Rebuilding the Unconscious: National Reconciliation and Personal Poverty

"What was in the unconscious, by talking about it, was brought into the conscious mind, and since the conscious mind, Dr. King's already won, the behaviour changes. Wait a minute, what's that mean? Wait a minute, what's that mean? That means that we may be closer to Dr. King's dream than we fear, but we got to keep talking. We've got to keep talking, even when it's uncomfortable." 

"Today, the American Dream is under threat. Our veterans are coming home to few jobs and little hope on the home front. Our young people are graduating off a cliff, burdened by heavy debt, into the worst job market in half a century. The big banks that American taxpayers bailed out won’t cut homeowners a break. Our firefighters, nurses, cops, and teachers – America’s everyday heroes – are being thrown out onto the street." From the Rebuild the Dream Contract 

Van Jones

Usually, this space features original writing, mostly essays, articles, and creative pieces published across the globe, a repository of works featured online. Such original writing usually comes after referencing relevant quotes from the luminaries of the age, those who spoke and clarified humanist dream-thinking beyond conceptual idealism to the pragmatism of imaginative vision and achievable action. Yet, in light of the exceptional words of Van Jones, noted public intellectual on green economics and social justice, a project on the American Dream, and the War on Poverty, a non-fiction work entitled, The American Nightmare: Deconstructing the War on Poverty that I had been working on for on average 6-10 hours daily over a span of three weeks has been suspended due to negligent correspondence. 

The suspension of the work has led me to seriously question my place in the Struggle. I have reflected earnestly and steadfastly into the bitter and stubborn recesses of my young mind, to uncover and explore the history that has led me to my current state, profession, and living circumstances. Not only has the suspension irked me personally, it has led to a seemingly irreparable disintegration of my professional development, as I have been led to question the very foundation of my primary income-earning as a freelance writer. Simply, I accepted a job to write a major work on poverty, which truthfully, paid so little, and asked so much of my time, that it may as well have led me into poverty. 

Added to the initial fact, while I did the work out of curiosity and an impetus to serve a greater work ethic in the name of fulfilling a position asked of me, the suspended correspondence between myself and the publishing agency has caused unmentionable anxiety. The topic on poverty in the United States, and government programming intended to reduce and eradicate poverty had led me to very interesting conclusions on the nature of governance and civil progress in the American context. The freelance job that I had taken to produce 215 pages of carefully written and closely studied work on the subject was truly an exhilarating and inspiring process. 

However, the process as a whole, and the empty-handed result thus far, has left me with an enduring impression with regard to the nature of work, one that, honestly, compels me to complete exasperation. Was it vain pride at the chance of writing a book, and being paid for such work? Or, the overall scheme of my life that has led to this point of personal and professional denigration in the name of accomplishment, work and independence? 

The work of SoJourn(al), this space, is essentially one where the process of a young life, and its manifestation of dreams, come to fruit through perennial dedication to the passions of independence (i.e. self-employment) and creativity (i.e. resourcefulness). After completing the original sound-art works relative to the Sketches of Style collection, I intend to break from uploading more original content here, to recollect and compile all of the works that support the overall intent, create a master publication (i.e. in the form of self-published collected original materials, such as dream fiction and essays on the narrative subconscious), and begin a new page on a new project.     

For now, more music reviews from BeatRoute are forthcoming… 

__________

There was a sheen of golden sand on the top of the butte, where I sat, immersed in the Valley of the Gods. And as I opened my eyes, the sand sparked, as an invisible flame rose to greet the monumental sun. Tears cracked the thirsting rock as I held in my arms the newborn drum. Taut calf-skinned and maple-encircled instrument of spirit, it moved, as inside me, with a petrified grace. 

Mount Desert Island, Maine, by Jervis McEntee

Not alone, yet from the clouds above, heavy with a sad rain, pregnant with the forecast of solitude, I remained silent, a silhouette of the drunk Earth, whose lines disappear and merge with the clear and lucid landscape horizon. Then, there were others behind me. With hands held at their sides, solemn. We awaited the grace of the Royal Native footstep, a rush of patient anxiety, the air true and sound of our hearts' own unhindered regularity.

"Prayer in the Desert" by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Then, as with the march of an oncoming storm, they strode in dancing. Their flat footwear dusting the tops of the sky, elegant with strength. Their movements sure and ancient, greeting the naked stone with the trust of an artist's hand, as the land's own song cried and intoned the sacred. And all then overcame the one great Fear of Death, displaced by the Beauty of Truth. Their songs spoke of Love, Peace and Unity. Then a rain flattened our wild hair, and we cried in unison for the end of a loud and gross age.

"Early in Day in Desert Quiet" by Mary Agnes Yerkes

I began to beat my skin, summoning the gravel and the hail, I floated on a subtle ecstasy, my own song, for them, for here, for us. The drum cracked and moaned, and my heart opened with a newfound longing. The rhythms of the Earth called forth the Witness. Of sight and mind, I broke fast on the holy mount, within the inner sanctum of my own restrained and haunted psyche. Liberated, I stood, bowed with respect to the territorial spirits in whose name I intoned the first breath of song. 

Lions in the Desert by Henry Ossawa Tanner

We left the butte alone, as it had been for aeons. The Valley of the Gods lay silent and waiting behind our upraised eyes, sharing in the unsayable fate of humankind. 

 _____________

Thelonious Monk, the great American composer...

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.

The Woman Behind The Dream: Chopin and the Timeless Tuning

“Because perhaps to my misery, I already have my perfect one whom I have without saying a word, served faithfully for a year now. Of whom I dream and in whose memory the adagio of my concerto has been written.” Chopin, The Women Behind the Music

In the memory of such early genius as Chopin, our cultural continuity glorifies bygone eras with a creative resurgence only known to Western opulence. And looking out from the window of one's own, the sparks of desire light. At first, softly, the Earth burns. Then, the air plumes in a haze of smoke. The bonfire of magic absolves the moon of its light, and the stars become mere smoky display. Inside, and from underneath, the imagination fires the kindling of co-unity with the mind.

___________

And in such as a bout of unspent night, where slumber is deep and each morning fresh, I woke into dream. The longing test of emotive fire, the blinding seed of passion instilled. To work, and to find solace in worldly accomplishment deceived! The wakeful night spun an inglorious frost, a loosened hold on the sunless firmament. 

The Night with the Genii of Study and Love by Pedro Américo

A summit revealed the greatest of depths as the wounded sky bled rain and ice, brewing over the darkening clouds. We traversed impossible concave stone, sharp as a split mirror, the ice moved our flesh towards the brink. In a vivid flash, I saw memory itself, bear unto the apex of Earth. The stars crowned the lonely top as we gazed into our battered arms with hands of ice and stone. 

Storm in the Mountains by Albert Bierstadt

From the greatest of heights, the shadow of a man fell to die. Scattered in the colourless flush of snow, the piercing rock dashed all hope. Still, with chests full of heart, we climbed on and to the frozen prison. Alone, I emptied my eyes and climbed the last step. The day sped past in a hearse, as a vision of unity stung my heart with its sole truth: alone with the Alone. 

____________

To close the album, "Evocations: district.Columbia" the track, "Untrained Timeless Tuning" consists of improvisations on piano (keyboard) and xaphoon (bamboo sax). The age-old American sound of piano and woodwind hearkens to the unique sonic fusion that is completely unique and characteristic of the country. Especially in the use of a certain type of improvisation, the classic sounds evince an internal discovery of not only the human soul, but the soul of the land known to Americans as home.

In such a time as today, when war after war knocks at our doorstep, we can be reminded of the cultural heritage that more prominently identifies us as a unified people: music, the one common language of humanity. So, the sound is masked with electronic innovation into the 21st century, where the piano sound is a controller, and the woodwind is a recent invention. The first xaphoon was made only forty years ago on the island of Hawaii.

Further, the title, "Untrained Timeless Tuning" speaks to that harmony that is basic to all regardless of class, education, ethnicity or religious identification. There is a way to shared harmony, and it emerges through a music untrained by the classism and privilege of modern higher education. Whether speech, or instrumentation, the music that is untrained, while in tune with the essence of human life as pain, raw and blunt, is the very timelessness that high art seeks to capture. That timelessness is bred in every interaction and exchange whether within or between us always.

When we speak of Re-Writing our STORY, as in the chapbook wherein this piece is written, this very realization is the voice that carries our experience to such wonderful stretches of the imagination; present and transformational. So, the traditional keyboard and woodwind sound is transformed into an electronic movement of triumph in contemporary sound creativity.  

The following six-poem chapbook, Re-Writing our STORY, is the final series of works from the district.Columbia collection. The pieces reflect the penultimate phase of true revolution as a spiritual transformation of one's narrative. That is, one re-imagines their perspective through a revolutionary act of storytelling. This kind of storytelling reflects personal truths, daily experiences and common points of view with regard to the larger narratives and mythologies that consume unknowing minds through belief, propaganda and pride. The feature piece, Untrained Timeless Tuning, was published with Poydras Review in August of 2012.

Re-Writing Our STORY

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Galen Mongeau

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

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

Learn More about Pipelines:

And the People Protecting Future Generations:
KEEPERS OF THE ATHABASCA

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

__________________ 

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

Interior of an Ironworks by Godfrey Sykes 

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

Cottonopolis by Edward Goodall 

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

______________

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


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

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


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

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

Interludes via FREEDOM

The Madman Within: Valery and the Personal Energy Crisis

Paul Valery par Jullien

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."

 
"Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph." 

"To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth." 

"At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind." 

"A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key." 

Paul Valery

Here, I continue on the themes of an essay regarding a theory of sleep cycles, and the natural course of the human experience of time as espoused in my previous post, Metaphors in the Art of Goya: A Theory of Unconscious Development. Beyond the bounds of the twenty-four hour time bomb, the seer lives to posit the cyclical nature of time in the natural course of creativity as it rises and falls based on the "internal clock" or "the internal orbit" as I will more aptly describe it. Leading through to an experience of time in the twenty-four hour day as much like the seasons, at different stages of life, or the year, we will be naturally disposed to certain times of the day. 

To keep a fixed schedule of waking and sleep throughout one’s life is unnatural and unhealthy, leading to an incomplete understanding of one’s self in relation to the ecological rhythms of the earth, and one’s own nature. Put more concisely, the mad genius intellect of Paul Valery writes, "A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key." So, continuing on this theme, I would say that, a great foreshadowing to the resolution in thought from the prose essay writings on SoJourn(al) can culminate in formulating a creative practice so that any person can discover the certain time of day that best suits their activity and temperament. 

When allowed to our own devices, we naturally settle into a certain time of day based on the kind of activity with which we are engaged as our primary focus in life. For example, if one is studying texts, the predawn hours may be optimal in terms of the energetic rhythms and ecological harmony involved in the practice and the setting in which one lives. This could potentially lead to invaluable developments as a repertoire of useful information for employers seeking to offer work-life balance and optimal efficiency and motivation based on the kind of work in which they are engaged. 

All of this, in both theory and practice, is based on variables of ecological distinction (the character of a place), individual temperament (how one relates to a certain time of day), and the focused activity (one’s primary work or occupation). Regardless of the person or type of work, with the application of guiding principles, one can find a harmonious relationship with time and productivity through attention to details of place (ecological awareness), energy (sleep cycles), and activity (work medium). 

__________

He is silent and still as stone. His face a petrified grey, staring blankly into an off-white wall. His mind has long gone, and yet his body remains. 

The Battle between Carnival and Lent (detail) by Peter Bruegel the Elder

A rodent gnaws into its raw skin. Dirt falls from its brittle hair. The animal dies before my eyes. I was happy and excited to see what once meant my life, and now...

________

As the tired groaning of racist America brews a proud glory of personal despair,
more,
An interpersonal contemplation on the theme of color:
Hair,
Eyes,
Fingers,
Pubis,
Nose,
And Shape,
Body of form,
And the formless desire

White against the all-escaping cloud of solar obscurity,
Who rushed civilization into the neighborhood of the absent & poor

Breaking the long arduous fast
with an unwelcoming community,
founded not on Love,
only on a hope to pray
before the Cyclops’ rise
over the crossed horizon
...

Stretching beyond the bounds of individual reaction,
To choice.

excerpts from "The socialist epoch"

Myth of the Writer as Artist in the Inner Space Age

Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann) By Christiaan Tonnis

"Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artist temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers, which otherwise occurs much later in life...myth is the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration." Thomas Mann in his essay, Freud and the Future

Within this essay by the great 20th century writer Thomas Mann, author of the famed Magic Mountain, are masterful insights with which to learn the various modes of self-discovery as espoused in the mythic fires of ritualized, eternalized thought throughout the ages. In the ageless struggle towards self-knowledge, the embattlements are often constructed in defence of the outer world, or the world, and in offence from the inner world, or the self. In the midst of those embattlements, lies a field. As Rumi says, "Between right doing, and wrong doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." 

To explore self-knowledge with regard to knowing one's place and vocation is to embark on an inward journey. Only by recognizing the bare truths of our life in the present moment, and proclaiming them as such, and in turn, making them an integral part of the conscious, and waking, mind, can we understand that the truth about myth. 

Myth addresses and reveals the ultimate needs of the human psyche. Myth speaks of the search for meaning in the life of humankind. The final lesson of myth is that the ultimate question for life in the modern world, as with all times, is not, "what is my place in the world?" The essential question remains, "what is the place of the world in me?" Every one is the ONE. You are the world. 

The world is of our own making. We are all co-creators in the aftermath of reason. Work is play, and play is work. Play is the life of the universe at work, also understood as LILA in Hindu thought.   

_________

I walk past a prison in southern California. The air is humid. I can smell salt and chlorine. Why am I barefoot? I bend to look through stone latticework. I see peers, young men and women my age, cleaning a concrete prison campground. A dismal gymnasium? A barren bathing area? They wear radioactive protection, in orange suits and gas-masked. 

Lady in Prison by Raja Ravi Varma

I dart across the road. Barefoot, my feet sink unaware into the freezing water runoff from the prison cleanup. My feet are numb as I walk over a grassy knoll on my way to a gas station. The clear sky is warming. There are gas stations everywhere, and I can't seem to get anywhere close to one. My torso is overheating, and my feet are so frozen I can barely stand.

__________

Touring the phantom cloud

At rest between Celtic shores, distressed by multi-lingual borders and rocky soil, and a northern jail for the barbaric tongues who gouge panicked eyes from the skulls of New World kinds

An orgy of ruthless becoming

Among the equestrian speed, famed by pre-teen daughters of class and medieval French dreams, who cast off the Muslim humidity from Spain’s bound whores, and lust after a secretive world of music in the drum talk of yesteryear’s snoring traditionalism

Yet woken alive

Through non-ordinary literary thought and perpetual action, to finally inundate the worldly risks bedding with our species at once in an archaic passion, straying from the lofty

First World throats of progress

excerpt from "Mad artistry"

Van Gogh, Ophidian-Seer of Starlight Medicine

Cafe Terrace at Night by Vincent Van Gogh

"For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream." Vincent Van Gogh

Artists are seers, and so, are truth-seekers. Yet, human experience blurs the line between seeing and seeking. Certainty is flux, and flux is certainty as form is emptiness and emptiness form. The old Taoist adage of dual unity is the perplexing clarity of universal distinction. To the point, and contemporaneously with current societal and ecological trends, human life is further revealed as an innate paradox. Van Gogh continues in his mad method of artistry in saying, "I dream of painting and then I paint my dream."

The wisdom of Van Gogh speaks to my previous post, The Cubism of Unity: Shelley and the Myth of Monogamy where he speaks on God (Unity) and Love (Diversity). "Love many things," he says, "for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well." More simply put, Van Gogh confesses, "But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things." 

In the beautiful and powerful 1956 film, Lust for Life starring Kirk Douglas, the tormented genius and emotional outcast paints Starry Night, while the narrator speaks: "Sometimes I work on into the night. I'm hardly conscious of myself anymore. The pictures come to me as in a dream with a terrible lucidity." Night and dream are married in a mystical love through the human as artist, animating the spirit of the dream towards a night imbued with the life-giving stars of an empyrean both transcendent and visceral. The dream stirs from the lowest of depths, and reaches towards our greatest heights. We are besieged with an all-consuming, all-cleansing, all-awakening, all-encompassing Mystery.  

Search on this site below for more original interpretations and creative contexts on Van Gogh

____________

My nature writing blends into an arcane Spanish-language text. The publication circulates among Earth-lovers and wild foodists alike. Together, my readers and I endeavour through a dense thicket of swamp. Community leaders take the helm of a slow-moving canoe, shifting through the bullrush stands and mud vents emitting the hot gaseous fumes of peculiar decomposition. 

Forest Swamp by Arkhip Kuindzhi

A rattlesnake emerges from the rushes as we emerge from the blinding vegetation. On the waters, ready to disembark for a land crawl, a comrade teases and taunts the rattlesnake head. The venomous wisps and hissing instills a deep-set fear straight through my eyes. The rattling spells virulence and ire. Reptilian awe paralyzes my arms and legs as I stare, petrified, watching the snake slither madly towards me. It darts and in a split-second latches onto my arm. My reaction is pure thought. Still as stone, I feel its fangs stick into my blood. 

Old dream interpretation folklore sees a snakebite dream as a positive symbol of regenerative holism. See my recent nature writing publication for Canada's only independent news cooperative. 

__________

To return to primal and distended physical tumult
A chaotic folly
Dreaming in smokeless fires

...
In the post-kingdom English croak
Over bastions and landlocked heights
That furnishes much scheming

A trite & forced inhuman sense
Of belonging
In a war trench

Phase of lunatic civility,
As the prosperous few wade
In proud shores of quicksand

Loss of self,
Ruined foresight vanishing
Into the uncreated past

excerpts from "Horror-story jazz"

Vietnam! Your Season Is Eternal!

Maimed Poet

"I sometimes have this dream of leaving the temple to return home. I dream my fingers have grown back and the swelling on my face has subsided. I dream that I have with me a dozen baskets of my best white lotuses and travel to the floating market of my youth. As I approach the women I would free all of my lotuses into the water and watch them float through the market like a white river. It would be then that I had finally returned home. Set free and pure. Then I would wake up into the black night and realize it was simply a dream, one of many that will never be fulfilled."

Lotus-Seller

"It is not too late."

Maimed Poet

"It is late. It is later than you realize"

- from "Ba Mua" (3 Seasons)

"My body is like the jackfruit,
Its skin prickly, its meat thick.
If you want to test it, then drive in your stake,
Don't fondle the surface, or sap will stain your hand."
("The Jackfruit")

- Ho Xuan Huong, Queen of Nom Poetry

Listen to Vietnamese Folk Poetry

Where is that land, worth fighting for, worth dying for, loving and dreaming for? 

Where is that land stronger than our Western fathers, who defeated the brunt of genocidal ambition, and lived to tell the tale?

______

We both walk into a building. There is old, thick carpeting. I smell musk and old, lingering dust. Chinatown, very mildew-filled atmosphere with dusty, we walk into a building. A set of stairs leads us left. We walk into a room with many bleachers looking towards a stage. We walk up the steps and we find our seats. It’s theatre seating. I notice two young men who are now much older. When I met them they were elementary school kids and now they are adults. They grew up with me in our apartment complex, upstairs. We notice that there is a kind of Taoist ceremony happening in front of the stage. There seems to be somebody in the right corner of the stage, appearing as a schoolteacher or Taoist priest, accompanied by a luthier. The luthier is fixing three Koto instruments on stage. I take note of the three Koto instruments; they are very old and large. When I went up to them, I realized they were very cheap. They were just effigies for a ritual, paying homage to something unknown. I found myself walking out of the auditorium into another neighbourhood. 

I quickly realized my husband was no longer with me. I found myself in a workshop. There were construction workers, male and female in overalls, squatting on the ground, hammering and working on things. I noticed one guy was the site manager. I wanted to impress him. I started working on something. He said, “you know, we pay $25/hour here.” I said, “I could take on this job.” He said, “You’ll work ten hours here.” The whole time I was thinking about my husband, wondering where I was. As the sequence progressed and I kept working harder, lifting wood planks and wires, I was doing really well. It came time to leave. I picked up my shoes, bags and coat. I walked towards the door. The manager looks at me, chuckling. “You wish your husband was here right now,” he said. “More than you know.” I said. There you were, gazing at me with loving eyes. He’s right behind me. I was totally taken back, embracing you tightly. I rested my head on his chest and said, “My love, you saved my life.” He responded, “I’m here to walk you home.” My heart pulse became more regular. I smile.  

________

Work

"To look for work, means that you will be benefited by some unaccountable occurrence." (iDream)

________

“Look...to the horizon!”

“How prophetic…”

“Be patient...look!”

“Give me your gun.”

The creature defies the boundaries of human sight
on Earth.
A rarity unspoken.

“Something to tell the grandkids about!”

“Don’t say a word.”

- excerpt from "To The Horizon"