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

CPR on Martha Ann

A minstrel tuned a lyrical oud singing.

I look up to the tree house balcony and scream to myself to slow down because there is a speed trap up ahead but no one hears me or cares.

Wind - ruh - in Arabic meaning breath and spirit, filters my voice, sounds of oral history away.

My fingers are a sparrow hawk diving on unsuspecting prey.

fredom is knowing how big your cage is

I suspect he’s found a sleeping policeman stretched across the road near the intersection on Hard Drive south of Tacoma where the young girl got blasted by the partially blind old retired man living on a pension going to the drugstore to get his wife’s prescription filled last winter as she walked her dog along Bride Sport Boulevard braving hard slashing winter squalls flying East across Budget Sound full of homeless derelicts and sexual offenders out on parole from Paradise prison where 2,500 convicts incarcerated for drugs, sexual crimes and murder repair bicycles.

They donate them to charity. They make furniture for $.26-36¢ per hour in a Classless IV state owned operated “tax reduction” industry producing chairs and tables doing draftsmanship, sewing, upholstery, laminating, cutting, measuring, finishing, sanding, packing, and shipping maple office materials near state hospitals for the criminally insane and military bases full of calibrated B-52 bombers, with Cobra attack helicopters collecting dust on runways in the city of Lakewood facing financial cutbacks in police states and garbage collection taxes due to voter initiatives, rising interest rates, trillion dollar debt, and a collapsing economy.

It was foggy with crumpled forgotten leaves next to the young girl’s broken life as her dog licked her hand trying to say, “It’s ok now, get up, let’s go home,” as drivers blasted their horns out of callous indifferent anger because they were late for dinner yakking on cell phones negotiating magnificent commercial deals with con people, scam artists, confidence men and sharks swimming below the surface of appearances looking for the key to financial consumer heaven impatiently pulling around innocent bystanders trying to glimpse the disaster inside the labyrinth without a center.

The heat from my last bitter cigarette says it’s too hot for smoking. I know all too well that chemicals in the smoke, such as nicotine, create growth factors causing scar tissue. The beta TGF§ is an autocrine cytosine - meaning once it is elevated due to smoking it creates its own synthesis and eventually forms tumors in a slow deadly process.

I accept my addictive habit as a genetic DNA snub or behavioral choice.

My fingers fly. Bird shadow mirror paper as harsh hot dry winds whip down the Willamette Valley.

Perspiration slides down creased faces as motivated men dig graves and hammer nails with machines in the heat of making it happen, making it perfect and serene in the superficial media controlled culture. They create fantasies of new promises and utopias surrounded by manufactured needs exceeding passionate desired appetites called Desire and Greed.

I sit in my fragile tree house living on the edge of somewhere else keyed into vibrating hammers striking nails home. In my tree house I put it down where it belongs. Chamber a word round, aim and fire. The American way is to fire first and aim later.

Lock and load crashing echoes through space, followed by another crashing bore expending taxpayer’s dollars and foundry worker finances.

I scream hot molten lead words.

My youthful naiveté led me across an ocean of innocent waves to hot humid heaven jungles.

I was born dead in Vietnam and slowly came to life. 1969.

I’ve missed sitting here doing this. Confronting my shadow, my primitive, instinctive nature is scary.

I want to get up stretch my long thin arms go for a run burning calories and fat molecules. I swallow air savoring the world.

I am too full of sorrow to eat anymore.

I need a cold drink, need to paint a watercolor or manipulate a digital image with Dada surrealism placing a dragonfly rippling silence with translucent wings inside a Japanese ZEN meditation garden with carefully raked oceans of sand.

I meditate on my breath and the process of death.

I forget how to type on mirrors received from Mongols along the Silk Road.

I whisper to myself, “I would rather do it well than badly, but I’d rather do it badly than not at all.”

Ten talons tear at twenty-six keys.

I need to stop people from dying.

I need a commitment-free lover to explore the vocabulary of touch.

My mirror is a hard reflection in my pale hands. I digest words, strings of vowels and consonants forming letters held together with cosmic ethereal portable imaginary glue invisible indecipherable delicate foreign symbols.

Faces blur in the heat of rotating emergency lights reflecting off a magic prism hearing a frantic 911 AMR plead for someone to get the IV going. Administering CPR to the child, I remember my sister, Martha Ann, 13, when she was dying from leukemia and needed life.

I follow procedure. I shake Martha Ann, screaming, “Help!” open the airway, look, listen and feel for a pulse. After two breaths I check the carotid pulse near her Adam’s apple, find the landmark on her chest and do CPR for 1 minute, pressing 1 - 1 1/2 inches deep. I do five compressions and administer a breath every five seconds.

Drenched by tears I look up as traffic swirls past us.

I resume CPR knowing I have, at the most, two minutes to help her. I know two things about this reality:

1) the dead can’t feel any pain and 2) they can’t talk.

Below me oral traditions echo through my heart-mind as nails sing, brushes excavate ancient papyrus. Camel hair caresses rice paper shovels and doors. Silver axes cut the forest down for small caskets.

“Look, it is one of us,” the Turkish tree said when the axe handle came into the forest. Slamming hammers beat nails into coffins.

I hum an old tune. Language is a virus. La-de-da.

Spinning emotional fire visions flow, associate, blend, dive and dance on point performing a plié at the barre.

Steeled letter keys strike hammers, blasting iron nails, merging into Maple, Ash, Cherry and petrified wood.

Iron forged edges bite hard earth releasing soft dust. Brushes reveal artifacts as conspiratorial alarm bells bing bang bong salutations at the end of a line.

A manual typewriter carriage slams home inside the middle way.

Buddhists say you should cultivate the perfect balance of wisdom and compassion.

If you have too much wisdom you are unfeeling, cold, like marble.

If you have too much compassion you become too sentimental.

I resume CPR.

Weaving A Life, V1

A Little Zen Tale

Only the dead know the end of war. - Plato

*

“We storytellers, enchanters and teachers,” said Omar, “know the world is made of stories and not atoms. Here’s one for your history. Or is that hiss-tree said the snake?”

Somebody told a story about somebody telling a story in a story.

“It came to pass an old woman seer who shared the beauty, magic and mystery of life with friends and strangers took a pencil in her bone white hand on a cold, snowy evening and looked into flames of creation. Embers smoldered in front of her crystal glass. She dreamed she loved a blind stranger. Her friend and lover were spirit guides, blind shooting stars. They flew away from their village with a tribe of survivors.

“They left behind skeptics, cynics, frauds, charlatans, liars, cheats, fools, scoundrels, knaves, demons, and ghost shadows. They dissolved taxicab drivers, beauticians, janitors, doctors, and lawyers, Indian chiefs, cooks, nurses, busboys, lackeys of every sort of makeup and verifiable description including animal trainers and circus performers.

“They moved through the wilderness of their youth, following Raven, their spirit guardian. They carried provisions to satisfy hunger, thirst and desire. They never knew, appreciated or realized desire until they were tricked into eating a piece of fruit. They scattered seeds at an oasis in the desert.”

“What happens next Omar?” said a kid.

“It was raining in the desert before Christmas as Gulf Air Flight 212 departed Kuwait. We encountered gray turbulence in neutral airspace where Islamic law against the consumption of alcoholic beverages had no influence. I savored a cold Carlsberg. By Carlsberg numero dos we were at 25,000 feet in blue sky and white thunderheads. Airmobile again.

"In Bahrain I collected a visa stamp, took a cab to the Diplomat Hotel and room 621 with an excellent view of the aquamarine Gulf and new civic center construction project. I opened windows, an ice cold beer, calibrated rock and roll music on the radio and ordered a three-egg omelet with hash browns, whole-wheat toast complimented by thick Turkish coffee. A Filipino waitress in pink room service motif brought it up.

"The next afternoon I took Taxi #1 into Bubba Bahrain, a maze of haphazard streets. I bought vitamins at a pharmacy and escaped expensive shopping zones entering the old suq lined with herbs, spices, textiles, fruits, vegetables, secondhand watches, goats, sheep, brooms, tea and ancient emulations.

"From an inside secret pocket of a worn olive drab photographer’s vest, I pulled out a very small, simple and technically precise European designed 35mm rangefinder camera loaded with 125 ASA black and white film. A gift from gods of optical ingenuity. A well-designed tool. A work of art.

"I started with an image of a donkey’s head covered by a burlap feed bag to prevent attacks on unsuspecting humans. Down twisted alleys I wandered, shooting old men and women, trapping their spirits on negatives. Children’s faces wearing cartoon character masks with innocence preserved behind wide glowing eyes were captured forever. Delicate eroding architecture, thatched reeds on woven bamboo poles embedded in mud, iron grated windows and intricately carved balconies made of blue and white mosaics were threaded into a black canister.

"In early evening out of curiosity I stopped at a Persian carpet retailer to learn about his business. Over endless cups of tea he shared these facts.”

1. There is a difference between “expert” and “well knowledged (sic).”

2. Carpet making is based on tradition, history, quality and time. Takes 14 months for some carpets.

3. Design and a particular technique is required to produce a good quality carpet.

4. His carpets were woven and stored in a warehouse in Iran before being smuggled by dhow to a Dubai wholesaler. A buyer in Bahrain purchases them by the bundle paying a single price for the lot before shipping them to the shop.

5. Cotton costs BD (Bahraini dinar) 2/lb.

   Neck wool BD 7/lb.

   Silk BD 9/lb.

6. Good prices were available now with the recent devaluation of the Iranian Real.

7. One needs to be aware of specifics. Is it pure silk or combed wool? What is the precise number of knots per square inch?

“I thanked him and walked to the Dolmen Hotel, an old foreign oasis constructed for air crews. Interior pseudo classic Arabic architecture featured vaulted windows, wattle thatch and poles on low ceilings. Dave, from the Twin Cities, sat at the bar complaining about needing a third operation to correct poor metatarsal bones in his left foot. He said Saudi doctors messed him up twice so he came to Bahrain for, hopefully, a final operation.

“I saw three Filipino males have their right hands cut off in Riyadh for stealing,” he said, meaning Sharia law. “Justice is served every Friday at high noon in the town square. Authorities tied their arms down on boards to support the wrists.”

 “Amazing,” I said.

“Yes,” Dave said. “The multawa, an official, approached one man, flashed his sword into the air and severed his right hand off. He screamed. The multawa moved down the line doing his job. Another man carrying a blazing torch applied fire to the stump to cauterize the wound.”

“Lynnette, a 31-year old Filipino waitress at the Dolmen was pleasant, lonely and bored. After five years doing cashier work in Manila she found a job in Bahrain.

“My dream is to save money and buy a house back home.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Not really. The wages are poor, they give us lousy Indian food and there’s no social life.”

“Why’s that?”

“Hotel management locks us in at 7 p.m.”

“Sounds like slave labor. Been going on in the Gulf for a long time.”

“Well," she sighed, “it’s just a job. It's not forever.”

I wandered away.

“At happy hour, the Intercontinental Hotel was jammed with Arabs, English investment suits and punkers. I ordered a beer at the bar. A small Bahraini man crowded next to me started asking questions.

“Where are you from?”

“Everywhere. I am the mother of all grasshoppers.”

“What do you do?”

“I kill people. I'm a mercenary.”

“I don't believe you,” said his eyes. 

“Yes. I kill people with kindness. It’s a living. I am busy 24/7. It’s a job. It passes time. People pay good money for me to take care of their problem. I’m paid to clean up other people’s messes. No women or children.”

He wanted to know something about his life. I predicted his age, family history, occupation and future. He left me alone.

“Outside the Kuwait suq battered red and white rusting water trucks with chipped paint stood idle inside a wire compound leaking their loads into dust. Two solitary Bedouins sat on metal folding chairs with crushed plastic buckets and sacrosanct rags collecting dust near the Fifth Ring Road waiting for drivers needing a car wash. Waiting was their patient life in the desert, waiting for dusty cars, waiting for oil to be discovered below sand, waiting inside an omnipresent yellow haze swallowing everything.”

Weaving A Life, V1

A 3,000 Year Old City

“Once upon a time,” Nino said one bright future day as the tribe rolled along, “and such a strange time it was, the gravity of thinking played music in a new century. There was a Spanish man with a hammer. At exactly 9 a.m. on an overcast Cadiz morning he began chipping away at unexplored caverns. The Alio modo Fugue a 2 Clavier by Bach drifted in the background.

“He was building an extension on a roof where housing was scarce and straight up. The only split-level ranch duplexes with multiple garages in sight were American reruns on old battered televisions. He hammered stone the sheltering sky. It was over 100 degrees. His hands bled. Blood seeped through an old Moorish roof splattering into a room where a writer in exile lived with a blind prophet. Hemoglobin landed on a keyboard. On the B. He let it dry. He treasured sudden rare immediate insights. Drops fell and congealed.”

“Fascinating,” Omar said turning a page. “And then?”

“Down below in deep morning shadows Rosario swept her front stoop on Benito Perez Galdos. Her white apron was clean and starched. She swept away yesterday’s accumulated debris and the fine mist of pedestrians coming and going. Old shit, dog urine and dust received her mop’s holy water. Their accumulated real and imaginary sins littered Galdos, heading for the gutter.”

“Let me guess,” said Omar, picking up the thread, “church bells pealed eternal melancholy songs of hope and redemption across from the Castelilo de Santa Catalina, the main citadel of Cadiz built in 1598.”

“Exactly,” Nino said. “Inside tight white oval corridors, an exhibition of black and white photographs depicted Nicaraguan people fishing, polling canoes through tangled jungles, chopping down forests, sitting for the camera, living and laughing. One room held beautiful black handmade fans in tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca.

"Considered the greatest poet and playwright of 20th century Spain, he was assassinated by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) a Franco death squad in August 1936 for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality. He belonged to the Generation of 1927 with Dali and Bunuel identifying with the marginalized Gitanos and woman chained to conventional social expectations in Andalucía.

"He wrote about entrapment, liberation, passion and repression. A long red scarf lay draped over a single rattan chair. Invisible wires held black fans decorated with peacock feathers and rainbow colors suspended in silence. Outside a dark window Atlantic waves smashed ramparts.”

Nino took a breath. Omar sacrificed an orange skin to enjoy the fruit.

Weaving A Life, V1