Universal Globalization

I am working on a program of study with colleagues in the US including 2 in Hawaii, NZ, Australia, Europe and myself in China, Asia on the Theory of Systems. Len Troncale our leader from the Ploytechnic university of California in Pomona is an inspirational genius andi never pick up anything he writes or says without gaining massively huge new insights. Last Friday afternoon WSA time we got talking on networks fractals and networks and the nature of what a general theory of systems might be. Len himself has begun constructing what he sees as the Periodic Table of Systems. I agree with him. That is what it is. A two dimensional structure for all the isomorphies from one system to an other.

One of our colleagues in the seminar, Janet McIntyre, is very insistent on the value of the mobius strip as a model for what systems may be about it is truly interesting for it is a two dimensional surface that can only have reality in three dimensions but if split in two forms two interlinked circles i.e. the two dimensions fall out but as two identical copies of the same thing. they can both appear in Len's Periodic Table and theri is a clear linkage between them.


An other key idea is that there are no structures only flows and that structure is an emergent perceptual artefact created by us to explain the discontinuities in the flows.

This all leads me without having quite yet been able to connect up all the dots together to Giles Pickfords beautifully succinct poem below which I published on this blog last year and to a new book:

Universal Globalization

by

The Global Silk Road

Sedition is Curved by Giles Pickford

The universe is curved and so is endless time.
The Earth’s road is curved and all creatures walk this way.
There is something in it which hates a dead straight line.
So nature’s lovely, curly, random shapes hold sway.

But there is one deadly straight unnatural force
Which shows its hatred for the universal curve.
Tyranny drives with great speed in a linear course,
Piercing the rib cage of freedom. It does not swerve.

Sedition bows humbly to unnatural power.
Appearing bent, recalcitrant, with curled lip; it would
Resist tyranny at every turn, hour by hour
Until the universal arc of all that’s good

Bends arrow, spear, sword, cannon, each linear thing
Into a rounder shape. Thus the great circle of time
Completes its perennial quest, eradicating
Cruelest tyranny, the most unnatural crime.

Gilles Pickford wrote that sedition is curved. I concur. Everything flows on the surface, the mobius band that is the universe. This has three dimensions for an object that has two

Fast and slow flows create what we choose to call structure but is in fact simply an eddy in the flow of indeterminable but short duration.

I just had to put this incoherence out their because wrapped up in it are some truly profound ideas about the nature of the universe and our apparent understanding of it that just MUST be explored and will the Way give me the time ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

A Nobel Prize for Al Gore: Will American's Get It?

Over the last few years I have had lots of discussion with US friends about the rights or wrongs of the USA's system of democracy. It elected George Bush as president in preference to Al Gore.

My view has been that this could be a good thing for America and the world. It would inoculate Americans against the disease of carelessness with respect to their democracy and constitution. They would be motivated to avoid future errors if this was one. This could be effected in two ways. First by Americans being truly democratic and atually voting - hardly half the potential voting population voted in the Bush Gore election. Second those that did vote would perhaps learn to use their vote more advisedly.

Americans should forgive foreigners. We take the Presidency far more seriously than they do. It matters to us more. It protects America but not foreigners from America The constitution is constructed to produce a Head of State with little power to harm the people. This is symbolised by the built edifices in the centre of Washington DC. The Presidents residence is the smallest. It is not only dwarfed by the capitol building, owned by the legislature, but more significantly by the Jefferson memorial on the other side of the Park from the Oval office. This serves to remind Presidents of their unimportance relative to the people. The constitution Jefferson's helped to draft was designed to ensure that the American Presidency was and would remain relatively weak relative to the power of the people. To these designed ends it works beautifully. Americans comes close to electing a constitutional monarch with little in fact no effective domestic power independent of the legislature and a short term of office unrelated to their own longevity. Electoral mistakes with presidents time out.

Unfortunately for foreigners the Constitution works too well to achieve one if its other ends. It is designed to ensure that in times of threat to the American people's freedom their leader the President can mount an effective well focused defense. The President is constitutionally commander and Chief of their armed forces and determine the higher level strategy for their use and the constitution provides a clear chain of command leading back to a President with all the executive authority required to achieve any desired end. So while the American presidency enhance the freedom of the citizen it also produces a very authorative and powerfully effective presidency to defend American's freedom if it is ever necessary to do so. The American Presidency is thus highly focused and constitutionally and politically very powerful when it comes to dealing with foreigners. Foreign affairs do not powerfully engage most Americans and when they do they generally have little truck with those their President deems as their enemies.

This is America's and the worlds Achilles heal. The USA citizen is indeed free and the constitution caps this with a President able to act as the “defender of the free”. Unfortunately this is the free within the USA and has not always meant Presidents have been "defender of freedom". Often they have been. Western Europe and North East Asia have every reason to be grateful for this at least twice in the 20th Century. However an unattended unconsidered consequence of this asymetry in power between the domestic and foreign arenas is the temptation for presidents to indulge in operations that are very little to do with defending freedom but everything to do with defending American commercial interests at its expense. The USA has established and supported more dictators, human rights abusers and terrorist groups than one would ever like to enumerate. Presidents have done this with little interest shown in their actions by the majority of American people for whom foreign affairs lie right at the edge of their peripheral vision.

This lack of interest by American voters has allowed some presidents to use their responsibilities for dealing with foreigners and as head of the nation's armed forces to do so in a very VERY powerful way. This has sometimes meant that the US nation has dealt very aggressively with those foreigners the executive deems as threatening what ever the American President chooses to define as the freedom of the American people. It was intended that the President could be effective to defending American's freedom at a time when the USA was a relatively very small, though well off, country protected by its geography from any real threat from others. However the power that flows from the freedom of US citizens to think and act as they will is unprecedented in history and highly effective and creating and sustaining wealth. Us business is well guaranteed against interference from within continental United States and has a presidency that very often be willing to stretch the definition of American freedom and its interests outwith anything I am sure was intended by the founding fathers.

The release of the American people into the highly resilient social, political and commercial freedom the described system has created has produced the most creative concentration of human intellectual and commercial effort in history. It has successfully used ideas knowledge and insight to make the USA the richest nation on the planet by far. This puts the US President powerfully in charge of awesome resources which he can deploy as he will outside the United States for good or ill with little expectation of great domestic censure outside the political informed elite in Washington.

Most Americans are Americans because they themselves, and or foreigners, mainly but not always foreign governments, have rejected them or their parents or their grandparent or great grandparents. Dealing roughly with such foreigners especially those they are told might threaten their freedom is thus unsurprisingly not something the average American voter see as a problem but it has often become a huge inexplicable problem for people elsewhere in the world who perhaps thought that this powerfully free and rich people would defend what little freedom they might have.

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” and the wealth and freedom generated by the US system has created American presidents who outside their own country are demigods wielding as close as one can get to absolute power. Some American presidents have without doubt been corrupted by it.

Gore was a man who if elected might not have been. However to be fair to all he has never actually been tested in the office. He was not given it and so was denied access to the absolute power that may have been able to corrupt him. However in being so deprived he then chose to act in a very powerfully way indeed in the interests of mankind.

Our planet has now recognized this in the support given to him in being nominated to the Swedish, no I should say Norwegian Academia of Sciences, for the Nobel Peace Prize. This might justly be described as a decision as well crafted in its potential impact as Jefferrson et als constitution. It give out all the right message hopefully in time to the planet's people about what needs to be done. One hopes that the message gets through to the people with the most power to make it effective in the VERY necessary short to medium term, the American citizen with the capacity to vote. Let us hope they choose to act appropriately.

British humour is full of irony and self deprecation. These are qualities not so evident in Americans.

The event of November the 11th made it clear to the world and America that despite its past geographic invulnerability this no longer holds good. The USA cannot avoid being part of the global village. The isolationism of the Munro Doctrine is no longer an option. A very powerful, internationally protective, Presidency may have been redundant it is no longer.

The US executive' s response to these pressures has been interesting. It has concentrated power in the hand of the executive not just for dealing with dangerous foreigners in a manner much against the spirit of the US Constitution but also done so with respect to the rights of its own citizens. It has enhanced the power of the state against people. In doing so it denies the whole purpose, thrust and conception of the USA as a separate distinct and rightly proud nation.

Habeas corpus was thrown to the winds and arrest and detention without trial has been thrust aside not only at Guantanimo Bay but also through the Patriot Act. This can now deny protection even to US citizens against false arrest and detention. This effectively undermines everything that Americans have fought and died to establish. In addition, and most insidiously in terms of the long term freedom of American citizen's, it has used its administrative authority to centralize under Presidential authority the machinery of government dealing with what is now called homeland security.

This is in direct contradiction to the all important constitutional concept of the separation of powers. And it is a separation maintained by most states,commercial corporations and the American constitution not just to protect others but to protect the leadership of their own central authority. Such separation ensures power can never be accumulated locally within government for it to be pursued for its own ends maybe against the will of the President himself.

Two organization that one should both rightly admire and fear have disappeared in this process the FBI and the CIA. They have been amalgamated with others into the Directorate of Homeland Security. This is hardly the American Way. As we said above irony is not one of the greater dimensions of American humour but it is throughout the British Commonwealth being shared by the Australians Brits and Canadians. It seems it is now intelligently shared with that great American institution of the cold war the former CIA.

I got lost in Virginia trying to get to Georgetown. I ended up very wrongly on the Georgetown Turnpike. I was going entirely in the wrong direction. I did however arrive at Langely at the entrance to what was previously the HQ of the CIA. I found it was now adverted as “The George Bush Intelligence Center”.

How could an executive headed by his son object to such a name and now the world has given Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize. Lets hope American's get it. The planet needs Americans to stand up for what their forefathers fought and died for, the individual against the power of the state and each citizens duty to fight to support the commons that Al Gore and the Nobel Committee have so clearly defined for us.

Archeology Physical and Historical: Islam's Role in the World

About the Silk Road

by
Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis (http://yisou123.wblogs.org/2007/10/10/about-the-silk-road/)

Although people, ideas, and goods had been traveling across Eurasia for millennia, the historical Silk Road is considered to have been established in the 2nd century B.C.E. when a Chinese envoy journeyed into Central Asia in search of horses and allies to fight marauders on the borders of China. Soon afterward, Buddhism began to spread from India north along Silk Road land routes to Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan and south by sea routes to Southeast Asia. Buddhist art and architecture, of course, were transmitted along with the religious doctrines. One of the major architectural monuments of Buddhism is the stupa, in India a solid hemispherical mound signifying the death and final great enlightenment of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni who lived and taught ca. 450 B.C.E. Influenced by the shape of Chinese watchtowers, the stupa was transformed into a multistoried pagoda in China, Korea, and Japan, but it retained its original symbolism.

Until about the beginning of the Common Era, the Buddha was represented by signs such as the Bodhi Tree under which he experienced enlightenment and the Wheel of the Law, a term given to Buddhist teachings. By the time Buddhism was spreading to the rest of Asia, in the 1st-2nd centuries C.E., worship was aided by anthropomorphic images. The human image of the Buddha first developed in two places on the Indian subcontinent — in Gandhara (present-day northwest Pakistan) and in north-central India. The Gandharan figures were partly inspired by provincial Roman images, such as grave portraits produced in Palmyra on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, a trading terminus of the Silk Road. These Gandharan figures wear heavy, toga-like robes and have wavy hair. The figures from north-central India (particularly the city of Mathura) were partly modeled on indigenous Indian male fertility deities and wear cool, lightweight garments.

With the development of the tradition of Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism from the beginning of the Common Era onward, the number of sacred Buddhist figures greatly increased. Devotion was focused not only on the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, but also on a growing number of celestial Buddhas and bodhisattvas. (Bodhisattvas are agents of salvation who attend the Buddhas, postponing their own complete emancipation from the world of suffering until they can save all sentient beings.) The celestial Buddhas did not have historical biographies like Shakyamuni but, like Shakyamuni, were embodiments of the wisdom and compassion of the faith. The hierarchy of Buddhism includes many other angelic and guardian figures, all of whom were represented in painting and sculpture throughout South, Central, East, and Southeast Asia. Cave-temples were often carved out of rock escarpments to house these images in India, on the Central Asian Silk Road routes, and inChina. Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, with its (now destroyed) colossal Buddhas was one such site. Another well-known site, comprising almost 500 cave-temples filled with some 45,000 wall-paintings and thousands of sculptures, is found near the town of Dunhuang in northwest Gansu province. Dunhuang was the first Silk Road oasis trading center within the borders of China proper, and merchants grown wealthy from Silk Road trade were among the patrons of the cave-temples.

Another visual form associated with Buddhism is the mandala, a representation of an enlightened realm where union between the human and the sacred occurs. Most often for example in Tibetan Buddhist art or in Japanese Esoteric Buddhist art, the mandala is a circular or square configuration, with a center that radiates outward into compartmentalized areas. The deity at the center of the configuration, who signifies absolute truth, engages in reciprocal interactions with figures in the outer precincts, who signify manifested aspects of that truth. The practitioner unites the outer manifestations in the center of the mandala and then internally absorbs the mandala as a whole.

During and after the 8th century C.E., mandalas were drawn on paper or cloth through all of
Asia. These two-dimensional mandalas were hung on temple walls as focal points for veneration, for contemplation, and for rituals, or they were spread out on altar tops for specific ceremonies. A two-dimensional mandala, however, is meant to be transformed into a three-dimensional realm, usually a palatial structure, by means of contemplation and ritual. In their two-dimensional forms, these mandalas often look like architectural ground plans, seen from an aerial viewpoint.

Buddhism was well established in India, Central, East, and Southeast Asia by the 7th century C.E. when another religion, Islam, and its visual images began to spread across Eurasia on Silk Road routes. By the 8th century, just one century after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E., Islam had spread from its homeland in Arabia west across Egypt and North Africa to Spain and east to Sasanian Persia. Early Islamic art showed a mixture of Roman, Coptic, Byzantine, and Sasanian styles. Although the holy text of Islam, the Koran (Qur’an), does not prohibit figural images, the non-figural character of Islamic decoration began early, based on traditional theological prohibitions against imitating God’s creation. The earliest extant Islamic structure is the Qubbat al-Sakhra (often called the Dome of the Rock by Westerners) in
Jerusalem. Built in 691-92 to commemorate the place from which Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven, this shrine with its golden dome displays vivid mosaics of scrolling vines, flowers, crowns, and jewel forms in greens, blues, and silkroad gold. Sacred calligraphy — writing from the Koran — also adorns this shrine, reflecting the importance of the Word of God in the Islamic tradition. The Koran was sometimes written in gold script on parchment decorated with floral interlaces. An interesting parallel to this form of sacred writing is found in East Asia where Buddhist scriptures were often written in gold characters on bluish-purple paper. The Buddhist tradition of sacred writing developed independently but reflected a similar yearning on the part of devotees to sanctify holy utterances with the color silkroad gold.

Many other religions were practiced in Silk Road lands — Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Assyrian Christianity, Manichaeism, Confucianism, Daoism, shamanism — but Buddhism and Islam spread most pervasively throughout this region, leaving the greatest imprint on Silk Road culture. The Silk Road was at its height during the 7th through 9th centuries, when Muslims ruled in West Asia and the Tang dynasty presided over a cosmopolitan culture in China. Various land and sea routes stretched from the shores of the Mediterranean to Japan, the easternmost terminus of Silk Road culture.

Ceremonies that took place in the year 752 at the Buddhist monastery of Todaiji in present-day Nara, Japan, provide a vivid testament to the internationalism of Silk Road culture. The occasion was the consecration of an enormous gilt bronze Buddha about 50 feet tall, weighing some 250 tons. Those in attendance included monks from India, Central Asia, and China. Among the many rituals and performances that took place was a ribald dance-drama performed by masked and costumed dancers. A Chinese lion-dog led the dancing procession. He was followed by a handsome prince from South China and a beautiful Chinese maiden. An ugly, fanged lecher tried to seduce the Chinese lady but was restrained by two fierce, muscular Buddhist guardian deities. Then appeared Garuda, from Indian Hindu and Buddhist mythology, a mythical bird who obtains the elixir of immortality and devours his enemy, the dragon. Garuda was followed by an old Brahmin priest-sage from India and by another elderly figure wearing a Turkish hat. The dancing procession ended with a group of intoxicated, red-faced barbarians and their Persian king. Occasionally the Persian king and his drunken entourage are identified as the Greek god of wine Dionysus and his companions. Most scholars seem to feel, however, that this was really a group of Persians. Probably, for 8th-century Japanese, the distinction between Persians and Greeks was nebulous. They were all “barbarians” from the Western Lands.

Chinese Tang dynasty objects also attest to the cosmopolitanism of the era. Many textiles show Persian motifs, most notably the pearl-encircled roundel with figurative designs such as men on rearing horses facing backward to shoot rampant lions or two animals in ritual confrontation with one another. Another West Asian specialty, silk road gold and silver metalwork, was also imported into Tang China. Metal bowls, plates, and cups, decorated with such West Asian motifs as griffins, mouflons, and deer, are found in the graves of the upper classes. These tombs also contain ceramic figures of foreign musicians and dancers. Other figures on horseback — both men and women — seem to be playing polo, a game that may be derived from a 6th-century B.C.E. Persian sport.

In 750, just before that festive consecration of the Great Buddha in Nara, the Muslim Abbasid dynasty established its capital in Baghdad, which became a fabled city of learning. The 9th century saw the building of the Great Mosque of Samarra and the Great Mosque of Cairo. It was during this period that lustre, an opalescent metallic glaze used on ceramics, was developed. The shimmering square lustre tiles set in lozenge patterns on the Great Mosque of Al Qayrawan (ca. 862) are a splendid example.

The 8th century saw the Muslim advance into Central Asia. One of the material results of this conquest was the Muslim adoption of paper, a substance that had been developed much earlier in China. Muslims began to transcribe onto paper the knowledge that they had gained from many people — including Greeks, Central Asians, and Indians — and made these pages into books. Paper helped link the Islamic Empire across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe), and paper itself, the process of making it, and the knowledge written on it were eventually transmitted to Europe, helping to inspire the European Renaissance.

Another great period for cross-cultural interaction along Silk Road lands was the age of the Mongol Khanate (13th and 14th centuries), when the Polo family traveled from Venice to China and back. In the 13th century the Mongols (Turkic-Mongolian nomads) conquered China and pressed as far west as the Ukraine. They entered Islamic Iran and conquered Baghdad in 1258. Although the Mongols massacred tens of thousands of Muslims, soon many Mongols converted to Islam. Within ten years of their conquests Mongol Muslims were building great mosques and stimulating arts and letters by their patronage. One way they encouraged and transformed the arts in West Asia was by importing Chinese artifacts, artisans, and styles. A group of Chinese workmen directed a paper-making establishment in Samarkand under Mongol patronage in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Blue-and-white ceramics are a good example of East-West interchange along Silk Road lands during this period. Islamic potters had decorated tin-glazed vessels with cobalt from about the 9th century onward. Muslim merchants in South Chinese coastal cities introduced this ware to China where, in the late 13th century, it was copied by Chinese potters creating high-fired porcelain ware. The white porcelain vessels decorated with cobalt blue designs were then exported to West Asia and to Southeast Asia where they became enormously popular and were copied, although not in high-fired porcelain. A good example of cobalt-decorated ware inspired by the Chinese examples is Turkish stoneware from the Iznik kilns, dating from the late 15th century onward. In the 15th century the Chinese court finally began to patronize blue-and-white porcelain, encouraging domestic production and use of the wares, not just their export.

The importance of the historical Silk Road, with its emphasis on overland routes, declined after the 15th century, when Europeans began to dominate the sea routes connecting Europe, the New World, and Asia. These sea routes increased the ease of travel and the availability of goods. Objects and ideas continued to influence East and West as Westerners adopted Asian fashions and collected Asian objects, and, in turn, Asians developed a taste for Western fashions, food, and technologies. The exchange of objects continues today in the global marketplace at an accelerated rate, with camel caravans and clipper ships replaced by e-commerce and overnight air delivery.

Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, an associate in research at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Asian and Japanese art history at Boston

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About the Silk Road the Historical Archeology a View

I really love the coherence and well documented archaeological evidence of this piece. I am sitting here reading the above and am now writing this while in the middle of reading excerpts from the Cambridge Medieval History, on the early history of the Abbasid Empire.

I am interested in these topics. When my own work in International Business set out to describe the importance to the modern world of really effective communication between North East Asia (China, Japan and Korea) and the West (The USA and EU) I could not help but note that such communication was not new. There are similarity in topic and issues dealt with between Confucius and Plato writing roughly at the same time that can hardly been ignored.

As this article rightly notes there is much in the Renaissance Reformation and the Revolution in Scientific thought, art and aritisanship we call The Enlightenment that lead to the Industrial Revolution whose origins can be best traced to Islamic culture, both Arab and Central Asian. Of particular interest are the origins of the search for a route to the East by and to the West caused by the blocking of the Central Asia "Silk Road Route by turmoil and the growth in the Caliphates of Islamic fundamentalism around the 1400s.

It is also pertinent to note the huge similarities that exist between the practices of protestant churches and those of Islam - the election by each autonomous congregation of its own minister, the importance of each professor of the faith of their direct relationship with God without an intervening priesthood or hierarchy and the importance of living your life in Gods image all of which are fundamental to the structure of Islamic practices and beliefs.

My work on the "The Global Silk Road has to rely mainly on such historical archaeology. An implicit correlation, and or association, between ideas in these distinct cultures rather than the "hard" facts of the traditional archaeological record used in this piece. It is so pleasing to find this independent enumeration of the connectivity I have surmised in the above observations on possible causality.

I believe these connections are of significance to the modern world as there was something about the way Islamic culture developed up until the 1400 that made it peculiarly useful as a means to link East to West. The most important of these being its capacity to enable human being to be accountable individually but yet feeling and knowing themselves to be part of a global movement that interpreted political structures - only the Mongol s united the routes from the Pacific almost to the Mediterranean most of this time it was political fragmented with the only unifying theme being Islam.

A positive constructivist role for Islam in the Post Modern World is only too evidently necessary. Global well being depends on it as recent, current and expected terrorist events make clear. It is to be hoped that humanity can unite as an entity without expecting any of us to abandon our own answer to what Victor Frankl saw as the strongest driver of human behaviour "Mans Search for Meaning". Fundamental to Islam and the flower of the Enlightenment the Constitution of the United States of America is tolerance of all others who seek there way to the one God. Thomas Jefferson and his drafting colleagues may not have cited there indebtedness to the Koran and the Prophet but historical archaeology suggests that they might have to do so.

Brian Hilton

http://www.theglobalsilkroad.com

The Time Tree

Chapter 1
First Time Chengdu

I first became aware of the Time Tree in Chengdu. Chengdu does not grow evident beauty. It does grow time.

I was walking to work at 07.30am on a May morning. My first time, a full working day, Chengdu. I heard a huge blast of birdsong. It emanated from where? This was not easily ascertained. I sought to explore its source. I looked down this alley then that. There suddenly it was, a tea-house. Lots of mature man sat around drinking tea under lime trees. On every table, and hanging from every accessible tree branch, was a cage. The bird in each, maybe a hundred, were singing their hearts out.

I went in. I was amazed. Early morning on a work day. So many men uncommunicatively sitting around while little birds blasted the air with song. What was this?

Without Chinese I was unable to ask . I watched, listened and thought. How could so many working men on a working day have the time for this.

I made my way onward. My interest in Han Wen, written Chinese, made me stop in front of a huge advertising hoarding. It adverted, I discovered with the aid of my electronic dictionary, “Chengdu The 24 Hour a Day City”. I pondered.

Over the next few months I was to learn that Chengdu did indeed grow time. Sleep for this city is a redundancy. Everything expands here to accommodate its inhabitants need to be and be with. At all times of day or night whole streets lined with tea houses, bars or restaurants have people sitting, talking, playing majiang, having there ears cleaned, their shoes polished, newspapers delivered, etc. Everything is geared up to maximising the time people have to be or be with each other. Parts of Europe approach this in Chengdu it the art of its soul.

Chapter 2
Time in a Bottle

A thing rare in China but becoming less so is truly decent wine at a decent price.

Alcohol is easy. Enough white spirit to get very drunk on costs less than 25 cents.

This does not buy time it spends it in befuddled thoughts and a sore head.

Fine wine gains time, cool white Orvieto in a dusty Tuscan, Italian town, deep red Chateauneuf du Pape on a hot day in Orange in France, Cuvee Mumm on a sunny afternoon in the Napa in California or Shiraz on a dusky afternoon at Chat's Cafe in the heart of the fine Arts Faculty at the Austalian National University in Canberra with Colin, Murray, Peter, David and Jill. All wines and places where time grows if only for a while. In Chengdu it grows all the time out of such bottles not least at The Bookworm with a bottle of Chilean Campo Largo, white or red, to hand and good friends all around. Its ambience nurtures time. Chengdu procreates it and further nurtures what it helps grow. Thus The Bookworm provides a cultural palette, in the right place, Chengdu, for humanity to stand and sit around being as one Chinese, American, Australian, Argentinian, British, Brazilian, Canadian, French and Irish a delight of all the colours of mind and feeling generating more hope for a human future.

You can take a little of this a lot of that and time flows out onto the canvas of life. The pleasure of humanity on a small global scale. This Western enclave on the far Western Plain of the massive dynamic canvas of humanity of modern China. Hopes, expectations, realisations and growth. They, with love, are all around. Our species future?

Chapter 3

一年成池 “The first year a moat
二年成市 The second a city
三年成都 The third, Chendu

The third time West is to the Time Tree. You may be free but you never leave. The movement to the West is one way. Years speak centuries. In 19th Century America young men went West. In the 20th Century they took the Pacific and in the 21st the West beckons from the East.

What is this place. The West ends. The Silk Road starts to God, Islam and oil.

The Time Tree flourishes. Days are not centuries they are millennia.

With these thoughts Cheng looked at the emptiness that lay ahead and started out on the road to the mountains. He reckoned the bus would get to Song Pan and Emma's Kitchen by night fall.

He was looking forward to the Journey. It was going to be long. Could her get there ever, he wondered, thinking of the route he had chosen. Would they let him get there? He did not know. Fear tinged his thoughts. He knew from experience these would fade and Andreis would know the answer when he met him for dinner at Emma's. Andreis knew the way through the mountains. He would know, he mused. His darkness lifted to the light of the day and he settled into writing. It was to be a long journey on the road to the WAY..