Thai Nights

The voice, our family gatherings were political and in the evenings and we, the children would be put to bed while the men's deep voices discussed how to frame our world or the women discussed how to reinvent the worn out items. we were all civil engineers and we never knew there was something that we couldn't do. The voices put me to safe and secure sleep as they are not alarmed, not raised in despair or attacks, just thoughtful or thankfully jovial. my paintings sold well here in the southwest, not in galleries as i was a woodland Indian and they bought my work as it reminded them of something familiar and they didn't even know what. i was thinking, it's interesting that you had so many comments on the sounds. it's because it's familiar. the sounds and voices out of those boxes created for each person their own view of their world. No two are alike. as my paintings, each one is a dance in the mind of the viewer without me there. they see in the stillness something that i couldn't even imagine was there.
s.s.burrus

glimmer, glisten. glow
Like the sea, they reflect no light
She does not see me
Deep in the water of her eyes
I see me
And I see her
As she is blind, so am I
Deep in the bright blue-green water of her eyes
Deep in the blinding glow of her bright wide eyes
Deep in her

I realize--this word for awake, for aware, for astonishment, for agony
realize, just the two of us, we could have made it
realize, that you could have made it
and I could have made it with you
realize, that I let your tears flow through you until they washed you away
washed me away in you
I hear--this word for listen, for remember, for dreaming
hear, you call
hear, you whisper
hear, you cry
your voice is my silence
my silence is breathless, silver on silver, glass on glass
I see--this word for feel, for pain, for remorse
see, the skin, the eyes, the touch
Why--this word for love, for longing, for loss
why, you said it would be in your heart forever
why did you let me throw your heart into the sea?

At the mirror in white
The white with deep stains of red
The red from the blood of my lovers
He loved me
He loved me
I loved them both
They took me
They took each other
Come, come back to me.

Midnight was the time when I slid into a deliciously dark, smokey jazz club in Chicago and was bewitched by a blend of music I hadn't heard before. It was distinctly Bossa Nova topped with a layer of bop. They were beginning to call this style "fusion" as Latin jazz had resurged. But what I heard that night was decidedly more and rarified. The piano was exceptional, technically and emotionally. And there was another layer floating underneath--subtle, classical riffs that might answer the intriguing question of: What happens when Jobim meets Bach?
That's how I met Manfredo Fest, a worldly, classically trained pianist and composer who sautéed jazz and Brazilian rhythmic harmonies into a feast of musical entrées.
We met and talked that night in between Manfredo's sets as he maneuvered through the crowd, flirting with his fans, joking with his friends, and whispering a few modulations to his band. It was a delight to see, because, you see, Manfredo couldn't see--he was blind, though you'd barely notice it. It seldom affected the rich, full life he created and enjoyed. He was a high spirit that night and for as long as I knew him.

Rune said: If you live in the past, you have no future. If you live in the future, you have no present. The present is all you have as it rolls and curves in space-time in all directions at once.

Yet, sometimes, at the edges, if there are edges, there are tiny, tiny noises, sounds, tiny pieces of melodies? of voices? of images that can be heard but not seen? When the sky is clear and dark, when the wind is steady and plain, when the memories are quiet and the breath is almost silent... tiny noises beckon, everywhere.

Rune knew.

In 1921, archaeologist Cyrus Atherton discovered a scroll on the island of Malta reputed to be a relic from the last days of the fabled city of Atlantis. It contained a prophecy... at the stroke of midnight of the new millenium, 2001, a new "first" human would emerge. Not yet female or male but still a fully sensual and sexual being, the "innocent" would search for its creator and thereby reveal to the world the next stage of evolution... maharanda.
These words opened a play I wrote entitled, Maharanda. Completely fictional, the concept is based on a theme that has permeated every culture in every period of history: the ultimate appearance of the "messiah", the answer.
The history of our species as perceived through this theme is a series of movements, like a series of master scenes. The first movement ended with the evolution of language extended to the evolution of writing. The second closed with the discovery of the sub-atomic world and extended into so-called artificial intelligence, the electronic computer. The third, scene three, has just recently faded to black in a Swedish laboratory where quietly, nearly unheralded, human thoughts and part of a memory were downloaded to an external silcon chip.
And now, the 4th Scene begins... the light slowly fades in on a brave new world. No death: immortality, timeless life. A brave new world. As this current scene in which we live extends over the coming years, there will be many less humans on the planet, almost no warfare, an end to pain, disease, poverty, and almost no suffering. Great joy and great hope? Or the distant voice of Peggy Lee singing: "Is that All There Is?" Huxley was right and it scared the hell out of him.

I had the good fortune of being born into the first generation of a European family in America. A bazaar of languages cascaded through our household and our foreign cultural traditions kept us, for a time, ostracized even insulated from the everyday red-white&blue that bullied us to join the herd. It also meant that we were usually among the last to have the latest, newest "hep-ist", "hip-ist" stuff that defined the promises of the good life... like television. (Witness: my long-pants cuffs didn't fashionably reach my shoe-tops until I was fourteen.) But we did have radio... that wondrous window of audio alchemy that vibrated a body from coccyx to fontanelle. Radio was our "Starship Enterprise."
The focus of our living room was a huge four-feet tall (or was it two feet?) fine-finished wood floor-console RCA Victor radio that gave us almost every major station in the U.S. and many from around the world on shortwave. Every non-summer day, from as far back as I can remember, when the Northen light at 4pm began to darken with eerie gray shadows, I'd hook my feet underneath the bottom of that "ship " and lie back to journey out into the world. There was "Captain Midnight" and "Sky King" and "Jack Armstrong" and "The Shadow" for adventure. There was news, the reassuring reports of local voices who spoke about "what's what" like an uncle visitng with the latest gossip. There was the important and irrefutable news from shortwave BBC, heralded by the chimes of Big Ben without commercials and spiced with short fifteen-minute side trips to "Hummingbird Haven" and "Puddings Are You". There was music... Russian, French, Greek, Spanish, Chinese and orchestral, symphonic, so-called classical.
And there was... opera, live from the Met sponsored by a big-hearted, shadow-government: the Texaco oil company. And dance, that's right, classical ballet on the radio with music and narration for the theatre of the mind. And there was NO talk radio... no one gave a damn about the chit-chat opinions of their neighbors outside the local barber shop.
Every night, in our living room "theatre" or in the kitchen, the family's activities centered around the airwaves. The beauty of it was that you could do so many other things while you listened... homework, sewing, cards, crayoning, baking, smoking, drinking, and all of those private little games that kids play by themselves while their mind's "eye" is journeying somewhere else. Even after television spread across the country, radio still provided big-time entertainment for a while. All of the show-business stars had radio shows.
When I was ten, I was gifted with my very own radio set carefully enshrined in my little bedroom upstairs. It was a herald of privacy and independence, like a first bike or a first auto. So many weekdays it was 4pm downstairs on the main stage and afterwards, upstairs in the "black box", an intimate world because I imagined and believed that the voices speaking just for me were there, somewhere alive inside the tubes and down along the wire (which they were since so much of radio was live!). Just the way I came to believe that speaking to someone on the telephone took you down the wire where you sat in a pitch black tube facing the person you were talking with... unseen, untouched but sensually and completely present (totally un-digital). How magnificent and true it was to be a child and how difficult and perplexing it is to preserve that natural beauty.
We lived close enough to the Canadian border to receive the clear signal of one of the great radio networks in the world, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting). They not only presented fully developed, variegated programming, but they also served a full menu of the world's greatest radio theatre - BBC. There was the Royal Theatre, hosted by Laurence Olivier which produced classical as well as modern drama, uninterrupted, uncut. They also produced adaptations from literature. I first discovered H.G. Wells in a Royal production of "The Country Of The Blind", narrated by Olivier himself. Cervantes joined my life with a broadcast of "Don Quixote." CBC offered its version of the "Royal"... imagine, a three-hour broadcast of Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under The Elms", again, uninterrupted, uncut. No time for popcorn or peeing: a nifty piece of character-building for an energetic little boy.
On the American side, radio theatre was in abundance. Nothing, to this day, can compare to lying in a dark room and listening, imagining, staging somewhere down the wire the chilling, thrilling, nose-dripping joyful fear of "Lights Out!", "Inner Sanctum", "Suspense"... all weekly scary radio theatre shows with original scripts, guaranteed to keep you awake long past your bedtime. Film and television grab you and hold you, but radio, as it was, is a secret-sharer that enters the private world of your mind's theatre and designs the acting, the directing, the staging to fill your own inner world. Only reading comes close to that.
There were also the showcase radio theatres. The "Lux Radio Theatre" was the most famous, hosted by Cecil B. DeMille. It was primarily a marketing opportunity for Hollywood but it was grand piece of entertainment. They actually adapted movies and produced them on the air often with the original stars. There was Humphrey Bogart and Tyrone Power and Greer Garson and Shirley Temple and a bevy of big names doing it with only a microphone. Sometimes, the films had already been in the movie-houses, sometimes they were currently at your neighborhood "Cameo", sometimes they hadn't been released yet. No matter... it was for you, one on one, for you.
Radio theatre had a rich tradition beginning in the 1920's when the crystal earphone gave way to the loudspeaker. It was a special art form that required special writers like Arch Obler (find and read one of his scripts, you'll see why). And it required special actors and directors like Orson Welles and his magical Mercury Theatre. Without scenery or costumes or makeup or lighting, it drew on one major instrument, the voice. Like great musicians, great radio actors were able to paint and move the images in your head in a way that was as powerful and memory-spawning as any purely visual experience. They did it with their voices, with their breathing, with their timing, and with your willing embrace.

There has never been a radio actor to match the ear, the eye and the breathtaking talent of Orson Welles whose voice was a gift from birth, untrained, self-trained, un-trainable.

The auditory experience is unique in the way it embeds itself in the memory. The realm of those experiences remain in my memory as crystal, vacuum-tubed clear as when they first appeared. I can replay those treasured "tapes" in my mind at will, and, at will, I can dance again in the dark.

What have we lost? It echoes... what have we lost? Only The Shadow and your memory knows.

the cause of fear is ignorance

In the Ancient World, that time before Judeo-Christian morality and the steam engine, Art was not usually segregated from the days and nights of journeying through life. The vast sum of it was identified with the craft of the 'artisan' who created works out of fear, by threat, commission and the possibility of sale, often driven by the ignorance of religion. The artist as an impressionistic window into the where and why of life was uncommon and often ignored. Later, Art evolved into a primary activity of decoration, and then, for a brief time, became that impressionistic window, created for its own purpose. Eventually it morphed into the massive merchandising megalomania of today where everything is 'art' and everyone is an 'artist' and the impressionistic window of past, present and future is a disposable slide-show. The prevailing image can be summed up in the words of another Roman sage:
tempus edax rerum - time, the devourer of all things.

For a time in the last century, and an even longer time in the centuries prior, European languages dominated international communication. French was the global language of diplomacy, German the language of science-technology, Italian the language of music, and Spanish, the sometimes language of romance. Speak them appropriately at the appropriate occasion and you were considered 'civilized'. Speak them not, and you were considered 'provincial', 'back-water', 'second class'.

Today, the Lingua Franca is English. Not the Queen's British English or the lyrically-melodic Irish English or the twisted-nose Australian English or the potato-in-mouth American English. No, it is an international-English, what I like to call, Aenglish. It's a curdled stew of pidgin, business-speak, techno-speak, Americo-grunt-speak, rap chatter, and the spit-less mutterings of email, text messaging and all the rest of the internet's babble-lingo. There is no dictionary for it, no guiding Academy, no usage horizon... unless you're a charismatic Christian speaking in 'tongues'.

As air travel became the world's girdle, it was immediately apparent that all involved, from pilots to reservation clerks, had to read from the same page, an English page. When multi-nationalism became the marketing structure of the globe and the dollar became it's currency, English became its code. After the end of World War II, with Europe and Japan in rubble, and China yet to heave its masses out of the countryside into the cities, American science-technology paraded across the surface of the Earth singing in English. And then there was Hollywood, rock&roll, and television. It all said: "Move over." Or in pure body-language Aenglish: "Here's my elbow!"

Travel anywhere in the world and you'll see, read and hear Aenglish, even if it's only a short-word vocabulary consisting of 'Helloh Mistuh', 'Wat you want', 'Hay Hansum', 'Tankyu', 'Byby'. If you're a Russian traveling in Madagascar, you're out of luck unless you speak the local language or a few words of Aenglish. If you're a Chinese in Argentina, some Spanish please or just a little bit of Aenglish will do.

This planetary talk code is spoken fluently in many places and taught in many education systems, including America... but without the background and underpinning of its mother-English: its syntax, Roman Latin and Greek infrastructure, its roots. Thailand is a good example.

In this 3rd world kingdom ("Hay Mistuh, wy arnt we 1st world?"), English as Aenglish is prevalent... not quite a second language, but spread throughout signage and labeling, with even short-word vocabularies among remote villagers. It's taught in many schools in the education system--taught by teachers who learned it from books and the internet and from the very same classes they are teaching. They seldom teach conversation, how to speak. The result is a strange phenomenon, awkward but interesting. It goes like this.

Speak in English to a Thai, on the phone, on the street, in a shop, and unless you speak a little Thai, they will understand the Aenglish parts, but that's all. Now, if you write it out (print it out), the chances are they'll understand exactly. Why? Because they were taught to read and write, albeit, not too well, but well enough. Speaking, rather 'hearing' speaking, remained a mystery.

The Thai language is not a lyrical language. Like most Asian languages, it has no syncopated flow, no sense of musical sounds, a limited vocabulary. The written language has no punctuation, no capital letters, no illustrative typography. Thais do not speak, they shout (both loudly and quietly), in a droning monotony of nasal tones. And that's the way they speak English, and that's why Aenglish is a smiling, easy second language for them. Easy and smiling.

The same is true in a number of places, especially in Asia and Africa. Read and write, but no speak. Not a bad thing, this by-road to literacy... until you read their 'twitterings'. 'Tongues' are for everyone.