Book of Amnesia, Volume 3

Gonzo journalism. Creative nonfiction. Jazz prose poetry.

Life experience. System analysis and social autopsy.

Genius kid friends share adventures and stories.

This is a flawed masterpiece.

Everything you need to know is in this book.

This work incorporates stories from Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia and Utopia.

Book of Amnesia, Volume 3

ISBN: 9798859766413

Babble Fish

A Bursa schoolgirl waiting to be grilled maternal fish bait stood at a bus stop with a cell phone implanted in her cerebral cortex. Her mom connected, “Are you alive?”

“I dream I am a free person in a free country. I've escaped the tyranny of what if’s and maybes. I have grit.”

“Enough babble fish jack-o-lama-trauma,” said Zeynep the Director. “Cut to the chase singing songs with abundance, wonder and gratitude."

Ms. Linguist picked Mr. I Love History up. They screwed. She dropped him off. He never paid now. He always paid later.

“Life gives you test first and the lessons later,” said Zeynep. “Blind love with a little luck is a never ending adventure.”

Stressed out over-medicated Turkish kids carried bags of fresh brown bread, black olives and poisoned red apples home to mommy dearest here’s something from my secret garden.

Weaving A Life, V1

Hand Wings

She spoke with her hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed of writing a short story, perhaps flash fiction.

Nervous, she selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony summit. She opened a black notebook. She made a pot of green tea. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

Her story emerges from nothing. Discover a point of departure, a direction.

She drew a picture. It looked like this.

An illusion of a mirage - the soul filled with silence, an abyss in which the whole world disapears beneath the pressure of a single thought, memory, look.

Meaning and Sense.

Meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself.

Sense cannot stay still radiating out in directions that divide and subdivide. The sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.

 

Every August

“Tell us a story,” said kids.

"I’ll do my best,” said a Zen monk. "I heard this story from a friend in The Windy City and it’s stranger than creative nonfiction. Somebody said August is the cruelest month. The hottest. A local 15-year old girl killed herself yesterday with a single shot to the head. Makes you wonder who, when, where, how and big WHY.

“Last August it was M in Chi town. The perfusionist. She called a wrong number out of desperation and I inherited the inevitable task of talking her through the drama of her life. I answered the phone in Tacoma and kept her on the suicide hot line. It produced basic peace of mind for her. I created poems and an intense piece entitled The Last Several Pages about a book she was reading. She said was going to join a procrastinators club but kept putting it off. She married a real estate salesman. They lived happily ever after.”

"Walking through fire," said Omar the blind author of A Century is Nothing.

"It was a tough one. All about listening, recognizing faces of fear, seeing truth. Letting go. Moving on. Finding balance.

"Another August rolled around. Out of curiosity I called one of those 900 relationship toll-free numbers and left a message: Independent orphan seeks open-minded spirituality adept woman for casual relationship and friendship.

"Did you get any response?" said Omar.

"Three. The Relationship Express hummed along tracks stopping at stations named Loneliness, Emptiness, Friendship, mid-life Crisis, Ticking Time Bombs, Endless Conversations, Rhapsody of the Disenchanted, Still Looking After All These Years, and Where’s The One? It zoomed past scenic views of Depression, Melancholy, Trust, Hope, Anxiety, Doubt, and Fear.

"I transited into the listening role with a couple of new women from Montana facing self-discovery, broken relationships and renewal. We're riding the range, mending fences, and setting up new parameters. Now I love women, yes sirree, well all right then this curious nature of heart-mind making new connections. I’m not saving anybody. All the stations have various levels of becoming. Passengers stuck on personal growth levels bang heads and hearts against illusions grasping their Gestalt, shattering mirrors and delusions. They work out in private emotional, physical, spiritual fitness centers. Levels replace levels. Each level has a center. The vortex is the equilibrium, the source."

"We are works in progress,” said Omar.

"I’m just doing my work.”

“That’s a powerful statement,” said Omar.

"Yes it is. Now I wouldn’t be the first person to say it’s healing work but I’ve learned to listen. Not all the clowns are in the circus. I make it perfectly clear to these kind ladies that I am not in the rescuing business anymore. Nope. No way. Honesty is the best policy and I’m not in the mood to waste our time and collective energies establishing a Heavy Deep & Real relationship. HDR.

"The emotional bottom line is they’re looking for a kind, sensitive man who won’t screw around and fuck up their lives. They’ve been cheated on, dumped on and left taking care of the kids. They need someone who will just listen to them without saying, ‘I can fix it.’ They know what’s what. They know how the world works, how the heart beats. They have their own toolbox. You’ve gotta have a good tool box."

"Tools. Couldn’t agree with you more, " said Omar.

"We’re all passengers on life’s train," said a Zen monk.

It’s the Circus Train!

A fall loon circles above schools of minnows. I stand in Puget Sound shallows as the Florida circus train rolls north. I yell and wave amid swirling dervishes. Rapid tides breath in and out.

“It’s the circus people. Step right up under the big Irish bog top.”

People wave from their moving life station. Tired eyed circus veterans stand next to clowns filming water lap land. They reload memories into instamatics. Midgets peer over the edge of an abyss next to sturdy muscular mustached roustabouts.

Everything they need in their magic portable city is on rolling stock - water trucks, tents, buses and animal cages. A bright red ‘For Sale,’ sign in a train window. Someone decorated a rolling window with a plant garden spilling into water vapor. Another displays a hanging toy elephant.

They live their dream life on rails. Caged people living with watered and fed animals. Routines: set it up, do the show with all the temerity of tenacious trainers, take it down, pack it up, load it up rolling miles this gleaming circus waving hello goodbye as ocean waves a silver fish and one sparkles skyward.

When they reach the Canadian border they reverse engines to roll east through Big Sky country toward winterized Florida.

Rare dawn light passes sleepy stations bathed in dew diamonds.

Riding the rails follows spirit journey.

“The simple way is to listen, detached, share and establish levels of responsibility, limitations and boundaries remaining open to the big picture,” said a monk.

A shadow carrying a candle passed them in the dark.

"Not too much wisdom and not too much compassion, whispered a wandering monk climbing a Cold Mountain toward a bamboo cabin sanctuary.

"Who are you?" said a child.

"I am a wandering monk."

"Where are you going?"

"To gather medicinal herbs for tea."

"Would you care to join us later?"

"Yes. We all have (a) ways to go."

"That’s a powerful story. Your friend is onto something there. She touches what people deal with in their daily lives formless form and emptiness. It’s not fiction. Or is it? Is it a lie layered with your imagination to make it true?”

"Good question. Omar speaks and writes from the heart-mind. There are people who don’t want to hear this stuff, but say hey kid, they can take it or leave it. I’m willing to take her at her word. It’s about the human condition."

"Well said. Life is something to be lived and not talked about. What say, shall we rest here awhile, enjoy some food, companionship and a siesta?"

Everyone gathered in a sacred circle. It was all light in their interior shamanistic landscape.

Weaving A Life, V2

A Child Named Magic

Ready! yelled a girl off stage.

Camera! said a boy.

Action! said a stunt person named Altman in the role of director.

Where are we going? asked a child named Magic.

Down a road, counseled a tribal elder. A long and dangerous road. A path filled with adventures, steps, stumbles, waterfalls, clogged rivers, blue sky, and heavily mined paths. We will face detours, tales, diversions, cliffs, fragile rope bridges, animal habitats and playful parallel narratives. We will explore rivers, valleys, mountains, passes, and edges of consciousness beyond anything we’ve known or dared to dream.

We'll learn from extraordinary people, explore distant places, smell new fragrances acknowledging our authenticity, said a woman storyteller.

Burmese writer in exile

*

We'll study 26,000 year old paintings carved on stone walls, travel into children’s voices and become old bleached bones of our ancestors, said a child. We'll live in Spanish crypts with names, dates, family histories chiseled in sharp gray mountain rocks that will cut you like a knife. Our blood will coagulate in time’s river.

You will see the word eternity scrawled with ink on a stained white napkin held up to a forty-watt light bulb in Cafe Paradiso by an old toothless man with a knit cap pulled down over his eyes. He will burn this word, said an elder.

Tribal voices spoke.

Think of it as a small sacrifice, an offering, a form of suffering.

The river of life will wake you up, said an elder. You go up river and reach pools. They are as quiet as your mind in deep meditation. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero Homo Sapiens. You are water, stones, vegetation, soft green moss, animal skulls, blue sky, nature and sound. The sound is water. It is soft. It is all you know.

You sit in the middle of everything pure and simple. It is all you will ever need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice with tools. You will inhale his death and exhale his life. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to pay for their sins, to accept the responsibility of their life.

You will memorize every silent sound and carry it with you. It is light and very portable. It will divide and multiply its flowing vibration around rocks in the stream. You are a rock and a stream. Amplification of clear water sound is a single bird throated song. Short immediate. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby.

It will wake you up, as I said. You pay attention. You fly away and we will never see you again. We know where you are and see you’re safe, blessed by the sound, pulse and flow being part of the river. Its magic spirit is strong. It’s flowing through civilizations, its adventure down, down, down. It’s distributing itself along the way. The stream is never ending, never beginning. As above so below.

It is the stream of life.

Listen to the energies. They will swallow you. You will be absorbed into the flow and you will be still. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, their wildness, purity unimpeded, reflecting deep pools below open shadows. You are the flow.

We move forward. Living in the past is time consuming. Nothing behind. Everything ahead. We pay attention. The road gives us our fate. Fire begins with one ember.

Funny, said a child. Someone along the way said it wasn’t the mountain they thought was difficult but the pebble in their shoe.

True. We will meet people and establish a mutual form of simple heart-mind language.

Is it paved? asked one, this so called road of language?

With good intentions, phrasal verbs, grammar, and simple present continuous obscure contextual meaning, answered one.

I’ll believe it when I see it, said someone in shadows.

Is that a detour sign up ahead? said a forward observer. He was so far forward it scared some of the tribe. He was out there, testing frequency shifts.

They suspected he had a psychic ability to see stuff that hadn’t happened yet and they were at a loss, trying to figure it out. They had to trust him. They released their fear, healthy doubt and uncertainty. It was beyond, well beyond their comprehension. He mumbled things like, You can’t step in the same river twice, sharing stories, histories, legends myths, dreams, and illusions.

Omar, Ahmed, and tribal survivors didn’t know if he just made the stuff up out of sheer boredom or if it was the truth of history. Much to their amazement while others carried a lot of stuff like emotional baggage, fear and genetic uncertainty, he kept it simple.

His pen sketched and scribbled notes. Pencils and colors danced across Moleskine pages. They noticed in their simplicity and sympathy he carried a kid’s watercolor set. He used river streams and tributaries to mix paints. He splashed pigments left, right and center.

He loved making Fibonacci spirals. They couldn’t figure him out with their subjective abstract sense data perception tools so they relied on trust, instinct, blind faith and a crazy thing called love. Love, a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor drove bus #11.

Passion created and destroyed.

They were blessed by their limitations. He used life to create art and used art to criticize life.

Many adults in the tribe being programmed and conditioned cynical skeptics didn’t get it. Indigo kids were clued in to his natural wild mind and trusted him. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one.

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

We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Ahmed. Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.

They sang oral traditions.

They experienced seasons, celebrations, ceremonies, rites, and magic.

They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children heard, memorized, chanted, and recited songs of their ancestors.

Weaving A Life, V4