Remember ABC - TLC 37

Said the Director of Sales at TLC.

“What’s that mean?” said a Kurdish beggar girl in Bursa one freezing night. To pay a Mafioso extortion bill her family threw her to the wolves. She hawked blue tissue packages to a sad man playing a flute sitting near a broken escalator above a homeless woman in rags setting fire to a pile of manuscripts trying to stay warm. Have mercy.

“Always be closing.”

Lucky sat in a blue plastic Metro chair zooming through a rainy morning. Mountain peaks meditated in white clouds above rocky-forested slopes and golden mosque spires. Other than two cheerful speech-enabled women, passengers were cold, distant, lost, bored and going somewhere intangible or else they’d be homeWaiting For Godot.

Tracks sloped down concrete edges. Blurring trees disappeared. Cars slid into darkness as florescent beams glided lighting bolts on steel tracks. Black click clack music reached an underground station with immaculate white tiles, benches and a large steel box holding bagged sweets. Comatose women in floral scarves grasping plastic bags studied heavy territorial shoes built for comfort. Station man in a green and yellow uniform manipulating a broom pushed history.

An automated Metro voice announced a stop. Doors opened. People departed. People boarded. Doors closed. Metro rolled on.

Communist party loudspeakers lashed to trees boomed across Lenin Park Lake in Hanoi:

Enjoy the ride. You’re only on it once.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collected everything.

The Bursa Sales Director resigned the next day. He had a falling out with management. It was always about numbers. Sell. Sell. Sell. He said he had 210 for February. They said 175.

That ominous day the TLC owner arrived from Constantinople, parked his Benz and entered the center of the universe where everything happened similtanesilly.

The receptionist freaked out and called the Sales Director.

Marketing man #2 escorted Boss through the center of Earth. He looked around. Purchased from Leaf Branch Growth in Dublin for $700,000 the three-month old franchise didn’t meet his standards. He had a corporate mentality and wasn’t a happy little camper. No clocks, broken glass doors, no wall art, out-of-order computers, badly peeling lamination work on desks and so on. “Shoddy half-finished work, even if I do say so.”

Lucky and the soon to be extinct director were enjoying a munch lunch with sheesh-kabobs. The director’s cell sang.

“He’s here,” said the receptionist.

“Who?”

“Sand Dune. He just blew in.”

“Oh no. I’m not dressed for work.”

Buy low sell high.

Revealing his true character he ran away. After a final e-mail to headquarters about numbers he trashed his office, yelled adios to the staff and disappeared into a subterranean cavern catching a Metro home sweet home.

Women staff cried on the sidewalk facing the center. A girl dragging a metal cart filled with cardboard and broken computers needing an OS surmised someone died. Serious departed tears. Tearful women smoked in sunlight. One tear reflected 360 degree blue sky. Melting mountain snow returned to work murmuring gossip and fear.

“Who’s next?”

The center’s magic numbers were now two sales, two receptionists, two native personal tutors (one from Trabzon - see footnotes) and two imported barbarians.

“We are understaffed, overworked and underpaid,” lamented a joyful personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep, the older, from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French, Esperanto and Cello. She cherished seven magic stones from Mudanya on the Marmara Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her Kurdish creation stories. Her language was out loud and outlawed by scared totalitarian Ankara politicians. Kurdish speakers were decapitated in public with a jeweled word sword every Friday at high noon.

“Bend over,” said Teflon Ergonomics, the Prime Minister and de facto dictator. Playing economic prosperity songs to poor uneducated Soma coal mineworkers, illiterate villagers and wealthy middle class voters he bought the presidency in late 2014. It’s never too late to be president, he said. Manipulation and I can really run the Deep State now.

 TLC had Janus heads. One head was the owner.

“Hey,” he said, “it’s a business this language and money acquisition cycle.”

He called Hire-n-Fire, the maintenance manhole cover job in Instant Bull and ordered him to fix every little thing. He returned and did a partial job. It gave him an excuse to come again in a juicy sandwich with Russian dressing.

“Someone’s chasing their tale here,” said Omar, a vinaigrette vignette guide. “I love fragments of true authenticity. It’s all I trust.”

 *

L said to Z: There’s an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. “Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

What did you expect?

I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist.

Wandering deep into the Tarim Basin along the Silk Road in Central Asia I discovered the Tokharin language and Afansievo culture dating 4,000 years. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorations. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA, based on an Iranian dialect.

A change of context changes experience. On the loom of time the three fates weave the word context from Latin.

Con (with or together) and texere (to weave).

A change in context is an essential and active process. Weaving directs thoughts, emotions and actions.

A kairos shuttle passes through openings in the space-time continuum. The loom binds or connects the weaver’s ability and power to speak.

Dancing in dunes away from precious oceans the wise spirit of Hsuan-tsang, a Chinese Buddhist monk recitesThe Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest printed book dated May 11, 868.

As Gascoigne, the author of The Dynasties and Treasures of China said, “The text is printed from six large blocks, each of them two and a half feet long by almost a foot broad. The scroll is a worthy and complete ancestor of all subsequent books, for it contains not only a superb woodcut as a frontis-piece...”

Hsuan-tsang was a Chinese pilgrim. He traveled to India along the Silk Road seeking out original Indian Buddhist holy books. He discovered 1,000 deserted monasteries destroyed by Hun invasions in the 5th century. He wandered through India for sixteen years visiting Buddhist places. He collected Indian holy books and carried them back to China.

While turning pages between Sanskrit words, mlecchita-vikalpa, the art of secret writing, Hsuan-Tsang tells us existence is formless. The human condition is actually hopeless, humans will never really know the universe and the concept of soul is an illusion.

Suffering is an illusion. Abracadabra!

Curious to see more to know less, I glide on after removing a grain of sand from my shoe. It isn’t the mountain that’s hard to climb it’s the grain in one’s shoe.

Years later in Colorado I met a mountain climber who, after confronting trial, error, doubt and fear reached a rocky mountain summit.

“Well, how did I do?” she asked her instructor.

“Are you still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what did you expect?”

I asked her, “Where do you step from the top of a 100 foot pole?”

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.

Neurons fire on all cylinders. Seven trillion human cells dance. The honorable monkey mind trickster sleeps, sensing pure purpose, destination, goals and reflections. If I do not pay complete attention the monkey mind identifies with a mental movie and runs wild splashing green jealous slashes, red anger strokes and blue attachment colors on pure empty canvases. I respect wild monkey mind. Keep a meditative eye on it. Mindfulness.

Magic words grow here.

Old roots expose wired genetic guilt and illusionary fear traps.

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.

A Century is Nothing

Lao Steam Bath

The American Red Cross steam bath is in an old two-story LP colonial building.

Frequented by tourists. One buck.

Changing cubicles, storage lockers, bathroom outside, interior wood floors, massage available for $7, hot tea, separate male and female steam rooms, rest area benches and a blaring television with obnoxious Thai music programs.

Loud and Lao Der.

A bored man plays with the remote like at home.

Goodbye quiet meditative, healthy healing place. 

Women caress skin with yogurt and condensed milk.

You step inside the broiling room. Steam heat provided by burning logs below. You enter a high speed Japanese language bullet train conversation as young men discuss SEA travel stories. We started in Thailand, then Cambodia, now here, then Vietnam.

Sweating invisible men are packed together tighter than a thin girls' episodic vagina monologue in a sweltering cardboard room lost in a warren of bored poor neglected Kip currency seekers.

Below a yellow moon all the stars fell down.

One afternoon an Italian, his face obscured in melting heat said, Fear is the global problem. His voice whispered through rising herbal heat. Moisture collagulated on a single yellow bulb forming stars.

Fear is universal, he said, Fear contracts hearts.

5 rhythms in dance

Relaxed, he asks what I dream about. My imagination, perception and sensation means scrubbing cloth, wringing out water, hanging cloth on hangers, ironing cloth, folding cloth, bagging cloth, weighing cloth, handing cloth to strangers, accepting money, smiling and dreaming of freedom. I dream dance.

He traces my forehead, breasts, and jealous thighs. He dreams I have a real life with real opportunities. Courage. Self-esteem. Freedom. Dignity. He takes me far away from here. We escape to a beach. I see silent crashing blue and white waves. Feeling the sun on my face I smell the sea. I run into blue/white water shouting The Sea! The Sea!

I wear a long white cotton dress. It feels invisible on my skin. I am brown and content. I am free. He memorizes my small brown hands, heart, head and lifelines. They are heavy deep real and calloused from laundry. He is gentle with me. I am a hungry animal. I release my repressed sexual energy. I trust him. I give myself to him.

I am a slave. He cannot save me. This is an unpleasant fact.

Edging my skin realizing sensations, I feel safe and protected. I curl into his arms.

Without words I say my family is poor. There is no chance for us. He’s been in country long enough to know how my culture works.

My father is seventy-three and ill. I have numerous aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and abandoned relatives. They smell money when they see a white face. They beg for money with fake reasons. They play their woe is me sympathy card. They are traditional and narrow-minded. They suffer from ignorance, envy and jealousy and want.

Desire and greed is their master. I told them Thorny is my benefactor. Thorny thinks I was abused as a child. He found a doctor to assess my condition. They said it was too late to do anything to help me. My life is more silent laundry.

Thorny talked to my father using an interpreter. Thorny asked specifics - was she abused? Father said I wasn’t abused. Was she hit in the head as a child? Did she suffer from a head injury? No, no, no, my father said. He said something happened to me when I was two.

I think they are afraid of Thorny and don’t want to tell him the truth. He flew home for three months. He plans to come back and get paperwork so I can leave and join his family in OZ. Fat chance. My luck ran out.

I don’t hold my breath. I dance.

I exhale my dancing quest. I showed my lover and he’s happy for me. If it’s possible, he signed. He knows my father has to approve any relationship with Thorny depending on cash amount. Marriage is a big maybe like my sister did.

If my family agrees they determine a pre-paid wedding dollar amount, say $3 grand. There’s a pre-nuptial waiting period, filing government papers. Pay greasy greedy officials. The government requires foreigners to prove they make $2,500 a month. Everyone here has a hand out. A wedding party will cost $200-$5,000 to impress friends with our social status. Big deal.

My father is afraid to lose me. He will say no. My lazy sister needs a slave. This is my fate. I am happy. It’s all I’ve known, know now and will know.

My life dance is ambiguity, poetry, acceptance, independent detachment and creative imagination. Dance is isolated yet cooperating and independent. I believe in the magic of dance.

When you dance, for a fleeting moment, you feel alive.

What do I see? I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, language in space. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth. Then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

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

I’ll dance until I die.

escape the tyranny of life

I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.

Silence is everything. I am one with everything. A singularity.

All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, forms, symbols, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.

Everything floats away. Mu. Nothing. Maya. Illusion. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, and texture feeling regret, loss and a death of the spirit? I witness sad lost blank faces. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.

I never hear laughter as I pass through life with my Dream Sweeper Machine.

What does laughter sound like?

What color is sound?

This is my Beauty. Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.

I am a stone cold Apsara silent dancer dancing with my revolutionary evolutionary soul.

I feel like screaming.

The dancing hall inside the Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. 

They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. A celebration of tranquility is their eternal dance. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

I dance to escape the tyranny of life. I use my dance to express life. I’ve danced all my short, sweet existence.

The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisperdance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots below the surface of appearances in deep burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life.