I live in “The City of Wagging Tongues,” as i’m sure, so do you all. This particular community is unique for its bilingual nature and Occidental Occupation - there is a gulf of misunderstanding which it has tried to resolve through a mutual pact of greed under the guise of entrepreneurial development. This is not the first community i’ve lived in that was predicated on “fleecing” the visitor. I once lived in a high desert community at the southern foot of the California Sierras. Though vastly different in demographics, the two are remarkably similar in their defensive conceits - with deeply divided communities joining forces in service of extracting money from a mostly unwelcome tourist population. The segment which i sort of resembled in the high desert was white and old, while their partitioned confederates were the original indigenous inhabitants, greatly reduced in ranks due to genocidal incursion by the whites through the years, but still controlling enough real estate clout to make their voices heard and force a coalition of sorts.
The whites whom i knew considered themselves “Mountain Men,” which is shorthand for reactionary operatives - think, _rumpian stronghold on Meth. They considered anyone who hadn’t lived in “Klan Valley” more than 2 generations as “flat landers.” The indigenous people were even more inhospitable, with good reason, for the entire valley had been entirely their’s before it was stolen by “settlers” less than 150 years earlier. I can’t say for certain because it has not been an area of scholarly study, but there are many similarities in most of the cities i have traveled to in the past 5 years. Though the state of Oaxaca is the most diverse in terms of ethnic breakdown and incidentally the poorest state in Mexico, while the bulk of the real estate in the city of Oaxaca is foreign owned, mostly by Spaniards. While the original Spanish invasion was stopped by the native Oaxaquenos on the slopes of Mont Alban, ultimately they had their ways and simply bought the town of Oaxaca.
A circumstance that has been sadly repeated in the province of Quang Nam where the ancient city of Faifo is located (Faifo - meaning the city of friendly strangers) though now known in the Hipster Doofus websites as Hoi An · considered a prime destination for the cultural adventurers hanging worldly savvy on their belts like so many “scalps” confirming some twisted version of courage and intrepidness in their trek toward enlightenment, or away from their inevitable earthly demise depending on where one stands. I don’t know anymore and am as guilty as any other interloper in this unique nexus of shore and history where farmers have been nurturing the loving abundance of rich wetlands at the crossroads of an epochal struggle between two jealous behemoths who are currently engaged in some incestuous fluid-exchange at expense of each of their ostensibly “free” populations but who are in reality consumer fodder for an economic system off the rails.
And there is very little between the socio-sexual-economic climax of these two mirrored images of the face of greed to intercede on behalf of our species survival. The powers-that-be have effectively divided us such so that wherever one travels it is nearly impossible to explain to anyone present how what Leonard Cohen so beautifully described as “steering by the venal chart” is not in our species’s best interest. Just a moment ago the wind rush that announces the rain squalls to come tipped over my smoking station at the back porch. I was greatly relieved to find no ceramic had been broken, but while rearranging the parts and pieces of my disgusting, but highly satisfying habit, i remembered back to one of my earliest assignments chopping vegetables in the Chinese restaurant in my home town. The owners were generous and gently amused by my cultural curiosity, even offering to apprentice me to a Chinese chef they were importing from China to a restaurant in Hollywood - how much different might my life have been had i accepted their kind offer rather than my reckless and myopic pursuit of fame and fortune in the wilds of the NYC art world circa 1974.
But the relief i felt finding no broken accoutrements of my possibly enjoyable, but very lethal tobacco habit coincided with a still remembered admonishment by my friend the restaurant owner watching me light up a cigarette at the end of our communal meal after the dishes were clean. “Dirty Habit” was all he said, and while appreciating that no ceramic had been broken by the change of weather, i had to chuckle to myself at the tobacco soot and grime i was picking up from my back porch along with the unbroken dishes/ashtrays - and acknowledge the timely truth of his kindly rebuke · Maybe that is the wildcard of our human experience - that nothing is lost through time and that no matter how vicious and demented the “whip hand” gets our collective search for meaning and relation will always rise up through the rhizome C.G. Jung used to describe the human trajectory. I don’t know, and i’m glad as hell that i have relieved myself of that conceit so that i might more carefully consider each invaluable passing moment in my own steps toward death, and beyond.
jts 19/08/2020he http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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