the art of irreality

"The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and so substitute the vision of reality for the reality itself."

J.-K. Huysmans, from "Against Nature"

strapped to a gearwork nightmare

Continuing research on 'the aesthetic', Alberto and i finally found the collection of Brothers Quay short films at the Dreaming Ant. what words can i give to this? sheer genius, the stuff dreams are made of... intricate machines filled with strange tinketry, dirty mirrors, living dolls missing half their heads, objects that have a life of their own, moving in a jittery buzz like mechanical bees, the little gremlins engineering the contents of our nightmarish sleep. each vignette seems utterly familiar, yet inexplicable. as soon as you almost understand what's going on the lights drop to that dream blue, the camera fades, blinks, fuzzes out, and the mind slips off comprehension. sheer genius, mastercraftsmanship, perhaps they sold their souls to the dark side...

one of the shorts, more explicit than the rest, was a historical lesson on the artistic technique of anamorphosis, used mostly in the 16th century, the couching of one image in another image so that it is only perceivable from an unconventional vantage point, full figures popping out of landscapes when looked at from the side. mesmerizing, and i begin to wonder how it is possible to achieve this effect linguistically, not just some code or cryptology concealing information in the letters and words themselves, but in the images, and themes. an enhanced symbolism where what is said is really a veiled allusion to something much deeper, that you would almost have to put your eyes parallel to the page to read... much the way that dreams function in the subconscious.

walking back at two in the morning, i was confronted by the surreality of sirens, flashing red and blue lights, a mass of ambulances and cop cars on the corner of liberty, a body being dragged in the light rain. flickering streetlamps. i shuddered. last month after watching Holy Mountain w/ alberto i witnessed a man sprawled out on the sidewalk near the hospital, one shoe off and the sock laying withered on the bricks and two security guards moving the van he was laying behind. and now this. it turns out a man was shot at the ATM last night, three times in the head. i can't help but think it is some reminder from the universe that though i am trying to be patient with this work, shit does happen. and two blocks from home. or that the act of creation on one person's part balances out with destruction and violence down the street. i am reminded of alberto's horror several years ago, in realizing that everything we do has an intimate affect on the world around us, every negative thought, every moment of doubt and disturbed anger ripples out like we're tapped into (or trapped in) some plane of crumbling energies. all the more reason to create, to sing, to smile at strangers, to live...

researching the subconscious

(from akira kurosawa's "dreams")

as i get my scattered notes and dreams together in some semblance of order (or several semblances), i've started researching cultural and artistic depictions of dreams in order to more fully capture the specific dream aesthetic i am going for. as my alchemical friend Alberto Almarza put it yesterday before we watched kurosawa's masterpiece, "dreams are of light and water, but hidden in vases and lamps, in oceans and lighthouses. full of cliffs and deserts and forests, wind-up birds, compasses and clocks, doors and doors and strange ghostly figures."

while watching "dreams" i was struck, as i was the first time i saw it, how his themes and images could have sprung from my own mind, or any mind, certainly winsor mccay's mind portrayed in his "little nemo" comics; archetypal situations playing out the crux of humanity in a wealth of colors and melancholia. lost in a blizzard, walking through a dark tunnel, watching foxes dance in the rain, running from an erupting volcano. i've been there before. so perhaps have you.

restless folk arcana

Ill-lit by xmas lights, no one notices a shabby figure warming up his pump organ, mashing the chords like it's 1885 and you're strolling restless on a boardwalk at coney island. in no hurry he sets a sampler to carry a a few sparse notes, kills the lights, and pulling out an old diver's lamp begins creating his world. out of a box comes a red and black striped carnival barker's jacket, and a faded parasol protecting the organ from the dark. out of a decrepit traveling chest comes a paper mache head, followed by hands, one covering the mouth, one pointing still into the dark of the box. from another chest comes more lamps, colored gels, a miniature record player, the atmosphere of a winsor mccay comic. with care he places them just so, and casually picks up a trumpet to accompany the procedures in small plaintive squawks. and then a tiny case with a tiny chair reverently deposited on the turntable, a tiny man even more reverently set on the chair, which begins to spin as the boardwalk descends into some dark jangley rhythm from your dreams. the jerk and start of sine wave switches all one-handed with organ and trumpet key saloon songs like some old-timey analog sequencer. he's telling a story, about his father and 4000 year old finubulae. questions accosted by the melody. and back to the boardwalk for a last stroll into the crooked sunset.

followed by a punk cowgirl singing a sad ukulele in front of old twenties' silent films, keaton and chaplin, journey to the moon; and my favorite 22nd century blues singer rocking caveman songs to scrambled porn.

the journey, by charles baudelaire

When i started reading this poem earlier i knew it was going to be one of those poems, the ones that make you cry yes! the ones that when they were written you know the microphones were listening. this translation, by geoffery wagner, is not as good as the french (and that's funny that what with the five years of latin reading it in the french actually makes sense. it least there it meters and rhymes), so i may tweak it a bit, but won't transcribe all eight parts.

1.

For the child, adoring cards and stamps,
The universe fulfills its vast appetite.
Ah, how large is the world in the brightness of lamps,
In the eyes of memory how the world is petite!

One morning we leave, brains full of flame,
Hearts full of malice and bitter desires,
And we go, and follow the rhythm of the waves,
Rocking our infinite on the finite of the seas:

Some, happy to escape an infamous country
Others, the horrors of their cradle, and a few,
Astrologers drowned in the eyes of a woman,
Some tyrannical Circe of dangerous perfumes.

So not to be changed into beasts, they get drunk
On space and light and skies on fire;
The ice that bites, the suns that turn them copper,
Slowly efface the mark of kisses.

But the true travelers are they who depart
For departing's sake; hearts light as balloons,
From their destinies they never swerve,
And, without knowing why, say continuously: Let us go on!

These have desires formed like clouds.
And they dream, as a conscript of his gun,
Of vast pleasures, transient, little understood,
Which the human spirit can not name.

ii.

That we imitate, the horror! the top and ball
In their bounding waltzes; even asleep
Curiosity torments and turns us
Like a cruel angel whipping the sun.

Whimsical fortune, whose end is displaced,
And, being nowhere, can be anywhere!
Where Man, in whom hope is never weary,
Runs searching for repose always like a madman.

Our soul is a brigantine seeking its Icarie;
A voice resounds on deck: 'Open your eyes!'
A voice from the maintop, hot and mad, cries:
'Love...glory...fortune!' Hell! is a rock.

Each little island sighted by the lookout man
Is an Eldorado the promise of Destiny;
Imagination, dressing its orgies,
Finds but a reef in the light of morning.

Oh the poor lover of chimerical lands!
Must one put him in irons, throw him in the sea,
This drunken sailor, inventor of Americas
Whose mirages rend the gulfs more bitter?

Thus the old vagabond, tramping through the mud,
Dreams, with his nose in the air, of brilliants paradises;
His bewitched eyes discover a Capua
Wherever a candle glimmers in a hovel.

iii.

Wonderful travelers! what noble histories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas!
Show us the coffins of your rich memories,
Those marvelous jewels, of stars and stratospheres.

We would travel without wind or sail!
And so, to gladden the boredom of our prisons,
Pass over our spirits, stretched like a canvas,
Your memories with their frames of horizons.

Tell us, what have you seen?

ghost in the choir

Before practice nikki and i met up for a cup of coffee and one of our deep conversations that have proven to be a strong part of our growing friendship, in which one of us will bring up some thought and we'll fall into it like life depends on it. the issue of spirituality came up, as a mutual acquaintance of ours follows Krishna, and i feel like the rest of our set either could give a fuck-all for spirituality or has their own non-linear path they tread, and nikki was wondering where that distinction is between religion and spirituality since it's a subject she has little explored herself yet. i told her a story my dad told me of when he was a child and they went to his mother's methodist church, even though his father didn't really believe in it he went along anyway, until he finally saw how hypocritical it was and they stopped going. the following saturday the minister showed up preaching hellfire and brimstone and my grandfather listened quietly before explaining his precise reasons and then explained that it did not matter where you worshipped as long as you kept god in your heart and he couldn't do that under the church's stifling rituals. when the minister left he turned to my dad and pointed to his chest and said "you can believe in anything, as long as you remember that god is in there." which is why when my parents had a catholic wedding he went along with raising us in it, and later said that it was so we could learn that having belief in anything, the world, yourself, the unknown, was a good thing. i also told her a few of the stories from rilke's "stories of god," an early collection of edgy faerytales for children, of how people used to pray with their arms open to embrace god but when they put their hands together and built imposing steeples god grew afraid of all these pointy things, or how a group of children decided their parents had lost god and so put him in a thimble so they would know where he was at all times. personally i never could relate to the idea of some imposing old dude up in heaven. why should i? i had a twin brother who i could talk to, create whole worlds with, who was me. what did i need with some absent and abstract deity? my idea of god resides in the people (and things) around me, in myself, in those really deep conversations and connections we make as recognition of something deeper that is shared. and the strongest relationships i've had rely on a mutual expression of divinity. even if it's not called such. of course there is much to be said for the aesthetics and rituals of any established religion. a wealth of meaning that when practiced regularly can really set one out of the every day, the sense of displacement necessary to break us from our too-established patterns. but in order for any of it to make sense, or be fulfilling in that way all the drugs tv money sex fail to be, it has to be yours (or ours), a space that is created which is open to embrace the world, and not fend it off or tune it out. that rapt free flow of hearts and attention, of undistracted eye contact, not readily found in the thick of the maddening crowd. unless i'm on stage or writing, but then it's like preaching, and only at times as intimate. it is often like howling into a void, the space left by noise-clogged senses. throwing a ghost into the choir.

god is the absent narrative: notes on formation

memory is a narrative. for memory to be constructed,
a degree of forgetting is necessary; the idea of a negative narrative.

a narrative is a measuring of time.
we function within the illusion that we have moved forward in time.

all narrative is ritualistic.

the ritual has a beginning, a middle and an ending.

in the absence of ritual, there is no culture.

the basis of all culture consists of stories.. i.e. myth.

the basis of our idea of myth: muthos: stories, neither true nor false, neither realistic nor logical.

dreams are neither true nor false (and not necessarily realistic or logical).

"our own myths we call reality."

"in my beginning is my end."

correspondences

from an intro to baudelaire (by enid starkie)

"the hidden relation between things here below and in the world above he called correspondences. everything in this world is merely the symbol of a hieroglyphic language and he claimed that it was the function of the artist to decipher the hidden writing of nature and interpret the mysteries of the universe. he considered that only poets who had reached a high degree of spirituality were capable of understanding and interpreting these mysteries. beauty was not for him, material beauty alone. beauty was essentially a spiritual reality and he was convinced that art was the greatest and perhaps the only means of effecting beauty in this world... beauty for him did not lie in the subject itself but in what the artist brought to it. beauty was the flame of the fire, the radiance of the energy, generated by the spiritual shock he received when he was moved and this spiritual shock could come from aspects hitherto considered ugly. he did not see beauty in ugliness, he only said that from ugliness he could distill beauty. from the fire kindled within him the poet forged beauty and the intensity of the fire depended on his spiritual nature. the more spiritual the poet the greater the intensity of heat generated. poetry for him was not mere composition and to be a poet meant to be capable of spiritual growth."

lovely dangers

"The lover, is in such splended danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky center, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence."

- Rilke

a day in familiar sensations

smell of musty elevators in apartment buildings like the one my grandmother lived in
and checked tableclothes spilled with diner syrup
the rumble and stale subway air echoing melancholy off the platform walls with classical guitar chords well dressed but scruffy fingers wincing as the train announcments sound off beat
jumbled glare of warehouse graffiti only visible from the tracks

smell of ocean salt and expectation, each summer of my youth
crunch of toes in sand and spiraled shells between fingers worn opalescent with waves
colors in the mute gray breeze: sky blue and purple clouded sand drifts edged with red tar waves with green ripples only vibrant when the sun slides out from behind the approaching storm
then the sand is brilliant
a cut of tweed porkpie hat and mother of pearl inlayed accordian, a boy on the T tries to look ambiguous and older than his too smooth cheeks and century

"hello!" shouts an old friend smile not seen for four years
smell of basil grown and ground to pesto by her hands
tang of red wine and bite of whisky, irish clinking on ice
overtone harmonics of musicians tuning and crackle hiss of microphone failure
sore muscles from too much walking
shimmering reflection of moonlight on water and the configuration of the Plaeidies
taste of kisses on rooftop



***

today we wandered into the downtown crossing to browse through musty old used bookstores (and why am i not running one?) where i found a copy of some aldous huxley poems from the 30's and Plath's "Ariel" which i remembered later i had dreamt about buying a copy of in my dreams last night (except that one was enormous and in spanish).