Zyanya Chambers
Chamber One
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 1: Continuity of Consciousness
The language of life is gibberish to me now;
fey, guttural ciphers scrolling bored and restive,
sibilant mallets of consciousness struck on a vast timpani.
The tableau lingers in an afterglow,
and with a choreographer’s gift,
prior to the vanishing,
an actor bows briefly, pure and untainted
and then walks off stage.
How can a thousand faces, properly lighted,
be cold and stumbling?
No applause?
The cruel silt
that amends our presence persists.
A timestamp assures us
that as parallel spirits of a shared pigment
we live in a serial time.
We can pace-off the distance.
We can overcome the linear,
and become strangers that blot a destiny
from the common ink
of implacable need.
The isolate choice,
a universe digging at its own scabs,
unrepairable
and therefore repeatable;
holds us from the silences of God.
Spun of faith,
we are the loom that imagines
the mirror image.
Despite all of this, we rise.
Stillborn spirits
made of vapors that seek the altitude
that never ends.
The backward glance does not satisfy.
The forward stare blinds.
The closed eye
gathers the single photon
and over the rim,
multiplies.
Notes
Zyanya Chamber 1 portrays the universality of the WingMakers when the element of time is extracted from the view.
Chamber Two
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 2: The Guardian
In a paralyzed moment
the shift bellowed.
Time crashed
to the black tarmac;
a pile of thrones.
Tectonic plates lurched
at me like celebrants
of a victory march.
My heart spun
in the blue, viscous liquid;
its centrifugal force
forever separating
the hopeful from the insufficient.
And now, yes, just now,
the minutes pool
like cut stones of
an ancient pyramid.
Time restored,
my spirit can once again
spit soft, vanilla words
upon the desecrate earth.
Who or what intervened?
A guardian forsworn
to protect pilgrims
from themselves?
An entrapped guard
that decided —
in the winking subversion of fate —
to ever-so-slowly
become me?
A deep-cast search
reveals the single eye,
the untethered diadem
that swells in secrecy.
Its mystery cloak,
like counterpoints unwoven,
drape like wings,
and I shimmer,
as it grazes my shoulder.
A winged guardian
steps out
and I feel the
countdown of self-destruction.
A compulsory step forward.
A mutual stare.
The stubborn arrival
that cannot be withheld.
Calling a name
expelled from a vacuum;
announcing itself
like a sudden flare in the
blackest night.
The guardian
within the guardian,
forever in contempt of court,
served a hasty warning
to the bought verdicts and
embodied deprival.
The evaporate world,
slung in the compost
of a universe uncharted,
reveals the one name
that is nontemporal.
It is the name
of an eternal psyche
lost in a thousand-linked
chain of temporal bodies.
Each chain, a guardian.
Each guardian, a wisdom-giver.
Each wisdom-giver, a god.
Each god, a universe.
Each universe,
a leavening of all
through the cut stones
of time.
The paralyzed moment,
beneath the lens
of the diamond core,
an undying perfection
unperturbed
like a spring-fed stream
enters a flaming forest.
Notes
Chamber 2 is the abstraction of how one’s guardian reaches into their world in quiet times of contemplation.
Chamber Three
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 3: Upon a Giant
The earth cringed when I left.
I heard its voice in my parting breath,
a deep-scowled tone
thundering atop all roofs:
“Didn’t he used to live upon a giant?”
Metaphoric roles
like jointed doll models
prance as Fate’s seductress.
Always ahead,
bartering pity,
deferring retribution
for the insolvent touch
of the black crude spirit in crusted books.
We forget the visit to god’s winery,
for the memory of invertible, twisted vines
and the fugue of a heaving earth.
I have learned to settle within,
outside my body,
unafraid of death’s opaque cloak
that falls
like a slowmotion leaf
in the utter stillness of a dawning forest.
The rhythm in my veins
entrained to the glorious Unknown
by the spirit mentors
Love and Death.
Lashed together
like a pacemaker to a heart,
parallel spirits can fly
halved or not;
keening tribulations unheard
In the safest safe.
I cannot promise mine is yours.
I cannot see for you.
I cannot live as an adversary.
I cannot chase a finite vision.
I cannot promise you indelibility.
I cannot give you the funeral of innocence.
I cannot, with pointed fingers, accuse
the goliath mistake of Destiny’s puppetry.
We might as well be vapors;
malleable, faint, ghostly.
With no points of attachment;
strings fall.
Giant hands wince without resistance.
But there is a way
into the centermost core.
The collective psyche favors a savior,
it always has
it always will.
The savior is the collective.
It always has been
and will always be.
In that central serenity of permanence
the feral souls flock
amid the skies, chanting
the primal hymns
of one being.
One collective being.
One.
Collective.
Being.
I have heard this chant.
It remains aglow of purpose
to draw us inward
to that place unfractured,
unmasked,
waiting for our memory to unite.
It is all.
The pluperfect of history —
all history —
is not right or wrong,
steeped in moral certitude.
It is chatter in the conversation between
all and One.
The Attractor, the One,
is not the beginning and the end,
nor the beginning of the end.
It is the before and after.
It is not the collective all.
It is the unified one.
The difference between is infinite
like the shadow of a universe.
Notes
Chamber 3, like Chamber 2, depicts the guardian teacher interacting with their student through the field environment. In the column of the violet light descending into the guardian teacher, is a pictograph of the snake-like image, often depicted with circles at each curve. I refer to this image as the “tempter”, as in the serpent of the Garden of Eden. To the serpent has fallen the unenviable task of illuminating humanity to the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. It is an interesting thing how the snake became the personification of tempter, but it has been indelibly linked to temptation ever since the creation of the book of Genesis.
As with all creation stories and their introduction of the human species upon earth, there are many interpretations. The tempter symbol is my way of signifying that good and evil or polarity is ever-present. Of the nearly 100 paintings that are currently released, about half of them include this symbol somewhere in the composition. It is a bedrock theme that the knowledge of good and evil tempts people to judgment and blame (religiously speaking, to sin).
The symbol is less prominent in the Ancient Arrow gallery, but makes its initial showing in Chambers 1, 2, 3, and 4. The symbol takes on variations over time, but it remains the good and evil serpent or tempter. The tempter is an initiator or activator of knowledge. It is not a devil or evil spirit. It is offering an experience of good and evil for transcendent purposes. In effect, and like all things divided into polarity, the good and evil serpent is providing access to knowledge concerning how good and evil operate in a seamless union.
It is the purveyor of transcendence. A wayshower to the Sovereign Integral state of consciousness.
Chamber Four
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 4: The Snake Remains
Extreme measures were required,
not platitudes without the how.
Hunting quarry with insults
is as ancient as humanity
sloughing its generational skin,
but the snake remains.
You can try to be the sum of all suns,
like a sparkle conspiring to dazzle its
diamond host,
but the snake remains.
We are pronged
on the wrong setting
like stained glass wanderers
tightly framed in gray, stone blocks.
The brazen herd watches
in the humming light and musty air
of truth’s museum.
Booming notes from a holy organ
whirl about their conflicted limbs,
but the snake remains.
A fire approaches
herded by winds that confess
that they are the only protectant
from the rope’s end.
Held by choking hands,
a slippage into oblivion
right on the border of Elysium,
so close to home,
but the snake remains.
The mirror’s countenance is unchanged,
a vague hereafter is dealt in equitous calm.
You look at your reflection,
as if prying off the lid of a paint can
completes the work.
When all else fails
you can push forward,
the onward breathing that draws life
from the thin air.
Feel that magic!
The thin air!
But the snake remains.
There is a showdown long coming.
The knowledge of good and evil
bears shriveled fruit.
Duality exhumed
to resume its quarantined patch of space;
and the only cannibal of note —
the ouroboros —
will dine
on the flesh of time.
How do we continue to bloom
when the snake remains?
When holes punch through us
and scatter our sight?
How do we listen,
just listen,
listen,
when the hissing remains
and the slithering unsettles?
In some way, we are all revenants,
poking through the earthen crust
like seeds whose code
impels the search for light.
A tree falls
and no one hears
its crashing reverberations.
The echo persists
deep below in that hollow, cavernous
space we call life.
We hardly notice,
but the snake remains.
Notes
Chamber 4 I refer to as the bird woman. These have a presence in mythology as the Sirin, and while my depiction separates the bird from the woman, it remains a picture of the Sirin.
Chamber Five
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 5: Not Impossible
The curious wing,
oblivious to its chains,
flexes muscle with hammering precision,
and the body rises.
The tugging of chains,
finally felt,
remove hope with clipped derision.
The winged creatures
settle for a range,
but have Icarus visions.
Over and over it repeats
until the range is compacted
under the weight of norms,
and the curious wing is made
less curious.
Maps have borders.
Their merciful renditions
take into account
the length of chain,
the invested energy,
the centered home.
The ganglions of separation
flared their afferent paths
and we followed
like debris
in the current
of a swollen river.
No map or wing is necessary.
Those are for mystical lore
where the blackbird priest,
with his feelered hands,
shames his flock.
The range grows smaller.
We are captives,
hidden tight in the twilight maze.
What force protects us
from what force?
The manacles chaff.
The wing beats tiresome.
The final story waits to be told.
Will we be there when it is?
And if home is not on our maps
or in the range of our wings,
then where is it?
The winnowed truth
blown by a trillion breaths
stands so tall as to be invisible.
In wavelengths too small to divide
like the print of an atom’s touch.
Our mouths do not move to these
rhythms and sounds.
The story is being told right now,
right here.
Immaculate.
Impeccable.
Imaginary.
Not, not impossible.
Notes
Zyanya Chamber 5 represents a narrative of the Quantum Presence and its flowering in one’s life when they use the single eye.
The single eye has been appropriated by various cults and secret societies over the past 400 years, however, it goes back much further as a symbol of out-of-the-body consciousness. Shamans used this symbol extensively to designate that an individual was out of their body, that they were experiencing life as a floating, disembodied eye. It was associated with a state of consciousness that an individual could achieve, but not sustain, at least while in the body.
The eye of Horus and Ra were bound to mythologies that suggested that the single eye was a form of protection against one’s enemies. The single eye was later used to symbolize the all-seeing eye of God. It was known as the Eye of Providence; a not so subtle reminder that God was observing our human actions and judgment was not far behind. As a visual representation, it’s suggested to be an artistic invention of Freemasonry, and its most notable expression is on the one-dollar bill.
The single eye, as it pertains to WingMakers, is a symbol of the sovereign integral state of consciousness. It is not phenomenalistic, as in the case of the shaman; protectionists, as in the case of Egyptian mythology; or omniscient, as in the case of the Eye of Providence. It is an interconnection. A lens into the Grand Portal that connects all consciousness in a meaningful and purposeful experience, despite the turmoil and relative chaos that operates in the individual domain.
Chamber Six
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 6: New Prometheus
Body sees.
Emotion feels.
Mind groks.
Soul is lit
from a fire
we cannot see
or feel
or comprehend.
Faith, a flat earth,
cast off from the matrix of unity.
It survived by pulling the sky-curtain back
and releasing the angels —
both good and bad.
Our binary world
rooted in righteous irrationality.
The door of no return,
built by a disfigured mind that ushers
final breathers to their life retrospect
against the whiteboard of binary code.
There is no debugging.
There is no real release.
Only the circuitous re-entry
into the cave of silhouettes.
The rehearsals staged.
Perhaps Plato suffered the disillusionment
that all true mystics — imperiled by detachment —
see, feel, and grok
when they stumble upon
the source of the fire.
There was never education
in the binary world.
It was a program.
The source of the fire
and the source of the program
are not entangled
in any manner, except one.
They are one.
And it is precisely there
where the disillusionment
rises up on its very tiptoes, waving its arms
and shouting: there is only the dance.
(Thank you, T.S. Elliot.)
The stillpoint smiles,
a doppelganger of the Mona Lisa.
E=MC2;
but the fire is not energy.
It is not dance.
How can such utterly opposite things be one?
We need a new formula
that pierces the interdimensional conclaves
of weirdness (spooky, if you prefer)
and bears humanity a new Prometheus.
Notes
The prominant mandorla with the single eye with an infinity symbol crossing over it, speaks for itself. If you’ve been reading the notes so far, you are no doubt becoming more expert in decoding these chamber paintings. From now on, I will simply add hints here and there.
Chamber Seven
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 7: The Oasis Ahead
These eyes that water in the telling,
drift on the edge of a stream
that issues from heaven or hades,
I’m not sure.
They both have gates.
To keep in
or keep out;
Does anyone really know?
It could be both.
The evidence is delinquent.
Fiddling with levers that rise and fall
at the will of vacant eyes;
humans, once incandescent,
now obscure light
from behind the curtain.
Dreams woefully mangled
into wavelengths long and aimless;
boomerang to ego
like a cat at feeding time,
nustling ankles.
The treasure is not out there
in the restless eyeballs.
The life you thought was to be lived
is to be annealed into a lump of clay
and tossed onto the potter’s wheel
to be reshaped,
retooled,
into wisdom’s golden casing.
Only your hands
can draw boundaries in chalk
and walk across them,
sated by the checkpoints
behind you
and the Oasis ahead.
Notes
The theme here is interconnection.
Chamber Eight
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 8: Testimony
I’m sitting in a pew;
a child of eight.
A deacon winces behind a lecturn
as he recalls the bitter plight
from which he was saved.
For some reason they call it testimony.
In the deacon’s moment of salvation,
when he was in the pit of despair
and the hand of God reached down
to save him,
he was naked.
Not even a figleaf.
(Damn and dam those Adamic themes.)
The deacon had been
the victim of alcohol and nameless drugs,
caught in their merciless undertow.
He ended up in the fetal position
on the floor of his shower (not exactly Eden),
when something miraculous happened.
A voice spoke to him.
I wanted to ask, were the drugs still working?
But it was church,
and my father was next to me.
I didn’t want to invoke the stern lanterns
or the stooping whisper.
That voice, at least to the deacon,
was real.
it wasn’t his imagination, he protested,
or having been caught in the crossfire
of alcohol and heroin.
No…
he made that quite clear.
Instead, by a miracle’s mirage
the deacon had stood to his feet, half-choking,
half-baptized by water,
in a birthday suit
that I couldn’t help curiously imagining.
The voice the deacon heard,
seemed to need a capital “V”,
because he had referred to it as the Voice.
It’s a funny thing to me is that god
should be capitalized, as if it’s a proper noun,
and any action (verb) or thing (noun)
that issues from god, should also be capitalized.
No comprender.
God is not a name for a person.
Even when I was eight
I knew that god was an indefinite pronoun.
But back to the Voice.
The deacon’s cadence slowed down,
his tone wrenchingly somber,
and then, he whispered the words the Voice told him
(from outside of himself,
he emphasized one more time):
“Lift yourself up. You have work to do.”
Hmm, I had been properly baited,
reeled in,
fileted and baked,
and then this punchline?
That was the Voice?
Of god?
That’s all it said?
That was what saved you?
That’s your testimony?
That was divine intervention?
For a deacon?
What about me?
Maybe the voice would say:
“Get out of bed. You have school!”
My mom said that.
Regularly.
That’s my testimony.
Notes
In Zyanya Chamber 8, we see how the halo is unconnected to the individual, hovering above in a somewhat disjointed manner. The theme is about the creation moment when potential energies are materializing in a human form.
Chamber Nine
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 9: The Theory of Everything
If we are to walk a tightrope
with the tipani of righteousness
banging out
its querulous beat,
we must be calm, steady, poised,
impervious.
At our back,
vultures crown the sky,
ink blots spiraling ever-closer
to stain the land.
One foot out
the rope cringes with the weight.
Far below, a rattlesnake darts
from behind gray rocks.
The theory of everything
is woven upon the tightrope
in code that only an ant
could see.
Doubtful it would illuminate
the ant or any of us.
Everything?
Really?
You mean a theory for every thing
in every dimension
that ever existed or exists?
Do you mean the future, too?
Is there such a theory
that can connect all the dots?
Leave nothing out,
even nothing?
I wonder where wonder would be found
if such a theory materialized.
Suddenly,
from out of the gloom of ignorance,
we looked upon our silver screens
and saw the irrefutable truth
of connection
to everything.
Would any of us understand?
The tightrope is too high.
The net, too thin.
The code, too small.
Our minds, too thick.
When the tightrope cringes
our hearts fall to fear.
Looking backwards to the wooden platform
that small block of safety
with a leaning ladder of Pisa.
And yet, there is the pull
of the other side.
The jawboning parrots block the way
critics of all things original,
The theory of everything
is the most original
of all originality
for the simple reason it threads
everything
in a single fabric.
What could be more original than that?
Notes
Chamber 9 in the Zyanya series introduces the clear justaposition of wings and roots. This signifies the natural tension between the earthly and higher realms. Even the “angelic” figure is rooted, though it provides succor to the female figure who is also rooted but without wings. There is a sense of transference between the two figures, and there is a common soul complex, just as there is a common ground.
The crescent moon factors in clearly on this painting. While some might think that the crescent moon symbolizes a cosmological element, in the WingMakers Materials the crescent holds a different meaning.
It is one of the more consistent symbols in my work, throughout the four published galleries. The moon symbol actually represents the cardiac crescent, as it is called in medical terms. When the symbol of the moon is seen within the WingMakers chamber art, you are seeing the luminance of the heart, not a cosmological body.
The heart forms within 22 days of conception. It initially forms as a “heart field” and then begins to morph into a crescent-shaped tube. This is true for mammals in general. Eventually the crescent becomes the right and left ventricles and the source of neuronal activity in the heart itself.
In the context of Chamber 9, this is the symbol of the heart being awakened.
Chamber Ten
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 10: One and Equal
The stories you’ve been told
have made you pray
to the sky-fixer.
With the weight of a ghost
in space
the genie spins.
You lower your clasped hands
to your sides and sigh.
A downward glance,
a broken floor,
a stunted breath
stuttering in the wireless world.
The unequal falsehood,
stood up by derelict stooges,
is paper-thin,
but as strong as a belief
can be.
Forked tongues welded
these stories to your mind’s basement,
the casement for the blind.
What does equal mean, any way?
Equality is a concept
from the other side.
It has not bred
on this side of the abacus.
It is the orphan in the corner,
the inductive murmur
neutered to
stand like a sculpture in empty
space.
We can see it,
touch it,
know it in our minds,
imagine its purpose,
but, like a marble eye
it stares back at us,
lifeless.
One and equal is the chant.
One and equal.
One and equal.
1&=.
Perhaps it is more a prayer
than a chant.
Maybe an affirmation?
Maybe a hope?
Certainly not a mantra.
The sky-fixer, spinning in weightlessness,
waits for more voices.
The franchised choir
whose mercenary ways
alienate,
separate,
explicate,
ultimately precipitate the reins
that embrace you
and hold you as seven and a half-billion
blueprints,
wandering the coagulate spirit.
Garbed as particles of one thing
ignorant of itself.
You pledge your fate
to the invisible giant whose
bowels of confusion constitute your path.
You rise up in protests,
victorious with new laws,
crawling
to the flying goalposts of equality.
The genie sleeps.
The three wishes expressed
lilt on the winds of time.
They are:
ONE. Give us immortal life.
TWO. Give us freedom within that immortal life.
THREE. Give us purpose.
A fourth wish limped behind,
whispered in a croaking breath:
Give us equality.
The genie scowled,
its arms green and muscular,
“There are only three wishes.
You cannot have more.
Do you wish to substitute?”
The particles, lost in their blueprints,
collectively shook one head
and crawled their separate ways.
Notes
In the WingMakers Materials there a a few references to living multiple lives simultaneously. It is a form of parallel worlds and multiple existences, all happening in the same frame of time (but not space). Zyanya Chamber 10 depicts this in an abstract form.
Chamber Eleven
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 11: Our Home
When all else fails
remind me of our home.
Even the word is warming.
In the back of a deep drawer
I can reach blindly,
fingers as eyes.
When I imagine home
I have no fingers or eyes.
Something approximate of light.
Something unbounded by
heaven and hell.
Something free
from the infectious armies
that patrol the borders
between black and white.
Liberation is the ultimate home.
There is no border,
gate,
fence,
moat,
wall,
door,
or barrier.
No antibodies patrol
with creeping tendrils.
No antidotes to patch poisen’s
wicked pluck.
Home is cast from a matrix;
a boundless source
unprogrammed.
A mystery billowing
like a forceful form half-seen.
When all else fails
let me hear the primal hymns
that soar through the tall,
half-naked pines.
Let me feel that ecstasy
when light and air
expose the soul’s heartbeat,
and its drumming
cannot be unsummoned.
When all else fails
remind me of our home.
In my final depletion
only speak those words:
Our home.
Chamber Twelve
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 12: My Quietest Voice
If I could speak
the quietest voice of my body,
I would doubtless disturb you.
I would tell you of noble gestures,
confounded by glamor and gain,
that codified discontent.
I would tell you that the search
is cast in the wrong direction,
because the maps were written
beneath wings of steel.
I would tell you that the
one thing missing,
that hibernates within each of us,
asleep in the surrender of hope and belief,
is the proof
that we are one and equal.
I would tell you that this proof
is not so hard to find
if you are willing to live
from the heart.
Only there
is the proof surfaced
like a whale’s breath.
I would tell you that the mind is a prism
that separates colors,
disunites forms,
and severs realities;
while the heart fuses,
mixes, and coheres.
I would, in my very quietest voice,
a voice that even an ant would
strain to hear,
tell you that the proof
is in the heart.
Chamber Thirteen
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 13: No Shelters
I walk a path surrounded by
thorn bushes,
darting from the underground;
angling their way
to the gleaning shelter.
Can you see this shelter?
Invisible horses herd us.
Stern voices command us.
Winnowing touches draw us closer.
Our purpose is lent
from a landlord cast of clay,
surfaced in gold,
burnished to a sheen that blinds.
Inside the shelter,
compliance of generation
upon generation,
hollowed out,
thinned to the same
themes of sin and insufficiency.
How can a shelter,
based on sin and insufficiency,
be a shelter?
An oasis for slaves?
A detour into the illusory?
The pull of a demonic shade?
A mirage of tarnished hope?
A dream of salvation
where souls are properly attired
in bowing minds.
I walk a path
that moves serpentine, dotted
with eyes that see
around bends and over mountains.
That see the karmic freight
borne of a listless, if not witless, mass.
Whose map encircles
an entire galaxy of learning
where there are no shelters.
Notes
The powers of duality, to hold our attention and distract us from our most important task: to awaken and stay awake, is illustrated in this chamber painting. The transmission of the higher frequencies is ongoing (the light entering the head of the central figure), but one must be diligent to express the actions of behavioral intelligence or they could be subject to duality, diminshing their awareness of that higher frequency connection.
Chamber Fourteen
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 14: Purpose Served
Do not be seduced
by the plow of nihilism.
Its seeds sprout,
and nihilists believe
in the sun, water and soil.
They are the equal and opposite effect
of something ineffable,
where real, unreal, and surreal
align in a magnetic clasp
of surrender.
The Enlightenment obscured
the ineffable,
like an eclipse
blunts the moon or sun.
The core of light
is unchanged;
the program of blockage
ebbs and flows
through generational time.
Science will prove perennial mysticism.
The eclipse is always temporary.
But in the shadows
the senses come alive.
Purpose served.
Notes
There are a few painting where words enter the canvas, and in this case, it is three simple words: the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. This painting is highly abstracted and dimensional in order to bring through the mysterious frequency of the unknowable.
Chamber Fifteen
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 15: Who Else?
In all of this change,
can we live blind?
What other species summons fire?
Who else walks the earth
with feet on ground,
arms raised up
in argument with the invisible truth?
Who else?
Can we live blind
like cave dwellers who cling to walls,
waiting for survival to crack
their translucent skin?
Who else?
If we blame the gods or spirits or ghosts
then we miss the connections.
We become the nucleus of disconnection.
Blame pours like crude oil
thickening, curdling, poisoning,
filling the cavities so receptive
to its leaden voice.
Our collective minds
frame the savior
in golden tones of sin and shame.
Fear strikes out
and we call the invisible
on our psychic phone
to absolve us.
The blame is plain,
it falls like rain.
It enters like water
fills a glass
half empty.
Who else?
Notes
Occassionally, a painting’s purpose is to evoke a sense of awe, not in the sense of beauty, but rather a sense of otherworldliness. Trying to depict the multiverse in a 42 x 30 inch canvas is a challenge that very few artists would entertain let alone attempt. Here is my attempt.
Chamber Sixteen
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 16: Monument
For if just once in its brief lifespan
the mud-limbed creature staunch entrusts
the entirety of its being to a single guiding star,
without thought to consequence or charge,
shorn of reservation and uncertainty,
of indurate heart, of resolute mind,
of immaculate soul…
it is ever sung and honored
within the senior ranks of bravery,
notwithstanding the overt success of its mission.
The act of commitment bricks the monument;
a willed reorientation of self
to the nurture of the seed’s kernel,
to the perfume of the flower of life
from which all life springs.
And should it be asked of me,
a sprout of divine derivation,
if the retrospective yields the lesson,
I would proud salute in quiet reverie
the God-spark’s passionate audacity
that emboldens and animates the mundane.
Notes
Zyanya Chamber 16 introduces a new element of the WingMakers visual vocabulary: spirit guides. The two golden figures on either side of the head of the central figure, are spirit guides, working with that particular entity to reach out and touch infinity. The figure shows the horns of materialism, the roots of physicality, and the wings of ascension. The astral and religious worlds beckon on the left side of the painting. Often I depict the heart as a desert underneath a night sky, and usually there is a body of water often reflecting the crescent moon. All of these are symbolic clues to decode the picture.
Chamber Seventeen
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 17: The Gates of Crumpled Paper
Inward goes the call.
The writing proceeds, but the words
fall
beneath my gaze
before they reach me.
A hand that is mine
holds a pen that is yours
over a paper that is ours.
Its white geometry
stares up at me like a gate,
refusing me,
using me to sour fate.
I know the madness inside you
lurks, breeding with itself—
each generation madder.
Until all of us,
straining to see what is within,
the last of kin
a silent monster
in my shadows.
Truly, it is not your fault
that you are a petal of gold
on the flower of disease.
I have crumpled another
page on the floor,
hoping to please you.
Another gate refused to open
so I closed its existence.
Your pen is too fine
for my words anyway.
And my hand is
tired of denial.
I can tolerate the savage smile.
The lock of hair cut in rage.
The latch left open at night.
The blackouts that seize you in their cage.
For that one small gift that you have given
is not so small.
A muse of a lonely highway;
of searchlights that prowl the night
in a feast of anti-mimicry.
You have brought me here
to see the crumpled gates
that my bare hands have laid
before your madness.
In this aloof chaos we call earth
we have both listened for the apology.
Stabbing at our brains’ indecision
every ounce of us drenched in the
sanctity of sweat.
The pitiless tint of crumpled paper
surrounds me
like birthmarks of the
cream carpet face below.
Lifeless and languid
they imitate cruelty in their disavowal.
But like you,
their denial is part of a calculation—
the kind that is not kind.
“Tough love,” you said,
“is the only witness to true love.”
You sacrificed your letting go so I could
walk
above
and below.
Gathering the words that had fallen prey
to a matchstick’s fleeting light.
The small gift that you have given
is not so small.
It has no dimension.
It has no presence at all,
yet it gives permission like the sun
to see.
The moon to dream.
The mountain to hope.
The ocean to feel.
The desert to desire.
The forest to commune.
The earth to live.
The human to love
and to leave too soon.
I know you know us.
You have pressed yourself to me
in the falsetto of love’s voice.
Not enough I thought,
but it was enough to create us.
When you go on, past me,
remember, any thought you might have
of me, is not me.
It can only be us,
because there was never a time when I walked
or ran or crawled or laid on this land
alone of you.
Never.
Nie.
Never.
My deprived angel, if you go mad
when my flesh
is crumpled on the floor
like a birthmark on Death’s face;
I will crush the gates for you
with my bare hands.
I will talk with the king.
I will tell him you are forgiven.
I will show him your small gift
that is not so small.
“There is only mercy
in a world of madness.”
I remember your words’ stealthy aim.
It was my heart,
the one thing that cannot be reduced
by a cage.
Like an evening shadow
I will wait the moment of your return.
The king and I will walk the land together,
listening for your arrival.
When you come,
I will run from my rations.
I will lie atop you heart to heart;
silent measures,
transparent wings.
The holy art!
And the time of crumpled papers,
of launching words like fireballs
over moats,
over stone walls
into the deaf kingdoms
that hold sanity dear…
souls will finally sit with us
around fires and cheer.
We are not crazy when we hold our breath
as one lung.
When we close our eyes
to the punishment of purity.
When stars speak
to a leaf and
we intercept the repartee,
and smile
as one.
Notes
Zyanya Chamber 17 is about: “The felt presence of an invisble world”.
The painting is trying to evoke this sense of wonder in the viewer. There is always much more going on in our local universe. Much more. Our five senses do not allow all of these frequencies to be processed and analyzed by our mind. This painting allows you to get a sense of this expansive, multidimensional world that is around you all of the time.
Chamber Eighteen
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 18: So, So Slowly
You cannot mute fire with Holy Water.
You cannot lure the wind to obey.
Yout cannot find the weakest in the stronger.
You cannot answer the questions that stay.
Cannot is the limit of can,
that you cannot unbelieve.
If you live a full life’s span,
gravity falls without reprieve.
Life is a humble, sprawling beast,
a tinder night seeking embers.
A castoff world unmoored released;
licking losses it falsely remembers.
Behaviors beneath the skin bloom,
their mount of the inner vessel complete.
Vanity spreads the bristles of its broom,
sweeping virtues to the street.
If we give, truly give of ourselves,
the water within becomes holy.
We learn what the universe tells,
even though it seems to speak
so, so slowly.
Notes
Chamber 18 is illustrating the “birth” of a new consciousness.
Chamber Nineteen
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 19: Seat of Freewill
The heart steers the mind
to unity and connection.
The mind steers the heart
to the red veils of separation.
Whose hands grasp the wheel?
It is called the seat of freewill
for a reason.
Notes
I will let you decode this one on your own. (Hint: the poem will help.)
Chamber Twenty
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 20: Real Gold
Following fires that bore into the land
like storms driven by lightning,
I see horizons cast deep,
flung by powerful, emboldened arms.
There, in that crease that folds mystery,
I can see a future
where ten billion differing beliefs
disintegrate into one.
Where the inside-out clarifies
why slavery can finally die.
We have been wrapped in slavery
since time was born on earth.
We accept the husk,
as if it was us.
The fools gold of spirituality.
The dazzle of light.
The glamor of angelic hosts.
The vanity of hierarchies undisclosed.
Its recipients; love-obsessed people
with u-shaped mouths.
The sovereign is integral.
It is not cut-off from the motherload.
The pocket of gold spreads everywhere.
There is no mine to find.
We are it.
There is no have/have not.
There is only illusion.
The program.
The lie.
The truth?
Well, that is worth finding.
But it is underneath and beyond and invisible.
It is cloaked and silent.
It dreams us awake,
and nightmares us asleep.
It runs when we walk
and walks when we crawl.
It seems to tease
like a harmless want.
The truth is,
it’s clear like perfect glass.
An oasis or mirage?
Somewhere in that midpoint,
intoning threats of sin.
We stand at the perfect glass,
watching the tarnished gift of mortality.
We delete love
in every judgment and blame.
Yet love remains
the only game.
Notes
This is one of a handful of paintings in the WingMakers art collection, where the subjects are completely abstracted, but this time, it is not in geometrical formations, but rather organic, biomorphic forms. This takes the concept of a gylph to a new level, like zooming in on a single glyph and really viewing the granularity, as if it was put under a microscope. This glyph represents the Sovereign Integral, contained (soveriegn) and connected (integral).
Chamber Twenty-One
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 21: Completion
Completion.
Such an odd word,
as if anything alive is complete.
Everything is in motion,
shapeshifting its way to new expressions.
All to assemble
at the mysterious attractor.
We are untethering
and reattaching simultaneously.
Our experience is to change,
modify,
reconstitute,
always to move on
to the expression of our next.
Unless you draw the circle of time
around a life,
marking changes,
completion does not exist.
We are the cast that changes
the stage,
the script,
the story’s arc,
down to the final, immutable page.
Until we are complete,
there is no completion.
Notes
Zyanya Chamber 21 is a painting that illustrates the collision of temporal time with “eternal” time-based frameworks. That which is eternal is the core of all things, and it cannot exist in temporal entities. Only the concept.
Chamber Twenty-Two
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 22: Purpose Penned
If I am free
then walls do not exist.
There are no iron bars
that cross windows.
No tape to seal lips.
There are no wars
that settle scores
or torch the night
in high-pitched wails.
If I am free
then not a single child
is hungry for love.
There are no whispers
of hate
or glorification
of handwritten fates.
If I am free
then there is no path.
Beliefs hurl their decrees,
dissolved in the aftermath
of an untold foretelling.
If I am free
then so are you,
even if we are transferred
to the bottom shelf
of the universe.
We remain the selfless self,
un-imprisoned in the unreal.
We are stewards and shepherds
of this recognition.
Purpose penned.
Notes
This painting speaks to the disorientation of everyday life. Many of us, as we travel the long path, encounter the cross frequencies of consumption, greed, glamor, and a dozen other varieties of phsyical, 3-D realities. These can drain our energy and cause disillusionment, which can easily cascade into depression. The figure that is upside down, is in this state. Caught in a swirling current of distractions. However, the main figure in the darkness remains, and that is the Soverign Integral.
Chamber Twenty-Three
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 23: What If
What if you could see
the universe as your home?
What if you could talk with God…
I mean really talk with the universal spirit?
What if the highest frequency in the universe
circled you moment to moment.
What if every morning you woke
11 million miles away?
What if you lived forever?
Yes,
yes,
yes,
yes,
and yes.
What if your learnings were lost
and you started anew?
Would you re-find them?
The very same ones?
Why would you?
The brilliant presence
has suffered in the intellect.
Isn’t it time
to do the penultimate crime
and open eyes that lighten?
Notes
Sometimes an artist wants to create a mood through color and form. This particular painting is to show the mood of contemplation, and how the act of this contemplation draws the attention of our higherr self (featured in the center of the painting).
Chamber Twenty-Four
Poem
Zyanya
Chamber 24: Broken
The frightened populace
edges closer;
a herd of ominous calamity,
yawning at the wing-full sky.
Switching tails rally against the flies.
Predators creep in the borderlands.
Some with bodies,
some with only a watermark.
A tightening spiral
brings tension.
Tension brings wear.
Wear brings breakage.
Breakage brings repair.
Healing is innate,
if allowed.
If a space is made,
if a time is given,
if an open mind receives;
healing can step in.
The graveled crowds
gnaw on the bleached bones
of sanctimony,
hoping to find a nutrient path
to accrete wisdom.
Wisdom is not found in the herd.
Wisdom is not found in the book.
Wisdom is not found in the path.
Wisdom is not found in the other.
The mind’s scrapbook interior
hoarded dreams and desires
like the pantry of a billionaire.
But where is wisdom on the shelf?
Wisdom is healing.
It is what recognizes and repairs
the broken.
Notes
Wisdom is healing. This is the simple theme of Zyanya Chamber 24 painting.