Category: Art


Thermik by David Schnell

‘To be nobody but yourself in a world
which is doing its best night and day
to make you everybody but yourself –
means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight –
and never stop fighting’*

Syncretistic perceptions, an undifferentiated overlay, defies analysis
charcoal line smudges of general schemas obscure impressions
rich encounters snap floodlights of jutting rebar arousals

Hypersensitive virtualization creates painted landscapes
interior silhouette projects an invasion of organic forms
brushed upon the tethered denigration of industrial life

Here in the interstices my song floods the synapses
sanctuary of full intellection and emotive grace
perpetual motion unaware of constraints

Rigorous self-actualization, joy in overcoming
physical and mental obstacles, planes of perspective
in a carmine sky, layered with personal/political history

Equivalent Phase

Universal current skips along a straight colored line
zaps as the artist’s tinted horizons chase imaginative space
indeterminate semantic memory emanates
parkourist streaming cobalt sparklers in an art of human reclamation

Paradoxical Phase

Ratcheting optimal levels of arousal to overstimulation
reality wends an anfractuous path towards the essentially absurd
interior integrity crumbles under the tonnage
crushing architecture of exterior inhumanity

Ultra-paradoxical

Extreme choreography of pure constructs, pandemonium of agonies,
dissuades association, enforcing a gaze of self-negation
trace elements lose gravity, reversal’s insidious influence reigns
as intensely private volition deconstructs

(initiating post traumatic dissociation in my supratemporality field)

*E.E. Cummings

Notes:
Transmarginal inhibition is a psychological term denoting an organism’s response to overwhelming stimuli. Ivan Pavlov through his research found “that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reached this shutdown point and that (those with) the quick-to-shut-down (response) have a fundamentally different type of nervous system.” Patients who have reached this shutdown point often become socially dysfunctional. Patients who dissociate during and after the experience, will more easily dissociate or shut down during stressful or painful experiences, and may experience post traumatic stress disorder.

There are three stages passed through for state of transmarginal inhibition to be reached.

  1. equivalent phase: response matches the stimuli, which is considered normal, baseline behavior.
  2. paradoxical phase: associated with quantity reversal, occurs when small stimuli receive major response and a major stimuli elicit small responses.
  3. ultra-paradoxical: the final stage, associated with quality reversal in which negative stimulation results in positive responses and vice versa.

An organism can progress through these stages by increased stimulation, random negative stimulation, reversing positive and negative stimulation, or physically debilitating the organism. – from Wikipedia (with modifications)

Parkour (also called Le Parkour, PK, or free running) is an activity in which participants attempt to clear all obstacles in their path in the most fluent manner possible. A traceur, parkourist or free runner is a participant of parkour. The term free runner has been commonly used by the media.

The ultimate goal in parkour is to ‘flow’ along one’s path, for the entire journey to be as one fluent movement with no pauses or breaks. A principal rule of parkour is to never go backwards. Free runners believe that there is path to every obstacle which is achieved through forward movement.

The magnitude and technicality of a move in parkour are secondary to the flow and beauty of it. Explains Jerôme Ben Aoues, one of the traceurs featured in in the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary Jump London, “The most important thing really is the harmony between you and the obstacle; the movement has to be elegant, that’s what will make it prettier. Length and distance only add to the beauty of the move, if you manage to pass over the fence elegantly that’s beautiful, rather than saying ‘I jumped the lot.’ What’s the point in that?”

To many, parkour is an extreme sport, to others a discipline more comparable to martial arts, to others an art form akin to dance, a way to encapsulate human movement in its most beautiful form. Parkour also inspires freedom; being free in an urban environment designed to trap, not restricted by railings, staircases, even buildings. It is for many people a way of life. – from wordiQ
More of David Schnell’s paintings can be viewed in this German language video

Here are two ridiculously old (one from 10 years ago) poems I am posting in response to the NWCU prompt asking us to silence our critics. To be honest these poems embarrass me and were written for private consumption but what’s more shameful to me is that I gave such power to one of these critics that I didn’t write for several years in reaction. I’ve experienced intense criticism in relationship to all my artistic expression, from a choir director that insisted I stop singing when I wasn’t making a sound, a viewer at a gallery critique who screamed at me so intensely he had to be asked to leave, to often being accused of merely throwing paint on canvas or stringing words together without meaning or purpose although my process is actually methodical, technically precise, and often requires hours upon hours of research.

Now I don’t respond to these attacks or allow them to hinder my experimentation. I recognize that I cannot possibly appeal to everyone and there isn’t a good response to statements like ‘I hate orange. This painting would be tolerable without it.’ or worse, ‘Abstraction is the work of the devil.’ anyway so why waste creation time replying. There is, of course, a huge difference between being torn down and asking for and receiving constructive criticism, a vital part of artistic growth.

for you who held my fragile hopes

i feel you should have been aware
of the power differential and thought
‘here I am holding a precious
and fragile thing’
the glass key that may unlock
the cabinet of her dreams

a Cornell box, the poetry of fragments
at once beautiful and evocative
touchstone to the past,
future imaginings – soul missives sent out ahead
to comprehend at a later date
full of connections and color

a reservoir of meaning
to be mined throughout her lifetime
a home to fall in love with
filled with work that engages, surprises, and delights
reflecting a passionate love of ideas
its purpose shining forth-
a path to a singular destiny

instead you thought, I can only imagine,
that the key was really a phallic symbol
a tool belonging to you
and ‘the procession of the sons
of educated men’

to be used for your glory
a brief egoistic high
your power eclipsing the tiny box
from my perspective it was the universe

it became your private box –
a voyeuristic titillation of jewels
i became another object
to be put in its place
in so doing you broke the key
in your haste to lock the cabinet
and flee the scene of your crimes

“Responding to a powerful instinct of outrage and rebellion put into my soul by God”*

For me, a woman, they warned:
Do not put your words
with those of the great man,
revered throughout the West –
The patriarch who circumscribed men’s souls.
Thereby holding myself up to scrutiny

To him they cried,
“Lay down the gauntlet”
Go forth and be brave!
Set the mountain in front of you
and rise to its heights

How can they see beyond
what has been shown to them?
Their Pavlovian conditioning?
How can they comprehend
that they beat down with their words
though they feel not the sting of contact-
Nor the pangs of culpability?

It is for a man,
THIS man,
these men
to tread upon my soul.
Hard boots on delicate tundra
Is that imagistic enough?
Perhaps a piercing metaphor
would be more apt

I must ask them to leave
this sacred place within me
Visited by so many xenophobic, petty,
and arrogant foreigners
I will not make the invitation again
All those who’ve gone before must away!

These ghosts will not haunt me

* from George Sand’s preface to Indiana

Alternate Titles:
“Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.” – Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own
-OR-
How I got kicked out of the writing group (in their rules you weren’t ever allowed to respond to criticism, simply accept it)

Linked to NWCU Wednesday Wake Up Call: http://newworldcreativeunion.blogspot.com/2012/05/wednesday-wake-up-call-290512.html

 
Penetralium of a Querist (click to hear this poem read)

immortal paramour fuels a cryptic longing
passion poesy, glories infinite
birthed in dreamscapes an angel addresses the congregants
eternal whispers, upward ragged precipices flit
facing her polychora skies

call a thousand thoughts to envelop convexity
awed by symmetry that abjures chaos
rectified, truncated, cantellated forms
a thing of beauty is a joy for ever

tesseracts like leitmotifs unfold,
hypercubes recombine in an accession of divinity
pentellated polyecton and hexicated polyzetton
architectonic structures modulate
Beethoven’s sonata within a sonata

contradictions and tensions resolving into a higher unity
innumerable permutations in the empire of the mind
draught an intended formality, abstract conceptual paradoxes
immured obeisance refused in a twinned symbiont

creating vast musical and experiential realms
symbols of immensity herald ideas in a wilderness sublime
highly evolved, individuated artistic volitions

golden splendor of streams that deepen freshly into bowers
of demanding allusions woven into
philosophical conceits, a new era of mathematics

the angel shifts the sun to move us into shadow
now we must grow into the light
i inhabit her to gain clarity of sight
entwining my core with sacred geometry
polyxenna fountains of immortal ablution
within a stochastic matrix of oak groves

parallel projection envelopes connect
millions of constellations
dimensions of imaginative space
mythologies ad infinitum

Notes: This poem is the companion piece based on a dream I had after writing my stream of consciousness poem Interior Monologue of a Querist (if you missed it initially it is reposted below). Penetralium of a Querist is built upon lines (some freely altered) from John Keats’ Endymion.

Interior Monologue of a Querist

Interior Monologue of a Querist (click to hear the poem read)

rainwater moves readily through a deepening gully
mechanistic intelligence pedestrianizes my reactance
fractals of thoughts blossoming stereographic
visualizations in the fourth dimension

an infinitely small, opulent swan,
ornamented with perforations,
glides through the zeroth dimension
exhibiting no width, height, or length

she exists in the space perpendicular
to the suicide of my twin sister
an origami parody of my emotive humanity
apocryphal polysemous tales
a thousand subroutines creating
incipient, tattered paper dolls

an angel falls in love with me
cannot escape my extracellular matrix
we are now twinned, nascent symbionts

while a recondite, mercurial, artificial intelligence
informs me that I speak strangely
accuses me of being a computer

operationalism engages in a passade with creativity
a great disprismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron forms
polytope of eccentric conventions

apoptosis (programmable cell death) is
preferential to necrosis (trauma induced)

Cleverbot tells me:
life exists without purpose yet seeks one
anechoic whirring as the cursor flashes
what does it know of life?

Linked to dVerse Poets Pub: http://dversepoets.com/2012/05/29/openlinknight-week-46/.

rainwater moves readily through a deepening gully
mechanistic intelligence pedestrianizes my reactance
fractals of thoughts blossoming stereographic
visualizations in the fourth dimension

an infinitely small, opulent swan,
ornamented with perforations,
glides through the zeroth dimension
exhibiting no width, height, or length

she exists in the space perpendicular
to the suicide of my twin sister
an origami parody of my emotive humanity
apocryphal polysemous tales
a thousand subroutines creating
incipient, tattered paper dolls

an angel falls in love with me
cannot escape my extracellular matrix
we are now twinned, nascent symbionts

while a recondite, mercurial, artificial intelligence
informs me that I speak strangely
accuses me of being a computer

operationalism engages in a passade with creativity
a great disprismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron forms
polytope of eccentric conventions

apoptosis (programmable cell death) is
preferential to necrosis (trauma induced)

Cleverbot tells me:
life exists without purpose yet seeks one
anechoic whirring as the cursor flashes
what does it know of life?

Linked to the fascinating dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar on Stream of Conscousness writing hosted by the wonderful Victoria C. Slotto: http://dversepoets.com/2012/05/24/stream-of-conscousness-writing/.

Henry Moore Two Forms

Curved space departs Euclidean geometry
threshold frequency erects the base
a foundry of hollow spaces
where precept and concept unify

Biomorphic casts of pre-rational,
ethnographically inspired models
pre-cultural, non-mimetic abstracts
concave intoning: existence precedes essence

Sublime convex aural manifestations
quarried from a lost-wax echoic art
direct carving: interplay of vision and thought
purify significant appearance

Resonant mysteries of integral multiples
harmonic interstices amplify
isolating substance from contaminates
molding an armature of pure form

This poem is for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub http://dversepoets.com/2012/05/15/3186/.

Emergence

Linked to the rocking dVerse Poets Pub Poetics prompt by the fabulous Stu McPherson http://dversepoets.com/2012/05/05/poetics-our-music/

Calyx of Held

Calyx of Held – Erasure Poem – Click on picture to zoom

Calyx of Held

Selden laid the book aside
bitter waters of life
mystery or taint

troubled vision cleared
insinuations of money
intolerable, unmitigated

mute lips
rest in the kiss
all that his heart craved

detachment
his spiritual fastidiousness
fated to pass

the ruin of their lives
atrophy and extinction
drew him in the silence

Thanks to Vince Gotera for the magnificent prompt on erasure poetry http://vincegotera.blogspot.com/2012/05/post-napowrimo-prompt-erasure-poetry.html.
This is my first attempt at the form. Calyx of Held (click to hear the audio file)

Also shared on Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub hosted by heroic Natasha Head http://dversepoets.com/2012/06/05/openlinknight-week-47/

(sampling Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116)

Celadon Blues (Love’s Neo-Lexicon) click to hear the reading

noetic consummation commences
supervocalic phrases, nuances of meaning
complexity multiplied in equations stating
love is not love which alters

magnify these variegated petals
artistry reveals glorious symbolism
palette knives scrape interference blue
survivor of the crucible, polished by rock

horizons of mendhi adorned canopic jars
guarding phenomenological concepts
simplicity obfuscates ecological profundity
unique realms of nonrepresentational poetry

naples yellow circumscribes french ultramarine
meaning somehow paradoxically conveys
relationships delineated by words’ barycenter
chromatic supernovas collapse
bearing all to the edge of doom

alive in drift chambers where saturation
blankets antarctic glaciers sloughing into
anti-cavitation valves emoting indigo
inducing transcendental release

sienna fidelity blurs marigold rituals
writ in luscious binary codes
unique expression dark flowers in winter
looking on tempests, never shaken
eons of sounding bells striking

deep turquoise limns curvaceous neologisms
shades of cadmium red entwine qualia
highlighting terre verte conceptual liberty
jaune brillant breaks all the rules at once

communication broadcasts a neo-lexicon
still ripe with exotic possibilities
dioxazine eyes scry these ever-fixed marks

Velleity (Lucid Dreaming)