Martha's Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girl friend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote, danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they would be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don't think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life, the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

A Cambodian orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is anew year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize moral character with social intelligence, integrity, and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Everyday I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produced Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss's part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a TV, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a sentimental fool. You're fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips, long and deep. Slow and sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, small money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here's the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 10 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Laotian dams financed with Chinese capital to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belonged to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - to feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Tolerance danced through life. 

Everything you know is a lie.

my cremation

Sekala, what is seen. Nisekala, what is unseen.

After chopping wood and carrying water I returned to Monkey Forest in Ubud, Bali for my cremation ceremony.

It was the best decision I ever made.

Everyday is a celebration.

The family tended my corpse for seven days, washing it with holy water, rubbing it down with rice flour, turmeric, salt, vinegar, and sandalwood powder. Shreds of mirrored glass - banten sutji - were placed on my eyes, pieces of steel on my teeth, a gold ring with a ruby on my mouth, and jasmine flowers on my nostrils. My four limbs received iron nails symbolizing perfect senses allowing rebirth as a stronger and more beautiful human being.

Since the 13th century every Balinese liberated their soul through cremation to heaven for judgment and rebirth in their grandchildren. Failure to liberate the soul haunted descendants as a ghost.

My corpse was wrapped in a white cloth, a straw mat and tightly bound with more white cloth on a rante of split bamboo. On cremation day it was placed in a tower constructed of wood and bamboo covered in rattan, decorated with colored paper, ornaments, glittering tinsel, and small mirrors. The tower represented the Balinese conception of the cosmos.

In a series of layers were bamboo platforms. The base signified the underworld with three ascending platforms representing the visible world, a pavilion for the body, and the tumpang or heavens.

French, German, American, British, and Japanese tourists wearing ceremonial sarongs holding camcorders and 35mm cameras mingled with local food and drink sellers. A Balinese man sold film from a suitcase. Women hustled soft drinks, water, and carved ebony statues. Local children trailed an ice cream man.

Festive crowds climbed crumbling moss covered earthen walls in Pedang Tagal anticipating my body exiting the family home. A towering ceremonial black bull waited as people gathered at the junction of two narrow dusty roads in sweltering heat.

My body was carried out and placed on the golden pavilion behind the 15’x15’ bull.

Women in ceremonial dress led a procession balancing effigies and offerings of fruits, rice and vegetables.

Forty yelling, screaming men in black and white checkered sarongs lifted the bamboo platform onto their shoulders. Laughing, they ran down the road jostling the bull back and forth in erratic semicircles to confuse angry spirits. Jubilant villagers doused the carriers and bull with streams of water. People stopped cooking, resting, working, and painting. They emerged from walled compounds to witness the ceremony.

My widow and children waited with 100 people in Monkey Forest. Noise and confusion mixed with laughter as the black bull and golden tower entered a clearing. The men struggled up a steep dirt hill under the weight.

The bull was placed under a cremation platform - bale pabasmian - constructed of bamboo with a white sky cloth and gold tinsel roof. Reeds secured the bull on four corner poles. The music stopped.

Women worked the crowd selling water and soft drinks in searing heat. Tourists replaced film.

Men cut the bull’s back open with a large knife under the sky pavilion and removed a section. I was lowered from the tower accompanied by cymbals, drums and clanging instruments. Women circled three times around the bull with offerings.

Hot, tired, sweaty, laughing men lifted me up and passed it to a group near the bull. They lowered it inside. My widow placed family heirlooms on my corpse. Forest monkeys chattered overhead. A black and white butterfly danced in fractured light.

A Brahmin priest in black stood on scaffolding singing and chanting prayers with my family. They cut a string binding white cloth, poured holy water from clay pots over me, passing them to a family member who smashed them on the ground.

The priest accepted a flowering plant and sprinkled soil on me. Another man added yellow silk. People handed them family items wrapped in white cloth to be placed inside. More clay pots were emptied on my form and destroyed on earth.

A tourist in the shade wrote a postcard.

A family member took a final photograph of me. An effigy of reeds and tinsel was dismantled and placed on me. The lid was replaced on the bull and secured with bamboo lashed diagonally across the corners.

Someone lit my fire.

The bull and flowers burned quickly as wood, bamboo and rattan sent smoke and ash circling into sky. Cloth shells flamed away as heat jumped to the tinseled golden roof.

Italian and French film crews worked close to the fire.

The crowd evaporated. The ground was littered with plastic water bottles and ashes.

My widow sat in the shade eating, drinking, and talking with our children and friends about sekala, what is seen, and nisekala, what is unseen. 

 

Becoming

Begin this day at dawn.

Pashupatinath Hindu cremation ceremony along Bagmati River.

Shiva is the destroyer and creator.

Wood pyres. A woman kisses her shrouded husband goodbye.

Light his fire.

Fire is the beginning and end.

Fire is your rosé flame.

Stir his bones.

His ashes flutter with death and mortality.

Silence. Solemnity. Serenity. Grounded and transient. Flowers. Offerings.

Glorious color dancing fire.

Return to Source. 

one day

A traveler joined a Jewish and Turkish man talking over tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

“I lost today,” said the Jewish man.

“What do you mean," said his friend. “You made 3,000,000 Lira.”

“Yes, but I lost one day.”

 

one day

A traveler joined a Jewish and Turkish man talking over tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

“I lost today,” said the Jewish man.

“What do you mean," said his friend. “You made 3,000,000 Lira.”

“Yes, but I lost one day.”