Fellini and Wardal

Video excerpt from Wardal’s interview with Fellini

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What would you wish for your mentor Fellini for his one hundredth birthday?

Artistic rendering of Federico Wardal

Count Wardal and his favorite mask

Welcome, readers, to August’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine!

We have an announcement from Tabitha Grace Challis, the writing and media professional who designed our original website back in 2008. She and her husband are in the process of adopting a child from Eastern Europe. This past summer, they hosted a teenage boy “K” who they fell immediately in love with. The opportunities for K in his home country are very slim and most orphans have little or no chance to build a life after they’re released from the orphanage at 16. Since there are a lot of costs involved with international adoption the family is fundraising to support this new phase in all three of their lives! People are able to contribute here.

This month we open the hood and watch narratives in progress, put together by a variety of storytellers.

Available free here: https://giphy.com/gifs/personal-YPXKpdSNR26bu

Some contributors reveal the subconscious through their pieces. Ken Dronsfield writes of memories and dreamtime, with poems that share vignettes and impressions from childhood. Mark Young joins together words and phrases from mathematics, culture and technology, allowing them to flow in streams that seem to connect on a pre-cognitive level. Amlanjyoti Goswami’s new poetry collection River Wedding, reviewed here by Cristina Deptula, incorporates literal streams and rivers as a motif and a metaphor for the movement of characters through both time and space.

No matter how far they migrate from each other, for educational or personal reasons, Goswami’s characters retain their familial tenderness and caring. This reminds us that what we see in life, the narrative we choose to create, depends as much on who we are and who we choose to be as it does on the world around us.

Some contributors demonstrate the power of our words, and our priorities, to shape our understanding and our actions.

Denis Emorine’s novel Death at Half-Mast, also reviewed by Cristina Deptula, presents a professor protagonist who exists in the uneasy middle between personal identities. He reaches a crisis point when he must make a choice that has huge consequences, not just for himself but for those around him. 

Henry Bladon points out the potential long-lasting negative psychological effects of words shaming and dehumanizing someone who unfortunately happens to share my first name. Sylvia Ofoha shows how deception destroys intimate relationships, even when love is present, and Chimezie Ihekuna argues that financial security should not be the only criteria for marriage.

In a more positive light, Norman J. Olson illuminates how his personal interest in oil painting leads him to notice the craft that has gone into the works he sees at museums abroad and makes those experiences all the more enlightening. Michael Brownstein’s travel pieces also reflect some prior knowledge of the diverse locales he visits, as he can identify the local flora and fauna.

Jaylan Salah writes about film director Ibrahim Fakhr, highlighting his role in crafting characters, and archetypes, over time.

Several contributors explore the creation of cultural and political narratives, and what happens when these clash.

Sometimes that happens when diverse groups of people come into contact with each other. Patricia Doyne contributes poems about refugees on the US southern border that explore how different framings of the issue affect how those people are viewed and treated. Geoffrey Heptonstall uses an incident of theft to probe issues related to survival, tourism, human rights, and law in a world with large wealth disparities. Judge Santiago Burdon probes a dilemma minorities can face once they gain greater social and cultural acceptance: what to do with a dominant cultural narrative that defines you in terms of your marginalization and struggles rather than letting you define yourself as a full and complete human being.

Other writers present work that reflects and conveys their worldview as well as their poetic sensibility. Pesach Rotem writes of groups of people coming together to take mass action, celebrating direct democracy. While each person may be mortal, groups can make lasting changes. Judge Santiago Burdon gives a ground-level perspective on rioting as a method of bringing attention to marginalization and injustice decades ago in Chicago, and on the plight of individual people caught up in the situation.

Daniel DeCulla uses earthy humor and the language of faith to refocus the attention concerning environmental sustainability issues while celebrating nature’s less traditionally aesthetic aspects.

While less openly political, J.J. Campbell points out the disparities that we sometimes see between cultural messages and promises and reality. Just because people say that the world will work a certain way, even when many powerful people affirm it, that does not mean that reality will follow suit.

Three separate authors rework early Old Testament Biblical narratives to make new points. Christopher Bernard draws upon the language of Genesis to illustrate a potential re-creation, a path forward for humanity away from destruction and towards cooperation. Dipe Jolaade rewrites the creation story to critique humanity’s weaknesses, while Doug Hawley adds to the ‘historical record’ in academic style to suggest that the paths our ancestors followed may not be our only option as a species.

Allison Grayhurst graces us with an epic faith-inspired journey of surrender, growth made possible by releasing the self and the past.

Our lives, as most narratives, contain a mixture of joy and loss, growth and despair, beauty and tragedy.

Indunil Madhusankha’s selected poems reverberate with the energy of kittens and puppies, yet in the next breath bring the tragedies of lost love and deaths due to terrorist and military violence. The official narratives of why the loss of life was worth it, whether from the government or the terrorist organization, bring scarce comfort to the grieving families. As in J.J. Campbell’s pieces, cultural messages don’t always trickle down to people’s personal lives.

Michael Robinson mourns the loss of his mother in a set of tightly crafted, elegiac vignettes. Mahbub celebrates the inspiration and renewal that he finds in nature, and grieves the urbanization of the landscapes he loves. KC Fontaine celebrates new birth with a photo of baby hummingbirds in a nest out his window.

From JanellRardon.com

We hope that the sight of them, along with other glimpses of hope, will inspire you to read through and savor this issue.

Minneapolis to Manchester and Port Sunlight (a few years ago)

by:  Norman J. Olson

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Bower Meadow

Mary and I went traveling last week to look at some Victorian and specifically Pre Raphaelite art in North Western England…  winter is a good time of year to travel to England…  the flights are open and the weather is usually kind of crappy so the tourist areas, museums, etc. are not crowded…

the flight was in a huge 767 Boeing jetliner…  I love flying in these big planes…  watching the lights of the Minneapolis area spread out below…  as we head into the clouds…  really beautiful and amazing that we can fly like that…  the flight left on Tuesday evening at about ten p.m. Minnesota time and got to London Heathrow at about noon London time…  I watched the movie Lincoln (I would give it three out of five stars…  ok…  but not great) and slept the rest of  the way…

we have some experience with travel in England…  the inter city buses are very cheap, but only if you buy the ticket before hand on-line…  in summer, the cheap fares sell out way ahead of time…  but in winter, they are often available right up until the bus leaves…  it is kind of a pain in the ass system because you have to buy the ticket and then have it sent to a coach station so you can get the paper ticket you need…  unless you have a printer on your computer…  so, we went to Victoria coach station (in central London via their amazing subway system) and found a place in the train station with free wi-fi…  but then did not know where any of the ticketing stations were…  but asking around, we found that the Colonnade Station was right by Victoria coach station, so had the ticket sent there…  big pain in the butt, but the bus fare for two from there to Manchester was only 17 pounds and change (one pound is a buck and a half)…  but the first bus that had the cheap fare did not leave until 5 p.m.  so we got some food and waited in the bus station and ate our delicious baguette sandwiches…

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THE WIND THAT SWEPT THE LEAVES

The wind that swept the leaves stirred the waters between the rocks. At the edge of one world we saw another. Glimpsed beyond the heat haze was a line of land. We knew it to be Europe. It was not far. The ferry between the continents went through the foam-speckled water like a sharpened saw through rough timber. So much was visible from the roofs of the Kasbah.

The satellite dishes seemed incongruous for people who displayed age-old traditions in their daily lives. They wore ancestral costume, led mule carts, sold hand-woven carpets, and heard all the old prayers every day. The modern world reached them as surely as we reached them.

We were a source of income as well as curiosity. Rich infidels in search of exotic experience. Their welcome was a duty they performed. Their true feelings were harder to discern. Winning the respect of these people was not something most visitors considered. They admired the welcoming, the Arab desire to please. ‘I want to make you happy,’ the trader would say routinely, even as he hoped for a good profit. He was not a hypocrite, for he also wished to please himself at the same time, and saw no conflict in these aims.

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Illusions Burned, Radiant Light Restored

Poet Allison Grayhurst

Part 1 – Exiled into a Ruthless Land

Time without becoming

***

It won’t work.

You thought it would work, but it won’t.

Clutched jaw, vermin making nests

in your gut, melted silver pouring

over your extremities, hot-plate

your whole hand must rest upon.

And here, you are supposed to find peace,

but you can’t. You can’t even glance

at that inhospitable land, can’t even step

a toe into its puddle of spittle without sinking,

leaves you

like a mad crow cawing aimlessly here, there

across the sky.

Stones here, fish there, people moving,

going where they want to, and you, stuck, perpetually,

feet locked in the mire – misquotes buzzing,

barely a light across the moor.

You hoped it would work. You believed,

and in that belief, you touched happiness

for weeks, woke up thinking this hell

was wrapped and sealed, that your freedom

could be activated and somehow

a great merciful tide would come

and clear a path.

But now you know it won’t work.

Now you know who you are,

a broken umbrella that won’t work.

Fated to feel the impossible tension

of who you are and who you wish you could be.

The birds are somebodies. Each tiny sparrow,

worth embracing. You wish you held value

like the sparrow or even a cloud

that for a moment

gives relief from a relentless sun.

You wish you could carry this weight

a little longer. But both your arms are broken.

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