SON OF THE MING DYNASTY

Waves of memories have been defrosting me, I live my histories, such makes my present bearable, I have contributed crimes, blessings and fortunes to lives and times before and after this now; I do nothing here but sustain myself; for creativity, enjoyment and production I merely live out past and future memories. It may dignified hope that I am at least willing to dream here, a bed is not a bad place, even a bed of nails is still a bed. With each eager springing pricking ending one dream and inducing another. The nails on my back prevent me from awakening from my pillow sleep.

I was a child during the Ming dynasty, the very dynasty that refused to convert to Catholicism, something which I may, at the time, have objected to for in this life I was born into the catholic faith. You cant argue with Confucius. While that may have been how I felt as a child in Ming China, here in this life, as a lonely Western Catholic, I was saved from starving to death on the 25th day of Christmas by a Chinese restaurant, Hunan cuisine if you care. The Ming dynasty’s refusal to turn over millions of Chinese to the Vatican saved my life on Christmas day. Anyway I was a child during that oh forward looking dynasty. Maybe not long enough to grow to adult hood in it, something happened, there was an accident I think, or maybe not an accident, maybe I just got caught in the crossfire of advancing civilizations but I did not make it pass my twelve year.

We slept on the floor, we were a family of means, by means I mean that I remember our house being clean and large, one sumptuous floor of puritanical squalor, four large rooms all adjoining each other as if it made the walls so unnecessary, I slept, in the central room, on a thick carpet like mat, very voluminous with décor, largely red with gold spirals and the head of a few mean dragons screaming at the air, harmless, completely harmless, their menacing frankness drew from me only ambivalence. Remember I said that we were rich because the house was clean, if you went outside of our door you did not have to go far to test if your nose was functioning properly, you were instantly attacked by putrid smells jazz dazzling with massive personalities, to have been a dog in such days must a been like sleeping on a bed of nails. Cut all your noses off you dogs! I once did cut my dog’s nose off, it was an accident of course, but then maybe there are no accidents, could you imagine my dog barking away: “cut my nose! For the love of Confucius, cut my nose! What I was saying was that the house being so clean in a place that had exactly the opposite abundance would require high maintenance which must have been and meant luxury.

From my mat I could see mom, she was not well, but she did not complain, her body was a bed of nails from her innards, I don’t think she was ever well, good doctors tried, maybe that is why I eventually, wrongly situated in this life, I became a doctor to try to cure her. Doctors tried everything on her, but they could not see the nails, they could never treat what they could never identify, she would ache all over, suffer nose bleeds, bloating stomach, water would run from her ears, and often she would faint, and still all the symptoms had no illness that could be attached to them. Now I would say that if a doctor can not see it, it is not a doctor’s problem, the problem is that doctors have made themselves the physicians of all that ails the body, my mother had a metaphysical illness. Doctors have no insight into that, they have to be able to see what they treat, to treat my mother one needed to believe in unknowables, to touch things with one’s hands that one can not feel, to believe in unbelievable things. Mom was unbelievable in many ways, unbelievable beings identify with that.

I want to explain to you why I became a doctor to save my mother, though we now know that a doctor could not have cured her, and besides that I died in China by the age of twelve. I remember laying on the golden dragons, laying awake because mother was awake with her nails; me nails put to sleep, her they make awake, mom’s nails kept me awake. I never saw father, though I suspect that he was alive and a middle level official of more power than personal means. I say that because I had been to houses where even when you stepped outside the main entrance you could not see the outside, you were still far away from the unpleasantness and rubbish that would make a dog beg his master to shop his nose off. But dad never worried much about mother, nor slept with her what ever sleep she got. At night when the night makes no requirements of the eyes, my mother’s eyes were wide open, I could feel them wide open from as far away as my mat, her pupils dilating to expand faster than the darkness so as to reach some promise of light at an equator that they would never reach; her pale face, uncomfortably moist, bathed by exasperation, laying there awake waiting for the daylight where she would not be force to fake a sleep that never would arrive. I wanted to be a doctor, not knowing at the time that doctors did not know anything about nails in your innards, nails in your middle brain, nails in your ears, nails in your brow, nails, nails NAILS!

The problems with wishes is that they come true. Let me explain. In China we have a curse which I am sure you are aware of because it is so very, very popular, it has survived well into these times and far beyond them even. I say beyond our times because as you know I have already lived many lives, and I want to make you aware that the lives you live do not follow one specific time line, they are random, you can have a life in the future which is sort of a dubious term because there really isn't a future, since you can be born into the past as much as to the present, or and I ought say equally born a god or an amoebae, that is what I am trying to say here but not saying it very well; randomness is so difficult to imagine here, people are not aware of spontaneous evolution or evolved extinctions, the most highly evolved are most highly likely to extinguish themselves. Everyone that is successful eventually gets to suffer evolved extinctions, but these are all things I don’t care to explain, you will eventually know them, if you don’t know them already and just don’t know them here, because we forget so much of being in our different histories of the universe just so we can survive here; but what I am saying is that I have existed in many different points of existence and that because of that I know that the saying or curse: “May all of your wishes come true.” Has survived far beyond what we call our times. More I am saying that the universe doesn’t evolve but don’t you worry about that.

But what I wanted to tell you, and I apologize for taking so many detours and not following the linearity that is so adored here, but it is just that I haven’t forgotten as much of all of my other existences and so it makes it difficult to be linear. But what I wanted to tell you is why I became a doctor. You see when I was a child in China, my mother’s pain afflicted me as well, and so I wished myself to be a doctor and then at the age of twelve something put a mortal stop to that. I can still hear my mothers woes from that, her nails were one thing she could handle without saying much to me, but when I stopped aging mother got a spike! Before curing mother from her nails I became her SPIKE!

I don’t know why I died so early in life; maybe, as son of a bureaucrat, to get away from the calamity of India’s religious infestation that was colonizing our spiritual life with that overly jolly and overly here, here, rice salesman Buddha. Or maybe due to a premonition of what was far away but sure to come, Manchu pigtails, no pigtail for this little boy. I wish that I could figure it out, when you are a child sleeping in the middle of a clean room, with simple but beautiful walls, and shiny floors and you are not afraid of dragons, and you dream of playing with snakes, and you hear your pudgy and overly happy little brother sleeping in the next room, all dressed up in his dreams, sleeping fully and comfortably and happily, with a beautiful maroon and black silk hat, while mother lays in her room awake, there just aren’t explanations. In my next life I would make myself a doctor, but I got detoured to Poland, and there were a few other places and beings in-between, and I finally got here to Earth where wishes come true, and with the help of credit card fraud I was able to finance myself through medical school.

But you see this is what I was saying, wishes come true. The problem is that they are not real time instantaneous, the universe is truly kind, it wants to make us all happy, so when we make a wish and make it with all the desire that a bed of nails can inspire, the universe dashes to make it come true, but it takes time for the universe to get all things working just right so that the wish can come true. This is because the universe does not know itself too well, and so when the wish is made fully real and assigned to the wisher, for a dream has your name tag on it, it tracks you anywhere you go in the universe and comes true for you, and for you only; the problem is that as it comes true you are then living in another era, in another place, under very different circumstances, and you wish it were not happening to you because mostly you don’t know that it is a wish that you made, though realistic parts of your brain say “Well this is probably a good thing.” Only pretty soon you are trying to kill the damn wish, and the universe, which of course hears you saying: “Oh I wish this were not happening to me!” or if you are really inconsiderate you say “Why is this happening to me!” Not even a question and the universe just can’t figure you out and that is how black holes get started, the universe trying to get away from making your wishes come true.

What matters here is that perhaps because of my resurrected memories in this world I did not want to be a doctor, which may explain why I wasn’t accepted at the more prestigious schools of medicine; if my will power had been involved in my decision then maybe now I would be doing something really phenomenal, and by that I don’t mean being a mere cartographer for the human genome project, deoxyribonucleic who cares, or a podiatrists, besides their licking pleasures what else is there to learn about feet! Angina, freezing heart, drip drain blood, rerouting and adding pipes, one ought never mess with heart, a pig’s valve belongs to a pig! An artificial heart makes you entirely a metal being with a stomach brain. No, I wanted to be something much bigger. The black plague, the potato famine, the infestations, spirited cholera, leper fleshings, cancerous venom that refuses to poison itself, and all the other countless of slow death tortures that have destroyed entire families and devastated towns and centuries, I have a gripe with all of them!

My adorable little brother, in this life, died of AIDS. AIDS doesn’t want to kill you, but it also does not want you to live all hidden by a wall of defenses that prevents you from suffering the feelings and ravaging menaces of everything else; and it is something else that kills you when it witnesses your nakedness; to stay alive you have to remind everything else that it has to go around you and not through you; architects sadly aside the universe despises straight lines they kill everything. Knowing all that there is to know the doctors could not cure my little brother, thirty pills a day to keep him alive were poisoning him, the doctor that saved him prescribed the dosage of death. I would do something to save him, to lay with him, brotherly naked kissing him life innocence.

And in this life I have my adorable mother pure declamation of poetry, suffers all of the symptoms that my mother in China had, both can not be diagnosed or cured by medicine, both got spiked by their sons, and here too I can not cure her; she is all by herself only in the company of what ails her, which again is metaphysical in scripture.

When you are walking the Western streets on a holy day, hungry and alone and wondering why you did this life to yourself because you forgot your wish, and all the restaurants are closed, and you think you are about to die of hunger, and suddenly you stumble into a Chinese restaurant raining manna you are in heaven! Such was the foresight of the Ming dynasty, providence sweet and sour soup kitchen for lonely Catholics. In the future everyone will be Chinese, more Chinese restaurants survive per square block than is humanly possible to stomach, so many of us have already been Chinese. Mother and I enjoyed our time in the Ming dynasty, so much so that last time she came to visit we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It is one of my fondest memories.