Survivors Talk - TLC 65

More Cambodians own a cell phone than have a toilet, said Rita. There are eleven million Khmer people with twenty million SIM cards. Ha, ha, ha. Priorities sing quality of life. Playing with a small toy prolonging adolescence our young generation talks yaks, chats, and texts enjoying cheap thrills. My condolences.

Goodbye and good luck to you and your family are our famous LAST words.

I am sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. The science of imaginary solutions regulates exceptions.

The beauty of travel, Lucky said to Zeynep, is my anonymous sensation in a crowd like you feel as a street photographer. Invisible. An outsider. After Vietnam flying from S.F. to Denver to see family before finishing my military time in Germany I became a ghost-self. Other. Passengers stared and averted their eyes. Guilt.

If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space.

I share field notes from Battenbang, Cambodia where I evolved for three months.

Men gather at 0615 for coffee, companionship, tea, lies and stories.

A fire roars inside the cement stove in the local java/tea shack along a muddy road. Orange and bright red flames heating water consume kindling. Stacked kindling stands like 12,000 orphans in 269 safe places exonerating memories of loss and abandonment.

Words crackle, spit, and dance with laughter's sensation of heat.

Survivors stare at a ghost-self writing/drawing in a notebook.

Khmer Rouge, The Organization, murdered everyone my age.

They are over forty and survivors of The Dark Years. They wear fresh pressed short-sleeved white cotton shirts and black pants. They talk about money, business, jobs, kids, wives, girlfriends, weather, facts, opinions, plans, construction projects, rice harvests, myths and fear of ghosts. Eating fried bread they drink brown tea and thick java. Spoons create music with glass class and style.

1.7+ million ghosts dance through silent conversations whispering, What if I die here? Who will be my role model? All my role models are gone. Feed me, feed me, cries a ghost to their family burning sandalwood incense.

No one talks about the past. Silence is golden noise. Men talk about the long now.

Some focus on another’s face hearing words discovering kindness intention and meaning. Others study cell phones or watch a Thai music video on a plaza scream at full volume. One hears an abstract conversation disguised as a peddler pulling his trash cart down the red muddy road squeezing air out of a worn plastic bottle summoning attention deficit disordered sellers waiting to hear wheezing AIR knowing they can pawn junk, an old family heirloom or a traditional wooden loom with or without cotton or silk threads where women wove white cremation shroud clothing for relatives long gone.

Living in the past is time consuming, said Memory. Keep me alive.

Ghosts live in the past, present and future. Leave it there, said one. Half our population is under thirty. They have no memory of the past. Education is the key. We missed our chance. The only chance I had was to run and hide in the jungle. My education was nature. Look at my hands. I know two things. Now I spend my life in an office rewriting our sanitized history. A tedious thankless job I'll have you know. And one more thing, I'd rather be writing than eating incense, if you get my meaning. We do, we do, said his friends cupping hot java jive sakes alive. History is time and geography is space, said a survivor. I disappeared by hiding where space folded, you don't say, Oh I do.

I realized my dream to be a gardener at a meditation retreat, said a thin 60-year old genocide survivor. White t-shirt, blue shorts and black flip-flops. His silent black eyes contained secrets.

How did you survive, asked Lucky. I ran away. First I hid in the jungle then I ran into mountains, deep, very deep, deeper than unconscious memories of life’s transient nature. I ran from the shadows of Death. I became a living ghost, a stranger to myself. Other. I survived hearing screams 24/7 from room 101 as generations slaved starved and died, hearing, witnessing brainwashed peasant soldiers murder everyone kids like you fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents all disappeared gone erased finished evaporated exterminated dead.

Yes, agreed Death. Everyone comes to me.

Khmer Rouge reign of terror: three years, eight months and twenty days.

I lived every one.    

When I thought it was safe I crawled out of slime crossing landmine paddies into a Brave New World. I stumbled over 1.7+ million bodies and bones, smelling, tasting, hearing seeing Death. Death bones in my dreams rattle freedom, food and family. My family is gone. I never sleep. Death sees me. Here, now. I feel it. I feel it closer than skin on bones, closer than white on rice.

It will take another generation before we adjust to breathing. Laughter is rare. My people have sufferedhopelessness and passiveness for twenty years. That’s a humbling life changing experience, said Lucky, yes I discovered life in a desperate situation.

They met every afternoon in fading light after torrid heat. Gardener waters red roses, flame orange bougainvillea, green ferns, purple orchids, hanging planters. Water rainbows cascade through white light coating green, sliding down stems, meeting petals. He smiles. Water disappears toward roots below the surface of appearances.

He sat curled up on a brown chair calm and silent watching Lucky mine an unexploded episode from a notebook. The gardener realizes a notebook, once used by Authority to write down names of the dead or soon to be, is now a potential source of liberation and memory.

I don’t know this tool, this machine, he said pointing at a plastic screen and floating artificial letters as Lucky played with twenty-six letters. I can’t read, no chance, it was all about surviving, labor, nature, planting, harvesting, scheming and deceiving, running, hiding, blending in, keeping your mouth shut. We work, breed and get slaughtered. Such is our fate.

A screaming voice from a nearby classroom wafted through orchids.

Quest-ions are forbidden!

Overworked, underpaid and undersexed teachers named Authority and Social Control said, Ask at your peril. Anyone with courage raising their hand to ask a quest-ion is shamed or silently beaten into silence. Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day. Conformity breeds conformity. Conditioning.

Curiosity is fatal, said Rita. Curiosity kills more humans than war, disease, lack of medicine and starvation. Humor, curiosity and courage are basic elements of intelligence.

Conversation’s silence attracted flies.

A gaunt man who survived The Dark Years from 1975-1979 wearing a dirty white hat ringing a hollow brass bell pushed his orange ice cream trolley through red dirt. He passed a woman unloading kindling. Men stared. Trembling eyes pursued life’s endless stream.

After Conversation died someone picked up a cell phone and called another living, breathing conversation. Hello, are you alive? Yes? Just checking. Have you eaten yet? No? I had rice and eggs. Tomorrow it’s lobster. Ha, ha, ha. Good luck to you and your family. Bye-bye.

Listening is a lost art, said Conversation. I don’t have a hearing problem. I have a listening problem. Most people don’t listen to understand. They listen to reply. Sullen suffering is a pervasive conversation.

People without love die from neglect.

You can say that again, said Silence.

People without love die from neglect.

The Language Company

star's story

How slow can you go?

Slower than a breath. 

Slower than stillness.

Slow slower and slower.

One night star bright moon light senses our mutual loneliness.

Star shows me scar marks on her wrists. My father died. I lived with relatives. They beat me. I tried to kill myself. Twice. I ran away. I became strong. I decided to live.

I met a man. I got pregnant. I had my son. He is 17 now. I studied Lao massage and worked for three years.

A good fool is hard to find.

Acrobatic spine torso. Ride the pony. Flexibility. Drive it home until dawn.

We are buried deep inside narrow dark muddy passages.

We are surrounded by women gossiping, telling stories in the market. They discuss the Lao woman with a tall foreign man. She inspects green beans. With theatrical brilliance she throws them back. Disdain. Too expensive. Poor quality. She negotiates greens, bamboo, vegetables.

You don't see foreign ghost spirits in this market.

 

About Face - TLC 62

“Such a querulous quandary laundry list of regrets, what ifs, and maybes,” said a vein-veiled mother sweeping hopes, plans, and dreams down a drain-o with should, would and could tyrannies.

Turkey witnessed a long lilting laborious laughing list littered with the bones of Hunters-Gatherers, phony Phoenicians, Romans give me your ears, Greeks, Hiatus, Coitus Interuptus, Arabs, Turkmen, Templar Knights, Mongols, nomadic pastoral hoards, Sultan-A-Mets from a Botox Bronx, Uighurs and literary rascals.

“The law of fear, uncertainty, healthy doubt, adventure and surprise in real time is implicit,” said Incense feeding dead ancestors their daily diet of guilt, shame, self-loathing and remorse fortified with essential vitamins.

A Turkish slave protected by a silk scarf hiding frontal lobotomy scars after perception was removed for analysis closed her balcony door killing world music. She didn’t hear wind-spirits sing dance and drum on shattered mirrors made of sand.

Bamboo leaves shuddered inside a kaleidoscopic reflection of sky, clouds and Lung-ta prayer flags above Lhasa. They danced with drifting chorten sage smoke.

Chinese boy-soldiers marched into a blind alley next to Rampoche Monastery on March 10th, Year Zero. They were surrounded by burgundy wrapped monks chanting, “Om Mani Padme Hum, Om...The Jewel in the Lotus.”

“Lock and load,” yelled Li Bow Down. “Fire. Ready. Aim.”

They blasted chanting monks.

“About face, save face.”

The Language Company

Two Zeyneps. I am sorry. TLC - 61

A wandering Mesopotamian tribe missed a crucial evolutionary step in their 10,000-year history. Collective schizophrenia evolved between Europe and Asian geographical worlds, two calibrations, two frequencies, two imprecise incomplete halves of one whole. Gestalt. Yin/Yang.

“Are we Asian or European?” said Zeynep the elder playing her cello resembling the human voice in a Bursa cemetery.

“Sadly,” said young Zeynep scribbling with black, red and blue ink on Moleskine parchment, “we'll never know our true identity. We suffer an existential identity crisis. 90% of Turkey is in Asia. We need talking foreign monkeys with clear pro-nun-ci-a-tion at TLC. Wow, it’s another day in a magical paradise.”

Zeynep knew her ABC’s. Always Be Closing.

Her grandparents had a restaurant near a Bursa shopping center.

He wandered in one day before going to TLC. Shy and curious she watched him writing and drawing. He smiled, Hello. She stared. He pushed red, green, blue and black pens across the table, turned his notebook toward her showing a page of color gesturing to materials and a chair, come and sit down. You can draw. It’s fun. She was curious with courage.

Trust. They became friends.

Zeynep and Lucky created art daily in a ravishing food zone.

Bored anxious depressed adults devouring their dreams, nightmares and anxieties with plain white yogurt swallowed shock and awe. Opium and lotus-eaters stared from deep vacuums with hard dark brooding eyes.

Want to make a deal? How’s it feel to be on your own with no direction home like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?

When Z or L made eye contact adults glanced away with fear, uncertainty and incriminating disbelief. Not to mention psychosis, repressed aggression and guilt complexes. They didn’t see regular professional strangers here, let alone one talking, laughing, playing and creating art with a kid as an equal.

Adults listened at 10% or less saying yeah yeah or I am tired with panache.

They asked Z many quest-ions without speaking.

What’s the melody? How can you revert to primal childlike innocence? Is the music in the cello? How do you get it out? Why do you risk being free and independent? How did you escape the tyranny of social conditioning? How do you develop your wings after jumping? Why are you always scribbling words or drawing or playing the cello? Do you have mental disorder? Are you on medication or meditation? Is it contagious this art and music process of creativity? Is it the food, air, water? Am I this or am I dreaming?

All of the above said Z. Good things happen when you take risks. You risk expanding your perception. You risk losing everything in the expansion. Are you prepared to lose everything?

Adults were afraid to express repressed feelings, too risky.

Rita entered the conversation: I know the feeling of fear believe you me when the bad people killed our families to teach us a lesson. Survivors are conditioned by this memory.

I am sorry are our three favorite words in Cambodia.

It’s the last thing 2,000,000 genocide victims cried out before a relative or a complete stranger slammed a shovel against their skull. I am sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Strangers threw their useless, lifeless, worthless corpse into a ditch all the rabbits ran singing, Must be the season of the witch.

One survivor said to another survivor, what a beautiful fucking mess. Help me drag this one away. You either let go or get dragged along, said a Buddhist monk lighting incense for world peace.

Same in China said Leo, We learn life’s hard bitter lesson to accept loss forever, I am sorry. What is the most beautiful word you know Zeynep?

Kindness. And yours? Food, said Rita and Leo.

Less talk and more drawing are essential in life, Z said. Experiment with circles, dots, triangles, squares, lines and curves to reach existential levels of realization. Connect the dots forward.

The asylum is a prison and protection, said Rita.

You create art to explore your sense of self and find out how you feel you are, rather than whom you think you should or ought to be, Z said, drawing her future.

Make the right choice for the wrong reason, Leo said.

Make the wrong choice for the right reason in the right season, Rita said.

Z discovered quest-ions were repeated. 1,001 quest-ions ran around her restaurant looking for answers. Quest-ions grew tired of repeating themselves. This is so fucking boring, said one quest-ion. We are abused. We are manipulated and rendered mute. Useless. Think of it as a test, said another quest-ion. Patience is our great teacher. I’ll try, said another quest-ion. Yes, said a quest-ion, these non-listeners have a distinct tendency to say nothing and say it louder than empty silence when they’re leaving, when their faces are turned away from eye contact, potential real heart-mind communication and growth.

Echoes drifted in through around silence and ignorance. I’ve seen that too, said a quest-ion, who, until this moment was silent. My theory is that it’s because of genocide, fear and ignorance. It’s also a delicate mixture of stupidity or indifference, said another quest-ion. I suggest it’s their innate Buddhist belief. They suppress their ego. Non-self.

Why’s the most dangerous quest-ion, said Lucky addressing quest-ions. Remember Leo asking why and ended up carrying shit at the Reform Through Re-education labor camp near the Gobi before becoming Chief of the Cannibals wearing an alarm clock around his scrawny neck reminding everyone of Time? Yes I remember said a timeless prescient quest-ion. Leo was one smart cookie, whatever that means. He figured out unique survival skills in a desperate situation. He knew the fundamental difference between book smarts and street smarts. Anyway before we drift off the subject, how do you explain fear, asked a quest-ion.

Rita - Fear is a basic instinct. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the amygdala. Flight or fight? Is it safe, eyes say scanning a potentially dangerous environment since Day One. You see it everywhere, all day, everyday all the scared uncertain eyes asking is it safe? They peek left, glance right, double check. The coast is clear. Let’s go. People ran away to survive. Instinct. People had a panic attack, started running and others would ask them a quest-ion like why are you running, who’s chasing you, where are you going or what’s the matter or when did you become afraid or why are you afraid, or why don’t you stay longer and the running one would keep going trailing abstract quest-ion words behind them like memories of dead or missing families or disembodied spirits or exploding landmines or molecules of indifferent breath. I see, said a quest-ion that explains everything. Yes, said an open-ended quest-ion. Being correct is never the point. 

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. We are assassins.

One more thing said a quest-ion eating fear try this.

Fuck Everything And Run away.

Or

Face Everything And Recover.

Quest-ions took the 5th. We refuse to incriminate ourselves.

Ignoring blind eaters Z traced ideograms, symbols and ageless archetypes with red, blue and black collective unconscious lines on white paper. She was blank paper, invisible ink and flow. Be the ink, she said. Be the paper. She connected dots forward.

I am a flow state.

Holding out two small hands she said, “I only know two things.”

They played guess which empty hand holds the answer to the BIG quest-ion. What is Life?

“That’s an excellent quest-ion to ask people as you pass through multifaceted adventures with an open heart-mind,” she said. “If you can hold it in your hand it’s not important.”

“You are a stream-winner,” said Lucky.

Red roses bled fragrance into blue sky turning it magenta.

Zeynep leaned across the table whispering an irrefutable truth. “All these adults were punished for asking quest-ions or dreaming. They’ve had creativity, curiosity and a sense of humor beaten out of them. They’ve been conditioned by fear.”

“That’s an unpleasant fact. There are two kinds of stories in the world,” said L.

“What are they?”

“A person goes on a journey, like us. A stranger arrives in a village, like us.”

“Some people never leave their village. It is their world.”

“The world is a village.”

Z and L laughed sang and played all day making a beautiful fucking mess.

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream....”

Zeynep said, “A work of art like this tome is never finished. It is abandoned with intuitive wisdom and courage.”

“I was abandoned at five. My mother left me for poliomyelitis in 1955,” said L.

“What's that?”

“It's an acute viral disease marked by inflammation of nerve cells of the brain and spinal chord. She was paralyzed from the waist down and lived her final twelve years in a wheelchair. She processed heavy frustration and anger. She took it out on her three kids and being the oldest I was first in line. She was a witch with a switch.”

“I see. My mother puts me in a box under the cash register when we get busy. That’s a form of abandonment. We have neglect in common. We learn to accept loss forever.”

“Seeing her do this to you makes me feel sad. She needs to keep you safe. Reminds me of lone wolves I met trapped behind fences away from mountain freedom. Maybe you can help her to think outside the box.”

“It’s my temporary fate. She means well, knowing I’m safe and she can keep an eye on me. It’ll stop when I grow taller and start helping out. I just imagine there’s no box.”

“It’s your sitting meditation practice.”

A stranger stood up in the restaurant. “Attention everyone. You came from somewhere else. We were all inside someone once. I am an exiled dissident North Korean nuclear rocket scientist living in Utopia developing invisible toxic laughing gas for export. Let’s create slave labor gulags and form collective socio-logo-gamma-ray-logical Anatolian ghettos with starving illiterate peasants morphing into a harmonious society.”

“We trust your vision,” drooled an eater. “Let’s take a vote. All in favor raise your hand.”

Hands holding bread crusts went up.

“All opposed?”

Falling hands crammed bread in gaping mouths.

“Let’s eat,” said the majority.

“What’s a vote?” said a woman dressed like a manikin.

A murmur ran out the door.

The Language Company 

Gili Air - TLC 58

After going cold Turkey he began this episode between dawn and noon on a ten-day December reprieve from a private Jakarta school. He sat on a green pillow at a Sasak warung, a small simple eatery.

Gili means water. The small island, one of three off the coast of Lombok had 1,000 residents and zero motor vehicles. 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 was big and blue. Across water Rinjani volcano meditated above grey clouds at 3,500 meters.

A Muslim cemetery with twelve small grey plots decorated with coral borders and eroded headstones rested in a grove of small trees. Weeds, trash and buried lives treasured memories.

Roaming Earth he discovered cemeteries in Lakewood, Hue, Donegal, Bursa, Grazalema, and Ratanakiri animist sites in Cambodian jungles where dead dreamed and he slept with shamans.

In 1999 his stepmother carried her husband’s ashes in a carved box through Colorado fall foliage to Sec. 9 Blk. 9 Lot 11A, Grave NGSW/MGSW at Mt. Olivet west of Denver. She placed them in the ground near his mother, Elizabeth (42-cancer) and sister Martha Ann (13-leukemia).

*

He was in Morocco on 9/11. Chance. Aptitude. Timing. CAT.

Pure luck and perfect timing, the secret of everything.

He teamed up with Omar the blind, a Touareg seer. After six weeks they moved to Cadiz for a month polishing A Century is Nothing.

Omar returned to Cueva De La Pileta caves south of Benaojan where he created 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings for archeologists and suicidal literary gnomes.

Lucky shifted to Grazalema, a small Andalucía pueblo for three months of winter writing with Little Wing, a weaver.

Across the valley was a cemetario near a small church. Empty white crypts held cleaning materials, rags, bricks and trowels. Behind iron gates plastic flowers, names and dates faded curling black and white photographs of the dead collected dust where a procession of men laid a forty-year old friend to rest. 

They slid his wooden casket into a long stone cold cement cavity and said hello to the blessed Trinity with fast fingers before returning to the tight white community of 2,300 for sherry and conversational memories about the shepherd who died alone.

Gray dolomite cliffs and peaks above crypts welcomed a watercolor sky as white, grey, orange and blue hurtled east. Egyptian vultures expanded wings on thermals. 

Lucky manipulated a rangefinder in fading light imagining interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and pueblo life. He focused down cavities cement shells and rectangular rows of empty passages named Eternity.

Invisible stories whispered desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors and silence.

Silence required air to reach the faithful. Silent stories evolving in silent stories exhaled a silent night of the pious silent in collective breathing. World’s cemeteries died at dusk.

Relatives watered red, pink, white, yellow roses in lost light.

A single drop of water on a leaf’s fragile edge reflected scattered clouds as an old Spanish woman, a sabiawith mystical abilities, stared over graves’ territorial expansion from her Grazalema balcony and down at a sleeping infant in someone’s arms as three juveniles wrestled near shuttered fruit shops among scattered orange skins.

She heard ash falling from a burning stick of meditation nonsense in Hanoi.

It whistled a white hair on a sliver of tongue’s laughter.

Hungry ancestor ghosts eating incense begged feed me, feed me.

The Language Company