Babble Fish

A Bursa schoolgirl waiting to be grilled maternal fish bait stood at a bus stop with a cell phone implanted in her cerebral cortex. Her mom connected, “Are you alive?”

“I dream I am a free person in a free country. I've escaped the tyranny of what if’s and maybes. I have grit.”

“Enough babble fish jack-o-lama-trauma,” said Zeynep the Director. “Cut to the chase singing songs with abundance, wonder and gratitude."

Ms. Linguist picked Mr. I Love History up. They screwed. She dropped him off. He never paid now. He always paid later.

“Life gives you test first and the lessons later,” said Zeynep. “Blind love with a little luck is a never ending adventure.”

Stressed out over-medicated Turkish kids carried bags of fresh brown bread, black olives and poisoned red apples home to mommy dearest here’s something from my secret garden.

Weaving A Life, V1

emotion expression

Everything going in an ear comes out as language.

A tool for emotion and expression.

The greatest sorrow is the death of the heart.

Life is found in a desperate situation. - Chinese proverb.

All you have to do is take out the garbage, said a writer. Separate the cans, glass, plastic, paper products, adverbs, and adjectives. Editors want it short fast and deadly. They want to feel a character facing obstacle(s) and their motivation. They want characters to reveal themselves through dialogue and action. How is the character living and feeling? Focus the lens through the protagonist’s eye. Live forever.

Make it immediate and dramatic. Show their vulnerability, their worries, hopes and fears. Use active verbs. Be specific so we feel the experience. Clarify the narrator's interpretation.

Please continue with your delightful story, Jamie.

Yes, well, it needs a central character, like Omar here, he's a good one with a woven thread and laborious languorous tension to move it along now doesn’t it? As I was saying before you went off a tangent Point, which I see you are prone to do, he understood their wingspan.

See, one of the largest nesting colonies of tawny vultures in Europe was here. While living and hiking in the region he’d seen several species: the golden eagle, Hieraetus fasciatus, Aquila heliaca, Hieratus pennatus, and Circaetus gallicus. Goshawk and the Egyptian vulture also inhabited the Sierras.

Amazing. I once was a screaming eagle in Vietnam, said Point. Strange place for eagles eh? Remind me and I’ll spin you a tale about them.

Ok. A large vulture grabbed air toward the mountain cliffs, sailed along the rocks and it was difficult to keep it in focus because their brown body blended perfectly with trees and mountains. It sailed, banked, disappearing into cover. Breaking through clouds another vulture flew into the sun splashing hillside and peaks in blazing light. It dropped in elevation, turning, showing quick flashes of golden feathers, brown body, in and out colors as the bird played on the air. Really incredible I tell you.

Then it flew near ridges turned toward his position for a moment, just long enough displaying complete wingspan and I’d guess a good 6-8 feet across, then it blended into the foliage finding its mountain perch.

Excellent. Nothing like a little free form flying exercise in the morning I say. Free morning drafts. Gets the blood flowing, lowers the heart rate and strengthens the spirit, said Omar.

Spirit of flight, flight as freedom the vision they must have, said Jamie. Imagine, if you will, how it feels to be rising on air, feeling the slightest push or pull as wind whips past you and you climb into and through clouds flying past you. You circle through endless space able to maneuver, balance, floating higher and higher. He felt good feeding small birds watching big ones fly. Always maintain your awareness.

History is the symptom.

People are the disease.

Language is a virus.

Weaving A Life, V1

Tribal Narrator

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.

Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.

I picked up my bamboo brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.

I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing,

They dreamed with eyes open.

When we are asleep we are awake.

I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.

I am not of this world.

I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things.

It is free of the three dusts: desire, anger and ignorance.

I sing my tongue-less body electric.

Where do I park this empty vehicle?

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.

Hanoi Alley Bell

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect and authenticity. Sex is fun.

Responsibility is a duty.

Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. He is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in a circular abstract desire to create art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to celebrate life.

His voice manifestation expresses human auditory tendencies in a tight space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank cement wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows ...

about life next door where a hunched over family sits on cold red floral tile slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths while yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television ...

featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, the national anthem about survival and rampant greed ...

on land, sea, and air as water pianos played by a young wisp her fingers a delicate blur of fast incantation musical channels

dance near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 1655 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage.

Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s arranged her family’s daily consumptive waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, shreds of fat pink. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s faces, dead, gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost images living above eternal electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue, and white on the family altar.

Plastic flowers, daily fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food.

Let’s eat.

Weaving A Life, V1

1100 BC

My forward observer position witnessed young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. Hiding in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

My meals with a Gypsy family timed down Gades days with a simple breakfast of toast, butter, jam or muesli, a lunch of thick soup, fresh salad, bread, water, and a main course at 2:30 p.m.

I read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy.

We live in a world of forms.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds in September 2001.

Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenicians, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía they exchanged belief windows, values, attitudes, construction projects and 3,000 years of icon free Arabian art. It was about agriculture, water, light, form, and substance.

Equality was the word at a Muslim burial exhibit at the Mondragon Palace in Ronda.

Phoenicians discovered Cadiz in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir and traded amber and tin. It was a Roman navel base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies.

People developed agriculture as populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian Peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000-year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed established communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanded their nation-state.

The Museo de Cadiz was filled with Roman artifacts. Humans wandered through archeological epoch discoveries from settlements in Gades along the coast extending inland to Seville and Cordoba.

Travellers discovered estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos and rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery and faces. They examined vases, dynasties, ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, and utensils.

Three million-year old human remains slept in stoned chambers. Sharp sewing bones rested in dust.

I dissolved anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance in the wake up.

Weaving A Life, V1