Season's Greetings from the Wilderness of the Imagination

Woman in the Wilderness, Star or Siberia by Alfons Mucha 

“Listen: in dreams and particularly in nightmares, caused by indigestion or whatever you like, a man sometimes sees such artistic things, such a complex and actual reality, such events, or even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, full of such astonishing details, beginning with he most exalted manifestations of the human spirit to the last button on a shirt-front that, I assure you, not even Leo Tolstoy could have invented it, and yet such dreams are sometimes seen not by writers but by the most ordinary people, civil servants, newspaper columnists, priests…” Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, p. 751-2

I recently read the last masterful work of Dostoyevsky, one of the world's greats of classic literature. The book is a testament to the sheer mental strength and quality of such a writer as experienced a mock execution ritual and incarceration in the labor camps of 19th century Siberia. Nearly one thousand pages, I received a copy of this masterpiece from a friend with a peculiar literary collection practice. The two volumes within which the book is contained were of different publications, yet corresponded to the page. This friend, while often aloof, has been a great literary mentor and companion. And as a final note, during the holiday season, I feel that Dostoyevsky's inkling as quoted above invigorates our lives especially today. The popular cult of the Christmas tree and its European folklore breeds a kind of mundane public dreaming, where the workers of the world unite in myth and imagine a complex world full of reindeer, gifts and traditions fabricated from the ordinary, to the ordinary. 

_________  

I have not remembered. Feelings unfamiliar slip away with the light of the world. Yet, in my waking night, before a small crowd of onlookers, I played along to my imagination, manifest with the unconscious origination of a dream reality. 

Whirling Dervishes by Jean-Leon Gerome

I swung Near Eastern rhythms towards her vibrating zither with emotive haste. As I felt the sway of awe form in my hands and heart, a lightness filled the room. I saw. A Sufi dervish began whirling. The air moved in circular deftness to my rhythmic accompaniment. The dancing figment continued unalloyed by the uninitiated crowd of the living; those led to dream only in the deepest dark of night. 

_________

Freeing the foundations of homeward longing onto a single raft
Out on the high seas,
A perplexed guide of Jewish law

Betrayed in the relaxed mystic fire
An American marijuana-seeding mind, Nepalese beauty
Direct from the magic psalm pinned against a “Tat Tvam Asi” wall

Frail pencil marks casting the Odyssey’s modern sequel
Into a vulnerable fasting mind, bled forth into the marathon sky
Massachusetts rain, following me to Calgary in rare consecutive days

Our literary giants, peering upwards, finally
In a New England fog haze through the mirrored mushroom mind
Whose perception flowered into feared atomic explosions

The true sexual freedom in nature
To lay soft stonework ground,
Firm with utterly expressed wonder at the world ‘round

Knowledge timed perfect with musical escapism
Into the bold motionless greed of a trapped metallic girl,
Re-born as prophetess in the unknown seed of Western belief

excerpt from "Grand Repertoire of Failure"

Public Dreaming: The 1st Anniversary Post of SoJourn(al)!

The First Birthday by Frederick Daniel Hardy

Thanks to all the fellow dreamers, bloggers and visitors who have participated in SoJourn(al). Especially to Poet Tree, who has kept interest and continued to comment with unslaked interest in the content of Private Dreams to Public Art.

In the first year, this humble blogspot has garnered 10,000 pageviews from all over the world, including a whole lot from Russia!

Na zdorovye!

With a high of over 1500 views a month, that is more than many online literary journals!

In my first year of publishing creative writing, my imagination roamed freely into experimental literature as a visual experience. With a mainstay of dream journaling as a rooting practice in creative writing, and through imaginative reflections on dreaming and its awe-inspiring influence on the entirety of human culture throughout the ages, especially in art, literature and music, I have embarked on a path of creative development as a full-fledged dreamer. 

My blog, regularly updated with creative dream fiction and original poetry, features my art alongside as a complementary art form drawn from the seamless worlds of consciousness and dreaming. Inspired by the tremendous creative insights, which fulfill my being after reflecting on the wealth of imagery in dreams, whose sensual experiences are pregnant with symbolic mythopoesis, I have endeavored to experience my greatest passion, the act of creative writing, as a visual art form. 

What I originally referred to as spatial literature began its journey in the public mind with the asemic writing / post-literature community, where my work was first featured on The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing. After only a few months, I have received ten exhibitions - in print, online and live at local galleries. 

The dream lives on in my daily life through the creative work of making new art, and in the unconscious wellspring of raw intentionality, to truly be an example of my art, as a positive and vibrant force of individuality. This is the greatest dream that my art reveals to me.

May We Continue Into All Forms of Consciousness to Create the Public Dream of an Art-Full World!

________

In a reprint of a philosophical musing on the experience of interpreting dreams through creative reflection on prominent imagery, or symbols, I have taken a step in another direction, a less conventional one, and one also corroborated by Freud (see my post: Free Association Beyond Symbols: The Interpretive Art of Freud) where the act of writing, is a willful and conscious movement towards free association, with an emphasis on free, which aligns with my creative aspiration, to see the entirety of my self through the lens of creative thought and its subsequent outpouring in language. Such is my raisons d'être for the SoJourn(al).

After contemplating the recent series of interpretations based on the application of generic dream dictionary usage, I have experienced the truth that in fact, the interpretation is in the writing, that meaning that in creatively writing the dream with imaginative insight into the narrative structure and enlightening detail, the interpretation is made, not as a definition or forecast, but as an act of creative impression in the waking mind of the public collective, where art and dream interfuse in a subtle rendering of meaning in the act of envisioning the import of the imagery on waking, through conscious language, yet still poetically, in a language that minds the unconscious relativity of creation, as a holistic creative act in tune with the entire phenomenal experience of being human. That finally, the dream and its interpretation are one.

As seen on my post: The Dark Ages Revivified by the Colour of Welsh Dream-Lore 

________

Interpretive Meaning

Interpret meaning in creative writing

Interpretation is the writing of creation

Meditating on dreams and the fleeting mind is to interpret

Creation is interpretation

The creative mind is interpretive

The world is open to interpretation

Create, and the mind is interpreted

Creation is the seamless measure of dream

When the unconscious is invoked in waking, a part becomes whole

Interpretation is literal recollection, a voluntary gathering of the involuntary

What is the outcome of a conscious recollection of the unconscious?

Writing is a means to creative interpretation

Writing is one way to mind the unconscious

When writing is a creative act, the mind is open to interpretation

When writing is a creative act, interpretation gives meaning

Thought, when creative, is meaningful

Silence, when thought, is interpreting

Be silent, think, and write a new interpretation

Interpretation is meaning

Interpretation is interpretation

Interpret meaning with meaning

Mean to interpret  

Tarkovsky and the Living Dream of Cinema

"Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." - from Wikipedia

"Thinks he’s a writer, too, by the way. He just can’t understand that a book’s a deed, not a paycheck. A poet must stir the soul, not nurture idolaters.

I keep having my dream. When I dream of the log walls and dark pantry, I sense that it’s only a dream. Then my joy is clouded, for I know I’ll wake up. Sometimes something happens, I stop dreaming of the house and the pines by the house of my childhood. Then I grieve and wait for the dream, that will make me a child again, and I’ll be happy again knowing that all still lies ahead and nothing is impossible…"

- from Tarkovsky's film, "Mirror"

Read "Dream Come True" an essay on Tarkovsky's film "Ivan's Childhood"

_______

I plunge headlong into the rocky ledge, a violent overfull valley, spilling into a mountainous void. I roll with the water amid the fixed stones, at the lip of a great waterfall. The pristine water is translucent. I am enwrapped in its confident downward pressure, to another world below.

At an Iranian friend’s house, I gaze at his wall of historical Persian metal wares, ancient pitchers and serving plates. They are bedecked with vibrant floral patterns, subdued with aging pigments amid a host of cultural décor. I notice one plate, standing against the wall behind most with an unusual patterning and coloration. “That one is Iraqi,” my friend confirms. A mysterious air breathes into our space as I gaze wearily into the Iraqi plate. 

The house opens into a full party, with laser neon club lights and steam flashing in a cacophony of mixed emotion and volatile potency from a youth desiring some greater fame than their abundant cultural upbringing. Tired of their unmatched indecision, wallowing in a spiritual squalor of heady daze, I shrink back outside into the unseen fold.

As I exit, I am at the entrance of the Amazon River basin as it snakes through the city of Iquitos. Looking forward through the dense canopy horizon, spindly serpent branches reach with emerald fire into the painstaking honesty of life and death. The humidity, secreted as from the pores of a mythic dragon, interchanges with the burly clouds shading the triumphant waterways. A diamond white streak of light, a perpetual lightning strike, an unwavering sunbeam, steals a path in the river, filling its surface with a radiant sheen from bank to bank. A path is lit toward the horizon beyond, where the river snakes into the pure touch of jungle, a celestial calling, a way out.

_______

Valley
"If the valley is barren, the reverse is predicted. If marshy, illness or vexations may follow. Vistas of green valleys with pleasant streams running through them show that you are embarking on a wonderful change that will bring you only happiness and much peace." (iDream)

_______

to catapult mind's range beyond all unknowing

further than the outermost reaches where our love, once was gone,
and now with her,
returned

- excerpt from "She with graying hair"

A Stern European-style Friendship

Man in the Cafe by Juan Gris

I sit aside from a political conversation, between my friend who is Metis (of mixed French-Cree and German ancestry), a politically engaged and stout character, and a man from Eastern Europe, they speak about the politics between Russia and Israel. When the foreign man resolves that the warring faction in the political strife should be tried for war crimes, his demeanor is final and exacting, so my friend softly congratulates. A firm resolve is respected and appreciated.

Thurs, April 28, 2011