Create You: Fearless Artistry and Creative Identity

"I began to dream heavily, violently, every night, and then I learned how to wake up…" 

"Consciously or unconsciously, all writers employ the dream, even when they’re not surrealists. The waking mind, you see, is the least serviceable in the arts. In the process of writing one is struggling to bring out what is unknown to himself. To put down merely what one is conscious of means nothing, really, gets one nowhere." 

Henry Miller 

Creation is life. More, the incipience of creation is the life of the creator. The life of the artist is bound to their creation, in the same way that a mammal survives on each breath of fresh air. As long as the air is fresh, the artist will continue to create, and as long as the authentic substance of heart issues from the core of the artist's own vision, the arist-seer will align and harmonize with all of creation. 

To forego a path without heart is acceptable. The great mystical physicist of our age, Fritjof Capra, began his famed text, The Tao of Physics, with that realization. Yet, on the path of heart, a different narrative runs its course. To remain true to oneself is to hold fast to the consciousness of one's life source as not merely the beginning precepts of one's physical subsistence, but of the visionary path onto which one is led through to the heights of meaning and becoming. 

The proud artists will realize their vision in the instant of a moment, at simply being the processional experience of creation, the ever-beating heart of co-unity with individuality and universality on Earth. To not over-think is the key to strengthen the creative momentum, reminds Henry Miller, the American author with a self-professed Chinese ascetic's nature. 

So, in holding fast, the artist and author of self-creation, is near-shattered, sensitized by the flood of the fleeting that files down the materialism and consumerism of an all-pervasive cultural fear, to belittle the uncultivated mind to ignorant non-being and blind negativity. In this way, the inner sanctum from where the creativity of an artist is strengthened by the water-like ability to be vulnerable, naked, raw and emotive in a full and unbridled formless truth. 

To all artists, and to the Self, I call on you to be strong, and to claim the ideas and visions and dreams in your mind and heart and being as you would claim your rightful place on Earth. For that creativity, and the perfect imagination of its fruition in your life, is your truth, your heart, your mind, your being, your soul, your foundation, your meaning, and all your own, it is you, your nature, your life, all yours, be it and be proud. 

Everyone, as with one mind and one heart, is capable of becoming sensitive to the expression of your truth as an unheard knowledge that only you possess and that is invaluable, necessary in its tragedy, absolute in its humour, refined in its judgment, authoritative in its experience, wild in its reason, cautious in its aspiring, and pure in its love. Create you. 

___________

Around this circle danced the flame of eternity. In the green spark licked the tongue of heaven. Spring in the Jungle bloomed with effervescent majesty among the ruined foundations of another remote, human wasteland paradise. The veils of fame and belonging passed like a soothing tide, recoiling in the abyss of oceanic depth. We smoked the herb of forgetfulness, harmony and love. 

Ernst Haeckel's 1905 Wanderbilder (Travel Pictures)

The smoke coiled around our lazing necks, floundering amid the slow-moving river, her brown body motioned like a heavy emotion. One among us, an artist of metal and flowers spoke up as paper and marijuana stung our eyes, blinded by the greedy moment, a fleeting light. "Native community leaders announced their wish to use our space. They will hold facilitations, meetings and workshops on the militarization of the Indian people; their War." 

Coolies on the Road near Kalicut, Malabar by Edward Lear

A shade lifted and a heaviness shrank as our hearts wept and our minds faltered along the brink. She, the speaker, high as the azure, fled to the banks, to swim and cleanse in thoughtful reflection. She swung on a low-hanging vine, falling into the naked river, dressed still in paltry coverings, now a resident of the Amazon for well over a decade. Her eyes spoke of what her tongue could not shake. 

Young hunter by Ferdinand Keller

They arrived, and we vacated the area, as a show of respect. And one day, on the top floor, whereon we store our arts, with wood canvases lain and strewn, I saw her. She was not Native. She was a woman of the Old Country. Her heart was cold as a perennial shadow. Her moonlit face eyed me with an inhuman glare, and her blood then boiled, raising her hair, intoning a voice as harsh and ghastly as the screaming bite of a bullet ant. 

14 abril by Yolanda Palomo del Castillo

I ran. And then falling with desperation in the rushing river, we were swept along. In the instant of our near-death, she lunged towards my angular body, stretched out above the surface, in full display of my superior experience on these riverine lands. I watched as the infamous cult leader, impostor of the Cocama ethnic struggle was buried in the open jaw of the current, as her bones cracked in the turbulent stream. Awash, I lay at the edge of reason. 

Giant tree in Brazil's tropical forest by Johann Moritz Rugendas

Then, I saw the body. The tattooed flesh, gouged and lacerated. Two arrows pierced the man's underside, widening a deep, mortal wound. With bowels distended, his blood having since let almost completely of his sunken frame, I cried, lowered to the wet jungle floor, bleary-eyed. Not only had his own turned on him, but the man also suffered bullets. Scarred and mutilated, his body is the story of his people, dead to the world, brutalized and beaten down by the perpetrators of human trust, by invaders and blood alike. 

_________

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

Spiritual Murder of the Mythopoetic Role

Fuxi and Nuwa by Anonymous

"Mythopoeisis is the act of shaping a myth into a new form, of making it anew; now I believe each of us does this poetic act daily, only we are not conscious of it, but myths, if alive, are always being renegotiated; we cosign them once more each day we wake up and go about our lives; but the action is unconscious. Poetry makes these processes conscious."

"...the individual psyche cannot, much as often it would like to, to be separated from the collective. Understanding the archetypal nature of our waking life and of our dream life would go a long way to revealing this truth."

- Dennis P. Slattery, from an Interview with Archetype in Action

________

“I have never traveled through West Africa! I have only seen East Africa.” I shout to the unconcerned on a bus through mud flats on the outskirts of town in Ghana. “It’s more industrialized here.” Suburban homes, colorful and well-roofed lie interspersed atop the unstable ground. Nothing grows here.

The plains shake off their sanded winds out onto a horizon as flat and majestic as any under a dim gorge of sky above. We approach an underprivileged village. The beams of their homes show with skeletal fright, a ghost of a shelter buries the inhabitants under a schema of incongruous monetary divisiveness. I am let out here with a group of excitable travelers. After a few bitter hours gazing into the masked poverty, the rest saunter off, straight into the shale-thin horizon, across the plain desert, leaving me behind to my shameful enjoyment.

The first unusual occurrence I notice is an old man, an elder, conducting witchcraft rites from a burlap, animal hid covered hut, half-emerging from a height of wires in the modern town center. He presses his hand up against a carved, convex piece of bone and wood overhead, pressed into the ceiling of his dusty keep. With that, the town comes alive. Animate devotion is surpassed unto grandiose might through communal dance, a powerful music enticing all to couple and find happiness in group intercommunication through a thankful greeting of sprites.

Then, chaos breaks loose from the fire. I disentangle the group of its emotional stability. I use a dull knife, a metal shard from their central structure. Cutting off hands and brazenly ambushing in an intoxicated insanity, bloodthirsty, I drive the community from their healthy nest. Only a few bodies remain, hanging onto life with the remaining ligaments and tendons still connecting their pulse, vibrating with accepted fate, a spiritual murder.

I flee. Following what I had learned in the village, I begin to collect seeds in the wilderness, these are jujus of flight. I need a new identity. I received wind of another African meeting, in the next town. Before I can get there, the Red Cross identifies me, soon to be incarcerated, deadened with madness I swallow the seeds. My flesh speaks of me, it says, “I am guilty.”

________

Murder

"If you commit murder, it signifies that you are engaging in some dishonourable adventure, which will leave a stigma upon your name...If you have a dream of murdering another, this is a warning that you must keep in control of your temper and emotions at all times and not get enraged to the point of murderous intent...You may also have some repressed anger at yourself or at others." (iDream)

________

clockwork porridge

clockwork porridge
spread over an island tongue
marauding, blasphemous
across seven oceans

timely
with education's pandemic drug:
the book

compromising home speech
on the First People's sand-quipped names
harboring love in their own unique hearts
with a history untold,
forgotten and enslaved to foreign grammar
to safekeep continued histories
of colonial struggle
in the vault of young minds
playing sound asleep
in the therapeutic mud
of their own beautiful creation.

March 7, 2011

Chinatown Calgary

Concave Jungle and the Murder of Christ

A Thicket of Deer at the Stream of Plaisir-Fontaine

I have a body running through pure jungle, a light body, toned and fair, the jungle is thick, bright and full of movement, shadows begin to appear, the jungle thickness becomes bent over to obscure holes and open spaces leading not to light but to darkness, the structure of the environment becomes more and more concave, threateningly stern with an almost mechanistic tinge, I can not see myself nor any movement and the first shaft of metal appears replacing the sunlit openings with industry, next I am driving a convertible down route 6 in Massachusetts, USA, I am instead a thin blonde lady, I get to the Quaker church across from the motel and enter, the silvery gray light fills the antique wooden house of worship, there is a sculpture of the wounded Jesus lying on a table, I murder him, stabbing into his wound, and get away, the police are out looking for who murdered the man, especially the reverend, however no one can find me, except my own self

Sun, May 8, 2011