Memory Spoke

“I’d rather be a tiger for one day than a sheep for 1,000 years,” chanted a Tibetan monk in a small chapel near the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa.

He sat on a platform swathed in burgundy robes holding the Vajra diamond thunderbolt and bell in his left hand. Ringing the bell he chanted sutras in muted tones.

Pilgrims entered the room through a worn door hanging after spinning copper prayer wheels in a narrow alley and climbing slick stone steps.

Three tall ornate, copper-plated Buddha’s faced them. Past, Present and Future Buddhas contemplated rows of flickering yak butter lamps, fruit offerings, khata scarves, coins and paper money.

Two wooden benches were against a wall. On the floor was a pan of round gray clay balls. Devotees rubbed one on faces and hands before joining others waiting to be blessed. Gathered with bowed heads at the chanting monk’s feet were playful, devout jostling travelers.

He cycled through sutras chanting and touching people on their head with the thunderbolt and pouring holy water on them saying Long Life. They eased away as others moved forward.

He was in a trance state.

An old woman with sky blue turquoise stones woven into her long plaited black hair and wearing a long heavy sheepskin coat sat down next to me. Sharing smiles she mumbled, “Namaste. Blessings to you.”

Whispering ‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’ she fingered prayer beads.

Babbling tongues sang. The bell rang.

Nepal

Awake, I returned to Spanish crypts with my camera. I imaged interments of chiseled names and pueblo connection. Invisible stories dreamed in occupied or empty crypts. They illuminated desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence.

Dreams floated to the listening faithful. They were silent stories of the pious as silent breathing revealed stories inside stories.

“The rest is silence,” said Shakespeare.

The widow observed crouched shadows in rocky fields shifting stones and pruning dead growth from olive trees along the Rio.

Wild yellow and purple flowers blanketed cleared land.

Romans built stone homes and designed baths near the river. They made walled fortifications with defensive mountains behind them. Ten-foot wide dolomite roads twisted from the pueblo down through the valley and beyond for future legions expanding their empire. Soldiers marching west branched north to Seville or south to Cadiz.

Grazalema men loaded cork on tired tractors. Using bedsprings for gates they built pens for sheep, chickens, dogs, goats, and children. Twisted rusting bed coils lay scattered. They used everything trying to tame poor rocky land.

Men assembled fences using blackberry brambles with sharp thorns. They reinforced fences with sticks, recycled old tires, tin cans, metal struts, old cars, and discarded cooking stoves. Chipped bathtubs became watering troughs for livestock. Small stone dams diverted Rio streams to small fields.

Everything was done by hand. Labor worked dawn to dusk, day in day out. Labor cleared erosion’s debris by marking land with tools and footprints.

The widow’s husband slept in the Catholic crypt. Dusty light danced through palm leaves.

She was a full silent moon above his bone white memory. Her spirit danced with spirits.

Spirits treasured clear impermanent memories. Finished sacrificial rituals his cloud vapor danced free from the cemetario to manifest with the full moon above stone fields, yellow flowers and flowing river where men worked their trust.

ART - A Memoir

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

 

Vietnam

Full Moon

I was grateful to see three full moons in the Sierras. Undulating valleys dreamed of planting, water and harvest.

Mad as hell caged hunting dogs below mountains howled high anxiety.

Grazalema men in sturdy boots carried lifetime labor tools through fields. When Luna was full they didn’t visit fields, river, forests or mountains. Men respected magic and ghosts. Men lived the day. Spirits lived the night.

Chained hounds howled dusk to sunset. Rising orange clouds met a yellow moon.

A heavy bolted brown wooden church door at the small church led to the vestibule of Republican resistance memories. A Virgin Mary crying blood decorated the altar. A widow in black performing her daily penance through action and devotion changed the white lace cloth. She soaked blood out at Roman public baths below the village where water flowed from stoned carved angelic mouths.

A forcestero with a notebook and camera passed her. She recognized his ghost, Yes a spirit visiting friends.

She blessed herself twice with bird wing fingers at the end of a warm winter day. Sun went home. Egyptian vultures pirouetted with the yellow moon evolving white.

She locked the black gate leading to the crypt. She remembered him doing his reconnaissance after yesterday’s funeral.

He worked in the crypt zone. Four long walls held the departed. Engraved stones with names, dates, in memoranda of children and adults back to 1896. He made images under the smoky green eyes of a wild Siamese cat on a red tiled roof.

Crypt construction tools, bricks, cleaning solution, trowels, broken black buckets and rags decorated empty crevices. Rectangles waited for ornate boxes from a casket factory miles and lives away. Caskets with simple bronze handles for six pairs of weathered hands. Brown and black lined caskets with satin pillows. Pillows softer than language welcomed living tears.

Survivor’s hearts beat long personal drum solos.

Every heartbeat contains a universe of possibilities.

Yesterday a casket in a black car garnished with wreaths of floral scents reached a black gate. Men carried it past a palm tree, through a church door, another black gate on rusty hinges and slid it into an empty domain name. Cold gray cement cavities had red brick ceilings. A desolate crypt space was long. It was empty. It was cold. It was a permanent change of address marked Eternity.

Men’s tools scraped hard winter soil. They were above ground.

Black was the night and cold was the ground.

“Any day above ground is a good day,” said an unemployed gravedigger. He looked at his hands. “I know two things.”

Resting outside the church seeing the concave valley and rising cubist pueblo I remembered a sitting meditation in Lhasa, Tibet.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Mekong Blue, Stung Treng, Cambodia

Lacibula Bells

“Those who dance are considered insane by those who can’t hear the music.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

*

A church bell tolled four. I paused writing in mid-sentence, threw on a jacket, locked Moorish doors and walked down a cobblestone alley.

A black Mercedes hearse covered with flowers waited outside a small church. Pueblo men stood with friends across the street. The bell was all. Black mourners escaped religion. Women and children scattered home.

Six men carried out a simple brown wooden casket.

He was forty and single.

They fed the hearse.

The bell ceased.

Flashing red lights, the village Guardia led the procession down a narrow winding road. 200 men followed the hearse. They crossed a small bridge above the Rio Guadalete River and past fourteen golden Aspen trees saying farewell by waving leaves.

Solemn men passed grazing sheep, horses, wildflowers and winter orange trees. They stopped at a small white church in a grove of palm trees. Pallbearers carried the casket past a black rusty gate and into a long white crypt zone. They slid it into an empty cement slot. The parish priest whispered final prayers.

Men paid their last respects and returned to cafes for sherry, thin sliced ham, coarse bread and conversations about the man who died alone.

Laughing, singing children played soccer or skipped rope in front of the main Grazalema church in the plaza. Heavy wooden doors were locked tighter than a coffin.

ART - A Memoir

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Detergent Molecules

On Christmas Eve in 2001 I met a tall funny animated physicist at Relax, a vegetarian restaurant owned by two English girls in Ronda, an hour from Grazalema.

Alex worked with molecular structures in Liverpool creating simulated computer programs for a detergent company. He was paid to have fun.

“Every couple of years I shift around,” he said in a drunken state of mind. “Well this looks interesting, I say to myself. I’ll try this for a couple of years.”

His height over the world was frightening at first. His companion, another physicist from Germany was Silent Night.

I listened. When he knew I was a writer he said, “Well then I’ll give you something for your book. I’m from Canada, my family is from Hungary, I spent six years in Athens, Georgia, then in Germany and now I am in England. The cord connecting me to my past has been cut, severed. I’m just floating around having fun. I just end up in these most fascinating places. I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing two or three years from now. I just end up in a place doing my scientific work and they pay me. It’s amazing. I think I am becoming less left-brained over time. I will tell you something that happened to me recently. I discovered music. I discovered the drums. When you play the drums you cannot be analytical about it, you have to be the drum.”

He shouted in Relax. We stood at the end of the bar. Languages blended with music, laughter and colliding holiday glasses. He was in the spotlight letting it all out feeling free.

His friend had driven down from Frankfurt and they met in Barcelona for a three-week holiday. They hoped to go to Morocco. Alex was anxious. “My friend’s passport expires in six months and we don’t know if they will let him in. We want to go in at Ceuta, travel to Fez, Meknes, spend New Year’s eve in Marrakech, then go over the Atlas mountains, swing through the Sahara and back north.”

“What happens if you can’t get in?”

Laughing from a great height he threw out massive scientific hands with manicured nails.

“Then we’ll just go where we feel like it, following old roads, seeing where they go, like we did today through white villages named Benacoz and Arcos. We have no plans other than trying to get into Morocco. Neither of us has been there. We don’t know it.”

“I don’t know it either,” I said. “I’ve been traveling so long I’m a stranger to myself. Other. Before here I was there for +/- 64 days.”

“Really?” he said, combining a question with an exclamation. “What is it like? I really want to know.”

“It’s a fascinating place. It may shock you and your friend the first couple of days and then you adjust to the rhythm, dealing with the hustlers, how to see in the light. Eight hours seems like twenty-four. You are the director, audience and player on location.”

“Really?” 

“Yes, really. You’ll have amazing experiences there. The people are kind and hospitable.”

“I will tell them I am from Canada even though I spent six years in Georgia. It took me six years to figure out how the Americans think and it was very strange. They live in their own little world. They don’t see out. I would talk to them and the frequency passed right through their transparent selves.”

“I know what you mean about their frequency,” I said rolling a cigarette. “Only 30% of the population has a passport. Their knowledge of foreign cultures is slight to nonexistent. After 9/11 some Americans abroad learned to say, ‘I am Canadian or Australian in Arabic.’ Others learned world geography fast.”

“I’ll bet they did. How long have you been here?”

”All day. I jumped through a window of Fate and left the states of amnesia on September 1st. After two months in Morocco I moved to Cadiz for a month and then came to this area.”

He ordered another beer. He was a tall smart kid in a brave new world. His excitement was absurd, scary, hilarious and full of repressed energy. Grabbing his space he streamed words as people squeezed past to bathrooms.

“Wow, this is really amazing. Why is this place so interesting and so full of people?”

“There’s an excellent Spanish language course at Mondragon Palace. Students come to Ronda for intensive 3-4 month classes. The city has Roman and Arabic culture, the weather is good year round and the social scene is nonstop. Plenty of recreational drugs are available, for medicinal purposes only ha, ha. It’s a good place for people to hang out.”

He laughed. “Well I’d be interested in the medicinal properties of course. Do you live here?”

“I live, hike and write in a Sierra mountain pueblo twenty-five kilometers from here. It’s called Grazalema. It’s an old Berber village. The Romans passed through on their way to Seville. I’m here for two days to see friends for the holidays.”

“Really? I never heard of it. We drove around today to a lot of places, just following the road. It was really great. This is a wonderful place,” he said, looking over people talking and drinking in candlelight. “Hey, I’ll give you something for your book. Then I’ll be in it.”

“Ok.”

“You won’t believe it but I work with a multinational company in one of their Liverpool labs. I use computer programs to create and analyze various molecules in their detergent.”

“Detergent?”

“Detergent. This is how it works. Some molecules are attracted to dirt. They adhere to it. They seek it out. Others like water. So, I assemble all these various atoms and molecules and see what they do. I introduce them to the materials and see how they react.”

“Fascinating.”

“Yes, and I get paid to have fun. They pay me to create these experiments.”

“So, you’re an artist using technology to create a canvas of detergent by painting molecules.”

“Exactly.” His enthusiasm blasted over a hip-hop rap bass beat. “You can put that in your book.”

“Why not? Readers will find your story-truth enlightening. I used to work in a town where there was a nuclear reactor and I knew physicists. Some worked with nuclear fuel waste containment, others developed hydrogen fuel cells for alternative energy sources. I never met a physicist working with detergent.”

“Yeah it’s pretty cool. And now we’re here. Did you know that the world is made up of 98% helium and hydrogen? Well, the remaining particle of atoms, a very small part is life and inside these atoms a very small part of that is intelligence. The rest of the pyramid is garbage.”

He laughed forever. “The amazing thing is how many people don’t know it or get it. The natural law is for things to get messy. That’s why people clean, rearranging molecules in some form of order. They think they’re in control of it. They’re afraid of change. Death and chaos freaks them out. Things happen outside their control or the plans of the creator. It expands the evolutionary process.”

“That’s cool. I took a statistics class once and while I wasn’t very good in statistics I learned one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Any individual or system will do whatever is necessary to perpetuate and sustain itself.”

“That’s it,” yelled Alex. “That’s a pure definition of how the world works. That’s the exact answer.”

ART - A Memoir

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Graz Work Shoes

Inland at 2,606 feet Grazalema men wore hard shoes.

They were a plain brown leather boot with four eyelets and rubber soles. Field shoes. Made for making a living in rocky fields, farming valleys and climbing mountains.

Shoes for taking care of livestock, cutting and clearing timber, shearing sheep, gathering olives, patrolling pastures and waterways, gathering stones from fields, building walls, gardening and working.

It was the same thing to them. To walk was to work. The shoes were not fancy.

Men standing around the Plaza de Espana on Sundays talking with friends in sparse January sun wore brown or black dress shoes. All dressed up and no place to go.

One man, a survivor of the Civil War in 1936 always wore a black beret. He taught music in a small musty dark basement room lined with empty cabinets and dusty band instruments.

His old spectacles had razor thin temples protecting hard squinty eyes and he never smiled. His gaze bore through you. He resembled a disciplined interrogation expert from Fascist Franco days. He was always dressed impeccably and wore black wing tips. There was a deep gash on the front of his right shoe where he’d met a rock.

Shoes were silent below tanned faces lined with life creases as the Penon Mountain loomed over them. Three men stood against the potable water trough staring at a white crucifix on a high mountain ridge. They talked about the weather, crops, families, politics, festivals, and pensions. Sparrows hunted for crumbs on cobblestone paths outside a cafe.

Across the plaza an old frail woman in black holding iron gratings for support sat in her open window peering up an empty street. She was a sabia, a wise woman empowered by grace and knowledge to perform magical acts.

Every day at dawn laborers gathered in the Plaza de Espana Cafe for coffee, sherry, bread, ham and conversation.

“I believe because I do believe,” a man said to no one in particular gripping his hot glass of espresso.

“Believe in what?” said one rubbing his hands against winter.

“When you snap your fingers they contain instants of time,” said another.

“You gotta believe we’re going to get through this winter,” said a sad man.

Mist was thick in the valley below the pueblo. A shepherd released sheep from a pen and drove them into a field of white boulders.

Graz neighbor

 

A Scottish visitor sitting outside the cafe shared a story. “I taught business linguistics in college, but I’m really an amateur botanist.”

He pointed up at the Penon. “When you climb up there, as you go higher you are going back in time. You are climbing through stages of life.”

He described rare flower species in the national park and their cycle of blooming seasons at different elevations.

Hearing the botanist reminded me of Jack, a geologist in Canada in 1984 as we passed huge gray boulders along Georgian Bay and he said, “If you imagine the Empire State building and put a dime on top, the dime corresponds to human’s time on earth and the structure is the planet, specifically those boulders. They are some of the oldest stones on the planet.” Rock on.

A woman at the table said, “At everyday level, physicists believe that the arrow of time always points in the direction of increasing disorder or entropy.” Someone asked her to explain.

“The second law of thermonuclear dynamics is really simple. An easy explanation is this. If you don’t clean a room, for example, it gets messy, things get moved around. So a person expends energy to clean it up. It’s about transferring energy.”

“Thanks for the insight,” I said to the woman as she negotiated a parking ticket outside her hotel.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

Two fit English hikers passed. “Let’s go and have a little explore,” said a white-haired man to his wife.

“I love you,” she said.

A team of eighteen jubilant British hikers armed with telescopic hiking poles, laminated topographical maps, spring water, binoculars, bird books, food, and esprit de corps left the pueblo for the Sierras.

I needed a new perspective and climbed high where views past Grazalema extended east over rolling rocky fields, tilled earth, rivers, thick cork valleys and distant mountains. Vision encompassed a tiny white pueblo and microscopic humans accompanied by their shadows exploring levels of experience. I focused binoculars in cardinal directions.

One man on his sparse plot of land cleared stones by hand, put them in a wheelbarrow and pushed his load uphill near his house. He dumped stones and returned to his field of laborious love.

A man in cold shade chopped at a thick tree.

Another man used his day clearing stones and hoeing a large area for winter planting.

Sitting on the mountain peak under sky windows my calm mind savored 360 degrees of clean pure light and air.

I danced in the mysterious beauty observing geological manifestations.

“Lunch is served on the terrace,” said an invisible waiter. The main course was water, meat, cheese, bread, two bananas, and an apple. Dessert was stripping off a sweatshirt to feel sun’s heat.

A fast screaming eagle shadow zoomed over me. Zap.

Down below men renovating homes in the shadow of old Roman ruins hammered their way as children ran, yelled and played in a desperate frenzy.

Eagles and vultures soared on currents. Cloud shadows creased the valley obscuring white homes. Twilight smoke curled from chimneys.

ART - A Memoir

Adventure, Risk, Transformation