The Year That Was....

I am not sure what should be written in this space as I know I am entering a time of existence that is not shared by everyone. I know that I have been through the worst of years and in some ways, I am passing through the best of years.

2013 has been a a bewilderment. It has had my best moments, and it contains my greatest disappointment and despair.  I have come to appreciate how we define each other, and how the relationships we pursue transcend the ways that we survive the day to day challenges that create the continuity of our awareness. Perhaps our greatest focus is the one that forms our survival through the creation of partnerships through which we create families and populate the world. For most of us that is the ultimate focus, but I suspect there is a new time ahead in the adventure of cosmic awareness. We are on the verge of discovering ways of being that extend far beyond the notion of survival.

I am sensing a different level of exchange among those I have been fortunate enough to meet and follow their adventures.

It is true that we never really repeat anything. But we often miss the immediacy of what is happening, and the moments that pass endure as a reality we cannot really grasp because we are not equipped to enjoy the scale that forever requires.

I find that my love for all who occupy my world has deepened, and my perception of the meaning each has brought to me continues to expand to connect the past with the relentless surge of Now.

Such feeling is too intense... Too combustible, too demanding... And so I must retreat... Or be consumed by the very passion that inspires us to be the best that we can be.

This passion is the life force of us all... Until now I have been reluctant to acknowledge its power in my life and have hesitated to embrace its manifestation. I have allowed illusions to distract me, and fear to paralyze me from the true freedom of being. So as I try to understand this extraordinary balance of past, present, and future, I know that I am on the verge of creating many new ideas and works that have been brewing for decades...

This was the year that was astonishing as it surprised me through dismantling all that I thought was fixed and established, and revealed that my greatest challenges are waiting somewhere ahead...

I actually don't know if I will survive the provocations exploding all around me. I don't know if I can endure such profound beauty of awareness.

A Story That Could Be Short...

How strange,  as I approach what is described as my golden years, that I should be shook to the foundations of my feelings and emotions… As though I were a teenager overcome by emotions and fainting on the stairs.

Feeling closer to so many people... More than at any other time of my life... Feeling the joy of knowing them and being witness to the greatness that resides in each and everyone of them...

And in such deep and deftly etched feelings,  I face a dilemma that is unsolvable and also simple... So vividly simple...  in the midst of such turmoil, I touch the fabric of such joy... The joy of having known and shared so deeply --- without the slightest caution or reserve... Only to find the appearances of illusions that mock the simplicity of trust and all that was created… Yet I would not give one moment back to gain peace of mind… I am brimming over with ideas… all stemming from the inspiration begun within the majesty of such devastating beauty that comes from the source of being… of who we really are… it was not a mirage of mental fabrication… we were tangible… we were real… we were the elegance of pure connection… we were friends...

We were the innocence of trust. But maybe such innocence was my diversion. Yet, something came from  nothing... something emerged in the world that had not been there before...  it is still there, illuminated and pure, but distant, as though I have somehow wandered to new and foreign regions.

I love all that has been these final years... My awakening... My renaissance... The new work ... The incredible surge of energy that illuminates these moments....and those who have inspired and sustained me, and those friends that bonded in a moment of time... ah, but Time is so fragile... The only time machine is memory, and memories fade...

Now I feel the simultaneous loss and gain that Time brings to this moment... Yes, it is all over... Yes, it is all beginning...

It all began when the afternoon sunlight of Spring poured through the window and left me dazzled...

Embodying The World

Since I was about nine years old I have regarded consciousness as a medium for being the world and connecting to beingness and timelessness through imagination which then presences the world as emerging reality… but reality is not just isness, it is the continual becomingness…

Sorry to enlarge the words… but being and time have become so value laden that I was trying to imbue them with an urgency of NOW, but not doing it very well…

We often think of ourselves as being in the world, enveloped by the awesomeness of the planet we inhabit as well as the universe that earth inhabits. But perhaps the reality is that this is all consciousness,and it is more inside us than we are inside of anything.

Embodiment has been my way of integrating technology and the human form... my creative experiences all have sought this integration. My creative work has been about embodying technology for discovery and extending our expressive range. Through this awareness of embodiment,  the things we do take on sharper meaning, and the reason for connecting and creating becomes more focused and more purposeful.

Embodiment has been my experience since my earliest days of sports and dancing... the presencing of ourselves as the embodiment of being the world is central to understanding what the world is to us. The world inhabits us, we embody the world, and give shape, purpose, and continual unfolding of moments which is more like the flow and expansion of air that the ticking of a clock.

Consciousness is not something that exists inside a brain, it is the process of our being, creating from nothingness and evolving and changing reality. Consciousness is us embodying the world. It is not somewhere. It is everywhere, but not static and stationary... dynamic and the essence of creating and creation.

That is why everything about us is always about change.

A TEXTING MOMENT

The texting below was an exchange that took place just before midnight... Earlier I had been texting to another person and it started to go bad because the ideas were very complicated and misunderstandings started to erupt. So we decided to stop. Such negative Texting can be a source of tension and miscommunication. This can also happen in email exchanges. Having suffered through the extreme misunderstandings that can occur through cybertext, I know that such discrepancies are not trivial. Some have changed my life in ways that I wish I could take back. Once text has become an object occupying space and no longer an expression in time like conversation that vanishes into fleeting moments passing by, it can become a destructive force that gathers momentum.

But the text offered here was a spontaneous exchange. The imagery that was created in the moment will serve as a road map to the planned experience in the Greenwich Village restaurant known as Choga. LN is a noted and accomplished choreographer, multimedia artist, and educator.


Wizard: I was advised to take it slow in making changes...
This struck me as spectacularly wise.
Did I ever give you the book Science and Technology in the Arts 

LN: No.

Wizard: That big book in guest room...

LN: I looked through the book when I was there and wondered if I could get a copy.
Our legacy is in that book!

Wizard: But "taking it slow" seemed good because I thought I would be surrendering a property I have been working on for more than 50 years.
My Credo was multimedia...

LN: Yes, give yourself some time.

Wizard: Stewart Kranz was impressed and that was why I was in the book...
If you look, the images are like pictures from IMPACT...

LN: Yes! I want to teach a course and use that book!

Wizard: When I got to NYU, I had chance to implement ideas as curriculums and productions
That's why I'm Having so
Much fun with the new EXPANDED MUSIC

LN: Great! Wish we had planned for your course and mine to connect!

Wizard: NOW EXPANDING MUSIC INCLUDES THE SENSE OF TASTE AND IMPROV AT CHOGA
Let's see about next semester. I'm
Offering it again...  Will have so many students for Spring
I have a great cellist in my class.
He is from Turkey.
His mother makes cellos.

LN: Wow!!!

Wizard: He is playing her instrument...
He is so sensitive and musical

LN: Does be compose?

Wizard: We have terrific violinist ...
Cellist seems afraid to improvise and we are
Taking all of us there tomorrow on video.
We are officially having class in Choga.

LN: This is unbelievable. I just came from a meeting
with a very important person and I suggested we use a
music composition with violin, cello and flute!

Wizard: They now have multimedia.
Choga has three screens and good sound system

LN: You never cease to amaze me !

Wizard: We are linking movement to notation
Our dancer will be our notation...
We will play her as she moves...
We will use both physical and emotional space as the score.
LN: Are you actually going to notate (symbols on a page)?

Wizard: I wish I had that Korean Artist... But yes... we will ask some students to map it.
Thanks for reminding me to take materials!
The strategy of getting musicians aware of embodiment  has really worked...
Last week everyone choreographed each other...
Conceptually this has been growing with me
and that IMPACT student Connie who was interested in embodiment

LN: One of the basic techniques is learning how to open to using space

Wizard: Not sure what you mean
How to open using space

LN: If you take you arm out to the side, it has a certain extension.
But if you take your arm out with the intention of expanding to the length of the room
You fill more space
You take in an idea

Wizard: Interesting... We use similar analogy with the voice

LN: Let the body open to dimension

Awareness is everything

You can do all kinds of movement awareness exercises.  I make them up. Try this one :

Bring your chin to your chest
Now left your chin with no particular intention
Now bring your chin to chest again

This time think about throat opening
Revealing throat
Do you feel your throat more?

Wizard: Yes

LN: I'm not sure that came across

Wizard: And I could see or hear filling the open throat with sound

LN: If you bend your elbow,
Now think of opening at the joint
To straighten your arm,

Wizard: I forgot to mention that Choga has this big open
Space in front of bar... So it is like a stage... a place for embodiment...

LN: Embodiment is about intention

Wizard: Yes, I agree
But it is also about Beingness

LN: And Nothingness ..

Wizard: And Heidegger

LN: Sartre

Wizard:  I'm going to take this text and turn it into my blog

Languaging and the Worlding of the World

Yes, writing takes time... And we have to take the time or time disappears, evaporates without any words to mark its passing.

Now that I feel the end of my time passing faster and faster, I regret all the poems unwritten, all the songs still inside, all the music left in the silence... The books unwritten...

Wait! Just one more moment!  Ah... Now the saying "time waits for no one" tolls like an ostinato across the emptiness of mind...

Howl is such a great movie. It has just been released for the home market. As good as the poem is, the movie may be better... Howl is about language... The essence of words and the eloquence of their sounds that transcend meaning...

I seem to have lost power like a car running out of gas or a blackout that suddenly descends upon a city... Not without warning... But with an impersonal  indifference ...

This text is empty... Just clicks across the screen... Taps of the true digital wasteland of fingers and thumbs eking out letters and words...

I am a romantic. I do believe in forever, even though I know I will soon disappear as everyone has before me and as will those who follow.  Yet for me,  forever persists as a premonition of a deeper truth. It flies in the face of the reality of the universe. Newtonian Physics describes a universe that  disperses energy so that eventually existence as we know it comes to a close, the law of Entropy.

Believing in forever is like believing in fairy tales. But it is the stuff that drives us to great achievements. The stuff that dreams are made of.

My friend says compose something, create something to pull you through nights of despair. But nothing comes... except I find myself echoing the Cole Porter song In the Still of the Night  because I recently had an epiphany that Cole Porter was summing up the existential question:

Do you love me, as I love you
Are you my life to be, my dream come true
Or will this dream of mine fade out of sight
Like the moon growing dim, on the rim of the hill
In the chill, still, of the night

This is sung to the night, to the universe... wondering if the love we feel in being alive will be returned by the world, the life we love. Or is our place in existence just a dream that fades out of sight like the moon growing dim....

In the chill,

Still,

of the night.

The hoped-for return of the world loving us is an illusion fading out of sight, like the moon that will be lost to the earth as it escapes its orbit... we see our hope growing dim on the rim of the hill until it is gone.  And all that we thought was as enduring as the universe is just illusion...

There is this shimmering moment in time that I think is forever...It is in the fire of imagination and the inspiration of those that inhabit my experience and my world...

Creating new work is more than refuting despair, it is making the world and creating ourselves in the emerging moments... evidence that we here and we are enduring... it is the worlding of the world.

Enjoying Daylight Savings Time

In these dwindling hours before the change to Daylight Savings Time, I'm still contemplating my options for the future and the Hemingway Solution.

I saw Running from Crazy  which is Mariel Hemingway's look at her family and the tragedies that plagued her... But no insight... not really... In the end it was just about her...

There were wonderful glimpses of her grandfather. But those came more from Margeaux Hemingway and her unfinished quest to retrace and relive the path of her grandfather... She took her own life at 40.

There are these moments that confront us where the prongs of possibilities enable us to map acceptable pathways. But I suppose as we grow older, those options become less profuse, more limited, and then, perhaps, none at all.

I'm about to make decision which will change things forever for me. It is the only decision to be made for what is right and just, and yet, deep down there is something not quite right... It is political and controlled by much that has gone wrong in this modern age of human relations.

Yet, from my perspective, I have had four years of extended discovery that was unexpected and changed the direction of my life. There was a touching reaching into the emptiness of my despair. This touching launched my renaissance, my quest, my inspiration to create something new and meaningful... to create something worthwhile that might have lasting impact.

Such was the transformation stemming from four years ago when my hope was renewed. A close friend once remarked that without hope there is no reason for living.

It is difficult to make sense of the wilderness where I have wandered since stumbling so abruptly a few months ago. The world that seem so clear was suddenly clouded by the impediments of my own personal maya, my illusions and deep misunderstandings. So experience has been at a deeper level for me than the past encounters of despair and dilemma. I am joyful-sad, grateful-sorry,  inspired-empty...  I am at that great divide where I look at the terrain that defines the journey...

But it will be great to have the extra hour... I wish that hour could be the doorway to infinity. There is so much I would do... So much I would launch... Bring so much to closure... Discover new beauty which is always the truth about being... Start new projects never meant to come to closure, but just to be in the ecstasy of perpetual becoming...

I have this extra hour to reflect on knowing those who have touched my life and opened the wonder of who each of us is to each other... All incredibly connected...

But also sadly caught in the web of illusion where we seem alone and trapped by our own reflections and delusions...

If this extra hour could only bring us all together in the simple wonder of our beautiful beingness.... Wouldn't that be a moment of awareness worth celebrating forever?

Wasn't that what Fellini was saying in 8½ ? Come down out of that intellectual scaffolding and simply enjoy each other....

I do believe in forever ---despite all the dismal predictions of entropy and the so called dissipation of spiritual awareness.

Yes... Let's enjoy... EN-JOY.  Enjoy is to put joy into all that we experience.

I am putting all my joy into this extra hour... the joy of all those who touch my life and continue to sustain me through the vanishing moments of Time Remembered and Time Forgotten...

None

Crossroads...

New era, but no new me. 

How many renaissances can come in one lifetime?

How many loves come and go 
and still have that one muse that moves to miracles?
 
How many thoughts remain beneath the surface, waiting to erupt?

How many inspirations beyond the horizon?

How many sadnesses can one endure, how many disappointments?

How much longing goes unrequited and endures?

REMEMBERING LINDA

Linda first popped into my life when I had an office on the 6th floor of the Education Building and had just finished my stint as Chair of Music and Performing Arts and assumed directorship of the music education program. She struck me as buoyant and youthful, and reminded me of a bobbysoxer from the days of my past. She was a charming southern belle, and she was passionate about music. She had visited the musicology department in Arts and Sciences but did not feel at home there, so she decided to seek out the School of Education which is now called The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.

Right from the start I felt a rapport with Linda. I could sense her passion for music and her determination to continue to grow. She said little about her family life, except to say that her husband Greg was undergoing a crisis in his health and that she was devoted to caring for him and his well being. But she had a sense that music was calling her to explore new possibilities for herself. She wanted to know if NYU music education would provide her the freedom and support to do serious research. She pointed out she was a teacher, but she was also an organist with an enthusiasm for scholarly excellence. "Your experience will be what you make it,'' I said, "and you will find strong support and room to be original." She began her study as a part-time student with a true love for learning. She was an explorer and was constantly researching, writing, working for causes, and engaging her students in her personal and musical discoveries.

Her presence with her colleagues was uplifting, sustaining, and refreshing. She was constantly reassuring her fellow doctoral cohorts. She was critical but constructive, engaged in dialectical exchange, and most of all, a source of inspiration and encouragement. In everything she touched, there was a thirst for excellence and quality.

Her NYU odyssey began about seven years ago, and it has been a joy to be a witness to her inquiry and to help shape its direction. As she was entering the final stages of her research we made plans to meet in October, but then she sent a message that it was determined she was fighting cancer. I was optimistic that she would recover. As Christmas was approaching, she encouraged me to finish putting music to a Christmas poem I was writing. On November 24, she asked "How is the song coming?" Actually, I was so discouraged by her illness that I was struggling.

In replying to how the song was going, I wrote "Slowly... Trying to be traditional with a twist... Know what I need to do, but doesn't jell. Waiting in Favela Cubana for brunch with a friend ... Nice cold day with the promise of winter in the air..."

Linda wrote back: "Yeah, even looked like snow earlier.  Maybe that could be in the song, too.  I love it that you are such a Romantic, in addition, of course, to being a profound creator of new music!"

And so these lyrics came so fast:

"Maybe it is snowing
Christmas from above
Maybe winds are blowing
New Year hopes of love."

And these lines came as I thought of Linda and the extraordinary adventure we shared in music and her research and the ordeal she was facing:

"Fears disappear
And all that's here
Is all the Love of every year..
We see the truth of who we are
As bright as any Christmas star."

It was with great joy for me to learn that the music therapist at Sloan Kettering sang the song for her while Linda was able to follow the score with Greg's help.

Sadly, we lost Linda. Her husband Greg sent a message: "Following 2 weeks of Hospice care in our home, Linda died on Monday afternoon, January 28th.  Our daughter and I were with her, and our son joined us soon afterward. "

Her research was on the Third Chorale Prelude of Cesar Franck, his final composition which was not finished. Although fully notated, on the day he intended to put in the registration and interpretative markings he passed away, thus leaving a mystery concerning his intentions for the work. Linda's research is original, inquisitive, and inspiring. Almost in symmetry to her musical inspiration Franck, Linda had completed her research, transcribed the materials and needed only to add the finishing touches to her dissertation when she left us.

She was just beginning as a professor at NYU, mentoring M.A. students with their thesis requirements. I see her touches in the department everywhere. She continued to attend Proposal Seminar long after she had finished coursework to listen to our critiques and comments about the ongoing research. Her presence was such a source of inspiration. I see her still, sitting in the seminar, still inspiring students, still looking to me like a bobbysoxer in her pale blue sweater, wonderful smile, and buoyant optimism.

Discovering Digital Awareness

Sunday morning,
Sitting for breakfast
With world-wide strangers...
Across from me,
A young man connected
To the ethereal digital world
Scrolls among his multimedia:
His laptop, tablet, and smart phone...
Occasionally tapping keys
And smiling sardonically,
Reveling in revelations
Echoing across synthetic synapses
Of some emerging global awareness
Manifest in a solitary compression
Of infinite possibility.

Maybe There's A Christmas

Maybe it is snowing
Christmas from above
Maybe winds are blowing
New Year hopes of love.
Maybe there's a Christmas
Just for you and me.
Maybe we can make it
All it's meant to be...
More than gifts and deck the halls
More than trees and shopping malls
Fears disappear
And all that's here
Is all the Love of every year..
We see the truth of who we are
As bright as any Christmas star.
All the years keep passing,
Falling flakes of snow.
Each of them is different,
How sad to see them go.
Maybe there's a christmas
Deep inside our hearts
Maybe peace is coming
Maybe now it starts.
So it keeps on snowing
And the winds keep blowing,
And the year is going
Fading fast away
Maybe here's the Christmas
Everyone can see
Maybe we're the miracles
Always meant to be.
Maybe it is Christmas.
Surely this is Christmas,
Yes, it must be Christmas today.

Copyright December, 2012 
John Gilbert
All Rights Reserved

Still Singing

Two years ago I wrote about a poem from my Poet's Passage that was a challenge to myself: "I Still Have Songs to Sing." I have continued to sing, and now resume a project that is more challenging yet, but perhaps possessing some potential to create and bring something new into the world. Actually as I am writing this, I am listening to Lost Works, a short tone poem that was part of a series. As I listen to it, I find it totally new... hearing things I didn't know were there. When one visits the website of Poet's Passage, it plays automatically.

Time has passed, and I am a different poet now. I read the words of the past and listen to past inventions with a new ear. Time has dissolved my ties to past works. I hold no secrets to their emergence. I listen to Lost Works and wonder why I didn't do more works like this. The orchestration of new instruments is rich, and the textures are sometimes profound. I listen with wonder. "Did I do that..." I ask myself, words falling silent in an empty room.

In the emptiness of this chamber, I hear new sounds... my fingers wander over the keys as though guided by some inner force. I recognize some fragments, but they grow in different directions than the past, they find new pathways and diversions.

I realize I never knew who I was or even now who I am. I stand outside myself hearing the collective sounds that now define my identity, realizing that the filter of my mind transforms them into some mysterious substance of myself. Then I understand that we share this filtering. Each of us filters infinite possibilities into discrete realities that define us and define each other.

My voice is different now and yet the same. I am still searching and stumbling across neglected terrain and finding new miracles. But I am confronted by the hastening of Time. I see the constellations of my existence racing away from each other faster than the speed of light. I am confronted by sense of loss of the past and the lost presence of those who were fellow explorers who supported and inspired me. They have gone on to other feasts, and I still stumble in the accelerated debris rendezvousing at destinations yet unknown.

Too much distracted, I must remember to sing.

Final Hours

This is the final post for a difficult year, a year filled with extremes, with challenges and stellar accomplishments, with gains and losses. Posts to this Blog this year have been infrequent, but they have been serious journeys of inquiry.

Perhaps the greatest gain has been the discovery that the only we gift we really have is time and that whatever time might be, it becomes transformed when we create something which indelibly stamps the moment with a tangible and palpable presence that carries its beingness into the present and into the continuing ongoingness of Time.  We are creating the fabric of meaning that is inextricably the texture of Time itself.  This transformative act is intertwined as the process and product of humankind enriched by the depth and multiplicity of consciousness that erupts into singular awareness.

Time is the essence of creation.  It is original burst of awareness that created the texture of becoming. We can literally look at the past, since we exist in the context of the speed of light, which we use to measure the presencing of now and to peer backward through Time perceived as Space. With more powerful instruments we can look ever further back into the "beginning" of Time, in search of that moment of ignition that launched the flow from nothingness into somethingness.

My last post, until now was on my birthday, that marked the beginning of Time's gift to me of itself. I didn't post again because I thought that maybe that was my last post, and that I was in my final days. But then I realized that we are all in our final days. All of us confront each moment just as each moment confronts us to extract meaning, to experience and savor the essence unfolding as conscious awareness of the present, of Now.

Central to the creation of Now is the understanding of its finite properties.  Nothing is forever, and even as we create to savor and deepen our awareness of being, the knowledge that our possession of Time is limited, is finite, is hurtling to the edge of a singularity.  The singularity of the Black Hole remains a metaphor and mystery... there is a sense that Time itself stops and a dimension unknown to our understanding redefines reality, perhaps dissolves into another parallel reality. Perhaps the universe itself is simply the conscious awareness of the evolving isness.

The Mayans are said to understand that the year 2012 would be the final days of the universe, observing that the universe will end on 12/21/2012.  Yet, I celebrate this new year knowing that the hours unfolding hold the promise of fulfillment, of extraordinary creation and wondrous discovery.  Our experience of Time is not arbitrary.  Our connection with Time unfolding is the only reality we witness... it is an energy exploding, illuminating consciousness as dynamic awareness. Each possession of Now is unique and singular and in this incandescent aliveness we embrace the possibilities on the leading edge of Time as our gift of choice and creating.

In these final days of 2011 I have written new text, poetry, and music... each instance as a connection of time and celebrating the discovery of what each moment contained...   I think I look back on those moments of creation, but actually those moments are contained in my awareness of now, which is pulse of Infinite Awareness. I can see that everything is the yin and the yang, but there is that infinite pause of silence where opposites meet... some call it the silence, the emptiness... and from that comes the substance of our creating. In these final moments I am punctuating time with text in our electronic consciousness. For me it is an act of creating meaning for these final moments, not as what is being said, but as something that is in the act of becoming.

So for this planet at this time, we end an old year and begin a new one. It belongs only to us, but is infinitely replicated. It is our celebration of Time itself. This is the one true religion that unites us all in spite of ourselves.

The Integrity of Conscious Awareness

I am passing through uncharted waters at the point where conventional practice is to note the moment of coming into the world and to celebrate it.  So I have friends who click me as is the custom in these modern days, and one or two have sent electronic cards full of the right words and images to call attention that today is passing by, and I'm still here. These waters are uncharted as each day that carves out a place in Time is always new.  It is the newness of things that attracts us, but looking back at these days, as they enter memory and gradually crumble into fragments of remembrance, becomes more complex as you reach that point when the days grow short.  And indeed they do,  "the days grow short when you reach September."  Would that I were really at September of my years, but I know the year is late and "I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."

In the incandescence of intense awareness I embrace those who continue to define my existence, who have nourished me through their response and their dialogic challenge to my conscious awareness.  Thought is the one dimension that moves faster than light, and I have entered parallel universes with such astonishing speed that I see our notions of reality are so primitive and uninformed. We have such richness and depth in our experiences that we could spend lifetimes trying to decode them, and we do. Isn't this what authors do all the time in their exploring and constructing new realities? 

It has been observed that nothing in the known universe contradicts Newton's law of entropy where energy (and matter) dissipates until finally all order disappears. The ordered universe is rushing headlong into disorder.  But there is one problem with Newton's observation: it doesn't include life, or the emergence of thinking, and finally consciousness. Life indeed does evolve toward greater order. Newton's universe is a machine, running like clockwork, but running down.  We are not in that universe, but standing somewhere observing it.

What has energized my thinking and action has been conscious awareness which is more than just consciousness.  This awareness is powerful and faster than the speed of light. It can leap to new realities and new awareness in an instant of insight and understanding. Some might describe this as a spiritual dimension, seeking some way of accounting for experience that is outside of our physical world bound by Newton's laws.

So now as I receive the best wishes in passing from friends and acquaintances, I appreciate that they are celebrating an event I had no control over. I do have prebirth memories, and I do note the days of birth and immediately following.  I still can see my father's blue eyes and his smile as he held me on a pillow in his lap and smiled down at me. I had an instance of insight that I had been particularized, and there was no way out, and what followed was an journey of learning how to survive, how to overcome each day, how to follow some path whose destiny was yet to be revealed.

I understand Hemingway's observations and the comments of existentialists who posit that while we have no control over how we come into this world, we do have a choice as to when and how we leave it.  From the standpoint of existentialism, life is meaningless.  We have the choice to create meaning, and our integrity stems from creating meaning and to understand that death is inevitable, but meaningless. Hemingway had reached a point where he believed  he could no longer create meaning with his life. The one remaining act was the deliberate choice to decide when and how to die. I do perceive we each must make meaning through our acts and choices. Creating meaning is our means for overcoming existential angst.

I just finished reading Yukio Mishima, a Japanese author who took his life in 1970.  He wrote an astonishingly lucid book about a Japanese officer and his wife who chose to end their lives as a final act of giving meaning to their life. Their deaths were an act of honor and bravery. The wife witnessed his death to celebrate his courage and a life of commitment to his country. She cherished her role as witness and followed him in death. Their final shared moments served to climax a life of constructed meaning. Their awareness of life and each other was never so vivid as in their final moments.

All of this now leaps out in vivid clarity in these unfolding days of September. Where once I looked for the meaning of life, I know that there is no answer to that question except the palpable destiny of my journey that constructs significance in an ever unfolding context.   At this juncture of my 75th year, I have more ideas, creative energy, and concrete projects than in years past, and I attribute this to new connections with others at a deeper level of conscious awareness.  There are those in my life that infuse me with a deeper sense of commitment to pursuing a universe of consciousness where life actually transcends and moves in the opposite direction of entropy. This maintains an integrity of conscious awareness at a level I have not experienced until now. But the most exciting prospect is that it is continuing to evolve.

IMPACT 2011: Exploring Slices of Time

Urban Jungles (All Photos by Dr. Chianan Yen, All Rights Reserved.)

IMPACT 2011 at New York University was an exciting panorama of collaborative invention from July 25 through August 12. The production of "works in process" was performed in Frederick Loewe Theatre August 11 and was streamed live on the Internet. Interdisciplinary production teams collaborated and collected their work under the title Creating New Worlds. A breakdown of the scenes may be seen at IMPACT 2011: Creating New Worlds.
The opening Urban Jungles was derived from daily movement and visual arts activities, beginning with texting, and reflecting the process by which many individuals intersected to form interlocking groups working together.

The focus of IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) is about collaborative process. Interdisciplinary production teams of international participants explore ideas in various media which are shaped into structures of media, theatre, with elements of all the arts permeating each scene conceptually powered by some paradigm or theme developed through interactive process. For convenience, eight interdisciplinary production teams were established to create and shape time and scene as a collaborative artistic entity.  Material was derived from daily experiences, including warm ups, focused or specialized workshops, and combined arts workshops.

The striking images here are from the camera and artistry of Dr. Chianan Yen.  These are "snapshots" of dynamic moments in scenes of movement and media interaction.  This documenting of moments transforms the essence of the content. What emerges from this is an essay in visual content with description and explanation that creates new material from the old content. We begin to realize from these images how multimedia can transform the scale of the experience.

 Suddenly performers are the content of the eye peering out from the screen. We glimpse them in an unexpected moment. Unexpected because they are in the flow of the moment, in the transformative action that segues into successive moments in a steady flow, but the camera enables us to trap time, to freeze it for our scrutiny. We gain insight into the moment.  The moment is performed again in a transfixed texture where we can see each detail. Structure and form leap out at us because we are not distracted by the motion.

The power of camera is to slice Time at a particular moment. The fixed image often contains dynamic kinesthetic power like a spring tightly wound about to be released. We sense the energy and imagine what the release will unleash. Proportion changes the relationship of objects and we can experience parallel movement in different dimensions and different scales. The still image releases the imagination to speculate on what will unfold in the next few instances. The still image communicates the power inherent in the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas and images. In the differences we discover the similarities. It doesn't matter if you have actually witnessed the movement inherent in the single frame. Still images engage the imagination in ways quite different than moving images. Still images allow us to look at the details embedded in that single instance. We submerge ourselves in the details of the moment, the isolation and implied connections.
Although the photographer has chosen a fixed position to snap the action in quick succession, the actual moments captured are a random guess that something significant is happening or about to happen. In some ways it doesn't matter which particular instance of time is captured, we have the luxury to review the results and to edit by selecting or discarding specific instances of Time. That editing goes on at very subtle levels, often not consciously derived, but with an instinctive perception that something significant is revealed about the whole in this particular session.  

Even as we concentrate on the visual elements, each image is a window into the moment with implications of what happened before and what is about to happen.  In video terminology it is a frame that we have chosen to isolate and its very existence defines it and gives it shape and meaning, an inadvertent relationship to the whole, and at some point might be viewed as an embodiment of the process. 

We are mistaken if we consider that the images are merely the visual representations of the moment. They are a window into time, a window for the imagination to build a context of all that is implied. The visual content contains context, but it

is also highly mysterious, evocative, and kinesthetic.  This remains true even if we have viewed the work performed or have access to a video representation.  It is possible to consider the still image as more powerful than the video record. Even the video is an edited instance of the event captured by specific lenses and camera operators.  Video is less evocative than the still image because it is controlling the our view of the context. Still images release us from the confinement of the succession of moments to focus on a particular moment where energy is compressed and imagination is challenged to create the context.

There is a natural tendency of the mind to insert meaning and context, even where none is intended.  Perhaps this is why still images are so profoundly interesting and arresting.  We seize the moment to enter into the context, to shape what we see and to make meaning, to experience a revelation that leads us to creating something new. So we celebrate these not so random moments from the camera of Dr. Yen. Embedded in these images is his years of experience capturing live moments and his countless hours of processing, where he is editing and refining each single image into an instrument for the imagination. In some ways the moments he captures are accidents, but if they are, they are happy accidents, and we are all the better for his efforts. But there is a point of view that nothing is accidental, which helps us distinguish that Dr. Yen provides a sense of excellence and meaning to the moments he has chosen to share with us.

But we also need to honor those participants creating content in time, of unraveling the essence of an idea into an iteration that is packed with so much meaning and information that we will never decipher it completely.  That is the wonder and mystery of it all, with still images providing us glimpses of that infinite continuum. Bravo to the IMPACTORS of 2011 for creating such moments of artistic discovery, and Bravo to Chianan Yen for his experience and practiced eye, and his instinctive sense of capturing the moment as it is about to happen.

A Walk on The Street of Dreams

It is so delicious to be utterly vacant. To have no thought that you should be any particular place at any particular moment...to be severed from schedules, time, and appointments...to wander freely.  So I permitted myself to wander down one of my streets of dreams... to mingle with so many walking along the street and to indulge myself in the fantasies of the past and the moment. To take snapshots of the mind and explore without any sense of accountability.

So I started toward Houston Street.  On the way, I came upon one of my favorite haunts, The Mercer Street Bookstore. It is a haven of quiet discovery. There is always something that catches my eye. On the shelves are so many possibilities that beckon like beacons.  Currently the most attractive section for me is the poetry section.  Here I discover poets with rich imagination... I stumble upon them in a much more meaningful search than Google could ever hope to deliver. I touch the covers,  leaf through pages, my eyes wandering over words and lines in random paths.

Today, as I walked into the store, sitting on a prominent display shelf was a book on American minimal music that I had never known. It was an electrifying moment of discovery.  Then I explored the books of poems and found many gems, but two caught my eye and ear right away. Celia Gilbert's voice in Bonfire was strong and sensuous with a clear sense of poetic rhythm and shaping metaphors that were inspired and insightful. I often like to read the poems aloud, and these seemed so so rich with possibilities.

In addition there was classic rough news, a profoundly erudite poetic voice of Kenneth Fields, who seemed to echo the tone and sensibility of Robert Graves. I always have loved Graves, and here I thought was a new found friend.
Both of these volumes reached out to me. I had gone in with the intention of just securing one new book to keep me occupied for an afternoon, but I left with three books. Even so, the cost for these is minimal compared to buying as new books, but they are usually mint condition, for the fate of poetry is that many poets publish, but few of us really listen to our poets. So these books have never been opened, never been read. Somehow poetry was something we learned to avoid in our classroom encounters in public school. I never understood this since so many of my high school friends "secretly" wrote poems that were expressive of the anguish that most of us go through as teenagers.


 I left with three books that are always a rich resource for my thinking and planning, for dreaming about the realities that lay ahead, for hoping to discover something of myself in these new voices, these new singers for a 21st century. How can one not succumb to the mystery of a a used bookstore, the filled shelves of books that have already taken a journey to end up on those shelves, lying like explosives ready to be ignited by the some incandescent insight triggered by the power of language.

My journey had barely begun and already so much was discovered and uncovered. I headed east on Houston Street, crossing Broadway and migrating to haunts that were once part of my younger days... most of them gone now, and most of the friends that inhabited these east village streets are gone. Crossing Mott street, the Rodgers and Hart tune of We'll Have Manhattan sounded in my head and I found myself singing "and tell me what street... compares with Mott Street..."

Not far from Mott street, on Elizabeth street, a dear friend had a serious struggle with drugs that removed her from my life for a while. We finally renewed contact and she had developed a promising career as a site specific composer... and then she disappeared and I have not heard from her again.

Crossing Chystie Street, I see the Sarah Delano Roosevelt Park which connects with Canal Street at the other end, an oasis amidst the brick and cement.  The trees are verdant green and the afternoon is punctuated by basketball players and people strolling almost aimlessly. The afternoon sun is bright, but the air is fresh and pleasant from the rainstorm the night before.

I continue east and soon I come to a poster for Another World, a film about Earth II possibly from a parallel dimension.  The film is about synchronicity and dual existences, a subject that has caught my attention and imagination.  It even figured into the idea of Creating New Worlds recently performed by 2011 IMPACTORS. As I look at the poster, I begin to realize that maybe there was a subconscious destination of the Landmark Sunshine Theatre, an Indie House that I haven't visited in a long while.  It really isn't so far away, but psychologically, across the great divide of Broadway, it seems remote and inaccessible.

I check the time and the film will start in about ten minutes, so I decide this will be a deviation from the journey.  Another World is metaphoric, for it is clear as the film begins that this is an investigation of alternative paths, of parallel lives where something creates a rift and a new possibility.  The film is focused on the narrative.  All though the film, I couldn't help wondering why such a large planet so near to us would not create extensive flooding and earthquakes, but that would be more the sci-fi element and not an examination of parallel possibilities.

The sun is starting to slant toward the western horizon as I emerge from the Sunshine Movie House.  I start back west along the the same path, now reversed, eerily aware through the movie that this route has been altered by Time.  I come upon the Puck Building, which once figured prominently in fundraising efforts for the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Center. It also was to be  a major asset in the plans for creating a new commuter university, The East West University of Art, Science and Culture. It was to be the second acquisition of a bold new venture in higher education, a venture of the spirit of Donghwa, the blooming and exchange between East and West.

A few yards further is the building that would be the first building acquired for the new university, a perfect location where subways converge.  The Addidas Building would lend itself to conversion with classrooms, a technology center, and the beginnings of the library. It would be the primary building that would become a first class commuting university where students would find an alternative through collaboration to the current competitive paradigm of higher education.  But it would also offer the world's best collection of Asian culture, literature, art, and science in the midst of the mecca of the West.  It would be a true meeting of East and West defined in new terms for a new era.

I found myself at the Angelika, another Indie film house.  I realized my journey of dreams  had film palaces at each end like book ends.  Not long ago, Woody Allen's Paris at Midnight opened in this theatre and helped me understand how the past erupts in the present and always colors our experience.  We all long for the greatness of times past, to be part of it. But I realized that today my journey was a mixture of past and future.

Inside the crowd was intent on the latest openings, and Paris at Midnight had no line. I could have walked right in to that showing.  But I was busy watching people and feeling the rhythm of the universe in the random collisions of people vying for position in the lobby. Over the entrance to the theatres, Angelika loomed as radiant as ever, a harbinger of dreams created with light and shadow on the screen... a dim reflection of reality like Plato's shadows in the cave in The Republic. Plato's allegory of watching the shadows in the cave has become a reality in our universe. We go into our caves and watch the shadows on the wall, more convincing and commanding than whatever we once understood as reality.

As I left the Angelika and continued toward the falling night, I passed Picasso's Bust of Sylvette as cryptic and alluring as ever.  She had sprung from the imagination of Picasso and had been rendered and enlarged, executed by Norwegian sculptor Carl Nesjär from a smaller original sculpture by Picasso. I realized that we seek to create permanence as best we can.  Stone survives the ages much better than film in canisters. Picasso's Sylvette is poised to survive wind and weather, even earthquakes. But we have outwitted the physical world through our reduction of the world to binary code. Films now exist as code transferable to various media until the end of time. Somewhere in the dreams of this afternoon's journey, reality flirts with imagination within the structure of awareness.  It is a Donghwa, a flowering of the essence of a new spirit, with new generations uncovering a world that has been waiting for us beyond our dreams.