Don Quixote has been on my mind a lot lately and he came to me in a dream tonight and spoke: Children of the Internet can't think a clear thought, can't think an original thought, because they are dazzled and dumbed-down by the relentless hunting and gathering on so-called social sites, with their siren calls to action based on their plundering of your personal data, their invasion into every aspect of your life, their insistence on taking away your individuality by perpetually coaxing you into being a follower, to like what everybody else likes, to post what you hope everybody else will like, driving your real self inward where it will eventually burst out as random, aggressive psychosis when you least expect it.
We weren't meant to be this controlled. This invaded. This anticipated. This mindf****d. We were meant to be free, wild people, innately kind, ferocious when necessary, musical, reverent, loyal, moonstruck worshippers of the universe, dancing in sunlight, gathering contrast, always flowing like thought, like blood, prowling about like a hungry shark, routinely turning into something else, and then something else, growing like summer corn, bursting like popcorn, like fireworks, a living exclamation point, a cyclone, a lover, a cherub, an Einsteinian lover of relativity, a raindrop, a pause, a tear, a silence, a cloud, a wonderer . . . Can we truly thrive with all this ungovernable grasping for the commercial heart of us? Don Quixote said no, and raised his weary lance, and galloped towards ____________________.
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Slow day melting into evening, I am moving lava beneath winter skies, wondering up and at the red moon . . . Spirit, let's run away together!
Gather up like minds along the way, create a real social network, crashing through the advertising, apathy, aversion, entropy, the money-back guarantees, extended warranty programs, the relentless up-sizing and honor the relevant Constitutional amendments, along with our own conscience and innate goodness and share, baby share, this pizza crust of Earth. So delicately we float together through this BIGBANG universe, bound to a unified field, in spider web galaxies, stars existing between like hope drawing out the carbon within us, dark matter peeping out like invisible black toads, beckoning matter inward to collapse upon itself, dimensions stacked like blockbuster movie casting calls. While intergalactic cellos play string theories . . . oceans move in dolphin moonlight, land reptiles mourn for their prehistoric feathers, frogs croak out dinosaur tunes, music invites our DNA to dance, trees lose leaves to the reggae rhythm of fall, everyday miracles perform to empty audiences, souls escape, babies arrive, a million thoughts live in a coffee spoon, your head buzzes like stormy night static on the radio, your belly button aches for an umbilical cord or for one honest palm print of your father's hand on your soul, Tech-9 fright bursts of being--seize, déjà vu phantoms liquefy into lava fields of regret, and create new islands of you . . . people’d with palm trees that rattle like dice in a cup, your terrors released as poisonous jellyfish ooze, as the sun rises on Kon-Tiki's of exploration plotting courses towards you, Titanic lifeboats row, row, row, for the holiness of your inner life, EVERYTHING swirling and stirring like windblown pollen, like hungry bees, autumn hornets on rotting apples, ghosts of your reluctance wearing Michael Jackson's dancing shoes do back flips in slow-motion on neon-lit trampolines, dissolving into quantum contrariness, which states anything is possible and so is its opposite, while Schrödinger’s rat creeps into San Francisco on little rat's feet, Magellan discovers he's afraid of water, Newton fondles apples stacked in pyramids at a fruit stand, Da Vinci cooks ravioli in the Bronx, Custer lobbies for Indian rights, and the former you becomes everything it possibly couldn't. Be the horse or Don Quixote. Be the pilgrim or the river. Be the crooked lance resisting rust but never, ever . . . be, the wind for the windmill. The white-haired man riding the scooter had no idea how cool he looked in his porkpie hat and goatee. I signaled him, trying to get him to pull over so I could take a photo, but he just looked at me as if I were a madman and so became another ghost in a mind that is full of them. All those iconic snapshots that I missed, floating like oil atop the sea waters of my brain, as real to me as the photos I have been lucky enough to capture, but as elusive as a fading dream, a half-realized fish swimming away, a flash of something I thought was important, and still do, but wonder, why? I am interrupted by the weather. We’ve already had a burst of winter, then it returned to a rainy fall, then a glorious dry fall, folding into a spell of monsoon riffraff clouds that eventually drifted out over the Pacific, enabling a sudden wave of summer warmth, conjuring thunderstorms. I watch the lightening freeze images—skyscraper white, then black, then cars frozen on the boulevards, walkers light up, then disappear, light up, disappear, and it brings me back to my memories, because that’s what our memories are like: flashes of something, lighting up the dark, imprinted on the brain pan but rarely understood as to why these particular images register and last. Winter came early; right after everybody ran out of mooncakes. Wooly caterpillars were extra wooly. The leaves couldn’t pack their bags fast enough. The hills surrounding the city surrendered to a fleeting layer of fickle snow.
Autumn hadn’t even been given a chance to become a ghost yet—summer was still the predominant peacock when winter jumped down from the sky, cracked the careless laughter, froze teardrops mid-tear, let the air out of the Indian summer dreams of the tourist vendors along the Yellow River, puffed up the city sparrows clinging to the edges of everything, chilled the construction workers living in tents along dug up roadways, clamped down on terraced flower boxes, wrung the swan neck of lilies in public gardens, and sent everyone scurrying for wool, down or Polar Tec underwear. Lanzhou is at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. I swear I’ve felt the crackling cold of Everest in the sudden wind that wraps around you like a corpse. A glacial moon cold, an intergalactic cold, like the cold frost of a non-feeling heart or the bow of a polar, ice-breaking vessel. Not all the time, but there are bursts of it. Bursts that leave you open to anything, ticking like a clock that turns its back on time, spinning like a planet in love with the sun, spinning like Einstein’s mind after too many gin and tonics, a hummingbird’s beak sticky with the essence of everything. Winter always takes us back into ourselves. What part of me is the blind Quinnipiac Indian who broke out of a prison in Texas? I happened to run across his story and immediately started writing: Iron Thunderhorse hated Texas. He hated the flinty feel, the gummy mornings, the mosquito sunsets, the citizen's automatic loathing of anyone whose skin was darker than adobe . . . The man in the corner store tells me that this autumn is the rainiest he’s ever seen. And colder, too. A neighbor of mine winks, then later tells me that he says this every year around this time. It reminds me of me, as I say this every year, too: Autumn is the time to remember. Still, it has been raining a lot. Not like Portland, Oregon rain, but rain nonetheless. For a high tech country, sometimes China can really seem really low tech. Like when it rains. Hard. The streets flood wide all across the city. Legions of day-glo, orange-suited workers use ancient brooms to sweep the water toward the storm drains. The first time I saw it, I gaped, thinking it an aberration, but it happens every time. I had so much fun writing and photographing this post that I am eager to share it with you all. It is a poem with pictures, and while a poem shouldn’t need photos and photos shouldn’t need a poem, it was a collaborative act—one wouldn’t have happened without the other, not to mention the rain and the wind and trying to keep my camera dry, while splashing through deep puddles, concentrating on remembering words that came in a burst. It’s moments like these that make living—sing. Over 2,400 years ago, before Aristotle wrote that a tyrant rises to power by first demonstrating that he is a man of the people, before the French learned how to make wine from the Italians, before the first socks were knitted to prevent sandal chafing, before Homer had an odyssey and Pythagoras had a theory, river men in China were regularly ferrying people and goods across the wild Yellow River on inflatable, sheepskin rafts. In modern China, with its bridges and dams and water reclamation projects, this tradition still exists among a handful of rafters still practicing the age-old ballad of curing sheepskins to float on water, and from May to October in Lanzhou, you can hire them to take you back in time. On a lazy, swollen, sun kissed August day, I did just that. "A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent." -- William Blake With these words I introduce my fledgling poetry page. Feel free to contribute. These days, truth is in need of a good scrubbing. It seems like everyone is lying with a wink and we've come to expect it. Successful businesses lie to us all the time and we condone it. We allow it. We've come to the point where we think we are not capable of judging what is true and prefer others do it for us. Observe the resistance within you. Truth is a razor whereas lies are a dull knife that penetrates through repetition. I hope you enjoy it, click on Elvis English Poetry page. It was summer in China and the masses were moving about, traveling with their schools or with their coworkers or their families or friends, but no one, and I mean absolutely no one travels alone, so the fact that I do, by itself, makes me a curiosity. Additionally, if you are a foreigner (laowai) in China, everyone automatically stares at you. Even the people not staring at you are staring at you. So if you like being the center of attention, move to China and it will be a dream come true. Attached like fire escape stairs to the sides of a red brick tenement, the way up the cliff-face Maiji Mountain Grottoes rose up, threatening, impossibly high for someone like me who is deathly afraid of heights. From Wikipedia, “Acrophobia (from the Greek: ἄκρον, ákron , meaning ‘peak, summit, edge’ and φόβος, phóbos, ‘fear’) is an extreme or irrational fear of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up.” For me, unfortunately, anything above the height of a one-story roof was high up. As with anywhere in the world, in China, the trip you have is the one you make. Travel here can be unfathomable, shockingly rude, indifferent, overwhelming, but it can also be generous, enlightening and extraordinarily kind. I found all of these and more on a recent summer trip to Tianshui. Deep in summer, the long-dead winter moans for its lost soul, the earth grows fat and sleepy, peach-skinned sunset skies turn into hot nights, drowsy appeals, fan squeaks, then dawn, a brief coolness, and the lava air flows again. All up and down the streets, flatbed trucks are parked on sidewalks, selling watermelons. The owners just cover up with plastic tarps and sleep in them, a seasonally repetitive party, light and dark green spheres of cooling delight, all for 1 Yuan (approx. $.20 USD) a pound. In the unfolding summer, life has burst out of every crevice and crack, covering limbs and twigs, plump and green, bright flower trumpets and saxophones blowing out color, seeding, singing, drooping, awakening to the sound of thunder, cascades of rain frolic, evaporation, summer glee madness, exploding . . . exploding. Pungent smells of life and rot, summer is a season on steroids. In the lonely heart of every city, there are also many other hearts. A night heart, a day heart, a hidden heart, a creative heart. Wherever I wander I keep discovering even more hearts, more particle entanglements, more unrealized dimensions, coexisting behind the transparent but stubborn veils of repetitive judgment that humans seem to be so guided by. Like all cities in western China, Shandan is covered with Gobi Desert dust. It gets on your clothes, gets in your hair, makes it a challenge to wear contact lenses, which I foolishly tried. Local women cover their heads with long scarves and hide behind big masks as if they were performing surgery. Still, the dust gets in and covers you with fine grit as if it were trying to rub you out or bury you. The day I spent walking along the wall I like to think I was covered with Great Wall dust. An ancient grit of ruin, particles released that attached to me, sharing collective wind stories of the greatest testament to xenophobia that ever existed, melting now in sad dry puddles back into the desert from which it sprang. There is no escaping the melancholy the corpse of the Great Wall incites. It clings to the wind-carved humps, vibrates in the pockmarked shadows, swells like a timeworn sonnet, cradles you gently like the famous lullaby baby in the treetops just before the bough broke, entering you like—yes, like a poem, a panoptic poem of inclusion and exclusion. I walked the line: was I being kept in or kept out? Even now at its diminished height, the wall is a formidable barrier, but you wonder, what exactly was it keeping out? What was it protecting its people from? Ideas? Change? Racial purity? Ever since I witnessed aboard a high-speed train sections of the Great Wall crumbling in the Chinese desert, I resolved to go and see this mystery up close and personal. What the wall provokes in me it might not provoke in you, still, it is an ancient wonder, an Ozymandian bedevilment, a gesture of epic proportion meant to close the door on the rest of the world, now eroding quietly except for the well-recognized, carefully preserved portions. How this could even be contemplated and engineered raises all kinds of questions, the least of which is: Why? To answer that question and so many others I boarded an overnight bus to Shandan—an area in which Marco Polo spent a year of his time in China, to try to absorb the residue of the why and the what and the how. An overnight bus is truly a trip. Brand new and gleaming, it had three rows of double-decked sleeper berths, separated by narrow aisles, providing passengers with bedding, a compact mattress, with the head part raised to a 45-degree angle. Surprisingly, it was super-comfortable. The trafficking of endangered animals—named the fourth most lucrative criminal activity in the world, just got a lot tougher in China as the government reinterpreted existing law to specifically name 420 species on the endangered list and increase the penalties for consuming them to up to ten years in prison. This includes tiger penis, rhino horn, bear bile and pangolin—a species of anteater, which China processes a 100,000 tons a year into medicine for blood stagnation in the liver and stomach. High in the arctic, a drop of glacier melts, freefalls into the oneness of the river that then joins the oneness of the ocean, a collective of the water-beings, everywhere, all at once, unbound, then, in time, rising up on some cosmic whimsy, it evaporates into clouds riding planetary winds to fall as rain in Omaha, Nebraska, down into a reservoir that provides the city’s drinking water, to end up as sweat on a lover’s thigh, and the journey begins all over again. On Earth, there has never been more water or less water, yet it is in constant evolution, forming and reforming, shape shifting in time, no time, all time, part of the everything that is, and so it is and always will be. To me, I believe our spirits are like that and that there is no death, we merely evaporate into other sacred realms, other reckonings, a kind of continuing astral astonishment of willful creation contributing to the ever-expanding universe. One gray dawn as spring was turning into bright summer green somewhere in the middle of America, I pulled into a rest area after driving all night, climbed into the back seat and dove into a dreamless black sleep. I awoke when the car got too warm and staggered out into a Leonora Carrington funeral dream. A crowd of people were dressed in festive costumes and gathered around a red pickup truck wrapped in black crepe paper. I knew the truck was red because it poked through like the color of my bloodshot eyes where some of the crinkled paper had unraveled. Stupefied and intrigued, I wandered toward the hallucination. It seems I had stumbled onto a wandering collective of buskers, magicians, performance artists, bracelet and ring makers, tarot card readers, raconteurs who passed the hat at the end of their tales and seamstresses of magical costumes who would sell their wares on the street and throw in a face painting for free. There were probably others who also made their living with their talent, but these were the ones I remembered. Consider for a moment what is wrong with a system of government that allows a billionaire to telephone the president of the Untied States to complain, and having the sitting president actually answer the phone. Consider that this billionaire is Mark Zuckerbook. Mark Zuckerbook! I almost pissed my pants. |
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