Taoist Offerings in the Hall of Dreams

Kannon in YUMEDONO (Hall of Dreams) by Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko 

Summer grasses /
 all that remains /
 of soldiers dreams.

Basho interpretation by Lucien Stryck

Kannon is the Goddess of Compassion. Her Chinese name is Kuan Yin, and in Sanskrit, Avalokitesvara. A statue of the Kuan Yin stands, similarly as pictured above, in my apartment. My wife, a Taoist-Buddhist, cares for the sculpture with a love beyond regard for high art. Standing behind an attendant bodhisattva, the Kuan Yin is a living recipient of our most momentary aspirations and our immanent longings, as they rise and fall into the sky of the figured form with our sound, breath, movement and speech. With a physical offering, the life of the seemingly inanimate sculpture gives way to immortal reckoning. The statue has received such offerings as the favourite pleasures of my late grandfather (a can of sardines and a cigarette), as well as my Shakuhachi breathings. 

__________

I see my wife, long braided hair, in full red dress, dimmed by the party ambiance, she wails on her mother-of-pearl Egyptian doumbek, with the percussive force of a musical heart, true bravura of heartened artistry. 

Two Drummer Girl by Isaac Israels 

As I wade into a kitchen room, I feel the presence of sheer evil at my side. And looking down, blood pours delicately from a soft wound. The ghost of death blinds my nerves as my eyes fog with principal madness, looking at the mean-faced ignorant sex-fiend of my abusive past. 

Sitting young woman in Dutch Kitchen by Henrik Nordenberg

That shared abuse, culminates in a shot, straight through the gut, though strangely a painless death as the water of my eyes bleeds my vision into an all too wakeful death.        

__________

Boiled threat of another animal’s blood

Given over to the insect mind,

A natural reason, the rational cycle

Filling 0’s with my precious un-devoured anchor

That holds human bread to the sand of the unfed

Screaming over shopping carts, cringing with nicotine blinks

...

Ruined men and women whose hearts run dry

Like the rivers that once fed their ancestral lungs,

Filled with the mythic bird

And they rise from the ashes of Hindu lore

In the European brain,

A tell-tale crime, getting skinny in between

...

In exchanging monetary behaviorisms

In the psychic deep of abundant perceptions

Closed doors sink into the undertow’s warning

excerpts from "Bless the failed pilgrim's march"

India's First Poet Sees Rama's Dream Journey

Ramayana by Prashanthprao

"Now a dream which is terrible, causing the hairs to stand erect for the destruction of ogres and for the welfare of Her husband, has been seen by me."

"Of what kind is this dream seen by you. Tell us". Listening to this utterance that came forth from the mouths of those ogresses, Trijata spoke at that time this word relating to the dream.

"Now it has been seen by me in the dream that Seetha also wearing white clothes was sitting on a white mountain surrounded by the ocean."

"Thereafter it has been seen by me that Seetha with eyes like lotuses has risen up from the lap of Her husband and gently touched the Moon and the Sun with Her hand."

"Rama with strength equalling that of Lord Vishnu, born in Raghu's dynasty together with brother Lakshmana and with Seetha has been seen by me thus in the dream."

"In that dream the ogre Kumbhakarna has been seen thus by me. All Ravana's sons have been seen to be sprinkled with oil."

"An assembly also of ogres drinking oil and wearing red garlands, with red clothes, with the sound of songs and musical instruments has been seen by me."

"Which woman while being sorrowful, such type of dream has been seen, that woman being released from various sorrows, will get unsurpassed pleasure."

"I am seeing Seetha coming near accomplishment of motive. I also see the destruction of Ravana also and victory of Rama coming near."

- excerpts from Valmiki Ramayana, Book V: Sundara Kanda [Book of Beauty], Sarga [Chapter] 27

"The main book of reference for dream – interpretation is Charaka-samhita by Charaka, part of which is supposed to be based on Valmiki Ramayana" writes Jayasree

Read this fascinating article on Hinduism and Dreaming

_________

Private museum screening: Amazon Tobacco Memories. A fellow artist, a sculptor of all things spirit, places his Kali – Uma papier-mâché work on a cabinet in a whitewashed room. The black fire spits with discerning ash, impeded by the radiance of the all-mother’s gaze. I am impressed by the artist’s visionary innocence, conveying a child-like eye for the Hindu cosmology, expressed as a Faustian drama of Dadaist cultural syntax. And the screening begins. 

The dark howling jungle cackled and hooted in the avian-simian craze, a sonic insanity swept through my over-civilized musical palate as the humid tension raised sky high in the Amazonian night. The river vessel, motionless across from an isolated village of thirty native inhabitants, I smoked a Peruvian cigarette with a quiet, philosophic friend. In a moment of uninvited silence, a hand perked up from the lower level through a handrail, offering us a leftover packet of smokes. We grabbed them, thoughtless and looked at one another. Returning the steaming laughter of the sleepless rainforest, we stained the lungs of the earth with anxious conversation and latent abandon. 

Later that night the clear skies illuminated my mind with obsolescent memory, the archaic wisdom of unpolluted climactic earth-born advancement reflected in the translucent universe, wherein my eyes sank as a body of thunder into the dank rainforest moat, encircling the mother of the universe, freeing the reptilian scale from the mammalian chord, giving voice to the source sprung with Martian light. 

________

Sculpture

"If your dream featured sculptures, it is a warning to pay more attention to your own personal affairs and less to those of others." (iDream)

Movie Theatre

"If you dream of being in a movie theatre, you are attempting to protect yourself from your emotions or actions." (iDream)

Tobacco

"To smoke tobacco, denotes amiable friendships." (iDream)

________

the always unborn

Kuan Yin companion

breathless nerve

lying, sweat dream,

figure of local poverty,

the sleeping wretch,

half-haggard with princely sexdom

wilderness of mindplay

needing rough deranged feeling,

entranced idiocy

blank eyes

pouring into belief,

experience for greater hilarity,

and necessity bred from popular hysteria

or psychic discomfort

in the open field

laughing out

the distressed boredom

to desire comic failure

in the moment's strength

aware

for newfound rich seeing

that once led animals into the evolutionary mold

senseless through plant networks

supporting with the medicinal love of creation

softly growing inside the mammalian egg

with lonesome prowess

over the angry female

war drama untold

over millennia

of gross mourning

in the struggle for simple pride

or earnest life,

never acknowledging the ageless

being of each seed

that lives.

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