Shanghai

I arrive leaving my passport on the plane.  In the terminal I turn toward a door and walk down a metal staircase into a thriving marketplace.  To the right standing on a stage a gorilla with an exquisite British accent acts as a barker describing the times and places of the events of the day.  Further into the underground chamber a giant two-headed American man silently overlooks the scene.  I turn away and look for an exit.  Perhaps, I might find a door which would open into the city.  Suddenly, I am in the arms of a middle-aged Chinese woman.  She keeps kissing me as she moves me back to the metal staircase where I am met by a tall, young, Chinese man.  He presses up against me.  I feel like grabbing him by the shoulders and rolling him over.  He’s threatening me, but it’s a standoff.  I climb up the stairs and reemerge in the terminal.  Back on the plane, I am travelling into the sun, into the land of the moon, to Bangkok.  The plane is filled with Japanese.  When the Japanese speak with one another it feels like a battling, a grappling.  It seems to me their keen appreciation of emotion derives from their feudal upbringing.  About an hour into the flight I get into a long conversation with Jim P., from Washington D.C.  A Vietnam Vet organizer, my age, he’s an Indianian.  We have mutual friends and he looks a lot like me.  He even wears a hat like mine.  He’s a lobbyist for the Amerasian kids.

At one in the morning Bangkok looks like Newark in 1960.  I sleep at the Hotel till five and then get out there into the Tai Chi dance, the macho wiggle of Bangkok traffic.  I'm expecting my friends.  I’m expecting them to be beat but valiant trekking from Katmandu to Anapurna – a zigzag from subtropical to the base of time – their goal to get through the pass into the sanctuary.  There are four:  a winged horse, Feaster; an ex-marine, Greenie, rugged and taciturn; Lee, brother-in-law of Feaster – game – but not as experienced; and Kennedy, my lawyer, old man moon of crew-ex Antarctica Navy Air Force – first time to South East Asia.


It’s cool and quiet in my room.  I begin a letter to the King:  Though this is my first trip to your glorious people I have bonded with them.  The dichotomies are heart-wrenching.  On the one hand you have the resurgence of a splendid gene pool; on the other you have dropped them, without blame, into a vat of carbon monoxide.  Sipping Singha, I continue .  Around Four, there’s a knock at the door.  It’s Feaster standing, beaming saying, an almost perfect trek.  We’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes.  Kennedy is across the hall.  I knock on Kennedy’s door.  He is tired but beaming.


Kennedy, Feaster, Greenie and I sit around my room and toast a successful journey.  All are wasted legs like twigs and stiff too.  Lee burnt still in room.  Wants to get back home.  Only one not to make sanctuary, but he will join us for dinner.  We walk to Mama San’s patio.  The trekkers walk bowlegged with a grim look on their faces.  At the dinner table, they tell stories about living in the Himalayas – Sergio Leone country.  After dinner, we saunter over to legendary Soi Cowboy, a little Disneyland of dancing girls.  We settle in at Susie Wong’s.  Really vibrating.  Fall in love with a twenty yr, old honey, pony tail, nice tits with Mick Jagger type lips.  I buy.  We’re about to leave and I feel someone looking at me from the corral.  Pale, lovely freckled – older serene looking through the bars of the cage.  Captivated, I say, I’ll take that one too.


Later that morning I ask girl with Jagger type lips to leave.  Have hands full with devout and real thing in Nookrai.  Give bye bye girl 1000 baht-remain friends.  Return to Nookrai.


It’s 5:30 p.m. the following day in Susie Wong’s.  The staff has assembled cleaning and getting the joint ready for tonight’s party.  The bar girls, food vendors, money counters and counselors wander in and out.  Each dancer looks as if she has just dropped in from California.  They crouch in front of mirrors and create alluring faces.


As 6:00 p.m. approaches the music shifts from romantic Thai to American rock.  The girls dance tossing their hair, mocking passion.  They dance whether farong there or not, but they need an audience to turn on; a bit languid without.


More fat girls at Susie Wong’s than anywhere else.  Fat man like Thailand.


I’m the monkey swaying back and forth in Dooley’s cage on Patong Beach.  Watching Nookrai sleep so smooth ruffled by an occasional crying.  A snake comes to her that night, and I stand there watching and then holding her; she never awakens.

Pound

In the world of art, a world which stems a tide and catches the fire and beauty of any given time, it is hard to beat the early 20^th century for its spirit of intense collaboration resulting in breakthroughs of form and meaning:  Brancusi in sculpture, Picasso in painting and Pound in literature.  

Pound collaborated with everybody – Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, W.C. Williams, Hilda Doolittle, F.M. Ford and so on.  His real goal in life was to meet interesting people.  Pound was a revolutionary and he never stopped creating his revolution which filled him with ridiculous generalities and obscure references that only a loving biographer would bother to understand.  Pound the great giver, an inspiration for so many others, became impaled on his own petard isolated by a dream of the glorious past.

Skin of Light – A Metaphor for Life

Misinformation is the root of pain the doctor says holding up a white sun which when released circles his head.  The doctor paces round a lobster red coal bed.  He prepares to keep pain from his brain by calling on his cells to expand.  There at the edge he finds a column of spine tingling molecules.  A certainty, a lightness lifts him from the ground and he sails, his hands aloft his fingers outstretched. 


In this world people are always mislabeling things.  This causes enormous emotional confusion.  Imagine if you think a dress is sexy and you intend to wear it to the ball.  Your friends get together and being good friends they tell you that was last years.  Don’t do it, but you do it anyway and you spend half the night regretting and the other half getting drunk at a dive bar.  Ain’t that the truth.  If you had been powerful enough in your beliefs you would have worn the dress with pride.  Perhaps you altered it a little with an accessory or two and took to the sky.

Off the Reservation

In this desert of sensory exhaustion, in this banal, repetitive nightmare dream called the middle class (the wasp’s contribution to the programming of the American mind), it’s easy to let yourself go and begin seeing things – things that could be our way of life like creating a new financial system and a cultural structure with an emphasis on efficiency and care.  Oh, that’s impossible.  Man’s nature just the way it is here on earth the territorial imperative rules.

If all our activity is based on making money we will always have emergency sirens not Bach; war over joy and the trap door will shut upon us from above occluding our chance to evolve.

We need to dig deeper into the world of art.  In the world which stems a tide and catches the fire and beauty of a given time the turn of the 19th century is hard to beat for its spirit of intense collaboration leading to breakthroughs in all fields of endeavor.  All great art is made that way by a self-awareness, a confidence which insures its longevity.  As soon as that collaborative strength is lost, the walls of the art kingdom crumble.

Our psychic pain is our amnesia.  We recall very little of our personal history and practically nothing of man’s experience which is why we repeat ourselves over and over.  The familiarity makes us feel secure, free of pesky thinking and the need to alter one’s course.

Thinking is an art.  Perhaps that is the reason why there is so little intellectual content in our media and art.  Art takes decades to develop.  This society of ours doesn’t pay you to practice.  In a mass culture, the absence of critical thinking creates a vacuum for the quick, the mindless and the violent to rush in.

During a brief stent as a teacher at San Quentin Prison, I spoke with Sal, a huge man sort of the opposite of the gentle giant.  Sal bristled with an anger he couldn’t control.  He had been imprinted at an early age to be the enforcer.  With tears in his eyes he turned to me and said, “I can’t believe it but it’s true – I’m safer in here.  I’m not fit… to live out… there.”  I have never forgotten his look – the real human baffled by his circumstance imprisoned with no discernible way out.

We’re pounding away at the old Humanist Culture like the ape men in Kubrick’s 2001, holding large animal bone and pounding.  The destruction of the old will be replaced by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – blanched out world of pharmaceuticals, computers, weapons and pleasure domes.  The pleasure domes are really great poundings.  Stadiums and halls where we get together and root.  You get it?  I prefer subtle sex but apparently a lot of pounding takes place.

The slight scratching sounds you hear are men and women’s fingers brushing key pads.  The computerized voices can drive you mad.  Humans get harder to find unless you get off the reservation.

The Myth

They say it’s the world of information.  Whoever controls the flow and, as always, who gets the info first wins.  The truth is our world is a world of crap – flimsy clothes, endlessly banal commercials, corrupt bankers and senile pols.  

It’s all crap and because of that, the foundation, which the modern world is built upon, is crumbling.  The dominant force in any culture becomes the gravitational force which we all must endure.  Our myth is simple.  America’s youthful power is what buttresses our metaphysical behavior.  We’ll blow you away!  We’re not kidding.  Back off.  We’ve done it and we’ll do it again until we get tired and worn out and become like Europe: a sad, socialistic world of care and conformity.

2011

This current America is like the silliest excuse for a culture I’ve ever seen or heard of.  You might think the reign of Louis XVI would qualify or Nicholas II, the final Czar of Russia.  How a society grows its people, how it takes care of her poor and most importantly its enduring aim determines its fate.

Our lives held in common hope by our communication devices, our particular genetic branches and the condition of our familial connections causes us to repeat certain behaviors ad nauseam.  Our lives are just like in the movie Groundhog Day without the redemptive quality.

These are two key elements to this kind of life.  The first is the glorious dream of our evolution.  We have been born and will continue to evolve till death do us part (contrary to the evidence).  The second key is found in our belief that that there are codes hidden everywhere in existence which enable us to control reality or, at least, to simulate say a universe so we can investigate it.  This gives us the power of prediction.

Given the data, we might know what will happen – the outcome of a horse race, a coming tsunami, a Presidential election, or how a friend feels.  Locked within the codes are tickers or inspirations, if you like, which give us the answer:  Our victories and our failures vanish.  What matters is our fortitude.

The People of Tomorrow

The people of tomorrow will misinterpret us here and now as we misinterpret those who came before us and so on.  The crux of the problem arises when we think we know what they knew, felt or what they saw.  We cannot know our ancestors unless we dig deeply into what remains of their surroundings and then assemble their images and words to explain their actions.  


What happened to them?  A good starting point is to ask what is happening to us.  How have our American characteristics evolved or devolved?  What characteristics have survived as virtuous?  Who do we emulate now?  I’m struggling to name a person we or at least some of us would know or know of and respect.

Maybe the probing glare of t.v. has exposed too many frailties, but character has little to do with appearances.  Naming a living exemplar reveals almost everything about you and me.  Some individuals contain within themselves I would say a sacred cohesion, a firmness that is its own value and cannot be commodified.


These people always represent a profound knowledge of life consistently displaying traits like compassion, generosity, and perspicacity.  Within them characterological value is asserted.