Chekhov & Wolves

Fear sells.

Fear speaks volumes being a universal language. Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear and sex into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work is not linear. It doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation.

Punctuation is a nail.

Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist. I love Linguini, said Devina. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know infinity, adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again. 

Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it.

A writer has grit and stamina.

Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess. 

A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted.

Kill your father. Marry your mother. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard lived experience. Experience is my teacher.

Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame mainstream upstream.

Anton Chekhov said, “When a human is born they face three paths. If you go to the left the wolves eat you. If you go to the right you eat the wolves. If you go straight you eat yourself.”

Phonsavan, Laos

Grit & Gratitude

Being nine Lucky helped 4th grade geniuses become more human near Jakarta.

Engage-study-activate. Everyone had fun.

Students learned that whining was boring and useless. Smart ones knew without understanding. They knew what they didn’t know.

Kids shared Socratic discussions. They explored and expanded creative imagination journal writing, cross-disciplinary art, chess and teamwork development projects. They built and flew kites.

They practiced good manners and treated everyone with respect.

They focused on developing character: zest, courage, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, fairness, generosity and integrity.

They shared soft eyes, relaxation techniques and meditation mind maps. They accepted personal responsibility for learning and exploring the process of becoming.

He assisted them to develop critical thinking skills outside imaginary social and educational conditioning traps. “I am here to help you make mistakes.”

One day a young teacher kid said, “We need challenges, Teacher Lucky.”

“What kind of challenges?”

“We need hardship and deprivation.”

“Yes,” said another teacher, “we need to take more risks.”

“How do you develop courage?”

“Through failure. We love to fail better."

“Correcto mundi. Welcome to The Think for Yourself Academy. Everything we do is an experiment.”

They planned, designed and constructed an elaborate high-risk rope and creeper vine obstacle course in jungles challenging body, mind and spirit. Teamwork skills blossomed like orchids.  

*

Residents near his garden sanctuary passed a tall green spiky cactus stretching arms into bluebird songs. A nanny carrying an infant memorized the echo of white cat paws trailing flip-flops. Faustus, seeing throughinnocent eyes rode behind his pedaling Chinese father.

A laughing skipping girl negotiated freedom.

A beggar wearing broken shoelaces studied pavement. A man spinning in his labyrinthine puzzle struggled with an activated cell phone in worn green baggy shorts hoping the call would save him from loneliness, boredom, alienation and metaphors like death.

Children in pink pajamas collected brown leaves and fragrant yellow-white hibiscus flowers.

In Bahasa sun a middle-aged daughter spoon-fed her mother in a wheelchair. Swallowing love her smiling mother remembered when she did all the feeding.

The Language Company

 

 Gili Air Island

Moroccan Girl Dances

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

She sits on her haunches. Her bare feet dig soil gripping small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with toes. 

Her toes are extended connections where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They prowl toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought. She is inside green with her wild brown hair pulled tight. 

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 impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a desert Red City. 

Her history’s desert reveals potentates sharpening swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, algebra, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, 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 stereo earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where controlling time is their passion for being prompt and responsible citizens giving their lives meaning.

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

She is surrounded by orange blossom perfume beyond rolling hills cut by wet canyons and yellow and green fields where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in blue sky. 

Her open heart hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift. 

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than eagle feathers in High Atlas Mountains. She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for a festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below stars. 

It is cold. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes.

Someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people. She sways inside the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory. 

She is not on the train. 

She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She dances through fields where she danced as a child seeing red and yellow fire calling all the stars to her dance and she is not on the train.

Weaving A Life (V4)

Burma

My Name is Erhan

I am your masseuse.

I’ve lived in this Bursa, Turkey hammam since 1555.

In a large domed room sunrays shafting at precarious precious angles slant along humid walls glancing off mosaic tiles singing blue, green, yellow reflections. The dome has a perfect eight-starred symmetrical hat surrounded by sixteen stars in a geometric pattern. At night stars sing their light. They give me a pleasant headache.

This is where I live and work. I raised my family here. I will die here. This is my fate in a water world where tea and conversations meet in companionship, community and conspiracy.

After the hammam and noon prayers men went to a teahouse. They whispered stories, gossip, myth, legends, fairy tales, innuendo, lies, half-truths and fabulous fictions as small silver spoons danced in glass.

Someone else writes this with a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck 149 fountain pen. He drinks thick black Turkish coffee. A silver embossed glass of water waits for fingers to leave condensation on its surface. He turned to a stranger, “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.”

“If you finish the water it means the coffee’s no good,” said a stranger.

Lucky distributed providence to oral storytellers engaging tongues, dialects, foolscap and fading footsteps behind shadows playing cards and slurping tea. Eyelids were heavy deep visual reminders studying down all the daze.

Such a grand and glorious saga, sang Zeynep, a heroine in a vignette.

I am a short story. You are a novel.

By day I am a gravedigger, said Lucky, and a literary prostitute after dark.

We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.

On your grave are two dates separated by a dash. What’s important is what you do during the dash. Is life a dash or marathon?

Go with your flow. Flow your glow.

The Language Company

Turkey

Knife Sharp Man

One morning after Saigon noodles in a cold alley a man, 60 after wars and cold hard survival prematurely ages humans, sits sharpening a knife for a woman customer, redefining the steel.

No left foot. He curled his leg stump back resting it on a boot.

In the afternoon he walks past with a shuffling gait. He's wearing a green fatigue shirt, hat, motorcycle helmet, carrying his worn red plastic bag of simple tools. Knowing his truth, not knowing his story. A land mine or a stray bullet?

His left boot is an old combat relic, a discarded war object. It is split down the front.

It is brutally hot. The sun is behind him. How does he feel? Where is he going? Home for lunch and rest? Looking for more dull edges.

I am always walking, he said. I stop, find work, sit, sharpen an edge, get small money, put away my tools, put on my fake foot and walk. I eat noodles or rice on the street. I nap. I walk and work until dark. Then I go home. Home is where they have to take you in.

I am a storyteller with tools for sharpening life’s dull imperfections and sharp mirror reflections.

I am surrounded by amputees, he said. They approach me on their crutches, their hands out. They wheel themselves down the street on little trolleys, without legs, low to the ground truth.

A one-armed young man wears an old blue baseball hat. He sees local businessmen approaching. They wear fresh pressed white shirts, leather shoes and shiny silver belt buckles.

He takes off his old hat. Holds it out. It is empty. They ignore him.

He puts it on his arm stump, runs his one good hand through his black hair, puts his cap on and moves down the street. 

I am in the army now, he said, an army of the legless, the armless, armies of physically wounded forgotten humans. They know you and you know them.