Ari Oklan

Every so often an artist emerges from the sea of our collective soul that forges a language for our times. Ari Oklan is one of those artists, in the tradition of poets, bards and street corner sages. Part Gerard Manly-Hopkins, part Richard Brautigan, his words, set to rollicking, modern minstrels, evoke feelings of The Band, Dylan and Richard Thompson, conjuring the sounds of other times; music halls, dusty, unpaved streets, shifty saloons–Post-Modern-Americana.

Symbiosis is an overused term, but if we look at the evolution of rock, from the wild-eyed-Dionysian-Sixties, to the no-future-Seventies, to the post-punk-beyond-Nirvana-Nineties, a psychic wholeness begins to emerge. The singer/songwriter becomes a weaver that stitches the various threads and themes into a tapestry of ragged reconciliation. Ari takes that concept even further in both life and art. He’s been immersed in the topography of the inner life for the majority of his life. His music is an outgrowth of a rigorous examination of the world around.

Before he set out for the waste land, Ari was a rising star on the US soccer scene, playing professionally in Europe at the age of 16. When he returned to the US to play at a university, he had a health crisis that caused him to put his dreams of playing for The US national team on ice. Classically trained on the piano, he turned his energies to writing and crafting the material that became genesis for Waste Land. On Waste Land he takes an Orphic descent into the cultural void of life in the new millennium, sourcing The Fisher King and reanimating the eternal journey of Eliot’s classic poem, meandering through the barren landscapes of the modern soul.

ORPHIC DESCENT

When Orpheus climbed down into the catacombs of the Earth, searching for his love and muse, Eurydice, he was blazing a trail for singers and songwriters for millenia to come. Guided by a mixture of angst and love, he navigated the underworld, a metaphor for his inner life, facing his fears in a shadowy realm of doubt and anxiety. When he finally reaches the center of the Earth, he sees his beloved Eurydice. He seduces both Hades and Persephone with the magic of his music and strikes a deal with them to release his beloved. Persephone agrees but only under one condition; that Orpheus walk out of Hell with Eurydice behind him. He would have to trust that she would be there when he ascends. He could not help himself and just as he was to emerge into the light, he turned and gazed into Eurydice’s eyes and she was gone forever. For Orpheus, the world became a waste land and his songs of lament filled the Earth. Orpheus becomes a musical precursor for the Fisher King.

WASTE LAND

Unlike Orpheus, the wounded Fisher King does not travel and descend into nether worlds, instead the nether world comes to him. Crops stop growing and a barren state comes over the land. The Fisher King cannot really move, so he spends his days near the river, where he is visited by knights who are their to heal him, but only one has the gift; “Parsifal.” Parsifal helps the king regain his psychic wholeness by journeying into the wounding. It’s there that he finds the mystery of the cup that captured the blood of Christ.

This theme was resurrected by T.S. Eliot who saw the post-war environment as being a reflection of the wasted, Arthurian realm. Fast forward to 2010 and signs of the waste land around us. This time it’s Ari Oklan’s turn to take the archetypal journey through the narrative of music and sound.

ANOMIE IS THE REAL TRAGEDY

One of the dark muses inspiring Waste Land is “Anomie.” Anomie is the sense of isolation and overwhelming experience of psychosocial loss of self that results when we become disconnected from all that was once familiar. It is a loss of one’s moorings in the world, a feeling of being a “stranger in a strange land”, separated from home, past, community, floating without boundaries, free in the void of space and time. This harrowing emptiness and extreme alienation is discussed by many, including Emile Durkheim, the father of Sociology, in his work Suicide, studying the increase and types of suicide, including the “Anomic”, occurring in rapidly industrializing France in the early 1900's. In a sense, The Existentialists, such as Camus in The Stranger, describe this as The Absurd, where extreme alienation occurs when external reminders of one’s identity and community begin to disintegrate, as traditional signs, symbols, norms, customs and morals all lose their meaning. Under such circumstances, the universe feels morally “tone-deaf”, with no sense of right and wrong apparent. In such a bleak Waste Land (T.S. Eliot), “God is dead” (Nietzsche). Consequently the anomic, alienated individual begins to fall into the nihilistic abyss, detached from any collective ground or fundamental bearings. Anomie, in this sense, “is to be made alien– strange, solitary, cut off from one’s origin and history.”

MAD FOR