Burma Market

Horse drawn cart traps. One traffic light.

Two motorcycles is a jam. Green for go.

Twenty minutes away on foot, an extensive traditional market covered in rusting PSP sheets is a delightful adventure  - returning to the source of community, dark eyed local curiosity, street photography, laughter and floating babbling tongues inside a labyrinth of narrow uneven dirt paths.

Footprints on stone and dirt meander through forests and mountains of oranges, apples, bananas, red chilies, green vegetables, thin bamboo baskets of garlic and onions, farm implements, 26 varieties of rice, clacking sewing machines, basic commodities, steaming noodles, cracking fires, snorting horses.

Sublime.

Blindfish heads whisper The Sea, The Sea. Silver scales reflect light.

A woman hacks chickens. Blood streams down circular wooden tree rings.

The gravity of thinking sits on a suspended hand held iron pan scale.

A white feather sits in the other pan.

Balance.

Rice mountains peak in round metal containers or scarred wooden boxes.

Horse drawn cart traps unload people and produce. Neck bells tinkle: Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might get the wish I wish tonight. Well. Fed horses paw dirt.

Ancient diesel tractor engines attached to a steel carcass hauling people and produce bellow black smoke.

Old wooden shuttered shops with deep dark interiors display consumables, soap, thread waiting for a conversation, stoic curious dark-eyed women, others laughing at the benign crazy traveler. 

A ghost-self sits in meditative silence, absorbing rainbow sights, sounds, colors, smells, feeling a calm abiding joy.

Talk Story

1. Where does the story want to go?
2. Embrace ambiguity
3. Stay confused

Be a work of art or wear a work of art

Talk Story

Discuss common sense

Not very common

The world of forms/ideas

Form is emptiness

Emptiness is form

Forms in natural world

Basho said, if you want to know a tree go to a tree

World of ideas

Imagination

Observation

Experience

Present moment

Ink me laughter

Waves light nature's song

Riding a beam of light through space

Keep your own counsel

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can

It’s what you find in the corner

Circus people live on the edge

Sunset swift lets fill orange sky with magic

 Inhale here

Exhale now

Mental hypothalamus

Unconscious

Grow Your Soul

6 Essentials. Memory. Archetypes.

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe." - Upanishad

*

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 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."

"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 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 Alfred Jarry, “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. The becoming of a memory.”

“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

16

My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

*

Give the gentle reader saatch aur himmat, Z said in Turkish. Translation please, said Devina. Truth and Courage.

Keep them engaged, said Tran, Be gentle with the reader. They are educated. Challenge them. What’s a word doctor, said Leo. Someone who fixes manuscripts with a sharp axe, said Tran waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston-driven fountain pen splattering blood red ink on everyone in his radius.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Edge focus. WE, you and I, them, he, she and us ain’t going anywhere. We live forever. In your dreams, yelled Devina. Everyone’s doing hard time. It ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Have mercy.

Rita, an orphan and independent visionary writer from Banlung chimed in with a voice sweeter than a Buddhist bell, I’m going to be an English facilitator and historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.

Where have I heard that before, asked Leo, an activist in exile from an orphanage on the Yangtze, heavy with silt and six trillion cubic meters of garbage flowing to the South China Sea.

What will you do with collected time, said Tran, Visit sick children in hospitals where they do DNA evolutionary experiments to stem the cells, can you sell the stems?

Speaking of stems, I’m moonlighting as a gardener, said Omar, There’s nothing more beautiful than nurturing nature in this impermanent life. We plant seeds for trees we will never see mature. Another leaf leaves life’s tree.

If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of the thorns give me a shout, said Tran, a one-legged Vietnamese child wearing his heart on the sleeve of a ragged 101st Screaming Eagle t-shirt.

A bird pressed its breast against a thorn singing, O what a beautiful morning o what a beautiful day.

A poet, like a chef or gardener, needs everything because they love everything.

I’m going to study Donatello, said Devina. Who’s he? He was a great Renaissance artist. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy. He was honest had integrity and was super original. Technically he worked with anything. You name it: wax, bronze, marble, clay, all kinds of rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist.

Painting with smoke and mirrors, said Tran, Hey, that’s what the Greeks said. They believed everything was beauty and order, said Rita, Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, musical notes, all the beauty originated with them didn’t it?

You got it, said Tran. Hey, you know what, I think I’ll take the day off and be creative. Ha. This present instant contains all reality, whispered Zeynep. We can call this experiment The Theory of Z, about a young precocious girl, her friends, artists and seers. Why not?

I taught a blind nomadic gardener/janitor/gravedigger and kid friends about emotional life in an alien schizoid civilization called Turkey, said Z. We shared values, stories and art with a free spirit.

I’ll tell you a secret. There’s two of me. One young and one old. The older is Kurdish and plays a cello in a cemetery. Can you dig it? Aliens and fantastic probabilities, said Rita, Tell me the difference between possibility and probability.

It’s about process not product. Whew, now that’s deep. Yeah, said Devina, We’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes. Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else speaking in the abstract.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said a demanding authoritarian Realist vomiting contrarian hypotheticals, truth, logic, verifiable data-based evidence, scientific facts, precise specifics. We must ascertain the immediate personal moral and ethical values with lofty principles and assistant principles on principal.

Z said, Speaking of aliens do you know about Iranian culture? They live south of us in the Middle Beast. It’s a violent repressive dictatorship. They have a VICE squad to control sheep behavior. Weird shit. Their oppressive culture keeps women in perpetual childhood.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Write Naked

            Earth peoples, oceans wave, celebrate life energy sex and harmonic forces, said Rita, What happened in the love hotel? Use your imagination.

            They paid a woman 3,000,000 Yen through a slot in the door. She gave them a key. It unlocked Akiko’s chamber of secrets. The room featured an American wild-west motif with an Indian chief on a white horse. Very cute, said Akiko. They stripped each other down. They took a long hot herbal bath exploring geography with tender lust. They jumped each other’s bones. It was in-out dialogue, pure passion. Show doesn’t tell, said Z.

            He toweled me down, said Akiko. I felt thick cotton noun fibers edge my thin shoulders, along my verb spine, weaving his fingers across my flat stomach, erasing, tracing water fingering my direct object jungle. Slow and easy baby, I sighed being his Shinto shrine as he gave me his offering. Our relationship ignored verbal language, said a blind Japanese masseuse in a love hotel.

            What conflicts exist?

            -Human vs. Human

            -Human vs. Nature already mentioned.

            -Human vs. ______><_______

            -Human vs. self. Do I or don’t I? Is it safe? Wiil it help me or will it hurt me?

            -Nature vs. Nurture

            Will someone playfully deconstruct the truth with literal facts to move the narrative along and get to the mind-at-large awareness of his or her experience, said Tran. I hope so, said Omar, A literary agent at a writer’s conference in Oregon said my writing was a word photograph jazz beat. She suggested throwing the narrative out.

           She said and I quote, Pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. I would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words, Yeah, said Rita, What did you say? I told her some novelists do exactly the opposite of what they’re told because disobedience is freedom, Beware of book doctors and blood thirsty greedy dictatorial aliens with an agenda, said Rita.

            Ok, said Tran, How’s this sound? Write everything in the first five pages. Grab the reader with a hook in every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and at the end of chapters, Yeah, said Grave Digger, WE need a hook, a big iron hook covered with dried blood hanging in the center of an empty Kampot market reminding genocide survivors what happens to them if they fuck up. They get a big fat rejection hook in the neck or through their trembling beating pulsating heart.

            Fear sells. Fear is a universal language.

            Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear, sex and growth into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation  ... punctuation is a nail. Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist.

            I love Linguini, said Devina, but he doesn’t love me. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know eternity adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again.

            Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it. A sincere writer has grit and stamina. Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess.

            A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Marcel Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted. Kill your father. Marry your mother or versa visa. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

            We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard-lived sojourn, Experience is my teacher. The rest is just information, Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame stream mainstream upstream.

Book of Amnesia, V1