skipping tracks of territory

Behind the box drab rowhouses, the stoplights and straight streets, a road winds down beneath the bridge. taken back by nature, kudzu and trees covering the hillsides and we're not in the city anymore. some kids sit howling on the crumbling steps, a last bastion of civilized life. and down, past the graffiti and gates, down to the tracks were minutes before a train went screaming by. it is dark except for distant streetlamps on the busway, and the fireflies swarming in the green, innumerable fairies or magic lanterns hung. soon you can hear movement, people, vagabonds and outlaws sitting on the tracks, tuning up instruments, sharing the stories of the day and a jug of whisky while swatting off mesquitos and slight paranoia of getting caught, dogs running around sniffing everything and even a family with a stroller. soon one of them begins to sing to the clapping of hands, an old timey folk balad sound with yum diddly ayes and sweet warble and wrapping back time to the contents of this modern life. and guitars, and the hoedown; bass, banjo, fiddle, spoons, mouthharp, harmonies and hallelujahs in their natural environment, and the lightning coming in fast. the kids getting drunk on moments of freedom, in forgotten spaces of true autonomy, we did this together, singing to the one still star and the wide open night where anything's possible. and the wind picks up as the music continues and the baby's started to fall asleep.

"Train!" someone yells, and with that the tracks are cleared, everyone diving into the bushes while one drunk stands defiant against the onrushing light, only to be pulled off quick but still reach out and slap the train as it passes, the expectation of loud roaring thunder and cheers. but it stops. uncertain moments. and everyone takes off running, diving up through the brambles, back towards the tunnel, ahead, afraid, have they already called the cops? walking past the conductor steps out, more concerned than angry, "is everyone okay? i thought i heard something hit." "we're fine, and all accounted for." laughing and running. "what happened?" "nothing, nothing, sorry to stop your schedule, but we're going now." punks running off into the night, and onboard the passengers look around in confusion. one of them, older and tattooed, sees our stream of unruly and begins making cheering fists and signs of success, as if our interruption saved him from the monotony of the journey. as if he'd rather be out here with us and stopping the trains with song. "alright, next year remember, we got to wrap it up before 2:20 so we don't." but how else could the evening have ended?

with a thousand voices

"The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment. We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the languaage of analytical pscychology this living thing is an autonomous complex. It is a split-off portion of the psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness. epending on its energy charge, it may appear either as a mere disturbance of conscious activities or as a supraordinate authority which can harness the ego to its purpose...

...The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny in to the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficient forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night."

-Carl Jung, from "Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"

written on the hollow

we have a map of the future
a bodygraph of heartbeats
hitting the wall of smalltown lust
under a hlaf-holy compass moon
and building blocked starlight

we have scars in this surface of streetskin
too many back-balanced books
shoes worn thin were the sidewalks revolt
and all these traced too deep
filled w/ ink to make more permanent
landmarks on the cityslide

we have no desire to be where we are
on a couch in a secret garden behind the ballpark
w/ birds flying lost in the bridge rafters
lights and roaring traffic-tide make them forget
when to sleep and after hours they circle
crying for nests the can no longer find

we have short attention spans
and shorter lives to get lost in
and the soul of the country has been canvassed
under the safety of crosscolored bordermaps
and knowing no matter how far
you find the same countertop coffee smiles
channeled through the tv for convenience sake
but beneath the blanket lies another story

we have escape mechanisms made
of rusty bikeparts and unatrophied muscle
the velocity of longing
certain sunlit parks were the clouds
still daydream of being butterflies
lovers around the world yet to meet
days were the drugs have worn thin
and nothing numbs the need to keep moving
or rot where you stand

we have a map of the future
let's burn it for fuel and get going

dreams for the devil's birthday party

woke at 6:30 this morning to cook brunch after only a few hours troubled sleep. so shortly after band practice this afternoon i passed out. and dreamed.


it's evening, don't feel like going to the normal hangouts, figure i'll do laundry instead at the corner laundromnat down hill from my house. all my clothes in a white garbage bag tearing at the seams. at the door i think, why am i carrying this bag of garbage? so leave it between the trashcan and a mailbox and go inside. things have changed. the front room is now a bar and hotdog shop, tiled floors like the O and flickering neon. and back down some stairs a large room of laundry machines and arcade games, kids playing pinball, skiball, dancing to a DJ in the flashing lights. What am i doing here? see a change machine, think i'll play, but no money. and no laundry either for me to pass the time while washing.

back outside, but now the hill and street are a parking lot and thick laned road, a movie theater and more shops behind as if the city had become a giant suburban stripmall while i was inside. i feel lost, want to go home. a girl drives up in a slick black vehicle, red hair and a face my mind keeps trying to composite from all the various beauties i've known. have the feeling i abandoned her earlier. "c'mon" she says as i get in, "i'll take you my way, it's safer there." we drive down roads i'm beginning to recognize again but not from real life , turn off the main drag onto a beautiful tree lined country road curving by the river, "why, this is so close, i should bike here more often" it is now daylight and the sun sparkles crystilline on the white leaved branches.

suddenly the woods break and there is the mountain, the bay full of towering rocks, the endless beaches and jade forests. the utopia of my dreamworld, but all covered with snow and thin light. "it's beautiful..." feeling slight apprehension. keep driving, i begin recognizing other spots too up the foothills: the standing gods, the bowl of masks, the last locked gate I had never found the key to. all the trials and tempts of my quest dreams, now down below our winding road. she smiles, "we'll be there soon." through more now completely snow covered pines.

and there a massive metal gate built into the cliff face, with guard of some sort keeping watch out front, rushing around hearding people through the doors. the girl panics, slams on the breaks. "what's wrong?" she tries to turn around, but they stop us and ask us to get in line for clearence. favian's there, upset they won't let him in or leave, thinking they think he did it (did what?), she says "don't worry, tell them you're staying with me" the floor of the hall is ice or thick polished crystal. we aproach the guards, one asks for IDs, accepts favian's story when the girl produces a slick black microcase from her handbag. i notice the other gaurd is holding a laser gun at us, reflected in the floor, except it's really another gun between his feet. and his feet are hands. this sets me off. "what's wrong?" one asks, "nothing," i try not to lose it, "just having a gun pointed at me is disconcerting." "not to worry," he waves me through with his foot without checking my ID, "I won't shoot unless you're a terorist, and i have a good feeling about you. next." i wonder how he can tell, suddenly have the urge to run back there and tell him to shoot me anyway, it would be easier than what might happen next.

we pass through the mountain and onto a cliff road on the side of a deep gorge careening with snow. I look up, and gasp. there is her city, all blue steel and crystal, old domes and sleak lines, both timeless and not of this world, spiring up to the stars. the only time i'd seen it before in dreams is last time i'd died, and flown around heaven robbing its banks.

this time it is all on fire. "no!" she screams. buildings crumble in on themselves, torn to all angles and howling. in the distance the guards rush about like ants trying to extinguish the balze. we run, find a set of stairs, green girders, and climb. I realize I'm on the wrong set as someone climbing the other side tells me to get down so he won't step on me. Favian looks over, "dude you're upside down" i climb off the escher steps, follow them up rightways behind an old crying couple who keep getting younger. to another set of moving stairs, but we jump off quick into the landing area.

selena is standing there, staring through a large glass window as several guards fight the fire on a balcony on the other side. a display on the wall counts down the remaining city sectors vs volume of flame, and the fine print reads evacuation ports will terminate immediately. "c'mon," the girl says, hurrying to a service elevator, "we can get out this way." the building is beginning to rock and grown. "wait" says selena as if in a trance, "look, it's not really fire. it's something alive trying to be born in this world." "my god!" favian whispers in horror and sways transfixed.

"there's no time!" i say, alreay in the elevator and holding the door open. the lights flicker. "but i have to see this through," she says "it will hold" a voice on loudspeaker begins counting down to all flames extinguished. "no" the strange girl whispers in the elevator behind me "that's just what it wanted to happen." the count hits zero. lights go emergency red wailing klaxons as fire leaps up everywhere. i leap back as the elevator doors slam, and the girl and i go hurtling down into the dark.

...

i have not dreamed like this for a long time. and may not get back to sleep for awhile. "i could be bound in a nutshell and consider myself a king of infinite space, were it not for these dreams" for sure the beginning makes sense to my life right now, but the rest... well, at least it is more symbolic imagery than seeing bombs dropped on DC. no wonder i've spent years numbing it out

brrr.

θέλημα

in that strange space between another stellar band practice and another bout of illness last night, and the stupidity of an argument with my housemate about musical drones and getting turned away from the east liberty health clinic because i looked like i should go to shadyside's clinic (showing that class and race divides are more important to some than actually healing the ill), I had several strange dreams that stayed with me despite being a bit drunk.

in the first there was a street party in a backwards version of my parent's neighborhood, and it had spilled into their house. i went upstairs to find my younger brother devon, who took me outside to show me a frail leaf that when held to the dying sunlight had engraved on it the greek word "thelema" θέλημα, which he wanted me to hold so he could photograph it. in the second, after a small stint rowing around a pirates' treasure cove i was left standing in the rain outside a shakespearean theatre waiting for a my twin to come back with the car keys so i could get home. i was rolling a cigarette when a redheaded girl in a white cape came out of th stage door and gave me a glancing look over before walking off into the rain as if i should follow her. but i didn't.

maybe it's reading all the anais nin, or finally getting back into my subconscious after a year of gut survival, but both these dreams struck me as highly significant. for years i dreamed of that mystery girl, who i thought of as a muse, but really represented all the faeries and crazy women i chased after, and would follow her through the dream time into all sorts of sticky situations. but now i feel no need to follow her, like i can find my own way home thank you very much, and only reaffirms my decision to find my own way through life without needing to subsume myself in love for others that is never really satisfying. most of it was just trying to find some semblance of the closeness my twin and i had growing up anyway.

as for the thelema leaf, thelema means will, purpose, or desire and became a major tenant of aleister crowley's magical philosophy: 'do what thou will,' stating that each person's task is to find their true will, that path of least resistance of action because it is supported by the whole universe and allows them to achieve their dreams on earth. he got this idea from the 16th century fransiscan monk rabelais who said: "because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us." which sounds to sum up my last five years pretty well.

selena and i had been talking about desire a lot recently, being driven by one's own internal starlight, and getting serious about music and writing this year only seems to be opening up so many more doors and being my "path of right action" that i can't help but follow it furiously. even if art and desire are frail and liable to fall apart in our lives the way the leaf my brother held up was doing. he wanted to photograph it as that is his true will, not just photography, but recording the hidden luminous nature of those things that are transient in this world, as all art does.

velvetine radicals

up late researching the history of Chezk literature and poetry I stumbled across a fascinating bit of rock and roll history: The Plastic People of the Universe.

Influenced heavily by early Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, and sounding like a precursor to such modern groups like Guts Pie Earshot, !!!, and most industrial music, the PPU were the driving force of the Chezk underground in the late 60's-80's when the communist regime was pushing their campaign of normalization. Though they didn't have a specifically political agenda, they refused to fit in to the standards for performers and ended up playing underground barn shows for thousands until they were all arrested for disturbing the peace in '76. This is where things get interesting: these arrests are said to have led playwrite Vaclav Havel to pen the Charter 77, the main opposition to communist rule that eventually led to the Velvet Revolution in 89 and the overthrowing of communist power in the Chezk Republic.

Despite not being activists, here is an incredible example of music becoming a force for social change, the name of the revolution itself harking back to the Velvet Underground, who represented to the members of the Plastic People all that was right and unique in rock and roll. Despite the fact that the "underground" in New York in the 70's had nothing to do with political oppression, that spirit of rejecting normalcy and pushing the arts to new edges carried through to the Chezk people and gave them the courage to reject the stifling influence of the communist regime. Of course, once the Iron Curtain was dropped, and the emigre' writer's books were finally sold in their native country again, the anger and intensity that had fueled the arts scene almost completely died out, and in some articles I've read from recent Chezk musicians they almost wished they were living back under communist rule so there would be something to inspire them to create art against.

I also went to see the Dada exhibit at the National Gallery yesterday (odd to see such art up on gallery walls), and was struck that what fueled these artists, besides a desire to be doing their own thing, was the horror and absurdity of World War I. That their art was the only way for them to express their outrage and fear at what was going on in the world around them. The collage, scrap art and military aesthetic of their art later went on to shape the aesthetics of punk, the feminist collages of Hannah Höch being the almost direct precursor of the work of Crass artist Gee Vaucher, Crass being another rock band that had a vast political impact, during their time singing out against the Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher's regime in 80's England, but also (in my opinion) as the main reason anarchism and hard politics got integrated into rock music as a youth movement, making them responsible for the current anti-globalization movement.

The irony being that despite the continuation of the Iraq war and the tightening civil rights at home, most modern american musicians and artists don't seem all that oppressed or horrified by what's going on in the world enough to make a really clear statement against it, or if they do, such messages have been heard so many times before that they don't stand apart from the spectacle to make any sort of real impact on it, and even punk is distancing itself from an explicit political message, as if that was so last century. it's not like anyone's telling them that if they don't confirm they will not be allowed to continue playing.

live the questions

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Richard Hell says:

on the self:

"All that "growing up" means is that if you are lucky you learn how to better cope with who you are - who you are doesn't change. In fact, that is probably the very definition of who one is- that which doesn't change. Living and identity are a kind of artform. You have this material- yourself- and the challenge is to explore or present it, to find a language or style for its display, its manifestation, that correspond to and are suited to tracking its nature. Anything seen in its fullness is beautiful. Or that's the only hope we have anyway."

on music:

"The power of music- what it gives you and does to you, where it takes you- seems impossible, like sorcery or subatomic physics, considering its simplicity. It's like the sun; and then the moon. How does it do that? I guess it must have something to do with the way music comes to you, you don't need to go at it the way you do with words. Then it encompasses, more dimensional even than light, instantly, and not by force but sympathy. It changes everything. And songs: The series and combinations of notes and how they are played and the nature of the instrument producing them, those sounds, are direct emotion itself; unlikely as it seems that that could be, there's a pure correspondence, you could probably analyze it like a scientist, and something in the design is in fact mathematical, giving you purely abstract pleasure too, and then that's all mixed with the possibilities of the message and purposes of the words, and the rhythm physically taking and compelling you, the whole mess shooting all around bruised and popping and breathing, threatening and begging, projected in miniscule waves that carom and vibrate so you literally move inside it and are penetrated by it. And that doesn't even touch on the appeal of a given person's voice and how it is a friend or not, or a sex thing, or an oracle, smart, sweet, honest, or angry or tough- all the character that's carried in a voice exposed to where it gives you something you get nowhere but your most intimate intense relationships. It seems amazingly good of them to do this for us.
-And it can be produced by one person holding a guitar. And you can have it all and all the different kinds for a few dollars worth of tape and a cassette player. Push a button and there it is."