20051130


© BurgsEye 2002

"The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life itself, which is a work of art. When man becomes fully concious of his powers, his role, his destiny, he is an artist and he ceases to struggle with reality. He becomes a traitor to the human race. He creates war because he has become permanently out of step with the rest of humanity. He sits on the doorstep of his mother's womb with his race memories and his incestuous longings and he refuses to budge. He lives out his dream in Paradise. He transmutes his real experience of life into spiritual equations. He scorns the ordinary alphabet which yields at most only a grammar of thought, and adopts the symbol, the metaphor, the ideaograph. He writes Chinese. He creates an impossible world out of an incomprehensible language, a lie that enchants and enslaves men..."

-Henry Miller (1937)
The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation (1980)

20051123

'Baxter'

Because the flax blades bend above
The dark bay, this way and that

In the shoreward wind; because their fronds
Are loud and heavy as if loaded

With clangour of remembered fatal words;
Because the great skein cannot be unwound

Begun by anger in the birth cords twist
That plaits a noose of water for the land;

I will not go on the green cliff-top track
Tonight or any night while the sea’s throat

Is filled with the voices of the oldest friends
Who offer what the living cannot find.


From Ode to Auckland and Other Poems by James K.Baxter
'Baxter' Original Print by Neil Buddle - Exhibiting at Corban Estate Arts Centre New Zealand

'Gibran'

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot enter even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
But seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
And he bends you with his might that
his arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness.
From the Wanderer by Kalil Gibran

'Gibran' Original Print by Neil Buddle - Exhibiting at Corban Estate Arts Centre

'Hesse'

He who travels far will often see things
Far removed from what he believed was Truth.
When he talks about it in the fields at home,
He is often accused of lying.
For the obdurate people will not believe
What they do not see and distinctly feel.
Inexperience, I believe,
Will give little creedence to my song.


From Journey to the East by Herman Hesse
'Hesse' Original Print by Neil Buddle
3rd of 5 posted on the DIGlog
Currently being exhibited at Corban Estate Arts Centre, Henderson, Auckland, New Zealand

'Ferlinghetti'

Don’t let that horse eat that violin
Cried Chagall’s mother but he
kept right on painting
And became famous
And kept on painting the horse with violin in it’s mouth
And when he finally finished
He jumped up on the horse
And rode away
Waving the violin
And then with a low bow
Gave it to the first naked nude he ran across
And there were no strings attached.

From a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Ferlinghetti' original print by Neil Buddle
This print is the second of five posted on the DIGlog. The original prints can be seen currently at the Corban Estate Arts Centre, Henderson, Auckland, New Zealand

20051122

War of the Words

There is a war, a war of words that kills and maims everyday.
Volleys of misinformation,
salvos of rhetoric,
bombs of ignorance.
Weapons of mass distraction raining down upon you, launched from a billion media cannons. Subscribed, underwritten and broadcast.

This offensive offensive, is rewritten, like history, everyday.
A brave tomorrow requires a courageous new past from which to spring.
Peace of mind?
Or a piece of our minds?
Cleansed, like the fresh page upon which untrue words sit like land mines, set to maim the innocent and the politically dyslexic.

Write your own history in advance.
Be your own author in this collective autobiography.
A journalist of self who cannot lie.

This raw war rages through the ages
and on red pages we have read.
Take up words like secret weapons
and say what must be said.

Transmit and you shall receive!

The Reverend

20051117

now


©BurgsEye 2005

"...art is that pure selfless action (as a flower growing etc.) that your pal Lao Tzu mentions. This is the big lust of the artist. To be spatialised. TO BE WITHOUT MEMORY. To flow from the original spring of the living-not writing. I consider writing no use except that it's old tissue sloughed off the man. What the man is is important.....the greatest art is timeless. What it is is the man. Art is merely the chart of his diseases. You examine it as a doctor examines stools."

Lawrence Durrell letter to Henry Miller

(Corfu August 1936)
The Durrell Miller Letters 1935-80
Faber& Faber 1988

20051115

Fear and Loathing in La Hospital

I am about two metres from the drug cabinet when I realise the nurses dolling out the prescriptions would well be advised to take a little of their own medicine and then in some pain ridden sense of bliss may they receive insight into how their little routines of busy-ness do not equate to patient care, least not in the compassionate sense.
Such is the nature of the underpaid workers that are proffered by poorer nations, given a uniform and called nurses running the wards at our city's hospitals.
The melodramatic histrionics of a Phillipino drama (or is that drag?) queen staff nurse riding rough shod over patients if they so much as dare mutter a word not connected to the question she is asking is both unnerving and hilarious.
She moves stridently from room to room like a crooked police chief in a third world jail making sure the incarcerated are serving in submission. Patient requests are met with a cold menacing stare, her fingers itchy for the cut throat scalpel resting in her hemline. Hers are the only questions, anything else may prove too difficult to explain to the next shift.
And so it goes for eight hours whilst I sit patiently with El Presidente Snr. awaiting his impending release from the chemical perfume and decaying limb house. We sit dutifully giving benefit of the doubt to the apparent busy-ness of our under praised health care professionals.
That is until the overacting staff nurse dares to question the questions of El Prezidente's father. Suddenly she gets a sense that the real work sitting on her desk -which hithertofore she has masterfully managed to ignore for the best part of her shift- was supposed to have been actioned before she took to her personal Spanish inquisition. However She remains staunch ordering Dad of eL-P back to his room before making herself busy being officious in another part of the ward.
But when pressed and presented with hard copy documents her demeanour changes, suddenly she is the powerless victim of another shift, a lone woman battling the entire beaurocracy of a foreign health system run by despotic doctors. Wouldn't it simply be easier for the patient to return to his bed until the morning.
Needless to say we smell blood. My father has his hand on the paring knife he'd brought in to slice his apples and I am reliving some Kung Fu moves I had seen in the Way of the Dragon back when the bigger kids were throwing Jaffas from the back row of the Delta Theatre. We are now prepared for battle and the snivelling maid in front of us has no idea of what is about to be unleashed on her person if she so much as mentions the words 'I can't.'
We press on our objective clear, our strategy unfolding flawlessly, home in sight.
Suddenly we are watching some camp vaudevillean actress wiping forearm across brow like she's about to feint in some tropical heat. Her sighs grow longer and more pronounced as if the overseer had dragged her out of the dormitory after twelve hours in the field to perform one last unthinkable duty of the day.
She dances around the fax and phone reciting number combinations, name, rank and serial number, tell them nothing. Her nice quiet shift is unravelling and she is now faced with some real descisions. Her troop around her flee for the prescription jars and she is the last woman standing against an insurmountable legion, it is time to pull out the damsel in distress sinking in quick sand wearing nothing but her surrender flag routine, but we're not buying it.
We move in for the kill. My fathers razor tongue slices her story to shreds before it leaves her pitiful pale lips, I am warming up with some leg strecthes across the nurses station reception desk, shadow boxing the disinfected air like Ali coming off the ropes against Foreman.
The shrinking violet had finally shrunk. Her bargaining avenues closed down, her exits jammed with the full weight of the roadblock of truth unfolding across her desk. There is no way back and no way of buying us off.
She hands Dad the self release forms with one final flurry of false tears hoping he will see the error of his ways and resolve to return to his bed until the next shift comes on.
I fly onto the desk, an explosive left warning kick fires quick as Evil Kneivel from a cannon catching the ends of her hair now standing to attention. She quickly finds a pen from the bottom of her barrel of excuses and with the Father of El Prez scrawled on the form in biro for all to see, we shoot her merciless stares reducing her to a snivelling ball of green and white uniform on the refective polished floor.
The doors fly open and we are free to go.
Half way down the corridor we can already hear her barking bilingual orders at some subordinate and stamping her court shoe heels around the rooms of sleeping patients.

20051114

Garbled Transmission Intercepted

key aura dig-i-men stop
perimeter secured stop currently establishing headquarters close to strategic waterway stop fully operational status achieved stop encoded communication can now commence stop mixed feelings and new beginnings stop here and now are the correct coordinates for future growth and global expansion stop opportunity and relative peace abound stop the reverend misses all comrades now operating in alternative zones stop praise the lord and pass the ammunition stop transmit and you shall receive stop
the reverend

20051113

Speed writing exercise

three billion
lost
souls
&
broken
hearts
f*cked up
priorities
&
trashed
dreams
know no
other way
out
in
exit

20051107

20051106

All Aboard


©BurgsEye 2003

The waka lies waiting heavy in the harbour. For Wanganui soon she sails into the setting sun and the promise of a new day.
In her wake the well wishers wishing well on dryland will at once diminish to little more than soil speckles on the rugged coastline south. But their hearts and souls ride large aboard, calming the ripped torn ocean and the trade winds making repand pohutukawas clinging to the cliff faces en route.
The fog horn blows all visitors ashore and the turbines turn up the briny like a heaving cauldron boiling over, full steam ahead and we barely hear their goodbye cries over the shrieks & yelps of new beginning nerves.
Theirs are two heads quickly lost into the paint work of the said vessel, everything merging with the night.
Quick stitching themselves apart of the fabric in fresh lands and greener pastures.
Good Luck Amigo's (Mr & Mrs Reverend DIG-Buddle) your memories will live strong.

shameless promotion




another guise another day.
Marieke Marygold & Ananda Burgess' latest mime incarnation ZIG&ZAG draws on the mercurial harlequin as inspiration in their series of clown characters that they inhabit and play, for the readies and more importantly for the sheer love of it.

20051102

doing gniod speed writing exercise 1

doing gniod
the act of doing
implies thought
though rarely thought
when doing
doing what for whom when
and not doing
thinking
or otherwise
there is no escaping
these thoughts
you
& me
not doing
anything
without
another
voice
guiding or
otherwise
implying action
not to mention
the already too many
preprogrammed
auto functions
of being
escaping without thought
to the place
of action
the implication
is beyond thought

The Creation Myth acccording to the Book of Dylanizm

Image Copyright - The Hamilton Taight Process
Digging in the crates, uncovers a rare find,
a shard of truth in the shadow.
Torn from the first Book of Dylanizm,
the first page, presumed lost.
The creation myth retold.
The bubles, bubles bubles...............
Post:-Reverend DIG
Date:-0111/Dylanizt Epok>33
Transmit and you shall receive