The fascism of language
and becoming a blue bird in the underground of dream…
Image #1 ". . . the power of art to stand alone, to be released from the Human eye's tendency to synthesize its experiences into a world of its own, is given a stunning form in cinema. Once we can think of an image that is not the image of this or that located human observer, then all art can be understood not as expressions of humanity, but as the release of imagination from its human and functional home. It is in this sense that the century of cinema has also been the century of non-narrative, non-representational and affective art."1
“How then can I recover myself from the fascism of language?”
“But what do you mean, exactly?”
“Well then, how can I recover my language, where can I tell in writing, in the most common telling way of what I know, that in my dream I am becoming a bird…? ”
In my dream, I am in the refuge of the mountains, a place I know so well, a place so difficult because I can never quite get there, at will, or be sure of transportation back, once I get there.
This time I see around me women, young mostly, all with face features hidden. It is the feel of a sanatorium. When I look again, one has a huge eye in the middle of her forehead, where her third eye, bright green, but hidden. Another is seen half faced, hiding a bloody wound, yet she seems fine. When I look again, she has a curved protrusion where her nose and mouth ought to be.
Then there is me and my companion, my guide.
I am rolled up at this stage and all I can see are my bird feet protruding, dark, thin and perfect. The entire rest of me is rolled up neatly by now, covered in papery thin, in this long extension of matter, a tangle, emaranhado, like the jumbled wire connections you sometimes find inside a forgotten drawer, except that my wires in the log are wispy thin, endless crisscrossing, pleasing slowly moving connecting lines. And brand-new black bluebird feet sticking out, properly proportioned to the size of the log that resembles my size.
My woman guide tells me all I have now is the learning the skill to kill another bird, maybe a smaller one. And I may have to learn about raw meat, blood and seeds as the only source. The food.
I am afraid though and it becomes confusing to wake up and behave... as if nothing had happened at all.
The sometimes ever present emperor tells me “I am afraid that this is madness. This is not a proper dream, this is a changing, transforming dream. This is not going to end well. Wake up and wait for me! I will help you then.”
I realize then that this transformation has been going on for a long time. Way back in writing school I sculpted the face of an old woman, a very dark pilgrim from the northern territories, the ones who roam across the tundras, in northern Asia. I sculpted her beige robes from scraps of raw silk fabric, her sash a treasured batik scarf from Indonesia. Other writers were sculpting shiny beaded queens and goddesses with fancy gold brocaded dresses and my small woman seemed insignificant, when on display at the end, in front of some five hundred women, all seeking to be free, all seeking to write, to tell their stories…
It was a workshop about doll making, and the leader, a woman from Mongolia, spoke of deep ancestry and in the initial liquid glass pyramid meditation, she posed the question:
Imagine the call of your oldest ancestor, listen to their voice, let their image guide your hands. My old woman wanderer was a clear descendant from the blue bird people … I knew that for sure.
The second image of intense bluebird light was a first experience for me with the crystal caves, where the meridian directions were important, I could never remember which way was the right way. My teacher then was a writer and a reader of souls, trained in the orthodoxy of Jewish traditions. My entries into the cave always yielded scribbled drawings, instruments, technologies I had never seen before, I thought, except in dream. They also yielded colors, lights in movement.
Then the crystal mountains of my childhood popped up, when my father would take us to the hunting places, the hounds happy and eager. Inevitably on the way we would stop by the crystal walls… the cherished mountain landscapes that had not yet disappeared, to shift and transform into laptops, chunky jewelry and talismans of protection.
And I ask: Do you know who and what generated your current desire? Do you have a desire to trace the source of the fuel that ignited your desire? A tricky question because I am not referring to current common abstractions to fire, water, metal, wood nor earth. Simpler than that, just what is the desire in you that reunites you with some precious forgotten beauty?
People who live around me are finding spaces they did not ever recognize nor know before. They are seeking Cohen’s Hallelujah, for example, as a substitute for community religion, as I see it. They are living for some renaissance in life… fiercely rejecting death in twists of quotes and easily available facile spiritual image landscapes of trans sens dance. And I ask, how much did you pay for that? As the Chinese folk I met in Kuching would invariably say. I paid way less than you did! and we are back to the marketplace, where now you are expected to write a piece or and publish a book, and charge for your imaginal creations.
The squirrels and the birds had a new batch of babies and I now feed them, separately, on the ground. The jays, cardinals, brown thrashers, chickadees and titmice teach their young that the woman is a source. Sometimes, early on, I watch them waiting by the window. The adult jays squawk their requests, the squirrels and the cardinals stare you down, cross eyed. The young ones just twist their heads and wonder.
My desire brings me back to that log of wispy connections and I wonder what faces my desire might paint on the bluebirds of my dreams. “…then all art can be understood not as expressions of humanity, but as the release of imagination from its human and functional home.” Outside the necessary narratives demanded by the emperor? Free to roam with other then human interfaces?
Can we, and do we wish to escape the narratives and so is that how we might escape the fascism of our languages?
If I give in and transform into a bluebird, happily lose my human density in identity, effectively die to embrace my deep ancestry…
will I then be able to sing my song?
As quoted by Claire Colebrook in her Gilles Deleuze book. Sent to me yesterday by a dear friend.
You know, when one reads it after wine and weed it is even more beautiful.
I love that. "Something becomes what it is, only in its encounter with something else, its imaging or perception of another potential, another Image."