Ice Girl

"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

This is a work of literary journalism.

It’s fucking hysterical.

Now and then mean the same in Ratanakiri, Cambodia animist jungle languages.

Leo is incognito and invisible perusing the Wild West. It is replete with wandering literary outlaws, animists, shamans and 25,000 natives. Rambunctious young Banlung cowboys and cowgirls dance 125cc machines through spiraling red dust.

How long have you been here, asked a 12-year old girl cutting and selling ice along a red road.

All day. I started in China. I walked to Vietnam. Then Laos. I’ll stay here awhile. We can talk.

Ok, she said, cutting crystals. Is a day long enough to process a sensation, form an impression? Is it long enough to gather critical mass data about the diversity of the human condition in this total phenomena?

Yes, said Leo, If you slow down. How is life here?

I work, I breed, I get slaughtered, she said. This is my fate. My fate is a machete slashing through jungles. Fate and random chance are two sides of the same coin. Yeah, yeah are two of my favorite lazy words. Especially when I am talking with illiterate zombies ...

They are same word but I spit them out twice at light speed. You accent the last consonant, drawing it out like a sigh, a final breath, a whisper. Y-e-a-hhhhh. It’s crazy English believe you me. Impressive, eh? I can also say OK twice fast with a rising sound on the k sounding like a which means I understand without admitting meaning or personal truth-value. It’s vague. Why be precise? People love conversations using abstract metaphors. Ok?

Ok. Address the very low literacy rate, said Leo. Hello, literacy rate, how are you? she said.
I am well thank you and speaking with improved elocution. My English is getting better. The more I see the less I know. I open my head, heart and mouth.

Someone said literacy means reading and writing, said Ice Girl.

I doubt it, said Literacy. Who needs reading and writing? Humans need food, sex, air, water, stories and red dust. Hope is in last place. In fact, hope may be the greatest evil because it’s a myth, like evil.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said Ice Girl, sawing cold.

I thought you said eating and fighting, said Literacy. You must be fucking crazy. My survival depends on eating and fighting. Reading and writing is for idiots. Millions never learn how to read or write, let alone scribble stories. No chance. No money. No tools. Education is a waste of time.

I see, said Ice Girl. When I write my stories filled with immediate sense impressions and precise details they lose their magic. They are like ice. Ice loses its essence. It reverts to a primal form. Existence precedes essence. It’s lost between heart-mind-hand-tool-paper. Spoken stories lose their edge ...

Too many people talk out their stories. Magic is lost in the telling. Lost tales float around looking for ears. Talking kills magic and mystery. Ghost stories. World tribes memorize chants, rhythms, songs, tales and star trails with a side order of red dust. You never hear a kid say, Let’s take the day off and be creative.

Ice Girl in Banlung

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Every photograph has an aura of death.  - Barthes

Knives

On the flight from Amsterdam to Casablanca September 1, 2001 a woman sitting across the aisle used a small knife to skin an apple. Her right thumb measured thin red working a blade down fruit.

She was delicate and firm manipulating the sharp tool. Observing others using a sharp edge I remembered her.

One winter afternoon as the sun sang past Sierra Mountains, a man on a cane labored uphill to a gazebo overlooking Grazalema with his small dog. We exchanged pleasantries.

He pulled a folding blade out of a crumpled brown sweater pocket and a pear in a white paper napkin. He had the same precision as the woman. Finished slicing a piece he kept it on an edge eating off steel. He tossed the core to his barking mongrel, wiped the blade, folded it, pocketed it and stabilized himself to the potable water stone fountain. He removed his upper teeth, washed them, put them back in his face and wiped his mouth with the napkin.

Garcia the village Fleischer had the skill.

Grazalema families had it butchering pigs on plywood slabs in their garage on freezing January mornings as laughing women flayed with surgical precision. Disemboweled pigs covered the floor. A man stirred a steaming cauldron removing fat from bones.

A cafe man with a long thin blade slicing strips of ham off pig bones for hungry Seville day-trippers had it.

In February 2002 friends butchering sheep in Casablanca for Eid al-Adha, or “Feast of the Sacrifice” had it. Sacrifice with a capital S. Abraham dreamed he wanted to kill his son and God said, “No, I will send you a ram.”

Three sheep were slaughtered, one for each married man in the family. The sheep spent their last night in the furniture factory attached to a warren of rooms constituting the family home in an industrial part of town.

We started at 9 a.m. after a breakfast of crepes and tea. Ahmed, Tofer, Saad, and their father secured wooden beams and ropes above a red and gray tile floor. We held the first sheep down and sliced its throat. Breath and blood flowed across checkerboard tiles.

The head was severed and thrown to the side. We cut a hole in a back leg near tendons and bone, ran a rope through and hoisted the carcass. Covered in blood, laughing, sweating and struggling we raised the carcass into blue sky.

Blood paints tiles. Rex II the German shepherd drank his fill.

Sliced wool coats were thrown on a ladder to dry in the sun. They’d be collected by a man and made into family prayer rugs.

We inflated the body with an air compressor to facilitate skinning. Blades were honed. We worked fat off the skin of the poorest animal.

Organs tumbled into plastic tubs. Women carried them to a kitchen upstairs. The interior cavity was washed with hot water. Large sections were cut up with a band saw, wrapped in plastic bags and frozen.

Liver skewered with fat was grilled over red-hot coals and served at noon with tea, bread and olives. We ate in the shade of pink and red bougainvillea flowers. Casablanca was dead quiet.

At 3 p.m. we swallowed the stomach with lemon, olives, fresh bread, fruit and water.

Across the street itinerant men cooked sheep heads on a makeshift grill of coals with synesthesia.

The sound I saw

Smells a lamb’s head crying

Music of embers

Wool glazed eye calm

Cadence of a blade

Releasing blood

Touch hears the poorest skin

White intestines

Black liver on red coals

A single piece of charcoal

Welcomes a skull

Horns curve from blue sky

Into quivering dark-eyed knives

Slashing flesh

The feast lasted three days.

Sacrifice with family and hospitality.

Knife art.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

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Memory Spoke

“I’d rather be a tiger for one day than a sheep for 1,000 years,” chanted a Tibetan monk in a small chapel near the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa.

He sat on a platform swathed in burgundy robes holding the Vajra diamond thunderbolt and bell in his left hand. Ringing the bell he chanted sutras in muted tones.

Pilgrims entered the room through a worn door hanging after spinning copper prayer wheels in a narrow alley and climbing slick stone steps.

Three tall ornate, copper-plated Buddha’s faced them. Past, Present and Future Buddhas contemplated rows of flickering yak butter lamps, fruit offerings, khata scarves, coins and paper money.

Two wooden benches were against a wall. On the floor was a pan of round gray clay balls. Devotees rubbed one on faces and hands before joining others waiting to be blessed. Gathered with bowed heads at the chanting monk’s feet were playful, devout jostling travelers.

He cycled through sutras chanting and touching people on their head with the thunderbolt and pouring holy water on them saying Long Life. They eased away as others moved forward.

He was in a trance state.

An old woman with sky blue turquoise stones woven into her long plaited black hair and wearing a long heavy sheepskin coat sat down next to me. Sharing smiles she mumbled, “Namaste. Blessings to you.”

Whispering ‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’ she fingered prayer beads.

Babbling tongues sang. The bell rang.

Nepal

Awake, I returned to Spanish crypts with my camera. I imaged interments of chiseled names and pueblo connection. Invisible stories dreamed in occupied or empty crypts. They illuminated desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence.

Dreams floated to the listening faithful. They were silent stories of the pious as silent breathing revealed stories inside stories.

“The rest is silence,” said Shakespeare.

The widow observed crouched shadows in rocky fields shifting stones and pruning dead growth from olive trees along the Rio.

Wild yellow and purple flowers blanketed cleared land.

Romans built stone homes and designed baths near the river. They made walled fortifications with defensive mountains behind them. Ten-foot wide dolomite roads twisted from the pueblo down through the valley and beyond for future legions expanding their empire. Soldiers marching west branched north to Seville or south to Cadiz.

Grazalema men loaded cork on tired tractors. Using bedsprings for gates they built pens for sheep, chickens, dogs, goats, and children. Twisted rusting bed coils lay scattered. They used everything trying to tame poor rocky land.

Men assembled fences using blackberry brambles with sharp thorns. They reinforced fences with sticks, recycled old tires, tin cans, metal struts, old cars, and discarded cooking stoves. Chipped bathtubs became watering troughs for livestock. Small stone dams diverted Rio streams to small fields.

Everything was done by hand. Labor worked dawn to dusk, day in day out. Labor cleared erosion’s debris by marking land with tools and footprints.

The widow’s husband slept in the Catholic crypt. Dusty light danced through palm leaves.

She was a full silent moon above his bone white memory. Her spirit danced with spirits.

Spirits treasured clear impermanent memories. Finished sacrificial rituals his cloud vapor danced free from the cemetario to manifest with the full moon above stone fields, yellow flowers and flowing river where men worked their trust.

ART - A Memoir

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

 

Vietnam

Create

"At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mysteries of life itself. At 100 I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110 everything I create, a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before." - Hokusai (1760-1849) The Great Wave

Funeral to pagoda ...

Full Moon

I was grateful to see three full moons in the Sierras. Undulating valleys dreamed of planting, water and harvest.

Mad as hell caged hunting dogs below mountains howled high anxiety.

Grazalema men in sturdy boots carried lifetime labor tools through fields. When Luna was full they didn’t visit fields, river, forests or mountains. Men respected magic and ghosts. Men lived the day. Spirits lived the night.

Chained hounds howled dusk to sunset. Rising orange clouds met a yellow moon.

A heavy bolted brown wooden church door at the small church led to the vestibule of Republican resistance memories. A Virgin Mary crying blood decorated the altar. A widow in black performing her daily penance through action and devotion changed the white lace cloth. She soaked blood out at Roman public baths below the village where water flowed from stoned carved angelic mouths.

A forcestero with a notebook and camera passed her. She recognized his ghost, Yes a spirit visiting friends.

She blessed herself twice with bird wing fingers at the end of a warm winter day. Sun went home. Egyptian vultures pirouetted with the yellow moon evolving white.

She locked the black gate leading to the crypt. She remembered him doing his reconnaissance after yesterday’s funeral.

He worked in the crypt zone. Four long walls held the departed. Engraved stones with names, dates, in memoranda of children and adults back to 1896. He made images under the smoky green eyes of a wild Siamese cat on a red tiled roof.

Crypt construction tools, bricks, cleaning solution, trowels, broken black buckets and rags decorated empty crevices. Rectangles waited for ornate boxes from a casket factory miles and lives away. Caskets with simple bronze handles for six pairs of weathered hands. Brown and black lined caskets with satin pillows. Pillows softer than language welcomed living tears.

Survivor’s hearts beat long personal drum solos.

Every heartbeat contains a universe of possibilities.

Yesterday a casket in a black car garnished with wreaths of floral scents reached a black gate. Men carried it past a palm tree, through a church door, another black gate on rusty hinges and slid it into an empty domain name. Cold gray cement cavities had red brick ceilings. A desolate crypt space was long. It was empty. It was cold. It was a permanent change of address marked Eternity.

Men’s tools scraped hard winter soil. They were above ground.

Black was the night and cold was the ground.

“Any day above ground is a good day,” said an unemployed gravedigger. He looked at his hands. “I know two things.”

Resting outside the church seeing the concave valley and rising cubist pueblo I remembered a sitting meditation in Lhasa, Tibet.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Mekong Blue, Stung Treng, Cambodia