The Aroma Cafe

THE POEMS, PHOTOS AND DIGITAL ART BELOW

will be on display at the AROMA Cafe

1122 Fourth Street, Downtown San Rafael

(Next to the Rafael Movie Theater)

 FEBRUARY, MARCH and APRIL, 2022

Buy a print, support Neighbors Without Borders

Hope to see you there...

The Aroma Cafe

for Sophie

Life comes by the Aroma cafe

watch it, taste it, hear it say

that our world is heating up

too much violence in this cup

I can feel your life through this window pane

inside, outside, not quite sane

addiction, guns and loved ones dying

cruelty, children, bullets flying

life comes by the Aroma cafe

start now, choose a kinder way.

 

Faces

FACES

 

That side of my face
that I show you
is all about legacy
full of roles and a presence
of whom I want you to see
 
The other side
is for guarding
doubts and uncertainty
always concerned with protecting
what you think of me
 
Inside somewhere
is the real one
an aspiring nominee
searching around for some semblance
of authenticity
 
Florence & Barcelona, 2017

Mental Orphan

Sometimes that thought

passing through my mind

cannot connect

with its final destination

no matter how hard I try

to force the conclusion to completion

it remains an orphan,

floating around

in a sea of possibility

and without a life vest.

Then, not much time left

for it to be rescued.

Time, is the active ingredient

in all of this.

Soon, there are so many new thoughts

who need feeding

that the original is abandoned

to the orphanage of thought.

Perhaps, one day, it may find a way out

of itself to completion.

Persian Pond

 Persian Pond

Here in Kew Gardens
royal botanical brilliance
is the ethereal Persian pond
and the breathtaking beauty
of Dale Chihuly and his
white glass sculptures
placed amongst water lilies
floating with a seductive splendor
that naturally belongs here.
 
His art now invents life
as a new form.
A force that finds expression
in a thousand and one
reflections, rippling energy
through the one who looks
and would cause even Aristophanes
to exclaim! "which of you
took the other as your model?"

Kew Royal Botanical Gardens ~ London ~ June 2019

Note:
In “The Symposium”, Plato has Aristophanes, a famous Greek theatre and comedy writer, tell the story of the Soulmates.  Plato's story describes humans as originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.

"Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our human nature together, it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.  Each of us then is a matching half of a human whole and each of us is always seeking our soulmate, to fuse with the other half that matches us." 

Collisions

 

Collisions

"Consciousness actively directed,
seeking significance and meaning
in a confused and chaotic
inner world."

What meaning is my look seeking?
That bothers it
To look for me
Anyway!

Gnawing at me to look
And revealing by looking
My “Self”

Look careful now
That “Self” is not the look
Or consciousness
It is “Mind”

Revealing the meaning
Found here through the act
Of looking

So, try and grasp “Mind”
As a soap bubble or God
And it will dodge your Act and
Object

Leaving you to collide
With the meaning “Mind” puts
into everything you bring

The collision is the Act
That lights you up
To conscious life
And this meaning thing!

Note:

The Poem "Collisions", is based on a passage from the "Commentaries on Silo's Message" , page 2, that describes "The Inner Look" or "Inner Seeing". The author Silo, wrote these illuminating interpretations of key topics that can give a deeper understanding of the three parts of his work: Silo’s Message which includes The Book (The Inner Look), the Experience (Ceremonies), and the Path.

The Image was created digitally on an iPhone in the style and colors of Piet Mondrian's nonrepresentational art.  Mondrian's art was intimately related to his spiritual and philosophical studies, he believed that art reflected the underlying spirituality of nature. He simplified his paintings down to the most basic elements in order to reveal the essence of the mystical energy that governed nature and the universe.

Abstractions

Abstractions

Now a shape, now a line, now a pattern, NOT form

Just some color and shade with a tone loud and warm.

 

I feel your vibration you glow through the dark

and pierce my perception conditioned remark.

 

The message you send is not here and not now

You’re a whirling gyration revolving somehow

 

To open a new world of unbounded space

Expanding the mind from its usual place

 

Of seeing the motif that runs everywhere

And affirms the familiar, its vision so square.

 

It’s not where you look, it’s a feeling you get

Unstable emotions that surge and upset

 

Strike as lightening and travel the length of the rod.

Clear the ground, find your own way, become your own god.

Note:

All the images above were generated digitally and are based on the abstract art and colors of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky.  Painting for Kandinsky was deeply spiritual, he was driven by an inner necessity to create moods from color that was independent of representational objects. He also related painting to composing music.  "Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key sets the soul vibrating automatically."

Kandinsky was influenced by the spiritual writings of theosophy and wrote an important book "Concerning the Spiritual in Art". In the book, he calls for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art.

San Andreas

 

San Andreas

In this part of my world

the overwhelming scent

of California bay willow,

much more potent than its

European cousin, takes me back

to a remembrance of things past.

I had just set foot on the land

where San Andreas

ripped its fault line through

this place now called home

a new beginning

a new chapter, a new life.

 

Now in these golden days

savoring all those glowing moments

I stand here beneath the Buckeyes

the leaves letting go one by one

amongst the memories, the beauty

and the radiance of the setting sun.

Algorithm

Algorithm 

  

You're a recipe for ruin

problem solving operation

lured in by your fascination

generated by another then another…

 

You are made of bits of data

silicon tracks that forge new paths,

that branch divergent as we click

into another and another…

 

We are divided, conquered, carried, 

formed and shaped regenerated

with a new repurposed meaning

then another and another…

 

Artificial and compliant and now

captive to your screen time, living by your

rules based process, set to follow calculation

count another then another…

 

Feel your soundless drumbeat patter,

rhythm, footstep and procedure,

problem solved a new production then

repeated infinitum add another then another…

 

Note:

The mandalas above were created using several computer generated algorithms and programmed input using finger brush strokes and patterning strokes.

Algorithmic works of art are based on computer generated algorithms devised by an artist or a pre-made algorithm that modifies external data such as images or gestural inputs based on randomness. All inputs by Ken Dickinson, generated art by FotoDa and SimpleEffects.

The Elephant In The Room

 

The Elephant In The Room

I always felt

you were an obstacle to my growth
and that once you left
everything would be fine.

Now you are gone
I hear you comment on my life
from that space behind my eyes
or in the middle of a conversation
your words come out of my mouth.

The obstacle I needed to remove
was myself
and this way of feeling
and thinking and acting
that sets everything on the wrong course.

And remember instead your other side
the kind and generous heart
your listening skills
and that famous line…

“well then, you'd better get on with it”

The Left Bank

The Left Bank 

From South Elisio drive take the path across the salt marsh

and walk down the left bank of Corte Madera creek

to the Bon Air bridge.

White egrets and black headed night herons

wade the edges here and you feel a sense of

dinosaur time in these graceful creatures.

But we are from another time and waiting for us now

the magnificent French onion soup at the Left Bank Brasserie

in the little city of Larkspur.

Passing through the wetland we hear Saint Patrick’s ring

the noontime hour, its peal of bells

cascading down Magnolia avenue.

And then seated by the warm fireplace

the smell of anise, fennel, and pearl onions

drifting through the winter afternoon.

One spoonful of this soup and you are in the world of

Degas and Manet, James Joyce and Hemingway,

taste dragging memories of a time long since passed.

But we are past memories and past the present

already in an uncertain future

as Saint Patrick’s rings the 2 o’clock knell.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls

said the great John Donne

it tolls now for us, and it’s not going well.

 

Quintessence

 Quintessence!

Three sovereigns of a land danced today

around Dark Energy in the universe.

I went looking for Dracula and Darth Vader

but found instead an accelerating universe

beyond light speed

expanding each day

through a string septet play.

I thought we were star stuff

as Orpheus said

not invisible brane worlds

strung between quantum vibrations

vacuumed in space

with measurements that even

uncle Albert couldn't add up.

And his cosmological constant

is speeding away.

Quintessence!

exotic, mysterious inexplicable.

Something moving

in empty space

that holds the stars and moon in place.

Photography by Ken Dickinson
Paintings by Rucha Shirsalkar

Note: 

In physics, Quintessence is a proposed form of dark energy, suggested as an explanation of the accelerating rate of expansion of the universe. Quintessence differs from the cosmological explanation of dark energy in that it is dynamic; it changes over time, unlike the cosmological constant which does not change.

In literature, Quintessence is the queen of a land of speculative science in Rabeliais' novels Gargantua and Pantagruel.  In Rabaleais' time, a fifth element quinte, beyond earth, air, fire and water, was supposed to be the ethereal substance of which the stars were composed.

François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer, physician, humanist, monk and Greek scholar. His novels present the comic and satirical story of the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel and various companions, whose travels and adventures are a way to make fun of the follies and superstitions of the times. 

Generating Monet

 

 

Generating Monet

 

You changed the way that we look

not as form, but as color and light

so that we who look must impress ourselves 

to discover your new found insight 

 

And now the lilies can see themselves

transformed through automaton art

an algorithm, a mind of its own

making new forms of color and light

 

Saturated with shade and exposure

a warmth and a vibrance so bright

are you Frankenstein or creator?

a mutation or start up delight?

 

Note:

Each of the images above were created using four different original photos of water lilies and a computer algorithm with some degree of autonomy, to create new original works of art. All photography by Ken Dickinson, generated art by FotoDa

The poem explores issues of what art is today originally outlined in an essay by Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In recent years, images of art have become freely available global commodities without little or no value because they are commercial products that lack the aura of authenticity of the original. Now however, we see a movement towards generating original art digitally and authenticating and creating value for digital art through NFT's (Non Fungible Tokens), a digital token that can authenticate a digitally created piece of art, that can then accumulate value and is redeemable.

Lands' End

Lands' End

From the legion of honor
arrive to the trailhead
walk down the steps and gravel stones
 
and a dusty path leads through a woodland
of scented eucalyptus and Monterey cypress,
blackwood acacia and coastal bluff scrub.

And then, Lands' End!  The pines stand
as sentinels at the edge of a world
where worlds sometimes end.
 
Guardians, tutelary daemons
framed, in a mist shrouded sky.
as fog horns moan over the silence.

Once they were sirens of longing,
remembered now from a long time ago,
where the second love nest began.
 
A hawk drifts by on the salted current
red tailed, I reach out
and breathe it all in once again.

Golden Gate spires pierce the miasma,
memories move through the stillness,
of all those years departed and gone.

Pillar of Reflection

Pillar of Reflection

for Janet

When I look at you

I see myself

standing there

by the half moon, high

in the western sky

your dancing starlight

sings to me

and this warm earth

kisses my cheek

irradiating light

heavens bound.

Tonight

throughout all my being

I know why

you and I

are here.

Red Bluff Park, California

Note:

The images above are based on original photographs that have been regenerated using digital filters that simulate Orphic abstract art in the style of Robert Delaunay and the non representational form of Piet Mondrian.

The Orphists were rooted in Cubism but tended towards free emotive personal compositions unrelated to objective reality. Named "lyrical abstraction" they saw art as a union of sensation and color with the aim of abandoning recognizable subject matter to concentrate exclusively on form and color. This artistic movement also took up Simultanism the idea that colors look different depending on the other colors that are around them.

Sunflower Daze

Sunflower Daze

Your seeds flow spiraled

rows of future promised

for a world that grows

in petaled flowering

now through cycles opening

gently as you rise and

shine and sparkle dazzling

with your propagation

planted deep within

the kernel that is in you

so we stop and listen

as the ripening opens, feel

you blossom through this

moment and we’re grateful to be

caught inside the magic of your

sun filled flowering daze

Painting by Vincent Van Gogh

El Samovar de Rasputin

 

El Samovar de Rasputin

In La Boca

What dark destiny trolls these streets?

All around are painted walls from distant times

when ships sailed here to be broken

robbed, stripped and spent

as la vida tangoed on

in its toilet bowl of existence.

 

Here, a loose tiled sidewalk can jump

at you in any moment and you must keep

all your senses in this place or feel the knife

plunge its way through your vacio

as it cuts in a moment of madness

through all of what you know 

and taste as real.

Graphic: Stock Poster Image 

Note:
The Poem is an indirect ode to the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and in particular his famous short stories that involve duels between Knife Fighters.