Blackbird Arise

The Chinese do not want to buy the same things that we do.
Yes, they frequent megastores, but also traditional markets.
Housewives may purchase live hens and carry them home
squawking by the feet, their daughters’ hands in theirs.
They have no alternatives. The government is more
openly war-minded. The fascists are publically amassing.
They have no regard for our well beings. They deride our pleadings
for peace and mercy. They would rather bulldoze homes
in the countryside to carry out ambitious reforestation schemes
than let us live our lives as agrarian pagans, and see us to the city.
Here we live on top of each other, crammed in so close
that we’re forced to hear their music and animated conversations
about topics of which we can only catch a word here or there,
that I would never even think about, let alone discuss.
Ach! This small talk is killing me. I need to get out of the city.
Go back to the countryside. There I had a garden.
Mother raised me and my family on vegetables she had grown
herself and cooked in her kitchen with loving motherly care.
Mmm yum Christmas turkey! We sure love the way mom makes it!
I’m sick of running into people and having to say excuse me or hello.
I don’t want to buying anything. Exchanging currency feels dirty.
Engaging in commerce, selling labor to an employer is like
standing before someone who trusts you and telling a selfish lie.
But that is what you do here. The buildings are boxes,
the streets are squared, the ways we have to walk
are so unavoidably constricted that I have to squeeze to get by.
Suppress another shudder of visceral anxiety. I want to scream,
but I know that I would cease the incipient outcry
when those around me would think: Tsk, some crazy person.
Come on Ham, let’s get the children away from this madman.
I guess this is sanity: the ability to maintain a lid on the urge
to act out irrationally. I hear a heart beating under hot water.
The city is attacking. The slumber I fell into has gradually receded
in incoming tidal waves of waking consciousness.
The balcony I have rented overlooks a parking lot.
Out beyond, between other 24-storey apartment complexes
I can see treetops, wires, slowly rolling cars. If I don’t go soon
someone will come and call on me. And I don’t want to encounter
anyone; I’m not in the mood. I gather my things to leave.
Taxi to the art district. I stroll the streets, smoking,
turning randomly off into alleyways. The works on display:
generic. Nothing worth looking at for more than a couple seconds.
Everything is unoriginal. I try to be impressed by the anthropological
significance of there being a place like this, but I am not surprised.
It’s the same as I was told about: A must-see attraction
should you have the opportunity. Yes, I can see the charm.
Still, now that I am actually here, it just all seems so… sad.
So I turn into a bird. Set myself free in a woodsy district
and fly off on my own. I was inside a tiny cage, flapping frenetically.
I was enclosed in with this other bird who had lost its will to live
and just sat passive in its own and my acid shit at the bottom
of the cage. I identified with the bird. Its avian brain could never
learn there would be no escape. After every failed attempt
to fly it sinks and non-verbally thinks: No! Wrong! I need to…
Bash against the bars! Be unable to spread my wingspan.
I gave the petshop owner a hundred yuan and ordered him
to hand over the birds with angered urgency. I turned
and said, We have got to get out of here, meaning this part
of the city, where if the birds were to be set free
they would hardly be any better off. They would likely live
in ongoing states of fright amidst this traffic, urban dwellings,
not a trace of any but neon greenery, and die soon from poison.
We taxied to where there were woods. At last I opened the cage.
Seconds were of the essence as long as those creatures
under my care were suffering… Goldfish, gerbils, turtles
and other such animals that were sold in that rotten petstore
certainly aren’t as happy as they would be in their natural habitats.
But this is where we differ, us land dwellers, to the great
beings that soar dashingly through the blue at all sorts
of creative verticals. Gravity weighs us down. And we become
complacent. We live in a cage that stinks of shit.
Our water and food troughs are filthy. We are so packed
in with one another that we can barely move, the constant contact
is sickening. We can endure it. Our energy settles
once our hopes are given for lost. The bird, however, cannot be
so easily sedated. He has the magical ability to fly!
to go anywhere he wants, as high as he possibly can.
I freed those birds from the city as a symbolical act,
but also and primarily because the moment I witnessed that bird
slamming itself about in grave desperation, I reacted
empathetically. I bought the two birds and walked
up the side of the street, furtively looking out for an available cab,
doing my best through my aura to bestow calm on them.
It won’t be long, I said to myself and repeated, it won’t be long…
I am no land-bound man. I am a breeze-blown blackbird.
Did you know that men can fly? Yes, of course, they do so
through their thoughts, which unlike other animals’
can center on the divine. As the Wright brothers could tell you,
for a man to fly it is difficult and very challenging. It takes
many persevered attempts. One must cope with crashes,
despondency, doubt, ridicule, loss of motivation, but it can be done!
Look where we are today: in Hong Kong, having been in Shenzhen,
headed for Kolkata tomorrow. O my, it’s a Christmas miracle!
Christmas – in the sense that this is the winter solstice,
a fresh and novel wave in the chronological ocean of years…
May you prosper new inventions, ideas, ten million dollar ones!
Mwhahaha, the evil in the background erupts. His laughs
fade away, strange and mysteriously… Thoughts ascend
in airy flight. They dip, swivel, and dive. They arise off our heads
like steam from a hotspring in snow. In the sunlight,
under the stars, walking, dreaming, discovering water,
getting naked and going swimming. I am a stately blackbird.
I wonder what a goldfish – Dip – feels like when it – Swerve –
swims around in water – Soooar… Can’t be anything like this,
I, an imperfect man, muse on one of my vaunts into nature.
Human nature is inextricably complicated. Disregard any easy
answer. There isn’t one. You see, we have, our minds are
possessed by these psychophysical aggregates.
How many thoughts normally course between two disingenuous
parties carrying on a conversation? No telling. Definitely fewer
the shorter the interactions get, the more we push away.
It is our dilemma that we must solve if we are to receive
our divine reward. To cope with who he is versus who he must
be in society, in relation to others, is the main preoccupation
for every wise young man. The religion of evolution
teaches that in the beginning we were muddy-minded beasts.
We have been trying to purify ourselves for the past
thirty thousand years through the process of alchemy.
The future must come to terms with itself. I don’t have an answer.
This is no utopian manifesto. I point out what needs to change.
There! I am a little girl playing the magic witch game.
On whatever thing I point my wand – a perfect stick I found
in the woods earlier – its essence is immediately altered.
Take that frog for example. Which one? There!
The frog turns into a handsome prince, his lips deliciously puckered.
Now that stone over… There! It turns into a towering mountain.
I am bored. I put my stick down. Sit on a rock by a stream
and watch and listen to the amazing water pass. I leave
the city proper. I am still technically within its limits,
but this place isn’t so overwhelmingly urban. Much greener.
Ah yes! I can fly! I am a free blackbird again. There! Now…
There! I flap upon an air current, a thought: I might pay a visit
to the energy force that orchestrates every movement in the universe
today. I head for heaven. I knock at the pearly gates.
The gatekeeper to the Emerald City peeps out a squeaky eyehole
and demands, Yes? What do you want? I seek audience with God.
Ehe? He is occupied at the moment. May I take a message?
Um, no. I would rather see Him in person. Please I have flown all the way
from the poet down on earth. I only want to pay the Energy my respect
and make a humble request of It. But if He is busy – I suppose
I should have made an appointment – tell Him I am grateful
that there exists a green section in the city, but it is vastly not enough.
I don’t know when was the last time His Excellence deigned
to check in on it, but the city has gotten completely out of control.
I suggest it be destroyed, but, and I must emphasize, benignly;
no bloodshed, famine, plague, or war. Just a purely peaceful
abandonment of that way of living. I would like to see a kind of
Great Green Brave New Emerald City Utopia of the Future!
while I am still alive. And I’m due to die by 2063, at the latest,
so the Energy better get crackin’! I will pass the word along,
the gatekeeper responds smugly, and shuts – with a squeak
as well as a bang – his eyehole. I wonder if he will, or whether
he was lying… I shrug my wings, leap off the edge of a cloud
and head back toward earth, where my head is at present.
During my descent, I decide resolutely that if I don’t start
seeing some improvement soon, I am going to come back
with an army of pacifist blackbirds and coup d’etat Emerald City.
I am intimidated. I hate confrontation. It always brings out the worst
in my ego. But I am a bird inside a cage, trapped in an onerous city,
unable to accept that there is no escape, bashing myself
against the bars. Here thoughts do not have room to fly.
They bubble up and seethe underneath ceilings, become stagnant
pools that fester. Our minds are untreated wounds; grotesque gangrene.
Ehhh, the cries of misery moan. Sounds like they are faking it,
I judge as I walk by on two strong, healthy legs. The cripple is begging
for money. Except in the hope that the sky isn’t just a memory,
that it still exists somewhere far away, the bird witnesses its first
dawn from the branch of a tree – and that is indeed not even space.
Hope… Puh! I am already under sedation. How much struggle
from internal conflict have I already swallowed without speaking
up and taking action? Mental pain is a drug. Take your antideppressant.
It will also cover your symptoms of schizophrenia and sociopathy.
Its side-effects include loss of self-identity and impotence.
But you will be able to live a normal life again. The more you take,
the further you can tolerate things being wrong. This can work
to our benefit. We can use the drug, pain, as our vaccine.
Now that I am immune, I can go undercover as an agent into the city
and not fall apart in seizures when I am subjected to its human pollution.
I can carry out covert operations, an extremely skillful spy.
The author, the Cold War-era operative, occupies enemy territory,
taking pictures for his poem-report with his camera-equipped eye.
The most perspicacious tracker, the prim Harvard man explains
to his hierarchical superior, could not detect that when I touch
my finger to the rim of my glasses, like so, a tiny camera
in the nose-piece snaps a picture. If I can just get into their central
headquarters and get anywhere near their top secret documents
we should have all the information that we need to win the war!
Ingenious, the poet smiles, very good agent Orange. Carry on
now with your child’s play… I am doing nothing for which I could
be tried or prosecuted. I am a blackmarket dealer in ideas.
And even in states where thinking along particular lines
is sacrilege and punishable by strictest law, I am still exculpable.
This isn’t explicitly forbidden. The dumb government cannot verbalize
eloquently enough to describe what I am doing against it
and label the subversion illegal. I am therefore able to go
about unsuspected, like a blackbird high above people’s heads
My totem protector, go be free. I have opened your cage.
Birds, messengers to the divine, come swarm the city like locusts.
Authority does not fear my freedom because it is quite isolate.
But if everybody were blackbirds, the myth about the power
that cages us would like past flaps of wings dissolve
into our destination: Sky! Right after the poor petshop owner,
who I harbor no ill-will against, being only ignorant, forgets
his service to the city; wanting only for himself, grabs
the pink bill I offer him: a hundred yuan for two birds’ freedom.