Detergent Molecules

On Christmas Eve in 2001 I met a tall funny animated physicist at Relax, a vegetarian restaurant owned by two English girls in Ronda, an hour from Grazalema.

Alex worked with molecular structures in Liverpool creating simulated computer programs for a detergent company. He was paid to have fun.

“Every couple of years I shift around,” he said in a drunken state of mind. “Well this looks interesting, I say to myself. I’ll try this for a couple of years.”

His height over the world was frightening at first. His companion, another physicist from Germany was Silent Night.

I listened. When he knew I was a writer he said, “Well then I’ll give you something for your book. I’m from Canada, my family is from Hungary, I spent six years in Athens, Georgia, then in Germany and now I am in England. The cord connecting me to my past has been cut, severed. I’m just floating around having fun. I just end up in these most fascinating places. I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing two or three years from now. I just end up in a place doing my scientific work and they pay me. It’s amazing. I think I am becoming less left-brained over time. I will tell you something that happened to me recently. I discovered music. I discovered the drums. When you play the drums you cannot be analytical about it, you have to be the drum.”

He shouted in Relax. We stood at the end of the bar. Languages blended with music, laughter and colliding holiday glasses. He was in the spotlight letting it all out feeling free.

His friend had driven down from Frankfurt and they met in Barcelona for a three-week holiday. They hoped to go to Morocco. Alex was anxious. “My friend’s passport expires in six months and we don’t know if they will let him in. We want to go in at Ceuta, travel to Fez, Meknes, spend New Year’s eve in Marrakech, then go over the Atlas mountains, swing through the Sahara and back north.”

“What happens if you can’t get in?”

Laughing from a great height he threw out massive scientific hands with manicured nails.

“Then we’ll just go where we feel like it, following old roads, seeing where they go, like we did today through white villages named Benacoz and Arcos. We have no plans other than trying to get into Morocco. Neither of us has been there. We don’t know it.”

“I don’t know it either,” I said. “I’ve been traveling so long I’m a stranger to myself. Other. Before here I was there for +/- 64 days.”

“Really?” he said, combining a question with an exclamation. “What is it like? I really want to know.”

“It’s a fascinating place. It may shock you and your friend the first couple of days and then you adjust to the rhythm, dealing with the hustlers, how to see in the light. Eight hours seems like twenty-four. You are the director, audience and player on location.”

“Really?” 

“Yes, really. You’ll have amazing experiences there. The people are kind and hospitable.”

“I will tell them I am from Canada even though I spent six years in Georgia. It took me six years to figure out how the Americans think and it was very strange. They live in their own little world. They don’t see out. I would talk to them and the frequency passed right through their transparent selves.”

“I know what you mean about their frequency,” I said rolling a cigarette. “Only 30% of the population has a passport. Their knowledge of foreign cultures is slight to nonexistent. After 9/11 some Americans abroad learned to say, ‘I am Canadian or Australian in Arabic.’ Others learned world geography fast.”

“I’ll bet they did. How long have you been here?”

”All day. I jumped through a window of Fate and left the states of amnesia on September 1st. After two months in Morocco I moved to Cadiz for a month and then came to this area.”

He ordered another beer. He was a tall smart kid in a brave new world. His excitement was absurd, scary, hilarious and full of repressed energy. Grabbing his space he streamed words as people squeezed past to bathrooms.

“Wow, this is really amazing. Why is this place so interesting and so full of people?”

“There’s an excellent Spanish language course at Mondragon Palace. Students come to Ronda for intensive 3-4 month classes. The city has Roman and Arabic culture, the weather is good year round and the social scene is nonstop. Plenty of recreational drugs are available, for medicinal purposes only ha, ha. It’s a good place for people to hang out.”

He laughed. “Well I’d be interested in the medicinal properties of course. Do you live here?”

“I live, hike and write in a Sierra mountain pueblo twenty-five kilometers from here. It’s called Grazalema. It’s an old Berber village. The Romans passed through on their way to Seville. I’m here for two days to see friends for the holidays.”

“Really? I never heard of it. We drove around today to a lot of places, just following the road. It was really great. This is a wonderful place,” he said, looking over people talking and drinking in candlelight. “Hey, I’ll give you something for your book. Then I’ll be in it.”

“Ok.”

“You won’t believe it but I work with a multinational company in one of their Liverpool labs. I use computer programs to create and analyze various molecules in their detergent.”

“Detergent?”

“Detergent. This is how it works. Some molecules are attracted to dirt. They adhere to it. They seek it out. Others like water. So, I assemble all these various atoms and molecules and see what they do. I introduce them to the materials and see how they react.”

“Fascinating.”

“Yes, and I get paid to have fun. They pay me to create these experiments.”

“So, you’re an artist using technology to create a canvas of detergent by painting molecules.”

“Exactly.” His enthusiasm blasted over a hip-hop rap bass beat. “You can put that in your book.”

“Why not? Readers will find your story-truth enlightening. I used to work in a town where there was a nuclear reactor and I knew physicists. Some worked with nuclear fuel waste containment, others developed hydrogen fuel cells for alternative energy sources. I never met a physicist working with detergent.”

“Yeah it’s pretty cool. And now we’re here. Did you know that the world is made up of 98% helium and hydrogen? Well, the remaining particle of atoms, a very small part is life and inside these atoms a very small part of that is intelligence. The rest of the pyramid is garbage.”

He laughed forever. “The amazing thing is how many people don’t know it or get it. The natural law is for things to get messy. That’s why people clean, rearranging molecules in some form of order. They think they’re in control of it. They’re afraid of change. Death and chaos freaks them out. Things happen outside their control or the plans of the creator. It expands the evolutionary process.”

“That’s cool. I took a statistics class once and while I wasn’t very good in statistics I learned one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Any individual or system will do whatever is necessary to perpetuate and sustain itself.”

“That’s it,” yelled Alex. “That’s a pure definition of how the world works. That’s the exact answer.”

ART - A Memoir

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Graz Work Shoes

Inland at 2,606 feet Grazalema men wore hard shoes.

They were a plain brown leather boot with four eyelets and rubber soles. Field shoes. Made for making a living in rocky fields, farming valleys and climbing mountains.

Shoes for taking care of livestock, cutting and clearing timber, shearing sheep, gathering olives, patrolling pastures and waterways, gathering stones from fields, building walls, gardening and working.

It was the same thing to them. To walk was to work. The shoes were not fancy.

Men standing around the Plaza de Espana on Sundays talking with friends in sparse January sun wore brown or black dress shoes. All dressed up and no place to go.

One man, a survivor of the Civil War in 1936 always wore a black beret. He taught music in a small musty dark basement room lined with empty cabinets and dusty band instruments.

His old spectacles had razor thin temples protecting hard squinty eyes and he never smiled. His gaze bore through you. He resembled a disciplined interrogation expert from Fascist Franco days. He was always dressed impeccably and wore black wing tips. There was a deep gash on the front of his right shoe where he’d met a rock.

Shoes were silent below tanned faces lined with life creases as the Penon Mountain loomed over them. Three men stood against the potable water trough staring at a white crucifix on a high mountain ridge. They talked about the weather, crops, families, politics, festivals, and pensions. Sparrows hunted for crumbs on cobblestone paths outside a cafe.

Across the plaza an old frail woman in black holding iron gratings for support sat in her open window peering up an empty street. She was a sabia, a wise woman empowered by grace and knowledge to perform magical acts.

Every day at dawn laborers gathered in the Plaza de Espana Cafe for coffee, sherry, bread, ham and conversation.

“I believe because I do believe,” a man said to no one in particular gripping his hot glass of espresso.

“Believe in what?” said one rubbing his hands against winter.

“When you snap your fingers they contain instants of time,” said another.

“You gotta believe we’re going to get through this winter,” said a sad man.

Mist was thick in the valley below the pueblo. A shepherd released sheep from a pen and drove them into a field of white boulders.

Graz neighbor

A Scottish visitor sitting outside the cafe shared a story. “I taught business linguistics in college, but I’m really an amateur botanist.”

He pointed up at the Penon. “When you climb up there, as you go higher you are going back in time. You are climbing through stages of life.”

He described rare flower species in the national park and their cycle of blooming seasons at different elevations.

Hearing the botanist reminded me of Jack, a geologist in Canada in 1984 as we passed huge gray boulders along Georgian Bay and he said, “If you imagine the Empire State building and put a dime on top, the dime corresponds to human’s time on earth and the structure is the planet, specifically those boulders. They are some of the oldest stones on the planet.” Rock on.

A woman at the table said, “At everyday level, physicists believe that the arrow of time always points in the direction of increasing disorder or entropy.” Someone asked her to explain.

“The second law of thermonuclear dynamics is really simple. An easy explanation is this. If you don’t clean a room, for example, it gets messy, things get moved around. So a person expends energy to clean it up. It’s about transferring energy.”

“Thanks for the insight,” I said to the woman as she negotiated a parking ticket outside her hotel.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

Two fit English hikers passed. “Let’s go and have a little explore,” said a white-haired man to his wife.

“I love you,” she said.

A team of eighteen jubilant British hikers armed with telescopic hiking poles, laminated topographical maps, spring water, binoculars, bird books, food, and esprit de corps left the pueblo for the Sierras.

I needed a new perspective and climbed high where views past Grazalema extended east over rolling rocky fields, tilled earth, rivers, thick cork valleys and distant mountains. Vision encompassed a tiny white pueblo and microscopic humans accompanied by their shadows exploring levels of experience. I focused binoculars in cardinal directions.

One man on his sparse plot of land cleared stones by hand, put them in a wheelbarrow and pushed his load uphill near his house. He dumped stones and returned to his field of laborious love.

A man in cold shade chopped at a thick tree.

Another man used his day clearing stones and hoeing a large area for winter planting.

Sitting on the mountain peak under sky windows my calm mind savored 360 degrees of clean pure light and air.

I danced in the mysterious beauty observing geological manifestations.

“Lunch is served on the terrace,” said an invisible waiter. The main course was water, meat, cheese, bread, two bananas, and an apple. Dessert was stripping off a sweatshirt to feel sun’s heat.

A fast screaming eagle shadow zoomed over me. Zap.

Down below men renovating homes in the shadow of old Roman ruins hammered their way as children ran, yelled and played in a desperate frenzy.

Eagles and vultures soared on currents. Cloud shadows creased the valley obscuring white homes. Twilight smoke curled from chimneys.

ART - A Memoir

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Hope Marries Exile

Hope had free choice. She married Exile at the Cathedral of Dreams. They ran through meadows, olive orchards and summited Spanish mountains above the Mediterranean.

“There’s a big world out there,” she said to Exile.

“Yes and that’s only the top of it,” he said. “Shall we share an orange?”

“Yes,” said Hope smiling at real and imaginary worlds past the event horizon, “we will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Delicious.”

Hope birthed a girl named Patience. Raising Patience was life’s little test for Hope and Exile. Patience gave them the test first and lessons later.

Exile was a lone wolf and Patience tested his love. She tested his stability, honesty, trust and way of creating worlds inside worlds melding swirling atoms of experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker. Patience admired this.

Personality tests revealed their character traits and imperfections. With empathy and gratitude Patience tested Exile’s ability to act and let go. She gave him desire, anger, and ignorance and he created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. Patience cherished this jewel in the lotus.

Hope was relieved seeing Exile content in this context.

“No one dies. Their spirit evolves,“ said Exile as they chopped and carried wood.

“True,” said Hope. “Patience lives forever. Magic protects her. I felt it before she was born. She was a stream of light floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” said Exile. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will master her Jinn spirit energies becoming a fine healer.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe. Stream splinters sang twilight. Exile chopped. Hope carried. A yellow moon rose through orange-blue streaks above the Sierras.

“He went to the cemetario today,” said Hope.

“Who?”

“The forcestero, the outsider. Visiting spirit sources.”

“Indeed,” said Exile, “they fly with the full moon.”

Hope and Exile danced in their nets of light. Their floating spirits were free of substance. Free spirits in a free world left temporal bodies floating down to the Rio Guadalete River.

River said, “I wake you up. You follow me and reach pools. Pools are your quiet mind in deep meditation. Deep pools reflect absolute emptiness. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero. You: nature, water, stones, vegetation, trees, animal skulls, blue sky, and sound ...

My music is water. It is soft. It is all you know. You are centered pure and simple. It is all you need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to accept responsibility for his life and death ...

You memorize my silent sound and carry it in you. It is light and portable. It multiplies its flowing vibration by streaming. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, wildness, purity unimpeded. Amplification of clear water is short immediate direct and with you forever. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby ...

I wake you up. You pay attention. Your spirit flies away and I know you are safe, blessed by my pulse and flow becoming river. Feel the energies. My magic spirit is strong. It flows through your life adventure. I sustain you. My stream is never ending, never beginning. It is the stream of life. Absorbed into the flow you are still. As above, so below.”

Exile and Hope combined their blood with water. The water rushing from dark gray Sierra Mountains through dolomite paths was clear, cold and delicious.

Gathering flowers they savored fresh turned soil, olive and cork trees, pine, evergreen, Pinsapar Fir and trees without a name.

Trees pointed at stars. “Look there,” they said, gesturing thin branches toward sky diamonds, “there, there we are.” Trees identified pulsating white stars.

“Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” sang another, “there we are.”

“And there, and there, everywhere.”

Moonbeam winds heard stars whisper magic star tale secrets of star trails dancing in a vast silent vacuum. Hope and Exile manifested light.

ART - A Memoir

Author Page

Lao kids carry worlds on their back.

Sierra

Freezing gray and black clouds at the summit formed a blanket around my shoulders with essential threads I needed. They’d be measured, cut and woven into a memoir of new/old stories.

Grazalema or Lacilbula in Latin was a 3,000-year old Berber village and white pueblo below the Penon Grande Mountain with 2,300 residents.

Nature formed rain to welcome me home.

Hail the conquering hero fell hard and fast. Inch deep frozen rain accumulated on patio plants. The weather turned bitter cold for a week.

“Unseasonable,” said my petite neighbor outside her blue Moorish door near a red rose bush with sharp thorns.

My patio had twenty plants with orange and lemon trees. It was an intimate old white home with plastered stone walls, cold black and red tiled floors, no central heating, no hot water, gas cookers in a small kitchen, kitsch on walls and mantelpiece, a round writing table with an electric heater for leg warmth, a downstairs bedroom, a large freezing room upstairs with a valley view and a bathroom.

Shortwave reception from a European transmitter picked up fragments about new economic ideas.

“Using resources more efficiently…People are productive…A budget of people and scarce nature…Natural capitalist, high quality kilowatt hours with higher profits and better service...Money an enabler a curse with a price on everything...Create time dollars without a specific value...Mutual credit systems…Invent complimentary currency systems…Functionality and earning credits with mechanisms and the social cost…Transfer the future of money…Economics doesn’t give us the whole picture doesn’t provide all the answers…Price determines behavior maximizing financial consequences…Accountability industry...”

I changed frequency.

Graz friends live forever

Every day after finishing morning pages I turned off the word machine, unplugged the heater, checked gas cookers were off, packed food, water and compass, laced up hiking boots, noosed a silk scarf, put on a wool hat and gloves and grabbed my thick walking staff to climb back in time.

The first patio door was unlocked with a heavy iron key left by Arabs. They’d ruled al-Andalucía for 800 years.

Keys to heaven dangled from Catholic vestments or battle dress in European paintings. The key to paradise was heavy and manipulated by people with Control, Power, Money and Leverage. 

I collided with a low hanging winter orange, laughed and slipped the bolt on the second wooden door, entering the courtyard. A single red rose beneath a lemon tree presented its fragrance. One curled petal went in my pocket.

“Ola,” I said to my smiling neighbor sweeping stone steps. She worked from sunup to sundown.

“Ola. Are you going climbing? It’s a fine day for it.”

“Yes.”

“Adios.”

I passed the shuttered Municipal Bibliotheca where I studied Spanish art history and Andalucía reference books M-F from 1830-2030 as giggling children doing homework made faces. Their behavior was direct and honest. They teased me about sex using their fingers showing what happens between men and women. In-out dialogue. Universal gestures.

Laughing, we shared intuitive awareness until the neurotic rigid librarian needing dental care told us to BE QUIET. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up.

I was a pleasant aberration in their life. Foreigners didn’t stay long in Grazalema. A forcestero in exile is always home.

Girls had bags of pens and pencils giving them diversions and choices. A pen? A pencil? Ink? Which color? They traced animals, people and transcribed religion lessons. Boys messed around and girls studied, a universal educational fact.

I hiked past narrow connected whitewashed stone homes buried below rising Sierra Mountains. Roman cobblestone streets were rough, smooth, jagged, slippery compressed viaducts sloping toward the middle for drainage. Residents staring at Penon Grande saw gray dolomite rocks stab aquamarine sky. Walking residents peering down had eyes pierced by rocks.

I read a poem about Andalucía by Manual Nogales from the El Gastor pueblo. It was about rocks, pines, sun, water, clear mountain air, local pastries, simple men, beautiful women, 1,000 balconies with 1,000 geraniums, old Moorish and Iberian secrets, hidden treasures, red and orange Sierra sunsets, bandits, legends and myths.

I stopped at a family bakery to get T-Rex, their German shepherd. He spent his days chained to a tree and was ecstatic sensing freedom. The family appreciated my willingness to take him climbing.

“Where are you going today?” said the woman.

“We’ll climb the Penon southern route and return in four or five hours. Is that ok?”

“Yes. See you later.”

I secured his long leather leash. We left the pueblo, climbed a rise and descended to a small parking lot. Four adults with an infant got out of a car. A man opened a gate inviting me to follow.

“Gracias.”

They stayed in a sunny meadow. My choice was a steep, rocky, narrow muddy trail in cold shadows. My staff’s worn metal point stabbed soil.

Facing a date with destiny I took my time quickly with muscular skeleton bone skin steps. My heart rate roared a wild-throated vibration in my ears.

T-Rex moved with agility and determination.

Climbing revealed new peaks. Distant miniature valleys spread fir and pine ranges with jutting gray limestone rocks under flowing green mountain ridges. Magic.

We climbed as white and gray dolomite stones tore at my boots.

We ascended through nature’s office exploring new levels of experience. Tributaries extended in four directions.

T-Rex’s powerful legs and energy kept me moving.

I trusted nature with humility and gratitude.

We rested above a valley of Pinsapar Fir surveying a massive ring of limestone peaks. Pinsapar Fir from the Tertiary Period 2.5 million-years ago survived in isolated parts of southern Andalucía and Morocco.

A rolling stone gathers no moss on a luminous soft green mountain peak. Small yellow wildflowers clung to stubborn roots. T-Rex explored ice and flowers. Grazing sheep scattered.

On a plateau meadow dolomite and limestone rocks exploded from the surface. I’d climbed back in time. Snow patches shadowed sky mirrors reflecting prism light. Mountains filled eastern valleys.

I was between peaks on ancient terra firma feeling the sky caress my forehead as gray white and dark blue clouds hurtled over geological evidence in silence. Fast western clouds sailed with invisible perfection.

On a mountain summit time runs faster than at sea level. Gravity is stronger at sea level. Gravity slows time down.

T-Rex shared cold water, raisins, salami, cheese, bread, and friendship. Wind whispered silence. I was frigid then broiling as sun danced through clouds. I savored long deep breaths.

Sitting on jagged stones I read compass instructions: You’re never lost, there’s only various degrees of uncertainty about your position.

I laughed. Vibrations of joy echoed in emptiness.

Far away on planet Earth spinning in a galaxy, countries produced marketing plans selling insecurity to docile buyers.

Governments produced Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. FUD. Scared consumers washed it down with super-sized sugar drinks, tea, java and fresh coconut juice.

Blind sheep accepted imaginary media nightmares of unknown caloric proportions.

The sky is falling. The sky is falling.

Love is in the air. Run for cover.

If you laugh you last.

*

Source: ART - A Memoir

Author Web Site

Graz

Going To Graz

“Take a good look at me! 

I am an idiot, I am a clown, I am a faker.

Take a good look at me!

I am ugly, my face has no expression, I am little.

I am like all of you!”

-  Tristan Tzara

*

After a month in Cadiz I needed solitude for winter writing. Patricia opened a provincial map. She pointed out coastal towns. “Villages full of Germans this time of year. It depends on what you want.”

She highlighted areas and small towns north of Cadiz like Arcos de la Frontera, Bornos, Villamartin, and Prado del Ray.

She pointed to a village named Grazalema. It was in the Sierra National Park and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve with 146 species of birds, tracts of Pinsapar Fir and climbing opportunities. “This is also a beautiful area. One of my favorites but it will be cold there this winter.”

“Thanks for your help. I like the sound of Grazalema. I’ll live there for three months before returning to Morocco.”

“My pleasure. Good luck.”

One Romani said adios to another Romani. I carried my pack and word machine past the San Francisco cathedral where men fitted fragmented dolomite stones into puzzles.

Tanned people drank coffee or red wine watching muscular workers string plumb lines and hammer beat up rocks into passive submission. A priest in religious shadows fingered rosary beads waiting to hear sinners release imaginary guilt.

Hammer music faded as I traversed passages to a park where a bronze Spanish hero on horseback waving a sword dripping blood proclaimed freedom and a constitution in 1812.

Transatlantic shipping vessels with the word FAST loaded at a dock. The Canary Islands were two days away.

 A harbor billboard extolled CONSUME.

 Adjusting my antenna I heard Sonny Boy blowing his harp, “If you don’t help me darling I’m gonna have to find me somebody else.”

The COMES bus wound north passing olive and cork trees, crumbling stone homes disintegrating to earth, tilled soil and walled estates. Giant black steel bulls advertising local sherry guarded hills overlooking highways. Bulls, sheep and cows grazed in fields. Moorish castles hovered above old Roman roads.

Men manipulated shovels, small dump trucks, cement mixers, wheelbarrows, chisels and hammers. They heaved, hauled and sweated as homes and businesses consumed fields. They attached stones to existing structures. Roman stonewalls married Moorish stonewalls.

Adults were big kids assembling life projects to authenticate their being.

Bread, water, lentil soup, ham, cheese and olives dressed mid-day tables with a siesta for dessert.

Yangon, 2015

In Algodonales I negotiated a ride past Zahara de la Sierra into rising mountains. The abandoned castle sat on a pinnacle above fields and three lakes.

The Almohads, a strict Berber sect from Morocco, built Zahara in the 8th century. It fell to Castilian prince Fernando de Antequera in 1407 and was recaptured in a night raid in 1481 by Abu-al-Hasan from Granada.

Spanish anarchists, bandits and literary outlaws in exile used it as a hideout in the 19th century.

The high vertical mountain pass at 1300 meters was Puerto de los Palomas or Dove Pass. Doves did not live there. Egyptian vultures ruled skies.

The narrow hairpin mountain road wove through clouds, rain and snow as plateaus, rivers, lakes and forests disappeared in fog. A disembodied spirit floated.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Yangon, 2015