Experimental Cave Art: Philosophies in Word, Vision and Sound

Aboriginal Rock Art, Ubirr Art Site, Kakadu National Park, Australia
Photo: Thomas Schoch

“When your night becomes day, then that which is dreamed is on earth. Do not be too high-spirited, but go, and go alertly.” Aborigine Saying

In continuity with the theoretical writings on the natural sleep cycle as expansive beyond the twenty-four hour day, and especially beyond the programmatic workaday cycle, it is not only the activity of waking activity that might define the energy experienced by the mind-body based on sleep cycles but the content of dream itself.

For example, we go through cycles of remembrance and forgetting, this is a fundamental attitude of the cosmos, as we see in the natural tendency to the peek-a-boo gameplay in all children. Similarly, as this is reflected in our conscious and unconscious experience of life, so this is true with the content of our dreaming. We will go through periods where dreams are not remembered, and then after a time, will begin to remember again. These periods of remembering the content of dreams ultimately point to an unresolved momentum of energy building up in the psyche as a consequence of either personal or collective unconscious activity that one becomes susceptible to in their daily life.

Until this mode of consciousness is directly confronted and transformed through creative insight and practical application in thought, reflection and in some basis of continuity in consciousness, e.g. imaginative outpourings based on the theme and nature of dreaming, where all suppressed and repressed energies are focused and shifted into full view, the involuntary sleep or unconscious REM will continue to emerge and take shape in the psyche through imagination, emotion, intellect and every exhaustible mode of subtle activity.

Every time a dream is remembered, the remembered content, whether imagery or emotion or otherwise, is part of a string of remembrance leading back to a source of reflection deep within the whole being of both the individual dreamer and the society throughout the entire spectrum of its history, propaganda, knowledge, media, relationships, etc.

Oftentimes, the strength or immediacy of memory, the lucidity of the dream state as it interweaves through the waking mind, forecasts the urgency of attention to the subconscious. For example, I have experienced lately that the instant I am ready to sleep, as fast as I close my eyes, I see the content of my dreaming, the imaginations is teeming with life and energy, needing to be witnessed, calling out over the margins of consciousness.

The only way to resolve the inception of remembered dreaming is to confront the subtle impulse to emote or inspire a certain inborn expression, metaphorically illustrated in the dream itself. When dream and life are subsumed into wholeness, undivided by the normative values of structured time and analytical thought, the subconscious and the conscious merge into a healthful surrender of the cosmic unconscious faculty of Being, as the great mystery of self-awareness. As reads the motto in Athanasius Kircher chiseled over the alchemist's doorway, originally in Latin, it says, "While Sleeping, Watch'. See previous post: Alchemical Poetry of Terence McKenna

_________

Breathtaking hot night. The empty dark dream of memory. Narrow canals, irrigation trenches in the backyard under a pitch-black sky, a starless new moon. The seizure of domesticity; fencing blinds besiege all passage to horizon’s beginning, and a house cat skits through the mud with a silent flit of dusty soil. A chase begins, until I grab the fickle creature by its muzzle, and in the raw and ruddy brown earth, I tangle its fibrous backbone, cracking the living spine with the brute edge of my wrist. The sky clears like a strong exhale, and the ground takes formless cover of the starless sky above. I drift away from a mind to a life as inert as the swift welcome of death.

An Australian mangrove, ebb tide by WC Piguenit 

Worshipful room of sweat and lust, the emotive spring of music keeps us swinging to a joyful noise, the urban sound of pain alleviated before closed eyes, staring inward to hear the sight of the muses, invoked by the musician hosts sweltering mad before a small though dedicated crowd of movement. And the headline group enunciates first note with strength unseen; the crowd has since escaped into the bleak, old night. A few straggling local friends stand by the stage, amused and apologetic. One song passes in the silent hollow, a space deemed fit for thousands reduced to pin drop nothingness.

Musical entertainment at the spinet by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld

The emptiness is as palpable as the heartless mind, rounding off pales shots into the murderous pangs of repeated history, the bitter angst of adolescence returning in a white noise of a flushed and ruthless voice, the weird ground rumbles and quakes with burning trust; that a future still opens ahead – full and potent with renewing vigor, to wake again, and live the day from the start, even if our rise coincides with dusk. A silent vision unearths our eternal belonging with grace, and the human community within, where the heart is still in its constant beating, in its rhythmic patience with a more sacred trust.

__________

An elegiac satire on split vein of domesticity, as it unravels and spurns the knowledge-creation of a more unstructured style. The home is the centrepiece of domestic life. Yet, for many thousands of years, there is evidence that we were in fact cave-dwellers. "Caveless" muses on nostalgia for those cavernous days through a reading of "Cave! Home", about a time when petroglyphs and charcoal painting were more important than off-white, beige and any number of dull, and sterile wall aesthetics, and the great-image language of visionary rites were outweighed the significance of antique literature. How can we resurrect the idea of the cave in the context of the modern home, with its womb-like contours and living light that curls throughout our waking minds like breath, and infiltrates our dreams like a warm lover enduring a midnight meditation at our feet?

"Placeless Human Society" is also read here to recognize the dramatic shift from our ancestral pre-history as cave-dwellers of imagination and earth, where suburbia (and its non-subordinate counterpart: the city, for that matter) has essentially uprooted us from this inborn life as a dweller from the earth. On a mass scale, we now dwell on earth abstractly, our imaginations have breathed on, yet the umbilical cord to the womb-cave-home from whence we emerged has long been cut.



"Cave! Home" was published in 3:AM Magazine on September 17, 2012 and is also featured in the most recent chapbook, "Creating in the City" which was released with "When No Stars Appear".

"Placeless Human Society" was published in Outward Link on November 7, 2012. The "Caveless" track release marks the release of the chapbook, "Suburbia to Suburbia: America-Egypt".

Suburbia to Suburbia: America-Egypt

A Triunity of Conscious Remembrance: Writings on Noetic Symbolism

“We can dream about anything, no matter how preposterous, topsy-turvy or unnatural it may be.” Cicero

The three-tiered modes of consciousness, being unconscious, subconscious and conscious are reflected in the synchronous relationship between dream and memory. This is a daily experience from which we may understand the depths of mind on an elementary level. Fundamentally, it is a known fact that all people, and even many animals, are inevitably sent into the subtle realms of dream; it is part of our natural physiology. The three modes are as follows:

1)

Unremembered dreams are phenomena of the unconscious. The subtle emotions that the body and mind feel as a reaction to such dreams are only known by the most acutely aware. 

2)

Dreams that are had, and are known, where the dreamer on waking knows they were dreaming, however cannot remember any specific details apart from references to waking experience, are manifestations of the subconscious. At this point, waking and dreaming states of consciousness meld into a noetic dialogue, an inter-meeting, wherein the fluid exchange of reason and sense are exchanged with imagination and emotion. 

3)

Dreams that are remembered vividly, and dreamt lucidly, are part of the conscious realm. Most people are not fully conscious in their waking life, meaning they are not fully aware and actively engaged in their own lives, as in the source of their own lives, spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. A conscious dream is more than a physiological memory of the natural, instinctual imagination, it is a gift from the transcendent inner world, a gate into our inmost being, where we contact that which seems at once incredibly strange and entirely familiar, our fully exposed, and whole selves. 

__________

The sting of marshland rushes bruise and cut the soles while tangling the toes in knots of wet, risen moisture. The earth perspires with enduring anxiety under these blank skies. Emitting the hot sweat of gaseous vents through the decaying roots and bacterial soil, I trudge. 

The Pontine Marshes at Sunset by August Kopisch

On the horizon, a large city is burnt to ash. They say it all begin with the conflagration of a movie theatre, and a plane crash that split the small city in two with massive fires extending outwards. Not a soul survived. The earth feels cleansed by the death of a throaty death rattle. The decay of human bodies seems to rise as from the strength of the grasses rooted in the damp, dank shifting ground. 

The Unknown by John Charles Dollman

Above our heads, a plane spews hot trails of ash. A man behind me loads a rocket and stings the plane through its side. I watch as the behemoth machine incinerates in mid-air, crumbling with a hauntingly delicate rush through the death-consuming land. I am surrounded by a feel of homicidal, at once in the horizon, while within the breast of the alive. The air is heavy with fate. 

__________

The rains bear down hard and long
On these deceased pangs, longing to embrace ghosts
Long shied-away, deep within memory’s misbegotten despair

...

The diminished poor bear arms while the rains fall

Calling them home no more to breath

In the air of pure and raw savagery

Beckoning our rice-fought union to work

In undivided shame across river’s breadth

That brings wealth and a name to the American prince

With breast inflamed

Prepared to reason with his shame

And engrave in the desert an unplanned way

Towards brotherhood

...

Freeing spontaneous whispers

To a last pleasurable remorse

Upraised and sacrificed

As great offering to the Klezmer bonfire

Whitewashing the New York tide with Greek verse,

In one soundless escapade towards relaxed state of being

...

Cyclically bridging the human body with the global fate

In one silent orbital wave that resounds instantly in every curve of lost strength

Between arms where the beat follows to our brethren and kin,

A growing and invisible host to our name, thinking up a sound

And so, calling forth the blessed invocation of being

excerpts from "The rains bear down"

The Poetics of Pindar in the Shadow of Man

Apotheosis of Homer by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
(Pindar is holding the lyre up to Homer - left)

"Things of a day--what are we, and what not? Man is a dream of shadows."

Pindar’s Pythian Ode VIII, lines 92-97 

In the introduction, to this Gutenberg Project, edition, first printed in 1874, the first paragraph reads:

Probably no poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar finds so few and so infrequent readers. The causes are not far to seek: in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty of his language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought, resulting mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt transitions...  

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Extant Odes of Pindar, by Pindar

I feel in resonance with this statement, besides the self-proclamation of my being a "poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar", but in his evaluation of his difficulty, i.e. dense language, obscure thought and allusive and abrupt transitions. I wonder if this is not a symptom of authentic new literature in general. For example, a crucial voice in this realm is Charles Bernstein and his "Attack of the Difficult Poems", read one of the first essays from this book, "Against National Poetry Month As Such" to understand the pertinence.

Truthfully, in dream, as well as in verse, there is a pop culture stagnation on the mind. Should we all sing and listen and read easy lyrics and welcoming verse, while the lucidity of literary interpretation and nightly dreams remain ever so evasive in their pantomime mimesis of psychological form? A lucid awakening plays out over the genera of new and renewed creative seeds blooming as it were infinitely maddening, as the apex of the mind's delicate host.

_________

The haunting seeds of lost friendship and the weak figment of their passing is numb unfeeling silence, unheard. My heart clamors for reconciliation in noetic visions beyond reason, where the rational mind bursts open into a field of images, a broken and pent up rage to a cinder of memory.

Halemaumau, Lake of Fire by David Howard Hitchcock

Their eyes, and the pulsating muscles of my playful cousins, in mid-wrestle at the masculine chest of brotherly camaraderie in this family of blue-eyed men send me past the workman’s vine to a host of health-inscribed thoughts of expatriate exile exhumed from a life brought up to resume the business of American sign language, the ignorant who of excellence in academic abstraction, in social chutes and ladders of wily self-prophecy, and to look upon the face of a sterling-minded mage, whose throat cast a bitter respite onto the quickening of youth into age. I looked for temptation, to tempt me away in rooms of stolen face.

Detail of Lucan Portrait (Scar Eye) by Leonardo da Vinci

There, in the banquet hall, an uppity boast of townsmen saved of our irreligious in-sight, the movers of the day quell the footstep rebellion with damaging drink and superlative plates. I eye a mash-up of delectable fine-tipped cuisine, and sit, as one of them, unseen, inside. Unnoticed, I wade in the cool waters of the riche divide. The veil of misty superstition lifts at my seamless intervention in the realm of immortal fruits, and I finish my serving with a drool.

Dessert by Willem Claeszoon Heda

I see more. As I reach for a dessert at a nearby table, my conspicuity is urged into the fore, and my hand is re-directed, to return to the shale heart of my incising friendship with the embittering death at hand in the nook of an isolated city, dry with meager helpings from the nostalgic bread of a million savage thoughts of implacably naïve blood.  

_________

In an instantaneous recognition at Earth’s bare wonderment,
The stir of our breath
In the wind and pulse of sweat from the face
At true love’s rhyme
Under clouds, glowing with the luster of sky and an atmospheric rain
Bellowing in the blown heat
A thunderous moisture in the kiss from a Columbian Goddess

excerpt from "Bare Wonderment"

Reflection on "Save the Humans" lecture by Rob Stewart

There are few more mindful of the delicate lucidity of ocean life, and its profound meaning in the interdependent webs of consciousness, subconscious and unconscious education. There are few who emerge from the subconscious depths with such memory, and imbue the unconscious ground with the animate vibrancy of temporal generation as befits the glorious epochal bridge of sea life and its significance for the holistic fate knotted so tightly with human existence that with almost seamless sight, the depths of our own subconscious churn with its equanimous tempests. Such is the mind of documentary filmmaker (Sharkwater), author and speaker, Rob Stewart whose visit to Calgary yesterday to present his new book, "Save The Humans" shone light on the deepest and darkest secrets of the 21st century paradigmatic predicament of all life on Earth.

The Oceanic Subconscious 

Tempests of Human Fate

Learn about his hardworking team of United Conservationists

_________

What wide-eyed mission into the black waters of Atlantic night! My childhood friend, a forgotten son of old Portugal, climbs into an unsteady raft. To what subterranean fortress do we aspire? The growth of waves curls up and over drifting notions of our common presence, floating now in opposite directions, waylaid by the wind-whipped tide and our inability to muster the strength. We separate out over the clouded night, and ink dark sea.

Hero and Leander by Peter Paul Rubens

Aground on concrete, I see glowing through the foggy clime, a bus stop. A rain-swept pier empties in the sallow light. Hurriedly, I rush into the bus, towards the unknown. Highway bound, the clouds shatter and coagulate in an undulating mass of dizzying heights. The gathering storm moves closer. I look out the window, and time desists as hail and thunder rumbles the window. The music in my head quietly plays on. 

_________

A great tormented void rings over the binding salt of my sleepless thoughts
         Called forth into being by the bone-skinned drum of life’s flow,
A drawing
         from
         the
         well,
A sacred heat
         Below the eardrum’s fall to a coarse truth;

                           “We all feel undone by shameful tragedy.”

A distinct forging into the now dizzy percepts of a lingering eye
         Finding beyond the brush stroke predawn –
The blinking heart of the drum impresses the joy of the animal womb,

                           To dream anew

- excerpt from "A Dark Glory"

Vibrant Dream Colours from Water Fasting

Fasting & Dream - Water & Lime cleanse, 7 days

Details: dreams are very realistic, relaxing without unusual, frightening tangents, if I noticed weather, colors or textures in the dream it was always very pristine, a lot of conversation style dreams, where when I haven’t fasted I don’t recall ever having dreams when conversations ever made sense or went anywhere, though conversations in dreams when water fasting was similar to having a conversation in daily life, it wasn’t disjointed or restricting, speech was very flowing, surroundings are extraordinarily vivid and lucid, upon eating again, bad dreams return...

_______

An Iranian friend, steeped in the tragic wisdom of silence, broods in a shadowy corner. His long Sufi beard and uncut hair masks him in an aura of incredulous perfection, looking from stolid eyes at my cowering brother. We are in a room of ghastly hosts, a live auction of sorts, only to entice participants in creative performance. “Create art to reflect your dearest love relationship!” The auctioneer steams with cacophonous temptation. My love stands upon the stage, white and delicate. Throwing myself in a purge of color and form, I choose vermillion, ebony and a touch of cobalt. The canvas thins over a pale, dried grass and carpet springing untamed from the welcoming floor. Without impediment, I stretch a rudimentary sheath of black over the rough medium. Paint filters in between the cracks as I begin to include a light bluish, red-bordered sailboat along the top of the canvas. I draw with unknown talent, creating instantaneous angles and exacting renditions of my sailing ego upon a clashing infinitude of ocean waves. The ebony drips flat with humongous brush strokes into the saturated grass and carpet thread, conveying icy death in the storm clouds beyond. The ship tosses, animate in the innumerable play of dancing strain on the veld of sea and sky. Livid vermillion lies agape near the sun-opened crests, stark, aflame, directing the sail away from the inexorable closing of opaque storm ahead. I embrace my love, unafraid.  

_______

Painting

"Dreams about painting often signify renewal and emotional growth for the dreamer...The painting is symbolic of your intuition and inner realizations." (iDream)

_______

“A beautiful body

gone cold with death,

yet still contained in glad purpose

towards another weary world decay

feeding sacred bushes that smoke & thin in the desert winter

blinded on sandy beaches, hidden beneath a glade & cliff,

as profaned skeletal thunderbirds fly with mouths shut

before a lunar god dreams a song inside another human.”

All so caught up and timed

each finger presses against her hair

and her snoring wink uncovers a madness in spring

bringing together all things in the mystery of continuity

- excerpt from "Repeated Dance of the Fluid Earth"

Lucid Remedies Affects Waking Consciousness

Lucid Dream Tea from Algonquin Tea Company is a wild-crafted sweet gale / bog myrtle. Drink 1 cup, well-steeped before bed.

The tea has the effect of extraordinary stimulation, wherein the mind is active with constancy, which is why the normal state of consciousness carries over beyond the threshold of sleep. Beware, sleep on the tea is not as restful as without.

- testimony of a personal friend

__________ 

In Monterrey, Mexico, I am living in my old place with parents. I was the same age as now, though living with them. It’s funny because my Dad is dead. My brother was around but did not talk, he was just a presence. We had to pick up someone from my old elementary school. As we drove by, with my grandparents in the truck, we saw a big new door on the school. There is a park across from us. As we drove by in the park, we saw lots of birds. They were having a feast of food from the street vendors. There was an owl, crow, peacocks, turkeys and other strange birds. As we passed by the door, a girl shared a corn on the cob with a huge black turkey taller than her. The turkey would bite a few grains and the girl would bite from the outside. She was waiting to be picked up. We went around the corner and parked behind a tricycle. I got out of the car. I walked in the park and chased the birds. There were people there waiting for the kids. The birds got angry and the people ran away. Now the school is empty, all the kids have been picked up. I crossed the street and went in the school. A big patio is caked with mud. A few kids were playing soccer there. Since I was there to walk through the school, I searched for my old classroom without success, the school changed a lot. They had new buildings with big glass windows.

With my cousin, we received some coupons from the newspaper. Mine said “Monterrey” in big, red letters, handwritten as by a child. My cousin had a different piece of paper. I looked at his.

On another night under influence of the tea, I am with a group of people in an isolated cabin in the mountain wilderness. We are besieged by a ravenous pack of wolves. The cabin is invaded completely. All we have to fight back are pillows and straw brooms. 

_________

There is slight chance that the Dream Tea may affect daily waking consciousness, i.e. in the form of recurrent deja-vu as “dream characters” and “dream figments” however in life. In these cases the recurrent manifestations which trigger a dream-life liminal state are in the form of plants and certain characteristic features of people. The following stories are two examples.

In Michoacán, hiking through mountain range. I traveled much these days, walked a lot. On the corner of a road, tall up to the torso of a medium sized person standing with small, orange flowers in the shape of trumpets. Seeing the plant became a catalyst for dream recollection, it was as if the plant had existed purely in dream, though was interestingly present in my waking consciousness.    

If you’re in Mexico, this kind of person sticks out. He was 14, but looked 8. He looked like the main character from the film “The Blue Lagoon”. He was very blonde with curly hair, a strawberry or crystal blond. He liked to dress with a loin cloth and perform fire juggling. I arrived in Palenque and was hanging out with street drummers. Among them there was this kid, playing drums with a girl. I thought she was his mother. Later on, we stayed in the same place close to the ruins in Palenque. He asked me if I could buy gas for him for his fire show. He looked to young. That girl I saw with him wasn’t his mom. I helped him. He started his show on a street crossing. I collected the money. We got money at least to pay the hostel camp site and to get burgers. It was already dark and we were heading back to our place, some cabins near to the pyramids. He told me a bit of his story. He said he was 14, and fled home to look for his brother. His brother was a drum player and hitchhiker. He started telling me incredible stories like traveling to India and practicing mantras. We were hanging around a hippie commune with Hare Krishnas so I wouldn’t believe him. He sung mantras like, “Hare Hare Hare Hare Sham Bo”. I wondered how such a young kid traveled alone. He had his own tent, all by himself. I think he would have liked to travel with me, but I didn’t offer and he didn’t ask. This is a recurring situation with many of my blonde male friends and even my Dad (who was also blonde).

_______

“A struggle to exist.
In any form, taken
whether through ideology or bread
the resonance of the painful universal cry
into an imperfect echo that was never us.”

“In the process we have transformed
and become unrecognizable to ourselves
as the mirror casting our own reflection dirties with our pathetic work
for the sick sighs that last only in the mind after the inescapable is approached
finally
with complete resolve
in the last gasp
before the drop into…”

- excerpt from "Haunted by the lack of breath."