Immigrant Story - The Mark - TLC 76

After a year eating Turkey with a side order of Mudanya olives he landed in Jakarta. If you don’t have an onward ticket blue uniformed ones shake you down. You know the drill. Extract a crisp green C note. Insert into a worn passport. Slide it across a counter. Man smiles. His golden shoulder braid shudders. He gestures just a minute.

You stand aside as Europeans and ill-informed internally displaced desiccated immigrants stream past paying with their lives to receive an entry stamp for thirty days before heading to another gold braided computer man.

Your man comes out. He escorts you through The Quest-ion Line. Incoming. Quest-ions screaming help ran for cover. He hands your documents to another gold braided scam man.

He says, Wait outside the NO ENTRY zone. You observe men, women and orphans waiting for one last stamp, one final slim to nil chance for freedom from tyrannical vagabondism a disease with no known antidote.

Computer friend nods, accepts documents and does his thing. Opens removes cash slides passport through a scanner darkly stamps it hands it back. Hands down. Deal. Ace high. Genius returns it to you, Good-bye my little butterfly.

You grab your bag and hit the bricks.

230,000,000 (+/-) humans struggling to survive with a little luck eat you with their eyes.

On one side are 1,001 females with Women For Hire signs. They swing brooms, caress irons, dance with mops, feed infants, hang washrags, burn trash and stir woks. Visual acuity. Rancid re-cycled cooking oil penetrates universal collective unconscious. 

On the other side are 1,001 males with I Will Do Anything placards.

Small print reads, “I can clean, drive, escort, bribe, talk, build, hammer, make bricks, carry bricks, stack bricks, break bricks, sleep, eat, pretend I am busy and freelance vaginal come and go construction projects are my specialty.” 

A gamelan orchestra of eighteen copper gongs and brass symbols creates a melodic meditative refrain with gentle persuasion. You follow effervescent notes into the dark night of the soul with lost quest-ions whispering to you, The Mark.

Quest-ions tout you:

Want a maid? Want a driver? Want a cleaner? Want a cook? Want transport? Want boom-boom? Want a room? Want a job? Where do you go? Where are you from? Want a quick fix? Want an exit permit? Want a new passport? Want inoculations? Want to get lucky? Want to meet my sister? Want a butterfly? Want to change money? Want to die here? Want to be cremated here?

Want to hang out with talking monkeys near Ubud? Want to eat? Want to meet my friends, liars, cheats and thieves? Want water? Want a map? The map’s not the territory. Want to take a chance? Want an answer? Want a way out? Want love? Want massage? Need AIDS or HIV? Want a friend?

Want boredom and loneliness and alienation your highness? Want a guide? Want a SIM card? Want a taxi? Want ice?

Want to join a Brave New World? Want to be a charter member in a New World Order manipulated by politicians, greedy geo-political banks and fraudulent financial institutions? Want a secret identity theory and off shore tax-free bank account? Want to torture humans with water molecules in a friendly country’s secret black prison?

Want to die before you get old? Want to fade away? Do you have plan tomorrow? Where do you go? Where do you go tomorrow? What’s you (sic) name? Where is this line of quest-ion-ing going? Are you the hammer or the nail? How did you get here? Why, tell me why. What is life?

All the quest-ion words were brought in for interrogation. Zeynep, a savage detective looked for motive and opportunity.

A ghost plays a six-string Kemil instrument in shadows. You follow phantom notes into the night.

Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

The Language Company

 

Before Indonesia - TLC 75

Behind reinforced plate glass Istanbul airport windows near conveyor belts and x-ray security machines was everyone who stayed behind - guards, cleaners and Konya dervish dancers.

An attractive thin-legged blond duty free clerk finished her day shift and stripped down for her baboon floorshow at Kitty Cat Night Club. Get down sweet thing, said a Turkish Deep State operative. Shake your moneymaker, said his bodyguard.

She drifted through life with clowns, misfits, literary outlaws, gravediggers, social deviants and manic depressed tourists waiting for airline workers to clean toilets, load beverages and MSG processed food onto Luftwaffe flight 3343 destined for Bang Cock as late afternoon light slashed through terminal dungeon zones of serenity.

“Travel isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s an adventure,” an American father said to his whining son on a rooftop cafe overlooking the Phosphorous. Staring at golden needle mosques, blue waves and catamarans sailing the seven seas they slathered red jam on toast.

After a year soaking in a wet misty Turkish hammam, this abject polite and emotionally distracted future tense void-like dream sequence passed through frequencies where idle people sat around showing no incentive and no desire to be creative or think for themselves as if their loss, their fate was always a long now.

They’d failed to take control of their lives as willing victims in life’s short sad joke.

One was the sullen masked security woman in her 20’s, forced by economics to meet and greet departing strangers. Lucky put his Eagle pack on the conveyor.

A laptop, 120-year old Monte pocket watch out, Leica rangefinder and cell phone went in a plastic tray. Stuff rolled away. She approached. “Do you have any knives in your luggage?”

“Yes,” he said to her death mask, “in the checked bag. They are from Tibet. They are silver with turquoise and coral stones. The handles are yak bone streaked with brown earth colors.”

Insecure security personnel wore death masks to confuse angry spirits eating incense minus verifiable identification. 

Her mask said, I could care less, I'm so tired, so anxious, so bored about everything in general and nothing in particular I could shit a kebab sausage shaped like a small powerful package of torpedo feces grilled to perfection in a tomato based food culture served with onions and wedges of lemon garnished with sour reality. 

“Open your bags,” said her edgy mouth behind cotton fibers.

“Which bag would you like me to open, big or small?”

“The small one and where’s your passport?”

She’d never have one. He handed it to her and she really wanted to be important, self-sufficient, self-reliant, strong, courageous, adventurous, and other impossible to imagine allegorical brave daring metaphorical nightmares in her short sweet life controlling the situation with this Bardo traveler free on parole from a dusty Byzantium archeological dig caressing pottery shards, glazed Ottoman tiles, castles and mosques while stirring musical sugar cubes in brown tea and weaving magic carpets in Kurdish villages under perpetual attack by Predator drones released by aggressive profit motivated war mongers to keep the anxious populace guessing and manipulated 24/7 by terrorist media FEAR propaganda machines controlled by moronic corrupt inefficient political idiots serving as an excuse to waste money on expensive military toys as global environmental, educational and health care systems collapsed under the weight of corruption, greed and eight billion starving mouths. 

After dusting off Patriot mussels and fixed-wing Turkish military aircraft for Syrian no-fly zones, hand carved Meerschaum pipes, glazed ceramics and Roman ruins he unzipped the small Eagle bag.

Winter Hawk flew free.

Lone Wolf ran free.

Shocked back to a fake reality she rummaged. She found music. She couldn’t hear beatific notes blooming along broken-hearted trails of Turkish and Kurdish women fleeing from arranged marriages.

She didn’t hear singing, keening women drumming soil above a wooden Ankara casket six feet down or melodies composed at transcendental borders coalescing with feminine songs birthing, cultivating children like seeds after a quick rain. 

She went through the motions.

“You can go,” she ordered in a short, fast deadly sentence.

Go was music to his ears.

The Language Company

 

Peasants Day

“We are the only animals who laugh,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “and we are the only animals who know we are going to die. We imagine our death, our mortality. This fills some with dread, psychological neurosis, lack of purpose. For others it’s a release, a joy, and a dance. Freedom is unconditional. I was born laughing.”

“I was born dead and slowly came to life. Are you a clown? Perhaps a clown fish?” I asked.

“Look in your dream mask mirror,” she said. “Not all the clowns are in the circus.”

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.”

“Let’s dance. Let’s meditate on the process of death.”

My name is Beauty. Death is my mother. I have no tongue.

Your mask eats your face.

Look Back - TLC 73

Asian survivors looked back with reinforced healthy doubt and fear rather than face courageous futures.

In Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia genocide/war survivors said more to a person’s back than their face. Leaving was abandoned. Bye-bye and good luck to your family.

Zeynep and Rita turned a page.

Rice grains in a broken bamboo basket sustained crows blacker than shadow faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Rita, their eyes dance over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice or staring at palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding stilted bamboo thatched homes as naked children playing above buried landmines sail dream kites.

They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. Patient forever they wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON observing minute cosmic details and subtle imperceptible movements across miles of flat land mined country penetrating thick green foliage.

Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers feeling fluttering lids and soft retinas tremble with visual sensory information data sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient.

Watching without seeing is their Zen.

Their life is a sitting meditation.

Seeing without understanding is their life.

I don’t know and I don’t care.

Tropical heat destroys my DNA.

Living in perpetual internal darkness they cultivate essential immense critical survival intentions. They stare far away with telescopic acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, dancing making music and singing.

Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent.

They watch past another person during a conversation.

They watch each other’s back.

We survived by paying attention, said survivors. That’s life.

They face watching beyond wild where everything known and unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

         Everything goes and nothing happens.

         Everything happens and nothing goes.

One anxious dreaded moment in their life recognizes fear. Disguised as ignorance and indecision fear asks is it safe?

What if never entered the conversation.

What is the difference between watching and seeing, asked Zeynep expanding passive and active verb signifiers.

Real eyes realize real lies, said Leo.

Survivors read sky for rain. Survivors read mad dogs yapping, growling, fighting and fucking in deserted black broken streets without electricity, said Rita. Screaming yelling male adolescents and genocide survivors read kick boxers fighting on national television every Saturday/Sunday afternoon at 2. It’s standing room only in packed tea/java houses.

                                             KILL HIM!

                                             KILL HIM!

                                             KILL HIM!

Killing as Entertainment. I love this, said Death. They are really into Power, Humiliation and Revenge. Reminds me of millions shouting their anger at killing fields while murdering 1.7 million. If I kill enough maybe I will survive. No one kills the killer. You prove your ability and allegiance by killing. Don’t push your luck, said Authority.

Violence never changes only the players, said Zeynep.

It’s our latent repressed anger gene, said Rita. Denial will kill you and anger is expensive.

Women meditate talk and laugh. They live longer.

Boy men scream at televisions.

Idle youth squeezing pores waiting for Godot read acne in a motorcycle mirror. They haven’t seen the play. They are the players.

No one shows up, nothing happens.

Hungry girls wait for Freedom at night.

Destiny rested as noon heat waves reflected improbable shimmering anxieties. Sad working girls washed beige underwear in a lazy brown river. Water’s exhilaration introduced a cloud. Thunder clapped. Lighting flashed. Tears flooded dirt roads.

Banlung children wearing red and white Santa caps dragged expectant mothers toward dusty chrome plated display cases in the market. This one! This one!

“Your life is an art project. The world is one big art museum. Buy a ticket. Take the ride. Yeah, yeah,” said a UXO worker in a bright yellow Mines Advisory Group (MAG) vest fanning soil with a detector near The Plain of Jars outside Phonsavan, Laos.

The Language Company

Mahliang, Myanmar

You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.

Fog shrouds trees before dawn on a chilly morning.

Mornings are fraught with mist as an orange burning orb rises over forests and rice paddies. Crows caw sing wing wind songs above monks chanting sutras at a pagoda. A bell reverberates.

Leaves dance free from The Tree of Life.

This raw, direct immediate experience reminds a traveler of Phonsavan, Laos, near the Plain of Jars, long ago and far away in the winter of 2013. A Little BS came of it.

At 5:45 a.m. below trees with yellow leaves, 100 grade ten female students with dancing flashlights trace a dirt path. They've escaped the comfort of hostel dreams.

They dance toward classrooms and a cavernous dining hall for rice and vegetables. Hot soup if they are lucky. Mumbled voices scatter singing birds.

Thirty-five grade ten female student voices reciting scientific lessons at 6:15 a.m. echo from classrooms at the Family Boarding School.

Dystopian wrote memorization. Utilitarian. Repetition.

Learning by heart.

It’s not about learning. It’s about passing the exam and marks.

Vomit the material.

The wisdom of the heart is deeper and truer than knowledge in the head.

They drone on huddled, hunched over wooden benches in jackets and yarning caps with swinging tassel balls. A bundled teacher scratches white words on a blackboard – Today is the day of my dreams.

A narrow garden of hanging pink, orange, purple, white orchids reflect shadows before scattered light sings. An office girl sprays H20 diamonds on petals and green leaves.

A distant solitary bell reverberates.

Monks chant sutras at a pagoda.

A thin stick broom sweeping world dust cleans perception.

Two doctor brothers own the fifteen-year old school. They speak good English and are friendly, resourceful and gentle. Their parents are also doctors.

Zones are under construction - new rooms and a kitchen for foreign teachers near the dining room. A gym, library and science labs are being built between long two-story buildings with eight classrooms per level.

Old trees prosper. Crows and dogs scavenge garbage.

Men and boys hammer, saw, dig, carry lumber, bricks, and rebar iron and mix cement. Boys shovel dirt from trenches. Women shoulder excavated dirt in bamboo baskets.

In the shade of 300-year old trees girls sort piles of plastic water bottles and Styrofoam containers. Crows watch with disinterest.

Kitchen women sitting in a sacred circle talk about life, love and their emotional wellbeing while peeling onions. They live longer.

Uprooted bamboo is planted against cinder block walls decorated with brown and green broken glass shards to prevent education from escaping.

Tree branches hacked into rough art forms pierce blue sky.

Fear & Curiosity converse with gestures. Do something you've never done before.

Trust, love, friendship.

Communicate. Learn. Imagine.

I am a rainbow.

This school reminds a ghost-self of rural schools in Sichuan, China. Broken windows, trash, rough cement passages where sewage smells like success.

Painted platitudes and Odes sing on the roof.

Learning in Paradise

Cement shells, paper exams plastered on windows.

Faded green paint. Wooden benches.

Worn wooden floors. Blackboards. Chalk n' talk.

Cover your mouth when you erase the past.

Ghost-self meditates with sleeping tigers.  

An eight-car train from Yangon to Mandalay rumbles past. Lonely whistles blow. Ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Horse cart traps jingle jangle hoof tarmac music, prancing and dancing along dirt paths - On Comet, On Cupid, Dasher and Dancer.

The peripatetic facilitator of English, Courage, Creativity and Fun is here unti mid-February on a three-teacher team from Mandalay.

He arrived in early December to prepare the program before two teachers arrived for four weeks and then two new teachers.

His sleeping room is spacious, light, leaf shadows. He salutes the sun and burning stars every morning through leaves of time.

Food in the family kitchen prepared by a smiling auntie is delicious; spicy curries, chicken, fish, pork, fresh veggies, soup, rice, fruit. Everyone is soft and attentive.

Native barbarian speaker focus is English exposure with Listening and Speaking for 365 G10 high school students with respect enabling Courage. 

In addition to text stuff  - artists, writers and dreamers explore and discover their infinite beauty and potential with Creative Notebooks. SOP. Mind map your self.

How to be more human.

How did I grow?

Chess lessons, strategies, and tactics, improves their critical thinking skills, planning, logic, accepting responsibility for their actions, visualization, time management, and teamwork.

Learn. Play. Share. 

500 grade 10-11 students live at the school. They’ve come from distant Shan state villages and Myanmar areas. They are their parents’ social security.

The school has an excellent reputation for matriculation results.

Segregated classes. Walking on campus, girls shield their faces from distant boys with books. Boys hide their faces from girls with books. No social testosterone distractions.

Zero gadgets.

They study Myanmar, math, history, physics, chemistry, science, biology and Magic and Potions from 6-11, 1:30-6, 7:30-11 p.m.  Sonorous voices echo daily.

They leave school one day a month.

The Wild West Village

Horse drawn cart traps.

One traffic light. Two motorcycles is a jam.

Green for go.

Twenty minutes away on foot, an extensive traditional market covered in rusting PSP sheets is a delightful adventure  - returning to the source of community, dark eyed local curiosity, street photography, laughter, and a floating babble of tongues inside a labyrinth of narrow uneven dirt paths.

Footprints on stone and dirt meander through forests and mountains of oranges, apples, bananas, red chilies, green vegetables, thin bamboo baskets of garlic and onions, farm implements, varieties of rice (a huge business), clacking sewing machines, basic commodities, steaming noodles, cracking fires, snorting horses.

Sublime.

Blindfish heads whisper The Sea, The Sea. Silver scales reflect light.

A woman hacks chickens. Blood streams down circular wooden tree rings.

The gravity of thinking sits on a suspended hand held iron pan scale. A white feather sits in the other pan.

Balance.

Twenty-six varieties of rice mountains peak in round metal containers or scarred wooden boxes.

Horse drawn cart traps unload people and produce. Neck bells tinkle: Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might get the wish I wish tonight. Well. Fed horses paw dirt.

Ancient diesel tractor engines attached to a steel carcass hauling people and produce bellow black smoke.

Old wooden shuttered shops with deep dark interiors display consumables, soap, thread waiting for a conversation, stoic curious dark eyed women, others laughing at the benign crazy traveler. 

A ghost-self sits in meditative silence, absorbing rainbow sights, sounds, colors, smells, feeling a calm abiding joy.

Wander and wonder.

Two teachers arrived for three weeks. One tall relaxed American male and serious eyes. His Irish female’s unhappiness confronting the hardship assignment masked emotional distress and deep bitterness.

She lived at the girl's dorm fifteen minutes away by dusty footprints. I feel isolated.

Cry me a river, said human nature.

Hardship and deprivation develops character, said an Asian child.

Don’t give me that crap, she said. I have twenty years of teaching experience and this is hell.

Hell is other people, said Sartre.

Be a good Catholic girl and make a confession, said Personal Problem.

It’s life lesson #5, said the child.

Yeah, yeah, said the whining adult eating her frustration and anger garnished with succulent tomatoes.

The world is a village. 

Mindfulness.

Mindful seeing.

Mindful attention.

Mindful presence.

Calm abiding.

Check in with your breath.

Engage senses. Visual epiphany between what is and what will be.

Yellow leaves flutter from trees. Thanks for growing me.

Brown birds with white wing markings sing on a branch. I feel free, what a glorious day.

Laborers pound nails and pour stones and sand into a cement mixer. Women shoulder baskets of dirt.

Angel choirs chant lessons; Life isn’t easy. Life is good.

On Friday at the end of week número uno the ghost-self carried a bag of colored chalk and a yellow daisy to a class of twenty-five girls.

Standard white chalk dusted world’s education. It dressed the stage and the brown raised platform where wooden faced esoteric teachers lectured, droning absolute physic computations dulling hearts and smiles. 

It reminded him of a previous incarnation in Room 317 at Yang-En University in Sichuan, China in 2006 (A Century is Nothing).

We see through our eyes not with our eyes.

See with soft eyes.

How is you, said ghost-self?

I am a creative genius, they laughed.

Don’t let school interfere with your education said Laughter Therapy. Ha. Ha.

Please open your creative notebook. Free writing.

He wrote, “Love is...” on the green blackboard.

Five minutes. Write fast. Do not go back, erase or cross out. Keep your hand moving.

Classical violin music by Hillary Hahn echoed through the room.

They meditated on the process of eye - hand - heart connections.

Be the ink. Be the paper.

They shared writing with partners.

Students drew a floor plan of their favorite room. They practiced tragic English target language - using “There is...There are...” describing furnishings.

They practiced prepositions of place. I am on Earth. I am sitting between friends.

He divided the class into three teams and partitioned the BB.

He opened the bag of colors. Draw your dreams.

Laughing and chattering they created rainbows, rivers, moons, suns, people, mountains, trees, birds, and flowing gardens.

After fifteen minutes they wrote about their art experience in creative notebooks. You created a masterpiece, he said. See you Monday.