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  

Beloved Cuba: Reflection on "Amada" by Humberto Solas

I chose to watch this film firstly to practice Spanish apprehension, and in turn, out of an enduring captivation with all things Cuban. In 2006, I protested in NYC against the unjust incarceration of the Cuban 5. After an invitation to travel to Cuba illegally for the purpose of providing much needed resources to an isolated people, I developed a lifelong interest in Cuban affairs. Now living in Canada, I may one day be able to legally visit the country. 

That aside, the content of the film, "Amada" by Humberto Solas, draws on the old story of the internal breakdown of classist oppression in the wake of international pressure and domestic corruption. Here the domestic is defined both as the country of origin and the aristocratic residence. The aristocracy implodes by the will of incestuous love, from within the adulterous presidential marriage, for the hand of the revolutionary dreamer. A passionate, creative literacy is at stake as the emotionally unstable protagonist must struggle to emerge from the trappings of her own heart and that of the deviance of her husband's oppressive rule. By the end of the film, she walks through the yellow-fever afflicted impoverished hovels of the common people, as the presidential villa is stormed by hunger strikers from the dispossessed farmers of the countryside. Read a comprehensive film review. 

Reflecting on the film, I've become privy to the fact that hunger strike is not an obsolete word in the Cuban political vocabulary, even today. Under the post-Fidel government, there is reason enough for young, passionate dreamers of new literacy to afflict themselves with terminal struggle. Read Yoani Sanchez's blog on Wilman Villar Mendoza. 

________

Downtown, I walk by the library. Usually a place of hoodlums, corner crows spying deep into the drug-addled core of the urbane West, a nightmare seethes through eyes lit with nostalgia and lost reckoning. I’ve come from old wood houses, family life on the water, foundations on grass and neighborly wildlife, the windy pines. Now, I aspire to music.

I see a group of rough young travelers, Quebecers, stealing across the prairie to a destination unknown to them, as unknown to all, a mystifying crowd, escalating with their sounding drums, a cacophony of cans and djembes, they are wildly talented. Two play a doumbek as well as any world-class percussionist. I join in, highly amused, jamming along with intentional spirit, a community of street languor and silly dope-swung dreams. Though my assumptions spit back at me, a gunpoint stares at my face.

“Do you speak French,” he says, threatening to murder me with nonjudgmental, hawkish eyes. “Merci” I respond. Handing a pocketful of change over and into their busking bowl, I stealthily walk away. Outside the city, back at the calm-winded house, cool riverine breezes blanket my siblings in peaceful naps. Before they wake, I exit, towards a nearby field.

An older woman, a family friend watches from the stoop of the front door. Our eyes meet from afar, speaking numbers unheard from our mouths, I continue on, shakily into the lone moonlit night. Soon, as I pass through a wormhole of overgrown, forested road, I am led into a city with the immediate turn of a spotlight; a bright glare prefigures the polluted sky with the damaged gold of human weakness. It is a native city of the hoodlums who I had an altercation with earlier in the day.

Massive television screens display commerce and public failure, an aspiration to woe, and the sickly art of rectitude. A votive triviality burns every wandering eye. A street-side host clamors with frayed tongues over the spillage of an alleyway tomb, unreasonable crowds fish-eye over ledges and stairways, pleading with the entertainment rite to move in its festering abuse to inhumane ends. Unable to get a word in, demeaned with the unsightly pandering, I turn back.

Soon, I realize the family friend who saw me as I was leaving had followed, together we return back to our house. Through the forested womb on the outskirts of the city, the young bandits meet us, hiding in the shade as we approach. With the instantaneous glint of a knife, we are attacked and at once evade with spritely ingenuity. Followed, the reign over a pillaging burst of hollow mongering, as they ransack churches and elderly communities in their attempts to follow us to our rural homeland. At home, alive, I realize she’s not with me. I tell the rest of the family what’s occurred, and as soon as I do, she walks through the doorway, she had overcome, her eyes speak with the wealth of her matured cry, pouring out into the silent comfort of our haven.

_________

Criminal

"To dream of witnessing a crime indicates that others are wasting or taking over your time, energy, and ideas. To see a criminal fleeing from justice, denotes that you will come into the possession of secrets of others, and will therefore be in danger, for they will fear that you will betray them, and consequently will seek your removal." (iDream)

_________

slumbering amid graves
launched astral fleeting,
stone wrought misdirection to be filled

by the plagued European missed fortune,
a drought opening to ice age fruition
in the holy garden

beneath the tree of Good and Evil and its seeds
browned with a madness,
strong, birthed into a woodland street

low, dim face,
burnt with crazed flesh hunger
to consume a poet's lie,
lips all red

excerpt from "ghost!"

In Defense of the Dreamer as Individual

“The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual.

This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources.

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.

C.G. Jung, 1934"

________

We climb the old-fashioned narrow wooden staircase to the humble apartment where my grandfather was born in Lower East Side Manhattan, 1915, into a family of Greek immigrants. The colors of the neglected wood panes and creaking floorboards radiate with a rustic golden aura. The internal structures are mostly charcoal etched, as a black and white drawing, pockmarked with rough patches of oblique pitch darkness. I am accompanied by my Iranian friend who peeks in abandoned night table drawers. Searchingly, he endeavors to reach through a pile of handwritten pages and small books. He begins talking to me about Eduardo Galeano, all the while correcting my Spanish pronunciation in conversing over the dense terminology. At that, he leaves with a few leaves in his coat jacket. I stand amid the bare walls, as the airless womb of my ancestral birth in this country is revealed. I sit at a gothic typewriter. Copious thoughts string in a massive upheaval of soundless striving through the mind of a creational writing that ceases only with pure death, and at once, below me are the distracted lives of my parents. Their televisions blare mindlessly with brainwashed floundering. I empty a nearby drawer, seeking madly for a worthy object, a true talisman, to invigorate my standards of inspiration before this all-consuming pyre of human intentionality, transmogrified by the immense distance of a screen and its subjects never felt by palm or breath. Does their lower meandering mirror my own creative origins on lettered key before the abstract maw of my own typographic lore?   

________

Typewriter

"To see a typewriter in  your dream indicates that you need to open the lines of communication with someone in your life." (iDream)

________

“from the mountains' worshippd gaze

I am estranged as a foodbank flourishing madly

in a churlish booth-fountain

spurning liminal trespassers in a just tirade

isolating occupied human vats”

- excerpt from "Spare my Spit"