Duende

In June 2001 I called Pascal, an airline ticket broker in Montreal and set up the itinerary. Seattle, Detroit, Amsterdam to Casablanca round-trip for six months.

“When do you want to go?”

Another draft of A Century is Nothing would be abandoned by mid-August. I selected a random date.

“September 1.”

“What did Narcissus say when he saw his reflection in the water?” said Pascal during a conversation.

“What?”

“Watch out for yourself.”

“Good one.”

“We’ll take care of it,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

“Thanks for your help.”

A ticket to dusty roads in another village, town, city, country and continent offered new adventures. KISS. Keep it simple stupid.

Leaving was a wise karmic decision. Speaking of history.

I checked out of living between fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive fuel at Hanford and the Umatilla Army Disposal Site where 7.4 million pounds of discarded chemical weapons waited to be incinerated.

Humans would be vaporized in an instant if the winds of change shifted. Weapons of mass destruction glowed in backyards.

My future lives were freedom, choice and plenty.

Two months after 9/11 while writing in Cadiz, Spain I visualized my incarnation as a calm word mercenary on an existential literary mission.

I created and wrote with discipline and perseverance.

I had duende, an untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit and dark sound.

It signifies a charisma, emotion, expression and authenticity manifested by flamenco dancers, bullfighters, shamans, prescient seers and weavers. Audiences feel they are in the presence of a mystical power. The duende is an elf or goblin in Spanish and Latin American folklore.

The Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca produced the best description of duende.

“Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel. In that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Marrakesh

Kandinsky

Fishtail Mountain, Annapurna Range, Nepal

Wassily Kandinsky, the painter, had the ability to see sound and hear color.

In 1911 he founded "The Blue Rider" school in Munich, taking abstract painting to another level. Magic.

Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1908-1922.

..."Synesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by "a studious blind man" claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet."

..."If Kandinsky had a favourite colour, it must have been blue: "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white."

..."Despite his theories that the universe was in thrall to supernatural vibrations, auras and "thought-forms", many of which came from arcane, quasi-religious movements such as theosophy, Kandinsky's belief in the emotional potential of art is still convincing today. Our response to his work should mirror our appreciation of music and should come from within, not from its likenesses to the visible world: "Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings."

Ice Man

Street Talk

Captain Tremendous Tremor here again with an update from the dead zone of grieving Chinese parents and crushed kiddies. One reality shows to go ya where Big Brother wraps barbwire around collapsed schools preventing parents from rescuing 10,000 kids. Educational corruption and fear thrives in a Brave New World.

If you want to play you must pay. We know so much and understand so little.

“I don’t understand a thing. Let’s take the day off and be creative,” sang Zeynep, “grab our cameras and tale a walk.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed through ephemeral effervescent worlds healing strangers. Free non-transferable luck was distributed to the needy.

Air simmered grilled meat aromas in a tomato culture as swirling silver musical spoons tickled tea glasses. Seven tonal notes create cosmic spectrums.

Inside Ulus alleys near Ankara laughing blacksmiths with calloused hands burnished musical metallic containers. Friends forged balconies, grates, bars and enclosures on anvils with Thor’s hammer. Gateless gates.

A coal man loaded bags of black on his back. A cornered Russian mistress wearing diamonds on the sole of her shoes waited for rich monkeys. A weaver loomed geometric silk ikat threads. A father taught his son the art of carpet repair. Needle led thread. Dusty stories coagulated and copulated on teakettles rusting atop Roman burial slabs covered in binary codes.

Expanding universal maps and NSA spy satellites collected data.

Total information awareness. TIA.

A peasant woman rolled dough to make ravioli-like manta pasta. A brown snail carrying its spiral galaxy home scaled green and white stones as waving antenna received signals from orbiting space-time Dream Sweepers.

Head scarfed Kurdish women inside stone path shadows near crumbling straw packed homes with broken wooden slat shutters sat in a sacred circle talking and rolling spicy grated seeds into grape leaves. Thick meaty fingers toiled. Heavy 24-caret golden bracelets reflecting scattered light led to undiscovered archaeological sites for sore eyes and a doctoral thesis on amalgamated dust.

“It’s true to report that everyone in Turkey is psychologically well adjusted, employed and content with their free life,” said Zeynep.

“You’re dreaming, delusional or telling real lies,” said Curious.

“Made in the shade, cool baby,” Lucky said. “This is to say with precise specific clarity they have the courage to speak, are never tired or afraid of falling in love and marrying someone outside their rigid social and/or economic class. They take amazing risks and suffer greatly with gratitude.

"Photographing the universe they rent time-share apartments in black holes sucking matter into a void. Some scribble or doodle unintelligible non-linear calligraphic ideograms. The majority disappears into phosphorescent television monitors where they absorb political blather and fake reality shows. Media buys them. They give up their consciousness and miss the show.”

In Bursa a father + two son trash collection team pushed a rolling cart loaded with discarded plastic computers past crumbling Ottoman buildings secured behind barbwire and rusty locks. Faded orange and blue pigments peeled a long lost hollow bell.

One freezing morning a grandmother staring at Ottoman history lifted her child’s child to an iron-grated window. Zeynep, an invisible street photographer present with empathy squeezed a soft shutter release. A whirling dervish painting with light in continuous mode murdered time.

“Freedom is essential in my life. I control the result with spontaneity. I develop real relationships and embrace extreme situations. I’m a photographer who needs to travel. If I stay in one place I go blind.”

“Our images communicate light, story, form, emotion, information and raw aesthetics,” said L.

“Emotional impact. Photography is more art and intuition than process and procedure,” said Z.

In a warm art studio overlooking a fast icy river flowing from Uludag a female flute player fingering emptiness explained melancholic notes. Her chattering laughing friend created marbled flower art using pinpoint dabs of color in a tray filled with hot wax.

A white seagull’s calibrated internal navigation system negotiated air currents with Winter Hawk, Lone Wolf, 101 Screaming Eagles and Labrys of raging violin string theories. Piano melodies and hard bop jazz improvisation reinforced Bamboo resilience.

A 19% waxing crescent moon danced with clouds. Moon remembered moons in Augustine Fujian. Eat moon cakes, said Curious. Feed dead ancestors with filial duty. A cruel heartless forgotten forgiving month heard sky welcome moon. Clouds explored atmospheric conditions.

HELP screamed in a literary agent’s slush pile.

Help was a bulldozer leveling forests to harvest trees outside Phonsavan, Laos.

Vietnam bought them all. One tree = $10,000.

Chopsticks chairs tables toothpicks. Wood you believe it?

Lighter than Winter Hawk’s feathers, HELP made fun of people.

Invisible howling soft wing energy manifested Beauty. Letters. Signs. Symbols. Metaphors. Observations. Unpleasant facts.

Help expressed brevity. How are you? I'm short, said Brevity.

Help played with variable truth-value meaning.

Help, a landmine in Cambodia below the surface of appearances in a luminous landscape reaching infinity weighted for sensation.

 The Language Company

Random probability

"Tell everyone you know: "My happiness depends on me, so you're off the hook." And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they're doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel - and then, you'll love them all. Because the only reason you don't love them, is because you're using them as your excuse to not feel good."
 - Esther Abraham-Hicks
transcend  Read more…

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond.

We make our living by catching electrons at the moment of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the instant of each jump and storing it up in intricate loops for ourselves. We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systematically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility.

Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member of our own species unique. Everyone is one in 7 billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing."
 - Lewis Thomas
Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
running after my hat  Read more… 

 

defrost

Here's what may have happened with his friend, the V woman.

One requires sex when there's no electricity. Quiet, all the humming power is down. 

It was mid-day and hot. Humid thick tropical heat.

Her first class open door and windows were covered with newspapers to prevent strangers from seeing in. 

He parked his bike and entered. She was defrosting the fridge. Smiling, they hadn't seen each other for days. They hugged speaking languages. Grateful to know their needs and passion.

They showered, soaping each other down. She gave him a towel and a swig of mouth wash. They spit in the sink.

She climbed on, kissing his nipples, moving to the statue of liberty, salivating, stroking, kissing and sucking. Yum-yum. He spread her red lips and slowly brought her to nirvana. They took care of each other before, during and after.

They showered, enjoyed a long cool drink of water, laughed, smiled sharing an embrace.

Life is big and we are small, she sang. Life is found in a desperate situation.

He pedaled into heat. She finished defrosting the fridge.