Hello all,
I’m not sure this is the best way to find it. No matter what we do, if you try and pin it down too hard with concepts it will vanish, quick as a faerie that’s been given a new jacket.
But first first – a poem – this one is called “A Mirror Without A Frame” and it is about how someone can sing something into the room that was not there before, and that opens up a doorway. https://soundcloud.com/departmentforliberationcorporation
Think about a song that you love, how it opens up the room you are sitting in in a new way. Think about how you have not just enjoyed but needed songs at a certain time in your life – maybe Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell talked you through it when your heart broke, maybe Radiohead allowed you to feel like a weirdo again, or Orbital opened up a portal to a crystalline world within the waving grass, or Kate Bush nudged you to have the courage take your shoes off and throw them in the lake, and to fall in love.
Sometimes, a song catches you in the chest and opens up the imaginal within a situation, and in that recognition you come home for a moment. When you recognise yourself in a song something in the psyche expands to meet it’s kin in the songworld. In this expansion there is not only company and respite from loneliness but also the sound of rushing water, as one’s personal story flows again into the deeper imaginal river.
The radio stations are plastered with songs, and now with YouTube and Spotify you can find whatever you want wherever you are. X Factor will make you a star. It’s easy enough to berate the commercialisation of music, but that’s not really my point.
My point is that by surrounding ourself with music, we have shrunk and deformed it. Not necessarily our experience of it, which can still be awesome, but our conception of it and its relationship to the world, to nature. So long as our conception of it is deformed, we will struggle to even recognise the places we have been touched by it.
The living world is made of sounds, and listening is one of the royal roads into the imaginal realm. True songs are not entertainment, they are more like the fabric of the heart of the world. They open the gates of perception; as Stephen Buhner says, this is not even a metaphor. Music does indeed open up gated channels and expands perception.
Buhner describes how musicians as they play and respond to each other begin to reach into a place that music seems to draw from, at first between each other, but as a song deepens, it begins to come from another place again altogether. As someone who likes to create songs, I know this place. It’s a place of unfolding, where something more happens than i expected, a “glimpse of the world’s broken promise”.
dark eyes to a heart,
a hand to a guitar’s body,
or a waist to an embraceshe is
to this room where broken promises
seem redeemed for the moment
of the music’s movement;”
To this end, I’ve been making one off excursions into that place, quick forays, tracking a thread, with no preparation, just following a thread. As the basis of art is the gift, I’d like to share one with you next time. You can find a recording of “mirror without a frame” attached.
Further ventures into the imaginal
Here are some further future paths into the imaginal I’ve taken that seem to gleam with the possibility, that I would like to offer to approach the question “how to enter the imaginal realm” we need to ask questions like:
It’s not an accident that the old words for soul all originally meant ‘breath’ -pneuma, anima, psyche.
2 words – how to write?
We use words all the time. Words are at once beguiling and confusing. They get worn down and dulled though use and become cliches. Yet words are a part of nature.
James Hillman wrote that words are angels – “angelos” means “messenger” – that within each word may be a hidden angel. Our job is always to renew language, and to find the places that it connects with the wildness it came from. A language that has its origins in myth, in the symbols within tree branches, the contours of landscapes, the patterns of animals, the shapes of water, is also a language that can bear heartbreak, can mediate a dispute, can calm troubled waters and bring a story in the place of raw pain.
What is the difference between speaking and singing, really? Many singers begin their songs, hardly more than speaking. There is a deepening of breath, a yielding to the outbreath as it starts to carry emotion. The melody and harmony of the voice, always there, becomes a little clearer when we sing. Often songs take off in the middle; they enlarge the world of the listener as the stakes and the feeling become stronger, more real.
Deep down, do we know that our life is a song? If so, what stops us singing?
5 myth – how to enter the depths?
Myth brings us close to the dreaming Earth, an imaginal ecology is a mythic ecology. How can we as Martin Shaw says “tune our ear” to the mythic river that flows just below the surface of the everyday.
6 ritual – how to transform?
7 nature – how to come home to reality?
These deeper mythic patterns are the ecological matrix, as nature is the ground of the imaginal, and that matrix is made of living stories, some harsh and tragic, some as luminous as a moth’s wings at night. Nature is surely be deeper than we allow ourselves to know or imagine. In a broken culture that does not know how to re-claim it’s soul, where we can no longer appropriate and vampirise the wreckage of native american culture, or Tibetan culture, or amazonian culture, where else will we find renewal and depth if not in our experience of nature itself, of the wild places and mature ecosystems our culture has so brutally exploited and suppressed?
be well, take care
whose black curls tumble
onto pale shoulders
smiles wickedly
as the violin vocalises
her inner conflicts,She breathes in,
pauses, then
sings the room
into melodies of broken desire,
with the soft, cruel reverberations
of her electric voice.I can barely stand to watch or hear;
her beauty makes me feel sick
with the need to swallow the moon.
She is a mirror without a frame,
a black rainbow that vanishes
when the light’s switched on.
In this haunted world,
there’s always
more ghosts to purge,
more medicine to swallow.
More ghosts grow
to take their place.
But for those of us
who won’t be cured,
sickness cracks the heart open
to what’s always just beyond our grasp;
that glimpse of the world’s broken promise:
the mirror’s net of woven silver,
the tangle at the water lilies root,
the black mess of cables by her feet.
What a voice is to an ear,
dark eyes to a heart,
a hand to a guitar’s body,
or a waist to an embrace
she is
to this room where broken promises
seem redeemed for the moment
of the music’s movement;
this complexity held still,
for a moment;
cherished,
given voice.
Toby Chown 