“At this moment I realized that I did not know anything for certain:”* Hundreds of thousands of bodies wash to shore A volcanic eruption at sea submerges twenty islands, forest fires leave piles of charred redwood trees, a glacier sails away carrying a family of polar bears. Layers of stars get entangled in strings shaking them off into a network of milky ways. The St. John river flows away from the bay of Fundy. Cars go back on Magnetic Hill.
The creek in my back yard is as huge as the Nile or the Amazon. and is still polishing pebbles, Mallards fly over. The birch tree splits , dies and falls into the water.
The torn balloon was once the sky dome. Yellow and red balls left by little Lilly contain the code for future universes.
Evening touches morning Night swallows high noon.
A door opens in the basement ceiling goes up to visit the attic.
Upcoming Australian Talent Jackson Gallagher Speaks on Photography, On-screen Machismo and Being an Icon of Modern Fan Culture
(Jackson Gallagher – credit: Oli Sansom)
One might try a little harder if they plan to scare Jackson Gallagher.
Going from one extreme to the other seems to be his game. From directing serious documentaries to flirting on-screen with countless love interests on the famous Aussie soap opera “Home and Away”, Gallagher is not what you’d expect from your average 26-year-old Australian. Being a farm boy and growing up on a farm in Daylesford (a small town in Victoria, Australia) still didn’t keep him from barely escaping death during an ice-climbing trip in New Zealand, and traveling deep in the desert on photography missions with the “Act for Peace” organization, Gallagher documented experiences of the Syrian refugees in Talbiah Camp in Jordan and Al-Amari Camp in Ramallah.
What drew him to the experience was mostly, “Talking to the men and seeing how despite everything they try to sustain their integrity, how their roles -as providers for their homes- were affected and it hurts them. As the conversation goes on you could see through the cracks how intense the tragedy they’ve been through. All their lives they’ve been caring and looking after their families and now they lost a lot; homes, jobs, prolific careers. The women have shown great bravery in the face of turmoil and tried to maintain a sense of family.” The refugee experience had also tremendous importance for him because of his strong opinion on the way the Australian government handled the refugee crisis.
Review of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Tony Longshanks LeTigre
When I lived in San Francisco, there was a hackerspace in the Mission district that became my entire world for two wild years. It was like being beamed aboard an experimental anarchist spacecraft full of creative technology & the coolest, weirdest people imaginable, forever immersed in fascinating projects & conversations. All at once, I realized that hackers were the people I’d been searching & subconsciously waiting for my whole life. Everything was free in both senses. There was a laser cutter, a kitchen, a darkroom for photography, a woodshop; there were 3D printers, fabrics & sewing materials, tables & bins & shelves stacked with gadgets & computer parts & soldering materials; there were two classrooms, & best of all in my view, a beautiful little library where I spent many happy hours. I got to know hacker history & culture & what hackers like to read. I read The Jargon File & delved into the dazzling vortex of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. And I heard many raves for a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach. By the time I finally got around to reading GEB (as we henceforth abbreviate it), I had left San Francisco & life had changed; but Douglas Hofstadter’s “metaphorical fugue on minds & machines” will always remind me of that hackerspace in the Mission district where I spent some unforgettable days.
Grüße, Lieblinge. This is your new editor, Tony LongShanks LeTigre addressing you over the PA system. (Which we are in the process of making over — give us a little more time on that, but as you may note, the process has begun.)
Right after I finish this editorial letter for the May 2016 issue of Synchronized Chaos, I’m going out of town for a couple weeks to celebrate Beltane with the radical faeries in southern Oregon. I told this to a guy I volunteer with earlier & he got a funny face & said something along the lines of, “A bunch of white kids calling themselves neopagans as they party in the woods — how precious.” Rather than press the issue, he added, “The one that bugs me is when people mis-use the word ‘shaman.'”
“Oh, yeah. That’s a native American thing, isn’t it?” I asked.
“No,” he said, laugh-growling. “It isn’t.” And told me something about the accurate definition of shaman that I’ve already forgotten. Did it originate in Africa, or the Middle-east? Ancient Egypt?
“Then again, the cool thing about language is the way it all gets mixed up & blends together & so it evolves over time, just like people,” I added.
At the end of our shift together, the same guy handed me a five-dollar tip. “Just take it, don’t say anything.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
The theme for this issue is “herding cats,” because I have to be honest with you: it’s taken me a week or so to compose this letter & go through all the submissions, & I’m currently in a spot (gorgeous alpine valley in southern Oregon) where the WiFi connection is janky & there’s a lot going on that you don’t get to do in the city—I just helped dig out last year’s Maypole in preparation for a magic ritual tomorrow night—so I don’t have as much time online as I would like. Please forgive me for dialing it in a bit with comments on the material & the theme. It’s basically code for “I couldn’t (or didn’t have time to) think of a proper theme.”
Christopher Bernard reviews two short stories staged by Word for Word theater group in San Francisco, which “saves the best for first,” & deals with repressed westerners who discover libertine pleasures in a cultural setting foreign to them (the Orient), also raising issues of privacy that are more relevant (or more irrelevant?) now than ever before in human history.
Poetry reigns supreme in this month’s submissions, to be sure. JD DeHart examines the mechanisms of human hatred & intolerance “(“claws buried beneath a veneer of civility or class”) & the profusion & formal variety of language.
Nate Maye gives us a series of short poems observing the way that small acts of creativity seem to disappear into infinity (in “Blink”), & “an object of adulation that is sick in the head” (in “Doll”).
Angelica Fuse offers a quintet of poems on the escape of a cave woman from prehistoric marital tyranny, eating popcorn in a movie theater with “wandering fingers in the dark / that I kept endlessly at bay”, & a second poem about a doll that asks the ultimate (& ultimately impotent) existential question “what I would be / if I were given / life over again.”
Joan also contributes another piece, “The Passage of Time” describing the cyclical seasons of the year. Her work brings to mind Douglas Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher, Bach, which discusses infinite series: “And so the chase continues on and on for the rest of eternity, with Achilles never quite catching the tortoise.”
Essay by McKenzie Snyder about their father’s brain aneurysm that includes this powerful quote: “His mouth tries desperately to signal to his brain what he wants to say, but his brain denies him. Betrays him. The strongest man I ever knew is lying weak, damaged and disabled.”
Finally we have an essay by A. Iwasa, my comrade from the radical Berkeley newspaper the Slingshot, who gives us an excerpt from a longer work titled “the Transcendental Hobo,” concerning the momentous occasion of the first violent protest he took part in, against capitalism. The critique of capitalism is present as well—in poems by Astra Papachristodoulou (“These lenses can keep flashing filthy BANKNOT£S / for people who hide behind their idle followers” in their poem “Idle Idols”), as well as my own new poem, “Crapitali$m.” We have a great batch of submissions this month in both quality & quantity. Papachristodoulou’s poems also discuss soulmates as asymptotes, “projecting life as seen by the Kardashians / with selfies in a shell that’s rather porcelain,” and a dress that remains “the exquisite outfit of a prima donna” despite being ragged from countless trips to the dry cleaner.
Here is my prescription for you in the coming days, darlings: Do something wild, explore a vacant or abandoned structure, go to a public beach (such as North Baker in San Francisco) & observe the way people naturally self-arrange & coalesce into groups based on social persuasion & spend most of your time on the nude part of the beach, call in sick to work & instead get drunk & paint for the first time in 5 years (make it a painting you won’t regret in the morning!), take part in a demonstration against racism or the coldhearted eviction of longterm tenants, go to a meeting to help build a national movement to protect housing or strategize drastic direct actions to protect the one god we should all believe in: our planet. Have a little fun outside the safe box, & tell your coolest & most creative friends, especially if they are literate & physically attractive, to send submissions to Synchronized Chaos for June. Due May 31st.
“Isnt this just heaven?” asked the lady pushing the stroller through the middle of the farmers market,
as she looked at all the affluent well-dressed white people around her,
& smiled in the lambent sunlight
The night before, the police swept away
all the homeless people who had built
a peaceful tent city beneath the overpass
over the course of the preceding weeks,
setting them back, once again, to zero;
perpetuating the harassment of the indigent at which they’ve grown adept, at the behest of the real thieves & criminals
Capitalism, the worlds cheesiest religion,
sells us things we dont need,
tries every dirty, sly trick to squeeze more money out of us,
steals the world’s resources & sells them
back to the people (sometimes even at a discount!),
constantly breaks up community, continually renews
things that were just fine, tears down houses
that could have stood,
values profit over public welfare,
builds fences & little boxes around everything
in a universe where all is connected
Tony LongShanks LeTigre a k a “GlamorTramp” here, guest writing this month’s editorial letter for the April 2016 issue of Synchronized Chaos! After a few years as a regular contributor, Cristina asked me to help out with editing duties this month and possibly ongoing. We have in mind a site makeover and enhanced graphics for the near future, as well, so stay tuned for the further evolution of this longrunning international literary webzine!
After mulling over this month’s theme, I sensed a lot of pain, longing for escape in various ways, yearning for the past and for people of the past (our former selves as well as others), the arrow of time that points forward and leaves us often looking mournfully backwards — all of this no doubt reflecting, or enhanced by, the seemingly endless strife that threatens to eclipse the better world we hope the human race can get to!
This month we have inquiries into the nature of poetry by one of the most acclaimed and dedicated American authors working today, Christopher Bernard, and of mathematics and its relation to philosophy by my humble self.
Michael Robinson graces us with three short poems that express yearning for his deceased mother, “dreams of peace without the sounds of gunfire or the cries of death,” and a sepulchral longing for death and escape. His lean lines bristle with dark emotion, inspired also by systemic racism as related to black folks in particular, drug addiction and related dolors of street life.
Nowadays it seems that humans are our own worst enemies much of the time, but an essay by Rui Carvalho covering Alejandro González Iñárritu The Revenant (2015), a film concerning “a frontiersman on a fur trading expedition in the 1820” who “fights for survival after being mauled by a bear and left for dead by members of his own hunting team” (per IMDb), reminds us that there was a time when humans struggled with nature and its animals as much or more than with one another. The theme of The Revenant, as distilled by Carvalho, is that “Life is like a tree: although a branch might be lost, the important is to realize the tree remains strong as long as the trunk remains firm and supports all the other branches.” Carvalho illustrates his review with original artwork, as well.
While others cry into their pillows and long for yesterday, Kristen Caven keeps things lighthearted and upbeat with some retail therapy in “Take a Walk in My Scarpa.” Her ode to the material luxury of Italian leather also raises the interesting issue of language and the dissonance it can cause when a word doesn’t sound the way we think it should.
Joan Beebe, on the other hand, finds that the best things in life are free, like “The rising and setting of the sun,” as she titles her poem celebrating our celestial mother, the way the Sun nourishes us (and never more so than on the threshold of spring, which I for one am very much enjoying right now in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A.!)
K.C. Fontaine confers upon us a melancholy painting in the form of a poem, “Slow Suicide,” about a Pakistani painter whose studio is “a shrine to her lost self,” which seems to express a desolate present moment colored by nostalgia and regret.
Finally, we have a prose poem from Bangalore by Aditya Shankar about travel and the mingled pleasure and loneliness of traveling, with reference to art work by painter Abanindranath Tagore, which again expresses a desire for sanctuary, to be safely holed up in control of one’s creative endeavors, and the fine image of home as “a museum of achievement.”
Cristina asked me to choose an image to accompany this letter. I went to the website of the New York Public Library, which recently released 180,000 new digital images from their archive into the public domain, and searched the term “escape.” I went with a racially charged image, as you can see above. The harsh reminder of our not-so-distant past seems to me necessary in light of recent and ongoing events pertaining to systemic racism, police brutality and non-accountability.
Sorry to be so dark… I really believe we’re going to come through all this into a better world! Getting there is just going to be a challenge.
I count calories before and after workout,
collate data in charts and turn my home into
a museum of achievement, unsure about the
measure for the world to know, the desire of
fallen leaves to fly into houses, the loneliness
of colors for Abanindranath to call his peace, The Peace Cottage*. I am used to the way we
climb mountains to celebrate temples on the
pinnacle of certain, and worship longing on
the rest. Slight tremors on countryside rail
tracks that reach us before the train mark
the achievement of arrivals and departures.
When eyes bury in themselves, a complicated
dial that resembles the engine room, I record
the waterfalls of blood in my body, the arrival
of death like the hiss of an alligator rising from
its depths. The devices make me a prophet
of transparent lies that dissolve like ice cubes
into my divination. When I leave, I am a cargo
train that passes through all stations and no
passenger knows where I am heading.
Bio: Aditya Shankar is an Indian English poet living in Bangalore. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Hour After Happy Hour Review, CC&D, ‘Purrfect’ Poetry, Beakful, Shot Glass Journal, Earthborne, Terracotta Typewriter, and Eastern Voices anthology, among others. He is author of a poetry chapbook, After Seeing, (2006) and a poetry collection Party Poopers (2014).
