How to Listen to the Land: Raincoast Music and the Eye's Awakening

"Right now is the time when we wake up and start paying attention to what we are actually doing. I've always said we can do whatever we want. The question is what do we want to do. And we need a new definition of progress, you know, toward listening to scientists, and toward elegance and beauty. And so we have to get our philosophy right. What way do we want to go forward? And we need a critical mass of people who care deeply in their hearts about nature." Robert Bateman, Canadian artist from the B.C. coast sponsored by Raincoast Conservation Foundation for an Oil-Free Coast

This past weekend, I headed a block over from my apartment to grab my usual afternoon matcha. As I swung my head around to grab a coffee cup lid, my line of sight was crowded with the most peculiar, and at once familiar, beauty. Frame drums, doumbeks, and instruments of all kind, beautifully hand-crafted in the likelihood of natural aesthetics. The clouds of a waking dream parted as I stepped forward to shake the hand of the drum-maker himself. 

From Vancouver Island, Sylvan Temple Drums boasts specially crafted hand-made local woods just south of the Great Bear Rainforest. At first meeting, the key to my city's grandest music festival was gifted, unceremoniously, and with the sincerity of a true friendship. Before purchasing an absolutely gorgeous alder doumbek, I became privy to the music of such as Alabama Shakes, Thievery Corporation, Cat Empire, Caravan Palace, The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, Mamselle, Haram, and on. It was a splendid weekend. The gift of music breathed new life, and as through the wood of our country, the sound reverberated with untouchable magic into my heart and marrow. 

Such as luck would have, the serendipitous vibe of the exchange revealed the marked truth of reciprocity in nature. Human beings are mere messengers, and vessels of light and wisdom, others more naked and bright than the rest. They who are naked and bright are merely known as generous to us more gross souls. And so, in a parable of ancient China, correlative meaning ensues. 

Source: Galen Mongeau

After receiving the great gift, not as from divinity, but from the hands of a fellow man. I was moved to wonder on the spiritual nature of the harvest. In such a world as where the sense of harvest has breached sustainability to egregious excess in exploiting the natural resources of the land, where is the sane harvester of life's great gifts of creation? And from the musical instrument of the trees sings a tale of the potent harmony embedded within the forest, within the land. The land is imbued with the music of life, with the instruments of soul, art and meaning. 

When will we honour right harvesting, as in those who are traditional users of the land since time immemorial, not mere environmentalists, but as local harvesters who depend on the land for their livelihood? Whether it is in the food or the materials, in opening a doorway to family, community and inner fulfillment, our vocation, role and fulfillment is in the land, offering all a place, as a truly honest way of making each our own living. Might we see the hidden inner nature of the Earth as not only our source of physical life, but as our source of grounding and flight, as our source of reciprocal creativity, the inertia of magic and play as the source of harmony itself, as a way to growth, promise, and all our relations?

Learn More about Pipelines:

And the People Protecting Future Generations:
KEEPERS OF THE ATHABASCA

Also, read my Comment on Geist.com on the Energy&Art debates

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A pipeline twice the size of a whale. A gargantuan opening, closing the way through into an opaque, unholy void. The brackish filth of water moves as on its own under our quaking boots. And the spill seeps into the metallic soil below. The Earth shrieks, yet her voice is muted under a dense, resin helmet. Deafened by fortunes of squandered wealth, the murderous cold frays the nerves with blinding speed, and then, all there is to do is work.

Interior of an Ironworks by Godfrey Sykes 

"Give 'em yr bucket." Our manager removes our defecation pails, to be filled with drinking water for the next hour. The only change of the guards is vomit and an empty stomach. Coffee, whisky and blood. The grisly, noxious sky burns with the weight of an Earth turning on its side, looking out through grey eyes, a globular iris of naked waste. The entombed sky wretches as the darkening muck churns and writhes like a cold snake. What was once soil and groundwater, turned to the tar and feathers of the shamed petro-state of Canada.

Cottonopolis by Edward Goodall 

The pipe gargles and spews rasping smoke, as if it were a choking throat, attempting a last word before immobile onlookers. The brevity of life and death makes us motion-sick. There is a sea of greed, corruption and ignorance below these decks of metal and bone. The quiet break the loudest. And at once, as the gushing oil explodes with a merciless fire from the side of frozen metal, men are trapped behind the void. Wading in the flush of a liquid worse than sewage, the brain nauseates, overwhelmed with the job of planetary death.

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In celebration of the filters of raw earth into breathable air. The track "America! America!" is inspired by the forestal creation of a hand-crafted alder doumbek from Vancouver Island, at the cusp of the Great Bear Rainforest, a place that also signifies a cusp of human civilization. So, the sound of the wooden drum, of the local land, is played in conjunction with a Maple Shakuhachi (also indicative of the local country's national tree).


The doumbek and flute seek a passage, of wind and earth, into the waters of being and becoming, towards a sense of grounding (drum) and direction (flute). The vocalization/narrative sounding muses on the exhausting reactionary sense of progress that ensues in the modern world, where people continue to consume and waste, yet there is a lack of listening, and a lack of sheer creation.

The calamity of today is not one of natural resources, it is our state of mind, and as the musical instruments of the natural world teach us, there is much to learn from the shapes and sounds within. As Chuang Tzu said, "What happened was my own collected thought encountered the hidden potential in the wood. From this live encounter came the work that you ascribe to the spirit."


This nine-poem chapbook speaks to the deformed nature of land under the warped perception of consumerist greed and a wholesale corruption of value in life, and unsurprisingly human life. The interludes speak to a frenetic base of experience in the fragmented world of manufactured waste and devastated landscapes that have become the norm, closing our minds and eyes from the truths and repercussions of our noxious way of life.

Through poetry, I affirm and re-encounter all my relations through a sense of the inner community. Creative language inspires an inward journeying to find the root and nature of mind. The place where our whole selves may firmly take root in the most fertile of soil, in the home of universal belonging, and so give back and become one with the self-regulating, self-sustained renewability of life in harmony with all of creation.

Interludes via FREEDOM

Returning Home: Teachings of the Priests of Dream

Life is a lying dream, he only wakes / Who casts the world aside 

(from the Atsumori Noh Play, 15th century)

At birth we woke to dream in this world between. What then shall we say is real? 

(Kan’ami Kiyotsugu, 15th century) 

Two awakenings and one sleep. This dream of a fleeing world!

(Tokugawa Ieyasu, 1542-1616)

I know not what life is, nor death. Year in year out - all but a dream.

(Uesugi Kenshin, 1530-1578)

...the proud ones are but for a moment, like an evening dream in springtime.

(Heike Monogatari, 14th century) 

My life / came like dew / disappears like dew 

(Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1536-1598)

To what shall I compare this life of ours? Even before I can say...it is like a lightning flash or a dewdrop...it is no more.

(Sengai, 1750-1837)

What is that note, tone, breath, voice, play, word, motion, thought, desire, way artists, seers, filmmakers, musicians, and spiritual practitioners alike speak to when they intone the vowels, the grammar, the logic, the philosophy, the imagination, the language, the creation, the way of dream? Reflecting, ponderous, contemplative in the way and presence of nature, externalized in the wild, flora, fauna, breathtaking skyscapes, landscapes, seascapes and fascinating magic of ecological wonder, all, as is. To create a place, mode or setting, wherein dream is realized, invoked, intoned, imagined and integrated into life, is essentially the role of the artist, visionary, and seer, as spiritual practitioners of harmony, whether harmony of tradition, presence or ideal. 

Often, in the way of the artist, to create a work that truly evokes the magic of the innate powers of dreaming, truly inherent in all of creation, is the final meaning of the artist's path to holism, completion and a successful conceptual invigoration of idea into creation. Yet, in such as seers, or spiritual practitioners of a way of being, as the komuso, or "Priest of Emptiness" in Japanese history, who led a life of beggary, without identity, and harmonizing the mind with the suizen practice of blowing through a Shakuhachi - bamboo flute - instrument, dreaming in life is not conceived, or imagined, only led, and lived directly. For komuso life itself is dream, not necessarily solely creative conceptions representing life. 

And truly, as the komuso meddled further in the affairs of secular life, navigating rungs of hierarchical power among fellow humankind, corrupting laypeople and spiritual classes alike, the dream fell into the reality, of the fleeting nature of all things.  So, could komuso also be aptly translated as "Priests of Dream" who fulfill the order of dream within the waking spheres of existence, so as to harmonize the subconscious palate with a psychic holism of being? Self-prophesied, the world of dream that so invigorated the komuso into a unique way of living, being and harmonizing with creation, woke to the lightning flash wisdom of illumination beyond the forms of all-recognition, even to themselves. Yet, there still may be the spirit of the komuso wandering about, collecting alms from the wordless eye of longing that still beats the hearts of all things in the nameless anomalies of daily, human existence. 

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The wall cracks, sundered by a voice of thunder. An opaque sky churns, vomiting deep green ire with the blooded spires of lightning streaking the fragile heavens. Fled, spiriting off above the splitting stone, I nearly fracture my hand as the quaking Meleke rock fissures and smokes with the dust of an ancient soul leaving. As one, we are exiled. 

Fragment of wall painting with a flying Eros by Unknown

Ancient and medieval backdrops gush with flame and flick with the passion of countless ghouls resurrected at the spiritual death of the Unholy Wall. I clamber down and down, past the bustling, oven-hot Arab village of Al-Khalil. Hijabs and jalabiyas wave in the homely, communal air. Into the steep fold, barefoot on the highway teeming with military checkpoints, my heroic blasphemy fumes with the vainglorious ruse of a timeless lie: the first crime of possession: land. Fugitive of an Israelite childhood, my eyes scan the living ground beyond the vicious plain of stone and fire.

Discussion near a village, from the 43rd maqāmah of the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī

The smoothing grass, plush and soft with the furs of Mother Earth, trails off into the horizon toward the Far East. Cathartic winds blow my mind to perfect suspension. The gravity of our historic failure and the infamy of its lingering pains are momentarily nonexistent. Across a woody bridge, the babbling brooks of a better world shine in the blending sunlight. Sea salt air flecks the caressing breeze as my nostrils fill with aromas delectable and clean. A teahouse sits nested on a wispy, verdant knoll. 

Haboku-Sansui by Sesshū Tōyō

My wife, freshened with the familiar hygiene of the opposite sex, touched with the divine hydration of a natural and ecological grace, she breathes, stimulated with a love-crafted green tea. Her palms, supple as the camellia in spring, yet her fingers are as dry as the fermented leaf ready for brewing. Her presence reaches and receives far into the mind’s dan tien of ecstatic enlightening and inner wholeness. Her Taoist eyes free my insides with an internal repose unknown above. On the high flesh of a stone-wrought, deadening life of the destructive West, I have left my name and memory. Here, belief and need see no conflict, and I speak of dreams within dreams, dreamt in the art of peace. 

Camellia and a Lonely Bird by Zhou Shuxi

Yet, after an eternity of peace and splendor, in the decadent arms of all-embracing Love, I wake, as from a deep vision of suffering. I begin walking. The Earth shudders a breath cold with an early death. The rattle of antlers flutters with the cacophony of nature’s own chaos and war. In a triumph of sight, we lock stares, as antlers, across a dense thicket. Wounded, a stag and doe skip silently, as above a moving fan of grass. As one, we return to the dead old high of the ancient city. 

Wall-paintings of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom on Tangzi Street

Racing with the elegance of divine creatures, extinct water deer of Mediterranean freshwater clarity. Their bones exposed, as light transfixes through gaping, bloodless wounds. I can see clear through the deer torsos into the waking touch of humid, rolling grassland hills. Through a panoramic eye, a lifeless and incendiary pain wears the sepia-toned horizon into a wrinkle of earthly age. We pass, unseen, through the Golden Gate, and we embody Shekhinah in all of her feminine grace. 

The temple entrance by Aert de Gelder

An unpleasant, shivering wind casts over the city, clouded with complex overlain imperialistic landmarks of religious dogma and an historic oppression that explodes mercilessly into the present with a daily shade. Spectral, and at once shimmering an illumined field of stares, we glide past world dignitaries in the central spheres of power. Present to mind our fleshly presence is the leader of our Red and White Nation, who seethes through sociopathic eyes a malevolent taste for the darkening wick of livid silence and unrighteous judgment. And in our moment’s passing, the eyes of our contemporaneous leader of Northernmost America tears, heaving with the burdens of a deep shame. Eyes curling under, his heart beats pulsing his entire flesh of white, flaming anger. His throat, rung in fear, is tied to devious perfection in a self-important red knot. Yet born of compassion, we stir past undeceived by his show of destructive emotion, and on to lead a way towards a better future, of gentle humility and thoughtful pace. 

Landing the future (King William I in Scheveningen)

Bristling with inborn purpose, at once our trio of the living extinct disbands. Our knowledge of the land tested, the White Seers emerge. As ghosts of the sleeping, spectral in the haunting jungles, at home in the phantom light of a dense, forested canopy, they wake, first to our scent. Then, instantaneously, the flat crunch of a skeleton pierces the chilling air. The jaw of a big cat, prehistoric lynxes, tigers of the White North, fanged and cold with searing, yellow eyes, closes again. The deer, devoured. 

A Lion Kills Prasenajit in the Jungle by Unknown

I smell heart, pouring a continuous stream of hot blood nearby. My fearing hand graces the surface of a puddle of cooling plasma. Hunted, adrenaline affixes my intuition under the glow of the moon, southward. Peering into the pitch flood of night, I stumble and curse. They say a tiger sees a man countless times before the first hint of a presence. ‘Had their fill?’ Wondering, overwhelmed with the emotive stress of emergent trauma, blistering from the inside. And it scythes my torso, felt split nearly in two, as a crushed ember spewing unseen flares of heat and ash. Wounded, immobilized, my dilating pupils scan the dark wood with an unfocused and eyeless rush of mortality. 

White Tiger (Bạch hổ) by Unknown

In the burn of a single firefly, the moon perks of the featureless sky. I can see, I can smell, and I taste the White fur of deathly feline gore. The earth rumbles with each footstep, and the oncoming, clawed pads fill my nerves with lungs of raw energy. Moved with the thundering mammalian outburst of muscular flight, a single punch of stolen force, intervention of the High One, runs the cat’s hipbone straight through its blooded organs of night and flesh. 

The Four Continents by Peter Paul Rubens

Tangled with auspicious mystery, flattened with the mourning of a proud death, in a sudden rasp and rattle of a whispering cry, the end of the forest canopy floor reached. An open, under stars of mountains and a wealth of ears, insects roar in the funnel of a circular plain. Whirlwinds and dew sneak into my ears like the healing rain of an exiled land, birthing renewed into an Earth of spring. I wade through the sweet water of an alpine marsh, distant clouds ashore on the far horizon move like celestial birds. Light rain begins to fall, shining through incandescent sunrays, refracting like broken glass over ruddy mirrors. 

Wind and Rain by Ma Yuan 

Awoken, by my own breath, his presence is as the light itself. Herbsman! Bearded aglow with holy eyes, smiling wide as the mountain range afar. His words a waterfall, cleansing and purifying constantly, with the movement of natures’ own lifeblood itself. We sit in a glade, I in the deep meadow, and he over a gathering of lime, emerald and olive-shaded bushes of growing herbs, reaching as to his light, and lengthening at his every movement, touch and word. So, as I. 

Hanuman fetches the herb-bearing mountain

“In the morning, eat of the red corn,” says he, Herbsman. An ear of red corn emerges as with the pleasure of an offering, gift or invocation from the mouth of a ground and tongue of a seed. One kernel, consumed, and my flesh lightens with the bread of fulfillment, and all my wishes humbled with regard to the constant water that flows to the life of all. Cleansed, opened, revived, moved and lifted, I listen with intent respect. “At night, eat of the white corn.” As the morning eye of fire stares into my forehead barely above the horizon, I yet see a vision of the white corn in mind’s eye, unknown on Earth. The Herbsman continues to pour the clear-souled water of natural wisdom through the mystic wine of musical friendship over each and every pour with all movements and messages invoked, intoned, and conveyed with brevity, clarity and unity. 

Indian Corn and Mexican Vase by Cordelia Wilson

The Herbsman’s voices soothe and mend, teaching of Water, the element Carbon, Life in all varying forms and formless ways; how to purify one’s self through knowledge and action, and reason, in seeing as being, for every portion of ground on which one sits as the Ground of All Being. In earnest repose, he guides my mind as a rudder, and we sail, as with the passing life of Creation. In an earthly tradition, the Old Man is believed to have evoked, “Highly evolved people have their own conscience as pure law.” A vision of wisdom is sent from the Old Ones by way of dreaming. As observes an Italian proverb, "Where the river is deepest, it makes the least noise."       

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Due to the unplanned nature of returning home in the wake of an unprecedented natural disaster as the solstice floods of Southern Alberta (see previous post: Flood of Creation: A Photo Essay on the Art of a Natural Disaster), I have yet to create space and clear time for an original sound art/musical narrative in concert with the forthcoming, self-published chapbook, "Understanding our Meaning" from the district.Colombia experimental writing gallery. Yet, Kjarvik's experimental galleries are voluminously published for the public eye on Scribd, and previous experimental narrative sound art works are freely shared for listening on Bandcamp. 

I look forward to picking up from where I left off with the previous post, The Poetics of Resistance: Myths of India and Freedom, in the meantime, we celebrate a long-awaited peace only known when waking from a deep and fulfilling night rest at home. So, the second collaborative musical offering from a spirited and festive friendship of three, Welcome Home! completes the initial live mix, Let It Go! which has personified the last weeks of precarious mental and environmental stability.  

Music of the Dream Author: Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Release

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Album Art

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I

Winded Keys Duet for Piano & Shakuhachi 

"Winded Keys" alludes to a number of esoteric meanings, the most significant conveys a personification of keys. A key is used to open a doorway, highly relevant for an opening track. The track also relays that in a sense, we are all potentially keys. Through deeply listening to people, they can become as a key, opening the most significant doors. The person speaking at the beginning of this track is a passerby, stranger, and seeming vagrant in a riverine Canadian city. He is a key to Love, yet he is winded by the turmoil of life, and as so, opens the doorway to a key, strung by piano strings, and spinning in the Shakuhachi wind. That key is you while you listen to "Winded Keys".

Northern Shelter 2 Movements for Xaphoon & Percussion

"Northern Shelter" opens with an optimistic frame drum and xaphoon, as a young traveler eyeing the horizon, knowing his loved ones are near, and his bed is made. He traverses the grandiose open that he knows as well as the back of his hand, and with music on his tongue, he enters home. In the north, long stretches of life throughout the year are homebound due to the chronic lack of sunlight, rapid change in weather, and intermittent blistering cold. While under cover of shelter, in the deep, dark of night, an opening of the subtle sky of dream invites human eyes into worlds beyond our greatest imaginative stirrings.

Desert Plains Waves for Darbuka & Xaphoon

"Desert Plains" dramatizes the imaginative soundscapes of any day in the life of a dweller in the "desert plains". The inspiration for this track lives in the landscape. I have spent the last six years travelling between and living in Alberta and Egypt. I have noticed that the desert dry climate is common to both ecologies. The high plains whereon the great civilizations of the Blackfoot Confederation once hunted buffalo and the Sahara desert, wherefrom the ancient glyphs that are the foundation of most living language scripts on earth (except Chinese-derived), are home to an incredible vivacity, enveloped in the mysterious paucity of life. The horizon is grandiose and welcoming, yet equally embracing. "Desert Plains" is essentially in two segments, where at first there is a rhythmic yearning to see beyond the open, and escape the blinding immensity of the seemingly lifeless horizon, then after a time, there is a soulful maturation into the melody of a whole person, rooted in the landscape they call home. In that transition, the harmonic register of the xaphoon alludes to "Caravan" by Duke Ellington, as the traveler sees the mirage of a caravan ahead in the distant horizon of the desert plains, and at once entering the fold, the apparition dissipates. "Desert Plains" is a solemn homage in defence of rootedness, in this our age of heightened mobility.

Inward Flight Sketches for Shakuhachi & Darbuka

At this point in the saga that is "Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I" the desert-plains dweller seeks the gift of a shaman; an end-blown flute. In a clearing, under the starlight of a new moon, the once traveler, now dweller, becomes seeker. At this point, the journey moves from outward-driven to inward-seeking. The journey within is a journey into the infinite. The Self is the immovable point, around which all subjects waver, orbit and grasp in eternal flux. Yet, this is the play of the universe. For the Ancient Hindus, the universe was play, or as they called it, Lila. "Inward Flight" illustrates how the inward journey is playful.

Cold-Blooded River Epic for Frame Drums & Wind

In his inward search, the seeker becomes seer. All that exists on Earth, all that humans have created, the vast plenitudes of universal form in life and art become as ephemeral as an unrecorded improvisation, played aloud to the spirits and muses of a seer rapt in a vision of death. Here, the "Cold-Blooded River" comes into focus, where a visualization not unlike the Ancient Greek River Styx is seen in a vision. As in a buddhist ice hell, the river mists with the deathly cold of a swift and unforgiving seduction. Will the seeker cross the river of death? "Cold-Blooded River" asks the listener that question.

Four Directions Moments for Darbuka, Frame Drum, Shakuhachi & Xaphoon

After making it across the "Cold-Blooded River", that is the river of death and extinction, our spiritual humanity sees the realization that a sense of direction goes beyond the cardinal points of seasonal, ecological and temporal occasion in life's experience. "Four Directions" unites the dream vision, or literal physical manifestation in the mind's eye with a more spiritual vision, which is more like a revelation of insight. In this sense, the "Four Directions" unites four primary instruments; darbuka, frame drum, shakuhachi and xaphoon, where each represents a unique way of seeing, yet no instrument of perception is more clear or true than another. The four directions, or the heart compass is set deep within every mode of will. South, symbolized in the darbuka, is of growth and warmth. The darbuka is the prime origin point of my current growth in music and the creative life. The darbuka is closest to my ancestral heart, as it speaks to Greek and Jewish music, where my blood rests deepest. North, symbolized in the frame drum, is of wisdom and endurance, because it is a humbling instrument, and used in many sacred traditions, for example the Persian Daf frame drum in Sufi ceremonies. West, symbolized in the xaphoon, is of introspection. The xaphoon, also known as the bamboo sax, is a new instrument, invented in Hawaii in the 1970s, yet it follows in the great tradition of reeded instruments. East, symbolized in the Shakuhachi, is of illumination and enlightenment. It is with the Shakuhachi, the renowned end-blown Japanese flute, that I often meet twilight. Breathing through the river-fleshed air, I keep a bit of that sunlight with me as the moonrise enlightens the depths of winter.

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Original concepts formed after hearing the wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman's voice reciting his poem, "America". An impromptu recording of street voices led to creating an atmosphere of the mood, feeling and soul that goes into voice, and the unintended harmonies of using our speaking voice. Instruments are extensions of the subtle body of the spiritual human form. When recognized as such, our voice speaks through them, as through us.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I is the celebration of voice through sound. After my first year as an incipient writer in visual form, my creativity bubbled and erupted with mysterious energy into a realm of creative visual stimuli, of spatial literature, of manuscript art, of asemic writing. Now, as I begin to record the sound of my voice, I first amuse in the imaginative spectrum of voice through instrumentation.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I is the first part of a seven track series, mirroring my process in seeing through a cycle of sevens in the creation of manuscript art and experimental writing. Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II will feature a single LP-length track in four parts. A collage from four of my currently finished manuscript artworks have been used as cover art.

Influences: John Cage, Brian Eno, Duke Ellington, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Jan Garbarek, Godspeed You Emperor, Hossam Ramzy, Vi An Diep, Ai Hagiwara, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, street conversation, birds, wind, clouds, river, silence 

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See other instances of my musical creativity on earlier recordings: 

Dream Music and the Creative Breath

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"

Dream Music and the Creative Breath

Hear my beginnings on Xaphoon, a modern woodwind instrument.

Also, listen to Vi An's ambient, new single, "Souls of Flightless Birds" to hear my initial touches on Shakuhachi

To hear my more percussive beginnings see my earlier posts Busker's Gamble 1 & 2

________

My elementary school music teacher begins the session with an arcane eye, emitting positively unintelligible sentiment into the classroom. The entirety of the students’ awareness is razed in a moment of ineluctable meditation at the front of the room. The teacher is absorbed in trance, unable to begin the lesson. Then, she takes up an oboe, and begins a hypnotic hum, playing without her fingers. She bends her lips to the visionary yonder, bespeaking a ghostly insight into the sonic membrane of harmonious mystery. 

Three Black Women (1912) by Nicholas Kalamakoff 

As the hum begins to rise, a crack in the doorway spells fear in the eyes of my fellow students, watching as a three nude black women gracefully dance their way to the front of the room. Their light steps are unmatched in delicate beauty. The warmth of their presence is charming as the teacher begins to lather up and down immense, powerful scales. The dance heats with inner vivacity. Without fully recognizing, I have been completely entranced, alone in another room, seduced by the mad eyes of the superhuman subtleties emerging of the dance of sprites. The unity of music and dance is embodied in the untouchable, ebony enigmas. 

________

Sculpting our Music

to empathize with space,
emptied learning
devoid of causality,

to exist in nonsense happily,
with or without means to find the light to continue
and realize that meaning prevails in the ability to emancipate need into desire
and transform desire into being,

to see you,
in the flap of a wave thickening
in a sky filled with stars aglow
in the insect's wing,
eaten then,
raw in the toothless humanity
forming on the tip and base of the tongue
with each word-stopped breath of compassion

stating,
"subsist without things,
yet do not merge one with sheer being,
there is no escape from right,
take time to see,
play aloud to the soft distance
in each touch
on the eternal book
resting coolly
on the back of every pulse
moving through fingertips pressed over reality."

simply unlearn doing
by giving into the peace already;
know your surroundings,
truth does not move,
yet there is mystery in sound's effortless becoming
around and within the hand that pulls time into the heart
and plays breath
in tune to the sun's round birth canal of thoughtless entry
into an orbital law,

a return to archaic wisdom
in ancient instruments
and the rare music of inward listening
that shares all in the act of creative wondering

to explore the mind without friction
against the beat of our one heart,
drained now by love's unknown pleasures
offered to the inescapable friend,
who appears as death at the beginning of night,
freezing time
for a moment's celebration of temporal freedoms
grinning out of sight