The Begging Bowl

In the middle of now-here a skinny naked black man dragging a shawl in blazing noon sun walked along the road at a steady pace, his black mop of hair bouncing. His eyes were on fire.

The stranger took coffee in the old Tiznit market square as Berbers in flowing blue robes meandered through his dream.

A hustler on his bike materialized out of thin air.

“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes by bike. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”

“Why should I?”

“Great morning prices.”

One hundred years ago this guy would have been on a camel in his burnoose tending his flock out in the Sahara. He’d have been planning to invade Spain and married to a beautiful Berber girl with dark seductive eyes, had tons of kids and conquered the Iberian peninsula in his spare time. Now he was on a 50 cc imported European bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slicked black hair smiling with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.

As a traveler used to multiple dimensions and shifting frequencies the wandering ghost was passing through the transition machine being assaulted by monosyllabic well meaning idiots taking him for a fool. Only the fool and children spoke the truth.

All the hustlers were released on parole for good behavior. They were out. They had no idea who, what, when, why, where and how he’d showed up in their jurisdiction. They lived in an inverted paradigm.

He was on assignment, a hunter gatherer of words and images.
Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence - Metis - a hybrid form.

‘Snapshot’ was a hunting word from the late 1800’s. He made them, he didn’t take them. That’s the qualitative difference. Someone once said “The best pictures are the ones in your mind.”

On one level this was true yet he enjoyed gathering material for future creative projects when he’d establish a base in a Crow forest or elsewhere with transmission potential.

He enjoyed the challenge; the patience factor, seeing before the fact, before the action occurred, before the vision manifested itself. Before, during and after the emotional rush. He knew a little premonition was a dangerous thing. It took practice. It involved human detachment and reptilian behavior.

It was a beautiful strange fascinating magical alchemy developed over years traversing the planet; becoming involved on a subtle level of intuition, trusting instincts, being the moment.

The essence of being and nothingness. A singularity of being and non being, stalking and allowing the movie to roll as action led to certain climatic instants. He isolated elements and captured them clean and simple. He tweaked reality. The emotion preceding the action was his intention.

It was the KISS philosophy and straight shooting.

A shooting star flashed across the sky shedding tears of light. He settled into a rhythm of the place, faces on film, framed for posterity. Ephemeral realities moving through passages of time and space. Sitting down, doing his work, packing up the essentials and hitting the road.

He found his comfort zone inside a zonal theory of photography. Shades of gray. Spectrums breaking down the barriers of language, attitudes, belief windows, values, perceptions and interpretations. As a physician and guardian of the visible world film was his prayer wheel and he kept it spinning.

The decisive moment where he divided time in two.

It was a pure thought with pure action. A way of life through the gateless gate.

“Infinite diversity through infinite combinations,” someone said while walking and laughing on the curvature of the earth. It was a walking meditation or kinkin in Japanese.

It didn’t matter if it was the most crowded tourist souk on the planet or a single malnourished boy under his torn plastic sheet offering him sweet green grapes. They all wanted a piece of the action. Everyone graduated with degrees in Hustling 101. It was all about survival. How the world works.

Meditating on the process of death shaped his motivation.

“The nature of my mind is the empty sky,” he said to the hustler.

“Get on,” said the biker.

He shouldered curiosity and got on the hustler’s bike. They roared out of the market, down narrow twisted streets, bumping and grinding gears through alleys, zooming along high gingerbread adobe walls, in and out of blinding sun, blasted into cool shadows and arrived at an empty shop. Full stop.

A young boy in his Tiznit silver shop took over the sales operation plying him with sweet tea and sugared words.

He tried sympathy and pity. He cajoled, he waited, he sighed, he put on his saddest face.

He tried to convince him to buy something. “Morning sale means good luck.”

“Every morning you wake up is good luck,” said his visitor.

The boy used well established emotional appeals playing the man for a sucker. His attitude was that every traveler was rich and relatively speaking tongues of dialectical materialism this was true. Especially when you consider in Morocco one person worked to support 13 and only 9% of the population had a job.

He handed him a wooden bowl.

“This is the traditional way. Put your choices in the bowl. We can discuss the price later.”

He accepted the wooden bowl and, to be polite because he was a guest in their country, wandered around a showroom looking at inlaid boxes, handled daggers with fake stones, silver rings, bracelets, bangles, beads, earrings and silver necklaces in provocative gleaming displays.

In another reality he carried his begging bowl through dirt streets in the world. It felt cool and smooth in his hands as his fingers caressed a worn oval surface.

The begging bowl had a consciousness. He remembered exchanging one denomination of printed paper money for another undetermined value of currency with a malnourished homeless child wearing blood red ragged shorts and broken sandals sticking a needle into his scrawny arm standing in the gutter of their broken down existence full of suffering and futile hope in Dhaka, Bangladesh near a sacred bull wallowing in dust.

Five million starving humans swarmed around his pedicab one day beating on fractured windows pleading for charity. He reflected the horror in his mirror.

He re-calibrated true bearings and measured his way inside third world countries thumbing open his useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary. It was full of myths, symbols, images, ideographs, pictographs, virus inoculations, sliding scales, musical interludes, sonatas, vibratos, journey notes, bleeding tomatoes, broken hearts, fried home truck stops, haiku, khata scarves, pure mirror paper, type-A negative blood donor manifests and empty wooden bowls.

Tiznit boys wanted him to fill it up. They wanted him to be greedy. They wanted to hear the sound of silver strike wood. They had great expectations of wealth based on his desire. He wanted to hit the bricks. He found one interesting bracelet and it clattered, spinning silver.

He became a Tuareg Berber. “I’ll give you 100.”

“Mister, please, the price is 350,” the boy said, being fresh out of tears, too tired to cry and the man in front of him, being Berber, used to endless patient Sahara nature, comfortable with just sitting inside the silence of being, not doing, was not fooled by fake emotions of self-pity and stayed with his last and final price.

He was a hustling mercenary 24/7 and it wasn’t his job, destiny, fate or karma to go around rescuing sellers trapped in their reality, in their expectations.

“Take it or leave it,” he said in Tamashek. The boy was shocked to hear his language, his dialect. He had no idea. They were on common territory.

Negotiation is hard work. It didn’t require extraordinary skills; just patience, determination, dedication and hard hearted basic instinct. He received one piece of silver and dissolved into a broiling sun, experiencing a metamorphosis as his ego dissolved.

The bowl reflected emptiness.