Dream and Love: All Our Relations

From Ben Okri's Mental Fight in London by Alessandro Lucia

“Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.” - Ben Okri

I found the above quote on THE DREAMING of shamanic drummer and creative writer, Lindsay Dobbin. It is such statements from the most brilliantly expressive minds of our time that draw one in to reflect on the substance of one's own nature. This is the creative spark. Ben Okri is so intuitively accurate in feeling out the subtle vibrations of the human heart that I feel as if he has literally been watching me. The relationship between love and dream is the strongest seed of self-knowledge. Those who forget their dreams are not awake to love. 

________

The sky is open. Light blue, and an atmospheric glow, passes through my eyes with serene pleasure. Delicate moisture fills me with a cool air. I exhale all the grandeur of my inspiration, each breath an offering to the immeasurable beauty above. Sky is a translucent goddess.  

The Eve of the Deluge by John Martin

As I gaze forward, I see Christ standing atop the water. From afar, his face still affixes to my eyeballs with the cosmic presence of mystic flesh. I am reminded of Alex Grey's Christ painting. Then, in a moment's whisper, a pair of Bison crash through the water. I see the lake is barely a foot deep. The age old prophet is lost to my sight. The Buffalo steam through the water, carrying themselves with the charm of a sibling rivalry. The sacred flesh of the plains opens a revelation of the land's own history. 

__________

"…the apparent flood of a bleeding anorexic paradise…drowned in the furtive beckoning towards malformed reasoning…my Anglo-eyed drug…rushing forth into the magi of atheistic awe…the lawless prism of deep endless failure…gone astray in the fatalist’s catastrophic underpinnings…during midnight conversation…"

excerpt from Epistrophic Misdirection

Free Association Beyond Symbols: The Interpretive Art of Freud

The Dream of Prisoners by Moritz von Schwind
(appears in Freud's 1920 publication)

"Interpretation based on a knowledge of symbols is not a technique that can replace the associative technique, or even compare with it." Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. p. 124

See my earlier post, The Dark Ages Revivified by the Colour of Welsh Dream-Lore for an intuitive lead into this analytical reasoning on the act of interpretation, as confirmed by Freud.

_________

Highway travails, backseat blues, the wrested grapple on leathered frowns presses my skull to the glass with thinly worn agreement with current circumstance, transitory. I pipe up, “Now! I need a bath!” The car halts at a gated stopover, wherein curious attendees ask for a fee. The lockjaw tension spills out into an arts fiesta of European nostalgia. 

The Rose, or the Artist's Journey by Moritz von Schwind

I call out to the crowd, “Now! I have a poem!” I begin muttering, unconfident to truly belt out the words, poorly edited and written with fine ink on a magazine page. The people in the room simply continue on, unalloyed with the anti-climactic triumph of my ever- softening voice. As I saunter outside, away from the dizzying crowd, drunk on their high horse of serendipitous camaraderie, I wade in hollow memory. 

Apparition in the Woods by Moritz von Schwind

Repeating two names, Rem and Rom, as nicknames to the famed feral twins of classical Roman fate. Unnerved by the mysterious blank, open backdrop of mental awareness rusting and pasted over with tasteless eyes, I reason and devise a new way. Alone, into the darkest, thickest patch of forest, I tread the unknowable, pathless, fearless and out of mind, out of time.  

________

Following the wave’s break
Chilling the surf in its open, living mind

Shedding tears
Upside into the sky’s unbroken cavity

When fish jump
And break surface of mental clarity with life’s untamed spontaneity,

When life emerges
And takes of its observant few what prophecies are foretold by nature

...

To die the impatient death of youth
And brush past the envisioned self

Struggling to go together with soul
To the summit of human glory

- excerpt from "Borrowed from the Ancients"

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.

A Dream To Write What Matters

 Akashi Gidayu (writing his death poem before committing Seppuku) by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka c. 1890

My dream has been to craft writing that matters. I am motivated by a need to emphasize the direct spontaneity of mind as, in essence, a creative intuition, where through honing a creative craft, significance is placed on the world uniquely and honestly, without narrow frames of reference. I am interested in the whole being, including one's dreams which only reveal themselves in one's most private, trusted, spirit-bound state: sleep, or intoxication in a poetry which reflects the true, unadulterated nature of mind. 

Read my recent publication at ditch, the poetry that matters

__________

Sitting around a table at a cozy bookshop, I am unaware as to my true motivation and internally neglect my immediate surroundings. I sit around a group of people with small, cottage industry books, with handmade paper and designs painted right on. They are of all sizes and degrees of detail, mostly amateurish, though charming. Many sneer at me as I handle five-stacked copies of poets.org magazine. People begin reading. As I listen, I inwardly revolt. “I can’t read with these people,” I think. As my turn comes, I feel exceedingly confident, and begin reading my piece to great delight. The second piece I read starts with a Latin phrase, including “spiritus” and other recognizable Latin terms. A man scoffs at me from across the table. Other people feel lessened by my proud nature, stifling their humiliated travails with my officialdom. I receive no congratulations. Forget community inspiration.

__________

Book Store

"To visit a book store in your dream, foretells you will be filled with literary aspirations, which will interfere with your other works and labors." (iDream)

___________

Controlled by the mind of unborn dreaming
as our mundane praise sickens the grieving

erasure of a loveless burden

"for the intensity of an aspiring fear?
towards the weird?"

linguistic tribes
pour over their bandaged fingers of torrent
for one emotional quake
...
To the nervous body of tradition
tortured by the hours of sitting

in tragic rooms
oblivious to all the news in the world

of gross and entombed friendships
with the eternally dead

subject

To writing possibilities in the voice
of a suicidal mage

Thanking the lessons of the flesh
in an impoverished state

- excerpt from "a message for the few"