Of This Ice Age

When the books are no longer profitable, and the great human chrysalis is over, my pen will fall, covered by hourglass sand. This same sand will fill our Television and halt the works of disaster which had until then infinitely displayed themselves. History's diarists relax their hands! A beached whale shall mate with the shipwreck of a flood myth. Turning over a leaf both new and old our seasons will divide and be two-fold. Snows melting in summer sun and grasses iced by the winter voice shall shout and shine together. This beautiful clashing, this sublime terror. Buried nunataks towering above the hidden Lake Vostok - both will be revealed. Some events are difficult to imagine. Outside of the memory bank their value is obscured. In that region of death, a forbidden zone of cinemas, we'll discover a mass jutting out of the sand. The weavers shall coat with their tongues its dark grit. From buzzing to bleeping, language will sing what our senses lost feeling of. Hearing these songs may keep us alive enough to give some words, some music, of worth.
To another, someone other, than ourselves.



-G.D. Burns

Juan Belmonte's Ghost

  

Found image collage

View large for audience faces 

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."