stormy monday

They call it Stormy Monday. Tuesday's just as bad...

I stepped outside of myself and witnessed a blind man walking down life’s street. You breathe in. You breathe out.

Neither of us had seen each other before. Dressed in rags, he stooped under a torn shouldered bag. He had no left hand. His right hand stabbed cracked cement with a crooked staff.

In the middle of the sidewalk he stumbled into a parked motorcycle. Chinese schoolgirls eating sweet junk food on sharp sticks whispering silent secrets about his stupidity passed me with empty black wide eyes.

I remembered. If a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark. A blind man crossing a bridge is a good example how we should live our lives. Enlightened mind.

I followed him. I sensed a lesson in humble existence. He scraped his staff against shuttered shop steps. He massaged a long concrete wall. A beggar sat in rags made from boiled books. His skeleton supported a battered dirty greasy cap, threadbare jacket, no socks, broken shoes. He struggled to light a fractured cigarette. His cracked begging bowl was empty.

The blind man ran into him. 

“Go around” screamed the beggar. “Can’t you see I’m here you idiot!” 

“Sorry, I didn’t see you.” 

“This is my space! Pay attention. Keep moving you fool.”

“Sorry to bother you. Maybe you’re a little sad, angry or lonely? Maybe I can help you.” 

“What! Are you completely fucking crazy as well as blind? I have no wife, no children, no parents, no friends, no home and no job. I live here hoping people will take pity on me.”

“I see. I know the feeling. I’m on my own. Maybe we could work together, be a team.”

The beggar rubbed his stubble. “Hmm. Let me think about it.”

“Take your time. Knowing our destiny means there’s no hurry.”

“How can you be so sure?” 

“Call it a hunch,” laughed the beggar, “Fate’s a great teacher. Ha, ha, ha.” Kids passed. One coined the bowl. 

“Thanks kid. Good luck on your exams next week.” 

“I hate school. Too much homework. It’s so boring and tedious. I rather be home playing violent computer games or chatting online with my friends. I am an only child. I am a little Titan in my universe of want, want, want.”

“Your attitude sucks. Only 5% of the Chinese population has a university degree. Did you know every June, four million students graduate from a university. 60% will not find a job. They will work the street like us. Your so-called developing society faces hard cruel lessons.

"Reality outside your textbooks. Your people have fucked up the environment. Do you sleep where you shit? Sixteen of the most twenty polluted cities in the world are in this country. You sound like one of those single pampered little emperor kids I see, hear and smell every day. Busy, busy, busy. Get used to it or you’ll be out here with us.”

“A fate worse than death,” said the kid. “My father owns a factory. He is rich man making huge profits off the sweat of poor illiterate fools and idiots like you. Bum. My future is filled with money, a big house and a new car.

"Thank God for the one-child policy. I will buy a trophy wife. I will give her blood diamonds imported from African mimes. My country is investing huge amounts of capital around the world to export raw materials. We feed our machines of consumption 24/7.

"As you know our country was squeezed, manipulated and exploited for years by big nose foreigners. Now it’s our turn to cash in billions of T-bills and let them dance to our sweet tune. And...my family has a multiple-entry visa for Macau so we can leave whenever we feel like it. So, fuck off beggar man.”

“Yeah, begging isn’t a job, it’s an adventure.”

Rural Chinese school, Sichuan. A paradise to learn. Cradle to become a useful person.

Old man coyote

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” answered a kid with a Ph.D in psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute.

“What else did he say?” 

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive in the future I must journey to the past. To attain the sanity of oneness with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed. One must confront their shadow or be crushed by it.”

“I like it,” said a seer named Rumi. “What else?”

“Well, here’s a cool thing he said. ‘”I liken the formation of a character to weaving fabric. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. You have a choice, you can finish the garment, however it will always be botched and ugly, or you can unravel the weaving back to the first mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and hostile. The analyst lends patience, honesty and courage.’”

“Excellent,” yelled kids, “here’s to our being patient patients with courage and authenticity.”

“Speaking of courage, I’m looking for someone who knows reading and writing,” Rose said to the children.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about reading and writing,” a child told Rose. “I thought you said eating and fighting. I know about that.” 

“Perfect, let’s go together,” said Rose.

“Do you know any good stories?” a child asked Rose.

“A few. Would you like to hear one?”

“Sure.”

“This is a story about Old Man Coyote.”

“Old Man Coyote stood on the bank of a river with a friend. It was early spring and the river at that point was more than a mile across. After watching the sun set in the west, his friend said, ‘Tell me, Coyote, what is it that transcends everything in creation?’”

“Old Man Coyote pointed at the muddy water in the river and said, ‘When you drink all the water in this stream, then I will tell you.’”

“I’ve already done that,” his friend said. He defiantly crossed his arms over his chest.

“Then I must have already told you!” Old Man Coyote said.

“Very good,” said a child. “Know any more?”

“Ok, one more, then I need to roll along. Lots of children to see today.” 

“One bright summer day, Rabbit asked Old Man Coyote, ‘Where is the right path?’”

“The right path is the one that leads into the forest,” replied Old Man Coyote.

“I'm not asking about that one!”

“Well, what path are you asking about?”

“I'm asking about the Path of Knowledge,” said Rabbit.

“Oh,” said Old Man Coyote. “That path! That path is very clear. It is as straight as a bowstring. You can face it without hesitation. But I’m warning you, all who travel along that path trouble only themselves.”

chinese cover story

One essential joy was selecting the cover photograph of a young Chinese girl.

Her image revealed heavy, deep and real emotional honesty. She stood trapped behind the steel grate at a Chinese nursery school enduring a hard dismal Chinese educational process seasoning her childhood character and personality in the poor village of Maija where the tea man and artist drawing the dead lived.

Her eyes held all the secrets of the world and unfilled wish-dream potential. She stared at the stranger, a diversion in her expanding universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her, trapping her against the gate.

It was locked by an old woman who feared persecution and execution if any kids escaped. He was on the other side. Being invisible has its advantages. He held a small black metallic machine to his blind eye.

She heard a series of curious clicks as a shutter opened and closed, an interval between life and death, trapping, freezing time, one decisive moment in the eternal present, a decisive instant, capturing her image on a memory-fiction circuit card. He smiled, whispered, Thanks, disappearing past pig farms on a dirty black mountain bike.

She had no way of knowing, because she was younger than tomorrow or older than yesterday remembering spring how her image on the cover, her clear child eyes were visible for everyone.

Her small dark eyes held archetypical memories of dynasties and great Chinese electronic fire walls evolving with the speed of electron particles illuminating her face, sadness, fear and curiosity at that precise moment. Stories about stories inside stories manifested the girl in alchemical truth, alive, breathing, unaware of her immortality in infinity.  

He'd visited her primary school with a university student who worked in the Maija pharmacy after school to make ends meet helping her aunt dispense cheap placebos to poor illiterate women and men alleviating their suffering, pain and fear of death singing, dancing speaking unintelligible Mandarin words.

Laughter and kindness were blessings after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored women teachers who didn’t want to be in a class tomb any more than the students. Teacher’s mantra was Push them through. No one had free choice. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability.

The dead, dying idiots sputtered stuttering in Beijing opening rusty doors of perception being a communist-socialist Marxist dream removed from poor villages where rich well connected officials raped and reaped huge financial benefits practicing oppression, coercion, bribery, graft, slander, using death threats as powerless simple peasants tilled soil, followed slumbering oxen, stalking mud and rice paddies. Where green rice stalks revealed a blue sky with Beauty.

Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic in China for years.

Why are so many Chinese students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking, besides the commercialization of education? The absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers. The one who dares to open their fat little face and question authority gets killed.

Bang. 

more channels!

“More channels!” someone screamed. “We need more channels!”

Media buys people.

There was a preponderance of rumors. Hard evidence at G Zero was charred beyond recognition. It’d need DNA analysis and carbon-14 dating.

Social worker locusts swarmed out extolling virtues of well being, hope, trust, and bravery in the face of adversity, ethics, free choice and impending sales at outlet stores. People seeking outlets and outlet stores found solace in their ignorance of how the world worked on molecular, political, religious, economic, philosophical and cultural levels.

Long festering animosity and cultural bias danced circles. An invisible Orobus constricted their heart. Their myth was part idealism and realism standing on it’s head. Socially, culturally, geographically and emotionally deprived children listened, shaking their heads, learning a hard life lesson. One that escaped their parents.

Kids knew when adults were bullshitting them.

Scholars with erudite studious means to an end started speaking Arabic, reciting Sufi poetry and 1,001 stories about the rise and fall of civilizations. Stories written well before their meager time with hieroglyphics and cave paintings. Caves were full of survivors. Candles sales were brisk. 

“A tisket a tasket we need a casket,” sang multi-lingual children.

Historians, political scientists, talk show experts, taxi drivers, fortune tellers, beauticians, and morticians took calls on hotlines. The number of callers increased exponentially. Suicide search and rescue teams were put on alert. Citizens packed hospital emergency rooms. Medical schools increased graduation classes to meet needs.

Demand outstripped supply when it came down to fear and consumption.

Wow, that’s some heavy sociological shit. Media buys people.

Healing

“Is that why there is pain and delight in human  relationships?” a woman asked.

 “Yes,” the teacher said. “The collective unconscious is too big to live out our personality so we create outer figures, projections saying, Bear my anima for me. This creates the pain and suffering. When there is individuation there is a strong ego personality.”

“Please give us an example?” 

“Well, war is like a falling in love experience. The shadow, the dark side, exists with the bright side and is misunderstood. The shadow is projected in dreams. In war. Veterans carry images of losing, darkness, violence, destruction and evil inside them.”

“What is the healing tendency?”

“One must find meaning. It requires self honesty. They  respect dreams and the unconscious. They play. Fantasy is good, dynamic play. It is about symbolic levels. The collective unconscious is manifested in all cultures. This is why Jung was attracted to Asian symbols. He believed they existed near the bottom of their unconscious in an instinctual life.”

“People in the western cultures are afraid of death? Why?”

“Old age is a value feeling. Unfortunately, in some cultures it is perceived as insulting. It is the archetype of the old fool. It is fuller than the wise man. We create meaning. The imagination is the reality of the psyche combined with pure play. We listen to the wisdom of the dream. Everything we do comes from the heart.”