Tuesday, June 3, 2025

For Alice Notley (an addendum to a previous post about her sudden removal from the linear)

 

 

For Alice

   well maybe it only means
you don't have to pretend
or perform any longer
only flow with delight entropic
& you will be obvious
once and for all undeniable
self-similar to us anonymously
united in the overwhelming absence
ahead of all matter
& found in many places perfectly
unexpected both normal weirdo
fitting to all sandy particles
a strand of beach a string
of opals or yet nothing like that
faceted multi or not at all
fixed like that but unable to not emerge
also shadow of face feathers within face
glowing fox snake owl ointment
hydro carbon metallic catalyst
desperate unembraceable you un-you
of the sudden disincarnates ablossom
well discordant and wry
just portent tangentially sensitive
to all the things not there you echo
tuned into absence radio
resonant with the decibel void
as our general non-existence deepens
thickens and densifies
& merges again into will be
thrown celestium velocity
what scatters out eons
coming out pronouns
you me us inclusive
exclusive, elusive,
at home in the incomplete

Suchness & the Field of What Recording is About for Me or Back in the Garden Again

 

 
 
As Joni spread the fairy dust stardust golden canticle
and opened us to the seemingly impossible task
of getting ourselves back to the garden (not just the Rave
of Woodstock but to the X not marked on any map
--- I am reminded here of formulae from the alchemical 90's
which came to me in Sun Ra's voice one day:
the treasure map where X marks the spot is Map of Mystery
where X marks the spot of destination, el dorado, delusional ends
whereas the Mystical Map is where X marks the moment
this locus of process and reality evolving its flower
 
Eden is among us. It is found within the foundation of pure love. The keystone is within every seeker to join the formation of the temple. Eden is pure vibrational awareness, a modality of consciousness and sensation. Music is only a portal or a bridge to the feeling. Field recording is a ritual return to primordial perception while the alleged rational scientific purpose is ethnographic, ecologically rooted, leaving us with data to study and learn more about our environment. This learning is without end. The experience of the vibration also is without end and the spiritual aspect often lost in the gear is that circuit of vibrational constant sensing itself on all bandwidths. 
 
Musical instruments and recording gear are tools and as MacLuhan or Novalis seemed to say they are models and extensions of our own organs. 
 
Novalis suggested that new organs of gnosis and feeling were evolving. 
 
 All field recording is the creation of memories of places made sacred by memorialization, annotations of a transaction with the recognized infinite, temporary temples. Hildegard of Bingen had a garden too and I feel it must not have been far from Eden. It's modality was called Viriditas or the "greening power of G-d" Music, art, deity, earth, sky in no particular order or in every order in the palm trees, figs, olives, in the eyes of the wondering miraculous baby Buddha or the hooves of the ibex. Everything that is and including that which is not. As Lao Tze remarked, "the hole in the hub is what makes the wheel useful". The axle connects all the wheels.It is a thoughtful, mindful world and you are within it as discovery itself.

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Rest in Poetry & Remain in Light: Alice Notley (1945-2025)

   Below you will find a poem that Alice Notley sent to me a few years ago when I was in the process of gathering material for a new journal that never got past experimental stagings. For the moment, I'm too shattered to say anything more than to put these few momentoes together. One of the poets I've read my whole lifetime and who always surprised and often confused me and tested every known and unknown boundary (see poem below for instance). You have to hear one of her poetry recitals from the last few years to get the whole picture of how she bridged into shamanism and declaimed verses with true bardic intensity and bubbling cauldron of mind. In our correspondence we talked a lot about dreams, lucid dreams, premonitions and clairvoyance as poetic resource. 

Many will miss her and my condolences to Anselm & Edmund Berrigan and the extended family. 

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Notley




          You are          human                   Shat-
        in-between bodies of                tered Dawn
       this life. All the files seem to be ruptured, good. The
      light, magenta and yellow won't cohere I can't remember
   . . . the name of what I was calling these almost unstable isles
                        previously, sometimes cubicles, floating but
                        there are no strict geometric forms, here in
                       reality. Or lines of swastikas or star shapes
                      are you washed in the blood enough yet. You great
                     big beautiful doll, faceless and free. Accusations tre
                  mble, maybe you face fuckup. In transition winds
               where cubicle crumbles. I know some people are dying. I break off
           pieces. The room doesn't have to beg you not to leave it expands to
        be big enough for your souls expands within and keeps
       'we want you to know us a                                       going
       gain' is being said. You nev
      er know who you'll bump in
     to the white doves coo and crows
       caw soft as
         ghost caws
                                                                                calling me
                   I                                                        what you all
               call here                                            made. You defend it
            beckoning                                         beyond a medical report
           with air. How                                      because you like waking
           are you Pretty.                                 up, really. Another of lily
      Words don't sti                                   he said Lily died last night
       ck together she be                          did he I didn't write it down
    speaks somehow say                             I can touch your centur
   ing. We can float. I once                             ies here in an instant
  dreamed I flew with Uncle                            holding it's the holdin
 Taylor high high above the earth                      g that makes us souls
higher than an airplane or any                        O you're a strange god
thing next to wispy clouds would                   I go there still into the
you like to see my heart? Is it                       beloved action. Have you
broken she says. It stopped bleed               always? I don't know. I
 ing. Be that I can carry and now I'm         don't know if anything stops
  Hold the holder the gravity that             Human suffering, though, is
 is known as the expanse of Death.          only one example of the
 I am carrying you to freedom                    cosmos. Everyone has al
  Are you the old man? I am the good          ways been free but a
 The part they don't get, is how it is d           fraid to choose freedom
  on't understand. Because from                   I hold you free you keep
    Point Zero there are no Ways.                  choosing the pressure of
    Like music can be any way. I               bodies. I chose as a human
      know she says Keep me com           to slip through the micro-hole
     fortable. I'm trying. You'll ne             into the other mode I am as
    ver leave. I always come back.      everywhere. It is a beautiful day
  Where will your head be. I have       in the lace. grace palace. Your
  heads everywhere. And me? You'll    face is pretty and shining again
  sort of have them everywhere too.         (real words)

-- Alice Notley

        

        Here's Alice reading from the book she gave to me in Paris in 2017 (picture below)

https://alicenotley.bandcamp.com/album/alice-notley-live-in-seattle 

  This is a link to a whittled down version of the 2017 interview I did with Alice and which was produced by Marjorie Van Halteren.The longer discussion is worth hearing and I will try to post that as soon as I find it in my archives. But I think it's 3 hours!

https://exchange.prx.org/pieces/316593?m=false 

 "What we need to do is explain to people that difficulty isn’t difficult."

               -- from the Paris Review interview 2024 

 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8263/the-art-of-poetry-no-116-alice-notley

 

Photo by Marjorie Van Halteren


 

Friday, May 16, 2025

The Bridge of Many Shapes: Release Notes

 Work in Progress. This post will be updated as the CD goes to press
 

 The Bridge of Many Shapes 

(CD and Digital Release on Mahorka, June 2025)

The idea for the title came among many dream phrases on the night of November 11, 2024

"crossing the bridge of many shapes, we will meet again, when the months grow longer, discussions going on for weeks, the Hindu and the Muslim boys carry baskets of corn, any basic coverage is universal, the girl child leads an elephant, her hand held by the elephants trunk, in her other hand five roses, there is a kind of sheep with cobalt stripes, the mango pit once peeled turns out to be an almond"

  This album is a dreaming of a Trans-Eurasian Balkan psycho-archeology by means of sound.  Dreaming is meant here in terms of the songlines of Aboriginal Australians who while walking sing the tribal ancestor creature's dreaming into the geography of their own activity, communing with landscape, ghosts, spirit animals. This is an act of decolonization and a dissolving of the present moment and an entry into oneiric antiquity, an imaginary return to and travels within the homeland of my ancestors once adrift in the Cucuteni-Trypillian corridor. A shamanic journey in sound back through the mirror of the earth. 

 The aboriginal dreaming of the totemic spirit of the land however is not enough. My ancestors removed themselves from the corridor of Ukraine, Moldavia and Romania over a century ago, moving to the USA, while now my own soul has drifted back across the ocean, again inside the strange and weathered boat of my own body, searching out harbors. In this respect, I have been able to put wind in my sails and oars into the waters via the inspiration of two Carribean authors whose works trace the double life they led as people of Africa and people of the Americas. Kamu Braithwaite who charts inside his body of work the shared border of two continents ripped apart by geological time and yet experienced from both sides, after his people were forcibly carried from Africa to Barbados. While his life took shape on a distant island far from Africa his ancestral story comes from afar to an island that appears to him like a boat sailing not only ocean but dreamtime cosmos. 

Guyanese writer Wilson Harris also traces an awesome asymmetry, living in many places and displaced from many, wandering in a body tossed by chance operations and historical impositions. "Mind has ancient sorrow it does not understand, fabrics of sorrow that reach through rational experience, Mind has sadness, joy, tragedy, comedy, interlaced in indescribable ways, Mind has vestiges of everything as it longs to return to the end and the beginning of things. It longs to return to a ground of truth, in which justice lives beyond all reasoning, absolute barriers. Mind longs to return in sacred ships, to the promise of wholeness on a distant shore which is still there when an age collapses. There is a ladder between the shore of earth and the Artist's painting. We are astonished to see there a curious solidity to grief painted in solid lines, a nervous solidity to joy..."   -- from The Ghost of Memory

 Among the Kogi people there is said to be a series of energy line between sacred places of resource and ritual in their seasonal life cycle. They too inspire me in the concept of an Eastern European and Balkan sense of songlines. See the bibliography for more in depth descriptions. Thanks for reading and listening to The Bridge of Many Shapes and thanks to Mahorka for making the CD happen 

 

Bibliography

 -- On the Kogi concept of dark energy pulsation threads -- Aluna -- an Ecological Warning by the Kogi People https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftFbCwJfs1I&ab_channel=Aluna-TheMovie

-- Spinal Catastrophism by Thomas Moynihan
-- In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
 -- Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
-- That one poem by Kamu Braithwaite that keeps writing itself
-- The Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris
 

 
 
  The culture of the Peoples of the Sea is a flux interrupted by rhythms which attempt to silence the noises with which their own social formation interrupts the discourse of Nature. . . . The cultural discourse of the Peoples of the Sea attempts … to neutralize violence and to refer society to the transhistorical codes of Nature..  The culture of the Peoples of the Sea expresses the desire to sublimate social violence through referring itself to a space that can only be intuited through the poetic, since it always puts forth an area of chaos. In this paradoxical space, in which one has the illusion of experiencing a totality, there appear to be no repressions or contradictions; there is no desire other than that of maintaining oneself within the limits of this zone for the longest possible time, in free orbit, beyond imprisonment or liberty.
—THE REPEATING ISLAND: THE CARIBBEAN AND THE POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE
-- Kamu Braithwaite 

 

Thursday, May 15, 2025

The Plane Tree Anamnesis Magic Trick, May 11

 

    May 11

 
 Every day I go to the park I touch the trunk of the large plane tree standing just inside the entry gates. I believe the tree is over 300 years old because it's big enough to sense by the girth -- perhaps 20 or more average sized adult humans can fit within the column of the trunk -- and maybe I even read somewhere that it is that old. By placing my palms on this tree I am connecting not only with the tree but with the cosmos. The tree is like a medium. I connect to the cosmos via the tree as a ritual confirmation that goes in two directions. Of remembering and forgetting. My need to re-connect is a an act of anamnesis. My amnesia stems from the fact that while I am away from this tree (or any tree, since I dwell in a brick apartment building) I forget my connection to the wider universe as I become concerned with all those details that cluster around my life and cling to this part of my consciousness associated with my individuality, namely my ego. During my daily and nightly life my consciousness steadily drifts away, forgets the cosmic tree that links me to my actual ancestry among all beings living and even those who seem non-living and motionless or whose motion is not apparent to only 5 senses although I have witnessed in extraordinary moments that rocks do breath and participate in some cosmic intimacy I need other mediums to allow me to access. By touching the tree at least, I recover momentarily what gradually gets lost on my journey back to the building and up the stairs into the room with the table, books, instruments and computers. This writing is a special moment where the tree is commemorated because while the internet can take me many places the cosmic tree becomes tacit and/or I do not heed it directly. Even if that tree is taller than any buildings. The tree builds the air along with the oceans. The tree generates its own sky, its layered spheres and surrounds itself with its own canopy, its own dome, its heaven. It maintains its quiet conversation with its sacred extended family and is perhaps unforgetting and at least for this moment unforgotten.
 
 
 
Light sculpts the day before eyes
 
   May 10
 
 music has always been about listening
and maybe not wanting to hear yourself think
a living suspension of disbelief in the platonic ego
even aristotle came closer to spirit through phusis
and embodied idea now come to us as vibration
in the so-called language of the birds
and the serpents -- but whatever comes through
human language now is suspicious
our systems have been tainted and compromised
it's poetry not god that died
 
  -----
 
Portrait of the Heron's Eye
  ---------------
 
     "If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings—means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance—emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these. More precisely, the forests around Ávila are animate. That is, these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think. It is to an examination of such thoughts that this anthropology beyond the human now turns
       -- Eduardo Kohn
 
 

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Henri Michaux and the Cartesian Dose, DMT and the chemistry of Intolerance

 


  Apropos a certain well-known author's (and former FB contact's) adverse reaction to the view that Michaux never really did a heroic dose, nor ever had any really profound "trip" that would constitute visionary experience -- & that maybe the microdosing Cartesian control freaking artist Michaux only dabbled, overly concerned with potential madness, worried about his ego retention, rather than finding the fourfold of Blake, prefered to tease and to tantalize his own intellect and entertain the paranoiac Western bias that insists on industrial and technological control of the free winds of consciousness ---- long breath pause------  I found this rather conducive and fair minded account (link below) of the psychonautical crisis in hypercapitalistic anthropocene to be quite relatable. 
 
 Very sorry Mister David Toop, I have admired some of your rambulous scripsi but this time you stumbled into a puzzling dismissive and thoughtless arrogance which I had imagined you were capable of -- a  reflective incapacity that seems quite out of character politique or maybe we got played by the algobots --- but you deleted my (much milder) comments and blocked me on FB, wow....
 
 
"Michaux speculates about a strongly hierarchized technocratic political future in which psychedelics will have become part of the curriculum for training an elite destined to govern by moving the masses with carefully administered doses of charisma.
 
"How can this distinctly authoritarian vision of the future be reconciled with my earlier claim that Michaux's drug writing inaugurates a “molecular” conception of politics according to which psychedelics tend to undo organized political authoritarianism? Like many artists and intellectuals preoccupied with their own creative activities, Michaux had what might be described as solipsistic or even, in his case, autistic tendencies: “Evil is other people's rhythm,” he wrote in 1949 (Michaux, 2001; p. 342, italics original). When he imagines the possible advantage which psychedelics might give to the leaders of a hierarchical technocratic state of the future, he, like some of today's oligarchs, pharma entrepreneurs, and “psychedelic pundits” (Devenot et al., 2022) and some of their critics, does not pause to consider that others with very different political viewpoints starting from much less privileged positions could also enjoy a similar benefit but to different ends. He does not imagine, but his readers can, the effect of such a boost in political self-belief on the undermotivated and quietly despairing multitudes who might lack the basic self-esteem and self-confidence which, according to philosopher Axel Honneth's recognitive account of autonomy, for example, are essential proto-political conditions for the exercise of this and other aspects of political agency: “molecular” conditions, even though Honneth does not use this term (Honneth and Anderson, 2005). There is good reason to believe that without quite being above the threshold at which they might be diagnosed as clinically depressed, a sizeable proportion of the world's downtrodden lack the motivational means and self-belief to engage in projects of individual or collective transformation: they are held captive by their situation, beaten down by economic hardship and social deprivation, caught up in flows of information, “guidance,” and “entertainment.” Reading against its grain, from the perspectives of radical democracy and recognitive theory outlined here, perforce briefly, Michaux's anticipation of a psychedelically assisted technocratic future suggests that there would be a considerable transformative benefit in the psychedelically assisted self-raising of their self-esteem and motivation by a despondent global majority, indeed that this would in effect consolidate the force of their political will..." 
 
 "There is one respect in which Michaux's drug works are politically problematic: as mentioned (Section 1.1), their orientation is resolutely toward Western technoscience and biomedicine and engages only very fleetingly with indigenous cultural practices. In this one respect, Michaux's approach is rather narrow and ignorant and I would not wish to suggest otherwise, though at least he is transparent about this orientation and, as the following section establishes, he is to some extent consistent or evenhanded in the sense that Christian mystical experience is also subordinated to scientific explanation and translated into secular naturalistic terms. Had he been questioned on this point, I can imagine him responding along these lines: however significant indigenous practices may be, like it or not, Western technoscience is now the hegemonic paradigm and unless indigenous experiences can be translated into its terms they are destined to remain of largely antiquarian interest. They can certainly be “recognized,” as many scholars in the psychedelic humanities tirelessly demand, but whether much follows concretely from earnestly felt rhetorical gestures in this direction is a decidedly moot point. Of course, Michaux's approach contrasts markedly with that of some scholars in the psychedelic humanities, who wish to envision a future that “respects the lineages of the knowledges that are essentially and not accidentally bundled with these plants—Indigenous and counterculture wisdoms” (Devenot et al., 2022). However, Michaux is less interested in “plant medicines” than in synthetic chemical forms... "
 
 After getting through this study, even into the fine details of the footnotes, I feel that the issues are divided along colonialist lines. Western conquistadors learned about some plant medicines of which indigenous people alone had gnosis. It still scares them that stuff eaten direct from the jungle belly ombelicos makes you smarter more energetic and healthier than those lost in the supermarket shopping. But the Europeans of the West are alone in this amnesia about mycelial intelligence. All throughout Eastern Europe, the Steppes and the Balkans the amanita wisdom is implicit. It does all depend on trees having natural growth cycles of forests... and it depends on you being there as an intelligence among other intelligent beings -- animal and vegetal -- in process --
 
 Michaux had a highly regulated and art intelligentsia approved experience and his books and drawings circulate in the bourgeois culture zones because it was all made palatable and mild mannered. Perhaps the cautionary tale of the Artaudian extreme precedes and conditions and curbs the enthusiasm. You can be a "creative" person having anxious existential encounters on the buzzed out edge and the yet the salvific normalizing western ego comes back and makes every thing safe and cozy. It is only clinical microdose experiment afterall not a the whole cloth experience of being taken to the roots of phusis and bios and maybe encountering G-d or even a revolutionary encounter with the cloud of unknowing
 
 
 

Sunday, May 4, 2025

The First Day of the Rest (of Your Life) = new album and poem

 


https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/first-day-of-the-rest-of-yr

something of a door remains
in the detritus of interpassage
and the poetry of non-existence
something of a broken door
that just won't close
(hang all that spiritual bypassing
that shusuma is without obstruction
right or wrong, we are never
outside the contraries
& no money makes any hipster
sacrosanct permanently)
something of a door
of its hinges remains ajar
other critters, creatures
features of the creation within us
hold the space open
this open space, for/by
the other of others,
absence itself
wherein potential as spirit
seeps or flows in thru cracks
when you see what is not there
within what is there
somewhat like what remains of your life
which you know nothing about
yet vaguely anticipate
dip toes into with caution
or walk through obliviously
when not practicing mindfulness
because, you know,
who has time for mindfulness
in the mindless lumea
after all, right?
we kind of do & kinda
don't while the whole earth
thinks and gives signs
 
 
"Don't get too involved
with the nightingale or the peacock.
One is all words
and the other all colors."
-- Rumi


Before the Anthropocene (a short poem) & some links to newish tracks on SoundCloud. Worlds beyond the Human (including the Human!)


https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/ror-april-22-op-667-pt-1

 
 Before the Anthropocene
There were no names but things
Knew themselves
For what is true
In any name
Comes from the origin
Here now
Before even us
Departing
Without speaking
To one another
Conjoining
In the surrounding all
Tacit
 
 
 
 
 
     Link below to an essential documentary about faith, healing, rituals, sacred spaces, the celestial and the earthly mothers -- for those who do Italian or have some intuition about gestures and contexts -- icons, indices and symbols -- songs -- there is something you can pick up with the attuned third eye and ear --  

un documentario di Luigi Di Gianni   

"La Madonna in cielo la "matre" in terra"   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8r4g9ffGvc

 
 "Dreams too are part of the empirical, and they are a kind of real. 
They grow out of and work
on the world, and learning to be attuned to their special logics and their fragile
forms of efficacy helps reveal something about the world beyond the human."
-- Eduardo Kohn 
















 
 

Monday, April 28, 2025

Stochastic Coherence. Goin' On. Like a Blister in the Sun. Schumann Rizharmonics. Heliopathy



listen to the links simultaneously if you can
 
 
   
     Studying the phenomenology of the Schumann resonance as we are being impacted by another strong geomagnetic storm -- which I think hits people in the North harder than elsewhere perhaps right now-- maybe because the weather is not quite warm yet and the weather patterns are erratic and the solar influx is sudden, invasive and when I say people of course I mean the entire range of living entities with biomass, collagen, water suspended proteins, dna -- all those whose "mood" can be affected by sudden extra induction of polarizing atoms and molecules as these unknown anonymous particles within and around us seek ground or neutrality on the earth
 
    The studies of the CME impacts are correlative but not quite taken as seriously as if it were a Carrington event although the solar cycle is now at a huge and premature maximum and the coronal gap that occurred in the last 36 hours or so of observations indicate a space larger than 18 earths in girth
 
   Listening to Stefan Burns' youtube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8xynWgxQ1U&t=54s
 where he charts out the various studies of brain waves versus fluctuation of the Schumann resonance and their variance was very illuminating in terms of heliopathy as related to the mind electric -- while other studies chart the way in which heart beat irregularity (the body clock) influenced in a challenging manner: that is tachycardia and arrhythmia of heart beat correlated to Schumann resonance increase/decrease as a result of geomagnetic storms
 
Many other aspects of our health, wellness and daily feeling of pain, toothaches, cramps and other issues related to barometric pressures on the body are getting information from the conductivity -- that flow of ionized particles without borders inside us all --
 
    How we use this ion influx is up to us and how we can interpret this energy depends on awareness of what is maybe happening on a purely unconscious level of our biology and we interact with, literally, every "body" -- body mindfulness in effect, in the solar system
 
   The average amount of lightening strikes cloud to ground, not to mention the sprites (lightening exchanges between clouds) is a measure (a scale) for all periodic terrestrial rhythms -- where music finds it's coincidental patterns synchronous with such shifts, in between the quavering staves of the harmonic resonance -- of coincident nano coherence
 
    Stochastic coherence
 
Just another reminder of other studies in the field:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Monday, April 21, 2025

Roza Luxemburg in Poznan/ Posen

 


  
   many long years after zamosc-born jewish polish rosa luxemburg was gone from the city in then not-quite-poland where she stayed briefly the city ruling entity in the later quite-poland city by law installed a plaque where she resided while she worked for socialist values and policies in the still not-quite-poland city

  the plaque on the building strasse Szamarzewiskiego Kaiser Wilhelm ulica commemorated a woman political scientist who in the context of the era was dynamic and self-determined and the first woman with a law doctorate in her time yet had controversial ideas which went against the grain of lenin and poles and germans who all had their own axes to grind

  but roza was murdered, executed, martyred for the causes she believed in by germans in berlin who threw her body into the landwher canal where I myself often wondered how many faces floated of ghosts of various heres and nows

  many many years later in the now quite-poland-city where the plaque had been affixed to the wall of a building that was in an earlier quite-poland city then under the dominion of the soviet martyriolatry that had fallen into demise and the building facade in ruins there came a moment when the plaque I recall with roza's profile was removed and then then later replaced by a textual plaque that was subsequently during the first year of the PiS party rise to dominance in quite-quite-poland vandalized and scandalized and then eventually removed to never be replaced

  poznan does not want to embrace it's own heritage apparently. and it is the same case regarding zygmunt baumann. both jews and both poles (but commies) but when it comes to protesting the genocide in gaza there is no one on the streets because they are now in quite-poland quite philo-semitic.


Thursday, March 20, 2025

Aboriginal Land Massers and Peoples of the Sea; Intermingling Aliens, Hearing Beings

      "we talked late into the night, arguing whether or not we too have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems... "  --  Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia  

 

 

        We speak of aboriginal cultures and native populations only because a disrupted isolation shouts back at us: dwelling in a remote location over centuries, eventually breached, broken, infilitrated and, sadly, in most cases, not transformed into a greater compassionate family conglomeration; instead  the intrusion caused stress, marginalizing, displacing or eradicating aboriginals, colonizing and deforming their lands and psyches. And yet there are survivors of the wreckage. There are stories. There must have been an island and there must have been an ocean. There must have always been someone, even creatures of other species, emerging from, crossing over the ocean and making their way into the land masses of previously unknown creatures... insects, spores, bacteria...

       There must have always been water within us and without

(crossing wave fronts, actually, equally unknown creatures themselves, the conquistadores, coming from afar, also aliens for the aboroginals -- and perhaps we only know ourselves via the experience unknown and vice versa, as intermingling aliens

     All of the creatures must have had maps of their media, carried within their bodies somewhere. Whether the medium was land or the sea, they negotiated passages, they constructed imaginary bridges and mental stairways, not only horizontally but vertically. Creatures who gained verticality via their spinal erection threw their head bubbles up into the heavens and eventually numerically charted the rise and fall of celestial objects greater and smaller. Who among us keeps these maps in mind or at heart for quick access can help us navigate the coming unknowns perhaps. Here, in this blog, I try to assemble some resemblance of their ways of knowing and feeling, of our shared ancestral blog, as it evolves

 Here is a field recording from Australia  Victoria Square 

 https://soundcloud.com/hearingbeings/victoria-square-tarndanyangga?in=hearingbeings/sets/victoria-square-tarndanyangga

   Hearing Beings,  a project I just discovered today -- thanks to Khristos Nizamis --  allows us to see with our ears the post-colonial sonosphere and an imagination of the pre-colonial ancestors and by extreme contrast, the sound inside a flagpole in the square that commemorates indigenous tribes either scattered or no longer there. There is much more to hear on the Hearing Beings page n SoundCloud, so listen further when you have time -- the Kangaroo Island sequence may even be a soothing background as you read the rest of this post.

https://soundcloud.com/hearingbeings/sets/kangaroo-island-natural-sounds-and-soundscapes

       ABORIGINAL LAND MASSIVES

           I found the following excerpt from 

 'The Dust of the Mindye' by Jim Poulter  --PhD.M.S.W. Dip.Crim. Dip. Soc.Stud. MAASW

--   floating around Facebook one day and was moved by those words...

   (Jim Poulter is the author of more than twenty novels, children's books, local histories and academic texts. Jim's forebears first settled in Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne's Yarra Valley in 1840 and established a close relationship with the local Aboriginal people)
 
 
     "Aboriginal population matched the carrying capacity of the land because they saw their primary mandate as caring for the land and each other, their society was focused on the development of sophisticated technologies for land management, resource husbanding and population control.
The structure of Aboriginal society also reflected these ecological considerations and eldership was attained not simply through age, but by demonstrated and accumulated merit in both religious and secular knowledge. There was therefore no division between church and state, because elders had to demonstrate a unified knowledge base as well as a communal approach to decision making.
Through this blending of spiritual and secular authority in a system of eldership. Aboriginal society might be best described as a 'Druidic Meritocracy'. It was therefore a truly communalist society with no individual or specific group having control over resources.
     
      There was no individual accumulation of wealth or power and as a consequence there was conversely no accumulated poverty or disadvantage. there were no social class differences apart from the respect due to age and merit, and as indicated. decision making was by consensus rather than edict.
All tribal areas were based on water catchment areas and the totemic system was utilised as a means of species conservation and land management.' The totem system therefore had a primary ecological purpose and all knowledge was integrated through the totem system to serve that primary ecological purpose.
 
      This ecological focus was achieved by the universal way in which the totem system was structured across Australia and in turn how this determined the structure of Aboriginal society itself. Aboriginal family kinship was therefore an integral part of their system of ecological relationship and control. Aboriginal people therefore saw human society as an interdependent part of the whole ecology and not separate from or holding dominion over it.
      For instance in all Aboriginal societies a Yin and Yang type of conceptual division existed, where every living and non living thing was divided between these two halves or 'moieties'. At the simplest level (and there were several ritual exceptions) this meant that an individual was not allowed to hunt or eat any of the animals in their own moiety. because they were his or her spirit cousins.
In this way at least half the food sources were taboo to an individual and for instance it might mean you could eat wallaby but not grey kangaroo, or ring-tailed possum but not brush-tailed possum. As indicated, the totem system also governed marriage and family relationships and together with common male and female contraceptive practices, all tribes ensured that their population remained consistent with the natural carrying capacity of the land.
 
     This was however not just the carrying capacity of the land in a good or average year, but in the worst of years. For Aboriginal people abundance was the norm.' These land management and population control practices therefore meant that prior to British settlement in 1788 Aboriginal people in Australia enjoyed the highest common standard of living of any people in the world."
 
==============
BACK TO THE WHEEL
==============
If you didn't get enough from the above article to forget about such trite stuff as who invented the wheel, we feel sorry for you, but here we go ...
There are historical arguments about where the wheel came from, but a popular belief is that a wheel was first recorded in the middle east, in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) around the 4th century BC.
Another popular belief is it that the wheel was first used in Mesopotamia an historical region of Western Asia around 3500 BC.
The wheel certainly didn't first arrive on the shores of this continent by the British, it is well known that many ships arrived before 1770, and some of these even traded with First Nations people for centuries, and most of the vessels had wheels for many uses, but as it turned out, no First Nations tribe or clan had any continuous need for the wheel over the 70,000+ years.
 
   THE GREAT WHEEL OF THE TIDES
 
 But what of the Sea, what of the Ocean... what are it's rhythms and how did knowing them create colonialist enterprise and how through knowing the great power of he isolating medium can this knowledge be the creative force for a new balance?
 
From "The Repeating Island"  by Antonio Benitez-Rojo
 
   "The culture of the Peoples of the Sea is a flux interrupted by rhythms which attempt to silence the noises with which their own social formation interrupts the discourse of Nature. . . . The cultural discourse of the Peoples of the Sea attempts … to neutralize violence and to refer society to the transhistorical codes of Nature. . . . The culture of the Peoples of the Sea expresses the desire to sublimate social violence through referring itself to a space that can only be intuited through the poetic, since it always puts forth an area of chaos. In this paradoxical space, in which one has the illusion of experiencing a totality, there appear to be no repressions or contradictions; there is no desire other than that of maintaining oneself within the limits of this zone for the longest possible time, in free orbit, beyond imprisonment or liberty.
    —THE REPEATING ISLAND: THE CARIBBEAN AND THE POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE
 
 

 
 

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Opening the Tool Box: Mundus Imaginalis (Henry Corbin) Introducing the Imaginal (Cynthia Bourgeault) TAZ (Hakim Bey) Social Sculpture (Joseph Beuys) OPEN! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain.

 it takes many to make one and one makes many, so, first, here's a shout out to the crew working the clock that it is to keep the cyclical swing on it's way into the perfectly becoming, let's give a big wave of vibrational gratitude to our:

                                   


  and an update: an invitation to read the interview with John Seed and visit his resources page

 https://journal.workthatreconnects.org/2017/04/16/interview-with-john-seed/

"It’s worth remembering that our ancestors survived the previous extinction spasms …… this is the fifth or the sixth, and we’ve made it through all of the others, so we have a tremendous pedigree of success behind us …..But anyway, that’s the idea that I’m working with, that perhaps if we  look long and hard at our own impending extinction, steep our minds in this likelihood, that this might create the conditions for the kind of change in consciousness that could usher in a different scenario."

     and now onto the news that stays news

 some old gold and a few new recently struck veins 

to follow to your own personal alchemical applications

 Henry Corbin  http://www.bahaistudies.net/asma/mundus_imaginalis.pdf

Cynthia Bourgeault   https://www.cynthiabourgeault.org/blog/2018/11/13/introducing-the-imaginal

Hakim Bey  https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/T.A.Z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-by-Hakim-Bey.pdf

Joseph Beuys http://wolfgang-zumdick.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Zumdick_ALP_7-7-15.pdf

Open! (great resource for essays and articles on maverick and bucking bronco ideas)  

https://onlineopen.org/lethal-theory

     

                 and here are a few new playlists from my SoundCloud

 https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/sets/heliopathy

 https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/sets/mental-health-food-store