King Tut

           Today he was pacing back and forth, dragging his fingers in the dirt and glancing at the people.

           Last year, he'd sat there like a stuffed trophy.

           Jim, John and I yelled and threw peanuts, a handful of which sold for a nickel from a glass dispenser by the guardrails. When some of the nuts hit him, he picked them up one by one with a hand way too big for the job, but then he delicately picked off the shell with his fingertips, popped the nuts in his mouth, and ate them. Just like we'd do. John, Jim and I laughed real loud.

The gorilla looked at us, stood straight up, roared, and beat his chest with his hands, Whap! Whap! Whap!

           It scared me and all three of us jumped back. A man in a blue uniform with 'Cincinnati Zoo' embossed on a white badge came over. "Don't tease him, boys. He's an old man like me, a silverback.Have a little respect."

           King Tut snorted and opened his mouth so his gums showed. His teeth were yellowish and worn except for four big fang-like canines.

           Jim said, "I'm glad he can't get out."

           My brother John and I stared down into the gulf that separated us from the gorillas. A moat they called it, but it didn't seem nearly deep enough to me. I glanced at the ape again, but he was ambling away, showing his rear end to us.

           "Let's go somewhere else," I said, still shaking.

           Mom said like a joke, "He's your cousin. So are all the monkeys. You're related to them."

           Although I'd heard that before, it stuck in my mind this time.

           The rest of the visit was just entertaining, like we were watching cartoons on TV: the animals brought up close enough to see clearly. The floppy proboscis drooped over the muzzle. The huge claws of the aardvark. The big-eyed nocturnals, tricked into feeding by some kind of special light in a dark room. Animals so enormous they were hard to believe. Roar, hiss and howl of their calls. They were odd and interesting, but they seemed very different from us. They lacked something King Tut had.

           He looked so much like us, he bothered me. Our hair was like his thick fur. His long fingernails were like ours only bigger and stronger. His roar had seemed like a human scream of protest or complaint. All he could do was howl and act up. We could use words. Knowing he was kept in a cage made me think that a wildness like his was locked up inside of ourselves, and we were just as afraid to let it out as the zoo keepers were to let King Tut run loose.

Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folkdances. His poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town in 2005.

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What Life Is

Seasons change, night falls, day breaks, wealth fades, and technology ages but life is way more than that.

One cool summer night, I was gazing at the dark but starry heavens lit by the fullness of the moonlight when a scene caught and captivated my clouded senses. A scene that reminded me of what life on earth should be. A family in their barong-barong just meters away from where I am. A shelter made up of a recycled and rusted aluminium roof that, should an ant sneeze, would surely be blown off. Uneven wood flooring on which they spend their nights dreaming of their unrealized dreams and routine candle lit dinners. Sofas and toilets that flush shall forever remain a mystery to them. Their children go to school with faded and crumpled school uniforms, worn out bags, mismatched socks and- if they’re lucky enough- a good pair of shoes. Life was kept out of complexity. They don’t have televisions to spend watching dramas through the night; they don’t have Steve Jobs to reach the virtual world; they are strangers to Android; they don’t even have a bed to call their own. They don’t have Louis Vuitton or Hermes; they cook their food on firewood; they study their lessons through candle light, yet you can still see happiness and contentment in their eyes.

The scene made me feel light-hearted and realize how lucky I was to have parents working their butts off to send me to prestigious schools providing all the decent things I need. How lucky I was that when I was younger, I always had a new set of school supplies at the start of every school year. How lucky I was to own a Barbie when I was a kid, that I’m a computer literate at the age of 11, that I can goof around the club and eat on buffet anytime I want, that I am here writing this with an excellent power source.

Life is neither about wealth nor prestige, they are just merits. But real life? It is appreciating what you have and being happy despite of the detours, humps and road repairs during the journey. Learn to appreciate everything. If you are in pain, feel it! If you are confused, pray. If you are happy, scream at the top of your lungs, laugh your heart out, dance under the rain, and take chances. We’ve got only one life to live, dare to be different and make memorable memories.

-Julie Anne Damudara
Inspired, Inspirational, and dedicated, Julie Anne is a 20-year-old writer from the Philippines.

Artwork by Marta Dahlig

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A State of Affairs

Do you often think of the world? Of the human race? What of life? More specifically, how do all of these things collude in the modern context?

Modernity, with all its power and majesty, is – to use a modern term – plastic. I do not know for sure if it is this way because it might be that we have simply jumped on an exponentially large number of times in the past 1000 years (and especially the last 100 years) in all physical terms; we might have simply not had the ample time to evolve into accepting all our progress as a race.

That being said, however, the emptiness of life as we know it is astounding once we take a moment to absorb our actions and the mentalities behind them. It is the very fact that we have accustomed our being such that we do not examine our activities that prevent the majority of us from seeing the very depressing situation we are in.

Think of your daily routine and what makes you do it, right from the simple act of waking up at a particular time down to our extremely complex human interaction protocols and you will understand that almost everything we do, we have no real reason to do; we just do things because that’s how things are done and because things ‘need’ to be done.

The Imam, al-Ghazali – possibly the most influential figure on Islam since the Prophet Muhammad himself – realized this around the age of 30, when he was already one of the most important scholars in the Islamic world, and his thoughts and doubts regarding the purity of his deeds climaxed to a point where he walked out in the middle of a class he was teaching, not returning until some 10 years later after spending a tremendous amount of time in the vast deserts in seclusion from his 11^th century world.

What took a spiritual expert 10 years, 1000 years ago, to grapple with would take the average person of today an eternity. The dilution and desensitization of the entire spectrum of the human experience into a mainstream monoculture, as well as its condensation – in terms of relative importance and purpose, through popular and social media – into a couple of  minutes long sexual experience in itself is a dilemma beyond what most of us care to comprehend. When we add to this the modern perception of success – that of belonging to an elite, international and wealthy culture – we see the extent and seriousness of this crisis.

It should be noted, at this point, that by referring to ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’, I do not mean to contrast this with some sort of nostalgic classic age where all was well with humankind. It is, in fact, my understanding that the extension of time did not corrupt us, so much as it peeled off many layers of life that kept us busy. In a sense, the advent of today’s science and technology is that which gave us the luxury of enough spare time to further scrutinize our basic human instincts and their relevance to our intelligence.

Our experience with our advance so far is akin to that person who climbed the tallest of mountains only to discover that he is blind and incapable of witnessing the view from the top. The only reasons possible for this is because we either climbed the mountain in the wrong way, or we have simply climbed the wrong mountain altogether.

In the first case, the solution is facile, even though it is demanding. That is to say, all our knowledge and experience can be looked at or utilized in a way that changes us from the state we are in into something more favorable. The simplest example of this type of a solution is what is known as a ‘motivational speech’, where a charismatic person delivers a hearty speech which invigorates us for (usually) a short period of time. This is generally accompanied with audio and visual effects, to boost effectiveness, then disseminated on popular video-hosting sites like Youtube, much like mass-produced drugs.

The second case is a much hairier state of affairs, primarily as it involves understanding which theories are, at their core, incompatible with a meaningful life that is more ‘organic’ than ‘plastic’. Examples of such a case would include capitalism, consumerism and other ideas that measure positivity based on ‘physical’ values like money which contribute to ‘outer’ wealth that does not intrinsically change our value in terms of ‘morality’.

After the identification comes the far more challenging aspect: finding a real alternative; that is, one that contributes to our ‘inner’ wealth without sacrificing our ‘outer’ wealth. Generally, such solutions are attempted by religions and spiritual movements and have historically had an entire spectrum of results with, unfortunately, no honorable mentions of success in our modern times.

All this said, we must understand that, as the great Arab poet, al-Mutanabbi, once said, “Matching the fortitude of the people, crises befall them.” In other words, our problems are only as big as our ability is powerful or shrewd enough to solve them.

-Abdul Rahman Dabbour

Big dreams, toughest path and best burger cook in history

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