Fun is the key to retrieving sanity back into our world - regardless of hope, or a viable future · to die having fun is a noble quest; though not the type of fun propagated on internet pages designed to separate you from your wherewithal. No, the fun i am imagining is that which can be had alone in an empty room not knowing when the door will open again. The fun that is conceived under such conditions is what has informed the minds of liberators of the human race from time immemorial. Ho Chi Minh was imprisoned, and wrote poetry that proved instrumental in fortifying the spirit of a Nation in a successful war for freedom against the most powerful and well-funded imperial military force the world has ever known. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for the criminal act of opposing apartheid - he transmitted his writings on rolls of toilet paper that proved instrumental in the liberation of South Africa from a determined apartheid regime.
My oldest brother reps himself as a member of the working class - a leader · and like every workers’ union i’ve ever joined, his allegiance has been to consolidation of his own power. I live in a small, ancient coastal village in Viet Nam, and it is doomed by the greed of its own leaders and the business interests it has invited to demonstrate “modern economics” to centuries of a commonsense population fortified by the cauldron of strife, but annealed and quenched in the waters of poverty. Because i only glimpsed a “snapsot” of this locale prior to the Covid miasma - i do know that just prior to the plague here shit had gotten so distorted that one glutton entrepreneur had even begun the building of a castle on a beach south of Da Nang. I am not hooked up, and so won’t confirm the truth or lie of such an image on the internet, but based on the naked greed and egregious cultural arrogance of the most recent “economic occupying force” - i have no reason to doubt the truth of such a “Villa” - popular nomenclature for rich people exploiting poor people.
And don’t i sound so high-minded and pure of heart, it’s a genetic defect - fictional obfuscation, just like my eldest hermano calling himself, proletariate while gulping all he can get down his throat before someone finds him at the refrigerator door. Please understand it is the rancor of language you are reading and not a proper understanding of the human being my brother is. We shared the same mother who when i was, maybe 13 years old threw a pair of onyx bookends that had been purchased in Mexico through her bedroom window screaming at me “You have no idea how much pain you caused during your birth” - and who promptly dismissed the event from her memory leaving me to ponder its meaning even to this day. Ma has confided to me, how honestly i can’t say, that of the four children she’d had - she was the hardest on my oldest brother · i try to imagine what that must have been like, but i have to imagine beyond the cruelty he has shown me as a younger sibling through years.
In one of the last visits i’ve had with Ma, i arranged to have a school age chum of hers come to visit her in her locked - memory challenged quarters · i was pretty proud of myself for arranged such an unexpected visitation given they were both +90 and had known each other since -20; shifting from one room another, she, Ma turned her attention to me from this confusing specter of her razor memory and declared - “you are obsequious” · and returned her fawning attention to this old friend. I was wounded, i am wounded, we are all wounded but my lesson is to find the love in my heart that will aid her transition to death which she described to me of her younger years, “an inconsolable fear.” How does one, or all of us, which i am sure share some similar story of turbulence and anguish to that of love and support to all around us - wherever we may be and however incongruous that situation may seem · that is a question ?
My visa expires in days, and my hosts are broadcasting that the borders may be opened soon - i have no place to go and no one to be with · this does not sadden me; this does not gladden me - it is simply what i face · these are the “extinction chronicles”. The best i can hope for is one person to find fun in what has been written and to find comfort with that possibility. Ugly, horrendous events are about to envelope the veil of development that has been employed to obscure the raping of an entire planet andye species to satisfy an irrational appetite for abundance by a handful of emotional ciphers - i could be angry, and have been, but more i am perplexed by the paradox that those in greatest need of love and kindness have situated themselves in the trajectory of all the force and umbrage a betrayed people can demonstrate · as they say in L.A. can you s’plain this¿
jts 23/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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