Visionaries

The asylum is a prison and a protection. We shelter psychotic misfits, deviants, shamans, tricksters and uninhibited geniuses. The outside is the inside veiled in mystery. We escaped the maddening crowd to be on an island.

You’re either mad or innocent. A polite genius. Madness is healthy.

Do you work from the inside out or outside in? The outside objectivity is an illusion. The inside mind-at-large is flowing chemical and electrical energy.

The asylum is filed with writers, artists, musicians, dreamers, creatives and orphans exiled from many countries. You wouldn’t believe the input, output. In out, in out, click and clack quacks, scribble dribble quibble, maniacs, dancers, actors, poets, musicians, playwrights, and painters with canvases expand their dreams. They create a world of memory using active imagination.

You breathe in you breathe out.

My body, my breath, my practice.

We have dreamers, screamers, singers, schemers and bell ringers. Ding-dong. A monk ringing a bell walks down a Yangon, Burma street at 4 a.m. Everyone shuffles to the meditation hall. Sit in silence. Silence is a great blessing. Silence is the loudest noise on Earth. Deep silence = Deep bliss.

The bell is small brass with a clapper. What is the sound of one bell clapping? Meditators and artists see with their ears and hear with their eyes. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature is my teacher. I see through soft eyes.

Janitors, Grave Digger and literary outlaws are essential artists. People make a beautiful mess and I clean it up.

 Blade Runner

What do inmates sing about? They sing about identity theories, art, sexual and spiritual love, freedom, addictions, ideas, suicide, hope, light, fragility, strength, integrity, beauty, truth and mystery. They sing the nomadic alliterative alternative.

Zeynep and her friends are visionaries. They are visceral realists. Why does the ONE STATE lock them up? They are a perceived threat to the stability and social harmony of the status quo. They’ve been branded, labeled, categorized, diagnosed, drugged, tortured and incarcerated. Perhaps incinerated. Set yourself on fire.

Burn like the sun, radiant … flame your life.

Give a person a match and they’re warm for a minute.

Set them on fire and they’re warm for the rest of their life.

If you catch on fire jump in the river.

Sounds like fear based propaganda. It is. Clearly. Precisely. Concisely ... Too many adverbs if you ask me, but what do I know, I’m only a word janitor. Every single fucking beautiful day I collect tons of word garbage in a Top Secret BURN BAG. I haul it to a gnat on life’s river, light it and leave it free flowing down the stream of life. Yes, said Death, Flowing.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Abracadabra

The one who dies with the most toys wins. Congratulations.

Besides writing, gardening and storytelling are you Grave Digger, Yes, said Zeynep, I am a Grave Digger by day and a literary prostitute by night. I made my own shovel. I cut down the tree … I shaved the bark, fashioned the long handle, extracted iron from earth, created fire, heated the iron ion particles, forged the iron and fitted it. It’s a custom-made job. One of a kind, like you. Unique … I am very busy doing nothing, a kind of jazz poem. Musical flow feeds the writing. Rhythm, harmony and improvisation.

Music is the fuel.

Most humans are busy, busy, busy. You never hear a dying man say, I wish I’d spent more time at the office … I bury failures and successes in the same grave. It’s a job and puts food on the table. I develop and cultivate plots where I plant symbolic and metaphorical empirical roots.

I love good dirt … I also perform cremation ceremonies for families needing ashes, bones and dust. WE are radiant stardust and 1/3rd the life of the universe. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our bodies are nothing but recycled atoms and quarks from exploding stars.

I am fire, personified. Shamans control fire … I am a lightning bolt singing Abracadabra. Translation - hurl your lightning bolt even unto death.

It’s an alchemical process. Grave digging is a full-time honorable job with dignity and respect. Look at my hands … Look at your hands …You know two things … Look at a blind potter’s hands, a blind smith’s hands, the blind laundry woman’s hands, the blind seamstress’s hands, the blind beggar’s hands, the blind writer’s hands, the blind executioner’s hands, Death’s hands … all the hands dancing, gesturing, pleading, laughing, loving, touching, holding, grasping, signing hands, all the non-VOICE hands.

An open hand holds everything.

People say the world is a big place. By the time you get to your plot Earth is a very small place, ha. Put that in your opening remarks at a literary festival.

Do you have a night job? Yes, I am a word janitor in an insane asylum.  It’s a good place to jot down ideas and sketch. I am a literary outlaw. I violate all the writing rules.

Rules are for rulers. A ruler is a tool to measure something. A human ruler is an autocratic dictator in the Middle East, North Korea, Burma, China, Turkey, Russia and serious Syria among other places. You name it. They sit on a fancy papier mâché throne … Older wiser slaves offering sage advice to save their ass and protect their bureaucratic position OBEY the boss and do what they are told to do. Or else.

They Rule. Some rule out of kindness and compassion. They accept freedom and responsibility and accountability for their actions to be just and empathetic.

Many rule using FEAR and intimidation. As an outlaw word janitor knowing ambiguities, contradictions, paradoxes and false identities, I collect evidence.

I take out the garbage, like adverbial labia. The garbage is a mixture of fact and fiction. Some garbage is true factoid and some garbage is invented farrago. Janitorial work is fun, useful and necessary. I meet fascinating patients living free from fear now. I discover cool stuff people discard. Many patients wallow like pigs in regret, drown in guilt pools or die in future fears.

Earth is one big insane asylum.

No memory means no guilt and no guilt means no fear. Sweet.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Courage

"Writing has nothing to do with literature. It's not literature. It is witchcraft." - Clarice Lispector (bio)

Good travel writing is creative hanging out.

Can Zeynep do this? Yes, she’s around 18 now in 2021.

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 shares stories. 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 … It’s all energy, frequencies and vibrations. Storytelling, exposition, myth, jazz poetry, and system analysis flow in the stream of life. Glow with your flow … 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.

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, V1

Twenty-five quotes by Lispector.

Focus

Flower whispered, I don’t like sleeping alone.

Easy to remember Flower’s soft deep tactile sensations. Practice the Middle Way  ... The Middle Way is deep breathing and mindfulness  ... The Middle Way is loving kindness. Metta. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude.

Discover harmony between detachment and sentimentality. Eat the world with your blind eyes. Yes, my Flower, yes. Dead or blind, there’s no difference. People who cause you difficulties are valuable teachers. They give you the opportunity to develop patience, said Omar a blind mystic amanuensis.

Q. What else did you experience during the massage?

A. All explanations have to end somewhere. An explanation is a well-dressed mistake.

What is a spotlight focus? A spotlight is on a specific. A breath. A flame. A sound. Pure sensation. Give me an example. Spotlight: the universe reflected and refracted in a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower.

Floodlight is the big general picture: sunlight reflects off a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower petal membrane veined with green umbrella fan leaves caressing cool fresh air growing from a pink lotus in mud below gray clouds near mottled moldy white streaked paint on yellow Khmer walls wearing brown, green, white shards of glittering glass to keep out cunning thieves and devious land pirates as tall singing palm trees dance below white cumulus clouds flying across blue skies above green forested mountains and jungles teeming with beauty, leopards, wolves and 232 species of butterflies.

Question? How much does silence cost? Depends.

Deep silence = deep bliss.

In my silence only my voice is missing, said Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet.

Money buys silent bribes.

Bamboo Nomad said, Open your head, heart and mouth if you want to practice speaking tongues with me, I am a facilitator.

I am a storyteller, said Zeynep from Bursa, Turkey. We communicate telepathically. A-dolts don’t get it.

Q: How many types of people are there in the world? Three: people who make things happen, people who watch people make things happen and people who don’t know what the fuck is going on.

Funny sad true unpleasant facts. Like exploding galaxies, a meaningless universe and orgasms. Reality is the funniest thing happening. It’s difficult to take any of this seriously. People should play more.

How did I grow?

The bigger the fear the bigger the defense. Can you hear yourself think? Yes, it’s important to keep a running monkey mind dialogue going to express emotions, ideas and awareness of illusionary sense details, distractions and existence.

You are critical mass expressing art.

Socrates asked the big question: HOW TO LIVE?

Establish character nuance with emotional honesty and a sense of the fantastic. It’s essential to establish a conte\x/t. Give me an example of compression.

They came, burned, raped, pillaged, trussed up their loot and gone. Excellent.

I know everything and can say nothing.

I know nothing and can say everything.

Tell me about hanging out. Travel writing uses novel techniques. It explores a place, discovers and/or invents characters, selects and tailors experiences and arranges the action to give the narrative shape and motivation.

Time is history.

Space is geography.

Book of Amnesia V1

Tran

Before going to Cambodia I lived in Vietnam for seven months. Five months in Hanoi and two months in Saigon. I first went to Vietnam at nineteen and spent a year with the 101st Airborne near Hue.

I put it in a memoir called ART – Adventure, Risk, Transformation. It was self-published in 2019.

I met Tran Van Minh at the 85th Medical Evacuation Hospital in Da Nang in 1970. I came down for hearing tests.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

I turned to the traveling tribe of seven storytellers. Tran from Vietnam, Rita from Cambodia, Leo from Tibet, two Zeynep’s from Turkey, Devina from Indonesia and Omar. Survivors. The Magnificent Seven. All of them have poems, stories, and dreams to finish they haven’t started yet.

Tran: I grew up in a village near Da Nang. There was a war in my country. I was five. One day I was playing near my home and stepped on a landmine. It exploded. Someone took me to the hospital. They saved me. I lost my right leg from the knee down. Now I have a plastic leg where my real leg used to be. It was a gift from a kind stranger. I’d like to thank them but I don’t know who they are or where they are. Maybe it was someone who came to the orphanage where I grew up after the war.

Anyway, it’s ok now. At the hospital they fixed me up and gave me crutches so I could get around. I lived on a ward with other Vietnamese kids. One day I was cruising down the hall and saw an American guy. He smiled at me. I smiled back.

He followed me to my ward and talked to a nurse. I’d like to be his friend. What is his name? Tran. Ask him if he’d like to be friends. She asked me and I said yes. Yes is one of my favorite English words. The man and I became friends for three days.

He said he had a hearing problem. I’ve met people with a listening problem.

Sometimes he carried me. It was great. We hung out together eating, watching movies on a big white sheet and playing on the beach. Then he gave me a big hug and left. He said he had to go back to his unit. He said he would always remember me.

I gave him my picture. I’m smiling, wearing blue hospital clothes and sitting on a bed with my missing leg wrapped in white bandages. I felt sad but I understood when he left. I lost my family in the war and I’m an orphan.

WE accept loss forever. That’s a good story, said Rita, I’m an orphan also. We have loss in common.

I met a happy child with courage. Tran was my teacher and connection with the real world. Be a child. We are one with the world around us. Tran survived with confidence, courage, strength and spirit. He taught me how precious life is. Tran is an essential storyteller because he is a survivor.

Tran - I am Bui Doi. This means children of the dust in Vietnamese. We shine shoes, beg, pickpocket and sell postcards and gum near tourist sites.

Bui Doi. Children of the dust.

Book of Amnesia, V1