Where do I park this empty vehicle,
asked a Tibetan monk
burning corpses
after an earthquake killed 2,686 people
in a remote village at 13,000 feet.
A child survivor ate cigarettes,
and paper napkins
drinking his urine to survive.
Life is found in a desperate situation.
Disaster gave the Chinese Party Propaganda
machine a glorious opportunity
to create a new Hero and promote being One People.
Namaste,
The demanding accusatory tone of voice is always an admonishing attitude of voice how reality is. Shanghai commands are simple and direct.
Heels strike cold hard pavement in darkness. The sharpness belongs to a girl escaping from family for the night. Muted voices of an old couple walking through narrow concrete canyons echo as heels fade.
An elevator door opened on the 11th floor of a five-star business hotel in Shanghai.
A beautiful Chinese girl, 20, in a white dress clutching a small black purse stared at a scuffed marble floor. Small puddles of rain water gathered around her shoes.
She raised her face from the ground.
Deep dark brown rings circled old, tired, fearful eyes hiding her heart's knowledge, revealing her soul.
There was no place to hide, no magical cosmetic concealing the truth of everything she knew. The woman and witness instinctivily understood each other. Passing toward another temporary hope, another ethereal reality.
She was on the wrong floor and pressed another number. Doors closed. She was moving up in the world. Up to the room of a foreign businessman taking her through night into morning.
Everyone in town was making money.
Billboards shouted, “Making Money in China is Glorious!”
She carefully folded hard earned hard currency into her black purse after a long hot shower and took the elevator down. Gliding through a revolving glass and brass door, she passed a deserted dark empty Japanese restaurant and negotiated gray stained industrial steps to Nanjing Xi Lu.
One million serious adults in blue industrial clothing practiced Tai Chi with controlled balanced concentration.
Every methodical movement had meaning.
Dawn's collective mist breath crashed around her well worn heels skipping over cracked stones through shadows.
Metta.
Namaste,
Nepalese people live in your pocket, ala small Donegal villages.
Get a room. Water and electricity are extra.
No electricity? No problem. Have more dark erotic secret sex. Produce more children.
They will light up your life.
Here is a bucket. Get in line.
Here is a pail, an empty water bottle.
Why pay for plastic when you need water?
Elicit electric.
Here is your cage.
It has a wheel. Get on the wheel.
Begin running. Run forever.
How long is that?
Run until the green light comes on.
What does green mean?
It means stop running.
Rest.
Metta.
Namaste,
65 million people in Asia
live in a village called Poverty
surging oil prices, production shortfall from bad weather, export restrictions
by food producing countries
food is a weapon
poor Asian families spend 60% of their income on food
600 million
2/3 of the world's poor
live on less than $1.25 a day
wealthy countries spend 15% of their income on manufactured food
Metta.
"Keep your hand moving," whispered the writing teacher to 80 robots.
The foreign teacher wearing Tang Dynasty clothing filled with dragons, yin-yang balance, a Phoenix rising, a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains while emperors danced with concubines inside Forbidden Cities' red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams dove into silence beside abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss was a manifestation of phenomenal superior detective analysis and forty questions of the soul marking marketing examinations at 7:00 p.m. followed by utter exhaustion.
We escaped the sterile Chinese university on mountain bikes, singing, “We know so much and understand so little.”
“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” bright star Leo said. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’”
We sharpened sticks on stones carving paleo-Leo-lithic cave paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name backwards for future historians and archeologists to get the gist or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, “English On Line.”
Being hunters-gathers we salvaged assorted garbage mired in mud. We created a semi-permanent temporary recycled art project on the canyon bottom.
We assembled statues using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, lost feathers, sharp needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, dried condoms, fractured leaves, bird calls and worn and torn useful Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa, Tibet.
In nature they drilled for cauliflower.
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