Myths Became Stories

Zeynep said, “I am a rose thorn and Winter Hawk. Wings instinct and heart. My razor talon tears meat from bones to feed my creative Hunger Angel.” - (Everything I Posess I Carry With Me)

“I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist,” said a gravedigger. “My specialty is languages. Lost tongues. Wandering deep in the Tarim Basin following the Silk Road through Central Asia I discovered the 4,000 year old Tocharian language and Afansievo culture. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorers. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA based on an Iranian dialect.”

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions said, “Myths tell what really happened. Myths suggest a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth is truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories based on fear and belief containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place.”

Marcus Aurelius - "Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered."

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History became legend.

Legend became myth.

Myth became story.

(What you wanted - Myth - Actuality)

This anthropological fact accompanied Lucky wandering among unfinished construction projects and abandoned manuscripts in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

He joined millions of emaciated migrant refugees passing shattered bricks, broken hopes and strangling dangling cables connected to nothing in particular.

Shoddy incomplete dust dreams and quick profit schemes thrived where political thugs disguised as beauticians, missionaries and NGO social workers living in penthouses and driving Land Rovers exploited villages stealing land, rivers, mountains, children. Extorting money.

Their rule of law was a truncheon named GREED.

*

Sophisticated command and control procedures thrived. Corruption stole millions. Substandard schools pancaked 10,000+ children from one-child families in a Sichuan earthquake.

Garment factories in Dhaka crushed wage slave workers stitching designer labels at a discount.

In May 2014 an inefficient unregulated profit-oriented private coalmine in Soma, Turkey caught fire, exploded, burned and collapsed killing 301 miners.

The angry Teflon Prime Minister (now President) visited the disaster. “This is a fact of life for poor illiterate underpaid miner slaves. It happened in Britain in the 19th century,” he said to widows and families. An angry miner booed him. He slapped the miner. “If you boo the Prime Minister you get slapped.”

His aide, a frustrated soccer player wearing a suit of armor kicked a miner on the ground being held by police. Aide screamed, “Dissent is TERRORISM!”

The ruling AKP Justice and Development party said it was all a mistake: the mine explosion, slap and penalty kick.

Violence, denial and repression are a way of life here, said Zeynep the younger creating a myth.

The Language Company

Shit Detector in Turkey (48% said no thanks)

One Sunday evening Lucky walked along a narrow Bursa street in Turkey.

Kurdish mothers in headscarves extended thick manicured necks beyond balconies observing street life. Women swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules out over blood stained escarpments.

They married newly consecrated relatives during fifty-minute encounter sessions designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering old memories overlaid with new linguistic impressions.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult.

The president plays his hand.

Glorious grand immediate silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling, tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings, resonance, and chromatic silence paused with reflection and flight. Symbols of forgotten strumpets playing music between notes wailed solitary notes across an abyss.

Creased faces ironed brilliant red roses petals. Faces embedded themselves between pages in a worn black unlined notebook.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions eating lonely tears in a tomato based culture buried ancestors.

Water exploded off pools as happy hour birds heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears after assembling French cars at a Bursa eco-friendly green plant.           

“Welcome to Earth. Hello babies.”
            “Were you punished for being a dreamer?”
            “No. I was fortunate my family understood my nature. They respected my need for solitary time.”
            “I see,” said a blind beggar.
            “Wipe your glasses with what you know.”
            “I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician.”
            “Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”
            “Brilliant.”
            “Fascinating. We learned to say fascinating in finishing school instead of bullshit.”
            “You have a built-in shit detector.”
            “Ain’t that the fucking truth? Everyone needs a shit detector here in Turkey."

Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable fiction-memory?”

Lucky passed his double identity twin theory below the surface of appearances at Ozmanhomogenized Gazi metro station. Two gravediggers wearing long black overcoats carried umbrella projectiles. Stepping into unknown futures they stabbed cement in cadence.

Green Metro cars slid into the station. Lucky sat across from a boy, 10, his mother and father. His father’s hands were hard calloused. They were simple working people from Van in the east. The boy smiled, fascinated by whirling prisms of light flashing past windows.

His father pulled up his son’s shirt. On his chest were two plastic suction cups and a small machine the size of a deck of cards. Ace high. A heart monitor measured his beats, his life rhythm, and his regularity. His father checked the display, saw the cups were secure and dropped the shirt.

“It is a machine for my son. It helps him,” he said with tired eyes. “We got it at Hospital A. Doctors said it was essential for his life.”

After the shirt covered his chest the boy and Lucky smiled, cupping their hands around eyes scanning the universe. They were explorers with magnifying glasses.

He’s a happy kid. Not afraid of a thing. We should all be so fortunate. Especially all the tired Turkish adults streaming their life tales, “Oh pity me. I am so, so tired.”

Talk to the kid. He’ll tell you how tired really feels.

Echoes of digger umbrella projectiles on stone faded near young lovers huddled on benches, a beggar crash landed on tarmac, head scarfed wrapped women with sacred scared eyes, children on curious adventures and wide eyed echoes along green tracks leading into dark tunnels disappearing into a wilderness of snow blanketed forests where two black shawled women negotiated muddy paths through foliage waiting for spring to thaw out relationships with nature.

Rabbits running in the ditch The Season of the Witch.

Living breathing biped accidents craved a place to happen with clarity insight and precision. Pearl letters played out on a fragile necklace of water bead molecules in an instant in eternity.

Time is a strung-out pimp looking for salvation, a fix an exit.

The Language Company

Playing a Turkish lament in Trabzon.

It's not a problem. It's a surprise.

Between wild bonsai and Bamboo he regained consciousness at 5:18 a.m. outside Jakarta.

“Twilight in reverse,” sang a full-throated songbird in a Banyan tree stretching gnarled roots, “be diverse and grateful.”

It warbled a short trill, trilled a long solitary note, trilled short and silenced.

Bye-bye blackbird.

He lit Tibetan incense and unlocked the front door. Hearing bolts slide the bird sang. He stepped out. He whistled in return, establishing a connection. Mimicry. White and purple orchids shared aromas. Inhaling petals and bird melodies he scattered breadcrumbs on a path. Black snails snaked through roses leaving slime trails. He watered apple trees, flora and fauna.

His mind reflected a diamond.

Dew on a spider’s web glistened silver pearls.

Villagers awoke before dawn. Girls swept leaves from stones. After wringing flesh fibers dark eyed laconic women wrapped raw silk around female skeletons before hanging laundry on portable stainless steel structures to dry inside gray billowing fumes from fired garbage dancing over a sky high chipped wall decorated with green glass shards and oxidized barb wire.

Plastic bags, banana and coconut leaves, discarded clothing, feathers, Styrofoam happy meal containers, cardboard, chopsticks, plywood, grammar textbooks, comprehension checks and balances and IMF social network addictions LIKE ME burned with ferocious addictive intensity.

Phobia sang a rising middle class song accompanied by an Indonesian servant spoon-feeding Chinese infants before boys were stolen by coastal trafficking mafia retailing for $3,500 - $5,000. Negotiate. Keep talking about price. Always Be Closing.

The one-child family planning genocide policy created a desperate daily search for heirs. Losing face with facile piety meant public humiliation. Shame.

“There are 119 males for 100 females,” said Chinese Statistics at The Office of Mandatory Abortion and Population Control next door to The Morals and Re-Education Office down the street from The Ministry of Truth Myth & The Dark Arts.

“All the A men with a career, condo, cash, credit card and car are taken. Single women will have to settle for a B or C man.”

Millions of women facing single status shame committed suicide to preserve filial family honor. Goodbye cruel world. Good luck to you and your non-family.

Before an Indonesian girl swept she wept. Birds whistled. Humans yapped emotional SOS distress signals as leaves veined. Rats, geckos and butterflies laughed. A faint step slapped gravel. A piano note reverberated. Broom music whisked stone. A crescent moon sex slave on her back massaged ink in sky islands floating on blue water. Awake for the living.

Be a work of art or wear a work of art.

Art is what everything else isn’t.

Lucky survivors composed tongue bone oracles inside Tibetan meditation thangkas creating a Kalachakra ceremony with rainbow sand particles.

Mandala. Center. Release.

Silk weavers fingered golden threads. Miners harvested Blue Zircon near Ice Girl in Banlung. Read everything backwards. Backwards everything read. Write right left to the imagination sitting on a Metro subway sandwich as sensations explored labyrinths without a center. Mystic Arabic dervish dancers spinning on the Wheel of Life rejoiced in ecstasy. Angels danced on a pinhead.

Give female orphans sewing machines training and they’ll change the world with endless job opportunities, low population growth, free medicine, clean water and free education, said The Dream Sweeper.

Your needle leads thread, said Kairos. I am a compass without a needle, said Lucky.

The heart-mind gift of writing allowed Zeynep to meditate in the present as a stranger to herself: Mindfulness gives me time and time gives me choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. I’m not swept away by my feelings. I can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

I love the crazies, it’s the fools I can’t tolerate.

A Zen writer is an artist, said Zeynep the younger, heroine of The Language Company.

They love making a big bright, beautiful mess, cleaning it up and making another mess. You are a Lone Wolf blessed with R/7. Free is your quality of life.

The world is a stage and we are but the players. The play’s the thing. A risk taking adventure using asemic language sensing joy and mystery winds down. A poem begins in wisdom and ends in delight. Visionary mystics blossom radiant beauty.

Water-stone. Yin-Yang.

Wear a star on your forehead. 

Small powerful stars sing with their light.

Zeynep, a curious star visited a blue marble hurtling through space. What is Earth like? Are inhabitants gentle and compassionate? Do they share calm heart-minds? Do they create archetype wisdom art using multi-colored pigments on cream-colored paper dreaming with their eyes open spilling rainbows in meditative blissful silence? 

What is life? Autonomy. Personal growth. Self-acceptance. Purpose. Environmental mastery. Positive relationships. Eudemonia.

one door opens - TLC (end/beginning)

He escaped Turkey after fifty-one days of learning and enlightenment. He’d returned because he was curious about Trabzon. He appreciated the hospitality and kindness of strangers at ground zero.

He discovered he was too sensitive to Turkish suffering and repressed aggression.

A little luck goes a long way.

One door closes one door opens.

He felt tranquil seeing red and green-checkered diamond and rectangular Cambodian earth patterns. Small human habitats with flickering candles in windows illuminated manuscripts.

Let's go home, said a grateful cloud passing by. We know you by now.

Decompress language and your quality of life with slow steps and smiles.

Laughter and curiosity joined simplicity sanctuary and serenity.

Veni. Vidi, Vinci.

He came, he saw, he lived.

Good-bye and good luck to you and your family.

The Language Company

Zeynep the heroine of The Language Company

Diamond in your mind - TLC

Secret literary agent accepted a covert mission. 51 days led here.

He knew in mid-September, after being in Trabzon, Turkey for two weeks doing street photography at dawn, writing field notes, helping students develop speaking courage and bringing prosperity to everyone along a wandering path, his essential choice for freedom brought him to today October 25^th.

Savoring thick java and sweet flaky pastry in a Trabzon establishment he observed people on Sacrifice.

Every day is a celebration when you practice the art of letting go.

You either let go or get dragged along.

Miniature buses disgorged humans: head scarfed heavy-set women clutching canes, swaggering males, well dressed couples, a sleek woman twirling a red rose, old men trailing texting generations and desperate parents gripping children’s hands.

A tan joyful man released from his daily grave digging soil toil danced away from angry confused faceless ones anticipating a long uphill walk past shop windows where they’d purchase flaneur reflections.

Shoppers entered to buy pastries, cakes and cookies. We have to show up with something a wide wife said to her mousy husband. Children begged for sugar, Feed me.

Three obese Saudi males bought bags of hand wrapped candies. Our caloric families will love this stuff said one from the house of Saud cramming it into his designer bag on plastic wheels of fortune.

You brought us good luck today, said the smiling woman behind the counter when Lucky prepared to walk on. You’re welcome. It’s a never-ending adventure.

A Trabzon taxi driver taking him to the airport said, “Today is like Christmas in Turkey.”

Deck the halls with boughs of folly tra-la-la-la.

Near the check-in zone a girl of four didn’t see her mother’s knife-like eyes inside the chador. A black veil masked her face. Closed for respectful preservations.

Everyone stared in amazement as a literary outlaw enjoying random encounters with evanescent beings sang your life is a work of art. We are stardust riding a blue marble through space.

The flight from Instant Bull to Backpack took eight hours.

In a transit zone he discovered Mont Blanc Fine and Medium Rollerball refills and a large bottle of dark blue fountain pen ink for Omar. He bought a 12-pack of multicolored pens for Zeynep.

Do you travel the world, asked the clerk as look n’ leave passengers examined the art of writing instruments. It is my destiny, You brought me good luck today, I am a calm lunatic assassin, I am not saving anyone.

The plane to Seems Ripe banked left to the imagination before climbing to 33,000 feet in an invisible night as he journeyed to the center of the Earth.

The Language Company

Ride like the wind.

A gravedigger is never out of work.