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Entries in indonesia (34)

Saturday
May042024

Anturan Village

The narrow road to the deep north in Bali dropped into tight hairpin turns and thick vegetation. High forests became jungles and green valleys.

Anturan is twenty kilometers west of the bustling port city of Singaraja where the Dutch established a port exporting slaves to grow tulips back home.

150 families lived a simple existence, and unlike many Balinese communities, depended on the sea. The Balinese believe sea demons inhabit waters around their island.

Anturan homes are stone and thatch. Wealthy families live in cold concrete habitats with tiled roofs.

Blue, red and yellow outrigger canoes carve black sand.

Small reed thatched huts near shore provide shelter from a blistering sun. Men repair fishing nets turning nylon into knots. Women tend fires, nurse babies, clean, cook and gossip.

A guesthouse has twelve clean inexpensive rooms. A restaurant provides Nasih Goring: white rice, chilies, egg, thin yellow noodles, cabbage, vegetables and nondescript pieces of meat washed down with water. A local shop sells batik clothing, soap, washing powder and cheap Japanese Zen garden bamboo toothbrushes.

Word machine traces sun as Icarus flies with Phoenix.

Men offer 5 a.m. boat trips out past the reef to watch schools of educated dolphins.

Waterfalls hot springs and a Buddhist temple.

Smoke from cooking fires curl into coconut trees as twilight spreads along the shore. Children talk and play in sand. Men prepare boats and lanterns for night water journeys at 6 p.m. Boats drift into oceans, dancing yellow and white lights against black sky. Women place burning incense sticks in sand praying for a safe return.

Baby chickens follow a mother hen. Piglets slurp boiled rice and water mixed with coconut skins from a trough.

I teach children how to whistle. They teach me basic Bahasa language.

Mumpi is dream.

Gadis chand is beautiful girl.

Anturan is quiet by 9 p.m.

Roosters crow at 5. Pink dresses sky. Gray turns blue water. Thick southern forests and mountains lie hidden in low white clouds. Rice paddies are a dark green. A young girl breaks sticks for a cooking fire before shoveling rice out of a large black pot. She feeds her baby sticky pancake-like bread.

Ten boys haul in a fishing net cast in a wide semi-circle. Hand over hand they draw the net tighter as sweat streams down dark laughing faces and bulging thighs. Fishermen return, women unload fighting sardines into bright plastic buckets overflowing with silver protein.

A man from town buys the fish. Fishermen sit in shade watching women haul fish, stacking buckets onto each other’s head carrying them to trucks and motorcycles for markets.

I wander up the beach to find a clean swimming area and investigate another guesthouse. A woman hauling a heavy bag practices broken English selling cotton fabrics and carved teak demon masks.

“Cheap morning price. Buy from me, slow business, no sell today. Want a watch? Hey! You look at my shop? Sarong? Transport? Tickets to the dance tonight?”

A local man asks where I’m from.

“I am from heaven. Down to have a look at paradise.” He hustles the periphery offering me a prostitute for $22. I decline.

“I have seven wives, one for each day of the week. They wait for me in heaven. I need to save my energy for them.” He intuitively knows the importance of good karma in this life. He doesn’t want to return as a lower life form and disappears.

I escape hot black sand into clear cold water.

Mountains palm trees along shorelines as land arcs east along the coast.

In the afternoon I visit a warung food stall stocked with sweets and meats. The kitchen is a 10’ x 15’ bamboo thatch room in front of a concrete shop-home with an open woven reed kitchen door. In black sand bricks stacked two feet high form a stove. Fuel is broken twigs, small sticks and dried branches. A wok bubbles water, grease and spices cooking a chicken a fine dark brown. Another brick stove holds a pot of boiling fish.

A long flat prep area for cutting, slicing, sitting, talking and meeting is under bamboo shelves with woven thatch holding glasses, pots, pans and a basket of ingredients.

Intense smoke escapes through reed cracks. Kindling is added to cooking fires.

A bundle of sticks outside the door is the forest in micro bits, multiplied by daily requirements of 150 families.

Outside the kitchen two girls pound rice and banana into a powder using heavy round pieces of wood the size of baseball bats. They pummel the mixture in a smooth round large stone pestle in a rhythm of beauty and music maintaining a consistent vertical movement, hands overlapping, rising and descending, pausing to sift grains and add fresh material.

One girl coughs and spits in the sand.

They finish pounding, leave and return with water in five gallon buckets balanced on their heads. The chicken is finished. An old woman arrives for the fish. Bananas are sliced and fried, children buy sweets and people stare at a foreigner.

I practice intricate Bahasa tongues composed of nine levels of usage depending on the status of the person being addressed.

Young boys play with a toy tank and a colored bubble maker improvising group games. Kids do chores and play with brothers and sisters in a microcosm, a community in a world of communities.

As above so below.

Weaving A Life, V1

Saturday
Aug192023

world photography day

Tibet

Laos

Burma

Indonesia

China

Cambodia

Turkey

Vietnam

Nepal

Tuesday
Apr112023

Lombok

I climbed through the center of Bali

inside magical light

past a sacred volcano at Lake Batur

with a small portable typewriter

a map carved on narwhal bone

a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper

codices or painted books and texts

on bark paper called Amate

and cactus fiber including

palimpsest animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

 

My hair caught fire.

Gathering flames I lit a piece of bark for guidance.

I mixed volcanic ash with water creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm of antioxidants.

I applied this to my skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.

 

Sunday
Oct022022

Imagine

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, being all of 18 now, which is INFINITY standing sideways…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.

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. Coup de ta da. 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

 

Tuesday
Jul272021

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.

So it goes.

Weaving A Life V1

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