51 Days in Turkey

Ebru had apartment keys. A broom and mop. Certified by Deep State Central Cleaning Company. Dust my room.

Alerted to transcendental shifts by Ebru, the bald strapping German TEOL teacher paid 170 Lira to take a Dolmus bus seating twelve through Giresun, careening up and down hills as the driver played an aggressive horn past sad-angry husbands, sad-angry wives, morose backpack kids, ebullient silver fish sellers, grizzled tea men huddled in shady alleys, hawk-nosed women chattering laundry, despondent boy clerks soaping glassy watch out time windows seeking clarity, while negotiating twists, turns and exists to reach a harrowing slick 65-degree upward slope leading to a white apartment bordering The Department of The Forest at the end of the yellow brick road.

He unlocked the door. Five empty freezing rooms.

The kitchen counter displayed empty soda bottles, a black plastic bag of cheap harsh stale tobacco, a box of lavender herbal tea flowers, 1/2 jar of Nescafé, one white coffee cup, one spoon, a sharp knife, a fork in the road and one bright yellow plate.

On a white laminated shelf was a first edition of Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, signed by the author.

“Read this,” said Silence, the loudest noise in the world.

Next to it was a black key for a teachers’ cabinet at TEOL.

“Call Trabzon,” the German man informed Ebru. “We have an MIA.”

She rang Sit Down in Trabzon.

“Lucky Foot took a hike,” she said.

“Call out the SWAT team and dogs. Hunt him down. Kill him with extreme prejudicial kindness.”

She called SWAT. The line was busy.

The German returned to TEOL and gave Ebru the key. She approached the cabinet. A rancid smell smashed her nose. “What’s that god-awful stench?”

Gagging, she threw up all over a teachers’ desk littered with empty tea glasses, cell phones and half eaten Simit pretzels. Regaining her composure she approached The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari (1920).

She heard a ticking sound. Maybe it’s a bomb. I should call the bomb squad.

They arrived. A man in a bombproof origami suit applied a stethoscope to the front panel. Yes, something is ticking.

He drilled a hole and pushed a microscopic eye into darkness. A mirror inside the cabinet reflected a thin piece of pulsating metronomic metal. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

“We’ll have to open this with thrilling caution. Get the Die Rector.”

The Die Rector, an economist, knew what to do. “Let’s assume there’s no fucking problem. Give me the key.”

Ebru handed it over. Everyone backed up hard drives.

The Die Rector, 56, who was scheduled for a heart-valve transplant in January, unlocked the door.

Inside was The Language Company by Zeynep, class rosters, green, yellow, orange highlighters, a magnifying glass, telescope, world globe, hourglass, a bag of hazelnuts, radioactive isotopes, a red rose with thorns, a dissolving image of a smiling ghost playing with Lone Wolf in a mountain meadow, a mirror, a dozing Black Mamba, a high voltage Dream Sweeper Machine from Hanoi, a Honer blues harp in the key of C, a magic carpet, one sugar cube, a glass, spoon, dry tea leaves, an empty bottle of Xanax, a ticking metronome, a bamboo forest, dusty footprints and rusty loudspeakers squawking:

We are Authority, Power and Control. Surprise!

Two things happened. He saw his reflection and suffered a minor heart attack. The aggressive Black Mamba struck him in the neck, injected 100ml of venom and slithered away to survive another day in paradise.

The victim collapsed writhing on the floor. He died in two minutes no more no less.

Ebru screamed, Oh no.

The bomb squad man stopped the metronome. “Time has ceased. Call an ambulance.”

The German called the Trabzon orifice. “We have a D.O.A. Die Rector in rigor mortis.”

“That's your problem, not our problem. You deal with it,” said Trabzon. “Don’t bother us with petty details. No evidence means no case. Die Rectors are a dime a dozen.”

51 Days in Turkey

Bursa, Turkey

Taos

Other looked on with pure heart awareness. A woman named Raven (Corvus Corex) shared a talk story.

One day I returned to the Taos Pueblo. It was over 100.

Dry dusty silent heat.

“Find something that speaks to you,” said a Tiwa Native American woman.

I walked past their cemetery where 150 women and children died when the church was burned during a Hispanic and Pueblo revolt in Taos after the American occupation in 1846 by U.S. forces. Wooden crosses scarred by sun, heat and dust stood in haphazard rows on brown ground. Plastic flowers. Names of children and elders chiseled in wood. A black and white rosary draped on a small cross marked a burial ground.

“Due to shortage of space we bury the new dead on top of the old dead,” said the Tiwa woman.

Hard soil. Wooden crosses stood at angles in the heat. White black and brown crosses faded in sun. Names, ages, children, parents, flowers, and rosaries slept inside a small adobe wall. The old bell collected dust in the burned out charred remains of the church steeple.

The screams of the trapped women and children echoed as the attackers poured their modern civilization of guns and religion into the church. One moment it was quiet and then you heard children screaming and there was no place for them to go, no chance.

“We left it that way,” the Tiwa girl said to pale faced visitors standing silent seeing. She disappeared, a vapor of spirit, a reminder of where they were and how they’d come to this place in the dust below sacred mountains and sky.

Of all the pueblos in New Mexico the Taos Pueblo has the most magic, the deepest significance. Power. It sits on hundreds of thousands of acres, all sacred Indian ground, sacred forested mountains, with sacred rivers and lakes. Adobe brown buildings stand stacked on top of each other to the sky. Blue doors. Wooden ladders. Red chilies hang in the sun. It is a hieroglyphic of habitats of ancient homes, fortress and sacred living space.

A young brown eyed Tiwa woman explained their life; language, the small adobe cooking kilns for baking breads and pies, how they mixed straw and mud forming adobe buildings, maintained dwellings and the number of people living on the pueblo and those on connected reservations.

“A matriarchal society. No women sit on the fifty member tribal council. Tiwa is the language on the Pueblo and a pure oral transmission. Nothing is written down. Sacred words. Tiwa means - wee-who,” she said.

“It means when you give, expect nothing in return. When you give you open that corridor of energy for yourself and your kind or your people, your vibrations, and it is filled with goodness. Great powers or awareness are within it so that it descends upon you and places in you whatever that gift is that you’re supposed to get. That’s what giving does. It awakens placement. It brings down clarity. We are people from the Source - the center of the circle of light. The No-Form creates the form. In the Tiwa language there are no nouns or pronouns. Things have no distinct concrete existence. Everything is in motion and seen in it’s relationship to other motions.

“The power is not in words but in sounds made in saying and pronouncing words. Each of us is a ceremony, a vibration of All-That-Is. We are the vast self.”

Inside a pueblo room, a woman called Sunflower painted intricate black and white spider web designs on her pots. Her gift streamed in and out weaving geometric colors. Her brush dipped into black ink, her left hand inside the pot turned it as she etched a black line. Diamonds, circles, rectangles, a sun eye, and sun god danced black on white.

I wandered across a small stream flowing from sacred mountains. It carried water to nourish the pueblo. Healing liquid. Water flowed during the 4th year of a ten-year drought.

I visited with men and women selling turquoise, beads, arrows, water, silver bracelets, postcards, drums, pottery, sharing stories. A man and his drums made from animal skins. Beadwork. Blue sky stones.

A brown dog slept in the dust of midday sun. Crude serviceable wooden ladders extended from earth to adobe roofs to clear blue sky. Indian women sat talking under Ramada lattice poled roofs. They waited for tourists asking new questions about old things hoping to sell their work.

A tired woman from Miami and three kids passed. Blond kids wearing floppy khaki hats carried water bottles. Having the time of their lives they shuffled boots in dirt studying ants. They’d never been this far west before.

A Tiwa man told his story about hunting. Furs and pelts hung on his hitching post walls. It was cool inside his place.

He wore a t-shirt of an American flag wrapped around an Indian on horseback shooting a buffalo, “Hunting, The American Way.”

“Yes,” said his long dark face and sad eyes, “I took my boys, when they were young enough, up into the mountains, the sacred mountains here and taught them how to hunt.”

They hunted bear, cougar, rabbit, fox and elk.

“A bear. How do you kill a bear?”

“In the lung. When they charge you hold your ground. One arrow in the lung. It stops them immediately.”

“Do they fight you, do they run?”

“No, they do not fight you. They stop. They die.”

An elk head with many points looked down from his wall. Fur huge brown eyes.

“And the elk?” 

“One arrow brought him down,” he said, pointing to his kill.

“How close did you get?”

“Ten feet. We tracked him for three days. We studied him well. I taught all my boys the art, the skill of the hunt. We started early that day, it was day three, we camped we tracked him for three days. We knew where he grazed, where he went for water, where he slept.”

The elk was big and eyed silent. No startled look. Black nose for smelling down wind, up wind, all the sacred mountain winds. Ten point antlers streaked with brown maturity.

“How did your boys do?”

“They learned well. I started them young. We all do but not everyone here learns as early as my boys. I learned from my father and he learned from his father. We took our packhorses left the pueblo and moved into the mountains, high in the mountains. We camped by the rivers and tracked their prints, their habits their patterns. Three days was all it took.”

“It’s the simplicity of it all. It’s the spirit of the animal isn’t it? You know their energy.”

“You become one with the animal. You become the animal.”

His bow and arrows hung on the white wall. Rock flints. Sharpened points.

“Then what happened?”

“On the day of the kill we were up before dawn. We broke camp. We moved to the river. The elk came down to drink and didn’t smell us. We were in the rushes, hidden. We were ten feet away. One arrow,” he said, pointing to the elk on his wall, “there, in the neck. He fell fast. We used everything.”

“My boys learned well. I have three of them and now they are grown and my work here is done.”

Weaving A Life (V4)

Story

“That smells nice,” said the garbage collector to the sage burner.

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themselves. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I meditate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

ART

Freedom

“We are caretakers of Mother Earth,” said the shaman girl.

“I want to swallow the world but I am too full of sorrow,” said one.

“I’m going to start a club for procrastinators,” said another, “anybody want to sign up for unlimited access?”

“Are your needs being met?” said Rose.

“I have a need for freedom and a freedom from need. Perhaps I’ll end up taking care of people like us,” said a girl named Hope. “I’m the last myth that dies.”

“Yeah, you can work in a day care center for adults.”

“That’s a-dolts.”

“Hah. We are all death deferred,” said Martha Ann, fixing her glasses with duct tape.

Seeing her experiment with optical illusions, a kid said, “Remember James Joyce? He said, ‘Wipe your glasses with what you know.’”

“Are you plagiarizing again?”

“No. It’s taken out of context.”

“Textile, tactile, texture, context, content, abstract, where’s it all going?”

“Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract,” screamed an abused child being whipped with a fishing pole by his neurotic mother in a wheelchair.

“Are we wondering or wandering?”

“Where’s eternity end?” said the astronomer kid.

“I’m going to study the bottom line,” said a boy raising a digit testing imprecise global economic market index indicators based on assumptions. “If we control the debt, we control the country.”

“International financiers and corporations run the show, babies. Politicians are their slaves.”

ART

Mandalay Palace

Uncertainty Principle

The world gave me a strong sense of querencia, a Spanish term for homeland, “a place - like a bull facing death in the ring -  where you feel comfortable dying.”  - Lorca

"I am a character in my own story," said Omar, "a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories."

"Wonderful, said Jamie. "I like the part about the sacred wisdom circle. It’s a magic story. Reminds me of a woman talking about her Ghost Dance. In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance magic is destined to return souls of those who have died. Is it my turn?"

"Sure Jamie, just keep it shorter than life because a reader doesn’t want to struggle if the narration is hard to follow."

"Yeah, said the kid. "This twisted tale may have too much Zen for some readers to wrap their head around. You become the thing you fight the most. Let’s see all the beauty and ugliness without hope or fear."

"Ain’t that the truth. What is the sound of one hand laughing?"

Someone in the tribe asked Point to tell them about the beginning of his wandering ways. Omar wrote it down and translated it into new languages for historians.

“Fly, fly. After a steady heavy rain a pregnant peasant woman regretting the instant she spread her legs out of loneliness and desperation to have a child and anchor a man to her with birth weight, propped her mop made of strands, discarded rainbows, as her solemn dispassionate morose husband shucked peas and removed garlic shells from their protective casing.

"After the sky finished crying and washing student street where parades of disenfranchised spoiled adolescent Chinese youth sought shelter from the storm and well after open windows released cello notes from a child sitting upright tuning her eyes to black notes on white pages with a determination to master the instrument as another music student hammered piano keys behind locked doors, flies gathered around brown sticky eggplant paste slowly dripping off a cracked plate with feelers extending their appetite toward a thin white butterfly leaving a green leaf."

“Food,” said the fly, “I love leftovers. Delicious. I survive on garbage.”

A speeding silver water particle whistled past mirrors at 186,000 miles per second. It collided with correlation. Speed and spin are mutually exclusive. The uncertainty principle. If you know the velocity you don’t know the position.

“It meets my needs. It’s not easy to find work in this country.”

“Hey, tell me about it. Have mirror will travel. Maybe you could write something like Mirrors For Dummies - could be a market niche, you know, for stressed out A-type personalities. The kind with too much dinero and way too much time. Reminds me,” the fly continued, “my ancestor said, ‘We’re not here for a long time but we’ve been here long enough.’ Know what I mean?”

"Years ago, a counselor in a room of Oregon veterans said,  ‘After a war everything is easy.’"

 A Century is Nothing

Write on your hand in Burma.