22 November, 2009

Falling away from You

Your fiery hands shake at me with a thousand palms
The glimmering yellows dust off their red masks

I am falling away from you in a broad refusal
of everything you glow as a heart


We denied this light
With every deeper and darker turning, twisting.
Now shelves of books are the bricks of our religion
Horizontal stack of smack and tumbling sedatives

The scribblings of memory and dreams
from a world filled with your light
we peered into the concentrations
of your ever-present laughters
The buffalo's form an echo of Word


Autumn cries at the gate of Beulah
and this darkness is a bitter sleep

O Moon, be conception's movement of
the soft music in my hollow mind

For on that day of sun, we are born rising


- G. D. Burns

22 October, 2009

Currency of My Youth

Enlarge for details
Photoshop creation from scanned images


The single most influential video game upon my life has been a role-playing, Super Nintendo console release from the mid-1990s. Chrono Trigger's gameplay, throughout its epic themes, plot-developments and magnificent musical score, impressed upon my Being a certain conviction that the past, present and future are intermingling and reflecting upon one another. Many aspects of the game, such as the use of magic as based upon the elements, a planetary foe which is simultaneously aiding & abetting the evolution of consciousness, and the most aesthetically pleasing time machine since the DeLorean of Back to the Future, presented data to me that further crystallized my interests in art, biology, mythology, and all studies which have invariably aided my path toward understanding our planetary experience.

While I matured, video games had a publicly polarized opinion as destructive to young minds, helping along the institution of violence and isolation within society. As the accessibility of video games expanded just before my birth in 1985 from the arcade format to home consoles (worth corroborating to the emergence of the personal computer), the creativity of video gameplay design likewise increased with new varieties and directions. As all growth accompanies a rate of degradation - this is in reference to those games which displayed a lack of creativity or less virtuous themes (Mortal Kombat comes to mind, being very controversial for the gruesome "fatality" finishing moves) - the apprehension to approve of video games socially was often fueled by narrowing discussion of those which displayed violent acts toward human forms.

The 21st century affords us a variety of console, home computer, and handheld formats for video games with increasingly complex resolution, adaptability and gamer control. Although, at such high rates of technological advance, the very fabric of our interactions with video games are evermore challenged and stretched. Do we actually acquire a comprehension of the Reality which video games contain in their genesis, by our Senses or from the composite Mind of storytellers, composers, designers? - only the conscious laborer knows. The creations which continue to reflect back at me the more perennial issues that give certain video games value (likened even to some works of literature, art or music) contained something which much of today's developers sacrifice for general consumption of hardware - imaginative vision.
Chrono Trigger has survived the limited longevity of its original console format (SNES, 1995) and has continued with a force propelled by its fans and players with more than one re-release for the Sony Playstation in 1999 and another more recently for the handheld Nintendo DS in late 2008.

27 September, 2009

Ancient Tele Visions


Enlarge for details
Illustrations from a found King James Version Bible
(altered perceptions by Tele Gram)

22 September, 2009

07 August, 2009

The Infinite


(M.C. Escher's "Snakes" (c) 2009 The M.C. Escher Company - the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com)

After three visits to the Portland Art Museum, I still yearn to return for another sight of M.C. Escher's graphic works exhibition. The above print featured on the show's pamphlet was Escher's last, "Snakes" printed in 1969, and it hangs on the final wall before a stairwell to PNCA at 100. If you plan to go more than once, try walking through the partitioned room backwards by using said stairwell. Escher had many principles of craft and the exploration of non-linearity was certainly one of them. Let us honor his perspective with a likened sojourn.

Upon one visit, an observer had a magnifying glass in hand to see the Dutch master's detailed wood engravings. Revealed is a creator of practiced patience, an artist of spacetime. The exhibition includes examples of printing plates, in-process proofs, and early work from his tutelage as a graphic arts student (those pieces usually tucked away in numerous Private Collections). Entering the favored entrance are Escher's prints for the Book of Genesis, images of The Word. Early landscapes and illustrations of reflection, metamorphoses and the regular division of the plane - the breadth of his craft is done justice throughout PAM's walls.

Beside the video game describing Escher's laws of illusion and a small table of Escher books (with the recommended, in the opinion of this being, Exploring the Infinite: Escher on Escher), a strange but intriguing object awaits the keen observer: a fractal cube. Inside the cube are lights of differing colors, mirrors, and two corners to place one eye, on either side. Like Indra's jeweled net (see the Flower Ornament Scripture in Mahayana Buddhism or His Holiness the Dalai Lama's book The Universe In A Single Atom) your eye is reflected in all other points at the edge of this infinite space, while all spheres within reflect all other spheres. The sobering experience has not left me since my visit - it gives one the perception of the infinite that Escher hoped to create from making known the relativity of all perspectives.

Portland Art Museum is closed Mondays, open at 10 Tuesday through Saturday, 12 on Sunday, and closes at 5 all days except Thursday and Friday - open until 8. Enjoy the work with an appreciation all your own.

15 July, 2009

Fearful/Symmetry


Currently working on a watercolor inspired by the illuminated work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which caused a look into the thick tome of criticism (or encyclopedizing) of Blake's work by Northrop Frye. This scholar's book that has often remained neglected on this blogger's bookshelf, was ringing in my ears after I arose from bed around 4 in the dark morning.

While the new day's sun continued to paint the starry sky in with our own cosmic color blue, I began to recall the first time I read William Blake. A short boy of fifteen, living between Lake Ontario and Erie's shores on an old circular road. The day my senses were opened by the words and images he brought forth from his being was a truer baptism than my physical inundation at 8.

When you use some spacetime to find and read any of this prophet's works, for the first time or again, an elegant creation is set before you. This is because of the elegance by which its creator "in-visioned" the world. If half the history and matter of English classes were the study of seers like Blake or Tolkien (see Ran Prieur, http://ranprieur.com/essays/JRRT.html) an understanding of cyclical nature (both Great Nature and our inner nature) would shed the skin of our epistemological minds. And in the prophet's Word, "everything would appear to man as it is - infinite."

03 July, 2009

Medium/Message

Welcome to Waves of Guide.

The blog, Waves of Guide, is a vessel that can become full with the visions of our reality.

From an introductory feeling, i feel compelled to write a vision of my own, a young human being at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is not mine alone. Consciousness is a new-sphere shared by every sentient being on this spherical planet. Therefore, what i am aware of is not in isolation. i begin this blog anonymously, although some information can be found out of my identity. This identity is an ephemeral thing and so, Waves of Guide has no "author." Tele Gram is only a symbolic signature of awareness.

/*\ /*\ /*\

Why do this miming of self-identification outwardly, with our names, birthplaces, stories, the "first" dream-like memory? These are our fundamental anchors to a place in existence with solidarity and assurance. This Self-identification is occurring inwardly as well. Balancing though, an impartiality about our own self, the mind is in a much more fertile state, a receptive state. Identification with our roles choke us as grave weeds to a harvest, aggressively overwhelming our impartial nature of receiving ~~~
Tele Gram is a unit of these kinds of observations perceived at an ascertained awareness of consciousness. Following a thread...

In my outer life, a child born at the end of the 20th century, i could not truly understand the Spirit of my countrymen, and that of all natives of the human race strewn across their tense divided nations, from upbringing alone. Even after 13 years of an American education spanning between both coasts and its southern Gulf. It was not until four years after primary education (some secondary school meanwhile) that I could become lucid enough to see my feet planted in an abundant inhumanity.

From this perspective, the twentieth century i bloom from is much like the detritus of generations of bloodletting wars, two-faced concepts of justice and strange impressions of a false reality. i saw this fearfulness in my family, in my friends, in strangers...but whether a comforting childhood or a whipping, raw one, such gale-like forces of conception create pits that eventually shape our "vessel" to receive knowledge. If our attention remains broad, encompassing the body first and then pulling inward through a hollow, like a breeze, we naturally grow a sense of higher octaves of attention.

Great creatives (observers of Creation) have been born upon this very same planet that you and i inhabit, revealing the objective Truths and Laws expressed within/without it. Ancient schools of understanding kept the heart's feelings and the body's senses on balanced scale with the mind's thoughts. Cartesian logic, which states "I think, therefore I am," is a perception of Creation from a now favored sense, Mind. This example, of Descartes's only "dependable" factor for his existence, became a flagship of science, law and philosophy, one which seems to be capsizing beneath its own weight of leaden epistemology.

The early 20th century saw many observers whose creations represented forms perceived in Great Nature to teach us. None for the sake of the balance our minds and the greater collective rationalism, "science," was greater an influence than Albert Einstein, may the memory of him be Blessed. "E=mc2" was ever present in the late 20th century's media of television, film, and literature. i remember seeing it without understanding its significance in my own childhood. The significance of his general & special theory of relativity has yet to be understood by philosophy, art, poetry and other forms of expression. Physics is only the watershed of such an as yet unreleased deluge. In this way, the general population is still awaiting this teaching's nourishment. Where science and art meet lies a keyhole for our Minds to rejoin a Universal harmony.

This is a hope of my own in humanity, that we may all see in every face a body-mind-spirit in triangular peace.

It is on the eve of our 233rd anniversary of nationhood that i send this signal & invitation and leave the initial "delivery" with one grand, patriotic suggestion: Read Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," our forgotten founding father. January 1776, published. July 1776, Declaration of Independence signed.


piece of a dialogue before this post:
video taken kindly by ABC.

Messenger

My photo
Portland, OR, United States
For the Observatory's Grand Opening