Not All About Roses... Dreams, Gardens, and Clearing Karma in the Spring

 How vivid are your dreams? Mine are so intense that I'm sometimes completely disoriented when I wake up and find myself in my house in California instead of where the night-time adventures took me. I was so busy and now I'm resting? That's so strange... I think and start another day.  

Dreams are great for poems, though so I thought I'll write down the two dreams I had and make them into poems of sorts, too long and narrative for journal submission, but just right for the wordy blog.

On Friday after a Dream of Cleaning Vases

I ran away from demons, chasing me through crowded streets.

I cleaned off layers of black paint from an antique vase 

I inherited from my parents. See? It's smooth surface glistens 

as cobalt phoenixes dance in white, porcelain sky.

Let's arrange flowers you brought in this graceful vase -

hyacinth, irises and daisies, a pastel bouquet on clouds of sweet alyssum. 

No? How about a rose rainbow from my garden? Compassion, 

Yellow Mellow, Double Delight and French Perfume. Do not forget

the charms of decades-old Love at First Sight! Its scarlet petals lined with silver

remind you that nothing is ever simple. Everything changes. Nothing lasts. 

Let's walk down the garden path scented with orange blossoms.

Forget the lilacs of your youth. Let's smell the roses, shall we? 

The hybrid teas have a slight flavor but here's the Grande Dame - 

so magnificent in her fragrant, magenta gown.

Tired? Let me serve you Armenian tea - honey-hued, translucent liquid, 

steaming from the delicate China cup. Let's raise a toast

to timeless values. Let's celebrate togetherness and peace. 

There was a time to run. Time to stop running. 

There is a time to say "Enough!"  No pasaran. 

They shall not pass. When you say "No" 

They have to listen. It is the Cosmic Law, you know. 

Do not give up. You'll win your life back through loyalty and strength. 

Balance  your courage with the virtue of restraint. Hone justice 

with ageless wisdom. Do not be cruel. Always stay kind. 

Be careful - don't break the crystal core of your new heart!

How hard the lessons! How many failures haunt the past!  

Do not look back.  Regrets will turn you into a fierce demon. 

Breathe deeply, slowly in my vibrant garden. 

Live now, drink tea from Grandma's favorite, gold-rimmed cup!

May 8, 2023

The poem is inspired by a dream of washing a black-painted vase that slowly reveals its Chinese pattern of dancing phoenixes, blue on white. It seems like magic, removing dirt of the past, accumulated through generations, or done on purpose out of spite, to reveal such timeless, elegant beauty. There is a deeper meaning to the dream - the cleaning of ancestral karma, the hard work it takes to dissolve generations-old weight of ill emotions, regrets, despair. 

But then, there is the garden, birdsong and roses.  It's been my lifesaver in the plandemic, a refuge of serenity and beauty. I survived my bout of illness outside in sunlight, sweating it out while birds sang and orange blossoms filled the air with heavenly scent.  It is so important to be close to nature. Just enjoy life - of plants, birds, lizards, clouds. So much joy in ever leaf, every chirp and note of every winged creature. I was raised in a house with a garden, and loved going outside every day to watch the narcissus and daffodils sprout in their circles on the flowerbed, watch the golden forsythia bloom in an avalanche of petals, wait for the cherries to ripen, play with the willow branches, or read a book on the lawn.  Such simple, ageless delights. No TV, no fancy parties, just being alive in nature being alive, flowering and fruitful. 

When looking for a house in California I picked the one I've been living in for 25 years because of its large garden, fruit trees, and roses, so many patent roses planted back in the early 1950s, Four of these bushes are still alive, still blooming. A couple were "murdered" by a gardener whom I promptly fired - cut them down below the single bud, so the transplanted large-blossom hybrids could not grow back. These roses are "hybrid" because they grow from other roses' stronger roots.  At times the parent will try to bloom as well, shooting long branches out with small red flowers.  

The roses I inherited - Mister Lincoln, Compassion, Peace and Love at First Sight are still lovely, but not really fragrant. For delightful rose scents, I have to turn to the roses I planted - French Perfume, Mellow Yellow, Pop Art, and Grande Dame, Firefighter... The last two are quite alike, despite their names - dark wine-red in hue, huge double flowers, with rounded petals, more magenta in tone than wine of the Grande Dame.  Who would have thought that Firefighter would not smell of smoke and sweat? The Mellow Yellow is not as extraordinarily beautiful as the Oregold of darker, richer yellow and almost no scent. But the fragrance! I decided never to buy roses without rose scent again. 

Colors are interesting, too. Many of my roses are of a single tone - Mister Lincoln of dark, velvety wine-red, Electron and Compassion of clear, vivid pink, Mellow Yellow of creamy, sunny hue, the wine-red-magenta Grande Dame and Firefighter, and of course the pure white Iceberg floribunda bush, that guards the door with its year-round profusion of delicate blooms. 

Charmed by the Love at First Sight I inherited, I looked for two-tone roses and found Peace and Chicago Peace of white, light yellow and pink, Double Delight of white with dark pink edges, Deep Purple with burgundy edges on purple blooms, Rainbow Sorbet of yellow, orange, pinkish red changing in hues as they age, and, my most recent discovery, a fragrant Pop Art, its yellow petals striped with pink. The best of the best - both lovely and fragrant!  I have not kept the tags from these bushes, so I may have forgotten - one bush with pink-yellow-white blossoms seems to be Dream Come True. Another with soft-pink huge flowers = is it Carefree Wonder? 

This year I added some blue to my palette - small stems of szafirki and mid-size blue-yellow Japanese iris. Strong rusty orange in bunches of gazania compete with miniature carnations in white, pink and amaranth. White and pink African daisies I bought for 1$ each are still filling in the palette.  I'm very sensitive to color, so much so that I do not like black and white films, and do not go to see exhibits of drawings, which, in black and white are simply boring. But add color and the image explodes!  So here's another, more colorful dream, that went from jewel hues into pure gold and diamond of intense, joyful light. My life seems to follow the same trajectory. 

On Sunday, After a Dream of Jewel Lights

I remember us, together, flying upwards through the infinite 

lapis of cosmic expanse measured in constellations.

Intertwined in a tight embrace, we were one.  

Two halves of a divine apple of energy - twirling, swirling 

in a feeria of jewel hues - ruby, emerald, sapphire. 

Oh, how I miss those timeless days, years, eras of untold bliss! 

Language was not needed. Transparent to each other, 

we shared thoughts i an instant of yes, always yes.

We crash-landed on a small, distant planet of green forests

 and aquamarine seas.  Everything became heavy, dense 

on this continent of eroding rocks and cold rains.

Separated, we looked for each other in life after life, 

we passed test after test of  unforgetting. 

Would you recognize me without the crown of cosmic jewels? 

Would I find you in an alien landscape of chaparral and muddy winter streams? 

How could I tell it is you, among the desert dust of degradation? 

Yes, always yes, I recognize you in the topaz eyes 

looking at me  with this irresistible energy of masculine 

desire, commanding me to do, what I do not want to do.

Would you still love me if I were an ancient crone?

Would I still love the demon you've become? 

Greedy and resentful, hungry for scraps of my affection, fucus, time? 

Oh how I yearn for our return to the interstellar realm 

of jewel lights. Purified through water, fire -  lost and found - 

we will ascend from ruby, emerald, sapphire

through the sphere of gold diamond rays

ever expanding into the luminous

intensity of grace.

Patience, patience is the key. 

May 8, 2023

 

Rafik Amadol's Living Paintings - Computers and Mimesis, Art Imitating Nature

Rafik Anadol's Living Paintings are extraordinary, especially the evolving landscapes where mountains rise and fall, oceans advance and withdraws, star constellations build glaciers that melt into lakes.  I was completely transfixed by their beauty, accidentally discovered during a visit to a Monday Evening Concert of Process Music... Then I came back for some more.  This was a three-month show at an art gallery in Los Angeles, but I somehow missed it. Too many art exhibits I saw were basically the same, boring, broken bits and pieces, the detritus of sick imagination. Nothing to it. 

But the three "California Landscapes" slow moving digital art based on landscape photographs were astounding! The explanatory notes talked about Artificial Intelligence being involved in the creation of these fantastic pieces; but I disagree. The computer could select individual trajectories of thousands of spheres floating around on the screens, but definitely did not come up with the whole idea. So the credit goes to the artist, in my mind. The California landscapes transforming into each other were my favorites. First, during my initial visit to the gallery, I admired the most the monumental waves of magma modelled from movement of air currents - a wall of images and colors, huge and amazing!  Then, I noticed the smaller, slower-evolving "living paintings" in the second room of the gallery. 

I think I was hypnotized by the evolution of the Earth I saw... I was joined on the bench in front of these three pieces by many others, resting their eyes on the beauty of artistically-transformed and ever evolving landscapes. Such delight!

Some of the misty mountain landscapes, with peaks rising and falling in shifting light of the seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter, day and night, rain and sunshine - reminded me of the most famous Romantic painting of solitude in the mountains by Caspar David Friedrich, "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818). 

A sole man above a fog-covered valley, alone on a mountain peak, became the key symbol of romantic solitude and reflection, the key to the sublime.  Mr. Amadol found a different version or many different versions of the sublime in shifting, clashing, transforming patterns of movement and color. 

After a Visit to an Art Gallery

In a hall of Rafik Anadol's living paintings

the Universe breathes and moves,

mountain ranges rise and fall,

oceans clash and dance.

If I could live a million or a billion years 

that's how I'd see the Earth - rising and falling - 

a sea morphs into a lake shrouded in mists, 

becomes the bottom of a mountain valley, 

a melting glacier among snow-covered peaks, 

under a cluster of alien stars.  

Living, breathing matter folds itself into itself

pulled by invisible strings of constellations. 

Patterns twist and evolve in waves 

upon waves of transient beauty.

So that's what it was, that's what it is. 

Nothing's fixed. There is no ground under our feet.

Everything's fluid. Only the endless motion.   

The image above with multiple lines pulling itself into new shapes is a fragment of a larger, vertical "living painting" made from photographs of California landscapes, mountains, hills, lakes and oceans that slowly shift from one into another.  The impression of watching California in geological time of whole eras is indelible.  The fascination endless. No wonder so many young people were sitting in front of these evolving images for so long, transfixed by the evolution of the planet. 

The images were made from thousands of data points fed into a computer and then calculated by the machine. Rafik Amadol, a Turkish artist, calls this machine creation and AI art, but I think it is Mr. Amadol's art -after all he programmed the machine, selected the images and made Art to Imitate Nature in the grandest and most ancient tradition of mimesis.  In ancient aesthetic theories, "mimesis" or "imitation" of nature by art was its highest value.  

This aesthetic hierarchy,  placing first Art Imitating Nature, then all other art, has persisted in Western culture for thousands of years, from ancient Greece to the early modern period. Only in the late 19th century the artists'  imagination became of more value than their ability to see and portray what they see. The breach with "Art Imitating Nature" took place.  Mimesis became the domain of "kitsch." The results, though at first laudable, as in impressionism, were ultimately disastrous. From the jokes of surrealists, through the distortions of cubists, we reached the weirdness of conceptualism.  After WWII we ended up with tons of garbage parading as art and pretending to have intrinsic value. 

I somehow fail to notice value in such grand-standing experiments; except in cases of painters inspired by geometry, color, or the art of seeing itself, like Mondrian, Klee, Dali, and Julian Stanczak. So, when visiting galleries and museums I tend to gravitate to galleries where Madonnas and saints may be found with their golden haloes and intricately detailed gowns. 

The crowds at Amadol's exhibit show that "Art Imitating Nature" is alive and well - and using huge banks of data of movement of Pacific Ocean, for instance, or shifting wind pressure, temperature and humidity around Los Angeles may result in the creation of unforgettable, vivid, hypnotically beautiful moving works of art. Hats off to the artist - for harnessing the machine to rediscover the ancient tradition of Mimesis and for restoring the principle of "artisanship" to art. Old masters spent a long time perfecting their paintings, portraits and landscapes. They did not just pour paint from backets or threw eggs on the wall. They actually worked on design, details of composition, details of textures, surfaces and expression to achieve the desired effect. Mr. Amadol harnessed the power of computing machines and software to achieve his goal of creating large-scale mobile artworks. So beautiful! 

Sitting on a bench and watching the landscapes shift in front of me, made me think of the inevitable change, the patterns in my life, and the need to accept these transformation in magnanimity and peace. 

The Breath of Life

The Earth breathes.

Mountains rise and fall.

Oceans spread out and withdraw.

Seasons change. Plants grow from seed

into flower into fruit into seed.

Why do you expect to never change? 

Why do you spend thousands to torture yourself

with plastic surgery to remain slim and youthful? 

Why not accept the flow of time and grow old with grace? 

I was a girl, a woman, a wife, a mother. 

Time to become a crone - time to withdraw

into a shell of wrinkles, collect the wisdom

from all I've seen and done. 

The body changes, yet I AM the same.

I only know more, love more, laugh more. 

The scales fall off my eyes, I see the infinite

in a grain of sand, a leaf, a stirring of breeze

in the tree branches, the swaying of golden grass

beneath live oaks. Cloaked in transient matter

I AM infinite like a perfect pebble, a perfect song

of the matter delighting in existence. 

The Earth breathes. Let me breathe with her.

The mountains rise and fall. The Earth lives on.

Time is a turbulent river. I'm a rock carried 

by its waves, polished into perfection

that I AM. 

The imaginary landscapes erupt in a conflagration, or dissolve into different shapes, colors, hues...

The "living painting" below is a fragment of a wall-size installation, here caught in a fragment resembling a classic landscape with green forest, a red-yellow hill turning colors in the fall, and turbulent sky.  The magma above erupted from a two-tone semi-landscape "living paintings" with green-brown shapes at the bottom and various hues of blue and white on the top. It shifted into an ocean first, then exploded, in slow motion... 

A fragment of the flowing magma motion of colors and shapes: https://youtu.be/bcVp-wxd59U

On the Art of Buying Art

There's no room for Amadol's Living Paintings

in my old house, with shelves full of teacups, 

angels, and crystal balls.  Gold-framed photographs

of kids and roses would not fit in with the insanity

of imaginary landscapes, bursting into flames, 

wild magma flows, crashing and erupting, 

storms of blue, azure, and sapphire rectangles

falling in an avalanche like snow.

I'd like to win a lottery and buy a mansion

in Malibu, overlooking the ocean, with huge windows,

chrome and glass, ultra-modern chairs and tables,

sparse furnishing among pristine white walls, 

waiting for the burst of color from Amadol's lava flows,

bursting in vivid hues - straight from the souks of Istanbul

full of intoxicating magic of silk scarves and jewels 

set in sparking gold admired, while steaming honey-hued tea 

flows through the air in an acrobatic display, 

not burning the hand holding a tiny cup, 

painted with phantasm flowers.

I'd live where I am so happy, in my garden of birdsong

orange blossoms and roses, but I'd visit the mansion to admire

the other nature, filtered through the artist's imagination

with assistance of the machine. Not AI, not intelligent, 

the soul-less machine was an efficient tool in the hands

of its owner, a magnificent, imaginative creator, 

evoking the genesis of planets, the evolution 

of electromagnetic cosmos  on the broad expanse 

of his electronic canvas.   

Fragment of Julius Eastman's Buddha at the gallery: https://youtu.be/5FbeK60L56A

My first visit to the gallery and surprise exposure to Rafik Amadol's Living Paintings took place during a special concert by Monday Evening Concerts, pairing the shifting and evolving landscapes, magmas and waves of the Living Paintings with processual music of American minimalists, like Alvin Lucier and Steve Reich.  Americans seem to avoid minimalism of spiritual content these days, such as works by Aarvo Part, Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki or John Tavener. Instead, the music played at the concert was surface only, pattern only, without a deeper meaning. 

Some of Reich's pieces were fantastic, others unbearable (who can stand the shrieking noise of several glockenspiel played in their highest register, quite loudly?). For that part of the concert I escaped to the second room, to watch the evolving masses of color magma created by Amadol with the tool of a machine from patterns of humidity, temperature and wind speed in California. Fascinating. 

These shifting images welcomed me during the first work on the program, played by a lone percussionist, outlined against the intense hues of waves of tiny spheres in constant motion forming these huge patterns, like particles of air form winds and clouds. Sparse strikes of the Turkish gong resonated, along with more subdued tones of the marimba. The slowness of music slowed down the perception of time so the visual patterns could be appreciated more intensely.