alan liles - Waving Hello

Two-thousand-and-seven was a profoundly depressing year for me personally. It’s hard to say why. Or rather, it isn’t easy to explain concisely and well. Nor is it pleasing to resurrect the living dead in the maudlin fields of desolate times. I had been separated from the daily lives of my young children for over three long years. Since leaving my failed marriage of twenty-one years. And the lovingly hand-rubbed beeswax house… I had built with my own hands… on the seventy-acre organically certified New England farm… I had bought with money from the sale of my artist’s “live-work” space in Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, Massachusetts… where I had lived and worked as an underground artist in Boston in the eighties. Not to mention the laborious love called… Ediblehaus Bread bakery

In the terrible year two-thousand-and-three then. I left a beloved boy and a barely-known beloved girl, seven-and-a-half and five years of age. Abandoned a rich, earthy country life, a young family… a splendid Tulikivi soapstone hearth that warmed the backs of us on cold snowy mornings in a place called home… in Northfield, New Hampshire. Closed a successful organic… the whole spectrum of whole grains from teff to spelt, freshly stone-milled in house, sour dough cultured and yeasted, hand-weighed, hand-mixed, hand-kneaded, hand-shaped, peel-delivered-by-hand onto the wood-fired hearth, delivered by me…. the one and only baker of Ediblehaus… in flour-dusted, sweaty person, hand to hand

Closed forever then

An organic, handmade, to-die-for “god bread”… tiny bread bakery. A grand labor of conscience and undying love… a very small but growing business of radical culinary love and grandiose intent…. a hand-hewn “right livelihood” on the land to save the planet from the corporate death-machine Wonder

Walked… limped and crawled… out on decades of fermented love, sweat, tears, curses and heady joy. Drove what little I desired to carry in a ’94 Toyota Previa van with a hundred- thousand miles on it. Four-thousand miserable miles across the toxic, wintry wasteland of corporatized America in a dubious hearse then… No. A coffin on wheels… to quote my jolly mechanic. And eventually ended up in the sweltering Emerald Triangle of northern California, Humboldt County. At Heartwood Institute.

Why Heartwood? one might ask. And the simple answer would be. To study Healing With Whole Foods with Paul Pitchford, the guru of Healing With Whole Foods in the nineties, who lived, worked and taught Asian Healing Arts, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Zen Shiatsu classes there for twenty-five years.

But. Nothing is as simple, or as obvious, as it seems. Or so they say, they say, they

So. One day while delivering my “god bread”… made from my own original, endlessly creative formulae… in sweaty, flour-dusted person… at a local health food store… in the early two-thousands. I was accosted by a curious, idiosyncratic young man who appeared to be working… or loitering mysteriously… in the produce department. He told me enthusiastically that my handmade-organic-freshly-milled-whole-grains-wood-fired bread… reminded him… of a bread he had enjoyed at a place called… Heartwood… where he had… learned to bake bread naked. Where he had studied for a brief time with a man called Paul Pitchford

A man called Paul Pitchford…. whom I reminded him of. Him, the mysterious, eccentric young man, loitering or working? in the produce department of a local health food store where I sold bread.

You remind me of a man I studied with at a place called Heartwood. Your bread reminds me of the bread we made there

My curiosity aroused… my spiritual antenna alerted… by the above statement, I asked him. Who was this man and where exactly did you study with him? Instead of answering me directly, he made an odd gesture with his head that was intended to mean something to the effect of… follow me, hombre

And so I followed him to the esoteric… health and spirituality… “new age” book rack in the health food reference section of the local health food store. Where he placed in my hands the book, Healing With Whole Foods, by Paul Pitchford.

But. What in the hell does all this have to do with…. WAVE PATTERNS!?!

And the profoundly depressing year…

Ah. Yes. Let’s back up a year. No. Let’s move forward a year. No. Let’s

In late February of two-thousand-and-three I left home and went to Heartwood to study massage therapy. A year later in two-thousand-and-four I graduated from Heartwood with a thousand-plus-hour degree in Asian Healing Arts and Nutritional Counseling. I had also been taught the therapeutic massage modalities: Swedish massage, Deep Tissue massage, Cranial Sacral Therapy and Zen Shiatsu, Masunaga Style.

While at, or near Heartwood… somewhere deep within the steamy Emerald Triangle… in or around ’04-’05… I met and fell in love, more or less, with a young, beautiful… twenty-eight-year-old female classmate. Then. In the spring-summer of ’05 we traveled together across country in the coffin… back to the “killing fields” of New Hampshire, back to the abandoned organic farm

Back to the scene of the crime?

Yes. More and less. We traveled back to one dilapidated, rat-bat-bird-porcupine-infested barn in particular on the property in New Hampshire where I had stored all of my artwork and writings. All of my art-working and related materials… the collected, accumulated junk of the ages… which I had once required in order to make the re-cycled material “constructivist”… "assemblage"... “junk art”… which I had indulged in…. in the grungy warehouses and piss-bedazzled alleyways of Boston… Beacon Hill, Jamaica Plain and Somerville throughout the eighties

My ex-wife and kids had migrated to Vermont by then. The farm was for sale. I needed to tend to my artistic legacy, you see? It was time

And so, my young, fertile female accomplice and I…. I, at the ripe age of fifty!

We built a prodigious "burning man" funeral pyre consisting of all of my constructivist artwork and related materials… tossed in all of my esoteric spiritual writings for fire-starter… heaved on top at the last second, the old (1840’s) wood-and-iron mantle clock from my grandmother’s southern plantation, with my grandfather’s ashes hidden inside… and

WITH A WHOOSH!!!

We burned me.

All of me that mattered, or didn’t, to that hideous point. We burned, turned and buried the Collected Works of Alan Liles. On the hallowed, rich, black ground of the old decayed compost pile. Behind the dilapidated, weathered grey barn. In the fresh, waving green fields of spring, early summer. In Northfield, New Hampshire. And left for a three-day workshop ritual

To feed the Mother Ocean

In Caspar, California. On the far side of the country

Taught by a half-native-American, adopted-Guatemalan-shaman, obscure-to-me-but-celebrated-in-certain-apparently-trendy-new-agey-circles author, New-Mexican-horse-trader and rare-book-collector… And. Shamanistic ritual workshop leader extraordinaire! Martin Prechtel!!

WAVES WAVES WAVES…..

What does all of this have to do with?

So. Yes. Let us not forget. In the truly depressing year 2007. At the ripe age of fifty-two. Broke, confused, aimless… Drifting In The Deeper Land… at a loss for meaning, purpose, direction… with a half-empty Affligem Triple in a sweet-scented brown bag… leaning against a hard rock on Moonstone Beach… staring toward the distant western horizon… toward the setting sun

I decided to walk into (or upon) the ice-cold, wine-dark… raging Pacific Ocean?

Sort of…

Into, and through… the Infinite Blue Beyond?

In a poetic sense… sure. Or I could simply say

Having fallen deeply, profoundly in love with the Pacific Ocean
Of late
With her grandeur, her immensity, her vastness
Her prancing, dancing, spiraling virtuosity
Her constantly shifting, prismatic spontaneity
Her unrivaled quivering liquidity
Her dazzling, ribald, seductive… insouciance
The exquisite rotting crabs in bare knuckles smell of her
Her raw, pounding, thundering heart-wave music

I decided I was going to marry her.

The Pacific Ocean, that is.

Yes. Actually, I had been admiring her from afar for a very long time. Actually, I had been in love with her forever. Since I was a young child. Listening to her gentle murmur. Walking on

the long-white grandmother strand of Destin Beach, Florida looking for sand dollars, sea shells, notes… and maps inside of bottles. Lost and forgotten pirate chests! Buried treasure!!

Yes. It is true. I had always loved beach combing. Beach roaming. Being near the sea

Like a wingless gull, like a flipper-less seal, like a sordid
SOARING, SHARP-EYED SEA RAVEN!!
“PAINTED BLACK, BLACK AS NIGHT
BLACK AS COAL”

I was born to beach comb! Yes, I had “a calling” from the moment I stepped barefoot upon sand before Her Majesty the Sea!!

Most assuredly. I, too, had… heard the mermaids singing each to each…

But, unlike Professor Prufrock, I concluded
THEM DAMN BEAUTEOUS SEA WITCHES IS SINGIN FOR ME!!
AYEEE!!! AAARRRRGGGHH!!!
I’LL HAVE ME WAY WITH THEM PEARLY, SALTY WENCHES OF YONDER SEA!!!

But. How exactly does one marry an ocean the size of the Pacific?! One may ask.

Well. After careful consideration. I decided to teach myself how to surf.

That’s right. At the ripe age of fifty-two, with no prior experience or inclination to enter cold, wine-dark, shark-patroled waters… I went to a local surf shop and bought a nine-foot-two-inch Strive longboard, a wetsuit and booties… and jumped into the seething maw of the

ROARING SEA LIONESS OF THE DEEP!!!

The Pacific Ocean at the foot of Camel Rock in the middle of winter!

In the next most truly depressing year 2008, I did at least two most significant, pertinent things. Firstly, I went out and bought a Casio 10MP point-and-shoot digital camera. The first camera I had owned in many decades. The first digital camera I ever owned.

I don’t know what ever became of that excellent little camera?

But. In two-thousand-and-eight I began a series of “zen walks” in the dunes and along the beach. Walks in the dunes behind and along Mad River Beach. In Humboldt County, northern California. With the Casio 10MP point-and-shoot digital camera.

The purpose of these ’08 walks was, of course, to be near my beloved Pacific Ocean. But, to be honest…. I had other important reasons as well. The fact is… that my first year attempting to “make love with the Pacific Ocean” on a nine-foot-two-inch Strive longboard

Well. It hadn’t panned out so mellifluously. You see. One day while paddling extra hard and late into the day with a newly-met surfing buddy who was thirty-two years younger and ten years more experienced than I… and a Masonic brethren. Something happened to my left shoulder rotator cuff. Something that presented itself as the utter inability to move my left arm without severe pain.

I went to Chinese doctors for grueling acupuncture sessions and bitter herbs. I went to a chiropractor for whatever the fuck it is they do?! I had potent, “say uncle” wrestling matches… massage sessions with the Big Kahunas. And others. I put the useless arm in a sling. I tried ice and heat, ice and heat, massage, Arnica, Ibuprofen… everything I knew to heal my…. extremely painful shoulder injury. Nothing worked. Finally, the chiropractor, after charging me thousands of dollars for whatever the fuck it is they do?! Finally, after months of painful shoulder immobility and the total lack of use of my left arm… Finally the chiropractor told me

You have frozen shoulder syndrome… It is extremely painful. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. It will take six months minimum to heal on its own. You’re out of luck, pal

It was like that scene from the Billy Jack movie… when Billy Jack says to the corrupt small town southern “good old boy” redneck sheriff

Sheriff… You see that foot right there (Billy Jack glancing coolly downward toward his own right foot under his wide-brimmed black hat). See that foot right there. Well, Sheriff… I’m going to take that foot right there… and place it right here… on the side of your head

AND THERE ISN’T A DAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!!!

Well. Seemed to me that… My Beloved Pacific Ocean…. had pretty much flipped me off.

She had let me know… in no uncertain terms… that I was on the outs. Beached, landlocked, stranded, abandoned, discarded, ditched…. until further notice.

She, The Ocean Goddess, The Wild and Wooly Sea Lioness of Norcali… The Grand Master, She… just pretty much put up a DO NOT ENTER SIGN in the year two-thousand-and-eight and left me to wander sullen and forlorn

My other reason for buying the point-and-shoot digital camera and wandering seemingly aimlessly in the dunes… besides the fact that I could not surf for almost a year. My other reason was to break out of a “vicious circle” into which I appeared to have fallen

She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not…

Out of the odious, emotional “black hole” into which I seemed to constantly peer… as if upon the receding rim of an insurmountable, malicious maelstrom… apparently triggered by the tedious and highly tenacious… frightfully debilitating ’07 breakup of my two-and-a-half-year relationship with the fertile, young female “Heartwoodie”.

Damn! I just couldn’t shake off
The sweet clinging tenderness
At the rotten core of ‘er
The black magic of her inky embrace
I couldn’t unlock the genuine spell
I couldn’t unlock the chemical grip she had on my

THE SIRENOUS SEA SERPENT!
THE MYSTIKAL KRAKEN WENCH!!
SHE HAD ME BY THE HEART-BALLS, MATIES!!!

SHE WAS SUCKING ME DOWN UNDER!!!

And I seemed to be going down for the third and last time

So. You see. The zen walking in nature. The camera… the point-and-shoot process… the narrowing, the focusing of attention… the repetitive, elegantly simple, concentrated activity of observing the natural world… through the precisely limited, rational, rectangular camera frame… the framing attempt… at making pleasing “aesthetic” order… to derive “meaningful form”… out of the dynamic chaos appearing upon the screen of the camera

The stalking? The hunting? The zeroing in on the prey? The shooting!?

The almost surgical extraction of… “decisive”… (precious)… gemlike moments… from the otherwise barely noticed… insidious making and remaking… capricious ticking and tocking…. terrifying klicking and klacking… of the mad machinery of the human mind

The mere noticing of TAT SUNDARAM… All of This Sacred Truth, All of This Sacred Beauty

Was an honest and heartfelt, desperate attempt

To heal my “broken heart”
To make me “whole” again
To kill the pain
After the “death-in-life”
Separation from

THE HEARTLESS TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD KRAKEN-WENCH FROM HELL?!?

No no… The grievous loss of my children.

I had recurring nightmares that my son was drowning in the ocean and I was stuck on the shore… an invisible glass wall prevented me from reaching him. As I watched him swept out to sea. My dear lost son with whom I had read The Hobbit and the entire Lord Of The Ring through most of his sixth and seventh year… in 2001-2

My lost son and the lost daughter I barely knew, my sad lost farm, my entire lost life’s work… these painful losses… seemed to blossom out into all of the losses of my life, all of the losses of all of the folks in the world, all of the losses of all who had ever lived in all of time and space

A VAST BLACK GRIEVOUS WOUND OOZING HEART-SHATTER LOSSES!!!

Was growing inside of me
Blossoming and fruiting all around me
I needed to break out of the apparent dark prison of time and space, then!
I had to break out of the bleak realm where all of this suffering was occurring!

And so I began.

The original, un-manipulated, full-frame color images of these zen walks were self-published in a coffee-table-size Blurb book titled, Meditations Mad River Beach. In 2009.

The original Mad River Meditation photo images taken on these “healing zen walks” in ‘08 became the source material, the images and the inspiration for

WAVE PATTERNS

What I noticed on those quiet, intense, springtime walks in ’08 was this.

ALL THINGS APPEAR TO MOVE IN WAVE PATTERNS

Water… streams, rivers, oceans… obviously moves in waves. But. Sky moves in waves we call clouds. Air moves in waves we call wind. Weather patterns are waves. Earth moves in waves we call mountains, hills, dunes, sand ripples. The grain in driftwood stumps are purling waves. Dune grasses bend and flow like rivers. Everywhere I looked when viewing through that camera, I saw waves.

Well, of course, it’s rumored that light moves in waves. Einstein has taught us that Energy equates with Mass times the speed of light squared. Or: All Matter is convertible to Energy.

Reality Itself is Energy… in other words

And so, naturally, and, scientifically…. The World As Light

Is ever moving in dynamic, simple and complex… wave patterns.

Well. I had the recently gathered collection of digital photographic images from the aforementioned zen dune walks. And about this time, I became inspired by the "Transcendental Realism" work of the digital artist Adi Da Samraj. Who died in 2008. At the age of 69. Particularly his large, photographically inspired digital installation piece ALBERTI'S WINDOW from his 2007 Biennale Exhibition in Venice.

I went out and bought a Photoshop Elements 8 program in early ‘09 and installed it on a 2006 Apple iMac desktop computer that the little “Heartwoodie” goddess had talked me into buying. I discovered in Adobe Photoshop>> Filter-Distortions-Waves

And, Walla!!

I converted the Energy Patterns that were literally appearing as… Mad River Beach, the dunes, the sand, the weathered driftwood and ocean debris, the Pacific Ocean, the sea stacks, the sky, the clouds… the sun and its myriad reflections

I captured the soul of a place like a lightning bug and placed it into a glass jar to

Not just any squalid place! But. This very specific, very special place!

The “here and now” living breathing uniqueness, wholeness, wonder… its spiritual essence!

Magical, mysterious…. elusive, illicit… wild, wonderful, soul-brimming, unpredictable

Beatific Humboldt County, in and around the Mad River where it meets the sea

I descended to this place
I took a firm stand upon the earth
I felt the mud and sand between my toes
I breathed the ocean air
I listened to the roar

Using Adobe Photoshop Elements ’08…. or was it ’09?… and an ‘06 iMac then. With no prior experience and no assistance. I translated the Energy Patterns that are appearing here as this “material world” into the Wave Patterns that are the magical foundation stones… mathematical algorithms that are the fundamental building blocks… of a digitally, computer-generated alternate parallel aesthetic reality… a pixelated-mad-funhouse-mirror world otherwise referred to as… cyberspace.

I transported… the sacred, living beating heart… along with the enigmatic footprints of the fabled yeti… the energetic, digitized DNA…. the spirit of the land, that is... Mythical Humboldt County… into the “coded infinite mind” of the perilous machine matrix

Just like Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods!

And you know.

There will be hell to pay

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