calligraphy Brooms

Down dream street in Turkish reality

an unprecedented wave of egalitarian support featuring millions of sad, serene women facing callously arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to become engaged to strangers on transcendental borders. This wave of support resembled an open handed gesturing in the eternal present as a mother reluctantly gifted her daughter a long fare well wave watching her disappear into life’s teeming stream.

         “Be well my love,” she sang. “You will always be in our hearts.”

         Her daughter joined a world tribe of singing, sighing women. They lived their dream, making sacrifices with clear intention, motivation, determination and focus. The entourage of waving, singing women danced through valleys, climbed jagged Eastern Mountains named Regret and entered a no-name village where males pounded war drums and hammered plowshares into word swords.

         Marginalized poor angry males killed each other over pita bread, olives, fresh tomatoes, kebabs, women and geographical dust while studying imaginary maps.

         “The map is not the territory,” said Visualization, a cartographer.

         “Where is this place?” asked a woman leader in a strange village on a strange planet in a strange solar system in a strange universe.

         “It is far away,” said a gravedigger with vast earth moving experience. “It is a dysfunctional place where bronze statues of fallen soldiers, warriors, politicians and testosterone fueled fools rust and congratulate each other on their mutual stupidity.”

         Wind whispered to women, “Go home, return to your children, your families and friends. Live in peace.”

         Women listened with heart-mind.

         “It’s tough living in dystopia where women are beautiful and sad,” said Visualization. “Millions don’t know whether they are coming or going, going, long gone. They’ve fashioned well-defined living death masks from loss and hopelessness and confusion and uncertain doubts selling tears wrapped in silence. Millions of us wait for an arranged marriage.”

         Potential husbands gathered to draw lots. They drew with ink and pastels and charcoal. The charcoal came from a deep black shameless unconscious well of tears where women, tired of waiting, sang, “Give me a child, give me someone to love and protect and carry forever and cherish and spoil with benign neglect. Give me your future. We don’t really truly honestly care about adverbial love, it’s all arranged. Everything has already happened. We just need to experience it. Love is a blind whore. It’s an impossible love. It’s a matter of practicality. Marriage first love later.”

         “Here,” said a marriage broker, “accept this man, this stranger into your heart. Just give him a child. Get to the verb.”

         “We breed, work and get slaughtered,” said one woman. Daughters wrapped these constricting words around their hearts in love’s tangled jungle.

         You never see women taxi drivers in Turkey. It’s a male ego thing with bright speeding tire spinning toys on wheels. It’s a Toy’s For Tots live game show. In cafes idle retired or chronically employed guys sit around all day from opening to closing playing backgammon. They slide little wooden pieces carved from youth’s forgotten toys. Young macho guys spin shiny yellow taxi wheels playing arranged symphonies in the horn section. They are the next generation of backgammon players.

         Women know better. They express their feelings. They live longer.

         Courageous women stood up to parents. “I respect your traditional ideas about arranged marriages, however, to be really honest heavy deep and real with you, it’s old fashioned conservative thinking. This is 2013 not 1987. I am a member of a new freethinking generation. I am not willing to be a victim, a willing victim of your narrow-minded attitudes. I will choose my friends, lovers and companions, based on my needs. I know why the caged bird sings.”

         Before leaving Ankara I shared a Chinese calligraphy painting poem with students. It was an old Qing dynasty poem, a gift from primary students in a rural Sichuan village school. A visual simplicity symbolized the transient nature of life lessons.

         Bright beautiful children in their radiant universe wearing red Young Chinese Communist Pioneer scarves around well-scrubbed necks sitting upright at colorful plastic desks raised hands when I asked questions yelling, “Let me try! Let me try!”

         Only young brave students had the courage, the absence of fear to say this. Older students at middle schools and university were aged and silenced through tyranny and oppressive parental and educational brainwashed ideological practice. Shame. They’d lost their curiosity and enthusiasm. Only primary kids had the courage, the inherent inner freedom to say, “Let me try, let me try!”

         Their beautiful black pictographic calligraphy ink read, “One day a man climbed into the mountains and reached a hut. He met some children.”

         “Where is the teacher?” he asked them.

         “They pointed up the mountain covered by clouds. ‘He is not here, he’s gone into the mountains to look for herbs.’”

         Chinese characters were creased where latitudes and longitudes met linguistic horizons.

free speech

Grill your usual suspects
while eating chicken with shredded
lettuce not have this conversation in the abstract.

Loudspeakers resembling Lenin Park in Hanoi blare in Giresun, Turkey.
Attention Comrades!
Journalists, lawyers and acti-visits in Turkish jails, prisons and poems file your briefs.
A woman speaks about behavior control systems designed with sparkling syllables.

Children memorize grammar rules. Pass the examination.
Life is the BIG test.
It is multiple choice.

Silverman polishes red stones
semi-precious hands whisper secrets 
a baker removes loaves from ovens 
fish hawkers wash ice
life sea streams.

Bread aromas float past women selling cabbages bigger than lost children. 
A beautiful mute-deaf woman in Cambodia scrubs foreign laundry.
She dances until she dies.
Her life dance is a slow meandering death of loneliness and heartbreak and silence.

It is the dry season in Khmer civilizations as leaders across a porous border
sell forests to Vietnam furniture and toothpick factories.
Chinese developers purchase the country for $16.9 billion and counting
The National Museum in Siem Reap is 50% owned by Thailand.

Buy a ticket.

Black Sea is green and blue.
Eat dreams with fresh yogurt minus anxiety. 
Cultivate silence

Amazon women live on an island off the Giersun coast.
They visit the Turkish residency permit authorities.

If you want to play you have to pay, said Authority.
They cut off their right breast.

Arrows of time.
Bullseye! 
Everything is permitted. It's already happened.

 

they went shopping

after 9/11 to satisfy their fear of poverty to overcome their fear, a small fear growing stronger day by day being fed by hysterical know-it-alls in 24/7 media ivory soap towers of higher intellectual reasoning based on empirical evidence.

“More channels!” someone screamed. “We need more channels!” There was a preponderance of rumors. Mucho evidence was charred beyond recognition. It would need DNA analysis and carbon-14 dating.

According to Ahmed with the gift of foresight, “Teams of social workers swarmed across Earth extolling virtues of well being, hope, trust, and bravery in the face of adversity, values, free choice, and impending sales at outlet stores.

"People seeking outlets and outlet stores found solace in their ignorance of how the world worked on molecular, political, religious, economic, philosophical, and cultural levels. Long festering animosity and cultural bias had come full circle. An invisible Orobus constricted their heart. Their myth was part idealism and realism standing on its head.

"Socially, culturally, geographically and emotionally deprived children listened, shaking their heads, learning a very hard life lesson. One that escaped their well meaning parents. Kids knew when adults were bullshitting them.

(Kids had a built-in shock proof shit detector.)

"Scholars educated at global universities started speaking Arabic, reciting Sufi poetry and 1,001 stories about the rise and fall of civilizations written before their time with hieroglyphics and cave paintings. Survivors filled caves. Candles sales were brisk.

“A tisket a tasket we need a casket,” sang multi-lingual children.

"Historians, political scientists, talk show experts, taxi drivers, fortune tellers, beauticians, and morticians took hotline calls. The number of callers increased exponentially. Suicide search and rescue teams were put on alert. Citizens packed hospital emergency rooms. Medical schools increased graduation classes to meet the growing need. Demand outstripped supply when it came down to fear and consumption."

Source: A Century is Nothing

patriots Act Out

This excerpt is certified and approved by transparent beings.

It organically saw the light of day in two works: A Century is Nothing and Subject to Change.

War on terror experts discussed global strategies in a play with many acts. A play on (s)words. Some acts were hard to follow let alone comprehend. Reviews would be mixed when it ran off Broadway flagging down a Berber slave caravan inside an air-conditioned nightmare looking for a Caravanserai along Route 66.

“What’s the name of the first act?” asked a playwright.

“Patriot,” said General Consensus.

“How does The Patriot Act sound?” said the scribe, a former loan shark and energy consultant.

“I like it, I really like it,” said Asscroft a general Attorney. He was a neo-conservative hard nosed right wing crazy religious fanatic from the State of Misery. “It has teeth with wide ranging constitutional subversive powers, perfectly timed for our agenda. Let’s push it down the legislator’s throats.”

“Does that mean the gag rule will be in effect?” cracked a comedian on welfare.

“Sure does. Anyone who so much as expresses concern about this constitutional urinary tract act will be blacklisted, hounded, ridiculed, ostracized, and labeled unpatriotic. They will never work again in this great beautiful free country. This is the home of the scared and enslaved. We will revoke their voting rights and cancel their citizenship. I’ve had it up to here with this liberal democratic crap. Our culture is to kill. Take no prisoners. Abuse the hell out of the detainees. Tell the peace makers and tree huggers to take a hike through old growth forests,” Attorney added with a smirk.

“Let there be no doubt about our honorable intentions. We are on a holy mission from God. Our destiny is to install democrazy in the Middle Eats,” said chef Boy R. Dumbed Down Dee, “whether they like it or not. They’ll eat what we give ‘em or starve. This is an ala’ carte, carte blanche military menu.”

“Should we continue bombing?” queried an intelligence asset in deep cover. Plame as day.

It was days, weeks, months and centuries since angels sang after dialing 911.

English hawks warbled about taking the campaign into winter. They needed hawk food. As predators they knew the terrain, the sweet sound of wings whistling through clouds with laser guided precision. Their talons were sharpened by their inherent power and Manifest Destiny. They were ready, willing, and able to establish and sustain new economic empires. They’d raped, pillaged and plundered plenty of old world civilizations and would not be deterred in their quest for more power and influence.

They had the perspective and experience of establishing colonies and global power under the crown, under the gun, establishing The Rule of Law. They were experts at economic terrorism, and exploiting natural resources using cheap labor.

“Yes, absolutely,” said another intelligence agent, an N.O.C. disguised as a cleaning woman with Gypsy blood.

Nonofficial cover was their nom de plume allowing them to work for foreign proprietary front companies while spying. Fronts were numerous: airlines, travel agencies, banks - world currencies and blood - military tribunals and civilian courts, oil and gas companies, construction firms, cafes, telecommunications, land, sea, and air shipping firms, brothels, juke joints, casinos, tailors, clip joints, beauty salons, crematoriums, and mortuaries.

The downside was being left out in the cold if their cover was revealed to compliant sheep citizens and transparent independent muckraking media. They’d be left blowing in the wind. A hard rain would fall. Everyone in the food and information chain was expendable.

A buttoned down butler brought them a mandate for an appetizer and they dug into their personal caves of hunger. They had all the Neolithic or "new science" tools at their disposal. Suddenly the garbage disposal clogged and someone called for maintenance.

“Maintenance!” demanded a shrill counter intuitive pro-active and very demanding defensive individual named Bumsfeld with lipstick on his collar from a one-night stand. “Get up here on the triple and bring your torch. Stuff happens. It’s the unknowable knowable.”

“Sorry sir,” said Maintenance, “stuff happens and my torch is down for maintenance, if you get my drift.”

“Drift, draft, fore and aft,” said a divorced right wing conservative senator up for erection. He washed his hands of the whole affair in dirty water. Finished, he threw the baby out with the bath water into the world’s endless suffering where 17,000 children died every day from starvation and economic terrorism.

Where 4,000 and then send some more American soldiers named Casualty in Iraq slept their dream of dreams in black body bags.

Agents returned to deep cover operations funneling arms, explosives, communication gear, maps and cyanide capsules to homeless, nameless volunteers.

A Spanish woman in black with an ear for dialogue mopped her stairs and pavement along the narrow Rue Castanets. Finished, she dumped the water into the gutter watching it flow to the ocean, evaporate into clouds and rain flowers.

“This is no time to be surrounding ourselves with incompetents. Find someone who knows the lay of the land,” said a junior fellow named Full Bright on a scholarship. He unrolled a parchment for all the knights to see.

“Now see here,” countered Deli, “what it’ll be gents?”

“Make mine ham on rye,” said El Salvadore from the divan where he fondled his Dali. She was in no mood for this intentional violation of her writes.

“You know I don’t eat meat,” she said.

“Yes my dearest,” said Salvadore, “I’m well aware of your passion for fruit. You are my passion fruit, my darling. We’ll see what they have in the queen’s pantry. Perhaps a nice juicy banana?”

“Yes,” sighed Dali dearest, “peel it down for me. I am a bed rabbit. Elementary my sweet.”

“Yes, darling, he who wants to enjoy a fine fruit must sacrifice its peel. Let’s turn the lights down low and make whoopee.”

Salvador turned to his friend. “What do you make of this Pablo?”

“Hmm,” Pablo said, “it’s fairly abstract standing alone. It needs definition, stronger emphasis, a wider range of implicit specific graphic detail.”

“I agree,” said Salvadore, “perhaps broken orange melting time machines. Dashing surrealistic nature enveloping warriors disappearing into exile, fighting real and imaginary foes is called for.”

“Yes, a nice touch, that,” said Pablo. “Many are called few are chosen. We may consider this, my dear colleague, an experiment, an expanded vision. An extension of a red or blue period.”

“Well put dear comrade speaking of the blues. Less is more.”

“Agreed,” said Pablo, “let’s not put in anything extra or take anything extra out.”

“Such a novel concept,” said Don Q., an eavesdropping unemployed literary agent sitting on a nag and wearing a battered bedpan for a helmet.

“Excellent,” said Salvadore. “My friend Cervantes said the exact words to his companion Pancho. One rode an ass into history. Shall we have a go then?”

“Yes,” said Pablo. “Be my guest. Let’s take a line for a walk with Klee.”

“It’s glee Pablo. Joy. Such a silver tongue you have. Have you thought of a name for your new work my wise friend?” asked Dali.

"Guernica comes to mind,” Pablo said.

“How appropriate,” Dali replied, stroking his exquisite mustache. “It will become a classic. It will connect the wild subconscious and rationality. It’ll make you famous, old boy.”

Picasso’s Guernica commemorated the small Basque village of 10,000 in northern Spain. It was market day on Monday, April 27, 1937. In the afternoon waves of planes from the Condor Legion, Heinkel 51s and Junker 52s piloted by Germans blasted Guernica. Survivors found 1,660 corpses and 890 wounded people in the rubble.

“Be that as it may,” Pablo replied. “Art historians and critics will have their say hey kid. It will shock supporters of social realism and propaganda art in France and Spain.”

“How did you do it?” Dali queried.

“From May 1st to June 4th in 1937 I made forty-five drawings on blue or black paper. I incorporated the bull, the horse, classic bullfighting figures, and the lantern from my 1935 Minotauromachy. I used the weeping Dora Maar because she has always been a woman who weeps. Guernica is a bereavement letter saying everything we love is going to die. And that is why everything we love is embodied in something unforgettably beautiful, like the emotion of a final farewell.”

“I still think your vision aspires to greater heights,” said Dali. “Your work contains fantasies meeting the objective violence of history.”

“You are too kind my dear Dali. People have started talking about your work. Your intentional dreams, so strangely manifested, in the way you have masterfully allowed your subconscious free rein on the canvas. Most amazing, your Persistence of Memory.”

“You are too generous Pablo. I merely reflect the ongoing crisis in society, the surreal absurd nightmare, with, shall we say, a twisted rather sordid but truthful elusive creative beast we must acknowledge to allow our perverse authenticity freedom wherever it leads us.”

“So true my friend, for we are only the conduit of the magic,” said Pablo. “We paint what we see with our innermost senses, born by authentic inner visions.”

“We are the mysteries speaking through the mysteries,” said Salvadore.

“We are ceaselessly redrafting the short story we call our life,” said a scribe.

 

there are no rules

I didn't write the rules. Why should I follow them? - W. Eugene Smith, photo essayist.

Lens: Visual journalism.

A Nepalese man breaks rocks in Bandipur.

Music is the fuel at a Tibetan resettlement village outside Pokhara, Nepal.