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Entries in social conditioning (13)

Thursday
Mar052020

51 Days in Turkey

In 2008 while facilitating English in Bursa, Turkey he worked with Azra, a personal tutor. She told him about Trabzon on the Black Sea near Georgia. “I was born there and it’s beautiful.”

In the summer of 2012 while meditating in Asia he applied for a Teaching English Foreign Language (TEFL) job in Trabzon.

They needed native barbarians with clear pronunciation.

Let’s see the terrain, said Omar, a Touareg Berber ghostwriter friend. Reconnect with Z, the author of The Language Company, meet diverse people, do street photography, write about it and analyze the situation with diamond mind wisdom.

Go on an adventure.

He arrived in September.

Satire and curiosity witnessed the deterioration of educational quality. Rampant commercialism and artificial empowerment. Dystopian reality. Greed is a hungry animal. So it goes.

51 Days in Turkey

 

Many clowns are not in the circus.

Saturday
Nov162019

Shanghai Interrogation

The boy soldier was silent.

“What’s that for?” said the female Public Security Bureau official pointing to the typewriter on the table. 

“It is for writing letters.”

They have reservations about letters. Letters, they wonder, looking at each other with jaundiced eyes. Black eyes streaked with exploding blood vessels full of fear and suspicion.

Letters indicate political insurrection, dissent, forced labor, mandatory abortions, propaganda, civil unrest, turmoil, revolutions, tanks in the street, torture, solitary confinement and executions.

They see party leaders wringing pale hands pacing forbidden cities past stone lions, conducting top-secret meetings trying to figure out what to do, how to put a face on all this. How to manage and manipulate dis-information rivers controlling floods.

The boy soldier and his comrade save face by maintaining blank, stoic expressions. They suspect I have connections.

Maybe I am a plant, a party member sent to check their unit. Assigned to monitor their methods, their questioning tactics, their subtle use of intimidation, their implications to control and influence people’s lives with fear for the good of the state.

For all they know I am a subversive. A word terrorist.

“Letters. We will keep an eye on this one,” she said to the soldier.

They're thinking: We have ways to make you talk. They don’t say this but I know how it works. I’ve read Tu Fu and Li Po's work. I’ve digested their bone dust history through dynasties.

“Yes, well, we’ll see,” she said. “We need to remind you to remember this very carefully.” Her voice gained an octave.

The bent nail gets hammered down!

“Just because you speak our language doesn’t mean you are special. We can revoke your visa and force you to pay a fine. We can put you away where no one will ever find you. We will discuss your situation with our leaders. We have driven the talented people abroad. Some went into hiding but we know where they are and we find them. We always do. We find them in their homes, schools, and jobs. Some accepted positions at foreign universities where they form counter-revolutionary groups bent on overthrowing the state by writing articles, stories and books critical of their motherland.”

Her face resembled nuclear fission as she pounded the table. “They are a disgrace! They are running dogs!”

“I see,” I said, dropping my eyes saving face.

Downstairs, my warrior team armed with tools made on slave labor production lines financed with western capital, are busy. They laughed, sang and danced knocking holes in theories, lies and deceptions. They built facades, charades, fast food outlets, dream machines, and ignominious pious grandiose standards of living faster than joint venture ink dries on thin rice paper.

The authorities are momentarily appeased.     

I understand they are following orders.

To the letter.

I am well aware, remembering letters, if they execute me with a single bullet to the back of my head my family will have to pay for the ammunition. My family will be very surprised when they get a bill in a letter from kow-tow authorities for a round. They will have to buy a round and will never meet the last of the big time spenders.

To make matters worse, the authorities, after executing me, will disembowel me and recycle internal organs seeing profits to be made from a used, well traveled perfectly functioning heart, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, eyes, ears, hair, genitals, spleen and assorted by-products. It will be a beautiful fucking mess.

First, they will need impossible to find International Reply Coupons and second, the post office glue made from horses is a disaster. Gets all over the wooden counters and fingers of rude, impatient people because they are slobs. After smearing glue everywhere they push and shove toward the sullen postal clerk thrusting mail in her face.

If she didn’t have guaranteed sticky white rice three times a day my grand inquisitor would be home knitting a sweater and gossiping with neighbors. They’d be discussing vegetables, weather and roving demolition crews with bulldozers wondering when, not if, their ancient hutong neighborhood would come tumbling down and they’d be forced to move to bland housing tracts on the edge of the Gobi desert.

They will be the last to know. Earth trembled as blades sliced dwellings in half sending clouds of green tiled dust spiraling into a polluted sky.

Not only will the officials need IRC coupons to bill my next-of-kin for the bullet, they will require hand carved marble chops with ideograms and delicious red ink to verify and administer their official proclamations and imperial judgments.

They will chop and stamp my passport until it bleeds. EXPIRED. They will chop every single page.

They are important cogs in the wheel of the law grinding themselves down into the dust of ages.

Their looms spin out broken threads faster than they can weave them into their tapestry. If they make one mistake they will answer to the authorities.

They examine my passport with filthy greasy fingers. They turn pages, looking at visa stamps, examining strange forbidden exotic designs. They see rainbows and a rising phoenix. They hear drums from Amazonian rain forests while savoring fruits from lush gardens filled with crow and raven songs. Eagle feathers drift out of the pages.

On one page they explore meadows illustrated with roses. Thorns dive out of the sky piercing their hearts. A river of blood from Tibet breaks through dams flooding their ancestor’s graves. Names, histories and corpses float toward Seas of Memory.

Turning another page they scamper on frayed rope bridges above raging gorges screaming, “Help us. Save us!”

They keep going. The other side of the gorge is dark and dangerous, full of Black Mambas, vipers, pythons and fear bred demons slithering out of the ground, evaporating into rivers of sound, twisting forms dancing through their eyes, weaving into their heart.

Blind, they struggle through fog and hail storms into blizzards toward mountains. They are stranded inside the discursive circular logic drowning in a river of tears inside a river of dreams on the River of Time.

“We’ve gone too far,” the boy yells to the PSB woman. “Turn back!”

“It’s too late.” They began seeing with their ears and hearing with their eyes.

Turning a leaf they dived into the ocean of their love below the surface of appearances.

In deep turquoise waters they discovered a secret spirit cave pulsating with a heartbeat and magical sources of inspiration and beauty.

She handed the passport to the boy. “What do you make of this?”

He took off his military party hat and scratched his head.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Appears to be some fable, a fairy tale, a mysterious rambling incoherent story. Never seen anything like this before.”

His comrade grabbed it back.

“Yes, strange indeed,” she whispered. “Where did you get this?” She held up a page of a butterfly sitting on a pure white lotus flower growing from mud.     

“My girlfriend sent it to me. It’s a dream.”

“Where did she get it?”

 “Along the Tao.”

 “What Tao?”

 “She collects dreams from people along her journey.”

 “Where is she? Laos? Bhutan? Burma? Tibet?”

The interrogator is suspicious. She knows primitive mountain people are animists, superstitious types. Their Dongba ancestors in Yunnan created a written language 1,000 years ago using pictographs and worship nature of all things. They have powers like levitation, lowering their body temperature, running for miles above the ground, transcending their physical bodies.

“She is everywhere.”

“I don’t believe you."

She skipped a few pages and started reading.

“They floated through caves into Greek and Roman civilizations. Inside a huge cavern flooded with celestial starlight were halls filled with world art. It was arranged in a form of a historical magic time circle. They admired fabulous paintings of strange beauty. They cried tears of happiness. Their tears created the beginning of the ocean.”

She handed the passport back.

“It appears authentic. But, I must say, parts of it are rubbish. Pure imagination. Your girlfriend will have to account for this. She’s crazy and needs medication. She needs to be somewhere safe for the sake of her emotional health. We have ways of dealing with these people. She’s clearly a threat against state-controlled propaganda laws and social stability. We can’t allow lunatics to just go roaming around the country writing this stuff. She could be in serious danger.”

She rattled on in her well-rehearsed monotone.

“There are immediate restrictions on your travel outside Shanghai. You are required to check with the local Public Security Bureau if you want to leave yourself, if you need to transcend this impermanent state of being.”

“Yes, I know. Existence is suffering. Thank you. I am rainbow of Light. Will you have more tea?”

“Yes.” She handed me a cracked cup. I poured tea.

She doesn’t want to lose face with this foreigner. Not in front of her comrade. He might talk at headquarters. Her superiors will question him. Her comrade is young and vulnerable to new ideas. Like free will and free choice.

She’s afraid if he has the chance to escape he will visit new lands, meet people, see their art and absorb their music and stories and be free.

She finished her tea gave me a withering look and left.

Before leaving the boy soldier ripped Psyche out and put it in his pocket. He smiled.

“You have been very cooperative. We will keep an eye on you.”

Weaving A Life V4

Thursday
Aug012019

The Garden #5

Podcast entitled BLEND IN.

Written while teaching at a private Chinese business university.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Published in Weaving A Life (V1).

Thanks for listening.

The Garden #5

 

Sunday
Jul012018

Fear Motivates Earthlings

Part 3.

Mr. ON speaks to his English class at Chinese Pineapple Appliance Factory #8...

Learning occurs in the context of task-based activities. In other words you learn by doing. You do and you understand as we say, said, do, did, done.

In exhaustive detail we will discuss four important appliances and their English A/C-D/C let’s see connections. They are: washing machines, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens.

These machines are now essential and fun to operate in one’s life. They are labor saving devices. Don't ask me what that means.

Maybe it’s a labor of love, like labor pains or an educational experience at a popular Re-Education-Through-Labor Reform gulag in the Gobi Desert.

You don’t ever want to go there. Trust me.

I don’t know and I don’t care to know. You know heavy deep true love because it is your job to put machines together with meaning. It’s like English. Putting words together makes a sentence or phrase. Pass the syntax please.

For your final exam you will assemble a Freeze & Point Refrigerator and extraterrestrial Moon Rover named Jade Rabbit.

A simple sentence is: I NEED HELP. Three essential words.

Or: I need food or I need a job. I need water. I need sex. I need freedom from need and a need for freedom. I need to be a free person in a free country. A Chinese immigrant waif named Curious in Turkey, not the bird, teaching Mandarin in Ankara said that with mindfulness.

Some English sentences are brief and precise. Some are gibberish. Many stream of consciousness sentences are composites of useless idiomatic semantic syntax, which is not the same as income tax, however both are expensive.

Life is difficult. Art is easy. Make the reader/observer work hard.

Write this down. English in >English out.

More vocabulary = more speech. Use it or lose it.

Say new words three times and make a sentence to retain restrain refrain vocal volcanoes.

Open your head, heart and mouth. Eat English. Empty your vowel bowel movements.

Please open your creative notebook. Using a simple writing tool like a pen or #2 getting the lead out with a fast pencil answer the following questions using simple English.

Be brief. Be concise. Be short, fast and deadly.

What is life? _______

How did I get here? ______

Why am I here? _____

Am I a machine? _______

Am I a tool of factory #8? _______

Am I a tool of nature? ___________

What is a human machine? ________

What is my motivation to learn English? _________ Secret answer – MONEY with a capital M

Here’s life's equation. No English = no job. No job = no money. No money = no food. No food = starvation.

I am sorry. Bye-bye. Good luck to you and your family.

Your supervisor has instructed me to motivate you. She loves rules and regulations. She eats rules 3x day. She expects me to demand you arrive on time, complete assigned tasks and pass exams. Her authoritarian management style commanded me to use fear as a form of discipline with you.

We know how phobias motivate Earthlings.

If I fail to pass you I will be executed. Survival is my fear-based motivation. It is my DUTY to push you through. You WILL pass because my life depends on it. No quest-ion about it.

Fear is a funny word. How do four little letters enable esoteric ephemeral trembling meaning and sensation? For example:

Fear of starvation.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of losing face.
Fear of failure. Fear of failing better.

Fear of humiliation or shame. Greater than Death – the Grim Repair.

Fear of not meeting family expectations.
Fear of speaking in public.
Fear of ancestor ghosts.

Fear of being ordinary.

Fear of success.

Fear of crossing a transcendental border.

Fear of______(free choice). Fill in your Tabula Rasa.

In our next lesson we will discuss parts and functions of a language washing machine.

One more thing. Normal is a cycle on a wishing machine.

Doctoral students will construct, operate and defend their dissertation using The Dream Sweeper Machine.

Thank you for your short attention span. See you when you see me.

The Language Company

Sunday
Jun102018

Eudemonia

What is life?

Autonomy.

Personal growth.

Self-acceptance.

Purpose.

Environmental mastery.

Positive relationships.

Eudaimonia.

Near Jakarta he shared a universal story with Grade 4. “Many tribes love to look back. Passion and grasping creates suffering. It's a genetic molecule of fear, healthy doubt, fantastic uncertainty, surprise and adventure. Monkey mind. No worries, no memories. A child’s innocent curiosity lives in the present.”

“Every little thing is in front of us,” said a genius kid.

“Yes,” Lucky said, “focus on your essential needs not your wants. Imaginary wants manifest desire. Attachment and grasping creates suffering. Suffering is an illusion. We are all passing through. Humans look back in their vivid reptilian imagination hoping to see a ghost memory, a figment of their imagination."

Is it safe?

“Change is scary. They look back to remember where they came from. They look back because they are afraid they will never see the village and people again. They use their disappearing energy to look behind wondering and wandering and milling around in a perpetual state of shock and distraction.

“Humans seek clues at their personal ground zero. They’ve evolved from distant galaxies. Java man evolved here 40,000 years ago. Accepting an evolutionary premise, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance. We are stardust. Never trust an atom. They make up everything. The world is made of stories not atoms. Oh, and one more thing. Don’t let school interfere with your education.”

He lived in talking monkey zones. They ate rice, drank water and fucked. They washed one set of clothing and hung it on bamboo.

They killed all the animals and burned down all the forests. They bred, worked and got slaughtered. Shamans brought rain. Tropical downpours gave humans free showers.

Food was cheap. Let’s eat mantra. This had nothing to do with simian behavior. It had nothing to do with two women sitting in a dark warung food joint near a private school facing a tall cinder block wall.

Chickens goats and cats prowled pecked and foraged in garbage. One woman sat in a deep meditation as her friend cleaned her scalp. They took turns exploring and inspecting. This genetic ritual was practiced in world zoos, jungles and rain forests.

Chattering storytellers. Musicians played ancient gamelan tunes. Heal people with music. Music is the fuel.

Idle Indonesian males after washing taxis studied accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. Waiting for passengers they played chess in Banyan tree shade. Checkmate, said Death, You lose.

Drivers visited the warung chatting up girls, devouring spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies, green chilies and deep-fried snacks.

One lucky explorer created a Brave New World.

Culture is what you are.
Nature is what you can be.