Wolf meets dog. Freedom vs slavery.
Laugh and keep moving.
Passion & peristence.
Writing like music - rhythm, harmony, improvisation.
Time, effort, patience, cooperation.
Living safely is dangerous.
Dialect of the hands.
Thread music / dancing needle / flying leaves / zone of color art magic / sewing, tea, eggs, chillis, juice /
Writing Book of Amnesia / polish monster / just sitting / rain
Northern Laos
Writing is a river with many tributaries.
Photography: intuitive, creative impulse, timeless, presence, aura of death, a diary, essence.
The Divine Comedy. A romantic dreamer wanders Earth.
Act. Find the truth. Emotional honesty. Don't be afraid.
Dance is freedom. Movement never lies.
What I want to report is that I've done nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.
What is your myth - the myth in which you live?
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
Writers are shamans.
We go into the mountains and we come back with visions for our tribes.
Our holy assignment.
Wolf meets dog. Freedom vs. slavery.
Writing is a river with many tributaries.
Empathy - Cognitive & Emotional
Mushin - no thought, no emotion, no expectation
Kafka - it's about impossible situations and ambiguity
Dialogue with an image. What / why it speaks to us. What does it say to us?
“I’m not surprised they passed on it,” said Omar. “Anticipating their response I just finished a retort. Would you care to give it a read?”
“Sure.”
Dear Literary Agent, (insert name here)
Many thanks for your letter in response to my submission. As a matter of fact I have 60,000 specific succinct precise concise words floating around my small cabin here in a Zen bamboo forest. I will seduce them onto blank 20/lb. bond white sheets. Their text will be an artistic marvel of design.
I will wave my magic word wand over said words to rearrange them in a simple easy to follow linear form aligning nouns, verbs and direct objects with clear syntactical structure and so forth.
I love ironing. I share this passion with Haruki Murakami.
I will iron sheets of words with discipline, passion and persistence.
My egotistical profit driven anal editors will cull all unnecessary adjectives, adverbs and useless verbiage from the manuscript. An expert at practicing, I will write short fast and deadly.
My well-honed Berber knife and laughter’s Labrys axe will kill darlings with panache.
Deleted suspects will be stripped, blindfolded, water boarded and deprived of due process as part of my polishing action under the International Geneva Font Scribe Protection Act as described in The Book of Kells, Illuminated.
Subversives deemed unfit, dispensable, extraneous, and gratuitous for literary service will be executed by Executive Order #Zero123 with no emotional attachment. Next of kin will be notified in Braille. Fatalities will be a footnote in history where the sound of speech has no alphabet.
The epic will have the intellectual density of an essay, lyric cohesion of poetry and a structure resembling a documentary film incorporating cross-referenced evidence.
To write and to draw is the same Greek verb.
When Mr. Butcher and Mr. Barber, my insolvent intrepid illiterate editors finish cutting I’ll get back to you with a revised manuscript. A.S.A.P.
No publisher is going to drink champagne from my skull.
Sincerely yours, Omar the Blind
“I love it Omar. You’re the man with passion and wisdom.”
“Just doing my work. Few have read it. Fewer have understood it. Post it please?”
“With pleasure. See you later.”
“I’ll see you when I see you,” said Omar whirling his kaleidoscopic protean prism pen.
“Excellent. I imagine Rose, Faith and Tran will be joining us,” I said.
“Yes. They’re walking to Benaojan caves.”
“Delightful. Walking makes the road. We can share stories. I heard from Little Wing this morning.”
“Great. How is she?” said Omar.
“Excellent. She’s weaving threads in Grazalema.”
“Lovely. I look forward to seeing her new creation.”
“Let’s hope she didn’t destroy everything and begin again near the beginning,” I said.
“She realizes life’s tapestry contains flaws, missed stitches and rough edges. We’ll see her clear intentions,” said Omar.
“We will. Her weaving contains frayed edges and severed threads. Like our stories.”
“Yes,” said Omar. “Seeing the front gives one a feeling of totality with holistic harmony and perfection. An organic pattern appears from random elements like a lotus growing from mud.”
“See the beauty and cruelty without hope or fear.”
“No memory means no guilt, no guilt means no fear,” said Omar.
“It’s the Middle Way with detachment and discernment.”
“You sleep with the tiger,” said Omar.
“It’s process with passion. We act and let go. Adios amigo.”
“Adios.”
ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir
Mandalay, Burma
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