Fragmentary

My imagination is a monestery and I am its monk.

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Sometimes I am so happy I depress people. - David Bowie

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"Similarities b/t writing and drawing -

both tend toward the imaginary;

both are fragmentary and unfinished." - Kafka

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Absurd Language

Do you want the short version or the long version, asked a reliable narrator of dubious credibility.

A perfect question in life’s chess game of experiences and conversations as people play with choices and consequences inhaling, exhaling, living, traversing, falling, flying, exploring, and walking on the spinning Earth rock, said Devina. Rock your world.

Mandalay construction site.

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The celestial rotation makes people dizzy, confused and disoriented and many fall down, said Tran. Hello gravity. WE fall up, said Rita.

If you flesh out the short narrative version with specific details it grows, said Z. Character threads develop. Destiny and action forms character.

Destiny weaves a rope of hemp fibers, or woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia, or Cambodian cotton, or Lao silk worm threads designed to hang yourself if life becomes unbearable, perhaps too sweet, too beautiful, too sad, said Desire.

Determining your fate suicide is a daily choice and a way to escape a terminal adventure travel disease. You are manipulated by someone in the story before, during or after you finish a random simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on. It evolves a life of its own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten word lava from a highly charged pressurized center.

The reader and writer are one.

Short, fast and deadly.

This explains how silence between words sees language as absurd, irrelevant and a burning ring of magma fire.

This molten conglomeration of Voice and Sign language, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, dust  ...  

24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and geological logical particles discovered by humans and other alien life forms  ...

Blasts out of the deep red hot core of finite transient human Mind-At-Large existence into a blue atmosphere where it cools, as the gravity of thinking, the scourge of civilization, agrees to ignore the abyss it’s malcontents and expectations of loss fear and Death contributing to its infinite force.

The dense mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, dances flowing down engulfing everything in its path melting landscapes, carving new strata, grand canyons and Leaping Tiger gorges, gouging out tributaries for cooling debris, slowing to a glowing light as you open a vein and scribble one true sentence, said Z, O my word, let it cool, heat and serve.

Book of Amnesia, V2

O yeah, said blossom tree, Life is dance.

Scent

A story from the future.

Create like a God, order like a King, work like a Slave.

It's about impossible situations, ambiguity. - Kafka

Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action.

Sweet rain, humid heat, frangipani scent.

Healing

Rose, a healing clown, wove her way through Intensive Care pushing a cart of snacks, books and toys.

“One size fits all,” Rose yelled above children’s laughter. “Come and get it.”

Children accepted rabbits, bears, yaks, animist tribal masks, elephants, snow leopards, tigers, panthers, and turtles wearing hexagrams.

Rose gifted wolves, foxes, spiders, eagles, ravens, fire breathing dragons, watercolor brushes, Chimayo blankets, Hopi Kachina Earth spirits, 232 butterfly species from Cambodia and Tibetan prayer wheels.

“Hey,” shouted a child, “what’s your name?”

“Rose. What’s yours?”

“Ash,” smiled the kid, “short for Ashley.”

“Well,” said Rose, “you don’t look so short to me. In fact, you look larger than life, if you know what I mean, jelly bean.”

“That’s funny,” laughed Ash, reaching her thin arm into the space of Rose dancing fingers in a dervish whirl.

“Here, have some colors Ash.” Rose zapped her with a rainbow spilling laughter, prisms and stardust.

“Wow, cool. Thanks Rose.”

Rose shared extra crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, green tea, fresh pitta bread, grape juice, bananas, apples, milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, rice and toothbrushes. She offered mint-flavored dental and mental floss.

She gifted fragrant soaps, candles, multicolored silk threads, bells, gongs, cymbals, looms, shuttles and bilingual dictionaries.

Rose dispersed gamelan orchestras, watercolors, camelhair brushes, calligraphy ink, Laotian silk, papyrus sheets and illustrated poetry books. Multifaceted mirrors reflected and refracted waves of eternity.

A Lao child carries the world on their back.

“Wow,” said a dreaming child, “this is beautiful,” beaming innocence around the room in a spiral vortex.

“You are beautiful,” said Martha Ann. “Mad and innocent.”

“Make my day,” yelled a boy looking through a telescope into the infinite expanding universe composed of 13.5 billion-year-old stardust. Children swarmed like bees making honey, “Let me see, let me see.”

“Guess what?” said astronomer. “There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.”

“May I see?” said a kid.

“It’s a see saw,” said a joker, “around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a child. “I am real. I invent your dream. Tran and I with our Dream Sweeper Machine decipher and reconfigure old dreams to create new memories.”

Voices sang a cold mountain poem. “Am I the soft sand of sleep that calms your tortured heart?”

“What strange mixture of life and death am I?”

“I am a wanderer searching for a Who to What I am.”

“You can indicate everything you see.”

“I am a butterfly dreaming I am a healthy child.”

A rational child said, “Pain is a sickness leaving my body. I feel free.”

“You is what you is,” said a small voice. “My mother was appointed to have me.”

“That must have been terrible.”

“It was her karma. Intention is karma.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s being aware of your actions and how they return in new forms and opportunities in your life. How they manifest your destiny. Today is our destiny. We accept responsibility for our choices and actions. We accept responsibility for our freedom.”

“Are you one with everything?” said one.

“Yes,” said a wise child. “We are a singularity. We are a witness. It’s part of the sacred contract. We are not in this room, we witness it.”

“Is absorbing our parent’s pain and suffering expensive?”

“Can be to be or not to be is the question,” said a kid named Shake Your Sphere.

“My mom says anger is expensive,” said a child.

“That explains why I can’t find the price tag,” said the joker child playing with a full deck. Ace high. Play the hand you get. Run the table. Outside hospitable windows a sparrow seeking crumbs darted from branch to branch on the Tree of Life.

“You betcha,” said Rose, grinning ear-to-ear not fear-to-fear through her Tantric death mask. “You are one third the life of the universe.”

“Like a rolling stone,” sang a child playing a riff on her blues harp in the key of C. “Ain’t it a crying shame. That old feeling is gone.”

“Ain’t nothing but the blues talking sweet thing,” said a sanguine one.

“Sometimes I blow and sometimes I draw. People should talk less and draw more. Ha ha ha.”

ART

 

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Kids Write

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

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

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themself. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I mediate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

“Get is the joker word in English. A lit agent at the Willamette Writer’s Conference said this work is a word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic epic in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Rita, 14, an ice seller and independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung in Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

It was a wild-west town of 25,000 with dusty red roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries. “It’s fucking hysterical.”

ART

Players

Players enter the stage.

Speak their lines or silent.

Perform their actions and leave the stage through a door in the back.

The door leads to a garden.

The garden leads into...