The Transmitter

I am the Naggal, ‘The Transmitter’ in Persian history.

I am the hakaawati, the professional storyteller from historical times when stories were told after harvests, during night when stories were cherished, reserved for darkness - the idle time between planting and harvesting - during long lonely winters.         

“Their stories maintained, developed, protected, transferred to children and women. This is the way the ones who feared the power of the story told us.”

“Why?”

“They abandoned us to the exile, islands, remote meditation caves, vision quests, temples of stone singing word-strings toward Arabic, Persian, Indian, Mongolian, Tibetan and European oral mystics. It was all a play, a la’ab inside the shadow of their imagination.”

“What did you learn from them?”

“There were seven layers, seven levels deep in their unconscious. Seven is the number you must remember, for it symbolizes perfect order and a complete cycle. It leads to the seven directions of space, forms the series of musical notes, colors, planets and spheres. Seven is the symbol of pain, a sickness leaving the body.”

They moved through the wild wilderness of their youth after seeing and hearing their spirit guardian, a solitary black raven, a Tibetan Golak. 

The oracle went into a trance to deliver the transmission.

The transmission was Baraka, investing them with a supernatural power of prosperity and blessings. The Baraka allowed them to conserve and control power.

Baraka was transmitted in the solitary deepness of the Sahara between Berber tribes. The more you see the less you know. The less said the better.

life is a palimpsest

I acknowledged kairos - the shuttle passes through openings in warp and weft threads, making things happen, creating new forms, new fabrics inside my word loom. The shuttle voice allows me to recover, preserve and interpret tales.

I'm one of those people who’s learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to. An open hand holds everything.

There are no metaphors, only observations.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life. Drifting some said. If I had one coin for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis.

Settling down was not an option.

I am a compass without a needle.

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 created a secret symphony of ancient stories in a Spanish cave. I was transformed there. No past, no future. Present.

No lengthy drawn out off-the-wall abstracts explains my small empty self to anybody anything by virtue off who I was, am, and will be.

Life is a palimpsest. Have ink will travel.