Ice please

In another incarnation they were naked in a meadow. I am blind. He is deaf. Millions have Usher syndrome.

We hold hands. Skin is our unified quantum field theory of tactile language. Beyond feeble illiterate words. Fate introduced us at an NGO charity ball, Save The Children Now & Forever.

Deaf is a famous concert pianist. Blind is an Angkor Wat explorer. She scaled 88 keys seeking tonal quality, perfect pitch and frequency. He explored her twin peaks, smooth geography, labyrinths, valleys, hall of dancers and thick topographical jungle foliage.

They had a tacit agreement to be gentle and kind together. Peel my skin like sweet aromatic fruit, she whispered. I am your skin mistress. One must sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Play my flute, he moaned.

*** 

Remember this, Leo said to Ice Girl in Banlung. In China we learn the less we do the fewer mistakes we make. The fewer mistakes we make the less we are criticized. I remain safe and happy. It’s called THE SYSTEM. Brainwashed. You see this in all Asian educational systems.

Students shuffle in, remove their brains, soak them in a cleaning solution, which is not the solution for fifty tedious minutes and replace said gray matter at the end of class. It’s endemic. Command and control procedures. Big Brother is watching you. Save face. The fear of public humiliation is greater than the fear of death. Karma is the universal law.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Khmer new year april 14-16

On Khmer New Year’s day, a bitter mother at a guesthouse wearing blue cotton floral teddy bear pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, yellow candles, red candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling vicious fucking canines, balloons, clouds, condoms, clones and clowns. She has a terrible temper.       

“Wake up idiot!” she yells at her infantile hubby.

She is one among millions of sad angry neglected women.

She turns on the Idiot Box. LOUD. Her daughters, 4, and 6, are entranced by the visual Apsara circus. They never read books. This is weird because their father was a bookseller in the capital for six years. What happened to literature, what happened to paper, books, education, and critical thinking wonders Ice Girl.

Now he sleeps alone with Boring, having performed his sexual duty, rents out rooms and roars around the forgotten river town on a souped up 125cc noise machine alleviating suffering, spinning his loss, his intellectual wheels, pretending to be important, stirring up dust.

It’s rare to see anyone in Cambodia reading anything on paper, unless it’s a directive from unaccountable government command and control centers sustaining their economic dominance perpetuating 20 years of passive hopelessness. Or forged land paper deals screwing illiterate peasants. So it goes.

Survivors read empty streets on swivel necks. Survivors read rice. Survivors read (empty) bowls. Survivors read money. Survivors read blank faces in rear view bike mirrors. Survivors fall in love with their reflection pretending it is real. Hello Beauty.

Beauty is the mother of Death.

Leo and Ice Girl turned a page away from morning, away from scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows.

They are blacker than shadowed faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Ice Girl. Their eyes live in the present dancing over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice, or watching palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding thatched bamboo stilt homes as naked children harvest dream kites.

They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. They wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees, and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON always ready to observe minute cosmic details and subtle movement across miles of land mined flat horizon country penetrating thick green sweet foliage.

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

Watching without seeing is their Zen. Living in perpetual darkness they have a small immense critical survival responsibility. They stare far away with telescopic floodlight acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, and speaking.

Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent. They watch past another person during a conversation. They watch each other’s back. They face watching beyond wild where everything unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

One anxious dreaded moment in their short sweet life recognizes fear.

Fear is disguised as indecision and loss and ignorance. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

Children's story hour

He was in Morocco on 9/11. He didn't take possession of that event. Fate said hello, hah, hah, hah. 

After two months he shifted to Cadiz, Spain with Omar, a blind Touareg writer.

His forward observer position allowed him to witness young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. They hid in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

Meals with a Gypsy family timed down Gades days with a simple breakfast of toast, butter, jam or muesli, a lunch of thick soup, fresh salad, bread, water, and a main course at 2:30 p.m. He read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy. The world of floating images.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds. Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenician, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía citizens exchanged belief windows, values, attitudes, construction projects, and 3,000 years of icon free Arabian art. It was about agriculture, water, light, form, and substance. Equality was the word at a Muslim burial exhibit at the Mondragon Palace in Ronda.

Cadiz was founded by Phoenicians in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir and traded amber and tin. It was a Roman navel base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies. People developed agriculture as growing populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian Peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000-year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed established communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanded their nation-state.

The Museo de Cadiz was filled with Roman artifacts. Humans wandered through archeological epoch discoveries from settlements in Gades along the coast extending inland to Seville and Cordoba.

Travellers discovered estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos and rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery and faces. They discovered vases, dynasties, ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, and utensils.

Three million-year old human remains slept in stoned chambers. Sharp sewing bones rested in dust.

Scientists collected anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance. Minute grains of mica. Archaeologists and mobile blood donation units explored rain forests and hacked through Angkor Wat jungles discovering isolated oceanic islands above simmering volcanic eruptions.

ACIN

STC

shame Sings

My name is Li Bow Down. I am in charge of the Tibetan Monastery Re-Education Through Reform with Severe Consequences pogrom program. My masters called me out of retirement.

I was playing mahjong, screwing concubines and enjoying Fujian tea with friends at the Shanghai-FreeLand resort.

Authority ordered me to get my old ass back to Lhasa and take care of THE problem. Back to the future.

They gave me a fire extinguisher to douse flaming monks. Ah, the ignobility. Fire is the essence of life.

Give someone a match and they are warm for a minute.

Set them on fire and they are warm for the rest of their life.

Here’s an uncensored image of what we do to people in the program.

Li put an image on a table.

See this woman, he commanded. She is denouncing her family, friends and most importantly, herself in public. We are big on shame. We are the masters and they are the puppets.

“Shame on you!” yelled 1.6 billion puppet people.

         “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

This is one of our more popular and effective methods of creating a harmonious society. It works wonders, because if memory serves me correctly and it does, mind you, serve me well, we’ve been coercing people for 5,000 years. Pick your favorite dynasty. We used to put them in wooden stocks with their crimes painted on paper necklaces and parade them through town. They confessed. They had to.

We call it self-criticism (samzen) re-education and reform. Big buzzwords. They were denounced in public. Talk about blatant social disapproval.

Maybe you think I am joking, making this up. Well, I didn't make it to the top of the system scrap heap by bowing down to big nosed foreigners telling me how to maintain control in Tibet and keep the monks and serfs and slaves in line.

As you know the monks in Tibet provoked the armed, young, naive, scared People's Reactionary Liberation soldiers on March 10th in Year Zero.

The rest is history, well, not really history because we rewrite that when it suits our propaganda purposes. It’s easy and convenient.

Life is cheap here. More tea?

calligraphy Brooms

Down dream street in Turkish reality

an unprecedented wave of egalitarian support featuring millions of sad, serene women facing callously arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to become engaged to strangers on transcendental borders. This wave of support resembled an open handed gesturing in the eternal present as a mother reluctantly gifted her daughter a long fare well wave watching her disappear into life’s teeming stream.

         “Be well my love,” she sang. “You will always be in our hearts.”

         Her daughter joined a world tribe of singing, sighing women. They lived their dream, making sacrifices with clear intention, motivation, determination and focus. The entourage of waving, singing women danced through valleys, climbed jagged Eastern Mountains named Regret and entered a no-name village where males pounded war drums and hammered plowshares into word swords.

         Marginalized poor angry males killed each other over pita bread, olives, fresh tomatoes, kebabs, women and geographical dust while studying imaginary maps.

         “The map is not the territory,” said Visualization, a cartographer.

         “Where is this place?” asked a woman leader in a strange village on a strange planet in a strange solar system in a strange universe.

         “It is far away,” said a gravedigger with vast earth moving experience. “It is a dysfunctional place where bronze statues of fallen soldiers, warriors, politicians and testosterone fueled fools rust and congratulate each other on their mutual stupidity.”

         Wind whispered to women, “Go home, return to your children, your families and friends. Live in peace.”

         Women listened with heart-mind.

         “It’s tough living in dystopia where women are beautiful and sad,” said Visualization. “Millions don’t know whether they are coming or going, going, long gone. They’ve fashioned well-defined living death masks from loss and hopelessness and confusion and uncertain doubts selling tears wrapped in silence. Millions of us wait for an arranged marriage.”

         Potential husbands gathered to draw lots. They drew with ink and pastels and charcoal. The charcoal came from a deep black shameless unconscious well of tears where women, tired of waiting, sang, “Give me a child, give me someone to love and protect and carry forever and cherish and spoil with benign neglect. Give me your future. We don’t really truly honestly care about adverbial love, it’s all arranged. Everything has already happened. We just need to experience it. Love is a blind whore. It’s an impossible love. It’s a matter of practicality. Marriage first love later.”

         “Here,” said a marriage broker, “accept this man, this stranger into your heart. Just give him a child. Get to the verb.”

         “We breed, work and get slaughtered,” said one woman. Daughters wrapped these constricting words around their hearts in love’s tangled jungle.

         You never see women taxi drivers in Turkey. It’s a male ego thing with bright speeding tire spinning toys on wheels. It’s a Toy’s For Tots live game show. In cafes idle retired or chronically employed guys sit around all day from opening to closing playing backgammon. They slide little wooden pieces carved from youth’s forgotten toys. Young macho guys spin shiny yellow taxi wheels playing arranged symphonies in the horn section. They are the next generation of backgammon players.

         Women know better. They express their feelings. They live longer.

         Courageous women stood up to parents. “I respect your traditional ideas about arranged marriages, however, to be really honest heavy deep and real with you, it’s old fashioned conservative thinking. This is 2013 not 1987. I am a member of a new freethinking generation. I am not willing to be a victim, a willing victim of your narrow-minded attitudes. I will choose my friends, lovers and companions, based on my needs. I know why the caged bird sings.”

         Before leaving Ankara I shared a Chinese calligraphy painting poem with students. It was an old Qing dynasty poem, a gift from primary students in a rural Sichuan village school. A visual simplicity symbolized the transient nature of life lessons.

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

         Only young brave students had the courage, the absence of fear to say this. Older students at middle schools and university were aged and silenced through tyranny and oppressive parental and educational brainwashed ideological practice. Shame. They’d lost their curiosity and enthusiasm. Only primary kids had the courage, the inherent inner freedom to say, “Let me try, let me try!”

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

         “Where is the teacher?” he asked them.

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

         Chinese characters were creased where latitudes and longitudes met linguistic horizons.