wheel of time

Tibetan monks created a Kalachakra universe at the Denver Art Museum.

They meditated on the impermanence of life.

After completion they destroyed The Wheel of Time mandala.

 In a procession blowing horns and clanging symbols they carried it to the Platte River. They released it into the river to eliminate violence in the world.

Seven billion humans celebrated.

“Not all the clowns are in the circus,” whispered a dying girl trapped in streaming media selling FEAR.

In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance returns souls of ancestors.

“You got that right!” yelled a boy spilling secrets from Pandora’s box.

“Yeah,” said a girl. “Reality is the funniest thing happening. It’s impossible to take any of this seriously.”

“True. When I grow up to be big and strong I will be an archeologist. I will play and dig in dirt. I will brush things off revealing stories. I will destroy things to learn things.”

“I want to swallow the world but I am too full of sorrow,” said one poignantly.

“I’m going to start a club for procrastinators,” another suggested, “anybody want to sign up for unlimited access?”

“Are your needs being met?”

“Excellent question. I have a need for freedom and a freedom from need. Perhaps I’ll end up taking care of people like us,” said a girl named Hope. “I’m the last myth that dies.”

“Yeah, you can work in a day care center for adults.”

“That’s a-dolts.”

“Hah! Everyone is heading back in the direction they came from,” acknowledged Martha Ann, fixing her broken glasses with duct tape. She died of leukemia at thirteen holding courage.

“Remember what Joyce said? Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said a kid watching her experiment with optical illusions.

“Are you plagiarizing again?”

“Not exactly. It’s taken out of context.”

“Textile, tactile, texture, context, content, abstract, where’s it all going?”

“Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract,” screamed an emotionally abused child after being whipped with a fishing pole by his neurotic scared angry mother condemned to a wheelchair.

“Are we wondering or wandering?”

“Where’s eternity end?” the astronomer kid asked.

“I’m going to study the bottom line,” said a boy raising a digit in air testing incisive imprecise global market index indicators based on economic assumptions. “If we control the debt, we control the country.”

“International financiers run the show, babies. Politicians are their slaves.”

“Welcome to the American Suffering Society, ASS,” said another.

“I thought this was the Academy of Healing?”

“You’re in the right place at the right time. Let the clinical studies begin. I feel free!” sang the chorus.

“Who’s got the placebo?”

“I’m going to cut cage locks, release birds, lone wolves and screaming eagles into the wild beyond where they belong,” sang a girl, “and then I’m going to cut through the net of ignorance.”

“They will never escape the sky,” said a child doodling on polished glass with a diamond mind.

“I’m going to take up the flute, lute, harp and violin,” chimed a musician. “Small ensembles are the coolest, Baroque style. The suites are the small sections.”

“Can you play The Four Seasons?”

“Depends on the time of the year, dear. I’m working on it. Violin solos are tricky. They’re intense without being tense. Be patient.”

“We’re all intensive patients it should be easy. Now there’s a lesson, to be sure. Patience is our great teacher. We should be grateful to people who make our lives difficult. They are teachers.”

“You’re a poet and don’t even know it,” said a kid with bedside manners.

“But your toes show it because they are Longfellows,” replied a youthful sage.

“They smell like the Dickens,” said a disembodied voice.

“I was born a poet like a bird’s born to be a musician. It’s all instinct, play, imagination.”

“Well, I’ll be smudged,” a kid yelled, lighting sage for a kiva ceremony.

“The future is in garbage, I’m telling you. Be a trash collector and find all kinds of cool, interesting stuff people throw away,” said one. “They buy it, use it, forget about it, get bored with it and trash it. I’ll start a recycling center. We can exchange old stuff for new stuff. Like blood.”

“That smells nice,” a garbage collector said to a sage burner.

“Let’s create a book,” said one to all, “and we’ll be in it.”

“Hey, cool idea, then we can use episodes for stories or vignettes or salad dressing.”

“We need stories, air, water, sex, shelter, food and...”

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello.

“I am a plot looking for a character. I am a plot dragging characters around with cinematic jump cuts.”

“It will have characters and conflict,” said a young scripter. “It will be full of irony, symbolism, weather and sex. Vietnam is a woman having her field plowed.”

“Absoultely,” said a writer. “More than that it will have want, obstacles, rising and falling action and resolution with emotion as characters change and grow and realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters feel, taste, touch, hear and see revealing themselves through action. Socrates subordinated character to action. Just get to the verb.”

“Sleeping alone is boring,” said Sunflower, a blind masseuse at Seeing Hands in Kampot, Cambodia. Her hands were all.

 “Wow! Let’s make it immediate and dramatic like focusing a lens. I’ll play director.”

“Exactly. A series of conscious and unconscious levels, you know, kind of like a maze or something, a puzzle palace. I need your help with internal and external dialogue as characters reveal their insecurity and fears in the dark night of the soul, how they trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight, how they are comfortable with their insecurities and their desire for self-preservation by scheming because they want to be important. They don’t have principles or morals. They want recognition not fame. They have to survive.”

“Let’s act out their fears, hopes and worries.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs and use specific adjectives for description. The slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital, a character?”

“Sure, a place has character doesn’t it? Writers have used geographical settings: Vietnam, Morocco, Bhutan, Ireland, Cambodia, Tibet...Room 101.”

“That sounds like a nature versus man struggle or man versus man. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the truth with literal actuality moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China.

“Get is the joker word in English. A lick my clit agent at a Willamette Writer’s Conference said this is a beautiful word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic work in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Ice Girl in Banlung, Ratanakiri, Cambodia. It was a wild west town of 25,000 filled with red dusty roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries.

“Beware of naysayers, soothsayers and book doctors,” said a kid. “We are in this together. Through thick and thin. Through health and illness. Writing is a disease. We lie for a living. No editor will drink champagne from our skull. We’re trapped in our bodies, trapped in this hospital, trapped in a never-ending labyrinth. You’d think there’d be a moonlighting word doctor around here disguised as a heart specialist. Shine on bright star.”

“Ok,” said kid writer, “how’s this sound? Write everything in the first five hundred pages, uh, I mean five pages. Grab the reader with a hook beginning every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and the end of chapters. Start and end sentences with a strong word.”

“Good idea,” said a kid, “keep them turning pages. What happens next? If there’s no plot, nothing happens.”

“People are born. People live. People die. People wait. People fart around. Nobody comes. Nothing happens. Is this a fill-in-the-blank trick life test?”

“Life gives you the test first and lessons later,” screamed a overworked, underpaid and undersexed Hanoi teacher losing face in front of 80 robots. She pounded a podium with her pedagogical Marxist elephant control stick.

“It’s ok to be horrible. Some writers quit because they want it to be perfect. Many never start. Many never finish. It ain’t about starting, it’s about finishing. Write your dash. You need to be passionate about your work without being obsessive-compulsive. Do it because you love it. Make a beautiful fucking mess. Clean it up and make another beautiful mess.”

“Editing is a form of censorship,” said a kid waving a pile of rejection letters. “You don’t want to make the average reader work too hard do you?”

“No, they’re lazy to begin with you know. Obese, addicted to fast food, screen visuals, social web sites, FaceLost, and sextexting with short attention spans. No attention span? No problem.”

“Rewriting is writing. Cold hard detached. Revision is the party. Being a writer is like having homework every single fucking day.”

“What’s a word doctor?”

“Someone who fixes man-u-scripts,” said a blind kid waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston fountain pen splattering A- blood on everyone in their radius. “They rearrange words and sentences. Writing is like digging a well with a needle.”

“Punctuation is a nail. Period.”

“Just tell the truth,” said a Cambodian orphan. 1 of 12,000.

“The truth is, speaking of a fix, does anyone have any spare drugs?” said an addict in a gazebo group, “I need to get out of here and take a trip.”

“We, you, he, she, us, them, they, little old me and I ain’t going anywhere,” they chorused.

“Where’s the scissors? We need a sharp edge here.”

“Cut it out! Who’s got the cosmic glue holding everything together?”

“I have two scissors and one brother.”

“Your English is fluent.”

“Paste it where the sun don’t shine!”

“In your wild creative dreams!” yelled a kid.

“Super cosmic glue keeps everything from happening at the same time.”

“Living well is the best revenge. Best served cold.”

“Revenge and ambition are why humans have wars. 4,000 years of killing each other and no knows who the king is.”

Rose knew they were doing hard time. Have mercy. A child chimed in, “I’m going to be a 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 a Chinese refugee child from an orphanage flooding the Yangtze with dead children.

“What will you do with the time you collect?” asked her friend.

“Visit sick children in hospitals where they do evolutionary experiments to stem the cells.”

“Or is it sell the stems?”

“Speaking of stems, I’m going to be a gardener, can’t imagine anything more beautiful than making nature astonishing to the eye. Leave something for future generations.”

“If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of thorns give me a shout,” said Tran, a brave one-legged Vietnamese warrior child wearing his heart on his sleeve.

“I’m going to study Donatello,” said another.

“Who’s he?”

“He was one of the greatest Renaissance artists. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy.”

“And?”

“Well, he was very honest, had integrity and was super original for his time. Technically he worked with anything. You name it, wax, bronze, marble, clay, rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist. He was always discovering new tricks of the craft.”

A child painting with smoke on mirrors blasted light, “Hey! That’s what the Greeks believed. Everything was beauty and order.”

“Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, seven musical notes. Beauty originated with them didn’t it?”

“You got it,” said the painter. “Hey, you know what? I think I’ll take the day off and be creative.”

“The present moment is eternal reality,” whispered a child, “We live in the eternity of the instant.”

“It’s about process not product.”

“Whew, that’s deep!”

“Yeah, we’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes.”

“Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else.”

“Fools speak the truth.”

“Fools are everywhere. We are fools whether we dance or not so we may as well dance. If fate doesn’t make you laugh you don’t get the joke. The value of truth value meaning is in the mystery.”

“Tunkashila is grandfather’s spirit. It’s wisdom and calmness,” said children inside a sacred circle. “It is the way of the warrior. We are all warriors.”

Rose listened with her heart-mind. She knew others were not ready to receive their insight and blessings. Terminal black tires left skid marks through lives. People they hadn’t met, contacted, or connected with would feel the heat and smell fire where their wheelchair rubber met the road. They were true spiritual road warriors with distinct calibrations, shifts, vibrations and energy frequencies. The future would be a scary time for older generations unaccustomed to their authenticity.

Rose knew it would be a real beautiful mess figuring out where to put the disability act in their short sweet Ghost Dance. Perhaps in rising action leading to the epiphany, or in the falling action leading to a beautiful heart breaking emotional catastrophic epiphany. Cut. The end. Cue applause.

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” a child said out loud with reported speech. Their wheel of life pealed skin down, playing tag inside crazy wisdom.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones?

“To sleep, perchance to dream.”

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” said a kid with a PH.D in psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute.

“What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive in the future I must journey to the past. To attain the sanity of oneness with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed. One must confront their shadow or be crushed by it.”

“I like it,” said a seer named Rumi. “What else?”

“Well, here’s another cool thing he said. “I liken the formation of a character to weaving fabric. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. You have a choice. You can finish the garment, however it will always be botched and ugly, or you can unravel the weaving back to the first mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and hostile. The analyst lends patience, honesty and courage.’”

“Excellent,” yelled kids, “here’s to our being patient patients with authenticity and courage.”

“Speaking of courage, I’m looking for someone who knows reading and writing,” Rose said to the children.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about reading and writing,” a child told Rose. “I thought you said eating and fighting. I know about that.”

“Perfect, let’s go together,” said Rose.

Subject to Change 

Mandarin Duck

Omar remembered a daughter in Cadiz. Faith worked at Mandarin Duck selling paper and writing instruments. She practiced a calm stationary way.

“May I help you,” she said one morning greeting a bearded stranger. She knew he was a forcestero.

A stranger from outside.

His eyes linked their loneliness minus words. She averted her eyes. He was looking for quick painless intimacy and ink.

“I’d like a refill for this,” he said, unscrewing a purple cloud-writing instrument with a white peak.

Recognizing the Swiss rollerball writing tool she opened a cabinet and removed a box of thin and medium cartridges.

“One or many?” she said.

“Many. I don’t want to run dry in the middle of a simple true sentence.”

“I agree. There’s nothing more challenging than running empty while taking a line for a walk.”  

“Isn’t that the truth? Why run when you can walk? Are you a writer?”

“Isn’t everyone? I love watercolors, painting, drawing, sketching moistly.”

“Moistly?”

“I wet the paper first. It saturate colors with natural vibrancy.”

“With tears of joy or tears of sadness?”

“Depends on the sensation and the intensity of my feeling. What’s the difference? Tears are tears. The heart is a lonely courageous hunter.”

I twirled a peacock feather. Remembering Omar’s Mont Blanc 149 piston fountain pen, I said, “I also need a bottle of ink.”

“What color? We have black, blue, red. British racing green just came in.”

“Racing green! Cool. Hmm, let’s try it.” Omar would be pleased with this expedient color.

I switched subjects to seduce her with my silver tongue.

“Are you free after work? Perhaps we might share a drink and tapas? Perhaps a little mango tango?”

“I have other plans. I am not sexually repressed. I am liberated. I have a blind secret lover. Here you are,” she said handing me cartridges and inkbottle with a white mountain.

I paid with a handful of tears and a rose thorn. My ink stained fingers touched thin, fine and extra fine points of light. Faith and her extramarital merchandise were thin and beautiful. She was curious.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“It was nice meeting you. By the way, have you seen the film, Pan’s Labyrinth, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro?”

“No, but I’ve heard about it. Something about our Civil War in 1944, repression and a young girl’s fantasy.”

“Yes, that’s right. It’s really a beautiful film on many levels. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland.”

“Wow,” she said, “I loved that film, especially when Alice meets the Mad Hatter. Poor rabbit, always in a hurry, looking at his watch.”

“Funny you should mention time. A watch plays a small yet significant role in the Pan film.”

“Really? How ironic. I’ll have to see it.”

“Yes, it’ll be good for your spirit.”

I pulled out my Swizz Whizz Army stainless steel, water resistant Victoriabnoxious pocket watch.

“My, look at the time! Tick-tock. Gotta walk. Thanks for the ink. Create with passion.” I disappeared.

Faith sang a lonely echo. “Thanks. Enjoy your word pearls. Safe travels.”

Under a Banyan tree I sat on a park bench in weak sun, fed cartridges into a mirror and clicked off the safety. It was a rock n’ roll manifesto with a touch of razzmatazz jazz featuring Coltrane, Miles, Monk, Mingus and Getz to the verb.

Subject to Change

my cremation

Sekala, what is seen. Nisekala, what is unseen.

After chopping wood and carrying water I returned to Monkey Forest in Ubud, Bali for my cremation ceremony.

It was the best decision I ever made.

Everyday is a celebration.

The family tended my corpse for seven days, washing it with holy water, rubbing it down with rice flour, turmeric, salt, vinegar, and sandalwood powder. Shreds of mirrored glass - banten sutji - were placed on my eyes, pieces of steel on my teeth, a gold ring with a ruby on my mouth, and jasmine flowers on my nostrils. My four limbs received iron nails symbolizing perfect senses allowing rebirth as a stronger and more beautiful human being.

Since the 13th century every Balinese liberated their soul through cremation to heaven for judgment and rebirth in their grandchildren. Failure to liberate the soul haunted descendants as a ghost.

My corpse was wrapped in a white cloth, a straw mat and tightly bound with more white cloth on a rante of split bamboo. On cremation day it was placed in a tower constructed of wood and bamboo covered in rattan, decorated with colored paper, ornaments, glittering tinsel, and small mirrors. The tower represented the Balinese conception of the cosmos.

In a series of layers were bamboo platforms. The base signified the underworld with three ascending platforms representing the visible world, a pavilion for the body, and the tumpang or heavens.

French, German, American, British, and Japanese tourists wearing ceremonial sarongs holding camcorders and 35mm cameras mingled with local food and drink sellers. A Balinese man sold film from a suitcase. Women hustled soft drinks, water, and carved ebony statues. Local children trailed an ice cream man.

Festive crowds climbed crumbling moss covered earthen walls in Pedang Tagal anticipating my body exiting the family home. A towering ceremonial black bull waited as people gathered at the junction of two narrow dusty roads in sweltering heat.

My body was carried out and placed on the golden pavilion behind the 15’x15’ bull.

Women in ceremonial dress led a procession balancing effigies and offerings of fruits, rice and vegetables.

Forty yelling, screaming men in black and white checkered sarongs lifted the bamboo platform onto their shoulders. Laughing, they ran down the road jostling the bull back and forth in erratic semicircles to confuse angry spirits. Jubilant villagers doused the carriers and bull with streams of water. People stopped cooking, resting, working, and painting. They emerged from walled compounds to witness the ceremony.

My widow and children waited with 100 people in Monkey Forest. Noise and confusion mixed with laughter as the black bull and golden tower entered a clearing. The men struggled up a steep dirt hill under the weight.

The bull was placed under a cremation platform - bale pabasmian - constructed of bamboo with a white sky cloth and gold tinsel roof. Reeds secured the bull on four corner poles. The music stopped.

Women worked the crowd selling water and soft drinks in searing heat. Tourists replaced film.

Men cut the bull’s back open with a large knife under the sky pavilion and removed a section. I was lowered from the tower accompanied by cymbals, drums and clanging instruments. Women circled three times around the bull with offerings.

Hot, tired, sweaty, laughing men lifted me up and passed it to a group near the bull. They lowered it inside. My widow placed family heirlooms on my corpse. Forest monkeys chattered overhead. A black and white butterfly danced in fractured light.

A Brahmin priest in black stood on scaffolding singing and chanting prayers with my family. They cut a string binding white cloth, poured holy water from clay pots over me, passing them to a family member who smashed them on the ground.

The priest accepted a flowering plant and sprinkled soil on me. Another man added yellow silk. People handed them family items wrapped in white cloth to be placed inside. More clay pots were emptied on my form and destroyed on earth.

A tourist in the shade wrote a postcard.

A family member took a final photograph of me. An effigy of reeds and tinsel was dismantled and placed on me. The lid was replaced on the bull and secured with bamboo lashed diagonally across the corners.

Someone lit my fire.

The bull and flowers burned quickly as wood, bamboo and rattan sent smoke and ash circling into sky. Cloth shells flamed away as heat jumped to the tinseled golden roof.

Italian and French film crews worked close to the fire.

The crowd evaporated. The ground was littered with plastic water bottles and ashes.

My widow sat in the shade eating, drinking, and talking with our children and friends about sekala, what is seen, and nisekala, what is unseen. 

 

Sidi Ifni, Morocco

It was high noon.

He yelled out, “Sidi Ifni.”

The lot director deserted his friends in the shade of a solitary tree gesturing to a battered car in the throng of vehicles. The “grand taxi” in the hot, dry, dusty sand choked Tiznit parking lot was an old blue and yellow Benz. Dreaming drivers waited for passengers.

“Thanks.”

The driver was crashed in the back.

Knowing it might be hours, days, weeks, months, years, or centuries until they had a full load, he wandered off for bottled water and bananas. Yellow peels raised dust as he released skin from a fresh skeleton. Locals did not eat bananas in public and he wasn’t interested in dietary protocol. 

They departed Tiznit when the car was full of smiling toothless Berbers returning to stone homes far away. They zoomed through barren scrub desert past rocky hills and distant menacing adobe fortresses.

He sat smashed between the window and a friendly French speaking young Gendarme en route to his garrison in Sidi Ifni. The gendarme protected a worn crumpled green canvas satchel.

It was empty - however - the stories inside were real.

It’d survived invasions, standing orders, foreign legions, armed bandits and salt and slave caravans moving north across the Sahara returning south with gold. It held letters to mistresses locked in harems, declarations of intrigue, suspense, tension, conflict, and treaties.

It revealed bilingual conversations about moral ambiguities between characters in comedies and dramas. It divulged wild tales about distant mirages, instruction manuals for training hunting falcons, intentions, motivations, meditations, aqueduct plans, mosaic fountain designs, and extensive agricultural necessities inside tiled adobe fortresses on hilltop positions overlooking a vast emptiness of silence.

The gendarme dozed off and the stranger peeked into the bag of tricks.

It contained irrefutable empirical evidence.

Dear Commanding Officer of the Garrison,

My first secret hostel was buried deep in Wicklow Mountains, an old bare bones mountain hut without running water or electricity tucked up a long canyon at the base of Lugnaquilla Mountain.

The two-story house was built in 1955 and donated to An Oige by a woman doctor. The view is excellent, down a long sloping valley surrounded by mountains. To the left is a roaring 10-15’ wide river suitable for drinking and bathing, full of trout with wild water rushing and roaring downhill gathering speed trailing moss, polishing stones, nourishing ferns, wild hedges and rock walled paths, remaining from glaciers and the gravitational forces of time and pressure.

It’s a small hostel catering to travelers on foot or bike with a warden sleeping room upstairs and ladies room suitable for six. Gentlemen sleep out back with sixteen bunk beds and outdoor toilets. We have plenty of extra blankets and mattresses. The small intimate common room has an old fireplace and kitchen with gas cookers. Refined elegance.

It’s a mixed bag of students, city workers, mercenaries, poets, playwrights, hardy hikers, orphans and a mishmash of European and Arabic languages. I keep it open all day long, register arrivals at 5 p.m., making sure there are enough beds to go around, manage cookers, gas, and toilet paper supply.

It’s the perfect repository for extended day hikes. I explore high glens in thick forests with dark brown pine floors and trickling brooks, rivers and streams cascading from the mountain. Feeding deer flash soft golden rust brown with white markings bounding away as I stumble through soaked green moss. I traverse to Glendalough through fields and pastures way back and beyond.

I fish the river in solitude, peel potatoes and carrots for stews, paint, write, share road adventures with vagabonds and play chess by firelight.

Pawn takes pawn as players attempt to control the middle of the board attacking and defending positions simultaneously. It’s about position and material. We make necessary sacrifices from the beginning game through the middle game to the end game.

Andy, a German visitor said, “Chess provides an outlet for hostile impulses in a non-retaliatory way. The therapeutic value is enormous.”

“Chess gives me discipline, direction and power,” I said.

“That’s the price of creativity. I have recoiled from the emotional discomfort of my life through transference and make myself master of the situation through games,” he said.

“Yes, it’s a drive for perfection and it’s irrationality.”

“Every game is a challenge I must meet.”

“Do you know Capablanca?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. His accuracy was pure position and logic. His play was accurate, tenacious, patient, with a disciplined imagination.”

“Jose Raul Capablanca once won 168 games in a row during an exhibition tour. He said, ‘I see only one move ahead, but it always the correct one.’”

“His knowledge-guided perception or apperception was excellent because of his training. He’s regarded as the greatest ‘natural’ chess player of all time.”

 “Your move.”

I reminded Andy of Queen Isabella’s passion for conquest.

“She was responsible for giving the queen piece more power during her reign. They say she was playing one night in Cordoba when Christopher asked for ships and supplies intending to find India. She initially declined but her Abbot convinced her to reconsider.”

We played in the illuminated dark of night as peat fires roared up the flue. Quick moving violent storms pummeled the place.

“That’s a dangerous move,” he said as my knight escaped a pin.

“Yes, but it’s elegant.”

“We destroy ourselves eventually,” he said.

“Yes, as long as we enjoy the process. Your move.”

One clear day while sitting near the river doing her nails Susan related a literary dream from a poem by Brian Merriman she was reading.

“Have you heard about The Midnight Court?”

 “No,” someone said. “Tell us.”

“It’s about a fellow who falls asleep and has a dream where he’s taken before a court of women who condemn him to be punished for all the men in their knowledge. How women should have the right to marriage and sex but often meet with disappointment and rejection by men who could easily have become their lovers and husbands.”

“Sounds like a Greek tragedy,” someone said before jumping into the wild river grabbing a fish fighting on a hook, line and sinker.

Another traveler remarked, “Yes, for those who think, life is a comedy and for those who feel, it is a tragedy.”

Fish blood flowed downstream.

Every misty morning I dragged a table outside and rolled thin parchment paper into and through the Smith Corona portable. The irony and simple joy working under the table and on a table at the Smithy was pure simultaneous rapture.

It was not a job it was a joy because I did it in an artistic way. It was a new day, new paper, new energy, new and improved attitude with imagination and discipline.

Late one fall day while strolling down the valley enjoying moist air and kicking a rock past waterfalls in the rain with Andy on our way to check mail and have a pint two miles away, Joe Murphy, the area manager, arrived in his little dark blue Morris Minor chugging along the narrow road.

“We’re closing you down for the winter.”

“Fine. Gotta new place?”

“Yeah.”

It took thirty minutes to get the pack, word machine and Evidence sheets together. We slammed the wooden shutters closed from the inside, bolted them, turned off the gas cookers, locked the door and left. Quick and painless, like love.

“We need you to go to Donegal.” Murphy said driving the rocky road to Dublin one, two, three. “We’re having a problem up there with the locals.”

“What kind of problem?”

“It’s a big place, gets a lot of visitors. Mr. Johnson, the warden, is from somewhere in England and married to a girl from the south. The locals don’t take kindly to him being from across the water if you know what I mean, so there’s been some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? Is it spelled with a capital T?”

“Well, I heard someone may have spray painted some words on the house,” he said. “You’ll have to see for yourself and if so get it cleaned up will ya? Besides, you may want to pay a visit to the neighbors. Smooth things out ya’ know.”

“Sure. My specialty is smoothing things out. What happened to the manager?”

“They left after almost three years. She has family in Mayo although I heard they went to Glasgow or Iceland.”

Floating images.

We evolved out of Wicklow mist covered mountains leaving the river’s long song behind us, melting our perception of primitive nature as humming tires reflecting sound exchanged high wild rivers and mountains for overgrown suburbs of estate houses, manicured lawns, chip shops, pubs, and oppressive church steeples humming humanity’s guilt.

Bless me father for I have traveled.

We passed Sandymount and Martello Tower where Joyce wrote, staring at his unknown future exile in Italy with silence and cunning. He realized the exile’s holy Trinity: language, culture and friends.

“There’s Martello,” I said.

“Aye, Joyce was a strange bird,” Joe said shifting gears and hitting the gas.

“Yes. But man could he write. He said, ‘Wipe your glasses with what you know.’”

“There’s some truth in that,” Joe replied.

“Do you know what an epiphany is?”

“Sure. Isn’t it some kind of insight?”

“It’s something quickly revealed. Joyce wrote tight short scenes where something happened to a person.”

“Maybe it’s like getting hit by lightning.”

“He once commented to a friend when they asked him about his daily writing after seeing Joyce was agitated. 'I wrote seven words today,' Joyce said and his friend replied, “What’s the problem then?” and James said, “but I don’t know what order they are supposed to be in.” I laughed.

“I never heard that,” Joe said.

How’s that for troubled? I thought.

“I thought it rather clever of him to have a character named Daedalus,” I said. “Figured it out he did. Broke it down into the heroic manifestation of human frailty he did, Daedalus.

“You know what I imagine?” as the Mini blasted around corners plowing an asphalt path, “Joyce was a wonderful word trickster he was, he loved language with playful passion, he invented new language. He made it up. It was consciousness without the editors, minus the critic. He left them stewing in Ireland. You know the name Daedalus? Well, if you pronounce it really slowly and enunciate it out it sounds like die day lie us, or some such thing. We die day by day. Fascinating. What do you think?” 

Joe gripped his small black wheel. “It’s possible. Joyce said a lot of things.” 

“Yes!” I shouted sticking my head out the window feeling sharp Irish sea winds slash my face.

I turned to Joe, changing the subject. “Yes, Chief Joseph of the Nez Pierce tribe said, “My heart is sick and tired. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

“I never heard of him,” Joe said.

“White people discovered gold on their territory in 1863 and moved them off their land. It’s everybody’s land. That’s what the Native Americans told them. We’re only caretakers of Mother Earth.

“In 1877 he tried to lead his people to a reservation in Idaho. Seven hundred warriors battled 2,000 U.S. soldiers across 1,400 miles in a beautiful tactical retreat. They were massacred by  palefaces.  His people froze to death near the Canadian border. They took survivors to a concentration camp in Oklahoma. It was pure genocide. On the reservations soldiers gave the Indians corn to eat and they fed it to their meager livestock. Chief Joseph was finally allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest in 1885 where he died of a broken heart.”

 “I see.”

We traveled along the rocky road to Dublin in silence. One, two, three, four, five down the rocky road all the way to Dublin leaving them all broken hearted.

The gendarme shifted in his sleep.

The stranger slipped the papers into the green satchel.

Outside the dirty taxi window in an endless hazy future of rocky dune hills, black shrouded women on donkeys balancing large ceramic brown jugs plodded miles to a shallow well inside circular stones.

The city may move but the well remains.

The two-lane road ran forty kilometers south to Sidi Ifni, a Spanish enclave with 15,000 people on cliffs over the Atlantic. In a lush valley beneath old Moorish castles were two cinder block construction enterprises, wadi oasis palms, gardens, and tributaries running to the sea. Thin men sifted sand and gravel through wire screens. Belching machines pressed out bricks. Another man hauled them to trucks.

Part of Spain until 1969, facades suffered from emptiness, wind, and water. Sharp white cubist block homes scattered on hills broke light. It was an old art deco town full of decayed deserted buildings from an elegant forgotten history. European expats bought holiday apartments for $2,000-10,000.

He found a room in a cheap hotel overlooking the Atlantic and rested for three days.

Mosque masters called five times a day. Trick or treat. Sleep deprivation became the norm. Late to bed and early to rise makes a man crazy.

He walked on a beach with an unemployed Internet worker from North Carolina. Bill had never been out of the states before. He was shocked and fascinated by Morocco. 

“The poverty levels are amazing,” he said.

“You get used to economic realities, touts and price gouging. It’s a poor country. The people are kind and hospitable.”

“Fez was amazing, then I got sick for three days in Meknes. Had to rest.”

“It’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth. Why did you pick Morocco?”

“My partner, Sam, a world traveler, had it in mind and then we were laid off. He asked me if I wanted to come along. I had three weeks to get it together; shots, pack and stuff. It was pretty crazy but I made it.”

Sam was a savvy cynical traveler. He told people he was Australian. A well rehearsed diversion after 9/11.

“The Greek islands are cheap, specifically Santorin,” he said one night over bad fish and rice in the hotel restaurant. “Thailand and Laos are good bargains as well.”

Deserted Sidi Ifni beaches stretched for miles. Renegade surfers relishing excellent conditions camped to the north.

“North Carolina is somewhere over there,” Bill said, pointing west. “Imagine that. I’ve never been away from home before.”

“You either adapt or get back where you feel comfortable.”

I shared ideas about writing goals and publishing.

“You need a hook, a marketing platform, be willing to fail, rejections are part of the process, murder your darlings, overcome the fear of making it perfect and be passionate about your work. I've learned this through trial and error. Publishing is a business, a casino. The bottom line for an agent is, can they make 15% on your book? The shelf life of a book is maybe six months. It’s about the joy of creating, writing for your self and not worrying about the market. Keep it real.”

“What’s real?”

“Give your characters desire and conflict in the first five pages. Let them show and tell. Take them on some kind of journey with character arc. It’s about dialogue and action and using all your senses. Have fun with it. Nobody in 200 years will want to read it.”

“Well, knowing that takes the pressure off.”

“No fear. Finally, make your query letters human, don’t kill your query in the synopsis, reduce the synopsis to a single sentence for your pitch, and establish your marketing platform.”

“Thanks. I’ll give it a shot when I get back.”

“My pleasure. Enjoying your trip?”

“Yes, it’s been very interesting. I rode a camel out into the dunes south of Zamora. It was really the only thing I wanted to do on the trip.”

“He paid way too much,” Sam said. “They ripped him off. He went out at 4 p.m. they rode for an hour, camped overnight, had breakfast and returned to the hotel. It’s strictly for tourists. He could have found something cheaper.”

“It was really cold out there,” Bill said. “I couldn’t sleep and stayed awake almost all night. The stars were amazing. They were so close I stayed awake staring at them until dawn.”

It was a place of truth and beauty for him.

Bill and Sam were nervous about returning to states coping with terrorist siege mentalities and media produced fear.

Their days in an old Moorish civilization were numbered. They faced the unknown like getting their stuff out of storage when they returned and finding new jobs.

In their country of birth people loved storage facilities. Through history they accumulated tons of stuff and needed a place for it. It was precious to them. They were attached to it. They birthed it, raised it, and married it, dragging it around behind them for years, lugging it into and out of new apartments and homes, before burying it in caves filled with a deep fear of loss. They stored it someplace else because their palatial homes, caves, hovels and shopping carts were filled to the brim. They consigned it to cement storage facilities hidden behind mazes of security gates, security fences, and secure double-padlocked doors in run down industrial zones trapped in the bowels of decaying cities. Where it collected dust. Buried memories, artifacts, time capsules and all the forgotten stuff.

In The Red City after Sidi Ifni, he packed light. He was ready, willing, able, and well prepared for invasions and grounded Special Forces with the latest killing technology. Exploring general theories of relativity he assembled his Zone II medical kit, dehydration packets, emergency space blanket, climbing boots, Swiss army knife, short-wave radio, R-11 telephone jack, energy adapters, battery charger and a zippy drive for backups.

He carried phrase books, geographical maps, a water purifier, modems, lip balm, chopsticks, dental and mental floss, a sarong, Honer blues harp, immunization record, watercolors, a resume of seasons, fountain pen, ink bottles, blank Moleskine, a warm heart and cool mind.

A Century is Nothing

 

shanghai Interrogation (Tea Talk)

The boy soldier was silent.

       “What’s that for,” the female Public Security official said pointing to the typewriter on the table. 

       “It is for writing letters.”

       They have reservations about letters. Letters, they wonder, looking at each other with jaundiced eyes. Black eyes streaked with exploding blood vessels full of fear and suspicion.

       Letters indicate political insurrection, dissent, forced labor, mandatory abortions, propaganda, civil unrest, turmoil, revolutions, and tanks in the street, torture, solitary confinement and executions.

       They see party leaders wringing their pale hands, nervously pacing forbidden cities past stone lions, conducting top-secret meetings trying to figure out what to do, how to put a face on all this. How to manage and manipulate disinformation rivers, controlling floods.

       The boy soldier and his comrade save face by maintaining blank, stoic expressions. They suspect I have connections.

Maybe I am a plant, a party member sent to check their unit. Assigned to monitor their methods, their questioning tactics, their subtle use of intimidation, their implications to control and influence people’s lives with fear for the good of the state.

       For all they know I am a subversive. A word terrorist.

       “Letters. We will keep an eye on this one,” she said to the soldier.

       They are thinking: We have ways to make you talk. They don’t tell me this but I know how it works. I’ve read Tu Fu’s work. I’ve digested their bone dust history through dynasties.

       “Yes, well, we’ll see,” she said. “We need to remind you to remember this very carefully.” Her voice gained an octave.

  “The bent nail gets hammered down!

“Just because you speak our language doesn’t mean you are special. We can revoke your visa and force you to pay a fine. We can put you away where no one will ever find you. We will discuss your situation with our leaders. We have driven the talented people abroad. Some went into hiding but we know where they are and we find them. We always do. We find them in their homes, schools, jobs. Some accepted positions at foreign universities where they form counter-revolutionary groups bent on overthrowing the state by writing articles, stories and books critical of their homeland.”

       Her face resembled nuclear fission as she pounded the table. “They are a disgrace! They are running dogs!”

       “I see,” he said, dropping my eyes to save face.

       Downstairs, my warrior team armed with tools made on slave labor production lines financed with western capital, were busy. They laughed, singing and dancing, knocking holes in theories, lies and deceptions. They built facades, charades, fast food outlets, and dream machines, ignominious pious grandiose standards of living faster than joint venture ink dries on thin rice paper.

       The authorities are momentarily appeased.      

       I understand they are following orders. To the letter.

       I am well aware, remembering letters, if they execute me with a single bullet to the back of my head my family will have to pay for the ammunition. My family will be very surprised when they get a bill in a letter from the kow-tow authorities for a round. They will have to buy a round and will never meet the last of the big time spenders.

       To make matters worse, the authorities, after executing me, will disembowel me and recycle internal organs seeing the profit to be made from a used, well traveled and perfectly functioning heart, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, eyes, ears, hair, genitals, spleen and assorted by-products. It will be a beautiful fucking mess.

  First, they will need impossible to find International Reply Coupons and second, the post office glue made from horses is a disaster. Gets all over the wooden counters and fingers of rude, impatient people because they are slobs. After smearing glue everywhere they push and shove their way toward the sullen postal clerk thrusting mail in her face.

       If she didn’t have guaranteed sticky white rice three times a day my grand inquisitor would be home knitting a sweater and gossiping with neighbors. They’d be discussing vegetables, weather and roving demolition crews with their bulldozers wondering when, not if, their neighborhood would come tumbling down and they’d be forced to move to bland housing tracts on the edge of the Gobi desert.

       They will be the last to know. Earth trembled as blades sliced dwellings in half sending clouds of green tiled dust spiraling into the polluted sky.

       Not only will the officials need IRC coupons to bill my next- of-kin for the bullet, they will require hand carved marble chops with engraved ideograms and delicious red ink to verify and administer their official proclamations and imperial judgments.

       They will chop and stamp my passport until it bleeds. EXPIRED. They will chop every single page. They are important cogs in the wheel of the law, the wheel grinding themselves down into the dust of ages.

       Their looms spin broken threads out faster than they can weave them into their tapestry. If they make one mistake they will answer to the authorities.

       They examine my passport with filthy greasy fingers. They turn pages, looking at visa stamps, examining strange forbidden exotic designs. They see rainbows and a phoenix, hearing wild drums from Amazonian rain forests while savoring fruits from lush gardens filled with crow and raven songs. Eagle feathers drift out of the pages.

       On one page they explore meadows illustrated with roses. Thorns dive out of the sky piercing their hearts. A river of blood breaks through dams flooding their ancestor’s graves. They see names, histories and corpses floating toward Seas of Memory.

       Turning another page they scamper above raging gorges on frayed rope bridges. They hear people screaming, “Help us. Save us!”

       They keep going. The other side of the gorge is dark and dangerous, full of Black Mambas, vipers, pythons and fear bred demons slithering out of the ground, evaporating into rivers of sound, twisting forms dancing through their eyes, weaving into their spirit. 

       Blind, they struggle through fog, hail storms, into blizzards toward mountains. They are stranded inside the discursive circular logic drowning in a river of tears inside their river of dreams on the River of Time.

       “We’ve gone too far,” the boy yells to the PSB woman. “Turn back!”

       “It’s too late,” she cried. They began seeing with their ears and hearing with their eyes.

       Turning a leaf they dived into the ocean of their love below the surface of appearances. In deep turquoise waters they discover a secret spirit cave pulsating with a heartbeat and magical sources of inspiration and beauty.

       She handed the passport to the boy. “What do you make of this?”

       He took off his military party hat and scratched his head.

       “I’m not sure,” he said. “Appears to be some fable, a fairy tale, a mysterious rambling incoherent story. Never seen anything like this before.”

       His comrade grabbed it back.

       “Yes, strange indeed,” she whispered. “Where did you get this?” She held up a page of a butterfly sitting on a pure white lotus flower growing from mud.      

       “My girlfriend sent it to me. It’s a dream.”

       “Where did she get it?”

       “Along the way.”

       “What way?”

       “She collects dreams from people along her journey.”

       “Where is she? In Laos? Bhutan? Cambodia, Tibet?”

       The interrogator is suspicious. She knows the primitive mountain people are animists, superstitious types. Their Dongba ancestors in Yunnan created a written language 1,000 years ago using pictographs and worship nature of all things. They have powers like levitation, lowering their body temperature, running for miles above the ground, transcending their physical bodies.

       “She is everywhere.”

       “I don’t believe you,” said the woman. She skipped a few pages and started reading.

       “They floated through caves into Greek and Roman civilizations. Inside a huge cavern flooded with celestial star light were halls filled with beautiful art from everywhere in the world. 

       “It was arranged in a form of a historical magic time circle. They admired fabulous paintings of strange beauty. They cried tears of happiness and their tears created the beginning of the ocean.”

       She handed the passport back.

       “It appears authentic. But, I must say, parts of it are rubbish. Pure imagination. Your girlfriend will have to account for this. She’s crazy and needs medication. She needs to be somewhere safe for the sake of her emotional health. We have ways of dealing with these people. She’s clearly a threat against state-controlled propaganda laws and social stability. We can’t allow lunatics to just go roaming around the country writing this stuff. She could be in serious danger.”

       She rattles on in her well-rehearsed monotone.

       “There are immediate restrictions on your travel outside the city. You are required to check with the local Public Security Office if you want to leave yourself, if you need to transcend this impermanent state of being.”

       “Yes, I know. Existence is suffering. Thank you. I am rainbow of Light. Will you have more tea?”

       “Yes.” She handed me a cracked cup. I poured tea.

       She doesn’t want to lose face with this foreigner. Not in front of her comrade. He might talk at headquarters. Her superiors will question him.

       Her comrade is young and vulnerable to new ideas. Like free will and free choice. She’s afraid if he has the chance to escape he will visit neighboring lands, meet people, see their art and absorb their music and stories.

       She finished her tea gave me a withering look and left.

       Before leaving the boy soldier ripped the butterfly page out and put it in his pocket. He smiled.

       “You have been very cooperative. We will keep an eye on you.”