Expansion

Expansion is a curious subject for a wide variety of people.  Expansion calls for a variety of interpretation. Expansion is the sole vision of the one who has it. So what is the cause call and reckoning for this action verb? Expansion has business implications, personal implications, and societal implications.  But what is expansion actually. 

Like most things in this life under the human gaze and perception it functions like a story. As pattern recognizing creatures the pattern we are most familiar with is story. Often human beings adapt to visual and sensory stimulus with explanation. Indeed all of the structures of society, language, social norms, sense of wrong doing is from an established pattern pulled from stories created by human minds.  So they have limitations. They must make logical sense and sometimes logical sense has a very limited perception and almost none of the facts. 

As fallible creatures we have no choice but to function in a limited perception based ideology. The hardest thing for a human mind to give up is a pattern once it is accepted as fact and universal law.  This is why religion still factors so highly as well as perceptions on gender, race and socialization. No matter how advanced the society its failure bursts forth from the same spring. Misunderstanding and false patterns.

These patterns revolve around the relationship with assumed power and brilliance based on wealth. As beings that have a list of actual needs to enable life the principle of wealth has always held sway in human hearts and minds.  Wealth in its purest intent is there to remove chains and provide freedom.  Often the wealthy find that their wealth just becomes an even harder set of chains to break than their previous condition. Freedom in its purest form is usually anonymity.  True wealth from having nothing at all. Yet our patterns tell us that there must be merit in wealth. Merit in achieving and attaining. The wealthy themselves take on the role as superior human as they use assets to back ideologies mankind has wanted to believe in forever. In an attempt to validity their claims and ideas they attempt to shape the world as a safe.  In both phrase and actuality.

The nature of nature is balance and flow. When imbalances occur we call them natural disasters. Volcanoes from too much pressure, hurricanes from imbalances of air and heat. Stories tell me a story. Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.  A decent story makes you feel something. A great story inspires you to build your own stories.

Pick Up That Axe. Life After Prince

The first time I heard 'Do me, Baby' I was too young to truly understand what it meant but I knew it was everything I wanted one day.  Sitting in the back of my mom's car listening to the local Dallas, TX R&B station I heard Prince for the first time and started to try and understand the concept of doing someone.  Because according to him it could be the most amazing thing anyone would ever do.  So of course I wanted to figure it out. I never asked my mother cause I didn't think she knew anything about it or else she would be on the radio singing about it. So I wanted and need more of this Prince fella.

This started a love affair with what he considered music which calls to my soul in ways most people can't understand and a few know all too well. Love is sometimes a taboo subject for young poor dark kids.  Mostly because all the love we see in media is usually not dark. Prince taught me what love could and should be. I became fascinated by his vision.  It wasn't till I was older that I truly understand what was the most engrossing thing about this artist. Prince taught me to accept me. No matter who I find that person to be.

When you grow up and you have a very keen understanding from the first time you become truly consciously aware of yourself that you are different life gets harder.  We have a culture obsessed to a painful degree with fitting in and staying in your lane whatever in the hell that means. And when people step outside of the bounds of where everyone thinks they belong they get shunned. It’s the functioning act of society.  Provide the human interactions that we need to feel whole or deprive them from those who buck the system.

When I first saw Prince I found him to be beautiful in a way that I had never seen a man achieve beauty. He was glorious, fashionable, wore heels and just glowed.  He showed attitude and sass he was everything any young girl would want to be.  But he was intensely male no matter what else he had going on. So he then became who any girl would want to be with. It was a perfect moment of the yin and yang energies of masculine and feminine existing in the same being. It was the first tangible understanding that the concepts of male and female are a myth.  A structure we put into place to maintain the status quo.  When you realize that is a lie you begin to question everything and then you begin to rebel.

Freedom looks beautiful and Prince embodied that in every way.  But it was beyond freedom.  His freedom was unique because its core was identity. It’s not till you get much older do you recognize what that beauty is.  Prince was a man that didn’t' challenge identity and gender roles to be controversial or as a gimmick. He challenged them because he refused to let them define who he was and how he expressed his art or lived his life. He lived as he needed to in order to bring clarity to his art to his life to his unique vision. He was an alchemist who took the elements around him, reshaped them and reformed them to become something we had never seen and realized in that instance we should have never lived without.

What he became for me was a catalyst to a crucial understanding for every human walking this earth.  Of all the things that can be bottled, copyrighted, co-opted, stolen, renamed, identity will always be yours. The unique aspects of your life and being that make you who you are is the only marketable skill any of us will ever really need.  The art is driven by the artist, not the other way around. Your art is not your vehicle to success, you are.  And how well you reveal yourself defines the success of your art.

I consider his death a wakeup call to the conformers and those on the fence.  The ones trying to fit in and emulate others to achieve fame and fortune. Greatness is only gained from great risk and there is no greater risk than true unfiltered exposure. The reason he was able to be prolific after decades of work is that he never had to figure out where to go.  The art was never in control, he was. The art didn't live in its own space to be pulled from and used. He was the art. People can remake his music, they can offer tribute they can mimic his style even take his name. But they will never capture the essence of what made him great.  That is a journey that each artist has to make for themselves.

If you take nothing else away from the death of an icon understand his beginnings. He was ridiculed criticized and maligned. But he never stopped his journey because it didn’t matter what you or anyone else thought. His work was never about impressing you.  His work was about expressing him. His story is a living breathing testament to faith beyond all else. To trusting the higher forces because they have entrusted you with this life and this time.  This place. Stop counting. He never counted. It doesn't matter when just do it. Like the man said, Do me, baby. Like you never have before. Which really means do you. Make the journey.  Find it, embrace it, put your foot in it. Pick it up. Pick up that pen, that paintbrush, that script, that microphone. Pick up that axe. 

And now my favorite Prince moment of doing him:

Like and Unending Circle. . Linking Like a Chain

Waiting

Somewhere near the end of time
Someplace lost, perfect and divine
I called it's name and waited for an answer
It moved slowly closer like an erotic dancer
It taunted me from afar and held me enrapt
Promised to hold my heart, my soul entrapped
Just as it arrived, I turned to run
Just as it reached for me, I wanted none
It's power frightens me, It's glory blinding to see
More than me, yet not nearly as offensive
Infinite madness, yet slow and pensive
A moment's hesitation, a moment's pause
I feel myself being clamped firmly in it's jaws
Escape is impossible, regret useless
It's true intentions I can only guess
Yet, I want it's heaven, I crave it's hell
I hunger for the lives it's lived, the stories it can tell
Let me go, set me free
If I swallow you whole, I will cease to be
My destruction in your hands, my salvation in your trust
And whatever the outcome, I know the decision will be just
Should I cry for mercy, or obnoxiously demand more
Ask to be tossed like a rag doll or expect to be taken to it's core

My decision made, I close my eyes
Releasing all self-doubts, all others' lies
I trust you, Whole and true
I love you, I love you

Unconscious Love and the Path to Duende

In some sports and other physical activities when someone hits a streak of perfection they are thought to be unconscious.  In basketball especially.  A player can shoot lights out for a quarter and he’s having an amazing game.  If he shoots lights out for an entire game, has double digit assists and rebounds he is unconscious.  The idea stems from the player attaining a visceral plane of existence beyond themselves, beyond the limitations of their own body.  He has in essence abandoned his own form and become in those moments the game itself.

Flamenco

In dance and music the Spanish refer to it as Duende. Its most commonly associated with Flamenco. With their attempt to quantify this elusive concept they describe a nature that creates something to aspire to.  It carries the power of a dark goddess and an insistent muse inciting liberation from all forms.  The spirit of evocation.  What makes music move us to become it in the form of dance, or when singing or playing an instrument.  It is the tapestry of human will, emotion, thought and form where all pours into and out of the spirit and soul at once.

Christopher Mauer the editor for “In Search of Duende” has isolated it to four key elements, irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.  The Duende is not a possessor but a foe.  It flashes the artist a glimpse of the Universe, life, death and the beyond forcing them to acknowledge the primal forces civilization has attempted to weed out. For to create something of a Duende nature you must drink from the fountain of the divine.  With ambrosia on your lips the art is force of creation reshaping the artist, the viewer and in that moment the fragments of time and space themselves. The artist battles with the dark, the opus, to try and harness it’s power with their own will. The nature of it is to consume and the will of the artist must fight to prevent being lost to it because then it is misspent force producing only destruction.  The terms are simple; you either create or be destroyed. The force cares not which one is the result, only that the show, the dance, the song go on.

Beyond

Duende, being unconscious, are states of love.  Instant blind unquestionable moments of human connection to the will of creation.  Built in a second yet somehow lasts an entire lifetime.  When you hear the plaintive whining, words of desperation, pain, elation, humiliation in the verse, the chords, the pull of a song like Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.  The untamed temerity, angst, dark lord rise of Ravel’s Bolero.  The soul shattering burn of desolation, delusion, and degradation of Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves aWoman. You are in its presence.  Its seat its foundation its very will empowered by love, of a concept an idea and even upon occasion an actual person. Our love and ability to feel and pursue it is a myriad of self-serving justifications of our own selfish desire to know joy and joy alone.  However we forbid the whole story choosing to determine the measure of that love, only the joy, only the sweet, only the succinct. 

The beast will not abandon parts of itself to humor your earthbound delusions. It is a full serving, a full course that has to be taken in as it is whole and unbound. It will show you suffering and revel in it knowing how sweet that next climax of joy will now be.  It will bury you under your own filth knowing the elation that freeing yourself from it will bring.  It knows love in ways that only subjugation can embody.  The will of the spirit is not a benign entity but a ravenous specter.  A poltergeist of your own creation that hungers for the fight because in battle alone can it reveal its true face.

Instinctively we seek the ones that will bring us the fight.  We seek the ones that will embody our spirit, empower, provoke, goad so we can rise to the fight again.  Know our true faces. FEEL.  The pain, the rage, the fear, the hope, the rise, the push, the ease, the release, and the fall.  Always it begins and ends with the fall, pain the catalyst and the affirmation of life, of love. Search through those dark, dark, dark spaces.  Love lives even there.  Love sees itself clearly there. It settles with the comfort of an old friend, for in the dark all is free. Stare into its phantom less eyes and know the wonder of the creation of life again and again.  All rises from the darkness and that’s where all shall return. 

Flamenco Courtesy of http://www.ebsqart.com/Art/Portraits/acrylic/599088/650/650/DUENDE.jpg

Beyond Courtesy of http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/about/exhibits/images/portrait.gif