TAKE A DEEP BREATH by Igor Goldkind, reviewed by Belinda Subraman

TAKE A DEEP BREATH, Living With Uncertainty, is an illustrated collection of essays, poetry, and short stories confronting the pandemic in personal terms. It will provoke, entertain and stimulate your thinking into deeper realms. There is philosophy, questioning, comfort in shared experiences and a little sex too.

I will offer up a few lines few lines from various pieces in the book to give you a taste of his writing and perspective, hoping you will seek out more. You may watch a video and hear the author read and hopefully you may order the book. 

In “San Diego Beat Poets”  he writes

“We can play our songs on air violins and/
Summon the rain to drown our sorrows in a sea of greater uncertainty.” 

In “Death is in Life’s Garden” He says

“She holds his weight against her body,/
Until Death sighs and buries his head between her thighs/
So that she is certain he will return to his labours on the morrow.” 

From “Being is Becoming Still” 

“I am fearful of fully failing myself, and yet/
I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.” 

From “What Happens After You Die” 

“Our mind no longer fathoms./
So we have to leave our mind behind —/ 

To finish this sentence and fly.” 

In “He Said What She Said,” after a younger woman insists on phone sex with him but rejects meeting him in person the next day because of his age he writes:

“Later that morning, I dyed my hair black/ 

and left dark stains in the porcelain sink.” 

From “TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SELF” 

“We are like Nietzsche’s tightrope walker, balanced between the polarity of our historic, known self and our potential, unknown self, poised in balance our entire lives above the unknown. Zarathustra’s observation of the tightrope walker includes the will to surrender one’s own will to gravity, to calibrate two independent directional forces into one balance? “

Igor Goldkind

Interview:

Be: What is your ultimate aim in Take a Deep Breath? Is it to just “go with the flow” or maybe just use what you’ve got where you are and live in the moment? 

Igor: No. The ultimate aim of Take a Deep Breath is learning how to live with uncertainty. For some time now we have had a crisis in authority, a distrust and dissonance of truth. This is because much of the world we have been sold on as the “Real World”, isn’t. But each of us has the innate ability to recognize the difference between the so called ‘RealWorld’ and the actual world we live in. 

It takes discipline and practice to focus on the actual world by not being distracted by the ‘real world’ . 

Be: How do you feel the art relates since is is mostly abstract? Is it meant to connect somehow to the unspoken or unknowable? Did you have the artist to illustrate totally from his inspiration from your words? 

Igor:  The best way to think of art is like stained glass windows in a cathedral. The source of the light the truth of our experience, can often only be conveyed indirectly, through allegory or narrative, music or image; much as if you stare at the sun all you can see is blinding white light. But through the contrived colors of the stained glass window, the artist is able to prism the light into discernible and relatable components, so as better to apprehend the truth of experience. And yes, the illustrator Rian Hughes, read the book and interpreted the narrative content visually, to offer another stained glass for the account to pass through. 

Be: Was this writing therapy for you in addition to the Zen quality of the process of creation? 

Igor:  I think any act of creation is therapeutic. To compose a song or a poem or paint a painting, choreograph a dance, is all a deep reflection of our complicity and collaboration in the cre- ation of the experience of the world that we are having. Our imaginations both collectively and singularly, are in-the-world. It’s important to be self aware of our participation in our own experience. We are not spectators for or of, our lives; we are the ones who create our own lives. It is useful to be conscious of and remain aware of that constant process. 

Be: Is this a creative text to encourage people to use writing as therapy, an inspiration for the individual to explore their deeper realms or is it simply a sharing from your “deeper realms or both? 

Igor:  I think my book is intended to encourage people to better understand themselves in their relation to the world, others and their unconscious selves. So much of the outcomes of our reality is dependent on unconscious forces within us that play on the world almost as if we were more than one person. Writing helps us integrate those various selves into an integrity we can recognize and identify as our self. I use my own experiences as an example as a demonstration of what I prescribe. 

Be: Do you or have you worked in the field of psychology? 

Igor:  I studied both psychology and philosophy at university and had the privilege of studying with the French post Structuralist Michel Foucault at La Sorbonne in Paris. Much of my thinking is Lacanian but I fall back more on practical philosophy, than psychology. I find that psychology is too often focussed on treating symptoms rather than exploring causes. 

Be: Ultimately how would you like people to react to your book or what would you like people to take away from what you have offered? 

Igor:  I hope it helps people. I hope it serves like a tap on the shoulder and a ‘hey, look over there at that’, which is so often what we really need when we’re fixated on anxiety or depression. I also want people to think carefully about suicide. Not dismiss it or be scared of it, but to realize that most people at one time or another have thoughts of suicide and it is important to know how to process those thoughts rather than suppress them. 

As I say in Take a Deep Breath, if you can’t get around something or over something, you have to go through it to get past. 

Or as the second chicken replied to the first chicken on the opposite side of the road when he asked him how to get to the other side: 

“But you are on the other side of the road!” It’s recognition that counts. 

GAS Featured Poet: Igor Goldkind

 Igor Goldkind is an author, poet, and independent scholar. At the age of 14, Igor served as a volunteer Science Fiction Coordinator for the now wildly popular San Diego Comic-Con. It was in this capacity that he met Ray Bradbury, whom he asked for advice about becoming a writer. Through Comic-Con, Igor also befriended Theodor Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison, two of his major influences. He worked in the British comic publishing industry and is best known for having coined the Graphic Novel genre as a global publishing genre. In 2016, his award-winning multimedia novel published by Chameleon Publishing IS SHE AVAILABLE?, broke ground in combining Poetry, Comics, Jazz, and Animation setting a new bar in electronic publishing. He continued to blend poetry with art in his new work TAKE A DEEP BREATH, Living With Uncertainty, an illustrated collection of essays, poetry, and short stories confronting the pandemic in personal terms. Igor writes and lives in the San Diego, California but misses the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_G

Suicide Note

There are a still a few options open to you, apart from death.
Which is after all, inevitable and not so much an option as the fast forward to the point where there are no more options.
Living is dying anyway, so why speed up the process?
To avoid pain?
Many have endured much more than you and still clung to the delays to the inevitable.
Is it because you no longer feel of worth or of value?
To whom, yourself?

Perhaps your judge is drunk or wanting in discernment.
Perhaps your judge is just wrong and his judgement awaits over-ruling by a higher one.
Who are you after all, to judge yourself?
If you are so worthless then your judgement is suspect its certainly not worth acting upon. What if you went and saw a movie instead? or got drunk?
Or went to sleep?
Or made love until the dawn found another hanging judge to sentence you?

Do you want to die because life is absurd and void of meaning?
What took you so long to notice?
Does your slowness make you want to speed things up?
Trying to arrive sooner to the destination because you already know what’s there? Instead of death you could seek laughter,

which is really a form of dying;
a release from the known into the unknown by way of catching your breath in its own rhythm. Inward and outward.

What if you were about to hear a joke you had never heard before that made you laugh so hard that you woke up into the wide open world that contains this one?
If you die now, you might just die before hearing the joke that would wake you up
To a world where you no longer wanted to die because you had found yourself already here,

Where you belonged
where you were all along,
not living or dying but blinking and breathing like this, Like this, like this...

                                *****

The Line You Walked 

I am my father.
I am my father’s son.
I am my father’s father
I am my daughter’s son. 

I am the line that walks these dots
Connecting one Pole to another
One foot follows the other
From Lodz to Ellis Island to Brooklyn to Washington to Marseille, To the frozen thunder of L’Ardennes, 

Munchen, Salzbourg, Yale, San Pedro, Cham Kom, Chichin Itza Lansing, San Diego, Berkeley, Paris, Heidelberg, London
One arrow pointing to this hallowed ground
We stand on now. 

These dots, these stones, these memories We tread upon:
What you could not take with you,
You have left behind 

For me, for us
In the meaning you finally found 

Behind eyes glued shut
Behind my daughter’s eyes glued open
In wonderment, in curiosity
In the mind’s intrepid search for the reason in it all. 

Stepping forwards, stumbling backwards.
Looking up, looking down, looking sideways at the world.
Looking over your shoulder with a joke, with a laugh and a dimpled grin. Man makes plans while God laughs.
Student, soldier, teacher, brother, husband, father,
Grander father still. 

Between these dots
We can see the being of who we were, Who we become and who we are: One in the same. 

I am my father.
I am my father’s son.
I am my father’s father
I am my daughter’s son. 

Your work, my father, is not yet done.

    For my father, Dr. Victor Herchiel Goldkind 1924-2011