Saturday, December 11, 2010

So, . . . What's going on here?

'We notice that you are looking at a bunch of very random words and seeing this story in them! We even notice that in different versions of the same work the words are not the same.'

In the Muse Poems I am not seeing the words as words but hearing them as sound. I let the sounds run from one to another and let that remake the words that support the sequence.

Though written, they were drawn, literally, and in surrogate, as silhouettes of sound, as written words they were first read and spoken as sounds, never spelled.

The words thus thus taken as suggestions of sound sequence, not sound sense. As we assemble the words we are looking for a 'story', but that story is akin to toys in a doctor's office for the children to play with. The real reason is not to play with the games that we are there.  Well, yes, we are for that reason too!

This is the distraction of conscious mind. The rule, to make a sentence out of five random words, places an almost impossible overload on the conscious mind, which fights at this point to keep its leadership. However the battle's lost, because at this point the Muse takes over.

The original 'story' that we thought we were composing, is actually only one facet of the crystalline structure that's presented. Like any dream, it has other stories she wants to tell.

She's better at it. We let her speak.

I come to many many versions of the same poem, and love starting out again with the same sound sequence and letting it evolve a different way.

In that evolutionary process, I don't keep drafts. Drafts are the death of poetry. It all must be as fluid and surefooted as canoeing down a river. You don't go back. You can haul your boat back up to the top and read it over. But you don't put drafts  up and down the river and paddle back and forth between them.

Often I'lll post one of these works and know it needs resolution. Some tiny changes have to be made so that it can be read in this world.

The grammar 'she' uses is more direct, less complicated than ours. Those tiny differences are what I make up for in the edit.

The editing is based on a set of rules which I hew to totally.

Reading a poem enough times aloud, changes it. Just the reading changes it.

When I'm not happy with a poem, I refer back to the original, which to me is akin to a silhouetted tape recording, something that we took down as we arranged and spoke drawn words. I regard this as sound resulting from ritual activity . . or . . . vibration that is allowed to flow through ritual activity . . . as if the ritual itself creates some kind of lens, or imaging device.

It is very hard to make these poems hang together unless one does that. Sound flows most easily in a discussion. Here the unequivocal assignment of roles, as in dramatic role, is necessary, to give the sounds their sense. There has to be a setting, a stage, and a dramatic ritual to go with it.

The Greek dramas made sound out of sense, i.e. spelled words. that have meaning, but first stripped them, literally, of their their content, so as to place them where they could assume a grammatically correct relationship to each other. This is a kind of acrostic puzzle, impossible for conscious mind to do on its own. Language expurgates itself of sense, becomes a new sequence of sound, and then reassembles itself again towards grammatical sense one more.

Here is my water. It's all water.

Let the sound flow like water over the rocks, and let the content, i.e. meaning, flow  by like fish.

I could learn




I could learn a color language. 
Dry rhythms mounting trouble,
Drive it, play a silhouette.

Give that passion, as communication, to a studio head.
Have no greening hold me . . .
then a dark deep strengthening dream.

You guys never say, or drive past
Sculpt hot and dirty,
almost always above a sanguine picture original.
Understand why I live, or think, or choose.

Sound is ok.
Wildly aware, no "I", banal!
Go observe!
What demands a drunken angel stud?
A body can ask a girl, "won't they eschew fun?"

All were drunk, style was back up.
Health too, our Saturday affair,
understood a deep paragon.
She investigates thought about an opening.

Whisper,
So thin.
I perform related mental fixations.
Phone, fiddle, scratch, part the opaque yard.
Give your companion over to a subject.
Surface!
Catch only a deuce.

Delve!
Know that infant blue.


with Layna Roberts 5/12/06, 15, 16, 17
Part I, Part II



  The Muse Poems:

   1  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81


Songs of Orpheus



DNA, and RNA, it will soon be discovered, are light-processing molecules.

All molecules process light. All atoms. Exited enough, heated enough, struck by radiation of any kind, electrons, they emit photons in return. But few are built as musical instruments.

That noble helix, and its half one-off copy, RNA, are 'light ladders', that spin out photons when 'strummed' by a special acrobat, the serotonins manufactured by numerous plants, funghi and the brain itself. They light up as they move down through helical contortions, reading the code, and sending out light.

This I believe, and hope one day I can prove, is the source of the ancient myth of Orpheus and his music.

Radio waves are light. Certain molecules enable us to transmit and receive.

The very beautiful 'pick' for this instrument exists in the form of serotonins in our own brain, or ingested psilocybin, the DMT  (Dimethyltryptamine) in ayahuasca. The list of plant compounds that invite Orpheas' music is vast Cannabis, ArtemesiaSalvia, Datura, and magic mushrooms of many genus', Stropharia, Psilocybe, Amanita and  Claviceps. Even some animal compounds, notably amphibians and reptiles are psychedelic.

Orpheus's song surpassed the music of the Gods themselves. His music healed, moved, altered, changed. He was said to be able to charm and transfix in bliss the wild beasts, any living thing, even the weather and stones. Could Orpheus's music have been the essence of a transcendental experience, a life altering psychedelic mysterium, brought on by ingestion of a gift from another living substance.


   C, G, A, T
   A, C, T, G
   G, T, C, A
   T, A, G, . . . C.


Now if a 'system' broadcasts information using radio waves, which are light, photons of a non-visible wavelength, that 'system' is also tuned to receive the same frequencies.

Therefor, it is not only likely that we are playing our own DNA, but also hearing the DNA played to us by others.

All our DNA? Most likely yes . . but here's the interesting part . .

So called 'junk' DNA, that is the vast majority of our genetic makeup that has not yet been identified as possessing genes, is now turning out to be a kind of historical transcription of the 'tablet' upon which our genetic information is written. For a moment consider it as the part of the blackboard that bears a record of things being written, then erased out.

It's history, a transcription of our family tree back to the beginning of time. A symphony of biological evolution, a swell of song extolling our ancestors, and the existence of life.

It is my belief that junk DNA is actually where the majority of our cultural genes reside, and that these genes, that determine behaviors instead of physical makeup, may be played so that the culture of others may be understood, particularly, and I mean this, particularly, when a ritual of playing those songs is engaged with the help of one of the aforementioned substances.

Genes, 'junk', social genes, if it is in DNA, it can be played by serotonins in the brain. We become tree frogs singing the song of our existence. We alter reality with our song.

In other words, communal ingestion of a psychedelic substance in a ritual context, amplifies the song played by one's DNA, and that this may be received by other minds much as the same way as tuned coils receive and broadcast radio waves simultaneously.

Tune yourself to the songs of others! Orpheus lives in all of us. The lyre of light, the ladder of life . .

   From our moment of birth when our DMT sings,
   Plays all our many, nucleotide 'strings'.
   Broadcasts our history, our life to our kin,
   Frequencies blasting the state your mind's in.

Stay tuned for amplifications on this thought.

Land of Sindh


I'm walking to Bharat's salty pans, 
Going to meet my Guju gal, 
I'm walking to the Ranns near Pakistan, 
To the deserts of Kutch and sal'. 

I'm going to the sands near Burton's Sindh, 
Where 'A Thousand and One Nights' was first inspired, 
I'll study him, and see how his women are livin', 
In the lands of sea, snake, and chai. 

I'll wander about Ahmed's souks,
Where shops are the size of a bug.
Spend some time buying cotton threads,
And maybe even spring for a rug.

I'll go to the Sultan's marble abode,
And the temple below his city.
I'll follow the Shah to his Islam below,
And study his hareem's poetry.







The Amir will take me birding,
Out there on those salty pans,
He's got a fast falcon that he's learning,
And an equally fast pair of hounds.

I'll catch me a Nagar tiger
Out there on that salty bog.
Maybe I'll snatch some gold from her fire,
Maybe I'll see a hare chase a dog!

I'll stroll with Amir and Amiri,
By the shores of the Sabarmati,
Then back to old Mumbai,
To visit pals at Merchant-Ivory.

Then stop to watch some cricket,
In the dust of that CCI club.
I'll drink mint tea, and mumble a plea,
To have it in a glass that's been scrubbed.

When I meet my yoginis at Coba,
I'll be Nāgá'd by number one Muse.
We'll go sneaking in tandem for Cobras,
'It will confuse her if I don't bring my shoes.

"Do you reckon I'm a Nagar Tiger?
"You see me naked out here in the cold?
"It's freezing here in Tiger valley!
"My crotch is needing more gold!"

Now I'm the Shah of Ahmedabad,
I've brought over my daughter and son.
But I'm really just a Connecticut Yankee,
Who happened to shoot a hare with a gun.

I'll walk barefoot down by the river,
The women of the desert go there to wail,
They peddle me used tins of cooking oil,
To ship my sculptures back home to Yale.

Scheherazade tells me her stories,
From dusk right through to the dawn.
She's got me ensnared, in the plots that's she's bared -
I'll postpone her execution.

The birds call out time to do yoga,
At first light of the desert morn.
Down his hole goes that old King Cobra,
Singing that ohm-filled song . . . 

"I'm going to Bharat's salty pans!
"I'm going to the Ran of Kutch!
"I'm going to catch me a Nagar Tiger!
"In rolling deserts of cactus and Bhuj!"


[Hindi transliteration , also my Muse comments on this piece, I respond.]




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