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. 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 aint on the page it aint 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 hot 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 Bantey Srey 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 Asia 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, said Zeynep, Let’s make it heavy, deep real immediate and dramatic. Focus a lens. Floodlight or spotlight?

Yes, said Devina. Shine a light on illuminated parchments etched on skin with sharp bamboo 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 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 Unabridged

Kid Genius

Good travel writing is creative hanging out.

Can Zeynep do this? Yes, she’s around 19 now in 2023.

Fate introduced us when she was 5. I was 50 going on 10. We connected immediately. It was about trust and authenticity. She’s a fine storyteller and visual artist. She has stories to share.

She contributed to The Language Company.

She travels with storytelling kid friends: Leo from Lijiang, Utopia, Devina from Jakarta, Indonesia, Tran from Danang, Vietnam, Rita from Banlung, Cambodia, Omar a Tuareg Berber from Morocco, a harlequin, a word janitor and Grave Digger.

Omar is blind. Eyes lie. Real eyes realize real lies.

Question? What is your interpretation of visual sensation?

Data based evidence is impermanent impaired observation … Energy, frequencies and vibrations. Storytelling, exposition, myth, jazz poetry, and system analysis flow in the stream of life. Glow with your flow … Many stories are recycled, retransmitted and translated from, into and beyond languages, like SIGN speak.

Language is a virus. You need it to get in. You need it to get out. Input & output. Language in language out.

There are word photographs. You cannot photograph a memory … Every photograph has an aura of death. A photograph is a kind of haiku. Life is a grand experimental adventure in evolutionary nature … Nature is the teacher. Language is a living organism … a repository of culture. No language means no culture.

Kid storytellers have the courage to speak the truth. Speaking truth they don’t have to remember what they said. They express in absurd detail what others are afraid to say. They speak with pinpoint precision. They speak using Voice.

There are VOICE Ones and SIGN Ones. SIGN ones speak love.

Curious kids live now without expectations or discrimination. They play the long game. Adult’s biology, culture, social conditioning and fear of shame, humiliation and death focus on limited narrow results … outcome … product … they eat, live, fuck around and breathe product … end game … pawn traps King … Checkmate.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Mandalay, Burma

Question

Question? Is the problem or surprise the form, a formless form or the form of the formless forming sea foaming form? If so, can it be understood by reducing, redacting, paralleling, associating another journey? Can you break the continuity of the journey with memories of an ephemeral I ? Yes … It’s not a problem, it’s a surprise, said Impermanence.

Who am I?

I am a who to what I am.

Why am I here?

How did I get here?

How did I grow?

Q has three parts:

a)  What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil?

b)   What is the nature of evil? The question is the answer. It is not in this tale, play or manuscript.

c)   What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?

Q. Where does the real end and the artificial begin? I am a superficial person, said Grave Digger … I pretend to be who I am in my future. I know two things. My hands. My work is never finished.

Q? Does fate control our free will? Yes.. Fate cannot lie. If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get life’s joke, said Laughter Therapy … Ha, ha, ha.

Q? Should we worry about the style? No. Should we worry about the form? No. Worry is interest on a bill yet to come due. No guilt, regret, fear, or monkey mind. Monkey loves the circus of sensory overload. We live in a world of forms.

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

A C-19 virus transmitted by Asian bats to humans in late 2019 is not a surprise. A pangolin ate bat shit. The pangolin was trapped, died and ended up in a wet market. Consumers bought it, sliced it, cooked it, and served it at parties. Delicious. Infected humans traveled and transmitted C-19 to millions around Earth. So it goes.

Holy bat shit! said Robin a cape crusader wearing a mask practicing social distance.

Q: do we have to capitalize the first letter of every sentence? no is the short answer no.

Q: what is strange? Life is strange, bizarre, comic, tragic and very short … Life is a brief clear precise concise life sentence. How do stories, vignettes, jazz poems, journalism fragments, and system analysis communicate with each other?

A: They walk dirt paths, ford rivers, scale mountains, explore jungles, valleys and estuaries and cross metaphysical existential borders … they build sandcastles near the sea. They practice telepathy … they are time travelers. Aliens.

They meditate on the process of their death.

The dance and dancer are one.

As a mystic and prescient person, Zeynep you have the responsibility to be honest. Be light about it. Think big and stay in the particular. Know what keeps you motivated and happy. Autotelic. 

Next question Z, How do you stay fresh and centered? You make it new day-by-day, said Z, Make it new. A storyteller staying in one place goes blind, we move around before becoming native and dull. Before we think and act like local sheep.

Lost confused passive ones living in Inertia, a state of mind, perfect the art of MILLING AROUND in Country ABC, said Rita, They speak in monosyllables Yeah, yeah. Big vocabulary. 2% are awake. 98% are asleep. The majority are afraid to ask the WHY question.

Fear is a killer. Life is a killer.

People asking questions get slaughtered. See the Killing Fields on page 101 - the last room you want to enter. Keeping your big fat fucking mouth shut is wise and prudent behavior to survive post-genocidal truth ghosts. It is an unpleasant fact. If you open your trap someone cuts out your tongue.

In this peculiar particular situation expert scientific witnesses have proven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt and doubt has a shadow with logical coherence … that WE, being expert witnesses, reliable narrators and noble natives living with our DNA genius bear witness to alienated, lonely, bored, listless, passive Earthlings meandering with no purpose, lost, unimaginative having zero curiosity and staring with blind eyes - due to severe emotional, mental, physical traumas with memories of suffering, genocide and ghosts.

They remain childlike, tender, sweet, kind, and hospitable with a terminal case of confusion and loss forever, hiding in deep shadows, addicted to dumb phone entertainment boredom.

Their beating hearts caress resignation, despair, depression, lack of initiative or incentive based on fear of punishment, or loss of face or humiliation with hard-wired SHAME. They live a meditative Buddhist spiritual way of identity and culture.

They are easily distracted. Kids play. Forever young. Adults have perfected the art and style of Pretending To Be Busy.

What art. What beauty. What style. What form. What context. What a formal pertinacious way. What objective truth. What verisimilitude.

Here are some true facts, said Rita an orphan and independent author. Unpleasant facts are littered in this epic like lovers, countries, butterflies, social systems, food and transformation.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Teamwork

Let's have a meeting! Yes. English teachers unite!

Get dressed and take our Moleskine notebook filled with poetry, drawings, dreams, stories and visions. Collect one piston-driven fountain pen filled with green racing ink.

Remember water. You've gotta have H2O where you go. It's gonna be a hot one. Seven inches from the mid-day sun.

Pedal to a class tomb on old campus surrounded by luscious green trees straining to light. They are a canopy of welcome relief. Rose petals wither on the ground.

Smile and greet your compatriots, your stalwart educational guides. Take a seat. Look around. Engage your senses.

Gaze out the window toward the lake. It is shimmering. You hear scraping. What is it? Local workers are building a wall. A new great wall. Exciting. History in the making. How do they do it?

It's simple. Materials and raw labor.

Ten village men and women - who do most of the heavy lifting - bags of cement, trowels, shovels, a few plastic buckets, water, piles of gray bricks, empty drums for support, some boards and a couple of wheelbarrows.

Step 1. Build rickety scaffolding using drums and boards. Remove the old steel fence. Discard to side.

Step 2. One team mixes cement and water. Shovel into buckets. Another team puts bricks into a wheelbarrow and pushes it to a dumping area.

Step 3. Men wait for women to hand them bricks and buckets of cement. They slather on the goop and align bricks. Brick by brick the wall goes up. It blocks the green sward, blue lake and wild flowers.

Only the sky is safe.

Step 4. Another team coats the exterior with a bland gray mixture.

It's never going to be finished. Art is like that. It's so beautiful you feel like crying.

Someone steps to the podium and starts speaking - using exquisite language - about the value of education. Cost benefit analysis. Profit and loss statements. How we have a huge responsibility to our shareholders.

During a brief moment of silence you hear a shovel, a trowel and laughter.

Another day dawns in paradise.

Passing Through

Begin this day at dawn.

Pashupatinath Hindu cremation ceremony along Bagmati River.

Shiva is the destroyer and creator.

Wood pyres. A woman kisses her shrouded husband goodbye.

Light his fire.

Fire is the beginning and end.

Fire is your rosé flame.

Stir his bones.

His ashes flutter with death and mortality.

Silence. Solemnity. Serenity. Grounded and transient. Flowers. Offerings.

Glorious color dancing fire.

Return to Source.

Tibetan energies. Joy. Laughter.

This joy – new beginning – transformation.

Empty / full.

At this very moment they look and leave.

Abstract metaphorical language.

Non-attachment.

Ink whispers secrets of silent mystery where life is found in a desperate situation. Balancing precariously on the edge of an abyss.

Young boys stare at a writer. The blind lead the blind.

Everything is Under Construction at the Source.

The vast self.

Existential awareness.

Cessation of sensation and perception.

A walking meditation.

Rivers, like people, only know why they were born when they reach the end.

Poverty and illiteracy. I work, I breed, I get slaughtered.

Imagined or invented conversations and episodes.

Fiction is a tool for unveiling, not obscuring the truth.

Literary fiction expounds historical truth.

The necessity of that moral choice.

Bookends of Bhaktapur. In between 90 years/moments. 90 breaths.

Non-attachment.

Sitting.

Awareness of energies.

Fleeting impressions. Images are visual stories.

Illuminate expand invent.

Passing Through