Asha Gowan /// Trauma, Logos, Spiritual Exigency

In this episode, Matt Baker speaks with educator, philosopher, and poet Asha Gowan about art and trauma, poetry and the self. Check out her website here: acgowan16.wordpress.com/

The Pit of Fame

There’s a pit of fame that rivals the peaks in my lands, one I admit I dug and put there. It’s not a brief dip, not a dimple but a departure where the soul leaves its things.

Careful where I step, I try to escape the pull in a flood of sacred words and tether to principles higher than my sight.

But the wind, it unhinges there in its own spirals and howls as the vacuum draws the cycles in like, all the miles down, every wolf in every cave of my history mourns their piece to a cratered false idol.

And it must gnaw my smile crooked because why do I look this tired?

The pit blends in with the topography and there are few who travel that far to understand.

It, open-mouthed, creates new gravity and shifts and hovers like a scent caught ending.

I would fear the nadir had it not lifted me so gently mended, had I not called to God and watched the dark turn so vastly bending. And where was faith, where was more?

On the other side of an abyss where evil is the aberration and where silence has been teeming warm with doors and doors and doors.

- Asha Gowen

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Understood at Last as a Sexual Message

A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
music of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything is silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table

- Adrienne Rich 1972, Diving into the Wreck, Poems 1971-1972

Music contributors for this episode:
Knots, Hania Rani
Prey, Niky Nine
Eden, Hania Rani
Cimmerian Walkers, Skrika
Philanthrope, Sleepy Fish

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