scruta

A friend of mine slings a new rap record over to me, Drake’s Take Care.  “Over My Dead Body” rattles around in my head while I’m in the shower.

Rappers. Every single record it’s the same, gloating about the money, the fame, the life. Bling blingin’ and shit. Show boatin’, ego affirming drivel. And still, I never get tired of hearing about it. “Why?” I’ll ask myself.

Then I realize, that deep down, deep down in the lonely vault of the heart we see our lives as great productions with booming synthesizers in the background, productions worthy of projecting into the minds of others, billboard productions to spring others to life… if only we had the words.

Yeah.

Like feeling my power, steppin’ in my shower, soakin’ down my hair with pert plus, man it’s the bes’,  don’t make a fuss.  Jumpin’ out an dryin’ off in the freezin’ cold,  see my face in the mirror, man I’m gettin’ old. I’m almost 30 and I got less than 30 g’s, sing it wit’ me, man, if you feel me, please.

Yeah.

People keep asking me where I’m going. If I’m really hitting my stride. What the hell, man, you think I just do what I do for fun, turning down promotions just to keep myself alive? I’ve got projects on the pot, I’m waiting to set them live, I live my life in China land, sweet so sweet it ain’t a dive.  But you get distracted, man, pulled away from the things you think are right. Drank too much beer at my local pub last night man, lost everything I came with.

Yeah.

What you online bloggers? Silent scribblers in the midst? Think you’re livejournaling is the shit, man. You want to be a funny guy? I’ll crack my fingers and flick off something that you can’t handle, man. Leave you shame commented you can’t hold on to nothing, not even your pride, huh?

But yeah, it’s alright feelin’ stronger. Feelin’ better. Livin’ life alright. Gonna sleep tonight. You just keep goin’ on and on. And there’s crazy folks all want iPhones over here, out in China, man, and it’s alright.

You have to step away from the past

To see that it’s passed.

Li

Ha!

Zhou

What?

Li

Here’s a good one!

Zhou

What?

Li

Oh, man. This is crazy. I have no idea how they thought they could print this.

Zhou

What the hell is it?

Li

Okay, so there’s a theater guy, a young guy from America. He’s here on a Fulbright.

Zhou

Oh, a Fulbright, he must be very smart.

Li

Yes, very smart. A Fulbright.

Zhou

Wow. A Fulbright! Where did he go to school?

Li

Yale.

Zhou

Yale! Wow!

Li

Yes.

Zhou

Wow. Yale.

Li

Anyway, he’s in China. He studies theater and Chinese. He does a new kind of theater.

Zhou

A new kind of theater?

Li

Yeah. It’s called applied theater. I’ve been reading about it. It’s not so new in the West.

Zhou

What is it?

Li

Basically, you make the audience into actors.

Zhou

Oh. Well, what’s so bad about that?

Li

The idea is that you explore social or political issues by getting the audience involved in particularly difficult situations.

Zhou

Political issues?

Li

Yeah. This guy went to northern Yunnan near Tibet and did a workshop with Tibetan and Han residents.

Zhou

Oh no.

Li

Yes. He presented them with a scene where a Han man got in fight with a Tibetan man and his girlfriend. The audience came in and took the roles and tried to resolve the situation.

Zhou

Well, did they resolve it?

Li

Of course not. A teacher had to make a speech about harmony.

Zhou

Really? He had to give the harmony speech?

Li

Yeah.

Zhou

Wow.

Li

And they wanted to print this story.

Zhou

Ha. Wow.

Li

Yeah.

Zhou

But Li-

Li

Yeah?

Zhou

He has a Fulbright. He went to Yale. Why is he doing this?

Li

I don’t know.

Zhou

Yale.

Li

Yeah, Yale.

Shanghai was an orchard of great trees bearing great fruit, reaching high into the clouds. I walked along the groves for miles, unable to find an end. I made my home in a place where the grovesmen of the orchard made their homes. One grovesman, old and kindly in face, let me live in the storeyard where he gathered fruit. Each night I slept with the sour smell of ripening fruit in my nostrils. Each day the grovesman showed me how to choose the rotten ones from the others, and soon, I became an adept laborer.

One day, while sorting out the rotten fruit, I saw a woman gathering my refuse which I had placed outside the storeyard. I asked her what she was doing, and she said that she was collecting them for her self and that she didn’t mind the rotten ones. Her teeth shone with a strange brightness. Her eyes pierced me strangely. She filled me with suspicion. So I followed her when she left with her basket of rotten fruit.

I arrived at a massive warehouse fashioned from the hollowed trunk of a great tree that had fallen. Following her inside, I saw hundreds of laborers all polishing rotten fruit, making it gleam, readying it for sale, loading it up on trucks to take it far away from the grove. I was shocked. I found her and asked her why she did what she did.

She said it was what she had to do. Everyone else was doing so.

“And the old man?” I said.

“Him? You are living with an old fool, a man who lost his family long ago. He keeps the good fruit for himself.”

I studied her face, reassured with a pride I couldn’t penetrate. She added with her flashing teeth, “That fruit won’t last forever.”

“Why not?”

“Because the trees are dying.”

I was taken aback and full of confusion. She sighed with disdain, then took my hand. She led me in silence out of the warehouse to the nearest tree, stretching high towards the sky. She hit it with her fist and it rung with an eerie hollow. As it reverberated, I could feel my heart falling.

Li

It’s weird.

Zhou

What’s that?

Li

I get this feeling sometimes.

Zhou

Like what?

Li

Like I’m invisible. Like I could stop doing my job and nothing would matter.

Zhou

That’s crazy! Don’t you know how important our job is? We work in the propaganda department! We are the protectors of Chinese culture, don’t you know we’re under attack?

Li

No. I know, I know. But that’s it. The whole idea is that we’re just the people behind the scenes, the one who delete the words so they are never read. I look back at my life and I think, where is my work? It’s invisible.

Zhou

It’s noble.

Li

Is nobility being faceless? Nameless? Lost in the heap? In fact, not even lost at all. Like you were never there to begin with.

Zhou

Hmm.

Li

Do you think it will change?

Zhou

What will change?

Li

Nothing… nevermind.

Marcid

Barbican

Love isn’t difficult;

It’s actually quite simple,

And that’s what’s so difficult about it.

If I die in a plane crash, I want to crash in the middle of the Amazon, a churning pyre of hissing deep-growth trees, twisted metal, crackling wildlife and the wide-eyed stares of the natives.

I want the blaze to spread in a wild fire, engulfing a wide acreage of rainforest, lighting up all of Amazonia, seen even by sleepy babes from the swampy depths of Manaus. I want the satellites to relay pictures to squat, brilliant men in dilapidated security strongholds, making them gasp with stale breaths over toasted coffees. The fireball will be a phoenix testament to the world that, when analyzed properly, tells fortunes for the soothsayers of fantastic realms, cities of gold, looming on the horizon, beckoning wizened travelers from faraway lands to place their feet upon their scintillating pavements, casting gazes at the beautiful women who glimmer with metals swirled about them…

The dreamers will call this demise, this too-quick oxidation, this fiery explosion the end that caused the beginning.

There are a dozen bagels strewn across the tracks leading through a subway station.

What if some man lost his mind over a distressing phone call and, in a fit of rage, hurled them off the platform?

What if that distressing phone call was from an irate wife, her voice becoming more nasal the more incensed she became, complaining that bagels were not what she wanted, but rather croissants?

What if the wife was so preoccupied with bread products because she was attempting, unconsciously to drive her relationship to a breaking point, a result of her guilty personality ( highly correlated with her sky blue eyes), to atone for the on-going affair she has been having with the neighbor next door?

What if the next door neighbor, bored to death, the former co-owner of a bagel store taken from him forcibly by his ex-wife (the other co-owner) only engaged in this affair to get back at his ex-wife, posting videos of himself fucking his neighbor after she sent him pictures of herself naked in the Caribbean with a new Don Juan?

What if, spurred on by his overwhelming hatred of his ex-wife, the neighbor went back to his bagel shop surreptitiously and filled a batch of bagels with a heavy, explosive diarrhea-inducing laxative?

What?

Would it be such a bad thing that these bagels ended up strewn across the tracks of a metro station?

There’s a truth about history that only lowly listings editors know. They know history in all of its elliptical savagery. They know the way the great dreams and aspirations of men and women are so easily reduced to a blurb of 50 words or less. Rich, pleonastic adjectives overflowing with life are squeezed until they become sparse and dessicated. Fertile, courageous verbs are left neutered and sickly, only perfunctorily conveying their messages. Style is sacrificed to the great gods of formatting and orthology.  Even legendary figures and the most proper of proper nouns must struggle for so much as a one-word epithet. In the end, all you are and all you wish to be is reduced to time, place and cost. History leaves you nothing else. Period.