February 2013 Words + Art Reading + Poem

exhibit | wheel of everyday life
artist | gunilla klingberg

If you look closely in the photos, you can see that this giant modern mandala is composed of familiar big-business logos.

POEM | BRANDED (feb 2013)

Branded –
is nothing sacred anymore?
In this day + age, it never was.
Wearing logos like bindis,
the seat of concealed wisdom,
but where is the wisdom?
I see only addiction.
A steeping in the form
the mandala is meant to liberate
To melt away the veil
– like glass –
standing between the real + unreal,
“outside” + “inside”.
But the unreal has come to dominate,
giving unnatural power to physical death,
lost as most humanity is
– as Morpheus so rightly said –
in “the desert of the real.”
Even so,
the illusion is unraveling.
I used to rail against my parents’
prohibitions against coke + mcdonald’s.
Caffeine made me crazy.
mcdonald’s was not gourmet.
Thank goodness for that refined taste
that seemed like snobbery
to child-me.
It saved me from the poison,
the addiction, the brand
of hypnosis.
Yet the mandala is designed to hypnotize.
Hypnotize through the eye’s devotion
to a gate to another world.
But that doesn’t work so much anymore.
The images are old.
To claim obsolescence of wisdom
is as heretical as the modern brands,
but it is a truth that
even truth grows stale.
Is there beauty in brands?
A scion of the wisdom says it is so –
says that brands + advertising
are the modern training in symbology,
the creation of a universal picture language
recognizable to all,
the forerunner outfitting in the over-scaling
of the walls of words + language
with telepathy,
transferring pictures mind-to-mind.
So in the profane,
we find the sacred after all.
And a Tibetan on a mountain
in the 1930s saw it coming…
Mandalas made of logos,
the god of the symbols,
temporarily grounded in the only
place humanity knows for now,
but previews of coming attractions
when all creative energy
is directed to the divine.

Our Debut Voicing Art Book

Voicing Art: Poetry of Space | Place | Time
is now available!

Poetry inspired by works of art, the art of nature and the exploration of beauty, perception and insight through the cartography of the unseen.

 

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