Giants

“Try this,” said Raymond Carver a famous short story writer. “Write 25 words. Cut it to 15. Cut it to 5. This is what dead editors and hatchet men did to my work.”

Let me try, said Leo  ... here are 25  ... Once upon a time there was a tribe of orphans from Asia who escaped from captivity and abusive life where they were forced to … (haul shit, fuck evil men, work in a factory making electronic gadgets)

Fine. Next? Let me try, said Tran. Here are 15 … A tribe of orphans escaped the tyranny of forced labor and ran away to be.

Good. Next? Let me try, said Rita. Here are 5 … The scared orphans ran away. Precise, said RC, Keep it simple and short. Shorter is better. Less is more. Short, fast, deadly.

Character is action, said Omar. In a novel words reveal a character’s action. It’s internal and meditative. On stage in a play it’s all action.

Writers say what others are afraid to say.

They write naked.

They write in blood.

They write in exile.

See and smell their fear strength and authenticity. Heavy, deep and real. HDR.

Communicate without Voice words. WE sense their sincere authenticity. Writers confront their mental illness every day.

They love SIGN language. Gestures. Their awareness is misunderstood when speaking in SIGN because Speaking people ignore you. Voice Ones are illiterate and interrupt each other. See their fear being alienated, bored and alone. See, taste, hear, smell their fear to BE deaf, dumb and blind.

How do people cope using gestures, said Devina. Gestures control people. Asian Voice Ones talk over each other in their neurotic way. Loud and louder is their mantra. The loudest one is the BIG winner. Congratulations.

Here are my fears said Rita: The fear of living in Cambodia where you are always afraid looking over your shoulder and seeing the past with hard eyes because you have no imagination after twenty years of pure survival instinct with no incentive no initiative facing nightmare futures.

You are afraid someone will sneak up behind you and kill you. You suffer from fear and superstition. 1.7 million hungry ghosts swarm around you. Day in. Day out. We’re talking about some serious long-term trauma with a side order of shame and guilt. It will take another generation or two to clean our consciousness.

Rita: When I grow up, I will be a Fear & Superstition Manager. I’ll have booth on a red dusty road with an F & S sign. People will give me their fear(s) and superstition(s). I won’t say anything  ... I’ll smile and accept it. Thank you. Healed, they continue on their way. I burn it.

For example, they fear someone shows up in the middle of the night while they dream of peace and freedom and kills them. They fear armed strangers raping their screaming wife and daughters while they watch. They fear someone cutting out their tongue. They fear someone in their family not returning from the killing fields.

They suffer the fear of remembering & the fear of forgetting. They fear memory.

They fear losing their children, said Rita. They fear having no imagination. They fear asking why  ... They fear being distracted by stimuli in the environment … They fear controlling their environment … They fear their environment because it controls them … They fear living in Asian countries where, due to circumstances controlled by aliens, parents, teachers and authority figurines they live in perpetual childhood.

Adults keep you there with fake dependency & emotional abuse. They teach you fear. You eat fear three times a day. Delicious fear they say. Have some more. They are the great manipulators. Adults are giants with giant voices and giant control techniques. They threaten you with fear of pain, shame and guilt. It’s a vicious circle.

Life is a circle, a Fibonacci spiral.

The Wheel of Life is the universe.

When you meditate you are free from rebirth. Humans need love. Humans need compassion, kindness and empathy. They need to talk less and draw more. It’s a social and cultural thing. Giants never learned how to read or write. Giants fight, eat, fuck and sleep.

Un Pleasant factoid: 69 million children worldwide of primary school age will not  go to school this morning or tomorrow, next week, or next year.

I fear struggling to join the rising middle class in _______ without political connections and getting a degree in business, said Rita, After authority figures said a business degree was essential thousands got one. Many graduates don’t speak or care to learn English for future opportunities where they need it. They’re stuck working dead-end paper pushing menial jobs, sweeping dreams, chopping vegetables, doing boom-boom, sleeping or slaving in the tourism sector.

They need English to speak with foreigners or to get a job.

A teacher makes maybe $1,000 a month minus bribe fees. They lack initiative. Facing tiny sheep they fear losing control and acting like a fool in the theatre of life.

People fear questioning authority in Utopia before they execute you with a bullet in the back of your brain, said Leo speaking of historical awareness, I dance like nobody’s looking.

Yes, said Rita, I fear meeting my hungry ghost in a country where you:

a) are completely lost

b) have no comprehension what people say

c) suffer paranoia, a terminal disease

d) enjoy tedious ennui boredom carving a niche in your soul and you crave endless electronic distractions and gadget sensory overload

e) need food, water, clothing and shelter from the storm

f) have a humbling life changing experience of magnificent proportions    

g) hear a bell signifying enlightenment and satori, said Omar

Book of Amnesia, V1

Visionaries

The asylum is a prison and a protection. We shelter psychotic misfits, deviants, shamans, tricksters and uninhibited geniuses. The outside is the inside veiled in mystery. We escaped the maddening crowd to be on an island.

You’re either mad or innocent. A polite genius. Madness is healthy.

Do you work from the inside out or outside in? The outside objectivity is an illusion. The inside mind-at-large is flowing chemical and electrical energy.

The asylum is filed with writers, artists, musicians, dreamers, creatives and orphans exiled from many countries. You wouldn’t believe the input, output. In out, in out, click and clack quacks, scribble dribble quibble, maniacs, dancers, actors, poets, musicians, playwrights, and painters with canvases expand their dreams. They create a world of memory using active imagination.

You breathe in you breathe out.

My body, my breath, my practice.

We have dreamers, screamers, singers, schemers and bell ringers. Ding-dong. A monk ringing a bell walks down a Yangon, Burma street at 4 a.m. Everyone shuffles to the meditation hall. Sit in silence. Silence is a great blessing. Silence is the loudest noise on Earth. Deep silence = Deep bliss.

The bell is small brass with a clapper. What is the sound of one bell clapping? Meditators and artists see with their ears and hear with their eyes. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature is my teacher. I see through soft eyes.

Janitors, Grave Digger and literary outlaws are essential artists. People make a beautiful mess and I clean it up.

 Blade Runner

What do inmates sing about? They sing about identity theories, art, sexual and spiritual love, freedom, addictions, ideas, suicide, hope, light, fragility, strength, integrity, beauty, truth and mystery. They sing the nomadic alliterative alternative.

Zeynep and her friends are visionaries. They are visceral realists. Why does the ONE STATE lock them up? They are a perceived threat to the stability and social harmony of the status quo. They’ve been branded, labeled, categorized, diagnosed, drugged, tortured and incarcerated. Perhaps incinerated. Set yourself on fire.

Burn like the sun, radiant … flame your life.

Give a person a match and they’re warm for a minute.

Set them on fire and they’re warm for the rest of their life.

If you catch on fire jump in the river.

Sounds like fear based propaganda. It is. Clearly. Precisely. Concisely ... Too many adverbs if you ask me, but what do I know, I’m only a word janitor. Every single fucking beautiful day I collect tons of word garbage in a Top Secret BURN BAG. I haul it to a gnat on life’s river, light it and leave it free flowing down the stream of life. Yes, said Death, Flowing.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Focus

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 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.

Book of Amnesia V1

sweet heat

Embrace fear, uncertainity and doubt.

*

Pedal to spa

Twenty minute sauna 57C / 134F

Plunge pool 5C / 41F

Floating

Garden zone

Relax

Repeat x3

Daily meditation

A flower has profound responsibility.

Tran

Before going to Cambodia I lived in Vietnam for seven months. Five months in Hanoi and two months in Saigon. I first went to Vietnam at nineteen and spent a year with the 101st Airborne near Hue.

I put it in a memoir called ART – Adventure, Risk, Transformation. It was self-published in 2019.

I met Tran Van Minh at the 85th Medical Evacuation Hospital in Da Nang in 1970. I came down for hearing tests.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

I turned to the traveling tribe of seven storytellers. Tran from Vietnam, Rita from Cambodia, Leo from Tibet, two Zeynep’s from Turkey, Devina from Indonesia and Omar. Survivors. The Magnificent Seven. All of them have poems, stories, and dreams to finish they haven’t started yet.

Tran: I grew up in a village near Da Nang. There was a war in my country. I was five. One day I was playing near my home and stepped on a landmine. It exploded. Someone took me to the hospital. They saved me. I lost my right leg from the knee down. Now I have a plastic leg where my real leg used to be. It was a gift from a kind stranger. I’d like to thank them but I don’t know who they are or where they are. Maybe it was someone who came to the orphanage where I grew up after the war.

Anyway, it’s ok now. At the hospital they fixed me up and gave me crutches so I could get around. I lived on a ward with other Vietnamese kids. One day I was cruising down the hall and saw an American guy. He smiled at me. I smiled back.

He followed me to my ward and talked to a nurse. I’d like to be his friend. What is his name? Tran. Ask him if he’d like to be friends. She asked me and I said yes. Yes is one of my favorite English words. The man and I became friends for three days.

He said he had a hearing problem. I’ve met people with a listening problem.

Sometimes he carried me. It was great. We hung out together eating, watching movies on a big white sheet and playing on the beach. Then he gave me a big hug and left. He said he had to go back to his unit. He said he would always remember me.

I gave him my picture. I’m smiling, wearing blue hospital clothes and sitting on a bed with my missing leg wrapped in white bandages. I felt sad but I understood when he left. I lost my family in the war and I’m an orphan.

WE accept loss forever. That’s a good story, said Rita, I’m an orphan also. We have loss in common.

I met a happy child with courage. Tran was my teacher and connection with the real world. Be a child. We are one with the world around us. Tran survived with confidence, courage, strength and spirit. He taught me how precious life is. Tran is an essential storyteller because he is a survivor.

Tran - I am Bui Doi. This means children of the dust in Vietnamese. We shine shoes, beg, pickpocket and sell postcards and gum near tourist sites.

Bui Doi. Children of the dust.

Book of Amnesia, V1