Amnesia

Imagination tells the truth, said Zeynep. It is curious how this beautiful monster evolved. It began in 2010. The working title was Big Work.

It’s raw material, mirrors, reflections, experiences and journeys in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia. The journey is the destination. I’m happy to get it down now and make sense of it later.

Live every day like it’s your last because one day it will be.

My responsibility is to document stories from diverse cultures. A record of people, places and growth with Direct Immediate Experience.

D.I.E.

I will create a small book about Amnesia. I am an experience junky and a hack journalist gifted with the ability to see the future. I murdered many darlings. Some darlings survived. I already revealed I am also a gardener and word janitor collecting vignettes, flash fiction, and diamonds cutting through desire, anger and ignorance, with be-bop jazz poems, dreams, visions, fragments, word plays and miscellaneous elements of truth-story and fiction-memory threads whistling like a blind person in the dark.

This is not a novel. It is not linear characters detest the formulaic A to Z. I am Z and the beginning needs work.

What will you be at night when you reach the end of the road?

It is experimental in nature, like Omar’s literary memoir, A Century is Nothing. In fact, unpleasant as it is and I’ve faced many unpleasant enlightening facts. Part of his epic performance is included here for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Question. Did children invent infinity and eternity? No. They are abstract concepts. Like elastic time. Time is a circle. Children live forever. WE are immortal.

We begin with children’s voices. I say WE because it is everyone. The WE are you and I, us, them, he, she, it, all universal pronouns. Language is communication not rules. Grammar means rules … tedious shit.

One voice many voices. Storytellers. The world is made of stories not atoms. They are essential with heart-mind. Wisdom mind burns bright. The Mind-at-Large spirit is motivation. Karma. Here is one of my kid friends.

Hi. This is the day of my dreams, said Tran, 10, amputee and dust collector, Da Nang, Vietnam.

Let’s create a book, said Zeynep, And we’ll be in it. I am a central scripter because I am young enough to know how much I don’t know which means I don’t know anything the first thing, the last thing, the only thing, the main thing about the literary publishing game.

I imagine literary means being accepted and commercial means selling and establish marketing platforms and becoming addicted to social media because media buys people.

Many humns drown in a glut of low quality information.

I understand the meaning of meaning, subjective truth values, I am curious and question everything and like my friends in this chess game of life experiences I am fearless.

I never take yes for an answer.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

We are Bushido warriors with Zen clarity insight and wisdom. The majority of adults are, in my little clear, concise, precise deadly specific opinion based on empirical experience, tyrants, rigid, autocratic, blind in one eye, easily distracted, idiots, depressed, angry, insecure, resentful, neurotic, suffering from illusions, greedy for money and power and CONTROL and so on. I love their personality and character faults.

They take drugs or escape into phone madness to erase pain and memory. They struggle to forget. They take Soma to BE on a perpetual holiday from mind numbing tedious monotonous life. They become soft and pliable sheep…easily manipulated by viral media machine messages. Burroughs called it The Soft Machine.

Every person counts.

To relieve a low level of fear called anxiety they need a high dosage of feel good prescription drugs and/or phones. Same-same but different.

Here in Turkey, said Z, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, is prescribed for the nationalist sheep. It is safe, effective, addictive and abused. Adults take the easy way out because they are lazy, anxious and afraid after July 2016. They live their personal FEAR.

Adults boss us around because we are small. Big ones manipulate us through fear, intimidation and bribery. Eat your vegetables and you can have desert.  Don’t tell your parents what happened in the dark chapel and I’ll give you some money. Give me a bottle of expensive French wine and you’ll pass my class.

Give me your daughter and you can have some land. Give me your sword and I’ll spare your life.

I buy your freedom with candy, money and things.

Give me your tomorrows and you can have some food. Give me your soul and you can go to heaven and live with twenty-four virgins after I kill you.

I will give you clothing

shelter and food

if you give up your free speech.

What a great deal. And so on.

Adults think they are omnipotent. They are physical giants but believe you me many are smaller than a neutrino quark in my humble estimation, interpretation, elaboration, shun. This creates a tragedy.

“Life is a tragedy when seen closeup but a comedy in long shot.” – Charlie Chaplin

Book of Amnesia, V1

Fly

Ireland.

One night a Donegal fly arrives while I’m typing.

It lands on the lampshade.

A muse watchdog fly, one eye, many eyes.

It rubs its feelers together in anticipation of finishing off someone’s meal. Flies have lived on Earth for 93 million years. They symbolize death and decay.

There is no food lying around, only papers, magnifiers, books and clothing.

The fly’s aware of magic power and pure intention drawing it to the writer. The lamp is hot. The wind is cold. The fly reads my mirror mind, sees bleeding fingers, feeling the loneliness and freedom.

Fly appreciates and comprehends this must go down just as it must land to rub it’s feelers together sitting on the precipice of light beams with wonder, fury, delight, ramifications, responsibility and repose. Karmic fate.

-I saw you from a foreign window, said fly. -You were on a path.

-True. Suffering is an illusion. It’s a grand precious adventure. The road is made by walking. It’s a long walk.

-Seems full of fools, dead ends, bookends, trails, trials, tribal ramifications and tribulations. Where is the beauty and truth in this tale? Where is the narrative structure? Where is the plot of formless form?

-We live in a world of forms. It’s in the exposition. The big show. It’s in the thread of fates’ fabric. How do I know where it will go? Part of my job is to gather material, get out of the way and allow a writer to organize it. I’m lucky to get it down and figure it out later. I’m a conduit. I’m a figment of your imagination.

-So it would appear, said fly, -who lives it, writes it, rewrites it, polishes it, reads it, kills it, ignores it, abandons it. I am a drop of water on your mirror. Feed wild birds daily crumbs. Water flies from sky. It explodes into earth. I disappear into dust. Burn baby burn. Cry baby cry.

-You’re a fly. An insect. Short attention span, like some humans I’ve met. No attention span? No problem.

-Hey. Take it easy. Listen. Stay focused. Stay on task. You were in the jungle, the real deal amigo. You were dazed and confused, stupid, naive, dressed in green, following blind orders. Blind led the blind. You were the willing doing the ridiculous for the ungrateful. You survived to tell the tale. Give me a break. Start with one true declarative sentence. Punctuation is a nail. Write what you know. Write the ending and work backwards. Center ripples out. Use verbs and nouns. Murder adjectives and adverbs. Use active tense. Give me dirty realism. Surface. Write with passion. Keep it simple. Seduce the reader.

-It was hot and humid. It was November. I was a climatic cinematic spotlight-floodlight focus. I was a thick stream of gracious fear, healthy doubt, glorious uncertainty, wild adventure and unlimited surprise. 

-How did you feel?

-Shit, I was young and scared. Apprehensive. We were all young and petrified & naive packed into a tin can flying low over green jungles. I smelled the green lieutenant’s shit next to me skimming jungles before they opened the doors, before some sergeant got on yelling at us to get out and get going. We walked down the stairs into heat exploding off pavement. A brown and white striped tent waved in the distance. We walked toward it. There were hundreds of guys yelling and screaming at us.

-So what. Kinda Blue by Miles Davis

-Man it was weird, I gotta tell ya. All these guys in earth  brown uniforms, caked with dirt laughing, smiling, yelling, crying, taunting us, thanking us for bringing in their plane, yelling “man we’re going home, what’s your honey’s name jack and I’ll take good care of her, man am I short,” all kinds of verbal incantations.

-So what. (take 2)

-You don’t get it do you? Man we were just getting there and I said, shit here I am at 19 and I’ve got 365 days to go. These guys are done, finished, out of here and it was the biggest longest looking instant of future time in the immediate present tense sense you could imagine. I couldn’t even begin to see it, 365 what? Are you kidding me? Others went into shock knowing they had no idea what was in front of them, only seeing 365 days staring them in the face. You knew life expectancies disappeared fast being a numbers game maybe, at the most six months if you were lucky and then after surviving 180 days you stayed on edge trying to make it through the rest. We swallowed salt pills three times a day. The weak dropped like flies.

-Not funny.

Weaving A Life V1

Director of Brooms

Lolly

Omar napped. Little Wing wove.

She looked up from threads. Want to take some signal equipment up to our ops at Firebase Lolly?

Sure.

Pick it up at 1000 hrs. Someone will drop you off at the chopper pad. Stay up there two days.

Lolly was a firebase ten miles from Camp Eagle and the 101st. I climbed into a Huey, the door gunner wearing fly goggles gave me the thumbs up, strapped myself in and we lifted off. 

Rotors thudded through air fighting gravity lifting off at an angle and forward as the pilot kept the momentum steady, increasing speed out over the perimeter. A winding river reflected sunlight in a gleaming stream. Mountains and hills blended elevations.

The gunner sat over his M-60 staring down and out at the green canopy below us with belts of shiny ammunition feeding into his machine from an open ammo box at his feet. Nestled inside the rounds was a cold unopened can of Bud's beer. Each ammo belt layer resembled a meticulous package wrapped to his exact specifications. He knew if he turned his quiet metal into a chattering signature of death he'd have no jamming worries.

A red mail sack lay in the corner.

I wrapped a faded green scarf around my face in the cold air, sat back and relaxed.

All fire base vegetation had been cleared to the peak. Staggered machine gun placements fortified with sandbags lay submerged inside layers of razor wire wrapped around the hill decorated with claymores.

On top was a small landing pad, commander’s post, miniscule mess hall, hootches and 105mm artillery positions in deep pits surrounded by stacked sandbags. Gunners rotated pieces by degree of slope and calibrated for firing relying on infantry patrol coordinates. Sunburned kids and pot bellied sergeants manned isolated mortar pits.

Fire in the hole, said a chicken fucking a GI.

Firebases allowed artillery support, infantry patrols into jungles and military intelligence was close to Viet Cong traffic patterns.

We set down on a PSP steel-landing zone in a swirl of dust. I got out, grunts heading for the rear climbed on, I gave the door gunner a high sign, turned and lugged the machine to the ops conex.

Ben, the African-American Vietnamese linguist had been there six months and planned to finish his tour at Lolly.

I love this shit, he said opening a can of peaches after we installed his machine. Better than the Eagle routine.

I know what you mean.

He was respected for his ability to decipher and transmit language information. He intercepted and processed good traffic. Grunts regarded him as a magician. They used his information to strike and intercept Cong units, harass them and stay alive in the jungle.

A grunt’s life expectancy was six months. 180 days.

He lived and worked in a small conex buried in the ground near the command post with electronic wings on his sandbagged roof. Wearing headphones in dim light he hunched over radio equipment writing on a sheet of paper. Spinning the dial. Dialects, frequencies, verbal traffic.

He reminded me of a resistance fighter in a film noir. A sewer rat with brains needing excitement content to spend a long year on top of a hill buried in a box.

ART, Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Hagoshrim Kibbutz

We flew to Israel and tight security at Ben Gurion airport. Arrived at dawn, walked down stairs past soldiers, across the tarmac to a black van with open doors flanked by soldiers with machine guns. A man sat with his pistol on a desk. We showed him our passports. He checked for Arabic visas. He scrutinized our faces.

“Why are you coming to Israel?”

“To work in a kibbutz.”

“How much money do you have?”

“A couple of hundred dollars.”

“Do you have a return ticket?”

“Yes,” I said pulling out a ragged open ticket from Air Icelandic marked Chicago. He looked over our papers, opened an inkpad, hammered a stamp on a page, placed an entry visa in our passports and handed them back.

“Ok. You may go.”

We walked cross the tarmac, placed packs on a conveyor belt and followed a maze of chest high metal anti-bomb partitions. A female soldier scanned our luggage for explosives. She marked them with chalk, checked our papers, peered into my typewriter and waved us through.

We grabbed a bus into town past fields and industrial zones. We had an address for a kibbutz office.

“Welcome, or Shalom as we say here. My name is Sharim. We are pleased to have you come to Israel and volunteer to experience the beauty, joy and culture of living and working on a kibbutz.”

Bleary eyes looked at a map with colored pins showing settlements. “What are the pins for?” I asked.

“They designate types of kibbutz and locations.” Red, blue, yellow and green pins pricked a weathered map with a heavy concentration in the north.

“The red pins are religious kibitzes, the blue ones are agricultural farms, the green ones are primarily factories. Yellow pins designate combination farms near the border with Lebanon.”

“What kind of farms?” asked Joan.

”Oh, all kinds. Most produce their own food. They grow fruit and vegetables and have fish farms with a combined industrial production kibbutz operation.”

I pointed at a red pin up north. “What’s this one?”

“That’s Hagoshrim. It’s an old kibbutz. There are about 200 families, ten kilometers from the Lebanese border and twenty east of Syria.”

“How is the life on the kibbutz?” Joan asked.

“It’s straightforward,” he said. “Volunteers usually stay for six months. They are given a place to stay, meals and encouraged to join in the daily activities. They have duties on the kibbutz, usually from early morning to noon and then for a few hours in the afternoon. We organize cultural tours to parts of the country for volunteers. They meet many people from other countries while also gaining a deeper understanding of the Jewish faith. The experience makes a deep impact on many people’s lives.”

“Can we work on more than one kibbutz?”

“Yes. That’s possible after you stay and work the minimum of six months in one location.”

We chose Hagoshrim. He called the kibbutz and gave us bus fare and directions. We thanked him and went to the crowded central Egged national bus station. 

The bus skirted brown fields, lush green agriculture and desert wasteland. Fatigued soldiers with grease guns and collapsible stocks napped.

We passed tilled soil, fruit trees and villages. We bounced along awkward roads past the Sea of Galilee. A nervous girl, 23, twirled a yellow Kleenex into a knot with long red fingernails.

We rolled into Kiryat Shimona, a town of 20,000 in the north tucked into a corner near Lebanon and Syria. Famous for rocket attacks at night. Sounds familiar.

We hitched a ride on a fruit truck full of soldiers doing their two-year compulsory service passing ochre colored fields of fruit trees and olive orchards.

At Hagoshrim we registered, heard pre-induction volunteer procedures and were assigned separate sleeping quarters in basic army barracks from 1948. We sat in a well-manicured garden with flowers and fruit trees.

A thin gray haired man explained how their society worked.

“Welcome. Shalom. This is one of the oldest kibbutz in Israel. You will be assigned daily and weekly jobs by the volunteer coordinator. We are a multi-purpose kibbutz. Everything you see around you has been planted, grown, built and developed over the last twenty years. When my parents came here there was only desert and we were fighting wars against our enemies. We stayed. We dug the ground. We planted. Our parents had children and they built schools and bomb shelters.

"We are always ready to defend our land. Our families converted the desert into productive land. We grow fruits and vegetables, harvest them, keep some for our own consumption and sell in the market. We have fish farms providing a source of income. Everyone takes meals in the cafeteria, volunteers and families. It’s good food and you will not be hungry here. Work starts at 5:30 a.m. when it is cool. We take a midmorning break with lunch at 12:30. The afternoons are for personal activities although there are some afternoon assignments.

"Saturday is the Sabbath when no work is done. This is not a religious kibbutz, which means you have the choice of taking part in our ceremonies from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. In exchange for your labor you receive accommodations, clothing, food, free international postage and a small amount of payment in the form of a card which is used in the small store for essentials like toilet paper.”

“What kind of jobs do you have?” Joan asked.

“We are totally self sufficient. Volunteers work everywhere and do everything but pull guard duty. We take care of the children, staff the nursery, kitchens, and tend gardens and farms. It’s comprehensive.”

The kibbutz segregated children from parents and allowed visitation rights one night a week.

“Hey this is great,” I said to Joan walking to an old wooden building.

Joan was enthusiastic. “It’s not bad, plenty of sun. That’s probably why we start work so early in the morning. It must get pretty hot here in the afternoon."

Weaving A Life, Volume 2

Talk Story

1. Where does the story want to go?
2. Embrace ambiguity
3. Stay confused

Be a work of art or wear a work of art

Talk Story

Discuss common sense

Not very common

The world of forms/ideas

Form is emptiness

Emptiness is form

Forms in natural world

Basho said, if you want to know a tree go to a tree

World of ideas

Imagination

Observation

Experience

Present moment

Ink me laughter

Waves light nature's song

Riding a beam of light through space

Keep your own counsel

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can

It’s what you find in the corner

Circus people live on the edge

Sunset swift lets fill orange sky with magic

 Inhale here

Exhale now

Mental hypothalamus

Unconscious

Grow Your Soul