Cianalas/Tãsknota launch is live

a Folk Opera film

Here is the link to my Kickstarter that went live about an hour ago (we have 30 days to reach the goal!): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thislongingisourhome/cianalas-tasknota-an-album-length-folk-opera-music-video

I want to share a bit about the storyboard for the film.

There is a point in this film/memoir, where, after deep salmon-wisdom, into early Christian stronger-than-death love, then the creed hammering, the beautiful side of monasticism, then the witch hunts, the crusades, etc… I will eventually lose my colours and my flowers, and turn a sort of beige. And… deeper down and further in, I will go blind-folded into what “making all things new” looks like. I may even end up looking like a sort of Picasso painting, showing all dimensions and angles of time while singing in German, Rilke’s line from The Archaic Torso of Apollo:

denn da ist keine Stelle,

die dich nicht sieht. 

Du musst dein Leben ändern

This dimensionality will appear after the confession and the apology as someone who was born with a face that represents the edge of the colonial shadow - and it will appear before an embodied, metabolized sense of all that ever was, scars and all.

Although it may not seem like it at first glance, because it is music and not philosophically dense, this album, Cianalas/Tãsknota has been deeply influenced by the time I have been spending with integral thinker Jean Gebser. (The entry points to him, before diving into his book The Ever-Present Origin, have been Cynthia Bourgeault and Jeremy Johnson.)

Gebser knew we were headed for a time in which a “new factor” (a multifaceted, co-created factor) would have to emerge beyond technocratic rationalism:

“The condition of today’s world cannot be transformed by technocratic rationality, since both technocracy and rationality are apparently nearing their apex; nor can it be transcended by preaching or admonishing a return to ethics and morality, or in fact, by any form of return to the past.”

But he also said:

“Before we can discern the new, we must know the old.”

So this Folk Opera is just one contribution to how we might “know the old” and “discern the new”.

The end of the opera shifts into surrender and powerfully tender devotion… and culminates, in the whole of creation praising the Maker… within all things.

I don’t have the example of the Rock Dove costume I am working on, but at the end, during the song Praise the Maker, there will be flickering glimpses of me in a ballet-like bird-god costume, (inspired by Mark Wallace’s book When God was a Bird), sitting on a cosmic egg.

All of these visions, these dreams, are in a sort of lucid place right now, and to bring them to “this density” (as Teilhard de Chardin called it), it will take a bit of joining together in a collective on this Kickstarter.

I see already since I’ve started to write this, that we’ve reached 6% of the goal. So thank-you to my early-bird supporters - for sharing in this vision.