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turning over the ashes of the Unnamed

from Evocations: Exotic Settlers by Rusty Kjarvik

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about

"turning over the ashes of the Unnamed" is a piece commemorating the Indigenous struggles of Latin America. Initially, the writing process is based on experiences in Yucatec Maya communities. Recently, the sounding was recorded while following the tragic cycle of intermittent, and ultimately, futile justice in Guatemala to reconcile its genocidal history.

In nearly every traveller's experience, the settlements of (un)civilization often provide an impermanent, temporal space even for the most autonomous of vagabonds. Especially in my experience, the piano has been a portal through which my sojourning meets the firm legs of tradition. In this union, both the ephemeral and everlasting are bonded under a greater mystery of the always passing, transient truth, elevating us to a higher sense of travel as mutually relative to the foundational ground of human tradition. Memory and history seed the pangs of movement with the brilliant emanations of creative ingenuity and inspired reflection.

So, in this track, imagine the traveller, or "exotic settler" chancing upon a piano under the weary heel of an empty horizon ahead, and the spiralling beauty of tradition below. "turning over the ashes of the unnamed" is featured in the new self-published chapbook, "The Deceived Plane"

lyrics

a distant, dry flame
turning over the ashes of the unnamed
fallen in pits
beware, the presidential return

breeding with genocidal urns
loving the tirades that sink oceans
into Charybdis swarms

alone, centered by intoxication and my forlorn host
brother, in demise
a lonesome paradox in disguise
read and weep, as the ancients' rowing

cabins alight with pages
in the eyes of warring children
who cry in blood
and tear from the sod with teeth, cracked
amid the skeleton earth, war torn

greed, strapped aimlessly to the butterfly
home bearing Trotskyan steeds
in the fight to bring back wealth
to the lands of Zapatista

covered with stark, oppressive emotion
and chained, now
to the oriental rug

March 7, 2011
Chinatown Calgary

credits

from Evocations: Exotic Settlers, released April 23, 2013

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Rusty Kjarvik Brooklyn, New York

My ancestors are from the lands in and around what is now Norway, Poland, Germany and Greece. They lived above the Arctic Circle, spoke Yiddish, were Romaniote Greek, English settlers during the revolutionary war of America, and from Germany pioneered in 19th century Alberta, Canada where they also took Blackfoot names. They were buried in religious fame; and so I also go by Menachem ben Asser. ... more

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