Goethe and the Existential Life of Modernity

Ginko Biloba, a poem by Goethe

Who are ye that thus rudely banish slumber from my eyes? What mean these vague and insolent glances? Why this fearful procession? With what dream of horror come ye to delude my half awakened soul? Goethe's Egmont, Opening lines of Act V. Scene IV. 

A play about liberty under the thumb of oppression, my preliminary inkling about the Egmont drama is that it forecasts the oppressive momentum that lives within, and supports, heroic independence. I have been contemplating the uniquely liberating present that I experience with my love. American and Vietnamese, we are from two countries whose people, not long ago, brutally killed each other. I wonder sometimes about our extended family relations. How is it possible that the same blood now joined today by love, once was spilt by hatred. As Goethe writes in the poem illustrated above, "Is it but one being single / Which as same itself divides? / Are there two which choose to mingle / So that one each other hides?"

Read my Letter to the Editor "Embracing Diversity" on BlackCoffeePoet 

& See a Collaborative Interview & Essay "Busking and Creative Ecology" by Vi An and myself on In Stereo Press

Previous Post on Goethe: To Dream in Red is to Uncover the Veil of Consciousness

________

I sat under the opaque cloudy open. A dark rain hovered in the misty atmosphere. The pressures of a battered mind fill my eyes with a salivating remorse. I've since exiled myself from a gathering in my city's core. Restless, I fill my mind with blank unease, ass wedged against the wintry pavement of a curb. This area is one of neglect and rage.

Street in Venice by John Singer Sargent

Checking my phone, I have a text. I'm to be on CBC Radio. A talk show host tells me my words are acid and wry. I'm paid. We've settled. The night lingers. I wade in thoughts of a lonely walk. I kill time, staring into the light of my phone. What's it come to? What's the noise? Why do I do this? After raising the question, I feel light enough to carry on. I stand up, and walk. I am a question.

_________

"Falling as a failed lilting feather from a broken wing

Clinging to the unforgiving cold mechanical dawn

Still dreaming an entire civilization

And how illusory, how ultimately disillusioned I am by my youth

Drained of all wicked savagery and raw earth

Into a vegetable gladness

Thawing next to a lone rock

Cracked by a lightning strike from the changeless ice age broth of sky

Almost infinitely long ago, and now rinsed, overly purified by the fresh rains

...

Fathers and mothers in my cultural upbringing
The writers, artists and musicians
Spouting intelligent insanity

From within forms called the book, record, image
All a lie before the transcendent spontaneity of creation from newfound inspiration
To be and do what feels harmonious and complete
...

Finger-pointing to stars and storm clouds
Washing away mud with a healing presence,
A profound humbling that presents power and at once feigns innocence

In departing from all with humility
Yet a fearless flesh-traded mastery over the air,
Stares eyeless into the stoned intuitive rendering"

excerpts from "Contemplation's Itch"

Sleep-Talk of the Modern Writer: A Joycean Saga, Part II

James Joyce, textorized with an excerpt from Ulysses by Maxf 

“Oliver St. John Gogarty noted that the typical modern writer was doomed to go on talking to himself but that it was left for James Joyce to go one step further and to talk to himself in his sleep in Finnegans Wake.”

From Charles Reznikoff Bio on Poetry Foundation 

Internet, technology, modernity, and history, the Joycean nightmare, the daily dream of the silenced voice, speaking in thought, imagining a placeless space of mind, the code of subjective emergency. I lay half-awake, surfing the viral webs of unreason in my sunless haunt, of trivial whereabouts and soundless frequency. An internal vibration wakes me into another dream of subconscious sleep, the inactive pause of breath. In the information age, for the modern writer, free speech is a painless bubble of thirst. My words are a mere spidery sleep-talk, spinning the collective web on and on, to perchance catch the insect eyes of innumerable minds, insights unseen, and only felt, as the nerve of a quiver.

See related post: A Joycean Saga of Psyche, Muse of Endless Night

_________

Before I went to prison I sat around a family circle. My grandfather was in his prime and all of his siblings were alive. That was the last time he put on his sailor cap. 

Portrait of a Sailor by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

A new fish stinks straight out of water. These metal bars are hot with memory. I clean past my fresh environment. There is a consensus of suicide and the death of life. I steal a look through my most haunted imagination, and it’s real. A shark-toothed man with pomade-drip hair and an orange shirt draws his own jaw. A thin, black-haired youth pierces his erect member into a cellmate. Even if I were passing straight through this corridor, it would be hell, and this is my new home. 

Prisoners Exercising by Vincent Van Gogh

I’ve returned to my grandparent’s abode. He’s dead. I wake in the middle of the night. The house is empty. I have never seen it empty in my whole life, ever. What am I doing here? The only presence is the lightless noise of my empty past.  

__________

"A secret curing,

Brewing twilight

In the motionless loss of our human presence

From the awaited future, yet eternal sound

In patient happiness breeds the contented need to produce

Chirps

To entice the sickness of pride to leave with day and unite mind

With a grateful stare into the mind’s ending"

excerpt from "City Birds"

Reflection on "Mary's Near Death Experience" solo theatre by Jamie Tea

Photo: Performer Jamie Tea. Photo by: Tim Nguyen/Citrus Photography.

Jamie Tea Tognazzini's solo show, "Mary's Near Death Experience" at soulOcentric had me laughing from start to finish. The performance was hilariously charming and impacted me on so many levels. Firstly, the show had many references to concern and love for the ocean, which from my previous post "Reflection on 'Save the Humans' lecture by Rob Stewart" one can see is an extremely pertinent and worthwhile issue to raise in all forms and contexts in the public eye.

Jamie Tea enlightened that perspective through a great bravura of comic timing and voice acting which grabbed the audience on a journey into the space age, complete with the naivety of a southern-belle with a knack for religious experiences and a jaded Coney Island street worker. The shapeshifting ventures were spurred on by the dream of a "cosmic wonder-fish" which led Mary to the Moon, to admire spacescapes and woo the audience's imagination with a subtly refreshing candour.

I've known Jamie Tea from her work with Green Fools Theatre, during their Outer Space-themed 2011 Halloween Howl show. It seemed almost as if Miss Tea had projected her character from that previous show and placed her unique acting genius front and centre.

Stay tuned for Green Fools Theatre this Halloween!

_________

Oh! I know that recurrent clarity, the open water: the blue ocean when calm. They say a oceanographic project recently cleared a magnificent coral shallow, with its cerulean majesty, awakening the surface of conscious freedom from the lowest of depths, the inertial core, to the highest of realms above in the unspoken silent space of brilliant sky. 

Mediterranean by Nikolay Dubovskoy Sredizemnoye

Unafraid, I swim. Sharks are a passing memory, and fish and dolphin happily glide atop the water with a bounteous air, showing their fins with the gentility of a human smile. The water is cool, refreshing, and I swim eagerly, immersed in its healing, maternal body. 

_________

Our modern lives run clean through this cursed river

Our blood dirties, streaming from the porous core
These are wounded oceans.
We sink, while the light of the world floats amiably to the surface
Belly up.

- excerpt from "Belly Up"

The Achuar Awaken the Modern Dreamer

Achuar Chief Peas Peas Ayui visited my city this month. He came to stand before the CEO of a company destroying his homeland, poisoning his children, and tearing from the riverine soils our one community of all Earthly life, the very biodiversity of the Amazon: OUR LUNGS.

Through Pachamama Alliance

The Pachamama Alliance noted that the Achuar have a "Self-Sufficient Dream Culture" who, "In all aspects of their culture reflect a spirituality oriented around dreams and visions. The Achuar have many ancient, and refined rituals to access dreams and integrate them into daily life." (source)


Based on a travel account into Achuar territory, we may learn more about the importance of dreaming:


For Information on the Achuar, Oil "Development" and the Perils of the Modern Dream
Go To AMAZONWATCH

The "Extinct" Released!

While submerged in moments dreaming, through the night, past dawn without heed to sleep, my wife pieces together a spellbinding gorgeous array of color and texture through rhythmic sound, composed with originality sparked by intuitive improvised sense awareness on midi keyboard, blank canvas of creative recognition in tune with her virtuostic Zheng spectacle woven seamlessly within the elementary modern electronica and Asiatic-influenced sonic currents streaming through her own resonance in ancient to modern forms of music.

Bask in the brilliance of "Extinct" Vi An's follow-up electronic album after "Endangered"

http://vian.bandcamp.com/album/extinct