Akiko

“The fear of living, observing and experiencing in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them,” said David Foster Wallace.

*

            Sheep fear watching other people make things happen and not knowing what the fuck is going on, said Z. Sheep and robots fear taking a risk. They know it’s easier to do nothing than take a chance, said Leo.

            I cut useless meaningless vague words blocking the narrative river. I am innocent, happy, empty and brave. I am not afraid to make wise selections when it comes to editing this massive amount of verbiage, said Zeynep.

            Where’s the burn bag, said the janitor.

            I fear Room 101, said Winston Smith in 1984.

            Poor schools makes it easier for SYSTEMS to control ignorant citizens.

            Leo - In Utopia we learn the less we do the fewer mistakes we make. The fewer mistakes we make the less we are criticized. I remain safe and happy. It’s called THE SYSTEM. Brainwashed. You see this in every Asian education system.

             Students shuffle in, remove their brains, soak them in a cleaning solution that is not the solution for fifty tedious minutes and replace said gray matter at the end of class. It’s endemic. Social conditioning.

            A teacher is Parent #2. School is your first dictator.

            Big Brother is watching. Save face. It’s your karma.

            The fear of humiliation is greater than the fear of death, said Death.

            Karma is the universal law.

            Will your characters discuss moral ambiguities? Yes. They will speak with nouns and verbs and use specific adjectives for description, playing with words like Joyce. They will play with ideas, like Borges, said Zeynep.

Attributes of good ideas said Devina.

a.         Simple

b.         Unexpected

c.         Concrete

d.         Credible

e.         Emotional

f.          Story-containing

            Good writing is clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity. There are people who talk about things, said Zeynep, People who talk about people and people who talk about ideas. The life of the mind.

            Is a place a character, asked Tran, Sure, said Devina, A place has character like Kroma, Cambodia, a sleepy river town, famous for pepper, Sunflower’s hands, Milling Around and the SIGN ones, said Rita.

            Writers use a specific location in their work, said Omar. Cadiz, Spain worked its way into my morning pages. I traveled with a nomad after 9/11.

             His laughing axe synthesized metaphors of death, sacrifice and letting go. His mirrors became gifts (hello beauty) and gifts multiplied gifts with gratitude. The gift keeps moving. It was imperative to leave the united states of confusion and Morocco behind.

            Exile suited our spirit. It was the irony of ironies, pressed irons with heavy starch in the collar please I told the world’s dry cleaner. Wash and wear. Dry a tear.

            Nothing is true & everything is permitted, Omar told Akiko, a Japanese fashion designer in Cadiz.

            Everything is permitted with fabric and threads, naked in the dark exploring their personal puzzle maps, tracing contours through the Sierras in Andalusia toward beaches woven with linen and silk.

            They were two orange and black butterflies dancing in a courtship ritual. They slept together in a Hokkaido love hotel filled with mirrors.

            At 2 a.m. Cadiz garbage workers in fluorescent yellow tiger stripes collected discarded words along narrow streets.

            Omar wrote the morning down as sky painted orange, pink and cerulean colors. A crescent moon hung in the west. He walked down Benjumeda Street as uniformed school kids gripped parental hands passing veiled grandmothers wearing widow market black at intersections on their daily economic briefing. Roman cobblestones rested in white shadows. Cool clear air dusted lungs.

            The Plaza de Falla Moorish red brick extremities shimmered in soft light. Arches formed prayer hands. Golden, cast iron, bronze, brick, tile, and papier mâché arch models in the world prayed for non-violence, dialogue, a ceasefire and arms control.

            Arms out of control waved goodbye to sanity and millions of orphans.

            Weary serious sad med students gripping texts crossed plazas toward class. Matriculation was a fading dream. Two men grimaced a ladder past a hospital and a fortune teller selling lottery tickets. Gambling was a big deal in Cadiz. Machines in bars with three virgin cherries rotated. ONCE lottery tickets bought the population where 40% were unemployed.

            Pay now pray later. The best is yet to come, said an unemployed Roma fortune teller.

            A nurse in white perfection entered a cafe for coffee. Old people hobbled in and out of a hospital. A woman left the hospital carrying one crutch. Needing Grave Digger she walked past an ambulance. I’m busy, said Digger, See my calloused hands.

            Death stood watch 24/7 in the big leagues.

            Book of Amnesia, V1.

Giants

“Try this,” said Raymond Carver a famous short story writer. “Write 25 words. Cut it to 15. Cut it to 5. This is what dead editors and hatchet men did to my work.”

Let me try, said Leo  ... here are 25  ... Once upon a time there was a tribe of orphans from Asia who escaped from captivity and abusive life where they were forced to … (haul shit, fuck evil men, work in a factory making electronic gadgets)

Fine. Next? Let me try, said Tran. Here are 15 … A tribe of orphans escaped the tyranny of forced labor and ran away to be.

Good. Next? Let me try, said Rita. Here are 5 … The scared orphans ran away. Precise, said RC, Keep it simple and short. Shorter is better. Less is more. Short, fast, deadly.

Character is action, said Omar. In a novel words reveal a character’s action. It’s internal and meditative. On stage in a play it’s all action.

Writers say what others are afraid to say.

They write naked.

They write in blood.

They write in exile.

See and smell their fear strength and authenticity. Heavy, deep and real. HDR.

Communicate without Voice words. WE sense their sincere authenticity. Writers confront their mental illness every day.

They love SIGN language. Gestures. Their awareness is misunderstood when speaking in SIGN because Speaking people ignore you. Voice Ones are illiterate and interrupt each other. See their fear being alienated, bored and alone. See, taste, hear, smell their fear to BE deaf, dumb and blind.

How do people cope using gestures, said Devina. Gestures control people. Asian Voice Ones talk over each other in their neurotic way. Loud and louder is their mantra. The loudest one is the BIG winner. Congratulations.

Here are my fears said Rita: The fear of living in Cambodia where you are always afraid looking over your shoulder and seeing the past with hard eyes because you have no imagination after twenty years of pure survival instinct with no incentive no initiative facing nightmare futures.

You are afraid someone will sneak up behind you and kill you. You suffer from fear and superstition. 1.7 million hungry ghosts swarm around you. Day in. Day out. We’re talking about some serious long-term trauma with a side order of shame and guilt. It will take another generation or two to clean our consciousness.

Rita: When I grow up, I will be a Fear & Superstition Manager. I’ll have booth on a red dusty road with an F & S sign. People will give me their fear(s) and superstition(s). I won’t say anything  ... I’ll smile and accept it. Thank you. Healed, they continue on their way. I burn it.

For example, they fear someone shows up in the middle of the night while they dream of peace and freedom and kills them. They fear armed strangers raping their screaming wife and daughters while they watch. They fear someone cutting out their tongue. They fear someone in their family not returning from the killing fields.

They suffer the fear of remembering & the fear of forgetting. They fear memory.

They fear losing their children, said Rita. They fear having no imagination. They fear asking why  ... They fear being distracted by stimuli in the environment … They fear controlling their environment … They fear their environment because it controls them … They fear living in Asian countries where, due to circumstances controlled by aliens, parents, teachers and authority figurines they live in perpetual childhood.

Adults keep you there with fake dependency & emotional abuse. They teach you fear. You eat fear three times a day. Delicious fear they say. Have some more. They are the great manipulators. Adults are giants with giant voices and giant control techniques. They threaten you with fear of pain, shame and guilt. It’s a vicious circle.

Life is a circle, a Fibonacci spiral.

The Wheel of Life is the universe.

When you meditate you are free from rebirth. Humans need love. Humans need compassion, kindness and empathy. They need to talk less and draw more. It’s a social and cultural thing. Giants never learned how to read or write. Giants fight, eat, fuck and sleep.

Un Pleasant factoid: 69 million children worldwide of primary school age will not  go to school this morning or tomorrow, next week, or next year.

I fear struggling to join the rising middle class in _______ without political connections and getting a degree in business, said Rita, After authority figures said a business degree was essential thousands got one. Many graduates don’t speak or care to learn English for future opportunities where they need it. They’re stuck working dead-end paper pushing menial jobs, sweeping dreams, chopping vegetables, doing boom-boom, sleeping or slaving in the tourism sector.

They need English to speak with foreigners or to get a job.

A teacher makes maybe $1,000 a month minus bribe fees. They lack initiative. Facing tiny sheep they fear losing control and acting like a fool in the theatre of life.

People fear questioning authority in Utopia before they execute you with a bullet in the back of your brain, said Leo speaking of historical awareness, I dance like nobody’s looking.

Yes, said Rita, I fear meeting my hungry ghost in a country where you:

a) are completely lost

b) have no comprehension what people say

c) suffer paranoia, a terminal disease

d) enjoy tedious ennui boredom carving a niche in your soul and you crave endless electronic distractions and gadget sensory overload

e) need food, water, clothing and shelter from the storm

f) have a humbling life changing experience of magnificent proportions    

g) hear a bell signifying enlightenment and satori, said Omar

Book of Amnesia, V1

Flower

process is more alluring then product

Dimmi - tell me your secrets ... fundamental laws of nature ... synthesis ... geometry + shadow + light

Barthes - photographs attract us because they are pensive, they think

ideas in living laboratories

*

History, war, and violence screwed us, said Rita. Human genocide animals massacred 1.7 million out of 11 million between 1975-1979. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need. They eat, sleep, plant, harvest, fuck and sit around.

They are soft and kind. They have a good heart.

As Buddhists they visualize a positive future with good education, health care, quality medicine, job opportunities and community strength.

They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The lesson is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing staring humans. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone. Zap said Rita.

Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. Let’s pretend to be someone else in life’s play.

Whew what a mouthful, said Tran, an amputee from Vietnam, Yeah spilling sounds and metaphors, the human condition reads history and weeps, time history is a play, create memory history and re-write it. Your memory is the world, said Omar, And the world is a village.

Everything I need is here.

Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.

Question?

What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands? Her hands were all. Her hands were water air soft gentle sensations. Learning sensing and feeling is her physical way. She engaged all her senses. Touch is her essence.

She knew your pressure points. Soft, medium or hard, she said. During her meditation we considered this fragment. We discovered immediate direct experience with structure form and literary vulgarity.

We slow down inside a labyrinth contemplating a lotus growing from mud.

A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive. They write naked, in blood and in exile.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Burma

Surprise!

Question?

Is the problem or surprise the form, a formless form or the form of the formless forming sea foaming form? If so, can it be understood by reducing, redacting, paralleling, associating another journey? Can you break the continuity of the journey with memories of an ephemeral I ? Yes … It’s not a problem, it’s a surprise, said Impermanence.

Who am I?

I am a who to what I am.

Why am I here?

How did I get here?

How did I grow?

Q has three parts:

a) What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil?

b) What is the nature of evil? The question is the answer. It is not in this tale, play or manuscript.

c) What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?

Q. Where does the real end and the artificial begin? I am a superficial person, said Grave Digger … I pretend to be who I am in my future. I know two things. My hands. My work is never finished.

Q? Does fate control our free will? Yes.. Fate cannot lie. If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get life’s joke, said Laughter Therapy … Ha, ha, ha.

Q? Should we worry about the style? No. Should we worry about the form? No. Worry is interest on a bill yet to come due. No guilt, regret, fear, or monkey mind. Monkey loves the circus of sensory overload. We live in a world of forms.

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

Northern Laos

A C-19 virus transmitted by Chinese bats to humans in late 2019 is not a surprise. A pangolin ate bat shit. The pangolin was trapped, died and ended up in a wet market. Consumers bought it, sliced it, cooked it, and served it at parties in Wuhan. Delicious. Infected humans traveled and transmitted C-19 to millions around Earth. So it goes.

Holy bat shit! said Robin a cape crusader wearing a mask practicing social distance.

Q: do we have to capitalize the first letter of every sentence? no is the short answer no.

Q: what is strange? Life is strange, bizarre, comic, tragic and very short … Life is a brief clear precise concise life sentence. How do stories, vignettes, jazz prose poems, journalism fragments, and system analysis communicate with each other?

A: They walk dirt paths, ford rivers, scale mountains, explore jungles, valleys and estuaries and cross metaphysical existential borders … they build sandcastles near the sea. They practice telepathy … they are time travelers. Aliens.

They meditate on the process of their death.

The dance and dancer are one.

As a mystic and prescient person, Zeynep you have the responsibility to be honest. Be light about it. Think big and stay in the particular. Know what keeps you motivated and happy. Autotelic. 

Next question Z, How do you stay fresh and centered? You make it new day-by-day, said Z, Make it new. A storyteller staying in one place goes blind, we move around before becoming native and dull. Before we think and act like local sheep.

Lost confused passive ones living in Inertia, a state of mind, perfect the art of MILLING AROUND in Country ABC, said Rita, They speak in monosyllables Yeah, yeah. Big vocabulary. 2% are awake. 98% are asleep. The majority are afraid to ask the WHY question.

Fear is a killer. Life is a killer.

People asking questions get slaughtered. See the Killing Fields on page 101 - the last room you want to enter. Keeping your big fat fucking mouth shut is wise and prudent behavior to survive post-genocidal truth ghosts. It is an unpleasant fact. If you open your trap someone cuts out your tongue.

In this peculiar particular situation expert scientific witnesses have proven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt and doubt has a shadow with logical coherence … that WE, being expert witnesses, reliable narrators and noble natives living with our DNA genius bear witness to alienated, lonely, bored, listless, passive, Earthlings meandering with no purpose, lost, unimaginative having zero curiosity and staring with blind eyes - due to severe emotional, mental, physical traumas with memories of suffering, genocide and ghosts.

They remain childlike, tender, sweet, kind, and hospitable with a terminal case of confusion and loss forever, hiding in deep shadows, addicted to dumb phone entertainment boredom.

Their beating hearts caress resignation, despair, depression, lack of initiative or incentive based on fear of punishment, or loss of face or humiliation with hard-wired SHAME.

They grow and live a meditative Buddhist spiritual way of identity and culture.

They are easily distracted. Kids play. Forever young. Adults have perfected the art and style of Pretending To Be Busy.

What art. What beauty. What style. What form. What context. What a formal pertinacious way. What objective truth. What verisimilitude.

Here are some true facts, said Rita an orphan and independent author. Unpleasant facts are littered in this epic like lovers, countries, butterflies, social systems, food and transformation.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Chapter 15

Earth peoples, oceans wave,  celebrate life energy sex and harmonic forces, said Rita, What happened in the love hotel? Use your imagination.

They paid a woman 3,000,000 Yen through a slot in the door. She gave them a key. It unlocked Akiko’s chamber of secrets. The room featured an American wild-west motif with an Indian chief on a white horse. Very cute, said Akiko. They stripped each other down. They took a long hot herbal bath exploring geography with tender lust. They jumped each other’s bones. It was in-out dialogue, pure passion. Show doesn’t tell, said Z.

He toweled me down, said Akiko. I felt thick cotton noun fibers edge my thin shoulders, along my verb spine, weaving his fingers across my flat stomach, erasing, tracing water fingering my direct object jungle. Slow and easy baby, I sighed being his Shinto shrine as he gave me his offering. Their relationship ignored verbal language, said a blind Japanese masseuse in a love hotel.

What conflicts exist?

-Human vs. Human

-Human vs. Nature already mentioned.

-Human vs. ______><_______

-Human vs. self. Do I or don’t I? Is it safe?

-Nature vs. Nurture

Will someone playfully deconstruct the truth with literal facts to move the narrative along and get to the mind-at-large awareness of his or her experience, said Tran. I hope so, said Omar, A literary agent at a writer’s conference in Oregon said my writing was a word photograph jazz beat. She suggested throwing the narrative out.

She said and I quote, Pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. I would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words, Yeah, said Rita, What did you say? I told her some novelists do exactly the opposite of what they’re told because disobedience is freedom, Beware of book doctors and blood thirsty greedy dictatorial aliens with an agenda, said Rita.

Ok, said Tran, How’s this sound? Write everything in the first five pages. Grab the reader with a hook in every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and at the end of chapters, Yeah, said Grave Digger, WE need a hook, a big iron hook covered with dried blood hanging in the center of an empty Asian market reminding genocide survivors what happens to them if they fuck up. They get a big fat rejection hook in the neck or through their trembling beating pulsating heart.

Fear sells. Fear is a universal language.

Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear, sex and growth into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation  ... punctuation is a nail. Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist.

I love Linguini, said Devina, but he doesn’t love me. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know eternity adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again.

Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it. A sincere writer has grit and stamina. Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess.

A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted. Kill your father. Marry your mother or versa visa. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard-lived sojourn, Experience is my teacher. The rest is just information, Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame stream mainstream upstream.

Book of Amnesia V1

A flower has profound responsibility.