key

Ink whispers secrets of silent mystery where life is found in a desperate situation.

Young boys stare at a writer.

The blind lead the blind.

Everything is Under Construction at the Source.

The vast self.

Existential awareness.

Cessation of sensation and perception.

It's a walking meditation.

Rivers, like people, only know why they were born when they reach the end.

Poverty and illiteracy. I work, I breed, I get slaughtered.

Imagined or invented conversations and episodes.

Fiction is a tool for unveiling, not obscuring the truth.

Literary fiction expounds historical truth.

Necessity of choice.

Loom

A character said with a secret JOY you have returned.

Yes, she says, my dream of you is unfolding. She caresses silk threads on her loom of time. Your sensitivity and serenity calms me, he says.

Before dawn. The Mekong river is water. Fog obscures distance. She stands at a window looking for him. He is on the river. His net flies over still deep water. Threads and knots of jungle vine land on the surface. They sink into silence.

She hears the Mekong sing. She returns to the source. Sleep. She dares dreams, aware of voiced whispers in silence. Silence becomes her sense of desire. She follows desire. Gratitude, her awareness, calms her tortured heart. A leaf leaves the tree of life.

Transparent water bowls sing. A purple lotus grows from mud.

She is at her loom. Her pattern begins with purple silk. This is her base. She runs threads through thin lines of balance. Twin bobbins spin out golden threads for new diamonds. Weaving is her meditation. Her voice. It is her heart-mind, hands, fingers and feet.

Hand Wings

She spoke with her hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed of writing a short story, perhaps flash fiction.

Nervous, she selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony summit. She opened a black notebook. She made a pot of green tea. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

Her story emerges from nothing. Discover a point of departure, a direction.

She drew a picture. It looked like this.

An illusion of a mirage - the soul filled with silence, an abyss in which the whole world disapears beneath the pressure of a single thought, memory, look.

Meaning and Sense.

Meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself.

Sense cannot stay still radiating out in directions that divide and subdivide. The sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.

 

Frozen Memory

After Saigon, Leo walked to Sapa in NW mountains.

Talking monkey tourists from Hanoi are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance / screw and buy cheap imported plastic products, said Mo and My, H’mong storyteller sellers.

Day trippers are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts and lost eyes. They run to stand in front of a Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore us.

A woman tourist slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at my work: a handmade belt, a colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than Mo.

She is surrounded by a chorus. “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!” 

The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers selling fake watches, cheap pants, shirts, hats and knickknacks.

Eyes scan colors, fabrics and faces.

A park has baby red roses. A dusty historical statue stares at brackish fountain water.

Red Dzao women have bags and threaded samples spread on the ground.

“Do you want to buy from me?” said one smiling with gold teeth.

“Yes. I want to buy the mountain.” Leo pointed to the rising green western forest, steel gray granite slabs, deep shaded valleys and gray clouds skimming peaks around high deep edges rolling toward them.

“Ok,” she said. “I will sell you the day mountain for 10,000 and the night mountain for 10,000.”

“Ok. It’s a deal.”

School kids in uniformed mass hysteria and deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial skin drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs fuck on the street in front of the church where tourists gather for a photo shoot.

Local women armed with cameras they rent by the day selling images, reflections, memories and dreams poke and prod women, husbands, boys and girls into groups for the moment. The decisive moment they will remember forever.

Their image will collect dust near a votive candle altar and burning innocent incense feeding, appeasing dead hungry ancestral ghosts. Caught in time. Frozen alive.

Tribal Narrator

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.

Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.

I picked up my bamboo brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.

I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing,

They dreamed with eyes open.

When we are asleep we are awake.

I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.

I am not of this world.

I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things.

It is free of the three dusts: desire, anger and ignorance.

I sing my tongue-less body electric.

Where do I park this empty vehicle?

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.