Pay Attention

A monk asked Yang-chi.

How to escape the clamor of the mind?

Read the ancient text.

What is the ancient text?

The moon is bright in space. The waves are calm on the ocean.

How does one read it?

Watch your step.

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Creative Hanging Out by Tran

Please put the blue sky on the white table. It is fragile and creased along the horizon.

Pay Attention.

There are:

People who want to control you

People who want to blame you

People who want to distract you

Samuel Beckett was very precise. He didn’t want theories or any level of intellectualization. He paid a lot of attention to the tone of voice and to the relationships among the characters. He cared a great deal about the silences and the pauses. It’s as beautiful as the chance encounter on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella, the essence of surrealism.

Freedom is being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience, said David Foster Wallace.

DFW had the courage to express in absurd detail what it feels like to live, observe and experience life. He knew many humans lacked the sincerity and honesty to really voice their awareness. He gave us deep exquisite work and then checked out. He suffered from depression. Pale King.

Every feeling waits for its gesture. Gestures use people as their instruments, bearers and incarnations. Impressions exist in a distinct serene zone of imprecise calculation. Observations dance with empirical data structure. Art, symbols and metaphor.

Language is a virus, like C-19.

Blue dragonfly eyes create a lightning bolt. Flashes of brilliance in the DNA helix reveal spiritual and truth-value meaning in your play. The poetic inspiration rebels against science and math.                                 

Dancing color spectrum

Jellyfish aqua laughter smells sweet fresh cut grass

Yellow butterfly voices perspiration’s inspiration

Transparent wave energies wash your interior/exterior dream

I love to doodle, said Zeynep. It’s my meditation. Everyone doodles their noodle while splashing in their life puddle.

Good travel writing is The Art of Creative Hanging Out, said Tran.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Simple Voice

After a reliable narrator established a voice, geography, atmosphere, tone, conflict and cinematic jump cut action employing minimum wage universal themes like time, boredom, passion, loneliness and alienation in an unforgiving universe of meaningless existence with humor and curiosity holding hands and casting characters like plot dragging others around chained to their personality defects and character flaws wearing original death masks surrounded by distracted simple, noisy, gadget addicted compassionate illiterate peasants in a play waiting for Godot, writing with a Mont Blanc 149 fountain pen using Royal Blue invisible ink on blank parchment was pure luminous joy.

Lucky sat at an Indonesian warung - a cheap eatery serving white rice, spicy chili, eggs, green veggies, tempeh, tofu and deep-fried crackers behind a cement wall. Smoking teachers called it The Berlin Wall because they could inhale nicotine poison developing cancerous tumors away from inquisitive prying eyes of parents and school admin moles.

He’d escaped the tyranny of kind plaid dressed Bahasa robot educators trapped in futile expectations of perpetual childhood.

A village woman piled trash near a grove of banana trees and flamed it. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Billowing smoke obscured a thin man pushing a blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cloth, tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and household goodies through neighborhoods from dawn to dusk.

Cumulus clouds gathering mass and momentum discussed future seismic activity 7.5 miles below Java and inevitable roaring tsunamis pounding Japan land. Let’s destroy a nuclear reactor in Fukushima Daiichi, said a roaring wave, spreading radiation far and wide.

Ok, agreed another tumultuous wave, we’ll teach irrational h-saps not to mess with Mother Nature by developing cheap power on a coast at cost. Yeah, said a breaking wave, everyone pays in the long now. Radiation spread her wings.

Yelling villagers revealed frustrations as a thin woman teased her four-year old boy-monkey child. Pregnancy and birth gave her a one-way ticket out of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger into a parallel universe of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger. She worked, bred and got slaughtered.

In world villages women traded sex for fake temporary security. Father ran away to impregnate and abandon new naive victims. Hungry girls and mothers went to bed in a perpetual security-sex-money-childbirth-food cycle.

Species evolved.

She tormented the kid. He cried. He depended on her for safety and food. She laughed at him. She created a mini-monster who hated women now and later. He’d kill her with a silent machete honed on his hatred’s hard-hearted wet stone.  

A mother and daughter uttered primal grunting sounds. The mother combed daughter’s hair scavenging protein rich nits and lice. Crying children and distracted zombies savored -7 emotional years of miserable maturity.

Life is a temporary condition, said Beauty.

Primordial darkness is a cosmic birth.

Society is a cave.

Solitude is the way out.

Two women balancing scrap wood on heads took a shortcut through village mud. A white and yellow-flecked butterfly danced in spring’s breeze. Goats with tinkling bells foraged in trash and weeds.

Across town at Sukarno International Airport pale disoriented tourists waited to get passports stamped at immigration before exploring Balinese temples, hands-on erotic organic massage parlors and swimming in blue-green waves of surfing laughter with sharks on porpoise.

Removed from their naive traveling eyes palm oil plantation owners in Sumatra destroyed rain forests to feed their families so rich women could consume sweet facial cosmetic balms.

Poor Javanese farmers killed elephants with poison laced pineapples for the black market ivory trade providing Chinese consumers with aphrodisiacs.

The World is a village

Your village in Northeast Laos thrives near rivers and pine-mountains.

You plant it. You nurture it. You harvest it. You eat it. You carry it.

Every day starts at 4:00 a.m.

You put food into a wicker basket, heave it onto your back and either walk to town or ride with other villagers in the back of a small tractor or truck, belching diesel. Perhaps a tuk-tuk overflowing with soil smells, green life talkers. Maybe on a motorcycle as chilly winds blast your face.

It feels good to be alive.

Get there early. Spread your treasures out on a rice sack near the curb. Cold winds refresh the street. Say hello to friends. Broken dawn breaks over eastern mountains shrouded in fast clouds.

Mothers and daughters arrange labors of love.

Women arrive and unload bags of corn, dead civet cats, onions, greens, bamboo shoots, apples, and language. They grow rice, ginger, beans, peanuts, peppers, bananas, squash, sugar cane, corn, papaya, cucumber, and sweet potato. They only leave villages to sell to townies.

A smiling old man crouched on the corner wearing a green army pith helmet from a forgotten war sells bells and musical iron instruments for oxen and water buffalo.

An ancient shaman woman’s deep lined face bundled against morning displays roots, herbs and small bundles of natural remedies. People trust her innate knowledge.

Her dialect and wisdom is older than memory.

 

on loan

Our loved ones are not given to us. They are only on loan.

two kinds of people

From a work to be abandoned.

Mango said, “There are two kinds of people in the world.”

“What are they?” said a Cambodian orphan.

“They are subdivided into specific sub-species. There are people who want to blame you and people who want to distract you. There are people who want control or approval. There are people who face the music and there are people who run for cover.

"There are people who pay attention and people who don’t know or care what the fuck is going on. They are too poor to pay attention. There are people who make things happen and people who dream about making things happen.”

“That’s a mouthful of mango logic if you ask me,” said the orphan. “You mean, according to the philosopher, Damon Younger Than Yesterday, ‘distraction is an inability to identify, attend to what is valuable, even when we are hard working or content.’”

“Yes, that’s what I said I mean because I mean what I say and say what I mean jellybean,” laughed Mango doing the tango with Taoist monks at the Temple of Complete Reality in Sichuan.

“Disorientation begets creative thinking,” said Confusion.