KRIEG

The violence of our culture pierced me in the cradle, and I have remained transfixed by it.

HURRICANE

A strange, humid silence fell over the town before the storm drifted in. Everything seemed to go into a charged, meditative state beforehand, and the tree leaves occasionally flashed silver in a display of worship or fear. How wonderful to know, as a result of the heightened perception our technology has brought, that we were on the edge of a beautifully spiraling, enormously proportioned upsurge of energy. The hurricane, so like swirling galaxies, was a reminder of an untouchable enormity at the edge of my life, and of the vast movements of energy and matter of which I am a part.

The vastness of the cosmos is only untouchable in my present consciousness. I am a strange sort of dual-being, one part made of the crude materials of the universe i.e. a part of the universe itself, whereas the other part, my consciousness, is a sort of harmonic overtone produced out of my body's energetic fluctuations, which perfectly mirror those that take place in countless other parts of space.

Every particle of matter has a potential for higher consciousness.

SPEECH

There is no material in the universe that does not speak.

DANCE

Dance, in its earnest and naturally channeled expression, is a way of being completely present in the world, without allowing rational, human complexes to take over consciousness. It is a kind of expansion of consciousness in the sense that, when the rational and practical voices in the mind have been quieted, the consciousness is liberated from its situational blinders, and is able to unfold into a fundamental experience of physical and mental existence. It is a way of communicating the simplest truth of existence, a ritual to participate in, and reflect on, the endless motion that is presence in the ensouled body, i.e. human existence. We are wondrous contraptions, built subtly of the crude materials of the universe, and infused with a vast spirit. In dance, we drift effortlessly and artlessly through the universe, projecting out only what we fundamentally are.

.

something is delicately knotted nothing

QUIXOTE & AHAB

Don Quixote struggled against the rising tide of rationality, believing a world seen through the lens of myth to be more coherent and beautiful. Off he went, heroically, gracefully even, a living myth himself, an ancient human intelligence asserting order on an ever-shifting unknowable. Living life mythically, as rationally, entails many difficulties. After all, humanity turned to rationality after finding critical fissures in mythical world-coverings. Smaller, more arcane fissures are the death of rational frameworks. Nothing is ever simple, and before long, no matter what we do, we are caught in countless ambiguities and distractions. To save face, we must continually project our myth, or our rational framework, on a sometimes uncooperative universe.

A sort of "postmodernist" irony results from Quixote's attempts to live mythically, wherein images of grace and beauty in the world are revealed to be layers of artifice and self-deceit above an abyss of chaos and absurdity.

The postmodern mindset, then, is really not so new. Mankind has always found absurdity (the close-up view of vast incomprehensibility) lurking around the edges of its systems of explanation, whether they be mythical, rational, or otherwise. It sometimes seems that all of mankind throughout time is massed together in one eternal flaring of spirit, one atemporal drama of understanding.

~

Ahab's is a violent conquest of truth. He attempts to barbarically drag one of the great, inscrutable constructs of the otherworld down to human understanding. It is a kind of glorious blasphemy, to hunt the whale. Starbuck may be right that we should turn back before falling headlong into the abyss, head back to the small comforts of land.

On the other hand, how could we turn away from such a heroic quest into immensity? On land, among whatever reassuring material extensions we can scratch together, we will still feel a gnawing sense of loss, of absurdity. We feel we are ignoring all the ineffably vast workings of the life engine that cranks beneath the bland appearances of sheltered life. Ahab finds a primitive channel into immensity, or the beyond-man, and throws himself audaciously into it. In this action, he almost deifies himself; he towers beautifully against infinity, a savage, brilliant

animal.

~

These two fight the epistemological battle alike and together.

DREAM

We were on a cruise ship full of casinos and strange gatherings of people. Margaret and I got a 100 Euro note from an ATM for a little gambling. It happened to also be a delicious biscuit, and I couldn't help but take several bites of it. Suddenly I realized that I had eaten at least 60 Euros worth, and began spitting out the masticated note, hoping that I could still get change for the parts I had chewed up.

We rushed to a choir rehearsal (our whole reason for being on the boat) and began singing. The room was huge, metallic, and dingy. After a while, our vessel separated from the cruise ship and we went rushing across the surface of the sea, out in the bright winter sun and salt spray. We came up on a vast metallic structure jutting up out of the ocean; a tunnel system. It arched up over us and we went inside, traveling down and through its rusted entrails for a while. On the other side there were a great number of rusty barges covered in broken down trucks and small buildings. We landed on an island and began walking. It was desolate, and covered in charred buildings and broken vehicles. The air seemed thick, and though the sun was bright, there was a peculiar dimness all around. Everyone I had been walking with suddenly disappeared, and I was left alone on this strange, deserted island in the middle of the ocean. I walked and walked, and caught a glimpse of some red swamps through the grid of burnt houses. I woke up.

THE WHALE ROAD

Along the wave front, seeing down into the water and through the sky, we swam after the whales, who lived in some place beyond the curvature of the land and below the surface. I could see the vapors meet the sea, and the great violence of their intercourse. There is endless war and burgeoning life at the intersection of two great bodies. A nymph led me along the whale road, though at times I was separated from her by an enormous swell of rolling blue, and I was left only with my fear and exposure to the vastness.

At last I saw the whales, blue on blue, off the rocky promontory.

THE DOOR IN THE TREE

I climbed through the gnarled orchard in a soft rain, searching for the shining medallions. They glinted and glowed all around; the wind wove and danced through the water, and pressed the leaves, which covered them and then revealed them in all directions, at all points.

I crept to one tower, a dark and looming one of twisted limbs; it was bottomlessly green and its savage thorns guarded a great load of the golden fruit. The life in the earth gathered around it, raging umber to ochre to verdure, roaring into spots of incandescence. I saw the light in the earth pouring out of the tree, the force in the soil.

I climbed through the rough substrate, the rain pelting down now, and grabbed and twisted the fruit with my long, leather hands. The tree fought and wounded me, but as I came around to complete the circle, it opened its door. I walked into the tree, the silent room, the living temple, the twisted spirit gut where I was born and will die.

The wind and rain were gone now, and the fruit hung calm and harmless around me.

Tell me of the Steely Oncorhynchus that swims through the veins of the earth. It struggles down from the towering places of its birth and spends a life in the vast ocean. Tell me of its return, its following a spirit thread back up into the mountains, back to the spot where its soul was woven.

I'll tell you of our birth in the forests and orchards, and our odyssey through the fire and blood of human life. I'll tell you of our return to the sylvan chambers, of their reflections in hospitals built from wooden skeletons, earth, and sand.

AIR LIFE

The silent people all swayed in time, gently leaning this way and that as the train trundled through a dark and indistinct country. Stepping out to an empty station, a man exhaled. His breath pushed the air; the air slid through leaves and found sleep in dark hollows. It climbed slowly to the clouds and pressed into them.

It seems the world has a fullness to it, and that I am inescapably linked to everything else.