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.

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.

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.

trade sex for security

He sat at an Indonesian warung, a cheap food place offering white virgin rice, spicy chilly, egg, green veggies, tempe, tofu, deep fried crackers, on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

Smokers called it the Berlin Wall because they could smoke away from the inquisitive prying eyes of parents and administration moles. Desk jockeys in green plaid. Hot and sticky tropics. He’d escaped from the tyranny of noisy educational sad robots trapped in their futile expectations of perpetual childhood.

An illiterate village woman piled her trash near a grove of banana trees. She lit a fire. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Smoke curled around a man pushing his chipped blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cheap cloth, simple tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and basic household goods. Rolling wheels through neighborhoods.

Cumulus clouds gathered momentum.

Nearby were yelling village people. A tall thin woman teased her 4-year old monkey boy child.

Pregnancy was her ticket out of hell, loneliness and misery.

In world villages you traded sex for security. Father ran away to impregnate new victims. A mother tormented the kid. He cried. She laughed at him. She created a mini-monster. A boy who hated women now and later. He was dependent on them for food and affection.

In the future he’d kill her with a sharp machete. A mother and daughter uttered primal grunt sounds. A mother combed her daughter’s hair scavenging follicles for nits and lice. Protein. Human evolution.

Crying children. Perpetual distractions. Emotional zombies, minus seven. Time=death. Life is a temporary condition.

displaced aggression

She pedals her New Star bike into Siem Reap for iced coffee. It's cold and delicious. Men play chess slapping wooden pieces, gesticulating at high decibels. 

Kick boxers on a plasma screen pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of invisible millions with displaced latent aggression after a recent genocide.

WHAM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM! YES!

Saturday and Sunday afternoons are filled with masses of boys and men in cafes screaming at a television. 

KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!

Idle men sit in shaded empty white tourist vans waiting for bodies brushing dust. 

Looking busy is fun.