The Girl on the Train

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

Imane, - Faith - sits on her haunches. Her bare feet dig soil, grip small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with her toes.

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

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

She is inside green the girl 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 their orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a Red City in the desert.

Her history’s desert is full of potentates sharpening their swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam and 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 in the east.

She does not wear stereo earphones or listen 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 to give 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 along yellow and green fields, where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in her blue sky.

In her open heart she hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift. Her toes caress soil and she is lighter than air, lighter than a feather of a wild bird in the High Atlas mountains far away.

She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for the festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below the stars.

It is cold outside. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes and someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people and she sways inside the gradual hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She travels 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.

Natasha from Kiev

At the beginning of September 2001, passengers at the Amsterdam airport waited for their flight to Casablanca. There was Youseif, a Moroccan man from Fez living in San Francisco going home to see his family after many years. He would stay three months.

There was a woman from Kiev with her 5 year old son. Her name was Natasha and she was tall, slim and beautiful. She was married to a Moroccan man. They’d met at the university in Kiev and he lived in Amsterdam. She had not seen him for three years and he didn’t know his son.

He did not come to the airport to see her because he didn’t have the correct papers nor was she able to leave the airport and see him because she lacked the correct papers so she waited for her flight to her new home.

Natasha had heard about her new home but had never seen it. She was taking her son to Morocco where they would meet her husband’s family for the first time and live their life.

She did not speak Arabic. Her cheap red, white and blue Russian plastic baggage was falling apart at the seams. Her son was a terror and pissed his pants leaving a trail of urine in the departure lounge. Natasha was beside herself.

With them was an American writer going to Morocco for six months. He had finished a book in the summer about a woman who spoke every language and he was jumping through a window into new adventures.

We all spoke the same language as night fell around the roar of planes leaving gravity taking people somewhere.

We were buried at gate 54D, miles from bright gleaming duty free shops full of perfume, electronics, banks, casinos, toy stores, restaurants, gleaming diamond rings and watches, customs, clothing stores and business.

Passengers carried plastic bags saying, “Buy and Fly.”

It was midnight when we landed in Casablanca and walked through a towering hall full of intricate inlaid mosaic tiles and a waterfall. Framed images of smiling kings watched us. Customs was a formality and the baggage conveyer belt broke down as frustrated passengers waited.

Small wheels on useless baggage trolleys were bent and stuck. They careened left and right as people wrestled impossible loads through green ‘nothing to declare’ zones toward friends and relatives.

I helped Natasha load her life on a cart and she disappeared into the throng with her son. I watched her husband’s family approach her. It was his father, mother, brother-in-law and an older woman dressed in traditional jellabas. They welcomed her with a hug, speaking words Natasha did not understand. They scooped up the boy.

I focused on the old couple as they slowly walked away and imagined they would take him forever, this progeny of theirs, their connection to their son.

Natasha, an alien in their world, an aberration, would be relegated to a new life. She moved into their world with a Ukranian passport, speaking unknown languages where she would be welcomed on one hand and relegated to a life in a new reality serving her new family.

She was going to be many things to them and they would manifest their loss on her. She would carry the water and gather wood. She would carry their fading light, hopes, dreams and connections. Their grandson would realize everything. They disappeared into a polluted city of 5 million.

They were descended from Berbers. Their culture had a passion to touch a world outside their ability to perceive the reality.

Their son in Holland relied on his mobile. He could do no wrong. He was a grand man in their eyes and hearts. Many women came and went in his life. It was his dark eyed nomadic destiny.

While his wife was trapped in the airport he was with his girlfriend and he didn’t have the correct papers anyway. He wasn’t lying when he said his family would take care of her.

I whispered this story to Natasha but she found it hard to believe.

Art of the Knives

September 1, 2001. Before sleeping dragons woke up in Truth Or Consequences to have a little fun at the poor human’s expense.

One thing he witnessed with clarity on the transatlantic flight was how a Spanish woman sitting across and up a row manipulated her knife to carve an apple. She used her thumb to measure thin red skin and gently worked the blade down the fruit near her thumb while maintaining slight pressure.

She was delicate and firm with the sharp tool. He’d observe many people using knives and he always remembered the Spanish woman’s fingers and blade.

On warm afternoons as winter sun sang past the Grand Penon dolomite mountains in the Sierras an old Spanish man labored up the hill on his cane with his brown and white terrier toward the gazebo. The gazebo overlooked Lacilbula.

“Ola,” exchanging pleasantries. The man pulled a folding blade and a pear wrapped in a white paper napkin from his brown sweater pocket.

He had the same precision as the woman on the plane. When he finished slicing a piece he kept it on the edge and ate off steel. Slice by slice. Done, he tossed the core to his barking mongrel, wiped off the blade, folded it, returned it to his pocket, took his cane, walked over to the potable water stone fountain, removed his upper teeth, washed them and put them back in his mouth.

The village butcher named Garcia had the art. Grazalema families butchering a pig on a plywood slab in their garage had it. A cafe barman displayed it with his long thin blade slicing thin strips of ham off a pig’s bone wedged between wood supports.

Friends had it butchering rams in Casablanca for Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice. The feast, a major Muslim holiday, commemorated the Qur’an’s account of God allowing the patriarch Ibraham to sacrifice a ram instead of his son Ishmael. It was sacrifice with a capital S. Ibraham dreamed he wanted to kill his son and God said, “No. I will send you a ram,” and this was their tradition.

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

They started at nine a.m., after a breakfast of crepes and tea. Ahmed, Tofer, Saad and their father secured wooden beams and ropes above the red and gray tiled floor.

They held the ram down and sliced it’s throat. Breath and blood flowed across checkerboard tile. It fought for it’s life, kicking and screaming. The head was severed and thrown to the side. They cut a hole in a back leg near a tendon and bone, ran a rope through it and hoisted the carcass into the air.

The wool coat was sliced off and thrown on a ladder where it dried in the sun. It’d be collected by a man pushing his rolling cart through the neighborhood and made into a prayer rug. The body was inflated with an air compressor to make skinning easier. Blood flowed over tiles.

Rex, the German shepherd drank his fill.

Sharp knives. They re-sharpened blades in the shop and worked fat off the skin of the poorest animal. Internal organs tumbled into plastic tubs. A wife carried them upstairs to the team of women preparing meals. Men washed the interior cavity with hot water.

Liver skewered with fat was grilled over red hot coals and served with tea, hot bread and olives at noon. Everyone gathered at a long shaded table under pink and red boginvillas flowers and clear blue sky.

At 3 p.m. they ate the stomach with lemon, olives and fresh hot bread. Fruit and water. Larger sections of the ram were dismembered with a band saw, placed in plastic bags and frozen. A third would be given to the poor.

Across the street itinerant men cooked rams heads on a makeshift grill and hacked off the horns.

Rare people say they experienced two sensations simultaneously: they saw colors when they heard sounds, or they heard sounds when they ate something. The condition is called synaesthesia.

The sound you hear is the smell of a ram’s head crying. The music of embers, wool and glazed eye calm. The edge you touch is the blade releasing blood, the feeling you see is the poorest skin, white intestines, black liver on red coals. A single piece of charcoal welcomes the skull, horns curve from blue sky into dark eyed knife slashing flesh.

All families made the sacrifice. Sacrifice, community, family energies within the spirit world and human hospitality. The feast lasted three days.

The art of the knives.

Leaving Casablanca

Slanting light wrapped its arms around someone gathering raw unfiltered and uncensored material on their journey.

Light cut the sky, severing the white village, stone paths, Moorish brown doors, idle men, shifty eyed one armed merchants, unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

As a Wandering Ghost he traversed light, space, and time near vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on both sides of their extended faces while shaking hands with everyone confirming his flight. Your exile dream vision.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with this hesitancy, this delay, this boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through their indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses and delicate woven craft work designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa. They craved freshly cut sweet smelling green boiling tea to mix their life’s colors with dust.

They taxied down the runway as rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds thunderheads formed a white billowing future, all air and water,
an infinite dream machine.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward Seattle and heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis he wrote to Imane in Marrakech, the Red City.

“Dear Imane, - Faith in Arabic - my dearest friend in another earth orbit time zone, a Heart Space. Imagine meeting you on a train just by chance. We trust our instincts to experience the truth.

“I am flying over ice fields, Canadian white with blue water cracks, down below stretching to the northern horizon. We are above the clouds whispering winter’s knowing. Spring will find white ice melting.

“We are above frozen rivers looking for strength inside it all to flow.

“Orange and jasmine fragrances in a Marrakech courtyard welcome your eyes surrounding you with sensual delight. I am trapped inside a metal container above frozen white water. I need to jump into the cold water and scrub off old airport noise, dust, sound, people pushing their lives toward inarguable conclusions.

“Yes, I will jump down onto white ice floating to meet you on the other side of a reality where sand lies shimmering beneath the blue sky and a warrior’s life is strong.

“Spring is coming, you see small tight winter trees waiting to explode in Holland, such a pity, such a tragedy waiting to happen, this season shift as if someone put 2 and 2 together in some grand equation.

“Billy in the Spanish Sierras is 3 weeks older than before he was born which doesn’t have anything to do with this memory yet contains everything because he is a lovely boy and calm. He saved their relationship you know; Mo, the desperate English woman who cheated on her English husband after producing two lovely daughters in Graz, an old Roman village in Andalusia. She took up with Pedro, and yes, Billy’s conception and birth saved them forever.

“I will always remember watching Pedro, an old hippie turned anarchist turned leather worker, one morning when we shared breakfast. We were in his old white stone home along the back ridge of narrow tight Roman cobblestone streets below Penon Grande mountains.

“We enjoyed toast, cheese, olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. Pedro gently sliced red skin and spread each tomato seed on his brown bread.”

A defining moment. Each seed itself a small world of life and future. So small yet so significant. We never wasted anything. We weren’t poor mind you just paying attention to the details.

“Back to us. Our Marrakech train conversations were the magic of being still, hurtling past abandoned mud homes, villages where women ride donkeys miles to wells looking for blue water, children without education tend flocks, men hammer their sharp knives through mint tea while laughing with the sky.

“As we sat in Jemma space watching black hooded cobras dance you were beautiful with a fine laughter and our time together was sweeter than the smell of jasmine in the afternoon and now I see ice cracking into blue water falling from the blue sky and winter sleeps below us.

“Just as the Sahara sand blows south for the winter, ice retreats north to it’s spring and it’s austere, nothing at all, a blank white, perhaps like a huge, gigantic white blank page in an old black sketch book with a broken spine spilling watercolors, stories, poems, releasing old visions of butterflies in micro fauna extremes.

“I survived these adventures and I ramble onward and tell you now when I am in the air it’s good to be moving like standing still in the frozen river of dreams. We are a cloud of blue water dancing with white ice seeing this amazing world of ours. Specific images from these moments.

“To be precise when I grow a little weary of all the moving, all the standing silent inside the language of silence white clear and slow the smell of jasmine in the garden penetrates my heart.

“I would like to rest my head and heart there just now, just for the smell of knowing red dust, water bells, chimes, singing birds, oranges, lemons, your laughing eyes again and this is enough.”

The Begging Bowl

In the middle of now-here a skinny naked black man dragging a shawl in blazing noon sun walked along the road at a steady pace, his black mop of hair bouncing. His eyes were on fire.

The stranger took coffee in the old Tiznit market square as Berbers in flowing blue robes meandered through his dream.

A hustler on his bike materialized out of thin air.

“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes by bike. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”

“Why should I?”

“Great morning prices.”

One hundred years ago this guy would have been on a camel in his burnoose tending his flock out in the Sahara. He’d have been planning to invade Spain and married to a beautiful Berber girl with dark seductive eyes, had tons of kids and conquered the Iberian peninsula in his spare time. Now he was on a 50 cc imported European bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slicked black hair smiling with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.

As a traveler used to multiple dimensions and shifting frequencies the wandering ghost was passing through the transition machine being assaulted by monosyllabic well meaning idiots taking him for a fool. Only the fool and children spoke the truth.

All the hustlers were released on parole for good behavior. They were out. They had no idea who, what, when, why, where and how he’d showed up in their jurisdiction. They lived in an inverted paradigm.

He was on assignment, a hunter gatherer of words and images.
Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence - Metis - a hybrid form.

‘Snapshot’ was a hunting word from the late 1800’s. He made them, he didn’t take them. That’s the qualitative difference. Someone once said “The best pictures are the ones in your mind.”

On one level this was true yet he enjoyed gathering material for future creative projects when he’d establish a base in a Crow forest or elsewhere with transmission potential.

He enjoyed the challenge; the patience factor, seeing before the fact, before the action occurred, before the vision manifested itself. Before, during and after the emotional rush. He knew a little premonition was a dangerous thing. It took practice. It involved human detachment and reptilian behavior.

It was a beautiful strange fascinating magical alchemy developed over years traversing the planet; becoming involved on a subtle level of intuition, trusting instincts, being the moment.

The essence of being and nothingness. A singularity of being and non being, stalking and allowing the movie to roll as action led to certain climatic instants. He isolated elements and captured them clean and simple. He tweaked reality. The emotion preceding the action was his intention.

It was the KISS philosophy and straight shooting.

A shooting star flashed across the sky shedding tears of light. He settled into a rhythm of the place, faces on film, framed for posterity. Ephemeral realities moving through passages of time and space. Sitting down, doing his work, packing up the essentials and hitting the road.

He found his comfort zone inside a zonal theory of photography. Shades of gray. Spectrums breaking down the barriers of language, attitudes, belief windows, values, perceptions and interpretations. As a physician and guardian of the visible world film was his prayer wheel and he kept it spinning.

The decisive moment where he divided time in two.

It was a pure thought with pure action. A way of life through the gateless gate.

“Infinite diversity through infinite combinations,” someone said while walking and laughing on the curvature of the earth. It was a walking meditation or kinkin in Japanese.

It didn’t matter if it was the most crowded tourist souk on the planet or a single malnourished boy under his torn plastic sheet offering him sweet green grapes. They all wanted a piece of the action. Everyone graduated with degrees in Hustling 101. It was all about survival. How the world works.

Meditating on the process of death shaped his motivation.

“The nature of my mind is the empty sky,” he said to the hustler.

“Get on,” said the biker.

He shouldered curiosity and got on the hustler’s bike. They roared out of the market, down narrow twisted streets, bumping and grinding gears through alleys, zooming along high gingerbread adobe walls, in and out of blinding sun, blasted into cool shadows and arrived at an empty shop. Full stop.

A young boy in his Tiznit silver shop took over the sales operation plying him with sweet tea and sugared words.

He tried sympathy and pity. He cajoled, he waited, he sighed, he put on his saddest face.

He tried to convince him to buy something. “Morning sale means good luck.”

“Every morning you wake up is good luck,” said his visitor.

The boy used well established emotional appeals playing the man for a sucker. His attitude was that every traveler was rich and relatively speaking tongues of dialectical materialism this was true. Especially when you consider in Morocco one person worked to support 13 and only 9% of the population had a job.

He handed him a wooden bowl.

“This is the traditional way. Put your choices in the bowl. We can discuss the price later.”

He accepted the wooden bowl and, to be polite because he was a guest in their country, wandered around a showroom looking at inlaid boxes, handled daggers with fake stones, silver rings, bracelets, bangles, beads, earrings and silver necklaces in provocative gleaming displays.

In another reality he carried his begging bowl through dirt streets in the world. It felt cool and smooth in his hands as his fingers caressed a worn oval surface.

The begging bowl had a consciousness. He remembered exchanging one denomination of printed paper money for another undetermined value of currency with a malnourished homeless child wearing blood red ragged shorts and broken sandals sticking a needle into his scrawny arm standing in the gutter of their broken down existence full of suffering and futile hope in Dhaka, Bangladesh near a sacred bull wallowing in dust.

Five million starving humans swarmed around his pedicab one day beating on fractured windows pleading for charity. He reflected the horror in his mirror.

He re-calibrated true bearings and measured his way inside third world countries thumbing open his useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary. It was full of myths, symbols, images, ideographs, pictographs, virus inoculations, sliding scales, musical interludes, sonatas, vibratos, journey notes, bleeding tomatoes, broken hearts, fried home truck stops, haiku, khata scarves, pure mirror paper, type-A negative blood donor manifests and empty wooden bowls.

Tiznit boys wanted him to fill it up. They wanted him to be greedy. They wanted to hear the sound of silver strike wood. They had great expectations of wealth based on his desire. He wanted to hit the bricks. He found one interesting bracelet and it clattered, spinning silver.

He became a Tuareg Berber. “I’ll give you 100.”

“Mister, please, the price is 350,” the boy said, being fresh out of tears, too tired to cry and the man in front of him, being Berber, used to endless patient Sahara nature, comfortable with just sitting inside the silence of being, not doing, was not fooled by fake emotions of self-pity and stayed with his last and final price.

He was a hustling mercenary 24/7 and it wasn’t his job, destiny, fate or karma to go around rescuing sellers trapped in their reality, in their expectations.

“Take it or leave it,” he said in Tamashek. The boy was shocked to hear his language, his dialect. He had no idea. They were on common territory.

Negotiation is hard work. It didn’t require extraordinary skills; just patience, determination, dedication and hard hearted basic instinct. He received one piece of silver and dissolved into a broiling sun, experiencing a metamorphosis as his ego dissolved.

The bowl reflected emptiness.