Gareth Calway - Bard On The Wire: Dante

Showing posts with label Dante. Show all posts

January 21, 2019

Around Creation in 80 Minutes - The Baba Lovers "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love"

Sedgeford poet Gaz Calway has teamed up with the North Carolina singer-songwriter Gabriella Tal on an album of unusual lovesongs. The album - called "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love" - begins on an Indian hilltop with a devotional chant before taking the listener through a hell at the centre of earth and out the other side to Eden and in a thrilling ascent of seven heavens, each more enchanting and ego-free than the last.

"Hell isn’t other people; it's ourselves, our self-fulfilling

Cock up conspiracy clouds, our I-land's alien nation."

In the process, the performers experience a growing self-knowledge and meet ideas and characters drawn from all over the world and from all arts, cultures and Faiths. There are references to Dante's hell, purgatory and heaven; the Arthurian quest for the grail; the Sufi 'Conference of the Birds;' the soul-realising love stories of Leila and Majnun and Lancelot and Guinevere; Celtic maidens, Homeric and Hindu gods, Judaic angels, Shiva's snake; Jacob's ladder; and an immortal Light glimmering beyond the dark forest of the material world.

Listeners voyage through (inner) space like grail knights, preparing to overcome the terrifying challenge of the fourth heaven where ego and love struggle for final supremacy and to avoid a great fall back to the start.

Dante was guided on a similar path by Virgil and Beatrice. Gaz and Gabriella are guided all the way to the Seventh Heaven by the written works of the twentieth century Indian Spiritual Master Meher Baba, at whose Tomb-shrine the musical game begins.

The attractively packaged album with 24 page lyric booklet is released on 31 January and available via www.thebabalovers.bandcamp.com where an online version is also available for download. The duo's online single "Heavenly Moon" featuring two tracks from the album is available there now. The album releases here on 31 January 2019 - https://thebabalovers.bandcamp.com/album/6-degrees-of-separation-7-degrees-of-love

July 10, 2017

Dr Who Am I and the Zen Trails of Hafiz - the studio album. (out now)

This link to a 60 minute digital solo album on Bandcamp is now live. Dr Who Am I and The Zen Trails of Hafiz.

It is a 21st C take on Dante's Divine Comedy.

Track listings

1.	The Word On The Street And The Lovecraft 04:17	lyrics	buy track
	2.	The Last Flight To Heaven 03:26
	3.	Faith, Give This Who-Man Inspiration03:54
	4.	Hell -001 to Hell -005 (The Night Train To Dis) 06:27
	5.	Dis (Hell Bottom) 04:23
	6.	Eden (A Love That Involves Evolution)01:29
	7.	Welcome To Heaven 05:22
	8.	Starry Eyed (Heaven 001) 03:34
	9.	666 Rockets (Heaven 002) 05:52
	10.	Ruling The Gods (Heaven 003) 06:38
	11.	At The Kuber Pass (Heaven 004) 07:02
	12.	All In The Mind (Heaven 005) 04:54
	13.	This Face That Burns Upon My Eye In Searing Fiery Gale (Heaven 006) 03:47
	14.	Grail Accomplished (Heaven 007) 03:33
	15.	This Face That Burns/Midnight Lamp02:07
	16.	This is God 01:05

about

Meet Bond. Adam in a Bond. (Agent 00Heaven.) Licenced to save. You will need him in the fourth heaven.

Can he get astro knight grail pilot Dr Who Am I and grail navigator Lt O Who Ru through hell and up to the seventh heaven before Kuber destroys the cosmos?

The album brings you the full story in 16 ghazals lovingly crafted into sound adventures. As first performed in the Norwich underground, July 2015. Now available in its finished studio form to the entire cosmos!

"6 Degrees of Separation: 7 Degrees of Love. (ghazals, sonnets and villanelles) Sheriar Press.

View and buy the book here

poems inspired by the life and works of Meher Baba

(1894-1969)

January 31 2019

Bowthorpe Cemetery April 12 2019, on the fortieth anniversary of the event described on below (p.13 of the book). Despite a prolonged search down memory lane, on this occasion, very much older and infinitesimally wiser - and unlike previous revisits - I couldn't find the gravestone; but I was given this vision of new life (pictured above) instead.

The day we met[1]I stepped inside your door

To say goodbye forever, so hell bent

On every kind of unemployment,

Schoolboy-giggling at work so heaven-sure

But you knocked me senseless to the floor,

Saying heaven on earth was what you meant

Which rang an old school bell and testament

To the word on the street I was searching for.

Gaining heart, I crossed my city of the dead

To Easter Thursday chancing on a grave

Dated the day I was born and lay down.

‘What’s lost in the wasteland is found there,’ it said

‘Who loses himself for love will be saved,’

‘Who dies lives’ and my heart, lost to you, was found.

[1]I attended a Meher Baba introductory meeting at UEA, the University from which I’d recently graduated, on January 31 1979. The elderly speaker was Lady Dorothy Hopkinson. I was late arriving and giggled hysterically throughout. Dorothy had a physical condition that made her tremble in addition to which her Western intellectual audience was largely bemused or hostile. She affirmed with impressive moral courage a (to my ears) bizarre vision of the modern world but then concluded with her belief (which my heart shared though I lacked her moral spine to affirm it in public) that God can only be found within us. At the end, I felt I owed her at least the respect of apologizing for my rudeness before I turned my craven back on the whole adventure. She asked me if I wanted a hug. It was of course exactly what I wanted and I spent the next day wondering what had hit me. I resisted the explanation that the unfamiliar and joyous new sense of purpose – the now to me unmistakable presence of Meher Baba - had anything to do with that crazy meeting. But by Maundy Thursday 1979 I was living in a kind of vision and the poetic allegory described in this poem was actually happening in the ‘real’ world. An epiphany. The courtship - or perhaps the honeymoon - before the marriage.

Dr Who Am I and The Zen Trails of Hafiz (theDante-esque adventure described in Part B of the Book) is the soul's long journey home through hell on earth and the seven heavens to God. It has been made into a musical album with 24 page lyric booklet, featuring the poet and singer-songwriter Gabriella Tal. Like the book, it is called "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love"

https://www.sheriarbooks.org/product/6-degrees-of-separation/

Buy the book here
Publisher's Facebook story about it here

Publisher- http://www.sheriarbooks.org/

What is the book about?

Nothing. And Everything.

And the long love-longing to get from one to the other.

All the poems in the book are written for singing or some kind of musical performance.

"If God did not love music, the world could never have come into being;

And if men did not love music they would never get to God." (Francis Brabazon)

Part A - The Calling

Beyond Doing - Beyond Doing "You say Heavenly Moon, I say Beyond Doing" Poet and singer performing different sections of this ghazal in different ways.

The Word of the Street and the Love Craft (a rough mix)

Leila and Majnun; Lancelot and Guinevere

One of my more avid readers once declared that she prefers love stories of married people to tales of, in whatever sense, extra-marital or courtly love. Part A certainly beats a heart drum for explicitly married love poetry but my belief is that Leila and Majnun (and the Western, less obviously spiritual versions Lancelot and Guinevere) represent the longing for the unattainable 'other' half that marriage channels. Just because we spend every day with a person does not make them any less of quest to achieve: 'knowing' in the (ironically termed) Biblical sense is only a small part of really knowing. The historical place of courtly love for the nobility (ie love achieved outside of a marriage primarily a land transaction) gave way around the time of the Reformation to a culture interested in love stories of married people and in practical terms women's long journey in the West from sex/love objects to equals and business partners began about then. But if you're looking for passionate and mystical love in Milton's married (and pre-Fall 'knowing') Adam and Eve, good luck. "He for God only; she for the God in him." Give me Dante's transcendent Beatrice every time.

Part B - Dr Who Am I and The Zen Trails of Hafiz

https://soundcloud.com/gaz29-1/the-tyranny-of-dead-forms-rap (Hell)

'New mezzo del caiman di rostra vita.'

Taking my Dante pastiche to Florence:

The Night Train To Dis (film)

Whoops! Hell 1 and Hell 2 are in the wrong order and it should be Perseus not Jason on p.43.

Perseus in the Piazza della Signori in Florence.

All of Part B of this book was performed live by heart under St Benedict's St in Norwich in July 2015. (see pics)

The poet as Dr Who Am I in the stage show of the book.

Apart from two villanelles, the book is made up of ghazals and sonnets. Here's one of the 'Hell' villanelles-

Hiroshima, The 4th degree of Separation

Some video and audio versions of the "Zen Trails of Hafiz" ghazals sung by Gabriella Tal:

Hear a musical version of pp. 40-41 sung by Gabriella Tal

Watch a video version

Seeing Is Believing (film)

SEEING IS BELIEVING! a must hear!

All In The Heart (Sixth Heaven) (film)

But only God is real: This Is God

Gabriella's 10 track solo album of these ghazals

Gabriella's video sequence of these ghazals "Seven Flights of Love".

April 06, 2017

Goodbye Cruel World

Hear it realised as a sound poem here.

Film to follow:

An autumn leaf detaches itself from a tree and Falls. On it is some writing - a suicide note. The performer catches it in his hand.

The performer holds an antique magazine issue of Dante's inferno (vol 1 of 36, publ. 1903) with a burnt-brown cover. He is wearing shades and removes them during the Dis-tinted spectacles verse, only to restore them before the end. He indicates his heart on "This Not (knot) only love dares to tease undone." A modern take on Dante at the mouth of hell.

Now was the day departing, and the air
Embrown’d with shadows… (Inferno)

As fall off the light autumnal leaves
One still another following, till the bough
Strews all its honours on the earth beneath
E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood
Cast themselves, one by one, down from the shore
Each at a beck as falcon at his call. (Inferno)

The night train West voids a soiled brown note and leaves the downfall station;
Goodbye Cruel World - I trust you receive THIS communication.

The Zoo-break heart-freeze sin-beasts of Dante shadow the Circle Line,
Paddle up shit creeks out in the Styx to Dis-on-Vacation.

Spine-chilling out dark half glasses of Daily Hell, Bank Holiday
Messiahs Dis-May my heart; Dis Troy, dim Dante’s Vision.

God save me from my Dis-tinted spectacles’ bewitching
Bewildering shadows of Dis-appointment Dis-guised as Eden.

God save me from Dis-consolation Discourse, Fifty Shades
Of Grave; the pinched shrill of Avant-God; this don't know 'Who' we are from Adam.

The name is Bond. Adam in a Bond. The Actor Who Can't Go On.
Wash off this Who-do, not dis, not dis, this suicide mission.

Hell isn’t other people…….It’s ourselves, our self-fulfilling
Cock-up conspiracy clouds; our I-land’s alien nation.

Marx says to do is to be; Sartre to be is to do, Sinatra
Do be do be do this ‘Not’ only Love dares to tease undone.

Who to do or not to do? to be or not to be? Who’s that
At the tunnel’s end? Death. I embrace your oblivion.

August 07, 2015

Gaz and Morra Raise Hell, Gin Fest 2015

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Watch the show here

Two scenes from T.S. Eliot's Waste Land; a homage to Dante ('The Night Train' and 'At The Gate') and a hymn to the Beat (the opening of 'Beat Music') at a folk festival in a pub garden. You can't say we don't go for it! Making a stand at the Gate with the poet of the shamrock and the rose ( bruva by anuva muva Anto). As Bruvva Luther once said, we can do no uva.

big pics above by Perce Paradise

below by Festival dude kind of in order

The SAGA louts

Beautiful Days and Paradise

Joe and Mary

The Fried Pirates

'Gaz and Morra Raise Hell' came to Gin Fest on 8 August 2015. It started as a hastily reconceptualised version of Dr Who Am I and the Zen Trails of Hafiz on 19 July (see below) as 'Heaven and Hell' - two of the three Hafiz astronauts vacated the tardis after 3 months of gruelling training at the last moment (all part of the divine plan) but the trip must go on and it did in the most delightful way - and two weeks later we're back with a high speed version that we think you'll like. We get you from hell eg this and this to heaven a hell of a lot quicker.