Cadiz

"I am not a rich man. I am a poor man with money. They are not the same thing."

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

*

           Omar and Akiko entered a student cafe for pan, butter, strawberry jam and coffee. The place hummed with readers, writers, calculators, talkers and dreamers. Students checked their phones to tell time. They told time where to go. Silent time told them to eat faster and get their sweet ass to class. White gamma rays bathing the room sang through skylights.

            I visited Ashiakawa on the island of Hokkaido one fall, said Omar. Speak memory, said Akiko. Beached summer red and yellow canoes were tied up for winter. Ducks and mallards rested on water. Women gathered leaf shadows along wide paths. At a Shinto temple on a small island an old brown structure imposed its sentinel protection. Sacred space.

            There was a Tori gate, cement bridge and guardian lions in the small courtyard. Crows cackled. At the temple was a square stone basin of water with four wooden ladles resting on a crossbar. A single cup of water dipped and poured back into the basin created a visual ripple effect. A drop on the surface released a thousand colors as a golden and brown pebble bottom exploded. One drop created smooth colors before emptiness and stillness.

            A visitor dropped single splashes. Ephemeral beauty. I inspected paper prayers and 1,000 white crane offerings fluttering near stone steps. Two women arrived at the water basin, drank deep, spat water out, walked up steps, clapped their hands three times, bowed in prayer, clapped three times, threw coins through wooden slots into the temple, clapped twice, walked down stone steps and threw remaining water on stone lions, laughed and crossed the stone bridge. Leaves floated reflection shadows in the world.

            Akiko laughed, I don’t have a particular god. The Dali Lama said the only true religion is one of love and kindness, said Omar, I understand.

            They walked to the Playa de la Caleta beach past a shit-covered statue of Simon Bolivar on his bronze horse singing his mercenary exploits in Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, and Bolivia. They felt sand below a blazing sun. Men in blue coveralls raked and shoveled trash into a wheelbarrow. Violent foaming wild southern flanks of green blue black sea smashed rocks. East water was calm.

             Spanish women under umbrellas knitted gossip with bright red yarn. Memory cards captured digital coastlines, long human shadows and a solitary cane as an elderly person performed her rebirth in water transformation therapy.

             She swam to Kampot, Cambodia and married a pepper farmer. She gave him twins named Alpha and Omega. She taught them Spanish and oral storytelling magic. They introduced her to orphanages and Zen meditation practice. She swam back to Cadiz to find her crutch. It was gone.

            Tavia Tower next to the Music Conservatory displayed a 360-degree perspective with tight white Moorish cubist homes slanting into cupola cathedral spires tolling eternal songs.

            Religion is larger than human existence because we promise eternal salvation, said a friar, a monk and adept Brahmin.

            History’s ocean was vast, spectacular, sad and incomprehensible.

            Akiko cried farewell. Waving into an empty blue sky Omar vanished in Islamic, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Shinto shadows. Akiko’s energy spirit, strength, freedom and dignity was a sweet memory called the past. Stable and fluctuating mirages.

            Playing his Honer blues harp in the key of C he wandered deserted Cadiz noon streets singing about a train leaving the station with blue and red lights on behind. Taking my baby away. All my love’s in vain.

            Good love story said Tran.

Practice

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden. It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ... Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Practice allows you to wake up.

Mandalay

*

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a calm velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.   

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Juke

My Cadiz, Spain experience sang of Juke, an African word meaning wicked or disorderly in one language.

It also meant a building without walls in the Congo. For American Blacks it took on sexual connotations and a type of dance.

It may have also described jute - a rough fiber made from the stems of a tropical Old World plant used for making twine, rope, or woven into matting - fields and jute workers visiting makeshift bars. Juke joints were bars with dance floors and back rooms for gambling and brothels. Shake your moneymaker.

Your Mask Eats Your Face

To juke was to lead a wandering life, have intercourse. To go in, jam and poke. Whorehouses. From the 1930’s on Delta blues players played juke joints, passing the music from generation to generation. Juke boxes were invented in 1927.

Nothin’ but the blues, everybody’s talking ‘cause talk is cheap.

Hard field work prisons, slavery, life, death, love, loss, leaving and living the blues with a feeling.

It was nothing but the blues talking.

While living, singing, and playing harp blues in the key of C, I trimmed long fingernails down to the quick brown fox jumped over the fence. WYSIWYG. Small slivers of enamel snow spiraled into air floating to cobblestones.

It was a clear truth after three days in the Sierras on narrow Roman passages, chopping and climbing in ancient forests removed from civilization’s discontent.

People moved fast and furious in Cadiz. I sensed their malcontent maladjusted wild crazy freedom from being closeted, closed in, no sky, no air, stoned frustrations manipulating mainstream desires down ways and means with cause and effect in the big city.

It was all a relative reality in the absolute reality and most of my relatives were dead.

Their grounded headstones decorated with names, ages, epitaphs collected dust living with memory.

Weaving A Life (V2)

Blues Music

One day I wrote Blues Music Story on a broken green Fujian, China university board with flakey chalk.

I discussed the African Diaspora, history, suffering and slavery on farms for small money and how they gathered to make music after long hard days in the sunshine of their love.

How the blues manifested as men and women left rural villages on economic migrations for city jobs like China now. Floating people in a floating world.

How the blues expressed feelings of loss and separation from family and friends. It’s an emotional, deep in your spirit soul music.

I pulled out my blues harp and they said, “Oh it’s a cochin.”

“Want to hear some blues?” 

“Yes!”

I blew sweet slow stuff picking up the tempo blasting rifts wailing train whistles. Giving them a real sense of loss forever.

“This is called, ‘Spoonful' by Howling Wolf.”

“When you’re a wandering minstrel or a Griot - a West African performer who perpetuates the oral traditions of a family or village by singing histories and tales, considered by musicologists to be a link with the acoustic blues - or a Seanachai - a traditional Irish storyteller of myths and legends - or a magician, seer and Adept this is natural. I am merely a conduit for music. It comes through me.”

After the blues lesson we practiced making a sandwich. Assemble ingredients: bread, tomatoes, mayo, relish, turkey slices, mustard, onions and lettuce. How do you eat a sand wish with chopsticks?

Let’s eat. Asian mantra.

New music echoed. Everyone ran to a window. 

Across the street an Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three story building.

It towered above a gated Jakarta community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees, displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yo-yo’s and orphans sleeping on broken bamboo bed springs or swimming to Utopia through flooded dreams. 

In his left hand he held a shining silver chisel. In his right, a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between the Stone Algae and the Iron Algae.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. His chorale was an old tribal creation song remembering family and soft rice paddies. Wind carried his life song.

A slave girl offstage in life’s dramatic interlude using a brothel broom of thinned tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm. She created her symphony of sadness and neglect waiting to be abandoned like a vignette.

The Language Company

A private Jakarta school - TLC 70

Monday at 6:45 a.m. is formal education tyranny time.

Players call it Stormy Monday. Tuesday is just as bad. Wednesday is kind of rough and Thursday’s oh so sad. The eagle flies on Friday. Saturday I go out to play. On Sunday I go to church get down on my knees and pray. They call it Stormy Monday.

Lucky stood in front of an open rusty iron green gate wearing a pressed green shirt made of palm fronds. He waved an iridescent peacock feather wrapped in a Native American leather braid decorated with rainbow beads welcoming students at a private school.

Parents rule fool. 

Martial Catholic music blared from tinny church loudspeakers at the nearby church of the Immaculate Misconception. Religion was under permanent construction. Empty false hope the greatest evil based on blind faith filled towering grey artificial plastic golden arches with compressed dust.

Air conditioning ducts lay scattered in the vestibule. Purple priest garments hung by a broken thread in a chastity of lotus blossoms. Heaven’s holy light played along a contorted floor jangling cracked tolling bells.

The incomplete church thrived underground. Shadows and illusions named shame, guilt, sin, jealousy, regret, sloth, and lies had enough parking spaces for a choir of angelic forms in the rising Indonesian middle class.

Humans invented religion in their free time. We need meaning and intention sang priests, poets and philosophers. We is educated. Order poor uneducated slaves to get back to work, said a king of dubious origin waving a jeweled mind-sword.

Black tinted SUVs arrived at the gateless gate. Sleepy-eyed kids extricated themselves from air-conditioned nightmares. A green uniformed whistle-blowing male slave directed traffic. Blue clad office boys unloaded suitcases of textbooks, water bottles, lunch baskets, severed cultural connections, identity theories and universal mind maps.

Sleep deprived children waited for a maid, a driver, a mom, a dad, or a perfect stranger to hand them a suitcase handle, a plastic get a life grip. 

Children said good morning to Lucky before dragging cumbersome baggage along slick mopped tile floors down a hall-like crypt. They manipulated life luggage around corners before hoisting it onto little shoulders killing back muscles or pulled it clattering up two flights of stairs. Click-clack-click-clack music echoed through corridors absorbing childhood.

After leaving her vehicle Amanda a 4th grade genius waited in tropical sun. Her right hand was empty. It held everything.

Exhaust from idling cars, vans and flaming plastic bags filled the air. Everyone choked. Feeling exasperated she was angry tired and bored. She opened and closed her empty right hand suffering a desperate spasmodic fever.

She stared straight ahead. Her brown eyes focused beyond green gates. Retinas explored tropical subterranean rain forests. Wild purple orchid aromas permeated shade near a flowing river. Blue-green waterfalls crashing into jungles gave her a cool essential meditation in her heart-mind.

“Give it to me. Give it to me,” shouted her grasping hand. Someone handed her a plastic suitcase handle. She dragged educational baggage into a cave. It would take eight more tedious years to exterminate her innate childhood curiosity and sense of humor.

The Language Company