~ Lying in bed. Two days ago I called my girl to say goodbye. Xinjiang melons tasted like honeydews mated to cantaloupes. Betty told me that Gretsky retired in June. I'm permanently retired and yet unable to retire, being perpetually broke. Tennis players need to win if they want to make a living. But they never talk about that, do they? Anyway, my girl told me over the phone that the Institute for Sold Souls will cover most of my airfare. Makes losing all my time seem worth it.

The day is bright and warm, even at 7:00 A.M. Betty is up early for an excursion, and her talkativeness makes me smile and I feel good about going away alone. She takes a picture of me in front of the hotel. I'm clean-shaven but feel less than serious. Today is the longest day of the year, June 21. The sun came up at 6:00 and doesn't set till 10:00. I'm not so strong, but feel a surplus of energy: I can make it anywhere I want to. My bike feels too heavy. The ladies in the post office ask me to open my packages so they can make sure I'm not mailing hash across the sea.

By 10:00 A.M. I'm out of town. Free, with nothing to worry about. Breathing deeply is my biggest thrill. In front of me the road unrolls a bolt of black, silken heat. I feel that lovely peaceful sense of going nowhere in the middle of infinity and nobody to know I'm doing it. Alone and unobserved - I'm completely free inside the huge, real world. I ride to the wilderness of purest nature! There will be no noisy televisions there... The sun and wind are happy. The artificial anxieties of all "civilized" things are no more. No more hand-me-down neuroses of complaint. The hypocrisies and all the deceptive social ladders fade to nothingness between trees shimmering under a friendly sun...

It's noon, 38 degrees north latitude and 35 degrees Celsius. The birds are singing up in the incredibly tall, mature trees along the way. Peace at last. Cute kids chatter along the road. They laugh and wonder up at my presence. Yes, the Earth will live for awhile yet, despite us crazy humans.

Here's a restaurant along the brand new main street of Shule. What a contrast to Kashgar only twenty kilometres north: the street looks built only last week! Wow. The city planners of China are smart enough to make new streets wide enough for cars, donkeys and people all at once. Of course, from the sidewalk, you'll never know if the real cause of growth is pork or planned development; because, outside town, the villages giving off the road are entirely different. The villages are made of ancient mud bricks and the little lanes seem modest under the great trees. The paths are shady and children always play and couples walk together. But these villages all look as if time passes by - unmeasured... To step across the highway from the village into Shule is a mind-bender. It's like some shiny new civilization next door to the eternal mud wall! Wonderful Chinese brain-teaser! I can see the poor folk suffer impossible crises of perception... For whom the white tower and the wide pavement? Where art the great king to occupy yonder office? Is he to arrive tomorrow - or next week? What does he do all day behind the wheel of his land-cruiser?

Eternal mystery of modern civilization: we build with or without stated purpose. Even so, we are organisms who desire progress. It can be effectively argued that we must waste an awful lot of natural resources before we achieve the technical prowess necessary to find solutions to various man-made crises - all of them created by our material appetite - an inescapable circle.

Nowadays, all societies import forms of doing and making things: we share the life inspired by neighboring societies. So, the polyglot soul of the world comes closer to each of us; you can't stop it. We do things, without knowing why! You don't believe me? Well then - if you can close all the gaping holes between rich and poor, the big street and the dirt path, then you deserve a Nobel Prize for economics. But if you've been working on an elaborately theory of statistical analysis instead, then I would have to bet you don't know why you're working on it...

Oh yes, the world is like a vast numerical calculation that doesn't end. You add and add and subtract and multiply, but it doesn't equal anything... The old world goes on, especially when you want it to explain itself. It's a vast path, and it leads you into everyone else now. Try to find out what your friends are feeling. It's like a god wakes us up in a clever trick of consciousness. You are given a chance to master your spirit with imagination. You are literate. We are free because we say so. I'm guilty because I feel it. But that I am my own master is no longer a matter of righteousness. Can you free yourself from judgement? The vision of freedom inflates the "ego" - or whatever you want to call yourself. How free are we of each other? We are made of deliciously feeble opinions; we are made to be impartial and we dissect each other with invisible knives, too sharp... Pity the wandering imagination. Dare you risk your center and stray beyond the social niche bought with birthright of class and education? But viewing things conversely, from a lower position on the social scale, then the world hasn't changed at all for your own good, and you will see how bitterly the world will refuse to forgive you for insisting upon what you want to do. Nobody has the right to push you aside. They just have more right to it than you, even if you have more to say... you're still running still in the running. Still.

I lost it. So, I'll find it again. I'm good at it: born to pick up the ball and lob it back at the stiff archers of ignorance. Sure, I know that my closed eyes are responsible. But I know that a shirt costs very little to stuff. Society has other ways to make us pay for our vanity. Seldom are we lucky to earn bread with our best talents! That's the bite that distorts me till I become vermin. My first wish for freedom, for success is a lost laugh. There's a shroud upon my memory. Because the heart I wanted was the one I gave up for dead years ago, after I wrote my first poem, and realized that despite the ecstasy and joy of creation, my whole life long would be a struggle against losing art to the devouring nature of a society automated by physical wants and unthinking reactions. I'm too conscious to let go. I am too crazy to explain what I'm feeling now.

We live on - despite our better wisdom and creative inclinations - maybe because few of us really share our blessings as we should - and others can't share your experience. To invert fear and remember joy, I climb deeper into creativity. Can you back up a few notions into the past of your aspiration? Our human towns all look the same in America and Europe. Even ghost towns can be mistook for bustling centers if you drive by fast enough. We cannot help but want things to be identical - as "we would have them be" - around the world... But the people here in China, they have perspectives both beyond and behind the privileges of the Western way of knowing better. We know nothing better - we only believe we do.

The White Man cooked the Native American Indian for dinner and then held it against the Native American Indian that he didn't taste very good! We are like that: we white men have a way of being right all the time no matter what. The Chinese and other Asians have a way of being blind and right at the same time that we white men find annoying; because, in response to our criticisms, the Chinese always reply, ludicrously: "Do not interfere in the internal affairs of our country..." And it's as if they actually believe such a simplistic command creates a rationale sufficient to excuse the cruel injustice that the state can and does impose on ordinary people. Well, then again, we can blame some fairly recent European philosophers for creating the current international political milieu, of the pressing need to promote international responsibilities across borders and languages. The "Rights of Humanity" are tantamount to faith in God for today's chief rhetorical sentimentalists: pull on the heartstrings of your neighbor before you bed his wife, then he will never suspect you did her!

Come now, isn't it noble, you insist, to promote concern for other people, especially oppressed people like innocent Tibetan country folk, monks and nuns who are beaten and jailed for such great crimes as burning flags and singing songs? Sure it's fine to say that you care, but what it comes down to is really - how much can we actually do to improve that faraway situation in Tibet? We can walk into China and tell people not to put monks and nuns into jail. But they still put them in jail! Go ahead, say what you like. The Chinese have a bad habit of instituting more controls if the first set seem ineffectual. They can't change their minds or admit a mistake. The system they have in China isn't anything like you can fathom! Too many reasons are attached to its need for abstract notions like "security," which of course amounts to security for nobody but the regime... But that doesn't matter, since the regime is interested in itself before any of your careful thoughts about human rights! You can criticize, but the silent answer in the mind of the Asian ruler always comes back the same: stability is priceless. If confronted by questions of brutality, corruption and freedom trounced - what can the great leaders say? "Who police's the police?" As for the legal killing in China, how can you explain that the authorities consider that a kind of disease control, and that human dignity is restored by punishing the crime severely? "Crime" in China can be anything that upsets things. There can never be enough police in China: the authorities will laugh at your "Western" conscience as something weak and ignorant of the mighty ideals of their glorious system. To contrast definitions of freedom, to suggest political and social alternatives to the regime, and to share grand notions of democracy and human rights isn't yet a practical way of life to the rulers of China.

A bowl of rice topped with fried lamb mixed with peppers and a tasty tuber like turnip, but very bright yellow. 3 yuan, or 25 cents. I keep going despite the noonday sun. The main road from Kashgar to the mountains is busy. The map I found at the museum shows a secondary road to the east. This detour to Yecheng implies an extra 80 kilometres, but the route comes much closer to the Taklamakan Basin. It's my only chance to see the desert, so I go. The poplar-like trees are plentiful. The barley harvest is being threshed by the peasants. Heaps of barley and wheat pile up. The people toss the grain into the air, sifting chaff away...

Some villages of Xinjiang are very large. It's a busy Monday market. All the locals seem quite pleased to see me, as if I wasn't expected to show up. I eat some fruit - delicate, sweet red cherries - and a baked mutton bun for lunch. My neighbors grin at the thought of such an odd-looking foreigner lunching with them. Nearby, some local farmers joke about which homemade wooden rake to buy, since they are all too rough and flimsy.

The road goes through oasis after oasis. Vast fields of produce grow. I reach a town called Yopurga. The main street is being reconstructed in slow motion. The main street is a dugout road bed loaded with stones bigger than basketballs. The town doubles as a garrison for young Chinese soldiers. So many towns in China are like this, as if they wouldn't even exist, weren't it for the army.

The Yopurga hotel is empty but for a few permanent lodgers. Dinner finds me sitting round a table with local people. I have nobody to talk to anymore. So I sit with them. I roll cigarettes. It seems hard these first few days, as solitude silences the tongue. Nobody knows the language of your mother. But the people with me are warm and curious. I see why they join me: everyone comes from some place else! The cook comes from Chengdu, and he's been away from more than a year. The manager of the restaurant is from some other place, and she's a Christian. I see the big cross she has put on the wall. Everyone is lonely. Some school girls come in to ask me questions. The manager is so pleased with the cigarette I give to her, that she thanks God and gives me my meal for nothing. I read alone in my room, "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins. Have to pee at three A.M... But the innkeeper has locked us inside the building - a typical Chinese thing - and very helpful if there's a fire. (Locks are worshipped in China.) I wrench the window open and piss precariously into the darkness. Not much chance anybody can hear it.