Buy Low, Sell High

In the Sahara removed from death, chaos, tears and 3,000 funerals I suggested to Omar maybe it was about economic terrorism, poverty and empathy.

He understood the economics of survival, bartering, trade, exchange value, supply, demand and getting the best price. Not too low and not too high.

“A person cannot drink or eat more than they need. It’s about hospitality,” he said.

Omar’s tribe migrated from Mali, Southern Algeria and Mauritania. Prior to 1956 there were six million Touareg on nine million square kilometers of desert with no government borders controlling movement. Now there were 7-10,000 in the Sahara Occidental.

Berbers controlled the Iberian Peninsula as a colony from Marrakech castles. Fierce warriors, they resisted outside control while maintaining their language and culture during Roman, Vandal and Arabic rule.

“Your enemy is my friend,” said Omar.

His tribes conquered and ruled Spain for centuries.

He’d seen boring television images. He preferred human conversation. Omar knew television and cell phones were the most insane consciousness-stealing inventions of all time. They sold desire and greed designed by advertising companies pitching food, sex, self-esteem and illusions of false happy secure lies.

After the successful 9/11 attacks desperate stories, lies and myths evolved, adapted and adjusted like petri dish cultures.

They created new languages, art, music, attitudes, values, principles, weapons of mass distraction and historical chaos in the long now. They took on new fragmented impartial impervious identities.

“Buy low and sell high,” said Omar as sand shifted below a blue sky.

“Simple as ABC,” I said.

“It’s easy to comprehend at the heart-mind level.” He was a man of few words. We contemplated a vast silent world.

“No language, no culture,” he sang as shooting stars played celestial tag.

I visualized elements of fear, disinformation, misinformation, bias, lies, half-truths and paranoid propaganda bloviated by politicians, popes, prelates, mullahs, and animists in every oral language on a spinning blue marble in space-time. 24/7.

Fear sells. People buy.

Human brains overflowed with data and visual distractions. Incoming! Run for cover.

Free C-19 vaccines were administered to seven billion humanoids.

Survivors crammed mountain caves as orphans sang, “A tisket a tasket we need a casket.”

Peaceful people lived wisdom, empathy, and compassion. Meditation, deep breathing, harmony and forgiveness of Spiriti Sanctus were portals into clear awareness.

Arabic speaking scholars recited poetry by Rumi. They shared stories about rising and falling civilizations. Transmitting oral stories they diagramed hieroglyphics, cave paintings, metaphors and unconscious archetypes.

I envisaged historians, political scientists, talking heads, taxi drivers, unemployed fortunetellers and morticians answering suicide hotline calls. The number of callers increased exponentially.

Governments increased military spending.

They cut education, health care and social programs.

Citizens overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms pleading, “Give us drugs to alleviate our fears and illusions of desire and suffering.”

Fear and Consumption demand outstripped supply.

Scarcity was thrilled.

“What happens when they run out of CONTROL programs and advertising?” a girl asked her mother, the mother of all answers.

“Don’t worry my sweet,” said her mother living her worst nightmare, “They will invent, fabricate and illuminate something new. The manufacturing sector will rebound when shelves are empty. Advertising and propaganda never dies. We’ll always have sugar and we can always go shopping.”

“How long will it take to reduce these feelings of imaginary fear?”

“Healing, empathy and compassion require our individual intention. Many practice a calm way like there’s no tomorrow,” said her mother.

“Healing energies, peace and love sustain us.”

“There is only F.U.D.,” said the mother twisting her daughter’s hair until it caught fire.

“What is F.U.D. mother?”

“Fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’s part of our DNA since we jumped or fell or were pushed from The Tree of Life 60,000 years ago. FUD evolved with a vengeance as hungry unconscious greedy demons.”

“What about adventure and surprise?”

“They are factors in our adaptation as a species. You ask great questions my dear,” fanning her daughter’s flame. “A long now-time. A century is nothing.”

“It’s good to know some things,” said the girl. “We know so much and understand nothing.”

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve already said a lot.”

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Tell me the truth,” mother. “I want to know your truth.”

“It’s a miracle we are here is my truth. It’s a big cosmic joke. Our insecurities are disappearing and our strengths are growing. Consider this. The letters F.E.A.R. can mean face everything and recover, or fuck everything and run away.”

“Life is a magical celebration, mother. We are flukes of the universe. We are miracles. Life is a beautiful short dream. There’s no rhyme or reason. It’s about realizing peace and gratitude in our heart. We connect with family, community and world tribes. Inhale other’s suffering and exhale healing. Cultivate our heart-mind awareness.”

“I love you,” said her mother.

“I will be present and grateful mother. May we go out and play now? May we take the day off and be creative?”

“Yes, let’s invent a game theory my sweet.”

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Floating

I'm one of those people who has learned through living

that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to.

I am a metaphor looking for meaning.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places

and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life.

Drifting some would say.

Floating.

If I had one red cent for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis! Settling down was not an option.

Yes. I could bid on blessings.

I’d sacrifice pre-linguistic symbols and create silent metaphorical abstractions.

My linguistic skills would evolve into love into discursive logic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic iron and copper paintings create

a secret symphony of ancient magic stories in a Spanish cave.

No lengthy drawn out off-the-wall abstract

explains my small empty happy self to anybody

by virtue of who I was, am, and will be.

Life is a palimpsest.

“There are only two stories in the world,” Leonardo said to the Moroccan. They carried boarding cards through the Casablanca terminal. “A stranger arrives in a village or a stranger leaves a village.”

“Yes,” said Omar, a blind writer overhearing their conversation, “we might add there are also stories about love between two people, stories about love between three people and stories about the struggle for power. Stories are about characters revealing emotion through dialogue and action.”

He handed Leonardo a pile of yellow papers wrapped in rushes.

“A gift for you. It contains a farrago of evidence. Keep it simple.”

“Thank you.” Where do I find you?”

“In the caves south of Ronda. It’s a long walk.” He disappeared into Baraka.

A Century is Nothing

Attitude

This is Metafiction with a Gonzo attitude; master journalist, photographer’s eye and the balls of an actor.

“Start at no particular time of your life. Wander at your free will all over your life.” – Mark Twain

There are not many things you need to remember about your visit here to Earth.

The world gave me a strong sense of querencia, a Spanish term for homeland, “a place - like a bull facing death in the ring -  where you feel comfortable dying.”  - Lorca

Flow like a river, reflect like a mirror and respond like an echo.

On the meridian of time there is no injustice; there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.

“He didn’t believe in countries and the only borders he respected were: borders of dreams – musty borders of love and indifference, borders of courage or fear – golden borders of ethics.” - Roberto Bolano

*

This is a camelo, Spanish for a tall tale.

Hello. May this find you well. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Omar. I am a Touareg Berber nomad from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

I am a blind prescient writer in exile.

This is my story about how I and other tribal members met a strange kind man named Mr. Point immediately after 9/11. He just showed up and the Sahara is a big place.

When others hear this tale they express disbelief.

“How can that be?”

Living Baraka, a supernatural energy and magic power practiced by our people, his appearance was, shall we say, expected. He is a poet, shape shifter, cosmic comic clown and literary outlaw.

Now it happened that we traveled together just like you and I now and we formed a community. We shared many tales and I have taken the liberty of including them here with some of my own stories. We enjoyed amazing adventures together.

I confess this narrative is not linear. In a sense, this is for and about children: innocence, curiosity, empathy, and playful pure intentions. Children love inventing stories and hearing them.

Stories are essential like air and water.

My friend and I love to travel and besides calling the Sahara home I also inhabit a very real magical late Paleolithic Spanish cave in Andalucía. It encompasses 26,000 years of art and history. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greeks. It means story. This explains the title, A Century Is Nothing.

Someone in our tribe said, “Imagine the earth is 24 hours old. To see a perspective of how long humans have been around, imagine they’ve been on the planet for only the last 60 seconds.”

Marco Polo, a famous traveler near death in 1324 at seventy left his famous epitaph for the world. “I have only told the half of what I saw!”

Keep an open mind and fasten your seat belt as we may experience a little turbulence during flights of imagination grounded in invisible particles of reality. In the event of a water landing your heart-mind may be used as a flotation device.

We’ll meet again. May your journey be filled with loving kindness, compassion and authenticity.

 

A Century is Nothing

Duende

In June 2001 I called Pascal, an airline ticket broker in Montreal and set up the itinerary. Seattle, Detroit, Amsterdam to Casablanca round-trip for six months.

“When do you want to go?”

Another draft of A Century is Nothing would be abandoned by mid-August. I selected a random date.

“September 1.”

“What did Narcissus say when he saw his reflection in the water?” said Pascal during a conversation.

“What?”

“Watch out for yourself.”

“Good one.”

“We’ll take care of it,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

“Thanks for your help.”

A ticket to dusty roads in another village, town, city, country and continent offered new adventures. KISS. Keep it simple stupid.

Leaving was a wise karmic decision. Speaking of history.

I checked out of living between fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive fuel at Hanford and the Umatilla Army Disposal Site where 7.4 million pounds of discarded chemical weapons waited to be incinerated.

Humans would be vaporized in an instant if the winds of change shifted. Weapons of mass destruction glowed in backyards.

My future lives were freedom, choice and plenty.

Two months after 9/11 while writing in Cadiz, Spain I visualized my incarnation as a calm word mercenary on an existential literary mission.

I created and wrote with discipline and perseverance.

I had duende, an untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit and dark sound.

It signifies a charisma, emotion, expression and authenticity manifested by flamenco dancers, bullfighters, shamans, prescient seers and weavers. Audiences feel they are in the presence of a mystical power. The duende is an elf or goblin in Spanish and Latin American folklore.

The Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca produced the best description of duende.

“Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel. In that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Marrakesh

Future

Yassein from Morocco was one of my tennis students the summer of 2001. A hunting-gathering seed was planted in life’s little garden. I decided to take a six-month break in the fall.

“They love paper,” said curly-haired Yassein meaning corrupt authorities in North Africa. We sat in his Mediterranean diner. He poured fresh mint tea and said, “You can find enlightenment anywhere.”

I needed new psychic energies, frequencies and a shift in my literary life. He set me up. “You will find it easy to settle in. My mother is in Paris. She is nervous about the place. Here’s a paper. It’s for a six-month rental in Marrakesh and I’ll get her signature. My friend in Casablanca has the keys.”

He briefed local friends on the deal.

“How much are you paying Yassein for the apartment?” said the American insurance agent with a Moroccan wife. She practiced her English selling bras in a department store. Uplifting.

“We’ve agreed on two hundred a month depending on the condition of the place.” 

“Oh,” said his wife, “you’ll absolutely adore the place. We’ve been there many times.”

“Yes, my wife is very well connected. Her father used to be with the national police.” I smelled an interrogation. They showed me travel photos. In one he wore a dark blue suit and tie next to a naked camel.

In late August I gave Yassein’s girlfriend, Bashira, a Pakistani with two kids and one on the way, a check for two months. “Yassein’s in Morocco,” she said.

He’d gone home as a fake tour guide when in reality he was scrambling around paying off a Berber family to get out of an arranged marriage. His mother in Paris had set him up with a village girl.

While his relationship with Bashira helped, Yassein regretted wasting his time in the United States of Amnesia starting and stopping diners selling hummus. He regretted having a mother even though he loved her. She was a pain in the oasis.

Projecting her desire it was everything she wanted for her son. She was the mother of all arranged marriages. She had connections in a village.

“We can control more land now,” she’d told him. “She is a lovely girl. Her family is well off. They own many camels. The oasis is thriving.”

This was all well and good when she was sitting in her Paris flat remembering the Marrakesh cinderblock hovel. Where Yassein’s ancestors drank tea and plotted Spanish invasions. She was renovating the place for tourist dollars. Paris was a world away. He was her front man.

“You will marry this village girl,” his mother ordered. “It is our duty, your duty. Family first. You are my eldest, never married and now’s the time. Think of it as a tradeoff, an extension of our relationship. It is a connection to our heritage and our community. This is your destiny and honorable for us.”

He married the girl to please his mother. He didn’t like it. It was a gigantic hassle and complicated his life. He’d been in the states long enough to see new futures.

It was an arranged marriage and he was snared in family schemes and trapped by traditional expectations. How things were done in the desert. It was all about relationships and consolidating resources.

It took him a year to finalize his plan. He was a juggler in a circus routine and his mother cracked the whip.

He kept the Berber girl and her family on hold. He blamed time, lack of money, no visas, no tickets, no way he told them. Not now. Later. He loved the word later. It was a negotiating art form in a culture where a century is nothing.

They bought it. He knew they had no choice. Their daughter was married and that was that.

“Sit tight,” he said. “Let her take English classes or run around chasing invisible paperwork in the notoriously corrupt and inefficient system.” They didn’t understand the tight part. He simplified it for them.

“Be patient.”

A player and hustler, he was an expert at dragging it out. He planned a way to get out of it. He set it up and played his trump card. Money talks.

He returned in August and bought her family off to forget the whole thing. They took their daughter back using his cash to buy land and livestock. She resumed hauling water, collecting wood, cooking and cleaning. Her future was done, finished and finalized. She was as good as dead.

Yassein took care of the paperwork, greased palms, got on a plane, returned to Bashira and forgot the mess. He’d never liked these arranged marriages and knew it was all about deceit, lies and manipulation.

When his mother heard what happened she was furious. “You’ve disgraced our family,” she screamed on the phone. She was so mad she conjoined her French and Arabic polymorphic syllables in the City of Electricity. She fried on the grid.

“Somebody had to pay,” he said. He didn’t say she gave him a migraine. “There’s something wrong with the line mother. I’ll call you back.”

Bashira didn’t know the backstory. She played her role with Oscar potential. Yassein played her.

“I’ve always wanted to go there,” she said the week I left. “It’s Yassein’s ancestral home. I’ve dreamed being there, taking care of the place, meeting the people, settling into the flow, the rhythm of the land. Smelling the spices.”

Smelling a fascinating opportunity I jumped into the future.  

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir