A Sad Affair For Celluloid When they can't see the obvious you might want to tell them to move to a new microscope telescope or a crystal ball without blemish or cracks. A young bartender friend who's cross stitched her name to private thoughts with enticing gold thread talks to me more than slightly upset. I see her eyes red as if she's escaped from hell or found love in a fire sale. I find out the latter is true. Her boyfriend and another bartender are involved in a film noir plot with betrayal the smoking gun in their manicured hands adding special effects. Such as big tears late night calls from hospitals police stations and a wax museum where alibis melt under combined duress and inspection. And I hear Vincent Price say-no one is winning here. The boyfriend's cute as a greeting card, living rent free with her steals cash too from her purse while she sleeps after coming home at 5 or 530 am. He has no job though he's been looking for months-you gotta admire tenacity. Yet she doesn't blame him, she blames the other bartender saying "She knew he was mine." I would ask to see papers of ownership but she’s distraught as a dancer whose music has been turned off. I could tell her guys like that don't belong to anybody. They just take until they move on to someone else with more to take from. I find it all too exhausting. "How could she do this to me," she asks. Once again blaming the wrong person. "I thought she was my friend." Tears fall from eyes azure but now dim and dark as nightfall. I tell her it all sounds like a sad affair for celluloid with actors chosen only for scandals in their past. My comment doesn't register its footprints in water as she excoriates her former best girlfriend so fiercely I can't hear anymore. Dispassionate, I pay, head outside to the stifling warmth embracing me like a desperate old lover who won't ask much. Which drained is all I've got wondering if in Hell there's a fire sale for my soul. or others like it. Broken Camera Snapshots I hang upside down with my mouth duck taped it is our first date. Holding a gun she dares me again to steal her heart. Tease of the warmth of spring between arguments. Then love disappears a butterfly venturing to wider nets. A final meeting lacking even one moment of grace. A bouquet of roses drowned in tears floats in river. False Fantasies I just want to ravage her madly he says. in ways far from Orthodox on a bed or in grass even sand, adding she is all he thinks of. This young movie star I'm unaware of. I tell him to be real as if he could. To focus on the bartender, both cute, young and for months now giving him far more free drinks than me. Though I'm a lot more generous with tips. He details a dream that follows the screenplay of one of the starlet's films. Where she meets him in another country, they become lovers flying to Spain where he proves his love, killing a bull fighter who tries to assault her holding sword and cape. Or maybe I just made that last part up like a poem where any ending becomes a lie or close or… I go play pool returning to find him trying to convince the waitress she should go with him to Spain where he can kill a bull for her. Maybe a bull fighter. She looks at him like he's crazy. I do too as I sit down next to him and switch to whiskey.
Essay from Federico Wardal
Enchantment: After 422 Years A Drama That Evokes Shakespeare
By Federico Wardal
After 402 Years, A Play Evoking Shakespeare
402 years on the wings of destiny until it reappeared: Enchantment, an esoteric drama written around the year 1620 about Shakespeare, four years after his death.
About the author, we only know that they were somehow connected with Denmark, since on May 4, 1709 the drama was donated in Vicenza by King Frederick IV of Denmark to Andrew Quintus, on the occasion of his proclamation as “Count of Wardal”. Andrea Quinto loved the theater and as a Venetian loved The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet, both set by Shakespeare in the Veneto, and the co-star of Incantesimo is Hamlet, prince of Denmark. This could explain the reason for the gift.
The play, however, was given, not in Danish, but in English. It is believed that the author was very close to Shakespeare, perhaps a disciple of him, since, in one scene, Shakespeare’s temperament is described as someone who often changes his mood.
Enchantment intrigues as it describes Shakespeare’s creative mechanisms relating to inventing Hamlet, Ophelia, Richard III, King Lear, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and Juliet and Romeo. But there is also an intense scene with the character of Death and some prophecies about today’s world. Whoever wrote it is surely an esoteric who wrote the drama with the method of “automatic writing”, that is, through the connection with a spirit: that of William Shakespeare.
There is much to understand between the lines of the text, in which secret codes may be hidden that could be related to political secrets of northern European countries at the time of King Frederick IV of Denmark. All this does not affect the extraordinary theatrical value of the text. Its plot is totally unique. An actor playing Hamlet, at the moment of the appearance of the ghost of his father, the king, murdered by his uncle, is captured by the spirit of Shakespeare, who, during a journey into the afterlife, makes him meet with his most famous characters.
It is interesting that if the automatic writing takes place under dictation by a spirit, by means of a special concentration or trance. Also the actor, co-star of the drama, is already in a state of special concentration or trance, for this reason he has the possibility of communication with the spirit of Shakespeare. The text clearly describes a fact known to few: the timescale of humans is different from that of ghosts. For this reason, the actor can take time off from his Hamlet play and travel with Shakespeare to the afterlife and then return to the scene, continuing the Hamlet play, without the audience noticing his absence in the least!
The richness of the text is impressive indeed. The author must have been a great scholar and soon it will be discovered who he or she is. After 1709, the text again aroused interest and was translated, also in Vicenza, into Italian around the year 1800 by Countess Lucrezia Quinto, great-granddaughter of Andrea Quinto.
Then it was forgotten again, but now it is finally back in the light. Here it is in English and Italian.
Poetry from Ian Copestick
You Just Can't Win I did a really, stupid thing, this week, well, last week. I ran out of Prozac. I've been really ill, all week. Feeling nausea, unable to eat properly. It's been a fucking rough week. I finally got it together to pick up my tablets today. I think it's the first time that I've ever read the instructions on how to take them . It was all there, " Don't let your pills run out. The withdrawal symptoms include nausea, sickness, low mood. Lack of energy, and motivation. Etc. " Basically, all the shit I've been going through in the last, horrible week. It's my own fault. I know that. But, I look at the side effects from taking them. They're almost exactly the same. You just can't win.
Poetry from Sayani Mukherjee
Peach By Sayani Mukherjee Peaches for summers Easy going smooth finish. Drilling of my internals I deny in small whispers. Quiver a word a little too bold As the climax turns up- After all those Unspoken unspoiled earthings When the room gets too much exposed I put on Aromatic screens facades Goldfishes a little bit safe To draw up An innocent plaything like a peach. To shut down Testing the waters when the crowd drops on. At the midnight quake A little quibble, a dripping of dew. Inhaling innuendos Amidst a thorny rose The peach does its job.
Dr. James Tipton reviews Mary Mackey’s new book Creativity: Where Poems Begin
Title: Creativity: Where Poems Begin Author: Mary Mackey Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press Genre: Literary Creation: Poetry Pages: 110 ISBN: 9781732614123 (paperback) Price: $18.00 Publication Date: September 2022 Review of Creativity, by Mary Mackey By James Tipton Where is creativity before it becomes the created thing? Mary Mackey’s new book, Creativity, explores the range of creativity itself: its subtle, pre-language source, experiences and people that helped inspire or discover it, and the poet’s journey from the depths beyond thought to the forming of a concrete, original image. People may think of art as its finished product—as, say, a beautiful sculpture. But what they don’t see are the chips of marble on the artist’s floor: Mackey shows us all the scattered chips and their usefulness for her. She defines in her introduction the process of creativity as: “…the movement of an adult mind back to the radical innocence and vision of the very young child who sees, not only the reality we all share, but all those unnamed, unclassified parts of reality we learn to overlook as we grow older. “ Mackey consistently returns to the notion that the source of creativity is beyond categories. One has to go beyond the boundaries of the rational mind to find creativity waiting, like a jaguar beyond the flicker of firelight. She starts us with her visions and sensations as a child who can be “conscious and unconscious at the same time…float in infinity.” That child lives in the pre-verbal source of creativity. Adults talk her ”into reality” but at the price of abandoning “all that exists outside its walls.” She enters “the world of time, the world of words.” Creativity takes us on her journey from the source of creativity to its manifestation as poems and her first novel, and back to the source, which she must rediscover after the rational mind has chased it out of her. As a child in school, math, with its abstractions, makes her mind ”blank out.” But geometry, dealing with “solid, palpable things: shapes, forms, positions and angles” is a different thing. It’s a process of seeing the world in a specific, minute manner, which leads her to poetry. It’s all about the looking, noticing what’s there, the microcosms that surround us, as in her childhood perspective: “…the world outside my window is on fire with autumn, and the leaves are blowing like sparks, torn off the trees by a wind that lifts them up and thrusts them toward the earth in wave after wave so the air seems filled with falling embers.” Her art of noticing continues: “I study one leaf closely, following its flight. I study another leaf immediately next to it.” This close observation leads to a unity of subject and object, of seer and seen: “I feel a thrill of recognition, as if this room has joined the whirling world outside the window. As if both are for a single moment the same.” One could see this as another interpretation of Keats’s ”negative capability,” in which the subject is negated and becomes the object, but it’s more than that. It’s about a fundamental interconnection, the discovery of which emerges as poetry: “I want to sing the words in my head, the words that will go outside and merge with the leaves, and then return to me so I can put them down on paper.” The structure of Mackey’s book itself is one of integration of rational language and vivid, intuitive imagery: she starts and ends each chapter with a poem that conveys in verse the essence of the chapter. The poems are carefully chosen as microcosms that bring the chapter to the reader on another, more subtle level. Mackey traces in each chapter a source of inspiration for her, whether pleasant or unpleasant, such as the ecstatic visions of the high fevers, the wildness of the jungle, and the challenges of being a feminist in a non-feminist world. Each of these experiences is boundary-breaking, taking her beyond what she perceived before as the world. And going beyond boundaries takes us to the major journey of the narrator: to discover and rediscover the pre-language source of the poem itself. The book’s narration brings us her story in the present tense: it all unfolds now for her in reflection and for the reader in a style of presentational immediacy. One experience separates her from the source of creativity, and that is, ironically, the path of the scholar. The Harvard senior thesis, the doctoral dissertation, the articles on literary criticism: even though they take her deeply into her field they take her out of the pre-verbal range of poetry: “my rational mind seems to have taken over at the expense of instinct, intuition, and ambiguity.” Since the act of creativity, and not logical, analytical, scholarly thinking is the deeper truth of her being, this lack of being able to write poetry brings her a sense of “disconnection, a dull ache, a background grief.” She asserts early in the book that “poetry continues after logic ends.” That is why she felt drawn to the worlds of the high fevers, why she loves the jungle: “In the jungle I will fall in love with wildness, and this love for wild things will make me into a poet.” The jungle frees her from the restrictive and relentless logic of the scholar. So the last third of the book takes us to her rediscovery of the poetic source within her. And to do this she must abandon also the voices of other writers as well as her own scholarly voice. In the dark night of the soul, which, for her, was the dead-ends of her life throughout 1971, she “wrote and wrote, and the words flowed so easily it seemed as if they were being dictated by a voice apart from me, a voice somewhere deep in my brain that finally knew what poetry was.” The last twenty pages of this little, but powerful book, bring us to the realization of jaguars. Mackey reflects: Jaguars are the keys that unlock the dream work for the shamans…or maybe it’s not a messenger I need, but some sort of technique that will lead me into those parts of my brain that have been inaccessible since I learned to speak. She eventually succeeds in this endeavor to be both “at a desk in a room in Berkeley, California, and…plunging ever deeper into a great ocean—boundless, infinite, and indescribable.” Mackey simplifies and clarifies the source of poetry: it doesn’t involve the self-destruction of Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, but a heightened awareness of the senses and of the intuition. Near the end of the book she takes us to the inception of a poem that comes not from suffering or from chaos but from the silent, wordless depths of the mind: "After a while, ideas and images come bubbling up from the depths. A poem begins to form in my mind, not a complete poem, not a polished poem, but the seed of something. The poem does not come in words." Read the book to find out more about where poems come from. Mackey’s style is immensely lucid, readable, and engaging. It is a trick to make the complex clear and the abstract concrete, but she does it. This book will be enlightening not just to anyone interested in the creative process, but also to creative writing students at all levels, discovering in themselves their own pre-language source. -- James Tipton, PhD, Professor of English, College of Marin, and bestselling author of Annette Vallon, A Novel of the French Revolution (HarperCollins). You can buy copies of Creativity at your local bookstore, on Amazon, or online from Small Press Distribution.
Poetry from Gabriel T. Saah
Seeking the enlightened One His garment is a reservoir of healing, His Name is a strong tower, His shrilled voice of glorious melody is calling, All heavy laden and burdened and cumbersome, Come to the fountain he provides. In him is light and there's no darkness nor blemish, Seek him all along and stay on the road that leads to his holy city, No book or wisdom surpasses his, In him is peace eternal. Seeking the Enlightened one is as digging below the earth for jewels, It is finding what the soul craves, Finding him means humility and love, Find him, because only he gives grace. He is the bright morning star, He sees your tears and hears your cries, He has no beginning and no ending, Like an oceans no one knows his beginning and his ending. Out of his love he formed you before you existed, Saved you even though it was death he tasted, He is the mirror of your thoughts, To reflect what is ugly and wrought. Guiding your steps to the hilltop of life, The gracious Lord leads you to glory, Follow him and will change your story, I dont see any cause for you to worry! Seeking the Enlightened one requires your life, All the waves and strikes, They will come to accompany you to his presence, Just as his blood broke the house of death and set you free.
Synch Chaos Mid-August 2022: Submerged Stories, Buried Dreams
Welcome, readers, to August’s first issue of Synchronized Chaos! This month the submissions seem to hold hidden depths, tell stories not always apparent on the surface.
Channie Greenberg sent us a surrealist, painterly photo of a pond, inadvertently in keeping with the theme.
Jim Meirose’s work resembles the submerged elements of a story, as if a child were listening to a tale a bit beyond their understanding. In biology professor Livio Farallo’s piece, complex impulses of thought move as if across synapses, encouraging readers to think.
Alan Catlin sends up loosely connected images of dreams and insects, while Anthony Ward conveys nostalgia through sounds and smells and Chimezie Ihekuna exults in the Christmas season.
Sayani Mukherjee writes of late summer, weather and fauna while Shammah Jeddypaul evokes primeval memory of bones and prehistory.
Mesfakus Salahin ruminates on imperfectly remembering dreams, while J.J. Campbell and Ian Copestick mourn the dull ache of loneliness and the physical weakness that comes with aging.
Richard Le Due talks of losing yourself to age or memory, or forgetting you’re not lost. Chris Butler reflects on the limits of our knowledge and how ignorance manifests through book burning and environmental inaction.
Gaurav Ojha critiques searching for knowledge that is too theoretical and doesn’t apply in practice.
Kahlil Crawford contributes poems of observation: watching and being watched, finding the cultural “bones” of a city.
In his review of Lisa Loving’s Street Journalist, A. Iwasa explores the role of reporters and the question of whether we can or should ever be truly objective.
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal writes of our emotional subjectivity, how our unease overtakes us, even in the midst of nature’s beauty. Mahbub grieves with a critically patriotic sorrow political assassinations of leaders of his home country of Bangladesh, while expressing the wonderment and refreshment he finds in nature’s creatures.
Susie Gharib writes of seeking refuge from the world’s dangers through flights of metaphor and myth. Ahmad Al-Khatat highlights the unwelcome persistence of traumatic memory for a refugee.
Mark Parsons’ pieces deal with disembodiment: being alienated from one’s own body and from one’s art, having to do random work to sell out/or in order to earn a living.
In the same spirit, Skaja Evens writes of the struggle of art-making: not only overcoming artists’ or writers’ block to make the art, but the challenge of staying true to one’s craft when one does earn some recognition.
J.P. Lowe’s protagonist realizes after his mother’s passing that she had personal artistic passions which she sacrificed for the sake of motherhood. His piece explores and honors buried identities and what we feel we have to give up for each other.
Jake Cosmos Aller presents various people who vanish or fade from consciousness one way or another, because they pass away or because others choose to erase them.
Mike Zone shares “discarded” movie concepts, ideas he had for movies that sound barely plausible but may never be filmed.
Jelvin Gipson relates the experience of hearing different voices within the spirit and choosing what to follow, having knowledge just out of reach. Timothy Jonathan talks about the ups and downs of life, figuring out who he is and accepting his own complex humanity.
Gabriel T. Saah and Samandarova Barno encourage people to choose creativity and love over simple greed for material objects and money, especially at the expense of others.
Taylor Dibbert expresses resolve at moving forward after a breakup, reclaiming oneself after a failed partnership.
Z. I. Mahmud explores in his literary essay how conscience nags at those who use their will to dominate others in illicit ways. Michael Robinson relates the transcendent experience he has through faith, where in church he can surrender and come close to God and step out of the limits of time.
Nazokat Urinboeva’s parable encourages compassion, diligence, respect, and mindfulness, while Rus Khomutoff speaks of the emergence of something new, the birth and flowering of a new world.