no metaphors

I'm one of those people who’s learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to.

I am a metaphor looking for a meaning. There are no metaphors, only observations.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life. Drifting some would say.

If I had one red cent for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis! Settling down was never an option.

Yes. I could bid on blessings. I’d sacrifice pre-linguistic symbols and create silent metaphorical abstractions. My linguistic skills would evolve into love into discursive logic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic iron and copper paintings create a secret symphony of ancient stories in a Spanish cave.

No lengthy drawn out off-the-wall abstract explains my small empty self to anybody by virtue of who I was, am and will be.

Life is a palimpsest.

“There are only two stories in the world,” I said to the Moroccan. We carried boarding cards through the Casablanca terminal. 

“A stranger arrives in town or a person goes on a journey.”

“Yes,” said Omar, a blind writer overhearing our conversation, “we might add there are also stories about love between two people, stories about love between three people and stories about the struggle for power. Stories are about characters revealing emotion through dialogue and action.”

The world is made of stories, not atoms.

He handed me a pile of yellow papers wrapped in rushes.

“A gift for you. A Century is Nothing. It contains a farrago of evidence. Keep it simple.”

“Thank you. Where do I find you?”

“In the caves south of Ronda. It’s a long walk.”

He disappeared into Baraka.

a 3,000 year old city

“Once upon a time,” Nino said one bright future day as the tribe rolled along, “and such a strange time it was, the gravity of thinking played music in a new century. There was a Spanish man with a hammer. At exactly 9 a.m. on an overcast Cadiz morning he began chipping away at unexplored caverns. The Alio modo Fugue a 2 Clavier by Bach drifted in the background.

“He was building an extension on a roof where housing was scarce and straight up. The only split-level ranch duplexes with multiple garages in sight were American reruns on old battered televisions. He hammered stone under a sheltering sky. It was over 100 degrees. His hands were bleeding. Blood seeped through an old Moorish roof splattering into a room where a writer in exile lived with a blind prophet. Hemoglobin landed on a keyboard. Directly on the letter B. He let it dry. He treasured sudden rare immediate insights. Drops fell and congealed.”

“Fascinating,” Omar said turning a page. “And then?”

“Down below in deep morning shadows Rosario swept her front stoop on Benito Perez Galdos. Her white apron was clean and starched. She swept away yesterday’s accumulated debris and the fine mist of pedestrians coming and going. Old shit, dog urine and dust received her mop’s holy water. Their accumulated real and imaginary sins littered Galdos, heading for the gutter.”

“Let me guess,” said Omar, picking up the thread, “church bells pealed eternal melancholy songs of hope and redemption across from the Castelilo de Santa Catalina, the main citadel of Cadiz built in 1598.”

“Exactly,” Nino said. “Inside tight white oval corridors, an exhibition of black and white photographs depicted Nicaraguan people fishing, polling canoes through tangled jungles, chopping down forests, sitting for the camera, living and laughing.”

“One room held beautiful black handmade fans in tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca. Considered the greatest poet and playwright of 20th century Spain, he was assassinated by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) a Franco death squad in August 1936 for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality.

“He belonged to the Generation of 1927 with Dali and Bunuel identifying with the marginalized Gitanos and woman chained to conventional social expectations in Andalucía. He wrote about entrapment, liberation, passion and repression.

“A long red scarf lay draped over a single rattan chair. Invisible wires held black fans decorated with peacock feathers and rainbow colors suspended in silence. Outside a dark window Atlantic waves smashed ramparts.”

Nino took a breath. Omar peeled an orange skin. 

A Century is Nothing

landmine survivor

“Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

  She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

  The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

  It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

  It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Laos, Angola and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

  40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

  She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin. The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.

  It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet.

  Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a Banlung shaman.

  Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is ignorance.

A Century is Nothing 

escape the tyranny of life

I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.

Silence is everything. I am one with everything. A singularity.

All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, forms, symbols, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.

Everything floats away. Mu. Nothing. Maya. Illusion. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, and texture feeling regret, loss and a death of the spirit? I witness sad lost blank faces. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.

I never hear laughter as I pass through life with my Dream Sweeper Machine.

What does laughter sound like?

What color is sound?

This is my Beauty. Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.

I am a stone cold Apsara silent dancer dancing with my revolutionary evolutionary soul.

I feel like screaming.

The dancing hall inside the Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. 

They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. A celebration of tranquility is their eternal dance. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

I dance to escape the tyranny of life. I use my dance to express life. I’ve danced all my short, sweet existence.

The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisperdance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots below the surface of appearances in deep burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” 

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” 

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” 

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” 

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”