Songs of Ascent for the Exile's Shabbat

Friday Evening, c. 1920 by Isidor Kaufmann

1. When YAHWEH turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream

א:  שִׁיר, הַמַּעֲלוֹת

בְּשׁוּב יְהוָה, אֶת-שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן-- הָיִינוּ, כְּחֹלְמִים.

2. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing

ב:  אָז יִמָּלֵא שְׂחוֹק, פִּינוּ-- וּלְשׁוֹנֵנוּ רִנָּה

אָז, יֹאמְרוּ בַגּוֹיִם-- הִגְדִּיל יְהוָה, לַעֲשׂוֹת עִם-אֵלֶּה. 

"Tehillim Psalms 126" (Hebrew)

________

I remember that hill over Muqattam. The overbearing expanse of city, modernity’s rush cascading over the fold of an unclean mind, burning with hot anger in the deep mud of trivial remorse. “They had a plan?” I ask myself, eyeing the inglorious ruins of the once-worshipped architecture still clinging to the life of popular assembly. 

The race of motorcycles and small vans gargle the steaming froth of smog. All spat murderous into the disappearing rain forming high above the human realm. The deserted outskirts, nude with the pang of an outstretched kin, and I am lost, reaching for high ground in the sand-whipped light. Moonless, my fatigued mind craves for recognition in the atmosphere at hand. I am a lone walker on the side of the road. A bus skids past, slows to a halt and I enter into smiling Arab tongues.

The rage and personified haste, the stone labyrinths, the winding path is lifeless with the cold sweat of his following. A professional runner turns and writhes in the pain of want, instilling in me an incisive turning. The wandering hate fills me with unrivalled curiosity and shame. I know no warmth, but for the hunted muscular knife-rent swallowing of friendship cursed along the highway pathways, intermixed with the foul bitterness and acrid taste of inner city air. 

We fall into a hollow stone, and as two locked in the crude horror of warring greed for a brother’s flesh, the wicked stress of rivalry bleeds into our distraught, nascent sanity and heaves it straight over the edge of common reason, to blood and night.

And in the turn of the People’s Spring, a vision unites my fiery cry for wisdom in the heart of our common ancestral history; humanity astir in the colored, feathered breast. A flight into the Eastern European pasture of stars, grazing in the weathered light of a great-grandmother, still kissing the martyred asp of tradition; a Jewish sprite. The elder ways fire in my unskilled mind an art, performative in the midnight trust with an earlier truth. The performance is tonight.

Wading in the molasses mind of patience for the spiritual will of ideation from the ghosts of the numinous beyond, I struggle with answerless freedom in the sordid now. I ready the ingredients. The wasteful strolls and meandering highs screw our minds into wakeful reason, to, with meticulous care, craft an act of such daring import as to quicken the mind and speak the heart. I make a paste, of turmeric base, with white, weakened broth. I will be a death camp victim, with lightless skin and gaunt hue.

Wasting away in the turmoil of ambient talk, I prepare my body, though with fault besieging me with lost and needed objects fading and reappearing sporadically, as to the rhythm of my anxious pulse as I meditate on the gas chamber. I’ve devised the shower faucets to emit a turmeric spray, the walls an exact replica of the infamous Aushwitz, Lodz, and countless others.

As I watch the clock spell a cruel lateness, as speeding on into the infinite daze of eternal death, I’m unable to hasten and prepare myself before my half-hour performance slot is up. About five minutes before my time’s ended, the door inside the dressing room bursts open to the step of Brazilian carnival dancers and Latin fiesta cooks with big rumps and loud mouths, shouting in a haze of upended happiness, a gorge of playful sight ignites my depth of ancestral reminiscence. The act is over before it’s begun.

________

Late

"To dream that you are late for something represents your fear of change and your anxiety about seizing an opportunity. You may feel unready or unworthy in your current circumstances. You may also be conflicted over decisions about your future." (iDream)

________

the dimly lit cougar
a swan and her minions

playing over the blonde heat
some unknown bass record

feet stung blind,
tough grotesque splurge over the glued racket

...

into a silent dysfunctional glare

breathing alone
holed-in

- excerpt from "sick in a sick society: the holed-in"

Blakean Spires Rise Toward Prehistoric Absolution

Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake

"We are shimmering scales on a snake which flies

 Which flies to the skies

 With a sacred surprise.

 We are feathers in wings

 We are the song which sings

 Of our common dream

 Sacred and sublime

 My breath is your breath

 I Share it with you

 Oh feathered snake

 Awake, awake

 We are ready to BE

 Aware of our divinity"

- excerpt from the feature “Meeting the feathered snake in the Cathedral of Nature” @ Lila.info a fantastic repository of Visionary Art, Contemporary Sacred Art and Outsider Art (permission granted for use)

_________

I read signs, undeniable and in my immediate vision before me. The signs foretell an oncoming fate of humankind with regard to energy resources. The future is a grim façade of a past latching on through the thinly laid dreams of a survivalist upon a bed of bloody nails, a failed magic trick. 

My vision clarifies with the acuity of a fish-eye optic nerve straightening over the bluff of a wide forest hill. The forest seems damaged, almost burnt, with an intense inbound potency of fear and isolation in every direction. 

I am as in the middle of another world, drowned in the trauma of unbridled change, a natural force looms, ever pervading, with another history, another worldview. I seem to move under the low hovering gray of sky when the tantalizing drip of adrenaline stirs in me. 

I feel a wolf near. This wolf seems more ferocious and starved than any I’ve imagined in the world before, this wolf eats human flesh. I move into a patch of dark grove, and with time edge my way off beyond the absolute wilderness of my strange, quiet surroundings. 

Human song echoes across the abandoned suburban neighborhoods. The sounds are of the nature of prayer, chanted and primal. I begin to see smoke rising from a hut made from animal hide and forest wood. 

As I approach, the scene quickly turns into an entirely new mode of experience outside the pale of a direct relationship with the bald face of nature, alone. Human interaction stirs a Medieval predilection. 

As I near the inhabitants of the small family camp, two of my friends soon appear behind me. With swords in hand, we face off with the camp’s inhabitants. My friends are quick to be aggressive and violent, however I seem to be the most nimble with a sword and quickly disarm them so as not to harm the innocent people of the camp. 

There is an air of blind unconcern for any solace in humanity, there is only bare personal need and pack mentality. I saunter off with my friends, who wonder about leaving me behind based on my insubordination, then to their ultimate liking accept me as one of the most skilled in the group. We walk through a completely emptied, silent suburban neighborhood. Once affluent, the residents have long since abandoned this obsolete way of life.    

_______

An outside view 

abundant hovels of eastern North America

"speak!

of a history that cowers with tragic hesitation

in a sick thirst for music

to transform the silent yawning of a near-frozen despair."

On the brink of waterless hours,

the people will their fasting into the deep, 

alone night of elderly decay.

Before the horizon, 

hill dwellers form their beliefs

by the norms of a faraway country.

Inside their habitations,

a strong light pulls warped wooden walls

and shrill metallic roofs

into sporadic gusts

Winds brew utter derangement

before the awe of a clear restitution.

- beginning excerpt from "A Fix in the Mourning"