Be Human

"Then we’d get to wondering about the billions of other minds at work just like ours, like the mind of a stockbroker in Tennessee and the mind of a toddler in Costa Rica and the mind of a mother in the Congo and the mind of a construction worker in Lebanon, and we’d imagine how all their thoughts are knit together in the same way ours are.

"And we’d think, “Isn’t this whole thing miraculous, the fact that we can share all this stuff and the only thing we’ve got to do is be human? Now this is one hell of an idea. This is something I can really get behind! What’s the point of hermiting yourself in your own brain if there’s a whole world out there full of love and fear and pity and compassion?” - David Foster Wallace

Chekhov & Wolves

Fear sells.

Fear speaks volumes being a universal language. Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear and sex into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work is not linear. It doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation.

Punctuation is a nail.

Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist. I love Linguini, said Devina. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know infinity, adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again. 

Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it.

A writer has grit and stamina.

Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess. 

A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted.

Kill your father. Marry your mother. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard lived experience. Experience is my teacher.

Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame mainstream upstream.

Anton Chekhov said, “When a human is born they face three paths. If you go to the left the wolves eat you. If you go to the right you eat the wolves. If you go straight you eat yourself.”

Phonsavan, Laos

Finch's Cage

In Sapa, Vietnam I discovered a side street and thick cold java at a run-down Internet cafe. I sat outside.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside a plate glass door. It’d escaped from its small yet safe bamboo cage in the main room.

Someone, perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her brother worried about dying of boredom or her old mother worried about dying alone had left the cage open.

Finch sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

Finch hugged the ground. It looked at green trees waving across the street. It saw a deep blue sky. It inhaled clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in trees but didn’t understand them. Their songs were about nesting, exploring, flying, clouds, trees, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so however I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off fast beating your wings to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity or memories filled with attitudes, beliefs, values and fear pulling you down.

Free, you turn and glide, relax and soar.

Finch being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted someone to rescue it.

It sang, “Help! Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all. I’ve seen enough. Let me in.” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown and bright eyed in its aloneness. 

An old woman opened the door. She trapped Finch in a purple cloth and returned Finch to its cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

“Did you learn your lesson little bird?” she said.

Finch sat on its perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang, “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language.

Muttering under her breath about inconvenience she shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

Mandalay

Courage

On his final day in Ankara he shared a Chinese calligraphy poem with adult students.

It was a Qing dynasty gift from primary students in a rural Sichuan school. This visual simplicity symbolized impermanence.

Bright beautiful elementary children in a radiant universe wearing Young Chinese Communist Pioneer red scarves around well-scrubbed necks sitting upright at colorful plastic desks raised hands when he asked questions yelling, “Let me try, let me try!”

Young brave students had the courage to say this.

Older students at a Chinese middle school, Chinese university and at TLC were aged, silenced and dumbed down through tyranny, fear and oppressive parental and educational brainwashed ideological structural systems.

Shame married Guilt, producing twins. The more the merrier.

Adults had lost their instinctual curiosity, humor and enthusiasm. Only primary kids had the courage to say, “Let me try, let me try.”

Their beautiful pictographic black ink calligraphy read, “One day a man climbed into the mountains and reached a hut. He met some children.”

“Where is the teacher?” he said.

“They pointed up the mountain covered by clouds. ‘He is not here, he’s gone into the mountains to look for herbs.’”

He folded the poem creasing Chinese ideograms where latitudes and longitudes met horizons.

His linguistic healing efforts departed Ankara with Bamboo.

The Language Company

China

Dance

“We climbed up. We descended,” said Zeynep breathing through her shamanic mask.

“Is it carved from tribal memories?” said Lucky.

“Masks are symbolic manifestations in diverse cultures. Mask dance is a ritual, worn in a dance trance. Wearing a mask you become the thing you fear the most, your essential nature. Masks hide a human’s consciousness of fear.

“Dance is about process, becoming from stillness, from nothing. Shiva symbolizes the union of space, time and destruction. Dance is ancient magic. People seeking transformation wear masks representing gods or demons. Dance is the incarnation of energy from the source. We are from the source. Have courage to wear your natural face mask. The entire universe is a vast theatre. Death does not exist.”

“Humans evolved their ability to scheme and deceive behind masks,” said Lucky. “How do they manifest compassion and love without projecting guilt and shame on others while wearing their mask?”

“That's an eternal life quest,” said Z. “It requires daily practice and letting go of ego. Cogito ergo sum. They think their mask is reality. It's not. It’s artificial, an illusion, a myth, a projection of their fear.”

The Language Company

Hanoi Ethnology Museum