Season's Greetings from the Wilderness of the Imagination

Woman in the Wilderness, Star or Siberia by Alfons Mucha 

“Listen: in dreams and particularly in nightmares, caused by indigestion or whatever you like, a man sometimes sees such artistic things, such a complex and actual reality, such events, or even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, full of such astonishing details, beginning with he most exalted manifestations of the human spirit to the last button on a shirt-front that, I assure you, not even Leo Tolstoy could have invented it, and yet such dreams are sometimes seen not by writers but by the most ordinary people, civil servants, newspaper columnists, priests…” Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, p. 751-2

I recently read the last masterful work of Dostoyevsky, one of the world's greats of classic literature. The book is a testament to the sheer mental strength and quality of such a writer as experienced a mock execution ritual and incarceration in the labor camps of 19th century Siberia. Nearly one thousand pages, I received a copy of this masterpiece from a friend with a peculiar literary collection practice. The two volumes within which the book is contained were of different publications, yet corresponded to the page. This friend, while often aloof, has been a great literary mentor and companion. And as a final note, during the holiday season, I feel that Dostoyevsky's inkling as quoted above invigorates our lives especially today. The popular cult of the Christmas tree and its European folklore breeds a kind of mundane public dreaming, where the workers of the world unite in myth and imagine a complex world full of reindeer, gifts and traditions fabricated from the ordinary, to the ordinary. 

_________  

I have not remembered. Feelings unfamiliar slip away with the light of the world. Yet, in my waking night, before a small crowd of onlookers, I played along to my imagination, manifest with the unconscious origination of a dream reality. 

Whirling Dervishes by Jean-Leon Gerome

I swung Near Eastern rhythms towards her vibrating zither with emotive haste. As I felt the sway of awe form in my hands and heart, a lightness filled the room. I saw. A Sufi dervish began whirling. The air moved in circular deftness to my rhythmic accompaniment. The dancing figment continued unalloyed by the uninitiated crowd of the living; those led to dream only in the deepest dark of night. 

_________

Freeing the foundations of homeward longing onto a single raft
Out on the high seas,
A perplexed guide of Jewish law

Betrayed in the relaxed mystic fire
An American marijuana-seeding mind, Nepalese beauty
Direct from the magic psalm pinned against a “Tat Tvam Asi” wall

Frail pencil marks casting the Odyssey’s modern sequel
Into a vulnerable fasting mind, bled forth into the marathon sky
Massachusetts rain, following me to Calgary in rare consecutive days

Our literary giants, peering upwards, finally
In a New England fog haze through the mirrored mushroom mind
Whose perception flowered into feared atomic explosions

The true sexual freedom in nature
To lay soft stonework ground,
Firm with utterly expressed wonder at the world ‘round

Knowledge timed perfect with musical escapism
Into the bold motionless greed of a trapped metallic girl,
Re-born as prophetess in the unknown seed of Western belief

excerpt from "Grand Repertoire of Failure"

Engineering the Unconscious

“…there exists a barrier in you, all our minds, which prevents these hidden and unwelcome impulses of the unconscious from emerging.” (Dr. Ernest Jones) 

“…the very idea of examining and analyzing one’s inner feelings was a threat to their absolute control.”

“By analyzing dreams and free association he had unearthed, he said, powerful sexual and aggressive forces which were the remnants of our animal past. Feelings we repressed because they were too dangerous.”

“If human beings were driven by unconscious irrational forces than it was necessary to rethink democracy.” 

- from the film, "The Century of the Self" (Part One on YouTube)

________

We wait aimlessly. The school cafeteria transforms into the living room at my grandparent’s house. The light brown rug gives off a beige boredom, as I sit amongst friends and family, waiting, so patiently, as if for the return of Christ. Eating is drudgery. There is an unlikely foment of pleasing silence about, precipitated by my power-hungry relatives. I have had enough. I clasp my hands and in a manner to mock Christian prayer, I bowl over carelessly in front of my father and uncle. “Christmas is within you!” I say to them with lifted humor. They smile with vagrant attention as my grandmother proceeds to welcome me to sleep downstairs. As I take up her offer, the entire upstairs rumbles with festivity. Smoke pours in dreamily as brass instruments are uncased and steamed with the strong breath of celebratory music. “Is it time?” I ponder, wistfully.

________

Christmas

"Symbolizes family togetherness, reunions and celebration. It is also representative of new beginnings and fresh starts." (iDream)

________

There are four deities.
Each represents a characteristic prevalent in creatures, stones, places, and thoughts.

Creatures are animals, plants, water and air.
Stones are celestial bodies, crystals and money.
Places are meaning, stories, songs and art.
Thoughts are actions which emanate from the center of being, the heart.

Each of the four deities has an age,
and each has a name with which it is remembered
by People.

The first deity is called,
Haumah; Nation,
the second is
Hakhalah; Community,
the third is
Mishpachah; Family,
and the fourth is,
Aahtzmi; Self.

Today, we are in the age of Aahtzmi.

- excerpt from "Deadly Vision Part I"

A Mind Transcends Market Demand, and Returns Home to Find Nothing Left

Landscape with Aeneas at Delos by Claude Lorrain

"Why should a financial engineer be paid four times to a hundred times more than a real engineer. A real engineer builds bridges, a financial engineer builds dreams. When those dreams turn into nightmares, other people pay for it."

Andrew Sheng 

Chief Advisor, China Banking Regulatory Commission

From the film Inside Job

_______

I begin walking outside of my grandmother’s house in upstate NY. I seem to have fled the house, where usually no one leaves when visiting because it lies in the middle of nowhere. I am walking down a hill, it seems at once to be in the Hampton Hills, where she lives, but also in Western Massachusetts, where I once took a hefty dose of LSD and walked all day on the country roadside. The northeastern forests bear down on my mind as spindly webs of the subconscious wilderness. Sooner or later, I end up nearing the house of my father, my stepmother waves her arm dramatically to motion me in as if I am a dog called inside. When I get in, it is Christmas morning, and my gifts are the gifts I’ve received from all the years being there for Christmas, loads of books on spirituality and Eastern thought, however in the form of mass market consumer items. I look through these books exhaustively and disgusted to no end, finding nothing.  

_________

comrade against these forbidden culturati

timed to the arrival of the outdoor preacher 

worshiping the lost dead

world of stone and writing.

- excerpt from "Another Worldview"