On the Creation of the Album "The Vale of Soul-Making" in the Flow of Contexts (Other Writings)

 a post I made on facebook goes like this:

 "walking past the people in the train station working for the watch tower (jehovah witness propaganja bulletin), the headline I read was asking me "can anyone dead come back to life?" and my immediate response to mind was that there is no death; there is only transformation. you stop moving, die, decompose, everything you once were is scattered and shared out -- you don't care: you are dead; this is equanimity. you compost your mother's body into the soil, the fungus and the bacteria convert you -- you always were all of this anyway, in many incarnations --your ex-body in osmotic molecular dispersal seeds the spore of variants --you feed a tree in the forest your strange chemical cocktail and it becomes one day a pencil you write with..." 

the post just mentioned, pasted above, had been shared by 6 people, although I don't know who these people were nor what they thought about it. but anyway, I decided, assuming that this was actually shared, hoping that my further comments about it might reach them, I added the following:

 " Reflecting upon this scene again, while reading a book by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called "Opus Dei" (about the history of Christian liturgy, the act of liturgeos, not about the organization bearing that name Opus Dei), it would appear that even the work of evangelists, who one might not trust, do in fact perform functions that activate intelligence, reflection, conscience and compassion in discovering the truth of the spirit through the immanence of the divine itself, manifest as the truth of the matter, the matter of the truth, being as it comes to us, considered to be literally endless and therefore factually that death only represents an abandonment of borders. And reading Keats letters on The Vale of Soul-Making, I found my thoughts concerned with experience and the soul, as Keats lays it out, a soul that only creates itself through a work inside coincidentia oppositorum, a struggle to define personal and eternal truth in the balance of a living and dying moment."

 As a result of this thread of research, I decided the new album (one of the 4 recorded in October 2022) should indeed be entitled The Vale of Soul Making" 

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-vale-of-soul-making

 Jeff Gburek. Featuring the poetry of William Blake & Stephen Ellis.

 

The following days I wrote poems and posts with poetic or philosophical, reflective content, as is my norm and I also noted, again, that I am not a magnet, not of great magnitude anyway, for LIKES OR LOVES and that my inability to garner readership or listeners did not matter one iota since I had the recent revelation that this writing was like singing, singing a song to myself, which is good, in and of itself, and that performing (externalization) in this theater of simulacral communications called SOCIAL MEDIA is in fact a very good way of making first drafts, statement that can in fact be elaborated upon, clarified, in my blog, moving, I hope, inexorably, slowly, towards creating the book or books I will eventually publish in the next few years, inshallah. So here are some of those poems and reflections, works in process. 

== 

 

MAYBE THE TREES?

who created the star broad enough to metabolize your oblivion?

search heaven for what star systems inform my body's electricity

and you will find several several specific binary tripolar eccentricities

convulvulus of wild fowl chases you across galaxies only to sleep in the guardian womb

photosynthetic caverns of leaves & the underground atelier

beavers, nutria, vivaporous tree-eater mammals

many a-thing eats down the chain

nature abhors any object, is what I mean

break it down for me. not so simple.

erosion is our star, orbitans,

lightning from jupiter

the shoreline of my mental systems shape-shifting

depends on the defiance of boundaries death compels

bringing things down to the minimal we others absorb

and I want to wail the reedy blues of the orbatids unsung

secret killer of grasses and manufacturer of soils

but after a certain intellectual treeline preconception dissolves

prosecco goes flat, the net goes down in the middle of the film

it's like meeting johnny depp too late in life for it to matter

yes, even jolie or jaylo! even shakira! maybe beyonce?

news comes in deflagration of war, raises the price 900 x

all that glitters comes up in body bags and nagual

shadows of meaning, blood-hounds rambling,

that box of coupons, lottery tickets and collage cuttings,

those 5 other guitars you never play, 250 bottles of nail polish,

all goes becky noddy as ballast to the overburdened seas

there's no time to play freebird, everybody's headed for the door

without coats until in the absolute outside kelvin degrees

demand the whole collapse of vital stars scatter brinkmanship

into skid-marks, skid-rows, scamper van grunge,

a survival sign in neon flashes

with the S gone dark

UR-VIVAL

UR-VIVAL

UR-VIVAL

on which form the Ozymandian ridge of sand

shifting in the off-light of post-nuptial

nautical twilight

blindly blinks

  &... despite knowing coffee is bad for me,

a cuppa'd be fine just now

rather than the corroded domes & megaphones of disaster

if only we had enough time the holy ghosts might save us

or maybe, given enough time, maybe the trees

spores, doors, reddy skirts be hangin

near the spruce

travelin' up the calves

 

 ==

 

music is freedom itself as dance living dying into mycomass always flowing

great hydras of terraforming cryptobiotic soil on the birthday of Arthur Rimbaud

mingling undulations siphoning idiosyncracy crapshoots

mon ultra somnolent itinerant cactus

my music never over

here but lion's mane mycelial

sporadic mutant blossom

ready now to dusk

as visions come to jacob boehme

far too early bohemian

fathoms of mothers gather their moss

build the braintree's leaves

prepared pinnacle

pineal acorn

nut squat

stored by squirrels

doffs its cap --

it's almost Spring

inside the Ice

 

==

 

     Wait for daylight but dance the darkness until then

 

One of my friends commented: 

 

"One can feel safe in the dark. Here it is eating the girl. Why?"

 

 

Bioluminescence!

---I answered:

      here's it the green darkness, the cast off light of photosynthesis. I don't know why. About anything. But that dance is the art of the greatest symbolic of all time because it engages all the faculties and leaves nothing behind. As it brings all things on physically forward, through the messages of one's own being, there in all contact with all others and unknowns...

Reflecting upon poetry and poets, I googled the name of Duncan McNaughton

 and found an intriguing statement by him and posted it, without quotation marks, to my FB wall

 

 "...Words do or don’t do the work of the poem—they are, as Jack Spicer said in his second letter to Lorca, “what we hold on with, nothing else.” The work of the poem, McNaughton writes, “is not in any sense a job for rhetoric, in order to gain efficacy of persuasion, to gain social affect i.e. power. . . . Language and discourse, specifically generated by the advent of writing itself, are in the agency of power. . . . It is like Alice Notley said, words aren’t language—they never were..."

 

A friend replied: Maybe I'm missing context here. What do you mean by "What we hold on with?" Sort of a passionate drive i.e. Lebenstrieb? And what are words then, if not sign symbols to communicate through "language"? And the last point: "Discourse or language can't be creative expression(s), as they are tools in domains of power as per your sources" or "single words don't make a language"? Will check these authors – sounds very interesting albeit cryptic due to the lack of framing.

 

 So, I had this to say. Well, first thing comes to mind is poets and how simply we know that we could never write (or even think) anything if it depended on grammar, just woids, theories of the sign, social approval, rhetoric -- all the linear framings of englightenment and post-enlightenment modes of reason and discourse. there is a passage from primo levi that comes to mind to me next where he describes one of his fellow inmates in auschwitz, known only by his number, null achtzehn, as the empty involocru of a insect blown by the wind but connected still to a rock by a single frail thread spun from it's own former body. that's where poetry allows for an almost superhuman power against the most inhumane forces imaginable. it remains cryptic because no one can explain it; and those who try to do so suffer the loss of a resource that perishes when exposed to certain forces of modernity -- like those freschi in the fellini movie -- poetry is not the image, the art, but the medium, the glue, the gluon in physics, that allows the pigments to cohere invisibly -- I wouldn't call it Lebenstrieb because it's not personal, it's not related to egoity nor corporal identity, not even to life so simply framed by one body or body of bodies -- I think a lot of people think it's like Chomsky's generative grammar or something but when I read his ideas about language, they don't seem to be covering the same field of energies. Well, that's the best I can come up with for the moment. Thanks for the question and for your curiosity

 

 Context perhaps helps to some degree (to provide my sense for it). For example, if you know that the poet Jack Spicer wrote his letters to Lorca in the 60's long after Lorca was dead and that Spicer lectured on magic and poetry used metaphors of mediumistic messaging services, like the radio in Cocteau's Orpheus film, maybe something of a pre-post-modern materialistic rhetoric based poetry can start to be seem in some depth of perspective. Poets often do not speak to nor need to speak to the living, alhough our use of material audible and visible to the living allows them to overhear our (often hit or miss) transmissions to one another. Some guiding principle in this.

 

This all lead me back to contemplating Olson's "the dead prey upon us for rest" and how this particular path in art where you are not creating works to convince the living people to some point of view, how the art of poetry and music in the service of the ecology of healing ancetral trauma for Seven Generations Forward and Seven Generations Back...how this is very different than being popular or influential politically --I wrote the following: 

 

 "if you tell people you are in coversation with the spirits of the other worlds, the dead, and listen to the voices of other species, you can remove a lot of the bullshit talk from your life. it's very liberating. we never made art only for people presently alive. I know very well after a decade or so of university education (and life among educated technician artists) how the idea won currency that art is about the here and now, your community, your human life, this materialistic paradigm, your techniques: it's is very easy to trace. and yet, all indigenous peoples had their universities of forests and mountains and seas and oceans. we all were once something like indigenous people, even nomadics. we owe our work more to the future and past works of the earth than we do to those whose sense of career inside capitalistic market paradigms prevent them from undestanding the scope the poetics we are bound to... because our happiness depends on expressing the truth"

 

 Afterwards I found this strange passage in an interview with Peter Sloterdijk

 

 

𝐆𝐨𝐝 𝐈𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐝. 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐦𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐞. 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐆𝐨𝐝. 𝐇𝐞 𝐈𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐀 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠

“I am absolutely a believer. Faith and life are synonymous functions. If you don't believe, you can't finish a sentence, for example. Speechlessness is the clearest sign of depression. In this respect, depression and disbelief converge. The title of my book "Nach Gott" (2017) was deliberately chosen to be ambiguous. The "nach" (after) can be read in a temporal sense: God is a thing in the past.

But "nach" also means "according to" or "as a result of". So we are at a fork in the road. There are increasing numbers of atheists today. Yet countless numbers still live under the religious umbrella.

God is still a key term for a psychosemantic immune system, a reference point for internal and external actions in an unsecured world. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” also hints at the continuing presence of God. The dead don't disappear completely, but have their place in the imaginary world. God lurks behind the hill, from there the living can sense him.

 

The divine eye, perpetually observing, dwells in modern man in the form of conscientious introspection. Moreover, strictly speaking, God cannot be dead. Organisms can die, but not God, for he is not a living being. So being dead is a metaphor for God's loss of meaning. But people still feel a longing for divine observation today – to be seen. A clear symptom is the social media and the communication mania that is revealed in it.

 

The vertical observation by God has been replaced by the horizontal observation by others whose gaze one surrenders to oneself. All of modern society, especially through modern communications technologies, has become a huge side observation context. In fact, people are gripped by a "reverse panic": While pre-modern people were still afraid of divine observation, modern people are not afraid to be seen. They crave it. They are constantly looking to get in touch with the kind of observation before which one's own existence flourishes."

 

(Edited and translated excerpt from interview with Sloterdijk on Deutschlandfunk Kultur radio program August 27, 2017 on the occasion of the publication of his book “Nach Gott”)

 

 

  On the Earth

 

Art? Go make an old growth forest and ask me to come to the opening!

 

 --- you will die before then! I will not waste my invitation, said someone.

 

--- but it depends depends on how deep you can go into the fecundity I guess... It's all a play of different tempi, different scales of time... Even in the park nearby there are trees 3 times my own age and they are still youngsters... Whereas the mites munching on the decaying leaves have tiny life cycles compared to even a dog or cats. It's all very funny. This thing called time

 

I will invite my body to feed the moment

 

 

 

 

 

Entoptic Imagery, Visions (Produced) Within the Eye and a Diagram of Graphic Signs typical of Paleolithic Art (potential graphic score symbols)

   

 

 In the shamanic societies of the world, the experience of entoptic imagery is considered to be a valuable tool to catch glimpses of the worlds that lie beyond the material world.  Seeing entoptic visions, and being able to interpret their meanings, is a desired and significant phenomenon.  Indeed, shamans often use tools such as entheogens or sensory deprivation to purposely induce entoptic imagery (Noll 1985)!

 

 

Entoptic Imagery and Altered States of Consciousness
 

Keith Eddley | Oct 22, 2012
 

"Entoptic images are visual effects which originate within the visual processing system of the observer. The term ‘entoptic’ comes from the Greek for ‘within vision’, indicating that the images come from anywhere within the optic system, between the eye itself and the neural cortex where signals from the optic nerve are interpreted. Since it originates within the visual system, entoptic imagery can only be seen by the observer.
For clarity, I would like to include a quick note on the definition of entoptic imagery. In their discussion of paleolithic cave imagery, Lewis-Williams and Dowson define entoptic imagery as visual experiences arising from anywhere within the optic system, which includes the eyes, the occipital lobe of the brain, and the many other portions of the neural cortex that process visual stimuli. This definition comes from the Greek translation of entoptic meaning “things perceived within vision”, and is commonly used by anthropologists and archaeologists (Williams & Dowson 1988). On the other hand, in most medical literature, entoptic imagery is defined as imagery which only originates from within the eye itself. Given the Greek meaning of the word entoptic, I prefer the anthropological definition of the term. Therefore, for the purposes of this article, ‘entoptic’ indicates imagery that arises from anywhere within the visual system, from the eyes to the neural cortex."

Full article here:

entheology.com/research/entoptic-imagery-and-altered-states-of-consciousness/?fbclid=IwAR2IPoiDViydjubNididA-AM9u5bnsCFL0rxogb_cXGkQkt7N_GVSGveWo0

 

 Entopic Imagery in Trance Consciousness and Rock Art

"From the above information we can see that entoptic imagery does seem to be consistent across individuals and across the conditions through which the images are seen.  In more recent years, many anthropologists have come to believe that these very entoptic images, seen during altered states of consciousness, were the impetus for the creation of both ancient and modern rock art.

In 1988, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson created a new chart of entoptic phenomenon based on images found in the rock art of the San Bushmen and the Native American Coso, who create their art while in ritual trance states.  Lewis-Williams argues that the form-constants that Kluver found in his mescaline experiments are also found in these trance inspired rock art images.

Lewis-Williams and Dowson compared these images to the images found in Paleolithic art and, based on the similarities between them, hypothesised that the Paleolithic artists were also in shamanic trance states when they produced these images.  He argues that the Bushman, the San, and all currently living human beings share the same neurological structure as the Paleolithic peoples, and that when the brain enters a trance state through dance, chanting,  drumming, the ingestion of entheogens, and so forth, it becomes possible to see entotpic images more clearly.  Indigenous peoples interpreted these images as messages from the spirit world.  Thus, based on this, Lewis-Williams suggested that the Paleolithic artists were in altered states of shamanic trance when they created their images (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1988)."

The similarities between these ancient and modern rock art images and common entoptic phenomena can be seen in the following diagram:

 

 "Genevieve Von Petzinger mapped out the Geometric Patterns of the Paleolithic world, identifying 26 distinct shapes.  She then looked for patterns of continuity and change over time and space.  She found that at an early age we already see 70% of the patterns being used, and that there is a high degree of repetition of a limited number of shapes, with some being replicated throughout the 20,000 year time span of the study.  This suggests that these symbols were not created at random, but that they were intentional and symbolic. Von Petzinger believes that the abstract nature of these signs is some of the best proof we currently have that these images were not being made purely for their aesthetic qualities, and she suggests that these markings were symbolic attempts to communicate ideas that were not so easy to depict in a physical form."

My reason for studying these symbols is for personal edification, enjoyment of their beuaty, suggestivity and application of the symbols to my developing system of scoring some of my sound  and music compositions. 

__JG__ 

Since Western materialism and ‘rationalism’ have become the dominant methods of understanding the human experience, the physical world has become the only valid object of perception and concentration, and anything which goes beyond that, including dreams, visions, and entoptic phenomena, are considered to have no benefit and are sometimes even considered to be signs of mental illness.  However, with advances in neuroscience and an increasing openness in the collective consciousness to the concepts of spiritual, non-substantial phenomenon, we are beginning to come to a point where we can understand entoptic imagery as a phenomenon that is simultaneously biological and spiritual, that may have played a huge role in shaping our experience of life and the cosmos, and that may even be essential to our future development as a spiritual species.

 

 

The Vale of Soul-Making and Five Broke Downe Homesick for the Open Road Medley Blues, Take Your Pick, Weave Your Earrings, Apply For Asylum

Endless Poetry by Al. Jordorowsky

And how is the
heart to become this Medium but in a world of Circumstances?

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-vale-of-soul-making  

These tracks were all concieved and recorded at my home studio in Poznan in October of 2022. They were also poetically mapped karmically erratically membered long before in the swim I walk in this flight through skies called My Life of glacier. Instrumentation: voice, synthesizer, clay tiles, feedback, radio, electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, melodica, zither, shortwave radios, field recordings, audiomulch live processing (track 3 and 8 ). Texts are by Stefan Ellis (7), William Blake (4) and myself (1). Track 8 is a composition for randomized replay of shortwave radio captures with live overdubbed improvisations based on considered tone sets for acoustic guitar, mandolin and melodica. Pleased to meet you all in the sound and to, in pleasure and woe, rebuild the anima mundi---  Jeff Gburek, November 4, 2022

N.B. Album is currently set as name your own price and will remain that way until I feel like it should be changed. The piece with Stephen Ellis' poem will be available for free download ad aeternitatis

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/five-broke-downe-homesick-for-the-open-road-medley-blues

    Five Broke Downe Homesick for the Open Road Medley Blues came to me as the title for those homespun tracks I recorded in October bounced off of various field recordings from the Summer 2022 . They are all recorded spontaneously at various locations They are mixed location recordings. One can glean, listen, hear the domestic and wilderness noises in the backgrounds (1), campfires, foxes or wolves, crickets (3). The tracks are mostly raw juxtapositions of field recordings/improvisations and dubbed improvisations in other locations without any editing, such that I've kept the recording artefacts (turning on the machine and turning it off) inside the final mixes. The final track (Abu Simbal) features a prepared guitar I call the Pseudo-Oud: an old acoustic guitar from which I stripped off some frets, supplied it with an odd assortment of strings, gave it a large metal wood screw atop plastic canister-lid as a bridge and played it quite close to the microphones to get this spacious reverberant sound. In the spirit of DIY and live experience of natural environments and the stardust transmutation.
__JG__

 

 The Man From Atlantis aka Michael Sill writes this about the album: "fantastic improvised guitar playing that is intimate and devoid of any pretence. Favorite track: Abu Simbal."

 George Christian, Brazilian guitarist & composer writes: "Barebones and haunting harmonies that can be really peaceful... Beautiful string work"

 

  http://www.lewisiana.nl/painquotes/keats-on-soul-making.pdf