The state of wonder.

 This is very old writing of mine. I thought it might be time to put it up here....

At Hogsback in VT, photo by R. Nethercott

The story of MANY and ONE

3 states of being, 2 properties of the cosmos

Old but mischievous children had gathered to hear this old one’s tale. They whispered to each other. Each had a different hat and a different face and different way of speaking. They laughed and drew pictures in the dirt with sticks because they were merry children though they were not young. Each had traveled many years to hear the particular words of this tale.

The ancient sat cross-legged on a log. The fire light lit the grey eyes and translucent skin and the white hair. A faint smile flickered also.

“Many and One, whose other name is ALL greets you and is you,” the old one began. The whispers stopped. The fire hissed and danced. Her voice was neither young nor old, neither sharp nor soft.

“Before the path of ALL was ONE,” she said.

“And ONE was at peace, without dimension or division or dissension or delusion. And that is the first state and the best. The undifferentiated state of one..”

One. One. ONE. The name of ONE burst in whispers down rows of attentive children. Some sat forward on logs or stones, some crouched, some leaned against trees. A few reclined in the grass.

“And after ONE sat silent, being and containing Unity, containing the matrix of the ONE endless formless self for many millennia, the ONE became curious. And that is the second state and is also the best: The state of curiosity.”

Curious. Curious. Curious. The word rippled among the children like wind through meadow grasses.

“And what the ONE was curious about was what might happen if the ONE mind concentrated all its thought on only one intersection at the center of the matrix of the One formless self.  And it was so.

“And from the thought of the One, matter sprang into being, expanding into the formless, endless self of the ONE> And it was entirely the thought of the One, and it was also the energy of the One and it was, itself, the One.

“Yet is was various -- so the One became Many and One, whose other name is ALL.

ALL. ALL. ALL. The children set to whispering again.

“And from that first property of All - Unity, came the second simultaneous property of All - which is Variety.  And from those two great properties of Many and one, come our unity and variety.

 And even so, we ourselves are many and one and all life and all that is and is not: all is many and one - Unity and Variety

And all that is, and all that is not -  All is the thought of the One, and energy of the one, and is, itself, One - Many and One whose other name is All.

And after Many and One became and sent matter and energy spinning and expanding into the undulation of time; the one mind marveled at the Variety, and at the Unity, and at the expanding bubble. And Many and One, All was filled with Wonder and delight. And that is the third state, which is also the best: the state of Wonder.”

Afterlife

 

AFTERLIFE

I’m just a sullen moth
flinging myself at the porch light,
always speculating,
splitting hairs,
asking myself why.
Is it the light?
Or the warmth?
Or the stillness of the
dried bugs inside the fixture
with that almighty bulb….
very still, but not "one" with the light
as their papery wings become dust….

            --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

#poem #mortality #metaphor

April 2016 Poem a Day #23 Sole Entanglements

For this prompt (to write a poem about footware) I am posting a poem I wrote many (MANY) years ago - because it is my definitive footware poem.

Sole Entanglements

Old shoelaces unravel,
unruly as love,
as likely to trip you.
Untied, each lace dances,
frayed and flaccid,
reluctant to knot again.
.
Velcro closures lock
and cling, too willing to grip,
but Velcro can't let go.
There's rip and uproar
when suddenly undone.
.
Old loafers are the best.
So easy to slip
in or out of at a
moment's whim, they
shelter your pennies
never ask for socks.

                    --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)  

Images of the unspoken: dances by Pina Bausch

Polite small talk is a social mask, but in the dances of choreographer Pina Bausch - you simply cannot escape viewing the unspoken subtext.

A severe and menacing man chooses among deeply fearful women who offer him a red cloth. He rejects all but one.  All are distressed. A flock of men poke and prod a woman as if she were a melon, or a small child.

These were among a few vingettes in the film "Pina" - a commemoration of the work of coregorapher Pina Bausch. It's not a biography, nor a documentary really, nor an epic. It sets Bausch's major works in the loose frame of her dancers memories of her - which are admiring and well, sort of oddly worshipful. The film shows them onstage and sometimes takes them dancing out into the city, and country.

I hoped the images present in the dances would be interesting and might inspire a painting or a drawing perhaps a poem also.  (I like to paint the human form in motion, and evoke motion, even in doodling.)  The dances were evocative of human relations and contained quite a bit of visual metaphor. The trailer will give you the idea.....

One scene that really struck me contained a couple embracing. Suddenly another man comes out of the side door and rearranges their embrace - then he picks up the woman and hands her to the man. The nitpicking spectator then goes back behind the door, after which, the man drops the woman. She immediately gets up and flies back to him, and they assume the original pose...  Then, of course, the man comes back out of the side door, rearranges them again, and this whole process repeats over and over and over - and  accelerating faster and faster to an impossible pace.

Finally the man no longer comes out to rearrange them. He doesn't have time and doesn't need to either because they have accepted his expectations and rearrange themselves. They subsequently revert to type, rearrange themselves, revert to type......, repeat, repeat, etc etc  What an odd, wonderful visual metaphor for social expectations and the way we internalize them.

Painting: The Riptide Within aka Brain Chemistry

UPDATED WITH NEWER VERSION OF THE PAINTING in Feb 2011

A human being, torn in multiple directions,  struggles but is unable to break free!  To me this is a visual representation of how I felt the greater portion of my early adult life: caught in a subtext of hormonal machenations, fighting overwhelming emotions. It's inspired by the mood swings of my youth... So much of what we are is about brain chemistry and DNA.  Studies of identical twins separated at birth are quite bewildering. Some marry women with the same first name and buy the same style of eyeglasses. Yet nurture and experience alter the brain as well, alter our paths. The brain, once thought immutable rewires itself, its chemistry can change.  So much is still unknown...  This is an oil painting on canvas board. It was begun around 1990 and finished late last year.

Alternate Parking

It was hard to find parking at the polls. We voted at 6:15 a.m. this morning. Before coffee before breakfast. I personally voted straight Democratic - Duane Perkins, Chris Murphy, Joe Taborsak and most important of all BARACK OBAMA.

( I am an independent who went over to a party to vote in the primaries when John Kerry was running...)
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I think the odd angle and out-of-sight bike in this pale pic, contribute to the idea of hidden alternatives, escape routes, and alternate ways of looking at the familiar.... This is a photo I took in New Milford CT, standing by town hall looking towards the green, (you can see the intersection with Bank Street in the distance.) I fiddled with the photo in both iphoto and Adobe Photoshop Elements.



UPDATE; It's 11PM and ABC news has just projected BARACK OBAMA will be the next president..... HURRAY!

Power & risk of focus

Let's say you have a couple of million gallons of water on the move...

The stuff could be spread out over acres and acres in a shallow flood. It could bleed off in to a network of irrigation ditches to feed the needs of others, or detour in to four or five isolated rivulets, each on its own path. Or it could drain furiously down one channel that gets deeper and cleaner as the flow progresses picking up momentum on its way to the ocean at the end of everything.

Lately my life feels a lot like the first option. I have been a wide stream on a gentle incline - acres and acres wide - covering a lot of ground very slowly, without particular direction. I have washed a lot of silt along with a lot of trash, all going nowhere in particular, going nowhere in leisurely cluttered way without momentum of any kind.

Yesterday I got out my shovel and started digging a more focused path for this flow of life force. As I was digging there were shovels of stuff I threw over my shoulder onto the banks. There were at least three people who only call when they need something, a few activities like shallow ditches heading off in the wrong direction that needed to be filled in, and a couple of financial drains I plugged up with a shovelful of determination and a firm NO! It was work, but it's a start. Well see how it works out, and if I can resist the big sucking effect when things that are sinking, or just flowing off in the wrong direction, try to pull you back...

-- Mar Walker

Sci-fi illustrator Michael Whelan at library

Fantasy and sci-fi illustrator Michael Whelan whose wild artwork has graced the covers of many a sci-fi tome will be giving an "illustrated lecture" at Danbury Library this coming Sunday from 2-4 pm.

I remember years and years ago, attending the opening reception for a show of his work at Gallery 7 with the artist in attendance. I think this could be a really exciting lecture. He is going to talk about the creative process and his career using slides of his work. His work usually involves symbolic or metaphoric scenarios rendered with a photo-realist's meticulous approach.

Perhaps that's a lesson for metaphor of all sorts - pick the right metaphor and use exact details out of reality to flesh it out......

Truthism - crazier than other isms?

It's tragic how people's ideas can clash.

On Youtube on my SingingMist channel, (Now thePuzzledDragon channel) I have a "Got Christmas Dread " video. Someone left a comment on it, that Religion and Science were bullshit and should be junked infavor of Truthism.

When I visited the website indicated on Truthism, I found about six pagse of of circular bushwhacking before it finally got around to the crux of it - an emphatic belief that the planet is controlled by "Reptilian Overseers." And of course you can see these reptiles only under the influence of meditation or hallucinogenic drugs. Imagine that.

I thought that was crazy enough, but then an equally strange thing happened. One of my regular viewers told the "truthist" person to get outta dodge with his "filth" I replied with some notes about free speech - but shortly after the fellow's account was suspended. I guess that was considered spam? His comments had vanished. I thought well, I will just start over again. And I deleted all the comments on that video.....

Funny how one man's truth is another's ridiculous fantasy - how one man's free discourse is another's filth. When talking about the religion, the storyline always gets crazy no matter what faith is under discussion. How outlandish is a virgin birth or people rising from death or the whole world being carried on a giant turtles back? It seems like no one is able to think of these crazy notions as psychological metaphor. No wonder we are bumping each other off at a frantic pace over religion. Maybe that's man's tragic flaw - his penchant for us-and-them self-delusion.

-- Mar Walker

Enlighten

This was moved from the Metaphoratorium Gallery where it was a May entry.

Butterscotch light illumines the dark interior. Talk about visual metaphor - here it is.... I don't like to think of myself as this lightless, but I am always hoping for a shot of brilliance to wake me..

Optical Phantasma

Moved from the Metaphoratorium Gallery:

The optical confusion obscuring this 2005 winter view of my front door, easily lends itself to metaphor. I took this shot from the living room window, through double-pain glass. I like the little light ghosts that resulted. Like everyone else, my view of the world can be distorted by phantasms: of imagination, personal history, assumption and unfortunate but transitory conditions inside the cranium.

---- Mar Walker