we had an encounter - TLC 11

On a 5th floor Ankara balcony he fed wild birds, nurtured roses and played in good dirt.

He collected poetic and photographic evidence. The rise and decline of Byzantine civilizations heard historians standing on street corners, lost highways or walking arduous mountain paths amid sweet smelling manure with tattered hats in hands, pleading, “Give me your wasted hours. Give me your wasted hours.”

Besides helping students discover the courage to speak another tongue with an active voice he got a part-time job driving a taxi-bus.

At 9:11 p.m. he drove a 15-seater minivan to a Soviet-style apartment in a middle class neighborhood. A swarthy man named Pida Pie apple of his mother’s eye opened a sliding door.

A symphony of high heels announced a parade of skintight blond Russians. They purred into the taxi-bus. He smelled cosmetics, lip-gloss and sex. The night was young.

Sly Pide Pie got in.

“Go man go.”

Lucky delivered the ladies to The Kitty Cat Night Club and returned to the apartment for another load. By 10:10 p.m. he’d transported thirty.

 “Pick them up at 5:15,” said Pide.

Lucky went home for a catnap with his estranged wife from an arranged marriage. She’d traded her sex for security and knew how to rub a ruble together.

After collecting women smelling of dancing, drinks and cold-blooded sex with diplomats and Turkish tycoons he took them home. High heels and acrylic language laughter faded. Dawn broke bread.

He stopped at a cafe for muddy coffee and aired out the taxi-bus.

Beginning at 7:00 a.m. he picked up kids for their daily dose of force fed feedlot education. They stumbled out of apartments piled in and fell asleep. Weeping mothers on balconies waving soiled red/yellow hammer and sickle cleaning rags sang good-bye to despondent sons and daughters.

A Chinese waif dreaming of autonomy had her eyes wide open. “Patience is my teacher,” she said.

“I remember you from the Fujian university. How did you get here?”

“I graduated with an M.A. in Languages, Humor and Courage. I stowed away on a ship leaving Shanghai. It sailed through the Straits of Malacca, the Suez Canal and into Izmir. I hitched here and got lucky. I discovered a nanny position with a family. I tutor their kids and teach Chinese calligraphy at the school.”

“Great wild future. What happened to your dream about being a waif?”

“No fear. It’s in The Dream Sweeper Machine. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am Curious.”

“Nice to meet you. I'm Lucky.”

“Sure you are. May I drive?”

“Why not,” giving her the tantric wheel of life.

“Wow,” she said, shifting gears, “this is fun. Let’s see how slow we can go.”

At 8:15 a.m. he returned home for a shower, good eats and dreams.

At 2 p.m. he walked to The Language Company. Students were doctors, lawyers, health care workers, engineers and university students. He was a guide from the side through etymology, phonology and morphology. The majority had passive verbs down.

“How are you,” he asked.

“So-so,” sang the chorus. “Tired. We need Xanax.”

Finished at 9:00 p.m. he started the Russian roulette acquisition cycle. “Put one in my chamber,” whispered a leggy blond. “My safety is off and I am well lubricated.”

Every morning, working with Omar, a blind Touareg amanuensis from the Sahara, whom Lucky befriended by fate in Morocco two days before 9/11 while on a six-month hiatus from the united states of consumption, they finished polishing a gonzo memoir. A Century Is Nothing. Omar sent it out.

Fifty unemployed suicidal literary agents huddled around a fire in a Benaojan cave south of Ronda read Omar’s epic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings and dancing shadows displayed bison, deer, archers, and crude time-comb slashes. Red and black fish were trapped in black cages. Fingerprints whorled hunting stories.

Agents concurred. It isn’t mainstream and too experimental. We can’t realize 15% from this. Thanks but no thanks. Let’s burn it to keep warm.

Omar published it independently in October 2007. He loved the do it yourself process: text, blurb, design, basic marketing and cover image of a Chinese girl.

“Yes,” Omar said, “it’s almost as true as if you can believe it.”

Few read it and fewer understood it.

Lucky shared it with friends and strangers. His best friend buried a copy in an Arizona time capsule. Omar sent copies to nomadic Blue Men in the Sahara. Through Constantinople publishing contacts it was available at D&R Books in Ankara, Bursa, Timbuktu and a big river in South America.

They selected the cover photograph. The girl’s image expressed emotional honesty with natural innocence.

She was trapped behind a hard steel grate-full educational reality in Maija. Her eyes held world secrets and unlimited potential. She’d stared at Lucky, a professional stranger and an aberration in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against a locked gate. He was on the otherside.

He raised a small black machine to his eye. She heard a subtle click. A shutter opened and closed freezing time, capturing her soul on a memory-fiction card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared. She didn’t know her child eyes would grace a book cover for everyone to see, breathing her immortality in alchemical manifestations.

He’d visited her primary school speaking strange unintelligible words, singing and dancing. His laughter and smiles were a relief from the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn’t want to be prisoners any more than the kids. No one had a choice here. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability, fear, paranoia and shame ordered from Beijing well removed from a world where farmers struggled behind oxen in rice paddies. Green rice stalks revealed their essence below a blue sky in mud and meadows of reality.

Leo said, “Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic for years. Why are so many students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking? Besides the commercialization of education, the absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers.”

Self-censorship, shame, insecurity and humiliation devoured steaming white rice and subversive dreams.

In Ankara with Omar’s blessing, Lucky signed copies. It was a strange sensation spilling green racing ink from a Mont Blanc 149 piston driven fountain pen on parchment fibers.

The first copy was for Attila the Hungry, a large bald man with a spectacle business. He sold Omar BanSunRa-Ray glasses on spec-u-lay-shun.

“The future looks brighter than a total eclipse,” said Omar.

In 2012 while living in Cambodia, Lucky and Omar cut the original to shreds, polished it and published the 2nd edition with Create Space on Amazon. Omar selected a new cover image of a serene Nepalese grandmother and granddaughter. 

A Century is Nothing

The Language Company

 

Father teaches son to repair carpets in Ulus, Turkey.

Democracy & Happy Meals

Immediately after 9/11 Spanish children scrambled through dust pawing soil looking for energy cells. Emergency air raid sirens exploded. Everyone scrambled into bombed out buildings.

"Hey, check this out," said a hungry refugee, "I found a case of Democracy. The Republican label says it spreads easily."

"Is it crunchy or plain?"

"How do I know? It’s just plain old Democracy."

"I hope it’s better than that old rancid Freedom Sauce. Let’s give it a go. Democracy is a good idea, in theory."

They opened the box, took out a jar, unscrewed the top, grabbed sharp knives, broke bread and slathered on Democracy.

"Wow! This is yummy."

"Yeah, well I got some stuck in my throat. It tastes like sand."

"It’s protein."

World tribes collected their Democracy.

"We need more energy," someone said. "We need music, news, a weather forecast. We need to know what’s happened."

"Need a clue? Take a look around you," said an illiterate person. Twin Towers, Iraqi and Syrian villages, and Afghan mountains smoldered on the immediate horizon.

"It looks desperate," said one.

"Eye, it does," said another. "It’s always darker before the dawn."

Sirens stopped and they emerged from darkness.

"We need shelter," said a family gathering rushes from the World Bank. Third world immigrants and internally displaced people pounded rocks and carried them on their backs toward unknown futures. They sang, “Give me shelter. Shelter from the storm.”

"Beware those who live on dreams," said a rationalist.

"We need a committee," said a company man. "We need order."

"May I take your order?" requested a disembodied voice from a black box in a drive-thru combat zone.

"One happy meal to go," cried a distraught family trapped in a massive traffic jam. It was bumper to bumper on the highway of death between the airport and Baghdad. Where the rubber met the road. Their digestive systems were backed up for miles with sugar, fat, grease and carbohydrates.

"Consider the essentials will you," pleaded a small voice from the back seat trying to get a dial tone, trying to get through, trying to find a rhythm inside swirling chaos. It threatened to swallow everyone and spit humans into a black hole sucking everything into a parallel universe. 

A Century is Nothing

What did you expect?

I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist.

Wandering deep into the Tarim Basin along the Silk Road in Central Asia I discovered the Tokharin language and Afansievo culture dating 4,000 years. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorations. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA, based on an Iranian dialect.

A change of context changes experience. On the loom of time the three fates weave the word context from Latin.

Con (with or together) and texere (to weave).

A change in context is an essential and active process. Weaving directs thoughts, emotions and actions.

A kairos shuttle passes through openings in the space-time continuum. The loom binds or connects the weaver’s ability and power to speak.

Dancing in dunes away from precious oceans the wise spirit of Hsuan-tsang, a Chinese Buddhist monk recitesThe Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest printed book dated May 11, 868.

As Gascoigne, the author of The Dynasties and Treasures of China said, “The text is printed from six large blocks, each of them two and a half feet long by almost a foot broad. The scroll is a worthy and complete ancestor of all subsequent books, for it contains not only a superb woodcut as a frontis-piece...”

Hsuan-tsang was a Chinese pilgrim. He traveled to India along the Silk Road seeking out original Indian Buddhist holy books. He discovered 1,000 deserted monasteries destroyed by Hun invasions in the 5th century. He wandered through India for sixteen years visiting Buddhist places. He collected Indian holy books and carried them back to China.

While turning pages between Sanskrit words, mlecchita-vikalpa, the art of secret writing, Hsuan-Tsang tells us existence is formless. The human condition is actually hopeless, humans will never really know the universe and the concept of soul is an illusion.

Suffering is an illusion. Abracadabra!

Curious to see more to know less, I glide on after removing a grain of sand from my shoe. It isn’t the mountain that’s hard to climb it’s the grain in one’s shoe.

Years later in Colorado I met a mountain climber who, after confronting trial, error, doubt and fear reached a rocky mountain summit.

“Well, how did I do?” she asked her instructor.

“Are you still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what did you expect?”

I asked her, “Where do you step from the top of a 100 foot pole?”

Down in the southern province of Suhag in Egypt where King Scorpion lived 5,300 years ago I worked with archeologists discovering clay tablets.

Humans recorded taxes on oil and linen; a material Egyptians considered ritually pure under the protection of the goddess Tayt. The hieroglyphic line drawings of animals, plants and mountains revealed stories of economies and commodities.

In Nevali Cori we found 9,000 year-old shards of ceramics pottery depicting dancers.

“These images,” said a metaphorical digger, “reveal a common ancestor creating to integrate their community.”

A camelhair brush cleaned shards. “Anything else?”

“Well,” one said sifting dust, “we surmise these images established a collective discipline in their community. See how the figures are holding hands? What do you see now?”

“I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space.”

“It’s more than that. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.”

“Earth?”

“Yes, then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.”

“Fire is the driver.”

“Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where the male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.”

“I see. And then?”

“After chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.”

Language dances in space.

Every fourteen days a living language dies on Earth. The last speaker says good-bye.

6,100 and counting.

Storytellers sing oral traditions. They memorize stories, songs, poems, seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They create and exchange family, clan, tribal myths and legends. Their children listen, memorize, chant and recite ancestor songs.

An historian’s job is trying to understand what happened through time.

An anthropologist’s job is to understand how people told their creation stories.

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions, said, “Myths tell only of that which really happened.”

Myths suggest that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined. A myth is a story of unknown origins. Myths are sacred stories of religion based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place. The world is sacred.

Myths, legends, stories.

Neurons fire on all cylinders. Seven trillion human cells dance. The honorable monkey mind trickster sleeps, sensing pure purpose, destination, goals and reflections. If I do not pay complete attention the monkey mind identifies with a mental movie and runs wild splashing green jealous slashes, red anger strokes and blue attachment colors on pure empty canvases. I respect wild monkey mind. Keep a meditative eye on it. Mindfulness.

Magic words grow here.

Old roots expose wired genetic guilt and illusionary fear traps.

Intensity propels ten claws across twenty-six keys. Reed-like digits reflect use and neglect.

Psychology handles the branches. Mindfulness swims with roots.

Evolution flashes flickering beams of incandescent auras and pulsating electro-magnetic fields evolving character, attitude, values, behaviors and intention.

Intention is karma.

Perpetual transformation.

A Century is Nothing

Omar's Book Club

Omar turned a page and read to his book club.

They were among the lost and looking tribe.

They were figments of someone’s imagination, caricatures of wild inventions in abstract designs spinning webs from the center. They laughed at everything with cosmic perspective.

Through laughter they regained their sense of delight inside the mystery.

Someone somewhere rang a bell. Noon’s mechanical hands said hello. Calibrated craftsmen hands read luminous dials. The facade of a Catholic church on a Spanish hill in a pueblo contained fissures and cracks in its foundation.

Long spider tentacles streamed from the base into dusty shadows where birds rested from flights of fancy along Roman walls covered in soft green moss. The church bells were old hollow iron shells with a broken clapper. Rusting heavy metal shreds in weeds weighed down wet script reading ‘O come all ye faithful’ in Sanskrit next to a book of poems written on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

Blood flowed down white walls soaking green stems in brown soil feeding roots beneath the surface. Roots had no shadows, below the surface of human awareness.

Their expectations were Southwest desert creation myths.

A young Anasazi girl shared her wind note vision.

My name is Kokopelli the humpbacked flute player. I am 1,000 years old. My image is found on petroglyphs or rock carvings and also on rock paintings or pictographs in kivas, on ceramics and woven baskets. The ancient ones, the Anasazi, regard me as a symbol of fertility, a roving minstrel or trader. People also call me the rainmaker, a hunting magician, trickster and seducer of maidens.

In the Pueblo myths my hump carries seeds, babies and blankets to maidens. I wander along the upper Rio Grande between villages carrying seeds and bags of songs on my back. Because I represent fertility I am welcomed during the corn- planting season and sought by barren women and avoided by maidens. If you listen well, you will hear my flute music echoing through canyons playing traditional songs.

She disappeared along fault lines in long undulating dry washes full of sagebrush playing her flute near rainbow mesas strewn with geological strata.   

Listen, said Little Nino, do you hear the music, clarity, gentle sweetness echoing through space? It’s sublime.

A flute joined the tribal tolling bell. Form whom the bell toiled and told?

Someone had passed on.

Sublime, said a person named Art, an unemployed American realtor. Survivors gathered around him admiring torn muddy glossy brochures of multilevel and split-level green and white pastel clapboard low mortgaged homes financed with borrowed capital surrounded by security walls decorated with barb wire and shards of glittering green glass.

Venomous Diamondback rattlesnakes, cobras, and African pit vipers attacked soft city folks on their trail of tears inside shadows coalescing like shape shifters, said Artsyfartsy. 

Domestic violence erupted inside hearts, homes, cities, villages, towns, and countries between resentful, bitter out-sourced wives, their alcoholic husbands, frustrated lovers, and their catatonic, aggressive video game programed kids. Someone called the feds.

The feds arrived, said everyone in the compound was Waco and leveled the place with heavy tank fire.

Prime time news, baby.

And then O Art?

Down on Mean Street near the Tigris River someone detonated a land mine under a diplomatic silver Suburban, shredding level-5 armor designed to protect it from RPG's, killing three American intelligence agents on the West Bank of heaven. Their cover was blown. Blood rivers flooded streets. An old woman of a displaced tribal nationality with a mop began her clean up operations. Shit happens.

Everyone in the region denied responsibility for the attack. Analysts said it was very sophisticated and similar to attacks against an evil empire in Iraq fueled by sectarian strife, poverty, greed, hatred, animosity, and stupidity fighting for power and control dating back to the Assyrian empire in 689 BC.

Thanks Art. Speaking of empires, how about this tasty morsel of history? Omar said, thumbing a page.

A Century is Nothing

Omar's Letter

Dear Literary Agent, (insert name here)

Many thanks for your letter in response to my submission. As a matter of fact at this exact moment I happen to have 60,000 tight specific succinct precise concise words floating around my small cabin here in a bamboo Zen grove. I will seduce them on blank 20/lb. bond white sheets. Their text will be an artistic marvel of design.

I will wave my magic word wand over said words to rearrange them in a simple easy to follow solid chronological narrative linear structural form aligning consonants and vowels with clear syntactical structure and so forth.

I love ironing. I share this passion with Murakami.

I will iron word sheets with passion and persistence. My vicious egotistical profit driven anal editors will cull all unnecessary adjectives, adverbs and useless verbiage from the assembled manuscript. All writing is garbage.

Being an expert at practicing, I will write short fast and deadly.

I will use my well-honed Tibetan knife and laughter’s Labrys axe.

Suspects will be blindfolded, stripped, and deprived of due process (part of the revisionist process) under the International Geneva Font Scribe Protection Act as described in The Book of Kells Illuminated. Subversives deemed unfit, dispensable, extraneous, and gratuitous for literary service will be executed by Executive Order #1234 with no emotional attachment.

Next of kin will be notified in Braille.

Fatalities will be a footnote in hiss-story. Where the sound of speech has no alphabet.

It will have the intellectual density of an essay, lyric cohesion of poetry and a structure resembling a documentary film incorporating cross-referenced evidence.

To write and to draw is the same Greek verb.

When Mr. Butcher and Mr. Barber, my invaluable insolvent intrepid illiterate archaic erstwhile editors finish cutting I’ll get back to you with a revised manuscript. A.S.A.P.

No editor is going to drink champagne from my skull.

Cordially yours, Omar, the Blind One.