Shame sings in Tibet - TLC 60

My name is Li Bow Down. I am in charge of the Tibetan Monastery Re-Education Through Reform Program.

My masters called me out of retirement. I was screwing concubines playing mahjong and enjoying Fujian tea with friends at Shangri-La Free Land Resort. Authority ordered me to get my old ass back to Lhasa and take care of THE problem.

They gave me a fire extinguisher to douse immolating monks. Ah, the ignobility.

Give a man a match and they’re warm for a moment.

Set them on fire and they’re warm for the rest of their life.

Li showed Lucky a grainy B&W image. Here’s an uncensored image of what happens to people in the pogrom program. See this woman. She is denouncing her family, friends and most important, herself in public. We are big on shame.

We are the masters. Peasants are the puppets.

“Shame on you,” yelled 1.7 billion puppet people. “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

This is one of our most popular and effective methods of creating a harmonious society. It works wonders because memory serves me well and it does, mind you, serve me like a slave.

We’ve been coercing people for 5,000 years. Pick your favorite dynasty.

We use to put them in wooden stocks with their crimes painted on paper necklaces and parade them through town. They confessed. We call it self-criticism. Samzen. They were denounced in public. Talk about blatant social disapproval.

Now we just shoot them down like dogs in the street.

Maybe you think I am joking, making this up. I didn't make it to the top of the egalitarian scrap heap by bowing down to big nosed foreigners telling me how to maintain Control and Power in Tibet to keep monks serfs and slaves quiet.

They are all illiterate peasants.

As you know because I say so the Lhasa monks provoked the young, naive, scared, armed and alarmed People's Reactionary Liberation soldiers on March 10th in Year Zero.

The rest is history, well, not real history because we rewrite history when it suits our propaganda purposes. It’s easy and convenient. Speak memory.

Life is cheap here. More tea?

History is the symptom. People are the disease.

The Language Company

draw the dead - TLC 54

Below shattered shouting Fujian mountains a patient Maija village artist sketched the dead near the university where Lucky and Leo biked through forests along narrow dirt paths seeing black and orange butterflies mate in dust as farmers planted, harvested and threshed rice. Women lugged exploding white cauliflower in bamboo baskets suspended on pliant poles balanced on emaciated shoulders.

Easy riders zoomed past athletic sweat shop shoe factories filled with morose girls and bent-backed forgotten women huddled over clacking Butterfly sewing machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until they reached a steep narrow street where they entered a small shop to enjoy high quality Fujian green tea with a purveyor of leaves. 

Uphill were red slat wooden home/shops, street noodles, rice, doughy steamed buns, appliances, a primary school filled with teachers screaming Blend In and hacking butchers.

The artist sketched dead people. His stoic art decorated family altars. Dusty faded ancestor images in temples and home altars ate bowls of fresh fruit and burning innocence. Death worship is a cultural way of life. 

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Remember ABC - TLC 37

Said the Director of Sales at TLC.

“What’s that mean?” said a Kurdish beggar girl in Bursa one freezing night. To pay a Mafioso extortion bill her family threw her to the wolves. She hawked blue tissue packages to a sad man playing a flute sitting near a broken escalator above a homeless woman in rags setting fire to a pile of manuscripts trying to stay warm. Have mercy.

“Always be closing.”

Lucky sat in a blue plastic Metro chair zooming through a rainy morning. Mountain peaks meditated in white clouds above rocky-forested slopes and golden mosque spires. Other than two cheerful speech-enabled women, passengers were cold, distant, lost, bored and going somewhere intangible or else they’d be homeWaiting For Godot.

Tracks sloped down concrete edges. Blurring trees disappeared. Cars slid into darkness as florescent beams glided lighting bolts on steel tracks. Black click clack music reached an underground station with immaculate white tiles, benches and a large steel box holding bagged sweets. Comatose women in floral scarves grasping plastic bags studied heavy territorial shoes built for comfort. Station man in a green and yellow uniform manipulating a broom pushed history.

An automated Metro voice announced a stop. Doors opened. People departed. People boarded. Doors closed. Metro rolled on.

Communist party loudspeakers lashed to trees boomed across Lenin Park Lake in Hanoi:

Enjoy the ride. You’re only on it once.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collected everything.

The Bursa Sales Director resigned the next day. He had a falling out with management. It was always about numbers. Sell. Sell. Sell. He said he had 210 for February. They said 175.

That ominous day the TLC owner arrived from Constantinople, parked his Benz and entered the center of the universe where everything happened similtanesilly.

The receptionist freaked out and called the Sales Director.

Marketing man #2 escorted Boss through the center of Earth. He looked around. Purchased from Leaf Branch Growth in Dublin for $700,000 the three-month old franchise didn’t meet his standards. He had a corporate mentality and wasn’t a happy little camper. No clocks, broken glass doors, no wall art, out-of-order computers, badly peeling lamination work on desks and so on. “Shoddy half-finished work, even if I do say so.”

Lucky and the soon to be extinct director were enjoying a munch lunch with sheesh-kabobs. The director’s cell sang.

“He’s here,” said the receptionist.

“Who?”

“Sand Dune. He just blew in.”

“Oh no. I’m not dressed for work.”

Buy low sell high.

Revealing his true character he ran away. After a final e-mail to headquarters about numbers he trashed his office, yelled adios to the staff and disappeared into a subterranean cavern catching a Metro home sweet home.

Women staff cried on the sidewalk facing the center. A girl dragging a metal cart filled with cardboard and broken computers needing an OS surmised someone died. Serious departed tears. Tearful women smoked in sunlight. One tear reflected 360 degree blue sky. Melting mountain snow returned to work murmuring gossip and fear.

“Who’s next?”

The center’s magic numbers were now two sales, two receptionists, two native personal tutors (one from Trabzon - see footnotes) and two imported barbarians.

“We are understaffed, overworked and underpaid,” lamented a joyful personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep, the older, from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French, Esperanto and Cello. She cherished seven magic stones from Mudanya on the Marmara Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her Kurdish creation stories. Her language was out loud and outlawed by scared totalitarian Ankara politicians. Kurdish speakers were decapitated in public with a jeweled word sword every Friday at high noon.

“Bend over,” said Teflon Ergonomics, the Prime Minister and de facto dictator. Playing economic prosperity songs to poor uneducated Soma coal mineworkers, illiterate villagers and wealthy middle class voters he bought the presidency in late 2014. It’s never too late to be president, he said. Manipulation and I can really run the Deep State now.

 TLC had Janus heads. One head was the owner.

“Hey,” he said, “it’s a business this language and money acquisition cycle.”

He called Hire-n-Fire, the maintenance manhole cover job in Instant Bull and ordered him to fix every little thing. He returned and did a partial job. It gave him an excuse to come again in a juicy sandwich with Russian dressing.

“Someone’s chasing their tale here,” said Omar, a vinaigrette vignette guide. “I love fragments of true authenticity. It’s all I trust.”

 *

L said to Z: There’s an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. “Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

Temporary management art - TLC 35

Bursa brought in a young teacher named Instant Bull. He didn’t last long. He missed the nightlife, friends and mommy who after 100 tearful years still did everything for her little baby boy. He was spoiled like everyone. He ran home pleading, Mother, may I grow up to be free and courageous? No. Go to your room, no dinner and no social network time bandits. Self-censorship is everything we believe and practice with mind body and soul so shut your trap.

Management brought in Spin, a schizophrenic alcoholic from Down Under. Night after night he carpet-bombed the teachers’ apartment with demonic deliriums.

“They’re here, they’re here,” he wailed in catatonic fits thrashing on the floor flailing nuclear arms into space. “Help me. They will kill me. Look, can’t you see them?”

“What can I do about this idiot?” said a scared shitless rail thin female Turkish/English teacher on temporary duty. The brilliant neurotic girl from Hoagie Sophia, her black hair clogging shower drains, addicted to TV, sugar and perpetual sadness missed her mother.

Communicating through sewer channels she told Constantinople management Spin had to go. They yanked him out like a bad molar.

She’d been with the company for five years as a Personal Tutor doing bi-linguine translations. Her English placation skills enabled students with false modesty. She’d quit for a translation job with another Istanbul company, discovered it wasn’t so hot after all and returned to TLC dragging her miscalculation.

Now she worked as a management spy. Istanbul gave her a title: Director of Personal Tutors. She traveled to nine centers evaluating and training tutors. She knew the system. Her social skills were shit. She was the perfect corporate drone head. 

Lucky met her in Ankara where she spied for a month. She spent her time chatting with her yet to be met and later to be left boyfriend in Johannesburg. “I hate Ankara.”

“If you want to play the blues you gotta pay your dues,” said Lucky.

“I’m tired of dealing with shallow minds above and below me,” she said sipping tea on the balcony. Bamboo listened.

“I am one of them, sent around to keep an eye spy on barbarian natives. They told me to train the tutors who’ve seen through my transparent disguise. I’m not fooling anyone but myself. I got the promotion I wanted and they used me.”

“Welcome to The Dream Machine.”

“In the future I will escape to Johannesburg and live with a paroled heroin junkie running a safari eco-outfit. I will wear an orange day glow jumpsuit emotionally attached to my despondent mother in Istanbul. Mama spends her life chained to a sink filled with life’s dirty dishes.”

Late one day as Lucky tended rose petals, thorns and fed Winter Hawk day old bread annoying idle businessmen slouched against a BMW downstairs yelling, “Where in the hell are all these crumbs coming from?” the director called from Constantinople.

“Would you like to move to Bursa?”

“Yes. When?”

“Next Monday. We need stability and maturity in the new center.”

“The center is a spiral of stardust. I’ll bring Bamboo. Thanks for the chance.”

His life was walking, writing, photography, helping others be more human, and spreading prosperity. Nurturing Bamboo as a calm lunatic he passed through with detached discernment. He was Mr. Fix-it, Mr. Dependable and a stable element in the periodic language table.

After he settled into Bursa, management realized they needed more temporary help. They brought in an experienced sadomasochistic Australian misogynist from another center to manage the show for ten days. He was fifty, a divorced womanizer with relationship and alcohol issues, an aggressive fool pawing female students and chatting with his twenty-one year old girlfriend in city E. He knew the TLC system and little else. He had a long running feud with management. They fired him.

The revolving TLC door circled through ineffective zones.

* 

 “People here in Turkey,” said Zeynep, “are good at two things, eating and sitting. Sleeping and fighting are close behind.”

“Yes,” said a rag and bone merchant boiling clothing and animal skins for Omar’s palimpsests, “we are surrounded by fools and incompetents. Reading and writing is for people with time, money, critical thinking skills, courage, humor and a future. Not to mention social intelligence. Natives make perfect excuses. They celebrate their perceived victimization and prolonged adolescence with self-pity and loathing.”

“Have you eaten yet,” asked Curious. “We always ask people about food first in China.”

“It’s the same here,” replied Zeynep, “satisfying basic needs.”

A chorus of 15,001 Chinese university students sang, “The less I do, the less likely I am to make mistakes, and the fewer mistakes I make, they less I am criticized. It’s easier to do nothing.”

“Thanks for a long sentence filled with verbs and truth-value meaning,” said a Cambodian orphan caressing a Burmese ruby reflecting 10,000 things in an elegant universe.

“My name is May Be,” said a Turkish woman filing for divorce after centuries of emotional totalitarian terror. She faced her family, friends and strangers with fresh self-esteem.

“He lied to me. I saw through his deceit and irresponsibility. I sent him home to his mama. When he realized his stupid shallow emptiness he ran back pleading, exhorting, crying, bribing and threatening me with personal, physical and emotional disaster, trouble, death and so forth. I didn’t buy his song and dance. It’s rare for a woman here to file for divorce.”

Winter Hawk sang a single throated bird song: freedom’s knowing how big your cage is.

“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” said Zeynep doodling on papyrus.

“Memories are for navigating now,” said Lucky. “What I’m telling you is true, or at least as much of it as I remember. I know I have false memories. Everyone does. Imagine people in a world without memory. No past. No things, objects, identification, grasping or attachment. Only patterns and sensation forms like flowing water or butterfly wings brushing air. Living in an eternal present.”

“You are brilliant. Let’s practice ZaZen.”

After meditating on the nature of comedic existence they witnessed human temerity, guilt, fear, shame and humiliation. Heavy sadness. Adult maniac manikins wore artificial death masks decorated with perpetual mediocre distracted confusion.

He’d seen it in the Middle Kingdom as Li Po and Tu Fu's poetic ink danced on parchment, expanding nature’s sublime story.

He absorbed it in Asia Minority seeing bored, tired idle people swallowing Xanax by the handful, eating grilled meat, playing backgammon and twiddling idle retired thumbs as Metro cars crammed with morose living dead idle humans dressed in black mirroring idle heart-minds zoomed to metallic industrial Ostim wasteland o-zones outside Ankara before returning at midnight filled with carved wooden caskets of wasted youth from the never-ending war in Serious on the Syrian border.

Gravediggers and headstone carvers enjoyed steady work with dead matter.

Plot is a character - TLC 34

 “I will tell you the secret,” said a silver shop owner in Istanbul. “Be honest. If you rip someone off, if you cheat them in the slightest, you will lose them and then you will lose others.”

“Thanks,” said Lucky, “it’s a karmic lesson. I will share life’s secret with you. Laughter.” Wind-spirits howled.

“I am a gelotologist,” said Bamboo conducting a careful study of laughter. Ha, ha.

He wandered with Leica and Nikon tools. Visual experiments. Shoot through things. Breathe and squeeze. Smile and sit still. Patience. Dance around your subject. Focus on spectators at an event. Move like a ninja. Geometry. Spontaneity. Hunt and trap. Embrace extreme situations. Be an invisible non-shadow.

The Museum of Archeology in Istanbul offered historical perspectives of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian sagas singing civilizations.

Cuneiform writing symbols told Sumerian stories. Scribes etched symbols in wet clay with narrow sharp reeds.

Greek and Roman statues surveyed visitors.

Greeks idealized the human form.

Romans focused on realism.

Bust heads.

Apollo, Aphrodite, Pan, Marcus Aurelius, Sappho the poet.

* 

Human-propelled factory buses roared around Bursa collecting worker aunts and uncles intent on daily toil and simple job satisfaction inside production and consumption machines. Rusty neighborhood loudspeakers imported from Hanoi exhorted:

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Accelerate production.

Turkish/French car companies and textile factories proliferated with a bumper crop of shirts and pants.

Asian babies had babies.

Fat happy housewives dusted, mopped, moped, morphed and scrubbed lives. Simmer tomatoes. Women rolling grape leaves filled with their husband’s crushed nuts gossiped in alleys near crumbling stone and thatch homes below the Ulus Roman citadel overlooking the Plain of Jars laid waste by relentless U.S. bombing in a nine-year covert war.

They destroyed lives to save them from future suffering.

TLC in Bursa made arrangements for a new teacher. TLC went through teachers like a hot knife through butter or a serrated scalpel through cancerous tissue.

“To cut or not to cut,” is the literary polishing process, said Omar.

“Caress one line of sharp description,” said Zeynep. “I love divine details the reader can visualize or imagine. My job is to give you the situation. Your job is to experience it. Recreate the human experience as truthfully as possible.”

“Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals,” said Bamboo. “Plot is not something that happens to a character. Plot is a character dragging others around.”

“Save the strong, lose the weak,” whispered a word surgeon walking their rounds from Tibet to Sichuan to Fujian to Ankara before Bursa along The Silk Road with Doner and Pide, surviving on handfuls of Lao sticky rice, iced java, dreams and sliced diced tomatoes while transporting Bamboo baggage filled with laughter’s fugue as Amnesia, smashing chopsticks wrung out wash and wear drip dry holidays near flashing factories before zooming along Metro subway tracks where world weary pedestrians completed a simple sentence with a full plate of shopping nouns dancing inside fire breathing verbal ovens stoking blind love’s fire feeling fear and inevitable death closing in for the kill before racing home to mother, father, sister, brother, and grandparents decked out in traditional morals, values and ethics strangling medicated ma-scared necks before handing someone life’s spare change by showing a gentle reader’s fragile receipt after paying at the Cosmic Bowling Alley for strikes and spares dude, and were you aware Ataturk the great father liberator of Turkey in 1923 has a green train carriage car parked at the main Ankara station?

It was a gift from Adolph The Further, everything surreal and imaginary in Turkey where idle men stood around bored, unemployed and uneducated drinking brown tea massaging a microscopic silver spoon around a rim swirling deep into a universal void of sugar stars clanging scrap metal against fractured glasses destroying perfect mathematical cubes manufactured in a filthy factory - so a female inspection engineer with a Masters in Food Quality Control and a TLC student whispered, “don’t use the sugar” to Lucky in strict confidence across a plate of Alfredo pasta one winter night a traveler before they attended a wedding in an underground Ulus cavern filled with Roma Gypsy musicians playing illegal anvil hammer and dulcimer music as wild free dancers and families celebrated an arranged marriage near testosterone driven shy lovers grasping hands below tables craving privacy as their short flaming life illuminated fatal attraction desire passion lust suffering loss courage joy gratitude and grand illusions.

Two elderly women in silk floral headscarves smoked exploding droplets plummeting from icicles on tiled roofs above the cafe where Omar released indigo ink flowing from his 149 fountain pen magnifying shadows seeing with a blind why eye.

L(if)e. No why.

Falling water molecules was music to his ears. If only it were true, he sighed.

The Language Company