B (named bee /ˈbiː/[1]) is the second letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds (depending on language), but most commonly a voiced bilabial stop.

The savage is perhaps not so much the first forefather of civilized man as the degenerate descendent of a previous civilization ….. It is not mental incapacity, but the long rejection or seclusion from opportunity and withdrawal of the awakening impulse that creates the savage. Barbarism is an intermediate sleep, not an original darkness.

    —Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga

_____________________________________

BANGKOK.  Somewhere in an old dented trash can on the corner is a sheath of speed tabs, diet pills, alarm clocks, bright eyes, wakey-wakeys, whatever you want to call them. “Never-Say-Die” is what I called them. These are the pills that block the sleep impulse and force the body to stay awake for long periods; weight loss is just the byproduct of this process of everything else being blocked. But what I thought would keep me awake turned out to be some kind of sleep aid, or perhaps somebody slipped me a Mickey in that last bucket of Whiskey Red Bull. Did I say “bucket?” Yes. For in Thailand, that is what you get when you intend to either drink a lot or at least to share with a group of friends, acquaintances, or gaggle of hookers.

Those pills knocked me out so completely that when I woke up outside Club Lucifer, a small gang of, three of them in total, Ladyboys, mauled and prowled over me, upon my half-naked body. I knew nothing of anything. There seemed to be some kind of death waiting around the corner but I wasn’t sure because at that moment, the only thing apparent is that this was a land far away. All the Westerners in the world may visit Pat Pong but it will forever remain as mysterious as Thailand herself. The Ladyboys were another story altogether.

“You sexy, you take us home.”

“Fuck you,” I shrugged, shook off the concrete, and I broke away from their makeup and wigs, dicks in tight jeans, small fake tits meant for somebody else.

There is a yearning for suicide within me, but for now I’m not about to let this death happen in any way so unspectacular where my family reads of my overdose, in the company of gay Thai boys, who dress up like girls in order to receive acceptance by their society and who disapprove of overt boy-on-boy sex. No, I’ll die all right, but let it be filled with light.

BLIND.  We sat at Max’s Opera Café on the edge of campus, and as he told me that there never would be a war again in Europe, I believed the professor. “To think that just fifty years ago World War II held most of Europe in conflict, and now just fifty years later war in Europe is unthinkable.” I believed him. I believed him because I was naïve, because I had no reason not to believe him, because he was a scholar of some achievement and I was not. The following year I enrolled in Serbo-Croatian language classes, held in a temporary trailer that served as our classroom while the buildings of the campus that were damaged by the earthquake of 1989 underwent repair and retrofittings. In that class I sat across from Egon Scotland and his wife Christine. Egon, a journalist with Germany’s Die Zeit, had enrolled in the class for the basic reason that I had, too: to prepare for a trip to Yugoslavia. By that summer I was there, in Zagreb, second capital of Yugoslavia, and the following autumn I visited Egon and Christine at their beautiful flat in Munich. A year and a half later, after the war in Croatia had swept across the republic’s entire stretch of its southeastern border, I sat in the bedroom of a mansion in Connecticut with Steven Skakel while he turned on VHS footage of war atrocities in Croatia. In that video I learned for the first time of Egon’s killing outside the town of Vukovar in Croatia’s far eastern region.

BAGGAGE. “You should leave Nepal now,” Nawang tells me. “There is a national emergency in our country because of Maoists everywhere. Shootings, kidnappings, tourists are robbed. Soon they will terrorize Kathmandu. It is not safe here. But it is not safe in your country either. Your government is attacking some terrorists in Afghanistan and causing war as well. Like Maoists in Nepal. Foreign elements causing war.

“But I can tell you,” he continues. “Nothing, no war any time in history, no war will be like the future war when China meets India. The Maoists in Nepal are the beginning of this war. China has only to cross Nepal to reach India. Then, the war to end all wars will occur.

“You see, God put the Himalayas here for a reason. Our mountains have power to stop everything, even Chinese soldiers trying to reach India. Let us pray China and India never meet. Om Mani Shiva Boom!” he chuckles out his large white teeth and his little belly bounces. Sai Baba looks down at us from the picture of him in his blissful repose and seems to agree with Nawang.

“I understand,” I answer.

Betroffenheit.   Munich reveals its unique character in the Lenbach Museum. The works of the artists in this museum come from many different countries but the artwork seems to reject this, instead revealing a message that all is bleeding into one. The Lenbach is a contemporary museum and it reflects Munich, a city which was devastated in the second world war and rebuilt to its modern state after allies freed the city. There is no evidence in Munich that Hitler waltzed in grand ballrooms and fed on Jew's flesh unless you really look at the modern buildings and ask yourself "why is this building or that building modern?" Then you realize that it is modern because everything around you was destroyed. And so the Lenbach Museum is a modern building where artists Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky and Alexei Yavlensky lead you through the modern century. However, their work does not report the crimes of this century; rather they convince through mood and paint that there was something more important happening than mass killings, something more important than horror and violence.
       There were some who tried to live through it all by continuing their lives undisturbed, undisturbed by means of isolation and the underground. It was the new renaissance that has been ongoing since the birth of Jean Cocteau, when Orpheus began his descent into the nether world. Continuing shows in cinema houses in isolated places like islands went on undisturbed, filled with people who went unnoticed as they proceed to do whatever it is they are born to do, and to be, never forgetting their responsibility to one another, to rely on one another, even today.

There were eight horses standing proud decorated with white ribbons of lace trimmings and crystal beads that hung and wrapped them round their bodies and across their bellies and between their hind quarters and winding through their tails and into the anus and the beads also hung from the crowns on their heads. There are four royal chariots standing motionless behind the horses, but the horses and the chariots are not attached to one another. These chariots are made of a rich, polished gold like you find in great Roman cathedrals, the gold that was mined by slaves and cast into elaborate designs by slaves who sometimes died from the forced labor. The gold chariots are amidst an haze of dense midnight-blue and the foreground is a common sidewalk-gray color, the same texture as a common sidewalk. Atop the chariots stand ridiculous men: in the first chariot on the far left stands Pilot in royal Roman garb and he is wearing headphones and holding a Walkman cassette player in his right hand; in the next chariot to Pilot's left stands Adolf Hitler dressed in his usual military uniform and in his right hand he is holding a McDonald's hamburger, half of it still wrapped in its McDonald's hamburger paper. He is just about to take a big bite of the hamburger. The third chariot stands empty and the only sure thing we know about the owner of it is that he is an American man from the south who believes that the Holocaust was a hoax. Standing in the chariot in place of the it's owner is a totem pole with three heads carved into it. At the top of the totem pole is the head of Sammy Davis Junior looking at you with his glistening eyes and thin lips that seem to be singing "The Candy Man," and below, the head of Leonard Bernstein looking relaxed and dignified, as though he has just finished conducting the symphony; and below Leonard is the head of Robert Mapplethorp with a cigarette between his lips. In the fourth chariot stands a statue of a young man with a shaved head in tight blue jeans, a white t shirt with the word FRONT painted in red letters in the middle of the shirt contrasts a black leather jacket with zippers and an arm band wrapped around the statue's upper right arm, a red band with a white circle and a swastika in the middle of it. The statue is holding a clinched fist and is shaking it at the horses. There are many naked boys swimming in circles in a pool that is transparent and suspended before the chariots. Most of the boys in the pool have blond hair and their bodies are all very pail, even though you know that there are African boys and Indian boys and Japanese boys and Eskimos and purple Nigerians and even boys from Tirana and Tiajuana. The constant swirling in the pool makes the water turn red because some of the boys are bleeding and the constant motion makes the water and blood mix until the entire pool is red and all you can see is the many sets of blue eyes looking at the next boy as the pail skin of the next boy comes closer and almost close enough to touch. There is so much blood at one point that screaming no longer happens, just summary executions and more pail bodies thrown into the pool. The horses are spotted with blood and the lace becomes now more decorated, delicate patterns with little red specks of blood, the crystal beads reflect light and glisten and now the horses begin to parade slowly in a circle around the swirling pool and slowly they march into a slow gallop, their broad necks and wispy miens all uniformly moving horizontally around, surrounding the pool. The slow gallop continues with just the sound of hooves until very young children in the foreground clap their hands, pulling their small hands from their fathers and clapping at the horses that are decorated in the blood of the boys. The fathers look down at their children and see their little heads covered by their little wool caps with the little tassels on top and they think how lucky is my son to be here with me witnessing the horrors of artists. The swirling pool grows deeper and the bleeding resumes, but those blue eyes remain undisturbed through pain and insult and final death, those eyes remain honest and faithful, never crossing and never letting the blood enter them. But then the blood in the swirling pool turns to fire and the horses begin to prance, the edges of the lace trimmings become scorched by the flames which lick their sides, the crystal beads glow from the orange flames. The children run toward the fire but their fathers only run a couple of steps to pull them back; the heat is so great they stop and scream for their sons who run right into the fire giggling and flashing their young white teeth, their little hands outstretched and reaching for the horses, "horsy, horsy." Their little tassels are first to catch fire, the boys in the swirling pool have developed blisters and the fathers look at them and turn away as if they could help them but refuse because they don't agree with the boys. The little children just keep running until they are running in the circle with the horses and the horses begin to trample them, their little bones are crushed while their fathers scream from the top of their lungs from the horror. The swirling pool turns into a dance and the boys have now reached each other to join hands, they smile and kiss one another on each cheek as their feet fan the flames, they rise above the fire and ascend to the clouds above. The children never escape the hooves that trample them, their fathers will never forgive them. The lace burns away and the crystal beads glow like coals from the flames, burning into the flesh of the horses but the horses do not understand what causes their pain. They blame the fathers who are watching the crystals burn, they have already forgotten their little children who lye dead. The statue turns to the empty chariot and whispers "When will you return, will you kill them all, will there be killing for me?" The totem pole quivers for a brief moment; Hitler has almost finished his McDonald's hamburger; Pilot is rewinding the tape. Finally the horses collapse into piles of ashes but the crystals continue to glow for a while, quite brightly in fact, the crystals glowing their fiery orange mixed in with the ashes.

Next to this painting is a simple Indian from Brazil sitting cross-legged next to a straw hut. He is communicating as only Shamans do, reaching the animal and pure energy. He is a mediator between the arts and the public, a priest between spirit and man.

BEER.   I get a call from mom at 6 a.m. so she can remind me to stop by to weed and water the garden while she’s out of town (she knows I’m already up, is free of ill intentions). She launches into how ripped up she feels. “It’s in the Trib this morning:  ‘….four million cans of beer every year, mostly to Indians.’”

That’s a lot of beer sold to one single South Dakota tribe. “’Some try to trade tools, electronics and other items for beer,’” she continues. “It’s such a sad sign and I’m afraid it’s all just getting worse,” she says. “It makes me so sad.”

She’s on it, heart-strong leader of no one aware of my interest in Indian problems though I do not speak of them. How does she do it? I thought how wonderful that not only had she not dropped that cake last Saturday afternoon, when her big dog growled and let out a thunderous bark as she closed the lower oven with her hip. But she hadn’t even flinched, lost her stride, didn’t reprimand the dog. “Focus,” I thought, an immovable center that let’s her glide from oven, past aggressive animal, to overcrowded kitchen countertop. It’s a vast landscape spread over this country, more accessible to me because this is my homeland. But I remind myself it’s not just an Indian problem, it’s the larger problem of alcohol and it’s the big question of addiction, in its many disguises.

Ravaging family and foe, Firewater, Demon Alcohol, killing more than one of my tribe. Grandpa died at age 52 of a massive heart attack, eyes froze wide open, large hands clutching bedposts, mouth screaming at God for help or letting him know loudly that he knows it’s all over. I never met Grandpa; Mom found him that December day in his bedroom, where he’d been napping. She was just 13 then and had been playing her new seven-inch recording of Earth Angel by the fifties group The Penguins, on her new phonograph. She’s carried guilt with her throughout her life, “….for not hearing his screams over Earth Angel.” She’s aware of the guilt now, but multiple years of psychotherapy cannot take it away.

Her call this morning was like a train swishing by outside my window. “We’re driving through the Pine Ridge Reservation on our way to the Black Hills,” mom adds. “I wish there was something I could do to help.” My mind lurched forth and I immediately linked up with her on the Indian article. It immediately made me think about the new Indian Cinema of the past ten years, of Indian recovery, at least what I know of it. It had seemed many tribes had tackled the problem.

Sherman Alexie, author, filmmaker, member of the Spokane Tribe, spoke of it in his June 1999 film release Smoke Signals. The film features the poem "Forgiving Our Fathers," taken from a Dick Lourie collection called Ghost Radio. The morning call, an article telling of beer cans strew across Indian roads, of drunken driving fatalities – 14 of the 74 total Pine Ridge Indian deaths in 2005 – of a dead grandfather coming back to me in the morning to say, “Enjoy this time. Be here. Forgive your father, too.” I hadn’t thought of that. Dad, twenty-years the recovered alcoholic living on the edge of the Anoka Indian Reservation up north.  I hear a train whistle blowing, another man alone today and every day.

BANARAS.  Our time together began in a hotel lobby in Banaras where we three, along with twelve others, waited for the minibus to the Nepal border town of Sonali. As we stand here at the chai stall with the tea sitting in low clear tumblers, steaming sweetly and the banana peels pulling away so freely to produce ripe sugary fruit suited to the cinnamon and cardamom spices of the tea, Wolfgang looks now like the father to Andreas whereas in the hotel lobby he was a mere brother.

Now Wolfgang sips his chai and sets it down on a shaky table. Ivan, the Pole, comes over and continues a half-workable conversation leftover from the bus. “I must just drink beer still,” he says. “I have been so sick it is this place Banaras,” he pronounces the city’s name with a sh sound, “it is such a sickening city.” Wolfgang shakes his head and reaches for the chai. “Now it is almost we are in Nepal, so I am drinking tea in Nepal but still beer now,” he grins ear to ear and chuckles through his beard, “to kill everything inside of me.” And this was probably right: the Indian beer will kill just about anything, so one is told, because there is the addition of formaldehyde in the beer to replace hops and grains that are not available for the fermentation process; this is for the intoxicating effect, the part of the drink which kills a little of you from the inside, obliterates the cells, dissolves you internally but not in a spiritual way but a chemical dissolving, like acid, giving the sensation of disconnection from the world ‘round about.

BOYFRIEND.   Several hundred miles away from a town called Hum on the Republic Square in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, stands a canary-yellow Habsburg structure that houses Confisurie Kras on its bottom floor, on the upper two floors several apartments now occupy what was once a single grand estate. This elegant building faces the main square of the city and in front of it passes the city tram, an assemblage of blue train cars with windows and seats and a bell that dings at every stop. Each weekday morning, Tomislav waits for the tram with a hoard of other Zagreb residents. In his gray coat and dark trousers and black boots, he blends in with the crowd. In his mind, in the minds of those that know him, he does not blend in but is quite spectacular. For in that elegant canary Habsburg building built by Austro-Hungarian Empire-commissioned architects, Tomislav calls it home. However, he does not live there and when his mother sold it after more than a century of family ownership and she moved to Hum, Tomislav, now in Zagreb again but on his own, still considers the old stately structure doma. There with his sisters and older brother and their mother, Tomislav and the others were born, even his mother was born there.

It was not always a building of elegance on the main square. This building has a curious history. Anchored on each side by newer construction and a set of building less spectacular, on its left as you face it stands an insurance agency, on the right the Confisurie Kras, chocolate maker and retail trade shop, and with some apartments above. But Tomislav’s building, not always the antique on the main square that makes it the subject of snapshots of visitors and residents alike, holds a darker past, far darker than the canary-yellow and far more hidden than its collection of apartments within. This building was the Nazi headquarters for the Croatian Republic in World War II and in that time, Tomislav’s family lived there while Croatian generals duplicitous with Adolph Hitler’s regime in Germany occupied the apartments of the building, with Tomislav’s family sandwiched into a junior set of suites while the plans to extinguish Yugoslavia’s Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and Partisani were drawn up on Tomislav’s family diningroom banquet. There, during World War II, Tomislav’s family harbored Jews in the basement, in the very same building, while tank boots rumbled over the floor planks and plans of the Holocaust committed to ink and paper, then to the fields of war.

BEGINNING. An opportunity to change.

November 16, 2001

Today I find myself back in the US in a very different country. The quirky funniness of Thailand and the deep mythologies of Nepal and India are far away. The nagging tuk-tuk drivers and dense heat with smog-filled streets are in the distance. The food on every corner and on every street and those smells filling the air, are back in Bangkok. The great buys had by rigorous bartering and constant smiles to retain sanuk are now on those cheap streets, and I am now here in America on streets cheapened by patriotism and the presence of flags outside storefronts, homes, and on car antennas, reminding the true free thinkers that freedom is still a dream to find. “Deep sleep awake.” Dreamtime is atman expressing itself, according to Sri Aurobindo. Mind. True Mind.

BLISS.  Billy Bliss,  Billy Bliss ­– spent his days and most his nights in an effort to reestablish mythic time. It was something he dreamed of reestablishing for others around him but knew he could only do it for himself, outside the civilization that brought out the Billy Bliss others had come to know him as: a man; but not, for he was a Brahmin. I met Bill yesterday and he said something particularly poingent: I’d rather print it out than spit it out. This is how I need to control myself. I should converse only when necessay, not talk to myself but write, write, write. I helped my sister yesterday, or more like I made a true attempt at self-less service, by calling her and telling her that I was going over to Lake Calhoun to load up her truck with wood chips for her yard. I did this and left.

With Bill, I went to Present Moment bookstore and he introduced me to Madame Blavatsky and to Alice Bailey. I’m going to enjoy these two writers very much. He bought me the title Initiation Solar and Human by Bailey and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. This latter title is one I have wanted to purchase for a long time. Bill is very intuitive, highly clairvoyant I would say and a true spiritual old soul, here to guide others but having been through this thing so many times is probably a little bored and frustrated by the slowness of human beings. I enjoy my time with him immensely. We went to see the film Away from Her. We went to Buca di Bepo and ate osso buco. In another version of Bill where he does not rescue himself from his alcoholism, Billy Bliss wore an old motorcycle helmet because of the grand mal seizures. Thankfully, Bill never betrayed me.

BEFORE.  The Wake Up Call

September 11, 2001

I leave India’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram really early, like 5 a.m. After spending three days and nights locked up there I am well ready to get out on the streets of Pondicherry. Strict vegetarian meals - yogurt, rice, lentils, that was it. Craving a hard cup of coffee after all that shanti-shanti business I launch onto a coffee bar located on the second floor of a Chevignon Jeans shop, like Levis only French. The coffee bar is as western as you get with lots of seating room and clean tables with paper napkin dispensers, something unheard of almost anywhere else in the city. BBC News plays on the overhead television.

I approach the wood counter and order a latte. The Tamil boy positions himself behind the Italian espresso machine, the one that looks just like those everywhere in the States, like the front of a ‘50’s Chevy, running out luscious streams of thick black liquid and rising steam. While he spins the levers and assembles cup to saucer I turn and look up at the television broadcasting the latest. A jet flies into a skyscraper. BAM! Another jet hits another skyscraper, BAM! I turn to the boy and ask him, bewildered, “What was that?”

            “That, my friend,” his dipping Tamil accent, and his head cocked toward the television: “That is America!”

            At Kashi [Banaras] Rail Station, I step down from a rusted train car with  my pack, step onto a cracked platform buzzing with an ocean of humanity. Indian citizens of every kind: veiled women pulling luggage in multiple colors, bleating goats randomly scuttling about, Sikhs in turbans—one of them baby blue—and saddhus dreadlocked  and painted; many mothers, holy pundits, and hording children seeking alms, but not from Indians  at all as from the occasional Westerner arriving to Kashi [Banaras]. Men and boys with rumbling pushcarts loaded with mangos and oranges, others with sweets and pastries, handcarts loaded with chai and coconut juice, cows and bulls with or without clanging cowbells, bananas piled past the height of my shoulders, box crates of curry paste and bottled chutney. Vermillion sellers squatting with their small sand piles of electric red, blue, pink, purple and orange powders; spices of every kind in big jars and antiquated scales from an alchemist’s lab ready to compare the difference with a set of cylindrical weights made of brass.

I maneuver around a group of sleeping children with their mothers, bathed by the late afternoon smoke of sunlight, flies buzzing over their faces and creeping into the sealed crevices of their eyes and lips. Drug pushers, touts, tour guides, rickshaw wallahs, betel leaf sellers, incense, makeup and shampoos, silk scarves and bracelets in every metal, scrawny dogs darting in anticipation of food. Stacks and stacks of papadam and chipatis sold, eaten in the open air, or packed off to the trains.

In the vacant lane between one platform and the next, a village of men dressed in long white dhotis wait as the train channels into the station over the hissing rails. I traverse ‘round a prostrate set of bodies set in their own mystery. The train rolled away with wheels that screeched out deeper into east India.

Fat people in the back of pickup trucks. Fatter people in wheelchairs on the gravel shoulder of the road. Lawn chairs set up by skinny people, less-fat people in them. Blood diseases. Obesity and diabetes which follow. The fair rides blowing colored lights into the air, celebratory fireworks blasting across the sky. I think she knows that train is swishing by outside her window.  But if she loses her focus, she’ll surely drop the cake.

Aurobindo concludes: Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth's evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature's process.  We are called to bilabial  pronouncements of biblical proportions. I’m in the middle of this thing:  “B” rhymes with “C”.

***