Exposing Consciousness ~ Expanding Subconsciousness ~ Entering the Unconscious
Primarily a writing exercise, this dream journal-inspired blog is a quiet introspective sojourn into the process that we traverse in going from private dream to public art. I see our dreaming as an internalized mythmaking. As I philosophize and expressively exhibit dreams, both private and public, I encourage and delight in creative language as a way to practice experiential metaphors through a “public dreaming." Writing Theory: Creative Dream Fiction
It was in a downtown French bistro where I listened to the hackery of a pseudo-theatrical storytelling musical showcase on the life of Django Reinhardt. I was expecting a real return on a small investment to witness the life of the Romani Jazz legend through his music. I was disappointed to say the least. Genius can never and should never be copied in any way, shape, or form. He made recordings.
I did learn from the storyteller with the gypsy guitar that Django, in fact, means "I awake". One of my favourite films, "Sweet and Lowdown" by Woody Allen features "I'll see you in my dreams" an all-time classic jazz beauty for our time. It speaks numbers with the instrumental ingenuity of the two-fingered guitar player, whose myths struck a chord from my earliest days of musical appreciation. It was especially this Antique FILM which got me hooked on Django! I've been awake ever since!
__________
I Awake Too Long
& Photographic Clarity Re-Places My Eyes
From Dreamscapes Lingering
In His Element by RK
Color of the Horizon by RK
I Am Seen by RK
A Shared Path by RK
Domestic Offerings by RK
___________
“A full expression of Love in mind, heart and wisdom”
“Will the new being have music in Their veins?”
“If marriage of shared blood, the perfect union of musical harmony and universal rhythm will mark the forehead and line the bones of the little one to be”
Raised on the pressure of finger to string And palm to drum
"Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you, but in your dreams whatever they be, dream a little dream of me." lyrics by Gus Kahn
My favourite duet with Louis Armstrong is with vocalist Velma Middleton singing That's my Desire. I've been listening to this duet recording on cassette tape for years until I found a rare video performance tonight. These old Dixieland jazz standards bring the kind of simple grandeur as understood by the likes of master improviser and jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, who said, "The more experience someone has, the more their simplicity is profound." Their musical simplicity is spacious enough to offer the needful release of Southern jazz artists mixed up in the lowly roil of dominant American prejudice. Music is the teacher, and with the intuitive language of sound, speaks to all indiscriminately, "Love is simple."
_________
She plays an acoustic piano with a Chinese zither in the body. Virtuosic at the keys and the zither strings simultaneously, the stage ignites with the mysterious vibes of a Native World Jazz fusion. Other musicians bend traditional instrumentation with a creative harmony so seamless its enigmatic ingenuity fascinates infinitely.
Nocturnal Serenade by Jan Steen
The lead musician, a full-bodied older woman, exudes a singular light as the stage dims and the concert hall empties. She stands in redolent awe and reverence for the magic of music. I gaze at the stage, as the musicians remain immobile. Their colourful clothing bespeaks contemporary First Nations traditions. The light outshines my eyes, as I stagger off with a mind unfulfilled by the enduring silence.
__________
What must you do to stay and decide
When you decide what to do with your life
When you feel you are alive and not as good as dead inside,
A nothing where you hide…
Not just a nothing
Where you lie…
...
One day you realize you must die,
So how to prepare for death,
First step live,
Second fail life with a smile
To see as clearly as your de-fogged morning
Mirror of bright possibility with pure face,
That freedom is a tear
And Death is a gift from the bosom of life herself.
To hear my more percussive beginnings see my earlier posts Busker's Gamble 1 & 2
________
My elementary school music teacher begins the session with
an arcane eye, emitting positively unintelligible sentiment into the classroom.
The entirety of the students’ awareness is razed in a moment of ineluctable
meditation at the front of the room. The teacher is absorbed in trance, unable
to begin the lesson. Then, she takes up an oboe, and begins a hypnotic hum,
playing without her fingers. She bends her lips to the visionary yonder,
bespeaking a ghostly insight into the sonic membrane of harmonious mystery.
As the
hum begins to rise, a crack in the doorway spells fear in the eyes of my fellow
students, watching as a three nude black women gracefully dance their way to
the front of the room. Their light steps are unmatched in delicate beauty. The
warmth of their presence is charming as the teacher begins to lather up and
down immense, powerful scales. The dance heats with inner vivacity. Without
fully recognizing, I have been completely entranced, alone in another room,
seduced by the mad eyes of the superhuman subtleties emerging of the dance of
sprites. The unity of music and dance is embodied in the untouchable, ebony
enigmas.
to empathize with space,
emptied learning
devoid of causality,
to exist in nonsense happily,
with or without means to find the light to continue
and realize that meaning prevails in the ability to emancipate need into desire
and transform desire into being,
to see you,
in the flap of a wave thickening
in a sky filled with stars aglow
in the insect's wing,
eaten then,
raw in the toothless humanity
forming on the tip and base of the tongue
with each word-stopped breath of compassion
stating,
"subsist without things,
yet do not merge one with sheer being,
there is no escape from right,
take time to see,
play aloud to the soft distance
in each touch
on the eternal book
resting coolly
on the back of every pulse
moving through fingertips pressed over reality."
simply unlearn doing
by giving into the peace already;
know your surroundings,
truth does not move,
yet there is mystery in sound's effortless becoming
around and within the hand that pulls time into the heart
and plays breath
in tune to the sun's round birth canal of thoughtless entry
into an orbital law,
a return to archaic wisdom
in ancient instruments
and the rare music of inward listening
that shares all in the act of creative wondering
to explore the mind without friction
against the beat of our one heart,
drained now by love's unknown pleasures
offered to the inescapable friend,
who appears as death at the beginning of night,
freezing time
for a moment's celebration of temporal freedoms
grinning out of sight
Seeing the metaphors in dream, is it a forecast for an external event? Is it a sign pointing to inner manifestation? I would emphasize the latter, though in many ways they are interconnected.
“Paul, meet Paul” a friend from Boston sits across from a
recent acquaintance. “I’m only going to St. Louis,” he confesses weakly. His
scooter lies in disrepair at our feet. I’m on my way west, as far west as one
can go, a bicoastal flight. The highway night is bleak, streaming lights
cascade horizontally in the brittle rain. The sky is opaque with faded ebony, a
mildew of steam emanates from under the gyrating wheels of our speeding metal
encasement.
My brother drives our mother’s work car. “You’re going to drive
this when you’re on your way,” he says warmly. I’m dropped off at a gas
station. A dark-skinned attendant intimidatingly pulls over a gas hose,
pointing a muzzle onto my plate glass window. The night is endless. “Where am I
off to?” I question my racing mind as my sibling waves from a friend’s vehicle,
moving away. All is out of sight. I am somewhere in the middle. I see the
futile passage of infinitude stretching beyond the hoarse glow of my shifting future
blown to the winds of the American past.
______
Escape
"If you escape from some place of confinement, it signifies your rise in the world from close application to business...This is an omen of good luck for many, as it is a statement that you are making good." (iDream)
"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."
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)
Are the effects of REM similar to that
of a film reel, where the mind develops a way to conceive thoughts with equal
momentum and speed as one would perceive, in simultaneous function with the the faculties of memory to create images, sound and other sensory phenomena experienced in dream as in memory?
Is REM the Dreamachine in the flesh?
_____
In this Dream Series,
I ask what about the recurring and unusual instances of action in dreams which
remind me of the function of metaphors in myth and poetry. For example, the
train seems to be a passageway, or link between worlds, memories and times.
Next, there is the “emptying of the fridge” in Venezuela when the Christian world
is coming down, and the frozen, armless hand of an enamored singer vying for my
attention at the final dream cycle.
The dreaming begins with my wife and me traveling to the
East Village of Manhattan to see a friend. This friend
allowed us a place to stay and offered his peer support as a successful
musician to my wife, who is also a successful musician. In the dream, however,
instead of a musician peer to my wife, the individual who we are staying with
is a friend of mine, a fellow writer, who engages with me in very healthy ways
to support our common goals as writers. When we meet this man, we find that he
is extremely effeminate. He wakes from his unkempt bedroom and greets us
warmly, however bedraggled and immediately throws on a pink, fishnet,
sleeveless shirt and walks out the door, we don’t see him again, but he offers
us his place.
Later, I find I am late to pick up my parents at the
airport, as they are arriving to visit with us during our time in Manhattan. I am very
late, and we have missed dinner, as the time reads after 10, however they are
relieved to see me.
As I am returning to the EastVillage,
I find myself in what looks like it may be Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I once
walked through, with intimidating hooded men standing motionless in small
groups on street corners. I feel out of place to say the least. I band of small
Latino kids face me and jeer and bat at my clothing as I try to walk away
unseen. I offer them money and they simply reject my idea that they are Mexican
or somewhere in some poor country in Latin America
and need my money. They don’t take beggar’s money, they say. Finally, I meet my
wife somewhere in the city and we board a subway train. The train pulls off at
what seems like we are now in Venezuela!
There is a choral group busking beside the benches in this very outskirts
subway stop. I flip them a coin behind my back so as not to let my wife see, as
she dismisses them. As we walk from the underground train platform, we walk
into a realm of pitch black darkness. There is no way to go, so we head back to
the subway. The choral group is gone and the platform is completely empty. I
try to find my coin, but find nothing.
"I grew up in a very powerful, spiritual, cultural area in Brooklyn, what they call Bedford-Stuyvesant...Everybody had to take art, you had to take piano, or trumpet or violin or dance, that was in the neighborhood, and economically everybody didn't have money, but culturally it was so wonderful.
[Marcus Garvey's] philosophy of Africa, is our ancestral home. We were taken away, those of us who were taken away, we have to give back, we have to rebuild our motherland, which is Africa, and all of humanity comes out of Africa anyhow, so he was way ahead of his time.
Your history, your ancestry is your foundation."
______
When we exit the train at the next stop, we are still in Venezuela, only
there is a field of sparkling light before us. Within the field, my father and
step-mother’s house lies empty. In the field, a highly religious ceremony is
taking place. They are enacting the end of the Christian world, the last
Christian rite it seems! As the high-rising organs sparkle with incandescent
crystals as one would believe heaven to appear, everyone present forms a mass
around a ceremonial hearth of heavenly glow. My wife and I dive inside the
house, wishing to escape such highfalutin religious activity, and begin
emptying their fridge, cleaning their expired foods out from their dusty and
neglected icebox. All the while, we see on television, the center of the Roman
Catholic world crumbling away, as the central image appears, where the great
Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil falls
down the mountain like Saddam Hussein’s statue in Bagdhad.
Then, out from the ceremonial mass, as its Christian imagery
begins to fade into an archaic celebration in precious stone, naturally
encrusted over a celestial mountain of pipe organ, I am somehow called out into
the midst of the open field, and led into a palace of sorts. There seems to be
royal intrigue about, a changing of the guard causes slight anxiety in those
present. One lady, however, turns to me and begins chanting and singing lightly
to calm us. She gives me her hand, which freezes in the grasp of my palm with
effortless burden. She then turns, leaving her hand in mine while singing to
everyone present, calming the vibration of the palace, near-crumbling at the
end of days with her strong, human voice. She comes back to me, though leaving
her hand in mine, her palm is now mangled, fingerless and bloody, though she is
calm and so are we.
_____
in the livid pull of train wreck desire
the followers’ sneering crimes become awake
to the rush of the wading horror
that thrives innocently on beer and hate
while our nonplussed singing escapes into the cruel, driven spines of the wicked slink of fame
that shines like hosts in a steaming ballroom of creative play
and shaved rasping throats blunder over towers of hypocrisy
engraved mores of hunger and celebration link together within insane, aesthetic duality
to please the entranced few
in a skinny pathway across ever-shrinking pores of history
wearing narcotic bracelets and shaming our alien tours with priceless need
in the random chores of spurious fornication
on bedside hordes that tame the blue African skies to dried jungles
that feel free with deserted lies
in the political waves of a corporate, shark-ruled tribe
swearing and leaning into the hounds of biblical law
"Though we are told to mourn it, we must know that it was a noble sound. It had majesty. Yes, it was majestic. Deep down in the soul of it all, where the notes themselves provide the levels of revelation we can only expect of great art, it formed a bridge. That’s right, a bridge. A bridge that stretched from the realm of dreams to the highways and byways and thoroughfares and back roads of action. To be even more precise, let me say that this sound was itself an action..."
The Dragon
"...Some people might ask, “What is this man doing talking about nobility? Doesn’t he know that this is a dragon-spawned and blood-encrusted century? Doesn’t he know that the dragon breath of our time is breathing down the neck of the year 2000? Doesn’t he know that this is the era of flash and cash?” ..."
written by Stanley Crouch, delivered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.
This is the Year of the Dragon in Chinese Astrology. Let us listen to the ancient and modern forms of the myth interweave with our creative dream for a new reality, a novel sound, to transcend the European Dragons of Mythic Evil and enter into the Astrological Dream of Good Luck, Power and Creative Strength in this the luckiest year of the Chinese Zodiac.
JUNO SE MAMA came to me
through my father.
He taught me about what it is to be
Man, Self, Strongness,
It is a ritual dedicated to
My mother.
Upon this earth, I want her to see.
I had to understand my father's house
before my mother's house.
JUNO SE MAMA is a prayer for all those
Who have suffered the
after effects of Slavery.
Who are we?
It is also a spiritual for the sick
and poor, light for the blind, comfort
to the young and old,
Cradle song for babies,
Wind...for birds in trees,
The sound of thunder and lightning that
BURST out over the earth.
It is a rhythm of virtue.
When you are all alone,
Many songs come...in the night,
I am a moon child.
I come from New Orleans
the surge of the bayou.
In my young life I worked
And dreamed.
I wanted to sculp,
to squeeze the earth
With my hands.
I talk with my hands.
Who teach me...no one.
I left my native home, New Orleans.
My people were not popular with
the Afro-arts.
I wanted to build,
to say.
A first Afro-American art center.
Young boy, with a Man's dream,
"and a child shall lead them."
JUNO SE MAMA.
While they were running the streets,
I
was listening.
I JUNO
a drummer born. American.
My father
a tuxedo drummer,
"once a tuxedo drummer, always a
tuxedo drummer."
My mother's father was a captain's
drummer,
F Company, 84th Regiment, Union Army
during the Civil war, 1863-6.
For the past 12 years I have been a
maker, designer,
a Son.....of drums.
My Afro-American Art Center will be
a home for the homeless,
Future sons of drums.
Coltrane moves in that direction
A man who knows
Directions for the future depend
On how we artists of today
cut the road.
Francis de Erdely, the famous artist
Made his contribution to my
art center.
His sketchings of me see into
and understand
Rhythm and Afro art.
The ritual, JUNO SE MAMA, begins in a
Mighty cloud burst
And the rippling of the water drum
begins beating against the
air cups of the world.
Moon children...ready to be born.
Signs of sky, earth, water.
One is born called JUNO.
His father's house is the bird.
You can hear him teaching his son
how to fly.
Fly, till you reach the sky, Float,
Fly, Float
till you make a boat
Be strong my son and show your arm.
I'm going to show you your MAMA's home
She lives in the sea.
There is birth in the water
in my mother's house.
No matter what has happened to us,
we have to sing.
There is always land ahead.
Earth is where it is happening,
It's where we go from here.
We have to sound the cry
of the conch shell.
Blow the shell...
blow, blow
till you see.
And JUNO blowed and blowed till
he grooved
and grooved.
JUNO LEWIS, December 1966
text arranged by jo ann cannon
