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

___________

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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Writing: The Child of Art and Music

Wood Mountain Poems, National Film Board of Canada

"My grandfather Dolmic dreamed that three coffins floated through the door of his brother's house. So, he rode to the next village to investigate, and found his brother, his sister-in-law and their servant girl dead of cholera. The baby, still alive, was sucking at its mother's breast. He built three coffins and arranged the burial, and returned home with the child in his arms. And they say dreams don't come true." Ukrainian Grandmother, Wood Mountain Poems

On May 3 of 2012, Copenhagen welcomed the largest sustainable fashion conference yet seen in the contemporary world. Sustainability and corporate social responsibility are buzzwords in the consumer industry, and are integrated more and more into every sector of the economy. What was once merely one percent of the fashion industry in 2007 – when estimated global sales of the sustainable fashion market were at three billion dollars – would increase exponentially, culminating in the 2012 Copenhagen Fashion Summit with the investment of over one thousand key industry stakeholders. 

One of the largest industries, fashion product lines contribute to the spread of over eight thousand chemicals and twenty five percent of the world’s pesticides into the natural environment. Not only that, most of the environmental impact is made after the consumer has purchased the materials. Yet, sustainable fashion is one growing eco-trend that is challenging the largely unsustainable fashion market by employing alternative textiles with less carbon footprint. 

Organic cotton is effectively transforming one of the most commonly grown crops, and so in doing, is spearheading the eco-fashion movement. Other cellulose materials include hemp and bamboo. Materials, however, are only part of the eco-equation. Renewability and source factor, as does labor conditions. The idea is to create what Rossella Ravagli, Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility Manager at Gucci, proposed during the 2012 Copenhagen Fashion summit, as a “good compromise between style, quality and new material.”   

Arguably, bamboo fiber is especially capable of meeting the demands of the new eco-fashion market. With an absorptive quality that captures greenhouse gases, bamboo grows in abundance without irrigation or pesticides. As the fastest growing woody plant in the world, bamboo holds a unique place in the fast-paced consumer market. Although, there is controversy regarding bamboo’s claim to fame in the eco-fashion market, as the process required to turn bamboo into wearable fiber, also known as Rayon, is marred with chemical-intensive labor. Yet, relatively speaking, bamboo as a source material for clothing is a more sustainable option than most. 

Yet another alternative textile, hemp, is potentially more eco-friendly than bamboo. Also easily grown, hemp clothing is often a composite of other organic materials. With such diverse uses as building materials, paper, jewelry, and fuel, hemp is largely responsible for complementing the greater trend of sustainable fashion with style. Hemp clothing is often designed with respect to traditional eco-fashion trends, opening interest in ethnic-inspired lines.     

This piece of commercial writing on eco-fashion was originally written for a client in China, and is also published as a blog on The Media Co-op

_____________

dusk fall

full equinox

hell's door

lonely crossroads

still bells

way back

world tree

______________

The week began with the resonant mergence of harmonic mastery still ringing in my ears. A meeting with contemporary legend, Amir Amiri opened my mind to the brilliant challenge of a distant sound's arrival. The shores of my thought curled and folded in a slow tide as I acquired the bittersweet taste of a traditional music's refinement into the beautiful wholeness of world.

The quick hum of the Persian santur danced behind my eyes with the lifted personification of an artist's temptation to unite with the all-breathing life of unity. Yet, nostalgic and principled, remained steadfastly earth-bound to the homely traditions of mother, father, and self. At once, another meeting with the unbound truth stared me in the face through the transfixing metallic song of the HandPan under the voice of LIRON MAN. 

After Man's show, Puertas, at the Calgary International Flamenco Festival, I then met the opening musicians, one of whom, Tamar Llana is featured in the video below. She sings next to her mother, Judith Cohen - an ethnomusicologist with a special focus on Sephardic music - playing the frame drum. The joyous union of ancestry, tradition, and contemporaneity through music led to a revelation of harmony as the voice of continuity, belonging and meaning.

To Dream Is To Conceive An Other

"I had a dream also before you were conceived which was quite interesting, there was a being there standing in the corner, it was a male, and said to me in the dream, said, 'please will you give me a place in your body.'" - Mother of Tulku, from the film by Gesar Mukpo

I have a friend whose named their first son a Tibetan name after she reportedly had seen the child himself appear in full bodily form prior to conception, asking if he could be born through her. Is he a Tulku? What does this say about the mother? Do you have any similar experiences, first-hand or otherwise? 

As a reclusive student of Buddhism, who became delightfully initiated into Green Tara devotions with a Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tsetan at a chance meeting, and in that series of meditational initiations befriended a forest hermit who's been a lifelong supporter of my work ever since, I will add my opinion on tulkuhood (please see my Green Tara Post for more). 

In my reading and meditation, I see Buddhism as an enlightened practice of seeing, in the way that Joseph Campbell saw myth as creative perception, and the way that Terrence McKenna saw shamanistic hallucination as an archaic mode of seeing through the phenomenal nature of human subjectivity.

In other words, I see tulkuhood as a universal expression of a natural phenomenon that is experienced every day, in every moment, by every one always. That easily said, without having redacted with much scholarship on the matter, I can humbly reflect on the notion that a Tulku is simply the ancient wisdom of indiscriminate practice, which resides in all social and personal forms, within all sentient beings. 

_______

We met in bars, malls, cafes, and sidewalk parks. The entire time, it was as though we met in the privacy of his home, even more, in the secrecy of his mind. He had let me into his imagination of himself. The way he was so sweet, surreal. Figments of smiles and laughter lit up our shared space as from a shared brain. He spoke with a borrowed voice.

The duplex works well for me, a single man on one side, my best friend and his family on the other. One day, they show me their leaking roof, a madhouse of water and anxiety. Unable to help, we attend a nearby gathering, an awe-inspiring array of human diversity, as an earmarked page in an unassuming book. A busker presents his CD release. On a new accordion, he plays the delight of all, while my best friend retreats back into our house, ready to subsume the difficulties of an entrenched domestic struggle. I continue on through the peopled havoc, stirring blindly with blissful listening and warm-hearted aspirations, to embrace the heart of our local culture and be drawn into its imperfect cultivation.

This is the last day, he said. No visitation, no indrawn temptation, not a flicker of need. What happened? I decided to see for myself, the state of this new loving presence, his shape-shifting personality beckoned me, although I had not seen another side, I knew his face does change.

Entering his house, no one welcomes me. Walking up the austere mahogany stairway, the banister is buffed and shining with inestimable taste. The doorway to a study is slightly open. A deep, unwavering silence overtakes my curiosity, I am driven through with the pain of loss, a reality I had known all along, though served so politely, mind-to-mind by the loving acquaintance. He sits at a high leather chair, bearded as not before with elder white beard, square-faced and unmoving. His countenance, exposed in the antiquated sepia light, is only recognizable as an acrid tinge of sentiment and memory, subtly issuing as from within, between our speechless minds. The instant is nigh, as he looks at me, stone-faced, an unseen floodgate opens from his untamed eyes. Then it fades and I leave, pained with eternal mystery of who.

_______

Age

"To dream of age, portends failures in any kind of undertaking." (iDream)

When I read the dream above, I immediately think of McKenna's statement, "you become unrecognizable to yourself" 

_______

donating beautiful soundless hearts
through world music motion

our one universal language emotion
& the commonly evolved ground broken through violent social awareness

meant to survive generations
with the traumatic blessing of the great earthly groan

from
MA, virgin, temptress,

my Kuan Yin

- excerpt from "I drank in the stupor"

On another poetic note: check out my latest publication, a very buddhistic haiku posted today on Marco Polo Arts Mag

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"

Through The Forest of Infinite Creativity

“I think I’ve created an environment in this forest that allows me to dream and to think. I like to work in that state musically, I’m very happy in that dream-like world…It’s a very internal type of sight, it’s a memory really…There has to be some struggle, I think, to create something of value, so there’s always that searching inwards.” - Howard Shore, composer

_________

The spiraling staircases in the inner lining of the university campus stretch as with poor digestion in the expunging of this semester’s students. It is our final few days. My friend, bound by the head with heavy dreadlocks races down the stairs, his phone falls from his clothing. On the phone, I see his experiments with asemic manuscript art. I am relatively unimpressed yet endeared by his attempts to invigorate this little known art form that I have been so adamantly embracing.

That summer, I board a ship-bound theatre. Is this a re-telling of “Queen of the Nile”? I am unsure as to the exact play. Soon, I begin to befriend those on board the ship in the starlight sun. All are jovial and friendly as the high-spirited waters direct us further into the riverine wilderness, high above atop the luxurious craft. In one scene, there is a procession involving an African woman character as lead. Two African-American ladies on board vie for the part. The scene calls for a booming voice. I console the lady who was denied the part. She receives her secondary well and smiles to me warmly when I whisper into her ear in Spanish. “You are the best to play the African role.”

In a campfire setting, unseen by a gathering of people on the banks of the palm-encrusted river banks, I sit with a Venezuelan friend as the festivities prosper in our midst. He shows me his new guitar, an electric Oud, played also by a Sudanese artist. Quickly, I mention my knowledge of the doumbek, after which he invites me to play with him. Our music is fine and elegant to the ears, as the fire spits rejuvenated glory into the dusky damp canopies above. Shadows flit with gorgeous mystery. 

__________

Ship

"To dream of ships, foretells honour and unexpected elevation to ranks above your mode of life...If you dream of being on a ship, you should listen to your instincts in waking life - they are powerful allies for helping you deal with everyday problems...if the voyage is calm you should go ahead with your plans."

________

“My home is at war.”

"There is no more to say."

So I said nothing.

When no response is needed, you don’t even show a face.

“There is no room for necessity.

We are past that.

We live for ideology and we have abandoned spirit for the still death of the end.”

Feb. 19 2010

L.A. apartment

Sleep - Hypnosis - Dream - Film/Create - Sleep

"TOO MUCH DREAM NO LIFE" from "Rated R For Nudity" by Dennis Villaneuve, director of Oscar Nominated Incendies, adapted from the play by Wajdi Mouawad 

"You have just declared war on the artists. 

Now, as one functionary to another, this is the second thing that I wanted to tell you: no government, in showing contempt for artists, has ever been able to survive. Not one. One can, of course, ignore them, corrupt them, seduce them, buy them, censor them, kill them, send them to camps, spy on them, but hold them in contempt, no. That is akin to rupturing the strange pact, made millennia ago, between art and politics." 

- Wajdi Mouawad in an open letter to Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

____________

What began as the preparation for a show soon became our entire reality. It was as if life itself began from the most unintentional and insignificant of moments. 

A soothing bike ride, me standing upon the frame, as my friend wheels down towards the river valley from the hills on which stand the university. This downward spiral towards the river soon etched in my memory as the outline of a theatre hall. Bike paths smoothed horizontally at the bottom of the hall, near to the stage, which seemed always so distant. 

It was there, on the stage, where my wife sleeplessly resides. I receive hint of this as I walk up the spiralling theatre, upwards toward the back entrance atop the sterling balconies. A wild goddess of the Flamenco guitar, relaxed, is winging a song in black straps and fine hair. From her effortless talent, she speaks of the upcoming show, that we’re all to perform at once, together. I am thankful to know of someone who knows. 

The washroom opens out from a small door, to a massive room, a two story, in which I stand on the balcony. Below two large pools of water are filled as chlorinated test sites of a kind. I accidentally pee over the edge of the balcony, just a touch. 

As I exit from the washroom, I find my mother, dragging on my sleeve; she is restless and sudden in her violent motions, tragically rushing to perceive my personal history. At the same time I practice my Xaphoon with exasperated over-exertion, until my chest caves in a whorl of a meandering tide, flushing me of all extant emotive energy. A wave of cataclysmic shock escalates from my belly, as I seethe in the inglorious aftermath of our parting. 

As I descend back down below the stage setting to prepare for the show and find my one and only love, who is also the centerpiece of the show, I abandon my mother, whose reckless desperation pilfers on a dusk-lit snowy hillock. She falls into the snow, beckoning me wholeheartedly, pleading with the strength of her unborn tears. I am silent and turn away. 

People begin talking behind me as I descend alone. The shuddering of friends and family bemoan my impoverished distance, as I stand before my bicycle, unknowingly unmatched the painful will of their unending pursuance. “Where is the child?” They call into a wasteland abyss of empty longing. My reputation dances on their imaginations, as successes and failures announce themselves under the thumb of their own figments of high and low, a personified blush with an instance of recognition amid the melting world order. 

I breakdown at my bike lock instilled with the inveterate blinking of innumerable eyes. “Where is my Love of always?” She is concealed behind a fortress of her own insistent distance, her own failed bodily doctoring. All the while, I sink in the ruthless pasture of my own blood, and its individuating soul.

________

Theatre

"To dream of being at a theatre, denotes that you will have much pleasure in the company of new friends. Your affairs will be satisfactory will be satisfactory after this dream. If you are one of the players, your pleasures will be of short duration" (iDream)

________

There are random lights amiss.
Television stares glide into time.

The stolen tool of history, on the back of a vanished piano-man ghost
listens to itself with a destructive attitude.

Famine touches up the spiritual sanity of highway fences.
We board the intuition that fails to comply with the original intent of a country, as idea of land.
And how do we face the sorry array of new experience reaching the faded heads of wealth-derived insight?

Ruminations detailed with a pertinent memory seek clarity as a process of several ordeals,
knowledge imbalances and physical immolation,
to understand with greater awe the only mystery
…continuity.

- excerpt from "An attempt at prose?"

Experiments With Conventional Dream Definition

"We believe warmth and brightness will return and renew all of the hopes of men. NO!!!"

"Let me put it this way, I don't think there's a deep concern about anything. I think there's a lot of, you know, there's sort of passing interest in things, but there's no real concern. It's doesn't mean it's a matter of conviction, again. People seem unwilling to become involved in anything. I mean, really."

Also by Arthur Lipsett, "[Free Fall] evokes a surrealist dream of our fall from grace into banality." (NFB)

___________

It’s the Floridian humidity. The silent pavement provides a buffer zone between the sweating plants and the lowering sky. Small mammals scurry mindfully in the thick brush beside these manicured pathways. A massive dome appears on our way. The recently past dusk threw a scintillating crepuscular finitude over the incredible structure. White-mounded, of chalky substance, the mound invited us with an easily accessible entranceway. An aqueous blue light hovers in a pallid mist throughout the sporadic lighting of a tunnel system. Globular shadows bloom over the fear-cast hideaway. “The deeper we press on, the more sheltered are the animals who dwell inside,” I peer into a subterranean passage, meant for a nocturnal fox. I turn back.

The next day, in the sweltering heat, I sit languorous with café atop a balconied precipice in an inner city restaurant. The muddied roads spell social friction as two heated rough bands of youth face off. The attitude about is apathetic, as resting feet mosey in careless to the disaffected gorge of violence in our immediate vicinity. I watch restlessly, bitter with remorse as the puffed chests of the youths splinter with strangled breath under their pitiful guise of torn flesh and mangled bones.

In the café, my wayward attention darts in the direction of a radiant presence. A world-class musician empties bellies of laughter and rays of his smiling countenance in all directions, especially meeting my eyes with his. We become acquainted. Over tea, he invites me to a concert of his in the evening. The concert hall is bedecked with the stylish wonders of the epoch. The bountiful core of human opulence shines in its full magnificence as the musician, a percussionist, gently plays a twin-headed gourd with a masterful split-finger technique, similar to the way one would play a hadgini. Bursts of mountainous excitement turn the crowd inside their beatific lives to a place more common to all. 

_________

Fox

"To dream of chasing a fox, denotes that you are engaging in doubtful speculations and risky love affairs." (iDream)

_________

The snowball effect and the end of humanity…

Pacification.
Air dead.
Noxious and looming.
Distracted meds fielding stringent commentary.

Of wrong.

Misinformed delusion.
Gray-haired wisdom.
Bold boom music.
Drunk on sleep.
Feeding extreme weak binge.

Insane night.

Wheeling through migrations
Globalizing responsibility.

For no one.

Healing engrossed savages
Inviolate demise.
Undone law.

Ruin.

Demeaned personality
Locked unmovable
Warm concrete.

Derailed western dream.

920pm. Feb 18. 10’

L.A., caged windowed building, pesto pasta and one cigarette