Amnesia

Imagination tells the truth, said Zeynep. It is curious how this beautiful monster evolved. It began in 2010. The working title was Big Work.

It’s raw material, mirrors, reflections, experiences and journeys in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia. The journey is the destination. I’m happy to get it down now and make sense of it later.

Live every day like it’s your last because one day it will be.

My responsibility is to document stories from diverse cultures. A record of people, places and growth with Direct Immediate Experience.

D.I.E.

I will create a small book about Amnesia. I am an experience junky and a hack journalist gifted with the ability to see the future. I murdered many darlings. Some darlings survived. I already revealed I am also a gardener and word janitor collecting vignettes, flash fiction and diamonds cutting through desire, anger and ignorance, with be-bop jazz poems, dreams, visions, fragments, word plays and miscellaneous elements of truth-story and fiction-memory threads whistling like a blind person in the dark.

This is not a novel. It is not linear characters detest the formulaic A to Z. I am Z and the beginning needs work.

What will you be at night when you reach the end of the road?

It is experimental in nature, like Omar’s literary memoir, A Century is Nothing. In fact, unpleasant as it is and I’ve faced many unpleasant enlightening facts part of his epic performance is included here for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Question. Did children invent infinity and eternity? No. They are abstract concepts. Like elastic time. Time is a circle. Children live forever. WE are immortal.

We begin with children’s voices. I say WE because it is everyone. The WE are you and I, us, them, he, she, it, all universal pronouns. Language is communication not rules. Grammar means rules … tedious shit.

One voice many voices. Storytellers. The world is made of stories not atoms. They are essential with heart-mind. Wisdom mind burns bright. The Mind-at-Large spirit is motivation. Karma. Here is one of my kid friends.

Hi. This is the day of my dreams, said Tran, 10, amputee and dust collector, Da Nang, Vietnam.

Let’s create a book, said Zeynep, And we’ll be in it. I am a central scripter because I am young enough to know how much I don’t know which means I don’t know anything the first thing, the last thing, the only thing, the main thing about the literary publishing game.

I imagine literary means being accepted and commercial means selling and establish marketing platforms and becoming addicted to social media because media buys people.

Many humans drown in a glut of low quality information.

I understand the meaning of meaning, subjective truth values, I am curious and question everything and like my friends in this chess game of life experiences I am fearless.

I never take yes for an answer.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

We are Bushido warriors with Zen clarity insight and wisdom. The majority of adults are, in my little clear, concise, precise deadly specific opinion based on empirical experience, tyrants, rigid, autocratic, blind in one eye, easily distracted, idiots, depressed, angry, insecure, resentful, neurotic, suffering from illusions, greedy for money and power and CONTROL and so on. I love their personality and character faults.

They take drugs or escape into phone madness to erase pain and memory. They struggle to forget. They take Soma to BE on a perpetual holiday from mind numbing tedious monotonous life. They become soft and pliable sheep…easily manipulated by viral media machine messages. Burroughs called it The Soft Machine.

Every person counts.

To relieve a low level of fear called anxiety they need a high dosage of feel good prescription drugs and/or phones. Same-same but different.

Here in Turkey, said Z, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, is prescribed for the sheep. It is safe, effective, addictive and abused. Adults take the easy way out because they are lazy, anxious and afraid after July 2016. They live their personal FEAR.

Adults boss us around because we are small. Big ones manipulate us through fear, intimidation and bribery. Eat your vegetables and you can have desert.  Don’t tell your parents what happened in the dark chapel and I’ll give you some money. Give me a bottle of expensive French wine and you’ll pass my class.

Give me your daughter and you can have some land. Give me your sword and I’ll spare your life.

I buy your freedom with candy, money and things.

Give me your tomorrows and you can have some food. Give me your soul and you can go to heaven and live with twenty-four virgins after I kill you.

I will give you clothing

shelter and food

if you give up your free speech.

What a great deal. And so on.

Adults think they are omnipotent. They are physical giants but believe you me many are smaller than a neutrino quark in my humble estimation, interpretation, elaboration, shun. This creates a tragedy.

“Life is a tragedy when seen closeup but a comedy in long shot.” – Charlie Chaplin

Book of Amnesia, V1

Book of Amnesia V1

Inarticulate Questions Mill Around.

Editing is form of self-censorship.

Punctuation is a nail…Be the hammer not the nail.

Language is a virus.

Today in the long now WE are literary outlaws. Many people … Multiple selves. A reliable heroine scripter named Zeynep and her storytelling friends.

“The scripter has no past but is born with the text.” – Roland Barthes

They de-storied all the rules. Like deconstruction and postmodern and literary osmosis. Play with it. There are no arbitrary drivel rules.

Five kid characters play literary outlaws. System Analysts. An amanuensis, word janitor, Grave Digger, a blind seer and others in the stream of life share stories.

Get it down now and make sense of it later.

Death joins them for laughs. Everyone comes to me at the end period

 Book of Amnesia, V1

Book of Amnesia, V1

ACT 1

(Fade In)

The beginning needs work, thought Zeynep.

It’s flatter than a 24-year-old on her back in a plywood room fucking a customer in Asia. Her heart beats like a drum. She’s been away from her village for five desperate years. Her mother and father slaughter pigs for the market.

Their lost daughter survives in a meat market. Supply and demand economics 101. She ran away and joined a sex money food circus. Moral: Wrong choice for the right reasons.

You pay and take your chances. Z considered the heroine’s dilemma. It’s strong, honest and REAL. What’s her quest?

Stay alive.

Stay sane.

Make money.

Send money home.

Get home.

Join a woman’s support group.

Avoid HIV and C-19.

Live to tell the tale.

Write it down.

Get it to a literary agent’s slush pile. Fat chance, it’s not mainstream.

Self-publish.

Get a life. Get married. Breed.

Have babies named Faith, Hope and Charity.

Enjoy temporary happiness.

Celebrate impermanence.

Eat incense.

The end.

Happy endings make me cry, said a blind editor waving her machete. Many true stories don’t have happy endings. People escape, disappear or die.

Take it easy. These are abstract letters and words on paper. It’s not about you Z. It’s ten claws scratching at twenty-six letters.

All writing is garbage. Take out the garbage. Burn baby burn.

I don’t see any humor in the girl’s hardcore reality, said the editor. Reality is an imaginary word crutch and time is a strung-out pimp looking for an exit.

Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor, said Z.

Inarticulate Questions Mill Around.

Editing is form of self-censorship.

Punctuation is a nail. Be the hammer not the nail.

Language is a virus.

Today in the long now WE are literary outlaws. Many people. Multiple selves. A reliable heroine scripter named Zeynep and her storytelling friends.

“The scripter has no past but is born with the text.” – Roland Barthes

They de-storied all the rules. Like deconstruction and postmodern and literary osmosis. Play with it. There are no arbitrary drivel rules.

Five kid characters play literary outlaws. System Analysts. An amanuensis, word janitor, Grave Digger, a blind seer and others in the stream of life share stories. Get it down now and make sense of it later.

Death joins them for laughs. Everyone comes to me at the end.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Freedom. Choice. Plenty.

The self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being.

*

Literary Agent: Give me international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Asian countries, greed, corporate monopoly play money profit and an orphan with no motivation but survival.

Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, drastic home foreclosures, massive unemployment, millions dying of C-19, jealousy, pride, and make sure pride is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashes empires, creates and resolves conflicts.

Give me disabled homeless angry American war veterans struggling with PTSS, divorce, authenticity, domestic famine and revenge, a central motivating factor  ... Give me imaginary borders in a crazy fucked up world.

Crossing borders is a transcendental act of courage, said Z, Ascertain the intention before the motivation, said Zeynep staying on a true line. The agent climbed a literary mountain. If there’s no literary mountain, she said, The publishing road would be flat, short and paved with gold.

Give me a new paragraph with short dirty realism sentences, said lit agent … Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts … Give me romance and treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem  ... Humans are the only animals that can scheme and deceive. 

Give me a life sentence with no chance of parole … Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by hungry ghosts … Give characters fear, forgiveness, shock and awe …

Like Orwell give me the unpleasant fact about a Burmese man, on his way to the gallows, stepping around a puddle of water … Give me his awareness of impending death and quick generous insight into his frail gentle human life.

Strap me into my chair living in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes, the metaphor of a single drop of lethal mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling drama intrigue and chaos.

Entropy - the 2nd law of thermonuclear dynamics. The center cannot hold, said WB Yeats.

Find the big metaphor Zeynep.

Give me revenge and betrayal - the how and why wars began … Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faust … Give me humans selling their soul to the Devil down at the crossroads at midnight to achieve immortality. Ain’t nothing but the blues … Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in hope, the last thing that dies with gravity and arc.

Hope walks through the fire. Faith leaps over the fire.

Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, and reactions with total comprehension knowing the scientific fact that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY. Some refer to total complexity as God.

You may want to move this fact to the brutal satisfying conclusion, said the agent. This means the long now or 20,000+ years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. There’s a huge difference between complicated and complex. If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried few are chosen … God has a huge slush pile.

Earth, this is God … I have someone who’s interested in the property and I want you OUT by the end of the month. How’s that? Imagine an accelerated space program? said Z, Only the very rich can afford a shuttle seat. So it goes.

Book of Amnesia, V1

16

My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

*

Give the gentle reader saatch aur himmat, Z said in Turkish. Translation please, said Devina. Truth and Courage.

Keep them engaged, said Tran, Be gentle with the reader. They are educated. Challenge them. What’s a word doctor, said Leo. Someone who fixes manuscripts with a sharp axe, said Tran waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston-driven fountain pen splattering blood red ink on everyone in his radius.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Edge focus. WE, you and I, them, he, she and us ain’t going anywhere. We live forever. In your dreams, yelled Devina. Everyone’s doing hard time. It ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Have mercy.

Rita, an orphan and independent visionary writer from Banlung chimed in with a voice sweeter than a Buddhist bell, I’m going to be an English facilitator and historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.

Where have I heard that before, asked Leo, an activist in exile from an orphanage on the Yangtze, heavy with silt and six trillion cubic meters of garbage flowing to the South China Sea.

What will you do with collected time, said Tran, Visit sick children in hospitals where they do DNA evolutionary experiments to stem the cells, can you sell the stems?

Speaking of stems, I’m moonlighting as a gardener, said Omar, There’s nothing more beautiful than nurturing nature in this impermanent life. We plant seeds for trees we will never see mature. Another leaf leaves life’s tree.

If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of the thorns give me a shout, said Tran, a one-legged Vietnamese child wearing his heart on the sleeve of a ragged 101st Screaming Eagle t-shirt.

A bird pressed its breast against a thorn singing, O what a beautiful morning o what a beautiful day.

A poet, like a chef or gardener, needs everything because they love everything.

I’m going to study Donatello, said Devina. Who’s he? He was a great Renaissance artist. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy. He was honest had integrity and was super original. Technically he worked with anything. You name it: wax, bronze, marble, clay, all kinds of rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist.

Painting with smoke and mirrors, said Tran, Hey, that’s what the Greeks said. They believed everything was beauty and order, said Rita, Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, musical notes, all the beauty originated with them didn’t it?

You got it, said Tran. Hey, you know what, I think I’ll take the day off and be creative. Ha. This present instant contains all reality, whispered Zeynep. We can call this experiment The Theory of Z, about a young precocious girl, her friends, artists and seers. Why not?

I taught a blind nomadic gardener/janitor/gravedigger and kid friends about emotional life in an alien schizoid civilization called Turkey, said Z. We shared values, stories and art with a free spirit.

I’ll tell you a secret. There’s two of me. One young and one old. The older is Kurdish and plays a cello in a cemetery. Can you dig it? Aliens and fantastic probabilities, said Rita, Tell me the difference between possibility and probability.

It’s about process not product. Whew, now that’s deep. Yeah, said Devina, We’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes. Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else speaking in the abstract.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said a demanding authoritarian Realist vomiting contrarian hypotheticals, truth, logic, verifiable data-based evidence, scientific facts, precise specifics. We must ascertain the immediate personal moral and ethical values with lofty principles and assistant principles on principal.

Z said, Speaking of aliens do you know about Iranian culture? They live south of us in the Middle Beast. It’s a violent repressive dictatorship. They have a VICE squad to control sheep behavior. Weird shit. Their oppressive culture keeps women in perpetual childhood.

Book of Amnesia, V1