After Nam I became a ghost in exile, a literary outlaw. Transformed.

In 1997 I completed a three day alcohol detox program. Clean and clear, I began writing prose with rhythm, harmony and improvisation.

On September 1st, 2001 I flew to Morocco.

I was there on 9/11. Call it luck or fate.

Imagining the global social, economic and psychological aftermath, I blended facts and satire in Morocco and then Spain.

ART combines literary journalism with social autopsy and storytelling. Adventure, Risk and Transformation.

ART

Happy in Mahliang, Burma

Ha, ha, ha. Priorities sing quality of life. Playing with a small toy prolonging adolescence our young generation talks yaks, chats, and texts enjoying cheap thrills. My condolences.

Goodbye and good luck to you and your family are our famous LAST words.

I am sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. The science of imaginary solutions regulates exceptions.

The beauty of travel, Lucky said to Zeynep, is my anonymous sensation in a crowd like you feel as a street photographer. Invisible. An outsider. After Vietnam flying from S.F. to Denver to see family before finishing my military time in Germany I became a ghost-self. Other. Passengers stared and averted their eyes. Guilt.

If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space.

I share field notes from Battenbang, Cambodia where I evolved for three months.

Men gather at 0615 for coffee, companionship, tea, lies and stories.

A fire roars inside the cement stove in the local java/tea shack along a muddy road. Orange and bright red flames heating water consume kindling. Stacked kindling stands like 12,000 orphans in 269 safe places exonerating memories of loss and abandonment.

Words crackle, spit, and dance with laughter's sensation of heat.

Survivors stare at a ghost-self writing/drawing in a notebook.

Khmer Rouge, The Organization, murdered everyone my age.

They are over forty and survivors of The Dark Years. They wear fresh pressed short-sleeved white cotton shirts and black pants. They talk about money, business, jobs, kids, wives, girlfriends, weather, facts, opinions, plans, construction projects, rice harvests, myths and fear of ghosts. Eating fried bread they drink brown tea and thick java. Spoons create music with glass class and style.

1.7+ million ghosts dance through silent conversations whispering, What if I die here? Who will be my role model? All my role models are gone. Feed me, feed me, cries a ghost to their family burning sandalwood incense.

No one talks about the past. Silence is golden noise. Men talk about the long now.

Some focus on another’s face hearing words discovering kindness intention and meaning. Others study cell phones or watch a Thai music video on a plaza scream at full volume. One hears an abstract conversation disguised as a peddler pulling his trash cart down the red muddy road squeezing air out of a worn plastic bottle summoning attention deficit disordered sellers waiting to hear wheezing AIR knowing they can pawn junk, an old family heirloom or a traditional wooden loom with or without cotton or silk threads where women wove white cremation shroud clothing for relatives long gone.

Living in the past is time consuming, said Memory. Keep me alive.

Ghosts live in the past, present and future. Leave it there, said one. Half our population is under thirty. They have no memory of the past. Education is the key. We missed our chance. The only chance I had was to run and hide in the jungle. My education was nature.

Look at my hands. I know two things.

Now I spend my life in an office rewriting our sanitized history. A tedious thankless job I'll have you know. And one more thing, I'd rather be writing than eating incense, if you get my meaning. We do, we do, said his friends cupping hot java jive sakes alive. History is time and geography is space, said a survivor. I disappeared by hiding where space folded, you don't say, Oh I do.

I realized my dream to be a gardener at a meditation retreat, said a thin 60-year old genocide survivor. White t-shirt, blue shorts and black flip-flops. His silent black eyes contained secrets.

How did you survive, asked Lucky. I ran away. First I hid in the jungle then I ran into mountains, deep, very deep, deeper than unconscious memories of life’s transient nature. I ran from the shadows of Death. I became a living ghost, a stranger to myself. Other. I survived hearing screams 24/7 from room 101 as generations slaved starved and died, hearing, witnessing brainwashed peasant soldiers murder everyone kids like you fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents all disappeared gone erased finished evaporated exterminated dead.

Yes, agreed Death. Everyone comes to me.

Khmer Rouge reign of terror: three years, eight months and twenty days.

I lived every one.    

When I thought it was safe I crawled out of slime crossing landmine paddies into a Brave New World. I stumbled over 1.7+ million bodies and bones, smelling, tasting, hearing seeing Death. Death bones in my dreams rattle freedom, food and family. My family is gone. I never sleep. Death sees me. Here, now. I feel it. I feel it closer than skin on bones, closer than white on rice.

It will take another generation before we adjust to breathing. Laughter is rare. My people have suffered hopelessness and passiveness for twenty years. That’s a humbling life changing experience, said Lucky, yes I discovered life in a desperate situation.

They met every afternoon in fading light after torrid heat. Gardener waters red roses, flame orange bougainvillea, green ferns, purple orchids, hanging planters. Water rainbows cascade through white light coating green, sliding down stems, meeting petals. He smiles. Water disappears toward roots below the surface of appearances.

He sat curled up on a brown chair calm and silent watching Lucky mine an unexploded episode from a notebook. The gardener realizes a notebook, once used by Authority to write down names of the dead or soon to be, is now a potential source of liberation and memory.

I don’t know this tool, this machine, he said pointing at a plastic screen and floating artificial letters as Lucky played with twenty-six letters. I can’t read, no chance, it was all about surviving, labor, nature, planting, harvesting, scheming and deceiving, running, hiding, blending in, keeping your mouth shut. We work, breed and get slaughtered. Such is our fate.

A screaming voice from a nearby classroom wafted through orchids.

Questions are forbidden!

Overworked, underpaid and undersexed teachers named Authority and Social Control said, Ask at your peril. Anyone with courage raising their hand to ask a quest-ion is shamed or silently beaten into silence. Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day. Conformity breeds conformity. Conditioning.

Curiosity is fatal, said Rita. Curiosity kills more humans than war, disease, lack of medicine and starvation. Humor, curiosity and courage are basic elements of intelligence.

Conversation’s silence attracted flies.

A gaunt man who survived The Dark Years from 1975-1979 wearing a dirty white hat ringing a hollow brass bell pushed his orange ice cream trolley through red dirt. He passed a woman unloading kindling. Men stared. Trembling eyes pursued life’s endless stream.

After Conversation died someone picked up a cell phone and called another living, breathing conversation. Hello, are you alive? Yes? Just checking. Have you eaten yet? No? I had rice and eggs. Tomorrow it’s lobster. Ha, ha, ha. Good luck to you and your family. Bye-bye.

Listening is a lost art, said Conversation. I don’t have a hearing problem. I have a listening problem. Most people don’t listen to understand. They listen to reply. Sullen suffering is a pervasive conversation.

People without love die from neglect.

You can say that again, said Silence.

People without love die from neglect.

The Language Company

"Hey, check this out," said a hungry refugee, "I found a case of Democracy. The Republican label says it spreads easily."

"Is it crunchy or plain?"

"How do I know? It’s just plain old Democracy."

"I hope it’s better than that old rancid Freedom Sauce. Let’s give it a go. Democracy is a good idea, in theory."

They opened the box, took out a jar, unscrewed the top, grabbed sharp knives, broke bread and slathered on Democracy.

"Wow! This is yummy."

"Yeah, well I got some stuck in my throat. It tastes like sand."

"It’s protein."

World tribes collected their Democracy.

"We need more energy," someone said. "We need music, news, a weather forecast. We need to know what’s happened."

"Need a clue? Take a look around you," said an illiterate person. Twin Towers, Iraqi and Syrian villages, and Afghan mountains smoldered on the immediate horizon.

"It looks desperate," said one.

"Eye, it does," said another. "It’s always darker before the dawn."

Sirens stopped and they emerged from darkness.

"We need shelter," said a family gathering rushes from the World Bank. Third world immigrants and internally displaced people pounded rocks and carried them on their backs toward unknown futures. They sang, “Give me shelter. Shelter from the storm.”

"Beware those who live on dreams," said a rationalist.

"We need a committee," said a company man. "We need order."

"May I take your order?" requested a disembodied voice from a black box in a drive-thru combat zone.

"One happy meal to go," cried a distraught family trapped in a massive traffic jam. It was bumper to bumper on the highway of death between the airport and Baghdad. Where the rubber met the road. Their digestive systems were backed up for miles with sugar, fat, grease and carbohydrates.

"Consider the essentials will you," pleaded a small voice from the back seat trying to get a dial tone, trying to get through, trying to find a rhythm inside swirling chaos. It threatened to swallow everyone and spit humans into a black hole sucking everything into a parallel universe. 

A Century is Nothing

An engraved lighter in a dusty Saigon display case read:

         Once people were born alive and slowly died.

         Now some people are born dead and slowly come to life.

Two high-heeled boys bought flaming gas to impress the girls. “Come next to my fire,” said one. Demurring she said, “I create my own fire. If you come any closer I’ll incinerate you faster than Tarek Bouazizi, a famous fruit and vegetable seller in Tunisia.” 

“Amnesia?” said one boy.

“Tunisia, you fucking idiot. Don’t you know anything about the world, geography and Arab Spring dignity, human rights and self-respect? Pay attention shit for brains. Here’s what happened.”

Tarek Bouazizi, 26, sold vegetables on the streets in the small town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. The unemployment rate was 30%.

He supported his mother, uncles and five brothers and sisters at home. He loved poetry.

One morning a policewoman demanded free oranges. He said no. She threatened to take everything because he didn’t have a license. He had enough of the endless cycle of poverty, bribery, threats, and corruption and complained at a local government office. They refused to see him. He bought some gasoline. He set himself on fire. He died flaming his life.

Tunisians grabbed their chance for freedom. Their dictator of twenty-three years ran away.

Middle Eastern, North African, Asian despots and autocratic international power hungry madmen went into denial mode.

Oh no, we're next. Needing to maintain power and control, dictators in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Venezuela, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia among others, gave the military and police free BIG money with strings attached to protect and sustain their intractable insatiablegreed.

Contacts = contracts.

They decreased rice prices to appease angry hungry people.

Protect us in our castles and mansions, said dictators. Protect us from educated empowered individuals demanding human rights, social justice, equality, education, jobs, medical care and an end to the charade of our reign of economic terrorism. Protect us from desperate citizens setting themselves on fire. Protect us from the aftermath.

You have to sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit, said Arabic Spring. Fear sells.

Hearing this story the boy backed off. Trailing flames the girls departed.

A confidence man, 60, in a worn beige leather jacket entered with his son. A stocky bodyguard with a thick neck, alert steel pupils, and short hair followed them. He was Russian or Tartar sauce. Brown suit, black wing tips. He clasped meaty hands together. He never moved. He watched his boss negotiate with the owner. He glanced at Lucky with meticulous eyes. He swiveled his gaze back to father and son.

The confidence man purchased a lighter and pen. There was a problem with the credit card transaction. He pulled out a cell phone called his bank, slathered words and disconnected. The owner punched in numbers. The sale sailed through.

Taking his purchase he turned to Lucky, “How do you like it here?”

“Everyone is hospitable. Fresh tomatoes are delicious. Anxiety is a national problem. The drug industry is making a fortune.”

“My accountant calculates steady pharmaceutical investment growth in my diversified portfolio. What’s your job?”

“I’m a designer of mysterious linguistic projects. I freelance as a literary prostitute and ephemeral word gravedigger. Alphabets, pictograms and ideograms contain no sound.”

“So I’ve heard. What’s your name?”

“Keyser Soze.”

“Ha. One who talks too much. We have many verbal fools here. Where are you from?”

“I am from the source. We are stardust. I am a stream winner. I don’t belong anywhere.”

“Good luck.”  Clouds opened. The father, son and Holy Ghost disappeared in a flash of blinding light.

“Who do you think he was?”

“Maybe the head of a big organization, maybe a bureaucrat, maybe the Mafia.  Maybe Deep State. Well connected. I never saw him before.”

People entered his shop.

“Goodbye,” said Lucky, “thanks for the tea and hospitality. Suited me to a T. Oh, and one more thing, what is life?”

“Excellent quest-ion. There are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. Let me guess. A bitch? A miracle? A dream? Paranoid attachment? A meaty meal with black and green olives smothered in red chili powder? Getting laid? Randomized coalescing atoms forming cytoplasmic hysteria? What you make it? How you grow? A beautiful mystery? An experiential game we get to play? Answers seeking/discovering quest-ions validating cosmological and deep philosophical significance? I give up. All I know is that you brought me good luck today. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. It’s my fate. I show up, sit a spell, strangers visit and look around. Some buy some don't. I go. The journey is the destination.”

The Language Company

Lucky Foot explored a gleaming upscale mercantile atrium filled with bald silver female dummies fronted by glass. Mirrors reflected screaming bored housewives paroled for good behavior pushing pram infants.

He happened into a store with Roman, Ottoman, Egyptian and Middle Aged chess sets - game of Kings. Checkmate, said Mother Death, Beauty’s mother, Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

Black jazz statues played sax, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards, drums, and bass. Some of My Favorite Things, said John Coltrane. Blow your cool heart out.

“Good morning. Do you need something?” said the owner.

“Namaste. I salute the light within you. I seek to help others end suffering and misery.”

“Is it a way, a path?”

“It’s the nature of absolute emptiness with compassion. Ultimate truth. Reality.”

“What’s its form? Form an answer. Fill in your form. We live in a world of forms. It’s not the answers we need to know it’s the quest-ions we discover. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Remain curious. Trust authentic fragments. Follow your heart. Grow from it. Anything is possible when you risk everything. Stay open to your true nature as a lotus grows from mud. Form is emptiness and vice a verisimilitude. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please. The quest-ion is the answer. Practice allows everything to wake you up. When you have taken the impossible into your calculations its possibilities become endless.”

“Today is good day to die. Meditate on your death. Celebrate your journey.” He pushed a buzzer. “Someone will bring tea.”

“Thanks. I like establishing impermanent relationships with compassion, trust, generosity and empathy.”

“You’re a dreamer dreaming the impossible dream. Are your needs being met? I suggest you need more direct immediate experience, observation and imagination. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Words escaping the tyranny of memories composed a jazz poem.

Kind of Blue, 1959 by Miles Davis. Modality.

 “Everything I do is an experiment. Traveling meets my genetic needs. I love weird. It’s a long strange beautiful trip. Life is an amazing beautiful messy test. It gives us the test first and lessons later. In my life I become we: many people. We face opportunities and challenges. We bring luck to people like you. People we meet and never see again. It’s ephemeral. We help strangers help themselves through levels of suffering, hardship, deprivation, letting go and developing courage. 

"Becoming.

"Throw in passion desire thirst and existential bliss with humor. Humor is the key. No shame, guilt or humiliation. No regret or fear. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am a dreamer with controlled imagination. I see you have knives. I need one to cut through fear and ignorance.”

 “Fear is blissful ignorance. Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is necessary to grow. Travel allows you deeper penetration. Travel makes you. There are not many things you need to remember during your visit to Earth. Please have a look-see.”

 “Our life is a work of art and life imitates art. Art is easy. Life is difficult. Clouds know me by now.”

“You don’t say.”

A cabinet displayed Swiss Army knives with cool tools for cool fools. 

The Language Company

Here's an excerpt from a scene in a literary masterpiece and a link to Metagifted courtesy of Wendy Chapman. Go Indigo!

“Do you you see a connection?”

A child with dyslexia spoke. “It’s tough. I’m trying to learn 1,100 ways letters are used to symbolize the 40 sounds in the spoken English language.”

“You mean to say,” wondered a child, “it’s difficult for a learning reader to connect verbal sounds with the letters or symbols that spell that sound?”

“Absolutely. Maybe that explains why there are 10 million children in this country with severe reading problems.”

Another child added, “show us where the sound of speech has no alphabet.”

“Good on ya! Wasn’t it William - that kid from Kansas who lived in the Burroughs - who said language is a virus? Where is he?”

“They took him away for treatment,” said a tyrant. “Some guy in a lab coat said he was hallucinating.”

“Probably naked while eating his lunch. Or, eating his naked lunch.”

“Whatever.”

“You mean he was dreaming with his eyes open, again?”

“You got it backwards. He was fast asleep with his eyes open and he woke up by closing his eyes.”

“Figures,” said a kid, releasing cost benefit analysis results scribbled on a medical insurance form with a co-pay deductible.

“Some people never learn. They get older sooner and smarter later.”

Peace.

"Did you know that the world is made up of 98% helium and hydrogen? Well, the remaining particles of atoms, a very small part, is life and then inside these atoms a very small part of that is intelligence. The rest of the pyramid is garbage.” Alex laughed long and loud.

We were in "Relax," a Ronda, Spain bar and restaurant at Christmas. He was tall, getting drunk and talking.

“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, to rearrange the molecules in some form of order. They think they are in control of it. They are afraid of the change. Things happen which are outside their control or plans of the creator. It expands the evolutionary process.”

"Detergent Molecules," is Alex's tale and filed in ACIN excerpts.

Speaking of art, Jonathan Jones in The Guardian writes about the discovery of a 27,000 year old drawing of a face in a French cave in Old Masters.

Peace.

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 built roads, establishing communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music and trade expanding their nation state.

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

He found estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos, rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery, faces, vases and dynasties. He absorbed ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, utensils, sewing bones. Human remains inside stoned chambers. Bones resting in dust.

Being a dust collector he felt right at home.
+

The realities of a small Spanish village Christopher Colon left centuries ago were not wasted. Everyone sailed for the new world after Phoenicians came sailing through from the eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago.

Spanish conquistadors sailed for the Seven Cities of Gold taking them to Mexico and north to Santa Fe, with their murderous desire for greed and wealth.

They found songs and ceremony as the Anasazi and Zuni Indians connected with the spirit world.

In 1543 a Spanish explorer, Anbrio de Espejo, discovered El Morro, New Mexico. He described it as “the pool at the great rock” because a source of water meant survival in the harsh environment.

Don Juan de Onate, another Spanish explorer, carved his name on the soft sandstone walls in 1605. He was responsible for killing hundreds of Indian men, women and children in his quest for gold as he rampaged through the Southwest. His legacy was European black death. His silver sword severed one foot from every Indian warrior he met.

They converted the natives with promises of salvation as bibles and swords dripped blood. They exported silver and gold to Cadiz where the Spanish crown took their 20%, called the quinto real, or royal fifth before Antonio Tavira was born.

A tossed coin landed on its edge. Picaros, the card and dice gypsy tricksters, moved into his Cadiz neighborhood selling a game of chance.

Civilization’s endless story continued with the Spanish whiners on one side and the Spanish complainers on the other. They blamed the weather.

He’d noticed with increasing frequency how people stood on the shady side of the street complaining about how cold it was instead of walking into the sun.

The Spanish Inquisition started in 1481. Over three centuries tribunals were responsible for 12,000 deaths.

In 1492 a bankrupt Isabel and Fernando monarchy expelled 200,0000 Jews from Spain who refused Christian baptism. The middle class was decimated by the church, state and landlords. Money, power and control.

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.

Near the sea, Sophia from Panama, pointed to her exhibit. Sand littered with footprints covered the floor. Yellow candles, icons and a huge black and white image of a Central America jungle warrior in a loincloth and feathered skull stood at the far end of the interactive display. Colorful exotic travel brochures were fanned out on a table.

In the center of the empty room encased in glass was a transparent reality. A TV with wires showed Panamanian women dancing black and white rituals.
“People are afraid to go in there,” she said.

Her dark eyes were brilliant. The sound of Spanish men hammering their construction anger without success at a church filled with bloody icons faded as Atlantic waves cleaned the world of perception.

“Maybe they’ve lost their curiosity,” he said pronouncing each letter.
“It appears so. We have to encourage them to go in.”

“It’s a time warp,” he said. “I sat in the flower market yesterday counting the number of smiling faces and only saw four in an hour. The people here wear a sadness.”

“It’s the way they live. They study the stones at their feet when they walk.”
“Yes, they are in love with the street. The beauty of the street. It is an old love.”

“Love is fickle,” she said dancing with an unlit cigarette in her hand outside the exhibition hall. They stood on white marble steps hearing the ocean wear down Spanish land. She spelled English words on the palm of her hand.

“You have to learn Spanish,” she whispered.

He wanted her. He desired to tell her she was beautiful in her language. Her own sweet particular language full of verbs, prepositions, proposals, poetry.

“Will you be here tomorrow?”

Sophia danced away. “It’s all random when I will be here.”

While they were speaking someone blew up a Coca-Cola plant in India. There were some pissed off humans in the world. So much for sugar consumption in the caste system. A low fat diet of fear and poverty took care of minimum daily requirements.

Out past high stone walls full of rusty cannons a cruise ship decked with white lights running stem to stern sailed toward Lisbon from Cadiz in the gathering dusk. The bow cut white water.

People afraid to fly, afraid to lose their luggage and fears in a compressed tin can at 31,000 feet carried a life vest. Their pockets were full of heavy change that would drown them if they capsized.

They waited for the captain to say “All hands on deck!” before being put ashore to figure out new survival strategies among natives. They would exchange gifts. They would import disease, firepower and religion meeting humans who ate the hearts of their enemies to increase their strength.

Survivors met a tribal chief deep in the Amazon. “The problem is,” the chief said, “is that we have the time and you have the machines and watches to control the time.”

“I know what you mean,” said a European banker. “They give you a watch when you retire but not enough time to wind it.”

He said adios to Sophia and wandered into a room containing beautiful black handmade fans with Spanish tributes to Federico Garcia Lorca. He was assassinated during the Spanish civil war in 1936 by the Black Squadron for his homosexuality and leftist leanings.

He belonged to the Generation of ‘27 with Dali and Brunuel. He identified with the marginalized gitanos and woman chained to conventional social expectations in Andalusia. He wrote dramatic plays 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.

Across the street outside the Spanish cathedral a bride threw her wedding bouquet into the sky as friends pelted her with white rice containing 50,000 genes.

Humans with 30,000 genes looked up as it rained flowers. Her friends, neighbors and strangers were overcome by the scent of wild forbidden fragrances drifting from the sky. They scrambled, pushed and shoved in a desperate struggle for a petal. They started laughing and singing in perfect harmony as an orchestra played Four Seasons.

“What’s happening?” an old woman in black said to her son.
“They are celebrating the passing of an era,” he said.

She was a survivor of the Civil War in 1936 when 350,000 Spaniards died. The war divided families, communities and friends. Another 100,000 were killed or died in prison after the war. Some 500,000 fled Spain.

For decades her brothers lay in a mass grave but it was not until more than 60 years after they were shot during the war that she could reclaim what she thought were their remains.

“What better flowers to take to my mother’s grave than the bones of her son?” said 87-year-old Alvarez, waiting for DNA tests to identify her two brothers.
The rebellion started in Morocco in 1936 when Spanish Foreign Legion generals led by Franco revolted against the leftist government. German and Italian soldiers, weapons and planes shifted the balance of power to the Nationalists.

A U.N. sponsored trade boycott of Spain in the late 1940’s gave Andalusia ‘the years of hunger.’ Peasants ate wild herbs and soup made from grass. 1.5 million Andalusians left to find work elsewhere.

Now 150,000 Spaniards of all ages formed long lines, waiting for hours rain or shine, to see "Exile," an exhibition about those who disappeared during or after the war.

"Exile" recalled history with a ragtag collection of artifacts belonging to individuals, including pictures of men clutching children as they traipsed through snow into exile dragging a suitcase which would serve as a cradle in a French refugee camp.

In many cases people in villages knew where their relatives were buried. Isabel Gonzalez, 85, said she was told in the 1940’s where her brother’s grave was - by the man fascist troops had forced to dig it. For years she made clandestine visits to leave flowers, but never dared stay long in case she was caught.

“Let’s cross here,” seductive women in silk dresses said to their matador escorts in tuxedos, trailing red capes dripping blood.

They blessed themselves under petals. It was impossible for him to explain how it could rain flowers but it happened and they knew it and he whispered the truth to them, a variety of theories mixed in cosmic soup.

When old people at the wedding reception heard the word “soup” they experienced enlightenment with lentils, carrots, potatoes, bread and a sliver of ham sitting in peace near a pinion wood fire.

Spanish sisters in matching green and brown pleated skirts dragged their book bags to school past thick brown doors. Generations singing hope whispered their future to me. Women in their perpetual black habits mopped steps. Women in eternal mourning clothes paced the pavement under soundless Egyptian vulture wings with excellent vision.

Time was a flock of nightingales zooming down narrow crooked Spanish corridors under balconies dripping red geraniums looking for the key to forbidden doors with brass Arabic hands and heads.

The doors remained from Moorish forces when occupation was a way to make a living. The unassuming and tolerant gaditanos people of Cadiz and Andalusia lived the spectrum from 18th century wealth to 21st century’s unemployment figures.

Their ancestors lived with ships departing and arriving from the port beginning with Phoenicians to Romans to Spanish Armadas, Trafalgar squared, a French siege mentality and invasions by the Merenids of Morocco.

+++

A well dressed man bald man with gypsy blood wearing highly polished black wing tips carrying a paperback novel with creased pages used the financial section of a daily rag to collect his dog’s shit off the street. He dumped it in a metal trash basket nailed to a wall.

Five minutes later a obsessive compulsive Spanish woman cleaning her ground floor flat said, “What is that smell?”

“History,” he said walking toward the sea.

One if by land and two if by sea easy rider.

“Oh say can you see? Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might dream the impossible dream and throw out the first ball,” sang history’s child.

“We’re headed to extra innings and the bullpens are empty,” a radio announcer crooned from a nearby navel base on armed forces radio waves, “and now this,” cutting to a commercial message from a used car salesman offering interest free, no down payment selections of the finest vehicles money could buy.

“Drive it away today,” he pleaded.
Every car on the road is a used car.

This alert was followed by a commercial for cheap fuel and a political proposal to open the Alaskan wilderness for drilling. Unemployed dentists signed up.

“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” said a paedophile priest brushing wild rice out of his hair. His big hand was on the little hand. Tick-tock.

A stranger passed a door named History. Arabian hands gestured the Baraka spirit. The palms formed arches. The Baraka spirit was about power and spirit energies. They were heavy duty brass knockers.

A woman polished their long fingers after sweeping and mopping the residue of dust from carefully inlaid diamond stone triangles set deep into the history of her Calle. She dumped dirty water into the street where it followed gravity as quick sparrows descended into stone canyons for nourishment.

She wore black. She wore black every day as a sign of respect for her late husband. It was the custom in Andalusia. He was engulfed by women in black.

She remembered everything about him. He was a good listener, nodding thoughtfully by the fire of their love as they admired their rooster figurines and cracked cups on the dusted mantle.

As contrite parishioners they bowed through tight wooden recesses into Sunday services at Plaza Tio de la Tiza. He nodded softly toward the street as they strolled and she talked about the weather. He studied his shiny black shoes.

“The price of meat is rising,” she said.
“It’s the fat on the bone,” he answered.

They passed a bull’s head hanging in a shattered window.

“Maybe we should consider buying a lottery ticket,” she suggested. “Help out the unemployed. All my friends say it is a chance. A once in a lifetime opportunity. We could jump through a window into a new reality with the winnings.”

“Yes,” he said, remembering her lament about the butcher. “Maybe we should cut down our consumption.”

Her husband’s hands were soft and she loved them. His favorite word was “yes,” and she couldn’t hear it enough.

They alternated walking between Plaza de Mira with its tall palms in the original city vegetable gardens; intimate Plaza del Mentidero with its huge fountain; the grand San Antonio Cathedral renovated in 1658, Teatro Plaza del Falla with its red Moorish facade and Plaza de Candeleria.

In the Plaza de la Cathedral they knelt to pray as white robed priests with a mandate from Rome guided their spirits into faith, hope and charity while administering final sacraments after hearing their confession.

Where he watched leaves change from green to yellow to brown and fall through air in their silence. Watching them lose their energy and return their strength to the soil and tree. They were free to fall through air and light.

In the patio was a lemon tree. Christ took three lemons and juggled. They met Jose and Silvia from Seville. We drove high into the national park stopping to walk and breath the clear air past mountains, valleys to the Mediterranean. Pure light.

We ended up at Zahara. The old abandoned tower sat on a pinnacle high above land, fields and artificial lakes. Zahara was founded by Muslims in the 8th century and fell to a Castilian prince in 1407. It was recaptured in a night raid in 1481 by Abu-al-Hasan from Granada and was the home of anarchists in the 19th century.

Somebody said George Harrison died the day before. We remembered ‘My Sweet Lord’. Somebody hummed, “I look at the world and it keeps turning. I look at you all while my guitar silently weeps.” We sat quietly inside vast plains, mountains ranges and sky.

Christ said anyone seeing the sky here would understand where Picasso got his colors. We were in the Spanish province of light. Sharp orange light painted the horizon from west to east as the sun bounced blue and green rays off El Torreon at 1654 meters, the highest mountain in Andalucia.

We climbed steep stone paths past old Roman baths past into futures. We held each other’s hands and coats inside pitch black stone step passageways toward the top of the tower.

It was magic, a kid’s day. The full moon showed a sliver of itself over mist hills and valleys to the east. Then it exploded up! It was a perfect white orb surrounded by purple, orange and blue.

We celebrated the impact being in the perfect place at the perfect time. History of Romans, Moors, Christians. Lakes stretched along the valley.

Lakes reflected moonlight. Before meditation the moon is the moon and the water is the water. During meditation the mountain is not the mountain and the water is not the water.

We were in a dream of light. Colors flashed across the sky, shooting starts came out to play. Mountains shimmered in the moonlight. The lakes were mirrors in our mind.

“In an improvisational acting class they had us do this when we made a mistake,” Susan said from the top of the tower.

She arched her back, threw her arms up and out into air and screamed, “I SUCK,” and relaxed. We laughed and understood her and the motivation in an instant. ZAP! Clearing the way with heart.

“This is the day of my dreams,” the writer said.
We took the low road back to the pueblo along lakes full of blue and silver moon light.

Susan said, “You know this would be perfect night to be able to fly. To make love in the sky.”
“Yes,” said the writer, “we could make love flying upside down then do acrobatic turns in space while connected.”

“Yes,” she said, “if the earth were a marble and dropped into the lake we could swim to the surface.”
“Yes,” he said, “and burst free and fly, glide over the mountains and plains forever”

“Yes,” she said, “just for one night.”
“Yes,” he said, “during the full moon we’d have the freedom to fly all night long.”
Their universe was yes.

They listened to sad Fado Portuguese singers as headlights shattered shadows. Moonlight danced on the water illuminating jagged gray dolomite mountains into the black sky full of shooting stars. We were all shooting stars.