CHIASMUS -- a Berlin Journal -- with an interruption -- June 2019

night on earth, jim jarmusch

here come the thrashers, the blind-scaping... nash, nash, nash

how to escape the evolving helter skelter of one's times and the ceaseless Big Brother Weather updates from the Polish Orwellian Central committee, red alert storm warnings of lightening thunderstorms, advice to stay inside,
do not take shelter under trees, etc etc (what trees?)

to live in the free-floating islands called cities the (in)communicative drift of internets unraveling deep space dust against tranquility trellis baffling babylon with lucidity, calm, distance
-- and to have lived in the suburb of Berlin called Poznan or in the vague suburb of Poznan called Berlin -- and travel the mental wires between the vardun of the imaginary chiasmus, migratory paths once again between the two trees, then the next two trees between them, we will have hewn with memory the passage for the Rom all the way to Andalusia

   here I will insert, jarring the frame, the poem, written in May, 2019 rather,  en route to play the DYM Festival in Santok, near Gorzow Wielkopolski, where the poet-singer Papusza lived once, after the double-exile (forced as the Gypsies were into sedentary city boxes, Papusza  Papusza -- who was also subject of a kris & declared pikie, her crime based on trumped-up charges she revealed the "codex" of the Romani language to Polish authorities -- a betrayal of her people, they said, when it was actually Jerzy Ficowski who did it all on his own by publishing a glossary within a book of her poetry in his translation)

    leaving from the west side station, Dworzec Letni, Poznan, aka Kaiser Station, formerly used exclusively by nobility when Wilhelm II and retinue would visit for vacations

but this time it's not the coal-guzzler locomotive but the modern "tabour" & me with my band of invisible mental gypsies flying still under the radar of the blocks & dish antennae

driven into the interstitial internal exile, with our relations: deer, fox, beetles, crack in the cement bunkers where something vegetal stubborn & rupestral chucks up a stalk of life, moving onward to

(lines written between line of the text)  

of the wars behind the Festung shambles in rows, rubbles, where some lingering  

Gorzów Wielkopolska to the Polish Rome of the shackled down Gitanos

bitter vinegar imaginary of zyklon B some souls still burn with final eyes blinking

 escaping into submarine dreams open the hatch to new War for the MIC 

close my eyes again, wishing it away, and with the rush of the cinematic windows 

the train awakens me in the forest that itself walks like tall trees my Gypsies stand

fir and spruce waves and witness to the bulldozers

  if this is dreaming it's very oddly cursive after all typically

looking out over the raw earth gutted for developments, 

logs piled for commerce,

 civilization breezing impotently through my hair, running like a train

by the lakes we declare we will be beavers of our own trees

the keepers of the stillness of our own lakes we declare where the waves

reciting our fishy erudition & cacophonous genealogy

 

     full of wandering go the ripples, these are the poems of peoples cross-currents

everywhere in hydrogen gambling through several stars & we few frail meteorites

 fallen in a splash within hearing. the form of the ear that cups the ripples

otherwise it's only muteness that sings the overtone ventilation's hidden incantation

at the rebirth of the magnetosphere surrounding earth within the engine

  while the greater blackness of energy mouths the contrary mantra of inexistence

maintaining the maniacal threads of hypocritical civilizations & suicidal life-forms

self-contradicting in the hells personal dynamos -- 

LOOK! the forest says,

Look, we are looking through you with Pinocchio eyes every limb

 & trunk severed pine-eye, the forest full of laughing silence, 

doe-eyes of the mare,

the marbly stare of our totem, of the lynx, peering through the leaves, the living bush preening itself like a cat rolling over in snow, or the throw of dice making words stick by chance to the paper, to the mouth of the speakeruntil I am jolted awake just by equal chance as the train arrives in Santok

and as if by a dream command, reality ensues

      and now, 12 hours and several dance-floors later

there is no return train for another 4.5 hours,

on Sunday, with nothing open in the Polish Rome of the Gitanos

 I sit editing over my lonely mishap fantasy journals shredded with truths waiting in the extreme normalcy of Orlen petrol station drinking over-priced coffee because it's too cold and windy to sit outside. & of course there's plenty of good pop music to inspire lonely fantasies of escaping which I share with the workers in the station, the modern petrol station with iTunes and Spotify & my habit of making up lyrics "food for life, can you be, food for life, fool as I am, for life, blurted blue out of the sky split open by the darkness desiring to pair with it's own alternating opposite, it's witness

baby, baby can you be my soul? the song seems to sing

and I try to be some soul, I cry, what I'm trying to be

Go, go, go baby, do your crazy math

Hello new words, goodbye, goodbye

I will never speak you again

May 19, 20


 

 Onward, back to Berlin, the post-postwar Berlin,

    freedom to live is a split infinitive binary and moody joyeux born of one surround sound paramecial or piecemeal membrane bouncing the wizardry from oz to osmosis

  Berlin, Neukoln/Kreuzberg/ Mitte/ in transit, all over/ May 28 until June 2, notes scattered, 

a deck pharos-light cleopatrick tarot cards, fanned or passed to hundreds of hands, back and forth,

language itself, this weather-worn & dog-eared effect, scattered notes, gathered

the screen lights your face so people actually see you typing out
your type, your aura secondaire, bristling with notions, the screen
reveals the scene inverse Diana was peeping upon
the veil over your mind the hologram of burdened desire
the lady pulling on her socks and restoring
her shoes & re-shoeing her skirt hikes up revealing her thighs and calves

revealing my eyes listening to all the people speaking mixed baroquen English and Germangly Turkish and being unable to grasp
the idea that one cannot grasp it (elusive context) anyway no matter what language

and what literature is. seems. becomes. an old form replaced by cinema while in both

the kinks into truth are in the details accidentally espied
like the Turkish girls walking arm in arm or with their mother's aunts
one only imagines they speak about potential suitors
you have to stay with things, walk arm in arm, with immediacy

& like the Turkish girls, around another Ecke, walking arm in arm again, this time with their grandmother's aunts or those who have the new husband in the first years still with the slick dark brilliantine hair fades in the zoomed style some bit of name tagged in the nape of the neck, the friend pushing himself the pram in those first years before something takes him away, a narrative we don't know about but you have to stay with things there unfolding the moss & sweet williams and the whirring ambulance that scrape slash of the kebab as it turns this peppery odor creating the hunger you don't really have, smell the Jasmine flowers hear the suitcase wheels and the French girls on their bikes as they discuss this city they don't need to hate, these two fishermen on the edge of the canal, with poles tipped in florescent green lights like antennae over the canal the grunting of swans disturbed in the floating sleep by the techno live-coding camp party for the Maria Himmelfahrt, the same old drunken thuds and their cigarette buds in the scuro drifting like fireflies almost extinct in the forest Glen on the other side of the water rippling...

all along the Paul Lincke Ufer it's only dweebie forever foreigners that cruise the margins 

when its another day the rain falls on Sylvio's (camper) caravan, he's feeding his friend's dog -- epxlains how his droogie in hospital was hit by a car while drunk -- and heavily on the canal there are millions of driokwrs (droplets) to see but without any umbrella I run now, quasi drenched by inches miles of rain above me not in itself wet because water isn't wet yet and the Turkish girl in hijab the couple she is with they crouch under cover of green overhang, looking out on the water without any rush regrets or rumbles, waters is watching itself escape endlessly... watching the wave propagations, maybe ... the freedom, so random, so still 

-- still cool, still abiding -- everywhere around that energy of every single body being ready for summer to jam and the burst of pollen through the nasal spasm the bee and hoverfly the titmouse & sparrow wiggling through narrow cracks in the walls --

There are no things really. Things are clusters, maybe, aggregates, amalgam of elementals maybe -- but things, as we call them, remain illusory by-products. The body is an ecstasy of energy. Movement makes things into an ecstasy of energy. One must or need only open the door to feel this ecstasy of energy. And once one goes out or comes into this ecstasy there is nothing that stops anything from going everywhere. You may say the skin contains the body & limits it to its flesh but every fibre of muscle and nerve and bone tissue is in flight and moves in this ecstasy of energy that even sweeps through sleep wide awake with metamorphic intentions that brainwaves barely notice at all. How can this be? We must wonder but we don't think about it most of the time because we are all serving this flow of energy 24 on 7. Everything we do is engaged in furthering this cosmological rippling of waves running across one another. Who can calculate all the gazes and flashes if the eyes?

the club called Loophole and all the scratches on the walls, how many dervish fingers filing nails

determined graffitists anti-de-featists making freaky grooves... our concerts and conversations mix with the passage of various languages -- my favorite pre-occupation -- listening and dreaming narratives -- more potential than real mostly -- never-ending surf and collide, pull and rush --

**

when she throws her loving drunken arms
around you at midnight
when the last train
is still in sight
and only then
when we are sure
we will forget
we will indeed forget
that we have need
of even this moment
fed upon being unable
to resist loving blindly
any isolate cloud
drifting across the desert sky
at one of the Ringbahn stations
where they heap sands

into granular hills
to ship later to desert
construction sites

combining

corruption and design

* 

now after hours delayed finally on the bus in mind I find the past
the scent of fresh wild rukola growing through grooves in the concretely at the Sudkreuz Berlin station pungent as the babble of voices of the Poles & Croatians, Georgians

drifting in the vape and cigarettes of permanent transition

which I wave away from my face in continual prayer

press freedom is being destroyed yes

but the less known freedom of other creatures

known even lesser, remains

collapsing into the liquid anthropocene

without any wave of recognition

perhaps for the better

to walk unknown

 *

freedom to live is a split infinitive binary and moody joyeux

born of one surround sound paramicial or piecemeal membrane

bouncing the wizardry from oz to osmosis. freedom is the bindweed

permaculturally specific to a fence that does not require vines but gets them anyway because of integrity of composition, staying power. freedom is one life to live within ever more moving leaves, concept set, venn hexes, carved on your life tree, swivelling blisters from bliss to blisters my sisters, you dangling blossoms, you thoughtless bastards. you -- made of many cells -- you -- organ within an invisible extension, none at all.and despite all that there is ever and anon a limit and withdrawal from the edge of freedom as if it's condition depended on drawing a line it should surpass by stepping first backwards before the leap into something largely nameless. this is the freedom of freedom: to not want nor care over much for itself. perhaps it is also vaguely some form of respect traversed by motionless. calm. position. vibration. scintillation. the awareness that there is nothing really absolutely necessary. whereas hunting or being hunted brings about a slavery and binding to a culture and it is capitalism that grows the false hungers. one freedom cobbles coattails cranial cases and  fabricates prams, basinets and identity preschools for many others. graduate into the perfectly polymorphous potentially polyamorous detachment from being unable to commit. the freedom not to do, to retain the right to do nothing, governs them all. very positively

*

when I ask myself...
have I met the eagle's eye?
i can say yes i have,
and the owl's and the lynx'
we are troubled somewhat
matters of survival
don't allow us to see
when other eyes, so plentifully,
surround us

distance comes in close,
little of the languages
known drifting between teeth
 huddle oviform
any longer than a pause

compounds of protozoans
entangle the blood
only briefly the sigh of the pestle
turns northern faces south

that's the smile
of the moon between
modernity & love

you can not kill
you can only buy
 
there is no sex
but a hexagon
making theft
into generosity

in the morning there will be
taciturn photons
under the palpebre
there is no better
word for them

my feathers, she said
they are dawns
making eyes
invisible
my colors woven
even through worms
the vision tore off
like a beak

faint echo reaches the fetus
from distant forest closing
the warm voices of the women, wooly
already heard the coyote
deer ears swivel
let us listen like a mountain
does it want to be seen?
does it want to be heard?
does the berry long to be eaten?
mind must quiet down to the empty
quieter than what I want to hear
beyond the threshold
you are telling me, a hand poised upon the door
mind quieter, as attention expands

.
we have re-labeled the streaked path of the glaciers
with indo-european promontories, tongues, 
cut up the parco into porco, carving out niches 
where hand-held units were once hand-holds
the brittle grip between precipices within caverns
the grotto a great ear into which dionysius'
trickle of the spring that summons the great chord
dashes into unicorns & harps the international garbage patch

.

The mixed cacophony of 3 or 4 competing sound systems is indescribable. the message is subtracted from the sum of the ungraspable -- "they are so contextually unconscious of what they are doing individually that they can't be competing/communicating with one another -- but the mind and ear trips and seeks endlessly to connect the things even as they drift away from any sense... so it's expanding the universe pushing time forward by chaos and collision toward the penultimate slowness of the long-lasting timeless but final vibration... The mixed cacophony of 3 or 4 competing sound systems is in fact indescribable and pervasive...

.

in the future fonts will be considered as visual timbre
awesome... i was even unaware... i have such a narrow habit with my devices, I can see how they do that, to screen, narrow, filter my perception. but that's mind-blowing, what you've written. seeing messages in another font, another cursive -- so like translation, in the personal sense (my mind is in a trans-translational crisis 25 on 9 days a week) -- but that the life of different languages, the modernity of a billion cellular floating icons of identity flapping their wings

Icharos, forest pheremones, chemical voices

Icharos *, forest pheromones,

chemical voices & musky patrin **

wandering in search of

my own ear-step

the silent attack of the pranic deer, the rain angel

weathering between cardinal numbers the knock

of the woodpecker's digital nods,

the channel, that would-be true channel,

 within the open air (the open ear) yet unopened

if the brain as a vehicle, legs of mind, or wings

 slumbering Garuda, won't unfold, the pineal

the excellence of a branch is

ever extending the breath of

what might be happening

between things when not aroused, directionless

as if the period of inaction

were an action itself, reverted

 after the a period of inaction, interaction reconvenes

as a way of stepping out

into itself again emerges

with peculiarly erotic

tendencies toward silence that

quench desires

leave things flowing, outward, uncontained

the traffic (of particles) without intervention

beckons as a sea of snared drums

going untouched in such

exceedingly hot weather

for days on end, not caring

to lift a finger, to find the row of fingers themselves

the mushroom is called the dead mole's fingers, ***

seems to contribute substances

disenabling other fungi

getting any grip on the surface of the wood

permitting this wood to harden,

be more resistant to decay

particularly more useful

such wood, for making violins

just an example

there are great ranges of structures

coming in between structures

much more is unknown

than is already known

much more remains so

at any particular time

and what if time

being such a determinant factor

in the history of knowing

is left out of the equation

or becomes less central

in the overall sense of

the dimensions of knowing

and not knowing

if you say you don't know

I'll probably touch the air

goodbye being hello

hello being waves

there was a whole lot of whispering

back and forth as Tesla called it

the back and forth

maybe forwards back

like Kantor said of the actor ****

walking through time's mirror

forwards back

in the autumn after

a heavy rain fall

leaves lay scattered on the ground

whereas in summer

this is not so

or what is the case

in spring in any case

this is much less so

when leaves are most supple

paradoxically resistant

or barely yet existing

it's all a matter of friction they say

let them fall where they may

when the neural network

seems most open for adaptation

a kind of apostasy

one can release beliefs and clinging

one can explore associations

install new constellations

tuning the brain

to the environmental evolving

acetylcholesterase, the enzyme ready for neural firing

Novalis thought

there could develop new organs

maybe more like aptitudes

maybe we'd better

think (more) like Novalis

except for the weird parts

of course

these trees wiry & reaching

as if they where some kind of antennae

stored me in their earth

and I am not at liberty

to tell you where

or why

 _______________________________/ /________________________

footnotes:

* Also spelled icaros, ikaros, from Quechca language. The songs in the ayahuascero traditions which refer to specific medicinal plants. The icaros is said to be given to the ayahuascero in a trance and by some extension the plant must give the song itself, sing the song, somehow, subtly. Hence the analogy to pheremones. This is a poem, after all; but follow your nose in the jungle and see where the gente de yaje lead you. Trust first of all the healing powers of nature.

** patrin are signs (crossed branches, a ribbon) that Romany people sometimes used to leave in the forest to inform other people who know the code about this or that contigent phenomenon.

*** dead mole's fingers A controversial name that is not universally accepted but since the poem was written in 2016, I am assuming I had some reason, even if merely poetic, for using this name. The blog site linked below has numerous picture of the same fungi fingers in various phases in divers places.

https://www.thegypsythread.org/dead-mans-fingers/

**** Tadeusz Kantor  Polish Dramaturge & Painter/Assemblage Artist

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

 

SYNCHRESIS/ what we think of as the local is a special condition of the random

                 SYNCHRESIS

      
   You suppose that you don't have to do anything at all to hear a dog barking and know that it is a dog barking. That is a big mistake. Because you do not realize what a tremendous effort you put forth... you inject into the sound you hear the most appropriate sound that can be drawn from all your remembrances... a perfect correspondence without the slightest discrepnancy..."

  Henri Bergson, The World of Dreams (1901)

 let us talk then to the animals, the wing'd aequatics,
the crustaceans then in the world of dreams, dear Yannick Dauby,
give them your ear under
the 21,000 leagues of the seizures of the seas,
 under that pressure, let the click

reverberate and surround our ignorance,

for the listening will be the means of the message

i want to hear everything i can hear
down to dew-drops the exhalation of frankincense

the doppler crab cricket lagooned
beneath that wall we call wreckage

shrimp pitches barked in harmonic
interference propagation

rendering pythagorean quantum
(for which he'd gone

into exile, for the sole idea of a ratio

I draw out the seed inside me so to speak, then crunch numbers

 "we the gods who alone created heaven only to tear it down"

  condensare (compression of thought.image.figure.word) is not a poet's elitist privilege, a resistance, from which, words withdraw into an acetate terminus, but the living phantome of the earth-memory, a framed fossil, minute  cosmological constant of culture, entrained in the dna the brain maintains, which culture also often avoids, as too delicate to mention

-- but by creating "agents" --- to explain it's crop failure from year to year -- it identifies sectors of cooperatives, quadrants, territories, root-systems that behave like rhizomes, rhizomes transsexuelles working along the street as roots, the fungus in the ear calling across the axis of cross-breezes -- here I am, here I am, I am here, where-ever I look, feel deeply, totemic trivia in seeming torpor of stone, obsidians, agates, the glass face cast into the colors of our children's eyes as reminders we are children of the earth

-- gods and counter gods are invented, stand as theorems fabricated from the plausible outcomes already given: economic universities, climatology, ethno-botany, marked marx, theories, spiders written to unwrite the algo-code, possible childhoods to come, civilizations, potential artificial intelligence that becomes organic, organic infiltrations of artificial intelligence, morphogenesis, morphic resonance, resonance regions, the dreamings of the Aboriginals, the ab-originals of which we the heamaotodes, the tiny people in the red vein of the soft white rocks called our bones, we throw up those flutes of temples at once under dark & lighter seas... 

 

 (one of Yannick's hydrophonic recordings... )

https://soundcloud.com/kalerne/181223-unkown-fish-haikou-harbour

for you will come a upon a person of another century wandering like a ghost insisting the stones and bamboos that Wen Fu cut do literally and actually speak and fishes pulse from some inner organ songs and you, in 2020, will say, yes, they do, we have grown ears called microphone insertibles, chips even between odd electrons, and this chap from the earlier centuries (what direction does the vector of time move in?) will say, no, no, no... this is not possible yet, you have heard nothing... and we will also have our doubts, being scientists... 

  Blake would say that there are some places in the Universe where the Fall has not occurred, the world has not turned upside down, and Eden still exists. Here Mankind is not governed by the rules of reason, stupid and strict, but by the heart and intuition. The people do not indulge in idle chatter, parading what they know, but create remarkable things by applying their imagination. The state ceases to impose the shackles of daily oppression, but helps people to realize their hopes and dreams. And Man is not just a cog in the system, not just playing a role, but a free Creature. That's what's been passing through my mind during my long illness, making my bed-rest almost a pleasure.
   Sometimes I think that only the truly sick are healthy.  

--Olga Tokarczuk

.... meanwhile peoples we call the Assanges and Snowdens and then Mannings created to carry the burden, the whistle-blowers, make some version of information palpable as truth, become scapegoats, messengers, between layers of the social orders, but held in check, too dangerous, made non-sensical, deconstructed by disinformation, so that the commoner, the non-specialist, so-called, gives up trying to understand, can't fact check into the deep slumbering web or sift from the unconscious codes of selfish superstitions, the public demonizes or animalizes these hermetic figures, and, like the different orders of animal world, the spirit animals at the cross-roads, or the mad in asylums, assumed to be always incommunicado, by having no explicable language, falls between the cracks, and yet...these are silences gagged like a frackable landscape...

    coyotito escaped from the clutches of the deceitful 

and taught her people how to avoid mankind

-- so, i guess what i am on about here, is this, a plan for escape: 

what we think of as the local is a special condition of the random...  

and perhaps vice versa, in the sense that a seed contains an implementation pattern for exploration of an indefinite spurt bifurcation... and it's probably because "compression" itself is a modality, a kind of collapse, a pre-boom slump -- but cells go odd, some being round and rolling, while others grow a directional whip of stirring up waveforms, of creating life enzyme passages, beating patterns, drift compositions that attract or repel

we may actually understand birds very well

(a selection of primes in a sequence) that render(s) something as "intelligible"

spatial intelligence as sound "bounce" // resonance -- we pitch our sound to environment --

 which we now only think of as "viral"... which is not a bad way to think, because  as we examine these (dis)associative minutiae, these carbonic erotomanias... they replicate themselves (thought as virus, language as virus) AS IF the only means to study the generative principle itself, the spatialization of the genetic code

we can think of them as words, syntagms, memes, enyzmes at specific heats, 

particles, sub-particles, monads, molars--- but language, as an event of environment mirrored between the nomadic nasal and pharyngeal cavities,  yes, we have some work to do to liberate it's gasp, the cardiopulmonary textuality graphed --- look how the heart has been transformed:

       toroidal electromagnetic fractal resonator

   but we don't write enough in sounds... and we also don't speak at all levels of sounds (this is another cultural conditioning... saint francis and doctor (hilda) doolittle are not far again from aletheia in wonderland... we don't need to think in freudian/darwinian terms of being "lowered" to their level of speech... we must raise ourselves to theirs... but we will never explain ourselves precisely, it seems, we are gravelly shadows upon shadows twisted into ropes unraveling light we know nothing about

  speaking to the whales, life inside the whales

 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science/talking-to-whales-180968698/?fbclid=IwAR1rTAWp-hoKZxt5m0Ff8Cb0iFJMDyGv12GpDXDfl5cqKhgJoU1Z7BnRYTQ

  "Synchresis is the forging between something one sees and something one hears - it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time. Synchresis is an acronym formed by telescoping together the two words synchronism and synthesis"

-- Michel Chion  

 

Berlin Week/Haunted Houses Reviews/Updates

 Getting on the Flixbus, guitar and suitcase in hand, in a few hours I will be in Berlin again...

playing solo set at Madame Claude on May 27th 

    at 22:30 approximately...

 https://madameclaude.de/events/experimontag-68/

and then solo at Loophole on May 29th, 

   the hour TBA. 

https://www.facebook.com/events/351442582385193/

These sets will be composed of 4 different & subtly shifting sounding environments/

ambiences, with acoustic guitar woven throughout/plus the mysteries of the sound-table.

Then, at Tatwerk on June 1

(Hasenheide 9, Aufgang 1, 3. OG)

    I will be providing a somewhat different sound palette

in support of Ana Kavalis, in a project we rehearsed for

and previewed last month, called Somehow Standing.

 

 By way of introduction, click on this video :)

  

 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=852808888431697

 

Two performances at 3pm and 6pm,

Space is rather limited for these performance so

reserve tickets ahead of time by writing to

info@tatwerk-berlin.de

or arrive early :)

looking forward to seeing as many old and new friends as possible, as ever... 

 in the past --------------  recently _______--------------__-----__________________

 

Muzykofilia Festival in Torun. Great times. Good musics. 

Wonderful audience.   Here's a video (audio only, of course) of my set direct from the board.  https://youtu.be/wSk-L9rjnQI

 

Photo: Agnieska Janik

 

 

Here's a very funny, creative review of my Haunted Houses album:  

 

    "I came for the house music, all dressed with my ravers outfit on and glowstick tightly squeezed in my hand… it must have been here somewhere I thought.. i mean, of course it’s an illegal house party and the directions are always a little vague, but still we should hear some booming beats to follow. But when going through all these abandoned houses over in this block, it slightly became apparent that this promised house party might be a misconception from our side… still trying to get out of here in order to find something else seemed to be more troublesome than expected." 

Read the full review(and link to the album) here

 https://yeahiknowitsucks.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/jeff-gburek-projects-haunted-houses

 

 

 I discovered that my album "Remote Provinces" released in 2009 on Aural Terrains label has now a representative track is posted on Youtube. I think it's sold out. But it's nice to hear a piece of it.   https://youtu.be/VlO5uJTMtmA

 

A few photos and then, it's time to say goodbye to blog-space and hit the road

 

Dom Artusa, Torun

Sunset, Santok, Dym Festival

Artist Jerzy Gąsiorek in Santok

Assemblage by Jerzy Gąsiorek, Santok

Ink on wood by Jeff Gburek

Karolina

Set up, Muzykofilia Festival, Torun

 

Radiophrenia Plays Two Cities by Jeff Gburek with Ilaria Boffa

 Radiophrenia Glasgow will be playing a few sound art pieces of mine in the next week.
  
     Tonight May 15 it's "Two Cities"

        On May 20th,  they will play
           "Dream on Orpheus Street"
                   (to be covered in the very next entry to this blog).
 

Flood in Poznan, 1889

   Radiophrenia is accessible via the link below and they will be playing a great variety of audio art, plays, field recording, hoespiel and sound collages with commentary and , yes, even a sense of narrative purpose.
 Until May 26th

 http://radiophrenia.scot/how-to-listen/?fbclid=IwAR27Qqw1o_qOHLKtktrwIjwNqIK1LZrGEptcpXYm79zs5zJckZSDzczZesE

“Two Cities” is composed of spoken word, poetry, site-specific field recordings, & acousmatic sound. The work encompasses themes of ecology, personal position, isolation, community and the liquidity of modernity, in all it’s elusive forms. The reflection of the two artists dwelling in two cities funneled into one place here & now for the listener. Ilaria Boffa, lives in Padova, Italia and Jeff Gburek in Poznan, Polska. They contemplate together, and apart, the waters rising and receding in the wake of civilizations that mark the tide levels of the planet. Audio, music and composition by Jeff Gburek.

For those who missed the radio presentation, no FOMO!
You can find the whole available for download here. Support our work within your means.  https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/two-cities

Part 1. “The Shrinking Pond”

Begun in 2016, when the desiccation of the region had just about peaked and all local bodies of water seemed still to shrink from contact with the outside world, the recordings of an early Spring during the crisis of a great dry year. The environment of the pond in Poznan was documented on 3 different levels and these sound layers are revealed with an animated and multi-dimensional audio-texture. One strata is the literal binaural ambience, the noises of machines and animals heard within human range; the next, hydrophones in the river and pond, and then recordings of magnetic resonance fields (caused by electric cables, street lights, automobiles, cell-phones — all using a disembodied guitar pick-up to capture sounds that are not normally within the human auditory spectrum. These sounds were then re-composed into a series of free audio spirals. After having heard Ilaria Boffa’s work, “The Two Cities”, I decided to add another spoken word intervention of my own, recorded this November, contemplating the atmosphere of ecological indeterminacy and human fragility. Together with the following piece “Acqua Alta, the tables turned and now liquid nature is swelling almost perilously at the seams. We stretch the cable of trans-communication, make ghost-bridges between two cities far flung and yet conjoined by a common liquidity. Special thanks to Marco Lucchi for the fragment of his “November Song” that appears in the composition.

Part 2 “Acqua Alta”

Embedded in this track is the voice of Ilaria Boffa speaking on two occasions. The first are phrases commemorating the language of Zygmunt Bauman (the sociologist and philospher, born in Poznan) and the concept of Liquid Modernity while in the second moment she takes us on her journey to Venice amidst the floods in November where she recites a poem called “The Two Cities” which, in her own words, “deals with a profound sense of absence and distance, the acceptance of a painful looming scenario that echoes from a remote past. Sinking, drowning becomes simultaneously a very private and universal condition, a reflection on the global eco-dynamics currently shared by living and non-living beings.”

The compositions feature texts and field recordings made by Ilaria Boffa in Venice recomposed, reconfigured and supplemented by Jeff Gburek in the studio and around Poznan, featuring slide guitar, piano, field recordings, radio captures, incidental voices (birds even). Thanks to Kołorking Muzyczny for piano and “the space to think” and Karolina Ossowska (backing vocals/voices on “Acqua Alta” and for inspiration in general).

Jeff Gburek is a multi-instrumentalist, sound designer & composer who uses prepared guitar, radios, magnetic field antennae, theremin, manipulation of organic objects, & special microphones to bridge formal music & environmental sound sources, bringing multiple dimensions of sound into consciousness. He has lived in San Francisco, Montreal, NYC, Berlin, Brussels, Lyon and now Poznan. Collaborators include Michael Vorfeld, Tetuzi Akiyama & Keith Rowe of AMM. He’s performed at Unidram Festival in Potsdam, Ad Libitem Festival in Warsaw, FRIV Festival in Poznan. He currently leads workshops offers private lessons on improvised music, acoustic ecology, field recording, English and Italian at Kołorking Muzyczyny, Poznan.

http://transparent-abelard.blogspot.com/
http://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek
https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/

Haunted Houses Of The Living. Album

    https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/haunted-houses

   No one believes in haunted houses anymore but I believe in haunted houses just a little bit more than the unbelievers, after having lived within several, if only inside the skull, the crackling brain-case, and the house-bones, as they settle unsettlingly, in the merger meridian between seismic flow and over-head gulf streams and low frequency nor'easters. There is a spectre in spectralism and a prismatic fractal flaw splitting hairs without identity. Without the words equal to sound and the sounds equal to words there is the poem that rides shotgun over the carriage drawn into dawn by subtle horses, nameless ones, I cannot know while being guided by them over paths of further air, knowing them anyway, gusts of hydrogen-weighted gravity, a bustle between vibrating strings, the bright glow in the punctum sordum, a train running in one ear & out the other. 

The worlds within the worlds inside the piano, the innenklavier, so called, the haunted house, the inner everglades of a sensual buzz as of strings in distant hunters of the stars drawing the mark. 

 Materials: grand piano, microphones, fingers, feedback (an immaterial material if ever there was one), delay, volume and pitch pedals. Did I miss anything?  Please let me know.

Easter Sunday (4/21/2019).

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/haunted-houses

Patrul Rinpoche, Nomadic Scholar (1808-1887)

This transmission thanks to Michael Northham
(listen to anything while reading)
 https://michaelnortham.bandcamp.com/
 Today first day of transmissions of Patrul Rinpoche
 - not so long (a text)
as he never stayed in one place long
enough to write
- an amazing nomadic scholar
from the 19th century.
Here a nice example :

 Advice from Me to Myself
- Patrul Rinpoche -

Vajrasattva, sole deity, Master,
You sit on a full-moon lotus-cushion of white light
In the hundred-petalled full bloom of youth.
Think of me, Vajrasattva,
You who remain unmoved within the manifest display
That is Mahamudra, pure bliss-emptiness.
Listen up, old bad-karma Patrul,
You dweller-in-distraction.
For ages now you've been
Beguiled, entranced, and fooled by appearances.
Are you aware of that? Are you?
Right this very instant, when you're
Under the spell of mistaken perception
You've got to watch out.
Don't let yourself get carried away by this fake and empty life

Your mind is spinning around
About carrying out a lot of useless projects:
It's a waste! Give it up!
Thinking about the hundred plans you want to accomplish,
With never enough time to finish them,
Just weighs down your mind.
You're completely distracted
By all these projects, which never come to an end,
But keep spreading out more, like ripples in water.
Don't be a fool: for once, just sit tight.

Listening to the teachings — you've already heard hundreds of teachings,
But when you haven't grasped the meaning of even one teaching,
What's the point of more listening?

Reflecting on the teachings — even though you've listened,
If the teachings aren't coming to mind when needed,
What's the point of more reflection? None.
Meditating according to the teachings —
If your meditation practice still isn't curing
The obscuring states of mind—forget about it!
You've added up just how many mantras you've done —
But you aren't accomplishing the kyerim visualization.
You may get the forms of deities nice and clear —
But you're not putting an end to subject and object.
You may tame what appear to be evil spirits and ghosts,
But you're not training the stream of your own mind.

Your four fine sessions of sadhana practice?

Your four fine sessions of sadhana practice,
So meticulously arranged —
Forget about them.

When you're in a good mood,
Your practice seems to have lots of clarity —
But you just can't relax into it.
When you're depressed,
Your practice is stable enough
But there's no brilliance to it.
As for awareness,
You try to force yourself into a rigpa-like state,
As if stabbing a stake into a target!

When those yogic positions and gazes keep your mind stable
Only by keeping mind tethered —
Forget about them!

Giving high-sounding lectures
Doesn't do your mind-stream any good.
The path of analytical reasoning is precise and acute —
But it's just more delusion, good for nothing goat-shit.
The oral instructions are very profound
But not if you don't put them into practice.
Reading over and over those dharma texts
That just occupy your mind and make your eyes sore —
Forget about it!

You beat your little damaru drum — ting, ting —
And your audience thinks it's charming to hear.
You're reciting words about offering up your body,
But you still haven't stopped holding it dear.
You're making your little cymbals go cling, cling —
Without keeping the ultimate purpose in mind.

All this dharma-practice equipment
That seems so attractive —
Forget about it!

Right now, those students are all studying so very hard,
But in the end, they can't keep it up.

Today, they seem to get the idea,
But later on, there's not a trace left.
Even if one of them manages to learn a little,
He rarely applies his "learning" to his own conduct.

Those elegant dharma disciplines —
Forget about them!

This year, he really cares about you,
Next year, it's not like that.
At first, he seems modest,
Then he grows exalted and pompous.
The more you nurture and cherish him,
The more distant he grows.

These dear friends
Who show such smiling faces to begin with —
Forget about them!

Her smile seems so full of joy —
But who knows if that's really the case?
One time, it's pure pleasure,
Then it's nine months of mental pain.
It might be fine for a month,
But sooner or later, there's trouble.
People teasing; your mind embroiled —

Your lady-friend —
Forget about her!
These endless rounds of conversation
Are just attachment and aversion —
It's just more goat-shit, good for nothing at all.
At the time it seems marvelously entertaining,
But really, you're just spreading around stories
about other people's mistakes.

Your audience seems to be listening politely,
But then they grow embarrassed for you.
Useless talk that just make you thirsty —
Forget about it!

Giving teachings on meditation texts
Without yourself having
Gained actual experience through practice,
Is like reciting a dance-manual out loud
And thinking that's the same as actually dancing.

People may be listening to you with devotion,
But it just isn't the real thing.

Sooner or later, when your own actions
Contradict the teachings, you'll feel ashamed.

Just mouthing the words,
Giving dharma explanations that sound so eloquent—
Forget about it!

When you don't have a text, you long for it;
Then when you've finally gotten it,
you hardly look at it.
The number of pages seems few enough,
But it's a bit hard to find time to copy them all.
Even if you copied down all the dharma texts on earth,
You wouldn't be satisfied.
Copying down texts is a waste of time
(Unless you get paid) —
So forget about it!

Today, they're happy as clams —
Tomorrow, they're furious.
With all their black moods and white moods,
People are never satisfied.
Or even if they're nice enough,
They may not come through when you really need them,
Disappointing you even more.

All this politeness, keeping up a
Courteous demeanor —
Forget about it!

Worldly and religious work
Is the province of gentlemen.
Patrul, old boy — that's not for you.

Haven't you noticed what always happens?
An old bull, once you've gone to the trouble of
borrowing him for his services,
Seems to have absolutely no desire left in him at all—
(Except to go back to sleep).

Be like that — desireless.
Just sleep, eat, piss, shit.

There's nothing else in life that has to be done.
Don't get involved with other things:
They're not the point.

Keep a low profile,
Sleep.

In the triple universe
When you're lower than your company
You should take the low seat.

Should you happen to be the superior one,
Don't get arrogant.

There's no absolute need to have close friends;
You're better off just keeping to yourself.

When you're without any worldly or religious obligations,
Don't keep on longing to acquire some!

If you let go of everything —
Everything, everything —
That's the real point!

This advice was written by the practitioner
Trime Lodro (Patrul Rinpoche)
for his intimate friend Ahu Shri (Patrul Rinpoche),
in order to give advice that is tailored exactly to his capacities.
This advice should be put into practice!
Even though you don't know how to practice,
just let go of everything — that's what I really want to say.
Even though you aren't able to succeed
in your dharma practice, don't get angry.

May it be virtuous.

Patrul Rinpoche (1808-1887).

Sarva Mangalam!

May all beings be happy!



Translation by Constance Wilkinson
https://www.shambhala.com/authors/u-z/constance-wilkinson.html

Many questions about the text were clarified according to the extremely kind explanations of the Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, during his stay in New York City, and according to the detailed explanations of Khenpo, Rigdzin Dorje of the Nyingmapa Shedra,Bansbari,
Kathmandu, Nepal.

Thanks to Matthieu Ricard of Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling, and to Anne Burchardi of the Marpa institute of Translation for their advice toward trying to make this translation faithful to both the letter and spirit of the original Tibetan.

All errors and misunderstandings are those of the translator.

May this poem, despite all shortcomings of its translation, serve to benefit all beings! 
Sarva Mangalam.

Wikipedia of Patrul Rinpoche
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrul_Rinpoche