At the Romantic Edge, Before the First Impression

The Golden Bough by J.M.W. Turner

"WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients." Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 1

Lake Nemi by J.M.W. Turner

__________

Reclined on plush couches in a generic condo lobby, my friend and I watch a political debate. Angered by a statement by the Prime Minister, he becomes extremely deviant in his manner. “No one should be living in Canada.” The argument goes on to delineate the environmental truths of socio-historical degradation in the wake of our 21^st century fate. Mindless, he unzips the entire leather covering and filches it for a sell. I follow in cheeky amazement.

Blasted knocks deliver crushing blows to the weak door, the hinges creak and splinter. A mass of Jewish men greedily express their intense fury. I unlock the door ever so slightly, leaving the chain lock in place. “Your friend’s killed our boy. A little man is dead.” Their mouths sputter with chainsaw smoke as they charge ultimatums and death threats in the name of my absent friend. “He’s skipped town,” I excuse. Unwilling to confront their standing guard, whose immovable post at the front of my residence is an unwelcoming barrier to my normal life, I flee with no plan to return.

Petworth House, Interior by J.M.W. Turner

After a filthy cheap bus ride, I clamber out upon the beach sand, and peering into the bright daze of lake horizon, I see my friend in a drunken rage at the water’s edge, swinging a heavy sack. As I approach, I see madness in his eyes. He is another person altogether, I sense a body in the leather couch covering. “Why didn’t you sell it?” I yell over crashing waves and turbulent wind. He simply eyes me with confounding disinterest and without a moment’s passing, he flings me headlong into the water, where we are all to drown with the corpse-filled leather covering. I swim, and as he plummets to the lake floor, suicidal and lost to the world, I grab through the heavy seaweed and rocky outcroppings with salt and stone eviscerating my every bit of skin of its human moisture. A whale’s fume stings my side and I feel I am being helped along, a fellow mammal and helper in my midst. And the undertow sucks me ever deeper beyond the shore’s shallow depths out to the plain sea.

Fishermen at Sea by J.M.W. Turner

Marooned on an island, miraculously alive, I am cast over a rocky shoal, where the sea moss hangs in a color scheme of subdued purples and deep greens. A man, of unknown origin, aids me in crossing a hillock, emptied of its cavernous rock, a mere sparsely covered hollow of mossy, volcanic emergence. As we reach out over the pockmarked swill, the entire island’s mass becomes visible, a wonderwork of natural phenomena, indescribable in its wonder: a truly new land.     

_________

in the shamanic din of civilized inclinations
to become the oldest persona of grace, emergent
of land intoxicated by the avian lords
who roam tearfully in landless bush
above the streaming Pacific's current
fanning to seed
atop island exotics
and breach the blind exploration
from nothing

to an essence of discovery
in the learned,
seated life

- excerpt from "Drugged Love, Seated Life"

Vibrant Dream Colours from Water Fasting

Fasting & Dream - Water & Lime cleanse, 7 days

Details: dreams are very realistic, relaxing without unusual, frightening tangents, if I noticed weather, colors or textures in the dream it was always very pristine, a lot of conversation style dreams, where when I haven’t fasted I don’t recall ever having dreams when conversations ever made sense or went anywhere, though conversations in dreams when water fasting was similar to having a conversation in daily life, it wasn’t disjointed or restricting, speech was very flowing, surroundings are extraordinarily vivid and lucid, upon eating again, bad dreams return...

_______

An Iranian friend, steeped in the tragic wisdom of silence, broods in a shadowy corner. His long Sufi beard and uncut hair masks him in an aura of incredulous perfection, looking from stolid eyes at my cowering brother. We are in a room of ghastly hosts, a live auction of sorts, only to entice participants in creative performance. “Create art to reflect your dearest love relationship!” The auctioneer steams with cacophonous temptation. My love stands upon the stage, white and delicate. Throwing myself in a purge of color and form, I choose vermillion, ebony and a touch of cobalt. The canvas thins over a pale, dried grass and carpet springing untamed from the welcoming floor. Without impediment, I stretch a rudimentary sheath of black over the rough medium. Paint filters in between the cracks as I begin to include a light bluish, red-bordered sailboat along the top of the canvas. I draw with unknown talent, creating instantaneous angles and exacting renditions of my sailing ego upon a clashing infinitude of ocean waves. The ebony drips flat with humongous brush strokes into the saturated grass and carpet thread, conveying icy death in the storm clouds beyond. The ship tosses, animate in the innumerable play of dancing strain on the veld of sea and sky. Livid vermillion lies agape near the sun-opened crests, stark, aflame, directing the sail away from the inexorable closing of opaque storm ahead. I embrace my love, unafraid.  

_______

Painting

"Dreams about painting often signify renewal and emotional growth for the dreamer...The painting is symbolic of your intuition and inner realizations." (iDream)

_______

“A beautiful body

gone cold with death,

yet still contained in glad purpose

towards another weary world decay

feeding sacred bushes that smoke & thin in the desert winter

blinded on sandy beaches, hidden beneath a glade & cliff,

as profaned skeletal thunderbirds fly with mouths shut

before a lunar god dreams a song inside another human.”

All so caught up and timed

each finger presses against her hair

and her snoring wink uncovers a madness in spring

bringing together all things in the mystery of continuity

- excerpt from "Repeated Dance of the Fluid Earth"

Skeletal Percussion under an Insurmountable Cliff in a Cairo-Western

Moses Striking Water from the Rock by Francesco Bacchiacca

I fail in my attempts to scale a sheer cliff face. The convex shaft of rock rises with crumbling shale and patches of vegetation. About 12 stories high, there a small plateau can be seen, whereupon a sparse array of pines and a wild horse appear at the glinting corner of my eye against the vertical immensity.

With extreme patience, I wait so long at the bottom, contemplating my journey up to the top of this rocky upshot plateau that my surroundings turn to nightfall. I am somewhere, it seems on a street corner of an old Western town mixed with a particular street corner in Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt where an old-fashioned, abandoned colonial bar still exists as the sole edifice of its kind across from the Iraqi embassy. It is nightfall and the dirt road is damp. Eyeing a nearby cat atop small, ramshackle homes and halfheartedly constructed projects, I shoe away stray dogs. I am playing an odd percussion instrument. With vertebrae, it seems of dog, horse and cat, in different sizes strung up, and hanging down off a piece of wood, I knock against them with the skull of a dog. The bone-knocking sound is then accompanied with a metallic cymbal-like object that I also strike against the differently-sized vertebrae hanging down in various lengths, to produce specific tones upon striking them. The sounds are enlightening, yet as the dog nearly kills a cat, attempting to chase it into certain death around my roofless quarters, I still yearn to rise with break of day and scale the rocky outcrop. 

Uninhabited Island of a Friendship's Whispering

On the Volga by Abram Efimovich Arkhipov

My friend shared a dream with me last night:

He said he could hear my voice in the subtle ambiance of a clear Caribbean sky. My friend had returned from the Caribbean only recently in his conscious life. In his dream, he said I encouraged him to move towards an uninhabited island.

You see, he is with the girl who introduced me to my wife. My wife is about his age, and his girlfriend is about my age, my friend and I are both of European ancestry and our better halves are both from Asia. There is an interesting mirror-like quality to our gatherings which resonates with crystalline friendship and mutual love. My friend is almost finished with school, and in the summer will travel with his girlfriend to Europe and China before they live together. This is very much how the relationship grew for my loving wife and I. After finishing school, we sacrificed our living arrangements to travel together to Mexico and return with the intention of living together. In my friend's dream, he hears my footsteps above him, beckoning him forward, to fearlessly transition into a new form of intimacy and trust within his enduring relationship and our circle of friendship.

The uninhabited island is, I think, a symbol for the unknown, a fate of complete originality, a calling to live, without regret, a life of authentic individuality. In his dream, he moves toward it, however awkwardly, with rubber scuba flippers, peddling a small boat over the foreign water. He is almost there.

Egypt and Iran: Two Lingering, Unforgettable Dreams

Two Dreams remain tightly etched in my memory, their content is also woven together within the intricate fabric of our now stirring collective mind, struggling to feel the common breath burn on the backs of our billions enslaved by poverty, war, greed, corruption, hypocrisy, malignancy, and on and on.

1)

I am within the house of my formative years, the beginning of schooling. It is a small house, cornered in an older, character neighborhood embedded in a seaside forest. The basement beckons me inside, yet I forget the actual content of the basement, except for the stairway down. Underneath, there is a flooding, a cesspool of oceanic imagination, swelling and swiftly carrying me into its drift. I see light from outside filling spaces marked by life and activity, those areas not reaching the natural light are dusty, dank and unused corners, filled with heaps of abandoned material. I find myself, as if swimming towards the light, to escape the basement of this house, and this memory.

Emerged, I swim across the surface of a great lake. The water broths and foams beside me, a plethora of life makes itself known beneath my feet treading the water. Then, a great lash as if from the lake floor catapults into the air a fantastic protrusion of flesh from a mythical beast, a loch ness of sorts reveals itself, yet does not harm me. I suddenly begin to see another side to the lake. All of a sudden I am carried in, as if involuntarily by a sweeping undertow.

I reach the other shore finally, though disfigured with fatigue and the nausea of being spun throughout whirlpools of fear and fascination within a lake of dreams. I am at the foot of a great cliff mountain springing up along the back of a cold-looking fortress. Next, I am unconscious, being taken to another basement. In this basement, I feel as if I am in Iran, the waters before me and the landscape prior to my incarceration reminds me of a very recommended film, called the "Lover's Wind" about the ancient civilization of Iran and natural landscapes of Persia. The film's incredible story about how it came to light should be read in complement.

I am imprisoned with other Iranian people, we are to be tortured. The basement windows along the edge of the roof resemble those of my childhood home, only now there are bars and the places of darkness are filled with mirrored rooms stretching as if infinitely, occupied with other prisoners, all of whom wear eyes of tortured pain.

I imagine the blithe reception to this childhood home, returning to its driveway, the neighborhood feel, the flowers and summer air, the large stones to sit on and the humming insects over the plain grass.

2)

My wife and I are in a room that resembles an actor's dressing hall for a theatre. We maintain an air of prestige, as actors or members of a theatre will. The mirrors are lit on their frames with gaudy light bulbs and the rest of the room feels turn of the century French, similar to the era in which Cairo, Egypt's downtown core was built from the ground to honor the architectural culture of its French colonialists.

We step out, led by an eager individual, who masked, invites us to walk with him on the street. As soon as we step out, we are in the midst of Cairo's Abbasia neighborhood, essentially the core of downtown, including Tahrir square and Muhamad Mahmoud Street, the current center of the crisis.

I know this street, this was where I saw a concert by El Tanbura. The mud of this unpaved road is not smooth, it has large bumps and divots, making even walking in it a curious adventure at times. The local youth walk down its narrow lane barefoot, smiling and wondering with mysterious humor. The foreign presence is immediately detected and is a center of fascination which equals my fixation with the imperfect dirt road ahead.

We move out into the street, I find myself edging into a crowd of demonstrators. We are suddenly in the thick of a mob of protesting Egyptians in Cairo's ongoing clashes with police. I feel gripped with fear at having my wife with me. I am separated from my beloved by the zing of a tear gas propeller wafting smoke and the sonic punch of a rubber bullet passes by me following. In the middle of demonstrators and police, I stand crouched low to the ground, reaching out to my wife. Rubber bullets and tear gas continue to rain throughout the quaking ground zero of protest in Egypt.

Skimming past abandoned riot police shields, I grab my wife's hand and we run into a dimly lit government building. I feel I have walked into Trostky's room in Mexico City, there is murder in the air eternal, a chipped skull and stray bullets encase the ambiance with a suffocating, dead air. We wander the halls and rooms only to find remnants of assassinated officials, burned intellectuals, tortured youth maimed beyond recognition. It is a breeding ground of hate. There is no escape.

Envisioning the Unconscious From The Cusp of the Atmosphere

Rocky Landscape by Ludwig Richter

When I see my dream, I am being lifted. The vapors of an immense hot air balloon warm the cold ground, the icy supermarket lights dim with an apparent lifeless sickening that dies suddenly to the snow-felt covered pavement of a parking lot. I am outside a lowly bowling alley bar where my step-father is playing rock and roll covers from the 70s. I escape outside to the car and am suddenly approached vociferously by wild predators; jungle cats with voracious appetites in the bleak misery of a New England modernized by the corrupted spoils of war, domesticated, yet freed into the all-vanishing gore of human flesh petrified by a society stifled by the categorical satiation of a thankless search for Nothing to entertain nothing. I find my Love with me at my side, she transforms curiously in and out of being my Mother. As she nears the car, I find one of the jungle cats is eating her alive! Yet somehow, she emerges from the carnal End of human being, and steps with me into the car. A rope somehow dangles in front of the car window, the jungle cats swat at the window, breaking and creasing the exposed metal like paper. I grab onto the rope. I am pulled upwards at an incredible rate into the glowing cusp of the atmosphere. I find my loved ones are in the basket of this hot air balloon that is lifting me up to the edge of Earth's last point of life. I begin climbing the rope, however its length is endless. I fall. My chest fills with cool air, and I inhale deeply, surfacing to a waking state in a moment as if floating to air beneath water. Again, I am submerged, into what is now mere mystery.

Journey into the Underworld with My Older Brother

The Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross, detail by Vittore Carpaccio

With my older brother, we take off within what seems as a deep opened chasm within a cave, into a body of water, as if endless. The water extends dream-like with opaque energy into a vast fear. We are on a small raft, a canoe of sorts, with all of our paternal cousins. The raft edges out onto the water and its depth begins to fall under us as a tremendous anxiety takes hold, and suddenly it's as if we are all alone, although together. One of our cousins holds a light out at the front edge of the vessel. Then, I begin to fall into the treacherous dark, depth of cavernous liquid. My brother reaches out to me as I fall overboard, though his arm reaches out too short. His palm opens up with fingers outstretched with a genuine attempt full with the strength of his being unto the ends of his fingertips. Still, in the water, full of fear, I feel a great abandonment. (I remember the time when in a small bay in Massachusetts, I was left to swim for over a half hour while he and friends did watersports, completely forsaken to the water and its full, unforgiving depth of life, I swam, as it were endlessly facing my most shallow of fears.) I begin to swim, however immediately I see a shark's fin. I call out to my brother, yet he is nowhere to be found, the vessel has left without me. The shark fin passes by me and I feel a brief moment of relief, however it then turns around and heads straight for me. I experience the full great depth of fear as the whole vibration of the body of water shakes with my fear unto the ends of the finality in our human mysterium. I grasp hold of a rocky edge. (Suddenly I feel the safety of swimming in one of the sonotes in Yucatan, Mexico.) The rock seems as resin, a sharp and hard-edge crystalline foment similar to the floors of the Chauvet caves in France. I climb atop the cavernous rock, it is as tall as the side of a mountain, yet I edge into its porous underlying texture and finally ascend to the top. I reach a pile-on similar to the Inukshuk in Inuit country, however it is as constructed with the street trash of urban Cairo, Egypt. I observe this pile-on as a marker that I have reached the summit of the cave's own tallest mountain and I seem to be again in the solitude of the fantastical cliffs and mountains of Petra, Jordan, with its piles and collections of small trinkets still bundled up and set on display in the after-hours of tourist visitation. This marker reminds me that I am somewhere, although foreign, that has been visited by human hands prior to my arrival and suddenly I am in the safety of human existence. I continue to forge on, in the absolute opacity of an endless night.

Next, I am driving with my older brother and our father through to a mythic resemblance of Falmouth, Massachusetts, the end of the bay into the open Atlantic ocean. We are driving him to be sent off by ship to the other shore; Europe. He is holding a concert ticket, as if he is going there for music. We are so glad to be seeing him off, and inside I am a little jealous! The sun is bright and it is a green day in what seems like the heart of Spring. In the backseat of the car, I imagine a bird's eye view of us driving through the open roads to carry my brother off to a glorious and resounding destiny filled with music and the brightness of a future fulfilled with mutual Love.