chakra

“We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time,” the Phoenix healer said from the Valley of the Sun. After 911 her body work client list expanded faster than the universe.

People fought to see her, absorb her hands, feel her strength releasing their anger, insecurity, frustration, confusion, sense of loss, and latent repressed hatred as she delved deep into tissues finding the blocks. Blocks of time’s compressed soul fire. Blocks of tension. Blocked chakra energy lines.

She opened them up. She rekindled their basic spiritual fire, their love, healing them as best she could under the circumstances. She let them go. It was hard demanding work. She was exhausted when she got home for tea and a soothing herbal bath.

He explored Cadiz. It was founded by the Phoenicians in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir trading amber and tin. The Romans established a navel orange base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey, and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies. People developed agriculture as growing populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. More land and crops, more food, more children required to work soil.

Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000 year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed built roads, establishing communities to satisfy impulses for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanding their nation state.

Duende

She had duende, a fundamentally untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit. It signified a charisma manifested by certain performers—flamenco singers, bullfighters, elves, seers, weavers—overwhelming their audience with the feeling they were in the presence of a mystical power.

The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca produced the best brief description of duende: “Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel; but in that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”

Little Wing followed a tribal trail to Lacilbula, where, after weaving morning pages she returned to the Rio Guadalete river below the pueblo flowing from the Sierras to Cadiz.

The battle of Guadalete was fought on July 19, 711 when 7,000 Yemenis and Berbers led by Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visgoth King Roderic.

Rio needed cleaning. Thick autumn yellow, green and brown leaves trapped between rocks clogged river sections. Liquid backed up to mountains beneath fast gray storm clouds. Using her walking stick, she clamored down a slippery slope and slowly worked her way up the Rio clearing sticks, leaves and stones blocking the flow. One leaf could do a lot of damage.

There were green maple, silver aspen, brown oak leaves. Old black water logged decayed colors danced with fresh green and orange pigments.

She was the unimpeded flow. A child playing near water and rocks in her dream world. Serenity and sweet water music. Rocks, stepping stones. Small pools and meditation zones of where she felt peaceful. Bird music darted up the canyon.

She cleared leaves long past twilight, staggered up the muddy incline facing the Rio in silent gratitude and performed healing chants next to a bare Aspen tree. She passed a ceramic Virgin Mary statue illuminated by melting red candles in a rocky crevice behind a locked gate.

Mary’s blood flowed over jagged dolomite gray stones flecked with green moss. She collected a hemoglobin sample for future weaving, crossed a stone bridge and returned home. She lit candles, started a fire, relaxed in her favorite chair enjoying a deep breath before bleeding word rivers to dye loom fabric.

The loom was her instrument of transformation and wool the hair of the sacrificial beast which women, by a long and cultured tribal process, transformed into clothing. This suggested how weaving skirts the sacred and the violent. Why her power at the loom was both derided and dreaded, transformed, like giving birth, into a language and symbol, a metaphor with new, positive ends.

Hope & Exile

Hope had many choices and she chose Exile. They married at the Cathedral of Dreams and ran through fields over Spanish mountains to the edge of the Mediterranean. 

 “There’s a big world out there,” Hope said to Exile pointing over the sea. 

“Yes and that’s only the top of it. Let’s share an orange,” Exile said to Hope. 

“Yes,” said Hope, smiling at real and imaginary worlds over the horizon, “we will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Delicious.”

Hope birthed Patience. Raising Patience was a test for Hope and Exile because she gave them the test first and the lessons later.

Exile was a strange wild bird and while he loved Patience she challenged it, his love. She tested his stability, honesty, devotion and his way of constructing a world inside a world, a universe inside the swirling molecules of their experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker and Patience admired this reality. 

They studied and evaluated their character traits and imperfections. They took personality tests. Patience tested his trust, his ability to forgive and forget with gratitude and love. Patience handed him small portions of fear, anger, jealousy, ignorance, and desire. He created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. These were the things Patience cherished.

Hope was relieved when she saw Exile was content. She didn’t know how long it would last. He always enjoyed living on the edge of somewhere else.

The old forest when they saw the axe handle entering, said, “Look it is one of us.”

“No one dies,“ Exile said one evening as they chopped and carried wood on the edge of a rain forest.

“No, I suppose not,” said Hope. “Patience will never die. She will live forever because she has a magic about her. I felt it before she was born. It was like a stream of light was floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” Exile said. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will learn how to float, how to project her spirit energies. She will be a fine healer.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe above wood. Streams of splinters blasted into twilight. Exile chopped and Hope carried. These were the choices they made as the moon rose through orange and blue streaks of light.

“He went to the cemetario today,” Hope said. 

“Who?”

“The forcestero, the outsider.”

“He was there yesterday as well, why?”

“Visiting the spirit sources.” 

“Indeed,” said Exile, “they will be out tomorrow with the full moon. Clearly.”

Hope and Exile danced in the meadow under the moon.

Light pierced their being and they floated. Nobody else saw them floating. They were protected by a veil of light dancing behind a curtain of surrender. Their spirits were free of their physical being. They were free spirits in a free world blessed by their imaginary limitations. 

They left their temporal bodies and floated down to the Rio Guadalete to combine their energies with water. The water was clear, cold and delicious. It flowed from dark gray Sierra mountains in a rush of sound through a rocky path. It flowed flowers absorbing their scent inside water. 

As petals danced in air Exile and Hope gathered warm flowers around them below the moon. They ran along the valley through fresh turned soil, past olive and cork trees, inside forests of pine, fir, evergreen, pinsapar, maple and trees without a name. 

Bare trees pointed at the moon.

“Look there,” trees said, pointing thin branches toward the sky, “there, there we are.”

Trees pointed to pulsating white stars. “Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” said one, pointing far away, “there we are.”

“And there and there,” they sang reaching every direction. The wind listened to the stars whisper secrets telling star tales seeing star trails across the emptiness of sky inside the vast vacuum of silence. 

Hope and Exile were light.

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.

A Warung story

He started this story on a Saturday morning. He was somewhere between dawn and noon. 

He sat on a thick green pillow at a Sasak warung, a small simple eatery. He'd found this place a couple of days earlier and liked it because it was quiet. The entire Air island was quiet. Maybe 1,000 residents. 

It was one of three islands off the coast of Lombok in Indonesia. It was called Gili Air. It was quiet. 

The bamboo pavilion where he enjoyed thick black coffee, hand rolled Drum cigarettes and serenity faced the ocean or maybe it was the sea or perhaps the Straits. Either one it was big and blue. Across the water was the island of Lombok. On this particular day Rinjani, the volcano at 3,500 meters was obscured by low grey and high white clouds.

He read "The Elephant Vanishes," a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. 

One of the main reasons he liked sitting here was because it was next to a small cemetery. 

Ten or twelve small plots, a few eroded headstones with scattered grey and coral borders in a grove of small trees. Weeds and small pieces of trash.

He always found cemetaries when he roamed around the planet. Peaceful places where he learned and observed customs, habits, histories. Air. Bursa, Turkey, Grazalema, Spain to remember three.

How the small Spanish village in the Sierras used crypts near the Catholic church. How they were decorated with plastic flowers. How empty crypts held cleaning materials, rags, bricks and trowels.

How the grazing white and grey sheep near the Catholic Cemetario filled rising green fields. There was a beautiful single palm tree in the courtyard. Behind iron gates lay silent white crypts decorated with real and plastic flowers, names, dates and old faded curling black and white photographs of the dead where a procession of men laid a 40-year old friend of theirs to rest last week. 

They slid his wooden casket into a long stone cold cement cavity, blessed themselves and returned to the village for sherry and conversation full of memories speaking about the man who died alone with no wife or children and above the crypts were gray cliffs and peaks in heavily wooded forests and the sky was a watercolor in progress as white, grey, orange and blue colors hurtled on an east wind. Where families of Egyptian vultures expanded their wings on thermals. 

After this vision he returned to Spanish crypts.

He manipulated his camera obscura tool in fast fading light making images of interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their pueblo connection. He imaged down cavities and shells of carefully constructed rectangular rows of empty passages. 

They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Stories of desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence. Waiting for air to carry them to the listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious, silent in their collective breathing. Stories inside stories. 

Metta.