Fall of the Artist in Transformation: The Moon at Dawn Exhibit

Full Moons and Dawn's Crepescules

"Do we break rules all the time? All the time. Do you stretch the rules, break the rules, all the time, and in the theatre in particular...It's the difference between working against the world we don't want and deciding to work towards the world we do want." David Diamond, Corporations in our Heads: Theatre for Living Tours New Production to Calgary

Two Octobers ago, when the seasonal round turned, the leaves of many pages filled with the love of language. Foresight and impermanence intoned a name: SoJournal. After the first year, this weblog had reached 10,000 lucid pairs of eyes, and now one year later, the lucidity has tripled in the pupils of innumerable dreamers; thousands and thousands of imaginations sparked, eyes opened and minds revealed as the clear movement of subtle knowledge - that supernatural creativity embedded deeply within, slightly beneath the folds of memory, as the enchantment of rain through the glass of consciousness, falling with near-silence, full of potent harmony, of life and renewal. The seasonal cycle returned. 

And so, as I began the creative journey of SoJournal with Cyclical Wordplay - a visual and literary purging from the spiritual gut of language - I now celebrate year two of this virtual space with the sixth artwork representing the collection, Full Moons and Dawn's Crepescules, in a seven-series cycle of visual, literary and musical collections/exhibits/movements. The elaboration of dawning abstraction unveiled as the phases of a moon, coloured as with the foliage of a cosmic fall from space into the mind of humankind; as formed of ethereal dream creations engulfing and erupting with the pangs of a voracious heart. 

So, the above quote is in reference to an assertion from David Diamond's fascinating book, "Theatre for Living" that in order for art to be transformational it must break the rules. In dreaming, we break the rules of identity. Everything is us - and yet we are curiously not - somehow bizarrely connected with the inner world of all that dwell in the subconscious netherworld of Spirit. In my art (visual, literary and musical), I am inclined toward the same effect. Dissolving boundaries is the practice, and the technique is the creation of art that ascends to transcendent heights of unity with the source of creative energy - the instinctual centre, before reason, simply to the joy, wonder and love of creation. 

In, the artwork, Full Moons and Dawn's Crepescules, look through the wintry window light into a charged, otherworldly space where the boundaries of inner and outer dissolve, where the moon cycles around and within our perspective, where we can look through and into a realm of potential, where harmony is interpretive and the veil of beauty and truth is lifted to reveal the nude face of raw creation. As with Present Sound, Silent Space, there is an accompanying collection of written works. For now, read on, through earlier altered states of visual writing below, and into the mergence of Sketches of Style in the form of sound. 

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Electro-Acoustic Improvisations

Cyclical Wordplay

Evocations: Cyclical Wordplay

Exotic Settlers

Evocations: Exotic Settlers

district.Columbia

Evocations: district.Columbia

Double-Mirror: Truths of district.Columbia

Sketches of Style

Present Sound, Silent Space

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Sketches of Style is the fourth album in a seven-work cycle of art, writing and music. Experimental, ambient, improvisations through an eclectic blend of world instruments (darbuka, frame drums, xaphoon, shakuhachi) synchronize together with original electronic beat loops conceived on very basic virtual drum pads.

The addition of electronic beats offers a new entrance into sound art that differs from the three albums preceding in this cycle of seven works. Three supporting and leading instrumental tracks are co-intoned together with voicing abstract, improvisational language - as in selections from the written form of Sketches of Style.

Firstly, the bed track of original electronic beats, under the name "Grey Sky Jump" figures well into a mood of autumnal ambience. The orchestration of world percussion added to the repetitive regularity moves the listener through a hypnotic, ambient xaphoon melody. The vocalization, abstract and experimental, gives way to a light, almost humorous, vibration of the incipient curiosity that sparks prior to the experience of absolute wonder, and finally, open-form astonishment at hearing the raw flood of creative instinct that pours boundlessly through every last aspect of our innumerable senses of visceral and noetic perception. 

Visions of Outer Conflict is a five-poem chapbook opening and setting the stage for the Sketches of Style collection with explorative extroversions of the spiralling mind. Through stories of perception into the paradigmatic movement of humankind through themes of diaspora and extinction, the chapbook then ends with Cajoled Spine-Tap, which alludes to a surgical procedure whereby the spine is alleviated of pressure to relieve a debilitating bodily experience. The aspiration is for the chapbook to have a spiritually resonant effect as the procedure, effectively allowing a clarity and relief from the pressures of normalized thought and predictable emotion.  

Visions of Outer Conflict

Hatsuyume of Peace: First Dream of a New Creative Paradigm

"Hatsuyume (初夢) is the Japanese word for the first dream had in the new year. Traditionally, the contents of the dream would foretell the luck of the dreamer in the ensuing year. In Japan, the night of December 31 was often passed without sleeping, thus the hatsuyume was often the dream seen the night of January 1. This explains why January 2 (the day after the night of the "first dream") is known as Hatsuyume in the traditional Japanese calendar." [Wikipedia]

As in English, the word for dream in Japanese (yume) means both deep aspiration and unconscious visualization. The significance of the post above signals the beginning of an end; the nature of originality. The nuclear age is a sure sign of the paradigm shift in human life on Earth. Until every nuclear arsenal is disarmed and abolished, we are living in an age of mass oppression, global misinformation, and unyielding aggression. 

Over 2000 nuclear weapons have been detonated since the first two that ended World War II.   

And so, on a much smaller scale, I am beginning to transition into a new phase. SoJourn(al) has seen unprecedented readership in the last month, with over 4000+ views, especially attributed to  growing international interest for the post, Dream and Love. 

I will be accepting contributions/submissions from readers, writers, artists, and dreamers of all kinds while I post once a week instead of once every two days, beginning with a professional feature ghost-writer. Meanwhile, I will be republishing more from my experimental writing collection, featuring original musical soundscapes by the Dream Author (also a regularly performing world fusion musician), together with the exhibition of new manuscript artworks to complete the seven-cycle series of manuscript art and experimental writing. 

At the same time, I will be creating another site to support a more singly-dedicated, long-term creative non-fiction writing project. My Hatsuyume, my first dream of the new year, or new cycle of seasonal life on SoJourn(al) is to continue to grow creatively, and to welcome all who are interested to collaborate, connect and unite.

In Solidarity, Peace & LOVE

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In continuity with the previous wellspring of visual stimuli, the photographic wavelength of colour turns the mind in an outpouring rush, a quaking truth of Earth on a course of unforeseen exploratory, after all, we are visual creatures 

River Styx Canadiana by RK

On the Other Side by RK

Water-and-Sky Medium by RK

A Way Through by RK

Take The One Less Traveled by RK

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This smile, these eyes…
Not because it’s you that I enjoy…
Nor your surroundings, and our place in them together…

I smile for what’s inside…
The poetries and open-ended music of Love…
...

Loosening the human rope around the oceanic neck…
The great ring of fire…
Lassoed in spring by the Albertan rains…
Toasting to hot chocolate whispers over Mexican breasts…
Sweetened by the oily touch of American tongues…
Piercing the used flesh of an imperfect dream…
...

In Rusty Kjarvik and his chess logic…
Pinching the Grandfather reality…
In the light of Persian mystical nights…
...

My instinct’s crying bold in the proud deep of North American continental strife…
To transcend the borders of national glory and reach the great peak…
Budding with growing concentration camp Israeli trees…
A miracle as grand as the celebrated synagogue of ancestral lies…
Bearing down hard on the smoky aftermath of the beaten Greeks…
Chained to their swollen shields…
Engraved as the shell of Turtle Island…
Beaming with foresight into the sweeping ancient European imagination…
...

Restitution, despised yet somehow completing our entrenched need…
To be and play forward in the shapeless deep…
The unceasing downpour…
And slow drizzling food of creativity…
To give our most valued offering…
To the smallest most insignificant pull…
Which finds our being necessary…
And in that moment die…
Unafraid to the dream inside…

excerpts from "Why, Autopoietic Eternity!"

The Original Meaning of Apocalypse

Apocalypse is originally from the Greek apocálypsis meaning "a disclosure of knowledge, hidden from humanity in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation" (source). Let today be a reminder that there is only one present, and all dreams, fantasies, prophecies and revelations ultimately bring us back to where we are in the here and now. Let us remember that today is always the first and last day. May the renewal of the seasons awaken our senses to the natural light of continuity and the breath of the living voice saying, "it's never too late to live for today." 

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There he is. I introduce him. Aboriginal poet of the year they say, and the reception is warm. Mythologists and Dreamers convene for the day, to listen to his heart beat to the rhythm of all present to listen. His words ring true, clean and sound through the temple of the mind.

Homage to a poet by Giorgione

I cavort through the crowd. Childhood friends move like Romany artists, musicians, gamblers and comics in their smiling delight. The air is communal and warm. Friendships seep through our pores with a nourishing embrace of eyes.

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No broken gourd of misinformation,
            Cracked on the headless spine of an open carcass
                        Breeding divine fungi in the tawny mist,
                                    A tempting kiss stolen across the breath
Of a warring ocean disengaged from its godly host

...
Anger in the tempest of religious man,
                        A cork-bottled nightmare
Emerging suddenly from the abyss,
Encouraging the lion’s stare
            To recede from tropical gore
                        And inculcate the masses
                                    Into a final tour
...

 Impressing the abstract wonder of the fearless
                                    And preparing a light
                                                For here

excerpts from "find Inspiration!"