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.

Easily amused

Children of all ages are easily amused

by repetition and task-based activities

like sweeping, fucking, eating, sleeping,

milling around and staring at phones with vacant eyes

happy sheep slaves addicted to phones

surrender their consciousness.

Cheap thrills. So it goes.

*

Tribal survivors ate roots and plants garnished with entropy.

Survivors passed through civilizations seeking antiquities. They reported back with evidence sewn into their clothing to avoid detection at porous India-Tibetan borders. They severed small threads along hemlines, Chinese silk gowns and Japanese cotton kimonos. Their discoveries poured light rays into waterfalls rushing over Anasazi cliff dwellings into sage and pinion forests.

Survivors arrived at a mythopoetic part of their journey.

I reflected on the unconscious residue of social, cultural, ethical and spiritual values.

I needed masks. I needed to understand the underlying mysteries inside death masks. I confronted the realm of spirit. I created masks on my pilgrimage. My journey is the destination. Masks signifying the dignity of my intention thwarted demons and ghosts. I became spirits dancing in light.

Everything is light in my shamanistic interior landscape. I released the ego - Ease-God-Out - detached from outcomes, eliminated the need for control or approval, trusted spirit energies and remained light about it.

Inside light with slow fingers and long thin ivory nails I turned clay into pots. Spinning spirals danced on the wheel of time.

I finished throwing them used them for tribal ceremonies and smashed delicate clay pots to earth.

They exploded into the air creating volcanic ash coating everything in a fine dust.

I dug into the soil of my soul.

I scattered raw turquoise stones along a trail of sacrificial tears on a long walk through geography.

Shit Detector

Lucky explored cobbled Turkmen streets alleys and dead ends. Mothers buried in headscarves observing street etiquette extended manicured necks beyond balconies. They swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules over blood stained escarpments.

They married consecrated relatives during fifty-minute Encounters designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering in Technicolor imprinted new linguistic impressions on synapses watching Pay For View.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. Use it or lose it.

Silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings and resonance, chromatic silence whispered, do not go gentle into the good night. Rage against dying light. Solitary notes of forgotten strumpets wailed across an abyss ignoring civilization’s discontent.

Creased faces ironed red roses petals. Faces eating masks embedded themselves on blank pages in Zeynep’s black notebook. “I don’t know which of us wrote this,” she said.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions after eating a full course meal of self-pity and loathing buried ancestors in a tomato based culture.

Water exploded off iridescent pools as happy hour birds swimming nowhere in particular heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears while assembling French cars at an eco-friendly green plant in a Bursa industrial zone.

“Were you punished for being a dreamer?” said Zeynep.

Ankara

“No, I survived the tyranny. My family understood my peripatetic nature. They respected my need for solitude, creativity and independence to a point. I received sadistic whippings with a fishing pole by my polio-diseased mother trapped in her karmic wheelchair and beaten with a leather barber’s strap by father for insolvent insubordination. Welt city. He made me eat dirt when he came home from work if the floor wasn’t clean enough. Now you know why I love linguistic gardening. I shut down my feelings. Mother and father demonstrated hard love in a perverse abusive way.”

“I see,” said a blind beggar.

“Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said James Joyce, arranging seven words..

“I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician,” said Lucky.

“Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”

“Brilliant.”

“In finishing school we learned to say fascinating instead of bullshit,” said Zeynep.

“You have a well developed built-in shit detector.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Everyone needs a good shit detector like writers and Cambodian/Laos landmine survivors. Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable documentary fiction from memory?”

“It appears. So.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed an imaginary double identity theory at Oz-man Homogenized Gazing Metro station.

Two gravediggers in long black overcoats carrying umbrella projectiles stepping into unknown futures stabbed cement in cadence.

Weaving A Life, V4

Writing Adventure

“’I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally memory gives way.” - Nietzsche.

“The interpreter” in the left brain strings experiences into narratives. A novelist in our heads. A novelist called memory ceaselessly redrafting the short story we call “My Life.”

"Writing and telling a story is all about detail and realising the significance of the insignificant." 

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public." - Goethe

...In both Irish and Welsh myth and saga, the art of foretelling the future is an essential part of the story. More often then not, it is to escape their fate, prophesied by the Druid, that leads the protagonists into adventures which inevitably lead them to the fate they seek to avoid. 

...At one point, the narrator irreverently criticizes the author and the book, saying: "You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own, and are calling it fiction!"     -Soul Mountain by Gao

Book of Amnesia, V1

Author Page

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