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

Ambivalent

Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.

A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire.

A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s thin, happy hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.

An old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point.

Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

The Language Company

South of Mandalay Part 2

A thin stick broom sweeping world dust cleans perception.

Two doctor brothers own the fifteen-year old school. They speak good English. Friendly, resourceful and gentle. Their parents are also doctors.

Zones are under construction - new rooms and a kitchen for foreign teachers near the dining room. A gym and library are being built between long two-story buildings with eight classrooms per level. Old trees prosper. Crows and dogs scavenge garbage.

Men and boys hammer, saw, dig, carry lumber, bricks, rebar iron and mix cement.

Boys shovel dirt from trenches.

Women shoulder excavated dirt in bamboo baskets.

In the shade of 300-year old trees girls sort piles of plastic water bottles and Styrofoam containers.

Crows watch with disinterest.

Kitchen women sitting in a sacred circle talk about life,

love and their emotional well being while peeling onions.

They live longer.

Uprooted bamboo are planted against cinder block walls decorated

with brown and green broken glass shards to prevent education from escaping.

Tree branches hacked into rough art forms pierce blue sky.

Fear & Curiosity converse with gestures. Do something you’ve never done before.

Trust, love, friendship.
Communicate. Learn. Imagine.
I am a rainbow.

This school reminds a ghost-self of rural schools in Sichuan, China.

Broken windows, trash, rough cement passages where sewage smells like success.

Painted platitudes and Odes sing on the roof.

Learning in Paradise !

Cement shells, paper exams plastered on windows.

Faded green paint. Wooden benches.

Worn wooden floors. Blackboards. Chalk n' talk.

Cover your mouth when you erase the past.

Ghost-self meditates with sleeping tigers.  

Martha Ann

Martha Ann’s young ghost spoke.

“My dog licks decomposing leaves off my fingers. People working over me manifest degrees of abject seriousness creating and validating their existence.”

A child whispers, “I need help.” Others listen with the heart-mind of a child, receive and write. 

“After Vietnam my older brother spent a month with me in Colorado before going to West Germany to work as a military newspaper editor and finish putting in his time. I'd come down with a cold that winter. Father wrote letters to him about my condition, how my energy dropped, how I became weak. He took me to the doctors and they made their diagnosis.

“I had a rare form of AML leukemia and started chemotherapy treatment. I needed bone marrow transplants. The prognosis was maybe five years for a complete remission. My mental attitude was strong and positive. They tried every experimental drug on the market. I lived long enough to enjoy one last Christmas when my pain was a sickness leaving my fragile body.

“Through this I stayed in school, in Girl Scouts and kept riding horses. I am far away. My long blond hair flies in the wind. I am the wind of strong intense discipline. My back is straight in the saddle. My blue eyes penetrate fear approaching a jump.

                                                                                                                                                       “Long before I died I started collecting horses. A smart witty precocious thirteen year old girl, I left home at an early age, went up to my neighbor’s to be with the horses. This is how my love started - my collection of stuffed horses in brown, white, black evolved into carved wood figures and clay models. Horses were my passion. I dreamed horses.

“I leave the stable leading the pinto by the leather reins. I am dressed in tall black boots, riding pants, stiff white shirt buttoned at my frail neck. Only I know I am sick. I am dying. It is my secret. I am in heaven. I speak magic words, a secret dialogue. You can tell by the horse’s response they understand me. I ride my horse in green pastures under blue sky. My face is serene.

“My sickness was a long slow meandering journey. I maintained my external optimism, smiling, laughing doing excellent in school. I knew I was sick.”

“She was a warrior girl,” said my brother. “Horses gave her comfort. She knew the freedom, the release, the passion. She rode every day after school. Weekends were spent grooming, laughing, and loving her relationship with horses. Her spirit on the horses was clear. She had no fear.”

“The drugs made my long blond hair fall out and I wore a wig. I tolerated all the inane questions and insinuations from classmates. I maintained my self respect and dignity.

“Dad, what happens when they run out of experimental drugs?” I asked one night at dinner.

He had no answer.
“My heart gave out three days after Christmas, 1972.”
"My brother received the expected phone call at at a military Field Station north of Kassel."

“Martha is gone,” said my father’s cracking voice.
“What happened?”
“I went to Children’s Hospital on my lunch hour, and she was lying there and she looked so beautiful yet so weak and she said, ‘Dad, hold me. I feel I’m going to faint,’ I did and then her heart stopped. It just wore her out.”

My brother cried. “I’m so sorry dad. I’ll get a flight out.”
“You will always remember her as a happy little girl,” he said.

Angels welcomed Martha Ann, gave her shelter and guided her onward. She never saw fourteen of anything. She never went to high school or college, fell in love, made love, worked, lived, traveled abroad, or explored future worlds.

She experienced infinite joy inside the deep dark passages of her vibrant trembling spirit. Her life was all wrapped up in one tight package with an expiration date.

She danced in wild remote mountains, climbing higher, smelling wild Columbine flowers, fixing them in her hair, spreading meals in spring meadows below clouds. Cold winter became her domain, her life, her now. Her childlike wonder and spirit energies soared over time’s river in her labyrinth. She evolved on her path of light, love, life and perfection, a human on a spiritual path, a spiritual being.

On her brief sojourn in the river of time she demonstrated tolerance, charity, integrity, kindness, trust, tranquility, dignity, harmony, compassion, and truth. Martha Ann validated her authenticity and hurled her thunderbolt.

I, meanwhile, return to my curious childlike nature, where I make a play, a la’ab.

Martha Ann remains an angel of light. Her Jinn is fire emanating life and consciousness. Fire consumes fear and ignorance.

My memory of her is a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions, and consciousness.

Meditation in the cosmic dance dissolves the self.

A Century is Nothing

Relax

People take life too seriously. They need to play more. Relax.

Invention of writing in 3300BC. Pictograms - abstracted into cuniform.

Impressed vs drawn.

Akkadian magician - askhipu

Bliss with N. vocab touch, clean sweet clear slow ... pleasure her rosebud O sensation - stimulation - relaxed, she enjoys long deep rapture, exhaust her gently.

Taste the tantric essence. Her enlightened freedom. Oracle premontion predicts future.

Gratitude. Respect. Trust.

Sweet strong trees kiss sky w/ leaves of love.

Green umbrellas celebrate twinkling stars.

Hiding & Courage.

Sex.

Java bridge flowing river.

Dancing trees & snowing leaves.