Create You: Fearless Artistry and Creative Identity

"I began to dream heavily, violently, every night, and then I learned how to wake up…" 

"Consciously or unconsciously, all writers employ the dream, even when they’re not surrealists. The waking mind, you see, is the least serviceable in the arts. In the process of writing one is struggling to bring out what is unknown to himself. To put down merely what one is conscious of means nothing, really, gets one nowhere." 

Henry Miller 

Creation is life. More, the incipience of creation is the life of the creator. The life of the artist is bound to their creation, in the same way that a mammal survives on each breath of fresh air. As long as the air is fresh, the artist will continue to create, and as long as the authentic substance of heart issues from the core of the artist's own vision, the arist-seer will align and harmonize with all of creation. 

To forego a path without heart is acceptable. The great mystical physicist of our age, Fritjof Capra, began his famed text, The Tao of Physics, with that realization. Yet, on the path of heart, a different narrative runs its course. To remain true to oneself is to hold fast to the consciousness of one's life source as not merely the beginning precepts of one's physical subsistence, but of the visionary path onto which one is led through to the heights of meaning and becoming. 

The proud artists will realize their vision in the instant of a moment, at simply being the processional experience of creation, the ever-beating heart of co-unity with individuality and universality on Earth. To not over-think is the key to strengthen the creative momentum, reminds Henry Miller, the American author with a self-professed Chinese ascetic's nature. 

So, in holding fast, the artist and author of self-creation, is near-shattered, sensitized by the flood of the fleeting that files down the materialism and consumerism of an all-pervasive cultural fear, to belittle the uncultivated mind to ignorant non-being and blind negativity. In this way, the inner sanctum from where the creativity of an artist is strengthened by the water-like ability to be vulnerable, naked, raw and emotive in a full and unbridled formless truth. 

To all artists, and to the Self, I call on you to be strong, and to claim the ideas and visions and dreams in your mind and heart and being as you would claim your rightful place on Earth. For that creativity, and the perfect imagination of its fruition in your life, is your truth, your heart, your mind, your being, your soul, your foundation, your meaning, and all your own, it is you, your nature, your life, all yours, be it and be proud. 

Everyone, as with one mind and one heart, is capable of becoming sensitive to the expression of your truth as an unheard knowledge that only you possess and that is invaluable, necessary in its tragedy, absolute in its humour, refined in its judgment, authoritative in its experience, wild in its reason, cautious in its aspiring, and pure in its love. Create you. 

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Around this circle danced the flame of eternity. In the green spark licked the tongue of heaven. Spring in the Jungle bloomed with effervescent majesty among the ruined foundations of another remote, human wasteland paradise. The veils of fame and belonging passed like a soothing tide, recoiling in the abyss of oceanic depth. We smoked the herb of forgetfulness, harmony and love. 

Ernst Haeckel's 1905 Wanderbilder (Travel Pictures)

The smoke coiled around our lazing necks, floundering amid the slow-moving river, her brown body motioned like a heavy emotion. One among us, an artist of metal and flowers spoke up as paper and marijuana stung our eyes, blinded by the greedy moment, a fleeting light. "Native community leaders announced their wish to use our space. They will hold facilitations, meetings and workshops on the militarization of the Indian people; their War." 

Coolies on the Road near Kalicut, Malabar by Edward Lear

A shade lifted and a heaviness shrank as our hearts wept and our minds faltered along the brink. She, the speaker, high as the azure, fled to the banks, to swim and cleanse in thoughtful reflection. She swung on a low-hanging vine, falling into the naked river, dressed still in paltry coverings, now a resident of the Amazon for well over a decade. Her eyes spoke of what her tongue could not shake. 

Young hunter by Ferdinand Keller

They arrived, and we vacated the area, as a show of respect. And one day, on the top floor, whereon we store our arts, with wood canvases lain and strewn, I saw her. She was not Native. She was a woman of the Old Country. Her heart was cold as a perennial shadow. Her moonlit face eyed me with an inhuman glare, and her blood then boiled, raising her hair, intoning a voice as harsh and ghastly as the screaming bite of a bullet ant. 

14 abril by Yolanda Palomo del Castillo

I ran. And then falling with desperation in the rushing river, we were swept along. In the instant of our near-death, she lunged towards my angular body, stretched out above the surface, in full display of my superior experience on these riverine lands. I watched as the infamous cult leader, impostor of the Cocama ethnic struggle was buried in the open jaw of the current, as her bones cracked in the turbulent stream. Awash, I lay at the edge of reason. 

Giant tree in Brazil's tropical forest by Johann Moritz Rugendas

Then, I saw the body. The tattooed flesh, gouged and lacerated. Two arrows pierced the man's underside, widening a deep, mortal wound. With bowels distended, his blood having since let almost completely of his sunken frame, I cried, lowered to the wet jungle floor, bleary-eyed. Not only had his own turned on him, but the man also suffered bullets. Scarred and mutilated, his body is the story of his people, dead to the world, brutalized and beaten down by the perpetrators of human trust, by invaders and blood alike. 

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Emerging Local Creativity: Literature, Music and Art Create Community

Matt Hanson, Calgary Working Group (photo: Drew Anderson)

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."

“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”

Kerouac

How did you get involved in trying to start a local media co-op?

I was corresponding with Montreal Media Co-op founder Dru Oja Jay and he expressed a kind of interest in the idea of a local in Calgary. I had been a member of the media co-op for about two years, the national. As I was more active, I was just more interested in what that means to be local. How they operate in Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver and Toronto — how they operate and what that might mean for Calgary. I started to put the word out there and it was very well received by Dru. He basically encouraged me to get together with others and talk about the idea and consider what is independent media in Calgary. Basically what I found is that many people are interested in their own projects, in terms of starting their own papers, but the difference here was that I was interested in connecting that kind of activity with a national co-operative site.

So, what’s set up right now?

Basically right now there is a Calgary Working Group as part of the Media Co-op and that has about 130 members, since 2009. All different kinds of stories have come from that. But in the past two years since I was writing with the Media Co-op, I found not many people contributing to the Calgary Working Group. I was just wondering about where is that understanding in Calgary in terms of this great engine of independent media and this source for people to get involved in media activity. So I went to different people who were involved in co-ops, like co-operative housing, and I talked about the idea and started to get it out there and I posted flyers and things about meeting with people. Initially I got three people that were very actively engaged in promoting and organizing the idea. Those were Melissa Manzone, she’s from Montreal but she lives in Calgary and she has a masters in journalism. Then a journalism student at MRU who has a certificate from SAIT in journalism and he’s still a student, and then another young woman named Chelsea Pratchett, who has done a lot of multimedia work — she has alternativemediayyc.com. Basically the next step was I applied for a small grant through the Arusha Centre, a Take Action Grant, that I received. I just started, DIY, working with Melissa who was editing articles with me, and also doing video interviews with people, and then through Alternative Media YYC I was organizing podcasts as weekly contributions. This small amount of funding is just an encouragement to the people here that might consider the idea of a local media co-op in Calgary.

How so? Would you use that money to pay them?

Yeah. The money has been used to pay contributors. Encouraging people with honorariums. To pay editors. To pay people organizing even. If they’re putting dedication into that, we consider that and we want to value their efforts. It’s a very free grant that I received.

How are decisions made? I come from more traditional media where decisions are made by editors. Who makes decisions in a co-op?

I’m really learning myself because I’m new to the co-operative sphere. But I’ve been really trying to figure out in terms of how the application of the co-operative organization works in relation to this. How we want to organize it is in a way that everybody has a share of the company, the collective. For me, this is really a learning process, in terms of how a co-operative organization works. Part of the funding I received, I’m putting into going to a conference to learn about worker co-operatives in Edmonton. Part of the forward process of this idea is really generating that structure. Right now, we’re at a very initial stage.

Why do it? A response to the media that exists? Do you think the media isn’t doing its job?

I think, to me, there’s that. I don’t want to be too reactive. I think it’s more about having a sense of imagination and taking things into your own hands, and really learning by doing in a way where the kind of media that I want to see is one that doesn’t just tell you about something, but incites you to action. The page is not the end of the matter.

So more of an activist slant.

Yeah, more of a fact that this is part of being more involved. Journalism should be about being involved.


This piece, also published for The Media Co-op, is an excerpt from this week's Your Face Here interview featured in Fast Forward Weekly on October 31

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War zone. Huddled under protection of stone, the dusty clamour of steaming trucks file past, carrying explosives, ammunition; the all-potent death of armed men. The sky burns under a 40 degree desert sun, magnifying the light of illusion with the bitter disbelief of guts strewn in the angry heat. The moonlit fox scatters beyond the floodlit path, and I sit, knowing I'm under the eye of a flagrant bomb pattern, patiently scanning the sky for my fate. 

Cpl. Alicia R. Giron

Down the gravelly road, an older man, built strong and lean, walking assuredly through hell's gate. In this valley, the shadow of death casts invisibly, as the omnipotent fear, that cutting vibration that pierces as it electrifies. Every last medieval hell of our wildest imagining is child's play in comparison. The daytime moon fills my mind, obscuring the passion of escape into the dizzying architecture of mythology, roasting in this Middle Eastern world fire.

Collateral Damage by James Miller

The black fly of fire-bomb death squeals past overhead, and I run, sliding my fingers along the desert rock, the stone crumbles into rough sand. My fingers, mysteriously blackened, feel into the stone. A black liquid seethes. Viscous, thick, it's oil. I realize I can't leave. The desert spring overpowers my body in a storm of evil lust. I treasure the root of all fleshly worship in this age of fire as the swarm of madness overcomes, and in a blinding instant, the stone implodes, my hand flits to dust, the Earth gives way to pools of ash, and I sink in the quicksand of eternal war, condemned to modern night. 

On the Impacts of the Iraq War, Read COMMON DREAMS

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For an ecstatic and mesmerizing experience, listen to this album while watching SAMSARA. There are new waves of sound yet to break on the open mind who might stand to listen on these ancient shores.

Delighting Destiny: Selections of our best during a live performance with audience. All proceeds from this album sales will go towards producing future performances and future recordings. Thank you for your continued support.

Fall of the Artist in Transformation: The Moon at Dawn Exhibit

Full Moons and Dawn's Crepescules

"Do we break rules all the time? All the time. Do you stretch the rules, break the rules, all the time, and in the theatre in particular...It's the difference between working against the world we don't want and deciding to work towards the world we do want." David Diamond, Corporations in our Heads: Theatre for Living Tours New Production to Calgary

Two Octobers ago, when the seasonal round turned, the leaves of many pages filled with the love of language. Foresight and impermanence intoned a name: SoJournal. After the first year, this weblog had reached 10,000 lucid pairs of eyes, and now one year later, the lucidity has tripled in the pupils of innumerable dreamers; thousands and thousands of imaginations sparked, eyes opened and minds revealed as the clear movement of subtle knowledge - that supernatural creativity embedded deeply within, slightly beneath the folds of memory, as the enchantment of rain through the glass of consciousness, falling with near-silence, full of potent harmony, of life and renewal. The seasonal cycle returned. 

And so, as I began the creative journey of SoJournal with Cyclical Wordplay - a visual and literary purging from the spiritual gut of language - I now celebrate year two of this virtual space with the sixth artwork representing the collection, Full Moons and Dawn's Crepescules, in a seven-series cycle of visual, literary and musical collections/exhibits/movements. The elaboration of dawning abstraction unveiled as the phases of a moon, coloured as with the foliage of a cosmic fall from space into the mind of humankind; as formed of ethereal dream creations engulfing and erupting with the pangs of a voracious heart. 

So, the above quote is in reference to an assertion from David Diamond's fascinating book, "Theatre for Living" that in order for art to be transformational it must break the rules. In dreaming, we break the rules of identity. Everything is us - and yet we are curiously not - somehow bizarrely connected with the inner world of all that dwell in the subconscious netherworld of Spirit. In my art (visual, literary and musical), I am inclined toward the same effect. Dissolving boundaries is the practice, and the technique is the creation of art that ascends to transcendent heights of unity with the source of creative energy - the instinctual centre, before reason, simply to the joy, wonder and love of creation. 

In, the artwork, Full Moons and Dawn's Crepescules, look through the wintry window light into a charged, otherworldly space where the boundaries of inner and outer dissolve, where the moon cycles around and within our perspective, where we can look through and into a realm of potential, where harmony is interpretive and the veil of beauty and truth is lifted to reveal the nude face of raw creation. As with Present Sound, Silent Space, there is an accompanying collection of written works. For now, read on, through earlier altered states of visual writing below, and into the mergence of Sketches of Style in the form of sound. 

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Electro-Acoustic Improvisations

Cyclical Wordplay

Evocations: Cyclical Wordplay

Exotic Settlers

Evocations: Exotic Settlers

district.Columbia

Evocations: district.Columbia

Double-Mirror: Truths of district.Columbia

Sketches of Style

Present Sound, Silent Space

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Sketches of Style is the fourth album in a seven-work cycle of art, writing and music. Experimental, ambient, improvisations through an eclectic blend of world instruments (darbuka, frame drums, xaphoon, shakuhachi) synchronize together with original electronic beat loops conceived on very basic virtual drum pads.

The addition of electronic beats offers a new entrance into sound art that differs from the three albums preceding in this cycle of seven works. Three supporting and leading instrumental tracks are co-intoned together with voicing abstract, improvisational language - as in selections from the written form of Sketches of Style.

Firstly, the bed track of original electronic beats, under the name "Grey Sky Jump" figures well into a mood of autumnal ambience. The orchestration of world percussion added to the repetitive regularity moves the listener through a hypnotic, ambient xaphoon melody. The vocalization, abstract and experimental, gives way to a light, almost humorous, vibration of the incipient curiosity that sparks prior to the experience of absolute wonder, and finally, open-form astonishment at hearing the raw flood of creative instinct that pours boundlessly through every last aspect of our innumerable senses of visceral and noetic perception. 

Visions of Outer Conflict is a five-poem chapbook opening and setting the stage for the Sketches of Style collection with explorative extroversions of the spiralling mind. Through stories of perception into the paradigmatic movement of humankind through themes of diaspora and extinction, the chapbook then ends with Cajoled Spine-Tap, which alludes to a surgical procedure whereby the spine is alleviated of pressure to relieve a debilitating bodily experience. The aspiration is for the chapbook to have a spiritually resonant effect as the procedure, effectively allowing a clarity and relief from the pressures of normalized thought and predictable emotion.  

Visions of Outer Conflict

The Woman Behind The Dream: Chopin and the Timeless Tuning

“Because perhaps to my misery, I already have my perfect one whom I have without saying a word, served faithfully for a year now. Of whom I dream and in whose memory the adagio of my concerto has been written.” Chopin, The Women Behind the Music

In the memory of such early genius as Chopin, our cultural continuity glorifies bygone eras with a creative resurgence only known to Western opulence. And looking out from the window of one's own, the sparks of desire light. At first, softly, the Earth burns. Then, the air plumes in a haze of smoke. The bonfire of magic absolves the moon of its light, and the stars become mere smoky display. Inside, and from underneath, the imagination fires the kindling of co-unity with the mind.

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And in such as a bout of unspent night, where slumber is deep and each morning fresh, I woke into dream. The longing test of emotive fire, the blinding seed of passion instilled. To work, and to find solace in worldly accomplishment deceived! The wakeful night spun an inglorious frost, a loosened hold on the sunless firmament. 

The Night with the Genii of Study and Love by Pedro Américo

A summit revealed the greatest of depths as the wounded sky bled rain and ice, brewing over the darkening clouds. We traversed impossible concave stone, sharp as a split mirror, the ice moved our flesh towards the brink. In a vivid flash, I saw memory itself, bear unto the apex of Earth. The stars crowned the lonely top as we gazed into our battered arms with hands of ice and stone. 

Storm in the Mountains by Albert Bierstadt

From the greatest of heights, the shadow of a man fell to die. Scattered in the colourless flush of snow, the piercing rock dashed all hope. Still, with chests full of heart, we climbed on and to the frozen prison. Alone, I emptied my eyes and climbed the last step. The day sped past in a hearse, as a vision of unity stung my heart with its sole truth: alone with the Alone. 

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To close the album, "Evocations: district.Columbia" the track, "Untrained Timeless Tuning" consists of improvisations on piano (keyboard) and xaphoon (bamboo sax). The age-old American sound of piano and woodwind hearkens to the unique sonic fusion that is completely unique and characteristic of the country. Especially in the use of a certain type of improvisation, the classic sounds evince an internal discovery of not only the human soul, but the soul of the land known to Americans as home.

In such a time as today, when war after war knocks at our doorstep, we can be reminded of the cultural heritage that more prominently identifies us as a unified people: music, the one common language of humanity. So, the sound is masked with electronic innovation into the 21st century, where the piano sound is a controller, and the woodwind is a recent invention. The first xaphoon was made only forty years ago on the island of Hawaii.

Further, the title, "Untrained Timeless Tuning" speaks to that harmony that is basic to all regardless of class, education, ethnicity or religious identification. There is a way to shared harmony, and it emerges through a music untrained by the classism and privilege of modern higher education. Whether speech, or instrumentation, the music that is untrained, while in tune with the essence of human life as pain, raw and blunt, is the very timelessness that high art seeks to capture. That timelessness is bred in every interaction and exchange whether within or between us always.

When we speak of Re-Writing our STORY, as in the chapbook wherein this piece is written, this very realization is the voice that carries our experience to such wonderful stretches of the imagination; present and transformational. So, the traditional keyboard and woodwind sound is transformed into an electronic movement of triumph in contemporary sound creativity.  

The following six-poem chapbook, Re-Writing our STORY, is the final series of works from the district.Columbia collection. The pieces reflect the penultimate phase of true revolution as a spiritual transformation of one's narrative. That is, one re-imagines their perspective through a revolutionary act of storytelling. This kind of storytelling reflects personal truths, daily experiences and common points of view with regard to the larger narratives and mythologies that consume unknowing minds through belief, propaganda and pride. The feature piece, Untrained Timeless Tuning, was published with Poydras Review in August of 2012.

Re-Writing Our STORY

The Artist of Moloch: Creativity and Capitalism in the New West

“Moloch in whom I dream angels...Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!” from Ginsberg’s Howl, Part II

What is it to be an independent in thought and action, to be an artist of heart and mind, and, most radically, to live within one's means in the New West? I live in a city where my next door neighbour makes over a billion dollars a month. I, personally, don't make money. Or, more accurately, my profits are nearly zero. Yet, I live life fully and exuberantly. On a whim I could splurge on an evening of luxury fine dining with my wife, or rent a car and go to the mountains, or even purchase a new musical instrument and the latest computer hardware. I am not in debt. In fact, the one and only stipulation to entering higher education, was that I not get into debt. I save, and live within my means, although I don't exactly see my money growing as the incessant growth models of Western capitalism would encourage. 

Nonetheless, as a city dweller, and especially in the city wherein I live, considered a global oil capital, the mean streets of capitalism are hawk-eyed and omnipotent on every corner. As an artist, the very ground under my feet is funded by the turning soil of the most destructive earthquake in human history known as the fossil fuel industry. Living the majority of the time through physical self-propulsion as a primary means of transportation balances one's perspective as an outsider of marginal and radical import to the status quo. Energy and economy, in their most fundamental and basic meanings, derive from the physique in relation to the sources of life in the ground (energy) and the way of relating to living exchanges through reciprocity and foresight (economy). Happiness is learned when expense is measured in sweat, growth in a smile and dividends in generosity. 

Daily the innocence of play in the mind of art, creativity and community is buried under the debris of an open-pit mine with lightning swift efficiency. Once aware of the mounting genocidal ecocide inherent in the dominant global energy policy, how can one go on knowing that at the end of the day the artists of the world become mere charade, trick and distraction for the bowling force of industrial belligerence? One of the greatest pearls of wisdom that my grandfather shared with me was what he had learned among his Greek family of early immigrants to Lower East Side Manhattan, New York. "We were poor, but we were happy, because we were together," he repeats like a charm against the malevolent truth of Western life: family separates. So, often, I feel, as a communitarian-individualist independent-ecologist artist-worker radical-traditionalist of the 21st century and of eternity, that my life is the epitome of what Ginsberg describes above, as in Moloch, and dreaming of angels. 

In the next weeks, I will be transitioning the SoJourn(al) site as a supplement to a new web-source exhibiting an ongoing creative non-fiction work that gives breath and voice to original knowledge. Oral storytelling, family tradition, and cultural literacy are waves of realization that have revealed a sliver of moonlight over the oil-dark sea. I see a way, and directed by intuition, the art of living further breathes a channel of oceanic action towards as yet unseen, inner prosperity. Philo of Alexandria, an ancient who fused Jewish and Greek philosophy at the beginning of the first millennium of the common era, is quoted: "Households, cities, countries, and nations have enjoyed great happiness when a single individual has taken heed of the Good and Beautiful. Such people not only liberate themselves; they fill those they meet with a free mind." 

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away up

passive aggressive

play waste

science silenced

weary night

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The track, "Columbian Map" is derived from the written piece, "Phantom Pages of a Medieval Columbian Map" from the district.Columbia collection of experimental writing. The meaning of the title refers to Columbia, the goddess myth of precolonial America, the ubiquitous feminine divinity of the land itself as seen and heard through Western European eyes. The "Phantom Pages" open an understanding of the land that transcends European representation through the cartographic delusions of "discovery", colonization and settlement.

A narrative art sounding is embedded between guitar and shakuhachi music. The introductory guitar melodies on the track are resonant of Indian Sitar music, yet also merge into influences from West African blues and Middle Eastern Oud playing techniques. The shakuhachi, through its abject dissonance and airy ambience, bridges two instruments from opposite ends of the globe, that through harmony and chaos move the voice to speak, as middle ground, as the remoteness of truth between directional extremes. My approach to the guitar (a quintessential Western instrument) as the embodiment of non-Western sonic influence further melds with my approach to the shakuhachi without any classical training, thus playing it with a Western ear. And so, western instrument with an eastern ear, and eastern instrument with a western ear redirect the two-dimensional cartographic reality of discovery into the 4th dimension of time through sound as narrative, voice and, more, a pure medium of truth.

A collection of five works from the penultimate chapbook from district.Columbia, "Changing our PERSPECTIVE" includes such works as "An Unknown Pleasure of Respect" and "Phantom Pages from a Medieval Columbian Map". With an ahistorical to contemporary thought in light of the current need to shift from an industrial to ecological society, this chapbook addresses that first perspective, or where we stand is the crucial point of change. Perspective, is also history. Until we transcend the dualistic norms of media consumption and direct experience, there is no way to begin again from a new point in history. The junction of the present and the past affix humanity at a crossroads of time. 

Before ascending into the next era of humanity on Earth and traversing the crossroads ahead, each and every last individual will be asked, Who are you and where have you come from? Anishinaabe Elder Dave Courchene wisely advises all people to return to creation, to return to the very beginning of our nature whenever unsure, whenever inundated with a sense of ignorance, confusion, loss. On the path to inner knowledge, light blinds, and the shadows reveal the road home

Changing our PERSPECTIVE

Returning Home: Teachings of the Priests of Dream

Life is a lying dream, he only wakes / Who casts the world aside 

(from the Atsumori Noh Play, 15th century)

At birth we woke to dream in this world between. What then shall we say is real? 

(Kan’ami Kiyotsugu, 15th century) 

Two awakenings and one sleep. This dream of a fleeing world!

(Tokugawa Ieyasu, 1542-1616)

I know not what life is, nor death. Year in year out - all but a dream.

(Uesugi Kenshin, 1530-1578)

...the proud ones are but for a moment, like an evening dream in springtime.

(Heike Monogatari, 14th century) 

My life / came like dew / disappears like dew 

(Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1536-1598)

To what shall I compare this life of ours? Even before I can say...it is like a lightning flash or a dewdrop...it is no more.

(Sengai, 1750-1837)

What is that note, tone, breath, voice, play, word, motion, thought, desire, way artists, seers, filmmakers, musicians, and spiritual practitioners alike speak to when they intone the vowels, the grammar, the logic, the philosophy, the imagination, the language, the creation, the way of dream? Reflecting, ponderous, contemplative in the way and presence of nature, externalized in the wild, flora, fauna, breathtaking skyscapes, landscapes, seascapes and fascinating magic of ecological wonder, all, as is. To create a place, mode or setting, wherein dream is realized, invoked, intoned, imagined and integrated into life, is essentially the role of the artist, visionary, and seer, as spiritual practitioners of harmony, whether harmony of tradition, presence or ideal. 

Often, in the way of the artist, to create a work that truly evokes the magic of the innate powers of dreaming, truly inherent in all of creation, is the final meaning of the artist's path to holism, completion and a successful conceptual invigoration of idea into creation. Yet, in such as seers, or spiritual practitioners of a way of being, as the komuso, or "Priest of Emptiness" in Japanese history, who led a life of beggary, without identity, and harmonizing the mind with the suizen practice of blowing through a Shakuhachi - bamboo flute - instrument, dreaming in life is not conceived, or imagined, only led, and lived directly. For komuso life itself is dream, not necessarily solely creative conceptions representing life. 

And truly, as the komuso meddled further in the affairs of secular life, navigating rungs of hierarchical power among fellow humankind, corrupting laypeople and spiritual classes alike, the dream fell into the reality, of the fleeting nature of all things.  So, could komuso also be aptly translated as "Priests of Dream" who fulfill the order of dream within the waking spheres of existence, so as to harmonize the subconscious palate with a psychic holism of being? Self-prophesied, the world of dream that so invigorated the komuso into a unique way of living, being and harmonizing with creation, woke to the lightning flash wisdom of illumination beyond the forms of all-recognition, even to themselves. Yet, there still may be the spirit of the komuso wandering about, collecting alms from the wordless eye of longing that still beats the hearts of all things in the nameless anomalies of daily, human existence. 

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The wall cracks, sundered by a voice of thunder. An opaque sky churns, vomiting deep green ire with the blooded spires of lightning streaking the fragile heavens. Fled, spiriting off above the splitting stone, I nearly fracture my hand as the quaking Meleke rock fissures and smokes with the dust of an ancient soul leaving. As one, we are exiled. 

Fragment of wall painting with a flying Eros by Unknown

Ancient and medieval backdrops gush with flame and flick with the passion of countless ghouls resurrected at the spiritual death of the Unholy Wall. I clamber down and down, past the bustling, oven-hot Arab village of Al-Khalil. Hijabs and jalabiyas wave in the homely, communal air. Into the steep fold, barefoot on the highway teeming with military checkpoints, my heroic blasphemy fumes with the vainglorious ruse of a timeless lie: the first crime of possession: land. Fugitive of an Israelite childhood, my eyes scan the living ground beyond the vicious plain of stone and fire.

Discussion near a village, from the 43rd maqāmah of the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī

The smoothing grass, plush and soft with the furs of Mother Earth, trails off into the horizon toward the Far East. Cathartic winds blow my mind to perfect suspension. The gravity of our historic failure and the infamy of its lingering pains are momentarily nonexistent. Across a woody bridge, the babbling brooks of a better world shine in the blending sunlight. Sea salt air flecks the caressing breeze as my nostrils fill with aromas delectable and clean. A teahouse sits nested on a wispy, verdant knoll. 

Haboku-Sansui by Sesshū Tōyō

My wife, freshened with the familiar hygiene of the opposite sex, touched with the divine hydration of a natural and ecological grace, she breathes, stimulated with a love-crafted green tea. Her palms, supple as the camellia in spring, yet her fingers are as dry as the fermented leaf ready for brewing. Her presence reaches and receives far into the mind’s dan tien of ecstatic enlightening and inner wholeness. Her Taoist eyes free my insides with an internal repose unknown above. On the high flesh of a stone-wrought, deadening life of the destructive West, I have left my name and memory. Here, belief and need see no conflict, and I speak of dreams within dreams, dreamt in the art of peace. 

Camellia and a Lonely Bird by Zhou Shuxi

Yet, after an eternity of peace and splendor, in the decadent arms of all-embracing Love, I wake, as from a deep vision of suffering. I begin walking. The Earth shudders a breath cold with an early death. The rattle of antlers flutters with the cacophony of nature’s own chaos and war. In a triumph of sight, we lock stares, as antlers, across a dense thicket. Wounded, a stag and doe skip silently, as above a moving fan of grass. As one, we return to the dead old high of the ancient city. 

Wall-paintings of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom on Tangzi Street

Racing with the elegance of divine creatures, extinct water deer of Mediterranean freshwater clarity. Their bones exposed, as light transfixes through gaping, bloodless wounds. I can see clear through the deer torsos into the waking touch of humid, rolling grassland hills. Through a panoramic eye, a lifeless and incendiary pain wears the sepia-toned horizon into a wrinkle of earthly age. We pass, unseen, through the Golden Gate, and we embody Shekhinah in all of her feminine grace. 

The temple entrance by Aert de Gelder

An unpleasant, shivering wind casts over the city, clouded with complex overlain imperialistic landmarks of religious dogma and an historic oppression that explodes mercilessly into the present with a daily shade. Spectral, and at once shimmering an illumined field of stares, we glide past world dignitaries in the central spheres of power. Present to mind our fleshly presence is the leader of our Red and White Nation, who seethes through sociopathic eyes a malevolent taste for the darkening wick of livid silence and unrighteous judgment. And in our moment’s passing, the eyes of our contemporaneous leader of Northernmost America tears, heaving with the burdens of a deep shame. Eyes curling under, his heart beats pulsing his entire flesh of white, flaming anger. His throat, rung in fear, is tied to devious perfection in a self-important red knot. Yet born of compassion, we stir past undeceived by his show of destructive emotion, and on to lead a way towards a better future, of gentle humility and thoughtful pace. 

Landing the future (King William I in Scheveningen)

Bristling with inborn purpose, at once our trio of the living extinct disbands. Our knowledge of the land tested, the White Seers emerge. As ghosts of the sleeping, spectral in the haunting jungles, at home in the phantom light of a dense, forested canopy, they wake, first to our scent. Then, instantaneously, the flat crunch of a skeleton pierces the chilling air. The jaw of a big cat, prehistoric lynxes, tigers of the White North, fanged and cold with searing, yellow eyes, closes again. The deer, devoured. 

A Lion Kills Prasenajit in the Jungle by Unknown

I smell heart, pouring a continuous stream of hot blood nearby. My fearing hand graces the surface of a puddle of cooling plasma. Hunted, adrenaline affixes my intuition under the glow of the moon, southward. Peering into the pitch flood of night, I stumble and curse. They say a tiger sees a man countless times before the first hint of a presence. ‘Had their fill?’ Wondering, overwhelmed with the emotive stress of emergent trauma, blistering from the inside. And it scythes my torso, felt split nearly in two, as a crushed ember spewing unseen flares of heat and ash. Wounded, immobilized, my dilating pupils scan the dark wood with an unfocused and eyeless rush of mortality. 

White Tiger (Bạch hổ) by Unknown

In the burn of a single firefly, the moon perks of the featureless sky. I can see, I can smell, and I taste the White fur of deathly feline gore. The earth rumbles with each footstep, and the oncoming, clawed pads fill my nerves with lungs of raw energy. Moved with the thundering mammalian outburst of muscular flight, a single punch of stolen force, intervention of the High One, runs the cat’s hipbone straight through its blooded organs of night and flesh. 

The Four Continents by Peter Paul Rubens

Tangled with auspicious mystery, flattened with the mourning of a proud death, in a sudden rasp and rattle of a whispering cry, the end of the forest canopy floor reached. An open, under stars of mountains and a wealth of ears, insects roar in the funnel of a circular plain. Whirlwinds and dew sneak into my ears like the healing rain of an exiled land, birthing renewed into an Earth of spring. I wade through the sweet water of an alpine marsh, distant clouds ashore on the far horizon move like celestial birds. Light rain begins to fall, shining through incandescent sunrays, refracting like broken glass over ruddy mirrors. 

Wind and Rain by Ma Yuan 

Awoken, by my own breath, his presence is as the light itself. Herbsman! Bearded aglow with holy eyes, smiling wide as the mountain range afar. His words a waterfall, cleansing and purifying constantly, with the movement of natures’ own lifeblood itself. We sit in a glade, I in the deep meadow, and he over a gathering of lime, emerald and olive-shaded bushes of growing herbs, reaching as to his light, and lengthening at his every movement, touch and word. So, as I. 

Hanuman fetches the herb-bearing mountain

“In the morning, eat of the red corn,” says he, Herbsman. An ear of red corn emerges as with the pleasure of an offering, gift or invocation from the mouth of a ground and tongue of a seed. One kernel, consumed, and my flesh lightens with the bread of fulfillment, and all my wishes humbled with regard to the constant water that flows to the life of all. Cleansed, opened, revived, moved and lifted, I listen with intent respect. “At night, eat of the white corn.” As the morning eye of fire stares into my forehead barely above the horizon, I yet see a vision of the white corn in mind’s eye, unknown on Earth. The Herbsman continues to pour the clear-souled water of natural wisdom through the mystic wine of musical friendship over each and every pour with all movements and messages invoked, intoned, and conveyed with brevity, clarity and unity. 

Indian Corn and Mexican Vase by Cordelia Wilson

The Herbsman’s voices soothe and mend, teaching of Water, the element Carbon, Life in all varying forms and formless ways; how to purify one’s self through knowledge and action, and reason, in seeing as being, for every portion of ground on which one sits as the Ground of All Being. In earnest repose, he guides my mind as a rudder, and we sail, as with the passing life of Creation. In an earthly tradition, the Old Man is believed to have evoked, “Highly evolved people have their own conscience as pure law.” A vision of wisdom is sent from the Old Ones by way of dreaming. As observes an Italian proverb, "Where the river is deepest, it makes the least noise."       

__________

Due to the unplanned nature of returning home in the wake of an unprecedented natural disaster as the solstice floods of Southern Alberta (see previous post: Flood of Creation: A Photo Essay on the Art of a Natural Disaster), I have yet to create space and clear time for an original sound art/musical narrative in concert with the forthcoming, self-published chapbook, "Understanding our Meaning" from the district.Colombia experimental writing gallery. Yet, Kjarvik's experimental galleries are voluminously published for the public eye on Scribd, and previous experimental narrative sound art works are freely shared for listening on Bandcamp. 

I look forward to picking up from where I left off with the previous post, The Poetics of Resistance: Myths of India and Freedom, in the meantime, we celebrate a long-awaited peace only known when waking from a deep and fulfilling night rest at home. So, the second collaborative musical offering from a spirited and festive friendship of three, Welcome Home! completes the initial live mix, Let It Go! which has personified the last weeks of precarious mental and environmental stability.  

Flood of Creation: A Photo Essay on the Art of a Natural Disaster

The Waving Surface of the Autumn Flood by Ma Yuan

Here, I've posted a selection of photos in gathering a visual essay on the Bow River's recent flood through the city of Calgary from Summer Solstice to the closest Supermoon in two decades. Again, as in the previous post, The Poetics of Resistance: Myths of India and Freedom,  I cite from the brilliance of Telugu poet Varavara Rao, whose words resound with chilling truthfulness and direct one towards reflection, even over the muddiest and swiftest, and most inhumane, of currents. 

"…Quite amazing, the moonlight that

Floods this room—

I cannot even see the moon outside.

To relieve this solitude

I draw out my blood

And transfuse it

With poetry that is heavy

With the sound of handcuffs.

Chain them if you will…

The birds of freedom

Will break into flight

To the sound of pioneer songs."

(Varavara Rao, written while in solitary confinement

in Secunderabad Jail 1985-89)

hints

hints (flooded)

silent

silent (flooded)

upstream 

upstream (flooded)

memory 

memory (flooded)

pathless

pathless (flooded)

preposition

preposition (flooded)

project

project (flooded)

peacemakers

peacemakers (flooded)

patients

patients (flooded)

lone

lone (flooded)

solitude

solitude (flooded)

between

between (flooded)

lightless

lightless (flooded)

homebound

homebound (flooded)

underground

underground (flooded)

isolation

isolation (flooded)

underworld

underworld (flooded)

leaving

leaving (flooded) 

tomorrow?

tomorrow? (flooded) 

rush

rush (flooded)

entranced

entranced (flooded)

history

history (flooded)

exile

exile (flooded)

solstice

solstice (flooded)

 _______________

The rainforest breathes of a drear & lush death. The ashen phoenix is all too quiet in the underbrush of dying embers. I see the dying earth breathe a hot ash of distrust and shame, the blood of broken faith runs as from a bone broken clean from the hip. Earth brews a harsh truth, of the fallen creation, yearning to return to the skyward dust. 

Phoenixes by Paulownia Trees by Kano Tan'yu

A spiritual lament turns and writhes like the roots of an upturned tree, cracking and spewing, breaking and rattling the final rattle of reconciliation. I mourn for the beings of ground and light. And of my throat, a burning rush of silence, the ignorant flicks of pain resound, shot through the echo chamber of an empty heart. I see through the body, holed with holy flesh flecked with wounds of impalement and rape. 

The Wawona Tree, 1887

Lungs, tethered to each branch, as I, see, soot-blackened, flushed with discolor and the pangs of mortal addiction. Now, every branch leaved and flowered with lungs of inanimate flesh, long dead and yet left unscavenged, to petrify, as if the air itself were evading the decomposition and decay. Time orbits in the long yawn of solitude. 

The Smoker by Édouard Manet

The more motionless I become, the more the world swirls and the dead sigh their long heaving sigh of memory and remorse. As each uncolored tree cowers lowering into graves of roots from whence they came, the thinning forest reveals a final stand. 

Büssender St. Jerome by Albrecht Altdorfer

A wild trunk, gnarled with the character of age, endures as a thick mark of life ahead. Its neighbor, a trunk straight and smooth, glimmers under the swarming azure. Yet not a single leaf of green rustles in the faraway vale. Pink, earthy and glowing with a bloody, purple pulse, a healthy lung of earthly flesh, as an undiscovered bloom of willow, breathes out the purest air. 

_____________

art & writing & all activities of the creative, while demonstrably flushed with the economic downturn of a costly natural disaster, remains invaluable, and reveals itself as one of the only true & sound Values of human life, beyond the impermanent trespasses of consumption and trade. creativity & art & writing & the wisdom that ensues & issues from the blank page of authentic thought and pure action are only strengthened under the taut and tested strings of emotion & trust in the depth of the human soul.   

I, Internalize My Body

my stomach,
stained with blood and coffee,
and I drink with a consumptive gaze
greedily at the tip of the root hanging from Earth's core,
the Indian tree,
swelling as it sways
to the rhythmic tuning of the cordial universal spring,
and so the strung chords of the world's birthing are plucked
duly, with grand motion over the starboard ocean rains
tunneling into a thunderous vision,
the pierced hawk
eyeing ground from atop the archaic skies of timeless dream,
the soundless above slips beyond the social canopy,
and Confucius prays for love
in the Taoist grave of Saturn's eyeless pupil
memorizing the pages of our life's trunk become engraved
with a stoned ape's tug,
at the hairless chord,
our once upraised wilderness
now chained
to European drug lust

forced, evacuated from my home, surrounded with flooded streets & powerless, transitioning from house to house among hospitable friends, i've been unable to find the space & resources to dream up a new original musical - narrative sound art - piece accompanying the forthcoming chapbook, "Understanding our Meaning" - although I have posted a video from one peace-loving afternoon among friends, in celebration of the presence, in all its magnificence & luxuries of life, breath and harmony. may we all find peace in the ground & space of the moment!

music, as a predominantly community-based art form, teaches us how creativity & art, especially in times of facing a natural disaster, reaffirms our basic humanity, teaches us that despite the angry gods, as metaphysical personifications of the suprahuman forces of nature, and their crashing display of power over death and rebirth, we overcome from within and for each other, through the human triumphs of creation by our hands, through our tongues and in our shared smiles, languages of communal warmth, embrace & gentle touch of especial human beauty, grace & Love.

a special thank you to all those who give help & promote compassion with artists & their communities in times of need