Journeys
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Sunday
Nov142021

Extraordinary

How many more full moons will you see?

 

 

"Rejoice, go and remember me." - Sappho

 

 

"Photography provokes language, new discovery, abstract dream like qualities. Extraordinary - that's what I respond to." - Moriyama

 

 

"Find what you love and let it kill you."

"What a circus, we're all going to die - love each other - we don't. We are eaten by nothing."

"Some people never go crazy. What truely horrible lives they must lead." - Bukowski

 

 

"Flooded with image overload people don't feel much emotion any more ... overstimulation (C-19), people lose sensitivity & aesthetic judgement so they will not learn anything meaningful." - Ai Weiwei

 

Thursday
Nov112021

Beauty & Respect

Tell me about the village. It is a microcosm.

Simple happy people live, work, breed and die.

They know desire, anger and ignorance exists outside the village.

Inside they practice compassion and meditation. They love singing and dancing.

They cherish nature with beauty and respect.

They accept responsibility for their choices and actions with free will.

A free people they practice gratitude with an open heart-mind.

Kind and loving they walk to the pagoda or wat

daily to make offerings and receive blessings from the monks.

They sit in meditation together. Their calm heart-mind is a lotus blossom.

A monk rings a bell.

Echoes flow to the village and beyond. Frequencies and vibrations dance.

 

Monday
Nov082021

Death Worship by River

Rumors of intelligent life in Hanoi is an exaggeration, said Leo. Rumor control reports existence.

Take my neighbors Sam and Dave for example, said Tran, Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. Their names and roles are interchangeable. These are not Viet names. If they were, they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone take care of them in old age when they are lying or dying on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 wafting kitchen smells.

It’s an Asian thing. It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $50,000. Cash or no deal. Virgins have high value in the marriage market. They are have been sequestered behind fear and insecure superstitions and trapped by hovering in-laws and outlaws for centuries.

Marriage is legalized prostitution.  

Father knows best. You don’t marry the girl in Asia. You marry the family.

Cash gives them security. You pay and get the girl. The fun begins. Grandparents need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young pregnancy is always the only option. The tyranny of motherhood.  

Accelerate production comrade. Many procreating humans have more desire thinking about providing offspring for their security than the physical pleasure of sex. So it goes.

Sex is a DUTY. It ain’t about pleasure. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. Get on. Go for the ride. E jack U late. There are 90 million hard and fast parenthood rules according to the popular Vietnamese Party book, Produce & Consume. Get married early erotic pressure is on and off, on and off. Savior a small death in 8 seconds.

You do not want to be unmarried, sad, lonely and forgotten. Loss of face and shame haunts singles with vengeance. Fear of loneliness increases the possibility and probability of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a socialist society. They’ve taken their hormonal cues and social control systems from Uncle China.

 

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Sapa females in the NW, a future fragment of this tale, illustrate the value and necessity for rural girls to marry at the ripe old age of sixteen and produce genetic replicants. Petri dish. More Y chromosomes. It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

            Humans crave less suffering and neglect and more love.

Dave’s voice releases anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off cold molten gray interior Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall? His life is one long cold cement wall.

Echoes dance through his brain like sugarplum fairies. He knows the echo because he made the WALLS. He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement.

He slathered it over red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire to create a work of realist art lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama programs about life next door where the family sits on red rose cold tile floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies ... slurping from cracked bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost desperate mouths and yelling over each other in tonal decibels ... competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations, palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland ... with a double bladed axe singing a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with peasants as small players.

            Everyone’s being played.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Wednesday
Nov032021

Blindness

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."

- Upanishad

 

Curious beginnings determine her artistic sense of formless form, coloring stories of her village, the other world.

Cutting, planting, harvesting completes slow rhythm of life. Her skill shines with every new expression. Her heart sings.

Her simple direct feeling is all sensation.

Art enables her this beauty. She describes what she draws. She creates what she sees. Her words fly through forests with resplendent peacocks, birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line. Turn a blind eye.

Blindness listened. Blindness heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

Blindness danced through late yellow faltering light / penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts.

A bike bell rang. A young Lao girl sat quiet watching the Vietnamese girl do her toenails. Cutting, and trimming, lemon / lime soak, cuticles, translucent before applying a silver hued glossy glean. Nail by nail.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight crying tears of silence.

A van labeled UNIVERSE filled with blank faced white Europeans trapped behind glass holding rampant desires and scared expectations on laps turned into a blind alley.

They fidgeted with uncomfortable languages floating into ear canals assaulting long painful strides navigating yesterday’s regrets / tomorrow’s fear / today’s dead lines.

Blindness practiced Tai-chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged blue ink for a dark shade of green.

A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered empty secrets.

Elements of silence said farewell.

Eyes investigated decompression while swallowing fresh yogurt with peach slices near afternoon’s languishing empty promises intent on making it new day by day.

Explanations have to end somewhere.

In her village, the other world, the one she never left, Blindness threaded new beginnings on her loom of time feeling pressure and tightness between notes.

Sunlight dressed saliva beads blending a weave, texture and design, saying hello Beauty.

Beauty has no tongue.

Weaving A Life V1

Weaving A Life (Volume 1) by [Timothy Leonard]

 

Monday
Nov012021

her chance

Bursa, Turkey

the woman on the metro

with a burned leg - you remember her clearly
how she sat after dragging her bad leg

into the compartment
this image of her
alone
cold
scared
in pain
how did it happen? why is she alone?
on a cold night in a flimsy sweater

her skin below the knee
running to her ankle
all burned away
exposing blood red lines

her abstract expression
her sacred scared distracted face
watching night fly past windows
where blue televisions and children eye each other

how she kept going
on the metro past a stop
where the expensive private hospital on a Roman
hill gleamed its extensive intensive pensive care
ward and her treatment was delayed
forgotten useless
here

because she is poor
so she stayed in her seat
anxious now feeling her pain
wondering where she would go
where she would end up this night

as a stranger studied her anxious passive 
expression feeling burns, violent burns
inside sensations fire and heat
nerve impulses darting through

along sensory
channels where signals blocked by
neurotransmitters shut down
her chance