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.”

Taureg

Tuareg Berbers in flowing blue robes meandered through his dream.

A hustler on his bike materialized out of thin air.

“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes by bike. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”

“Why should I?” 

“Great morning prices.” 

Five hundred years ago this guy would have been on a camel in his burnoose tending his flock in the Sahara. He’d be planning to invade Spain, married to a beautiful Berber girl with dark seductive eyes, had ten kids and conquered the Iberian peninsula in his spare time.

Now he was on a 50cc imported European bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slick black hair and grinning with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.

Used to multiple dimensions and shifting frequencies the wandering ghost was passing through the transition machine being assaulted by monosyllabic well meaning idiots taking him for a fool.

Only the fool and children spoke the truth.

All the hustlers were released on parole for good behavior. They were out. They had no idea who, what, when, why, where and how he’d arrived in their jurisdiction. They lived in an inverted paradigm. He was a hunter gatherer of words and images. Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence — Metis — a hybrid form.

Metis

As an entomologist, a hunter-gatherer with Metis, a cunning intelligence, seeking visual epiphanies, he opened his aperture to f/1.4 and let in light. All of it. Blinding light, prisms of kaleidoscopes, muted spectrums in waves and particles guided his vision to see and stop time. 

Manipulate a tool. A well designed black foreign range finder. A camera obscura. It had the finesse of a magnifying glass, a Hubble telescope looking into an expanding infinite universe, illuminating distant black holes sucking matter into a void. He couldn’t see the black holes but he knew they were there.

It was one thing he carried. He started carrying it in Nam.

It was just a tool. It allowed him to stop time. Divide time in two.

The kairos of his eye allowed him to discriminate intuitively. An eye and a mirror. It refined his being, one with the subject, how silence worked, a detached observer, a photojournalist. How to disappear inside the scene, move with the quickness of a wild animal, see, visualize, anticipate the impending decisive moment stalking his prey with cunning. How to freeze, compose in the viewfinder, breath, squeeze, advance with a quick flick of the opposable thumb, load, unload, develop, fix, print, label, and file his work. Film was his prayer wheel.