If you like Haiku, here is my 5-7-5 syllable spring collection. If you don't, flee now in terror and don't look back. Spring Startup Yes I am obsessed at how the trees cast off sleep, snow bunched like sheets. Spring Cleaning Down the warming streets trees shed the last of their leaves, flying winter coats. Spring Banter On carpets of hope I bid good morning to the awakening trees. Spring Willows Gravity buds first send out tentative green shoots bursting into stars.
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I put on my finest green, painted two shamrocks on my cheeks and went out in public. As usual, everyone stared, but at the supermarket I was a Leprechaun trickster, moving into their space as if to say boo, thrusting my face into theirs, backing them up, then laughing and leaving them to their bewilderment. Back out on the streets, to the occasional Chinese who like to hawk loudly and spit on the ground whenever a foreigner passes, I stopped, looked them square in the eyes, hawked and spit back. This spooked them but other onlookers liked it and actually smiled at me, enjoying this small drama, a St. Patrick’s victory of sorts. And on this day I will take every victory I can get. You see, ever since I was young, I have always felt my Irishness. An ache for a land I have inhabited in my mind even before I was conscious enough to know that ideas can reside in the deepest part of the unconscious and will themselves into being, because, even before I could understand it, I was Irish Proud and distrustful of overlords I’d never even been under the yoke of yet, and Irish creative like the great James Joyce, riffing off on imaginary soliloquies, bouncing this word off that word, and that word off this word, in my head you see, making up all sorts of imaginary universes, that by the way, all resisted the British. But it was more than that, it was a kind of sword to the sky defiance, mixed with a moss covered peacefulness, the peace of valleys not yet invaded, and a deep down, born-in melancholy that could make all the leprechauns cry, because I inherited the idea of a sad, lonely, unjust world, yet still, I was a wild Irish lad in the best sense, curious, innately tender, wily, stubborn, willing to take on all comers and then cry by myself because I had beaten them, confused by the terror of my inborn ferocity, snapping and snarling and leaping out at the first sign of oppression, doing battle with Don Quixote windmills I would later become well acquainted with, a ferocity I still saw in the faces of booze-beaten men who stalked about looking for something worth the fighting of the good fight, but settled instead for turning on those who most dearly loved them, creating the age-old Irish sadness that sings its sad dirge to this day from Limerick to Londonderry, from Boston to Nova Scotia. Yet, the world owes so much to the Irish. Its words and phrases have entered the vocabulary. Its music was absorbed and co-opted, birthing new musical movements. True Irish charm launched legions of imitators, and sadly, most of them are politicians, the Kennedy’s included, and so on and so on. Scratch against the skin of diverse nationalities and you will discover some Irish moss in all of them. March is my two-year anniversary in China and I as I crossed the busy road on which I first entered the city, it all came spiraling back to me like a lost vision, and before it escapes again, I would like to share with you all. It was a night of fireworks. In alleys and on sidewalks additional fires were lit so that you could jump over them to insure good luck. I watched a grandfather and his young granddaughter carefully set a fire, and then she gleefully jumped over it and then stood on the opposite side, urging him on, and he jumped, too, while I stood wondering what good luck was for her and what it meant to him. Luck, the night told me, is always in the eye of the beholder. In this 2014 Year of the Horse, it is star-struck night skies, the Heart Nebula shining in the constellation Cassiopeia, Mercury at dawn, the Hunger Moon on the 14th, Europa and Callisto crossing Jupiter’s face, while Mars continues to brighten in Virgo in the morning sky. It will be nine years ago on February 20th that Hunter Stockton Thompson died, and the following is a piece I wrote at that time, offered here for what it’s worth, intact, except for the editing of a couple of passages that were unclear: Tonight, in a run down and crowded Internet cafe, I read that Hunter Thompson had put a bullet in his brain. I let out an automatic gasp, swearing, yet did not draw the attention of the others around me, furiously absorbed in their own cyber-universes, clackety-clacking away at their rented keyboards. At first I thought it was impossible, that HST was merely firing away at atmospheric bats swooping by his head and accidentally shot himself, then I realized that, sadly, isn’t that the writer’s retirement plan? The ultimate literary unraveling? I am currently living in Costa Rica and had just come back to San Jose after 3 beautiful days at the beach. My head was full of palms roiling in the gentle wind, casting arachnid shadows in the moonlight, the conical, thatched roof beach bars looking out on waves endlessly tumbling onto the shoreline, and my mood was peaceful and relaxed and so very far away from the aggression and barking dog menace rampant in the States. But this really disturbed me. I had come to know him in the only way you can ever really know a writer, by reading and greedily absorbing everything he had ever written. I counted on him to be enraged for me, because he was far better at it than I could ever be. I needed to know he was prowling about in this world, with his acerbic discontent, his disdainful overconsumption, his armory of weapons locked and loaded and ready against the bastards and the rats and the snakes and their inevitable storming of his fortified compound. Sort of like you secretly revel in the antics of the neighborhood badass, knowing you shouldn’t, yet taking a vicarious, guilty delight in his unruly defiance, secretly believing you would really be like him if it weren’t for your job, your wife, or your stubborn yet innate timidity. Hunter didn’t know the meaning of the word timid. I mean, forget Fear and Loathing for a moment, this is the guy who wrote a book about the Hell’s Angels. Would you? Knowing full well that every biker in the largest and most dangerous motorcycle gang in the country would be pissed at you? And went on writing with the temperament of a rabid wolverine, creating in the process a new form that has spawned legions of inept imitators, and grandly busting out of the kind of journalism Tolstoy referred to as a kind of intellectual brothel from which there is no return. I wanted to go out and spray paint his name on cop cars, drop acid and duck at the swooping of imaginary bats, run for sheriff or at least dog catcher, borrow a friend’s gun and shoot out the street lights, anything but be normal, but I settled for a bottle of Wild Turkey and sitting in my window, singing sad songs that only succeeded in stirring up the alley cats into a yowling frenzy, and most likely alienating forever a neighbor or two, yet that was the best I could do on short notice. Cars passed, lights blinked out in windows, urban hunters and gatherers prowled, ransacking trash cans, as I cursed everything that was tame and gentle, even though I place a high value on gentleness, inconsolable in my Wild Turkey rationalizations, eventually passing out in a patch of moonlight on the floor, lighting me like a fallen angel. The next day I vowed never to drink whiskey again. Most of us will always be Clark Kents. There is no secret costume hidden beneath our clothes, no dazzling superpowers to save us from our ordinariness, and Lois Lane is out dining with some rich guy. We keep our rage well hidden. Safe. We hedge our bets. We leap and brawl, booze and bust, in the safety of secret worlds hidden deep inside us. Hunter Thompson lived on the outside. In full view. Got in a razor fight with life. Had the scars to prove it. Paranoia was an inevitable occupational hazard. I am sure he would sneer at what I have written above. And that is exactly the point. Someone has to. The human vultures and political pit vipers are probably all celebrating tonight, corpulent and crimson with hypertension, knowing that the Woody Creek scarecrow has fallen on his own spear, and his well-worn corrosive keyboard has gone silent now, forever. I think we should all go out of our way to make them miserable for a little while. It seems to me that’s the least we can do for HST, the wild, would-be, Freak-Power sheriff, out there sniffing the wind and following his own wolf tracks on the far side of Woody Creek. And so it is the year of the horse. It declared itself in fireworks, like it was in a battle to become itself, just like humans battle to become themselves, like the fire at the beginning of the world, it announced it’s becoming. I am one of the few witnesses. It seems as if everyone has gone somewhere else for the Spring Festival. The streets are empty of cars. Stores are locked behind metal accordion grates, with red scrolls taped on either side, with a red header heralding the year of the horse. They all look the same. Is it a law I’m unaware of? Exactly four years before my mother died, in exactly the same season, I had a chance to spend a month with her, every day making the long lovely walk through leafy old colonial Connecticut to her assisted living home, bringing her special abbondanza Italian deli shop lunches—which she barely could eat yet took delight in their obscene gluttony—just hanging out, spending time, meeting her friends and talking. I decided I wanted to send everyone an open Christmas card and I wandered about trying to find the perfect image. Yet, as I described in my posts last year, Christmas off the Sled and Christmas Looming, all the decorations are the same, and even though a Chinese teacher told me that Christmas is becoming popular in China—second only to the Spring Festival, it really is a nonevent. I wandered beneath the great December moon this year—such a lost, Jesus holy moon shining on a manger—trying to get my Christmas card money shot, but it was elusive, bashful. I got lots of shots but none that was able to capture its compelling, luminescent, Mona Lisa full moon smile. Instead I wrote a poem The Color of the Moon: The color of the moon is vacuum-packed sunlight an orbedcontemplationmagnet waxed lemon ice fire pockmarked with deep-cratered melancholy the earth’s soul the sun’s ego orbiting madly as lovers do . . . Then I realized it: The perfect shot would be the absence of Christmas. And so, here is Christmas in China, an empty mall photographed in late afternoon on December 23rd, 2013. Contrast this with what the malls in the U.S. would look like on the same date. Indeed, there are some subdued clues that it is Christmas (just for fun count the clues in the photos), but it still has not, as of yet, broken out wildly in China. Mogao CavesOn any trip to Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a must see. The carved out caves feature one of the largest collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures at a site established in 332 AD that has survived not only the withering effects of time but the actual torching of the caves by nonbelievers, looting by invaders, serving as refugee housing in 1921 for Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution along with the rampant plundering by legions of foreign, allegedly well-meaning, archeologists from Britain, France, Hungary, Japan, among others and a untold years of tourist marauders.
Dunhuang, whose name means to flourish and prosper, was established as a military garrison city in 111 BC at an oasis where the two Silk Road routes traversing the Taklamakan Desert to the west, merged. It anchored the Hexi Corridor, running southeast to Lanzhou and protected the merchants, monks, imperial envoys and camel traders carrying China’s precious silk and spices eastward. Located in Gansu Province—China’s most ethnically diverse—like all of Gansu, it retains the crossroads flavor, the intermingled lineage broadcast in faces, as well as the friendliness of a longstanding oasis town. Yet, all of the friendliness—the constant smiles, hellos and helpful gestures—were about to be outdone by a considerate act so unusual and from such an unexpected source that nothing like it had ever happened to me before anywhere in the world. Dunhuang is a city set up for tourism. Brand new train station and airport, a wide, welcoming roadway connecting them to the city’s center, a thriving outdoor city market, open at night, signs in English, food of all types, sand dunes and Buddha caves and even a glacier you can visit, with hotels available in all price ranges, from 5 star down to no stars, spread out in every direction and all very accommodating except for one small detail: all the beds are way too hard. How do I know this? I spent the better part of a morning and afternoon surveying them. This is a fact: Chinese people like hard mattresses, or no mattresses at all, just an inch and a half thick, dense plastic pad covered in a sheet on a metal bed frame. Some hotels I’ve slept in it felt as if I were sleeping on a box spring, covered with a thin pad. This is usual, this is accepted, Chinese travelers expect this. Lest you think I’m a lightweight, I have spent time sleeping on pavement alongside highways, in drainage pipes, on rock ledges, on banks of river gravel, floors, roll out, spine-breaking hotel beds, surfboards, hammocks made out of vines and all manner of collapsed, foamy, guest couches, backseats of cars, a bathtub once, and even on the hood of an abandoned backwoods Buick, as well as so many other bone-bruising places, but these days I really do prefer a nice soft bed. So, after another night spent sleeping on a thinly covered bag of bones, I set out to find a western mattress, armed with the translation software on my tablet. After checking the Internet, I headed for a hotel that promised a soft mattress but it was being remodeled. I soon discovered the info for Dunhuang was way out of date and set out on my own. Ancient legends say the area containing the Mingsha or Singing Sand Dunes just south of Dunhuang used to be flat. One day a fierce battle raged there and an army was annihilated, leaving the ground littered with bodies. A Goddess scattered incense ashes over them and from the ground rose up a giant sand mountain to bury the warriors, while the tears of the dead soldiers’ loved ones pooled to form Crescent Lake. Even now, it is said, when the wind comes from a certain direction, military drums rumble, the dunes echo the sounds of battle, the sand blows out sad laments for the fallen and mournful vapors of ghosts, drift. But this day, there was no wind, no battle cries, just sunlight and temperatures in the high 50’s and Xuxiangdong (whose name I shortened to Xu) beckoning me to follow. He led me to the camel ranch and pulled out money to pay for both of us, but I stopped him and paid my own way. I have found this is typical of Chinese generosity. If you are invited, the inviter expects to pay for everything. I guess he thought he had invited me by saying, “follow me, follow me,” and that became the tagline of the day, uttered in an amusing way as one would usher along a clueless child, along with repeating, “good friend, good friend.” I suddenly realized this was the extent of his English. No matter, we were on the same wavelength, everything was making us laugh, everything was blowing us away and we communicated our wonder with double thumbs up, shrieks and whoops of surprise and delight. We were joined by another Chinese tourist straggler and lined up for the camels. The legendary singing sand dunes outside of Dunhuang, China were not singing for me but they were not entirely silent, either. They say the desert sings of lost Silk Road traveler’s ghosts whose lives were taken by bandits or thirst or starvation, though it was mostly by the desert windstorms that rose like waves and extinguished all life that wasn’t smart enough to ride it out, yet all I heard were my own thoughts, desert dry, blooming, beckoning onward over the dunes and into what’s next. I send my Halloween wishes on the 18 percent Waning Crescent moon now in the zodiac sign of Virgo, which will dwindle to 11 percent on Halloween night, still in Virgo, and provide just a squeaky sliver of light, just enough to make the night seem spookier, the Jack-o’-Lanterns burn more maniacally, the rustling of the leaves a little more menacing, allowing the forming and dissolving of ghosts in the shadow bands wavering like heat above desert roads in tree limbs outlined against the dark indigo sky. In China, I no longer walk with a bad attitude, like they do in New York, the—you touch me I’ll kill you, a little bit crazy, unbalanced, kind of way, avoiding eye contact, focused as if they were reading a floating book in front of them, maybe something that was difficult to understand, like say, Finnegan’s Wake, shut down to all requests, whether foreign or domestic, the way people walk in every major city, as if they always know where they are going and are pissed off that they’re a half an hour late. A reliable, tried and true way to get to know yourself as well as your culture is to move to another country. The more different the country is, the deeper the experience. The deeper the experience, the deeper the insight. But no matter where you go, no matter how far you go, your country’s stereotype will always be waiting there to greet you. Autumn is slow in coming on here. Just a brisk tease in the air, and though the leaves on the creeping vines are turning a faded scarlet, the trees are drawing out their closing, stirring with a lively champagne fizz along the Yellow River at sunset. I walked along past a teenager learning to play an acoustic guitar on a park bench, learning the right way—I’m making music, everyone else can be damned, and I paused to listen but was too distracted by a giant statue of an ancient Chinese horse warrior racing after the sunlight, by flowers I have seen in Alaska growing wild, by fisherman, by upside down buildings reflecting in still ponds, by arcs of bridges strung with cables, but most of all by the sunset tones on the river, reminding me of the painting Soleil Levant by Claude Monet. And while I know that his was a painting of sunrise, there it was on the river at sunset, and I raced along, trying to capture it, click-click-click-click, following the wispy clouds grazing northward, the landscape withdrawing into purple-black shadows, like a fresh bruise, an indelible mark, a complaint against darkness, as the pink tones died away in the west, and the river, unfazed, began to reflect back the city as it rose up, giving back the light in blues, reds, yellows, greens, a palette to make any painter proud, smeared in the current, rushing ever onward. I always saw this as a moving thing, so please take a minute to watch the Yellow River Sunset slideshow. The Hutongs in Beijing is where real life occurs. Hutong is a Mongolian word that means water well and was given to the small lanes and alleyways during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) that spread out from the four corners of the Forbidden City, gathering around wells and gardens that from the ground make little sense to the visitor, yet seen from the air look like interlaced chessboards with all the dwellings connected. The morning sun shone on my Beijing breakfast and glinted off the coffee in an outdoor café, black with streaks of gold in a cloudy white cup. Peaceful morning pleasures: orderly crowds going to work, orange-vested street sweepers idling, impatient cars lined up at stoplights, the sky blue, the air just coming on sticky at 8 a.m., the bell not yet rung, eggs hitting the pan, sacrifices as yet to be made, the paradoxical hidden, the insoluble still soluble, a kind of hopeful awakening promise offered, languidly received then absorbed. |
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