Room 317, Yang-en University, Fujian, China

He liked her immediately.

She knew how to wear her sadness with dignity. It was a warm, comfortable security blanket woven in threaded hopes, dreams, lies, beauty and love. He didn’t feel pity for her potential rising like a bird leaves a branch toward higher sky.

Her meditation involved multiple personalities - student, wife, lover, worker, artist, laborer, dancer, commodity broker and teacher. She played an actress pretending to be someone else in her life’s play. Do not break character.

She was all he had at the moment. Time stopped for him swallowing all the tears she’d never cry. Perhaps it was deeply ingrained Confucian cultural modesty masks forbidding her the luxury of being open, real, honest, and human. Hide your true face, said Mask. Your face eats your mask.

She lived in a time warp where emotions were controlled and rationed by parents, Party leaders and invisible social ghosts.

A tight feeling constricted her throat. She wanted to scream, ”Help me please, I am dying of infinite inexorable sadness.”

No one heard her silent scream. Peasants, students and teachers were busy, busy, busy staring at cell phones reading/texting 5,000-year old characters. Word pictures.

Ideograms symbolized the idea of a thing without the sound used to articulate it. A day in the life peering down, down, down at a green ionized electronic glowing screen. Their universe encapsulated screaming screened electrons.

They were auditioning for walk-on roles as student and teacher character actors at a private Chinese business university of 15,000 students.

They needed to stand out, to find the essence of robotic behavior where daring wasn’t fatal. Express their inner emotional state with abject distraction. Where their self-esteem and courage nurtured support, respect and empathy in their longing.

They had latent desire.

Their struggle was for jobs, money and social position.

They’d accept financial filial piety responsibility for aging parents. If married they’d support four parents. The iron rice bowl theory of a guaranteed collective security network collected dust in history’s rubbish bin. It was discarded with state housing, state jobs, and state health care.

She lived in a Brave New World.

She knew this and failed to accept it. Her consciousness shift grasped fragmentary what ifs and maybes.

“If students spent as much time looking forward as they do behind they’d make amazing profound progress,” she thought, approaching old campus.

She inhaled the sweet scent of yellow, pink and red wild roses outside barred windowed classrooms near the stinking W.C. basement where school guards planted green vegetables in trash strewn plots.

She trimmed dead stems with her Tibetan knife, caressed a thorn piercing her heart and severed one fresh rose. She carried it through a gate and up uneven cement stairs evolving into a paradigm shift. She was always early and well prepared.

White chalk dust covered the teacher’s podium in room 317. She lived, breathed, swallowed and spoke white chalk dust. On a broken blue table in the corner was a small green plastic bucket filled with water. Dust floated on the surface.

She opened the window, picked up a torn crumpled rag, soaked it and squeezed it out.

She placed the rose in a cup of water and put it on the podium.

Stubs and nubs of white chalk littered the podium. She collected fragments of academic history, an ancient educational memory scattered by a previous teacher. They always left a mess of exculpatory evidence.

She placed them in a box of discarded chalk next to the water bowl and blew white dust scattering flying powder elements into the air dispersing particles. After wiping down the podium, she rinsed and squeezed out the rag, hanging it to dry on the windowsill. She looked out.

Rolling green Fujian hills and a large blue lake escaped her eyes. An old weather-beaten woman farmer behind a red brick wall tilled soil to plant vegetables. Motorbikes heavy with woven wicker baskets spilling vegetables, toilet paper, apples, gas canister and wide-eyed children chugged along a cracked cement road.

Ancient blue one-cylinder rusty miniature dump trucks loaded with white granite blocks rumbled past fuming diesel exhaust, throwing red clay dust into the air where it collided with white chalk dust escaping room 317.

It was a poor landlocked rural peasant infected paradise.

The Boss died last year. She attended his ceremony in the Great Hall at his campus villa. She wore white as a sign of respect for the dead. Her ghost persona sang a comfortable sadness past rows of flowers to the casket. She bowed. His thin white mustache face reflected glass smudged with fingerprints.

He reminded her of a Tang poet living in solitude inside a long Chinese painting where wind whispered songs with trees, mountains and stars.

After his death and passing tribute, students began holding hands in public. His private army of guards lost their power to intimidate, coerce and extort money from adolescents displaying affection in public. Guards roared around on bikes with flashing red lights looking important and, if motivated to survive, begged for jobs slinging hash, cleaning tables, and peeling vegetables behind student restaurants.

Hundreds of local villagers, officials, educational specialists, farmers, teachers and drones followed the funeral procession to a hill overlooking the campus.

They put him in the ground and exploded fireworks to scare away running capitalist dogs and ghosts. They returned to fields, kitchens, gardens, offices and classrooms.

A year later the school started building a grand tomb for their dead leader on a hill above the computer center building. It cost $261,591,79.

Small change.

Turning away from the window she selected yellow, blue, orange, and green chalk from a seldom-used box.

She wrote on the blackboard:

I hear and I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

She drew a picture of a face with bubble words - “I am an autodidact. You are responsible for your learning.”

She splashed rainbows, suns, faces, laughter's wild memory and imaginary abstract colors on a green canvas, barely scratching the surface of appearances.

An obnoxious loud rusty metal bell clanged for fifteen seconds. She turned and faced 100 university students. They were physically eighteen with the emotional maturity of a thirteen year old. This disparity explained why the university treated them like children to keep them in their childlike space place.

They had “Sports Meetings” on the “Playground.”

They had “Nap” time after lunch.

Maybe twenty-five cared about learning. Most just wanted to pass. Some might ask questions and develop a life long love for learning, knowledge and wisdom.

Anyone asking why was reported by spies to authorities and disappeared. Poof.

A rare one possessed an innate creative playful inquisitive nature. The majority slept with their eyes open. Lights on and no one home paradigm.

She smiled. Her sadness evaporated. She inhaled delicious dust and spoke in tongues.

“What color are your dreams?”

“Stop making sense!” yelled a student. “What’s the context? Critical thinking skills with humor and curiosity are forbidden! ”

They whined in unison, “We are worried about our marks, not learning the material. 60 is heaven. 59 is hello.”

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” she said.

“We know so much and understand so little,” said Curious, a bright star in the universe. "I want to be a waif when I grow up. A real person with dignity and self-respect.”

During meditation they heard an authoritarian Mandarin voice yelling next door.

“The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A Century is Nothing

Mandarin Duck, Cadiz, Spain

Omar remembered a daughter in Cadiz. Faith worked at Mandarin Duck selling paper and writing instruments. She practiced a calm stationary way.

“May I help you,” she said one morning greeting a bearded stranger. She knew he was a forcestero. His eyes linked their loneliness minus words. She averted her eyes. He was looking for quick painless intimacy and ink.

“I’d like a refill for this,” he said, unscrewing a purple cloud-writing instrument with a white peak.

Recognizing the Swiss rollerball writing tool she opened a cabinet and removed a boxes of thin and medium cartridges.

“One or many?” she said.

“Many. I don’t want to run dry in the middle of a simple true sentence.”

“I agree. There’s nothing more challenging than running empty while taking a line for a walk.”  

“Isn’t that the truth? Why run when you can walk? Are you a writer?”

“Isn’t everyone? I love watercolors, painting, drawing, sketching moistly.”

“Moistly?”

“I wet the paper first. It saturate colors with natural vibrancy.”

“With tears of joy or tears of sadness?”

“Depends on the sensation and the intensity of my feeling. What’s the difference? Tears are tears. The heart is a lonely courageous hunter.”

He twirled a peacock feather. Remembering Omar’s Mont Blanc 149 piston fountain pen, he said, “I also need a bottle of ink.”

“What color? We have black, blue, red. British racing green just came in.”

“Racing green! Cool. Hmm, let’s try it.” Omar would be pleased with this expedient color.

He switched subjects to seduce her with his silver tongue.

“Are you free after work? Perhaps we might share a drink and tapas? Perhaps a little mango tango?”

“I have other plans. I am not sexually repressed. I am liberated. I have a blind secret lover. Here you are,” she said handing him cartridges and inkbottle with a white mountain.

He paid with a handful of tears and a rose thorn. His ink stained fingers touched thin, fine and extra fine points of light. Faith and her extramarital merchandise were thin and beautiful. She was curious.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“It was nice meeting you. By the way, have you seen the film, Pan’s Labyrinth, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro?”

“No, but I’ve heard about it. Something about our Civil War in 1944, repression and a young girl’s fantasy.”

“Yes, that’s right. It’s really a beautiful film on many levels. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland.”

“Wow,” she said, “I loved that film, especially when Alice meets the Mad Hatter. Poor rabbit, always in a hurry, looking at his watch.”

“Funny you should mention time. A watch plays a small yet significant role in the Pan film.”

“Really? How ironic. I’ll have to see it.”

“Yes, it’ll be good for your spirit.”

He pulled out a Swizz Whizz Army stainless steel, water resistant Victoriabnoxious pocket watch.

“My, look at the time! Tick-tock. Gotta walk. Thanks for the ink. Create with passion.” He disappeared.

Faith sang a lonely echo. “Thanks. Enjoy your word pearls. Safe travels.”

Under the Banyan tree he sat on a park bench in weak sun, fed cartridges into a mirror and clicked off the safety. It was a rock n’ roll manifesto with a touch of razzmatazz jazz featuring Coltrane, Miles, Monk, Mingus and Getz to the verb.

A Century is Nothing

Moon Ghosts

The Andalusia moon would be full tomorrow.

Mad as hell caged hunting dogs howled high anxiety on western Sierra mountains with an excellent view of a white bone marble spinning through sky inside clouds of pleasure and pain as rolling valleys dreamed of planting and harvest.

Spanish men in sturdy boots carried tools of time’s labor through fields below the rising moon. When full they would not go to the fields, the river, the forests or the mountains after dusk. They owned the day and spirits controlled night. They respected magic.

Dogs bayed and howled through sunset into dusk of rising orange clouds as the moon rose through the either.

The men passed the cemetario on their way to the harvest. It was quiet there. The small church door was open, it’s scared thick and heavily bolted brown wood a thick piece of old resistance. The alter decoration was a simple Virgin Mary crying blood. The altar cloth was changed daily by a woman in black doing her duty saying her life’s penance through intention and devotion.

A forcestero, a person from outside the pueblo, a stranger with a camera passed her and she thought she recognized his shadow.

”A ghost. Yes, that’s all it was, a figment of a soul visiting friends.”                                 

She blessed herself twice with bird-winged fingers watching men walk to their land. It was the end of a warm winter day and the sun had disappeared with Egyptian vultures in heaven. She locked the black gate leading to a series of crypts.

The stranger was here yesterday doing his reconnaissance. Today he worked inside the second metal gate, inside the sanctuary, inside the crypt area. Four walls held the departed. Engraved stones revealed names, dates, places, memories, children, and adults back to 1896. He made images under the green smoky eyes of a Siamese cat on a red tiled roof.

Workers had left their crypt construction bricks, cleaning solution, black buckets and rags in empty crevices. Rectangles waited for ornate boxes. Boxes made in a casket factory miles and lives away. Caskets with handles for hands. Brown and black religiously lined caskets with satin pillows. Pillows softer than language mumbled through tears of the living seeing everything before trembling eyes with hearts beating like drums.

After church services in the village of 2,300 caskets were dispatched in long black cars with wreaths of infinite sweet smelling floral varieties to the black gate and carried on shoulders of strong men past the open church door, a palm tree and through a black gate on rusty hinges and slid into an empty domain.              

The cold gray cement cavities had brick ceilings. The forcestero stared inside an empty space. It was long. It was empty and it was cold. It stretched to eternity.

He stepped out of death's shadow. He heard men in fields using their tools on hard winter ground. They were above the ground. “Any day above ground is a good day,” a ghost whispered.

He listened and went to work.

In fast fading light he imaged interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their connection to pueblo life. He focused down cavities and shells of rectangular rows of empty passages. They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Waiting for air to carry them to listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious silent with collective breathing. 

“The rest is silence,” said Shakespeare.

The woman turned away from men and their shadows bent over fields moving rocks toward dreams and fence plans, pruning dead growth from olive trees along a river and saw the ghost working among shadows of the dead.

Her husband was there. She held his final whisper in her silent heart. “I almost wish it were true.”

She was the silent moon above her bone white memory, a spirit guide serving spirits. She joined the moon.

When he finished his work the forcestero flew away from the cemetario, river stones and fields where men worked their trust, his vapor rising to the moon.            

Their spirit energies manifested their destiny with the moon as dogs howled below them.

 A Century is Nothing

Invent a God

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

Everything you know is a lie.

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”

Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Zero on 9/11.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing

Life Essentials Post 9/11

Tribal adults and children survivors of 9/11 sifted through leftovers searching for sustainable resources. They needed essentials: food, shelter, water, air, sex and stories.

"This is the day of my dreams," said a girl with a diamond in her mind watching fireworks explode over the Willamette Valley in Eugene on the fourth of July. Her wisdom mind reflected 10,000 things.

Yangon, Burma

Omar opened his book, traced braille and read.

“The honorable monkey mind trickster wandered through her expansive museum sensing pure intention, motivation and reflections. If she is not careful and paying complete attention the monkey mind will run wild splashing green jealous slashes, red anger strokes, and blue attachment colors on her beautiful canvases. While some ignored it at their peril others respected monkey mind and kept an eye on it with respect and dignity.”

“It was a mindfulness,” said a woman sketching shadows.

"Now I see why Picasso painted Guernica in 1937," said a blond kid kicking stones, raising dust.

"Everything we love is going to die."

"Yes, we accept loss forever."

She cleaned her canvas with a camelhair brush while leaning against a wall of sound. The echo was deafening. Silence is the loudest noise in the world.

"Picasso was a great thief," said a museum curator. "When you see his work you see the influence of all great artists."

"The ancient texts predicted this," said Other, a seer.

He sat in a pile of splintered wood sharpening the edge of his knife on a small piece of flint taken from his old sweater pocket. Sunlight glistened off his finely honed Spanish blade as he worked it under the skin of a pear. 

"They talked about choices and unintended consequences," said a woman digging for water.

"I’m thirsty," said Little Nino.

"Be patient my child."

"Yes, said Jamie. "It takes faith."

"You can’t take faith to the bank," replied a girl.

"True," said Other, "faith doesn’t know where the bank is."

"A bank is what holds the river together," said a child.

"Faith is a woman in this tribal tale."

"It will take more than Faith," someone said stumbling over piles of discarded twisted logic.

"Speaking of falling faulty twin towers, it will require firm resolve, an unyielding capacity for vengeance, retaliation, and retribution in this living memory," said Lloyd, an unemployed insurance underwear writer from classless London. His three-piece Brooks Brothers suit was in shreds.

"It’s because of the amygdala," counseled a doctor.

"What’s that?" said Little Nino.

"It’s a location of the brain where fear lives. It’s a knot of nerve cells and tissues. We think anger lives there as well but we don’t know for sure."

“Yes," said Alfredo Jari, “memory is the duration of the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words, any internal obstruction of the flow of the mobile molecules of the liquid, any increase in viscosity is nothing other than consciousness.”

“Can you put that in plain English?" pleaded a lit major.

“Yes I can but I won’t.”

“Their collective archetypical memory was heavier than collective unconscious and lighter than consciousness,” said an analyst named Jung.

Lighter than wind.

Fat democratic spectators cheered from sidelines. Consumers swallowed bitter tears of greed and desire.

Let’s go shopping to reduce our fear of poverty, said nations of sheep.

“The archetype can't be whole or complete if it doesn’t allow for the expression of both good and evil in the conscious or unconscious,” drooled a sedated American soldier in a VA hospital wheelchair. He needed an exit strategy.

“More drugs, nurse!” he screamed. “I coulda’ been somebody. I could'a been contender!”

All he received was his pitiful wailing voice echoing in empty chambers.

On a movie set medicated military reservist wives dressed as cheerleaders jumped up and down in wild mind agitated states of abandon. They filed for divorce after taking lovers while their husbands looked for improved body armor in oppressive Middle East desert heat.

They were the undereducated doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.

Other visualized their death while poverty’s heirs prayed that instant replay would change reality. 

A Century is Nothing