Cadiz

"I am not a rich man. I am a poor man with money. They are not the same thing."

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

*

           Omar and Akiko entered a student cafe for pan, butter, strawberry jam and coffee. The place hummed with readers, writers, calculators, talkers and dreamers. Students checked their phones to tell time. They told time where to go. Silent time told them to eat faster and get their sweet ass to class. White gamma rays bathing the room sang through skylights.

            I visited Ashiakawa on the island of Hokkaido one fall, said Omar. Speak memory, said Akiko. Beached summer red and yellow canoes were tied up for winter. Ducks and mallards rested on water. Women gathered leaf shadows along wide paths. At a Shinto temple on a small island an old brown structure imposed its sentinel protection. Sacred space.

            There was a Tori gate, cement bridge and guardian lions in the small courtyard. Crows cackled. At the temple was a square stone basin of water with four wooden ladles resting on a crossbar. A single cup of water dipped and poured back into the basin created a visual ripple effect. A drop on the surface released a thousand colors as a golden and brown pebble bottom exploded. One drop created smooth colors before emptiness and stillness.

            A visitor dropped single splashes. Ephemeral beauty. I inspected paper prayers and 1,000 white crane offerings fluttering near stone steps. Two women arrived at the water basin, drank deep, spat water out, walked up steps, clapped their hands three times, bowed in prayer, clapped three times, threw coins through wooden slots into the temple, clapped twice, walked down stone steps and threw remaining water on stone lions, laughed and crossed the stone bridge. Leaves floated reflection shadows in the world.

            Akiko laughed, I don’t have a particular god. The Dali Lama said the only true religion is one of love and kindness, said Omar, I understand.

            They walked to the Playa de la Caleta beach past a shit-covered statue of Simon Bolivar on his bronze horse singing his mercenary exploits in Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, and Bolivia. They felt sand below a blazing sun. Men in blue coveralls raked and shoveled trash into a wheelbarrow. Violent foaming wild southern flanks of green blue black sea smashed rocks. East water was calm.

             Spanish women under umbrellas knitted gossip with bright red yarn. Memory cards captured digital coastlines, long human shadows and a solitary cane as an elderly person performed her rebirth in water transformation therapy.

             She swam to Kampot, Cambodia and married a pepper farmer. She gave him twins named Alpha and Omega. She taught them Spanish and oral storytelling magic. They introduced her to orphanages and Zen meditation practice. She swam back to Cadiz to find her crutch. It was gone.

            Tavia Tower next to the Music Conservatory displayed a 360-degree perspective with tight white Moorish cubist homes slanting into cupola cathedral spires tolling eternal songs.

            Religion is larger than human existence because we promise eternal salvation, said a friar, a monk and adept Brahmin.

            History’s ocean was vast, spectacular, sad and incomprehensible.

            Akiko cried farewell. Waving into an empty blue sky Omar vanished in Islamic, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Shinto shadows. Akiko’s energy spirit, strength, freedom and dignity was a sweet memory called the past. Stable and fluctuating mirages.

            Playing his Honer blues harp in the key of C he wandered deserted Cadiz noon streets singing about a train leaving the station with blue and red lights on behind. Taking my baby away. All my love’s in vain.

            Good love story said Tran.

spoooky

Cosmic Lemongrass

Every morning at 6 you go to the farm.

You cut lemongrass, load it into the van and drive to the spa.

Trim the lemongrass.

Deliver the lemongrass to male / female areas.

Lay the lemongrass on a wire mesh above stones in steam and sauna rooms.

Sliced lemons garnish lemongrass.

Turn on the heat.

Rising temperatures. Steam reaches 50. Sauna 55.

Pour water over lemons / lemongrass in the sauna.

Sweet heat.

Swivel the glass thermometer filled with pink sand on the wall.

It flows for 20 minutes.

Sit on a wooden bench.

Inhale - here.

Exhale - now.

Giants

“Try this,” said Raymond Carver a famous short story writer. “Write 25 words. Cut it to 15. Cut it to 5. This is what dead editors and hatchet men did to my work.”

Let me try, said Leo  ... here are 25  ... Once upon a time there was a tribe of orphans from Asia who escaped from captivity and abusive life where they were forced to … (haul shit, fuck evil men, work in a factory making electronic gadgets)

Fine. Next? Let me try, said Tran. Here are 15 … A tribe of orphans escaped the tyranny of forced labor and ran away to be.

Good. Next? Let me try, said Rita. Here are 5 … The scared orphans ran away. Precise, said RC, Keep it simple and short. Shorter is better. Less is more. Short, fast, deadly.

Character is action, said Omar. In a novel words reveal a character’s action. It’s internal and meditative. On stage in a play it’s all action.

Writers say what others are afraid to say.

They write naked.

They write in blood.

They write in exile.

See and smell their fear strength and authenticity. Heavy, deep and real. HDR.

Communicate without Voice words. WE sense their sincere authenticity. Writers confront their mental illness every day.

They love SIGN language. Gestures. Their awareness is misunderstood when speaking in SIGN because Speaking people ignore you. Voice Ones are illiterate and interrupt each other. See their fear being alienated, bored and alone. See, taste, hear, smell their fear to BE deaf, dumb and blind.

How do people cope using gestures, said Devina. Gestures control people. Asian Voice Ones talk over each other in their neurotic way. Loud and louder is their mantra. The loudest one is the BIG winner. Congratulations.

Here are my fears said Rita: The fear of living in Cambodia where you are always afraid looking over your shoulder and seeing the past with hard eyes because you have no imagination after twenty years of pure survival instinct with no incentive no initiative facing nightmare futures.

You are afraid someone will sneak up behind you and kill you. You suffer from fear and superstition. 1.7 million hungry ghosts swarm around you. Day in. Day out. We’re talking about some serious long-term trauma with a side order of shame and guilt. It will take another generation or two to clean our consciousness.

Rita: When I grow up, I will be a Fear & Superstition Manager. I’ll have booth on a red dusty road with an F & S sign. People will give me their fear(s) and superstition(s). I won’t say anything  ... I’ll smile and accept it. Thank you. Healed, they continue on their way. I burn it.

For example, they fear someone shows up in the middle of the night while they dream of peace and freedom and kills them. They fear armed strangers raping their screaming wife and daughters while they watch. They fear someone cutting out their tongue. They fear someone in their family not returning from the killing fields.

They suffer the fear of remembering & the fear of forgetting. They fear memory.

They fear losing their children, said Rita. They fear having no imagination. They fear asking why  ... They fear being distracted by stimuli in the environment … They fear controlling their environment … They fear their environment because it controls them … They fear living in Asian countries where, due to circumstances controlled by aliens, parents, teachers and authority figurines they live in perpetual childhood.

Adults keep you there with fake dependency & emotional abuse. They teach you fear. You eat fear three times a day. Delicious fear they say. Have some more. They are the great manipulators. Adults are giants with giant voices and giant control techniques. They threaten you with fear of pain, shame and guilt. It’s a vicious circle.

Life is a circle, a Fibonacci spiral.

The Wheel of Life is the universe.

When you meditate you are free from rebirth. Humans need love. Humans need compassion, kindness and empathy. They need to talk less and draw more. It’s a social and cultural thing. Giants never learned how to read or write. Giants fight, eat, fuck and sleep.

Un Pleasant factoid: 69 million children worldwide of primary school age will not  go to school this morning or tomorrow, next week, or next year.

I fear struggling to join the rising middle class in _______ without political connections and getting a degree in business, said Rita, After authority figures said a business degree was essential thousands got one. Many graduates don’t speak or care to learn English for future opportunities where they need it. They’re stuck working dead-end paper pushing menial jobs, sweeping dreams, chopping vegetables, doing boom-boom, sleeping or slaving in the tourism sector.

They need English to speak with foreigners or to get a job.

A teacher makes maybe $1,000 a month minus bribe fees. They lack initiative. Facing tiny sheep they fear losing control and acting like a fool in the theatre of life.

People fear questioning authority in Utopia before they execute you with a bullet in the back of your brain, said Leo speaking of historical awareness, I dance like nobody’s looking.

Yes, said Rita, I fear meeting my hungry ghost in a country where you:

a) are completely lost

b) have no comprehension what people say

c) suffer paranoia, a terminal disease

d) enjoy tedious ennui boredom carving a niche in your soul and you crave endless electronic distractions and gadget sensory overload

e) need food, water, clothing and shelter from the storm

f) have a humbling life changing experience of magnificent proportions    

g) hear a bell signifying enlightenment and satori, said Omar

Book of Amnesia, V1

Language Animals

Q: what’s the essential difference? People who think, experience life as a comedy. People who feel experience life as a tragedy. What did you expect? I ask you.

Archetypes are a universal collective unconscious symbolic truths. Humans are symbolic language animals, using abstract metaphors and cognitive ability to speak in tongues.

Oral (Voice) and gesture (Sign) languages dissipate.

Graphic (Art) languages are constant.

Incorporate your power of laughter and active imagination, said Devina. Ph.D., Education, Indonesia.

Hey, cool idea, said Rita, orphan writer from Banlung. We can use random precise episodes for stories.

To survive in this crazy world we need stories, air, water, sex, shelter, food and freedom, said Leo, activist monk. Everything here in Utopia is pure surface, said Leo, Air and water are free although the quality is dubious and getting worse … Sex is expensive like anger and stolen children. Shelters are ferns and rushes mixed with shoddy cement and crap bricks. Cheap building materials. Food is rice and gruel.

If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage, said Tran.

Will our adventure have a themes like boredom, loneliness or alienation, with a plot looking for characters and conflict, asked Devina, Timeless metaphorical motifs of love, treachery, betrayal, revenge, choices, consequences, morals, ethics, free will vs. determinism, values and abandonment with humans struggling to get something, like a glass of water? Will it have satire, irony, symbolism, and sex?

Yes. It reveals user exchange value. It speaks about the power of using money for sex and using sex for money. One hand washes the other, said a limbless amputee with no emotional connection.

It was a warm summer day. They were naked in a meadow of sunflowers. She was blind. He was deaf. They held hands. Skin was their unified electromagnetic field of tactile language beyond feeble illiterate words. Fate introduced them at an NGO charity ball.

            Blind is a famous concert pianist.

            Deaf is an explorer at Angkor Wat.

            He scaled her keys.

She explored his mountains, jungle geography and intricate hand-carved limestone designs at Banteay Srei temple.

They had a tacit agreement to be gentle and kind with one another. Peel my skin like sweet aromatic fruit, she whispered, I am your skin mistress, one must sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Play my flute, he said.

Yes, said Omar, a blind writer and a nomadic storyteller. Omar wrote A Century Is Nothing in green racing ink using a Montblanc 149 fountain pen. Be the ink. Be the paper. Flow.

You need eye & hand & heart. Two won’t do.

Few read it. Fewer understood it said Omar, Our stories contain, if an empty container can contain anything, the basics of drama, action, conflict, rising action, a climatic orgasm, falling action, resolution and empowerment with heart-mind emotions and delicious mouthwatering freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Yummy.

The emotion is so thick you can cut it with a finally honed Turkish scythe, saber, or word sword.

Word machetes in Cambodia sever families and futures. You will experience what the characters feel, taste, touch, hear, and smell revealing themselves through action … Like neglect, poverty and illusionary potentials? Yes, if the characters were any thinner, they’d be Japanese Sumi-e rice paper, or 1,000 handmade paper cranes at a Shinto shrine. Fly me to the moon.

17,000 world children die of starvation every day, said Grave Digger. Look at my hands.

Wow, Zeynep said, Let’s make it heavy, deep real immediate and dramatic. Focus a lens. Floodlight or spotlight? Yes, said Devina, Shine a light on illuminated skin with sharp bamboo needles dipped in Sumi ink.

Focus on an existential puzzle palace… Our memories make us who we are … They define our values and character … We cultivate memory’s history to sustain our lives.

Everyone builds their sandcastle with layered memories. Everyone works on his or her own personal puzzle.

I’m going to need your help with inner dialogue where characters reveal their insecurity and strength, their desire for self-preservation with values like love truth beauty compassion instinct and intuition because they have to survive.

As Rita and Tran know if you survive you are a WINNER. Life loves a winner. The soft machine loves a winner. Survivors want to prolong the inevitable, said Death. Some want fame. Some want recognition. Some could care less and don’t try. Fail better. Do.

Let’s see their fears and strengths, said Leo  ... Their fear of hungry ghosts & the poverty of food, love, and security is strong, said Devina, Strength and trust releases ego and expectations  ... all the expectations are external  ... circumstances outside character affect their psyche  ... environment affects silly humans  ... smart humans affect their environment  ... see their struggle to accept their authenticity. It requires courage.

See their fear and courage when alone with others … see their courage accepting loss forever  ... see their fear of starvation on physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological levels  ... see their courage of adventure.

Write one true sentence. See their skill to write short sentences, said Omar.

Book of Amnesia, V1