Leaving early

On September 1, 2001, Mr. Point was wedged next to the window of a puddle jumper flying over the Cascade Mountains. Next to him in economy was an overweight happy couple anticipating their future first class flight to London out of Georgia. Ten days before people on, from and inside cells placed long distance calls from caves.

“We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends,” said the wife, an alcoholic, “and then,” her husband chimed in, “we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food. I’d like to go to Costa del Sol. I’ve heard the culture is wide open, if you know what I mean,” rubbing his secret jewels and winking to the stranger.

His spouse wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh. Their combined girth was conspicuous consumption. They exceeded their weight limit. The scales of justice were balanced in their favor as they spilled wealth.

“What do you do for a living?” her husband asked.

“My friends call me Mr. Point. I work for The Department of Wandering Ghosts Ink. 24/7,” he said with a straight face. He was a survivor, Vietnam 1969.

“Busy, busy, busy,” he laughed. “Yes, I am a mercenary of love, an unemployed fortune teller if you must really know. You might remember me from the Academy of Pain and Anger Management if you have a need to know. If your top-secret security clearances are valid. The more you know the less you need. 

“I’m heading to Morocco to meet my female nomad lover and extraneous fascinating strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the Extraordinary Rendition Program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer suspected terrorists to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fake companies.”

The shadow of Little Wing, a weaver, passed them.

“If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they boil them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap or country music twenty-four hours a day to drive them crazy. Stale bread and rancid water. A grisly business, but hey, it’s a paycheck.

“We also set up off shore accounts for clandestine agencies, or fronts if you will. We collect raw opium in Afghanistan, process it in Asian labs so street addicts get their fix. Along the way we collect Chinese harvested internal organs and upright pianos to sell in Hong Kong. The market is diversifying. Pick em’ up and lay em’ down. No women or kids. We have to draw the line somewhere, eh? Business profit has never been better. Ain’t nothin but the blues baby.”

They cut him off after this truth. 

His one-way air ticket to Morocco and Spain promised another road, village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic potentials. The KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, principle. Just leaving was a wise decision as it turned out. Speaking of history.

“Beyond, beyond the great beyond,” he’d whispered to someone, somewhere on the spinning rock when they asked him where was he was going and why he did what he did with the who, when, and howdy doody yankee doodle dandy stick a feather in your cap crap paradigms.

A Century is Nothing

go up river

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up the Tonle Srepok River.

The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing.

She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. I weave after ice.

Animist village people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy local woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony healing sacrifice. She’d smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Village people are superstitious and trust her.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust down river in Banlung.

One prolific business in town is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the one east west paved artery are huts and shacks of rough brown wooden slats and rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125 cc engines, and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Village shaman.

A story for Grade 4

“Many world tribes love to look back. It’s all passion and illusions of suffering. A genetic molecule of fear, doubt, uncertainty, surprise and adventure. A childish innocent curiosity lives in the present. As people age they want & need the past.”

“Living in the past is time consuming,” said a genius kid.

“Yes,” said a teacher, “Focus on your needs not your wants. Your need for freedom and freedom from need. Needs manifest a desire for a memory or a ghost or a regret. We are all passing through. Humans look back to see if they see in their vivid reptilian imagination their ghost.

"A ghost from a family or friend looks for clues at their personal ground zero. They’ve evolved from distant galaxies. Java man was discovered here 40,000 years ago. Accepting an evolutionary premise, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance today. Oh, and one more thing. Don’t let school interfere with your education. See you tomorrow.”

A wandering teacher lived in talking monkey zones. They eat rice. They drink water. They fuck. They breed. They wash one set of clothing and hang it on bamboo. They burn down the forest. They breed, work and get slaughtered. They harvest brooms. Shamans bring rain. Tropical downpours allow people the luxury to wash cars. They use faint energy looking behind them wondering, all the wondering and wandering and milling around. 

Food is cheap. Let’s eat mantra. This has nothing to do with simians. It has nothing to do with the two women sitting in a dark warung neighborhood food joint near a private school.

The warung faces a tall cinder block wall. Chickens, goats and cats prowl, peck and forage through garbage. One woman sits in a deep meditation. Her friend parts her hair looking for insects, cleaning her scalp. They take turns cleaning and inspecting. This genetic behavior is repeated in zoos, jungles and rain forests. Chattering storytellers play the gamelan pounding out 40,000 year-old tunes.

Heal people with music. Music is the fuel.

Males wash toy machines and study accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. They play chess waiting for passengers. Checkmate, said Death.

They visit the warung to chat up girls while eating spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies, green chilies and deep-fried snacks. One explorer creates a Brave New World. They forge new futures with cold, detached logical intention. They create an assessment on process in a data based star cluster.

Puppet Masters in Tibet

Chinese-Tibetan puppet leaders in Lhasa informed monks they would increase patriotic education classes in monasteries. Re-education through Reform, ideology, propaganda and thought control is the way comrades. We use Power to Control using fear and intimidation.

The Chinese, after destroying and looting monasteries and killing millions in Tibet and main land China during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden. They recruited Tibetans to live and work in monasteries as spies and informers.

This system proved effective during the Cultural Revolution when family members reported on each other, neighbors and wild capitalist running dogs. It was a practical peoples campaign of fear and suspicion creating paranoia and ideological control.

Monks and nuns in monasteries who resisted or questioned this form of subtle patriotic education risked imprisonment, torture and death. They knew what happened to monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi Prison outside Lhasa.

“There are two kinds of suffering,” said a girl weaving wool carpets in her yurt on the Tibetan plateau near rivers and mountains. “Suffering you run away from and suffering you face.”

Inside Drapchi, Chinese guards beat Tibetan nuns and monks with rubber hoses filled with sand. They applied electric cattle prods to skin, sending wire-cranked juice into skeletons, extracting screams.

“Denounce the Dalai Lama!” screamed a young illiterate soldier from Human Province. He tightened metal screws around a nun’s wrists, bending them at a horrendous angle until she screamed in broken pain.

“Never!”

He wiped her blood off his broken glasses and increased pressure. It was a job.

“Save my face,” sang a Chinese girl, an innocent ignorant victim of the national one-child genocide policy, wringing out a mop of spider webs inside water rainbows.

She was in a large bland cavern classroom at a private business university in Fujian. All the students had failed higher-level exams for more prestigious universities. They settled for this. No choice. She cleaned crumbling uneven cement floors with strands.

A Century is Nothing

Seamus Heaney 1939-2013

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, County Derry, he resided in Dublin until his death.

From "Digging"

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Death of a Naturalist 1966

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