Amnesia

Imagination tells the truth, said Zeynep. It is curious how this beautiful monster evolved. It began in 2010. The working title was Big Work.

It’s raw material, mirrors, reflections, experiences and journeys in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia. The journey is the destination. I’m happy to get it down now and make sense of it later.

Live every day like it’s your last because one day it will be.

My responsibility is to document stories from diverse cultures. A record of people, places and growth with Direct Immediate Experience.

D.I.E.

I will create a small book about Amnesia. I am an experience junky and a hack journalist gifted with the ability to see the future. I murdered many darlings. Some darlings survived. I already revealed I am also a gardener and word janitor collecting vignettes, flash fiction, and diamonds cutting through desire, anger and ignorance, with be-bop jazz poems, dreams, visions, fragments, word plays and miscellaneous elements of truth-story and fiction-memory threads whistling like a blind person in the dark.

This is not a novel. It is not linear characters detest the formulaic A to Z. I am Z and the beginning needs work.

What will you be at night when you reach the end of the road?

It is experimental in nature, like Omar’s literary memoir, A Century is Nothing. In fact, unpleasant as it is and I’ve faced many unpleasant enlightening facts. Part of his epic performance is included here for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Question. Did children invent infinity and eternity? No. They are abstract concepts. Like elastic time. Time is a circle. Children live forever. WE are immortal.

We begin with children’s voices. I say WE because it is everyone. The WE are you and I, us, them, he, she, it, all universal pronouns. Language is communication not rules. Grammar means rules … tedious shit.

One voice many voices. Storytellers. The world is made of stories not atoms. They are essential with heart-mind. Wisdom mind burns bright. The Mind-at-Large spirit is motivation. Karma. Here is one of my kid friends.

Hi. This is the day of my dreams, said Tran, 10, amputee and dust collector, Da Nang, Vietnam.

Let’s create a book, said Zeynep, And we’ll be in it. I am a central scripter because I am young enough to know how much I don’t know which means I don’t know anything the first thing, the last thing, the only thing, the main thing about the literary publishing game.

I imagine literary means being accepted and commercial means selling and establish marketing platforms and becoming addicted to social media because media buys people.

Many humns drown in a glut of low quality information.

I understand the meaning of meaning, subjective truth values, I am curious and question everything and like my friends in this chess game of life experiences I am fearless.

I never take yes for an answer.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

We are Bushido warriors with Zen clarity insight and wisdom. The majority of adults are, in my little clear, concise, precise deadly specific opinion based on empirical experience, tyrants, rigid, autocratic, blind in one eye, easily distracted, idiots, depressed, angry, insecure, resentful, neurotic, suffering from illusions, greedy for money and power and CONTROL and so on. I love their personality and character faults.

They take drugs or escape into phone madness to erase pain and memory. They struggle to forget. They take Soma to BE on a perpetual holiday from mind numbing tedious monotonous life. They become soft and pliable sheep…easily manipulated by viral media machine messages. Burroughs called it The Soft Machine.

Every person counts.

To relieve a low level of fear called anxiety they need a high dosage of feel good prescription drugs and/or phones. Same-same but different.

Here in Turkey, said Z, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, is prescribed for the nationalist sheep. It is safe, effective, addictive and abused. Adults take the easy way out because they are lazy, anxious and afraid after July 2016. They live their personal FEAR.

Adults boss us around because we are small. Big ones manipulate us through fear, intimidation and bribery. Eat your vegetables and you can have desert.  Don’t tell your parents what happened in the dark chapel and I’ll give you some money. Give me a bottle of expensive French wine and you’ll pass my class.

Give me your daughter and you can have some land. Give me your sword and I’ll spare your life.

I buy your freedom with candy, money and things.

Give me your tomorrows and you can have some food. Give me your soul and you can go to heaven and live with twenty-four virgins after I kill you.

I will give you clothing

shelter and food

if you give up your free speech.

What a great deal. And so on.

Adults think they are omnipotent. They are physical giants but believe you me many are smaller than a neutrino quark in my humble estimation, interpretation, elaboration, shun. This creates a tragedy.

“Life is a tragedy when seen closeup but a comedy in long shot.” – Charlie Chaplin

Book of Amnesia, V1

Fly

Ireland.

One night a Donegal fly arrives while I’m typing.

It lands on the lampshade.

A muse watchdog fly, one eye, many eyes.

It rubs its feelers together in anticipation of finishing off someone’s meal. Flies have lived on Earth for 93 million years. They symbolize death and decay.

There is no food lying around, only papers, magnifiers, books and clothing.

The fly’s aware of magic power and pure intention drawing it to the writer. The lamp is hot. The wind is cold. The fly reads my mirror mind, sees bleeding fingers, feeling the loneliness and freedom.

Fly appreciates and comprehends this must go down just as it must land to rub it’s feelers together sitting on the precipice of light beams with wonder, fury, delight, ramifications, responsibility and repose. Karmic fate.

-I saw you from a foreign window, said fly. -You were on a path.

-True. Suffering is an illusion. It’s a grand precious adventure. The road is made by walking. It’s a long walk.

-Seems full of fools, dead ends, bookends, trails, trials, tribal ramifications and tribulations. Where is the beauty and truth in this tale? Where is the narrative structure? Where is the plot of formless form?

-We live in a world of forms. It’s in the exposition. The big show. It’s in the thread of fates’ fabric. How do I know where it will go? Part of my job is to gather material, get out of the way and allow a writer to organize it. I’m lucky to get it down and figure it out later. I’m a conduit. I’m a figment of your imagination.

-So it would appear, said fly, -who lives it, writes it, rewrites it, polishes it, reads it, kills it, ignores it, abandons it. I am a drop of water on your mirror. Feed wild birds daily crumbs. Water flies from sky. It explodes into earth. I disappear into dust. Burn baby burn. Cry baby cry.

-You’re a fly. An insect. Short attention span, like some humans I’ve met. No attention span? No problem.

-Hey. Take it easy. Listen. Stay focused. Stay on task. You were in the jungle, the real deal amigo. You were dazed and confused, stupid, naive, dressed in green, following blind orders. Blind led the blind. You were the willing doing the ridiculous for the ungrateful. You survived to tell the tale. Give me a break. Start with one true declarative sentence. Punctuation is a nail. Write what you know. Write the ending and work backwards. Center ripples out. Use verbs and nouns. Murder adjectives and adverbs. Use active tense. Give me dirty realism. Surface. Write with passion. Keep it simple. Seduce the reader.

-It was hot and humid. It was November. I was a climatic cinematic spotlight-floodlight focus. I was a thick stream of gracious fear, healthy doubt, glorious uncertainty, wild adventure and unlimited surprise. 

-How did you feel?

-Shit, I was young and scared. Apprehensive. We were all young and petrified & naive packed into a tin can flying low over green jungles. I smelled the green lieutenant’s shit next to me skimming jungles before they opened the doors, before some sergeant got on yelling at us to get out and get going. We walked down the stairs into heat exploding off pavement. A brown and white striped tent waved in the distance. We walked toward it. There were hundreds of guys yelling and screaming at us.

-So what. Kinda Blue by Miles Davis

-Man it was weird, I gotta tell ya. All these guys in earth  brown uniforms, caked with dirt laughing, smiling, yelling, crying, taunting us, thanking us for bringing in their plane, yelling “man we’re going home, what’s your honey’s name jack and I’ll take good care of her, man am I short,” all kinds of verbal incantations.

-So what. (take 2)

-You don’t get it do you? Man we were just getting there and I said, shit here I am at 19 and I’ve got 365 days to go. These guys are done, finished, out of here and it was the biggest longest looking instant of future time in the immediate present tense sense you could imagine. I couldn’t even begin to see it, 365 what? Are you kidding me? Others went into shock knowing they had no idea what was in front of them, only seeing 365 days staring them in the face. You knew life expectancies disappeared fast being a numbers game maybe, at the most six months if you were lucky and then after surviving 180 days you stayed on edge trying to make it through the rest. We swallowed salt pills three times a day. The weak dropped like flies.

-Not funny.

Weaving A Life V1

Director of Brooms

Lolly

Omar napped. Little Wing wove.

She looked up from threads. Want to take some signal equipment up to our ops at Firebase Lolly?

Sure.

Pick it up at 1000 hrs. Someone will drop you off at the chopper pad. Stay up there two days.

Lolly was a firebase ten miles from Camp Eagle and the 101st. I climbed into a Huey, the door gunner wearing fly goggles gave me the thumbs up, strapped myself in and we lifted off. 

Rotors thudded through air fighting gravity lifting off at an angle and forward as the pilot kept the momentum steady, increasing speed out over the perimeter. A winding river reflected sunlight in a gleaming stream. Mountains and hills blended elevations.

The gunner sat over his M-60 staring down and out at the green canopy below us with belts of shiny ammunition feeding into his machine from an open ammo box at his feet. Nestled inside the rounds was a cold unopened can of Bud's beer. Each ammo belt layer resembled a meticulous package wrapped to his exact specifications. He knew if he turned his quiet metal into a chattering signature of death he'd have no jamming worries.

A red mail sack lay in the corner.

I wrapped a faded green scarf around my face in the cold air, sat back and relaxed.

All fire base vegetation had been cleared to the peak. Staggered machine gun placements fortified with sandbags lay submerged inside layers of razor wire wrapped around the hill decorated with claymores.

On top was a small landing pad, commander’s post, miniscule mess hall, hootches and 105mm artillery positions in deep pits surrounded by stacked sandbags. Gunners rotated pieces by degree of slope and calibrated for firing relying on infantry patrol coordinates. Sunburned kids and pot bellied sergeants manned isolated mortar pits.

Fire in the hole, said a chicken fucking a GI.

Firebases allowed artillery support, infantry patrols into jungles and military intelligence was close to Viet Cong traffic patterns.

We set down on a PSP steel-landing zone in a swirl of dust. I got out, grunts heading for the rear climbed on, I gave the door gunner a high sign, turned and lugged the machine to the ops conex.

Ben, the African-American Vietnamese linguist had been there six months and planned to finish his tour at Lolly.

I love this shit, he said opening a can of peaches after we installed his machine. Better than the Eagle routine.

I know what you mean.

He was respected for his ability to decipher and transmit language information. He intercepted and processed good traffic. Grunts regarded him as a magician. They used his information to strike and intercept Cong units, harass them and stay alive in the jungle.

A grunt’s life expectancy was six months. 180 days.

He lived and worked in a small conex buried in the ground near the command post with electronic wings on his sandbagged roof. Wearing headphones in dim light he hunched over radio equipment writing on a sheet of paper. Spinning the dial. Dialects, frequencies, verbal traffic.

He reminded me of a resistance fighter in a film noir. A sewer rat with brains needing excitement content to spend a long year on top of a hill buried in a box.

ART, Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Jazz

"Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz."
- Bill Evans

Full Moon

Grazalema.

I was blessed to see many full winter Sierra moons. A bone white marble rode clouds. Undulating valleys dreamed of planting and harvest. Mad as hell caged hunting dogs howled high anxiety below western mountains.  

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

Dogs bayed sunset to dusk. Rising orange clouds danced with a yellow moon. Men passed the cemetario toward harvest.

A heavy open thick bolted brown wooden church door led to the vestibule of an old Republican resistance memory.

A Virgin Mary crying blood decorated the altar. A woman in black performing her daily life 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 camera obscura passed her. She recognized his ghost. Yes, that’s all it was, 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 danced in blue. She locked the black gate leading to the crypt. She remembered the forcestero doing his reconnaissance after yesterday’s funeral.

Today he worked in the crypt zone. Four walls held departed. Engraved stones with names, dates, in memoranda of children and adults to 1896. He made images below 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 dressed 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 religiously lined caskets and satin pillows. Pillows softer than language mumbling living tears. Hearts beat long personal and collective drum solos.

Every heartbeat contains a universe of possibilities.

Caskets in black cars with wreaths of infinite floral scents reached the black gate where they were hoisted on strong shoulders, carried past a palm tree, past a small church, another black gate on rusty hinges and slid into empty domain names. Cold gray cement cavities wore red brick ceilings.

I studied a desolate crypt space. It was long. It was empty. It was cold. It was a permanent change of address marked Eternity.

Leaving death’s shadow I heard men’s tools dig hard winter ground. They were above ground.

Black was the night and cold was the ground.

“Any day above ground is a good day,” whispered a gravedigger.

“I’d rather be a tiger for one day than a sheep for 1,000 years,” chanted a Tibetan monk at Sera Monastery outside Lhasa. He sat on a raised platform swathed in burgundy robes holding the Vajra diamond thunderbolt and bell in his left hand.

Ringing muted tones he chanted sutras. Chanting voices, drums, incense, and bells. After spinning copper prayer wheels pilgrims climbed narrow slick stone temple steps entering through a worn door hanging. Three ornate, copper-plated Buddha’s faced them.

Past, Present and Future Buddha’s contemplated rows of flickering butter lamps, fruit offerings, khata scarves, paper money and coins. Two wooden benches sat against a wall. On the floor was a pan of round clay balls. Devotees took one, rubbed paste on faces and hands, dropping it into a used pan.

They joined people waiting to be blessed. Gathered with bowed heads at the chanting monk’s feet were impatient, playful, devout jostling pilgrims. He cycled through sutras, chanting, touching people on heads with the thunderbolt before pouring holy water on their heads. Long life!

They eased away, others moved forward. He was in a trance state of awareness. Beyond wild.

An old woman in a heavy sheepskin chuba sat down next to a foreigner. Sharing a smile she mumbled kind pure words.

“Namaste. Blessings to you.”

Babbling tongues sang. The bell rang.

After this visualization I returned to Spanish crypts. Humming Estimated Prophet by The Grateful Dead, I manipulated a visual tool recording interments with names, flowers and passages of memory in love, loss, and chiseled historical pueblo connection. I imaged cavity shells of rectangular vacant passages where invisible stories dreamed. They illuminated desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence.

They waited for air to carry them to the listening faithful. Silent stories, silent night of the pious, silent in collective breathing with stories inside stories.

“The rest is silence,” said Shakespeare.

The church woman turned away from shadows crouched over rocky fields, shifting stones, fence plans and pruning dead growth from olive trees along the Rio. She saw her pueblo. Romans cleared fertile land now blanketed with yellow and purple wild flowers. They built stone homes and village roads.

They named it Lacilbula. They designed baths below mountains. Their road wound below towering cliffs. Ten-foot wide dolomite gray scraped stone roads twisted from the pueblo down to the valley. They built towers and walled fortifications with defensive mountains behind them for future legions expanding their empire. Soldiers treading 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. Survivors used everything trying to tame poor rocky land. Men assembled fences using blackberry brambles with sharp thorns.

They decorated fences with stones and sticks, recycled old tires, tin cans, metal struts, old cars, discarded cooking stoves and bathtubs. Chipped tubs 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 marking land with tools and footprints.

Her husband slept in the Catholic crypt. Dusty light danced through palm leaves. She remembered his final whisper swallowing diamond ice. “I almost wish it were true.”

She was a full silent moon above his bone white memory. Her spirit guide served spirits.

A ghost worked among dead memories. Finished sacrificial rituals he flew above river stoned fields where men worked trust. His cloud vapor danced away from the cemetario.

Spirit energies manifested destiny with a full moon.

Caged mad dogs howled fear in gathering darkness.

A Century is Nothing