On the mountain

This is from a NYT report by Andrew Jacobs in Baihuatan, China.

Fu Hong, a 19-year-old horse breeder, came trudging from the other side, his face gaunt and his clothing wet and smeared with dirt.

After the earthquake buried seven of his friends, he scrambled to the top of a mountain and hunkered down in the forest. For three nights he sat numb, impervious to the rain. “At least up there, nothing could fall on my head,” he said.

In the end, hunger drove him back to Yingxiu, but he was haunted by the death all around him; an elementary school had collapsed on 400 children, and the constant rumbling of aftershocks made it impossible to sleep. “I had to get out of there,” he said as he passed by. “My family must think I’m dead.”

Shattered

Greetings,

This Chinese artist does the dead. People bring him pictures of their loved ones and he captures their image using pencil. It is placed in family shrines to honor their ancestors.

As the images of heroic rescues and the grim reality of lost children flood the world, I am reminded of the artist, his work and all the children I knew in China.

May they rest in peace. May their parents and ancestors welcome them in their long silence, their memory.

Peace.

China Artist Does The Dead

Greetings,

Adapt, the balloon man lives near the hammam. Yes, mam. He lit a fire this morning under the abandoned stone memory where someone - he doesn’t remember who - lived, worked and died.

The balloon man collects anything he can find for his Sunday fire.

The fire blazes high and strong yellow flames. You see it from the metro window. You remember the balloon man from the other day when he carried his bouquet of flowers filled with air across his green spring field and set fire to the sky filling it with pink, green, blue and purple thin bags of air, his dream violet, daffodils, spilling balloon imagery across eyes, fields and sky flaming majestic canvas.

The balloon man’s voice carried across the rivers, “Create like a God, order like a King and work like a Slave because A Century is Nothing."

And, as he walked through the spring field, only the beginning, his thoughts flashed back to the fine knowing like stars throughout the universe - take a picture of the universe! - it would burn out, his fire, it would ask the air, “Where are you?”

“Where is your depth, insane calling patients," - reminding them of serious death defying appointments bathed in a light room near caged sad singing birds; three Golden Eagles, two males and one young female in the tall grass where two males battle, fighting the female for possession to be her dominate partner.

How she balanced on a strong extended leg, her deep brown lightning eyes, a yellow glint flashing anger, striking out with a sharp talon, it’s curving white tip a point slashing at the males circling her with desire, cunning and stealth.

She dances between the two males, pirouetting on one leg, her back near a fallen tree trunk protecting her flank. Her wings open, creating winds across the plains, reaching green mountain forests.

A wolf pack near her, trapped behind chains and fences numbers twenty.

They live on a worn brown hill studded with boulders. One lone wolf’s eyes are alien - slanting long deep with a unique fluorescent emerald green Aurora Borealis retina patina, rather like a deep slash inside of light, refracted prisms, very surreal and different this one wolf’s eyes.

"I am a lone wolf."

The others have “normal” wolf eyes. Brown, green. This one is an algorithm of DNA.

They are restless. They miss their wild and free nomadic relatives living in untamed eastern mountains near Armenia away from genocide and 1914 snow circling pines beneath fast vast gray skies. They look well fed and hungry. Hungry to get the hell out of their caged world.

Across town near shattered shouting mountains a patient Chinese artist does the dead in his gallery.

Peace.

Talking animal story

Greetings,

Once upon a time in "T" an imaginary fanciful place where idle men stood around looking bored and undereducated drinking brown tea after artfully massaging a microscopic silver spoon clanging metal against a small glass to destroy 2-3 cubes of sugar manufactured in a filthy basement far away where shy new lovers held hands inside the rising sun of their passionate desire for yawning bamboo chairs where two elderly women in multi-hued head scarves smoked as exploding drops of water from icicles plummeted onto roof tarps above a cafe where a ghost scribbled in shadows burning his fingers to see the why falling water drops played music.

Peace.

Kid's play

Greetings,

Wow, it's another lousy beautiful magical little day in paradise!

My five-year old friend, Zeynap knows her ABC's. We sing and draw in the fast yet ravishing food zone. Bored anxious adults stare at us in wonder and forgotten memory.

They eat their dreams with yogurt.

They ask us many questions without speaking. "What's the melody? How can you revert to such primal innocence? Is it the food? Air, water? Why does the caged bird sing?"

Zeynap ignores them tracing symbols - red, blue and black lines on empty white paper. She becomes the paper, ink and flow. She folds them and we play "Guess which hand holds the secret paper."

Nearby, red roses bleed their fragrance into a blue sky turning it violet.

Zeynap leans across the table. She whispers an irrefutable truth. "All these adults were punished for dreaming."

We laugh and play all day.

Peace.