Lit Agent Speaks

Give me international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Asian countries, greed, corporate monopoly play money profit and an orphan with no motivation but survival.

Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, drastic home foreclosures, massive unemployment, millions dying of C-19, jealousy, pride, and make sure pride is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashes empires, creates and resolves conflicts.

Give me disabled homeless angry American war veterans struggling with PTSS, divorce, authenticity, domestic famine and revenge, a central motivating factor  ...

Give me imaginary borders on a crazy fucked up planet.

Crossing borders is a transcendental act of courage.

Ascertain the intention before the motivation, said Zeynep staying on a true line. The agent climbed a literary mountain.

If there’s no literary mountain the publishing road would be flat, short and paved with gold.

Give me a new paragraph with short dirty realism sentences, said lit agent … Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts … Give me romance and treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem  ... Humans are the only animals that can scheme and deceive. 

Give me a life sentence with no chance of parole … Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by ghosts … Give characters fear, forgiveness, shock and awe … Like Orwell give me the unpleasant fact about a Burmese man, on his way to the gallows, stepping around a puddle of water … Give me his awareness of impending death and quick generous insight into his frail gentle human life.

Strap me into my chair living in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes, the metaphor of a single drop of lethal mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling drama intrigue and chaos. Entropy - the 2nd law of thermonuclear dynamics. The center cannot hold, said WB Yeats. Find the big metaphor Zeynep.

Give me revenge and betrayal - the how and why wars began … Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faust … Give me humans selling their soul to the Devil down at the crossroads at midnight to achieve immortality. Ain't nothing but the blues … Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in hope, the last thing that dies with gravity and arc.

Hope walks through the fire. Courage leaps over the fire.

Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, and reactions with total comprehension knowing the scientific fact that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY. Some refer to total complexity as God.

You may want to move this fact to the brutal satisfying conclusion, said the agent. This means the long now or 20,000+ years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. There’s a huge difference between complicated and complex. If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried few are chosen. God has a huge slush pile.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Memory

Tribal adults and children survivors of 9/11 sifted through leftovers searching for sustainable resources. They needed essentials: food, shelter, water, air, sex and stories.

"This is the day of my dreams," said a girl with a diamond in her mind watching fireworks explode over the Willamette Valley in Eugene on the fourth of July. Her wisdom mind reflected 10,000 things.

Omar opened his book, traced braille and read.

“The honorable monkey mind trickster wandered through her expansive museum sensing pure intention, motivation and reflections. If she is not careful and paying complete attention the monkey mind will run wild splashing green jealous slashes, red anger strokes, and blue attachment colors on her beautiful canvases. While some ignored it at their peril others respected monkey mind and kept an eye on it with respect and dignity.”

“It was a mindfulness,” said a woman sketching shadows.

"Now I see why Picasso painted Guernica in 1937," said a blond kid kicking stones, raising dust.

"Everything we love is going to die."

"Yes, we accept loss forever."

She cleaned her canvas with a camelhair brush while leaning against a wall of sound. The echo was deafening. Silence is the loudest noise in the world.

"Picasso was a great thief," said a museum curator. "When you see his work you see the influence of all great artists."

"The ancient texts predicted this," said Other, a seer.

He sat in a pile of splintered wood sharpening the edge of his knife on a small piece of flint taken from his old sweater pocket. Sunlight glistened off his finely honed Spanish blade as he worked it under the skin of a pear. 

"They talked about choices and unintended consequences," said a woman digging for water.

"I’m thirsty," said Little Nino.

"Be patient my child."

"Yes, said Jamie. "It takes faith."

"You can’t take faith to the bank," replied a girl.

"True," said Other, "faith doesn’t know where the bank is."

"A bank is what holds the river together," said a child.

"Faith is a woman in this tribal tale."

"It will take more than Faith," someone said stumbling over piles of discarded twisted logic.

"Speaking of falling faulty towers, it will require firm resolve, an unyielding capacity for vengeance, retaliation, and retribution in this living memory," said Lloyd, an unemployed insurance underwear writer from classless London. His three-piece Brooks Brothers suit was in shreds.

"It’s because of the amygdala," counseled a doctor.

"What’s that?" said Little Nino.

"It’s a location of the brain where fear lives. It’s a knot of nerve cells and tissues. We think anger lives there as well but we don’t know for sure."

“Yes," said Alfredo Jari, “memory is the duration of the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words, any internal obstruction of the flow of the mobile molecules of the liquid, any increase in viscosity is nothing other than consciousness.”

“Can you put that in plain English?" pleaded a lit major.

“Yes I can but I won’t.”

“Their collective archetypical memory was heavier than collective unconscious and lighter than consciousness,” said an analyst named Jung.

Lighter than wind.

Fat democratic spectators cheered from sidelines. Consumers swallowed bitter tears of greed and desire.

Let’s go shopping to reduce our fear of poverty, said nations of sheep.

“The archetype can't be whole or complete if it doesn’t allow for the expression of both good and evil in the conscious or unconscious,” drooled a sedated American soldier in a VA hospital wheelchair. He needed an exit strategy.

“More drugs, nurse!” he screamed. “I coulda’ been somebody. I could'a been contender!”

All he received was his pitiful wailing voice echoing in empty chambers.

On a movie set medicated military reservist wives dressed as cheerleaders jumped up and down in wild mind agitated states of abandon. They filed for divorce after taking lovers while their husbands looked for improved body armor in oppressive Middle East desert heat.

They were the undereducated doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.

Other visualized their death while poverty’s heirs prayed that instant replay would change reality.

Weaving A Life V1

Mindful

Mindfulness gives you time.

Time gives you choices.

Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom.

You don't have to be swept away by your feelings.

You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight by crying tears of silence.

A van of sad white Europeans trapped behind glass held repressed rampant desires and expectations in Siem Reap.

Fidgeting with uncomfortable languages floating in inner ears they pretended to be interested in nature's fleeting formless form flashing past starvation's widows.

Assaulting long painful strides navigating tomorrow’s promise they sat stone cold feeling nothing.

Look and leave people.

Blindness resolved to practice the subtle art of Tai-Chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged Midnight Blue ink for a dark shade of racing green in a Mont Blanc 146 piston driven fountain pen.

A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered secret illusions.

A Vietnamese salon owner replaced a straight razor blade. She sprayed water on an invisible traveler's crown. He closed his eyes. She edged her blade over and around his head, ears, down his neck across Buddhist temples.

A 4:00 a.m. gong suspended on a rope carried on a bamboo pole reverberated its magic echo through Yangon stone corridors. A woman flamed incense.

Chattering fish sellers bagged swimming protean.

Elements of silence said farewell.

Random eyes investigating decompression swallowed fresh yogurt with peach slices inside afternoon’s languishing empty promises.

Intention and motivation discovered a new day by day.

Explanations have to end somewhere said a well-dressed mistake.

In her village, the other world, Blindness threaded new rainbows. Her loom experienced pressure and tightness between notes.

Sunlight dressed saliva beads blending a weave, texture, design saying hello Beauty.

Beauty has no tongue.

She whispered, I have been waiting for you.

Myths, Legends, Stories

Down in the southern province of Suhag in Egypt where King Scorpion lived 5,300 years ago I worked with archeologists discovering clay tablets.

Humans recorded taxes on oil and linen - a material Egyptians considered ritually pure under the protection of the goddess Tayt. The hieroglyphic line drawings of animals, plants and mountains revealed stories of economies and commodities.

In Nevali Cori we found 9,000 year-old shards of ceramics pottery depicting dancers.

“These images,” said a metaphorical digger, “reveal a common ancestor creating to integrate their community.”

A camelhair brush cleaned shards. “Anything else?”

“Well,” one said sifting dust, “we surmise these images established a collective discipline in their community. See how the figures are holding hands? What do you see now?”

“I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space.”

“It’s more than that. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.”

“Earth?”

“Yes, then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.”

“Fire is the driver.”

“Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where the male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.”

“I see. And then?”

“After chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.”

Language dances in space.

Every fourteen days a living language dies on Earth. The last speaker says good-bye.

6,100 and counting.

Storytellers sing oral traditions. They memorize stories, songs, poems, seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They create and exchange family, clan, tribal myths and legends. Their children listen, memorize, chant and recite ancestor songs.

An historian’s job is trying to understand what happened through time.

An anthropologist’s job is to understand how people told their creation stories.

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions, said, “Myths tell only of that which really happened.”

Myths suggest that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined.

A myth is a story of unknown origins.

Myths are sacred stories of religion based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths.

They are in every place and no particular place. The world is sacred.

Myths, legends, stories.

Magic words grow here.

Intensity propels ten claws across twenty-six keys. Reed-like digits reflect use and neglect.

Psychology handles the branches. Mindfulness swims with roots.

Evolution flashes flickering beams of incandescent auras and pulsating electro-magnetic fields evolving character, attitude, values, behaviors and intention.

Intention is karma.

Perpetual transformation.

Weaving A Life (Volume 4) - Kindle Edition

 

Burma

Laughter is beauty

A man pushes an empty wheelchair across airport tarmac.

Boarding pass woman does eyeliner. The 'modern' stainless steel global glass hair port design hasn't reached Vientiane time warp.

Laughter is the Beauty.

Transitions are radiant and clear.

One life, no plan, many adventures.

Intention. Mindfulness. Impermanence.

Ancient stories. Music is the muse in Luang Prabang. Clean air, excellent light, brown Mekong, green elevations, deep valleys and long visions.

Hey Orphan, your Mystery bike is faster now.

Yeah, we visited a shop in LP after seeing the old tire hanging on a nail next to a white shirt drying in the sun. He was a nice guy, filled the tires, blasted Mystery with water, soaped and scrubbed it down, air hosed it dry, oiled the chain, re-calibrated Shimano gears and said, I'm going to Japan next year to see my family.