{"id":20328,"date":"2018-06-01T10:53:54","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T14:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=20328"},"modified":"2018-06-01T10:53:54","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T14:53:54","slug":"phantom-realities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/phantom-realities\/","title":{"rendered":"Phantom Realities"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"intrinsic-container intrinsic-container-16x9\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tM0uBqCOnN0?rel=0\" width=\"1120\" height=\"630\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Video: &#8220;Translating Architecture into Instruments,&#8221; TED video by &#8220;contemporary sound, performance and installation artist&#8221; Allard Van Hoorn. Van Hoorn&#8217;s <a title=\"Allard Van Hoorn: Work\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allardvanhoorn.com\/work.asp\" target=\"_blank\">Urban Songlines<\/a> project of a few years ago experimented with ways to generate sound &#8212; &#8220;songlines&#8221; of a sort &#8212; from various architectural elements. Although I can&#8217;t embed the video here, I was especially taken with his &#8220;Lusophonic Storyboard,&#8221; which you can read about (and whose video can watch\/listen to) <a title=\"Allard Van Hoorn: '2017 _ 052 Urban Songline (Lusophonic Storyboard)' (Museum of Art, Archictecture, and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal)\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allardvanhoorn.com\/biography_052.asp\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. As for songlines in general &#8212; the Australian Aboriginal variety &#8212; you can read more below.]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>From <a title=\"whiskey river: 'Phantom Blues,' by Hans Ostrom\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2018\/05\/phantom-blues-i-have-phantom-blues.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Phantom Blues<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I have the phantom blues.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m too tired to be blue.<br \/>\nThis is what phantoms do.<br \/>\nThey only almost have the blues.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#8217;ll get some rest<br \/>\nso I can get depressed.<br \/>\nYes, that&#8217;s it. I need to<br \/>\nfeel better to feel worse.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I am a phantom.<br \/>\nI hadn&#8217;t thought of that.<br \/>\nJust an old weary ghost<br \/>\nwith an invisible hat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Hans Ostrom [<a title=\"Poet's Musings (Hans Ostrom's site): 'Phantom Blues'\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/poetsmusings-muser.blogspot.com\/2017\/10\/phantom-blues.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<a title=\"whiskey river: 'Antilamentation' (excerpt), by Dorianne Laux\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2018\/05\/youve-walked-those-streets-thousand.html\" target=\"_blank\">and<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Antilamentation<br \/>\n<\/strong><em>(excerpt)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You\u2019ve walked those streets a thousand times and still<br \/>\nyou end up here. Regret none of it, not one<br \/>\nof the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,<br \/>\nwhen the lights from the carnival rides<br \/>\nwere the only stars you believed in, loving them<br \/>\nfor their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.<br \/>\nYou\u2019ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,<br \/>\nridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house<br \/>\nafter the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs<br \/>\nwindow. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied<br \/>\nof expectation. Relax. Don\u2019t bother remembering<br \/>\nany of it. Let\u2019s stop here, under the lit sign<br \/>\non the corner, and watch all the people walk by.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Dorianne Laux [<a title=\"Google Books: 'The Book of Men: Poems,' by Dorianne Laux\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=84NTN0_Z7PwC&amp;pg=PA61#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<a title=\"whiskey river: Fernando Pessoa, on the allure of a 100% false life\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2018\/05\/sometimes-i-muse-about-how-wonderful-it.html\" target=\"_blank\">and<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy. Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys. And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me&#8230; And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet [<a title=\"Amazon.com: 'The Book of Disquiet,' by Fernando Pessoa\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B002RI9X8I\/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1#reader_B002RI9X8I\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Not from <em>whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>pantoum: landing, 1976<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>dreaming the lives of the ancestors,<br \/>\nyou awake, justly terrified of this world:<br \/>\n<em>you could dance underwater and not get wet<\/em>,<br \/>\nyou hear, but the pressure is drowning you:<\/p>\n<p>you&#8217;re awake, but just terrified of this world,<br \/>\nwhere all solids are ice: <em>underwater boogie<\/em>,<br \/>\nyou hear, but the press sure is drowning you:<br \/>\nthe <span class=\"explannote\" title=\"a people of south-central Nigeria\">igbo<\/span> were walking, not dancing:<\/p>\n<p>where all solids are ice, <em>underwater boogie<\/em><br \/>\nis good advice, because they&#8217;re quick to melt:<br \/>\nthe igbo were straight up walking, not dancing:<br \/>\nand you&#8217;ve still got to get through this life:<\/p>\n<p>take my advice, quickly: they&#8217;re melting:<br \/>\n<em>you could dance underwater and not get wet<\/em>:<br \/>\nand you&#8217;ve got to, to get through this life still<br \/>\ndreaming the lives of the ancestors<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Evie Shockley [<a title=\"Amazon.com: 'a half-red sea,' by Evie Shockley\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/half-red-Carolina-Wren-Press-Poetry\/dp\/0932112536#reader_0932112536\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Yusuf:<\/strong> Brain function in the dream will be about twenty times to normal. And when you go into a dream within that dream, the effect is compounded.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ariadne:<\/strong> How much time?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Yusuf:<\/strong> <em>Three<\/em> dreams&#8230; that&#8217;s ten hours, times twenty, times twenty, times twenty&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Eames:<\/strong> Math was never my strong suit.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cobb:<\/strong> It&#8217;s basically a week one layer down, six months two layers down down&#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ariadne:<\/strong> And <em>ten years<\/em> in the third level. Who wants to spend ten years in a dream?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Yusuf:<\/strong> Depends on the dream.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>([<a title=\"Amazon.com: 'Inception: The Shooting Script,' by Christopher Nolan\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Inception-Shooting-Script-Christopher-Nolan\/dp\/1608870154#reader_1608870154\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In Alice Springs &#8212; a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.<\/p>\n<p>His name was Arkady Volchok. He was an Australian citizen. He was thirty-three years old&#8230;<\/p>\n[His] job was to identify the &#8220;traditional landowners&#8221; [i.e., the Aboriginals who &#8220;owned&#8221; land crossed by a proposed railway route]&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualise the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every &#8220;episode&#8221; was readable in terms of geology.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;By episode&#8221;, I asked, &#8220;you mean &#8220;sacred site&#8221;?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I do.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The kind of site you&#8217;re surveying for the railway?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Put it this way,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Anywhere in the bush you can point to some feature of the landscape and ask the Aboriginal with you, &#8216;What&#8217;s the story there?&#8217; or &#8216;Who&#8217;s that?&#8217; The chances are he&#8217;ll answer &#8216;Kangaroo&#8217; or &#8216;Budgerigar&#8217; or &#8216;Jew Lizard&#8217;, depending on which Ancestor walked that way.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8221;, said Arkady, &#8220;is the cause of all my troubles with the railway people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake, or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo. It was something else to convince him that a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven&#8217;s Opus 111.<\/p>\n<p>By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of <em>poesis<\/em>, meaning &#8220;creation&#8221;. No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went &#8220;Walkabout&#8221; was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor&#8217;s stanzas without changing a word or note &#8212; and so recreated the Creation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Bruce Chatwin [<a title=\"Amazon.com: 'The Songlines,' by Bruce Chatwin\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B01K6GBLVY\/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1#reader_B01K6GBLVY\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Video: &#8220;Translating Architecture into Instruments,&#8221; TED video by &#8220;contemporary sound, performance and installation artist&#8221; Allard Van Hoorn. Van Hoorn&#8217;s Urban Songlines project of a few years ago experimented with ways to generate sound &#8212; &#8220;songlines&#8221; of a sort &#8212; from various architectural elements. Although I can&#8217;t embed the video here, I was especially taken with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Dorianne Laux, Bruce Chatwin, et al.: hantom Realities'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,74,250,50,36,251,4159],"tags":[992,1531,2268,3337,4047,4617,4738,4739,4740,4741,4742],"class_list":{"0":"post-20328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","9":"category-music","10":"category-art","11":"category-language-writing_cat","12":"category-reading","13":"category-poetry-writing_cat","14":"category-essays","15":"tag-dreams","16":"tag-fernando-pessoa","17":"tag-dorianne-laux","18":"tag-architecture","19":"tag-bruce-chatwin","20":"tag-hans-ostrom","21":"tag-inception","22":"tag-evie-shockley","23":"tag-songlines","24":"tag-allard-van-hoorn","25":"tag-art-installations","26":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/048_urban_songline_01_web.jpg?fit=737%2C553&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-5hS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20328"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20338,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20328\/revisions\/20338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}