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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Through the center

I climbed through the center of Bali inside magical light past an extinct sacred volcano at Lake Batur carrying spare ammunition, a small portable typewriter, a map carved on narwhal bone, a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper, codices or painted books and texts on bark paper called Amate, and cactus fiber including palimpsest animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

My hair caught fire. Gathering flames I lit a piece of bark for guidance.

I mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm rich with antioxidants.

I applied this to my skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors. 

Source: A Century is Nothing.

Kalapuya

“I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. Dialects of ancestors who lived here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In the forest near the river all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.

“I am blessed to welcome you here. You have walked along many paths of love to reach me.

“My dirt path is narrow and smooth in places, rocky in others. I am the soil under your feet. I feel your weight, your balance - your weakness and your strength. I hear your heart beating as my ancestors pounded their ceremonial drums. I feel the tremendous surging force of your breath extend into my forest. Wind accepts your breath.

“I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. I am the oak, the fir and pine trees spreading like dreams upon your outer landscape. I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent in the forest hearing trees nudge each other. “Look,” they say, “someone has returned.”

“I love the way you absorb the song of brown body thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet-throated song you hear without listening. At night two owls sing their distant song and their music fills your ears with mystery and love.

“I am warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time. I am the spider’s web dancing with diamond points of light. I am the rough fragile texture of bark you gently remove before connecting the edge of an axe with wood. You carry me through my forest your flame creates heat of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the odor of forest in your nostrils filling your lungs. It is sweet.

“I am the cold rain and wet snow and hot sun, and four seasons. I am yellow, purple, red, blue, and orange flowers from brown earth.

“Language cannot be separated from who you are and where you live.

“I say this so you will remember everything in this forest. I took care of this place and now your love has the responsibility with respect and dignity and mindfulness.”

Source: A Century is Nothing.

after morocco

Well before sunrise in March 2002 on his last morning in Morocco, before seeing a sunburst orange ball on skylines flying toward Amsterdam, west to Seattle, and east over the Cascades; before leaving Sad’s family furniture factory home in Casablanca, a scribe, who’d been up all night anticipating another Exit, took a gigantic shit over a hole in the ground before sweeping a sweet smelling kid’s sanitized paper wipe over his skinny little ass.

He poured water from an old green bottle into the holy plumbing system, waking the dead on their life highway crowded with whiners, complainers and ghosts, before stumbling through darkness with Rex the German shepherd on his heels.

The toilet paper was crap in Spain. In Morocco it was nonexistent.

It felt good to blast yesterday out of his system. He knew all the bilingual time and surprises were worth it. Miniature adventures were a refreshing drink of water, a desperate invigorating breath during a climb for a clear perspective.

Slanting dawn light wrapped tentacles around an anonymous scribe gathering unfiltered and uncensored evidence of post 911 fear. Light cut the sky severing white villages, crude broken stone paths, scarred Moorish brown doors, ageless idle men, shifty eyed one-armed merchants and sad-eyed unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

The scribe traversed light, space, and time intervals near sixteen blue, yellow, and green starred mosaic vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on cheeks, shaking hands, confirming an exile's flight.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with hesitancy, this delayed boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses, and woven fabric designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa and a chance visa. They craved sweet green tea to mix life’s colors with dust.

The plane taxied down the runway. Rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds, thunderheads formed a white billowing future infinite dream machine of air and water molecules.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis after 9/11, global FEAR merchants had a never-ending consignment sale.

A Century is Nothing.