as animal molts

As the Animal Molts

Speaking of not-working as a work of art

who said that underworld dreaming and shedding ones skin

while transitioning into a novel form of creative life

has anything to do with work in the first place?

During a deep dream at the turn of this year

an animal appeared and by the time I awoke

I felt like it was time to reinvestigate

what we have come to call Human Nature

as in

"Is it in human nature to dream the animal spirit?"

And in dreaming it are we somehow connecting

with another aspect of our own creative momentum

while resisting the call of materialism?

Or at least by asking those questions

that's how I programmed myself

to interpret both the dream and what ensued

For what ensued i.e. manifested soon after the dream

was the fact that here in Kailua where we recently

opened a new branch of Mark Amerika Nature Photography

the new year was brought in with the arrival

of a rare and endangered Hawaiian monk seal

In fact the Hawaiian monk seal

is the most endangered marine animal

in all of the United States of America

So its arrival on our local beach

where most of our photography takes place

was quite an occasion for everyone

since as the neighborhood elders noted

"Nobody has ever seen one on these shores"

For me the deep dream that was really a premonition

and that anticipated the arrival of the monk seal

was heightened by the fact that one of the rants

I wrote the morning after the dream

featured some spontaneous riffs devoted to molting

or what I imagined to be a kind of "creative molting process"

which is related to why the monk seal was at the beach

that is to say it came to sleep and molt

Coincidence?

Probablistic algorithm?

Pseudorandom numbers crunching

my overcalculated visualization scheme?

What is the anticipated runtime

of my premonition algorithm?

Did it originate in my deep dream

the script I improvised the morning after

or the moment the seal began molting?

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Excerpt from the improvised morning rant:

"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit"

writes Ralph Waldo Emerson

and yet what is nature in virtuality

and do we wear the colors of the spirit

while postproducing in VirtualRealityLand?

This is not Second Life new age self-flagellation

nor is it a reactionary Get A Life doctrinaire formula

for those who are feeling irrelevant

It's more about going deep inside

the studio of your cosmicomic soul

as part of your "going back to nature"

Your nature

But a nature that has become overdetermined

overbought oversold overstretched

overcompensating for its supposed lack

while it still attempts to maintain ultimate value

Uber Value

as an avant-garde agent of formal radicalism

standing fast before the brave new world

of digicash paracurrencies funding subprime

point and click megaconsumerism high

on the gutted bellies of their SOMA sanctuaries

artificially juiced by their mixed reality TV boxes

stoned on the engorgement of organic Gee Whiz

melting plastic fantastic time forming dense molds

of plastered brains saturated with excess lies

that artificially inflate ones sense of self-esteem

even as the wet-dream of climbing Trumped towers

leaves them feeling on the verge of collapse

Meanwhile all of these autogenerated 3-D boxes

keep sprouting around your body aura

trying to close you in and categorize you

so that you can be easily packaged and neutered

into the soft blue funk of an ethereal oblivion

Who are you this time?

Creative Art Think!

Designer Guru!

Interactive Pipe Dream!

Mobilized Mega Hype Star!

Long Lost Messiah!

Morbid Meshuguna!

This is when your Second Life begins boxing you in

layering itself over your mythological body

as it swiftly navigates through the faux environments

your artwork gets ported through as part of some

ongoing social energy force field of commercial relatedness

Meanwhile your creative spirit has become compromised

and you're wondering if maybe you are losing touch

with the necessary angel of animal magnetism

your creative body has been moving-remixing in

Imagine another life beyond Second Life

beyond the totally immersive video game of your dreams

a life where you see yourself throwing off your avatar-skin

a kind of creative molting process

but where you have multiple layers to peel away

every layer stripped off a deeper peeling of the onion

as more and more of the unknown opens up to you

and you get closer to what you can only imagine is

the heart of the source material

As you continue shedding away the layers of skin

with increasing gain force speed and intensity

and the Outer You keeps disappearing faster than ever

you inevitably become hyperaware of the fact that

you will never really truly get to the core of the matter

because the core of the matter does not exist as a core

but is an all-encompassing source material

and these layers you keep shedding and discarding

reveal the molting process in fastforward motion

since new layers keep growing back faster than you can molt

and so now this screaming fast coming loose of the avatar

becomes a never-ending quest to reveal to yourself

everything you don't know and will never know

until there is nothing left but the dreaming-molting

the sensation of letting yourself go as you tap into

the "molting lava" of what hides just underneath the skin

the skin of your role-playing avatar as it shakes everything off

and you go back to first skins best skins every only skins

meanwhile the rumble of the deep interior anticipating

your next inside-out creative eruption

and somewhere in the middle of this molting-lava striptease

where your inside is out and your outside is in

you ask yourself "What is it that seeks?"

Pseudo-Self Portrait of the Artist

as Endangered Hawaiian Monk Seal

by Mark Amerika Nature Photography

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Metadata: Hawaiian Monk Seal, art, nature photography, dreams,