Music is the fuel

The one who dies with the most toys wins. Congratulations.

Besides writing, gardening and storytelling are you Grave Digger?

Yes, said Zeynep, I am a Grave Digger by day and a literary prostitute by night. I made my own shovel. I cut down the tree. I shaved the bark, fashioned the long handle, extracted iron from earth, created fire, heated the iron ion particles, forged the iron and fitted it. It’s a custom-made job. One of a kind, like you. Unique.

I am very busy doing nothing, a kind of jazz poem. Musical flow feeds the writing. Rhythm, harmony and improvisation.  

Music is the fuel.

Most humans are busy, busy, busy. You never hear a dying man say, I wish I’d spent more time at the office … I bury failures and successes in the same grave. It’s a job and puts food on the table. I develop and cultivate plots where I plant symbolic and metaphorical empirical roots. I love good dirt … I also perform cremation ceremonies for families needing ashes, bones and dust.

WE are radiant stardust and 1/3rd the life of the universe. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our bodies are nothing but recycled atoms and quarks from exploding stars.

I am fire, personified. Shamans control fire … I am a lightning bolt singing Abracadabra. Translation - hurl your lightning bolt even unto death.

It’s an alchemical process. Grave digging is a full-time honorable job with dignity and respect. Look at my hands … Look at your hands …You know two things … Look at a blind potter’s hands, a blind smith’s hands, the blind laundry woman’s hands, the blind seamstress’s hands, the blind beggar’s hands, the blind writer’s hands, the blind executioner’s hands, Death’s hands … all the hands dancing, gesturing, pleading, laughing, loving, touching, holding, grasping, signing hands, all the non-VOICE hands.

An open hand holds everything.

People say the world is a big place. By the time you get to your plot Earth is a very small place, ha. Put that in your opening remarks at a literary festival.

Do you have a night job?

Yes, I am a word janitor in an insane asylum.  It’s a good place to jot down ideas and sketch. I am a literary outlaw. I violate all the writing rules.

Rules are for rulers. A ruler is a tool to measure something. A human ruler is an autocratic dictator in the Middle East, North Korea, Burma, Russia, China, Turkey and serious Syria among other places. You name it. They sit on a fancy papier mâché throne … Older wiser slaves offering sage advice to save their ass and protect their bureaucratic position OBEY the boss and do what they are told to do. Or else.

They Rule. Some rule out of kindness and compassion. They accept freedom and responsibility and accountability for their actions to be just and empathetic.

Many rule using FEAR and intimidation. As an outlaw word janitor knowing ambiguities, contradictions, paradoxes and false identities, I collect evidence.

I take out the garbage, like adverbial labia. The garbage is a mixture of fact and fiction. Some garbage is true factoid and some garbage is invented farrago. Janitorial work is fun, useful and necessary.

I meet fascinating patients living free from fear now. I discover cool stuff people discard. Many patients wallow like pigs in regret, drown in guilt pools or die in future fears.

Earth is one big insane asylum.

No memory means no guilt and no guilt means no fear. Sweet.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Metta

Flower whispered, I don’t like sleeping alone.

Easy to remember Flower’s soft deep tactile sensations. Practice the Middle Way  ... The Middle Way is deep breathing and mindfulness  ... The Middle Way is loving kindness. Metta.

It is wisdom, patience and gratitude.

Discover harmony between detachment and sentimentality. Eat the world with your blind eyes. Yes, my Flower, yes. Dead or blind, there’s no difference. People who cause you difficulties are valuable teachers. They give you the opportunity to develop patience, said Omar a blind mystic amanuensis.

Q. What else did you experience during the massage?

A. All explanations have to end somewhere. An explanation is a well-dressed mistake.

What is a spotlight focus? A spotlight is on a specific. A breath. A flame. A sound. Pure sensation. Give me an example. Spotlight: the universe reflected and refracted in a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower.

Floodlight is the big general picture: sunlight reflects off a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower petal membrane veined with green umbrella fan leaves caressing cool fresh air growing from a pink lotus in mud below gray clouds near mottled moldy white streaked paint on yellow Khmer walls wearing brown, green, white shards of glittering glass to keep out cunning thieves and devious land pirates as tall singing palm trees dance below white cumulus clouds flying across blue skies above green forested mountains and jungles teeming with beauty, leopards, wolves, and 232 species of butterflies.

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, said Anxiety, 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.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Anturan Village

The narrow road to the deep north in Bali dropped into tight hairpin turns and thick vegetation. High forests became jungles and green valleys.

Anturan is twenty kilometers west of the bustling port city of Singaraja where the Dutch established a port exporting slaves to grow tulips back home.

150 families lived a simple existence, and unlike many Balinese communities, depended on the sea. The Balinese believe sea demons inhabit waters around their island.

Anturan homes are stone and thatch. Wealthy families live in cold concrete habitats with tiled roofs.

Blue, red and yellow outrigger canoes carve black sand.

Small reed thatched huts near shore provide shelter from a blistering sun. Men repair fishing nets turning nylon into knots. Women tend fires, nurse babies, clean, cook and gossip.

A guesthouse has twelve clean inexpensive rooms. A restaurant provides Nasih Goring: white rice, chilies, egg, thin yellow noodles, cabbage, vegetables and nondescript pieces of meat washed down with water. A local shop sells batik clothing, soap, washing powder and cheap Japanese Zen garden bamboo toothbrushes.

Word machine traces sun as Icarus flies with Phoenix.

Men offer 5 a.m. boat trips out past the reef to watch schools of educated dolphins.

Waterfalls hot springs and a Buddhist temple.

Smoke from cooking fires curl into coconut trees as twilight spreads along the shore. Children talk and play in sand. Men prepare boats and lanterns for night water journeys at 6 p.m. Boats drift into oceans, dancing yellow and white lights against black sky. Women place burning incense sticks in sand praying for a safe return.

Baby chickens follow a mother hen. Piglets slurp boiled rice and water mixed with coconut skins from a trough.

I teach children how to whistle. They teach me basic Bahasa language.

Mumpi is dream.

Gadis chand is beautiful girl.

Anturan is quiet by 9 p.m.

Roosters crow at 5. Pink dresses sky. Gray turns blue water. Thick southern forests and mountains lie hidden in low white clouds. Rice paddies are a dark green. A young girl breaks sticks for a cooking fire before shoveling rice out of a large black pot. She feeds her baby sticky pancake-like bread.

Ten boys haul in a fishing net cast in a wide semi-circle. Hand over hand they draw the net tighter as sweat streams down dark laughing faces and bulging thighs. Fishermen return, women unload fighting sardines into bright plastic buckets overflowing with silver protein.

A man from town buys the fish. Fishermen sit in shade watching women haul fish, stacking buckets onto each other’s head carrying them to trucks and motorcycles for markets.

I wander up the beach to find a clean swimming area and investigate another guesthouse. A woman hauling a heavy bag practices broken English selling cotton fabrics and carved teak demon masks.

“Cheap morning price. Buy from me, slow business, no sell today. Want a watch? Hey! You look at my shop? Sarong? Transport? Tickets to the dance tonight?”

A local man asks where I’m from.

“I am from heaven. Down to have a look at paradise.” He hustles the periphery offering me a prostitute for $22. I decline.

“I have seven wives, one for each day of the week. They wait for me in heaven. I need to save my energy for them.” He intuitively knows the importance of good karma in this life. He doesn’t want to return as a lower life form and disappears.

I escape hot black sand into clear cold water.

Mountains palm trees along shorelines as land arcs east along the coast.

In the afternoon I visit a warung food stall stocked with sweets and meats. The kitchen is a 10’ x 15’ bamboo thatch room in front of a concrete shop-home with an open woven reed kitchen door. In black sand bricks stacked two feet high form a stove. Fuel is broken twigs, small sticks and dried branches. A wok bubbles water, grease and spices cooking a chicken a fine dark brown. Another brick stove holds a pot of boiling fish.

A long flat prep area for cutting, slicing, sitting, talking and meeting is under bamboo shelves with woven thatch holding glasses, pots, pans and a basket of ingredients.

Intense smoke escapes through reed cracks. Kindling is added to cooking fires.

A bundle of sticks outside the door is the forest in micro bits, multiplied by daily requirements of 150 families.

Outside the kitchen two girls pound rice and banana into a powder using heavy round pieces of wood the size of baseball bats. They pummel the mixture in a smooth round large stone pestle in a rhythm of beauty and music maintaining a consistent vertical movement, hands overlapping, rising and descending, pausing to sift grains and add fresh material.

One girl coughs and spits in the sand.

They finish pounding, leave and return with water in five gallon buckets balanced on their heads. The chicken is finished. An old woman arrives for the fish. Bananas are sliced and fried, children buy sweets and people stare at a foreigner.

I practice intricate Bahasa tongues composed of nine levels of usage depending on the status of the person being addressed.

Young boys play with a toy tank and a colored bubble maker improvising group games. Kids do chores and play with brothers and sisters in a microcosm, a community in a world of communities.

As above so below.

Weaving A Life, V1

Adapt

Adapt, the balloon man lived below the hammam. Yes mam.

Adapt, Adjust and Evolve collected everything for a fire. One morning he flamed his life below a stone memory hut where someone - he didn’t remember whom - lived, worked and expired.

Internal passions blazed yellow and red.

Sparking a majestic canvas Adapt carried his bouquet of air-filled flowers across spring fields firing dawn with pink, red, green, yellow, and blue. Dreaming purple violets and daffodils spilled balloon imagery into children’s retinas.

His voice sang across time’s river, Create like a God, order like a King and work like a Slave.

Walking through spring with Courage, a personal pronoun, his flowing mind-stream movie flashed into around through a fine unknowing knowing starlight universe. Pure images were diamonds in his mind.

First thought, pure thought.

Sky mind.

Cloud thought.

His flaming life energy sang, What is life?

A game of experiences we get to play. Help others.

Expanding energy waves created screaming eagle dancers.

Two Golden Eagles fought in tall grass to dominate a female. Flashing anger with yellow lightning eyes and striking out with a sharp talon she balanced on a strong extended leg. A curving white tip slashed at males circling with desire, cunning and stealth. Pirouetting she danced between them protecting her flank near a fallen tree trunk. Her wings extended over green forests, Uludag, blue shorelines and across oceans.

Nearby trapped behind high voltage fences on a desolate brown hill studded with boulders twenty wolves died of heartbreak.

One wolf’s eyes were a fluorescent emerald green Aurora Borealis retina patina, refracted surreal prisms.

I am a lone wolf, like you, said Lucky. We share an R7 variant dopamine receptor gene DRD4, a chemical brain messenger for learning and reward. R7 is found in 20% of humans.

DRD4-R7 increases curiosity and restlessness, said Lone Wolf. Humans with R7 seek out new experiences with known pleasures, take more risks and explore new places, ideas, foods, relationships, and sexual opportunities. They embrace movement, change, adventure, migration and a nomadic lifestyle. I am dying here. I was born free.

I feel your pain and alienation.

Wolves needed mountains, valleys and wild rivers. They were hungry to escape an artificial prison.

Lucky knew why midnight welcomed Howling Wolf.

Weaving A Life, V1

Fernando Pessoa

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.

Again I see you, but me I don't see! The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken and only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

The Book of Disquiet