Creative People

I'm one of those people who’s learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to. An open hand holds everything.

Grasping is suffering.

I am a metaphor looking for a meaning. There are no metaphors, only observations.

I acknowledged kairos - the shuttle passes through openings in warp and weft threads, making things happen, creating new forms, new fabrics inside my word loom. The shuttle voice allowed me to recover, preserve and interpret tales.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life. Drifting some said. If I had one red cent for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis. Settling down was not an option.

I am a compass without a needle.

Yes. I could bid on blessings. I’d sacrifice pre-linguistic symbols and create silent metaphorical abstractions. My linguistic skills would evolve into love into discursive logic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic iron and copper paintings create a secret symphony of ancient stories in a Spanish cave.

No lengthy drawn out off-the-wall abstract explains my small empty self to anybody anything by virtue off who I was, am, and will be.

Life is a palimpsest. A game of experiences we get to play.

TLC - Facilitator of courage

A secret compartment in a unique one-of-a-kind jeweled knife illuminated the Tibetan plateau with antelope, snow leopards and gazelles among wild mountain pashmina underbelly goats knitting high-end sweaters and shawls for couture.

Shaggy yaks tinkled bells as eagles, Golak ravens and Winter Hawk winged free over remote white monasteries, rainbow Lung-Tao prayer flags and meditation halls filled with burgundy clad chanting monks playing gongs and cymbals, blowing silver jallee horns, lighting incense, laughing and reciting sutras in Himalayas near melting glaciers feeding wild torrential rivers flowing through slag scrabble rocky terrain, lush wildflower meadows, past isolated stone homes with yak dung drying on flat roofs, pilgrims studying a traditional herbal chart in the Amdo hospital and walking the Barkhor circuit in Lhasa filled with prostrating joyful people fingering prayer beads, whispering mantras and offering sage and pinion into a burning chorten under the ever-present watchful blind suspicious eye of naked plainclothes Chinese secret police disguised as international human rights observers employed by an NGO scam organization.

“You have some cool tools,” Foot said. “I am a tool of nature.”

“Yes you are and yes I do. Health care is expensive because patients and families incur 90% of the medical cost during the final years of their life. Hospice, home care, nursing homes, drugs, medicine, in & out patient care increases cost, long term debt, poverty and so on.”

“The dead paid sooner and the living paid later. Another unpleasant global fact is uncontrolled population growth, lack of job opportunities, substandard education and no medicine.”

“Life is filled with inconveniences. We have millions of idle unemployed here in Turkey. Bankers and politicians stole all the money. Greed is good is their mantra. Government is organized crime. Soma mine disasters with catastrophic loss of life is a fact of life for diggers making $500 a month. My job is to sell stuff. Treasures to be dusted on archaic mantelpieces. People buy things to make themselves happy - in the short term. They want to impress family and friends. They get bored, forget about it, lose it, throw it away or donate it to charity and buy more stuff. It’s a never-ending insatiable desire of supply and demand consumption dramatics. Advertising never dies. Fools are ruled by their emotions. Fear. Enough psycho-social-babble. What brought you here?”

“My feet. I work at The Language Company. I’m a facilitator of character and courage.”

“I know intestinal fortitude. It’s the most expensive virtuous school here.”

“Education is a business. You pays your money and takes your chances.”

“An open hand holds everything.”

They stirred sugar cubes, drank tea, and made small talk. 

The Language Company - C 1

“Mother had me before polio condemned her to an iron lung. She had another boy, lived in a wheelchair and produced a daughter with Irish will power. I survived in a dystopian dysfunctional family coping with physical and emotional abuse. Whippings, sadistic beatings, trauma and abandonment, the usual childhood shit. Feeling guilt for her illness I developed stone cold manipulation skills and independent survival skills. Trust in woman was MIA.

"Vietnam is a woman. We fucked them during the day and they fucked us at night. Love them and leave them. Abandoned ones become abandoners. Mother died at forty-two. My sister died of leukemia at thirteen. Only the good die young. She taught me courage. By chance do you have any?”

“It’s rarer than something that doesn’t exist. Courage is an intangible feeling of wellbeing and supreme confidence. You know this from your mind full Tibetan experiences. I sense you are a stream-winner. Sensation, perception, desire, fear, and ignorance ceased. Frequency shifts. Transformations. What happens to dreams The Sweeper collects?”

“They are sorted by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime scientific symbolic meaning.

“Word dreams live in vignettes, jazz poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, blood, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings near Benaojan, Spain hearing hollow bells ring high ring low as a Cambodian boy in satori clapping with one hand drags his cart along fractured dusty red roads collecting cardboard. Dawn to dusk. Composing musical symphonies he squeezes a plastic bottle expelling stale air attracting garbage contributors and hungry literary agents in a traditional publishing casino wheeling and dealing for their glorious 15%.”

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner stirring tea.

Sappho, poetess

The Language Company

A knife contained a collapsible battery-operated emergency room in Achebadem, an expensive private Bursa, Turkey hospital with heart rate monitors, respirators, and dialysis machines, transplant mechanisms, microscopes and high-tech life support goodies.

One engraved knife revealed The Dream Sweeper contraption manufactured in Ha Noise, Vietnam. It remembered evolutionary and revolutionary Communist nightmares surviving American B-52 bombers dropping millions of tons of ordinance on Nam, Cambodia and Laos. Hallucinations and bliss evolved from a point of light traveling at 186,000+ miles per second.

Space folded.

The efficient Dream Sweeper Machine collected unconscious talking monkey stories.

From inside narrow Nam alleys where death-worship was a constant reminder of rapacious ancestors eating incense screaming FEED ME dreams arrived crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, and sighing into The Machine.

Dreams begged for mercy, clarity, understanding and interpretation. There are no facts, only interpretations.

Dreams pondered historical inevitabilities: What is life? How did I grow? How did I get here? What if I die here? Who will be my unconscious role model? Who will save me from ultimate absolute reality? Who will feed me in a Peoples’ Communist Paradise dream reality where everyone shares toilets, kitchens and spoiled whining children? Where education is considered a waste of time and money? Where bribes are a way of life buying your future?

Bored Asians with an emotional level of -7 exchanged drab artificial lives playing on Fakebook, a glorious virtual electronic frontier of equality and equity enjoying hi-tech distractions with firewalls, corroded barbwire and rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent. Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

A boy brought brown tea, silver spoons and sugar cubes.

 “Prison is a refuge and a release,” said Lucky. “Solitary confinement, junkyard blues and an environmental impact statement: No one gets out alive. I was abandoned at five.”

 “We are all orphans sooner or later. What trauma happened in your childhood?” said the owner singing circular music clinking a teaspoon, “Twinkle, twinkle little star how I wonder...”

 The Language Company

 

Omar's Letter

Dear Literary Agent, (insert name here)

Many thanks for your letter in response to my submission. As a matter of fact at this exact moment I happen to have 60,000 tight specific succinct precise concise words floating around my small cabin here in a bamboo Zen grove. I will seduce them on 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 solid chronological narrative linear structural form aligning consonants and vowels with clear syntactical structure and so forth.

I love ironing. I share this passion with Murakami.

I will iron word sheets with passion and persistence. My vicious egotistical profit driven anal editors will cull all unnecessary adjectives, adverbs and useless verbiage from the assembled manuscript. All writing is garbage.

Being an expert at practicing, I will write short fast and deadly.

I will use my well-honed Tibetan knife and laughter’s Labrys axe.

Suspects will be blindfolded, stripped, and deprived of due process (part of the revisionist process) 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 #1234 with no emotional attachment.

Next of kin will be notified in Braille.

Fatalities will be a footnote in hiss-story. Where the sound of speech has no alphabet.

It 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 invaluable insolvent intrepid illiterate archaic erstwhile editors finish cutting I’ll get back to you with a revised manuscript. A.S.A.P.

No editor is going to drink champagne from my skull.

Cordially yours, Omar, the Blind One.