Invent a God

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”

 Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Earth.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing

Ice Girl - 14

Leo’s neighbors are Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang. 

Dave had a kid so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of him or her in old age. When they are sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 kitchen smells. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash or no deal.

You play the game or the game plays you.

They pretended to need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Socialist Party book, Produce & Consume.

Get married early. The pressure is on. 

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, lonely, and forgotten like a bad dream. Loneliness increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and personal instability in a well-mannered society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa illustrate exchange and user values for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and begin producing genetic copies. Petri dish. Wash and tear.

It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.

Sam cries. Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting forever which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.

His voice, this manifestation expressing human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near the gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunching over chipped slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with a gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water as pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels dance near a woman garbage collector who rings a bell every day at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s carefully arranged her family’s daily consumption waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink. Like shreds of fat. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above eternal glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue and white electric Buddha bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food. Pho hears her father whisper in her burning ear carrying her away from their flaming village. ‘Remember where you came from.’

She never physically returned. She carried memories.

It didn’t really matter which went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled alley blocking all but the most sincere light of fading day, she casually tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing day by day it became part of the collective mess, a collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Just enough to get her away from walls where she’d gossip with her neighbors as white twilight cracks filtered past musical hammers, creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from poor villages very far away laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers, drifting among H’mong Sapa kids speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after 8 dystopian educational years now selling their handicrafts to tourists; bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless mountain winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their external nightmare reduced to self-pity, leaving No Exit. A shattered mirror reflected her face.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his social network domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. Vietnam forced them all the way back to Manchuria.

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat spring garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the day. Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs. They kept the language and baguettes.

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family remembered dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and brown temples welcoming silence.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange. 

“Quick into the tunnels!” They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They burrowed deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence after all the crying and wounded foreign d(evils) fled in terror as peasants streamed down mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking oceans of creation myths, draining lands of blood, forcing d-evils into shining seas. A blue green sea danced red.

Their city voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but sounds of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction.

This fiction created their memory. 

Ice Girl in Banlung 

Remember ABC - TLC 37

Said the Director of Sales at TLC.

“What’s that mean?” said a Kurdish beggar girl in Bursa one freezing night. To pay a Mafioso extortion bill her family threw her to the wolves. She hawked blue tissue packages to a sad man playing a flute sitting near a broken escalator above a homeless woman in rags setting fire to a pile of manuscripts trying to stay warm. Have mercy.

“Always be closing.”

Lucky sat in a blue plastic Metro chair zooming through a rainy morning. Mountain peaks meditated in white clouds above rocky-forested slopes and golden mosque spires. Other than two cheerful speech-enabled women, passengers were cold, distant, lost, bored and going somewhere intangible or else they’d be home Waiting For Godot.

Tracks sloped down concrete edges. Blurring trees disappeared. Cars slid into darkness as florescent beams glided lighting bolts on steel tracks. Black click clack music reached an underground station with immaculate white tiles, benches and a large steel box holding bagged sweets. Comatose women in floral scarves grasping plastic bags studied heavy territorial shoes built for comfort. Station man in a green and yellow uniform manipulating a broom pushed history.

An automated Metro voice announced a stop. Doors opened. People departed. People boarded. Doors closed. Metro rolled on.

Communist party loudspeakers lashed to trees boomed across Lenin Park Lake in Hanoi:

Enjoy the ride. You’re only on it once.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collected everything.

The Bursa Sales Director resigned the next day. He had a falling out with management. It was always about numbers. Sell. Sell. Sell. He said he had 210 for February. They said 175.

That ominous day the TLC owner arrived from Constantinople, parked his Benz and entered the center of the universe where everything happened similtanesilly.

The receptionist freaked out and called the Sales Director.

Marketing man #2 escorted Boss through the center of Earth. He looked around. Purchased from Leaf Branch Growth in Dublin for $700,000 the three-month old franchise didn’t meet his standards. He had a corporate mentality and wasn’t a happy little camper. No clocks, broken glass doors, no wall art, out-of-order computers, badly peeling lamination work on desks and so on. “Shoddy half-finished work, even if I do say so.”

Lucky and the soon to be extinct director were enjoying a munch lunch with sheesh-kabobs. The director’s cell sang.

“He’s here,” said the receptionist.

“Who?”

“Sand Dune. He just blew in.”

“Oh no. I’m not dressed for work.”

Buy low sell high.

Revealing his true character he ran away. After a final e-mail to headquarters about numbers he trashed his office, yelled adios to the staff and disappeared into a subterranean cavern catching a Metro home sweet home.

Women staff cried on the sidewalk facing the center. A girl dragging a metal cart filled with cardboard and broken computers needing an OS surmised someone died. Serious departed tears. Tearful women smoked in sunlight. One tear reflected 360 degree blue sky. Melting mountain snow returned to work murmuring gossip and fear.

“Who’s next?”

The center’s magic numbers were now two sales, two receptionists, two native personal tutors (one from Trabzon - see footnotes) and two imported barbarians.

“We are understaffed, overworked and underpaid,” lamented a joyful personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep, the older, from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French, Esperanto and Cello. She cherished seven magic stones from Mudanya on the Marmara Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her Kurdish creation stories. Her language was out loud and outlawed by scared totalitarian Ankara politicians. Kurdish speakers were decapitated in public with a jeweled word sword every Friday at high noon.

“Bend over,” said Teflon Ergonomics, the Prime Minister and de facto dictator. Playing economic prosperity songs to poor uneducated Soma coal mineworkers, illiterate villagers and wealthy middle class voters he bought the presidency in late 2014. It’s never too late to be president, he said. Manipulation and I can really run the Deep State now.

 TLC had Janus heads. One head was the owner.

“Hey,” he said, “it’s a business this language and money acquisition cycle.”

He called Hire-n-Fire, the maintenance manhole cover job in Instant Bull and ordered him to fix every little thing. He returned and did a partial job. It gave him an excuse to come again in a juicy sandwich with Russian dressing.

“Someone’s chasing their tale here,” said Omar, a vinaigrette vignette guide. “I love fragments of true authenticity. It’s all I trust.”

 *

L said to Z: There’s an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. “Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

Fragments - TLC 36

At high noon Bursa emergency medical crews pried a suicidal man from below engines after he was electrified, illuminated and eliminated by Metro lightning. His famous last words: Goodbye cruel world. Goodbye mother.

As medical teams slid his mangled body into an ambulance Lucky explored a cemetery. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates and memories slept below towering pines and evergreens.

A grave-faced widow sobbing on a fresh plot pounding her breasts keened, gone…gone. Her sister drummed topsoil. A friend, mother, aunt or grandmother from Asian Steppes whispered to a child in Tamashek, “She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming death, remembering.”

The child wailed to grave women, “Auntie, Auntie.”

The silent woman playing drum soil remembered her son, brother, father, husband, uncle and grandfather with love. Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. I brought you into the world. I give you back to Earth. The circle of life is complete.

A sharp rose thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair through a humid rain forest covering 6% of Earth. Smoke from burning coconut and banana leaves circled through heart’s four clamoring chambers. Love echoing from the Forest Floor to Zeynep’s Understory rose to the Canopy before emerging through the Emergent where Bird of Paradise, Screaming Eagles and Winter Hawk flew free.

He passed chiseled Arabic script stones. Explosive metal shattered rock. A man pounding a sledgehammer disseminated graven memory shards. Pausing, he removed exculpatory evidence before slamming hammer’s voice, “I love the fragments.”

Sun sought asylum. Rose petals rained. Musical drum soil melodies echoed from a woman’s fingers.

 

Temporary management art - TLC 35

Bursa brought in a young teacher named Instant Bull. He didn’t last long. He missed the nightlife, friends and mommy who after 100 tearful years still did everything for her little baby boy. He was spoiled like everyone. He ran home pleading, Mother, may I grow up to be free and courageous? No. Go to your room, no dinner and no social network time bandits. Self-censorship is everything we believe and practice with mind body and soul so shut your trap.

Management brought in Spin, a schizophrenic alcoholic from Down Under. Night after night he carpet-bombed the teachers’ apartment with demonic deliriums.

“They’re here, they’re here,” he wailed in catatonic fits thrashing on the floor flailing nuclear arms into space. “Help me. They will kill me. Look, can’t you see them?”

“What can I do about this idiot?” said a scared shitless rail thin female Turkish/English teacher on temporary duty. The brilliant neurotic girl from Hoagie Sophia, her black hair clogging shower drains, addicted to TV, sugar and perpetual sadness missed her mother.

Communicating through sewer channels she told Constantinople management Spin had to go. They yanked him out like a bad molar.

She’d been with the company for five years as a Personal Tutor doing bi-linguine translations. Her English placation skills enabled students with false modesty. She’d quit for a translation job with another Istanbul company, discovered it wasn’t so hot after all and returned to TLC dragging her miscalculation.

Now she worked as a management spy. Istanbul gave her a title: Director of Personal Tutors. She traveled to nine centers evaluating and training tutors. She knew the system. Her social skills were shit. She was the perfect corporate drone head. 

Lucky met her in Ankara where she spied for a month. She spent her time chatting with her yet to be met and later to be left boyfriend in Johannesburg. “I hate Ankara.”

“If you want to play the blues you gotta pay your dues,” said Lucky.

“I’m tired of dealing with shallow minds above and below me,” she said sipping tea on the balcony. Bamboo listened.

“I am one of them, sent around to keep an eye spy on barbarian natives. They told me to train the tutors who’ve seen through my transparent disguise. I’m not fooling anyone but myself. I got the promotion I wanted and they used me.”

“Welcome to The Dream Machine.”

“In the future I will escape to Johannesburg and live with a paroled heroin junkie running a safari eco-outfit. I will wear an orange day glow jumpsuit emotionally attached to my despondent mother in Istanbul. Mama spends her life chained to a sink filled with life’s dirty dishes.”

Late one day as Lucky tended rose petals, thorns and fed Winter Hawk day old bread annoying idle businessmen slouched against a BMW downstairs yelling, “Where in the hell are all these crumbs coming from?” the director called from Constantinople.

“Would you like to move to Bursa?”

“Yes. When?”

“Next Monday. We need stability and maturity in the new center.”

“The center is a spiral of stardust. I’ll bring Bamboo. Thanks for the chance.”

His life was walking, writing, photography, helping others be more human, and spreading prosperity. Nurturing Bamboo as a calm lunatic he passed through with detached discernment. He was Mr. Fix-it, Mr. Dependable and a stable element in the periodic language table.

After he settled into Bursa, management realized they needed more temporary help. They brought in an experienced sadomasochistic Australian misogynist from another center to manage the show for ten days. He was fifty, a divorced womanizer with relationship and alcohol issues, an aggressive fool pawing female students and chatting with his twenty-one year old girlfriend in city E. He knew the TLC system and little else. He had a long running feud with management. They fired him.

The revolving TLC door circled through ineffective zones.

* 

 “People here in Turkey,” said Zeynep, “are good at two things, eating and sitting. Sleeping and fighting are close behind.”

“Yes,” said a rag and bone merchant boiling clothing and animal skins for Omar’s palimpsests, “we are surrounded by fools and incompetents. Reading and writing is for people with time, money, critical thinking skills, courage, humor and a future. Not to mention social intelligence. Natives make perfect excuses. They celebrate their perceived victimization and prolonged adolescence with self-pity and loathing.”

“Have you eaten yet,” asked Curious. “We always ask people about food first in China.”

“It’s the same here,” replied Zeynep, “satisfying basic needs.”

A chorus of 15,001 Chinese university students sang, “The less I do, the less likely I am to make mistakes, and the fewer mistakes I make, they less I am criticized. It’s easier to do nothing.”

“Thanks for a long sentence filled with verbs and truth-value meaning,” said a Cambodian orphan caressing a Burmese ruby reflecting 10,000 things in an elegant universe.

“My name is May Be,” said a Turkish woman filing for divorce after centuries of emotional totalitarian terror. She faced her family, friends and strangers with fresh self-esteem.

“He lied to me. I saw through his deceit and irresponsibility. I sent him home to his mama. When he realized his stupid shallow emptiness he ran back pleading, exhorting, crying, bribing and threatening me with personal, physical and emotional disaster, trouble, death and so forth. I didn’t buy his song and dance. It’s rare for a woman here to file for divorce.”

Winter Hawk sang a single throated bird song: freedom’s knowing how big your cage is.

“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” said Zeynep doodling on papyrus.

“Memories are for navigating now,” said Lucky. “What I’m telling you is true, or at least as much of it as I remember. I know I have false memories. Everyone does. Imagine people in a world without memory. No past. No things, objects, identification, grasping or attachment. Only patterns and sensation forms like flowing water or butterfly wings brushing air. Living in an eternal present.”

“You are brilliant. Let’s practice ZaZen.”

After meditating on the nature of comedic existence they witnessed human temerity, guilt, fear, shame and humiliation. Heavy sadness. Adult maniac manikins wore artificial death masks decorated with perpetual mediocre distracted confusion.

He’d seen it in the Middle Kingdom as Li Po and Tu Fu's poetic ink danced on parchment, expanding nature’s sublime story.

He absorbed it in Asia Minority seeing bored, tired idle people swallowing Xanax by the handful, eating grilled meat, playing backgammon and twiddling idle retired thumbs as Metro cars crammed with morose living dead idle humans dressed in black mirroring idle heart-minds zoomed to metallic industrial Ostim wasteland o-zones outside Ankara before returning at midnight filled with carved wooden caskets of wasted youth from the never-ending war in Serious on the Syrian border.

Gravediggers and headstone carvers enjoyed steady work with dead matter.