Eat Fast or Starve

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots.

He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery.

They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in village shoe factories years and lives away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' gazing befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus.

It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

Walnut Story

A Zen monk related a story.

"Before becoming a monk I was an English teacher in an Experimental High School near Chengdu in Southwest China. One day I held up a walnut."

“What is this?”

They answered in Mandarin.

I wrote “walnut” and “metaphor” on the board. “This walnut is like a person I know, very hard on the outside. They are very safe and secure inside their shell. Nothing can happen to them. What is inside this shell?”

“Some food,” said a boy.
“How do you know?”
“My mother told me.”
“Do you believe everything your mother tells you?”

“Yes, my mother always tells the truth.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s good, but I wonder if mothers always tell their children the truth. Why? Because mothers and fathers like to protect their children and keep them safe. Especially young children. Now you are in high school and developing as a more complete and mature human being. It’s good to question things and find out the truth for yourself. Do you understand?”

Some said “yes,” others nodded passively.

“This walnut is a metaphor for the self. A symbol. The self that is afraid to take risks because they are “protected” by their shell. Maybe the reality is that the shell is empty. How do we really know what is inside.”

“It’s a mystery,” said a boy.

“That’s right, life is a mystery. How will we find out what’s inside?”

“You have to break it open,” said a boy with poetic aspirations.

“Yes, you or I will have to break open the shell, our shell, break free from the shell to know what is inside. That can be a little scary when we are conditioned and comfortable carrying around the shell every day isn’t it?”

“It’s our self,” whispered a girl in front.

“Very good. It’s our self, this shell and the mystery. We have to take risks and know nothing terrible is going to happen, like trying to speak English in class.”

“If we don’t break the shell we’ll never feel anything,” said another boy.

A girl in the back said, “it means it’s hard to open our heart. It’s hard to know another person and what they are thinking, how they are feeling.”

“You got it,” I said. “We’ll never experience all the feelings of joy, love, pain, sorrow, or friendship and miss out on life.”

This idea floated around the room as I juggled the shell in my hand.

“I know people who grow very tired every day from putting on their shell before they leave home. It gets heavier and heavier, day by day. Many carry their shell into adulthood. It’s like wearing a mask. They look alive but inside they are dead. But eventually, maybe, something important happens to them at the heart- mind level and they decide to break free from their shell and see what’s inside. They say to themselves, ‘This shell is getting really heavy and I’m so tired of putting it on and carrying it around. I’m going to risk it.’”

I smashed the shell on the table. It splintered into pieces. Students jumped with shock.

“There, I’ve done it! I smashed my shell. Can it be put back together?”

“No,” they said.
“Right, it’s changed forever. The shell is gone.”
I fingered small pieces of shell, removing them from the nut.

“See, it’s ok. Wow! Now it’s just an old useless shell. It doesn’t exist anymore. It’s history. It will take time to remove pieces of my old shell. Maybe it’s fair and accurate to say the old parts represent my old habits, behaviors, and attitudes. It happened. From now on I will make choices using my free will accepting responsibility for my behavior. And, I know nothing terrible will happen to me. I feel lighter. Now I can be real. That’s the walnut story.”

“Well,” mused a sad serious girl named Sylvia Plath, “I believe every living object; seed, flower, tree and animal has an anxious soul, a voice, sexual desires, a need for survival, and feels the terror at the prospect of annihilation.”

“Language dreams itself."

A Century is Nothing

1100 BC

My forward observer position witnessed young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. Hiding in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

My meals with a Gypsy family timed down Gades days with a simple breakfast of toast, butter, jam or muesli, a lunch of thick soup, fresh salad, bread, water, and a main course at 2:30 p.m.

I read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy.

We live in a world of forms.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds in September 2001.

Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenicians, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía they exchanged belief windows, values, attitudes, construction projects and 3,000 years of icon free Arabian art. It was about agriculture, water, light, form, and substance.

Equality was the word at a Muslim burial exhibit at the Mondragon Palace in Ronda.

Phoenicians discovered Cadiz in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir and traded amber and tin. It was a Roman navel base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies.

People developed agriculture as populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian Peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000-year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed established communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanded their nation-state.

The Museo de Cadiz was filled with Roman artifacts. Humans wandered through archeological epoch discoveries from settlements in Gades along the coast extending inland to Seville and Cordoba.

Travellers discovered estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos and rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery and faces. They examined vases, dynasties, ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, and utensils.

Three million-year old human remains slept in stoned chambers. Sharp sewing bones rested in dust.

I dissolved anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance in the wake up.

Weaving A Life, V1

Write Naked

            Earth peoples, oceans wave, celebrate life energy sex and harmonic forces, said Rita, What happened in the love hotel? Use your imagination.

            They paid a woman 3,000,000 Yen through a slot in the door. She gave them a key. It unlocked Akiko’s chamber of secrets. The room featured an American wild-west motif with an Indian chief on a white horse. Very cute, said Akiko. They stripped each other down. They took a long hot herbal bath exploring geography with tender lust. They jumped each other’s bones. It was in-out dialogue, pure passion. Show doesn’t tell, said Z.

            He toweled me down, said Akiko. I felt thick cotton noun fibers edge my thin shoulders, along my verb spine, weaving his fingers across my flat stomach, erasing, tracing water fingering my direct object jungle. Slow and easy baby, I sighed being his Shinto shrine as he gave me his offering. Our relationship ignored verbal language, said a blind Japanese masseuse in a love hotel.

            What conflicts exist?

            -Human vs. Human

            -Human vs. Nature already mentioned.

            -Human vs. ______><_______

            -Human vs. self. Do I or don’t I? Is it safe? Wiil it help me or will it hurt me?

            -Nature vs. Nurture

            Will someone playfully deconstruct the truth with literal facts to move the narrative along and get to the mind-at-large awareness of his or her experience, said Tran. I hope so, said Omar, A literary agent at a writer’s conference in Oregon said my writing was a word photograph jazz beat. She suggested throwing the narrative out.

           She said and I quote, Pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. I would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words, Yeah, said Rita, What did you say? I told her some novelists do exactly the opposite of what they’re told because disobedience is freedom, Beware of book doctors and blood thirsty greedy dictatorial aliens with an agenda, said Rita.

            Ok, said Tran, How’s this sound? Write everything in the first five pages. Grab the reader with a hook in every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and at the end of chapters, Yeah, said Grave Digger, WE need a hook, a big iron hook covered with dried blood hanging in the center of an empty Kampot market reminding genocide survivors what happens to them if they fuck up. They get a big fat rejection hook in the neck or through their trembling beating pulsating heart.

            Fear sells. Fear is a universal language.

            Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear, sex and growth into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation  ... punctuation is a nail. Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist.

            I love Linguini, said Devina, but he doesn’t love me. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know eternity adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again.

            Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it. A sincere writer has grit and stamina. Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess.

            A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Marcel Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted. Kill your father. Marry your mother or versa visa. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

            We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard-lived sojourn, Experience is my teacher. The rest is just information, Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame stream mainstream upstream.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Hammam

The author was in Morocco on 9/11.

Twice a week he left #187 and walked through dusty stone rubble past discarded plastic trash and small broken trees to the Moroccan hammam. The Turkish style public bath cost seventy cents.

The left side was for women, men on the right. He paid the shy girl behind her veil, went in, stripped to underwear, crammed his clothes in a plastic bag, handed it to a smiling toothless Moor, and got two buckets made of old tires remembering the suq alley in the Medina where boys cut the rubber, hammered, made and sold these buckets.

He pushed open a heavy wooden door. Three medium vaulted arched white tiled rooms receded with increasing degrees of heat and steam. Men reclined on heated tiled floors, collected cold or hot water from faucets in buckets, soaping and scrubbing themselves down.

Passing unrecognizable human forms he entered heat’s mist dream, walked through two rooms and found a space near a wall. He filled one bucket with scalding hot water and another with temperate liquid. He stretched out on his back absorbing heat and closed his eyes.

Heat penetrated his skin. It was a respite from the outside world, the chaos of poverty, begging, humor and hospitality. No one could see him, no one knew him. Feeling peace he rolled onto his side as heat blasted skin, muscles and bones.

Inside steam and water music sweating men slapped themselves on the broiling floor. He watched an old wiry man dissolving kinks bend a customer’s arms and legs into pretzel formations. The skinny bald man energetically worked wrists, elbows, shoulder joints to the point of snapping them off skeletons. He rolled patrons over, pummeling spinal chords, slapping backs while bending knee joints leaving men spread eagle on wet tiled floors. Content faces welcomed his attention.

Satisfied with the meditation, Point sat up, soaped and scrubbed layers off skin with a rough hand cloth. He rinsed oceans across inlaid tiles, walked out, retrieved his bag of clothing, covered himself with an ikat sarong slipping out of wet underwear into dry clothing. He gave the attendant a small tip. The old man smiled, shook his head, rolling his eyes. It wasn’t enough. He dropped more coins into brown frozen fingers.

“Shukran. M’a salama.”

He stepped into cool night air. The dusty path was filled with scooters, boys playing on abandoned rusty cars, scavengers probing piles of trash and mothers dragging black gown hems on the ground. Bright yellow slippers slapping earth flashed light in silt. Wandering children sang happy innocent songs.

A one-eyed beggar stumbled past looking for alms. Point gave him one thin coin and skirted an alley through debris for thick black coffee at a local cafe. Entering, he passed men watching 24-hour global terrorism catastrophes at full volume from a television propped on steel supports hanging from a ceiling.

“Ah, Ahab,” said the waiter, a smiling young man in a purple vest balancing a silver tray of cups and water glasses.

“Coffee?”

“Yes please, no sugar,” gesturing outside where empty tables littered cracked pavement. Dejected desperate shoeshine boys tapped wooden boxes. Their dark unemployed eyes inspected shoes of chronically idle men drinking coffee and endless glasses of tea. A hopeful boy wandered in and out of tables tapping his shoe box. Strong mint tea aroma filled the air.

At the bar a waiter cut mint tea leaves, crammed them into a silver plated kettle, dumped in a brick of sugar, closed the lid, raised the pot and poured a steady stream of light brown tea into a small purple embossed glass. Opening the lid he dumped the tea back into the pot and placed it on a table with glasses, spoons and sugar cubes.

A subtle red color extended across a high adobe wall. The Atlas mountain range wore white snow.

Women in billowing rainbow fabrics walked across the desert from clustered stone villages to take a local bus into the shimmering Red City or sit on broken cement stones along the road talking with friends enjoying their social hour in eternity.

Dusk and twilight married to procreate many children. More field hands, more child labor in dead end trades making less than a $1.00 a day. Many would walk to northern Morocco and, if lucky with money, slip across the Mediterranean into Spain. Some angry marginalized naive kids would join T cells in Madrid, or Hamburg and disappear in Europe. A select few would attend flight training school in Florida. Others became wealthy drug runners wheeling and dealing hash heaven in Amsterdam.

Women sat gossiping on cracked pavement surrounded by trash. People discarded their lives as they went through it like caterpillars morphing into exotic species. Attempts to plant a single tree inside a small block of dirt surrounded by cement had proved futile.

People had stripped off the branches and leaves leaving a sharp broken piece of wood sticking out of the ground. People wandered aimlessly or sat in dust. Unemployed men on haunches stared at the ground. A fruit seller with cardboard boxes of green grapes under a single bulb on a rolling cart waved at lazy flies.

A man in his wheelchair poured bottled water over a handful of grapes. Grapes of wrath. Water disappeared into dust around his wheels of life. He ate one grape at a time watching laughing boys weave past on broken bikes as rusty chains grasped crooked sprockets.

A bearded man struggled along the street collecting discarded pieces of cardboard in his recycled life. Cardboard was utilitarian - a cheap sidewalk seat, a foundation in rolling carts to keep stuff from falling out the bottom, sun hats, beds and doormats in front of shops after infrequent rain.

Shredded telephone wires dangled from the wall of a telephone business office cubicle as men with mobile phones punched in numbers and lined up to make calls on the single working phone.

Disconnected grease covered boys manipulated mammoth truck tires along broken sidewalks to their shop. Tools spilled into public paths. The area was alive as people relying on their survival instincts scrambled to make a living.

Off the main road people set up evening flea markets. Two men unloaded piles of shoes from the back of a car along a sidewalk. Location, location, location. One seller spread a bright blue tarp on the ground anchoring it with bricks. His partner arranged cheap dress and casual shoes for potential buyers. No ‘adidas berber’ shoes for these guys.

They fired up a propane lamp. Neighborhood people escaping small flats after a day of oppressive heat prowled the street with friends looking for a bargain or just plain looking.

A Century is Nothing