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 Matsuo Basho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matsuo Basho. Show all posts

Wednesday, 5 December 2012

Taoist Offerings in the Hall of Dreams

Kannon in YUMEDONO (Hall of Dreams) by Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko 

Summer grasses /
 all that remains /
 of soldiers dreams.

Kannon is the Goddess of Compassion. Her Chinese name is Kuan Yin, and in Sanskrit, Avalokitesvara. A statue of the Kuan Yin stands, similarly as pictured above, in my apartment. My wife, a Taoist-Buddhist, cares for the sculpture with a love beyond regard for high art. Standing behind an attendant bodhisattva, the Kuan Yin is a living recipient of our most momentary aspirations and our immanent longings, as they rise and fall into the sky of the figured form with our sound, breath, movement and speech. With a physical offering, the life of the seemingly inanimate sculpture gives way to immortal reckoning. The statue has received such offerings as the favourite pleasures of my late grandfather (a can of sardines and a cigarette), as well as my Shakuhachi breathings. 
__________
I see my wife, long braided hair, in full red dress, dimmed by the party ambiance, she wails on her mother-of-pearl Egyptian doumbek, with the percussive force of a musical heart, true bravura of heartened artistry. 

Two Drummer Girl by Isaac Israels 
As I wade into a kitchen room, I feel the presence of sheer evil at my side. And looking down, blood pours delicately from a soft wound. The ghost of death blinds my nerves as my eyes fog with principal madness, looking at the mean-faced ignorant sex-fiend of my abusive past. 

Sitting young woman in Dutch Kitchen by Henrik Nordenberg
That shared abuse, culminates in a shot, straight through the gut, though strangely a painless death as the water of my eyes bleeds my vision into an all too wakeful death.        
__________
Boiled threat of another animal’s blood
Given over to the insect mind,
A natural reason, the rational cycle

Filling 0’s with my precious un-devoured anchor
That holds human bread to the sand of the unfed
Screaming over shopping carts, cringing with nicotine blinks
...
Ruined men and women whose hearts run dry
Like the rivers that once fed their ancestral lungs,
Filled with the mythic bird

And they rise from the ashes of Hindu lore
In the European brain,
A tell-tale crime, getting skinny in between
...
In exchanging monetary behaviorisms
In the psychic deep of abundant perceptions
Closed doors sink into the undertow’s warning


Sunday, 22 April 2012

Basho Pops My Dream Bubble of Jungle


Picture and Poem by Matsuo Basho

Still I have always been drawn by windblown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering.
—Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior, Translation by Sam Hamil


_______
I walk into an ecological sanctuary where exotic plants and fish thrive in a hot greenhouse. The humid air transports one to a transcendence of spatial dimensions, wherein time breathes with the quickening pace of an intensified microcosmic environment. Jungle leaves brush against my face as lotus-bloomed lilies freshly spring from the fish-born soup of breathable life in the density of my deeply woven surroundings. A plant scientist and professor live in a nearby hut within the transplanted immersion of moderate rainforest. Also an active marijuana enthusiast, he keeps to himself, remote behind a fastened wall of swollen wood. I and a few friends meander through the delicate passageways, magically mysterious fruits and vines hang down with a gift of flowering beauty unknown to our Massachusetts scents. Our eyes glisten in the cool dank inner workings of such magnificent spires as they that mount upon the blank calm of a recess and serenity in this isolated outgrowth of our Earth’s most advanced biological developments.

As we glide effortlessly, weaving in and out of the rejuvenating corridors, a glint of an eye sparks in an unseen corner. The walls open to encompass the ever-widening viscera of inbound flora. A blue panther sneaks beyond the encircling brush, masked by the glowing façade of a charged, fearful night. We are unprepared. Dropping everything, we rush headlong into the deepest corridor, seeking refuge. This otherworldly animal, prehistoric and enigmatic, bleeds into the folds of any remaining sensation of physical security. We manage to find refuge beneath an enclosure of tables. Frightened beyond the immediacy of thought, we smash the external glass of the sanctuary and carefully stretch outside into the neighboring cold, modern presence of the un-bubbled Earthly night.  
________
Jungle
"The jungle in dreams represents the wild, passionate side of your personality. How you feel about the jungle in your dream indicates how comfortable you are with this side of yourself." (iDream)
_________
gills 
swung & cushiond by a sacrament of fear
bluish

fine heard at the doorstep 
launch into the outer, outer face
punishd by grub 
bleary & entwined 
drunken 

hatching

encouraged to bleed freely
whitish as the granted 
millions of empires 
hunting forgotten, manmade laws
strapped to so much matter 
wholed or scrappd
left out, dried
mushroom fat, swollen spiritual 
mind 

one  

- excerpt from "stir.