Pessoa

Pessoa: impersonal medium

a conduit

write on impulse

intuition

a stranger to himself

externalized what he thought, felt & dreamed

Book of Disquiet

We are in exile with stealth and cunning.

Question? How much does silence cost? Depends.

            Deep silence = deep bliss.

            In my silence only my voice is missing, said Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet.

            Money buys silent bribes.

            Bamboo Nomad said, Open your head, heart and mouth if you want to practice speaking tongues with me, I am a facilitator.

            I am a storyteller, said Zeynep from Bursa, Turkey. We communicate telepathically.

A-dolts don’t get it.

            Q: How many types of people are there in the world? Three: people who make things happen, people who watch people make things happen and people who don’t know what the fuck is going on.

            Funny sad true unpleasant facts. Like melting icicles, exploding galaxies, a meaningless universe and orgasms. Reality is the funniest thing happening. It’s difficult to take any of this seriously. People should play more.

            How did I grow?

            The bigger the fear the bigger the defense. Can you hear yourself think? Yes, it’s important to keep a running monkey mind dialogue going to express emotions, ideas and awareness of illusionary sense details, distractions and existence. You are critical mass expressing art.

            Socrates asked the big question: HOW TO LIVE?

            Establish character nuance with emotional honesty and a sense of the fantastic. It’s essential to establish a conte\x/t. Give me an example of compression.

            They came, burned, raped, pillaged, trussed up their loot and gone. Excellent. I know everything and can say nothing. I know nothing and can say everything.

            Tell me about hanging out. Travel writing uses novel techniques. It explores a place, discovers and/or invents characters, selects and tailors experiences and arranges the action to give the narrative shape and motivation.

            Time is history.

            Space is geography.

We are bushido warriors with Zen clarity insight and wisdom.

The majority of adults are, in my little clear, concise, precise deadly specific opinion based on empirical experience tyrants, rigid, autocratic, blind in one eye, easily distracted, idiots, depressed, angry, insecure, resentful, neurotic, suffering from illusions, greedy for money and power and CONTROL and so on.

I love their personality and character faults.

They take drugs or escape into phone madness to erase pain and memory. They struggle to forget. They take Soma to BE on a perpetual holiday from mind numbing tedious monotonous life. They become soft and pliable sheep…easily manipulated by viral media machine messages. Burroughs called it The Soft Machine.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Chapter 15

Earth peoples, oceans wave,  celebrate life energy sex and harmonic forces, said Rita, What happened in the love hotel? Use your imagination.

They paid a woman 3,000,000 Yen through a slot in the door. She gave them a key. It unlocked Akiko’s chamber of secrets. The room featured an American wild-west motif with an Indian chief on a white horse. Very cute, said Akiko. They stripped each other down. They took a long hot herbal bath exploring geography with tender lust. They jumped each other’s bones. It was in-out dialogue, pure passion. Show doesn’t tell, said Z.

He toweled me down, said Akiko. I felt thick cotton noun fibers edge my thin shoulders, along my verb spine, weaving his fingers across my flat stomach, erasing, tracing water fingering my direct object jungle. Slow and easy baby, I sighed being his Shinto shrine as he gave me his offering. Their relationship ignored verbal language, said a blind Japanese masseuse in a love hotel.

What conflicts exist?

-Human vs. Human

-Human vs. Nature already mentioned.

-Human vs. ______><_______

-Human vs. self. Do I or don’t I? Is it safe?

-Nature vs. Nurture

Will someone playfully deconstruct the truth with literal facts to move the narrative along and get to the mind-at-large awareness of his or her experience, said Tran. I hope so, said Omar, A literary agent at a writer’s conference in Oregon said my writing was a word photograph jazz beat. She suggested throwing the narrative out.

She said and I quote, Pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. I would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words, Yeah, said Rita, What did you say? I told her some novelists do exactly the opposite of what they’re told because disobedience is freedom, Beware of book doctors and blood thirsty greedy dictatorial aliens with an agenda, said Rita.

Ok, said Tran, How’s this sound? Write everything in the first five pages. Grab the reader with a hook in every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and at the end of chapters, Yeah, said Grave Digger, WE need a hook, a big iron hook covered with dried blood hanging in the center of an empty Asian market reminding genocide survivors what happens to them if they fuck up. They get a big fat rejection hook in the neck or through their trembling beating pulsating heart.

Fear sells. Fear is a universal language.

Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear, sex and growth into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work 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, but he doesn’t love me. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know eternity 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 sincere 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 or versa visa. 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 sojourn, Experience is my teacher. The rest is just information, Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame stream mainstream upstream.

Book of Amnesia V1

A flower has profound responsibility.

Pay the price

I never take yes for an answer.

What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

*

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Chengdu. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion orators

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance

Vientiane, Laos

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your Mind-At-Large, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia, V2

Yangon, Burma

Saigon

Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

*

"I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole." - Elias Canetti

Die Twice

Before going to Cambodia I discovered a Saigon museum named for Uncle Ho. He’s the patron saint of Diehard Marxist Mania. It is a popular location for virginal couples posing for wedding photographs using expansive interior halls and sweeping stairways. Happy grooms escorted joyful brides in rented sparkling jewelry trailing gowns, frozen on stairs, in corridors, on window ledges. Jump!

In a dusty display case along a forgotten corridor were piles of medals, stamps, currencies and Zippo lighters. A Zippo was ubiquitous among soldiers with engraved inscriptions. One lighter said:

There are two times you face death.

Once when you’re born and once when you face death.

Hala, a Muslim girl I knew in Lhasa said, There are people who are born laughing and people who are born crying, I was born laughing.

Parked outside the museum was a U.S. Air Force F-16, ambulance, jeep, Huey helicopter and the tank North Vietnamese forces commanded to flatten gates and liberate the South. Rows of antique French cars used to ferry the wounded and ammunition around Saigon during the war collected dust in meticulous gleaming historical automotive fashion.

Hexagram 34 - The Power of the Great

Perseverance furthers. Ask what is right. Be in harmony. Movement. Not stubborn. Yielding quietly preserving work to remove resistance.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Fragmentary

My imagination is a monestery and I am its monk.

*

Sometimes I am so happy I depress people. - David Bowie

*

"Similarities b/t writing and drawing -

both tend toward the imaginary;

both are fragmentary and unfinished." - Kafka

*

Absurd Language

Do you want the short version or the long version, asked a reliable narrator of dubious credibility.

A perfect question in life’s chess game of experiences and conversations as people play with choices and consequences inhaling, exhaling, living, traversing, falling, flying, exploring, and walking on the spinning Earth rock, said Devina. Rock your world.

Mandalay construction site.

*

The celestial rotation makes people dizzy, confused and disoriented and many fall down, said Tran. Hello gravity. WE fall up, said Rita.

If you flesh out the short narrative version with specific details it grows, said Z. Character threads develop. Destiny and action forms character.

Destiny weaves a rope of hemp fibers, or woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia, or Cambodian cotton, or Lao silk worm threads designed to hang yourself if life becomes unbearable, perhaps too sweet, too beautiful, too sad, said Desire.

Determining your fate suicide is a daily choice and a way to escape a terminal adventure travel disease. You are manipulated by someone in the story before, during or after you finish a random simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on. It evolves a life of its own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten word lava from a highly charged pressurized center.

The reader and writer are one.

Short, fast and deadly.

This explains how silence between words sees language as absurd, irrelevant and a burning ring of magma fire.

This molten conglomeration of Voice and Sign language, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, dust  ...  

24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and geological logical particles discovered by humans and other alien life forms  ...

Blasts out of the deep red hot core of finite transient human Mind-At-Large existence into a blue atmosphere where it cools, as the gravity of thinking, the scourge of civilization, agrees to ignore the abyss it’s malcontents and expectations of loss fear and Death contributing to its infinite force.

The dense mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, dances flowing down engulfing everything in its path melting landscapes, carving new strata, grand canyons and Leaping Tiger gorges, gouging out tributaries for cooling debris, slowing to a glowing light as you open a vein and scribble one true sentence, said Z, O my word, let it cool, heat and serve.

Book of Amnesia, V2

O yeah, said blossom tree, Life is dance.