This was written in Austin by the fire place at Les Amis Café in one setting, and without any further editing, on a cold December night in 1983. All Sketches are by me, except for the first one which was done by Aziz Hallaj.

Sketches were prepared on different occasions in December 1983 while at Cedar Door Bar and Café in Austin. All originals were in color, and have been lost. Sketches were done with colored pencils except for the one entitled “Mr. M in the Spaceship” That was done in watercolors.

This piece was intended to be a letter. The letter, apparently, was never sent; and I have forgotten to whom that letter was intended.

The only change I made is to identify the writer as simply the Writer instead of “Mr. M, the writer.” That original reference remains in the last sketch.

Austin, Texas

December 1983

Movements in Red and Blue

on a Turquoise Stage

Dear --------

I have thrown on this shore all my knowledge and I pushed aside the gathering veins of my education – the jungle and the rain forest, the shame of it all. The silence which descended for the moment, and the happy scent that had filled the space. For that mere moment, that is all I know.

Here I am with an urge – to let appear what has been hiding under the covers and layers of the modern spacious rooms. My soul reaches for the cool night and a bit of light, just enough to help me retrace my steps.

The place here is different – out of focus, but certainly of this world – nothing has changed except for little details. The colors are more intense. They stare at me. I stare back – and I get bored. I may like to stare at them later, but enough staring for now. Millions of stars to gaze at. Here, I am never at loss to find things to to gaze upon. The water is bottomless. It is a paradox how this place sustains itself with all this water. But I can’t complain. I have my spot – a little one but enough to me make sit down and relax. I may like to walk later. I’ll think of something. I may invent a road and trees for shade. I hope I won’t drown in this water. Luckily, it is night now. So, I’ll make thirty trees not for the shade. But for the soothing effect. I start to recollect and I go for the extent that my memory can travel to. I fail to reach upon a letter written under the same sky.

I’ll write a letter.

The night reclines against the starry glitter – the night talks of places where letters can’t feel their way – there they are quite lost to the bad spirits of the dark. I say to the night that letters are to exorcise the terrible ghosts. That’s their mission. They go to those dark corners and fight their way. I see them crossing deadly waters, the cold of the deep valleys, the rivers of the disreputable underworld. They emerge as in an ancient ritual. The night says that sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they are imprisoned with all the doomed beauty which can’t find its way out. Never to be seen again. Except in the troubled corners of the spirit.

I’ll write this letter, and I’ll bit it farewell. It is a lovely letter after all. I’ll write it and throw it upon the landscape. Vulnerable – yes – but marching forward, it has one answer to whoever tries to stop it – I’m on a mission, it will say with a bold voice.

I look around again, the place is exquisite, the detail is highly intricate, but, on close inspection, symmetry prevails. I hear little incomprehensible murmurs from different locations created from a breakdown in symmetry. The night says it is areas of discontinued presences. The night speaks also of places where time is connected and disconnected, crossed and sometimes trampled upon. Corridors with mirrors alongside the walls are such places. Another is where the future is already assembled for the present. Blind alleys where time ends into a fence, a lake, a mountain. Ocean creatures made of the watery substance of time. The fruits of time. Cities of time.

I ask if I am at a place made of the substance of time.

No answer.

But that moment is already gone. It retreats to a hallway lined with discarded moments. Geometrical relics of past lives. Remnants of sighs and words. It retreats and stops halfway. Then it rolls. Slowly. Another structure amongst the countless shapes.

Memories persist here but I don’t know which ones are mine.

Curves of happiness, angles of sadness, spheres of hate, circles of love, chisels of free will, pillars of the absurd, polygons of behavior, triangles of conspiracies, labyrinths of science, tunnels of thoughts, parallels of emotion, chords of wisdom, cubes with a terrified look around the sharp edges, cubes with a smile, cubes with tears, laughing cubes, careless cubes, serious cubes.

In this place it is too late – and I seize the reins of another passing moment – yet another and another.

An old man who registers the trivialities. Number of waves. Of falling autumn leaves, unused seconds, meaningless words, wasted papers, unoccupied dots on unintelligible entities. It is all there. The madness of the seasons. The winds of change.

In another moment, a woman combing her hair in a reflective mood, and with her ancient eyes she pierces the heart of the earth. The unknown number of millennia since the start. Who knows? Except for the lost horizons of this act.

A moment of unlikely events goes before my eyes – unlikely secret events which are more important than dreams – more colorful than revelations. Here I am told about the light going through a distant future as we stare at whose atoms have not been assembled yet. In one story the legend of the traveling goddess who threw her territory into despair. She, the goddess of secrets, traveled seven thousand years into the future and brought upon her return a flower from that distant future, with a scent no one has ever smelt before. Whoever smelled it searched his/her past for a hint. A smell with no past, they said, does not have a future. She, on the other hand, concluded that she belongs to an ancient time. They looked into an intrusive future and she looked into a past she can’t remember. They tried to recreate the past, and she tried to remember her future.

I don’t know what happened later – and I was never told, this is the land of secrets after all, and the whole affair is arguable.

Some people say that seven thousand years can not be crossed in one step and will never have the means to do it; they argue that we are restricted to covering certain half-defined distances on a pitiful expedition that could have been covered in our own private space. Others suspect a conspiracy of the ages. They say that the unlikely flower was planted by the own hands of a sinister time after he was imprisoned in a mirror for dreaming of kissing the king’s daughter. They say that the flower is but a manifestation, of an otherwise unknown apparition, invented by forgotten ancients to cure the madness of whoever looks into a mirror and smells the scent. They go further to say, supported by highly respected historians, that ages and eras repeat themselves, and that history is a history of the spirits, and they continue, whenever an incident occurs twice it sends us back to the first square.

As for me –

I personally believe that an unlikely flower leads to unnecessary complications, and that we question the relics of the future everyday.

But it is better to be silent in front of what we know nothing about.

The shore and three of the trees with the reclining night

But the night draws to the night’s end, and the night I leave behind; the light of the day, veiled within the layers of the ascending darkness seizes the moment.

Good evening I hear from the other end of the world and the night persists in another story. I have seen the light but not like that one with dark patches on the light’s face. My eyes will close and wait for the dream forming on the sunny colors of the day. The smell, the scent, the games, the fifty moons already descending on a field of vision. One of many, an arc, a bigger one, then a circle.

A dance of white circles with rectangular shadows on a turquoise stage. With a tree and a house and a dreamy actor. One moon for a green lizard contemplating an absent horizon of the transparent city. It closes its eyes and slowly opens them and moves its head up and down. An agreeable sign for an untold gesture that disappears in the dance of the second moon. A second moon for the wild dancing actress – a dancer that had begun before somewhere before the stage was assembled and before the wild dancer rolled herself along the curving line – and the dance without a start and without an end had been lost in its own moves. A third moon for an old clown laughing silently – The old clown smokes a pipe and relaxes on two moons for a chair. Sometimes the two moons are the young boy looking for the young girl as he pushes a moon for an old wheel in front of him with a red stick.

From behind the window of the house sixteen moons watch with a grin on their faces. The young boy is scared from the looks in their eyes. The dreamy actor dreams, also, of fifty moons intruding upon the day. He dreams of hiding places, lizards, greenery, old clowns, dancers, and watchful eyes.

A Tunnel of Thought, Circle of Love

& smiling Cube on a Table

Sixteen Moons, a Window, and a Red Curve

I think of windows, water mills, engines, and little expectations for the welcome surprises. I already have an actor, a beautiful dancer, an old clown, a boy, a girl and a lizard by a tree. The dancer is caught in the air. Her unfinished step is all there is to remind an occasional viewer, a passer-by, of a movement about to take place. The uneasy balance is broken with a voice – “We are discerned …. With movements …. Not dreams. The writer may not feel obliged to explain. He says …. That movements are not meant …. To be seen. His feeling is that of a space-traveler on board of a turquoise stage …. Nevertheless …. It is a ship…. The writer, it appears, had deserted his characters. He left them suspended for quite a while. His excuse is that he had lost his script. The characters are reflecting, possibly, on the next line of action. He, the fine time-traveler he is, left a message. It mentions the fact that he is searching the ages for an absolute character that may transcend all scripts. This character will be able to recite what belongs to all the scripts. So far, we are on our own. The old clown says that the writer left in such a hurry he had forgotten to take a set of masks with him. Except for one. The old clown does not know which. Things are quiet here except for the monotonous sound of that engine and the animated moves of the lizard. We may be, as well, boarding a ship – without a writer we may be heading for a collision – nothing is certain around here except ofr the certainty of the moment …. Which, in one way or another, is not a moment at all. The one certainty is uncertain. But we go on. Nothing is lost. Nothing will ever be lost. We wait for the dancer to project herself out of suspension with one protracted move. Maybe that is she is moving now slowly … slowly. Life sustains itself without a script, without a writer …. The search is a waste …. Ages are all the same. Or is it …. The other way around ? …. This whole scene is a part of another script of which the writer himself is not aware …. His spaceship is only a pawn in a bigger scheme …. But …. No …. That peace …. Now …. That no one can negate …. Is all we carry with us …. And carry on …. Carry on ………….” – Thus the voice fades and the light gives the way to another patch of darkness. I go through the darkness as in a fog –

In this procession what remains is a wavy turquoise color waiting for an event upon it scarred surface, a crack around its smooth edges, or outlines changing their shapes imperceptively from a distance. From the distance, there is also light scattered across the valley. Sounds abound. Familiar pictures.

The Writer in his Spaceship

There is only one sound that is meant for me.

One light that is meant for me.

A stream of words and things exhibit their meanings.

One conclusion that is meant for me.

I travel through the fog on a thin cloud of air towards what the conscious of words had determined already. Already the wind plays with the tops of the trees. Already the arranged letters. Already the configuration of characters. Not to mention too much of this. This that already exists on the outside is gone. It will materialize in a group of characters flattering themselves with words and rebelling against an imposed order. The dreamy actor will murmur –

I dreamt of fifty circles intruding upon the hovering noon, and when they converged into reality I lost my dream – who will give again an ark and two oars? Who will give me a dove and a branching tree with the godly promises? Before the coming flood I will fly on a lonely stone and run away! On a lonely stone with a new just law and proclaim humanity on another stone. I will own the festive mood of the new earth and watch the greatest of the dancers stepping on the new moon. She will descend to the empty dry valleys, like a bolt of lightning beneath clouds of air ……………. –

One word of caution. The writer sends me the message that he is not into the dramatic, and what we dream of is destined, by the very nature of things, to be already somewhere. He does not believe in any future although he is a great advocate of the timelessness of coincidental encounters between rebellious characters. Thus, his facelessness and refusal to make an appearance. He mentions an imperfect god, unlike the Greek ones who busied themselves with family quarrels and unlike the all-knowing absolute god who is just an abstraction of the infinite and a representation of our own limitations to come to grips with our own definitions. He writes that an imperfect god is what an imperfect god is: an imperfection; a useless imperfection who likes to imitate us and create originals of our own selves. Originals that will slap us in our sleep into the reality that will hit us like a wall. The writer mentions also in his message that the script had not been lost. But like the imperfect god it is quite useless itself. A play which will be repeated, an approximation of a staggering experience. An approximation that carries the weight of another approximation – a statistical plot which makes the whole history and conquers the face of the day. The writer ends his message by mentioning that I had willed the shore, the water and the waves –

He did not say why!

But I know now that I have been implicated at last.

He does not know himself –

And I merely fall.

The planet is a dot on a turquoise background.

The planet is a little red sphere.

And I fall.

The writer is seated in a ship and covers his face with a mask.

I’d willed the entire scene.

As I fall –

The mask is that of a chameleon face.

But I fall.

Three chameleon people – one old man, one young man, one young woman.

They face the ship.

Still I fall.

The turquoise color recedes giving way to the round red planet dotted with green.

I can see as I fall –

The planet approaches.

The planet is a huge colored wall framed with turquoise color.

No end to this fall.

Only the planet now facing me.

“He is certainly writing – can’t give up!” The young man A says.

“Poor thing – we can only watch.” B, the old man, comments.

“Can’t we do anything to help?” C, the young woman, asks.

“He is the writer. He should know better.” Says A.

“You two only talk.” C interrupts with her chameleon eyes going in different directions. “What is to become of us,” she addresses the writer, “for once give us an assuring statement.”

“I’m doing my best. I certainly am, but, my dear C, these matters take time.” The writer screams to let her hear.

“How long? We have been waiting for hours!” A says impatiently.

“Well, I’d crossed ages, and I don’t know any more than you do!” The writer shouts.

For one moment of respite, fresh air, a breath of fresh air as I fall.

“The situation demands wise decisions,” B says. “Here we confront a replica of old times – we are told that the builders couldn’t change the color of their skin still they were capable of constructing this marvel. Their eyes moved in one direction still they wanted to see and grasp the dimensions they couldn’t touch ….”

“I didn’t come here to listen to a lecture.” A interrupts, “mere myths, superstitions from old minds like yours.”

The temperature is rising and I feel the suffocating heat as I fall.

“If you can be polite for just a second,” C talk to A. “It is cold here.” She talk to herself.

The heat penetrates my head as I fall.

“I am also hungry.” C says.

“Good idea. Let us go and eat. Better than talking about those extinct creatures.” A declares.

“I am hungry for life, you fool!” C says to A as they leave.

A copy of the last lines

I am not falling anymore. Just a fiery ball of fire drawing a straight line, leaving the writer behind me, towards the closest exit before I stumble into another scene.

M