Primarily a writing exercise, this dream journal-inspired blog is a quiet introspective sojourn into the process that we traverse in going from private dream to public art. I see our dreaming as an internalized mythmaking. As I philosophize and expressively exhibit dreams, both private and public, I encourage and delight in creative language as a way to practice experiential metaphors through a “public dreaming." Writing Theory: Creative Dream Fiction
Showing posts with label Latin America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Latin America. Show all posts

Monday, 16 July 2012

Borges On Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious


“The great English writer and dreamer Thomas de Quincey, wrote in some of the thousands of pages of his 14 volumes wrote that to discover a new problem was quite as important as discovering the solution of an old one. But I cannot even offer you that. I can only offer you time-honored perplexities.”

“And in our less beautiful mythology we speak of the subliminal self, of the subconscious, of course those words are rather uncouth when we compared them with the muses or with the Holy Ghost, but still we have to put up with the mythology of our time.”

- Borges, from his 1967-8 lectures "The Riddle of Poetry"
_________
An acquaintance, an intellectual from Latin America sends me an email bursting at the seams of the twenty-five megabyte limit. The prolific backlog of written research, charts, graphs and maps is stunning. He has proved, through simple correspondence, a scenario for the turn of the tide, an epochal shift in the geological age of the planet. The continents will roll, as on a dial, between the ocean currents. Coastal lands will be subsumed one on side by the leeching magma, on the other by tidal waves with enormity enough to swallow entire cities in a heartbeat’s notice. During this time, mythical beasts make themselves known, many from the below, many from above.

The Edge of Doom by Samuel Colman
The swirling aftermath of an ocean-swept city follows us upwards toward the mountain peaks. The shifting plates boom and gush, spitting fire and ash into the sunless sky, raining in metals and the boiling fury of an endless toxic night. We are protected by a subterranean demi-god, hidden to our waking eyes in the days of light. The simian beast grapples a crushing hammer, defeating a swimming ape three times his size emerging from the opaque, deathly soup of ocean water below. The battle is, to our human eyes, a goliath sight, many proportions beyond our own. Greedily, fear seizes as a last hope in the will to life. The blasting mountaintop seethes with equal force as the rising waters. 
________
Volcano
"To see a volcano in you dreams, signifies that you will be in violent disputes, which threaten your reputation as a fair dealing and honest citizen...Volcanic eruptions in dreams usually represent our erupting emotions. Feelings that you may be harbouring during the day might take the form of a volcanic eruption in a dream state. The unconscious psyche might be releasing positive or negative feelings in a safety of a dream (e.g. strong sexual feelings, passion, anger, rage, and fear). Superstition-based dream interpretations say that pouring lava is a warning about poor health. Dreaming about a volcano means the dreamer is in danger of losing a close friendship if she is not honest with that person." (iDream)
________
...
a planetary dissolution,
wavering on the edge,
deemed a wanderer,
stolen soul,
dreamer in artistic wonderland,
or violent binge-seeking parasite,
working miracles inside a silenced freedom,
without home, or conceived place
guiding mundane goals,
roaming vagrant, or seer,
yet still unripe,
recently fallen
from knowledge,
into wish, luck, intuition, and the all ecstatic
passion,
bellowing "good and evil are through"
impaled by the one breath,
strange yet true
...
throughout the known universe,
into the home of a single man,
living atop a mountain,
dreaming in the orbital spawn,
a satellite, the globe itself,
winding round, predictably,
to the course of light,
ending with beginning and finding us along the way
on the way,
all along

- excerpts from "Divorce & Diaspora

Friday, 22 June 2012

Undocumented Dreamers Blaze a New Trail


"I'm tired of seeing students criminalized for wanting to obtain an education. I'm tired of seeing students lose hope because they can not realize their dreams of living freely in this country."

- Maria Marroquin

"Every dream that I ever had as a journalist was coming true and I couldn't go to Mexico to a friend's wedding, I still couldn't...the lies just kept getting bigger and watching United We Dream and watching these, actually these four activists from Miami walk from Miami to Washington D.C. to fight for the DREAM Act, the Trail of Dreams, I felt like a coward, I felt accountable..."

Jose Antonio Vargas from Democracy Now! 
_______
Rummaging through childhood lairs, dusty basement keeps where in storage lay our ancestral feet. Our rummaging, nonplussed, we savored with every object greeted, music emanated as a voice from our sated finds. Plastic frames and silly hopes spoke with sheer brevity and noisemaking jolly. A working elder passes through unseen, behind our backs, provoking us to the drear of day in this predawn nostalgic sanctity.

“Keep your hands on the wheel!” the car steals across a merging lane, whiplashed and painstaking amid the gyrating fleet of normalcy. The driver fingers marijuana puffery, blind with musical havoc. I steam and vent with toxic remorse as we pass a humongous van filled with Mexicans, seized by the police. We are the true criminals.
_______
Marijuana
"As a symbol it stands for any activity that is not within the bounds of the law and it can denote the fact of not being able to think clearly if you dream you are smoking it, and this could cause you much trouble and stress. As an herb, it has curative powers, and for the older generation of dreamers who still think of this as an herb, this is a warning to have your health seen by a professional. If you have a dream of using marijuana, it suggests you have feelings of insecurity and regret. You worry that people will discover who you really are."
_______
the pregnant are disallowed entry,
to become second-class citizens
among the walking tits
and ass mockery that defiles our greater human
bond and friendship with abusive division
over the object-desire complex
parading as a public wildfire

- excerpt from "international women

Monday, 23 April 2012

Librotraficante and Biblioburro Meet on the Road to Dreams



"They’ve actually brought so much attention to our community that I think right now we really are on the verge of a Latino Renaissance. It’s beautiful, all around art, because only art can save us."

"They’re scared that we will overhaul the government through voting them out of office. And that’s exactly what’s about to happen, because what’s wrong is they’re sabotaging the American Dream for our young, and for everybody."
El Librotraficante (as seen on DemocracyNow!)
_________
The Banned Book List includes around 90 Books, below are a few that caught my eye! 


- Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire 
- Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson
- A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present, by H. Zinn
- Occupied America: A History of Chicanos
- Puro Teatro: A Latino Anthology, by A. Sandoval-Sanchez and N. Saporta Sternbach
- Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems, by J.S. Baca
- Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, by J. Kozol
- Mexican American Literature, by C.M. Tatum 
- Civil Disobedience, by H.D. Thoreau

Read these books! Start Banned Book Readings! Honour and Treasure Our Diverse Literature!
________
It’s a windy spring day over the artificial green grasses of a New England suburban park. Poet Tree is angles into view through my perspective, as if seen through a filmmaker’s lens. He begins reciting diligent lines with a fascinating edge. Almost as soon as he begins, the piece is ended, though now, the cool breaths of night play over the treetop sunset. The night in this town is a life or death truth. The cut rug of hospitality has its clear lines of disillusion for everyone with bad luck. In and out of the fire escape stairways beside brick fortress alleyways, I push on past the escalating traffic to my space and time. Inside my crooked little haunt, the VCR is malfunctioning. I play classic exploitation films from the 1970s, boom and bust raw in the piercing fire of aloneness. Walking outside from my unlocked door, my surroundings foretell the great epoch of Hong Kong, known in such a film as “In the Mood for Love”. I’m outside in the Chinatown midnight and it’s as lively as mid-day. Food is still hot off the oven. One sticky-mouthed Chinaman near a heated tray of veggie-covered noodles asks about my wife. “She’s not at home?” His lazy English tongue burns upon my already branded aching, any one can see it in my eyes. A love as hot as the sun drains my blood in every instant with a magic touch, changing from burdensome to lightening in every unpredictable way. “She likes to go out, speak Cantonese with her people, be a part of her culture,” I said glowingly, appreciating his kind interest. In our apartment, as I take out the soon-broken VCR tape, my one feels behind my shoulder. “What grace?” I know. The dim, cornered light is perfect, it is her night. 

________
Movie
"If you dream that you are playing a role in the movie, something from your unconscious is about to be revealed. It can also mean you are getting to play a new role in your life and go down a new path." (iDream)
________

poem for the children of the Biblioburro 

ransomed jungles breed aphrodisiacal wonder in a donkey’s emergent and effulgent touch within the heart of a reading child…hearing the pains of their ancestors in the black print façade of their enduring minds…a helpless urge to forsake the painless tree’s shade and reason with the governmental storage of thought on fire…to bring peace to the unwelcoming hoards armed with scales and the sheer brevity of a reptilian dystopia

- excerpt from "Epistrophic Misdirection"

Friday, 25 November 2011

Dream of the Kogi

 Anthropomorphical pendant of the Tairona people 
Representing a shaman holding two sceptres, wearing a large nasal ornament and a high headgear with two toucans.
 Lost-wax cast gold with false filigree decoration, 10th-15th century, Colombia. Artist Unknown. 
(Courtesy of Wikipedia.)

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive."

From (http://www.theelderbrother.com/kogi/article.cfm?ObjectID=17)

Saturday, 8 October 2011

Peruvian Hallucinations before the Muted North African Migrant’s Story


People and Landscape of Michoacan by Alfredo Zalce


Early Dream

I walk by a dim street in Latin America, seems very much like a bus stop sidewalk eatery in Mexico or a humble restaurant in the outskirts of a Peruvian city. Immediately outside the restaurant, a man is holding a relatively sophisticated looking, tall type jar. The jar reads something about Ayahuasca. I pass by the first time, however the second time, I drop a few coins in and receive a small bit of the Ayahuasca mix that this man is selling. I sit down in the restaurant, I feel as if I am with loved ones, good friends or my wife. We sit and I start to feel a bit woozy. Suddenly, I see a classical/jazz ensemble performing their music in a relatively nice hall setting immediately before me. I am making a mental commentary on the music. The effects seem to have subsided, as expected, I tell myself I am proved correctly that the Ayahuasca that was sold had no real effect.

Late Dream

I am at a seaside café on the Mediterranean. In some ways it reminds me of a small restaurant in Malibu, California that I went to with my brother. I sit down with an unidentified young woman and a man who resembles my old friend and colleague in Egypt, a Sudanese man. He also resembles an interviewee in Sudan who was asked about his return experiences to Sudan as a returning migrant from Egypt. The man begins speaking with me in Arabic about his father, his homeland, and a story regarding his village. The story is very interesting and has many features of local history and identity related to the man and his originating village. He is telling a story about fishing. I ask him to confirm with me that he is from Algeria, he nods. Just as I begin to translate the story for the other individual present, she begins talking over both of us to proclaim her ideas about racial barriers. The man seems disinterested, and I am somewhat bereft, though only wish to convey the man’s story and practice my translation efforts in relaying a beautiful, genuine story of home in the midst of migration and conflict.

Monday Oct, 3 2011