Monday, July 12, 2010

Flavor in Space: Ch 53

How will i leave this room with the sand colored walls?
How will I leave this city of the night?

At some time in the early morning, already the sky is bright. Through the window, slid wide open, I see the fog and clouds moving by. Wind rattles the window pane. I sandwich a paper crane between the window panes. The crane was made from poetry paper when I served tea to my friends here. Once garbage, now a crane, it softens the banging of old window panes.

Hours later, rain is falling in, dusting into the room. Outside, sheets of water pour down. Closing, now it's only heat and sweat that I feel, and a personal silence.

Swarms of dragon flies cluster by the towers of the Truth in Hope temple. The stones of the temple walls are not the usual beige, but almost brown and orange in places, wet, and glistening.

The clouds will break into the old roof of curved ceramic tile, the droplets finding their way through the boards will become rivulets, and old walls will be torn down into sandy mud. Is that the future of this house? I won't be here to see it?

On the other side of the galaxy, having passed by a thousand worlds, I'll land in one far away. And what then of this old room, where I have slept, and awakened. What of this city of the night?

Flavor in Space: Ch 52

At the New Post Station, the city of the night lies to the northeast, the devil's direction. The city here is called Ohcikubak, meaning both "the city of the bizarre" and "the city of song and dance." By one of its many kaleidoscopic colored gates, a huge phoenix splashes across building facades, the symbol of feminine power.

The streets are named for cherry blossoms, alleys and paths spin off at odd angles, lined with pink billboards, blaring multicolored light bulbs, thousands of technicolored doors, each leading to halls of perfumed parlors, each of these hawking fifty different methods of sweet intoxication.

Names on the signs parley double meanings or allude to sticky garden spots of someone's fantasies...

"Moth King/ Ego King"
"Ms. Crimson's Castle"
"Kangaroo Court Decision"
"Marsh/ Chat over Tea"
"Hamelin"
"Striking/ Diversion"
"If"
"Washing Boat"
"Waiting Dream"
"Apache"
"Southern Seas"
"Orange Prince"
"O2"
"Mana"
"Who"
"Hair of the Dogs"
"Baltimore"
"Desert Inn"
"Euphoria"
"Found Night +1"
"Buoy"
"Cat Root"
"Pony"
"Hide"

The rooms are run by women, women who spill out onto the street, glittering in red, pink, purple, and green. Their heads are layered with long loopy blonde locks. To the right, a group of white collared executives are ushered out blushing and laughing, followed by the crowing of lovelies. To the left, men, dressed in silken suits and robes, eyes beaming from bushy orange manes reaching nearly a foot high above the eyebrows, follow the women, trying to syphon off a section of the the lady's earnings in his own plush bar. "Men" are sexual objects here; if they are not passed up for the objects of the sex shop entirely.

This is the city of flowers, of beauty, of art. Those who work in the city of the daylight, rigid with service, status, and accounts; they come to the city of flowers for drunkenness, for equality, for kinship. They are with their brothers here, cared for by their sisters... for a price perhaps... and hence things are really no different here, just status taking another shape, the servants getting served:

One bar has its name written in fat black plastic tape, "Love and Peace: Life is a bitch but I Love bitch and bitch Love me. It's Your Choice."

The city of the night will only be a place for drunken fantasies bred in the oppression of the daylight, froth boiling over from the control of the pressure cooker of the towers of men, unless...

Unless there is meaning in art, in theatre, in play, real shadow and shade beyond the sparkles of color and midnight lights. This is the sober work of Toulouse Lautrec, Okuni, Picasso, Utrillo, Yoshino, Jakuchu, Rikyu....

Flavor in Space: Ch 51

At the New Post Station the city of daylight lies to the west. A temple to men, huge metallic phallic buildings scrape the sky. Men and women, dressed in black slacks and white creased button down shirts stream through long corridors towards their planned work hours. At lunch, vast courtyards of grey stone and brick are populated by men and women sitting on mathematically spaced benches, apart, unspeaking. A few fellows puff cigarettes at the corners of long ashen granite staircases. In a far corner lies a marble statue in a house of brick: buxom and round, sexual, yet cleaved below thigh and above belly.

At the center of the district is a the Oykot Prefectural Metropolitan Government Office. It's dual pylons rise taller and grander than any other building around, a feat of engineering, a wonder of power made solid. And below it just to the east, beyond a wide, clean boulevard, lies the broad, oval, Prefectural People's Square and the low Prefectural Meeting Hall of Deliberation. The oval People's Square is lined by eight bronze statues, all of women, six of whom are naked. The ladies flaunt their metal flesh in powerful poses, facing, obstinately, without fear, the massive towers across the way. Aunties, mothers, and grandmothers squat and transplant primped rows of bright red flowers in the most black soil of beds prepared below the statues.

Beyond the stone monument of male accomplishment, just to the west, is the vast New Post Station Central Park. Hidden among the dense groves of oak and zelkova are the hundreds of blue tarp houses in the homeless' towns. Men sit about on benches, staring forward. The soft din of highway traffic is perforated by the constant sound of the crushing of cans, elderly men recycling the trash of public parks and town squares. Laundry- rags, old towels, old office clothes- dries under black umbrellas beside blue domed houses the size of large copy machines. These are the towns of the floating men without companies, without work, without status.

Flavor in Space: Ch 50

Eventually it seems I have taken up the space man's offer: I venture to a foreign world. This craft, like a long boat, glides up the old canal of Otoyk, and now to the eastern mountains. With what power can we float over mountains? We follow a strange black river.

There are two rivers. This one we see and follow, black or grey, solid; it repels rain or snow, uninhabitable. And there is another river, running deeply in the earth, unseen, ancient, hidden, the final gift of a billion lives.

This other river is a river of power. We use it to fuel our crafts, to lift houses over mountains. Using this river, human dreams take flight as picture perfect realities, metaphor and language take on solid form, imagined heights of status become real physical distance.

The infinitely sided sphere of opportunity, on which, at any moment one stands at the exact center and the exact highest point, is stretched by the power from this hidden river.

Used, the river flows from deep inside the earth into a shallow human world manifesting mutative dreams of power, and then finally dissipating into the sky above.

Light, the intangible thread binding all beings in chains of life dangling in the darkness of space, meets this second river in the sky. The aged chains twist; many break and scatter. How can single generations, single links, handle the sudden encounter with the death gift of a billion lives?