Author Archives: lefnat18

Spiritus Mundi

Leave a reply

Nathan Lefkoff

Calculated Poem: Spiritus Mundi

Inspired by: -W.B. Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming

-research on the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption

-research on the bombing of Hiroshima during WWII

Spritus Mundi- “spirit of the world” (from The Second Coming)

————————————————————————————————————

Spiritus Mundi

Grieving in the gain of loss,

St. Helena tore herself open

and regurgitated like a mother bird for nine hours

to betray 11 million animals, 4 billion feet of timber,

and the man with the cats that could have fled but did not.

A force 500 times the bomb over Hiroshima,

the cloud that was purple and flashed internally.

Bodies erupted and spewed their dust and ashes

and something recoiled like the hand from the fire

and somebody stared as blank and as pitiless

as the face of a mountain.

That plane was a falcon,

strapped to its master,

and all it could hear was the falconer

as it shunned the gaping

its pilot blinder than the bomb that fell

to deafen a nation

and hatch desert birds that were trapped in the chests

of tens of thousands

to fly with the wind

and to nest in volcanoes

Week 7 Neuro Reverie

Leave a reply

Week 7 Neuro Reverie

“The headline on Sky News on April 26, 2010 read: ‘Murdered Gangster’s Brain Donated to Science: Scientists Have Been Given the Chance to Get Inside the Mind of One of Australia’s Most Notorious Gangsters.’ It was reporting the fact that Roberta Williams had given ‘experts’ permission to examine the brain of her husband, Carl Williams, who had been murdered in Melbourne’s maximum security Barwon Prison less than three years into a thirty-five year sentence. ‘I believe it’s to help with research,’ Mrs. Williams is quoted as saying, ‘and might help explain why guys like Carl do the violent things they do.’”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 165). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Who can fathom the thoughts of a notorious murdering gangster? Who can fathom any thought that does not stem from their own brain in the present moment? I picture a team of neuroscientists, suiting up as they prepare to enter into a dead mind that once thought dark thoughts. They are going to shrink to the size of brain cells and venture into the mind of Carl Williams like hikers venturing into wilderness. “What is there to find?” they wonder as their latex gloves began to coax sweat from eager, clammy hands. They will find dim and endless forests, pools of love at the base of extraordinary mountains and mazey caves without exits leading into them. They will see the cancerous growth of violence protruding from the earth like the head of a stone giant aroused from buried sleep. They will see the tense expression of anger and sadness, his behemoth fears, the innocence that fuels his rampant trample over the beauty around him. He sculpted a criminal mind with looming silence and the pounding of his massive fists.

Spring Week 7 Log

Leave a reply

Spring Week 7 Log

Sunday 5/12:

-1/2 hour reading Neuro (ch.6)

-1 hour writing Neuro reverie

-1/2 hour editing eAlphabet site

-1/2 hour working on term paper

-2.5 hours recording music

Day total: 5 hours

Monday 5/13:

-2 hours at the student seminar

–4 hours of editing music

-3 hours of recording music

-1/2 hour reading TGAO

-1/2 hour revising Neuro reverie

Day total: 10 hours

Tuesday 5/14:

-1/2 hour reading TGAO

-2.5 hours in class

-1.5 hours editing recordings

-2 hours recording music

Day total: 6.5 hours

Wednesday 5/15:

-1.5 hours in class (Calculated Poetics)

-1/2 hour reading Neuro

-1/2 hour reading TGAO

-1.5 hours recording music

-1/2 hour recording (gathering) sounds from the Evergreen campus and woods

-2 hours editing recordings

-1/2 hour revising poem

Day total: 7 hours

Thursday 5/16:

-2 hours in class (calculated poetics)

-2 hours recording music

-2 hours editing music

-1/2 hour reading Neuro

Day total: 6.5

Friday 5/17:

-2 hours editing music

-1 hour recording music

-1 hour recording (gathering) sounds from the Evergreen campus and woods

-1 hour reading TGAO

Day total: 5 hours

Saturday 5/18:

-1/2 hour editing the eAlphabet page

-1/2 hour reading Neuro

-1 hour editing recordings

-1 hour writing artist lecture paper

Day total: 3 hours

Week 7 hours: 43 hours

Total hours: 84.5 hours

April 29th

Leave a reply

Doom is the house without the door.

Insanity is the house

in which all doors lead to doors

leading to doors and doors

and doors.

Now and then

we come across the Only Mirror,

a lotus in that howling jungle

that is too wide and too narrow.

We tend to stumble past this.

Now and then

we stop and look and see reflections glimpse ourselves

eye to eye

pupil into pupil

and something in us mutters,

murmurs,

“I’m looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you

looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you”

On the edge of the jungle there is a remedy for sadness

that wanders like the Elk of the temperate rainforest

with a key to the asylum around his neck.

And he often stops to wonder

at his reflection in still waters.

His eyes black with passion,

a golden key around his neck

dangling.

A tattered lab coat hanging from his antlers,

blowing in the wind like a white flag of surrender.

Spring Week 6 Log

Leave a reply

Sunday 5/5:

-1 hours reading TGAO (The Great Animal Orchestra)

-1 hour reading Neuro (ch.5)

-1/2 hour writing Neuro reverie

-2.5 hours recording music

-1 hour editing tracks

-1/2 hour calculated poetics readings

Day total: 6.5 hours

Monday 5/6:

-2 hours at the student seminar

-1 hour reading TGAO

-2 hours recording music

-1 hour calculated poetics readings

-1/2 hour writing calculated poem

Day total: 7 hours

Tuesday 5/7:

-2.5 hours in class (Guest Poet: Susan Gevirtz)

-1/2 hour reading TGAO

-1/2 hour revising reverie

-1/2 hour revising the eAlphabet site

-1/2 hour reading Exercises in Style

Day total: 4.5 hours

Wednesday 5/8:

-1.5 hour in class (calculated poetics)

-1.5 hours in artist lecture (Susan Gevirtz)

-1.5 hours working on my term paper

-1 hour recording music

-1 hour reading TGAO

-1/2 revising calculated poem

Day total: 7 hours

Thursday 5/9:

-2 hours in class (calculated poetics lecture and seminar)

-2 hours recording music

-1.5 hours editing recordings

-1/2 hour reading TGAO

Day total: 6 hours

Friday 5/10:

-2 hours recording (gathering) sounds from the Evergreen campus and woods

-1 hour reading TGAO

-1 hour reading Neuro (ch.6)

Day total: 4.5 hours

Saturday 5/11:

-1 hour reading Neuro (ch.6)

-1 hour recording (gathering) sounds from the Evergreen campus and woods

-3 hours recording music

-1 hour editing recordings

Day total: 6 hours

Week Six Hours: 41.5 hours

Total Hours: 41.5 hours

Week 6 Neuro Reverie

Leave a reply

“It appeared that this challenged the conventional, rationalist accounts of ascription—that we understand the intentions of others by creating theories about what lies behind their appearance or their acts, on the basis of our own commonsense psychology about their desires and their beliefs about how to achieve them. It was not through theorizing about others, but through feeling what they feel, that we understand the mental states of others. I really do ‘feel your pain.’”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 146). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

“We have a social brain in that the brain has evolved to favor a certain type of sociality manifested in all the interactions between persons and groups that come naturally to humans in our social lives. And we have a social brain in that this organ in now construed as malleable, open to, and shaped by, social interaction—shaping sociality as it is itself reshaped by it.”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. (p. 163). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

The masses dethrone the mind so that we wake up at night and hate ourselves and hate our lives and reach out for flesh and LED screens and the bottles and the needle and the scalpel that’s only purpose is to divide and divide and divide. Now I picture a brain surgeon alone in a sterilized space, dressed in pale green garments with a scalpel raised about his naked brain. I wish that for a moment I could hold my mind in the cup of my hands. To turn it over like the heavy weight it is and to mold what I am told is malleable. So this is why my heart beats and where it pumps most of its blood. Oh my mind, my mind, you’re a thirsty beast aren’t you? Thanks for the daydream; something in me was parched for some poetry.

Me is for Music and The Midnight

Leave a reply

Field Study Proposal/Abstract

Through the immersion and exploration of my music and lyrics, as well as natural sounds, I will work to answer this question: What is sound, how does sound carry meaning, and what does my own sound (my music and lyrics) mean to me? The answer to this question will be accomplished through my immersion in the creation of my material followed by self-reflection upon the background of each song. Also to be included in this study is the reading and analysis of books on the subject sound that I have selected for individual research during Spring quarter.

The majority of students in our program this quarter will be basing their immersion, research, etc on the work of someone else. For what I am trying to accomplish, the idea of using outside methods seems counterintuitive. How can I base my methods of self-reflection around the work of others when I am my own scientist and only subject? My final term paper will be based on the organization and methodology of Susan Howe’s The Midnightin that the essay will be in the form of a journal.

Howe’s Midnight: I can imagine it being written by her all at once, alone and lucid in the middle of the night. Surrounded by bed hangings, scraps of herself and her past and the past of the world, she stared with eyes wide open into total darkness. When the Midnight is pitch black, it is a mirror, a wreck to dive into that jostles the senses and the mind and the heart and makes us as desperate and as fiendish as dogs to grasp and clasp and smash together the fleeting fragments echoing ghosts within ourselves and to squish them into something concrete that in the end crumbles in our hands like dry bread no matter how fast we scramble or how hard we try and cry out, like dogs. Dogs in the night, how(e)ling at the darkness as if there were never a moon or stars in the sky. In darkness, the light of the mind becomes clearer.

This paper is an exploration of sound science and current artwork that I have produced as well as a critical analysis of the artwork of my past. Where do my passion and history intersect with the music I make? How have the sounds of nature influenced my music as well as that of the culture I am a part of? I also delved into the idea of music as an evolutionary tool for self-expression and survival; a way for us to live with our Midnights without being blinded by the darkness.

To me, the Midnight that fuels Susan Howe’s work lies within us. It is an internal darkness from which light and music arise. It is the part of ourselves that we sense but cannot fully comprehend. It is fluctuating, untranslatable. The Midnight is the weight of self-awareness; the not knowing, the torment, the necessity of art, of music.

ABCs and 123s – weekly log and field notes

Spring Week 9 Log June 3, 2013 Spring Week 9 Log Sunday 5/26: -3 hours working on term paper -1 hour recording music -1.5 hours editing recordings -1/2 hour editing eAlphabet site Day total: 6 Monday 5/27: -4 hours working on term paper -1.5 hours recording -1.5 ...
Spring Week 8 Log May 27, 2013 Spring Week 8 Log Sunday 5/19: -1 hour writing Neuro reverie -1 hour editing and adding to the eAlphabet site -1 hour reading TGAO -1 hour editing recordings -1/2 hour recording music Day total: 4.5 hours Monday 5/20: -2 ...
Spring Week 7 Log May 19, 2013 Spring Week 7 Log Sunday 5/12: -1/2 hour reading Neuro (ch.6) -1 hour writing Neuro reverie -1/2 hour editing eAlphabet site -1/2 hour working on term paper -2.5 hours recording music Day total: 5 hours Monday 5/13: -2 ...
Spring Week 6 Log May 14, 2013 Sunday 5/5: -1 hours reading TGAO (The Great Animal Orchestra) -1 hour reading Neuro (ch.5) -1/2 hour writing Neuro reverie -2.5 hours recording music -1 hour editing tracks -1/2 hour calculated poetics readings Day total: 6.5 hours Monday ...

Bachelardian Reverie

Week 9 Neuro Reverie May 29, 2013 Week 9 Neuro Reverie “We will undoubtedly find support fir the core contention of the human sciences, that human societies are not formed by aggregations of such isolates, each bounded by ...
Week 8 Neuro Reverie May 22, 2013 Week 8 Neuro Reverie “…your brain is amazing; it is flexible; it can be trained, developed, improved, optimized: learn to use it well for your own benefit and for that of ...
Week 7 Neuro Reverie May 19, 2013 Week 7 Neuro Reverie “The headline on Sky News on April 26, 2010 read: ‘Murdered Gangster’s Brain Donated to Science: Scientists Have Been Given the Chance to Get Inside the ...
Week 6 Neuro Reverie May 6, 2013 “It appeared that this challenged the conventional, rationalist accounts of ascription—that we understand the intentions of others by creating theories about what lies behind their appearance or their acts, on ...

Poetry

https://soundcloud.com/nat-lefkoff/strange-bird-with-colton

https://soundcloud.com/nat-lefkoff/everything-passing-with-louise

https://soundcloud.com/nat-lefkoff/drumsticks-written-with-louise

https://soundcloud.com/nat-lefkoff/vampire

https://soundcloud.com/nat-lefkoff/centipede-with-louise-decramer

https://soundcloud.com/nat-lefkoff/great-white-plains-1

Poetry Observed

(embedded youtube or Vimeo video will go here)

Term Paper

Part 1

http://blogs.evergreen.edu/ealphabet/music-and-the-midnight-part-1