LIVING FREE OF TELEVISION

photo by vada, 3

New weather hysteria. We have a forecast for possible snow, an inch or two, and panic is in the air. Oh no, snow! What if the roads are slippery? What if? Of course the roads will be slippery. And it will be cold. For a short time. The snow will be gone by next day. This county isn't even included in the forecast. I'd love to see a wet snow with colored leaves still on the trees. I've seen it once. The world is like candyland. Weather forecasting has become a bit over-frantic in attempts to make the mundane into something exciting for five minutes of tv space. Gotta keep it exciting like the news and commercials around it with jets shooting missiles into Middle-Eastern cities, death from the sky, somebody else killed by cops, another school shooting. The weather doesn't have a chance in the excitement department. Recent reportage predicted a few months ahead to another Polar Vortex, that span of really cold weather that swept over us last winter. Another report says there will be no Polar Vortex this winter and it will be a mild winter. I've heard several predictions that the winter will either be the worst ever or the best ever, nothing in between. Bipolar. Our news, itself, has become bipolar. They only run extremes. Good drama. I'm remembering the time in the hospital channel-surfing a tv with fifty channels. I'd hold each channel long enough to see what it was, two to five seconds, run through it once and turn it off. I am still stunned by how much gun violence I saw, repeatedly, pointing, threatening, shooting, shooting to kill. News was about killing. Entertainment shows were about killing. The evangelists today are even more obvious frauds than the ones in the time of Tammy Faye and Jerry Falwell. Pat Robertson goes on raking in free money tax-free pontificating ignorance. 

by vada

Television is the American dream. I look at it and see what everyone around me, the people of the world I live in, are dreaming, tv shows focused on killing and fraudulent religion. Pizza dripping strings of cheese up close. Fast food. One of my rules of thumb for a good life, like stay out of Walmart, is don't eat anything advertised on tv. On Sundays, watching the race with Justin and Melvin, and football, and basketball, and baseball, and golf, and hundreds of commercials, I'm in a foreign country. It is not my world. Everything is coercion, you must buy something. You must look a certain way. You must have fun a certain way. I could not live with that hysteria in my house telling me what to buy, teaching me money is the only value. The False News channel has recently won a federal court case allowing them to lie legally in their news. Surely, this is to protect them from lawsuits for false reporting. It's not like they were waiting for permission. I'm glad I early voted. The political ads as false as Ann Coulter I pay no attention to since voting. I don't even hear them. Kay Hagan the democrat I can't tell from a republican. And the republican parrot Virginia Foxx. When I see her possum face I want to say, Knock, knock, is anybody in there? Not my world. I had the displeasure in the late 1980s to sit at a dinner party next to the head of the NC democrat party. He asked me how many children I had. I wanted to say, How many books have you read? I discouraged him from trying to talk to me right off. I felt like I died and went to hell. I did not feel at home. My world does not include people who ask me how many children I have, pretending to be interested in what I have to say. I knew before he started he was not interested in anything I had to say, and I wasn't interested in how many children he had. 

by vada

It was an interesting peep-hole into a world completely separate from my own, a world I did not want for myself. Something like television in that way. Made me glad I was not born into wealth as I regretted in childhood. Throughout my life, I've wanted to know as many different kinds of people as I could, from poor to rich, ignorant to brilliant, crazy to sane, different cultures, different countries. My reading is from all over the world. Recently been through about ten years or more of reading about China, history, fiction and poetry, seeing films and art. I'd waited a very long time for China to open up and let the rest of the world see their contemporary writing and art. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sparked my interest. I looked for more and found quite a lot more. Raise the Red Lantern, The Hero, Shanghai Triad. One led to another, finding writers at amazon. In a short number of years I learned China's history, the whole story of Maoist China from the revolution to the post-Mao era. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the expanse of desert in China. I've seen parts of it in films, looked at it in the Atlas. It's serious desert like Australia, perhaps even more. Not even Aborigines could live there. Some of my favorite poetry is from Old China, Li Po, Po Chu Yi, Tu Fu, Han Shan, One of my favorite books in the house is Sunflower Splendor, a collection of Chinese poetry printed in the early 1970s. It's a desert island book. Interest in China expanded to interest in Mongolia. The great wall of China was built to keep the Mongols out. They were that much of a problem. Mongols raided northern China regularly. The Mongols could not be defeated, and one of the wonders of the world was constructed to wall them off. 

by vada

I've not done anything notable with my life, but I've had a rich life of the mind, which was the only thing I wanted all the way along. I knew from the start I wanted to live remotely and alone, to follow my own interests. So much I was curious about and one thing led to another. By now, I have a fair to moderate understanding of the history of the whole earth. Persia is a gap. I have little experience with Persian history and writing. Some of Persian history is in the Old Testament. Persia was a powerful force in the Old Testament part of the world, and had some interesting kings. Their religion, Zoroastrianism, is one of the world's great religions. They are called Parsis in India, I've checked out a netflix documentary about Persia that was interesting, a good starting place. There is one king, in particular, whose life I'd like to read about. If my imperfect memory is functioning, I think it was the first Darius, the Great. He sounded like a good ruler. One of the rare ones in human history. I sent off for a DNA analysis a couple days ago. I'll be curious to see all the parts of the world my DNA went through. I feel like I spent some time in Mongolia. I'm curious to see the African lineage. I've an idea Africa is where most of it will be. Cultures all over Africa are unique unto themselves. The music from different parts of Africa are unique to their culture. Thomas Mapfumo's music from Zimbabwe is very different from the music of Chaba Zahouania from Algeria. My curiosity encircled the globe down through time. I don't know a great deal about any one place, but have some familiarity with almost every place on the globe. I don't know much about Greenland, though recently met a woman who had lived there. She told me about the landscapes inland seen from a plane. This is how I entertain myself while the people around me watch television and buy new cars. My life is so much richer for bypassing television. I've not had time to watch television. Too much interests me to waste a lifetime on hyper-violent, mind-numbing eye candy. 

vada herself

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LEARNING TO PLAY

A new project is taking me into a new place with cardboard and wood. This one is four sides instead of just one side. It is eight and a half inches tall and five and a half inches each side. This block of wood has been in the house for several years. I found someplace and kept it with the some-day-I'm-gonna collection of found things I'm looking to use up before my last day. I don't want who cleans up after me to throw them away. I have feeling for the beauty in each object such that now I want all my future art objects to be made from the found things. The plywood pieces I'm gluing cardboard to are pieces I've found over the years with a mind to painting on them. The cardboard is found too. I'm surprised at how many I have, and continue to find more. I had in mind I wanted to make a few small ones too. I found two small pieces in the house among the collection. This block of wood I'm working on now has been here possibly fifteen years. Its dry. It was excess, cut off the end of a six by six found I have no recollection where. It was aged when found. I have no concern about it drying further and developing new cracks. It has cracks from drying out, which is ok. I don't want cracks to occur after the project is finished. I've made a base for it to stand on from a block of wood five and a half by five and a half, an inch and a half thick. On top of it sits another block of wood an inch and a half thick, three and a half by three and a half inches. Both blocks of wood I found the exact size they are, at different times. They fit as if I'd cut them to size. The two blocks are held together by wooden pegs. The big block of wood will be fixed to the base by two wooden pegs. I'm looking at painting the base black. The big block I aim to paint a deep dark red not quite maroon; red enough it will be seen as red.  

Red is a color I have shied away from in the past, though now I want to make some beautiful red things. Red has moved in on me. I like red now like never before. I've always liked red, but never wanted to use it much. It seemed like an arrogant color in the past. It doesn't seem like that at all now. Possibly some years of seeing Chinese films, reading Chinese fiction and history, paying attention to contemporary Chinese art, I've learned an appreciation for red. Red is as important a color in China as the color combo red-white-and-blue is in USA. Red goes all the way back in the Chinese aesthetic. I tend now to associate the color red with Chinese art, an Eastern aesthetic. I already have a Western aesthetic by a lifetime of influences from European and American traditions, all of it based in Christendom. The Eastern is based in Buddhism. I see the two religions the same as they teach the same universal truths. Only the different cultures they represent make them different. At the core, they are the very same. I tend to see everything outside the core superficial. Only the core matters to me. I could go from one religion to another with no more problem than a Methodist visiting a Presbyterian church. I could go to a Buddhist temple and pray with others there, the same as I can go into a Muslim mosque, pray with the worshipers there and feel at home. Hindu is a beautiful religion, but there, again, only the core is of interest to me. I'd be interested to learn about the various gods and goddesses and the texts, though with the same interest as I'd read a history of India. My personal preference is to have it as I have it now. No religion. Only the core. I live with that core, the core that is the same in every living being. It is the very deepest part of who I am; it is my consciousness, the self who sees my dreams. I carry that core with me wherever I go, even to the liquor store. Like the Rastafarians say, I am I. 

That's where red takes me now, to balance of east and west in myself. One of the aspects of what I'm doing now that excites me is I see the Eastern aesthetic blended with the Western. That I'm doing single colors now is Eastern as it can be; Chinese, Japanese, Korean. It's also Western, particularly American. Everything I've done heretofore has been totally Western to my eye. I've wanted to get the east-west balance in my painting, but was not satisfied I had. Because I didn't have a warehouse to keep unsold paintings, I felt it important to paint for the people of the world I live in, rural Americans, Appalachian Americans. About ten years of portraits of mountain musicians. It came to feel like coloring books, keeping it inside the lines. I wanted to reach into the abstract in a way that the simplicity itself is what's abstract about it. On the plane of one color, the raised cardboard surface becomes subject, or positive space, while that around it becomes negative space, in one color. If the light is coming from above right, the light makes a light line along the right side and upper line of the rectangle, and shadow on the left side and lower side, two sides light and two sides shadow articulate the rectangle. For me, that line is the subject. This block of wood will have some interesting lines on it. I'm loving playing with a four-sided version of what I've been playing with on a flat surface. This feels like the first time I have felt like my art projects were playing. I feel like I'm making music finally. All the way along, it felt like every phase I went through was a leap beyond the last one, each one a stair-step process of learning by doing. It's like I've been learning chords, songs, techniques, the art of making music. Suddenly it all came together, ceased to be work and learning. Now I'm playing.

  

I have relaxed. I wanted to make something of my own aesthetic that is no one else's. To get there, I threw off thoughts of selling. I don't care if somebody likes it and don't care if somebody doesn't like it. I'm reaching inside self to find my own aesthetic without interest to please anyone outside myself. I was looking for something wholly my own. It started with a simple design that went simpler and simpler. I want to shave the object down to its own core. Like I don't want any kind of dogma to sour my faith, I don't want anything in my art object but its core self. I like using paint for color and for its textures. Putting the two levels of the base together with pegs, I used the smaller block to drill holes in first and use it to guide the drill bit for the peg holes in the larger block and in the bottom of the big block of wood. I was pleased with myself for doing it so accurately. I measured and drew lines, had it just right. The big block sat on the base at about a thirty degree angle off from what I'd planned. It's crooked. I have not been able to figure out how it happened. It's simply how it is. Everything about it looks right, but it's way off from what I saw initially. However, I want chance to have a role in everything I do. I read this as a chance occurrence out of my control. I received it as Divine intervention and said, Thank you. It makes everything just a bit askew, suggests the big block is turning on a pivot, gives a retinal sense of motion, gives it lightness. I like it. I thought for a split-second of drilling new holes, and said, no-no-no. I must receive the touch of the Divine when it is given. My mind is still unable to figure out what happened. It will look so much better. It will look like I meant it. The element of play is now established in it. The corners lined up, it would have looked like a wooden soldier. Now it is a dancer. 

*

NOBODY GOING NOWHERE

vada by cheyanne

I don't know if the answer is ignorance, or if it is far-seeing foresight, or if it is trained into us over centuries and millennia, or if it is from feeling powerless without a voice, or maybe from collective experience, but the question is why do we lay about and hope a benevolent force will come to us from outside to rescue us from ourselves? The hope that flying saucers would rescue us from hard-edged absence of caring has been with us since the Fifties. A website, paoweb, has "updates by Sheldon Niddle," purportedly channeled from galactic federation wise counsel. I've looked at it occasionally over the last several years to find over and over that "first contact," when a mass landing will announce we are being watched over by beings more intelligent than we; they're just around the corner, any day now, soon now, coming to set us up in an ideal society under the galactic federation. Whatever. A few years ago, a definite date was announced. The date came and went. Oh, well, no problem. Some things were not in place they thought were in place and it turned out the timing wasn't right. Sounds like Fundamentalists announcing the end of the world and then it doesn't happen. There was a bunch in southern California some years ago who poisoned themselves because a comet was passing by and it was here to collect their souls. Sometimes I need some input like this to remind self that our inept government is not the only dysfunction going around. It galls me to think the people in DC actually represent us. They do not represent our interests, but they do represent the greed, the I'd-rather-be-watching-tv mind, readiness to lie to get what we want, the way we look up the ladder not down, our style of looking the other way when we see somebody down and out, our self-centered focus that says all for me, screw everybody else. In that way, they are a mirror to American motivations.

 

vada by cheyanne

 

Sparta has been down and out since the year 2000. It was limping along before, but since 2000, businesses go away, new businesses start up and go away. For awhile the talk was tourism, get people to come in here from other places to save us because we can't save ourselves. And factories. Maybe a factory will come here and save us. How much of that mind that we cannot save ourselves comes from religion, a totally different kind of "salvation?" An old joke came to mind. A man fell overboard from a cruise ship. He's in the water praying to God to save him. Somebody threw him a floating ring, but he wouldn't touch it, God's going to save him. He drowned and went to heaven. He asked God why God didn't save him when he was calling for help. God said, I threw you a floating ring and you wouldn't have it. I take it to mean an element of self-help and accepting help is part of the deal. Seems like if we take care of ourselves, the desperate prayer to God to fix us may not have to be so desperate. I like to live my belief that God's counsel, scriptures, are here to help me make my own decisions more in line with the reality of the moment and not feel the need for the Unknown to hurry up and save me from the results of my own dim-witted decisions. I believe that in this time, historically in the evolution of consciousness, the mental exercise of making decisions is important in the soul's growth and the brain's development. I never learned about decision making until I was away from parents who permitted no decision making. I came out of the experience dreading, afraid of making decisions, not having experience. Right away I made some disastrous decisions for myself because I did not know how to decide, how to be impartial. Up to age 23 I was ruled from outside myself; parents, marriage, military. The next 5 years after leaving parents were taken up by forces outside myself making my decisions. I gave myself to them. By the time I left the Navy and marriage at the same time, I was suddenly able to start thinking about making my own decisions, and became jealous of making my decisions. Nobody makes my decisions without my permission. Anyway, that was the dream. In this time of the life, looking back, I was then, and am able now, to hang on to original purpose.   

vada by cheyanne

I can't say I've always made the best decisions or even rational decisions, even sensible decisions, but somehow I've made it to today. I started college on my own, making decisions for myself. I was not aware in that time of the importance of decision making. This is hindsight talking about the importance of decisions. Then, I dreaded having to make any decision. Didn't know what to do. I was on my own first time like a dog that had lived on a chain since a puppy set free. The dog runs heedlessly in any direction chosen at random. It just runs. Inevitably, like a bird that escapes a cage does not know defensive flying and gets nailed by a hawk first day, the dog runs across the road in front of a car first day. I was determined not to be heedless with my freedom, which allows me to be sitting here today writing about it; otherwise, I'd have gone the way of the bird and the dog. Made some decisions I would not make today, explaining why I have a little bit of peace of mind in this time of the life. For one thing, I tried to learn how to be social, how to be charming at a cocktail party, how to be seen with the right set, shit like that. It never took. Never found comfort in a cocktail party. Then, I knew people I would totally stay away from now. Also, the other side of the coin, found a handful of the best friends of my life unto death do us part. Knew some wonderful people, too, people I recollect with warm feeling in the heart. It doesn't do to get in touch with people I have not seen since that time. They've gone to careers, families and new cars, bought the package. I've gone hillbilly, live on a back road with a cat, two donkeys, and drive a twenty year old car with rust places. I'm really at an ideal place in the life. I've lived the ideal that I don't want to impress anybody. I'm there. Nobody going nowhere. I don't impress anybody who lives by the way of "the world," the human mind. I need the freedom to let go and let God, as they say, let things around me happen their own natural way with the least of my interference. It may not be good husbandry, but it is how I'm comfortable.

vada by cheyanne

I have, I actually have held as a guiding light for self, to be somebody who does not impress anybody. I don't want people looking at me with the I'm-impressed look, or sucking up to me because I have power and influence, or wanting to rub elbows because I have more money than they do, or introducing me to people I don't want to meet, a great big expanse of expectations I don't want to pretend to live up to. I want the world of commerce and whatever else they do out there, that whole system of taking other people's money legally, I want them not even to know my name. I want them to see me the way they saw old man Sherman Scott who drove to town on his red-belly Ford tractor and wore his bib overalls and work boots to church. Just an old nuisance nobody much knows, he sees just a few people and stays to hisself, not looking for nothing but to live in harmony with neighbors, friends and the people he knows. Articulating it like this, in retrospect, I've made it. I spend my own time studying, learning, not in a structured, academic way. Like, for some reason I start wondering what is going on in China. What news we get about China is propaganda. So I start at zero. I know nothing about China. I found some contemporary Chinese films through netflix, found Chinese fiction and poetry through amazon, then wanted to read a history of China. Came upon the time of Genghis Khan. Two pages. All I knew about him was cliché stuff. He seemed awfully interesting in those two pages. I put the marker in the Chinese history and found a biography, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Found him much like King David; genocidal warlord, brilliant mind, a heart as big as Mongolia, became the Founding Father of the nation that formerly had been continually warring tribes. He really was a great man. This was a man who could jump on a wild horse and ride, only rode wild horses. This is how my study is done my way. A little bit at a time over several years, I'm familiar now with how people live in China. This just one of many veins I follow with no purpose but the guiding light of curiosity.  

cheyanne selfie

 

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EVERY DAY ACQUIESCENCE

banksy

In my own little world the everyday life part of it doesn't seem so crazy. The people I know live their lives like usual. Sparta has less and less business. It feels like Sparta is a waste land. What businesses are open, they're barely getting by and staying open because they can't afford to close. This started in the year 2000, immediately after the Shakespearean usurping of power by the republicans after losing the election. The business activity in Sparta started slowing down right away. Through the 90s Sparta was staying afloat, not thriving, but it was looking like Sparta was a living entity. At the same time, Hong Kong transitioned from British colonial rule to mainland Chinese. It was no big thing looking from the outside. The Hong Kong population acquiesced immediately, overnight, to the new way things would be. From outside, one change I've seen is the Hong Kong men with guns movies had guns shooting from start to finish, bodies dropping one after the other. Since 2000 I see less gun shooting in the men with guns movies. They have gone into mind games between cops and gangsters. They didn't cut out the shooting, but it seems like the newer Hong Kong movies have become more mental than physical. Mainland Chinese films don't have guns, none that I've ever seen, except in wars.

At the time, I found it striking how Hong Kong's character had to change from one belief system to another overnight, and Sparta's character changed overnight too. It was like business was shut down throughout the republican administration usurped by judicial fiat. Everybody knew the election was stolen. It's just that everybody also knew our only recourse was to acquiesce. They destroyed our economy, our legal system, our political system, our way of life, all of it without resistance. All of it done in the face of acquiescence. The republicans by now have the economy so destroyed there probably won't be any coming back. I'm not talking about the stock market economy. It only applies to the takers, aka the rich, like casinos in Europe. The rest of us out here in the world are having our resources stripped from us by the super rich, our labor hardly compensated for at all. The Reagan Revolution has kept income for the working people steady for over 30 years while inflation goes up, up, up, and our resources are funneled into offshore tax free banks. We pay the taxes from our labor to keep a military going that is way out of proportion to sensible, and amounts to a circle of wagons around gated communities. It's for the benefit of the people that don't pay taxes.

antoni tapies

All of us know this is going on, regardless of whether we like it or not politically, and we acquiesce. I hear somebody saying, "What else can we do?" That's exactly what we're supposed to do, acquiesce. It's evidently the natural thing for us to do. I see people up in years who have spent their lives asserting their belief system onto government, like socialists for example, one of many examples, people who spent their lives frustrated and angry that American government is about money only, that it doesn't change. Angry all the time. It's either commit to actively making specific changes in government policy or acquiesce. It's how we keep the peace, we give in. A neighbor's dog has been killing the possums that live under my house, that keep the house free of rodents, snakes, country critters looking for sheltered places to nest. I don't like having my possums killed, but I don't want to kill the dog, and I don't want to make a fuss about it. So I say, to hell with it, and acquiesce. I honestly would like to kill the dog, because it also killed my favorite cat. But I can't allow myself to do it. I've thought of hiring it done, but tell myself it is not somebody else wanting the dog dead, it's me. Therefore, it's mine to be the one to kill the dog, not somebody else. But I can't do it. I once killed a dog over killing my chickens, and told myself I'll never do it again. Though, if the dog were to kill Caterpillar I would kill the dog within a week.

I was hearing somebody talking on NPR today driving to town about new initiatives cities are looking at for pulling the different parts of the urban community together to search for innovative ways to get the economic bloodstream flowing again after lockstep shutting it down by the collective republican party, people who want to shut down We The People because there's too many niggers that might benefit. The republican party is the present day manifestation of the Ku Klux Klan. Like the Mob in the big cities invested in legitimate corporations and disappeared as the Mob. The Klan disappeared as the horseback riding Kaspar the sinister ghost and became legally legitimate with their own political party. It may be the best for the USA to have a black president now, in this phase of the Reagan Revolution. The republicans are going apeshit like hornets after squirting hornet spray into the nest hole, buzzing up a storm. They all have an African American, the real deal, OVER them, excepting the puppeteers pulling his strings and their strings too. Washington DC is on hold with the republican shut down of American life, all but military, shutting down the economy on us, cutting off our blood flow. The state governments are under siege by republican chicanery like national government. The cities are evidently looking at ways to make it without state or national government. The republicans have become such a serious problem in their ongoing efforts to create police state, which they've done systematically unto completion, nullifying the Constitution before our eyes and laughing as we predictably acquiesced. It is the waves of our acquiescence they ride.

I was heartened to hear that some cities are starting to pull together as big communities looking for possibilities for becoming self-sustaining, looking to the good for all concerned. Breaking free from greed thinking. This being a direct consequence of the republican shut down of government for all but military and police, it could be a good thing. It looks like the republican party is on the highway to self-destruction. The arrogance toward the people by the North Carolina legislature right now is classic. This is republicanism at it's most cut loose. It's a Fuck All Y'All attitude to the American people, way beyond a thumb to nose gesture; it's spoken by action, not words. We hear it and see it on the news and acquiesce daily. It's so what we do automatically we don't even notice. It's our way of playing possum. Just flop over and sleep for awhile. When they shredded the Constitution, I scratched my head and acquiesced. What can I do? I can write this that you're reading now, but it doesn't do anything other than give me a chance to explore my own thinking on the matter, which is why I write these daily notations. A few who see it the same way will read it. A few will read it and hate it. I think republicans know better by now than to dip into this well. It doesn't have sugar in it. I like this spontaneous description of self, no sugar in it, the way I like tea and coffee. I'd guess everybody who knows me would agree with that. It would be a fun subject to explore on the psycho-therapist's couch.

 

 

 

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WHEEL OF FORTUNE TURNING

all paintings by feng dakang, china

Every day I hear concerns on the news that NSA is surveilling our email accounts and facebook accounts, and everything else. I wonder whence this pose of naiveté. I took it for granted from the beginnings of emails and facebook that they were available for government surveillance and were at least set to key words like bomb. I've taken it for granted that this daily blog is surveilled for key words from the beginning. I went into it aware of cyber surveillance. I tend not to use key words that ring alarm buzzers. I read and hear indignant accusations of government for spying on us. We the people are the enemy, anyway that's how the rich, our elected "representatives," the corporate world and the Supreme Court view us. By regarding us the enemy, they are making themselves our enemy and they're now working against us to drain us of the last drop of our blood/energy/money. That we have been subjects of surveillance has been the case all my life. In the Fifties when we talked on the telephone, it was characteristic of everyone to suspect a crackle on the phone line a sign of surveillance, then it was called wire-tapping, and sometimes we would say things to insult whoever might be listening. Of course, no one was listening to teenage chatter over the phone. Then, they were interested in communists, now it's terrorists.

feng dakang

I can't help but think it a fake naiveté to pretend it's a surprise we're being surveilled. It won't be long before interstate traffic is patrolled by drones that just happen to gather other information too. Police state is here and it doesn't appear to me that surprise is authentic. It is a popular police state. I believe Marx said that if change doesn't come by legislation, it will come by revolution. Legislation is on HOLD and revolution is in the air. Not like in the Sixties when every band was required to have a song about revolution and it meant nothing, but the Occupy movement and all that goes with it is becoming a problem. The suppression of the movement by corporate media, including NPR controlled by republicans, is making it into an internet underground that is growing all over the world. Big change is at hand. Big change is happening. As always, our government is the last to get it. Government has become a behemoth with a life and mind of its own like Hal the spaceship computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over the last 30+ years government has been our enemy. If you've ever paid your liability insurance for the car a day late, you know what I mean. The State of North Carolina has already informed me with certainty that it doesn't give a shit about me, only wants my money. All I can say is, that's all right---it runs both ways. Since I was informed by the State of NC of my status, I see NC as lines on a map and that's it. No emotional identification.

feng dakang

I have a feeling it would be a good thing to withdraw my interest in what government is doing. I've learned it has nothing to do with we-the-people except as the enemy. All I can do is accept and go on. The world of the people I live among is far more interesting than the news. Our political parties have minimalized to the not very bright vs the truly ignorant. It has reached such a low it isn't worth paying attention to. They say if you don't pay attention you're not participating in democracy. Well, we don't have democracy, the interest of we-the-people is nothing of consideration except for polls that inform the manipulators, the propagandists. I always hang up when I find it's a poll on the phone. I don't care to participate. I don't care to hear about Sarah Palin, for or against, and a long list of the others. They only make me puke when I hear them talk or read something retarded they said. That these people win elections tells me republican gerrymandering over the last 30+ years has successfully shut down democracy. Or that half the American population identifies with stupid. That's the part I find scary. So easy to manipulate they're boring for the propagandists.

feng dakang

The people around me are so much more interesting than our present run of politicians. Yet, I don't recall a time when they were better. There used to be the occasional bright light, like Fulbright and Moynihan, not many. Every president I've admired as a man was annihilated by relentless republican dirty tricks, starting with Kennedy. It's time to listen to more music. I like hearing news from Africa on BBC in the night when I'm up late. I like being aware of what's happening in Syria now and Turkey. I'm curious about China, how it is evolving. China is evolving now while USA is devolving. We are in rapid devolution. China is moving forward. We're moving backward. The wheel of fortune is turning. We're about ruling the world. China is about doing business with the world. We can't do business with other countries without controlling interest. China doesn't do that, so the developing countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East turn there for business. China does not have historical interest in expansion or the Western urge to rule the world. USA made a mess of its time at the top, squandered its wealth and influence. The 20th Century is called the American century. The 21st Century is already China's century. They will have Taiwan back before long and then China will be whole. It has been important to China since the day it became China to be its own version of united states. China means Our Land. When China is whole, I can't imagine a Chinese attempt to rule the world. But that doesn't really mean anything, my imagination. It is what it is and will be what it will be.

feng dakang

 

 



I have noted several times as a kind of refrain that the people I live among are so much more interesting than the people who compose our government. I live among people who work for a living, work at the low wage rate of the Reagan Revolution that froze wages from then to now, thereby running profits way up to pay CEOs multiple millions. We the American people have been easy targets. I won't let myself get involved in any of the political belief systems enough to feel the tug of wanting to do something to make a difference. I discourage that kind of thinking whenever it arises. The only "difference" I can see that I, as an individual digit, a pixel, can make is person to person in the world of my friends and neighbors, to help somebody having a hard time, to be a friend who can be trusted. I don't dare presume to aspire to any more than that. I don't have the last word or the answer to anything. Seeing my baby friend Vada once a week has become something of far greater value than anything to do with political systems. Time spent sitting on the floor with Vada watching her draw or helping her put shoes on is time spent at the apex of possibilities. Right now, at this time in my life, I can't think of anything I regard more valuable than time spent on the floor with Vada, watching her play. In the not too distant past I could not have foreseen saying such a thing now and meaning it from the heart. It tells me my heart is alive and well. In that way I can say my life has been a success.   

feng dakang

 

 

*

MO YAN GETS THE NOBEL 2012

       scared orphans, nanking memorial

Today I saw the first disk of a 2disk film from netflix, a BBC nature tv series, 3 one-hour episodes per disk, Wild China. The first disk deals with the Southern Mountains above Laos and Vietnam, tropical forest. Central China, Hunan province, has beautiful mountains. Then western China, the Tibetan plateau and the mountains, the Himalayas and Chinese mountains we've never heard of that have never been explored by any human, inaccessible. We of the west pay no attention to China except as the place everything we buy is made. Cheap labor, militarist society. The video shows how the very most remote people live in those places where the most remote rural people are poor and have least interference from government. The filming of the birds and underground burrowing critters, the insects, the fish, it was an amazement to see what a few photographers good at getting close-up shots could do with a mother monkey carrying her one day old baby, monkeys that live in cold mountains with snow, seeing varieties of animals I've never seen before, like a Tibetan bear with eyes that make its face look like a mask, even a few seconds of seeing a snow leopard. It brought to mind Peter Matthiesson's beautiful book, The Snow Leopard (1978), his search for the elusive snow leopard. The memory of it makes me want to read it again. All I remember of it from so long ago was that I loved it. Sometimes I wonder if Matthiessen might be the great American writer of our time.

I've been reading history of China, have seen multiple films of different times in Chinese history. I don't mean kung fu westerns, but films from mainland China where an art renascence is in progress. For example, today I heard on the news that Mo Yan of mainland China was given the Nobel Prize for literature. I was a bit disappointed the Committee didn't see Dylan having it coming like I do, but have no argument with it going to Mo Yan. A very respectable writer, good to have this attention pointed to him. He's a straight-forward writer, but does not challenge the government to put him in prison. I get the impression he likes to write. The freedom now for writers is almost as free-wheeling in China as here. Mo Yan is one of many in China. He stands out from the rest. At amazon.com is a good list of his novels available in translation. He's been keeping his translator, Howard Goldblatt, busy for several years. Just thinking that in my next lifetime I might enjoy translating contemporary Chinese writing into whatever language I'm born into, maybe Danish. I don't say any of this to forecast next lifetime. It struck me a lifetime as a Chinese translator of beautiful writing would be a good life, fulfilling. It has its agony, of course, like everything else.

In Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, he lets it happen. The rape of Nanking, December 1937, is one of the great atrocities in human history. It's there with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nazi death camps, Pol Pot, and the list goes on and on without end all the way back to the trees, to the ants. It's what we embodiments of the spirit of life do. I'm recalling my friend Millard Pruitt back in the time the Ayatollah was on tv. His solution to the Iran problem in the late 70s early 80s on tv news and everything else that came up, was universally, "A-bomb em." I sat there and chuckled within, not looking downward at him, but seeing country wisdom, a way of thinking from a place that was outside time until television arrived soon after electricity. A-bomb is television imagination. Change the channel. Zot! End of that one. Knowing he was coming from a way of seeing that was another time, another Age, another century, respecting that, and liking that in him, I said in fun, "If A-bomb em is the answer to every problem around the world, seems like there'd come a time you'd be the only one left." He said, "That'd be all right." A straight-ticket republican and a straight-jacket mind. If he were living, he'd be sending money to Alice's tea party, like he did to Reagan before, and Nixon and Goldwater.

Mo Yan wrote about the rape of Nanking from the inside, from someone telling it who was there seeing it, living through the Japanese occupation after initially mowing down everybody they saw. It was a full military assault on a civilian city inland. It was so bad it makes me feel immense sorrow just it coming to mind without details. I've read about it, seen documentaries about it, seen films made from fictional accounts of it. It's a moment in Chinese history I know fairly well. Couldn't pass a test on it, but sure do have a feeling for it, evidenced by the dampness in my eyes from it just coming to mind. Mo Yan gets down and dirty in it. I mean real dirty. It's not for the squeamish. What I've learned from Mo Yan and other sources of what the Japanese did to the Chinese people of Nanking makes me look at the Japanese a little bit more like WW2 vets I know look at them, men who won't drive a Japanese car. They gave the Nazis a run for the most vicious people on earth championship in their time. It was a blessing for all of Asia that America shut the Japanese military mind down, or possibly redirected it into corporate mind. Nonetheless, Mo Yan writes visually like a movie.

The memory from Mo Yan's Red Sorghum that will never leave my mind, I don't mean I obsess on it, but I'll sure as shit never forget it, is the old man the Japanese soldiers tied to a post and forced the local butcher, the man's neighbor and friend, to skin him alive in front of a big crowd of people gathered to see what was happening. The man whose skin was getting cut off cursed the Japanese with every breath, every curse word and phrase he knew; he cursed them until he expired. The Chinese don't mind getting down and dirty and they don't mind sorrow. Sorrow is a legitimate feeling in Chinese writing, and in Chinese life. They haven't had enough television and prozac etc yet. American writers over the last half century have taken sexual writing surely by now as far as it can go and not repeat itself, the Chinese don't go there in excess. In China, the Sixties sexual revolution passed them by. Some tried it, but the Tienanmen Square incident put an abrupt halt to that thinking. There are more important things going on in China than sex, as dictated from the top down. There is a certain way of looking at what I call the Chinese embrace of sorrow as a metaphor for the dark cloud of militarist rule and continual surveillance from known and unknown directions that hovers over all of China from way back in its history. Like the American pop culture fascination with zombies and vampires as metaphor in a time when the Bank is draining, coincidentally, our energy from our pockets to unaccountable Cayman Islands accounts.

The Chinese have their issues like we have our issues. Their issues are particular to their history as our issues are particular to our history. It's like individually it's our experiences that individuate us. I like reading Chinese writings of this time, fiction, poetry, essays, histories and the subtitles in films as well. China was closed up through the early part of my life. I wondered what was going on there, but didn't know how to find out with a logjam of curiosity backed up, waiting to see if I'd see the day China opened enough to let us see what is going on inside. First, I discovered the film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which pulled me in and made me want to see more. Discovered Zhang Yimou films. Zhang Yimou made a film of Red Sorghum with Gong Li. Netflix doesn't have it. I want to see it. I'll go to amazon soon and pick out something by Mo Yan to read. Or could read Red Sorghum again. It's such a powerful incident in China's history, in China's psyche. It's a story that needs telling and a story that needs hearing. I'm glad Mo Yan won the Nobel, for himself and for China. Congratulations to Mo Yan.

*

MAO'S LAST DANCER THE MOVIE

Privileged is a word that has stayed in my mind the last several days. My own feeling of privilege. Automatically, there's the privilege of being white in America, and there's the privilege of being American, white American. There is an element of what we call freedom that really is enviable to the rest of the world, with exceptions. Much as I go on about the holes in American democracy, it is only right that I fess up to appreciating the other side of the coin too, what's right about American democracy. For one thing, I'm allowed to openly write whatever I feel is important to say or even what is not important to say. The only presidents whose hands I would not shake would be Johnson's, Reagan's and W's. That only because I don't want them touching me. I don't want our energy fields to intersect. I see them enemies of the American people, serious enemies, in fact seditious. Americans are divided about half and half, for democracy and against democracy. I'd guess about 100% want democracy for themselves; only half of them want democracy for everybody else too. The electioneering money goes to swaying the undecided one percent toward's one's own direction.



A great film seen today was MAO'S LAST DANCER, the story of a Chinese ballet dancer who defected to USA for those basic freedoms we take for granted. By now, after seeing probably a hundred mainland Chinese films, reading a dozen or more mainland Chinese novels, reading some Chinese history, imagining what it must be like to live in China, Gao Xingjiang's ONE MAN'S BIBLE carried for me the feeling of living under the dark brooding cloud of political oppression with tentacles that entangled everybody without compassion. We don't know these kinds of problems except through stories out of China, and before that the Soviet Union. Our capitalist way is also without compassion, but we do have access to the law, which is largely in our favor, unless an international corporation wants it another way. Our enemies are within. They're not coming at us from the outside, but from inside, like a blood disease, like marrow cancer. The Bush administration was like brain cancer.



The film's depiction of the difference between USA culture and China culture was portrayed especially in the dancer, Li, when he was new here, like arrival. People hugging him, women flirting with him, all of which was forbidden in China. Any public display of affection forbidden. In China, it's the boundaries the people live inside. Here it is forbidden not to make public displays of affection, like hugging, "So good to see you," "I need a hug." We Americans have taken up hugging over the last half century. Hugging is new to us, and by now it's everywhere. Hugging is what we do. It can't be denied, hugging is a very friendly gesture. Li's first day, people were hugging him everywhere he went, and it was new to him, very awkwardly new. He came to the Houston ballet for 3 months and when it was time to return, he could not go back to living under the dark, brooding cloud.



It seemed like a karmic message I'm to learn something from. Yesterday, the story of the chimp taken from its life as a chimpanzee, raised in human conditions, then at about the same time in a child's development, Nim was taken from his people and his spirit crushed under intensive training like training a dog to obey commands afraid not to. He was caged in a single cage in a big room with several cages of chimps all living under the dark cloud of solitary confinement in his own cage in a world of chimps languishing from despair. Li, the dancer, kidnapped by the Chinese embassy, had to spend some time in solitary being held and returned to China on first plane. He fell into despair over just a couple days facing return to the relentless repression he knew before and took for reality. It was no longer reality.



If he'd not had legal assistance, his story would have paralleled Nim's, taken away to live in a cage of political repression the rest of his life, complicated by his attempted defection. The film goes on to make a heart-throbbing feel-good movie to the ultra max, legitimately, too. The film had no cheap shots. It's one of those films like AS IT IS IN HEAVEN where the final scenes wrap everything up in a happy way for all concerned. Quite the opposite of Nim's story. Mao's Last Dancer has an ecstatically happy ending that is understated. Very powerful emotionally. The story's beauty is in its innocent heart.

* 

TIME OR MONEY

 

     m.f. hussein

I've been wondering for some weeks what happened to my Asian readers. Used to be views in SoKorea, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, India and others. About a month ago the Asian readers stopped. I miss them. My sensing is that this is the same length of time USA and Israel have been bombing Iran. Iran supplies oil to much of Asia, including China. USA wants to slow oil supply to Asia. China released a news bite the other day calling USA a "troublemaker," for the posturing toward war with US fleet playing war games in the Pacific for them to see. The paper tiger better watch out. I used to think Obama was an intelligent president, but seeing him take us into these most dangerous places in the world, posturing and bombing simply because we need a new victim for American ongoing aggression, gives me chills. They talk about "pre-emptive" strikes, like daddy hitting the kid "for general principles." I'm curious if Asian countries have agreed to cut off internet with American blogs, etc. I can't say that I blame them.



I understand better every day the meaning of "live in the world, not of it." Finally, I feel like I have some understanding. My inclination when I moved to the mountains was to get out of the world. But the world was in the mountains too. Over the years, I've attempted to get along in the world, make a living, keep peace with the people around me, wondering all along the way where is the dividing line between in and of. Looks to me like Asia hunkering down, seeing the paper tiger's gaze move from Middle East to East. They had their cold war with Russia, but now that Russia is not able to play power games any more, it's time to subdue China's economic influence by controlling their oil supply, keeping it low to keep their production low. No point saying anything about it. It's not my call. If USA were not a rogue warrior nation, we could have good, solid, cultural exchange relationships with China and the other Asian countries. But America must dominate. Shiny, shiny, boots of shiny leather.



We, the American experience, have become in the world something like the Comanche Indians of western Texas and Oklahoma. The Comanches had horses a long time before the other Indians. The Comanches were a warrior culture. Little to no arts and crafts. The liked stealing horses from other tribes. Horses were their status. They commanded a rather large territory with their aggressive natures. In USA 2/3 of our taxes go to military. We don't do arts and crafts except in people who must. And they end up in corporations. They lose belief that their art is valid because it's not up there with the Best and making the Most money. When they stop, they stop forever. It doesn't pay. Maybe some might take up painting in retirement. We put off our lives to make more money. This is why I've never made money. Like in economy it's a trade-off where guns and butter are the issue. More guns means less butter. Americans are so used to it, it's our way of life.



Many years ago, I saw that divide between money and time. I chose time to money. I live in a world where it looks like everyone else chose money to time. I thought, what's the point of having money when you don't have time to use it? I believed I could have a better life with more time than money. Looking back, I don't assess that way of seeing it a mistake. I chose time and, though I can't say I've spent my time well, I can't imagine I'd be much better at using money than I am at using time. I also follow advice from some masters of the East. Shirdi Sai Baba recommended letting money flow through your fingers. Upasni Maharaj recommended living without ambition. Mind you, this is for people on the spiritual path; people living in the world, not of the world. Ambition would be the desire to do well in the world, on the world's terms. Ambition is involved with wanting. Letting money flow through the fingers allows the flow of the economy, keeps money, the bloodstream of civilization, in motion. Keeps the economy healthy, and is good practice in detachment.



Discovering those two methods of living in the world, not of it, each one sort of jumped off the page when I read them. I didn't need to make a note. I knew. As soon as I saw each one, I knew there was something to it to pay attention to. In my trust that these guys knew what they were saying--they did in everything else they said--I let go of ambition to see where it would take me. It's not that it took me someplace. It's that it inhibits attachment to position and other egoic magnets that look silly from the grave. I've learned from mountain musicians how to continue in my art form without ambition. I have my interest in making each painting what I want it to be in itself, not thinking how much I can get for it. When the money enters into my painting, the painting fades away. In this round of painting mountain musicians, I'm keeping money mind out of it. Art is not about money. It's not about position, either. I live in a country that discourages art for the sake of military might, the two don't seem to go together well, and art is my only interest. Military might is not even in the top thousand on my list of interests.

*  

SPINNING WHEEL

listening to the rain

Applied paint to the fiddle today, bringing it closer. As of today it's beginning to look like a fiddle by color as much as shape. It appears to have the lightness of a fiddle, deceptively light every time I've picked one up. If I can keep that or even enhance it is essential. I don't want the fiddle to look like it weighs 10 pounds. For the darker part of the wood I need darker than raw umber, which I can't use at all because it has a green base and I'm using red tones. Many ways I can get it. Red and green put together right can make black. Same for orange and blue. I'll make the dark part one of these ways. Orange and blue makes a warmer tone. I want all warm tones on the wood. I've studied his face all day and will approach it tomorrow. One of the eyes needs a tiny touch and nothing more, but it has to be right. His left eye makes him look Japanese. Funny, when I look at it and see the eyes oriental, the entire face becomes oriental. I see his eyes as western and he looks like a white man. I'd never noticed before the powerful influence of the eyes on the entire face.

I would venture, meaning I don't know, that our use of language has weakened and cell phones have demolished our original way of communicating through our eyes the way they do in the world of the dumb animals, dumb only in that they can't talk with language we understand. The language they talk we don't understand either. I've never heard the cats say a word to each other. I've learned with them and the dogs before them that I don't need to talk to communicate with them. Nearly all my talking to them is hearing my head roar, has nothing to do with anything. The cats have learned a lot of words, which I use for triggers. Like catfood. They also understand, You want out? That's in response to pleading eyes saying I want.

There are certain words, just a few, like friend. First time I told TarBaby he was my friend, he went into deep relaxation and purred out loud. I don't know that he'd ever heard the word before. This happened 5 or so years ago. Since then, every time I tell him he's my friend, he relaxes and purrs like that's telling him the very thing he wants to hear. I didn't say it any special way, but he got something. I doubt it's in the sound of the word itself because the same word in German is said something like froint. I asked TarBaby if he was my froint--he acted like he didn't hear. He's an American cat. Talk English.

Speaking of which, it bores me unto weariness when I hear somebody go on about why they oughta make em speak English if they want to live in this country. This is a English speaking country. Same as the immigrant issue. Defenseless people to bash. That's bully mind. Switzerland uses 3 languages on their currency, French, Italian and German. Those are the languages people tend to speak in the 3 regions of Switzerland surrounded by these countries. Anything I buy that's electronic and needs an instruction manual has the book divided into 2, 3, 4 or more languages. So what. All the better for people to understand you with. I like walking on a New York sidewalk and hearing every language spoken and occasionally my own. I've always loved the sounds of other languages. As a kid, my mother worked with a Mexican girl, Juanita, high school senior. I'd ask her to speak Spanish to me just so I could hear it. Bob Dylan has a song, Spanish Is A Loving Tongue. We don't have much that's loving going on, so it might be nice to have the Spanish language spoken more frequently.

It's just that old colonial racist belief that you keep the people of color down. The problem with Spanish is brownish skin tones. That's a no-no in the land of denial. The arrogance of whiteness was challenged this most recent election when we learned people of color are 50/50 with the white population. Being kept down, they're relatively poor, and sometimes totally poor. The poor tend to have more kids, meaning from here on, the people of color outnumber white in USA. When the Civil War was over, the freed slaves outnumbered the whites in the Deep South states. In a democracy, that's power. As long as white man has power that shit aint happening. That's where requiring education to vote in the South and keeping the black folks away from education started. The Randy Newman song, I think it's called Rednecks, comes to mind.

White man is in crisis at this moment. White man used to control the money, but now Yellow man controls the money. Yellow is non-white. Chinks. Slopes. Gooks. As America's white man star is fading, the Asians are coming on in the stock market world, outdoing us at capitalism. They used to be them dirty commies. Now they own us, thanks to the expense of two wars on poor people brought to us by white men. It looks to me like USA passed over the top of the wheel of fortune between the time of WW2 and Kennedy's assassination. The 20th Century is called the American Century. This century looks like it will be called the Chinese Century in retrospect. We're on the downside of the wheel as China and India are ascending. When I was little, those were the poorest places on earth. The wheel won't stop for them either. I hope they do better than we did, though I don't dare expect. They are, after all, human.

TRAVELER IN SE ASIA

duck duck

Went by to see Jim Winfield today, recently home from 3 months in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and VietNam. We sat on the back deck of the house with snow all around, in sunlight, warm and comfortable, his 9 ducks huddled on the snow in front of us, keeping an eye on us, company. The frozen pond is on the other side of the house. We watched the ducks as we talked. He'd hired a Mexican to shovel snow for him, a couple of trails to outbuildings, chicken house and barn, and get some off a roof with not much slope. They talked in Spanish quite a bit and I took a dozen or so pictures of ducks, only one of them worth looking at, and it barely.

I thought of China where they herd ducks with a long bamboo pole like a fishing pole, something to guide them with if one goes too far off either side of the herd. I remember a b&w photograph from someplace like Life magazine years ago of a Chinese boy walking a herd of white ducks. I wondered why ducks didn't take here like chickens did. My imagining is that our country, our towns, our suburbs were built on theretofore wild land with predators that had been driven into other territories, such that they have no territory of their own. A bobcat without its own territory is in the territory of another bobcat wherever it goes. Ducks are defenseless, like rabbits. Rabbits can run fast and ducks can swim. When the fox comes around, duck goes for a swim. It's not like chickens have a great deal of defenses, either, except some of them can fly a little bit. Duck eggs don't taste good to the American palate. But they do taste good to the Chinese.

Jim was talking about a possibility of going to southern China next year. He met several Chinese people in his travels this time. He learned that the mainland Chinese are free to travel inside the country now and there is a great deal of movement in China. People are making money and they're able to travel. For natural wonders of the world, China has some of the most awe-inspiring landscape on the earth. About 2/3 of the country is desert, serious desert with some of the most amazing rock formations and mountains on this earth.

The southern mountains are tropical and beautiful mountains. As a result, most of the population lives in the eastern part of the country, about the eastern 1/3, where all the history took place. The other side of the desert to the west is Tibet. I regret China's absolute takeover of Tibet, but I also regret how all the land of my own nation was taken. It's not like there's anything I can do about any of it, so I worry myself over it less as I grow older and see it's everywhere, idiots rule. Intellect without ethics is the same as ignorance. I can't say who has ethics and who does not, considering I know nothing about the subjectivity of anybody but myself, though actions do tend to be projections of thought.

Jim, like me, in the past have been interested politically, like getting involved is the way to make a difference. I look back now and laugh at myself. Oh so serious about a decision made in a world I have no access to whatsoever, by people who wouldn't even give me a second look. I didn't go to an ivy league school. I'm not of east coast wealth, west coast or any other coast of wealth. Therefore, I have no voice, without doing something really stupid like flying a plane into a tall building in Austin, Texas. Maybe he'll get the Darwin award for the year, extricated himself from the gene pool.

I've seen from reading current Chinese fiction and some histories, plus seeing well over a hundred Chinese films over the last 3 or so years with netflix, that China has a lot of cities in it I've never heard of, that when I see them in a film, they're bigger than Los Angeles, and skyscrapers galore. All of it new. Jim said he learned a good bit about Chinese cities he'd never heard of that are as big as our biggest cities, too. China is in production. He said it looks like Asia is coming to life in economic terms and in the terms of their traditional ways of life, just like here, the old ways are going fast. What's left is pop culture. I believe Asians can make us look like beginners at pop culture. The Asian pop market is immense. Thailand is the land of pop piracy.

Jim's observation of the Chinese he'd become acquainted with along the way is the same as my observation from film, fiction and history. The Chinese are very different from us. Very different. I like seeing Shanghai and Beijing in movies, past and present, but that's about as close as I care to get. I have to confess to a degree of fear where going as deep into the Asian world as he went is concerned. In Peace Corps, Winfield lived among Indians in the jungle of Ecuador, and spend 3 years in Zambia, in Africa, just south of the Congo. A few years in Haiti too.

He can go places and do things I can't do. I'm partial to plumbing, to start with. I like it a lot. I don't want to go to Bombay where it smells like stale piss all the time, until you get used to it and it starts smelling good. Movies and reading and hearing the tales of a traveler are my forms of adventure. I've got so bad that I don't even like to cross the county line unless it's a couple of miles to see Ralph Stanley at Fairview Ruritan. I like to live my adventure right here at home where I'm snowed in all winter with frozen pipes, a good time to stay at home.

ICON

bullhead

With Jr in the bed asleep or drifting 23 hours a day, that gives me a whole lot of time to not make any noise. I could, but I'd prefer he sleep when he's able. I don't even listen to what I want to play on radio show because I don't want to disturb his rest. All he does is rest, but that's because he needs it. His energy level is such that it is difficult for him to lift his head off the pillow. It's equally difficult to focus attention when spoken to. I'm learning to use key words with him. Whatever I say to him, he says, What? I have to tell it 3 or 4 times, each time I reduce it to a simpler element. By the time he gets it, I've pared it down to the noun and the verb.

Minimalism. I like the minimal in art, and art is reality. Now I'm learning the minimal language of key words, like googling. I have to think up key words for each of these entries for the box, Labels for this post. It's not very long since 'key words' entered the vocabulary, like icon to mean something besides portraits of Eastern Orthodox saints as soon as computers come along. Now we don't even know the word icon has a history. Just another goofy computer word thought up by California whiz guys. It took me awhile to catch on to the new use of the word and its frequency. Somebody would say something like so and so is an icon, and I look inside my head at a Greek Orthodox icon of some saint with a colorful halo and his name on it in Greek.

This happened several times. I began to wonder why is it all of a sudden people are using the word icon, people I know do not know about Russian or Greek Orthodox icons. It wasn't computing. Then I got it. When an awful lot of people are saying something at around the same time, television is where it came from. A few times at people's houses with tv on I hear the word icon about somebody being an icon, like that's a big deal. Television is the answer. But why that word? It's what those little logo images on the computer screen are called, icons. The early California computer geeks brought the word into everyday use with a long list of others.

In the course of a day, I have a lot of time to read. Just recently I found a Chinese writer who lives in California, got out of China somehow. Her name is Anchee Min. I suspect she's reversed it like Chinese do outside mainland China, so Min is her last name, that in China would be first, Min Anchee. Today I finished my second of her novels, The Last Empress. First was Empress Orchid. The first one is her life up to the time she becomes Empress and the 2nd her life from there to the end. Beautiful story. Beautifully written. Told in first person like an autobiography. And she wrote it in English. It was not translated from the Chinese. She knows her English very well for a second language. The life of Orchid is quite a story. Her reign was through the last half of the 19th Century. The story's context is seeing the old dynastic way come to its fizzle-out end.

Most interesting for me was seeing China crumble due to the British introduction of opium, internal corruption, and China's reluctance to join the industrial world, which, like a pack of wolves attacked and took great chunks of China for their own. Everything broke down from within, they had nothing to fight with, Japan was bearing down on them, the British, Germans, French, USA, moved in and took what they wanted. The Empress does all she can to keep China whole, and nothing works. I suppose it could be called historical fiction, but it seems to me like just a good story well told. I can't imagine the research she did. It's written as visually as a movie.

I enjoy Anchee Min's writing so much, I've started another of hers, Becoming Madame Mao. Mao's wife's story. She went down with the Gang of Four. Started it today and can tell I'll read it with the same zeal as these others. Very different character. Very different time. Only a quarter century later. Reading about Empress Orchid, seeing how China came to its own end because the old ways didn't function any more, I was looking back from a time when Beijing is a major international metropolis. Then it was poor as Albania.

It helped to see Mao in a new way for me. I tend to see him a megalomaniac despot. But, that's Chinese tradition. It took harsh measures to pull together a way overpopulated mass living in wretched poverty, sometimes so bad parents exchanged children so when the child starved to death the rest of the family wouldn't have to eat their own child. That's bad. Needs changing. Mao changed it. He used extreme, despotic means to make China function and put people to work. Big undertaking. They'd had such bad experience with foreigners, they kept the rest of the world out of their internal changes. The Bamboo Curtain it was called. A journalism key word.

Now that China is opening up, I'm reading as much as I can find that's coming out of mainland China. Also what's being written by exiles, dissidents, writers living all over the world. Throughout my lifetime China was like a boiling stew. The Tienanmen Square incident is, again, Chinese tradition. The East has a despotic tradition that goes all the way back. We don't have it in the Western tradition. Westerners wouldn't stand for it. Chinese despotism is shocking to us, but it's how they do governance.

From a country that meant the worst poverty in the world when I was a kid (eat everything on your plate--think of the starving children in China) to the world power it is now took place in my lifetime. It's looking like the 21st Century will be China's like the 20th Century was American.

I don't think much of what they're doing in Tibet, but to them it's an internal issue, and no business of mine. I'm glad I don't live there. But some interesting art, writing and film are coming out of China now.

This is the sort of thing I think about during the day while Jr is resting quietly. It's why I can do what I'm doing, staying in the house all day and night, on watch. Getting a lot of good reading done and assisting my friend at the same time.