Conversation Dies

"He didn't believe in countries and the only borders he respected were: Borders of dreams - musty borders of love & indifference. Borders of courage or fear - golden borders of ethics.” - Roberto Bolano

The beauty of travel is the anonymous sensation in a crowd.

On a Sunday all the Khmer men gather for coffee, tea and stories.

Do you take milk with your stories, said one. No, straight.

Some study another's face and words.

The majority study cell phones or a Thai music TV video.

I love my phone, said one, it allows you to give up your consciousness.

Others study a conversation disguised as a peddler pulling his trash cart

down a street squeezing air out of a worn plastic bottle to summon the attention

of a survivor waiting to hear the air

knowing they can pawn junk,

perhaps an old family heirloom or weaver's word loom

in a Lao village along a river stream of consciousness.

No one bothers the stranger writing or drawing in a notebook.

He's been here many times, many places on Earth.

Men sit and stare. Trembling eyes pursue the endless stream of life.

When a face-to-face conversation dies someone picks up their phone to call another conversation.

I just called to see if you're alive. Amazing.

Have you eaten?

Yes. Today was eggs and rice, tomorrow it's lobster. Ha ha ha.

Delightful dangerous literature - 2666

Draw, paint, sing, dance, write, disappear.

Tell me a secret, poet. Reveal your wandering verse, your free form exile. There is no salvation.

Not too detached. Not too sentimental. We are surrounded by androids. Give the zombies simple stuff. Let them wrap their minds around artificial entertainment instruments in their operating rooms. Cut them open.

How do we measure their emotional receptivity? How do they establish meaning inside the daily, brutal violence?

Rolling and tumbling. A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned. People take themselves way too serious. The art and elements of a Japanese folding screen - shapes, edges, designs, natural free form.

Tell me why you loved being a campground guard in Costa Brava, Spain. Was it the night, the dark? The ghosts from your childhood? Yes, I imagine it was all the ghost children, all the dead women in Ciudad Juarez. All the unclaimed corpses. All the young girls. Never identified. Never claimed. Forgotten forever.

How you turned to writing fiction to support your family, your children. How you said you would have rather been a detective instead of a writer. How they are related. How you realized your literary life in Spain after Chile, Mexico and lost highways along your way. Wandering. Literature, the abyss.

You created a new novel form before passing on. Thank you. 2666.

Creating literature is a dangerous occupation. Silence exile and cunning.

Metta.