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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Monday
Aug222022

Flower

process is more alluring then product

Dimmi - tell me your secrets ... fundamental laws of nature ... synthesis ... geometry + shadow + light

Barthes - photographs attract us because they are pensive, they think

ideas in living laboratories

*

History, war, and violence screwed us, said Rita. Human genocide animals massacred 1.7 million out of 11 million between 1975-1979. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need. They eat, sleep, plant, harvest, fuck and sit around.

They are soft and kind. They have a good heart.

As Buddhists they visualize a positive future with good education, health care, quality medicine, job opportunities and community strength.

They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The lesson is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing staring humans. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone. Zap said Rita.

Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. Let’s pretend to be someone else in life’s play.

Whew what a mouthful, said Tran, an amputee from Vietnam, Yeah spilling sounds and metaphors, the human condition reads history and weeps, time history is a play, create memory history and re-write it. Your memory is the world, said Omar, And the world is a village.

Everything I need is here.

Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.

Question?

What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands? Her hands were all. Her hands were water air soft gentle sensations. Learning sensing and feeling is her physical way. She engaged all her senses. Touch is her essence.

She knew your pressure points. Soft, medium or hard, she said. During her meditation we considered this fragment. We discovered immediate direct experience with structure form and literary vulgarity.

We slow down inside a labyrinth contemplating a lotus growing from mud.

A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive. They write naked, in blood and in exile.

Book of Amnesia, V1

 

Burma

Sunday
Aug142022

abundance

"Terrorism is the art of fear." - Salman Rushdie

*

Mandalay, Burma

*

Dear one I am here for you. Love, compassion, joy, freedom.

*

Contradictions - the lost writings of Kafka.

"Stay at your desk and listen.  Or don't even listen, wait for it to bother you ... Don't even wait, be quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it with writhe in front of you in ecstacy."

The nature of experience. What can writers do?

Celebrate abundance. We live in an abundance beyond our needs ... the abundance of plant, insect and bird life supplies beauty and marvels and enigmas ...

abundance of energies astonish, delighted, entranced ... sensibilities & energies ... we have to entertain the people about us, to support & empower them to accompany them when their paths become painful ...

travel reveals a deeper reality than the one we find at home ... a person in exile is always home

 "A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second." - Salman Rushdie

Friday
Aug052022

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

Book of Amnesia Volume 1 by [Timothy Leonard]

Sunday
Jul312022

whispers

yes said

everything happens for awhile

a boy in shadows layers bricks

another wall

another art project

quality of life

whispers

sweet nothings

writing is saying something

to someone who is not there

who will never be there

we will be the ones

who have gone away

- George Perros

A Century is Nothing ... True enough. Existence is suffering and pleasure. It’s a grand precious adventure.

Seems full of fools, dead ends, bookends, trails, trials, tribal ramifications and tribulations. Where are Beauty and Truth in this tale? Where is the structure? Where is the linear narrative?

It’s in the big show. Shows to go ya.

It’s in the thread of three Greek fates. The three most dangerous goddesses were the Fates called Moirai. Homer called them ‘spinners of the thread of life.’

Clotho, the birth goddess, spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured the length allocating the amount of time to each person.

Atropos cut the thread. Anyone resisting them faced Nemesis, goddess of justice.

The Fates spin out our lives, fusing art and language. My instincts indicate a good harvest.

I dance through canyons leading to Southwest kivas inside a fire dragon’s mouth. I welcome the energy of sun, rain, life.

Languages. Tongues. How do I know where it will go? My job is gather material then let the Other organize it. I'm lucky to get it down. A conduit.

Wednesday
Jul272022

Sonny's Blues

"Keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

- James Baldwin

Every photograph is a certificate of presence. - Barthes

"The man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air ... more terrible because it has no words and triumphant too, for that same same reason. " James Baldwin

"Beauty in imperfection ... the internal world meets the outside world and takes shape. When my desire takes some kind of shape, it becomes a photograph. Photos: out of focus, rough, streaky, warped ... (person's daily perceptions) ... photograph the mysterious and unknown." Daido Moriyama