Ecological Storytelling: Dream, Hallucination and Vision

              Hofmann's Potion by Connie Littlefield, National Film Board of Canada

"I think it's easier than to formulate high ideals, but a few things are more difficult, and to discover the means whereby those ideals may be implemented one has to dream but one has to dream in a pragmatic way" Aldous Huxley, in Hoffman's Potion

Do I hear a tinge of surf rock here and a splash of psychedelic vocals there? And all wrapped up in a damn fine beat! The new Ketamines 7” So Hot! opens with its killer two-and-a-half minute title track. Resistance vibes ebb and flow as they bray and stomp through lyrics held down by the kind of upbeat clutch that makes this Toronto group well worth a listen, if not a full-fledged tracking down.

Released this October, the band’s three-track album buzzes under the genres of punk, garage and power-pop. Spacey breakdowns mood out these catchy and tight musical explorations with extra-hot reverberating guitar riffs smoothed out over ambient and effectively eerie vocals. “New Skull Tattoo,” the second cut on the album, begins with a daze of light-hearted, fifties-era doo-wop rhythms fused together into punk lyricisms.

The Ketamines provide a riot of trickster stylings, as the lyrics carry us through into a stupendous poetic irony. Final track, “Summer Mothers,” sounds off a dream-pop show with the power of good feelings, impressing the listener with a kind of end-of-concert bittersweet rush that takes no prisoners. It reminds us that when the summer or the year ends and all is lost, we should just hold fast to the driving beat and we’ll all be okay.

All in all, each and every song on this new 7” is good listening. Even multiple listens later the songs groove pulse more and more in the veins. Straight to the head, this one’s a gem.

This piece of interpretive writing was published with BeatRoute magazine on November 3, and conceived under the influence of soundscapes by Canadian psychedelic music band, KETAMINES

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The Union Street Y faces the Puerto Rican cafe where I used to sit over a microwaved chocolate chip muffin and hot chocolate, eyeing the clock, readying myself for Hebrew school. The elaborate turnstile reminiscences of the red-bricked Y invited with the flushing scent of chlorinated memory and the erased lunch-hour sweat of youth. There, a mere two jaunt to the fish-gut factory ocean, I spoke to children. Fascinated by the swung heart of musical storytelling, the night awaited patiently, as the fat bosom of American daytime on the human Earth struggled to a peaceful end. 

Lesser Ury: Café Bauer

A story of Massasoit and the unvanquished heads of Massachusetts flesh, spell out the old paradigm loosed from vocal chords, taut with knife-edge reason on a silent beach. Their indiscriminate wisdom emerges from white-skinned pride, to destroy the vainglorious ruse of ego and fate. Mortality ensued in the fading light, as speech lightened the animate Earth with a name, and its meaning. The soil spoke with a tongue of roots, with teeth of stone and and words of food. Saying: where the story is told is equally or more important to the telling. 

A Northern Lake by Unknown

Flown beyond the wellspring of distant knowledge, exotic in its geography, sacred in its ecology, and born of a feverish need in its cartographic attemptation, a single mountain rose as a breach of faith on the plain horizon. Monumental airs shifted and sprang from the glowering mass of insurmountable ice. Formed as from a frozen volcanic fire, the ice lifted with evaporating death, as the cold grip of lifelessness in nonbeing. The frozen hell still beckoned forward the unanswered mystery of longing, as the natural light waned atop its insuperable caracas, a skull of monastic belonging. 

Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamouni, Switzerland by J.M.W. Turner

I stepped forward, onto the slippery fall of the sky's over-hastened drop to Earth, as the violated inherent reason of nature, unearthed. The pool fragranced wisps of spiritual air, the will of the unmoving background to all life on Earth, revealed in the deadening cold. As the stone ascended to its paternal source above, each step closer frustrated the nervous system with defeat, failure, and the fatal swoon of all human belonging. The release of the spirit, awake. 

Harlem Valley, Winter by Ernest Lawson

Captured under the fault of a boot, I risked a greeting at the hand of death's blizzard smoke, the craving and seductive flaw of its embrace. Unable to get back afoot, I peered through the ice to see the reigning female of human law. The Queen shone glinting the fixing light, fleeting, yet absorbed needfully. With a hand mobilized by the insane truths of modern life, I sunk below the ice, to finger the freezing metal, and to possess its deathless strength. Ascendance moved to transcendence. The impossible summit slunk beneath my loins, hidden in hoarding pockets and disguised on lusting hands. 

Queen of Coins (Diamonds) from the Visconti tarot deck by Bonifacio Bembo

The line at the cinema began to move. I paid, and saw the unseen. I paid, and mounted the insurmountable. I paid, and lived the unliveable. I paid, and knew the unknown. I paid, and heard the unheard. I paid, and paid the unpaid. And I paid, and paid to pay for the priceless. I paid to pay for the invaluable. I called home the unreachable. I vanished in the light. I stole out on the intractable ice. I rose my shoulders above the limits of atmospheric pressure. I called out above the thinnest trace of oxygenated air the name of the unnameable: I.  

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Beyond LSD, Within the Experiment

“The program I was involved was to study the active principles of medicinal plants and one of these medical plants we were studying was Ergot…At the end of the synthesis I was in a very strange psychic situation, a kind of dream world appeared, a kind, a feeling of oneness with the world, a very strange experience which reminded me to some experience I had in childhood.

Sometimes when I was in nature, with the forest and the wood, I had some kind of, I would say, mystical experiences. The feeling of oneness, to be one with nature, the feeling to see now the true aspects of nature, the beauty, and which filled me with happiness.”

- Albert Hoffman

“Could it be that this present, dream-like state was in some way connected with the crystals of LSD that Albert Hoffman was purifying that afternoon. He certainly had not eaten any but his fingers might possibly have brushed against a few traces of the compound. If so, then LSD was a remarkably potent drug. He decided to experiment on himself.”

- Narrator in "The Beyond Within"

Now, listen to Alan Watts on Drugs

________

Dim metallic bursts; silvery orbs bedeck the subdued leather warm of the café tables. Northern Greece, on the western outskirts of Ioannina, the Italian heel clicks in the vibrant waters at the center of the unruly European Earth. The Euro’s devalued to the near-extinction of another ancient peoples, drowned in the eye of the storm, at the height of neo-classical disorder. Ordering a coffee is now rife with the political amalgamation of a dungeon’s dearth. No one’s blinded, caffeinated, nicotine blink minds stutter over the oblivious stupefaction of leadership burned at the seam by the public hulk, dashing their traditional dress of human mockery for a breath of mutual truth. Together with family, we wade in the swampy lighting, in darkness as thick as the Grecian café mark on the silent, burning tongue of lingering potency.

Through a multicolored crest of followers, the warehouse screams with atmospheric delight, a musical haunt for the sacred lives whose energy dreams in smokeless fire. My Love is playing in a professional contemporary Mediterranean music ensemble. A chic audience reclines leisurely over metal chairs. Inside a graffiti’d dome of unfinished concrete, though a stylish rendition of the European artist-squatter paradise. I’m especially proud to see my Love creating wildly refreshing original music within the high standard of such daring quality. A kit drummer with a rig fitting over ten cymbals begins leading a rhythmic introduction of spatial ingenuity, moving the plush sonic stream of consciousness movie of artful belief into the realm of magic. Standing beside the audience, near the well-lit stage, small spotlights injecting funnels of visible dust in the wakeful air, I see her. Gowned in her usual flowing dress, a big explosion of black hair and her glowing skin. I am a martyr of unmade art.

______

Europe

"To dream of travelling in Europe, foretells that you will soon go on a long journey, which will avail you in the knowledge you gain of the manners and customs of foreign people. You will also be enabled to forward your financial standing." (iDream)

______

now transforming
through spiritual marriage
to my near love
whose life casts a benevolent spotlight on my being,
and path
with such wind,
a gusting splash,
refreshing the outer core
that foretells the dead body laughing at me

- excerpt from "society, charities and addictions"

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"