Process Not Product

Give the gentle reader saatch aur himmat, Z said in Turkish.

Translation please, said Devina.

Truth and Courage.

Keep them engaged, said Tran. Be gentle with the dear reader. They are educated. Challenge them.

What’s a word doctor, said Leo.

Someone who fixes manuscripts with a sharp axe, said Tran waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston-driven fountain pen splattering blood red ink on everyone in his radius. The pen is mightier than the sword. Edge focus. WE, you and I, them, he, she and us aint going anywhere. We live forever.

In your dreams, yelled Devina. Everyone’s doing hard time. It aint nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Have mercy.

Rita, an orphan and independent visionary writer from Banlung chimed in with a voice sweeter than a Buddhist bell, I’m going to be an English facilitator and historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.

Where have I heard that before, asked Leo, an activist in exile from an orphanage on the Yangtze, heavy with silt and six trillion cubic meters of garbage flowing to the South China Sea.

What will you do with collected time, said Tran, Visit sick children in hospitals where they do DNA evolutionary experiments to stem the cells, can you sell the stems?

Speaking of stems, I’m moonlighting as a gardener, said Omar, There’s nothing more beautiful than nurturing nature in this impermanent life. We plant seeds for trees we will never see mature. Another leaf leaves life’s tree.

If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of the thorns give me a shout, said Tran, a one-legged Vietnamese child wearing his heart on the sleeve of a ragged 101 Screaming Eagle t-shirt.

A bird pressed its breast against a thorn singing, O what a beautiful morning o what a beautiful day.

A poet, like a chef or gardener, needs everything because they love everything.

I’m going to study Donatello, said Devina.

Who’s he?

He was a great Renaissance artist. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy. He was honest had integrity and was super original. Technically he worked with anything. You name it: wax, bronze, marble, clay, all kinds of rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist.

Painting with smoke and mirrors, said Tran.

Hey, that’s what the Greeks said. They believed everything was beauty and order, said Rita. Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, musical notes, all the beauty originated with them didn’t it?

You got it, said Tran. Hey, you know what, I think I’ll take the day off and be creative. Ha.

This present instant contains all reality, whispered Zeynep. We can call this experiment The Theory of Z, about a young precocious girl, her friends, artists and seers. Why not?

I taught a blind nomadic gardener/janitor/gravedigger and kid friends about emotional life in an alien schizoid civilization called Turkey, said Z. We shared values, stories and art with a free spirit.

I’ll tell you a secret. There’s two of me. One young and one old. The older is Kurdish and plays a cello in a cemetery. Can you dig it?

Aliens and fantastic probabilities said Rita. Tell me the difference between possibility and probability. It’s about process not product. Whew, now that’s deep.

Yeah, said Devina, We’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes. Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else speaking in the abstract.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said an authoritarian demanding Realist vomiting contrarian hypotheticals, truth, logic, verifiable data based evidence, scientific facts, precise specifics. We must ascertain the immediate personal moral and ethical values with lofty principles and assistant principles on principal.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Question

Question? Is the problem or surprise the form, a formless form or the form of the formless forming sea foaming form? If so, can it be understood by reducing, redacting, paralleling, associating another journey? Can you break the continuity of the journey with memories of an ephemeral I ? Yes … It’s not a problem, it’s a surprise, said Impermanence.

Who am I?

I am a who to what I am.

Why am I here?

How did I get here?

How did I grow?

Q has three parts:

a)  What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil?

b)   What is the nature of evil? The question is the answer. It is not in this tale, play or manuscript.

c)   What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?

Q. Where does the real end and the artificial begin? I am a superficial person, said Grave Digger … I pretend to be who I am in my future. I know two things. My hands. My work is never finished.

Q? Does fate control our free will? Yes.. Fate cannot lie. If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get life’s joke, said Laughter Therapy … Ha, ha, ha.

Q? Should we worry about the style? No. Should we worry about the form? No. Worry is interest on a bill yet to come due. No guilt, regret, fear, or monkey mind. Monkey loves the circus of sensory overload. We live in a world of forms.

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

A C-19 virus transmitted by Asian bats to humans in late 2019 is not a surprise. A pangolin ate bat shit. The pangolin was trapped, died and ended up in a wet market. Consumers bought it, sliced it, cooked it, and served it at parties. Delicious. Infected humans traveled and transmitted C-19 to millions around Earth. So it goes.

Holy bat shit! said Robin a cape crusader wearing a mask practicing social distance.

Q: do we have to capitalize the first letter of every sentence? no is the short answer no.

Q: what is strange? Life is strange, bizarre, comic, tragic and very short … Life is a brief clear precise concise life sentence. How do stories, vignettes, jazz poems, journalism fragments, and system analysis communicate with each other?

A: They walk dirt paths, ford rivers, scale mountains, explore jungles, valleys and estuaries and cross metaphysical existential borders … they build sandcastles near the sea. They practice telepathy … they are time travelers. Aliens.

They meditate on the process of their death.

The dance and dancer are one.

As a mystic and prescient person, Zeynep you have the responsibility to be honest. Be light about it. Think big and stay in the particular. Know what keeps you motivated and happy. Autotelic. 

Next question Z, How do you stay fresh and centered? You make it new day-by-day, said Z, Make it new. A storyteller staying in one place goes blind, we move around before becoming native and dull. Before we think and act like local sheep.

Lost confused passive ones living in Inertia, a state of mind, perfect the art of MILLING AROUND in Country ABC, said Rita, They speak in monosyllables Yeah, yeah. Big vocabulary. 2% are awake. 98% are asleep. The majority are afraid to ask the WHY question.

Fear is a killer. Life is a killer.

People asking questions get slaughtered. See the Killing Fields on page 101 - the last room you want to enter. Keeping your big fat fucking mouth shut is wise and prudent behavior to survive post-genocidal truth ghosts. It is an unpleasant fact. If you open your trap someone cuts out your tongue.

In this peculiar particular situation expert scientific witnesses have proven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt and doubt has a shadow with logical coherence … that WE, being expert witnesses, reliable narrators and noble natives living with our DNA genius bear witness to alienated, lonely, bored, listless, passive Earthlings meandering with no purpose, lost, unimaginative having zero curiosity and staring with blind eyes - due to severe emotional, mental, physical traumas with memories of suffering, genocide and ghosts.

They remain childlike, tender, sweet, kind, and hospitable with a terminal case of confusion and loss forever, hiding in deep shadows, addicted to dumb phone entertainment boredom.

Their beating hearts caress resignation, despair, depression, lack of initiative or incentive based on fear of punishment, or loss of face or humiliation with hard-wired SHAME. They live a meditative Buddhist spiritual way of identity and culture.

They are easily distracted. Kids play. Forever young. Adults have perfected the art and style of Pretending To Be Busy.

What art. What beauty. What style. What form. What context. What a formal pertinacious way. What objective truth. What verisimilitude.

Here are some true facts, said Rita an orphan and independent author. Unpleasant facts are littered in this epic like lovers, countries, butterflies, social systems, food and transformation.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Book of Amnesia, V1

ACT 1

(Fade In)

The beginning needs work, thought Zeynep.

It’s flatter than a 24-year-old on her back in a plywood room fucking a customer in Asia. Her heart beats like a drum. She’s been away from her village for five desperate years. Her mother and father slaughter pigs for the market.

Their lost daughter survives in a meat market. Supply and demand economics 101. She ran away and joined a sex money food circus. Moral: Wrong choice for the right reasons.

You pay and take your chances. She considered the heroine’s dilemma. It’s strong, honest and REAL. What’s her quest?

Stay alive.

Stay sane.

Make money.

Send money home.

Get home.

Join a woman’s support group.

Avoid HIV and C-19.

Live to tell the tale.

Write it down.

Get it to a literary agent’s slush pile. Fat chance, it’s not mainstream.

Self-publish.

Get a life. Get married. Breed.

Have babies named Faith, Hope and Charity.

Enjoy temporary happiness.

Celebrate impermanence.

Eat incense.

The end.

Happy endings make me cry, said a blind editor waving her machete. Many true stories don’t have happy endings. People escape, disappear or die.

Take it easy. These are abstract letters and words on paper. It’s not about you Z. It’s ten claws scratching at twenty-six letters.

All writing is garbage. Take out the garbage. Burn baby burn.

I don’t see any humor in the girl’s hardcore reality, said the editor. Reality is an imaginary word crutch and time is a strung-out pimp looking for an exit.

Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor, said Z.

Inarticulate Questions Mill Around.

Editing is form of self-censorship.

Punctuation is a nail. Be the hammer not the nail.

Language is a virus.

Today in the long now WE are literary outlaws. Many people. Multiple selves. A reliable heroine scripter named Zeynep and her storytelling friends.

“The scripter has no past but is born with the text.” – Roland Barthes

They de-storied all the rules. Like deconstruction and postmodern and literary osmosis. Play with it. There are no arbitrary drivel rules.

Five kid characters play literary outlaws. System Analysts. An amanuensis, word janitor, Grave Digger, a blind seer and others in the stream of life share stories. Get it down now and make sense of it later.

Death joins them for laughs. Everyone comes to me at the end.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Raven

The next day the tribe crossed a plain and reached a raging river. As they knew from their ancestor’s tales, the river was deepest here because deaths upstream created tears as souls migrated on their journey through the Bardo.

What’s the Bardo? asked Jamie.

A place between life and death. A transition zone. Where, after you die, for nine days, you confront ghosts and demons wearing your old masks. We need nine days to take another form and during these nine days we meet all these demons reminding us of our temporal existence.

The tribe dreamed as wood evolved into ashes. Their fire dream consumed itself as sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peaceful feelings. She fell awake.

Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses as a morning breeze delivered petals of a wild rose to her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings, and blurred prisms of light.

She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle. Her essence was joy, delight and happiness. It was a world of pure being. She recognized the world of appearances was full of suffering, desire and illusion.

Discovering her essence, her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision. People seeking to know their future and wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart to them finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity. She kept her own counsel knowing others would have to find their own way in their personal and collective wilderness.

Her hair caught fire as she gathered flames while lighting a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors. She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.

She became an angel of light. Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness.

Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self. Fire became her driver, sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine was fed by the energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.

Yes, said Omar, Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies as the world of men communicate with their world by means of music and dance.

I am a character in my own story, said Omar, a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.

A Century is Nothing

Rolling Thunder

One hot July day my mother rolled her living prose poem of anguish, vision, truth and beauty through Denver and beyond.

“It’s all a myth, a way of remembering the past,” she screamed chasing shadows into blazing sunlight on Broadway Street where immigrant families sat on broken dreams.

She passed devout Tibetan pilgrims walking, singing, praying, and laughing inside the Barkhor circuit in Lhasa. They threw sky crystals at karmic ravens, the symbol of reincarnation.

She rolled past terracotta warriors crashed on bags at Shanghai train stations seeking invisible unknown terminal destinations.

She rolled past Elmore James, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Howling Wolf, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters down at the crossroads sliding their callused fingers on metal frets trading their souls to the devil.

The blues are the roots. Everything else is the fruit.

She flew past Balinese carvers edging faces for shadow puppet plays, jungle painters creating corporate butterfly murals, villagers harvesting rice in layered green pastures and landmine amputees plowing behind oxen.

Hearing Irish tinkers pound pans between villages she rolled past homeless humans dreaming of food as shadows danced on cave walls in the United States of Amnesia.

She rolled past a naked evangelist at his wailing wall forecasting human greed and global economic terrorism.

A phallic snake symbol delighted the envy of quicksilver messengers wheeling past tan cellular idiots waiting for an express bus to financial heaven.

Shifting gears, she burned past her husband’s white-haired aunt in a nursing home painting her final autumn leaf watercolor vision.

She sheared past Ashiakawa weavers threading seasons in Hokkaido, Japan and Sherpa’s brewing tea at 18,000 feet for expeditions collecting Trophy Mountains after paying hard currency to totalitarian emperors for the pleasure of suffering altitude sickness, hypothermia and high blood pressure death.

She rolled past consumers making quick money honey living on plastic debt while driving 4x4s through scarred Rockies as cock-a-roaches devoured natural resources. Land grab development bankers heard mutants scream, “Where is the water for God’s sake? We paid for our thirst.”

She sailed past her eldest son waiting for his NAM dust off chopper from Camp Eagle near Hue toward San Francisco. On the flight to Denver and beyond he became a ghost in exile.

He stayed in Colorado for a month, did eight weeks at the DOD Information School, finished his time in Europe and got out, a free man. He spent six months roaming from Germany to Finland, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.

In 1973 while attending the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley she knew he’d face abusive rejection from some students. They’d accuse him of being a baby killer and an undesirable outcast.

He became an invisible literary outlaw.

He incorporated passive-aggressive silence. He became anonymous, a figment of their imagination. Staying away from them he practiced covert dark arts on night patrols with stealth, silence and cunning on fully automatic.

Write it down and done, laugh, and move on.

His undeclared major was Survival 101. It wasn’t in the catalog of classes. University admin officials in their cubicles screamed, “You have to declare something!” He selected Cultural Anthropology & Mythology to placate the beast.

She read his final letters home about fire fight survival instincts remembering the horror etched on a black wall in D.C, with 58,000+ names as reverberating chopper blades severed stale humid tropic air and jungle survival removed veils of illusions. He’d surrendered to life and began collecting dust.

Like an old river she careened past Arabic nomads exchanging goats and camels for pearls as oil deserted sand enveloped silk encrusted carpets. Refugees on sinking lifeboats discovered geological family strata amid Chinese shipwrecks shifting divorce paradigms.

Independent shamans played with awareness using active imagination’s free potential - exhaling a mind’s eye making B&W street photography in exile.

Women wearing exploitation’s cloth wrapped in solitude braved whirling third-world poverty as their economic fate shattered malnourished rocks along Bhutanese mountain roads creating capitalistic nirvana. Imported from India and desperate for food they lived in river reed habitats with Gross National Happiness.

Gathering speed now.

Rolling her Wheel of Life, she evaporated six degrees of separation near the Tropic of Cancer in fast rivers celebrating animist tribal dialogues hearing tongues sing air earth water fire languages by crow, eagle, raven, coyote and wolf.

She received the mark of the king tattoo from a Tahiti artist in Saipan.

Indigenous natives were surrounded and confounded by blue-eyed European’s commercial greed and cultural annihilation while calculating slavery’s cost for competition’s profit.

In silence she rolled with patience, solitude, and nature just being her doing nothing poem.

Her life created a ruptured aorta in earth, fire, water, and air with pulse platelets as red lava flowing past Himalayan monasteries heard monks chant prayers in assembly halls at dawn.

Green, blue, white, yellow and red Lung-Tao prayer flags singing wind songs welcomed her sacrifice, liberation and freedom with perfection celebrating Maya illusion wisdom free from Bardo.

ART