Title: Sketches of Style on an Ocean of Air (Manuscript Art from original "Sketches of Style")

On the Artwork

On the Artwork

Placed in triangular formats, with oblong shapes as empty space left in the overlapping patterns of placement, emphasizing how style is a condition of emptiness or formlessness or the open-endedness aspect in expression, also known as “Sketches of Style”. It is my inkling that the freedom of empty space is the root of all creative inspiration.

“Sketches of Style” as a philosophy of creation is further pronounced where the action painting is done to reflect a kind of stop-motion photography. Whereas for example in improvisational painting or drawing, a line or brush stroke is imprinted with continuity, the blotter/drip action paint necessitates a kind of stop-motion effect, where each stroke/line requires a multitude of impressions almost resembling a kind of proto-pointillism. The perpetuity of spontaneous creativity is embedded within this mode of expression as any other, for to hold the mind in a state without any preconception is the goal, the source and the way.

Within the content of the image itself, which is a self-purported crossbreeding of a kind of “free painting” with “free writing” the sketches of style are the individual leaves or pages on which the writing and art coagulate into a whole expression, i.e. the experimental writing collection entitled, “Sketches of Style”. In the image, the pages float as if upon an open sea, where its wavering surface may bend and distort each page, blurring the paint and stretching the fabric. The water itself represents the practice of stream-of-consciousness poetics which underlies every expression. The reflection of the burning sun in the water instills in the consciousness, whether it is the spontaneous creativity of the writer or the interpretive ingenuity of the reader, a burning clarity, which exists at the edge of being obscured by the “Sketches of Style” pages or even unto greater obscurity outside of the image entirely. Yet, the sun’s reflection inevitably shines through, as visible as an intense ball of hot fire, situated under everything to further emphasize its importance as the necessary opposite of water. Are the leaves which make up “Sketches of Style” upon the water, or upon the reflection of the sun, ready to be scattered in the wind of a cloudless sky?

Preamble

Preamble

The title for this collection, “Sketches of Style” is from a dream. Also, I think even more subconsciously I am inspired by Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain” as this collection seeks to emphasize the element of style as a core aspect of the stream-of-consciousness practice of improvised writing, taking precedent over content and form.

The theory behind these writings is that style is an outpouring of perspective as perceptive choice, as in the idea that perception is based on active choice. What you see and register in your mind is based on your levels of experience and notions of reality and creativity. Because we can change our surroundings and ourselves, I begin from the source of my ancestry, which is predominantly Jewish-Mediterranean (from my maternal Grandfather) and so all of the historic and current occasions that I experience are inevitably transformed into a unique sense of self-understanding, grounded in my sensibility and aptitude toward a mytho-poetic persuasion in my perceptive and conceptive modes of experience, realized with increasing personal significance. Finally, I purport to share these realizations through my creative writing as an expression of style in formation as my own being undergoes a kind of formation that inevitably culminates into a complete obliteration of all recognizable forms unto a new way of seeing as the emergence of a unique style born from spontaneous creative practice.

Sketches on/of style: this collection highlights how my writing is not true poetry, rather sketches of style, that is, stylistic renderings of momentary instances, trails of thought, and imagistic devices to bring forth a harmonious and sometimes very dissonant balance between word, meaning and context, whether physically bound by page or voice. These are sketches and remain figments of writing, and are meant as a muse on the importance of challenging and making dynamic what is written. The basic intent is to practice an immediate and raw expression of mind, as sketches of mind to give foresight into insightful analogies between the unique experience of writing and collecting these sketches into a unified collection of writing.

Sketches of Style demands that what is important is not WHAT is written, but HOW it is written, i.e. emphasis is on form and space. Free Form demands that what is important and only important is that there is writing, where emphasis lies on spontaneity, groove, rhythmic stirring and pauses inherent in simply getting a page filled. Poetic identification in strings of words may follow the sympathies of freedom, when in fact, form is not freed unless style is present, as style acts in the life over the author, their certain style, at its blank, utmost vulnerable state, open for all to see in word sketches played over a loudspeaker of a strange mind asking too many questions.

Sketches of Style also utilizes a Free Form editing technique, taking certain phrasings and putting them together from the entire collection of writing, e.g. typing the entire collection as one body of work, going in to extract and replace passages that fit together. Is this similar to the cut-up method? It is sometimes more, sometimes less haphazard a creative process, yet intends equal spontaneous verity.

Why, Autopoietic Eternity!

This smile, these eyes…
Not because it’s you that I enjoy…
Nor your surroundings, and our place in them together…

I smile for what’s inside…
The poetries and open-ended music of Love…

Bearing down hard into my inglorious heart…
As a burnt wick trudging through the bled darkness…
Now blessed by the disinterested lost…
Whose minds graze the round of being…
In a conundrum of pain and untamed roaming…

Loosening the human rope around the oceanic neck…
The great ring of fire…
Lassoed in spring by the Albertan rains…
Toasting to hot chocolate whispers over Mexican breasts…
Sweetened by the oily touch of American tongues…
Piercing the used flesh of an imperfect dream…

The only cold matchstick…
Still reddened but dry…
A sad ending to the rage personified…
In Rusty Kjarvik and his chess logic…
Pinching the Grandfather reality…
In the light of Persian mystical nights…

Of music and the bodiless mind…
Forwarding beyond the wordless divide…
To train insight as creative willing into the artful breath of poetic necessity…

My instinct’s crying bold in the proud deep of North American continental strife…
To transcend the borders of national glory and reach the great peak…
Budding with growing concentration camp Israeli trees…
A miracle as grand as the celebrated synagogue of ancestral lies…
Bearing down hard on the smoky aftermath of the beaten Greeks…
Chained to their swollen shields…
Engraved as the shell of Turtle Island…
Beaming with foresight into the sweeping ancient European imagination…

Whose back lunged upward into the full sky with an amber gold…
Freeing the Hostess of Modernity with lifeless glamour…
And cuddling with the mountain’s ceremonial stone-wrought keeps…
Purifying my ancestors until their bones scintillate…

In the dreary madness beyond human hurt…
To an earthen burn…
A sensation born from deep under the subconscious blinds…
En eyeless face…
Peering gravely into the molten membrane of our one mind…
Bloomed into the immediate now with lotus awe…
Or the always distanced graceful presence of our insides…

With shared wisdom…
A lingering passion to unify and create our own night in this sinking vessel…
All existence…
Breaking down from the mouth to the wine…
A craving understated by the street-side paranoia…
That coasts assured into the numbing crime of our damaged religious signs…

A taste of poverty lingering with the sculpted muttering…
Announced softly with the motion of a hand…
Feeling for air above the hard-packed soil…

Forming dunes and painting the beach wilderness…
In the hair of an Asian temptress…
Whose punchy urges frame this bemused mind…
Struggling to see through a daily panic of poetry…
Scheming with all mental strength to form the formless into beauty…
And nonsense into the communicable…

A symbol of Love in the act of creation…
Yet fallen into the failed…
The early laugh…
Draining the energetic fingers with worthless junk…
In the silent reading itch to continue for continuity…
And perpetuate the laugh into the timely press…
Over the gorgeous moon visible at dawn over the charged urban jungle…

Cringing with playful Chinese drums in the MSG headache afternoon…
Waiting for sexual drink to find space in the lounging throat of want…
A risky path…
Over the endless din…
Whirring above the vibratory pandemonium…
With catatonic dissonance and hypnotic forgetfulness…

To scramble the mind-waves…
With the gurgle of a knifing toothache…
Searing into the cinematic backdrop of history…
As my Jewish ambitions for Calgary beckon with ruthless intellect and certain death…
To enjoy centenarian genetics over a glass of ginger tea…
And remain blameless on the deck or balcony of a Chinatown low-rise freedom…

To be and create willingly…
The tasteful force of lush introspection…
A thunderous improvisation in the sudden cry of heaven…
To proclaim the momentary passing of a world and its universe as mind itself…
In the contemplation of death…
And the nature of mind thickens over the fold…
To become wearily apparent…
As a new blanket of relief in the empty law of the drowned fate…
Beaming through all our embodied instances of life…

Defined in the present by nothing’s painful truth of becoming…
That, the frame of poetry’s eye…
Seeking individuality and expression within…
And throughout the frank endless mold of electric crystalline fractal-speak…
Rushing past the generations dead with rapid strength…
Over the mountain of fixed glory…
Where dream melds with the ancient fixation…
In overcoming the human form…
Trespassing in the realm of gods…

To marry the irrelevant mix of triviality in humor…
And offer our bodies to the deified blessing of one circular direction…
A featureless song prayed to over the burning incense light…
Of the mundane working…
Whose clasped hands respect the value in hope…
And the unknown’s shade remains thoughtless over the waking earth…

To renounce the children of envy and prosper with kernels of the bejeweled sand…
Along eastern shores filling our adolescent minds and cooking up internal choice…
As the creature of man embraces the four points of the underworld…
And smokes with the devil in the bribed factory of our New Bedford whales…
Who swam from the South Pacific tour…
And rescued their soldierly brothers on the history pages of the local war…
And the veteran newspaper determined…
That the youth were emancipated from our armed struggle…
And must now fight with words of praise or critique…
As the satirical play finds its step on the frozen lake of family…

Against the lame, discolored horizon…
Darkening ever so slowly until the shade-covered rushes are silenced…
With one last rustle in the kayak sound…
A memory pushed forth…
To cover the proud painterly disease of our Pisces rising…
Amid the bone dry grasses and paved seriated highway zones…
Constructed and vandalized by toughened hands…
Choked and gone purple with gushed veins…
Rasped and lacerated on the back of our cousin species…

The canine drought bespeaks a shameful woe…
A truism, unforgettable and opened finally with delicate sway and miscreant wonder…
At the sad mystery in the relative fire…
An erased afterthought…
The strong and elderly endurance…
To forge through the most sought after and undivided pressure…
From beneath the cold unmoving earth…
To present in words an archaic urge…
With controlled mind and agile fingers…
To re-create body in its own self-created form…

A silence breaks over the lawless head of our own shaking and forlorn chest…
Arms and face…
Feeling the stress of birth as an echo of fear in the humanly pain…
To desire to create…
To fill the footstep earth with humiliating love…
And stretch beyond the wrinkled chord…
With a truth unsought and yet communicated with kind connection…
A flesh, salted and massaged to share life at its most visceral…
While the real and changeless spectral flash of spatial duress grates…
Turning in the burly show of lost fortune…

A sure embittered wailing…
A longing…
A frenetic blur past the poetic stirring…
A joyless round…
A midnight wrangling…
A mournful purr…
A drinking insanity and wakeful surmising…

The restitution, despised yet somehow completing our entrenched need…
To be and play forward in the shapeless deep…
The unceasing downpour…
And slow drizzling food of creativity…
To give our most valued offering…
To the smallest most insignificant pull…
Which finds our being necessary…
And in that moment die…
Unafraid to the dream inside…

To slip away and join with the whispering few…
Whose wisdom has changed the All…
In a corrosive yet painless drip off the medieval wooden monastic awning…
A cool raindrop fix that relieves the immediate pleasure to perform…
And calls for an inner gratitude…
At the constant play of now…
Re-shaping sleeplessly…
In the feverish ordeal with patience…
To see still…
With eyes of our self-creating human identity…
What makes us…

The figment…
Pleasing the universal Word, yet with throat closed…
And with unceasing unobstructed vision…
Pressing beyond the viral keep…
Into the starry jaw of final rest…
To make all finally united within…
As a breath, still…
Purging the Great Mystery of Time unto an Autopoietic Eternity…

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