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

Transformative Art, Spiritual Fusion: Wisdoms of Ireland and India

"'All Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams…'  

Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment 

Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.”  

Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying: A Protest

Here the abbreviated wisdom of Oscar Wilde, writer of voice and ear, the triumph of the great artful listening bespeaks a wind chime of honest and natural truth. The delicate interweaving of Art and Life brews a certain mould, from which the divine spark of the punch-drunk imagination breathes with ever raging glory. That mould is Dream. As such, fiction follows with music, as the pure intent of the human imagination to express the most basic intuitive sustenance of life at its clearest and most meaningful. 

During the past week, I had experienced an especially overwhelming night in the overactive imagination, a flood of subtle sensation, burrowed deeply under the skin, an impalpable bitterness, of a foreign spiritual strength outgrowing and boiling over in the silent reaches of sleep. The raw experience did not give way overnight, and yet transcended recurrence. The seed of a spirit spoke in dream, of a catastrophic undercurrent, sweeping virulently through the mud of a quaking settlement on Earth: the city. 

River and sun transformed to tower and spear, and I woke more tired than I had lain the night before. Yet, with the vigour of independent living and creative meaning, I rose through the art of sound to wake well beyond the confining, artificial binary of sleep and waking; to a spiritual awakening! And through an outpouring of musical emotion, I stirred my brain with cathartic rhythmic trespasses over the faraway and distant geography of my inner reaches. At one among many; dancers, drummers, singers, storytellers and artist of sound and space, we together climbed the staircase of fiction to a higher reality, to a truth of our own making. 

For nights after, and indefinitely in the frame of the images spawned in the post-traumatic flash of outpoured nightly grief, there was peace. Nyx bloomed like a sunflower in the hazy morning of calm, human flesh. The rites of Psyche and Morpheus drew from the magical fount of youth and light a knowledge as seminal as birth; that our waking lives are inextricably tied to the dream fiction of our conscious and unconscious lives made whole. 

Or in the profoundly authentic voice of master artist Ali Akbar Khan, "If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist—then you may please even God."

Read my recent publication for Unsettling America on Decolonization and Transformative Art

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All in the Wailing City raised their arms, for the plagues of a swollen Earth flushed the unmentionable presence of God away, way beyond the horizon of knowledge and meaning. A great riverine tide swayed the living to their backs, drowning in a liquid rage. The seaside howled an unforgiving pain, calling all to remember its earnest retch of longing. Under the deep duress, a pause from the hollow movement, atop a quaking hilltop soon besieged on all sides by the amassing shores, I gazed ahead. 

 In 1879 the great flood in Szeged by Ferenc Somorjai (Somorjai Ferenc anyaga)

Gargantuan machines, with power enough to puncture a mountain, rammed innumerable tons of metal into the rising waves. All human effort subsided in a last ditch effort, as the naked winds blew away every last measure of reason, exposing the humbling futility of Man as a self-conceived separation from Nature. And the skies then parted, revealing the unspoiled Earth anew. 

The Great Flood by Bonaventura Peeters

Cleansed of human pain, the memories yet unearthed buried as spirit-hosts in the nightly youth whose ruined minds attuned with sensitive grace to the crushing prowess of the Earth. Ahead, I stole beyond the limits of the city lain to a soggy rubble in a flash. The riveting sun splayed its arms and legs with eye-splitting rays as gorgeous as the purity of Light itself. A golden cliff summit rose as an open palm to greet and hold me into a warm embrace. Amiable pelicans touched over the soothing flow of salt and weed, as my feet sped off, flying as together with the ancient birds of Attar; the flight of survival in beauty, circulation and ascendance.

Rocky Cliff with Stormy Sea, Cornwall by William Trost Richards

Arisen again, to the opaque summer sweat of passion and greed, the ascendancy was of illusion, a taste of mad lust in harnessing, benefitting and exploiting the power of Earth. I am only human. And, so I climb stairs and escalate to office-window pride, in the shy, glum and austere rest of an angering soul. Midwestern city of black flies and pale steam, the ire of billions casts a spectral gloom over such towering hypocrisy; dense as the soil of the Bitumen God of Calgary.

The Galata Tower by Moonlight by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

Uprooted, the towers of Oil and Untruth move as a serpent staff in my hand, readied and pointed toward the heart of the Jungle, the most immaculately climaxed biological development of all life's known diversity here on Earth. The jungle heart beats with the breathing of a thousand trees giving air to a wounded atmosphere of acid night. Within shot, the Awajun stare back, defending their land as all Land; to defend the very source of human existence. I shrink back, retreating and lacking the muscle to flesh out my own hypocritical ground, resting on the fat of the land in the cruelest eye of the storm, shrouded by cheap intoxicants and ignorant bliss.  

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"Holy Rope" is a metaphor for the piece of twine I've used to snare my 16' frame drum featured on this track. Inspired by the masterful and spiritual frame drumming of the First Peoples on the traditional territories now known as Canada. Aboriginal peoples from northern Manitoba to Athabasca territory in northern Alberta, where I had camped, exhibited their powerful and endangered musical traditions. The use of a piece of twine or rope over caribou and buffalo hides struck a particular tone of nostalgia within my own ancestral memory as a musical being. Most well-known to North Africa, the tar frame drum is one of many snared frame drums in the deep Mediterranean musical heritage. The buzzing vibratory emittance that issues from a snared frame drum as similar to the First Peoples of Turtle Island as in the Mediterranean moved me to ecstatic prayer through drumming at Indian Beach campground. As I joined Dene drummers, I was moved with singular intention towards a spiritual fusion of sound, harmony, and ecstasy.

So the musical interpretation to the piece, "Holy Rope" lyrically carries the meaning and message of the experience of intercultural spiritual fusion music. Begun, "the executioner's raffle" signifies the great life-or-death gravity of the drum, as for many, the lifeblood of tradition, voice and inner fulfillment. The use of a shaker stands for the regular heartbeat rhythm that is carried by traditional Aboriginal drummers, who then commonly sing with syncopated bravura over a simple, steady rhythm. So, in this case, the shaker represents the rhythmic attuning of the First Peoples of Turtle Island, while my snared frame drumming represents the lyrical rhythmic temperament of my own Mediterranean heritage as the descendent of a Greek Jewish lineage.

The following chapbook, "Act or Confront" derives its source of meaning and intent from the omnipotent realization of the fleeting and mortal nature of human existence. With deep regard for the passing flame, we are fulfilled at its passing in the conscious effort of continuing life on this sacred and beautiful planet Earth.

When the passing is not confronted, and is ignored for greed, or lack of honesty in any form, life itself is denied to future generations and to the vulnerable and marginalized peoples who have been placed at the end of the classist food chain hierarchies of the global market chains, as per their specific history in the multi-tiered colonization of Mother Earth across the great breadth of each and every corner of the Four Worlds (South-Emotional-Red; East-Spiritual-Yellow; North-Mental-White; West-Physical-Black). And on, ever deeper into the innate existential confrontation of co-existence and the inherent conundrums of reality, we "prepare our action". In continuity with confronting mortality, to prepare action is to recognize that we are action. As a basic principle of existence, we all act, and are all intimately involved in every last living and non-living process of becoming and disintegrating.

Act or Confront

Dream and Love: All Our Relations

From Ben Okri's Mental Fight in London by Alessandro Lucia

“Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.” - Ben Okri

I found the above quote on THE DREAMING of shamanic drummer and creative writer, Lindsay Dobbin. It is such statements from the most brilliantly expressive minds of our time that draw one in to reflect on the substance of one's own nature. This is the creative spark. Ben Okri is so intuitively accurate in feeling out the subtle vibrations of the human heart that I feel as if he has literally been watching me. The relationship between love and dream is the strongest seed of self-knowledge. Those who forget their dreams are not awake to love. 

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The sky is open. Light blue, and an atmospheric glow, passes through my eyes with serene pleasure. Delicate moisture fills me with a cool air. I exhale all the grandeur of my inspiration, each breath an offering to the immeasurable beauty above. Sky is a translucent goddess.  

The Eve of the Deluge by John Martin

As I gaze forward, I see Christ standing atop the water. From afar, his face still affixes to my eyeballs with the cosmic presence of mystic flesh. I am reminded of Alex Grey's Christ painting. Then, in a moment's whisper, a pair of Bison crash through the water. I see the lake is barely a foot deep. The age old prophet is lost to my sight. The Buffalo steam through the water, carrying themselves with the charm of a sibling rivalry. The sacred flesh of the plains opens a revelation of the land's own history. 

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"…the apparent flood of a bleeding anorexic paradise…drowned in the furtive beckoning towards malformed reasoning…my Anglo-eyed drug…rushing forth into the magi of atheistic awe…the lawless prism of deep endless failure…gone astray in the fatalist’s catastrophic underpinnings…during midnight conversation…"

excerpt from Epistrophic Misdirection

Andamese Teaching: From Kill or Be Killed to Communicate or Be Killed

Talking History - A Lakota Storyteller

"Myths and legends were told...usually at night around the village fire and the telling was reserved to the "dreamers" or medicine-men, the Oko-jumu...There were three ways a man, and much more rarely a woman, could become an Oko-jumu. One was by "dying" and then coming back to life, for example by fainting or by having an epileptic fit and then recovering. Another way was to be "kept" in the jungle by spirits: if a person showed no fear of spirits, it was believed that they would refrain from killing but they could still keep their victim in the jungle for a while. Yet another way was by talking to the spirits in a dream. The spirits were the dead and any contact with them either killed a person or made him or her into an Oko-jumu." George Weber. The Andamese. Chapter 23: Myths and Legends.

This study, originally from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, is especially pertinent to the study of rites of initiation, where the primary function of this social form of belonging, not only within the human group, but with humankind's higher spiritual faculties in cohesion with subtle ecological presence. This gives us insight into the source of human knowledge, as an intergenerational narrative, and even represents the role of conflict transformation and the relegation of the aggressive principle in human nature from a kill or be killed to a communicate or be killed.

For a comparative study between the Lakota and Andamese peoples with relation to the role of dreams in the making of traditional storytellers, read From Social function to Pedagogical Function on Mythic Dreams.

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Tramping through the corridor of my grandparents in the Hampton hills of New York, the beige linoleum lies dirtied with a score of recent visitors, and the angel light of the winter’s day breathes with an icicle heart onto the feet of the whitened doorstop. With a running muck of puppies, my father swings the door open and shoots me out into the dizzying cacophony of wild dogs, huge and menacing. Their growling eyes bear down with starving, cannibalistic teeth.

Ceremonial Orgies by Dog-eaters by Anonymous

As my father quickens back through the warm house, the slow-motion snow gathers under my frosted eyelids, as I work myself back up to my feet in the subzero temperatures, at eye-level with a host of swarming canines, wild and diseased. I notice the back leg of one dog’s been bitten clean to the bone. Their wounded sting of necessity chokes my well-wishing brain into a heady daze of a feral calling.

Gypsy dog-killers by Anonymous

And in the mind of my love, a dream of lightening news props up our necks to an after-life view. Our grandfather, recently deceased, visits us. He’s traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles away across the entire scope of the prairies, a young man of excellent hue, whose eyes invigorate the humble walls of our sleepy apartment. Again in his prime, he offers a blessing of material coordination with our passionate, creative hearts. An ingeniously crafted wooden box, shaped of his exceptional Norwegian whittling hand I presume, is handed over, as a gift, to us.

The Willow flute by Christian Skredsvig

Within the glorious arboreal artwork, two handcrafted wooden flutes of a celestial order are presented hearteningly. They appear as long bamboo flutes, however with a sound equal to a half-Shakuhachi, half-recorder timbre. We play them with delight, and upon sounding the first note, the golden presence of our late grandfather vanishes in a heartbeat of silence; a gift from the prime centre of our earliest known life.

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Drift of a fist to the sky
In the activist’s pause
Before standing unannounced
At the gates of eternal misery
Where strife finds embittered ground
And the inglorious suffering breeds childless offspring
Mourning for ancestral greed
Sprouting from a native gourd
With cracked shell
Lying abandoned and weakened at the skin
With taught shell-string clacking
With fortune’s boisterous western noise
Shrinking into the mist
Without echo
From musician’s deep sleep
Over the ancient soundscapes passing
Through electric wilderness
To heart

excerpt from "Ancient Soundscapes, Scholarly Jazzdoms"

Reflection on "Myths, Dreams and Religion" edited by Joseph Campbell

In this collection of eleven essays, edited by Joseph Campbell, I found a wealth of impassioned research into the mystagogy of our literate foundations. My reason for reading this piece of fine literature, was to creatively unmask the roots of a new mythology to re-identify with humankind, i.e. humanity, fashioned by my own literary aspirations. With essays by Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell himself, and other fascinating minds embedded in the culture of mythological literacy, I mainly focused my reading on the traits of human self-identity as it has evolved throughout mythic time. With regard to dreaming, the essays touched on the subject in the light of religious cultural referencing, often comparing Levantine with Indian dream philosophy, as either a visionary or intermediary state burgeoning natural self-transformation; an acorn, if you will, planted in the rough soil of the unconscious by the prehistoric mind of our mysterious bio-archetypal origins. And the perennial quote, from the final essay by Richard A. Underwood, "Myth, Dream, and the Vocation of Contemporary Philosophy" a reference to Heraclitus' Fragments reads, "Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe."

See my reflection on Amazon

Watch Joseph Campbell lecture on the Origins of Man and Myth

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Shrapnel of memory in the ephemeral reflection of a broken shard forced up the neck. Checkerboard flooring sprayed with clear blood. I loosened my grip around his slippery esophagus-cored flesh, dripping with the moldy puss in long-neglected balloon, deflated in the workman’s hand. In the dense obscurity where the long way back from the faint escape route memories still linger. Drinkable, luring, the tidal flush of shared pain extorts the constant sleep, the blathering, ongoing consciousness, never put to rest by the wasted highs of an unceasing mind, running off the bare edge of a fleeting freedom to simply be, and not be moved to contemplate homicide and escape in the backdrop imagination of the unreal & surreal & real fire of raw instinctual creativity.    

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Strangle/Strangling

"To dream about strangling someone, or being strangled yourself, means you have been hiding an important part of personality - one that you need to express to be happy - just to please someone in real life." (iDream)

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of memory and the strange
the lofty touch,
reminiscing beyond the treasured wine of death
as an end to meaning
in the fingertip and pupil
shone lunar and astral
with vanished luck

- excerpt from "hallelujah"