hello june

Goodbye May. Pound out your bright beautiful future. 

A Turkish man with a hammer. Gypsy music. 

Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone.

We began in India. Wandering no name alleys, streets, villages, rivers, valleys, mountains.

Darkness whispers, Who's there?

I received a reprieve from death row one night in Vietnam. My sentence was commuted to life without parole. A South American writer said parole means speech, word, a word of honor.

Parole is the condition under which you are free, with a language and human awareness.

Human freedom is unconditional.

Memory fades into living color remembered with absolute infinity. Desperate hands fold across heaving chests, feeling abandoned sucking air injuries. Stop the bleeding. Start the breathing. 

It rained yesterday. It was long sweet and slow and heavy. Streets became quiet. Everyone huddled in corners of their mind. 

Why is nature so cruel, they cried. Nature laughed, Hahaha. Human tears fell like rain. Tears flooded their memory of nothing.

Today the sun came out. It was hot. Humans cried, Why is nature so cruel. Nature laughed.

 

Scientists say old memory is not destroyed, but that many copies of the same memory could exist in parallel.

They say your memory is only as good as your last memory rather than based on your initial memory.

Speak memory.

“Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses
from the top of his wall.
A thorn from that is still in my palm,
working deeper.” - Rumi 

The skin I Live in

A film by Pedro Almodovar.

All the thematic elements your little heart desires.  A meditation on memory, grief, violence, degradation, and survival.

words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skin_I_Live_In

images: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EolQSTTTpI4

see with camera

How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. 

According to Orphan, They feel the experience of 8th century Angkor artistic splendor only with their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. Obscura.

It's not about knowing, understanding the Khmer people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera. They are in a big fat hurry.

They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines tight against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the virtual image of their faded memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. Death is close.

The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept, while they screwed. He waited as they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired bored faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry! They have no time to see their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It accompanies them through radioactive meltdowns. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press the DownLoad switch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.

memory 101

1 memory creates fiction, said orphan.

A non-verbal memory of lost time, said elf.

The angry one thought it’d be her. She spat angry words and gestures. The fury of a woman scorned. Accept loss forever. He paid mama. They cycled back. They ate fish, vegetables and rice and went to bed. For hours. Normally her customers were 15 minute quickie jobs. He slowed her down. Take our time. She was flat and flat on her back. She started relaxing. No hurry, sweet thing. After awhile she’d say, boom-boom?

Her vocabulary was extensive.

Relax, take it easy. 24, no father, a brother in Malaysia and a mother north of a capital letter. 

You are a monkey, she said curling up soft and warm. She used imaginary scissors to cut off his instrument of mass destruction. 

Yes, she said, I will eat you alive tonight while rain assaults the tin roof through fractured eroding leaves of lost time.

note

namaste,

european woman opens her small red and black notebook
tears the himalayas from her map
her trail of tears
white mountain gods

blue sky, eagles, deep gorges, waterfalls, cold wind
raging rivers
presses it all preserving persevering

between lined white crumpled empty sheets
scribbles memory 
down life's little road

with anxious nervous fingers 
she presses a tin foil magic pill free
swallows h2o my
how did i get here?
what if i die here?

metta.