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
Showing posts with label man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label man. Show all posts

Saturday, 3 November 2012

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"

Saturday, 11 August 2012

Deathly Assumption of the Premodern Morpheus

Morpheus by Jean-Bernard Restout
The God, uneasy 'till he slept again,
Resolv'd at once to rid himself of pain;
And, tho' against his custom, call'd aloud,
Exciting Morpheus from the sleepy crowd:
Morpheus, of all his numerous train, express'd
The shape of man, and imitated best;
The walk, the words, the gesture could supply,
The habit mimick, and the mein bely;
Plays well, but all his action is confin'd,
Extending not beyond our human kind.

From Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XI (Source

Death and sleep, the fading plea of waking form, dissipating under the thin sheets of human comfort, forlorn, the pain of reality is a realization, that death's blood stains the dying hand. 
________
The creaking wood of the log cabin breeds an authentic woodsy order. Inklings and whisperings from the unheard Northern ecology brew spindly mycelium waves into the tragic human desolation, a stolid break from the bitter taste of city life. 

An original inhabitant, with less design for the transitory fading of desire, hides in groves and pains with the aftermath of winter in this warming escape. Unintentional, with drab face, his emotive instances are bare with unknowable sorrow. The rain burns over the frayed wick of lightless trunks under the whistling canopy. 

He has the air of a murderer, more a serial killer. Thin and over-confident, he swaggers into a common room, his flesh woven in knots, gnarled eyes penetrate the pointed vulnerability of my female companion. The tense noose of our isolation bespeaks unforeseen warning. One night, he feeds.

Gathering my things, a fright of blearing raw insanity, my computers, my bags, the endless compartments within compartments filled with this or that, yet my Love is slaughtered in the white heat of this wooden homicidal mystery. I hear his steps and free myself from the burden of automobile and everything I own, possessing only the random trappings of a turning mind. 

I fall, retching in a golden mud, into a hole of wonder, the driven names sputter and churn in this earthen stomach, heaving and ingesting my whereabouts in a timetable of eternity. Blinking water, dripping in the metallic soil, spurns an awakening as I peer into the soft light of the tunnelling ahead, beckoning me to further escape. The wishy-washy sounds pander in my mind with noxious will. 

A funnel of heat presses its ugly scent into my eyes, as I sink ever deeper through a new hole, fainting with near-death experience, dropped beside a bus. Eagerly, a host of newcomers, young as myself, board the bus with all their things. Stupefied, lost faces daydream an unsayable nightmare, their hollow eyes mirror my own mourning. We’re off to Egypt, to face the sun of the age. 
_______
Murder
"To see murder committed in your dreams, foretells much sorrow arising from the misdeeds of others. Affair will assume dullness. Violent deaths will come under your notice...If you are the eyewitness to a murder this is also a warning, but, one that is alerting you to possible changes in your life that you will not like unless you practice self control and not expect others to order the situation for you." (iDream)
_______
roaming to sacrifice

memories
and the aftermath of a wordless crisis,
vagaries of mind bound by geographic boom
into the obscured continental pole,
driven
estranged to unknown homes,
sacrificed to roaming