Abracadabra

The one who dies with the most toys wins. Congratulations.

Besides writing, gardening and storytelling are you Grave Digger, Yes, said Zeynep, I am a Grave Digger by day and a literary prostitute by night. I made my own shovel. I cut down the tree … I shaved the bark, fashioned the long handle, extracted iron from earth, created fire, heated the iron ion particles, forged the iron and fitted it. It’s a custom-made job. One of a kind, like you. Unique … I am very busy doing nothing, a kind of jazz poem. Musical flow feeds the writing. Rhythm, harmony and improvisation.

Music is the fuel.

Most humans are busy, busy, busy. You never hear a dying man say, I wish I’d spent more time at the office … I bury failures and successes in the same grave. It’s a job and puts food on the table. I develop and cultivate plots where I plant symbolic and metaphorical empirical roots.

I love good dirt … I also perform cremation ceremonies for families needing ashes, bones and dust. WE are radiant stardust and 1/3rd the life of the universe. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our bodies are nothing but recycled atoms and quarks from exploding stars.

I am fire, personified. Shamans control fire … I am a lightning bolt singing Abracadabra. Translation - hurl your lightning bolt even unto death.

It’s an alchemical process. Grave digging is a full-time honorable job with dignity and respect. Look at my hands … Look at your hands …You know two things … Look at a blind potter’s hands, a blind smith’s hands, the blind laundry woman’s hands, the blind seamstress’s hands, the blind beggar’s hands, the blind writer’s hands, the blind executioner’s hands, Death’s hands … all the hands dancing, gesturing, pleading, laughing, loving, touching, holding, grasping, signing hands, all the non-VOICE hands.

An open hand holds everything.

People say the world is a big place. By the time you get to your plot Earth is a very small place, ha. Put that in your opening remarks at a literary festival.

Do you have a night job? Yes, I am a word janitor in an insane asylum.  It’s a good place to jot down ideas and sketch. I am a literary outlaw. I violate all the writing rules.

Rules are for rulers. A ruler is a tool to measure something. A human ruler is an autocratic dictator in the Middle East, North Korea, Burma, China, Turkey, Russia and serious Syria among other places. You name it. They sit on a fancy papier mâché throne … Older wiser slaves offering sage advice to save their ass and protect their bureaucratic position OBEY the boss and do what they are told to do. Or else.

They Rule. Some rule out of kindness and compassion. They accept freedom and responsibility and accountability for their actions to be just and empathetic.

Many rule using FEAR and intimidation. As an outlaw word janitor knowing ambiguities, contradictions, paradoxes and false identities, I collect evidence.

I take out the garbage, like adverbial labia. The garbage is a mixture of fact and fiction. Some garbage is true factoid and some garbage is invented farrago. Janitorial work is fun, useful and necessary. I meet fascinating patients living free from fear now. I discover cool stuff people discard. Many patients wallow like pigs in regret, drown in guilt pools or die in future fears.

Earth is one big insane asylum.

No memory means no guilt and no guilt means no fear. Sweet.

Book of Amnesia, V1

We are Stardust - TLC 80

He shared a universal story with Grade 4. “Many tribes love to look back. Passion and grasping creates suffering. It's a genetic molecule of fear, healthy doubt, fantastic uncertainty, surprise and adventure. Monkey mind. No worries, no memories. A child’s innocent curiosity lives in the present.”

“Every little thing is in front of us,” said a genius kid.

“Yes,” Lucky said, “focus on your essential needs not your wants. Imaginary wants manifest desire. Attachment and grasping creates suffering. Suffering is an illusion. We are all passing through. Humans look back in their vivid reptilian imagination hoping to see a ghost memory, a figment of their imagination.

Is it safe?

“Change is scary. They look back to remember where they came from. They look back because they are afraid they will never see the village and people again. They use their disappearing energy to look behind wondering and wandering and milling around in a perpetual state of shock and distraction.

“Humans seek clues at their personal ground zero. They’ve evolved from distant galaxies. Java man evolved here 40,000 years ago. Accepting an evolutionary premise, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance. We are stardust. Never trust an atom. They make up everything. The world is made of stories not atoms. Oh, and one more thing. Don’t let school interfere with your education.”

He lived in talking monkey zones. They ate rice, drank water and fucked. They washed one set of clothing and hung it on bamboo. They killed all the animals and burned down all the forests. They bred, worked and got slaughtered. Shamans brought rain. Tropical downpours gave humans free showers. 

Food was cheap. Let’s eat mantra. This had nothing to do with simian behavior. It had nothing to do with two women sitting in a dark warung food joint near a private school facing a tall cinder block wall. Chickens goats and cats prowled pecked and foraged in garbage. One woman sat in a deep meditation as her friend cleaned her scalp. They took turns exploring and inspecting. This genetic ritual was practiced in world zoos, jungles and rain forests.

Chattering storytellers. Musicians played ancient gamelan tunes. Heal people with music. Music is the fuel.

Idle Indonesian males after washing taxis studied accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. Waiting for passengers they played chess in Banyan tree shade. Checkmate, said Death, You lose.

Drivers visited the warung chatting up girls, devouring spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies, green chilies and deep-fried snacks.

One lucky explorer created a Brave New World.

         Culture is what you are.

         Nature is what you can be.

He invented new futures with cold, detached logical intention and compassion. He survived in an assessment-of-process paradigm inside an expanding data based star cluster.

The Language Company 

The Transmitter

I am the Naggal, ‘The Transmitter’ in Persian history.

I am the hakaawati, the professional storyteller from historical times when stories were told after harvests, during night when stories were cherished, reserved for darkness - the idle time between planting and harvesting - during long lonely winters.         

“Their stories maintained, developed, protected, transferred to children and women. This is the way the ones who feared the power of the story told us.”

“Why?”

“They abandoned us to the exile, islands, remote meditation caves, vision quests, temples of stone singing word-strings toward Arabic, Persian, Indian, Mongolian, Tibetan and European oral mystics. It was all a play, a la’ab inside the shadow of their imagination.”

“What did you learn from them?”

“There were seven layers, seven levels deep in their unconscious. Seven is the number you must remember, for it symbolizes perfect order and a complete cycle. It leads to the seven directions of space, forms the series of musical notes, colors, planets and spheres. Seven is the symbol of pain, a sickness leaving the body.”

They moved through the wild wilderness of their youth after seeing and hearing their spirit guardian, a solitary black raven, a Tibetan Golak. 

The oracle went into a trance to deliver the transmission.

The transmission was Baraka, investing them with a supernatural power of prosperity and blessings. The Baraka allowed them to conserve and control power.

Baraka was transmitted in the solitary deepness of the Sahara between Berber tribes. The more you see the less you know. The less said the better.

My Name is Erhan- TLC 64

I am your masseuse. I’ve lived in this Bursa hammam since 1555.

In a large domed room sunrays shafting at precarious precious angles slant along humid walls glancing off mosaic tiles singing blue, green, yellow reflections. The dome has a perfect eight-starred symmetrical hat surrounded by sixteen stars in a geometric pattern. At night stars sing their light. They give me a pleasant headache.

This is where I live and work. I raised my family here. I will die here. This is my fate in a water world where tea and conversations meet in companionship, community and conspiracy.

After the hammam and noon prayers men went to a teahouse. They whispered stories, gossip, myth, legends, fairy tales, innuendo, lies, half-truths and fabulous fictions as small silver spoons danced in glass.

Someone else writes this with a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck 149 fountain pen. He drinks thick black Turkish coffee. A silver embossed glass of water waits for fingers to leave condensation on its surface. He turned to a stranger, “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.”

“If you finish the water it means the coffee’s no good,” said a stranger.

Lucky distributed providence to oral storytellers engaging tongues, dialects, foolscap, and fading footsteps behind shadows playing cards and slurping tea. Eyelids were heavy deep visual reminders studying down all the daze.

Such a grand and glorious saga, sang Zeynep, a heroine in a vignette.

I am a short story. You are a novel.

By day I am a gravedigger, said Lucky, and a literary prostitute after dark.

We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.

On your grave are two dates separated by a dash. What’s important is what you do during the dash. Is life a dash or marathon?

Go with your flow. Flow your glow.

The Language Company

Zeynep the heroine

Invent a God

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”

 Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Earth.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing