State of Becoming

One Saigon day a nomadic TEFL facilitator having a look-see visited ELF, a local English Language Factory.

He didn’t go in. He’d researched the business from Hanoi. It was a large well-funded managed operation with branches.

At a nearby java joint he met a teacher from the State of Becoming, SOB.

He said, We have good support. They offer a CELTA certificate costing you $1500, we have resources and a wide range of ages, groups and abilities, I’ve been here one year and my experience is positive, we have good team focus and professional development, they take care of work permits, new teachers without the CELTA are required, at a 50% discount, to take the course. Education is a business. There is flexibility and structure, the educational level is higher than Hanoi, one piece of advice, if the student is 28, they have the emotional level of 21. (-7)

This EI  is common in Asian schools. Teachers tell sheep what to think not how to think.

Poor schools makes it easier for systems to control citizens.

Serious factoid. Push passive kids through The System minus critical thinking skills.

Oh, to be human…

Old man, young woman...

Wordsmith danced his final farewell Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble twenty words. Write one clean honest sentence.

Twenty words. Twenty quick painless illuminations about the 60-year-old man in THE BLINKING LIGHT. Retired American or European.

Smoking, drinking a beer, wearing a flower print shirt. Alone. He called someone. Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He grasps both her hands expressing deep gratitude. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love and salvation from loneliness, alienation, suffering and life’s blues. She comes to his emotional rescue.

He handed her the wine list. Anything you want, it’s yours. He is grateful to know and receive her. I want your heart, she said. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation. He is Mr. ATM from a lonely-hearts club band first aid. Mouth to mouth recitation.

After a quiet romantic candlelight dinner they returned to his hotel room. They danced naked for dessert. She traced his spine with fingers. He rested his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat, hearing the thump-thump-thump drum muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arterial aerated erotic aortas. Be the drum.

For one brief night in their healthy beneficial addiction they held each other with desperate desire before Tran’s Dream Sweeper machine collected everything at dawn. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Donegal, Ireland Typewriter

By Ghostwriter

Once upon a time wearing a crash helmet of bamboo leaves before inventing the Internet I created poems, stories and comprehensive travel dreams using paper and pen. Very archaic tools, I admit. Notebooks are layers of strata flattened by geological pressure hearing Fibonacci sing spirals. Using a fountain pen or watercolor brushes is process oriented.

Be the paper. Be the brush, be the ink, be the water. Flow.

It was clean neat and simple creative fun, experimental joy and a beautiful organic mess.

You never hear a kid say I’m going to take the day off and be creative.

In the late 70’s I pounded on a Smith-Corona portable typewriter for two years in the Emerald Isle.  A manic-depressed divorced Dublin lover with an angry drunken jealous boyfriend gave me the machine. I was her back door man.  He tried to kill me in a snowstorm.

I lived to tell the tale.

Working for An Oige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association as a troubleshooting warden, word janitor, Grave Digger and reliable narrator I carried the red machine from a simple stone mountain habitat in Wicklow to a wild northern conservative Donegal sanctuary in hard rain then south into peat bog Mayo where I created in a desolate hostel haunted by a young girl’s suicide, then to the Killarney hostel and again east south east to Devil’s Glen where J. M. Synge wrote verse.

All the while using inexpensive thin paper, carbon and ribbons.

Carbon paper was the original SAVE feature. Flat sheets in thin box. Valuable and recycled until every space became bone blackened as dream words escaped like free wild geese in Ennisfree.

Ribbons were solid black on stainless steel spools packed in small clear plastic bags purchased from a stationary shop on a Dublin side street off St. Stevens Green. A toothbrush flossed keys. It was a sweet, fast deadly lightweight machine on fully automatic.

I prefer the heart-hand-eye connection holding a fountain pen feeling a nib on paper seeing ink marry papyrus.

Can you find the DELETE key, asked Zeynep. It’s your best friend.

Before leaving Dublin for Donegal I visited a Liberties antique shop. “These are very old,” said the seer woman behind the wooden counter. She wrapped mirrors in newspapers.

"Yes, they are. I will take good care of them.”         

“They come from an old estate sale down in the country.”

“Whereabouts?”

“It’s been awhile, and my memory’s not so good anymore you understand my dear. Perhaps the Synge place near Devil’s Glen, a manor house with large stables and shed dating to 1867. It became a dowager house, a house where a woman of means would go to live after the death of her husband. Views extended across valleys filled with old beautiful brown, green and golden trees.”

“That would be J.M Synge, the famous poet and playwright?”

“Yes, my dear. He was born in the nearby village of Rathfarnham and probably only visited to pay his respects to aunts and uncles. I heard a story about a blind Synge family member who visited the place and knew every room, every corner.”

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine Devil’s Glen rivers rocketing from higher ground hurtling past bleak peat bog earth factories below rainbow sunlight skies with quick rising rainstorms inside twisted glens of lush green streams bounding through history’s birth, past slate gray stone thatched houses as wild sheep by the hundreds roam the land.”

“Good on ya. Yes, that’s the place. Another story is how grandfather Synge was in danger of going bankrupt from having established many walking trails around the area and planting trees during a time when the farming life wasn’t paying. The story goes that the butler, when they were living at the Granmore Castle nearby, knew the bailiffs were coming so he gathered up all the silverware and hid it in the forest. They owned the estate for years and sold it to the Irish Land Federation in 1943. It was completely self-sufficient with abundant land for grazing, pastures, vegetables, and livestock. Somebody died.”

“I see.”           

“What will you do with the mirrors?” she said. 

“I’ll treasure them and protect them. During journeys we will share secrets of truth and beauty. I will receive their visions and gift them to others along the path.” This didn’t scare the woman. She was from the ancient school.

“Hmm. Well then, I shall make a small gift for you. Take this.” She handed me a piece of cloth. It was a coarse, mottled, brown and white checkered wool with faded cosmic symbols running the edge.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

“Carry it with you and only use it to clean the glass,” she said. “It’s older than sand.” She rolled it up.

“One kindness deserves another.” I rummaged in my pack and pulled out Kamben gringsing cloth. “Here, this is for you. It is a magic cloth woven by hand on Bali, an island in Indonesia. They use bark and roots to make the dye. The cloth is essential for every social ritual from birth to death. It will protect you from evil energy and if you ever get sick soak an edge in water and drink the moisture. It will cure you.”

“Wonderful. Many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.

“After Mayo you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8th hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry. You will ride a bike down wet streets and meet a nun opening black church gates and you will tell her what happened. Together you will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, bless yourselves, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence then you will ride into town and go to news agents and buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking Guinness reading remembering John’s creativity and his dream Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”

Source: A Century is Nothing

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Dream Sweeper Bats

At 4:37 a.m. everyone sleeps-dreams. I fire up my super-efficient Dream Sweeper Machine and collect dreams, said Tran. I sort them by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime symbolic meaning.

Words dance as hallucinations, poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and abstract art congratulates a hand clapping the hollow bells of a Cambodian trash collector boy pulling his cart along life’s fractured possibilities.

This sensation is the bell, said Zeynep, visualizing her European-Asian future. It bridges the gap, gaps the bridge connections. 

Rita, Leo, Tran, Devina, Zeynep, Omar and Death meditate on the balcony.

Pre-dawn sky dances with pulsating stars singing their light. Ferns, plants, bamboo and a cold wind hum I feel free.

Fruit bats roost upside down under a coconut palm leaf. Who turned the world over?

One emits a shrill, high-pitched echolocation squeaky frequency vibration. Perceive senses their return. A sharp sound with a definite edge to the beginning, through the middle tonal range to finalities, a welcome signal to bats revealing where they are in spacetime awareness.

They said, Hello, I’m back. It’s a pleasure finding comfort after a night of flying.

I don’t need to learn the words, said Devina, I am the music.

My name is Nature, said Leo, I am grateful to be alive and paying attention to bat’s music.

This is why we wake early, said Omar.

Storytellers witnessed ten white seagulls flying toward Lenin Park Lake. Vision’s silent gift at dawn winged freedom in orange sky. Awareness of life in Hanoi has meaning, definition, value.

I don’t know where the artificial ends and the real begins, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. I am a deeply superficial person.

90% of life is showing up, said Tran an amputee with a big heart.

Yes, said Rita in her orphan voice, 10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you deal with it. You are director, audience and players. I hear with my eyes. I see with my ears.

Stay in character. Two players practice lines and delivery.

-       I thought you’d never get here.

-       Sorry, I was delayed.

-       Obviously. Are you staying?

-       What do you think?

-       I don’t know. You’re such a mystery to me.

-       You talk too much.

Ha, said Laughter Therapy, All the clowns are not in the circus.

A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned, said Devina.

It’s the madness of art, said Zeynep, bleeding letters on parchment. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Barbers

Inside a Bursa barber shop at 9:30 a.m. TV wall news blasted Kabul heavy alliterative artillery literary fire.

Dust explodes. Images flood the consciousness - trains filled with tanks, armored cars, firefights in Iraq and Syria, suicide bombers, machine guns, rata-tat-tat-tat, expose yourself for a flash of sight, aim, fire, reload, as smiling wealthy diplomats shake hands for the cameras and media propaganda value.

They gesture peaceful intentions. We agree to disagree.

Smile.

An old man gets a close shave. The barber is short, white haired with trim black mustache in a white smock, brown loafers, working the silver blade down elastic cheeks erasing yesterday’s growth. The old man closes his eyes, feeling steel blade sensations as lather evaporates his existence in a calm, gentle way.

A small bell rings as a man pedals his portable mango and pineapple fruit cart along a dirt road in Cambodia. Does the sound come to the ear or does the ear go to the sound, asked Rita.

*

One morning Tran and I located a street barber in Saigon. He’s on the corner of Noise & Confusion, a main drag through the heart of a swirling mass of mobile humanity. Beep-beep.

His place was bare bones marketplace essentials. He works a small corner of a cement box surrounded by a wire fence. One old comfortable broken barber chair, a lopsided table and a cracked mirror completes the ensemble. Cheap blades, electric trimmer, a straight razor, comb, and brush.

Cut black hair spills out of a green plastic bag near the gutter waiting for someone to recycle stuffing stuff.

The Dark Years

It was curious seeing the Cambodian barber open on the last day of Khmer New Year. The river town was dead quiet. Merchants and families slept in shuttered shops behind metal gray accordion sheets. A tropical afternoon sun beat down. White cumulus clouds billowed in the east. The barber had a customer. A white haired war veteran. He’d fought against Vietnam, Khmer Rouge, Death and his Ghosts.

He didn’t talk about it. He survived. Silent conversation was his destiny.

He sat in a solid steel chair staring at his reflection. He saw a long thin serene brown face and wavy white hair. A long mole resembling an inverted Buddhist pagoda hung down from the left side of his chin. The mole saved him from Khmer Rouge executioners. They were superstitious peasants. They believed he was the Devil. They released him.

He and the barber conversed in French. The thin barber had thick black parted hair. He’d lived here all his life. He survived four genocide years by killing his dreams and hiding with his family in mountains where the French later constructed and abandoned a post office, hotel and casino. All bets are off. They were The Dark Years. No one talked about The Dark Years.

The old man closed his eyes. Besides gardening and playing with his grandchildren, savoring blade sensations and ointment aromas with small talk were his simple luxuries.

Using small steel clippers the barber trimmed hair. It fluttered to a cement floor meeting piles of black hair. Electric trimmers with old frayed wires collected dust on a narrow wooden table under a fractured mirror. Hello Beauty.

After trimming neck hairs he adjusted the chair, easing him back. The old man meditated on miracles and impermanence of life.

The barber extracted a thin razor blade from a small piece of paper. He severed both ends into a soda can. Clink. He opened a wooden handled straight razor edging the blade in.

He sprayed water mist around the man’s head. Moisture refracted light prisms and dust. He trimmed microscopic hairs around the outside edge of an ear lobe before shaving above sideburns angling the man’s head with his left hand. The razor slid from temple to temple across the scalp line rasping skin.

He was quick, silent and efficient. Smooth artistic hands shaved skin fast and light. Short, fast and deadly. The blade danced on skin under the eyes. He wiped the blade on a white towel lying on the man’s chest. He shaved lower sideburns. He returned the man to a sitting position. The man smiled at his reflection. Hello Beauty.

The barber snapped the towel across shoulders removing dead cells. The man eased out of the chair. He removed a roll of money hidden near his waist. He peeled musical notes to the barber.

Merci. Au’voir.

He shuffled out. His son waited for him on a motorcycle. He tried to swing his right leg over the rear seat. He hesitated. He couldn’t manage it. His left hand reached for a shoulder. His frail contorted right arm was useless. The executioners broke the Devil’s arm. They wanted to hear the Devil scream.

Bursa barber. Cádiz barber. Hanoi barber. Cambodia barber. Faces shaved, haircut, clip, clip scissors, storytellers all.

All vocal music, choral tales of imaginary love, kindness, forgiveness, journeys, beauty, creativity, travel, adventure, risk, authenticity, truth and maladaptive trust with barbers.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Cadiz Barber

The Hanoi barber neighborhood is 150 years old, said Ha, a divorced male engineer with a six-year-old daughter. It is difficult to remarry when the girl’s father knows I’m divorced after they see my daughter and I alone and happy.

They were two characters looking for a third isosceles angle. 1+1+1

All the Hanoi barbers live here. Temple Cloud is dedicated to barbers. The temple has scissors, broken mirrors, lopsided chairs, cloth, shears, scythes, machetes, swords, sabers, rusty blades, plastic combs, dusty piles of black hair and talcum powder.

Tran hangs out at a small salon getting a haircut. A woman vacuums his ears to clean aural perception debris. Barbers have great stories.

Cadiz, Spain

Omar said, There is an old barber shop in Cadiz, Spain near Plaza de San Juan de Dios, the neoclassical town hall built in 1800.

The decrepit functional shop has cracked white and blue tiled walls and a yellow and blue star mosaic inlaid floor. A well-dressed retired man sat in a shaft of light smoking a Cuban cigar.

My nomad friend exchanged pleasantries, Buenos Dias. An old barber in a stained white smock smiled and welcomed him, Buenos Dias, what’ll it be Senor? Friend showed him a phrase from a book of sand gesturing over and down his long white beard painting a little.

Living in the Land of Gestures, Smiles and Body Language and speaking every tongue on Earth is an adventure. People attached subtle diverse meaning to gestures, facial expressions and vocal tone. Gestures dictated international Esperanto passport freedom, passing through, getting things accomplished, communicating visions like beauty, truth and hunger. Gestures sealed deals.

A flying finger expert was grateful to meet friendly accommodating people tolerant of his meager attempts to articulate real and imaginary words.

Having passed the barber often, seldom, never, occasionally, sometimes, always, while pausing, peering, staring, looking, seeing inside with innate curiosity, my friend knew they knew he was not one of them being a forcestero, an outsider. They trusted him in a vague familiar way.

The barber looked at the book of sand, studied quick hands. Yes, fine I understand what you want, here, gesturing toward a swivel chair, sit here. He put his Moleskine journal, fountain pen, glasses and faded filthy S.F. Giants baseball hat on a chair, took a seat, received the cloth and closed blue eyes.

As the barber prepared his tools friend contemplated how Cadiz people enjoyed balmy Mediterranean weather. Characters moved in and out of flats like nervous, agitated, obsessive-compulsive neurotic filmmakers manipulating a lens establishing a specific point of view, a definitive spotlight theme creating memory, abandonment, alienation, community, freedom, faith, and identity theories with narrative structure in a long talk story.

They recorded long distance location shots establishing the big picture and then zoomed tight. Floodlight and spotlight danced scene by scene.

It was their Gypsy DNA spilling oral discourse wandering Earth looking for sanctuary acknowledging their Roma heritage, how their ancestors intermarried Berbers a thousand years ago. How they survived omnipresent rigid authoritarian Catholicism in Sin City.

Only 18% of Spaniards were practicing Roman Catholics now, compared with 98% fifty years ago living with guilt, confession, morals, a breakdown of values and cognitive dissonance. C’ la vie.

The scissors and comb were musical instruments in the barber’s hands. A finger tilted his head left, then right. Language music floated. A bamboo walking stick dissolved shadows and silence with ripples of arriving. Acquaintances paid their respects to Omar.

Ola, we meet again, Omar greeted an old friend.

Welcome back my friend, you have been away a long time.

Yes, seems like forever and a day, we’ve been in the Sahara, before, on and after 9/11, pointing to the man getting his beard trimmed. A hell of a never ending story with numerous sub plots and twisted arcane elements of subterfuge.

Yes, such a scene of devastation, suffering and retribution by angry, scared, marginalized, misled, poor people speaking of Sahara, how goes it, I know it like the back of my old veined hand, trade caravans will be moving north this time of year.

Carpets, silk, salt, spices and slaves are selling well, said Omar.

You are fortunate my friend.

Yes, I’ve been blessed with good health.

And your family how are they.

They are well, thanks be to God. Allah be praised the most beneficent is shining their love on us. And the caves, have you heard from the survivors, any news. Word travels slower than a camel.

Tribes formed after the 9/11 attacks. They are moving toward serenity, sanctuary, and simplicity. Millions of refugees streamed into the screaming broadband media desperate to find work with international conglomerates and orphanages.

Manufacturing sectors grinding poverty constructed dreams for export.

Yes, said the blind seer. Internally displaced persons blended barley seeds with Leaves Of Grass according to Walt Whitman for delicious breads in refugee camps overflowing with multitudes of humanity. Human caravans migrated along Afghan valleys into rugged isolated pristine mountains to live in Paleolithic caves. I heard others resumed their journey along the Silk Road toward Constantinople, the Mediterranean and Cadiz.

How did they survive?

They carved on cave walls with Neolithic new science tools and rented caves out on weekends to eco-tourists seeking simplicity, sanctuary and sanity from personal and collective comic-tragic universal trials and tribulations they practiced the ancient art of equality fostered by Arabic prophets.

Art reveals strange twisted truths.

Yes, it’s the madness of art. One cannot escape art. Art doesn’t solve a thing. We live in a vast art museum.

A woman in red luminous flowing fabric danced through their dream in a state of perpetual transformation.

The forcestero and I journey in new directions. We have exploring and revising to do. 

He is my amanuensis, said Omar.

Ah, you are fortunate having a well versed nomad scribe. Such is life, and your family.

Allah and God be praised, they are in good health, Fatima Zamora is two years old now learning to walk.

Ah, this is good. It’s a long walk. Have you learned anything useful from the barbarians,

A little - they know many words but have forgotten the essential music.

In the 12th century Arabic and European languages invented new traditions based on 1,001 stories. They used imaginative prose by telling stories inside someone else’s story.

Ah, you mean somebody in a story is telling a story about somebody in a story telling a story about somebody, people talking about people.

Absolutely, my friend.

Fascinating, perhaps you’ve read 1,001 Nights, Yes, and Borges, Calvino, Pessoa, Saramago and Pirandello among others.

We see through their literary efforts how they reflect art, cultures, languages, and love telling stories, how they adapt a mask in their social context.

I’ve heard of this also, how they moved from India across Persia into Arabia with clarity.

Pardarar is Persian for storyteller. I am the Naggal which means the transmitter in Persian. Naga is The Serpent King in India.

Your story is being retold in Arabic with 1,001 permutations.

Yes from the vulgar Arabic tradition to a Latin form of learning.

Scholars say the four languages with the longest tradition are Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese and English. One can say English is the language of the cultured barbarians.

Ah, so it is. They are spoiled ill-tempered children, rather crass and despondent types, prone to violence, whining at high decibels practicing cold-blooded expensive revenge.

The Chinese stayed home, the English colonized, enslaving distant lands and Sanskrit some say, the most beautiful of all languages for its precise beauty, extended from India to the Southeast. Arabic has always been our tongue and well received.

Magicians, shamans, Griots and storytellers have much to learn from you.

Omar handed him a book of stories. This is a historically intractable farrago of empirical evidence.

I see, said a blind man off stage.

Many thanks, said his friend, accepting the parchment.

Have you noticed, Omar said, How people here have a talent, a unique ability to disappear.

Yes, I’ve seen how, after experiencing inner visions they vanish. Mysterious manifestations are invisible energy. Poof. Everything is pulsating pure energy.

They are descendants of the Jinn. According to The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Borges, Islamic tradition holds that Allah created angels from light, Jinn from fire and men from dust. Jinn were created 2,000 years before Adam. They begin as clouds or strange pillars and depending on their desire, take the form of men, jackals, wolves, lions, scorpions, or serpents.

By listening to the conversations of angels in the lowest heaven they obtain knowledge of the future and impart this to chosen humans capable of using talismans and invocations for magical performances.

Yes, said Omar. The stronger their identity and the deeper their connection to the spirit world, the easier it is for them to manifest in a place when they need to be there. They disappear like magic. They don’t leave a trace, or perhaps I should say they leave a sensation depending on the perception of the seer. It’s all light energy.

Can you do this.

Yes, when it’s necessary and people request help. I’ve lived with them, paying attention to how they listen, laugh, love, absorbing the knowledge, wisdom, and creation stories. It requires a kind of, how do I say, a presence, an empirical intuitive awareness of an ultimate spirit world.

We are flukes of the universe. It’s similar to cultures where people use their energies to become invisible. Being shapeshifters, tricksters, shamans and spirit guides, storytellers jump through a Time-Space portal. I am a sha’ir, a feared and respected poet shaman in my tribe.

Here’s a verse for you.

earth is made of sky

sky is emptiness

landscape migrates

wind drums the spirit of Raoul

Drummer of Death

Tuareg

blue men of the desert

Beautiful. Poetry began as song with music and drama, a song of grief for the dead.

The mind-at-large is happy & empty. Art is a revelation of an interconnected universe. Life is short art is long. We trigger the nerve impulses, muscle tremors with sensation and speech. We let the poem speak. Perception is the path of authenticity. It is a liberation outside one’s self.

Omar pointed at the nomad. My friend here is Li Bai, a Shisheng exiled poet sage in the Chinese tradition. He creates Sanwen, an intersection between essay, poems and fiction.

I am pleased for you. I wish you, your family, and your companion all peace and prosperity. Safe travels, Insha’Allah. Their hands touched their hearts with mutual respect.

The barber handed nomad an obsidian Neolithic black mirror from Anatolia created in 6200 BC. His smiling face was smaller. Hello Beauty. He felt lighter by a value of 1.

Objects in the mirror may appear closer than they are, laughed Omar.

It’s fine, a good length. Gracias. The barber trimmed eyebrows, brushed him off, removed the sheet, smiled, accepted Euros. Gracias.

Adios, he said to the barber.

Gracias, adios Senor, said Seville.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged