How to Listen to the Land: Raincoast Music and the Eye's Awakening

"Right now is the time when we wake up and start paying attention to what we are actually doing. I've always said we can do whatever we want. The question is what do we want to do. And we need a new definition of progress, you know, toward listening to scientists, and toward elegance and beauty. And so we have to get our philosophy right. What way do we want to go forward? And we need a critical mass of people who care deeply in their hearts about nature." Robert Bateman, Canadian artist from the B.C. coast sponsored by Raincoast Conservation Foundation for an Oil-Free Coast

This past weekend, I headed a block over from my apartment to grab my usual afternoon matcha. As I swung my head around to grab a coffee cup lid, my line of sight was crowded with the most peculiar, and at once familiar, beauty. Frame drums, doumbeks, and instruments of all kind, beautifully hand-crafted in the likelihood of natural aesthetics. The clouds of a waking dream parted as I stepped forward to shake the hand of the drum-maker himself. 

From Vancouver Island, Sylvan Temple Drums boasts specially crafted hand-made local woods just south of the Great Bear Rainforest. At first meeting, the key to my city's grandest music festival was gifted, unceremoniously, and with the sincerity of a true friendship. Before purchasing an absolutely gorgeous alder doumbek, I became privy to the music of such as Alabama Shakes, Thievery Corporation, Cat Empire, Caravan Palace, The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, Mamselle, Haram, and on. It was a splendid weekend. The gift of music breathed new life, and as through the wood of our country, the sound reverberated with untouchable magic into my heart and marrow. 

Such as luck would have, the serendipitous vibe of the exchange revealed the marked truth of reciprocity in nature. Human beings are mere messengers, and vessels of light and wisdom, others more naked and bright than the rest. They who are naked and bright are merely known as generous to us more gross souls. And so, in a parable of ancient China, correlative meaning ensues. 

Source: Galen Mongeau

After receiving the great gift, not as from divinity, but from the hands of a fellow man. I was moved to wonder on the spiritual nature of the harvest. In such a world as where the sense of harvest has breached sustainability to egregious excess in exploiting the natural resources of the land, where is the sane harvester of life's great gifts of creation? And from the musical instrument of the trees sings a tale of the potent harmony embedded within the forest, within the land. The land is imbued with the music of life, with the instruments of soul, art and meaning. 

When will we honour right harvesting, as in those who are traditional users of the land since time immemorial, not mere environmentalists, but as local harvesters who depend on the land for their livelihood? Whether it is in the food or the materials, in opening a doorway to family, community and inner fulfillment, our vocation, role and fulfillment is in the land, offering all a place, as a truly honest way of making each our own living. Might we see the hidden inner nature of the Earth as not only our source of physical life, but as our source of grounding and flight, as our source of reciprocal creativity, the inertia of magic and play as the source of harmony itself, as a way to growth, promise, and all our relations?

Learn More about Pipelines:

And the People Protecting Future Generations:
KEEPERS OF THE ATHABASCA

Also, read my Comment on Geist.com on the Energy&Art debates

__________________ 

A pipeline twice the size of a whale. A gargantuan opening, closing the way through into an opaque, unholy void. The brackish filth of water moves as on its own under our quaking boots. And the spill seeps into the metallic soil below. The Earth shrieks, yet her voice is muted under a dense, resin helmet. Deafened by fortunes of squandered wealth, the murderous cold frays the nerves with blinding speed, and then, all there is to do is work.

Interior of an Ironworks by Godfrey Sykes 

"Give 'em yr bucket." Our manager removes our defecation pails, to be filled with drinking water for the next hour. The only change of the guards is vomit and an empty stomach. Coffee, whisky and blood. The grisly, noxious sky burns with the weight of an Earth turning on its side, looking out through grey eyes, a globular iris of naked waste. The entombed sky wretches as the darkening muck churns and writhes like a cold snake. What was once soil and groundwater, turned to the tar and feathers of the shamed petro-state of Canada.

Cottonopolis by Edward Goodall 

The pipe gargles and spews rasping smoke, as if it were a choking throat, attempting a last word before immobile onlookers. The brevity of life and death makes us motion-sick. There is a sea of greed, corruption and ignorance below these decks of metal and bone. The quiet break the loudest. And at once, as the gushing oil explodes with a merciless fire from the side of frozen metal, men are trapped behind the void. Wading in the flush of a liquid worse than sewage, the brain nauseates, overwhelmed with the job of planetary death.

______________

In celebration of the filters of raw earth into breathable air. The track "America! America!" is inspired by the forestal creation of a hand-crafted alder doumbek from Vancouver Island, at the cusp of the Great Bear Rainforest, a place that also signifies a cusp of human civilization. So, the sound of the wooden drum, of the local land, is played in conjunction with a Maple Shakuhachi (also indicative of the local country's national tree).


The doumbek and flute seek a passage, of wind and earth, into the waters of being and becoming, towards a sense of grounding (drum) and direction (flute). The vocalization/narrative sounding muses on the exhausting reactionary sense of progress that ensues in the modern world, where people continue to consume and waste, yet there is a lack of listening, and a lack of sheer creation.

The calamity of today is not one of natural resources, it is our state of mind, and as the musical instruments of the natural world teach us, there is much to learn from the shapes and sounds within. As Chuang Tzu said, "What happened was my own collected thought encountered the hidden potential in the wood. From this live encounter came the work that you ascribe to the spirit."


This nine-poem chapbook speaks to the deformed nature of land under the warped perception of consumerist greed and a wholesale corruption of value in life, and unsurprisingly human life. The interludes speak to a frenetic base of experience in the fragmented world of manufactured waste and devastated landscapes that have become the norm, closing our minds and eyes from the truths and repercussions of our noxious way of life.

Through poetry, I affirm and re-encounter all my relations through a sense of the inner community. Creative language inspires an inward journeying to find the root and nature of mind. The place where our whole selves may firmly take root in the most fertile of soil, in the home of universal belonging, and so give back and become one with the self-regulating, self-sustained renewability of life in harmony with all of creation.

Interludes via FREEDOM

Taoist Offerings in the Hall of Dreams

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

Summer grasses /
 all that remains /
 of soldiers dreams.

Basho interpretation by Lucien Stryck

Kannon is the Goddess of Compassion. Her Chinese name is Kuan Yin, and in Sanskrit, Avalokitesvara. A statue of the Kuan Yin stands, similarly as pictured above, in my apartment. My wife, a Taoist-Buddhist, cares for the sculpture with a love beyond regard for high art. Standing behind an attendant bodhisattva, the Kuan Yin is a living recipient of our most momentary aspirations and our immanent longings, as they rise and fall into the sky of the figured form with our sound, breath, movement and speech. With a physical offering, the life of the seemingly inanimate sculpture gives way to immortal reckoning. The statue has received such offerings as the favourite pleasures of my late grandfather (a can of sardines and a cigarette), as well as my Shakuhachi breathings. 

__________

I see my wife, long braided hair, in full red dress, dimmed by the party ambiance, she wails on her mother-of-pearl Egyptian doumbek, with the percussive force of a musical heart, true bravura of heartened artistry. 

Two Drummer Girl by Isaac Israels 

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

Sitting young woman in Dutch Kitchen by Henrik Nordenberg

That shared abuse, culminates in a shot, straight through the gut, though strangely a painless death as the water of my eyes bleeds my vision into an all too wakeful death.        

__________

Boiled threat of another animal’s blood

Given over to the insect mind,

A natural reason, the rational cycle

Filling 0’s with my precious un-devoured anchor

That holds human bread to the sand of the unfed

Screaming over shopping carts, cringing with nicotine blinks

...

Ruined men and women whose hearts run dry

Like the rivers that once fed their ancestral lungs,

Filled with the mythic bird

And they rise from the ashes of Hindu lore

In the European brain,

A tell-tale crime, getting skinny in between

...

In exchanging monetary behaviorisms

In the psychic deep of abundant perceptions

Closed doors sink into the undertow’s warning

excerpts from "Bless the failed pilgrim's march"

Cuban Youth and Creative Autonomy

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"José Martí said, 'the children are the hope of the world.' He's very well known in Cuba and the rest of the world. And we could also say that youth is the light of the world, the hope of the world...Youth is very important in our society, because they are very well educated and many of them are professionals. Because of the universal right to education and many university graduates. In the last decade, the number of university students has risen five fold.

Today's youth is a population that has grown up after what we call the "Special Period." So, youth has grown up during this economic crisis and under the economic blockade of the United States, by the United States of Cuba. So therefore, they have been subjected to scarcity and economic limitations. And that has made more stumbling blocks and obstacles to the fulfillment of their dreams...They are the protagonists of cultural, community and artistic creativity."

Maria Isabelle Dominguez, sociologist and Director of Psychological and Sociological Research of Havana (1:01:30 of Cuba in Focus 2012: Part I)

"Children are the ones who know how to love." - José Martí

________

An impromptu, Hakim Bey TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), an occupation, a force field of instant creative spontaneous group presence, artist-magicians freeing the spare moment of interconnected spatial continuity in the visceral act of communal play, a boastful pantomime of acknowledgment, an undreamt torrent of sound waves blindly over my urban fate. A walk alongside the river pathway, and I sit with a group of peers, individual revolutionists, spit-shining the nature of mind with DUI grit. They hand me the most unusual instruments I’ve ever seen, self-invented out of sheer devotion to original ingenuity. Experimenting with a four-tiered frame drum, I notice the circle waits, watching for my creative intelligence to light the group momentum in the fire of scintillating freedom, manifest before their innocent eyes.

The next evening, I walk through an Eastern market, an Arabian Nights treasure trove for belligerent desire, fuelled by monetary drive amid strong wafts of perfume, spice, and the kohl-lined female blink into human want. I am saturated with immense apology. A downpour of mental guilt bruises my faded intentions with each step deeper into the dim havoc throughout the winding earth-ground pathways, leading into unlit alleyways, mental obscurity beckons my drowning, swollen self-pity as I lead myself ever deeper into the unknown grave of my found esoteric ecology.

The wares of an instrument seller captivate me. Albogues, duduks and exotic snakeskin frame drums line the wooden frame of a rickety wooden kiosk stand, seemingly unattended. As I stretch my hand out to feel the skin of a drum, an impish sprite, a young, rosy-cheeked tomboy gazes, beatific into a beam of light above my face. I can’t help but notice her unusual countenance, a proud and noble stature from her youthful facial expressions, shining brighter than the floodlight above us. Without speaking, she begins gesturing hands in avian wing patterns, mimicking the tongue, conveying a plethora of human emotion without missing a beat. 

Her play is expert, her storytelling movements well expressed, imbued with commonly understood meaning. A local woman emerges from the opaque shade of the antiques stone building, narrowing the market pathways. “That’s a well-known Aboriginal dance theatre,” she says, confirming the story well told. At the moment of her pausing, my mouth breathless with wonder and admiration, she gathers a small hand drum, only a touch larger than her palm, and taps with a wild energy, a direct speech of rhythmic pulsing. She speaks through the abstraction of form with an artistry not yet experienced by my foggy, nonplussed eyes, still burdened with internal weight. In that moment, I enter the sky, bodiless over sonic clouds, a booming voice silences the air at the cusp of our earthly atmosphere. I have been here before. With her help, I will return. 

________

Dance

"The dance is always a good omen and it foretells many things, such as children dancing signifies that your marriage will produce lively, happy children who are well behaved, older people shows a better business income and if you are enjoying the dance you will receive and unexpected windfall!" (iDream)

Drum

"To hear the muffled beating of a drum, denotes that some absent friend is in distress and calls on you for aid. To see a drum, foretells amiability of character and a great aversion to quarrels and dissensions. It is an omen of prosperity to the sailor, the farmer and the tradesman alike." (iDream)

________

filled. with immediacy
profaning eternity
of now, into secondary manifestation
of everything, into ignorant cries

for an end to all life, and unswayed
the silent mother feeds greater discontent
into the belly of her sanctified martyrdom,
consecrated over the neoclassical demise of New England

sameness, howling European mockery
and second-guessing the entire First History

- excerpt from "where is the mind in life?"

Improviser & Dreamer on Holistic Music

Keith Jarrett

"There's never been a time when improvisation was given the respect it deserved. By virtue of the holistic quality of it, it takes everything to do it, it takes real-time, no editing possible, it takes your nervous system to be on alert for every possible thing in a way that can not be said for any other kind of music."

Interviewer

"How important are other things in influencing the way you think?"

Keith Jarrett

"More important than music!"

Interviewer

"Like writing, philosophy?

Keith Jarrett

"More important than music...One of the biggest fallacies I think, in art circles and in music circles maybe when people talk about it is that music comes from music...music is the result of a process the musician's going through, especially if he's creating it on the spot."

- from "Keith Jarrett - The Art of Improvisation"

_______

With family in Israel, a live drum and bass duo explode the stage in a spark plug of sonic smithereens. The audience is drowned out in a hemp haze of blistering monitors which fuss and blow like a spiked gourd of grog. I am reminded of music by OM. This isn’t the right crowd. The auditorium audience begins to split as a punk metal doom bit hits incendiary in the mathematical freeze of anti-traditional musical formulae. As people begin to clear out, I take up a clarinet I had recently played on in the upper tiers of my consciousness on Earth. The subconscious knows the notes. Explorative and experimental I dash the family reunion and mystifying context of concert for my own harmonious bout with sound, bleeding through the fire of an impassioned reed. I stimulate the Earth with sounds of disbelief freed.  

______

Guitar

"Upon hearing the weird music of a guitar, the dreamer should fortify herself against flattery and soft persuasion, for she is in danger of being tempted by a fascinating evil. If the dreamer be a man, he will be courted, and will be likely to lose his judgement under the wiles of seductive women. If you play on a guitar, your family affairs will be harmonious." (iDream)

______

Astral Chamber

meeting completely rapt
& immersed
with clear exacting light
(without bright glare)

miraculous breath of spirit
allowing greater sight
drowning one inward
there      apparent
she        ghosts ever near
to wrap and envelop me
in the Act

March 9, 2011

Chinatown Calgary. Bedside.

My Hanging Drum Falls to its own Beat

Contrasting Sounds by Wassily Kandinsky

A doumbek drum hangs from a thin pine twig, and as I notice, it falls crashing to a strange forest pit beside a pond directly beneath a scraggly ancient tree, an immense figure, an arboreal delight yet demanding a kind of fear in its profound attention of the earth through its girth of roots, and beside the water’s edge, I pick up my drum from the ground, and yet a piece has been cracked off, a square piece, perfectly removed, and yet I still put it to my hip, and suddenly it feels as if a skin has replaced its plastic head and my hands find a delicate touch with rapid rhythmic technique in producing vibration’s adamant trill, a complete sound wave in the full emptiness of a masterful humbling against the unbroken skin of human touch met with the cover of Earth’s delicate heartbeat bringing that fullness to yet another creation of space in the continuous sound, ever unbroken by finger’s brush as a purr unites breath with rest

September 3, 2011