The Center of Dominance

Jedidiah in Berlin calls Sean in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Sean is up before sunrise, drinking strong instant coffee, writing poems in his head, fishing tin cans from the creek and eventually dancing with two deer in the fog.Jedidiah has just been to an art gallery, looking at close-up reproductions of paintings by Swedish mountain painter Ferdinand Hodler. The paintings have been enlarged until the brushstrokes themselves become landscapes. They start talking about what makes a painting feel alive.“You don’t want a painting to stay still. If it is still… it has to move.”They get into the idea of the center of dominance—the element that commands a painting and holds it together, but can also stop it from moving.“The best paintings are the ones that keep moving.”“They’re all dry. They’re all not actually moving, but some of them are.”“What is it that is making them move?”From painting, the conversation moves into poetry: auto-dictating poems, speaking before self-consciousness gets in the way, and the importance of making something that actually hits something real.“I want it to be real. I don’t want it—if it’s not real, then what’s the point?”They wander into desert poetry and the idea that children were sent to live among nomadic desert peoples partly to absorb a richer spoken language.“When words become physical and it becomes a thing that is actually moving your mind so you’re moving through the world differently.”Then comes a poem about color, beginning:“A single fleck of red glitter embedded on the bathroom wall.”The poem travels through Golden State poppies, a mustard seed, cannabis, the Rasta flag, “big blue,” ultraviolet catastrophe and turquoise sky.“Consciousness moves to cannabis, which is as high as the Rasta flag reaches.”They talk about color as frequency, the rainbow as a hierarchy of energies, and whether “higher” and “lower” have anything to do with better and worse.“The energy is lower or higher. I mean, it’s not to say that it’s better or worse. Spirit doesn’t see things like that.”Then they invent a map of consciousness as a spinning pie chart, with different thoughts expanding and shrinking as they take turns becoming the center of attention.“We always have more than one thought bubbling at a time.”“With space, there’s things for things to move.”“Pretty soon we got ourselves a puppet show or early animation.”Sean reads his seven stages:“Stage one. You will forever be alone. Keep secrets.”“Stage two. Sift prime motivating factors to serve others.”“Stage three. I don’t exist. In my emptiness, there is joy.”“Stage four. Be a placeholder for others.”“Stage five. Bring nothing but love. A full heart is always full.”“Stage six. Revisiting anything means you are dead.”“Stage seven is well beyond words.”Then deer, birds, animal consciousness, intuition and the possibility that animals can sense something humans can’t.“They can totally feel somebody’s vibe and be like, yeah, let’s party.”“A dog can see into the astral realm.”The poems get increasingly wild: purple, green and gold; “smelling like Teen Spirit”; bowels of the earth; ancient bones; megalithic cave women; crocodiles in the prehistoric North Pole.“The last time Earth was this peaceful was never.”“50 million years ago it was hot as shit and crocodiles lived in the North Pole.”“This is hardly a poem and more reflection of a wild night at prom.”Painting, poetry, color, consciousness, animals, God, geological time and the wildness underneath civilization.“We’ve blown up and are out of comfort zone and entered the realm of rewilding.”“There is no settlement free from the wild.”