Sleepless Children of Dream: Composer Vi An Diep Invokes Taoist Grace

"When you sleep your angels stay awake my children

The bombs will kill and destroy

Guns will take my life

Midst the noise and chaos

I will sing this song during your last breaths on earth

Carry you to your next journey far away from this hell

Then I may die in peace"

Lullaby to Dying Children during the Vietnamese War by Vi An Diep

“Be careful what you water your dreams with. 

Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. 

Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. 

Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.” Lao Tzu

“Sometimes I feel like the elephant in the room,” says composer and musician Vi An Diep. She is one of more than 20 artists involved in creating Elephant Song, the newest work by Green Fools Theatre. The “pay what you can” all-ages shows will feature an elaborate set for life-sized hand, rod and shadow puppets. The centrepiece of the production features both live and electronic music by Diep, a local artist who immigrated to Calgary from Vietnam two decades ago. Elephant Song is inspired by Diep’s life story, and her music reflects the way humans relate to the natural world.

Writer and director Jennie Esdale has worked with Diep since 2005 (Dancing on Water) and says she always wanted to do a show with Diep as the centrepiece. The story follows two sisters separated during the fall of Saigon. Diep, a refugee, arrives in Canada and teaches herself to play the zither. Through her music, she conjures the life of her sister, raised in the jungles along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia. Rescued by an elephant, the sister embarks on a harrowing journey in search of a lost calf. Along the way, she saves as many elephants from the perils of modern dangers as she can.

The story mirrors the emotional bonds of an elephant family through a human story, and both share a common theme: displacement. “Elephants are like humans in that they form close bonds with their families,” says Esdale. The separation of two sisters by the strife of war is reflected in the devastation of an elephant family by illegal hunting. “Just like humans, when an elephant loses its family it forms a new family,” she adds. “Elephants share an emotional range close to humans — the audience can relate to the elephants through the human element.”

Before writing Elephant Song, Esdale travelled to Chang Mai, Thailand, eventually meeting a woman with land that’s dedicated to an elephant sanctuary. Inspired by this activism,Elephant Song takes place along the Mekong River in Thailand and Vietnam, which is part of the natural habitat for Asian elephants.

The play openly addresses the role of humans in elephant endangerment. Actor and puppeteer Nicola Elson, together with the Calgary Zoo, will provide opportunities for audiences to become involved in elephant conservation.

“The artists can represent the work of the people on the ground, the conservationists and scientists, but at the end of the day we are not the foot soldiers,” says Dean Bareham, actor and set designer. “There are a lot of people who don’t like zoos, but the fact is that zoos actually do a lot to conserve endangered species.”

Elephant Song delves deeply into the emotional landscape of both the human and elephant characters. Set design, supported by music and mise-en-scène, is crafted with an appreciation for the fascinating visual and aural communications that elephants use, including both sign language and low-frequency vocalizations. “Live puppets exhibit the relationship between the humans and the elephants, and the shadow puppets represent the inner world of the elephants,” says Esdale. “Emotion through story can be more persuasive than facts, as it can inspire hearts and minds.”

Diep’s music cultivates introspection, inviting audiences to reflect on the inner worlds of human life. “The act of physically creating a sound connects people to their own feelings and from that they relate with the rest of humanity. That’s the role of music,” says Diep. “Jennie was able to listen to my story and feel the sentiments and elaborate on it in a way that is accessible for any audience.”

Central to the production is the dan tranh, a steel-stringed Vietnamese zither, featured in both puppetry and live performance. Diep’s instrumental artistry draws from a rich Vietnamese-Chinese heritage, with respect for a cultural preservation that is in harmony with the conservation of nature. “The instrument is a part of the immense heritage behind me,” says Diep. “The Vietnamese dan tranh is the only thing that really links me to the natural world and the heritage of Vietnam.”

The above article, "Elephant Song: Composer Vi An Diep performs semi-autobiographical puppet play about wildlife conservation and immigrant heritage" first appeared in Fast Forward Weekly on May 16, 2013 and later in The Media Co-op 

______________

have a ball by RK 

the music of life by RK

early spring by RK

red hiding by RK 

when i grow up by RK

________________

the exotic settler, has become unsettled by the music within, the rhythmic unity of creation instantaneously awakening the dreams of exploration to contented and rooted being that is beyond and before settler intuition, yet speaks of one at their furthest point 

cast astray by the weary exhaustion of travel and the toil of vagrant survival, at our most distant from any sense of self or environmental recognition, yet the voice within provides a means and path by which we may discover the foundation of life within and without and throughout all wherefores and times 

all faces of belonging in the deep runnel of ground churning and swooning with each and every step planted firmly before sitting, to meditate on the self as energy thoroughfare through which sky and ground meet in the cloudy visions of a creative mind at work, entranced by the muse of his own beckoning, the internal void voices VOID! 

Aloud! the name of god, from faraway lands, in the echo of valleys whose echoes resonate to beckon the voice to intone and invoke throughout and within and from and as the windpipe of the valley itself: Allah, is called, where in Arabic, the expression "ya" is used to call out with vocative interrogation, in this way, to see the meeting place of space and sound, of sky and ground, within the human taste for the call to nowhere now!

Four pieces herein envision and voice the foundation of character as Love, the unsettling settlement of dualistic harmony. The holistic fruition of light boundless and earth trembling. The boom and flash of awe and rust, coalescing at the frayed tip of the hangman's rope, blooming a new head of lore and myth. Words are eyes from heaven. 

The second piece, "allahlelujah" is also featured as a sound-art exploration on themes published herein, on the sacred mess of beauty at its core a seed nestled in the crooked ribcage bust of an itchy nude breathing the hoarse and callous gargle of raw touch and the healing blood that runs from a reddened face hot with night  

Finding Place in Another

Persian Mysteries and the Immortality Rites of Zoroaster

Tower of Silence (Dakhma), Mumbai by Cornelius Brown

“…never age and never die, never decay and never rot, ever living and increasing, being master of its own wish: when the dead will rise, life and immortality come, and the world be restored to its wish.” 

Yasht 19.2.11. James Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, Part II, The Sirozahs,Yashts and Nyayis; Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXIII (Oxford, 1883), p.290

__________

It is 12^th century Persia, the continental-temporal mirror image of 21^st century Canada. After a lesson on the estate, I a youth of educable age, begin to row across a placid lake with my father. The day is warm, with cool breezes flushing our skin in a mixed haze of natural praise and remorse for the end days of summering. My father, a muscular, bearded intimidation of manhood, speaks with the grazing lurch of intense commanding. As we row, in separate crafts, the waters turn rapid. In that moment, he begins testing me on my learned material. 

The oral literature of the day is mind-bending and terse in its memorable strings of morality, geography and spirituality. I’m able to recall various characters and events, and as I extrapolate, the waters toss and turn unexpectedly. At my wavering voice, my father’s eyes brim with the frosted fire of dark Persian mirth. Yet, as soon as I veer into future’s allusions, spouting the literary names and waves of later centuries unheard, a fire burns in his eyes of serious intent to quiet my youth’s wandering. As he reaches out to grab me into his craft and row back ashore to the consistent presence of historic symmetry, we are both swallowed by the apparition of a waterfall along the other shore, pouring us downward with the turbulent waters in a vein of undone chronology and placeless imagination. 

World According to Avesta by Orijentolog

I call out the names of literary history upwards along the upended future. Until the 21^st century’s own dawning, my mind, feckless among the archaic forms of Iranianization, is unceasing in its deliberations on the foreshadowed youth of humanity. I turn and writhe with ancestral might into the sheer unknowable mists. My father has since disappeared, and in that silence I begin to know my name.  

_________

Driving out demons with Masonic symbology
         Over the infinite sands of civilization,
         breathed and created out of time
In the sun’s ravishing corner of a universe,
         un-tempted and forever at a loss
                Between the child’s two eyes
                closing
On death and the holocaust of our forsaken government
         Laughing at the trees’ roots


When stretched to the bottom of India’s or Africa’s wells
         Ousting up the belief in life as a drunken tragedy
                              Yet, be not humourless
                              nor without comic sophistry


In the dance and song
         Come alive by the sexual majesty
                              In theatre’s delicate ways,


To present the creative being
as one with truth’s bold and upheld music
         Reflecting back in the caged mirror
                              A creator anew

- excerpt from "From Behaved Freedom to Absolute Nonsense"

Do Not Confuse Transparency With Justice, Interview With Julian Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lays the groundwork for sanity and clarity, two moral imperatives which become severely deluded in our modern economic infrastructure of global monetary exchange and corrupted international hierarchies with regard to law and policy. The transparency is won through the exposure of new facts, and the justice is had in their due measure via civil application on the ground. This is a bottom-up frequency of people intelligence. This is our one and only power in an age where the word, and its unforgivable silence, is one of the most powerfully dominating forces, painting such instances of carnage as the war in Iraq with the "nice" of workaday mindlessness, aloof and yet proverbial. 

Watch, and wonder why human experience has become the greatest challenge to corrupted power. 

"Politically significant leaks will be 'collaboratively analyzed by hundreds of [Wikileaks] editors in a way mainstream media-leaked documents could never dream of...'" Hanna De Jong, Wikileaks spokesperson, "Media/Web site aims to post government secrets"

________

I know this man. The narrowing, shifty corners of his immaculate apartment reek with the anticipated horrors of bachelordom. A homosexual no less, I slither through the tiny, dimly lit space, eyeing the specialty fabrics and delicate cabinetry with suspicion. This man is no frugal spender. He begins to prepare a fish salad. The salmon are now extinct. “Right and fished out all the way down to Caribbean,” he says, as I open a can of tuna.

Adaptation (2004) by César Leal Jiménez

The lights dim to near darkness as I put the last finishing touches on the salad. Lying across from one another on the carpet floor, he asks me how I deal with my oncoming death. I get nervous, as I notice him procuring a crack pipe from the folds of his clothing. I escape into the corridor halls of the apartment complex. Finding a washroom, I clamber downstairs into a basement. A mass of elderly people sits and washes in undivided toilet and shower stalls. Flabbergasted, I am at all odds. “Should I return upstairs?” Blankly, I go anywhere except back.     

________

full with brutish lies
that carefully whispers a song of superiority, stigmatized,
and the random tear, breaking at the seam of the color line
brackets, the argumentative congress
in sparked ruthless struggle

...

in our head and eye
who self-formed, began as a creative laboring
in the strong brush with a peculiar kind of will
that worshipped a diverse issuing of the ten-thousand tongued iris
performing for the blessed worldly guest

...

growing up in the solitary profundity of man, alone with nature,
wherein lies our humane passage
through social obstacles
in desire and the restrictive curse

- excerpts from "None Superior Than No One"

Poet-Doctor, Drugs and Dreams Are Your Friend

Le Rêve du docteur by Albrecht Dürer

"I never dream. When you’re psychotic, you don’t dream. Mugwort is an herb you can pick up at any local herbal shop. Although the tea is mildly poisonous, it can be drunk. Mugwort tea induces vivid, memorable dreams. Dreaming makes me feel normal. I feel connected with everyone through dreaming."

- from a conversation with a local poet and friend, David Rhoads

_______

Night in the suburbs, I jangle out onto the main road in a banged up old Volvo. The car is full of assorted items, the floors are mostly covered in piles of junk and the like. As I step on the gas, I see I’m driving unusually fast, though only about five mph above the speed limit. My lights are never working fine; I’m usually pulled over every time a cruiser spots me. 

In a shadowy nook, I see the dimmed lights of police, out for the catch. As I approach, the lights whir and sound. Still, I am in disbelief. “Again!” They must know me well by now. The cop who stops me perks with dissatisfied boredom as she clambers around awkwardly in the car for an extended time. My friend and I stand outside the car, weary and stung with silent cursing. Then, the overweight female cop raises one finger; it is covered with a green dust in the blaring flashlight. 

She inspects the dust carefully before swiftly grabbing my arms and locking them in a tight hold. “I’ve found marijuana in your car, you are under arrest!” I fight with murderous intensity. “What! All you found was a fingertip swipe of dust!” I am in awe of the local law’s asinine decision-making. As I squirm in contempt, defiant with unforgiving intensity, the lady cop calls for backup. 

In a matter of seconds, an SUV pulls up ahead of the first cruiser with two large, burly officers emerging in a torrent of violent forewarning. They attempt to handcuff me with riot strength, steaming in a haze of purposeless might. I loosen myself easily and struggle with unmatched will. Suddenly, I’m thrown back ten feet with a blood concussion, face puffed with blood, roughed up interminably by a single blow. 

On my way from a police car onto the steps of the police station and courthouse, I regain consciousness. A man on the sidewalk recognizes me. “Remember your permanent residency application!” he advises warmly. I am put before an authoritative lawman. I state my case. “Sir, this is an unjust conviction, I am on my way to gaining residency to live with my wife, this will put me under, don’t let a finger swipe of dust ruin this man’s life.” He takes pity on me. 

Later, I go on to liberate the entire northeast of North America from its bitter criminalization of personal marijuana use.

______

Drugs
"The interpretation of drugs in your dreams depends on the relationship you have with the drugs in your daily life and if they are doctor prescribed or not...The drugs could be suggesting a need for healing and getting in balance. Your unconscious mind may be suggesting outrageous things in hopes that you get the message to 'have fun, dream dreams, and get out of your own head!' Please keep in mind that the purpose of dreams is to raise our consciousness and to assist us in having better lives." (iDream)

______

"preposterous!"
said the proud visiting Englishman
in dismay,
"the army and police force will be trained
by the crown herself,
and no undue report will become of any loyal
to the blank calm
that befuddles our propaganda-fed livestock population"

- excerpt from "preposterous!"

Undocumented Dreamers Blaze a New Trail

"I'm tired of seeing students criminalized for wanting to obtain an education. I'm tired of seeing students lose hope because they can not realize their dreams of living freely in this country."

- Maria Marroquin

"Every dream that I ever had as a journalist was coming true and I couldn't go to Mexico to a friend's wedding, I still couldn't...the lies just kept getting bigger and watching United We Dream and watching these, actually these four activists from Miami walk from Miami to Washington D.C. to fight for the DREAM Act, the Trail of Dreams, I felt like a coward, I felt accountable..."

Jose Antonio Vargas from Democracy Now! 

_______

Rummaging through childhood lairs, dusty basement keeps where in storage lay our ancestral feet. Our rummaging, nonplussed, we savored with every object greeted, music emanated as a voice from our sated finds. Plastic frames and silly hopes spoke with sheer brevity and noisemaking jolly. A working elder passes through unseen, behind our backs, provoking us to the drear of day in this predawn nostalgic sanctity.

“Keep your hands on the wheel!” the car steals across a merging lane, whiplashed and painstaking amid the gyrating fleet of normalcy. The driver fingers marijuana puffery, blind with musical havoc. I steam and vent with toxic remorse as we pass a humongous van filled with Mexicans, seized by the police. We are the true criminals.

_______

Marijuana

"As a symbol it stands for any activity that is not within the bounds of the law and it can denote the fact of not being able to think clearly if you dream you are smoking it, and this could cause you much trouble and stress. As an herb, it has curative powers, and for the older generation of dreamers who still think of this as an herb, this is a warning to have your health seen by a professional. If you have a dream of using marijuana, it suggests you have feelings of insecurity and regret. You worry that people will discover who you really are."

_______

the pregnant are disallowed entry,
to become second-class citizens
among the walking tits
and ass mockery that defiles our greater human
bond and friendship with abusive division
over the object-desire complex
parading as a public wildfire

- excerpt from "international women" 

Requiem for an End to the War in Afghanistan

Hakim – Coordinator for Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers

“…if the fundamental military strategy in Afghanistan does not change, it may lead to further killing sprees like this, and may even lead to other September11ths”

Kathy Kelly – peace activist, two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee

“I think that the United States and military officials would like to characterize the massacre as exceptional, sort of one bad apple. But I think it actually encapsulates what the United States presence in Afghanistan is all about.”

From Democracy Now! 

______

World War Two is ending. I am a Jew, barely surviving the tight noose of the final solution in Europe. In the cold forests of northeastern Europe, I and a female friend or relative (a sister or cousin) are caught in our hiding place. Alone and scrawny with a mind filed away by a flood of unspoken atrocity, a thick-mustached German soldier enters. His damaged and sick outlook feeds off our vulnerable state as he begins taunting and undressing my friend. We fight back, as he wants us alone in his depressed desperation at hearing the end of the Third Reich nears. I am only just barely able to escape out of a basement window as he pulls angrily at my clothes, my friend wrapped tightly in his unforgiving seizure. I tear a small, tea-stained map from the corner of a dusty book. As I slip away into the cold rush of the oncoming night, alone I wander with map deeply embedded in my memory, which at the moment is only able to recall with short-term accuracy, deeply inflicted with trauma. I pass through an underground warehouse department. Small newspaper vendors stand under intensely unnatural fluorescent lighting. Barefoot, I stammer through unnoticed, my clothes torn in rags. In my mind, the map of northeastern Europe pans out into an image of the terrain northeast of Germany. There is a German-named port that I head to without mind to distance.

At the port town, I feel at maximum potential. My muscles are torn in rags, cut deeper than my tattered and frayed clothes. My tongue lolls conspicuously. People begin to empathize as I flush past townspeople and open markets. The sea is stormy, but the salt fills my blood with a renewed heat of yearning. Ever closer to the seaside, I find a ship departing for America. I board as one would glide through the unconscious fading of dream. I am instilled with unknown glory. A blooming of compassion empties my weighted heart with the immense figure of creaking wood and sail. I eagerly march aboard. I am let on without question. The massive ship endeavors out of the port into the wide, light gray fish broth of a cloud-covered fog horizon. A petite elderly Chinese lady appears at the port’s edge just before the ship splits the first wave in the open sea. Inside the ship, warm faces reflect the surrounding gray mass of shape-shifting wet form. Suddenly, I see my sister. Her face and mine glow with golden recognition. A new smile forms upon our lips, as we’ve never tasted.

Across the sea, I spend spring in the solace of a city park. The daily ground breathes with comforting life, relieving. Drifting slowly with a confident gait, my first lover enjoys the fresh air, approaching. She smiles at me, looking older, more mature and at ease. This fills my heart with unending joy. Beside me, my brother’s musician friends who we’ve known since we were children play their instruments flat on the ground like a slide veena. Their music is serene and magically rejuvenating.    

______

Requiem for the 16

"A soldier
Before the end of night
16 bodies
Turn to light"

There are many reasons why I left
Now Ex-Patriot
Now divorced from birthplace

My shores?
My flag?
My history?

I extinguish all landlocked loyalty

"A soldier
Before the end of night
16 bodies
Turn to light"

Now, I have 16 more reasons
Silently, I have countless more

Where did I flee to?
Another country with a poppy war!

I'm from anywhere
Where this requiem hits home

"A soldier
Before the end of night
16 bodies
Turn to light"

Sunday, March 11 2012

The night after hearing 16 Afghan civilians (mostly women and children) are massacred by a U.S. soldier. What kind of troops are we supporting? 

Occupy Demonstrator Forced to Immigrate to Egypt

Spring by Abel Grimmer

[In a vivid dream dreamed in my mother's house, the home where I first took flight from the nest, I experience a dream unlike that yet experienced on this visit to the places of my origins.]

I am an Occupy demonstrator; with stereotypical shaggy hair and a wiry beard sparse enough to age me youthfully. At first impression, a fire-born Sagittarius without regret or remorse. I have a taste for the insane rush of amateur denial. A ferocity grows in me to bleed with the public truth of mass suffering at the hand of the few: 1%. I feed off the morning dew before the violent marching of our militant society exhales its smog of consumptive dread over the undreamed folds of a quotidian, earthly stress.

With sudden instantaneous manifestation, my surroundings turn into a punctilious mold of congruent geometry. A seemingly shapeless mass of grey and beige frosts the walls of my interior perception with gross boredom. Enraged, I tear with mad vivacity for a new paradigm. Social dominance does not move astray from my line of sight as it defies internal contemplation and steers ever clearly into the bedrooms of the few: 1%. I give them all the middle finger with raw, open tenacity.

I am reminded of W. Bush; his first trip outside of the U.S. after his term of totalitarian presidency. We geared to angry maximums in a show of torrential defamation at his name.

There is a slump in the public demonstration. The efforts sway to clandestine operation. There is an underground swell of purpose. An optimistic slumber chimes beneath the sidewalk cafes. I am welcomed at a subterranean meeting place. The air is unpredictable. There is a contingent wading in passersby and onlookers who wonder about the end of their movement; it may be nearer than they fear. I have a purpose. I make my delivery and ask desperately for a place to sleep. I need to rest on a surface other than that of concrete smoothed by nylon. The muffled sound of sheets once quelled my silent might and now I am only stirred with the jarring gripes of untrustworthy leaders from this, our autonomous modus operandi of Darwinian survival.

Sleepless, I cower trenchantly outside the walls of an Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. The streets are emptied with sacred failure. The notches of murder scale high across the batons of the street police. I have come here to die to the American Lie. I wait restlessly, dealing with bureaucrats in twilight hours. The Cairo dawn inflames my vital organs with a need to escape this devil-coaxed life of American savagery. I fight for the freedom to move, for my wife and our sanity. We ask only to be awake, and not depraved of a social camaraderie known from collective suffering, shared through speech, and simultaneously lightened through action for one being, our whole. At the same time, we fight for the dignity to rest our heads on a feather of respect in this anthropomorphic hole of modern factory-style life ways.

The struggle continues.

Dreaming in a Transitional State

I am currently in a transition period in life, living in a place where I'm not allowed work or study or do any sustainable human activity, as I am an immigrant in a liminal state, not unlike the dream state, where I see the contents of my mind as if I was fully present, however, I recognize, as I am recognized by society that I am not completely here, am I sleeping? 

I am emigrating from my original place, am I dreaming? I am creating myself anew in this world sparked by minds filling with the stuff of dream, to go beyond body, naturally. To dream is natural. Dream.