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A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
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The Language Company The Language Company
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Subject to Change Subject to Change
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Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
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Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
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Entries in memory (49)

Wednesday
Jan222020

Read

I carried a copy of Omar’s book, A Century Is Nothing from Turkey to Indonesia to Nam in 2009.

Together with Omar we used fire, this crucible of alchemical combinations, diversities, sweat, blood and tears to create it so I’d use fire to release it.

Save books, build a library.

Books are universes of ideas, experiences, feelings, visions, paths, and destinations obliterated through discovery reminding memory.

They are worlds of dreams, stories, dramas, plays, songs, histories and guides into new visceral experiences. Pages sing their laughter with wisdom, song, and poetry.

Preserve memory. Live forever with paper’s tactile voice.

Voices of reason, imagination, comedy and tragedy are skintight drum stories. They are oral transmissions recorded on parchment, vellum, illustrated manuscripts in Irish Gaelic talking tongues, Sumerian clay and Asian scrolls.

I didn’t burn it, a way of sacrifice offering and letting go. Down the road I gifted the brick to three Asian women in Saigon. They had Chinese ancestry from Hong Kong and lived in Australia.

I said a friend wrote it so I signed it and laughed letting it travel with them. Thanks for the book. You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy it.

It took all three to carry it. They staggered up guesthouse stairs with the tome. After breaking down a wall they struggled to get it through an opening.

People need to break down before they break through.

Maneuvering it into a bag they discarded cheap Vietnamese souvenirs. We’ll have to check this monster all the way to Sydney.

ART

Monday
Oct292018

Little Voice

Where do I place it, these words?

What country continent city village town or heartbeat?

A heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.

Simple like a breath.

She asked him, Do you like small? Skin on skin?

Yes, kneading her shoulder muscles, easing out tissue from her supine sublime spinal chord erasing tension. Her smile said, Yes. Her relaxation exhaled.

She spoke with hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed writing a short story, a poem, flash fiction.

She selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony summit. She opened a black notebook. She made a pot of green tea. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

She drew a picture. It looked like this.

 

Tourists find, travelers discover.

Traffic sign - Slow Children...

Lightning bolts - blue butterfly, white sky, green flowers, red leaves, songs of invisibility, piano shadow.

How do you spell loss?

Memory contains an entire world.

A blind painter paints from memory. A blind writer. A blind poet.

She weaved words with yellow laughter.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

A dreamer with active imagination.

Little voice.

Saturday
Jul142018

Draw The Dead

The Maija artist in Fujian, China accepted a photo from a grieving relative, set up his easel and studied a face with a magnifying glass.

His pencil sketched an 8x10. On chipped plaster walls were images of farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, young and old Pioneer Communist members with tight red party issued scarves knotting necks suffocating passion.

This day he sketched a stoic resigned peasant woman. She’d suffered at the hands of the Nationalists then Communists then corrupt greedy economic free market revolutionaries before facing the indignities of old age.

Old age is a killer.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung near red streaks of paint in his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed feelers together. Tasty.

An emaciated smiling ascetic friend of the artist wearing a skeleton face with paper-thin arms opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand dispersing it into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. We shared tea watching the artist. The likeness was perfect. The tea tasted acidic.

These images decorated Asian family altars and collected dust in temples. Ancestor worship and the fear of ghosts is a big deal.

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes.

On anniversary death days they meet ghost ancestors in cement alley mazes where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicarious liquids flowed into small holes.

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee addressing Asian family noise.

“It’s come to our attention dear comrades, beloved family and friends...we have a communication volume problem in the neighborhood. Silence. We are trying to enjoy a long peaceful restful sleep. Leave us be or we will return to haunt you. Forever.”

The Language Company

 

Saturday
Jan202018

El Carnicero 

Big black hungry Spanish flies buzzed and fought around fresh red meat dripping warm blood into dust dancing along the devil’s whiplash.

A mangy cur dog rolled over in shade, ribs scraping grounded dust, begging for water.

A drop in the ocean, where it’s all H2O no matter how deep you dive. Waves washed shores singing stones.

Sausages retained a sharpness inextricably swaying like dancers in choreography. Tired, frayed strings bent under dead meat weight mass, substance, context.

Remembering the Spanish Civil War, Manuel the butcher stared through a jagged broken glass window. His facemask spoke a weary solemn stillness quiet lying fury.

His silent words were exaltations, evaluations, a surcharge, a value added tax in an empty stomach for services rendered by reinforcements riding hard through Basque valleys listening for waves of German bombers over Guernica 1936.

Beleaguered men inside stone shepherd huts trapped in desolate Pyrenees mountains stood spinning, surrounded by empty canteens, bread crusts, discarded family heirlooms, spent shell casings, and decomposing bodies relishing solitude.

He’s required to remember old Fascist propaganda spreading information.

He is El Carnicero, one who slaughters.

In order to put food on the table and provide for his family after peace was declared with celebrations of music, church services, baptisms, wine, street dancing and tear streaked burials, economics forced him to slaughter his remaining beast of burden.

His bull was his calling card, vision, hope, dream and village identity. Dictators, thieves and Fascists had stolen everything else. Dignity, integrity and self-respect survived.

Destiny arrived minus sympathy, sentiment or condolences. Shaded from a brutal sun he sharpened his axe, honing steel across a grindstone. New edges were sharpened with passionate ambivalence.

Laughter’s axe was ready.

He walked into a red clay ring surrounded by a white clapboard fence. The bull stood in the far corner.

He held out his hands lined with pulse-rivers. The bull emerged from shade. Manuel collected reins. In the animal’s eyes he saw memory reflected in his soul. Sighing, he clapped his hands twice, bowing to the bull as a Shinto priest pays his respects to Bishamonten, the Kami god of benevolent authority.

He asked for forgiveness, this act of fate, raised his laughing axe and brought it down hard and fast on the bull’s neck. The bull froze, slumping, straining to escape steel carving tough weathered skin, muscles, tendons, sinew, arteries, veins, snapping final bones.

Front legs folded, rear legs buckled. The carcass shuddered. A final breath exploded red dust.

He clapped his hands, severed the head and dragged everything through dust to his shop. He hung the severed head in his broken window.

For Sale.”

His wife served portions to family and neighbors. They consumed his life’s work, toasting his wise sacrifice for the greater good. Sharing is caring.

I am an accomplice to death. I could have stopped it. No. This is a lie. Truth lies. Truth hides in the mystery of interpretation. I couldn’t prevent death. I tried to speak and save the bull. Words. I was afraid. Language strangled me. My voice was dust. I was five.

He was my father.

Which is greater, real pain or pain’s premonition I wondered as Manuel’s silver blade melted reflections into diamonds of glittering light. The quick and dead burned. Manual and death danced inside my childhood, inside time’s compressed memory where rivers of stained glass mosaic memory melted. I took ownership of laughter’s axe.

Mirror reflections retained red river blood and sweat dancing on Manuel’s temple. Blood and sweat congealed in red dust creating tributaries and oceans in Spanish heat one swift irrevocable summer.

The world is a strong sense of Guerencia, a Spanish term for homeland, “a place, like a bull facing death in the ring, where you feel comfortable dying.”

Surviving along the Mediterranean meant controlling trade routes in slaves, salt, textiles, gold, silver, copper, limestone, turquoise, red granite, alabaster, bananas, sugar cane, cotton, sorghum, ivory, timber and purple dye.

Land and sea trade routes flowed with cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Phoenician alphabets, Mandarin, Meso-American, Runic and Indus script, coins, wooden tally sticks recording the number of animals killed, religions, amber, animals, royal purple clothing, grains, horses, incense, olive oil, silk, spices, tin, wine, tortoise shells and slaves.

Commodities.

Witnessing everything from a small Spanish village at the edge of the sea I seized cold-blooded mercenary opportunities. I evolved through determination, persistence and perseverance. Trial and error danced with cause and effect hearing The Art Of The Fugue by Bach.

Thin calm detached hungry dancing spirit fingers hummed down a necklace of threaded skeleton bone beads of catastrophic karmic actions near contemplative Gomchen mystic Tantric hermits north of Sera monastery in Tibet. Monks sat chanting and praying in sight of Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess.

Butchers, the untouchables, flayed corpses before smashing bones for vultures to reincarnate a spirit in a sky burial.

Frozen earth informed archeologists there would be no work here with their soft brushes.

I absorbed Tibetan dialects by swallowing bone dust. Transmissions of spirit energies, renewal and transformation evolved with joy, beauty and gratitude.

I sat meditating, breathing, digging, absorbing creation stories, illusions between what was and what is.

Realizing amazing journeys I discovered childlike laughter, curiosity and joy.

You are either innocent or mad.

Flip a coin. Magic nature opened my third eye to see what will be. Mirrors are free of dust and illusions. I dissolved.

The day after tomorrow belongs to me.

The Gomchen taught me how to meditate on the process of death. It centers a person fast. First thing in the morning, shapes my motivation with clarity.

“What is the motivation behind my desire to acquire _______ and the things that come with it?”

Motivation and its effects were determined by reading The Roots of Wisdom by Ming.

Mountains and rivers and earth are already nothing but dust.

Man, of course, is but dust within dust.

Bodies made of blood and muscle will surely return to bubble and shadows.

If the highest wisdom is not obtained, there will be no heart of understanding.

All is vanity.

One ought to live a life of peace and quietude.

What’s the point of unrelenting pursuit of external things?

El Carnicero, archeologists and I cherish our illuminated rolling stoned spirit energies.

Our choice is simple.

Sit or move. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

Thursday
Dec282017

Poem

In a Brave New World you shift

from truth and beauty

to comfort and happiness

I ate civilization

Aha ha

A new notebook deciphers emptiness

The fisherman

In a long blue boat

Cuts the engine

Drifting with current

Cool cornflower silk red ink

Slashes memory's fascination

Forgetting

Letting go

Be silence inside the labyrinth

Dancing shimmering red blazing wisdom seeks wisdom

In Laos

Wats glow golden

A sleeping Buddha

Dreams of compassion

Direct immediate experience

I am twinkling