Tu Muerte Llena de Flores

Tu Muerte Llena de Flores

Un ramo de poemas elaborado y traducido por Esliperín Montoya

El hilo que enlaza este ramo es el cuento de Blodeuwedd de la Mabinogion, el famoso romancero de la mitología galesa. Una mujer hecha de flores que buscó matar a su marido, y por eso mismo, fue convertida en búho. Blodeuwedd significa rostro de flores, y cuentan que en el gales de antaño blodeuwedd se usaba para hablar de búhos.

Tal como el mago Gwydion cogía flores de retama, reinas de los prados y tréboles, el editor coge poemas para conjurar algo más grande, algo que luego despega llevando la poesía a todos los rincones del mundo. Una agenda nefaria y mortal según los ojos de los príncipes de nuestra era, o los de sus seguidores que no encuentran más amor ni significado en la vida que el hallado en sus bustos mercenarios.

En el jardín de estas páginas encontramos el capricho y el abandono del excéntrico que va por la vida sin dientes, vestido en trapos de colores, repartiendo flores simplemente porque le da la gana. Quien oyó el tamborileo de las zapatillas de la Muerte por su mesita de noche y la recibió con un ramo. Quien echa flores a los novios y a las tumbas, y se espabiló de repente mientras el último pétalo de la rosa se caía. Encontramos la lírica y la letanía, el veneno, el perfume, el lamento, la risa, y el poema amoroso escatológico. Las flores que se abren encima de nosotros.

He cogido flores de una tropa de poetas bien seleccionada, poetas de otro aliento, trazo diverso y de melodías extrañas. Tanto de renombradas figuras de las literaturas inglesa, española, árabe, americana y galesa, como de voces desconocidas. Tanto de poetas jóvenes como de mayores, tanto de muertos como de vivos. Poetas que se han probado dignos de la etiqueta, no sólo por premios, alabanzas, o infamia sino por una cierta generosidad del espíritu y una dedicación destacada a la Poesía. Este pedigrí casi espiritual, de la inocencia sabia, de la inspiración beatífica, puede ser destilado en dos palabras, que de alguna manera se reflejan. Para los viejos: confianza. Para los jóvenes: valentía.

Todos los poemas aparecen en ingles y en español, y un poema en árabe. Los dos idiomas forman una dialéctica en el que el significado se genera en el espacio entre si. En esta tensión hermenéutica entre el Si y el No, en el intersticio entre cada lengua, entre la ortiga muerta y el arcángel blanco, justo en el centro del libro, una respuesta se proporciona a la adivinanza de todas las adivinanzas.

Video que muestra los libros

Este libro es un dardo de hadas untado de un elixir embriagador para re-encantar un mundo sin encanto. Que recuerde al lector su mortalidad y, por ello, viva aún más fieramente. Nuestra puntería es verdadera. Lo juro por todas las flores.

***

Tirada limitada de 300 ejemplares

Libro de tapa dura, tamaño bolsillo, encuadernado en tres matices de piel verde: colores encina, artemisa, y yedra salvaje; y dos matices de piel azul: genciana bavariana y baya de belladonna. Timbrado en oro. Papeles guardas color magenta, y color celeste. Impreso y encuadernado a mano por una familia de artesanos de marroquinería de Ubrique, Cadiz, Andalucía. Ya que los libros son encuadernados a mano, cada ejemplar es totalmente único.

440 paginas. 65 poemas por 21 poetas.

Índice 

*

Introducción

El dardo de las hadas

Flores echadas sobre tumbas

Flores para volar

Flores para fabricar dioses

'Donde liba la abeja ahí libo yo'

Mujeres de jardines y matanzas

Tus últimas rosas

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Los poetas

Antler

Casey June Wolf 

David ap Gwilym

Elena Botica

Emilio Montaño

Erynn Rowan Laurie

Esliperín Montoya

Giles Watson

Graeme Kennedy

Ian Kappos

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

MAAM (Maria de los Angeles Argote Molina)

Mahmoud Darwish

Mike Mahoney

Nicolas Ramajo Chiacchio

P. Sufenas Virius Lupus

Robert Graves

Ruby Sara

Scott Ramsay

Steven Posch

Tanya Fader

Victor Anderson

Se puede pedir Tu Muerte Llena de Flores en el enlace siguiente. Se envía inmediatamente. 

http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/your-death-full-of-flowers

Your Death Full of Flowers

Painting by Wild Grace

Your Death Full of Flowers

A bouquet of poems arranged and translated by Slippery Elm

The thread that ties this bouquet together is that of the story of Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogion. A woman composed of flowers, who sought to kill her husband, and was thereby transformed into an owl. Blodeuwedd meaning flower-face, and the owl said to have been called blodeuwedd in the Welsh of yore. 

Just as the wizard Gwydion gathered blossoms of broom, meadowsweet, and trefoil, the editor gathers the poems to conjure something greater, a something that then goes on to wing the poetry out into the world. A deadly and nefarious agenda in the eyes of the princes of our age, or of those who are their followers and find no love or meaning but in their expendable busts. 

In the garden of these pages we encounter the whimsy and abandon of the eccentric who goes through life, toothless and in colourful rags, giving out flowers just because. Who heard the patter of Death’s slippers by their nightstand and received him with a bouquet. Who throws flowers at grooms and graves, and awoke suddenly as the rose’s final petal fell. We encounter the lyric and litany, the poison, the perfume, the lament, the laughter, and the eschatological love poem. The flowers that open above us. 

Flowers have been plucked from a well pick’d troop of poets, poets of the other breath, of the diverse brushstroke and the obscure melody. Major figures in English, Spanish, Arabic, American, and Welsh literatures, as well as newly emerging voices. Poets both young and old, and poets dead as much as living. Poets who have proven themselves worthy of the appellation, not just through prizes, accolades or infamy but through a certain generosity of the spirit and a marked commitment to the Poetry. This almost spiritual pedigree, of wise innocence, of beatific inspiration, might be boiled down into two words, which in some ways, are each a reflection of the other. For the old: trust. For the young: bravery. 

All poems appear in English and Spanish, and one in Arabic. The two languages form a dialectic in which meaning is generated in the space between them. It is in this hermeneutic tension between the Yes and the No, at the interstice between the two different tongues, between the dead nettle and white archangel, right in the centre of the book, that the beginning of an answer is given to the riddle of all riddles. 

Video that showcases the books

This book is a fairy dart tipped with a draught to re-enchant a chantless world. That the lector remember his or her mortality and live all the more fully for it. Our aim is true. We swear by all flowers.

300 exemplars

Pocket hardback bound in three shades of green leather: holm oak, mugwort, and wild ivy; and in two shades of blue leather: bavarian gentian, and belladonna berry. Stamped in gold. Magenta and cerulean endpapers. Printed and bound by a family of artesanal leather workers from Ubrique, Andalusia, Spain. As the leather work is done by hand, no two copies are exactly alike. 

440 pages. 65 poems by 21 poets.

Contents

*

Elf Shot

Blooms Cast Upon a Tomb

Flowers of Flight

Flowers of God Making

‘Where the Bee Sucks there Suck I’

Women of Gardens and Gore

Your Final Roses

*

The poets:

Adler Frischauer

Antler

Casey June Wolf 

David ap Gwilym

Elena Botica

Emilio Montaño

Erynn Rowan Laurie

Giles Watson

Ian Kappos

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

MAAM (Maria de los Angeles Argote Molina)

Mahmoud Darwish

Mike Mahoney

Nicolas Ramajo Chiacchio

P. Sufenas Virius Lupus

Robert Graves

Ruby Sara

Scott Ramsay

Slippery Elm

Steven Posch

Tanya Fader

Victor Anderson

Your Death Full of Flowers can be ordered here: 

http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/your-death-full-of-flowers

Hunting is (still) not those heads on the wall

The woods at night. Mist in the trunks. Nightbirds, the voice of water. Heartbeats. 

Behind the fronds, the poet, crouched, feathered, fishing with a wand. Aflame with fear. Hush. Heartbeats. A branch broken, arrows loosed…Blood and the juice of berries on the riverbank…

At times it is the poet who brings back the white stag, at others it is the poem that hunts them. Regardless, after whatever frenzy has blown away and the arrows have been carefully fixed in their arcs, there is that familiar feeling of returning from a nighttime hunt in a far off wood. A wood so far away, that Distance herself is animated, has duende, is an integral part of the process. A process cold and slick with sweat; so beautiful, so terrible…

Then some skin the beast and hang it’s head in a museum. Visitors come, admire the royal posture of its horns, wonder at the frost of its white fur. But the head has grown mute, it’s fonts of prophetic speech dried up, and the cord to its music cut. It’s then that we remember Amiri Baraka: Hunting is not those heads on the wall. 

The artist is cursed with his artifact, which exists without and despite him....

   The academic Western mind is the best

   example of the substitution of artifact

   worship for lightning awareness of the

   art process.... The process itself is the

   most important quality because it can

   transform and create, and its only form

   is possibility. The artifact, because it

   assumes one form, is only that particular

   quality or idea. It is,

   in this sense, after the

   fact, and is only important

   because it remarks

   on its source.

Social media is guilty of even grosser artifact worship. Photos, statements, broadcasts about what one did that day are all heads that get hung up on the wall. Hollow posture is favoured to the exclusion of movement. Some apologize for this by emphasizing that sites like Facebook are a tool like any other. However, it is clear that social media sites are the end to their own means. This gallery of heads (faces?) do not tell how they were hunted, they are the hunt itself. When are we going to realize that this is a trap. The feedback loop occurs not only in relation to the ego, to peer validation and the thrills of self exposure, but to the ontology the ego is wed to. By submitting to the waterwheel of embeddable content, we are ever further from the sources of Ideas. No longer able to access Ideas, reality itself becomes diluted and pale. 

Reality’s yardstick—measured primarily in monetary value, and by extension, in Likes and hits—is such that small businesses, activists and their campaigns, artists and their art, must provide a constant supply of content, posts, updates, on social media sites or they cease to exist. While this precarious situation seems to offer little alternative, it might be time to rethink one’s strategy. Social media might offer some gains, but at what cost? Is it really so useful or is that efficacy an illusion? Recall forever, recall a time before the ipad, a time when people were less numb. That if an artist abandons or disavows having an online presence it does not make them ‘less official’. That offline conversations, pamphleting, performing, sewing seeds, speaking, planting food, learning skills, or teaching them, have more power than the ‘clicktavism’ employed (sometimes exclusively, it seems) by so many activists in the twenty first century. One can seek to use an enemy’s tool against them, but in the end one is still dancing to their music, and therefore, unavoidably under their control. Hunting is still not those heads on the wall. Here, what is true for art is even truer for social media. This is a reminder. 

Yet, the esteem of a strategy remains case specific. This is not to advocate that doors be shut without reason. However, there is an extensive difference between the employment of a given tactic as one in many, as something complimentary, and being wholly dependent upon it. What (who) would you be without social media? Would you still be able to do what you do? If you choose to make use of the internet, then let your presence be sparse, and even more so, unpredictable. Like when the dead walk in the world of the living, let whatever posts you make be received as incursions from another world, from outside the aggressive reality of Facebook and all social media; let them be hauntings. 

Reality is throned in the head. The internet (and especially social media) imposes a fatal separation of the head from the body. Poetry, like all art, compels the head to take back its body.  

A Farsi/Persian folksong sung by Azam Ali 

whose lyrics tell of a hunter who is reluctant to set his dogs after 

the rabbits, deer, pheasants, and so on because 

they keep reminding him of his beloved.

Oh to the woods again. To wonder, as all in green our love goes riding…

To pursue those fabulous beasts, not for sport, nor for profit, but to lose oneself once again, in that rapt and enrapturing dance of prey and predator, of bull and torero, or devil and witch…

To let the desert be your home, to thrive in the hinterland, to embrace exile if you must. (Especially if this means exile from social media.)

To see your beloved in all fauna, in all flora! In all things. Whereby the coup de grace becomes a death blow to the poet or hunter herself, whereby she cannot help but feel a great swash of mourning when the stag is taken. 

So in the throes of war, rapine, fear, and vehement environmental destruction, where man burns down his house to roast his pig, some poets seek prizes in the palaces of the academy, or accolades and visibility in the online agoras. 

Others disappear in the desert; their voices only rise over the city walls when the winds pick up. 

And it’s heads they’re after. 

Aquellas cabezas en la pared no son la cacería

El bosque de noche. Niebla entre los troncos. Aves nocturnas, y las voces del agua. Latidos.

Tras las frondas, el poeta agachado, en un disfraz de plumas, con una varita pesca. 
Ascuas de temor en el pecho. Silencio. Latidos. 

Se parte un palo, se lanzan flechas…Sangre y el jugo de bayas en la orilla del río… 

Hay veces cuando el poeta vuelve con el ciervo blanco, otras veces ellos son los presos de sus propios poemas. De todas maneras, después de que el frenesí creador esté llevado por los vientos, y las flechas estén colocadas de nuevo en sus aljabas, viene esta sensación familiar de la cual han hablado tantos poetas, de haber regresado de una cacería mortal en un bosque crepuscular, un bosque tan lejano en que la Distancia misma se personifica, tiene ánima, duende, Distancia que se convierte en una parte integral del proceso. Un proceso gélido y resbaladizo de sudor. Tan hermoso, tan terrible…

Luego, algunos despellejan a la bestia y cuelgan su cabeza en un museo. Vienen los turistas, y admiran la postura real que tienen sus cuernos, y se maravillan por la escarcha de su pelo marfil. Pero la cabeza ya está muda, sus fuentes de lenguajes proféticos ya están secas, el cordón de su música amputado. Es entonces que nos acordamos de Amiri Baraka: Aquellas cabezas en la pared no son la cacería. 

El artista es maldito por su artefacto, que existe a pesar de él y sin él

La mente académica occidental es el mejor ejemplo de la sustitución 

de la conciencia relampagueante del proceso de crear arte, 

por el culto de los artefactos… El proceso en sí es la cualidad más importante

porque puede transformar y crear, la única forma fija que tiene es la posibilidad misma…

El artefacto, ya que asume una sola forma, es nada más que una sola 

idea o cualidad particular. Es en este sentido, ‘después del hecho’:  la única 

importancia que tiene es que nos comenta algo sobre su fuente de origen…

Las redes sociales son culpables de un culto a los artefactos aun más grosero. Las fotos, las exclamaciones, los estados, los informes públicos de todo lo que ha hecho uno en un día dado (acabo de tomar un cafe, acabo de pasear el perro…etc) son todos artefactos, o cabezas que se cuelgan en la pared. Las posturas vacías se favorecen por encima de los movimientos. Algunos intentan excusarse de ello por asegurar que sitios como Facebook son nada más que herramientas como cualquier otra. Sin embargo, está cada vez más claro que las redes sociales no son medios a un fin, sino el fin de sus propios medios. Esta galería de cabezas (¿caras?), no nos cuenta de sus orígenes, de como han sido cazadas. Digamos que la cacería no es más que el propio acto de colgarlas. Cuándo vamos a darnos cuenta que todo eso es una trampa. Este bucle de retroalimentación ocurre no solamente relacionado al ego, a la validación de los colegas, y las ilusiones de la auto-exhibición, sino a la ontología con que el ego tiene matrimonio. Al someterse al gran molino de capas de contenido virtual superpuestas, nos alejamos cada vez más de las fuentes de nuestras Ideas. Ya sin poder acceder a las Ideas, se palidece y se diluye la realidad misma. 

La vara que mide la realidad—que se mide sobre todo por su valor monetario, y como extension de ella, en Visitas y Me gustas—es tal que los negocios pequeños, los activistas y sus movimientos, los artistas y sus obras, se sienten obligados a proporcionar un suministro constante de contenido, publicaciones virtuales, fotos, notificaciones y anuncios en las redes sociales o cesan de existir. Aunque esta situación precaria no parece ofrecer alternativa alguna, quizá ya es hora que reformulemos nuestras estrategias. Las redes sociales nos ofrecen algunos beneficios, pero ¿a qué costo? ¿Es que realmente son tan útiles o es esta eficacia un espejismo? Recuerda los tiempos de siempre, los tiempos sin los iphone, un tiempo en que la gente estaba menos entumecida. Que si un artista abandona o repudia tener una presencia virtual no le hace ser un artista ‘menos oficial’. Que las conversaciones cara a cara, fuera de las pantallas, el repartir panfletos políticos y artísticos, el sembrar semillas, el participar en actuaciones artísticas, el cultivar comida, el aprender habilidades nuevas o el enseñar, tienen más potencia que los ‘haz clictavismos’ empleados por tantos activistas en el s. XXI. Uno puede pretender usar la herramienta de un enemigo para luchar contra ellos, pero al fin y al acabo sigue bailando al son de la música que ellos han puesto, y por lo tanto permanecen inevitablemente bajo su control. Aquellas cabezas en la pared todavía no son la cacería. Aquí, lo que es verdadero en el mundo del arte, es aun más verdadero respecto a las redes sociales. Esto es un recordatorio.

Aun así,  el valor de una estrategia dada se estima en casos específicos. No quiero propugnar que cerremos puertas sin tener la necesidad. Sin embargo, hay una gran diferencia entre el empleo de una táctica dada como una entre varias, como algo complementario, y ser totalmente dependiente de ello. ¿Qué (quién) serías sin tu cuenta en las redes sociales? Podrías seguir dedicándote a lo que te dedicas? Si eliges utilizar el internet, pues deja que tu presencia sea escasa, y sobre todo impredecible. Igual que cuando los fantasmas caminan en el mundo de los vivos, deja que tus publicaciones se reciban como si fueran las incursiones de otro mundo, un mundo afuera de la realidad agresiva de Facebook y de todas las redes sociales; es decir, que sean embrujamientos. 

La realidad tiene su trono en la cabeza. El internet (y sobre todo las redes sociales) imponen una separación mortal entre cabeza y cuerpo. La poesía, como todo arte verdadero, compela a la cabeza que reivindique a su cuerpo. 

Una canción persa cantada por Azam Ali

La letra cuenta acerca de un cazador que no es capaz

de soltar sus perros a los conejos, ciervos, faisanes, y así

porque todos ellos le recuerdan a su amado

Ay, de volver a los bosques. De maravillarse cuando, con un arco en las manos, todo vestido de verde nuestro amor va cabalgando… 

De perseguir aquellas bestias fantásticas, no por deporte, ni por ganancia, sino para perderse otra vez, en aquella danza embriagadora entre depredador y preso, entre toro y torero, o diablo y bruja… 

De dejar que el desierto sea tu hogar, de florecer en el baldío, de abrazarle al exilio si debes…

(Sobre todo si eso quiere decir un exilio de las redes sociales)

De reconocer a tu amado en toda fauna, en toda flora! En todas las cosas. Por donde el golpe de la gracia se convierte en herida mortal para el poeta mismo, por donde no puede evitar sentir un gran pleamar de luto cuando se derribe el ciervo macho.

Así que, embrollados como estamos, en las angustias de la guerra, el miedo, el odio, y la vehemente destrucción del medio ambiente, en que el hombre prende fuego a su propia casa como para asar su cerdo, algunos poetas van detrás de premios en los palacios de la academia, o van cazando alabanzas en las ágoras virtuales. 

Otros poetas desaparecen en el desierto. Sólo se oyen sus voces cuando se alzan los vientos.

Y son cabezas lo que van cazando. 

Part 5 Essays (Ensayos) by Mike Mahoney

Art from Wild Grace's Lapis Lazuli series

El poeta Mike Mahoney continua exponiendo su constelación de ideas escritas en respuesta a La chispa azul libro compuesto por nuestro socio JP Kruse. 

Poet Mike Mahoney continues to expound his constellation of ideas written in response to The Blue Spark by JP Kruse. 

"Changing a way of life means changing a reality, and this is not a minor operation; when imposed forcibly it comes close to the annihilation of an individual or a culture as a whole.” - J.P. Kruse, The Blue Spark

Pure terror is involved here. Nauseating, dizzy, boiling cold & freezing hot terror. Gravity upside-down, blood-chilling terror. For people in prison so long they grow afraid of freedom, I think the word used is ‘institutionalized.’

Perhaps on the larger cultural scale, we've become so incarcerated inside our Pan-repressed terror at the world we've created, that the choice of freedom, suppressed for so long it's petrified in the dream-deep brain sediment & strata of human myth & vague nostalgia, is even more frightening and out of the question than our simultaneously present yet still impending world extinction.

Perhaps we’ve all become institutionalized within the dark prison walls of our capitalist ideas and cultural fears; inside the insultingly tight borders of our story – this fantastically growth-stunting western culture of gizmo-fetish wage-slavery, instant gratification & resource addiction; inside the cancerous catacombs of our inherited linguistic limitations & the gradual disemboweling of our spiritual fortitude.

It feels as if we’re so cut off from life as we knew it for the past two million years that the smell of Earth seems a distant memory. The kindling of fire an ancient lost practice. Lost on our dress shoes and iPads. It’s as though we’re animals who’ve been broken and tamed, humiliated into technology’s house pet, locked inside for so long we’ve become amnesiacs too afraid to go outside because we’ve forgotten there is an outside. Or if we do remember, it’s more we’re looking down at it as a child above the deep end of a swimming pool, scared of imaginary sharks, gripping the diving board with white knuckles too paralyzed with fear to jump. Somewhere deep inside him he remembers this should be fun. Exciting, even.

Without rituals that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, we spend our culturally-prolonged adolescence erecting walls and motes of behavior around our fears, insecurities, and shames until, by the time we become “mature adults”, we’ve repeated our own & our culture’s lies so much to ourselves we not only believe in them, we identify with them. And in a world as manipulative, cheap and illusory as ours can be, where massive corporations & fictitious markets roam the Earth munching up resources & thriving off of our societies’ lies to itself – the lies endlessly repeated, marketed, advertised, printed & publicized – we all believe we need to believe in something, even if it's believing in nothing. We all need some kind of psychic anchor to feel secure we won’t just drift off into insanity. A psychic mantra to localize us in the fuzzy temporal & dimensional space of ambiguity, abstraction and info-overload swirling all over the world. A psychic shield to protect us from overwhelming grief, anxiety and panic. From manipulative image magic and coercive reality engineering.

These anchors, these identity mantras and nexus points of recognition, these rhythms of refrain and hook, ground & coordinate us in a world where nothing else seems certain. They stake out a conceptual ground upon which we can stand. When this space is threatened, it's defended as if losing it would be worse than death. (And when it comes to moving into a larger reality, most of us would rather be invited than demanded. A smile, an invitation, these are much more persuasive than any demand, declaration or order.)

We hold on with a death grip to our phantom securities and illusory delusions of control in life, & over life. To avoid the nasty feeling of being completely naked, present, vulnerable and intimate with ourselves, with each other and with the surrounding reality, most of us will fight, scratch, kick and claw with tooth and nail to the death when we feel our tough outer shell of a world-view or self-image threatened.

It’s still a fear of death. A fear of the death of the ego if our identity is changed, challenged or threatened – if we lose our job for example, & therefore our confidence because our financial situation has changed, or if we lose our significant other, or a part of ourselves through accident, injury or illness. It’s a fear of death, whether the literal death of our body, or the virtual death of any of the other hundreds of chimeras of self we’ve created – all of our false senses of security, of legacy, of self-image, confidence & ego, of power & privilege, guilt & shame, of invincibility, independence & wealth, etc.. A fear of the death of our knowledge of the way the world works. Or the fear of admitting we’ve had it all completely wrong. The fear of the death of our trust in our world, or the death of our trust in self – (mostly an amalgamation of what the various fears, authority figures, and cultural narratives of our lives shaped us to be, and so probably shouldn’t be trusted anyway.)

Para mas información sobre La chispa azul 

por favor, visiten la página siguiente: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

The Blue Spark can be ordered here: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

Para información sobre el poeta,  sus libros y discos, 

por favor visiten la página siguiente: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com 

For information about the poet, his books and CD's, 

please visit his website: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com

IV. Essays (Ensayos) by Mike Mahoney

Painting by Wild Grace, from her Wayfarer series.

El poeta Mike Mahoney continua exponiendo su constelación de ideas escritas en respuesta a La chispa azul libro compuesto por nuestro socio JP Kruse. Para mas información sobre La chispa azul por favor, visiten la página siguiente: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

Poet Mike Mahoney continues to expound his constellation of ideas written in response to The Blue Spark by JP Kruse. The Blue Spark can be ordered here: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

Para información sobre el poeta,  sus libros y discos, por favor visiten la página siguiente: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com 

For information about the poet, his books and CD's, please visit his website: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com

“To overcome the inertia of a given situation, a new perspective has to be embraced with an almost blind faith, in order to rally enough force to break through existing patterns and to sustain itself whilst creating new patterns.” (JP Kruse, The Blue Spark)

And from Joe Chilton Pearce: “An ultimately serious commitment of mind . . . can be the determinate in any issue, overriding randomness and chance.”

No illness is cured by anxiously focusing on and worrying about the illness. Only more illness results from this, from self-amplifying the “problem” through anxious worrying and mental dwelling. Perhaps this is old-hat thinking, a kind of rough, blue-collar ignorance, and perhaps I picked it up from reading a lot of Henry Miller lately, but maybe it stuck because it's true.

If one is depressed, it’s the easiest thing in the world to be depressed about feeling depressed, and then to self-mirror this depression through so many lenses that before long you literally cannot recall a time of life during which you weren’t depressed. (“It’s Always Been That Way.”) The more one behaves and perceives and thinks this way, the more self-fulfilling it becomes. The same applies, however, to its opposite, with positive thinking.

Maybe a major part of any positive change comes more from placing our attention on the positive nexus of notions and actions that the new solutions spin around than in investing it into curing the maladies themselves, or at least in feelings and actions which balance out the dis-eased energies at play in our being. Perhaps a big part of it lies more in trusting that the maladies will diminish and dissolve away as the new growth of positive habits and perceptions bloom through our cognitive gardens, even if only in our imaginations at first. After all, the brain-body circuitry seems to have a rather difficult time differentiating between our dreams and what we call & think of as ordinary reality.

Yes, part of 'the change' is identifying & pinpointing what we want to change from, our problem, as it were, but dwelling on the "problem condition" can itself perpetuate and even strengthen the problem. To dwell means to live in, or reside inside of a place, a space, & to pack your belongings & move into the problem – living in it as if it’s a dilapidated apartment you can barely afford – is maybe not the best way to get out of it, let alone solve it, or move through it. It's perhaps a type of razor's edge, this conundrum, & one I struggle with myself in trying to "figure out" "how" to "let go" of my own fears and anxiety. But of course, there's no physical “fear-thing” to let go of, (outside of my mind), and part of letting go of something means to stop trying to figure out how to let it go. To an indeterminable degree, we seem to sustain the very existence of most our problems by believing they’re something we have to work to be free of.

We must stop our clutching and attachment to our problems, stop feeding them with the holy fire of our very creativity and attention. Yes, we must look long enough to clearly outline & identify them, to examine them, but then it becomes paramount we use our imagination, creativity, and the power of metaphor to transform the obstacles into stepping stones which enable even more positive change then was maybe possible without such ugly & clearly presented difficulties.

A change of story, a widening of story to encompass the old within the new, is necessary. And not just to include the old within the new, but for the new story to not be possible without the old, to grow from inside the shell of the old. To bloom its green leaves through the asphalt & cement cracks in the shell of the old. Nature always seems to build on top of and incorporate the old, after all.

This will take creativity, an inescapable part of overcoming anything, and of course in manifesting the new patterns which take the place of the older, ineffectual habits, whether bound up in our perceptions, our thoughts, our reactions and projections, or our emotional responses and fears. Creativity requires a type of relaxed and divine play with our perspective, our perception, and brings into forms the qualities and aesthetics of Beauty, so necessary and lacking in the world our cultural games have created and our history’s wake has left us bobbing up and down in, treading water for our lives in.

“It takes devotion to create and reverence to enjoy beauty,” writes Fritz Eichenberg in his Pendle Hill Pamphlet ‘Art and Faith’, from 1952. “We have sold mind, body and soul to the machine and, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, seem to have forgotten the formula to stop it. The magic of art…. Seems almost to be forgotten. But art is still the magic formula which can stop the robots who seem to run our world.” And later in the same piece he shares a quote from Herbert Read: “Art leads from play to fulfillment, from feeling to drama, from intuition to dance or music, from sensation to design, from thought to craft.”

Creativity is a ruling principle in transcendence, in evolution, in growth and novelty and the manifestation of all things new, all seeds blossoming. I truly think there isn’t a problem or hurdle or misunderstanding on earth or beyond perceivable to the human mind that is not able to be gotten around, gotten over or through, hurdled, surpassed, translated or understood, transformed, or, at the very least, softened & made manageable, by a creative rearrangement of perception, of language and processing. By a metaphoric transformation. A perceptual reframing. It’s all about our intent. Or as Joe Chilton Pearce wrote in his book The Crack In The Cosmic Egg, “Intent precedes both acquisition of knowledge and ability to do.”

Another of my favourite lines from that book, which reiterates what we‘re saying here: “A change of worldview can change the world.”

III. A THOUGHT ON MINDED ANTS

  

Painting by artist Wild Grace, from her Everpresent series. 

El poeta Mike Mahoney continua exponiendo su constelación de ideas escritas en respuesta a La chispa azul libro compuesto por nuestro socio JP Kruse. Para mas información sobre La chispa azul por favor, visiten la pagina siguiente: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

Poet Mike Mahoney continues to expound his constellation of ideas written in response to The Blue Spark by JP Kruse. The Blue Spark can be ordered here: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

As i loaf in my apartment, letting my mind loose to roam and explore the deep annals and chasms of the past, of the planet’s history and of our brief time upon its surface, it strikes me to imagine how our story would look to us if we were to see it projected onto another animal?

If we were to see the entire tale of our monkey species, the evolution of thousands of cultural narratives, tools and abilities, the evolution of our consciousness through a few thousand years of myth and history, put onto another animal on another planet earth without us?

If our whole evolution and history, from the origins of our imagination on to present day, were mainlined through our third eye and played out like a brief movie for us to watch?

How would we perceive it, looking onto a freshly discovered planet, strikingly similar in size and age, in ecosystemic diversity and chemical make-up to our own, if to our astonished gaze, we discovered an ant, a lowly insect, was undergoing all the processes of imagination and self-reflection present in our own species over the past few million years?

And if, looking through our high-powered and digitally-enhanced telescopes across time & space at this Earth-like jewel of a planet, we could perceive in a type of time-lapse reverie the couple-million-years long development of this ant species – from a primitive creature with a hive-minded mentality slowly dabbling with the taming of fire, then more quickly with the discoveries of art, language and the wheel, more intensely with agriculture and numbers, speeding up all the while and all the way up to the construction of a globe-girdling sprawl of electronics and technological cities similar to our own, a grid of virtual realities connected by pollution and ideology – with say a few hundred years passing every 10 seconds – what would we understand then?

How many times watching it through our monitors and computers screens would it take for our minds to light up into starry exclamation points of jubilant comprehension?

What patterns would we see there?

What future would we see?

In watching the first stirrings of ant-mind painting its dreams onto the walls of underground caves and tunnels, would resonance fill our thoughts as we gradually recognized ourselves in this meta-view of projected self-reflection?

And then would shock paint our faces as those newly minded ants quickly spread out over the entire planet, devouring the earth and taming her plant life and forests into agriculture and suburbs?

Taming the fauna into extinction?

Taming their own minds into ant-culture?

Into eastern and western strands of ant-culture with assorted types and dotted tribes of archaic memory-holders of the "Old Ways" spread throughout the dwindling wilderness areas of this alien, ant-sick planet?

Would we watch with horror as the ants exponentially multiplied within a few a generations, (only a minute or two to us watching from our privileged time-lapse point-of-view), into a gross imbalance of overpopulation so dramatic the world buckled under the weight of sustaining them?

What realizations and emotions would bubble up inside us as an enormous amount of energy from the planet’s incredibly wide spectrum of species withdrew from its vast diversity, from the millions of branches of its tree of life, down to just one twig of an insect: the ant?

After hours and hours of watching them live balanced within their world's harmonious and complexly integrated systems of developing life, diversity and health, only to see them turn left into abstract symbolism and its resulting societies and cultures, its inevitable technologies with globe-orbiting satellites and blood-spilling shames of war and ‘religion’ within the span of a few minutes, would we be appalled?

Nauseated?

Terrified?

Would we try and reach out to warn them when we saw the blood of their planet spilling into its oceans and clouding out its skies while fueling their culture?

Try and make them see they're living amidst the 6th great extinction event of their planet?

Would we put the fucking pieces together finally, and see in them a mirror of ourselves?

And if we did, would we change the way we think?

The way we live?

Or even the way we dream?