Title: Manuscript Cartography by Exotic Settlers (original manuscript made into art)

On the Artwork

ON THE ARTWORK - Manuscript Cartography by Exotic Settlers

The splatter paint over the faded pencil asks about the depth of the viewer. The viewer who chooses to go further than the paint enters into the experimental cartographic space where the name for this piece derives. While the content of the writing is obscured by the splatter paint, to view past the paint engages the viewer in multiple art forms as they clash (overlap) and harmonize (reveal new patterns and phrasings).

The choice of blue and green represent the sky and earth, as they are defined by this peculiar impression of their “settlement,” on the page. The sky and earth being part of a “settlement” connotes an entire world being impressed over the original impression on the page (the writing).

While settlement is often perceived as a calculated and technical mark of progress, it is in this sense being re-defined as an improvised chaos of pure human expression through the spontaneous splatter onto the penciled words, which originated on the page independently of any painting idea.

The splatter paint, in effect, embodies the “settler,” and its multi-colored facet further emphasizes its exoticism against the subdued writing.

While both the writing and the paint are part of spontaneous, fully improvised art forms of pure expression, the piece asks to defy the viewer’s preconceived notions of settlers as plain and understood and more; asks who the viewer resonates with, the settler or immediately observable and colorful expression (paint) or the original impression on the page which requires a bit more effort to engage with (writing).

The themes embedded within the paint and the writing, however, are expressed equally spontaneously and share the same space, either harmoniously or not relative to the viewer’s opinion, which aims at not presupposing any superiority between expressions of origination and settlement.

Preamble

PREAMBLE

Exotic Settlers charts the journey of experiencing the naturally transformative process of ending a period of transitional residence, and beginning to live in one place exclusively.

Questions of home, travel and what is foreign are approached creatively through a lens adjusted through self-reflection on these themes, which led to my own "settlement" within, as I have become more permanently resident in a specific place.

The transitional effect lingers psychologically whereby there are character archetypes and features of personal experience, which fade away and leave only a bitter nostalgia in their place, striking as a whiplash wound. This sensation is frequently common to those who stand their ground.

The concepts of the "settler" and normative stereotypes of the "exotic" are placed in abstract, sometimes jarring contexts as to displace fixed notions about any respective moral judgment.

The experimental verse goes through a process of intensified critique on our historic way of life as North American settlers and focuses this critique especially at our notions of the "other."

By the end of the collection, there is neither strict closure nor resolve about a permanent sense of home, only a greater awareness of perspective as it lies sometimes firmly, but mostly without any grasp on any actual "thing" on a ground of experimental, flowing, spontaneous expressions in language.

misbegotten souls


write creation into beings 
who love
are featured on wall-side murals
painted with treasured faces
expressing those unrepresented
yet in similar defiance.

those who love
write their minds into oblivion
find inspiration, even in manufactured design
infuse with consciousness the priceless
bold quaking rains that persevere
in lightning stroke lust over the farms and valleys
that spring with life into the wretched gold-skinned hands of the new american way.

ancient confusion rushes into a police-state fear
trading spaces and scaling the mountainous border crossings
gated and finally swaying in some unearthly rust,
pouring freedom over the northern continent,
undivided, a prayer, with love for mankind

in churning stomachs
full with their three sisters allied; corn, beans and squash,
rising higher than any mountain top in the sacred realms
giving life to spirit and bringing forth materiality
with means and pleasure, great fortuitous lakes
endless and violent, rain in meditative slumber
over the Mexican and Canadian wars
derails revolutionary whispers spreading
from the spineless cactus of a starry eyed west, or their imaginary pigments
blurring and becoming ready for hibernation.

knowing little about the feasting soil
nightly struggling through condensed and preserved flesh,
underworld growth, with roots feeling upwards through the grave-shorn grounds
plagued and slowly brought to a blank and enjoined concentrated stare
in owlish eyes, frantic and swollen with movement

heat, an irascible, stubborn melancholic being,
pushing microscopic grimace into folded skin and whitish glimmer
focused wildly into the upturned snow thick air,

oh dreamer in disguise,
wake with a call vocalized
from towers disappearing and weary
in the first morning light,
shock entranced gazers
pour pupils over the single-haired tip fragment,
reflect a statue's burned relics encased in antiquity
survive the past with trickery in the momentary revelation

from an on-looking sage,
her brown-eyed ghost, closes above her shoulders,
sinking and twisting with every step
into the shrinking abyss alleyway.

a life written as graffiti
from talented distended arms
working magic into the obsolete concrete

courageous youth that wars
over books and trivia for a mathematical applause
within their minds,
the build up,
cornering her feline sense
in a mundane yet sacrificial wail to another day,
a day after dead thoughts reinvigorate the mind
with careless hauntings that cry and stutter a storm,
made in blood and worn as a headdress
to the laughing and cruel butterfly Asian trust,
in a token object,
insignia drawn with fingernail accuracy
as a tattoo beneath the skin,
warning in wordless heed
to beware for the introspective desire,
most inner and yet most awake,
as host to the world's untamed fire,
a prehistoric urge,
to look above,
walking away from the estranged bellowing
hidden deep inside,
a union with touch,
spirit's shudder
listening to the walled moods that hallow

the virile savior,
kneeling before the mother,
her spring letting a fume
so intoxicating as to send a man wallowing
eagerly towards an un-nameable shame,
her ruthless smile,
gorging one's insides
into a powdery flame
giving shape to tortured bones

sickening angelic royalty
towards their straight guise,
shaved monkey
crawling upon the frozen banks,
wicked with poisonous bleeding,
whose cursed veins send fungal sedatives into a vacuum bowl
mixed with surprise and anguish
at the folly in pursuance to be awake,
with a strength that supports human will
to the final breath

a rising
a kind of love,
a womb and a brain,
mere child,
who knows that
universal play and laughter

peering sideways and bulging over the slid escapades
fugitive mourning,
a character's lost self,
whose personality unmasked sports trials
as a fantastic way to train one's higher grounding
to a freed order

blissful meeting with a metaphoric and real authority
who sits always wading
in the tireless mud of biological healing,
reminding hair to grow,
effortless and with destroyed vanity,
moment's kiss
flowing magic and spouting wonder-filled awe
in the most depressed body
whose sexual mourning becomes weightless with resolved guilt,
and following the waning moon to its relaxed state

the road edges into wax,
paper becomes scarce,
the moaning thought quickens
inside the brain's creativity mirror,
and stripped within its reflection

a bird-like human
reasoning beyond
whose sacrum separated and lit upon the sky
as a message for the fearing

whose search need not end,
and that there is a place,
within the human body,
which answers always in perfect response

to the seated one,
creating from our language experiment,
to transfix meaning into the furthered way,
lowly and threatened for existence
by its own shadows fleeing poverty
in the boiling mixtures
beneath the sidewalk havens 

"guide our feet from sewers and subterranean flashes"

whose spillage frequents
in the soupy offerings gifted to the poor and mighty artists,
re-writing their conflicts with love through a right to live
towers greater than human creation

beginning in our eternal meeting with seed, water and that divine breath,
multiplicity of oneness issuing like big bangs
in the nothing particles sprouting cracked eggshell pride
in the lonely skin and silent drive
weaning our animal nature into an alien hiding,
the alluring appeal to renew our cavernous descendants,
inclined to escape and recede into the forest

wet our brow and inflame our palette
in the stew lush root pungent floor,
glorifying our sanity
in the restless sweat that quivers
into the somber shade
forgiving their river's newly formed source,
whose edges bespeak an expression
so natural as to be kept silent and nameless
except in living form,
where representation yearns
to devote mindful effort
towards a mythic beautification 
renders nature's forms into the formless
supernatural direction 
with sacred number
carries signals to other worlds, 
finds need
swimming up from the mouth

"spring delicate and sure as birth rites movement
in first repose,
on the island
sought as refuge
from worldly upbringing
and so seamless an existence"

a fount that trails through earthly longing and invites a way,
oceanic and pathless,
to grow beyond the gift and to bestow.

February 7, 2011
First week at new apartment, Chinatown Calgary

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