I follow my impulsive feet
wherever they might go
my body is a pine tree
surrounded by the snow
sometimes I simply stand
beside a flowing stream
sometimes I chase a drifting
cloud past another peak
- Han Shan Te-Ch'ing (1546-1623)
Translated by Red Pine
Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.
Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.
"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."
"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."
"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.
"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”
Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."
"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."
"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.
"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."
"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.
"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."
"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Earth.
"You’re wiser than your years."
"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."
"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."
"What are they?" asked another orphan.
"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.
Leo’s neighbors are Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.
Dave had a kid so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of him or her in old age. When they are sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 kitchen smells.
It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash or no deal.
You play the game or the game plays you.
They pretended to need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Socialist Party book, Produce & Consume.
Get married early. The pressure is on.
You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, lonely, and forgotten like a bad dream. Loneliness increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and personal instability in a well-mannered society.
Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa illustrate exchange and user values for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and begin producing genetic copies. Petri dish. Wash and tear.
It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.
Sam cries. Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.
He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting forever which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.
Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.
His voice, this manifestation expressing human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near the gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunching over chipped slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with a gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water as pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels dance near a woman garbage collector who rings a bell every day at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.
Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s carefully arranged her family’s daily consumption waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink. Like shreds of fat. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does.
Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above eternal glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue and white electric Buddha bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food. Pho hears her father whisper in her burning ear carrying her away from their flaming village. ‘Remember where you came from.’
She never physically returned. She carried memories.
It didn’t really matter which went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled alley blocking all but the most sincere light of fading day, she casually tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing day by day it became part of the collective mess, a collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.
She was content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Just enough to get her away from walls where she’d gossip with her neighbors as white twilight cracks filtered past musical hammers, creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from poor villages very far away laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers, drifting among H’mong Sapa kids speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after 8 dystopian educational years now selling their handicrafts to tourists; bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless mountain winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their external nightmare reduced to self-pity, leaving No Exit. A shattered mirror reflected her face.
Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his social network domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. Vietnam forced them all the way back to Manchuria.
The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat spring garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the day. Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs. They kept the language and baguettes.
Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.
Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family remembered dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and brown temples welcoming silence.
During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange.
“Quick into the tunnels!” They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They burrowed deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.
The sweet silence after all the crying and wounded foreign d(evils) fled in terror as peasants streamed down mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking oceans of creation myths, draining lands of blood, forcing d-evils into shining seas. A blue green sea danced red.
Their city voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but sounds of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at life’s twisted fateful reality.
Their memory was a fiction.
This fiction created their memory.
Said the Director of Sales at TLC.
“What’s that mean?” said a Kurdish beggar girl in Bursa one freezing night. To pay a Mafioso extortion bill her family threw her to the wolves. She hawked blue tissue packages to a sad man playing a flute sitting near a broken escalator above a homeless woman in rags setting fire to a pile of manuscripts trying to stay warm. Have mercy.
“Always be closing.”
Lucky sat in a blue plastic Metro chair zooming through a rainy morning. Mountain peaks meditated in white clouds above rocky-forested slopes and golden mosque spires. Other than two cheerful speech-enabled women, passengers were cold, distant, lost, bored and going somewhere intangible or else they’d be homeWaiting For Godot.
Tracks sloped down concrete edges. Blurring trees disappeared. Cars slid into darkness as florescent beams glided lighting bolts on steel tracks. Black click clack music reached an underground station with immaculate white tiles, benches and a large steel box holding bagged sweets. Comatose women in floral scarves grasping plastic bags studied heavy territorial shoes built for comfort. Station man in a green and yellow uniform manipulating a broom pushed history.
An automated Metro voice announced a stop. Doors opened. People departed. People boarded. Doors closed. Metro rolled on.
Communist party loudspeakers lashed to trees boomed across Lenin Park Lake in Hanoi:
Enjoy the ride. You’re only on it once.
The Dream Sweeper Machine collected everything.
The Bursa Sales Director resigned the next day. He had a falling out with management. It was always about numbers. Sell. Sell. Sell. He said he had 210 for February. They said 175.
That ominous day the TLC owner arrived from Constantinople, parked his Benz and entered the center of the universe where everything happened similtanesilly.
The receptionist freaked out and called the Sales Director.
Marketing man #2 escorted Boss through the center of Earth. He looked around. Purchased from Leaf Branch Growth in Dublin for $700,000 the three-month old franchise didn’t meet his standards. He had a corporate mentality and wasn’t a happy little camper. No clocks, broken glass doors, no wall art, out-of-order computers, badly peeling lamination work on desks and so on. “Shoddy half-finished work, even if I do say so.”
Lucky and the soon to be extinct director were enjoying a munch lunch with sheesh-kabobs. The director’s cell sang.
“He’s here,” said the receptionist.
“Who?”
“Sand Dune. He just blew in.”
“Oh no. I’m not dressed for work.”
Buy low sell high.
Revealing his true character he ran away. After a final e-mail to headquarters about numbers he trashed his office, yelled adios to the staff and disappeared into a subterranean cavern catching a Metro home sweet home.
Women staff cried on the sidewalk facing the center. A girl dragging a metal cart filled with cardboard and broken computers needing an OS surmised someone died. Serious departed tears. Tearful women smoked in sunlight. One tear reflected 360 degree blue sky. Melting mountain snow returned to work murmuring gossip and fear.
“Who’s next?”
The center’s magic numbers were now two sales, two receptionists, two native personal tutors (one from Trabzon - see footnotes) and two imported barbarians.
“We are understaffed, overworked and underpaid,” lamented a joyful personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep, the older, from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French, Esperanto and Cello. She cherished seven magic stones from Mudanya on the Marmara Sea where she lived.
Her grandmother told her Kurdish creation stories. Her language was out loud and outlawed by scared totalitarian Ankara politicians. Kurdish speakers were decapitated in public with a jeweled word sword every Friday at high noon.
“Bend over,” said Teflon Ergonomics, the Prime Minister and de facto dictator. Playing economic prosperity songs to poor uneducated Soma coal mineworkers, illiterate villagers and wealthy middle class voters he bought the presidency in late 2014. It’s never too late to be president, he said. Manipulation and I can really run the Deep State now.
TLC had Janus heads. One head was the owner.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s a business this language and money acquisition cycle.”
He called Hire-n-Fire, the maintenance manhole cover job in Instant Bull and ordered him to fix every little thing. He returned and did a partial job. It gave him an excuse to come again in a juicy sandwich with Russian dressing.
“Someone’s chasing their tale here,” said Omar, a vinaigrette vignette guide. “I love fragments of true authenticity. It’s all I trust.”
*
L said to Z: There’s an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. “Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”
At high noon Bursa emergency medical crews pried a suicidal man from below engines after he was electrified, illuminated and eliminated by Metro lightning. His famous last words: Goodbye cruel world. Goodbye mother.
As medical teams slid his mangled body into an ambulance Lucky explored a cemetery. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates and memories slept below towering pines and evergreens.
A grave-faced widow sobbing on a fresh plot pounding her breasts keened, gone…gone. Her sister drummed topsoil. A friend, mother, aunt or grandmother from Asian Steppes whispered to a child in Tamashek, “She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming death, remembering.”
The child wailed to grave women, “Auntie, Auntie.”
The silent woman playing drum soil remembered her son, brother, father, husband, uncle and grandfather with love. Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. I brought you into the world. I give you back to Earth. The circle of life is complete.
A sharp rose thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair through a humid rain forest covering 6% of Earth. Smoke from burning coconut and banana leaves circled through heart’s four clamoring chambers. Love echoing from the Forest Floor to Zeynep’s Understory rose to the Canopy before emerging through the Emergent where Bird of Paradise, Screaming Eagles and Winter Hawk flew free.
He passed chiseled Arabic script stones. Explosive metal shattered rock. A man pounding a sledgehammer disseminated graven memory shards. Pausing, he removed exculpatory evidence before slamming hammer’s voice, “I love the fragments.”
Sun sought asylum. Rose petals rained. Musical drum soil melodies echoed from a woman’s fingers.
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