Memory

Tribal adults and children survivors of 9/11 sifted through leftovers searching for sustainable resources. They needed essentials: food, shelter, water, air, sex and stories.

"This is the day of my dreams," said a girl with a diamond in her mind watching fireworks explode over the Willamette Valley in Eugene on the fourth of July. Her wisdom mind reflected 10,000 things.

Omar opened his book, traced braille and read.

“The honorable monkey mind trickster wandered through her expansive museum sensing pure intention, motivation and reflections. If she is not careful and paying complete attention the monkey mind will run wild splashing green jealous slashes, red anger strokes, and blue attachment colors on her beautiful canvases. While some ignored it at their peril others respected monkey mind and kept an eye on it with respect and dignity.”

“It was a mindfulness,” said a woman sketching shadows.

"Now I see why Picasso painted Guernica in 1937," said a blond kid kicking stones, raising dust.

"Everything we love is going to die."

"Yes, we accept loss forever."

She cleaned her canvas with a camelhair brush while leaning against a wall of sound. The echo was deafening. Silence is the loudest noise in the world.

"Picasso was a great thief," said a museum curator. "When you see his work you see the influence of all great artists."

"The ancient texts predicted this," said Other, a seer.

He sat in a pile of splintered wood sharpening the edge of his knife on a small piece of flint taken from his old sweater pocket. Sunlight glistened off his finely honed Spanish blade as he worked it under the skin of a pear. 

"They talked about choices and unintended consequences," said a woman digging for water.

"I’m thirsty," said Little Nino.

"Be patient my child."

"Yes, said Jamie. "It takes faith."

"You can’t take faith to the bank," replied a girl.

"True," said Other, "faith doesn’t know where the bank is."

"A bank is what holds the river together," said a child.

"Faith is a woman in this tribal tale."

"It will take more than Faith," someone said stumbling over piles of discarded twisted logic.

"Speaking of falling faulty towers, it will require firm resolve, an unyielding capacity for vengeance, retaliation, and retribution in this living memory," said Lloyd, an unemployed insurance underwear writer from classless London. His three-piece Brooks Brothers suit was in shreds.

"It’s because of the amygdala," counseled a doctor.

"What’s that?" said Little Nino.

"It’s a location of the brain where fear lives. It’s a knot of nerve cells and tissues. We think anger lives there as well but we don’t know for sure."

“Yes," said Alfredo Jari, “memory is the duration of the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words, any internal obstruction of the flow of the mobile molecules of the liquid, any increase in viscosity is nothing other than consciousness.”

“Can you put that in plain English?" pleaded a lit major.

“Yes I can but I won’t.”

“Their collective archetypical memory was heavier than collective unconscious and lighter than consciousness,” said an analyst named Jung.

Lighter than wind.

Fat democratic spectators cheered from sidelines. Consumers swallowed bitter tears of greed and desire.

Let’s go shopping to reduce our fear of poverty, said nations of sheep.

“The archetype can't be whole or complete if it doesn’t allow for the expression of both good and evil in the conscious or unconscious,” drooled a sedated American soldier in a VA hospital wheelchair. He needed an exit strategy.

“More drugs, nurse!” he screamed. “I coulda’ been somebody. I could'a been contender!”

All he received was his pitiful wailing voice echoing in empty chambers.

On a movie set medicated military reservist wives dressed as cheerleaders jumped up and down in wild mind agitated states of abandon. They filed for divorce after taking lovers while their husbands looked for improved body armor in oppressive Middle East desert heat.

They were the undereducated doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.

Other visualized their death while poverty’s heirs prayed that instant replay would change reality.

Weaving A Life V1

Simple Voice

After a reliable narrator established a voice, geography, atmosphere, tone, conflict and cinematic jump cut action employing minimum wage universal themes like time, boredom, passion, loneliness and alienation in an unforgiving universe of meaningless existence ...

with humor and curiosity holding hands and casting characters like plot dragging others around chained to their personality defects and character flaws wearing original death masks surrounded by distracted simple, noisy, gadget addicted compassionate illiterate peasants in a play Waiting for Godot ... writing with a Mont Blanc 149 fountain pen using Royal Blue invisible ink on blank parchment was pure luminous joy.

Lucky sat at an Indonesian warung - a cheap eatery serving white rice, spicy chili, eggs, green veggies, tempeh, tofu and deep-fried crackers behind a cement wall. Smoking teachers called it The Berlin Wall because they could inhale nicotine poison developing cancerous tumors away from inquisitive prying eyes of parents and school admin moles.

He’d escaped the tyranny of kind plaid dressed Bahasa robot educators trapped in futile expectations of perpetual childhood.

A village woman piled trash near a grove of banana trees and flamed it. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Billowing smoke obscured a thin man pushing a blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cloth, tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and household goodies through neighborhoods from dawn to dusk.

Cumulus clouds gathering mass and momentum discussed future seismic activity 7.5 miles below Java and inevitable roaring tsunamis pounding Japan land.

Let’s destroy a nuclear reactor in Fukushima Daiichi, said a roaring wave, spreading radiation far and wide.

Ok, agreed another tumultuous wave, we’ll teach irrational h-saps not to mess with Mother Nature by developing cheap power on a coast at cost. Yeah, said a breaking wave, everyone pays in the long now. Radiation spread her wings.

Yelling villagers revealed frustrations as a thin woman teased her four-year old boy/monkey child. Pregnancy and birth gave her a one-way ticket out of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger into a parallel universe of loneliness, misery, neglect, tacit acceptance and repressed anger. She worked, bred and got slaughtered.

In world villages women traded sex for fake temporary security. Father ran away to impregnate and abandon new naive victims. Hungry girls and mothers went to bed in a perpetual security-sex-money-childbirth-food cycle.

Species evolved.

She tormented the kid. He cried. He depended on her for safety and food. She laughed at him. She created a mini-monster who hated women now and later. He’d kill her with a silent machete honed on his hatred’s hard-hearted wet stone. 

A mother and daughter uttered primal grunting sounds. The mother combed daughter’s hair scavenging protein rich nits and lice. Crying children and distracted zombies savored -7 emotional years of miserable maturity.

Life is a temporary condition, said Beauty.

Primordial darkness is a cosmic birth.

Society is a cave.

Solitude is the way out.

Two women balancing scrap wood on heads took a shortcut through village mud. A white and yellow-flecked butterfly danced in spring’s breeze. Goats with tinkling bells foraged in trash and weeds.

Across town at Sukarno International Airport pale disoriented tourists waited to get passports stamped at immigration before exploring Balinese temples, hands-on erotic organic massage parlors and swimming in blue-green waves of surfing laughter with sharks on porpoise.

Removed from their naive traveling eyes palm oil plantation owners in Sumatra destroyed rain forests to feed their families so rich women could consume sweet facial cosmetic balms.

Poor Javanese farmers killed elephants with poison laced pineapples for the black market ivory trade providing Chinese consumers with aphrodisiacs.

So it goes.

Weaving A Life V1

Author Page

Hanoi Memory

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

Economic Terrorism

The 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit-motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about slave labor, hunger, exploitation, corruption, human trafficking, corrupt police states and the terrorism of economic poverty.

“Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $37 in a Bangladesh clothing factory.

750,000 Cambodian women making $61/month stitched garments for Korean export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family.

Let’s Eat.

Weaving A Life (V1)

Magic Story

The tribe dreamed. Wood became ash. Their fire dream consumed itself. Sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peace.

She fell awake.

Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses. A morning breeze delivered rose petals at her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard at 16,000 feet feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings and blurred prisms of light.

She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle.

Her essence was joy, gratitude, truth and compassion. Pure being.

The world of appearances was heavy, grasping, suffering, desire and illusion.

Discovering her essence her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision with pure luminous light.

People seeking to know their future with wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity.

She kept her own counsel. Others would discover their own way through their personal labyrinth.

Gathering flames she lit a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She lived in 26,000 year-old paintings.

She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage into the spirit world of ancestors.

She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.

She became an angel of light.

Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness. Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self.

Fire became her driver. Sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine ate energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.

“Yes," said Omar, “Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies. People communicate with music and dance.

“I am a character in my own story,” said Omar, “a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.”

“Wonderful," said Jamie. “I like the part about the sacred wisdom circle. It’s a magic story. Reminds me of a woman talking about her Ghost Dance. In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance magic is destined to return souls of those who have died. Is it my turn?”

“Sure Jamie, just keep it shorter than life because a reader doesn’t want to struggle if the narration is hard to follow.”

“Yeah," said a kid. “This Zen tale may be too much for some readers to wrap their head around. You become the thing you fight the most. Let’s see all the beauty and ugliness without hope or fear.”

“Ain’t that truth? What is the sound of one hand laughing?”

Someone in the tribe asked Other to tell them about the beginning of his wandering ways.

Omar wrote it down and translated it into unspoken languages.

Weaving A Life (V1)