Spirit dream rides clouds. Ancestor ghost eats incense. Feeling slow and clean in the temple zone.
Leo discovered new Chinese ink, stone and brushes. He remembered Mr. Li, his calligraphy teacher in Utopia.
How to stand.
How to hold the brush.
How to rub the ink stone inside the black oval with water.
How to caress the brush and black ink along an edge.
Create simple strokes.
Be the ink, be the brush, be the paper.
Museum
The Saigon Museum is filled with glorious death defying historical struggles: wars, artifacts, diagrams, maps, tanks, planes, final assault plans, old cars used to haul the dead dying wounded and ammunition, statues of men making pistols, old medical equipment, typewriters for propaganda material, flags, posters, pamphlets, a burning monk in 1963 as Kodachrome blazes his life, villages, corpses, soldiers, politicians, dog tags, gas masks, knives, guns, tools, radios, helmets, baskets, pots and pans, shoes, shirts and skeletons.
Papier mâché people exhort the masses, Independence or Death!
They’ve traded illusions of independence and freedom for a one-party Socialist state filled with greed, corruption, nepotism and economic opportunity.
Life - contradictions and paradoxes.
Where does the artificial end and the real begin, asked a blind beggar.
Thich Quang Duc
The Amputee - Knife Sharpener
After eating noodles in a cold alley, a man, 60, remembering how wars and hard survival ages humans, sat sharpening a knife for a woman customer redefining steel. No left foot. He rested his curled leg stump on a boot.
In the afternoon he walks past with a shuffling gait. He’s wearing a green fatigue shirt, floppy hat, motorcycle helmet and carrying his worn red plastic bag of simple tools. I know his truth not his story. A landmine or a stray bullet?
His left boot is a discarded war object and split down the front.
It is brutally hot. The sun is behind him. How does he feel? Where is he going? Home for lunch and rest? Looking for more dull edges.
I am always walking, he said. I stop, find work, sit, sharpen an edge, get small money, put away my tools, put on my boot and walk. I eat noodles or rice on the street.
I walk and work until dark. Then I go home. Home is where they have to take you in. I am a storyteller with tools for sharpening life’s dull imperfections.
I am surrounded by amputees, he said. They approach me on their crutches, their hands out. Without legs they wheel themselves down the street on little trolleys low to the ground truth.
____
A one-armed young man wears an old blue baseball hat. He sees local businessmen approaching. They wear fresh pressed white shirts, leather shoes, and pressed pants with shiny belt buckles.
He takes off his hat. Holds it out. It is empty. They ignore him. He puts it on his arm stump, runs his good hand through his black hair, puts on his hat and moves down the street.
I am in the army now, he said. An army of the legless armless physically and emotionally wounded forgotten humans. They know you and you know them.
Book of Amnesia Unabridged
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