I fled. On my way back, I met a friend from before the accident. He recounted his story, how he had broken his back in an accident that mirrored my own. I didn't question the curious coincidence as he went on to explain the unthinkable, we were now living in a world so hostile to mankind that people were literally killing each other for the last crusts of bread, the last drops of water, the last feet to walk, the last fresh air to breathe, the last day to live.

__________

"towed current
            pulled slow,
            drifted away

hand,
            fingers following new lines
...

virgin thorn brush
            frame lilting strong above the careless face
of artistic madness
in the jokester’s foam and rust
...

the pulse breaking off the tops of widow’s peak waves,
            blushing high over the coastal horizon,

a piercing thought
that boiled in the mind’s own brain,
an intuitive question
            with an answer as certain as death in the next step"

excerpts from "empty Blown mind"

Apolitical America: Nightmares of the Preventive Paradigm

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed, and today people have lost faith in ideologies...But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians promise to protect us from nightmares...But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, security services and the international media." BBC Documentary Power of Nightmares

As George Carlin said, "You have no choice, you have owners." Yet, before I heard the words of this comic genius, I had an inkling that America was having its way with me, and I desperately needed to get out. When the twin towers came crashing down, I was a teenage male, bent up in a corner, with only one response, the one I thought my American family wanted to hear, "I would kill to get revenge." As I watched the growing stores of books on international post-Cold war espionage supporting the drama of "war on terror" dialectic, I became more and more sickened and disillusioned. Bush's maddeningly insane propaganda machine of backwards language and foolish bad humour turned my stomach. I fled America, to live in the Middle East. I needed to hear the breathing from "the other side". I found human hearts, not enemy minds. I found a camaraderie so naturally human, and so deeply universal, that I was fulfilled from my need to be "American" at all. With Obama's "war on terror" claim to fame at finally finding success in hunting down Osama, I remain ever firm in my convictions. American "terror" propaganda is so deep-seated that it is truly beyond politics, it is the very lifeblood and backbone of American society. 

See my post: Flightless Dreams and Dark Humour of a Post-W.orld...

__________

A gargantuan supply of Spanish rice, washed in a tantalizing array of chiles and spices galore, wades in a fine cream sauce. A team of cooks work with exceptional efficiency in an open kitchen. The dining area is of a posh nightlife design. Smoke wafts among whisky inhalation in the metropolitan air. 

New York Restaurant by Edward Hopper

As I stare into the blaring kitchen lights from the dim seating area, I notice a cook saunter over to a telephone on the wall. His white frock is stained with stout culinary effort. Taking another sip from my snifter, eyeing a fantastic belle at the table across from me, the dining lights suddenly dim uncomfortably. The kitchen light glares out over the tables with the stillness of an all too noticeable silence. Everyone is motionless. 

At the Moulin Rouge by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

My eyes survey the room with blundering anxiety. The white frock of the cook at the phone reflects a brutal white light over fearing eyes. His mouth opens, and out emits a breath so hot I can feel it nearly twenty feet distant. His eyes become two open holes. The man falls, and I can see his frock begins to stain red. Crawling along the open floor, he is steaming hot. As he unbuttons his cook's clothing, his chest pours with ashen blood, a red so crimson it floods my eyes with a blinding hue. In my mind, I kneel to help him. I sit, frozen. 

Triumph of Death (detail) by Peter Bruegel the Elder 

All realize the man will soon die. One cook slowly meanders over to a phone, shakily dialling to quell the emergency at hand. In a last gruesome attempt to breathe, the man on the floor has almost completely undressed himself. Swelling with heat, blood pours from his chest and mouth. Staring at me with empty, soulless eyes. I faint. 

_________

"Fires beneath the throat, hand and breast of a reflected sky
Inside the single-eyed, whose perfect clock chimed roughly over the groundless

Patience, dusting off wine bottles
Into Californian eternity
...

The idealistic round elegized by madmen before indulgent crowds,
A folklore, pained to vulgarity in the thick mire

Soaked with herbal grime,
That dream-forsaken wine of the ancient, pours

Sending women to mind thankless law
In the first civil war before nationhood or tragic mores

The fallacy in and out of sight,
Instantaneous with thoroughly flushed wives, fanning themselves awake

As the flies descend and drink their salivating gore-fest tirades,
The Queendom, saved by the ranting duration of a minor apocalypse

When all the rest of the world lies in tears
Shaken only by worldwide fame"

excerpts from "Co-creative Wondering"

The Wordless Dream Language of Myth

Chinese Goddess Nuwa by Unknown

"Until we get to dreams, there is a tendency to think of stories as 'words.' In dreams we experience stories as structures and patterns that evoke images and experiences, often without words...In dealing with dreams, such noted authorities as James Hillman have instructed us to "hold the image."By 'Holding the image,' the conscious mind can begin to discern patterns and structures that can eventually reveal rich psychic content...Some have said that, 'Myths are cultural dreams.'" Ontogenic Mythotypes by G. Charles Andersen

What is the relationship between language and dream? Dream is a language in and of itself. Language is mutable to Dream Language, when traditional dream interpretation is foregone, and creative writing is utilized as a means to "hold the image" in the mind of James Hillman. Such psychological import brings to mind the psychoactive artistry of Laurence Caruana and others who have respected the imagination as a prehuman remnant of archaic information. "The world is made of language" says Terence McKenna. And so, in using that language, we may hear our mythic vocation, a calling towards that which we had never dreamed, unearthed as from the unsaid and unconscious mysteries of our own psychic invention. 

__________

What a breath of fresh air! To drink, and see. I could feel my brother’s weeping, his heart caving in his shaking flesh as he triumphed again over a nervous breakdown, carrying him by air through the over-privileged dome of Western skies. And into the darkened haunt of old coast bumhood, and the numbing agents of a musical life amid the New England smile of selfish mockery and divulging swine. The ruthless remark, a self intensified in the bitter alcoholic night, the cobblestone streets, swept of hurricane feet and tires of his once-sickened flight returning.

Lombard Landscape by Fulvia Bisi

At home, lost to the time of his forgetting, he returns, an old man in his distant youth. The tingling respite of belonging in the gutters of Eastern fame, the ruinous gold of a mind enslaved to eternal seeking, he clambered down tumbling steps of creaking wood and linoleum brains, as I stared immobilized into the dark porch silhouette. A large man sat there, with dreadlocks lower than his back, and as he lifted an ember of smoke to his lips, his dark skin shone with the muscular life of a physical laborer on break, alone, a nameless body of the historic present.

Man with a Hoe by Jean-Francois Millet

I could only see him clearly under the bar lighting. The dizzying indoor lunacy of the drinker’s habit, a hovel of bored and roughened life spoke through his bristling mouth. After the rare silence of a few pints, he ended the night with means to see each other again. And like that, he disappeared in the great fog of blackness, opaque as the light-polluted air of a once booming industrial city, now smoking upward with the final ashen gasp of smoky incineration. 

__________

“What grievous horror betook these dumb streets?”

Touched with the unkindness of a meek following
From the near elderly, an old town deemed to inquietude
...
Taking off the English hat of a long gone America
Seeing no one in the mist fired laugh from this war

Breathing ocean
Suffocated by the calm before the storm
...
Clucking behind the chicken wire of suburban fate
...
Gripping for death at the edge of the western, manifest

As nature’s law thrives in disbelief

excerpts from "Calm before the Storm"

The Twilight of a Psychopathic Civilization

“We also, when building a relationship with people, believe that they are real. What a psychopath does is they weave a picture of a person that’s really a dream. It’s a spirit. It’s not real...When the psychopath is done with you, they leave. They’ve never had a bond with you. It’s all been a game…feeling no empathy…” Paul Babiak, psychologist, author of Snakes in Suits in I Am Fishead

I've showed this film to a friend of mine who has worked in mega corporations, and been subsequently laid off for his personable style of mitigating interrelationships between different interest groups. Simply  put, he was not a megalomaniac nor a psychopath, increasingly necessary prerequisites for keeping one's job in the field of human indecency, the corporate world.

I live in a city where oil corporations run amuck, seen as the life of the party, and there are Fisheads among us here, this is a city ruled by psychopaths, and the status quo lauds them. My friend, mentioned above, who worked for an oil company described their worldview well, "they are a storage and pipeline facility, and their worldview is as narrow as one looking down a pipeline."

________

Arctic light fills the top of the room with a brittle delicacy, like the tooth of a gentle jaw in the unknown hours of a white night. I sit across from a well-known theatre music composer. In his characteristic black jacket, he eyes me with the filling presence of boreal light, as a friend in the mysterious haunts of a northern dream. I’m at work on an essay. The title marks a conscious turnabout towards the psychic rush of art in the unconscious; a memory become prophecy as the light dims and the man disappears with my thought.

Arctic fox in winter mountain by Magne Håland

Leaving my room for the main complex of the northern university, I feel on edge as concave walls cut with sharp angles into grass-laden gardens, while up above the window glass refracts the incessant sun with chilling delight. As I move through a room, I am accosted for passing over an international boundary.

Mikak and Tukauk by John Russell

An Inuit woman breathes with intensive definition as she explains the national boundary, seemingly on the grounds of the school. With a bright empathy, I willingly and pleasantly follow the guidelines and roam across the border daily, with attention and respect for the defense of physical difference. 

________

        Throughout the sanctified fields of one human home
                  Lived to the final digression into creative madness 

The right to be
        As connected as all beings
                  With electric happiness
                          Outside

- excerpt "Lugubrious Background Nearing an Electromagnetic Haze"