Visions

Two Hanoi visions wearing crash helmets collided along the road to the airport.

A confident looking man walking near a lake tripped on cracked broken tile, didn't break stride, kept his eyes ahead, w/o losing face, stoic, passive, marching.

A young girl, 10, sat slumped against a blue stone crevice. She held a small box with something to sell. Her eyes contained world secrets. 

Is this suffering, being abandoned her destiny, an illusion for a Dream Sweeper?

Will she wither away and die here, lost, alone, forgotten?

She is one abandoned child among billions in the world, said Rita.

Saigon, Fall 2009 by Tran

Saigon or HCMC is short for Ho Chi Minh City. One door closes and one door opens.

The last time here I was leaving the war at twenty going on 100 to fly over the pond to The World meeting apathy and quiet rejection. I was transformed. I became a happy ghost. See ART.

Now I am out early drinking java in the Cholon marketplace, a throbbing mercantile zone near sewage, garbage, vegetable sellers, screaming motorcycles carrying precarious precious loads of food, towering stacks of plastic sandals, wholesalers, hustlers, beggars, thieves and market women who, after the initial suspicious glance thinking, What in the hell is that guy doing here, continued their daily business of haggling, selling, gossiping, cooking, scheming, dealing and living.

I wander down no-name streets to a Chinese pagoda, light incense, make offerings and meditate.

I enjoy Indian mutton curries at a mosque built in 1932. Serenity with repose and spirit.

At night in a park across the street is live music and a carnival as Saigon hosts the Asian Games. Iraqi and Chinese kick boxers practice in fractured darkness shielded by the moon. Gaping residents watch men and women punch and kick training partners.

I am in heart of darkness. Predators wear skintight translucent red dresses and black stiletto high heels. A woman must make a living.

Are you the hunter or the prey, said Tran.

Foreign tourist tribes move through on a quick three-day visit before swimming with alligators to Cambodia. They carry tattered guidebooks and wear rubber beach sandals. They are having an adventure. Traveling is hard work when you’re a stranger in a strange land.

Travel makes you.

Tourists collecting vague specifics of language and humid heat memories look distraught, lost, angry, hungry, confused and content like people they know and love and have forgotten in their eternal quest for an identity theory.

Old expats wear masks. After fifty you get the face you deserve. One step from the morgue. They struggle forward seeking food, water, emotional connections and meaning. There is NO EXIT.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Dream Sweeper Bats

At 4:37 a.m. everyone sleeps-dreams. I fire up my super-efficient Dream Sweeper Machine and collect dreams, said Tran. I sort them by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime symbolic meaning.

Words dance as hallucinations, poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and abstract art congratulates a hand clapping the hollow bells of a Cambodian trash collector boy pulling his cart along life’s fractured possibilities.

This sensation is the bell, said Zeynep, visualizing her European-Asian future. It bridges the gap, gaps the bridge connections. 

Rita, Leo, Tran, Devina, Zeynep, Omar and Death meditate on the balcony.

Pre-dawn sky dances with pulsating stars singing their light. Ferns, plants, bamboo and a cold wind hum I feel free.

Fruit bats roost upside down under a coconut palm leaf. Who turned the world over?

One emits a shrill, high-pitched echolocation squeaky frequency vibration. Perceive senses their return. A sharp sound with a definite edge to the beginning, through the middle tonal range to finalities, a welcome signal to bats revealing where they are in spacetime awareness.

They said, Hello, I’m back. It’s a pleasure finding comfort after a night of flying.

I don’t need to learn the words, said Devina, I am the music.

My name is Nature, said Leo, I am grateful to be alive and paying attention to bat’s music.

This is why we wake early, said Omar.

Storytellers witnessed ten white seagulls flying toward Lenin Park Lake. Vision’s silent gift at dawn winged freedom in orange sky. Awareness of life in Hanoi has meaning, definition, value.

I don’t know where the artificial ends and the real begins, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. I am a deeply superficial person.

90% of life is showing up, said Tran an amputee with a big heart.

Yes, said Rita in her orphan voice, 10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you deal with it. You are director, audience and players. I hear with my eyes. I see with my ears.

Stay in character. Two players practice lines and delivery.

-       I thought you’d never get here.

-       Sorry, I was delayed.

-       Obviously. Are you staying?

-       What do you think?

-       I don’t know. You’re such a mystery to me.

-       You talk too much.

Ha, said Laughter Therapy, All the clowns are not in the circus.

A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned, said Devina.

It’s the madness of art, said Zeynep, bleeding letters on parchment. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Arrival

Take the A Train from Lao Cai to Hanoi arriving at 4:30 a.m.

Rain cleans air.

Streets are deserted.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collects dreams from talking monkeys. Narrow alley dreams stream crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, sighing into The Machine. Dreams, like writing, need simplicity, accuracy, brevity, clarity and humanity.

It’s a new day. The first day in a new space, new neighborhood, this Shikumen twisted Hanoi dream alley. People share toilets and kitchens. They share their lives on Fake Space, a glorious Internet frontier of brief equality and eternal technological distractions. Walls. Barb wire. Thick rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent.

Prison is a refuge and release.

Solitary confinement with the junkyard blues. Environmental impact statements.

Climate needs spare change.

No one gets out alive. You are a Stream-Winner, this cessation of sensation, perception. U experienced this deep illusive truth in Hanoi while editing a 227 page Ph.D. thesis of Buddhist enlightenment written by a monk in Nepal sitting under the Bodhi tree.

Edited pages are returned to Thanh. She’s the manager of Just Massage, a team of seven visually challenged masseurs and masseuses in the Hanoi diplomatic area. Great people with healing hands. Empowered.

Everyone is a Buddha, she said, smiling.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

International Shoeshine Boys

By No One special important or famous.

Tools: a box, tinned colors favoring dark brown and black, a rag picker’s dream, a pair of sandals for a barefoot customer, a toothbrush for those hard to reach places and a buffing brush.

A boy in Marrakesh, Morocco plays Arabic music on his box with his brush.

A smiling Turkish boy in Bursa spins shoe polish cans with Roma dervish flair.

A Vietnamese boy in Lao Cai designs shining skills in tribal dialects.

A Cambodian orphan wearing a LANDMINE t-shirt sings about saving soles. Everyone here wears sandals. No chance said Dance.

A Chinese shoeshine boy discusses existentialism and learning disabilities with an NGO from Australia on a junket.

Where are girl shoe shiners? They are zero. They sell flashlights. When their red battery light indicator shows low power they sell their skin. Feeling empty they barter their interior semi-moist flexible vagina dialogues with a dark-eyed sullen abject apathy. Their emptiness increases silent oral heartbreak and viscous density before their mark comes in 8 seconds or less singing the blues.

Tran sells books at the Main Train Station. What are the titles?

a. My Life is a Beautiful Accident. I am a Fluke of the Universe.

b. Travels in Empty Space w/ Stardust Memories

c.  Cambodian Woman Pure Drinking Water

c-1. No Money No Honey Abridged

c-2  The Language Company, A Century is Nothing, ART, Grow Your Soul, Book of Amnesia Unabridged- Leonard

d. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

e. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

f. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

g. A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe – Fernando Pessoa

h. Song Lines - Bruce Chatwin

i. The Book of Disquiet - Pessoa

j. The I Ching

k. Facing Unpleasant Facts, Animal Farm, 1984 - George Orwell

l. Seven Japanese Tales - Tanizaki

m. The Art of War - Sun Tzu

n. The Tao Teh King - Lao Tse

o. The Book of Tea - Okakura

p. Invisible Cities - Calvino

q. Through The Looking Glass - Carroll

r.  Here Bullet, Phantom Noise - Brian Turner

s. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Joke - Kundera

t. The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut

u. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe - McCullers

v. Travels with Herodotus - Kapuscinski

w. WE - Yevgeny Zamyatin (precursor to 1984, Brave New World)

x. Fate is A Cruel Joke - Monkey Face

y.  Why I Always Look Back - Genocide Survivor S-21

z.  The Little Prince

aa. Against The Day, G’s Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

bb. Fairy Tales: The Short Attention Span of Biped Mammals

cc. Yeah, Yeah - Two immortal words: by Asian students

dd. How & Why Asians MILL AROUND with Panache

ee. How Simians Saved Earth with Stealth, Cunning and Deception by Whining

ff.  Blindness, The Stone Raft, The Cave,  -  Jose Saramago

gg. The Book of Chameleons -  Jose Eduardo Agualusa

hh. Pale Fire, Ada, Lolita - Nabokov

ii. Hunger - Kurt Hamsun

jj. The Glass Bead Game – Hesse

Disenfranchised junkyard dogs share mediocrity and human adolescent listlessness with rolling thunder microscopes. They create extensive noise. No meaning or value. There is USER value and EXCHANGE value.

What is louder than a group of Khmer / Lao people? Another group of Khmer / Lao people. Everyone celebrates two fleas dancing on a dog. Exciting.

Bored humans wander around. Dogs sniff butts, yap, fuck, and chase blind tourist rats down blind alleys careening into dynamic futures where the sound of one hand clapping echoes with growling gamelan cymbals. Dogs form a canine club, Bark n’ Bite.

Escher’s perceptual art includes elements of line and tonal quality. A dot, a line, a circle, zig-zag, oval. Seven basic forms create all art.

Synesthesia. To feel or perceive sensations in one part of the body produced by stimulus in another sensation. See sound. Hear color. Taste light. Smell conversations. A lie’s smell is disguised as truth flavor.                 

Every day I walk through a mine field where any false move could be fatal, said Roberto Bolano, a poet from Chile dialing 2666. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

October by Rita

Affect your environment. Do not let your environment affect you.

Take the blue line … celebrate red ink with a Chopin fountain pen … see how the ink bleeds on new paper … how it feels, this dancing wind song, point and line … take a line for a walk.

Hanoi air is cool before dawn when the landlord’s dog trapped in a long cement tunnel howls at 3:30 a.m. The dog is an apt metaphor for residents trapped in long cement tunnels called home sweet home.

Elsewhere the canine is grilled and basted on a spit at low heat allowing the flavor and juices to penetrate meat for a family feast.

Someone passing through is awake seeing stars, hearing the shriek of fruit bats returning to roost in long green palm branches gathering membranes, silent before dawn amplifiers at Lenin Park sing heavy DUTY patriotic songs with yellow grumbling bulldozers moving dirt, filling in lakes, drowning algae, plankton and fish habitats before the Party Leader plugs in her cassette machine to play aerobic madness in orange light before brainwashed human-birds preen ruffled dream feathers, screw their darling, feed incense to the dead, turn on plasma televisions, cook rice, fire up motorcycles and well before women sweep leaves from night’s tears.

Who will write the history of tears?

Free air raptors and Finch, destined to die in a bamboo cage, sing. Bats sleep in deep green leaves near the balcony of a narrow Hanoi home.

I don’t remember the century. Maybe it was The Glorious Year of Reconstruction.  Men hammered, shoveled and hauled Hanoi toward a glorious future.

Night stars dream before dawn hearing heavy machines at the park. Workers truck rocks to fill in the lake. Old Russian bulldozers shove piles of granite along paths creating new boundaries in citizens’ imagination limiting their curiosity and freedom. The ceaseless mechanical rumbling of machines sounds like a broken Teutonic alarm clock with geologic earthquake Richter intensity.

Echoes of crashing, tumbling granite stones shatters stillness. Reconstruction machines have a schedule, a deadline, a force of progressive development.

Inside bamboo an invisible scripter blends into a natural environment weaving a thread with unconditional love. Music perforates starlight silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged