Eat Fast or Starve

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots.

He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery.

They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in village shoe factories years and lives away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' gazing befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus.

It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

Easily amused

Children of all ages are easily amused

by repetition and task-based activities

like sweeping, fucking, eating, sleeping,

milling around and staring at phones with vacant eyes

happy sheep slaves addicted to phones

surrender their consciousness.

Cheap thrills. So it goes.

*

Tribal survivors ate roots and plants garnished with entropy.

Survivors passed through civilizations seeking antiquities. They reported back with evidence sewn into their clothing to avoid detection at porous India-Tibetan borders. They severed small threads along hemlines, Chinese silk gowns and Japanese cotton kimonos. Their discoveries poured light rays into waterfalls rushing over Anasazi cliff dwellings into sage and pinion forests.

Survivors arrived at a mythopoetic part of their journey.

I reflected on the unconscious residue of social, cultural, ethical and spiritual values.

I needed masks. I needed to understand the underlying mysteries inside death masks. I confronted the realm of spirit. I created masks on my pilgrimage. My journey is the destination. Masks signifying the dignity of my intention thwarted demons and ghosts. I became spirits dancing in light.

Everything is light in my shamanistic interior landscape. I released the ego - Ease-God-Out - detached from outcomes, eliminated the need for control or approval, trusted spirit energies and remained light about it.

Inside light with slow fingers and long thin ivory nails I turned clay into pots. Spinning spirals danced on the wheel of time.

I finished throwing them used them for tribal ceremonies and smashed delicate clay pots to earth.

They exploded into the air creating volcanic ash coating everything in a fine dust.

I dug into the soil of my soul.

I scattered raw turquoise stones along a trail of sacrificial tears on a long walk through geography.

Kandinsky

What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it.

What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

*

Wassily Kandinsky, the painter, had the ability to see sound and hear color.

In 1911 he founded "The Blue Rider" school in Munich, taking abstract painting to another level. Magic.

..."Synaesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by "a studious blind man" claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet.

..."If Kandinsky had a favourite colour, it must have been blue: "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.

..."Despite his theories that the universe was in thrall to supernatural vibrations, auras and "thought-forms", many of which came from arcane, quasi-religious movements such as theosophy, Kandinsky's belief in the emotional potential of art is still convincing today.

"Our response to his work should mirror our appreciation of music and should come from within, not from its likenesses to the visible world:

"Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings."

Shit Detector

Lucky explored cobbled Turkmen streets alleys and dead ends. Mothers buried in headscarves observing street etiquette extended manicured necks beyond balconies. They swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules over blood stained escarpments.

They married consecrated relatives during fifty-minute Encounters designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering in Technicolor imprinted new linguistic impressions on synapses watching Pay For View.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. Use it or lose it.

Silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings and resonance, chromatic silence whispered, do not go gentle into the good night. Rage against dying light. Solitary notes of forgotten strumpets wailed across an abyss ignoring civilization’s discontent.

Creased faces ironed red roses petals. Faces eating masks embedded themselves on blank pages in Zeynep’s black notebook. “I don’t know which of us wrote this,” she said.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions after eating a full course meal of self-pity and loathing buried ancestors in a tomato based culture.

Water exploded off iridescent pools as happy hour birds swimming nowhere in particular heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears while assembling French cars at an eco-friendly green plant in a Bursa industrial zone.

“Were you punished for being a dreamer?” said Zeynep.

Ankara

“No, I survived the tyranny. My family understood my peripatetic nature. They respected my need for solitude, creativity and independence to a point. I received sadistic whippings with a fishing pole by my polio-diseased mother trapped in her karmic wheelchair and beaten with a leather barber’s strap by father for insolvent insubordination. Welt city. He made me eat dirt when he came home from work if the floor wasn’t clean enough. Now you know why I love linguistic gardening. I shut down my feelings. Mother and father demonstrated hard love in a perverse abusive way.”

“I see,” said a blind beggar.

“Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said James Joyce, arranging seven words..

“I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician,” said Lucky.

“Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”

“Brilliant.”

“In finishing school we learned to say fascinating instead of bullshit,” said Zeynep.

“You have a well developed built-in shit detector.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Everyone needs a good shit detector like writers and Cambodian/Laos landmine survivors. Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable documentary fiction from memory?”

“It appears. So.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed an imaginary double identity theory at Oz-man Homogenized Gazing Metro station.

Two gravediggers in long black overcoats carrying umbrella projectiles stepping into unknown futures stabbed cement in cadence.

Weaving A Life, V4

Lombok

I climbed through the center of Bali

inside magical light

past a sacred volcano at Lake Batur

with a small portable typewriter

a map carved on narwhal bone

a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper

codices or painted books and texts

on bark paper called Amate

and cactus fiber including

palimpsest animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

My hair caught fire.

Gathering flames I lit a piece of bark for guidance.

I mixed volcanic ash with water creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm of antioxidants.

I applied this to my skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.