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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Entries in story (467)

Friday
Mar232012

pee wee play

a kid who had no idea
what was going on besides i want
grabbed for the yellow plastic ball
mine mine mine he screamed in Lao demanding

ball kid gripped tight
grimace
pulling away

suddenly 
four armed pee-wee power stranger rangers
with interlocking plastic
red, yellow, green, blue 
guns entered the fiasco 

hand it over or else
we blast you with our supersonic death ray
grabbing kid looked astonished
distracted

ball owner ran away
laughing, you can't BE serious

 

Tuesday
Mar202012

Taureg

Tuareg Berbers in flowing blue robes meandered through his dream.

A hustler on his bike materialized out of thin air.

“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes by bike. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”

“Why should I?” 

“Great morning prices.” 

Five hundred years ago this guy would have been on a camel in his burnoose tending his flock in the Sahara. He’d be planning to invade Spain, married to a beautiful Berber girl with dark seductive eyes, had ten kids and conquered the Iberian peninsula in his spare time.

Now he was on a 50cc imported European bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slick black hair and grinning with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.

Used to multiple dimensions and shifting frequencies the wandering ghost was passing through the transition machine being assaulted by monosyllabic well meaning idiots taking him for a fool.

Only the fool and children spoke the truth.

All the hustlers were released on parole for good behavior. They were out. They had no idea who, what, when, why, where and how he’d arrived in their jurisdiction. They lived in an inverted paradigm. He was a hunter gatherer of words and images. Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence — Metis — a hybrid form.

Wednesday
Mar142012

Metis

As an entomologist, a hunter-gatherer with Metis, a cunning intelligence, seeking visual epiphanies, he opened his aperture to f/1.4 and let in light. All of it. Blinding light, prisms of kaleidoscopes, muted spectrums in waves and particles guided his vision to see and stop time. 

Manipulate a tool. A well designed black foreign range finder. A camera obscura. It had the finesse of a magnifying glass, a Hubble telescope looking into an expanding infinite universe, illuminating distant black holes sucking matter into a void. He couldn’t see the black holes but he knew they were there.

It was one thing he carried. He started carrying it in Nam.

It was just a tool. It allowed him to stop time. Divide time in two.

The kairos of his eye allowed him to discriminate intuitively. An eye and a mirror. It refined his being, one with the subject, how silence worked, a detached observer, a photojournalist. How to disappear inside the scene, move with the quickness of a wild animal, see, visualize, anticipate the impending decisive moment stalking his prey with cunning. How to freeze, compose in the viewfinder, breath, squeeze, advance with a quick flick of the opposable thumb, load, unload, develop, fix, print, label, and file his work. Film was his prayer wheel.

Monday
Mar122012

Mythstory

Shovels plow into archaeological deserts reflecting passion and curiosity.

An archaeologist inside a tomb waving Diogenes’s lamp yells, “Every bit we dig out tells a little more about the story.” They unearth fragments of a story revealing institutions, customs and cultures.

A bird presses her breast to a thorn to make herself sing. There is an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. 

“Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

I am the thorn, bird, wing, feather and air. My thorn is a claw, a sharp definitive talon for tearing meat from white bones. Satisfying my hunger along the Tao.

I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist. My specialty is languages. Lost tongues.

“Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities,” according to Wade Davis, anthropologist.

Wandering deep into the Tarim Basin along the Silk Road in Central Asia I discovered the Tokharin language and Afansievo culture dating back 4,000 years. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorations. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA, based on an Iranian dialect.

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions, once stated, “Myths tell only of that which really happened.”

Myths suggests that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth has been defined as truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place. The world is a sacred story.

Wednesday
Feb292012

Tiwa language - Taos

She said, It’s a patriarchal 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 your 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.