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

Fear: Spoken Word of a Female Prisoner

"...the fear of prisons

The fear of strip searches leads to 

The fear of being naked in front of other women 

The fear of keys leads to

The fear of chains

The fear of small spaces it leads to

The fear of tears, the fear of dreams, the fear of loneliness

The fear of being forgotten, it leads to 

The fear of time, the fear of lies

The fear of metal doors leads to

The fear of dark empty corridors 

The fear of insanity leads to

The fear of separation, the fear of isolation, the fear of segregation, the fear of being a statistic." 

Spoken by a female prisoner at the final minute of short film, "Beautiful Sentence" 

Not until I wrote this did I understand the double meaning in the title...sentence. What phenomenal beauty there is in the regeneration of oral storytelling through writing. That is my key literary focus this past year, as I reflect on my greater literary ambitions. As I re-watch this humble documentary on an oft-recurring subject, the impact of poetry on prisoners, I think about the unique predicament I'm in this year, in relation to the subject of the above-quoted poem. I won't be departing or arriving in airports this holiday season. I'm staying far away. Although I am not incarcerated, I can feel the fear that this prisoner speaks of in her poem on the blatantly unjust quality of airports, and remain ever thankful that I have the option, and freedom, to not pass through, at least for now. 

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In light of not remembering the narrative arc of any dreams as of late, I am posting original photography from my waking life in relation to the initial topic instead of spontaneous prose and historical art

Crashland America by Rusty Kjarvik

Skeletal Cockpit by Rusty Kjarvik

No School by Rusty Kjarvik

Crash from the High Plains by Rusty Kjarvik

God-Awful Rhinoplasty by Rusty Kjarvik

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"An epic
of intention,
a bruised nation
and the stir-crazy polity,
struggling
with the sad gift
of only one humanity

a shipwreck beauty,
gleaming with the light of the ancients
over star-crossed paths
circulating through the veins
of an unbroken galaxial unity

evolving beyond one heartbeat to the infinite
blending of colorful awe
in the transitional being’s destiny
as wormhole wanderer
...

neck-tipped wheels edging naively on the backs of extinction,
Buffalo Confederacy of the western mage
playing tricks on white society beneath a rainbow cloak,
bundling rain and the boom of truth in our drum’s not-forgotten flower mask, straying now from pleasure and hate
in the unborn seat of quiet yearning

with English tongues of grotesque neighborly wick,
suffocated and pouring
over the tea-stained talk of elder medicine
healing beyond death
...

'knowledge in space,
as verbal structure,
passes beyond inert caution
to a stimulated dream-law,
intelligent yet nude'"

excerpts from "Epic of Intention"

21st Century Space Race of Sustainable Housing

“My version of the American Dream…it’s not about having stuff, although I do have nice things and I like them, what I like even more is time, time not to have to work to pay for a lot of crap that you probably don’t really need that you bought because you think you were supposed to have it. If you don’t have a mortgage and the taxes are low, how much do you really need to keep going?”

From the film: We The Tiny House People (Documentary): Small Homes, Tiny Flats and Wee Shelters by Kirsten Dirksen

Sustainable housing and the race to own is part of the fundamental underlying psychology of American and Western life. Making the shift is becoming tougher as the laws that govern mass society tighten their hold. I live in an apartment that is 18 (width) x 21 (length) feet. I've been living here comfortably with my wife for almost two years without complaints.

Read one of my recent publications on this theme at Outward Link

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With unspoken clarity, the Voodoo eyes of an Andean homunculus trespasses my mind with the depth of innumerable multicultural narratives; a grandeur of spiritual insight in the night of youth’s upbringing, synchronized in the silent sweep of imaginary play and the experiential divide of my true, hard-felt ascension atop a cavern mount of an empty and dark fate. Memory brushes oblong throughout the imperceptible, brittle light, a medium of failed intent in the thoughtful bondage of gross time. I look up, and to opaque, starless night.

Effigy Bottle by Anonymous (Recuay)

The human sky of night’s imagination dawns, as a cloth of plaster and wood, incinerating in the buzz of a static electric mire of projected brain, as follicles of neurons splay magically in a host of speechless disquiet, the air is pockmarked with the living breath of subconscious flesh downpouring its rain of enmeshed golden ash onto my waking perception with the rife torrent of singular mystery, the subtle crossing, tread between inner sight and the outer eye.

Travellers surprised by rain by Hiroshige 

The mountain seethes. My father’s forecast beckons truth from my brain, spouting a translucent passion, to see through the entertaining fires of apocalyptic forbearance. Yet, it is true, and in three days, the temperature rises through the Earth. The seas boil and the atmosphere blinds with stinging fright. The core, inflamed, invites solar lust in an embrace of human extinction. The rich, whose dire plans to descend into the safety of well-stocked caves, are burnt away as the fire breathes an exhale from below, and all else are incinerated with the dry lick of the inhaled flares of our sun, dying at an astronomical rate in a cloudless space of astral silence.    

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We drank in the rains
        Big drops that fell like ignorance
        over the spout-stopped Manhattan rubber
                Atop the fashioned grave, splitting at the seams
                         To unravel the blistering mummified dives
                                  In the panegyric future
                                  of the African ankh

...
In the breastfed porridge soup American city,
        Our children bred to be poor
              After the Baby’s boom
              turns to the Baby-bust generation

excerpt from "Daily Bread: Drug of the Illiterate" 

Reflection on "Mary's Near Death Experience" solo theatre by Jamie Tea

Photo: Performer Jamie Tea. Photo by: Tim Nguyen/Citrus Photography.

Jamie Tea Tognazzini's solo show, "Mary's Near Death Experience" at soulOcentric had me laughing from start to finish. The performance was hilariously charming and impacted me on so many levels. Firstly, the show had many references to concern and love for the ocean, which from my previous post "Reflection on 'Save the Humans' lecture by Rob Stewart" one can see is an extremely pertinent and worthwhile issue to raise in all forms and contexts in the public eye.

Jamie Tea enlightened that perspective through a great bravura of comic timing and voice acting which grabbed the audience on a journey into the space age, complete with the naivety of a southern-belle with a knack for religious experiences and a jaded Coney Island street worker. The shapeshifting ventures were spurred on by the dream of a "cosmic wonder-fish" which led Mary to the Moon, to admire spacescapes and woo the audience's imagination with a subtly refreshing candour.

I've known Jamie Tea from her work with Green Fools Theatre, during their Outer Space-themed 2011 Halloween Howl show. It seemed almost as if Miss Tea had projected her character from that previous show and placed her unique acting genius front and centre.

Stay tuned for Green Fools Theatre this Halloween!

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Oh! I know that recurrent clarity, the open water: the blue ocean when calm. They say a oceanographic project recently cleared a magnificent coral shallow, with its cerulean majesty, awakening the surface of conscious freedom from the lowest of depths, the inertial core, to the highest of realms above in the unspoken silent space of brilliant sky. 

Mediterranean by Nikolay Dubovskoy Sredizemnoye

Unafraid, I swim. Sharks are a passing memory, and fish and dolphin happily glide atop the water with a bounteous air, showing their fins with the gentility of a human smile. The water is cool, refreshing, and I swim eagerly, immersed in its healing, maternal body. 

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Our modern lives run clean through this cursed river

Our blood dirties, streaming from the porous core
These are wounded oceans.
We sink, while the light of the world floats amiably to the surface
Belly up.

- excerpt from "Belly Up"