The Girl on the Train

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.

Her bare feet grip small pebbles as root structures dance with her toes.

Her grounded shadow prowls toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields as her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought.

She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats waiting for restless time to deliver them to the Red City.

Her history remembers potentates inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building adobe fortresses and writing language.

She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket-sized edition of the Qur’an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.

She does not wear earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where illusions of controlling time is their passion to be prompt and responsible citizens.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with wild brown hair tied back with straw or flower stems surrounding her with fragrances.

Inside rolling hills cut by wet canyons she is surrounded by orange blossom aroma in yellow and green fields. Her black eyes absorb ephemeral cloud thoughts in sky mind. Her open heart feels her breath ripple her long shadow.

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than an eagle soaring above the Atlas Mountains.

She smells the Berber fire heating tea for a festival. A shaman dances in a goatskin cape and skull below stars.

It is cold. Flaming shooting stars leap into her eyes. Her nomadic clan plays flutes and drums. She sways with the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train.

She is inside a goat skull moving through soil, dancing through fields.

Red and yellow fire invites stars to her dance.

ART

Morocco

Ankara

Brown rolling hills said, Open sesame. Shazam. 1,001 Arabian Nights shared stories inside stories. Dervish mystic dancers wheeling in trances welcomed his spirit.

Lucky learned the majority of Turks suffered from anxiety. They took anti-depressants called Xanax to calm psychotic neurosis. Symptoms of overwhelming sadness dressed citizens in rose petals between self-pity, loathing and thorns.

Ankara was a boring, cold capital city filled with sad administrative paper-pushing androids.

He’d accepted a teaching/facilitating TLC job with an acquisition cycle.

A part-time female teacher from South Africa married to an English environmentalist studying seal habitats along the southern coastline helped Lucky buy a DNA cell phone. He’d never had one.

It was a 1984 red gadget with buttons and functions like calendars, tools, SMS, IM, Teams, Bluetooth, internet access, GPS and To Do, Did, and Does it work? Connections. Locations.

It displayed points of interest at low interest rates.

Instant,

Everywhere You Are

Or Imagine You Are

or Need To Be

Where You Are Now

at this precise moment

with dimensional proportions

suited his nomadic status

acquiring mobility extremes.

One morning he walked to the Ulus garden nursery below an old Roman castle. A red hammer and sickle flag waved above ramparts. He discovered white, red and purple roses, cactus, ten small plants, containers and potting soil. Good dirt.

A word gravedigger craves good dirt.

The Language Company

Write

“Beware of naysayers, soothsayers and book doctors,” said a kid. “We are together through thick and thin, health and illness. Writing is a disease. We lie for a living. We make things up and write them down. No editor will drink champagne from our skulls. We’re trapped in our bodies, this hospital and labyrinth. You’d think there’d be a word doctor around here moonlighting as a heart specialist. Shine on bright star.”

“Ok,” said the writer kid, “how’s this sound? Write everything in the first five hundred pages, uh, I mean five pages. Grab the reader with a hook at the beginning of every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and the end of chapters. Start and end sentences with a strong word.”

“Good idea,” said a kid, “keep them turning pages. What happens next is a reader’s quest.”

“People are born, live and die. People fart around. Nobody comes. Nothing happens. We are the architects of our actions and live with glorious or tragic consequences. Is this a fill-in-the-blank life test?”

“I only want you to bring two things to class,” screamed an overworked, underpaid, undersexed Hanoi teacher afraid of losing face in front of eighty robots. “Your ears.”

She pounded on a podium with her Marxist pedagogical elephant control stick, “Memorize the text idiots so you can vomit the material on a test.”

“I’m going to be sick,” said a bulimic kid.

“It’s ok to be horrible,” said a kid. “Some writers quit because they want it to be perfect. Many never start. Many never finish. It ain’t about starting, it’s about finishing. Write your dash between birth and death. You need to be passionate about your work without being obsessive-compulsive. Do it because you love it. Make a beautiful fucking mess. Clean it up and make another beautiful mess. Release the monster into the world.”

“Yeah,” said Tran, “a work of art is never finished. It’s abandoned. Like an orphan.”

“Editing is a form of censorship,” said a kid waving a rejection letter. “You don’t want to make the reader work too hard, do you?”

“No, most humans are lazy. Obese, addicted to fast food, screen visuals, social web sites, FaceLost and sex texting with short attention spans. CONTROL owns them. No attention span? No problem.”

“Rewriting is writing. Be cold and unsentimental. Polishing is the party. Being a writer is like having homework every single fucking day.”

“What’s a word doctor?”

“Someone who red lines manuscripts,” said a blind kid waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston fountain pen splattering A- blood on everyone in their radius. “They kill words and sentences.”

“Writing is like digging a well with a needle,” said Orhan Pamuk.

“Punctuation is a nail. Period.”

“Just tell the truth,” said a Cambodian orphan boy, one of 12,000, “and then you don’t have to remember what you said.” His parents rented him to an NGO on weekends for donor sympathy advertising.

“The truth is I need a fix. Does anyone have any spare drugs?” said a gazebo group addict, “I need to get out of here and mainline an adventure.”

A Vietnam veteran screamed, “More drugs, nurse, more drugs. I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody.” A nurse shot him up.

ART

Burma

Sweet

The tender gravity of kindness says howdy hi howdy ho.

Buddhist Khmer are soft and gentle. They live in the now. Present.

Their challenge is to focus on more than one thing at a time. This unpleasant fact is illuminated by their dopamine addiction to phones. FOMO - fear of missing out.

Text me baby, I feel alone and alienated in a mean old world. 

Gadgets make great babysitters.

For the majority it’s about entertainment distractions vs knowledge.

Relationships here are like adopting a child.

All the adults need childlike supervision.

After serving and clearing breakfast dishes three happy female housekeeping staff go to the garden.

#1 you sweep leaves into a pile.

#2 you brush them into the plastic container.

#3 you dump them into the black plastic bag. Repeat through the garden. Same when cleaning rooms. Everyone has one clear task and one clear task only the lonely. Consistency is a challenge.

Earth is a precious garbage dump. Plastic Styrofoam food containers, bags, cups, straws litter soil and water.

The world is a village.

Mandalay

You can take the people out of the village but you can’t take the village out of the people. They have green Environment Awareness garbage trucks. It all ends up somewhere. Garbage in - garbage out.

Everyone speaks at once. Comprehension and intelligent conversations develop. In Laos it is loud and louder. Here the loudest one is the big winner.

Cognitive dissonance loves attention span, memory and reasoning.

Milling and crowding around is an art form like wild animals in a feeding frenzy. Indecision breeds a new generation of passive anxious consumers. This has nothing to do with tropical heat affecting DNA or innate Buddhist spirituality.

Let go or get dragged along...in Burma.

Fairy Tale

I am sorry are our three favorite words in Cambodia.
It’s the last thing 2,000,000 genocide victims cried out before a complete stranger slammed a shovel against their skull. I am sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

One survivor said to another survivor, what a beautiful fucking mess. Help me drag this one away.

You either let go or get dragged along, said a Buddhist monk lighting incense for world peace.

Same in China said Leo, We learn life’s hard bitter lesson to accept loss forever, I am sorry. What is the most beautiful word you know Zeynep?

Freedom. And yours? Food, said Rita and Leo.

Less talk and more drawing are essential in life, Z said. Experiment with circles, dots, triangles, squares, lines and curves to reach existential levels of realization. Connect the dots forward.

The asylum is a prison and protection, said Rita.

You create art to explore your sense of self and find out how you feel you are, rather than whom you think you should or ought to be, Z said, drawing her future.

Make the right choice for the wrong reason, Leo said.

Make the wrong choice for the right reason in the right season, Rita said.

Z discovered questions were repeated. 1,001 questions ran around her Turkish restaurant looking for answers. Questions grew tired of repeating themselves. This is so fucking boring, said one question. We are abused. We are manipulated and rendered mute. Useless.

Think of it as a test, said another question. Patience is our great teacher. I’ll try, said another question. Yes, said a question, these non-listeners have a distinct tendency to say nothing and say it louder than empty silence when they’re leaving, when their faces are turned away from eye contact, potential real heart-mind communication and growth.

Echoes drifted in through around silence and ignorance. I’ve seen that too, said a question, who, until this moment was silent. My theory is that it’s because of genocide, fear and ignorance. It’s also a delicate mixture of stupidity or indifference, said another question. I suggest it’s their innate Buddhist belief. They suppress their ego. Non-self.

Why is the most dangerous question, said Lucky addressing questions. Remember Leo asking why and ended up carrying shit at the Reform Through Re-education Labor Camp near the Gobi before becoming Chief of the Cannibals wearing an alarm clock around his scrawny neck reminding everyone of Time?

Yes I remember said a timeless prescient question. Leo was one smart cookie, whatever that means. He figured out unique survival skills in a desperate situation. He knew the fundamental difference between book smarts and street smarts. Anyway before we drift off the subject, how do you explain fear, asked a question.

Rita (author of Ice Girl in Banlung) - Fear is a basic instinct. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the amygdala. Flight or fight? Is it safe, eyes say scanning a potentially dangerous environment since Day One. You see it everywhere, all day, everyday all the scared uncertain eyes asking is it safe?

They peek left, glance right, double check. The coast is clear. Let’s go. People ran away to survive. Instinct.

People had a panic attack, started running and others would ask them a question like why are you running, who’s chasing you, where are you going or what’s the matter or when did you become afraid or why are you afraid, or why don’t you stay longer and the running one would keep going trailing abstract question words behind them like memories of dead or missing families or disembodied spirits or exploding landmines or molecules of indifferent breath.

I see, said a question, that explains everything. Yes, said an open-ended question. Being correct is never the point.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. We are assassins.

The Language Company

Burma