About Me

Self-portrait taken by Jasmin.

So, who am I?

With a healthy dose of optimism and a pinch of modesty, I attempt to write an abstract that details exactly who I am. This is not an easy task as I am well aware - not only are we constantly growing, changing and being shaped by our experiences, but many failed attempts in the past to create something concise now embark on the seemingly impossible.

Hi, my name is Matt and I’m a full-time student at the University of New South Wales here in weather-intermittent Sydney. A bachelor to a Bachelor of Science (Psychology) / Bachelor of Arts, I identify myself as one to revel in the kingdom of things small and smaller still, to revel in the intruge of secrets ancient and undying, of knotted and gnarled woods of ageless forests, the bittersweet tones of suffering and splendour in classical Jazz music and the evidence of careful craftsmanship through the uneven chiselling of sandstone columns. But of course, I can’t be doing this everyday. Most of the time I’ll be found cursing the intricacies of statistical theories, wrangling my mind over the state of the public transport system or madly boasting about my ability to cook up a storm.

Well, I guess it wasn’t that hard after all!

What exactly is The Seven Dales of Vale?

This digital enclave borrows the title from my first anthology and earliest example of self-publicated poems and short stories, as a tribute to myself of the direction brought into my creative endeavours as products of emotional and spiritual experience. Over the many months of hosting, The Seven Dales of Vale has expanded beyond its original focus as a journal of musings to put on display my other aspirations including urban photography, poetry inspired by the masterful works of Auden, Yeats, Plath, Gibran and Shakespeare and many others as well as a newfound desire to catalogue my culinary journeys into family roots of Mediterranean cuisine.

The title alone doesn’t make a lot of sense unless the influence for its creation is taken into account. The number seven is considered lucky in many cultures and across many religions it represents sound progress to self-development: the first seven of the Noble Eightfold Wheel in Buddhism (before reaching Nirvana), seven of the sephirah of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and even seven of the sacred laws of humanity to American-Indian traditions toward fraternal and inward harmony. The meaning of the Dales is also represented initially by the first keys of the Tarot Major Arcana - from The Fool, being the genesis and ignorance of the adept, to The Chariot, the self-guidance and direction of creative energy.

Any good dictionary will tell you that ‘dale’ and ‘vale’ are archaisms both representing a valley - while this is true, we acknowledge the symbolic value of a Vale as the universe and the Dale as aspects of ourselves - we live and experience in life for the sake of contributing our Dales and returning to the Vale, the spirit of all things.

My intention is not to blatantly advocate to a particular way of thinking or believing, but to demonstrate my own life journey as a process of integrating personal experience with a constantly evolving, open and critical mind to spirituality and philosphy.

Why create the website?

For as long as I can remember, I have always found personal writing to be a source of solace. I began eagerly adapting the style of R.L. Stein to A4 scrapbooks in the hopes of a keen audience, but perpetually failed to recreate the effortless thrill of a professional storyteller. As the careful recluse I am most of the time, poetry is now my chosen form of self-reflection and gives me a skilled edge with which to excercise my illocutionary force. (what a semantic mouthful!)
I never did like the way poetry was taught in public schools and even still, do not like the way it is told in university lectures - formal techniques, although the quintessence of how a poem is formed, are often stifling to be followed as a sole guide.

Poetry (and songwriting equally so) is a brief way of notetaking a pinnacle moment or thought that has made its way into the list of profound movements.
But above all, a stockpile of photography, poems, music and short stories is useless without an engaged audience to review and become inspired. The Internet, being the most efficient and broadly targetted audience, thus became a choice medium for self-promotion.

Where am I along the timeline?

I began my mark on the Internet world adding my myriad of poems and short story works from early childhood to young adulthood to FictionPress, which has consistently proven to be a valuable resource for aspiring young writers. Recieving only comments of limited potential, I became rather elitist and rejected any new reviews that would insult the effort which had gone into writing. Nevertheless, considering my age and limited writing experience, much of my work was highly fragmented (and much of my older work continues to be so) with very little exploration of a solid subject matter. This is probably best accounted to a concurrent interest in photography during later high school years, which brought me away from the keyboard and into the darkroom. It was simply much easier to portray my personal perspective of the world with point and click.

I found that my exposure and personal gratification in web publishing was not as great as I would have hoped, and so my second project from there was to try my hand at a personal anthology. Within a graphically prolific Microsoft Word document, I formatted and filled with digital art (with which I still have yet to credit the original artists!) and experimented with different typefonts, until I had created a consistent body of work. My first, The Seven Dales of Vale, expanded into the project of this blog today, spanning into The Enlightment of The Rose, The Fields of Hope and in the process of writing, The Celestial Dawn (Caelestis Diluculo). Although I think it is nicer to round off at an even number of works, anthologies made and edited by myself are the closest thing to actual publishing, minus the rejection letters and the cost.

When I was 15 years old, my father was quite puzzled for ideas about what to give me for my birthday. He offered me a popular upmarket game or a dusty Olympus camera that had been dormant in the basement for 30 years. There is nothing earthshatteringly explicit about why I chose the camera, but the controls and the metal and the lens felt very right in my hands. And soon, I had discovered how to distort reality to my personal frame of vision. Now, I continue to use my Olympus OM-20 with patience and perseverance of the rising cost of film development. Photography and poetry often coincide nowawdays, as I find a large amount of inspiration in the places I have explored and new subjects of which to take advantage. Eventually, I hope to create a portfolio of photographic works to place alongside my anthologies and collectively represent the fruit of my labour as a young adult, and an encouragement for further development into the future.

The Present Moment

I look forward to what will unfold in the days to come. I look forward to my lifepath prescribed by society - my birthdays, my anniversary, my marriage and the birth of my children. But above all, it is my self-growth that I measure with greatest fervour. It is an unusual thing to say that I should look forward to my death, but it is about moving into my subsequent manifestations of a journey I am perpetually prepared.

I hope that now and in the future, my blog and other webspace locations will foster my creativity and the numerous ideas and ways of being which will inevitably shape who I am. With open arms and furiously typing fingers I welcome you to my small space on the web and hope your visit will be as entertaining as it is fulfilling. Please feel free to drop me a line in the Contact page with any questions about me and where I am up to in the Great Adventure!

With warmest regards, I welcome you to my small bastion of work on the Internet.

-Vale!

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