the center cannot hold

Blindness danced on through late yellow faltering light penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts. Literally.

Nearby, a quiet young girl watched the Vietnamese girl do her toenails. Cutting, trimming, lemon/lime soak, cuticles, clear before applying a silver-hued glossy glean.

Nail by nail.

In a Fujian, Chinese university classroom an angry undersexed, overworked teacher yelled, "the bent nail gets hammered down." - 80 comatose students understood her implication. Keep your mouth shut. Do not express your individuality and above all do not question authority.

Authority will SHAME you in public. They will execute your parents and burn down your house. They will exile you to a Reform-through-re-education work unit where you will haul shit for years and tears.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight, crying tears of silence.

A van of blank faced stupefied white Europeans trapped behind stained glass held their rampant desires and expectations on laps. Fidgeting as uncomfortable languages floated into inner ear canals.

Assaulting their long painful strides navigating tomorrow's promise.

Blindness resolved to practice the subtle art of Tai-chi with precision.

Movement.

A dance.

A watermelon. Circle, sever center.

Slowly push the edges out from the center.

The center cannot hold.

learn in burma

Give us the fifty daze M-F 5:30 a.m. short van trip to CAE, the private school in Mandalay where you helped 10th graders become more human with humor and curiosity. July - October 2015.

One class from 6-7, another from 7-8.

Four male teachers left starlight and climbed into the van. Three were morose. Too early.

Their dialogue mentioned sleep disorders, international menus and the quality of their shits.

One Black guy muttered about Kuala Lumpur fast food choices while cursing mosquitos and smashing them on windows.

The others talked about teaching adventures in China.

Exciting.

Yeah, I’m going to miss them like you miss a rock in your shoe.

I understand your student-teachers rearranged desks into groups to facilitate sharing. You played jazz, blues and classical music. They drew and colored their dream in creative notebooks. Daily.

Yes. Head – hand – heart.

I reminded them their creative notebooks would sustain them for years, long after the textbooks gather dust. Long after they vomited material to pass a test. Get marks.

Give me specifics.

My room was the only team-building configuration. The other teachers maintained rigid rows of wooden benches where students hearing a dull lecture stared at the back of someone’s head.

The Black guy mumbled. They replaced him with a dour scholar from Papa New Genie.

One British teacher lectured from the book and played cartoons.

A drawling American teacher projected The Star Spangled Banner lyrics on a screen and had the class recite words.

You’re kidding me. I wish I was.

You could hear the parrots…”Oh say can you see…”

Our team-groups shared ideas prior to discussing diverse topics improving their speaking confidence.

In his final class Southern Comfort had them singing “Jingle Bells.”

Boughs of folly. Oh yeah.

My geniuses played a round-robin chess tournament the final two days. Great fun.

They’d practiced chess every Thursday and Friday for a month. They focused on tactics, strategy, activating pieces off the back row, castling, attacking through the center.

They developed critical thinking skills, planning and logic, problem solving, accepting responsibility for their decisions, respecting their opponent and sharing ideas with friends.

Life skills 101.

We gave them everything - TLC 66

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.

Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.

It’s the hardest thing a person can do.

She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles, gold lame Apsara dancers, 232 species of black and red butterflies, 1.5 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry, Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups, crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks, begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks and whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage, narrow boned white oxen pulling carts, 14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness, letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered, Where have we been, Where did we go, What did we see, Where are we, How do we feel, Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re trapped in SEA.

One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.

The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.

Here we are.

My Name is Erhan- TLC 64

I am your masseuse. I’ve lived in this Bursa hammam since 1555.

In a large domed room sunrays shafting at precarious precious angles slant along humid walls glancing off mosaic tiles singing blue, green, yellow reflections. The dome has a perfect eight-starred symmetrical hat surrounded by sixteen stars in a geometric pattern. At night stars sing their light. They give me a pleasant headache.

This is where I live and work. I raised my family here. I will die here. This is my fate in a water world where tea and conversations meet in companionship, community and conspiracy.

After the hammam and noon prayers men went to a teahouse. They whispered stories, gossip, myth, legends, fairy tales, innuendo, lies, half-truths and fabulous fictions as small silver spoons danced in glass.

Someone else writes this with a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck 149 fountain pen. He drinks thick black Turkish coffee. A silver embossed glass of water waits for fingers to leave condensation on its surface. He turned to a stranger, “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.”

“If you finish the water it means the coffee’s no good,” said a stranger.

Lucky distributed providence to oral storytellers engaging tongues, dialects, foolscap, and fading footsteps behind shadows playing cards and slurping tea. Eyelids were heavy deep visual reminders studying down all the daze.

Such a grand and glorious saga, sang Zeynep, a heroine in a vignette.

I am a short story. You are a novel.

By day I am a gravedigger, said Lucky, and a literary prostitute after dark.

We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.

On your grave are two dates separated by a dash. What’s important is what you do during the dash. Is life a dash or marathon?

Go with your flow. Flow your glow.

The Language Company

Zeynep the heroine

Burma Brothers Grim

Since July, representing an English language company in Mandalay, he facilitated English and Creativity with Grades 1 & 2 every afternoon at a private school in the rural countryside.

Two Burmese brothers owned the new school with 500 students from G1-11. The Brothers Grim - this ain’t no fairy tale.

The last five months were joyful then…

In the last week of Now I Remember, (seven days past) while Grade 2 was drawing and coloring houses, dragons, dinosaurs, sun, trees, flowers, river, fish, boats, rainbows, people and dreams – pain, suffering and stupidity said hello.

100 Grade 11 male and female students gathered in a semi-circle on the cement patio outside the primary classroom. They faced steps and ornate golden script atop the cheap grandiose building:

Developing Youth, Character and Future Leaders Through Fear and Intimidation.

A stack of papers with all the names waited on a desk.

Headmaster brother in a white shirt and purple patterned Longyi, held a 4’ bamboo stick.

His voice echoed into hearts and minds - you failed the exam. You will receive your punishment.

Taking a paper from the stack he called out a name. A girl stepped forward, climbing two steps with her back to the crowd.

He measured the bamboo stick against her buttocks, coiled and unleashed the blow. Whack!

Her face stiffened. He coiled. Whack!

A small tear graced her left eye.

She rejoined her classmates.

99 passive students waited to feel sharp stinging lashes.

Primary assistant teachers oscillated between helping students and watching the angry headmaster swing his bamboo stick.

Name after name.

Chattering with friends, children colored a large red heart floating over a blue river.

Brother #2 entered the classroom.

Why is he beating the students, said the foreign teacher?

They failed the exam. Whack!

Parents want us to punish their children. They see we are doing our job. Whack!

It’s part of our culture. Whack!

Maybe we’ll change it in two or three years. Whack!

The foreign teacher and thirty children practiced meditation.

Breathe in and out.

Inhale suffering and exhale love.

Mindful awareness.

Mindful seeing.

Mindful attention.

Mindful presence.

Calm abiding.

He hugged each child. We created a loving environment.

You are a beautiful rainbow and a genius.

I love you.

Our time together is finished.

You are in my heart.