16

My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

*

Give the gentle reader saatch aur himmat, Z said in Turkish. Translation please, said Devina. Truth and Courage.

Keep them engaged, said Tran, Be gentle with the reader. They are educated. Challenge them. What’s a word doctor, said Leo. Someone who fixes manuscripts with a sharp axe, said Tran waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston-driven fountain pen splattering blood red ink on everyone in his radius.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Edge focus. WE, you and I, them, he, she and us ain’t going anywhere. We live forever. In your dreams, yelled Devina. Everyone’s doing hard time. It ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Have mercy.

Rita, an orphan and independent visionary writer from Banlung chimed in with a voice sweeter than a Buddhist bell, I’m going to be an English facilitator and historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.

Where have I heard that before, asked Leo, an activist in exile from an orphanage on the Yangtze, heavy with silt and six trillion cubic meters of garbage flowing to the South China Sea.

What will you do with collected time, said Tran, Visit sick children in hospitals where they do DNA evolutionary experiments to stem the cells, can you sell the stems?

Speaking of stems, I’m moonlighting as a gardener, said Omar, There’s nothing more beautiful than nurturing nature in this impermanent life. We plant seeds for trees we will never see mature. Another leaf leaves life’s tree.

If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of the thorns give me a shout, said Tran, a one-legged Vietnamese child wearing his heart on the sleeve of a ragged 101st Screaming Eagle t-shirt.

A bird pressed its breast against a thorn singing, O what a beautiful morning o what a beautiful day.

A poet, like a chef or gardener, needs everything because they love everything.

I’m going to study Donatello, said Devina. Who’s he? He was a great Renaissance artist. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy. He was honest had integrity and was super original. Technically he worked with anything. You name it: wax, bronze, marble, clay, all kinds of rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist.

Painting with smoke and mirrors, said Tran, Hey, that’s what the Greeks said. They believed everything was beauty and order, said Rita, Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, musical notes, all the beauty originated with them didn’t it?

You got it, said Tran. Hey, you know what, I think I’ll take the day off and be creative. Ha. This present instant contains all reality, whispered Zeynep. We can call this experiment The Theory of Z, about a young precocious girl, her friends, artists and seers. Why not?

I taught a blind nomadic gardener/janitor/gravedigger and kid friends about emotional life in an alien schizoid civilization called Turkey, said Z. We shared values, stories and art with a free spirit.

I’ll tell you a secret. There’s two of me. One young and one old. The older is Kurdish and plays a cello in a cemetery. Can you dig it? Aliens and fantastic probabilities, said Rita, Tell me the difference between possibility and probability.

It’s about process not product. Whew, now that’s deep. Yeah, said Devina, We’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes. Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else speaking in the abstract.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said a demanding authoritarian Realist vomiting contrarian hypotheticals, truth, logic, verifiable data-based evidence, scientific facts, precise specifics. We must ascertain the immediate personal moral and ethical values with lofty principles and assistant principles on principal.

Z said, Speaking of aliens do you know about Iranian culture? They live south of us in the Middle Beast. It’s a violent repressive dictatorship. They have a VICE squad to control sheep behavior. Weird shit. Their oppressive culture keeps women in perpetual childhood.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Language Animals

Q: what’s the essential difference? People who think, experience life as a comedy. People who feel experience life as a tragedy. What did you expect? I ask you.

Archetypes are a universal collective unconscious symbolic truths. Humans are symbolic language animals, using abstract metaphors and cognitive ability to speak in tongues.

Oral (Voice) and gesture (Sign) languages dissipate.

Graphic (Art) languages are constant.

Incorporate your power of laughter and active imagination, said Devina. Ph.D., Education, Indonesia.

Hey, cool idea, said Rita, orphan writer from Banlung. We can use random precise episodes for stories.

To survive in this crazy world we need stories, air, water, sex, shelter, food and freedom, said Leo, activist monk. Everything here in Utopia is pure surface, said Leo, Air and water are free although the quality is dubious and getting worse … Sex is expensive like anger and stolen children. Shelters are ferns and rushes mixed with shoddy cement and crap bricks. Cheap building materials. Food is rice and gruel.

If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage, said Tran.

Will our adventure have a themes like boredom, loneliness or alienation, with a plot looking for characters and conflict, asked Devina, Timeless metaphorical motifs of love, treachery, betrayal, revenge, choices, consequences, morals, ethics, free will vs. determinism, values and abandonment with humans struggling to get something, like a glass of water? Will it have satire, irony, symbolism, and sex?

Yes. It reveals user exchange value. It speaks about the power of using money for sex and using sex for money. One hand washes the other, said a limbless amputee with no emotional connection.

It was a warm summer day. They were naked in a meadow of sunflowers. She was blind. He was deaf. They held hands. Skin was their unified electromagnetic field of tactile language beyond feeble illiterate words. Fate introduced them at an NGO charity ball.

            Blind is a famous concert pianist.

            Deaf is an explorer at Angkor Wat.

            He scaled her keys.

She explored his mountains, jungle geography and intricate hand-carved limestone designs at Banteay Srei temple.

They had a tacit agreement to be gentle and kind with one another. Peel my skin like sweet aromatic fruit, she whispered, I am your skin mistress, one must sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Play my flute, he said.

Yes, said Omar, a blind writer and a nomadic storyteller. Omar wrote A Century Is Nothing in green racing ink using a Montblanc 149 fountain pen. Be the ink. Be the paper. Flow.

You need eye & hand & heart. Two won’t do.

Few read it. Fewer understood it said Omar, Our stories contain, if an empty container can contain anything, the basics of drama, action, conflict, rising action, a climatic orgasm, falling action, resolution and empowerment with heart-mind emotions and delicious mouthwatering freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Yummy.

The emotion is so thick you can cut it with a finally honed Turkish scythe, saber, or word sword.

Word machetes in Cambodia sever families and futures. You will experience what the characters feel, taste, touch, hear, and smell revealing themselves through action … Like neglect, poverty and illusionary potentials? Yes, if the characters were any thinner, they’d be Japanese Sumi-e rice paper, or 1,000 handmade paper cranes at a Shinto shrine. Fly me to the moon.

17,000 world children die of starvation every day, said Grave Digger. Look at my hands.

Wow, Zeynep said, Let’s make it heavy, deep real immediate and dramatic. Focus a lens. Floodlight or spotlight? Yes, said Devina, Shine a light on illuminated skin with sharp bamboo needles dipped in Sumi ink.

Focus on an existential puzzle palace… Our memories make us who we are … They define our values and character … We cultivate memory’s history to sustain our lives.

Everyone builds their sandcastle with layered memories. Everyone works on his or her own personal puzzle.

I’m going to need your help with inner dialogue where characters reveal their insecurity and strength, their desire for self-preservation with values like love truth beauty compassion instinct and intuition because they have to survive.

As Rita and Tran know if you survive you are a WINNER. Life loves a winner. The soft machine loves a winner. Survivors want to prolong the inevitable, said Death. Some want fame. Some want recognition. Some could care less and don’t try. Fail better. Do.

Let’s see their fears and strengths, said Leo  ... Their fear of hungry ghosts & the poverty of food, love, and security is strong, said Devina, Strength and trust releases ego and expectations  ... all the expectations are external  ... circumstances outside character affect their psyche  ... environment affects silly humans  ... smart humans affect their environment  ... see their struggle to accept their authenticity. It requires courage.

See their fear and courage when alone with others … see their courage accepting loss forever  ... see their fear of starvation on physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological levels  ... see their courage of adventure.

Write one true sentence. See their skill to write short sentences, said Omar.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Courage

"Writing has nothing to do with literature. It's not literature. It is witchcraft." - Clarice Lispector (bio)

Good travel writing is creative hanging out.

Can Zeynep do this? Yes, she’s around 18 now in 2021.

Fate introduced us when she was 5. I was 50 going on 10. We connected immediately. It was about trust and authenticity. She’s a fine storyteller and visual artist. She shares stories. She contributed to The Language Company.

She travels with storytelling kid friends: Leo from Lijiang, Utopia, Devina from Jakarta, Indonesia, Tran from Danang, Vietnam, Rita from Banlung, Cambodia, Omar a Tuareg Berber from Morocco, a harlequin, a word janitor and Grave Digger.

Omar is blind. Eyes lie. Real eyes realize real lies.

Question? What is your interpretation of visual sensation?

Data based evidence is impermanent impaired observation … It’s all energy, frequencies and vibrations. Storytelling, exposition, myth, jazz poetry, and system analysis flow in the stream of life. Glow with your flow … Stories are recycled, retransmitted and translated from, into and beyond languages, like SIGN speak.

 Language is a virus. You need it to get in. You need it to get out. Input & output. Language in language out.

There are word photographs. You cannot photograph a memory … Every photograph has an aura of death.

Life is a grand experimental adventure in evolutionary nature … Nature is the teacher. Language is a living organism … a repository of culture. No language means no culture.

Kid storytellers have the courage to speak the truth. Speaking truth they don’t have to remember what they said. They express in absurd detail what others are afraid to say. They speak with pinpoint precision. They speak using Voice.

There are VOICE Ones and SIGN Ones. SIGN ones speak love.

Curious kids live now without expectations or discrimination. They play the long game. Adult’s biology, culture, social conditioning and fear of shame, humiliation and death focus on limited narrow results … outcome … product … they eat, live, fuck around and breathe product … end game … pawn traps King … Checkmate.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Twenty-five quotes by Lispector.

Tran

Before going to Cambodia I lived in Vietnam for seven months. Five months in Hanoi and two months in Saigon. I first went to Vietnam at nineteen and spent a year with the 101st Airborne near Hue.

I put it in a memoir called ART – Adventure, Risk, Transformation. It was self-published in 2019.

I met Tran Van Minh at the 85th Medical Evacuation Hospital in Da Nang in 1970. I came down for hearing tests.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

I turned to the traveling tribe of seven storytellers. Tran from Vietnam, Rita from Cambodia, Leo from Tibet, two Zeynep’s from Turkey, Devina from Indonesia and Omar. Survivors. The Magnificent Seven. All of them have poems, stories, and dreams to finish they haven’t started yet.

Tran: I grew up in a village near Da Nang. There was a war in my country. I was five. One day I was playing near my home and stepped on a landmine. It exploded. Someone took me to the hospital. They saved me. I lost my right leg from the knee down. Now I have a plastic leg where my real leg used to be. It was a gift from a kind stranger. I’d like to thank them but I don’t know who they are or where they are. Maybe it was someone who came to the orphanage where I grew up after the war.

Anyway, it’s ok now. At the hospital they fixed me up and gave me crutches so I could get around. I lived on a ward with other Vietnamese kids. One day I was cruising down the hall and saw an American guy. He smiled at me. I smiled back.

He followed me to my ward and talked to a nurse. I’d like to be his friend. What is his name? Tran. Ask him if he’d like to be friends. She asked me and I said yes. Yes is one of my favorite English words. The man and I became friends for three days.

He said he had a hearing problem. I’ve met people with a listening problem.

Sometimes he carried me. It was great. We hung out together eating, watching movies on a big white sheet and playing on the beach. Then he gave me a big hug and left. He said he had to go back to his unit. He said he would always remember me.

I gave him my picture. I’m smiling, wearing blue hospital clothes and sitting on a bed with my missing leg wrapped in white bandages. I felt sad but I understood when he left. I lost my family in the war and I’m an orphan.

WE accept loss forever. That’s a good story, said Rita, I’m an orphan also. We have loss in common.

I met a happy child with courage. Tran was my teacher and connection with the real world. Be a child. We are one with the world around us. Tran survived with confidence, courage, strength and spirit. He taught me how precious life is. Tran is an essential storyteller because he is a survivor.

Tran - I am Bui Doi. This means children of the dust in Vietnamese. We shine shoes, beg, pickpocket and sell postcards and gum near tourist sites.

Bui Doi. Children of the dust.

Book of Amnesia, V1

ink brush pressure

I visit from Mars. It is 38 billion miles away. A way.

Earthlings visit a hospital to collect relatives with an expiration date ... a woman scrubs steel pots in a gutter soapy floods flow into street drains.

Earthlings are good at two things - eating and sleeping.

A young woman chops meat. Absorbing her rhythm I play my harp. She dances with a bloody cleaver. 

We share laughter. Music is the fuel.

*

"When we dance the earth trembles, the earth feels the beating of our hearts and we become one with the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth..." - Earth Keeper by N. Scott Momaday.

*

I can help you. I can't solve your problem.

*

Die cast - explanations have to end someplace

Character sketch in 20 words or less

Awareness - compassion - gratitude - kindness

Ink, brush, pressure

Line, shape, shading

Reality is the funniest thing happening

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – position or velocity

People talk about people talking about people

Pinpoint of light in left lung

Cancer sun flare

Meditate on the process of your death

A small sun glows in darkness

Active imagination shares a story – process

Talking with doctors in class

Illustrate FEARLESS

Fear speaks of patient death

Save the children

Language chunks

Courage

Curiosity

Focus on your breath

Meditation

Wushu slow methodical

Every movement has meaning

See through soft eyes

Gratitude

No mistakes in life art - happy accidents

Ink dances reveals point line shadow

Watercolor brush

Creativity has no rules

Take a line for a walk

Grow Your Soul - prose and poems from Laos/Cambodia