a German woman

Namaste,

Yes, said the eighty-two year old woman in impeccable hard, stone cold German to her Nepalese guide across the dinner table after she sent the green glassed bottle of beer back because it wasn't cold enough for her aristocratic standards as her arthritic silver haired myopic husband stared vacant with his docile gleaming owl ears hearing her reminiscent warble, Our Further had it right. We missed our golden opportunity to achieve greatness.

She sighed and stabbed her salad.

She ran a death camp. She signed documents in blood. She was cold, efficient and pure ideology. She escaped to hide in Argentina from Nazi hunters. She changed her name, her hair style, her accent. She prospered. She returned to Vienna and opened a bakery selling stale crumbs.

Fake pearls glistening in the glow of a candle strangled her. Wax dripped into her melancholic debris. She adjusted her mask and stabilized her husband out into the long dark cold night.

Local dogs howled at her smell.

Metta.

Memory & Tibet

Greetings,

Here are a couple of new reads for you.

Moonwalking With Einstein...by Joshua Foer. 

..."Before writing was common, human beings had to use their own brains for information storage, and before books were indexed — making it possible to gain access to them in a nonlinear way — people labored under the “imperative to hold” books’ contents in their own mental hard drives simply to find particular bits of information. Poets in the oral tradition, like Homer, relied on repetition and rhythms and other patterns to recite their work from memory, and in the ancient world, exceptional memories were both exalted and widely known."

Colin Thubron a travel writer and novelist has published To A Mountain In Tibet. He has written about the Near East, Russia and The Silk Road.

“You cannot walk out your grief,” he tells himself. “Or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are.” This is the reason he has resolved to go “walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way.” 

Metta.

Sam and Dave sleep

Greetings,

The bent nail gets hammered down, yelled a Chinese teacher next door to my classroom. 

The Maija artist accepted the photo from the grieving relative set up his easel, using a magnifying glass to see the face, using a pencil to capture the 8x10 likeness. On the chipped plaster walls were examples of his work; peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives and young and old Pioneer communist members with tight, tight red scarves knotting their necks suffocating their passion. 

Today he was sketching an old unsmiling stoic woman. A sad resigned peasant. These were people who had suffered. They’d suffered at the hands of the nationalists then the communists, then the new economic revolutionaries. The indignities of old age.

An old three-string wooden musical instrument hung on the wall near red streaks of paint inside this fine art museum. A black fly on the left shoulder of the artist rubbed its feelers together. Tasty. 

An old man with his emaciated skeleton face and paper thin arms carefully opened a bag of tea and poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand. He dispersed this into an old chipped blue pot and added water. We shared tea watching the artist work. The artist was good. The likeness was close to perfect. The tea was delicious.

The same kind of images decorate the altars in Vietnam. They sit in various temples around the cities. Death is a big deal. Ancestor worship. 

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge all the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths and request a little peace and quiet? On anniversary death days they meet all the other ancestors inside narrow mazes of alleys where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicious liquids drain into punctured cement holes flowing along narrow passageways slanted toward the middle where voices become echoes? Yes. 

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee to address family noise. ‘It’s come to our attention dear comrades, dear people, dearly beloved family and friends...that we have a communication issue here in the neighborhood.’

‘Silence! We are trying to sleep. The long peaceful and restful sleep. Leave us be.’

Metta.

Sam and Dave Part 4

Greetings,

Inside every family’s deep dark Hanoi space was a main room and altar for dead relatives, candles, fruit, burning incense a spirit food, and the black and white and color images reminded me of the Chinese artist in Maija, the poor pig village near the Fujian university where I lived for two years riding my bike across hills up and down narrow dirt back roads,

watching butterflies mate in the dust, old people threshing rice in fields, a woman lugging piles of white cauliflower to market in her bamboo baskets suspended on a bamboo poles, down long small tight dusty paths past athletic shoe shop sweat shop factories filled with morose girls and women hunched over threading clacking Butterfly machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until I reached a narrow street to sit drinking Chinese green tea with a man in his little shop. 

Further up the hill were small wooden shops with appliances, family market stalls, street food, electrical stores and butchers. In a small mud and brick place was an artist. His job was drawing pictures of dead people. 

After someone died a relative gave him a common small black and white image, the kind from 1949 when the country declared itself free, independent, and open with 3 Represents and benevolent Chairman Mao (our grandfather bless his heart) smiled at the masses.

Before he told the peasants, “Eat Grass.”

It was an image used throughout their life: in documents for residence, work, school and party politics. The people had the three iron rice bowls. A guaranteed living space, guaranteed work unit, and guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal. Everyone was treated the same, wore the same clothing, said the same thing and followed the leader, like kids playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

Metta.

Antonio Machado

Greetings,

A poem by Antonio Machado. Translated from the Spanish by Betty Jean Craige.

Walker, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more.

Walker, there is the road, the road is made by walking.

Walking you make the road, and turning to look behind you see the path you never again will step upon.

Walker, there is no road, only foam trails on the sea.

Metta.

You can't photograph a memory. - Henri Cartier Bresson