Myth of the Writer as Artist in the Inner Space Age

Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann) By Christiaan Tonnis

"Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artist temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers, which otherwise occurs much later in life...myth is the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration." Thomas Mann in his essay, Freud and the Future

Within this essay by the great 20th century writer Thomas Mann, author of the famed Magic Mountain, are masterful insights with which to learn the various modes of self-discovery as espoused in the mythic fires of ritualized, eternalized thought throughout the ages. In the ageless struggle towards self-knowledge, the embattlements are often constructed in defence of the outer world, or the world, and in offence from the inner world, or the self. In the midst of those embattlements, lies a field. As Rumi says, "Between right doing, and wrong doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." 

To explore self-knowledge with regard to knowing one's place and vocation is to embark on an inward journey. Only by recognizing the bare truths of our life in the present moment, and proclaiming them as such, and in turn, making them an integral part of the conscious, and waking, mind, can we understand that the truth about myth. 

Myth addresses and reveals the ultimate needs of the human psyche. Myth speaks of the search for meaning in the life of humankind. The final lesson of myth is that the ultimate question for life in the modern world, as with all times, is not, "what is my place in the world?" The essential question remains, "what is the place of the world in me?" Every one is the ONE. You are the world. 

The world is of our own making. We are all co-creators in the aftermath of reason. Work is play, and play is work. Play is the life of the universe at work, also understood as LILA in Hindu thought.   

_________

I walk past a prison in southern California. The air is humid. I can smell salt and chlorine. Why am I barefoot? I bend to look through stone latticework. I see peers, young men and women my age, cleaning a concrete prison campground. A dismal gymnasium? A barren bathing area? They wear radioactive protection, in orange suits and gas-masked. 

Lady in Prison by Raja Ravi Varma

I dart across the road. Barefoot, my feet sink unaware into the freezing water runoff from the prison cleanup. My feet are numb as I walk over a grassy knoll on my way to a gas station. The clear sky is warming. There are gas stations everywhere, and I can't seem to get anywhere close to one. My torso is overheating, and my feet are so frozen I can barely stand.

__________

Touring the phantom cloud

At rest between Celtic shores, distressed by multi-lingual borders and rocky soil, and a northern jail for the barbaric tongues who gouge panicked eyes from the skulls of New World kinds

An orgy of ruthless becoming

Among the equestrian speed, famed by pre-teen daughters of class and medieval French dreams, who cast off the Muslim humidity from Spain’s bound whores, and lust after a secretive world of music in the drum talk of yesteryear’s snoring traditionalism

Yet woken alive

Through non-ordinary literary thought and perpetual action, to finally inundate the worldly risks bedding with our species at once in an archaic passion, straying from the lofty

First World throats of progress

excerpt from "Mad artistry"

U, The Middle Way in AUM (Om)

Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva within an OM, in a Mahabharata manuscript from 1795 by Unknown

"Taijasa, whose field is the dream state, is the second
sound, U, because this is an excellence, and contains the
qualities of the other two. He who knows thus, exalts the flow
of knowledge and becomes equalised...

Internal to the waking consciousness, and pervading the waking consciousness, there is a subtler function of this very same consciousness, which is subjectively known as the dream-consciousness, or taijasa, and universally known as hiraṇyagarba, or the Cosmic Subtle Consciousness...

Neither can the waking experiences exhaust us, nor can the dream experiences completely comprehend our being. We seem to be something that is capable of being a witness of both the states. This witness is not a party either to the waking state or to the dreaming state. We are essentially, a third element altogether, something independent of waking and dream."

- excerpts from Swami Krishnananda's Mandukya Upanishad, pp. 12, 57, 59 [italics mine] 

________

The antique wood, a rocking chair, the once attributed tradition of upright relaxation, buried in the tourist fizz of los sapos market. Cobblestone streets mark the way for foreigners blending with hip-tied drum groups, Hare Krishna propagandists and the local elote vender. The Mexican wine of a Sunday Tianguis gropes at the neck, to smother the chosen speech in a howl of awakened want. 

I shudder behind a sunglass find, the inimitable Huichol hand, weaves a metaphysical mat of mystical enthusiasm, and so we play nonstop, enlightening the mouthed eyes with a music unheard. Nightfall, we are approached by a woman of colonial smiles. She breathes a home into our highest imagining, a place to live, among the cold stone steps of vanquished need and fulfilled sight. Her place is an ideal home, with a small bedroom tucked away into the corner of an empty room, full with the comforting hospitality of a traditional sunbaked Southern welcoming. We decide to continue on, despite the whipped lure of our eyes.

Returning north, I accept the invitation of a friend to ascend the mightiest tower in the world, newly built in our city. Hiking through a golf course, I reminisce on a similarly forged path through dense forest upwards toward the Rocky mountain peaks. Then, I see it. Eye’s nearly gouged by the immensity; I prick myself. 

The conical rise extends upward towards unknown alchemical engineering, and more, an unsupported bridge unites two lower towers from the bottom-center, and direct to the very top! My friend, always acting over-anxious, rushes us towards the bridge to the top. We enter the complex, prefaced by the usual commercial dives, a mall of unreasonable hacks festering like bottom feeders. 

With an upturned stomach, I hold on as we are shot out, gliding over a glass floor, as a rudderless, engineless boat would skim over placid waters. I dare not look down. In the building, the quick mindscape turns into a flood of waning mirth, and mindless havoc beams with unintelligible delight as people squander the golden drug of shameless technology, a great phallic middle finger, flipped by the entire Western world at once! To who? For what? It is directly skyward.

My friend and I quickly exit, having passed through the immense spire of cylindrical unreality, and we pour out onto an uptown street in mid-city. The concrete jungle returns us to the fading glory of a now obsolete infrastructure. 

Ghosts of the past fly like demonic insects through the gut-smattered concrete claustration. I notice a few as my friends, and meet them. On the outskirts of the unsubtle building, a beacon of terror, an insignia of waste, we burrow through an old tunnel system, climbing out into the abandoned system of underground pathways, leading to the base of the alien tower. 

Suddenly arrested by the horror of war, the sky blasts open with the shockwaves of a thousand bombs billowing like hot nails over the soft-fingered ground. As missiles breach the catastrophic abandonment of wires and tunnels ahead and behind, I loathe over remembered imagery from Iraq, Palestine, and endless claims to vengeance on our land, born of blood and built of sand.  

________

choking cry,
the rasping imperfection in ecstatic beauty,
momentous experience beyond human conflict
in the word and sound of a throat-muted music,
the play of life
final and resounding
in a tumult of white haze
around the English nape

croaking in the sharp whispered present,
fuming dry-eyed numberless fingerings
before a trickster’s Goddess tree,
pained to an ink-smeared fire on the blistering urban horizon

sleepless,
gone into aged reason
and the ethos of undreamt madness

- excerpt from "Assimilating America-Asia" 

India's First Poet Sees Rama's Dream Journey

Ramayana by Prashanthprao

"Now a dream which is terrible, causing the hairs to stand erect for the destruction of ogres and for the welfare of Her husband, has been seen by me."

"Of what kind is this dream seen by you. Tell us". Listening to this utterance that came forth from the mouths of those ogresses, Trijata spoke at that time this word relating to the dream.

"Now it has been seen by me in the dream that Seetha also wearing white clothes was sitting on a white mountain surrounded by the ocean."

"Thereafter it has been seen by me that Seetha with eyes like lotuses has risen up from the lap of Her husband and gently touched the Moon and the Sun with Her hand."

"Rama with strength equalling that of Lord Vishnu, born in Raghu's dynasty together with brother Lakshmana and with Seetha has been seen by me thus in the dream."

"In that dream the ogre Kumbhakarna has been seen thus by me. All Ravana's sons have been seen to be sprinkled with oil."

"An assembly also of ogres drinking oil and wearing red garlands, with red clothes, with the sound of songs and musical instruments has been seen by me."

"Which woman while being sorrowful, such type of dream has been seen, that woman being released from various sorrows, will get unsurpassed pleasure."

"I am seeing Seetha coming near accomplishment of motive. I also see the destruction of Ravana also and victory of Rama coming near."

- excerpts from Valmiki Ramayana, Book V: Sundara Kanda [Book of Beauty], Sarga [Chapter] 27

"The main book of reference for dream – interpretation is Charaka-samhita by Charaka, part of which is supposed to be based on Valmiki Ramayana" writes Jayasree

Read this fascinating article on Hinduism and Dreaming

_________

Private museum screening: Amazon Tobacco Memories. A fellow artist, a sculptor of all things spirit, places his Kali – Uma papier-mâché work on a cabinet in a whitewashed room. The black fire spits with discerning ash, impeded by the radiance of the all-mother’s gaze. I am impressed by the artist’s visionary innocence, conveying a child-like eye for the Hindu cosmology, expressed as a Faustian drama of Dadaist cultural syntax. And the screening begins. 

The dark howling jungle cackled and hooted in the avian-simian craze, a sonic insanity swept through my over-civilized musical palate as the humid tension raised sky high in the Amazonian night. The river vessel, motionless across from an isolated village of thirty native inhabitants, I smoked a Peruvian cigarette with a quiet, philosophic friend. In a moment of uninvited silence, a hand perked up from the lower level through a handrail, offering us a leftover packet of smokes. We grabbed them, thoughtless and looked at one another. Returning the steaming laughter of the sleepless rainforest, we stained the lungs of the earth with anxious conversation and latent abandon. 

Later that night the clear skies illuminated my mind with obsolescent memory, the archaic wisdom of unpolluted climactic earth-born advancement reflected in the translucent universe, wherein my eyes sank as a body of thunder into the dank rainforest moat, encircling the mother of the universe, freeing the reptilian scale from the mammalian chord, giving voice to the source sprung with Martian light. 

________

Sculpture

"If your dream featured sculptures, it is a warning to pay more attention to your own personal affairs and less to those of others." (iDream)

Movie Theatre

"If you dream of being in a movie theatre, you are attempting to protect yourself from your emotions or actions." (iDream)

Tobacco

"To smoke tobacco, denotes amiable friendships." (iDream)

________

the always unborn

Kuan Yin companion

breathless nerve

lying, sweat dream,

figure of local poverty,

the sleeping wretch,

half-haggard with princely sexdom

wilderness of mindplay

needing rough deranged feeling,

entranced idiocy

blank eyes

pouring into belief,

experience for greater hilarity,

and necessity bred from popular hysteria

or psychic discomfort

in the open field

laughing out

the distressed boredom

to desire comic failure

in the moment's strength

aware

for newfound rich seeing

that once led animals into the evolutionary mold

senseless through plant networks

supporting with the medicinal love of creation

softly growing inside the mammalian egg

with lonesome prowess

over the angry female

war drama untold

over millennia

of gross mourning

in the struggle for simple pride

or earnest life,

never acknowledging the ageless

being of each seed

that lives.

In The Burning Memory of the Thousand-Dreamt Rimbaud

"montage en rouge: Arthur Rimbaud et éruption volcanique" by PRA

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn” 

― Arthur Rimbaud

In the spirit of dream interpretation, I endeavour a creative interpretation of Rimbaud's oft-quoted line. All know the saying, "a picture is a thousand words" refers to the ability of the human eye to perceive new realities through the image, to a mode of internal perception awakening Dream, Realization, Insight, Beauty & Truth. Taking into consideration the outlandish tragedy of Rimbaud's life I would wonder to suggest that "softly burn" is an allegory on the fleeting nature of existence, which dream-like, escapes as a softly burning wick, where the wick is the body, tormented by the passing of life, in pain, and at once when life is realized as a dream, that passing burn is soft. Memories, awakenings, visions, are of those thousand dream-images through which the mind of the poet-seer burns, within. 

For a worthwhile initiation into another living mind revisiting this quote, please explore THE DREAMING, full of gorgeous mystical dream-mind renderings from the Yukon and beyond

________

The Hindu temple receives a multitude of bodies. Coffins too small for the eye bedeck the well-draped floor. Exotic designs move the carpeting fur under our crossed legs as we admonish the tragedy of a younger generation lost to the violent wave of an incredulous doom. The air is blameless while heavy with the intensity of childless mourning. I visit many coffins, pressing my hand over their delicately sheathed frames, wondering about the unwilling instant of realizing early death at hand. Luxurious instrumentation lightly carries our tears to the sky with a playful tabla swing, impassioned, vibrating the moment’s curse into a blessing of mysterious, celestial hosts. We supplicate for the presence of extra-human understanding.

The demons return to the doorstep of the temple. A slew of bodies fall limp to the floor, blood gushes, filling the red and gold henna-flavored carpet with monochromatic travesty. I hide myself in the ceiling. I can hear the marauders bellowing hotly underneath. Am I the sole survivor? The panicking sets in when bullets and swords pierce through the unprotected foam insulation, serving as a ceiling in between the stone encasing stone structure. The murderers smash idols and burn the priests’ fabrics. Then, they notice me. My heart shakes like a rattlesnake in a rib cage. Gently lowered by the facetious grin of a gangster, I retain my pride. Led to the doorway after bitter interrogation, I am let off, grieving now for the un-mourned, and un-passed, those whose deaths remained undreamt and survive with the turning flesh of burning memory.

_______

Temple

"To dream about a temple represents a need to be appreciated by those you love." (iDream)

_______

she, a mother-in-law, struck a few chords after work and fled to his new apt.
clean and unused, they spread genital juices all over the face of the linoleum floor,
not asking lawyers how to clean it up, they left it for dead
& fled the crime scene to her stepsister's house
where they indulged in mushroom chocolates
& fled the known universe

now legally insane, they saw themselves all perfectly unfit for more
in their mentally unbalanced state, slept soundlessly on the floor,
only he had a dream, that he was back in his home country,
though living on the border, officially, since 3,
& saw a mythical beast riding high in the military fly zone
just before the horizon, not a dragon, nor bird of sorts,
a great golden rabbit appeared, star-cast and beaten from eggshell glory

the profound gaze sent him into a subconscious stupor,
an eyes-glazed reverence serenaded his being with lightly caressing gusts
& breezes echoed sweetly from each celestial hop, the rabbit,
suddenly frozen in space
moved its ears at a lightning pace, and the resounding effect, a divine music
so piercing as to exhale a skeletal release from all human friction,
that generous, breathtaking gorge of sound streamed and crashed into depths unknown
with a lightness and eager wish for interdependent eternity

- excerpt from "how in the year of the rabbit, the pure still need things"

Training Our Brain to Welcome the Spirit of Dream

"In the altered state of consciousness of people who meditate, we often see theta activity appear. Theta activity is associated with dreams. It is a relaxed state, but something is happening in terms of cognition. It's not easy to maintain theta activity for a long time. It takes a lot of training to do that."

- from "Mystical Brain" by Isabelle Raynaud

________

Meditation with Mahakrishna 

Transcendence transpires. The transpersonal takes effect, dryly in the humid gathering. With rich clothes and frayed seams we sit before the elephant-headed Krishna. Ganesha-Elephant man! Seated before, equally clothed, he prefers to be addressed Mahakrishna. I vanish!

_______

Krishna

"To see Krishna in your dreams, denotes that your greatest joy will be in pursuit of occult knowledge, and you will school yourself to the taunts of friends, and cultivate a philosophical bearing toward life and sorrow." (iDream)

_______

we create

inspired music
unheard by earthly tones       nor human ears
harmonious voices                calling towards a presence

a welcoming home
within the space known as I
an eternal resting place
where through our music we share that space

with peoples     creatures      beings      spirits
places ways times and manifest ideas
through instinct's thoughtful mentation
recognizing all as one
we sing and play an emergent force
calling all forth
from within shells
hardened through travel

- excerpt from "Celestial tONES"

Unearned Happiness from the Dream City of the East

Beginning of Film

"Verily, the works of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day, that folk may view what admonishing chances befel other folk and may therefrom take warning.

Introduction to the Arabian Nights"  

"A street in Baghdad, dream city of the ancient East -" 

Sheikh

“Toil – for by toil the sweets of human life are found.”

Theif

“Thou liest! What I want – I take. My reward is here. Paradise is a fool’s dream and Allah is a myth.”

End of Film
starlight forms a message as the thief and his love fly through on a magic carpet 

“Happiness must be earned”

 _________

My face brims with a Cheshire grin as I watch myself practicing lively positions from the Kama Sutra. Hovering above, and fading in and out of my view in my space of “practice” His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada appears smiling with equal grace directly into my eyes as I lay down under my “dakini consort” if you will. He says to me without speaking, “Enlightenment is in a smile.” As if never there, he fades from my vision and my “practice” vanishes with equal mystery.

Standing up in the opaque darkness of my surroundings, I open a door to a small theatre. My wife accompanies me, wrapped around my arm. We are attending a slew of Spoken Word performances. The first performance portrays a sterling might and inventive will unlike anything we have seen pass through the English language outside of song. The subsequent acts are less impressive however we enjoy the entire show.

Walking from the theatre venue, the road reflects the night sky as flood lights bedeck our footsteps along the thin, snow-laden sidewalk. We continue on without a glace forward, watching our feeble footsteps upon the icy pavement. Without heed, we enter a rundown apartment duplex in our small, industrial city.

As we walk in, we find there are a number of past friends and friends of friends sitting on couches and occupying the entirety of the now tense indoor space. The silence is masked with intensive body language, mostly through the eyes. Our compatriots are from Colombia. I ask them about their experiences in Colombia. Two popular African-American entertainers, sit comfortably upon the upholstery and creaking wooden chairs. Lauryn Hill begins an eloquent diatribe about the situation of the people in the room, connecting the struggles of each and every one present to us all.   

________

Placeless Human Society

”If there is anything

less humane

than global urban centers,

it is their suburbs,

for they render

human society

placeless…”

- Calgary Winter 09’

Vegetative Spiritual Union between European and American Culinary Culture

The Marriage at Cana by Paolo Veronese

In any moment, winter changes into summer and back again. I am endless fields; they seem to be wheat fields. We are vegetarian spirits, and there are women dressed as Hindus in traditional clothing, singing while playing traditional instruments. 

On the horizon, summer changes to winter as cloud formations leave a hilltop covered in white flurries, a cross though somehow between cloud and snow, a wispy frozen mansion sits atop a hill where a youth in winter clothes plays with a white furry dog almost twice his size. And then suddenly, we are in what seems to be the mansion, dining at a long table set for about twenty to thirty people. 

The people are a mix between Scandinavian and Mexican. We are given a menu, on it there are choices of many different breads, breads with different names, Russian and Nordic names as far as I can tell, the breads are seasoned and sweetened. I choose two, yet can’t pronounce the second, so a kind fellow from across the table tells me he can lend me his dish which is the same to try it, it’s delicious, a cinnamon sugar-type braided bread, and then he calls for one in the right tongue for the new wife and new son. 

Then, a man to my right calls attention to the table. He wishes to make a toast, though a toast in the booming of his voice stretching over the table to all ears. 

He speaks in a Scandinavian tongue first, saying "there is an old saying," and then he changes to Mexico, saying "in Veracruz, they say…” 

It seems a meaningful and comical touch to the dining pleasures of all, and we are somehow strengthened in the notion that we are eating from the land, a 15^th century delicacy for the educated and mindful, who in central Europe begin to adopt new habits in eating that leave behind the rabble pouring over scraps of pig stomach and chicken bones. It is part of a revolution that cultivates self-dependency, health, and communal celebration in the joy of a diverse humanity.

July 5, 2011