The Wild Path: An Oceanic Reunion of Musical Discovery

New Government Road, Lillooet, B. C. by William George Richardson Hind

"I get privy to an area that most people have not seen and will not see, and that's just amazing, and I get to see it at this point in time before any of these projects go through whether they do or not - maybe they don't get approved by the NEB [National Energy Board] or maybe they do - but if they do and these pipelines happen, the places that I visit this summer or next summer or the summer past, they won't be the same as they were when I saw them.

It'll have gone through an irreversible alteration and not for the better. For the betterment of some human notion of bettering the Canadian economy, wealth, or prosperity but not for any betterment of the land." Ian MacNairn, Working North: Calgary Worker Speaks on Labour Conditions in Northern Alberta and BC

In two years, I hadn't seen the ocean. The epic grasslands of Alberta prairie filled my pupils with daily life, lived fully and for the present. Answering to no one except Father Sky, Trickster Napi and the Bow River, I moved humbly through the auspicious momentums of friendship, solace, distance, rootedness, and foresight. The elegant plans of my life incinerated like a vintage map under a breaking candle. In the bitter hours, I wore my bone to nothing but pure face. And the ocean called. At summer's end, as the leaves slowly dying with bursts of peace said in the silent flesh of wood, I broke past the unanswered din of prairie sky mind. The expanses narrowed with focus of sight, and the road stretched on through mysteries immemorial: a land of hidden truth and naked passion. The Earth spun on a gamble, and the sea rose. 

In two years, I hadn't seen the ocean. Firstly, through goggles of tires and binoculars of steel, I then moved through mountain fog to sail toward the island shore. Orcas lifted above the snowy crests, as solar rays burned through the misty sky raining a refreshing, and most rejuvenating, beautiful life. Water flushed my spirits in a spiralling lust, unafraid to lick the clouds and skim atop the brightening ocean. In the rain, I sang and wept oceans of longing fulfilled. The inner world lost its axis and at a loss for balance whirled in ecstatic harmony with the chaotic ring of Beginning. As the sky opened, arriving closer and closer to the island shore, my mind lunged with feline prowess over the horizon, to feel my own heart stretch across this watery earth in a divine embrace of superhuman love, of imagination and unity. 

In two years, I hadn't seen the ocean. The cedar hat and drum vibrated with untouchable grace, as I remembered the northernmost step I had taken arm-in-arm with the coastal peoples of the Canadian west. How their drum sang with opulent harmonies only so sweet as when filling the cold air above the tear-blending Pacific. Under the first sun, my friend, a luthier of fine wooden drums (harvested locally) led me to meet the Black Bear, wise fool of the gentle, lazy, clumsy earth. We found sacred fungi and cooked and smoked and bore down with rhythmic intonation over the self-built family home. The forest spoke with a voice to shelter our lives with the hard woods of a door and staircase, of walls and rooms of birth, childhood, adolescence and maturity to the soft woods of art, passion and a work to spell freedom from the burdensome street of poverty, class, race, addiction and anger. 

In two years, I hadn't seen the ocean. The night sky breathed light, streams raged in the subtle beyond as death called us inward to sleep under the reign of the green dragon tincture, a home concoction of herbal divinity. Sea lions surfaced to the call of the drum skins reverberating madly over ocean stones. Overlooking the snowcapped island range, we viewed the lush orchestral arrangement of oak, cedar and pine as nearby eruptions solidified into earth-bound communities, moved by the crafting of local life as it etches its place on currents of stone and seed. And so I left, speechless from the first mountaintop days ago as the journey from Alberta started, and from where it ended. To see the ocean, and to sing with the opening sky. To drum along the banks of the island range, seeing snowcapped mountains stare into the distance, over local life as it thrives and nests behind the silencing waves. 

____________

at home in the woods

from where the rain begins

full speed behind

horizontal moments

the daily unground

the first time we sang

the reason we left

to openness we come

the way of the blue unnamed

afterwork time

_____________

She came

She saw

She conquered

Video Description: So far the only 36 stringed zheng, Taiwanese made long zither in the world. Great innovation it was about time this was invented(?), innovated at least, because this is my first time improvising on one this grand of a size! Grateful to the luthier and to Sonia Liu of Vancouver's "Crystal Gu-zheng Centre" for allowing me this great honour to share.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II: A Sonic Narrative from the Far West

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I (Album Art Remake) 

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II (Album Art)

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." John Cage

Essentially one album, Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I & II are to be listened to in continuity, as a single expression of seeking through sound as voice and agency for the soul of the word. Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II is conceptually the final track of I, divided into 4 parts for listening.

Experiment with your ear, and look to the bottom of this post for an aural transport to the Far West.

Electro-Acoustic Improvisations II

On the margins of the vast, interlocking web of technology and nature, with broken instruments (both acoustic and electronic), we are beginners on the road to merging technology with all of life in this the human experience of Earth and the inner world as an evolutionary being of conscious development. 

Imagine sitting at the edge of a fire in the raw, teeming wilderness. The forest is thick. The air is heavy with an unbroken gamut of vegetable breathing. Warming your hands by the fire, under cover of starlight and the faint haunts of a new moon, the mind seeps and seethes with memories, dreams and reflections on the world “out there”. Civilization and its discontented fires of electric madness pour into your brain like an acid flashback. The Earth is still, yet your hands shake. So, before you is the music of the muses, the bare wonderment takes its own course into the heavens and hells of your own nature. Through music, the seeker of solitude purges the concrescence of electro-social distension. Discordant dissonance marries with harmonic essence as the jeering subtle flesh of mad electricity merges in the mind, hand and heart of one in touch with the strings, blood and fire of creative sound.  

Part I - The seeker discovers music as a beginner. The instrument is slightly out of tune, and the playing is imperfect. The melodies are introduced with electronic music, featuring static electric synthetic effects throughout. The seeker gains mental balance by overcoming the first break beyond the shores of civilization into the open expanse of nature beyond, where other, even more trying challenges are to be had in confrontation with the self, exposed and untended.  

Part II – With emboldened consciousness, the instrument and its sound are clearer. A fire has been set and night opens to the gorgeous possibilities of the sonic imagination. Electric distension is transformed into unseen beauty. The grandeur of melodic instrumentation opens up with a new strength of diversity. As the clouds above part to reveal pure sky, memory and reflection are enlightened through joining with traditions of seeking, as with the sonic movement into Middle-Eastern influenced lute music, translated to guitar in creative solitude with the empty awe of all-potent Nature. 

Yet, the seeker soon realizes this is only the beginning of the journey, and there have ever been electric distension scattered throughout the night’s hearth. By the end, the celebratory feel becomes more solemn as the seeker attains the first seed of self-knowledge, and understands the need to set one’s own pace and prepare certain deliberation before embarking on the pathless sojourn ahead. The music ends with the realization that it is dawn, and the horizon welcomes ahead.    

Part III – Reprieve from the journey, alongside a mountain ascent, beneath a cliff. Cool air from a spring entices the cold march of winter’s coming winds to turn and wade in the lush mountain air. Without a fire, music is the warmth. Creative passion warms from the inside with the brightest of flames. At first, blowing hard into the hands and fingers for the warm breath to spread throughout and allow for the wealth of instrumental music to unfold, the seeker stops playing as soon as it begins to rain. As in Taoist tradition, when the rain makes rhythmic motion, and the melodies of the thunderclouds fly with the magical presence of wind, one is to listen, and be humbled by the music of the spheres.  

Part IV – Beginning with a light touch of electronic moments, the music glides atop sounds of weather, especially as the seeker gets closer to the ocean. Following rivers, streams and tributaries, faring flash floods and rain-swept gullies, the seeker emerges from the wilderness with a great boon of discovery. A new instrument to behold! Notice, the music approaches harmonies with the natural way of impermanence and unity, as opposed to listening, where creative interaction with nature breeds a kind of musical kinship among humans and all life on Earth. As the seeker sights the ocean, the new instrument is played, ending the music and the journey. 

The new instrument is the xaphoon. Invented in the 1970’s in Hawaii, the xaphoon, also known as the bamboo sax, is a contemporary single-reed woodwind. The track ends with a homage to Jack Kerouac describing San Francisco, the very edge of the west, to crystallize the final xaphoon improvisation solo; a traversal of the “far west” in sound. 

Influences: Bill Frisell, Hamza El-Din, Vi An Diep, Steve Roach, Brian Eno, stones/minerals, earth, water/ice, winter, landscapes of the North American west, Jack Kerouac, fire, trees, reflection, solitude

See my previous post: Music of the Dream Author: Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I Release 

___________

On a clean, medical train through Sudan, my Nilotic companion eyes me with a piercing grin as we pass south of Juba into the New South. We have arrived at his hard-won home, South Sudan. His smile is buried deep within the pain of intergenerational loss, the hellfire of war still sting his reddening eyes as he tears up, the pictures of his innocent family smolders into the soil. The land speaks with his voice.

Southern Nubia by Friedrich Otto Georgi

A number of tourists from Europe and America depart from the train stop, as we all exit to proudly march through the gates of the newly formed customs center. Before I ready myself to stand up and follow in the foreigner’s line, I see the winking horror of rats, spiders and snakes twice the size of my face, gnawing at my brains in the middle of the first night. I’ve read such stories. This is open country for sub-Saharan life-threatening insects and arachnids galore. If only they sold us preventive supplies before stepping foot on the blood-torched burial grounds of a still cold reconciliation between tribes and kin. The first thing I see is a smile, wide and innocent as the all-embracing horizon. Before I entered Sudan, an asylum seeking Sudanese refugee in Egypt told me, “Sudan is the easiest place to kill someone.”

Tornai Man from Sudan by Gyula Tornai

I heave a sigh of relief as the other westerners depart into the folds of pyramidal shopping and freewheeling nature photography. I journey on, to the heart of the people. My friend is ever stoic, silent, basking in the wonders of a new nation in its infancy, victorious after so many losses, after so many needless ends, there is at least one fresh start to be had, and one that all can have a part in. Concrete residential towers spring up almost before my eyes, fresh paint lingers and drips throughout the dry stinging horizon of African sun.

African Riddle by John Mainga

Men work diligently, with the force of triumph, erecting monumental stone structures, for future generations to thrive, for the plentiful, abundant optimism of the future. The complexes are almost identical to the substandard suburban housing of greater Cairo, where many must have returned from as once-neglected refugees, now with a determined hand and proud say in social affairs. They don sun-deflecting head coverings, and traditional footwear made with scarlet fabric and coins. Women are nowhere to be seen.

Battle of Tamai by Geoffrey Douglas Giles

We drive on, deeper into the south. The more south we go, the fresher the earth, the more bare the optimism, the more innocent the smiles. The more south we go, welcomes are heard with more sincerity. The air is full of potential. The energy is warm, and the harshness that once thrived now sees a chance of dwindling beneath the pulsing chests of hard work. My friend dissipates into the sunlight now flooding our vehicle; as the inimitable human spirit washes us clean of fear.  

____________

The completion of this instrumental music project, "Electro-Acoustic Improvisations I & II " sets the ground for the next stage of my creative development, where I feature my experimental writing as spoken word together with my world music instrumentation. More art, music and writing next week! 

The Immortalizing Arts: Contributions by World Music Artist Vi An Diep

Gilgamesh by Samantha from Indonesia

"We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next." - Max More, On becoming posthuman

The search for immortality is as old as humanity itself. The earliest remnants of human history, namely, the Epic of Gilgamesh, among others, speak of the quest for immortality, to find the fruit or fount of eternal youth is part of the perennial epic that is the myth of Man. 

Anu, Bel, and Ea are whispering (wisdom) into his ear.
Ere thou earnest down from the mountain
Gilgamesh beheld thee in a dream in Uruk
....
Gilgamesh sought to interpret the dream;
Spoke to his mother:
'My mother, during my night
I became strong and moved about among the heroes'
...
Gilgamesh said...Tell me, How didst thou come to dwell (here?) and obtain eternal life among the gods?
...
Build a house, construct a ship; Forsake thy possessions, take heed for thy life! Abandon thy goods, save (thy) life, and bring living seed of every kind into the ship

(Epic of Gilgamesh)

Now, it is interesting the way that modern medicine has adopted the principles of "life extension" to the archaic traditions of humanity in the search for immortality. Life Extension is a medical term used to acknowledge the major advancements in modern medicine which have led to the unprecedented increase of the average human lifespan. The logic is that if the lifespan can be extended by some fifty years or so in the last hundred years, why can't we extend life to virtual permanence. 

What are the implications of human immortality on Earth? What comes to mind for me are a few major points. For one, there will be an excited advantage by the keepers of modern scientific medicine, mainly the West. In many ways, this can be seen as the furthering of an egotism that the Western World and particularly the scientific community has, where they feel they prevail over all forms of life, as the dominant form of knowledge-creation in the world today. It is often ignored how steeped in Western European history our modern science is, and that it does have its immoderate faults. Essentially, modern medicine is best in dealing with immediate physical trauma. When it comes to preventive, and long-term medicine, like "life extension" for example, there is less attention to detail. 

Outside of medicine, there is a biological component. One of the foremost proponents of "biological immortality", professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Irvine, Michael R. Rose, PhD, says in the Immortality Institute documentary Exploring Life Extension, "Most people who work on aging do it from a medical standpoint, which means humans, or if not humans, then certainly mammals, and all these organisms that didn't have an aging process were far-removed from mammals." He went on to give examples in non-mammallian life forms, such as anemones, creosotes, juniper, and others that actually do not age. He continues, "...life can be thought of as being divided into three basic stages...that third phase, which has not really been explored by contemporary biology is what interests me now, late life." 

With regard to the biological component of immortality and life extension, and the medical egotism which counter-inuits the state of the world, it seems that if we do not co-evolve immortally with our Earthly ecology, a spiritualistic sense of medical immortality for humanity would only contribute to the degradation of every source of life that the Earth offers to Man, and which Man exploits obscenely. For example, if we innovate major advances in anti-aging and life extension, we ought to transpose that technology into the natural world, into the life that not only lives on earth (us), but is the life of earth (all forms of life and life-giving). 

Finally, my sense is that in the early epics of oral literature, such works as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homeric works such as the Iliad, there is a lesson about the human quest for immortality, which is older than our backbone. The lesson is that only in our mortality, do we know our immortality. I would say this is also truer to Max More's reference to the alchemical tradition, where in the philosopher's stone there is a psychological mastery of the principles of physical life, yet it is in the psyche where the most enduring trial is overcome. Only in dying fully conscious and immersed in the ground of immortal intent, are we immortalized, and traditionally so in the words of the great poets, those of enduring words and pronounced voices to carry the names of certain individuals down the halls of human history. 

___________

First step in the thousand-mile journey by Vi An

Flight over the bridge by Vi An

Enlightenment over Peace Bridge by Vi An

Full Moon City by Vi An

First Light of Dusk by Vi An

____________

Vi An has generously agreed to contribute her musical artistry to SoJourn(al) for this exclusive post featuring original photography. This post celebrates her entry in a CBC music contest, Searchlight. Vote for Vi An!

In future posts, I will be featuring original world instrumental music by none other than the Dream Author. My idea is to feature a full-length album of original electro-acoustic improvisations on darbuka, frame drums, shakers, xaphoon, shakuhachi, guitar, harmonic, etc., then leading up to spoken word collaborations with my instrumental creativity to recollect the creative momentum from my experimental writing gallery usually featured at the end of each post. It is my intention to kick off this new paradigmatic focus of musical creativity with a contribution, and to offer space for photographers and musicians alike to contribute in the future.

Happy readings/listenings/viewings!!

Among all artists of One Love, in solidarity.

Tristan and Isolde: A Meeting of Musician-Lovers

Yseult la blonde by Gaston Bussiere

Isolde

"...Half dreaming melt into the elements,
When they seem most alive and beautiful :
To fade into the purple of the west."

Brangaena

"...Bad dreams are said to augur opposites,
And bring us joys in weeds of sorrow draped."
Tristan and Isolde: A Tragedy. Louis K. Anspacher. Brentano. NY. (1904). Act II

I first became aware of the special importance of the Tristan and Isolde legend reading Joseph Campbell. The first known literary attribution to the tale is by Gottfried von Strassburg. The incredible mark that this story has made on Western civilization and truly world history is based on the central theme in the tale: Love. It is love, outside of Christian wedlock, which motivates the principal characters towards dissolution. For the first time in history, the cast of collectivism imposed over individuality was broken by a spell of love. Suddenly, the individual appeared at the fore of socio-cultural continuity for the first time and proclaimed an as yet unknown impact on the founding institution of social cohesion. Not only did love surmount the apex of all human relationship, the creative life, which sparks and endures love, became attainable, enabling the sacrificial character of a new individuality of self-knowledge and self-development in the art of life on Earth. 

See my previous post: From Genius Mind to Genius Heart: Wagner, Liszt and Dream's End

_________

a strong wind blows, and night falls, penetratingly raw, I pick up my face and screw it to the side of a cabin, changing my ways before the all-consuming blush of my red wife, gently winnowing my insides into the decadence of a youthful love story, she is my only one, and we decide to attend a party, by invitation to perform music, she is diligent in her work

Female Musician by Unknown

and in this response, a mystery hangs breathless with the unprofessional glint of our new friend’s weakened sigh, and stammering over the frozen concrete mold of a battering casino avenue, the wading head of sky simmers in an uncooked pit of flesh as we enter a home riddled with the divorce of youth from the useable head, dark rooms of sexual witnessing, of strange rumors, and fatherless groans, cruel mothers bedecked with the sorrow of an empty need

Monday Morning by Hans Baluschek

old children sit silently staring at a naked couple, motionless and bearing nothing but their side skin in two separate rooms of frightening disarray, and back in the foreground, the entrance hall, two young men sport a frantic jam session with homemade instrumentation, wood and stone chopped in a dizzying fray of wires and bone, strung together for a wish-fulfilled greed of rhythmic sounding, which stuns and climbs atop the phantom noose of age with momentous fleeting tones

The Savoyard by Alfred Jacob Miller

in that moment, the hostess of our strange inkling of a human party hands us a small envelope, and in it a card, reading the names of my wife and I, and best wishes in our move to new york city

_______ 

A space for listening, to cleanse the air with sacred voice,
An incensed feeling,
Touching on lost beauty within and under the strongly pressed clothing
Worn like skin that drops sadly over her neck of virulent sorrow
As a shapeless feature in the energy of her following
...
Passing through a foreign box
Crafted with a tongue for sensuous musical fruition,
To meld in the sorrow and aftermath of prehistoric eyes
Dreaming around the enshrined doorway
Through our billions in pain

Excerpt from "To Play the Chord of Humanity beyond Taoist Shamanic Heights" 

To Dream in Red is to Uncover the Veil of Consciousness

Judge

"Yesterday, I had a dream – I had a dream about you. You were 40 or 50 years old…and you were happy."

Student

"Do your dreams come true?"

Judge

"It’s been years since I’ve had a really pleasant dream." 

Dialogue between the two principal characters in the classic filmmaking masterpiece "Three Colors: Red" by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Along these lines of artistic development towards a pseudo-scientific theory of colour, the iconic German poet, Goethe, produced a volume entitled, "Theory of Colours". While not being received as proper theoretical discourse by the scientific community, this was Goethe's prideful involution into the realm of human experience beyond the sublimities of intellectual life. 

Should your glance on mornings lovely
Lift to drink the heaven's blue
Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,
Royal red sinks out of view –
Give to Nature praise and honor.
Blithe of heart and sound of eye,
Knowing for the world of colour
Where its broad foundations lie.
— Goethe

(Quoted from Wikipedia article, "Theory of Colours")

Also, see my previous post: Reflection on Zbigniew Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

_________

I wake with eyes closed. I won’t open. I can’t look. The bed feels dishearteningly unlike where I know myself to be in my present life, yet strangely familiar to the one bedroom I never wanted to wake in again. It’s my father’s, and stepmother’s.

Bedroom in Arles by Van Gogh

Cat litter sheets and the nauseous sky pelt the window by my ear, as I smell the cheap havoc about in tepid condensation of humidity, a feeling of being too close to home, where abuse reigns on every familial plane, as a tree bespattered with the lifeless trembling of a deadly morning earthquake.

The woman at the window by Jozef Israels

I sink deeper, and the outdoors opens as an unsheathed bronze, polished and brandished for timely wielding about the nascent plain of equal hue, enlightened by the western sun. As a beckoning from Manifest Destiny herself, I trudge through the yonder horizon with a mind for exploratory happiness, in pursuit of the ear and chaff of corn and grain, the dizzying panorama of emptied wilderness, where the Vanishing Indian now only lives as a politically corrected name.

Westward Ho! by Emanuel Leutze

I tip my hat squarely to the north with scythe in hand. I wander through the flooding dusk lit pasture, a son of the mindless hate staring me in the back, now buried in the lightless flat of night’s self-awakening. 

This and two other dream narratives (21st Century Space Race of Sustainable Housing & Mindscapes Interpenetrate Dream with Reality) feature subconscious experience surfacing amid the sensual spheres of daily waking.

_________

The western pathway to slavery lies feebly
over the chasm
         As a vile whore reminds us
         to put grace before prayer

In motionless wonder,
personifying the lush diligence of an ancient society
         Dismembered at the plan of a cursed monotony
               To stare into the black façade
               and feel dreams slip through sleep,
                         In and out

excerpt from "Blind Daemon"

The Achuar and the Meaning of an Indigenous Map

“For many years these Achuar communities have dreamt of introducing themselves, their way of life and the beauty of their ancestral lands to the rest of the country and the world. For the Achuar, a dream is not simply a passing, nocturnal illusion without relation to one’s waking life. On the contrary, dreams are gateways allowing communication with the spirits of their ancestors, who come to visit and talk to the living, giving them advice and a vision of their future so that they can tread a clear path in life.” (Source)

_________

North America on a map, tangled in intercalated diagrammatic linearity. A pale shade of red loosely emboldens Native lands. The patchy splotches of coloration on the otherwise black and white delineation of national-political boundary displaces geography with a time-bound worshipping, a cultural veil of truancy, a wakeful respite from truth. Looking at the seemingly random collection of red area follow my eyes as my eyes follow easterly into the heart of New England, my mind is inundated with a series of educational videos on sexual abuse in reserve/reservation communities. Homoerotic visuals tear my stare into blurry remorse for the heady desperation and wasteful racism, looking away from the natural history, the undeserved step over fellow men. As I contemplate the madness of the contemporary imagery presented to me, I turn a corner atop a towering butte in the skyscraping mountainous land, hiking through a valley pass, immersed in the cold sky air, unobstructed by not but stone and hair. 

________

Map

"To dream of a map, or studying one, denotes a change will be contemplated in your business. Some disappointing thing swill occur, but much profit also will follow the change...To dream of following a map means you are going in the right direction in a real life situation. It also symbolizes emotional and spiritual growth...A confusing chart may indicate that you lack a clear sense of direction in your everyday life or are in the midst of changing long term plans." (iDream)

________

to the racist, sexist and conservative religious wine,
intoxicating the West
with a throat climbing upwards
to vomit the female's adam apple,
now so dry, shriveled with frost,
cracked and permanently wasted,
not a thought to re-cycle,
only the Mother (Mater/Matter) abuse,
to forgive latent mindreaders
stating new thought dictionary entries

new, with fresh ink over the staircase travelogue,
leading yet leaderless,
wading in the warm bathwater
fresh and awash with the purest feeling,
drinking earth and swaying so slightly
atop family trees brushing neatly
along the skin-touched pages
leafing soundly into a freed paradigm
lonesome with radical imagination,
to resist the sufferer's cold throne and sleep
instead in the deadly fog of oblivion,
away from the driven masses
who prepare to wake
...
who failed to swear an addiction into existence
over the creator's blue telephone,
hushing the musical light from beyond
into anonymity,
whose authoritarian drug was fixed by the word,
and now silent to the punch,
a subtle dream

slaking the thirst for lucidity to be
in modern consciousness,
say

"it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society" (J. Krishnamurti)

...

a healthy wave reaches sky's peopled shores,
wherein all are recognized within the womb,
unborn demigods come to that awareness,
giving lush expressions to instantaneous action,
rousing impassioned need to flow with an artistic palette,
swimming above extinction in winter's unprepared lulls,
choking the urge toward movement within,
a mental pride

singing zealous
while sad, and diving earnestly
into depression's darkest ignorance

shadow's dust so remote
now only found in greed, sick corners
within a Southerly, Global hate,
trading laws with resistance,
scheming out of natural dependence,
realizing childish humility, and finally
forgiving the precious sources of Love,
kneeling before forests,
swamps, wetlands, rains, fogs,
winds, grasses, bushes, trees,
soils, shores, stones, and all measure of fungal being
as barefoot sleepers,
smiling at the unknown,
unknowingly

- excerpts from "truth, judgment or unknowns"

No Country Mother West, Birth of Father Sun East

"...it was like we was both back in the older times, and I was a horseback going through the mountains in the night, going through this pass in the mountains, it was cold and there was snow on the ground, he rode past me and kept on going, never said nothing going by just rode on past, he had his blanket wrapped around him with his head down, when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it about the color of the moon. In the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark, in all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he’d be there..." from No Country for Old Men by The Coen Brothers

_______

The road from the American Southwest opens in a lightning flash northward. A literal streak of beaming spectral intensity whitens the sand-whipped pavement unto the Canadian border beyond. This is my road, from Mother’s home of her dreams, to the creative migrant’s expatriate sway. A great triangle figures over the backdrop of North American flight. A sweet host of ethereal musing enlightens our unforeseen paths with adamantine wisdom. More southerly, the Peruvian fleet screams in my head with a need to lie beneath a doctor’s analyses, feet pointed horizontally, outstretched and fixed on the meridian point of loosened stress. Though, I am always late.

Waking up, exhausted and bedraggled, I find a representative from Amazon Watch at a doctor’s office, telling me I’ll be seen on the morrow. He’s an astute Englishman, proud and busy. I head back to Mom’s. A car pulls up in our driveway as we serve dinner. A human rights organization representative accompanies my old friend from Sudan.

My heart flies to cerulean heights under the darkening late feast of sky. His African build glows through a rejuvenated skin. His head, bald as usual, is unblemished and perfectly globular, fitting for such an astounding brilliant balanced mind. He greets us and I immediately have my mother fix him a decadent plate of meat. After dinner, he and his organizational representatives stay for conversation. My parents have retired upstairs.

“You have been a father and a friend,” my eyes tear with conviction at understanding our separate paths, crossed by pure benediction in our shape-shifting inglorious world. “Thank you for visiting me in person.” I am ever relieved to see him healthy, glowing and taking on his dream of working for his people, forced migrants of Egypt, in the comfort of a socially and technologically developed country as we enjoy in the West. His road is unlighted. With pronounced intent, their vehicle sets off into the unforgiving American night.

_______

West
To dream of going west represents fulfillment, opportunities, and growth. Alternatively, west symbolizes death, old age or an ending of something. (Source)

_______

western civility estranged
captivity in genital awareness
a rough and tumble, hide
and seek gathering
pushing into skin
draped exotic
law, broken by
caress and
gentle magic,
winning over
the ravaged tragedy
of attraction:
a sounding
for the war
on sex

- excerpt from "monosexuality"