Ambivalent

Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.

A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire.

A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s thin, happy hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.

An old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point. Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

Laos

Many adults in the tribe, being programmed cynical skeptics living in fear, didn’t get it. Indigo kids trusted Omar's natural wild mind. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one, including silence.

He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.

We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Omar.

Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.

Singing oral traditions they experienced seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children moving through history heard, memorized, chanted and recited ancestor songs.

He was a forcestero, a person from outside the pueblo. A blind writer in exile, he loved birds and freedom.

Understory

“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” whispered Zeynep in Bursa doodling with magic pens on transparent paper in her elegant universe.

He'd had heard ALL of this before.

“Ha, ha,” he laughed seeing through their world of transparent stupidity temerity fear and never ending sense of confusion and so forth.

He’s seen it in the land of five red star golden Xiamen dragons

spilling black calligraphy ink on parchment and now witnessed it in Asia Minority

where bored tired people ate grilled meat played backgammon

and twiddled retired thumbs as metro cars

carried morose living dead humans dressed in black

mirroring their soul out to industrial wastelands

on the far edge of Ankara, before returning at night

filled with heavy hand carved simple wooden

caskets spilling wasted youth from the PKK war front near Serious on the Iraq border.

Gravediggers and headstone carvers had steady work everyday everywhere.

Emergency crews pried a suicidal man from below Bursa subway engines after being struck by lightning.

He walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.

A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, sister, mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming remembering."

The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie," but the woman didn't say anything. She played soil like a drum. She was sad remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.

Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.

Smoke from burning bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.

Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws lived here.

He passed chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.

There was a quick explosion of metal on stone. A man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.

The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes on Earth.

Kathmandu, Nepal

Buy From Me

“Buy from me!” sang the swarming young Black H’mong girls in Sapa, Vietnam.

They swirled around him like dancers at the faire, like gnats around a flame.

He was on fire and they wanted to save him.

The Black H’mong wear a deep dark blue almost black indigo cloth. After it’s been repeatedly washed and dried in the sun it takes on a glistening silver metallic sheen.

They crowded around him. He was a stranger in town. A stranger goes on a journey. Two kinds of stories.

Girls carried orange and green and blue and yellow woven bags around their necks. Inside the bags they had postcards of the Red Dzao people, narrow embroidered colorful wrist bands and thin hand made wallets. The wallets had a zippered pocket inside for secret money.

“My story is to sell in the street,” said Mo, all of 10. She wore a dirty green t-shirt. Her face was smudged with dirt. Her off white broken plastic Vietnamese sandals had seen their better day.

They cost 15,0000 Dong in the market. He gave her a blue 20. “Go buy some new sandals.”

She said, “Really?”

He said, “Yes, really.”

He waited in the food market surrounded by new languages, clattering dishes, the smell of frying food and a mishmash of costumed humans.

The Black, White and Flower H’mong. Red Dzao. Tay.

Mo came back with her new white plastic sandals in a pink plastic bag. She squeezed between two slurping H’mong women and sat down.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Ok, let’s get some chicken noodle soup.”

“Ok,” she said. Delicious.

Mo & My

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Suicidal Clare

A cell phone sang on the train between Marrakesh and Tangiers.

Omar rummaged in his robes. A depressed suicidal woman named Clare in Washington State was on the Suicide Hot Line. It may as well have been shit out of luck S.O.L. He switched from Arabic to English.

“Yes?”

“I am trying to save my insecure relationship from jealousy.”

“Jealousy’s a disease. It eats people alive. What are you looking for?”

“I am looking for love and meaning. Can you help me?” She had all the questions.

“I am only an emissary between people. Between you and your dream.”

“It’s a nightmare. What’s going to happen to me?” 

“You’d best be prepared for armies of touts, hustlers, beggars, thieves and economically loveless destitute men. They will want to escort, guide, lead, and administer their opportunity,” he said.

“Will they be gracious or benevolent with their tricks, traps, deviations and detours offering fake potential to save me? Will their well formed greed based on my desire, an illness of imaginary needs plead for my attention deficit disorder?”

“Yes. Eight hours on the ground in Morocco will seem like twenty-four. You’ll become a character in your own low budget film. It will open in small art theaters. You’ll be all the characters in the comic tragedy.”

Listening to Omar, I imagined everything as the suicidal woman’s voice assaulted the blind man.

Clare was too poor to pay attention.

She was beat. Omar knew Clare would be an expendable extra in an independent film. If she didn’t get real smart real fast she’d be lost in the drama. She needed a new identity theory. She’d change her name to Clarification.

The story was complicated with many jump cuts.

I remembered Ann, a New York literary agent’s advice. “Keep the big themes in mind and give us strong narrative structure.”

“Why? It’s not linear or logical.”

“I can only represent you if your work has these ingredients. Publishers want books for a general readership. It’s a tough market now. 175,000 books were published in this country last year.”

“I’ve survived markets in many countries Ann. It’s a miracle I’m alive to tell the tale. Traditional publishing is all about marketing, branding, product, price and placement with a hook.”

“True. It’s too disjointed and sporadic as it stands. You need to express more artistic and emotional beauty. I expected more from your time in Vietnam. I want to feel what you felt. I want you to expose your vulnerability. I want to detect patterns and opportunities.”

“Vietnam was FUBAR, Ann. Like Iraq, like any conflict.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

“Oh, I see.”

“This is honest work Ann. Memoirs and stories are about hunger. Some are even about food. This is edgy gonzo shit. It blends creative nonfiction with memoir, travel writing, literary journalism, social autopsy, and magical realism. I’ve asked myself, who or what has come alive? I’ve let it speak. I’m a conduit.”

“Tighten it up and send me your revisions. You can’t be a one-trick pony in this business. I need to make 15% off your genius because I’m the expert. What else are you working on?”

“At the moment I’m traveling with Omar, a blind Touareg Berber from Morocco who lives in a Spanish cave with a tribe of survivors after 9/11. He’s one hell of a storyteller and we’re sharing tales. He’s given me a stack of paper higher than Everest to read and revise. His daughter is a word-weaver working on a new narrative structure in an isolated Spanish pueblo. Together we’ve weaved 180,000 words so far. It’s about levels of personal and spiritual awareness, emotional growth, 9/11 repercussions, economic terrorism, religion, cultural prejudice, and healing.”

“What’s your hook in fifty words?”

“How oral traditions, myths, and truths are passed in verbal form from generation to generation in a metaphorical way. Stories are primarily a comic vehicle for moral instruction or spiritual guidance. Tragic narratives have been overused since the Greeks and Europeans. A tribe’s customs and structure...Themes are healing, authenticity, awareness, alienation, loneliness, boredom...it’s just a fucking book for God’s sake ...sheets of paper inside two pieces of cardboard...we’re breaking up Ann. I can’t live with him and I can’t live without him, this blind muse of a seer. I’ll call you when I get back to the states of conspicuous consumption. To the states of amnesia.”

Meanwhile, Clare changed long distance carriers to get a better plan. She failed to plan and planned to fail.

She whispered to Omar on a tenuous connection, “I played a willing manipulative victim. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted people who loved me to feel guilty and responsible for my suffering. My life is fear and ignorance. I collapsed inside my chaos, fear and grasping. I had to ask for help.”

“I see,” said Omar in a clear clairvoyant voice.

“I tried a walking meditation. It was really hard. I crawled. I walked. I tried to run. I collapsed into the quicksand of my neurosis. I wanted to fly like an eagle. My monkey mind went nuts. I slowed down sensing a new beginning inside me, inside my life. I walked on the curvature of the earth.”

“Marvelous. You have to break down before you break through.”

“I need to see you,” she said. “Where can I find you?”

“At Paleolithic caves south of Ronda.”

Before their connection died Clare related a quick story.

“There was a horrific accident.”

“What happened?”  Omar knew what he didn’t know.

God and Allah and the devil are in the details.

“Crazy men took planes and crashed them into city sky scrapers. The big apple.”

“I see.” He paused to hear more. It was a learning tool he picked up moving through the world’s worst nightmare manifesting historical fairy tales where Poverty and Wealth raised children named Expectations.

“Yes,” she said, “it was shocking.”

“Has the healing started?”

“Healers are working overtime. It’s going to take forever,” she stammered.

“Yes,” he said, “17,000 children in the world starve to death every day. Poverty is the real terrorism.”

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s just a thought.”

She couldn’t believe he didn’t know. Media masters in her right wing country had assembled their militant word/image arsenal and persuaded, cajoled, sold, exchanged, blasted, admonished, punished, harangued and scared them shitless, informing them how it affected their little world.

They ate fear like there was no tomorrow.

She was one weak sister. Being depressed and suicidal didn’t help. Friends, family and media convinced her the world was one huge scary place and she was a small expendable organism. Her habitat was on a well-exploited fault line. They sold her fear, healthy doubt and compassionate uncertainty in a nice neat little package. She consumed the whole enchilada.

“Omar and his friends knew many would remain in their complacent darkness,” said a veiled woman in the compartment.

They turned to her.

“It was very comfortable there. They would always live in shadows, oblivious to historical truths blinded by five senses, colors, sights, sounds, vibrations and frequencies. They were transparent sheep. It went right through them. Clear through.”

“How do you know this?” said Omar.

“Their world is made of glass, their vision obscured by ignorance and compliant stupidity. They needed a large dose of painkillers and glass cleaner for their belief windows. Tears softened their pain. They wiped down the days of their demise,” she said looking out windows flashing their reflections. She had old deep wise eyes.

“How do you see this prophecy?” said Omar.

“My name is Rose. I am a seer. I was born in the dark of the moon. I remember the future.”

“Where do you come from and where are going?”

“I’m like you and your companion here. Passing through.”

The three of us were very comfortable with the dark arts, energies and manifestations.

The Heart Sutra said, ‘emptiness was form and form was emptiness.’

Weaving A Life Volume 4