B.T. Lowry's Blog, page 3

Riffing ideas between the different senses and the mind

Here come some techniques that will be helpful to writers, visual artists, musicians and all other creative types. They also help with collaboration between all of the above.

Recently I watched myself brainstorming for stories. My mind worked to form bridges between the diverse worlds of my senses: the eye, nose, tongue, touch and ear worlds. It’s like drawing analogies between different types of sensory input. (Plenty of examples to come) Sensory information can also correspond with concepts, characters and stories. Sound strange and abstract? Well it is, but if you can handle that kind of thing, read on. Here in this article I’m going to send off a few riffs using this brainstorming orchestra.

So let’s say you have ripples in a pond. This is a visual, radial image.

image CC by Rudy Salakory

You could translate that into any number of radial designs. A cartoon explosion, radio waves, a sound pulse, or orbiting planets within a solar system. You could also make something where many radiating circles connect, but we’ll keep it simple for now.

Now let’s say you want to make those ripples into a concept. Perhaps power and influence is spreading from a central leader. Or maybe news of an event is spreading, through word of mouth and/or technology. Or the spread of radiation or heat, or a shock-blast. The ripples could be taken as patterns in the fabric of space-time.

Now let’s put one of these concepts into a story. Let’s translate the ripples in the water as news spreading of an important event. Something happens. People tell people, who tell others. Gradually a huge number of people know.

But what happened? Let’s see… We’ll grab another idea using a similar method and see if we can combine them. Let’s look for another visual pattern.

Here’s something you might see wandering around on a brainstorm walk:

Line of pillars CC Chris Smith

They’re evenly spaced vertical units. What else is like so? Soldiers in a line comes to mind, or a row of planted trees. A musical rhythm in the ear-world, or in the touch-world, someone tapping on your arm. In the realm of concepts we have consecutive regular events, like the daily release of a newspaper? Or a regularly broadcast signal from another planet. How about contractions? They’re regular but coming closer together.

Let’s choose contractions; birth is a very primal, interesting event after all.

So the event is an impending birth, and the contractions are coming regularly, closer and closer together. Soon the baby will be born and news will spread. So we’ve made concepts out of two images, then combined them together.

Who’s the baby?

baby in tunnel CC Pamela

I don’t know yet!

Moving to the ear-world for a source of inspiration, let’s check out Ali Akbhar Khan, a Sarod master from India.

Here’s a track from his album Garden of Dreams. (It really kicks off at about 1:45)

Now when I first heard this song, the swirling, flowing, progressive qualities of the music brought the following scenario to my mind: I’m on a little raft in a small but powerful river. The river has bored through a mountainside in a pattern like an ant’s nest. I’m going over waterfalls, whipping around corners, going fast and slow. Kind of like this scene from Aladdin, minus the magic carpet and lava.

So back to the idea we’re brainstorming for. The contractions are coming closer. Someone special is about to take birth, and that news will be broadcast. What kind of person is taking birth? They’re on a river? What’s this music all about?

How to connect all this into something cogent?

Let’s take a step into the subtle and bring in the principle of reincarnation. This person’s not just popping into existence; they have a history before this life. That history’s been like a river-ride through a mountainside. Wherever they’re coming from, it’s been an adventure, with ups and down, slows and fasts. We don’t have details yet, but it’s getting interesting, isn’t it?

Let’s learn more about this person who’s going to take birth. There’s a saying that the story of your life is written on your face. Who has the most lines? Old people, of course. I spend quite a bit of time in India, where people’s faces are fantastic and diverse, so I’m drawn to search for people there.

Doing a quick image search for ‘Old person India,’ some great photos come up. We’re not worried about our character’s gender for now, so I chose two men and two women, just so I don’t get in trouble with either side

Bouncing off Borders

Hi. I’m B.T. Lowry. Welcome to this week’s scene of the week, Bouncing off Borders.

Listen here:

http://btlowry.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/july-26-bouncing-off-borders.mp3

 

I shuffled up to the immigration desk.

“Papers,” said a brawler of a man with a thick black mustache.

I furnished him with my passport.

He scanned it, said without making eye contact. “Why do you want to go to the USA?”

It ’s a free world and this land belongs to no man, and to everyone. You people stole it from the Indians and they didn’t own it either. We’re all coming and going.

“Visiting friends,” I replied.

He frowned. “Don’t you have any friends in your country?”

No one belongs to any country or family. We’re all citizens of the Earth, and even more than that we’re  citizens of the universe and children of God.

“I do,” I said. “I have friends here too.”

He looked over whatever information was on his screen about me. “It says here that you’ve been to the USA before. You’ve been to many countries. Why would you want to leave your own country, stay there with your family?”

I have no country. I just happened to be born in some piece of land recently designated by a name.

“I like traveling.”

He made a mark on some sort of checklist, then looked back at the screen. “You said you’re a writer.”

“Yes.”

“Are you a journalist?”

“No Sir.”

He looked me in the eye for the first time. “Well what do you write?”

The whole world is an allegory. You just shift it left or right like transposing a song, or the down indicates the up, earth points to heaven. There ’s no fiction. Every idea indicates something real.

“Well, I filled out the landing card.”

He nodded, apparently satisfied. “Do you plan on writing when you’re in the USA?”

“No, Sir. I only write in my own country.”

“While in your own country, do you intend to write about experiences that you had while in the USA?”

“Ah, no Sir. I only write in my own country about experiences that I have in my own country, Sir.”

“Very good.”

“Can I go in?”

“No. Policy dictates that every man should live in his own country.”

“So there should be no travelers?”

“Only on business.”

I closed my eyes, told myself not to yell at this man, not to attack.

I opened them and raised my hand above my head. “Charge!”

From the back of the immigration room, a force of war-horses five hundred strong sprung from hiding. Their riders, clad in exotic, angular armor, raised hooked blades over their heads as they charged into the USA.

***

This scene was inspired by my recent visit to the Los Angeles airport. I was welcomed by men who had a keen interest in me as a person, who wanted to know all the details of my life. They were kind enough to escort me around the airport, and even gave me my own space in a locked room with other guests. I got to see the inside of a police van, and was able to return to my home country much more quickly than I’d hoped.

This experience left me with an appreciation for the human conceptions of countries, borders, and also money, because it is largely the glow of money which keeps these constructs intact. How amazing it is that a country not five hundred years old, in its current incarnation, and which was largely stolen from the older inhabitants, now keeps people who were born in other places out! It is indeed a testament to mind over matter that these ideas govern our lives and activities. In this spirit, I have decided to name a constellation of stars after myself, and should anyone ever make it to that area of the universe, I will question them thoroughly and charge them an entrance fee.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to see this scene expanded into a story, then tell me in the comments that this is the one you want. You can also grab my novel here, Fire from the Overworld. It is the story of two young mystics who fight to restore balance in their desert village, when war erupts among its spirit rulers. Feel free to sign up for the new scenes in your mailbox each week, along with guest posts, and my thoughts about living, loving, investigation and creation. 

This work is licensed Creative Commons, attribution, which means you can use it however you want, even commercially. Just let people know which bits came from me. Thanks!

In defense of Religion AND Science.

“Instead of branding people according to which camp they’re in and which flag they’re waving, it’s far better to look at underlying motives.”

This week I’m pausing the scene-of-the-week series. I’ve been thinking about religion and science, and how too often we get caught up in pitting one against the other, as if they are natural enemies, or as if one is totally false and the other is a virtuous savior. Really that’s all bollocks.

Listen to this article here

They’re wars, not religious wars

There is a popular saying, that most wars and death go on in the name of religion. This is often put forward by proponents of strict rationalism and its brainchild, science.

This is not true in two ways.

People usually kill each other for land, money and power. The two world wars were not religious wars. Stalin and Chairman Mao’s attacks on their own people were not religious wars. Taken together, these make up most deaths in the twentieth century. So statistically, at least in recent times, most violent deaths have not taken place in religious wars.

Secondly, wars that go on in the name of religion are generally not actually founded in the teachings of the religions in question. The Bible never advocated the Inquisition or the Crusades, nor the genocide that took place in the Americas. These were all done in the name of the Bible and Christ, but if you look deeper you’ll find that was just a false front. Christ taught his followers to love their neighbors, not to enslave and exploit them, to take their land and replace their spiritual sites with your own. Actually the underlying reasons for these conquests was greed, and the desire for self-aggrandizement. Religion was just a front, not the cause.

Science wars?

On the other hand, a religious person might turn the tables on science and say, “Hey! You claim that so much damage has been done by religion, and that science is progressive and helpful, but science has done far more damage than religion ever has. Guns, the atomic bomb, nuclear plant disasters, plastic clogging the oceans, chemicals poisoning our rivers, greenhouse gasses heating the planet—these are all byproducts of science, not religion. Wars between humans are nothing compared to rendering the entire planet less habitable.”

But again, if you look deeper, you’ll find that the cause of these things is not science. Science is the study of that which lies within the realm of the senses or the extensions of the senses. Based on discoveries made during these investigations, various technologies can be made. These can be helpful or harmful, both in their manufacture and their use. Thus far, we see a mix. Science has produced medicines to save millions of lives, and weapons to kill just as many. The wheel and fire are also scientific discoveries, not just nuclear bombs and plastic, so even the foremost Luddite can’t write science off completely. However, most of the gadgets produced today—androids and tablets and wireless ear-pieces—are unnecessary and very harmful to the environment in their production. What is real progress? Is it the advancement of our immediate convenience, or our capacity to understand, love and give? Too often, the underlying motive for scientific progress is also greed.

Therefore let us not criticize religion or science. They each have their jurisdictions, and it’s not helpful to falsely pit them against each other. Instead of branding people according to which camp they’re in and which flag they’re waving, it’s far better to look at underlying motives.

 

This work is licensed Creative Commons, attribution, which means you can use it however you want, even commercially. Just let people know which bits came from me. Thanks!

Moving to a new Country, pus a free novella

 

 

I’ll be moving to India soon, which I’m excited and also nervous about. I’m also moving to a new space in the virtual world: storypaths.net.

I’m excited about this new site because it’s expanding my offerings and putting them all in one place: stories and video services. In the future I hope to host other storyetellers there. I also plan to offer courses, led by both myself and other instructors, about processes and mindsets for satisfying creativity. Btlowry.com has been my personal site, but storypaths is more about connection and collaboration.

I probably won’t be writing many articles there, though I do have some things I’d like to delve into, so I may put up a few. Feel free to explore and send me any feedback if you’d like.

To commemorate the launch of the site, here is a free novella called Your God, My Gods. It’s there in a bunch of different formats, including an audio-book read by yours truly, and they’re all free. If you like it, feel free to let me know and/or leave a review.

Thanks for your support during this journey,

B.T. Lowry

Call for co-creators

Hi everyone,

Just a quick post to give you some news. I’m starting up a new site (soon to be announced) featuring creative services, media and courses. Most of my attention is going there these days, so this site here is getting less attention. I’m excited about this new project because I’m focusing more on collaboration, and on the business end of things. After deliberating about money quite a bit, I’m starting to see finances as a kind of fuel.

At the heart of creativity is, well, creativity and inspiration, and also relationships with the audience and co-creators. But business can be the engine to get my work out there and help me make more, and bring in other creative types. Creating and promoting: two halves of a chickpea.

That’s my view on it now, anyway.

So I’m putting out the call for co-creators. We’re talking animators, marketers, visual artists, musicians, writers, voice actors. I can’t pay you now. Sorry. I’m thinking of doing a royalty system, which gives you some skin in the game too. And as things grow, so can our projects.

I’ve been told finding collaborators is like dating. So you need to have an idea of who you’re looking for, and be willing to meet different people to see if you’re a fit. Bring it on.

Until next time,

B.T. Lowry (which stands for Bevis Theodore Lowry, by the way)

How to save the world this Christmas

Christmas is coming, with all its good cheer and marketing madness. It can be depressing to see just how much waste the greed there is at this time of year. Here’s what I did about it.

(I don’t know how well these will show up on your phone. You’d probably be better off looking at them on a computer so you can enlarge the images)

The Glories of Non-Renaissance Art

This is a fresco from a temple in India. The temple is in Varsana, in the Vrindavana area, the place where the goddess Srimati Radhika is said to have grown up, during her pastimes in this world. Yesterday I spent some time with a group of friends, there in the temple, discussing this piece of art.  The intriguing aspects of this fresco are so many, the discussion it provoked so lively, that I am compelled to present my perspective, for posterity. I will try my best to do this in language resembling that found in art history books, with a few weird breaks from that form.

Ahem.

An overiew

Firstly, and overview of what is occurring. This painting shows Vasudeva Maharaja carrying the child Krishna across the Yamuna, from Mathura to Vrindavana. He did this to bring Krishna beyond the reach of the cruel Kamsa, lest that tyrannical king should smash the baby, as he did many others before. In the upper right, Krishna is appearing to Vasudeva and his wife Devaki. He manifested initially in the form of four-handed Narayana, before transforming into Baby Krishna, at the request of Devaki. It’s a deep and intricate pastimes, and here we (I?) am just touching on it. Below that, Kamsa is shown smashing one of Vasudeva and Devaki’s previous children. On the left are Vasudeva and Devaki praying, or possibly Nanda Maharaja and Mother Yashoda awaiting the arrival of Krishna, as one local sadhu asserted.

Subjective size

First of all, the relative size of the people and things in the painting is completely relative to their importance to this instance of the pastime. Western figurative art tends to mimic the camera (well, the laws of perspective preceded the camera). Western abstract art is, in this author’s humble opinion, mostly terrible, and not worth writing about.

But what we see in this painting is different. Compared to what a camera sees, it is completely wonky. Vasudeva is taller than a building. A palace isn’t much taller than Nanda Baba would be if he were standing. But the entirety of the pastime could not be conveyed in one frame if the artist limited themselves by imitating a camera’s view. Instead, the size of the elements is relative to their importance. Vasudeva carrying Krishna is what this picture is mainly about, therefore they are the largest. The palaces are just there to give context, so they’re small. The personalities inside the castles are important (but not as important as Vasudeva Maharaja) so they are quite large. The trees and so on are also there for context, so they’re small, whereas the jackal upstream from Vasudeva is large (it showed him where he could cross). This is all absurd from the point of view of visual perspective, but that’s what’s so great about it.

Temporal dispersion within a single instance (not a bad section title, eh?)

Furthermore, not all the events in this painting took place at the same time. Kamsa is shown killing a baby on the right, something he did previous to Vasudeva Maharaja crossing the Yamuna river. Narayana is shown appearing to Vasudeva and Devaki, which happened earlier that night. On the left hand side, one local sadhu told us, Vasudeva and Devaki are shown praying, before the birth. I’ve seen a picture of Lord Rama where He crosses the Ganges River. In one picture, He is shown there with Sita and Lakshan on one bank, and on a boat in the middle, and offering respects to a sage on the far side. It was a bit like if someone shot pictures with a camera for an hour or, then put everything they capture into one frame. Except very different from what a camera sees, but that we covered.

So in this one picture of Vasudeva Maharaja crossing the Yamuna River, we have events happening at different times, and size relative to importance.

Intriguing stuff. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

What kind of story are you looking for?

Oh story lovers! I am considering where to focus my energies to craft meaningful stories, and your help is greatly appreciated.

 

What kinds of stories are you looking for the most, but are darned hard to find?

(As a bonus, a random person who answers will get an unreleased flash fiction story sent to you.

The questions are very short, and but a few.

Here goes:

What medium do you prefer? (short videos, longer films, interactive apps)

What length do you prefer? Do you want something you can digest in ten minutes, one hour, or are you looking for a story you can stay with for many days?

How about genre? Real-world contemporary, historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi etc.?

Characters? Women, men, boys, girls, aliens. What kind of characters do you relate to the most?

What’s the best story you’ve experienced recently, in any medium?

How did it move you?

Do you have any other ideas that I haven’t mentioned?

Please write in the comments.

That’s it. Thanks!

 

B.T. Lowry

Life Bound Friend by Ayla Nereo, Music Video

Hi there,

Have you ever had a song strike you so much that you want to make a video for it, to accompany the mood of the song with your own introspections?

Here is my video for the beautiful song, Life Bound Friend, by Ayla Nereo. The voice in the song, for me at least, is the call of someone no longer enmeshed in worldly turmoil, free enough to sympathize with their friend still caught up in it. Like the council of a genuinely kind and mature adult for a troubled youngster.

Without further ado, here it is:

 

 

When I was about twelve, two dear friends of my family were murdered. They were an elderly couple of the Baha’i faith, named Barb and Gord Scott.  They’d gone to South America to carry out missionary and charity work, and purchased a large van to transport needy people around. It was while driving in this van between cities that they were stopped by a gang of thieves. The men killed the elderly religious couple for their few possessions, particularly their wedding rings.

The news struck my mother hard. She is not a religious person, per se, but I would call her a person of faith. She wondered how this tragedy could be allowed to happen.

While she was crying at the kitchen table, face in her arms, she heard a voice, and had a kind of vision.

Barb Scott, alive and well despite the loss of her body, told my mother not to be grief-stricken. “There’s so much more than what we see here,” she said.

On another note, I’ll be going on a hiatus with my weekly scenes and such. I’m focusing my energies on flash fiction, a new novel, and experimental multimedia storytelling. So I’ll be posting more irregularly, at least for a while.

My well-wishes,

B.T. Lowry, aka. Venu Gopal das

Ghostyard

“I won’t leave my body, I told myself, no matter what happens.”

Hi. I’m B.T. Lowry. Welcome to this week’s scene of the week, Ghostyard.

by Tim Green

 

 

Listen here: 
https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/august-2-ghostyard.mp3

I won’t leave my body, I told myself, no matter what happens.

A riverbank is a stupid place for a graveyard. The bodies are bound to get washed away over time. People go to the river to get clean, or take their water buffaloes to wash the dust off. It’s meant to be a pure place, and a purifying place. Some worship this river, or use its water to worship other gods. But that same water filters through graves. How can it be pure?

Stupid.

I slowed down as I neared the graveyard, keeping an eye out for the rowdy ghosts, especially him.

On the other hand, maybe it was a good place to bury the dead. I had seen fewer and fewer ghosts there, since I’d come as a kid. Ghosts tend to stick around their bodies, and if their bodies have washed away, the spirits can go on to whatever’s next for them. Another life, usually. I’d known most of the kids in our village when they were old.

That’s why cremation is good: the vessel is gone so the spirit moves on.

Usually. The one I sought tonight was old. Old and tricky.

I won ’t let him fool me.

I looked carefully at the gravestones, taking in all the details. The crack there above the old woman’s name. I’d known her. Only dried flowers there now, a garland of red, yellow, orange, red, yellow, orange. If that old ghost made an illusion, he’d have to get every detail right to fool me.

He lives here. He knows the details better than me.

Never mind that. I’d just come to talk with him, ask him why he’d been causing trouble.

Was there a purple flower in that garland?

 

***

 

In India, ghost-knowledge is much more comprehensive than in the West (except the movie Ghostbusters, of course). Growing up in Canada, I sometimes wondered if ghosts existed. A glimpse of one, or word that someone had had even the remotest experience of one, was cause for gossip and fear among us kids. But in India they are categorized in many ways, largely according to the life they had while in a physical body.

If someone performs spiritual practices but also nefarious acts, for example they might become a powerful ghost. Those were often the worst kind. Sometimes whole families or even villages might be ghosts together, having been ripped out of their old lives all together by some violent event. There are ghosts fixed in trees, those who know they’re ghosts and those who don’t. Some are ‘for hire,’ and a dark tantric can incite them to attack living people. They can possess people’s bodies, and it’s easier if the people are weak-minded due to intoxication or mental illness.

Ghosts have their terms as ghosts, like jail sentences. Often they are living out what would have been the remainder of their life, which was cut short by a sudden death. It generally sucks to be a ghost, because they have the same sensory desires as they did in their lives, but without the physical senses to satisfy those desires. Powerful sages and yogis can release them from their terms as ghosts and send them on to whatever comes next, usually rebirth as a human or in another species.

Interesting stuff. Some day I’d like to develop a more complex story involving ghosts.

 

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to see this scene expanded into a story, then   tell me in the comments that this is the one you want.  If you want to see what I can do with a deeper story, pick up  my novel here, Fire from the Overworld.   It is the story of two young mystics who fight to restore balance in their desert village, when war erupts among its spirit rulers. Feel free to sign up for the new scenes in your mailbox each week, along with guest posts, and my thoughts about living, loving, investigation and creation. 

This work is licensed Creative Commons, attribution, which means you can use it however you want, even commercially. Just let people know which bits came from me. Thanks!