John Lennon - 32 years ago

Here's a excerpt from a book he wrote. He was living in Ireland, the emerald green isle and preparing to move to Donegal in the remote northwest.

He met a shopowner in a Liberties, Dublin antique shop to buy mirrors for his travels. He gifted her a piece of gringseng cloth, a healing fabric from Bali.

“Wonderful," she said, "many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.

“After Tiglin you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly and unfortunately, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8 hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry.

"Later you will take the black push bike down narrow wet twisted streets and meet a nun opening heavy steel black church gates and you will tell her what happened. You will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, cross yourself, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence.

"Then you will ride into town and go to every news agent to buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking, reading, and sadly, quietly remembering John’s creativity and his words Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”

crossing a border

He talked to Irish women on a Donegal bus.

“My family, while emotionally cold, distant and abusive yet well intentioned, kind and loving were rather dysfunctional, trying to understand my vagabond nature. They had no choice in the matter. By now they’re used to receiving strange word-strings full of mysterious symbolic metaphorical tragic truths from twilight zones. They receive illustrations as I transmit between crystals and gringsing decorated with universal binary codes.”

“Really now?” said Mary.

“Yes, I gave my folks a world map for their anniversary. They loved it, inviting friends, neighbors and strangers over for trivia games using postmarks, stamps, decals, flotsam, thread, needles, bark, cactus fiber, beads, charts of tributaries, topographical maps, animal skins, hieroglyphics, and Tibetan prayer wheels with Sanskrit characters. They caressed burned broken shards of Turkish pottery, Chinese bamboo brushes dripping blood, torn out pages from esoteric Runes, Paleolithic fertility symbols, vitreous writing, and one of my favorites, a Quetzalcoatl image full of written narration based on the oral performances of myths in Central America.

“Fascinating,” said Deirdre.

The Midnight Court

I entertained visitors, fished the Glen Malure river in complete solitude, peeled potatoes and carrots for stews, painted watercolors, discussed road adventures with vagabonds, wrote and played chess by firelight. 

Pawn takes pawn as players attempt to control the middle of the board attacking and defending positions simultaneously. It was about position and material. We made the necessary sacrifices after the beginning game through the middle game to the end game. 

Andy, a German visitor said India was once lost in a chess game between two kings. We played in the dark of night illuminated by fireplace light as peat fires roared their way up the flue. Quick moving violent storms pummeled the place.

“That’s a dangerous move,” he said as my knight escaped a pin.

“Yes, but it’s elegant.”

“We destroy ourselves eventually.”

“Yes, as long as we enjoy the process. Your move.”

In the morning Susan related a dream from literature she was reading, by Brian Merriman, a merry man while doing her nails near the river.

“Have you heard about The Midnight Court?” 

“No,” someone said. “Tell us.”

“It’s about a fellow who falls asleep and has a dream where he is taken before a court of women who condemn him to be punished for all the men in their knowledge. How women should have the right to marriage and sex but often meet with disappointment and rejection by men who could easily have become their lovers and husbands.” 

iPhone test entry

Greetings,

Once upon a time before I invented the Internet I created poems, stories and comprehensive travel dreams using paper and pen. Notebooks, flattened by geological pressure, strata layers, spirals, Fibbonaci.

Even using pencils or crayons or watercolor brushes. Be the paper. Be the brush, the ink, the water. It wasn't clean which always made it creative, fun, exploratory and a mess. A beautiful mess.

Then I used a typewriter. I carried a red portable Smith Corona around Ireland for two years. Working as an au pair in Dundrum, then as a youth hostel warden in Wicklow, Donegal, Mayo and Killarney.

I used inexpensive thin paper and carbon paper. The carbon paper was the original "save" feature. Sheets in a thin box. Valuable and recycled until every space became blackened, white dreams where words played, escaping like free wild geese in Ennisfree. Oh. I amost forgot, yes ribbons. Ribbons for the machine.They were black and came on stainless steel spools. They were packed in small clear plastic bags in a box from a stationary shop on a small Dublin side street. I used a toothbrush to clean the keys.

It was a sweet, fast lightweight machine. Kinda like this iPhone tool. Same-same but different. Wow! Star-techie.

I'll always prefer the heart-hand connection holding a pen, feeling the nib on paper, seeing ink marry paper.

Metta.