Glimmering cube of melting ice
Language of chopsticks
Incense smoke curls
Passing reflections
In death’s mirror
10
Street photographer works the image
Subject - light- composition
Move like a ninja
Geometry angles
Follow the light
Performance art
“’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
"I want to know one thing. What is color?" - Picasso
Mother's SHARP TONGUE
Inside Moleskine notes. Hiding under the bed. Slick. No answer. Locked door. Suspicious? More like stupid idiot. Pick up the remains. Tell me a story.
They hope for a lot. They get a little. She disappears. The tease does her job. Just enough desire and temporary distraction - stay down! - no getting down - just enough stimulation as the skinny dude hears her speak - now it's ok.
She's stacked everything on the floor at the end of the bed. This was a dream her uncle told her in the village. "Daughter, you need to be careful in the city. People will cheat you. They are clever. Don't let emotions control you - be reasonable - cold as ice when it comes to business. If you sleep with strangers, know where the exit is."
His scary story imagined a monster under the bed - whispering secrets to her before she fell fall feel asleep.
You have to love a stranger's stupidity, noise, sad face, confusion and chaos. Did he mention irony and entertainment value? So much for a fundamental shift in consciousness. Dying of boredom. Buried with boredom's memory.
Throw the sunset away with syntax. Treat silence with elegant love, respect and dignity.
The orange yellow moon rose.
Is a rose a moon?
How does the moon rise into a black voice of emptiness?
Into endless pyramids of joy with the beauty of simplicity?
Where do butterflies go at night?
Mandalay, Burma
“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” whispered Zeynep in Bursa doodling with magic pens on transparent paper in her elegant universe.
He'd had heard ALL of this before.
“Ha, ha,” he laughed seeing through their world of transparent stupidity temerity fear and never ending sense of confusion and so forth.
He’s seen it in the land of five red star golden Xiamen dragons
spilling black calligraphy ink on parchment and now witnessed it in Asia Minority
where bored tired people ate grilled meat played backgammon
and twiddled retired thumbs as metro cars
carried morose living dead humans dressed in black
mirroring their soul out to industrial wastelands
on the far edge of Ankara, before returning at night
filled with heavy hand carved simple wooden
caskets spilling wasted youth from the PKK war front near Serious on the Iraq border.
Gravediggers and headstone carvers had steady work everyday everywhere.
Emergency crews pried a suicidal man from below Bursa subway engines after being struck by lightning.
He walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.
A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, sister, mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming remembering."
The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie," but the woman didn't say anything. She played soil like a drum. She was sad remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.
Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.
Smoke from burning bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.
Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws lived here.
He passed chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.
There was a quick explosion of metal on stone. A man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.
The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes on Earth.
Kathmandu, Nepal
Yes. English teachers unite at a university in Fujian, China.
Let's get dressed and gather our Moleskine notebook filled with poetry, drawings, dreams, stories and visions. Let's collect one 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.
Let's go to a classtomb 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 local village men and women - who do the heavy lifting - with 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, rolling hills and wild flowers.
Only the sky is safe.
Step 4. Another team coats the exterior with a bland gray mixture.
It will never be finished. Art is like that.
It's so beautiful we 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, trowel and laughter.
Another day blossoms in the people's egalitarian paradise.
“’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
"I want to know one thing. What is color?" - Picasso
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