Department of Truth

According to Zeynep, a scripter in the present, I speak because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or value meaning. So. Help. Me.

1. Truth is classified. The source of truth about everything is classified. I am authorized to say with complete anonymity without revealing sources that truth is filtered, compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified inside a buried locked black box.

1a. The crypto key is top-secret for your blind eyes only. Grave Digger knows the combination and algorithm. The encrypted key is not on a hacked social network site designed to distract your face, mind, heart, consciousness or Lifebook personal profile time bandit. Real friends are few.

1b. Artificial friends are aliens on life support. The key for Time is inside an arrow piercing Greater Complexity with Entropy. A woman, man, child in country XYZ carries the world on their back. They are the key.

2. Truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke, the laugh track.  If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get the joke. Your tears speak and mangle fictional truth-story. They distort and strangle it. Truth is a figment of your imagination. Literary outlaws lie to tell the truth.

3. Truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia, author of Voices, being authorized to speak said, Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

4. Truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source. Eat your broccoli, walnuts and almonds. Biolabs will purify water and distribute free medicine and C-19 vaccinations to every human on Earth. Genetics will create Socratic open-ended educational dreams.

4a. Truth is a starving homeless mother pulling a heavy two-wheeled trash cart with flat tires through a dusty Cambodian town as her daughter forages in garbage containers for food, water and medicine. She is a qualifier, a split infinitive in infinity where someone’s leftovers are another’s banquet.

5. Truth will provide more than 1 billion people access to safe drinking water.

6. Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people who cannot read. Women are 2/3 of this number.

7. Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day. Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

8. Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world who have ZERO access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools.

9. Truth is a terminal disease like peace, love and blindness.

10.Truth is a sledgehammer in Mandalay, Burma.

Love is not truth.

11. Truth is food in your stomach.

This is The Truth Channel. Game, Set, Match.

Media dumbs down sheep.

Technology eats humans.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Rice

“Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment.”

*

A Turkish train chased moon, seawater and oil freighters. Two veiled lovers held hands at a station. Heavy green and purple grapes draped fences around barbwire stations. A sad man waiting for his life to unfold stared at the ground.

He’s married to his mother and her tomato-based history of love, regret, unemployment and zero opportunities.

A commuter ferry sailed across the Bosporus in elemental light. Visions of a Blue Mosque, spires and silver domes sparkled as blue waves swelled hearing artists carve Churning The Sea of Milk at Angkor Wat in the 9th century.

A heavy Chinese rain mutes voices with refined elegance. Moisture softens edges where words slash and stab, committing heinous crimes inside the imagination of lovers stranded in the long sad misfortune of falling water.

The moisture is a blessing for farmers huddled below brown and yellow ponchos planting rice in geometric rows as shallow water stalks reeds.

Rice steams in cauldrons being stabbed by steel spatulas as 15,000 university students stare at empty bowls. Farmers don’t know them, see them or begin to imagine the spoiled ravishing eaters with heads bowed over chipped white rice bowls, not in gratitude but in hunger’s anger being never satisfied and talking with their mouths full spilling grunts of MORE.

The farmers plant rice. They walk along brown dirt dikes inspecting a precious state owned agrarian middle kingdom as pouring rain music bounces off the surface, slides down leaves, collating green feathers.

Twilight’s heavy mist collects in thick clouds rolling over green forested Utopia mountains caressing valleys, streams and rivers, layering fields where silent men and women plant rice stalks one by one becoming invisible. It’s a poetic Tang landscape painting.

Book of Amnesia V1

20 Years

Once upon a time there was a man in a village.

For twenty years he went into the mountains searching for gold. Everyone said he was crazy.

One day he discovered gold. He took the gold to a bank and exchanged it for money.

He bought some rope. He tied one end of the rope around his waist.

He tied the other end to the pile of money.

He ran through the village dragging the money.

Everyone said he was crazy.

He said, "For twenty years I've been chasing money and now money is chasing me."

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Hunger

I passed an old man smoking a Cuban cigar in shafting light.

Well-heeled Cadiz women with and without children in wheeled prams shoveling sweets into infantile mouths paraded past palms on Iglesias de San Juan de Dios navigating inlaid stones near a cafe with Novelty metal chairs holding tired tourists and relaxed locals smoking, drinking coffee, talking in tongues, devouring soft hot pastries and studying creased maps filled with historical referential diagrams.

Furrowed foreign brows watched humanity find its way.

Shirt starched waiters scurried from table to table. They placed orders with women behind counters wearing white lab tech coats.

The lone plaza resident, a tall black-bearded Romani madman with untied tennis shoes roamed perimeters looking for someone to hustle. Looking for Charity’s leftovers.

A sign around his neck said, “I came here in the 9^th century and I’m not going away.”

I remembered the Bedouin woman in her heavy black chador revealing her eyes to the world hovering in Marrakech shadows. I ate chicken, rice, and bread away from birds basting on gas fired yellow circles.

Her motivation? Hunger. Hunger for freedom, dignity, and love.

She approached me with her hand out, speaking Arabic, “May you have blessings and prosperity.”

“May God make it easy for you. I will leave food for you. Wait.”

She stood across the street seeing through fabric slits. Her eyes were the world. She was silent and invisible.

Wild cats roamed malnourished skeletons around tables escaping a waiter’s swift shoe. She watched and waited. I fed scraps to hissing cats fighting over bones. We were all surviving in frail circumstances.

Remembering Omar’s wisdom about consumption and hospitality I didn’t eat everything. I left to pay. The waiter couldn’t clear the table because he was figuring the charges. Her blackness closed in. We were a team. She was free to collect everything. She produced a plastic bag from her chador, picked up the plate and dumped in bones, meat, rice, and tomatoes. The works.

She glided into shadows. I walked past. Our eyes locked. I was naked. She was covered in her belief. Her invisible clear eyes flashed a brief recognition. I nodded. She smiled under her veil. Our relationship of mutual respect ignored verbal language.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Bhaktapur, Nepal

Story

“That smells nice,” said the garbage collector to the sage burner.

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themselves. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I meditate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

ART