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Entries in sappho (6)

Sunday
Nov142021

Extraordinary

How many more full moons will you see?

 

 

"Rejoice, go and remember me." - Sappho

 

 

"Photography provokes language, new discovery, abstract dream like qualities. Extraordinary - that's what I respond to." - Moriyama

 

 

"Find what you love and let it kill you."

"What a circus, we're all going to die - love each other - we don't. We are eaten by nothing."

"Some people never go crazy. What truely horrible lives they must lead." - Bukowski

 

 

"Flooded with image overload people don't feel much emotion any more ... overstimulation (C-19), people lose sensitivity & aesthetic judgement so they will not learn anything meaningful." - Ai Weiwei

 

Wednesday
Jan132021

Touareg Berber Story

Under a full moon I transited south from Marrakech over the Atlas Mountains.

I was on the fringe of the Sahara eight days later when someone dialed 9/11 taking a bite of the big apple.

Whoops.

There was a hungry little worm at work. I was so far removed I did not take possession of that event.

I learned what happened from a Touareg Berber named Omar.

I wasn’t surprised. Fate bites you when you least expect it.

Omar spoke with his hands. I read his open palms and dark eyes. My ability with unspoken tongues and universal gestures was legendary. Body language gestures using humans were works in process.

Omar waved one hand in air as a bird condemned to be free. He raised a hand indicating height and smacked his flying hand into his stationary hand. The impact echoed across emptiness. His eyes flashed universal secrets. I had no idea where, how, why, or when he’d received his information, perhaps from trade caravans or through osmosis.

“I see.”

In the desert we did not talk about Being and Time, existential philosophy, the nature of evil, principles or values. We tweaked reality by breathing.

“3,000 people from eighty countries died,” said Omar. “Dust to dust.”

“Ah, an attack against the world,” I said, sensing an abstract permutation with eternal ramifications and hidden opportunity costs.

Writing story-truth futures, Omar and I sat down in Morocco and then Spain imagining stateside and global aftermath reality in the long now. 

I wasn’t surprised this happened. Myopic allegiance singing sheep in the United States of Amnesia would’ve had world citizens believe in their US/ THEM attitude.

Survivors evolved multiple ground truths, sifting soil, searching for plausible theoretical logical rational scientific cause and effect answers. Meaning?

Reconstructing, revising and recalibrating history they were left gasping, choking and breathing death mask dust. They evaluated meaning, truth and consequences in their short fragile existence.

Welcome to Earth babies. Revenge is best served cold.

Now they tried to answer the big question. “Why me/us?” and like Phase II group addicts it would keep them busy forever.

After the attacks their children asked, “why?”

Impatient angry adults under extreme pressure to be financially successful in their all-consuming life were frustrated with this “why” question from kiddies. As parents they wanted to be the boss, the all-knowing grown-up in complete Control. They assumed they knew all the answers. Whoops.

In a circular karmic game called Civilization & Random Revenge, players with long historical memories rolled the dice when it was their turn to play. Everyone had to go back to Start.

Citizens under siege didn’t read historical footnotes. They avoided the small fine print. The stuff they accepted carte blanche or skipped because they didn’t think it was important, the stuff made in Hollywood, the entertainment make-believe crap of car wrecks, violence, revenge and moronic happy endings.

Their attention span was shorter than the lives of 17,000 world children dying every day from starvation.

Somebody off stage triggered the lights exposing human fragility and evaporating all sense of humor. Audiences were stunned into silence when the curtain descended. It was full of loopholes, black holes and wormholes. The forbidden apple was rotten.

Survivors needing a new card from life’s deck did not want to see the Joker wearing a funny hat with bells.

Some had studied history. They knew in a vague way being experts on vagueness, mediocrity, hypocrisy, ignorance and cynicism how history’s long memory and sweet revenge encapsulated itself. They faced frustrating futures because they’d been lulled into complacency and brainwashed by soft media machines.

Media buys people.

Humans had assumed they would always be consuming bigger and better things. “The one who dies with the most toys wins,” said a salesman.

Tectonic plates of awareness shifted below the surface of appearances. Out of sight, out of mind. Awareness needed serious attention.

Human relationships snagged on fear, healthy uncertainty, doubt, adventure and surprise. Dreams of peace and prosperity, mortgaged tract homes, green lawns, two car garages, fast and faster food, weapons of mass destruction, love and symphonic notes danced on the edge of an abyss with hope, regret and fear.

Checkmate, said Death.

We need more channels, yelled sheep.

Shocked screaming patients streamed out of personal and collective asylums. They digested and overdosed on media medication rendering them catatonic, compliant and mute.

Earth is one big insane asylum.

Human nature and revenge stirred things up big time. Secure lines of clear fear communication revealed unconscious intentions of human revenge. Humans struggled for meaning in a random universe.

They tried to explain and/or rationalize and/or comprehend with logical coherent rational scientific explanations while mumbling, stuttering, staggering, falling, fumbling and failing to see how the world worked.

They struggled to explain all the moral ambiguities, principles and ethics on fill-in-the-blank final exams. They faced huge evolutionary adventures.

“Because I said so,” was the standard refrain when their sweet little monsters asked “why” for the umpteenth time. Cool laid-back intellectual facades developed fictionalized fractured fissures.

It was time to straighten the whiners out once and for all.

They went shopping.

This alleviated their fear of poverty, death and airplanes. Shopping is the perfect distraction. Shopping conquered fears growing stronger day-by-day fed by hysterical media, totalitarian governments and liberal know-it-alls in melting ivory soap towers based on empirical evidence and pure speculation.

“More media channels!” screamed millions. “We need more propaganda, advertising, distractions and fake news.”

There was a preponderance of rumors, myths, innuendoes, and evidence charred beyond recognition. It needed DNA analysis and carbon-14 dating.

Social workers and therapists swarmed Earth extolling virtues of wellbeing, hope, tolerance, gratitude, compassion and courage in the face of adversity, free choice and impending sales at outlet stores.

People needing therapeutic outlets found solace in their blind ignorance of how the world worked on molecular, political, religious, economic, philosophical and cultural levels.

Long festering animosity, religious, economic and cultural karma evolved. An invisible Ouroboros eating itself constricted their heart. Their mythical existence was part idealism and realism standing on its head.

Socially, culturally, geographically and emotionally deprived children learned a hard life lesson that escaped parents. Kids knew when adults were bullshitting them.

They suspected parents, teachers, doctors, social workers, bureaucrats and orphans, amputees, suicidal veterans and displaced humans and gravediggers did not own or Control the market of absolute answers.

Blind sheep believed something better just had to be on the idiot box, computer or phone. No attention span? No problem.

Inside demon gadgets a little animal named Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, and Adventure was hungry. It had a vociferous appetite for all things vain and glorious. It ate its young with spicy relish at picnics. It had no morals, ethics, principles or 21st century rationale.

It had a neoconservative financial and political agenda for:

Money

Power

Control

ART - Adventure, Risk & Transformation - A Memoir

 

Sappho

Saturday
Oct102020

Twinkle

Dive deeper than subterranean unconscious dreams.

Nail girls protected by large floppy hats seeking cuticles needing a trim canvas sand sun lovers.

String theory bracelet girls traverse grains of the universe. Boys ply sunglasses. The future is brilliant.

A girl balancing a bamboo platter of pineapples, mangoes, bananas, paring knife, plastic bags and sharp sticks prowls sand from dawn to dusk.

People watch people watching people. It's the thing - look without understanding.

A narrow blue and white boat arrives on sand. A boy throws out a rusty anchor.

Backpackers from islands unload kilos of memories, dreams and reflections.

Boatman launches five large empty water bottles toward land grab.

Mid-day sun shimmers above shaded tables as massage clients smothered with oil feel muscled women knead bronze skin tone epidermis as children laugh, run and play in surf near extreme serious a-dolts and retirees wondering how they ended up in paradise removed from frozen Europe hearing dulcimer hammers at a nearby five-story Chinese hotel cement project.

Swimmers plunge into H2O covering 70% of Earth.

Couples embrace cold drinks behind mirrored sunglasses.

Fat white Russians slobber UV 30 on skin drink cold beer discussing nuclear options against NATO.

99.9 % of beach people stare at phones.

Strangers accustomed to cement pavement feel sand. Danger.

Watch your step. Cautious sensation.

Babel languages whisper a Sappho wind oracle singing iambic pentameter odes with save face time.

Spit in the ocean.

Restless orange diamond light crashes into sunset.

Red sun white waves blue sky green islands. Floating world.

Silver waves lap shore

White crescent moon hangs by a thread

Stars sing with their light

I am twinkling

Create your life sandcastle

Rinse and repeat

A brown butterfly dances with green waves singing sand

Grow Your Soul

Saturday
Jul252015

Take amazing risks - TLC 22

“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives. They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence. They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, he said, “When I was nine I was going on fifty. Now I am fifty going on nine. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” she said lighting a candle in darkness.

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

The Language Company

Sappho

Saturday
Dec032011

dead sunday

I learned from Ankara students how they were tired.

They loved being addicted to their phenobarbital phenomenon reality altering life, taking anti-depressants by mouth. I processed their fear and anxiety. 

A national Turkish problem according to a psychiatrist I met one day by chance on purpose my second week is anxiety.

It was a dead Sunday.

Clinking a small musically inclined silver spoon dissolved square sugar cubes made in a factory where the hygiene conditions were abysmal.

I sat in a tea house filled with artifacts. Iranian carpets, blue amber oil paintings and thick deeply embroidered cushions near a well thumbed Tarot deck. Fortune telling is an art and science depending on the suspicious, auspicious way. I gifted them the State of Relaxation. The Zen Tarot. Reading, feeling, absorbing the future.

We are all extras in someone's film, said Sappho.