Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.


Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Friday, November 12, 2010

The Perfect Wave Project: Background

My first foray into poetry came at just before and after a crisis event in my life back in the late 1990's as I conceived and wrote a lengthy surfer poem about searching for the perfect wave. On one level, this search became a metaphor for the power of desire towards an unattainable ideal. While the poem works on more than one level, it seems to be a comment on the consumer culture of southern California. This poem, "Ballad of the Ancient Surfer," which initiates the rest of my poems, can be found on the Pages section of this blog.

My subsequent poems would be shorter, with a degree of continuity in them that addresses some of the issues raised by the opening poem. Reflected in my subsequent poetry is the assertion of the power of love over desire, but with a continued oscillation, conflict, and coalescence between the two. The influence of Walt Whitman's poetry and vision pervades my own poetry and lends itself to a vision of human salvation through body and soul liberation. The concluding three poems can also be found on the Pages section of this blog.

A general theme in all of my writing, including my fiction, can be described as the striving to rise above despair and the misanthropic impulse to attain a vision of hope and faith in our human nature. My contention is that the path to human salvation lies not by trying to live up to an individualistic ideal but through greater cultivation of that dynamic of our collective nature that can be described as both love or spirit.

In the Biblical passage where the Apostle Paul addresses the Cornithians, he makes reference to a "thorn in his side." Recognizing his own weakness, he'd appealed to God to remove this thorn. The answer, Paul relates as follows:
“But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness'.”
As I read the poetic genius as it appears to reflect and project the course of human evolution, it’s not about our pride in how we measure up to either an ideal or against others, but in the spiritual realization of how beautifully we can complement each other, from the sexual to the societal. Thus I offer something I’m calling The Perfect Wave Project as a means to harness our redemptive qualities, enabling our combined strengths to overcome our individual weaknessess, and getting us on the right track toward that greater end.

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