Bayon

The Bayon is a three-tiered pyramid temple with 49.5 towers and faces. Archeologists theorize the multitude of faces symbolize Buddha looking over the entire country. Eyes are everywhere, angled degrees. Detailed bas-reliefs.

Energy, cunning, silence and exile avoids crowds by discovering solace and serenity in secluded places. Not a single tourist explored Western walls or courtyards.

Playing with rocks Rita and friends created small Mani statues.

You cannot photograph space, said Rita sitting below shaded faces.

You cannot photograph a memory, said Tran.

A photograph has an aura of death, said Z.

Temples are hidden in deep forests, labyrinths with mazes and magical light-shadow play.

This is the day of my dreams, said Devina.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Day of My Dreams

Dance in serious moonlight  ...  

Dance-sound-letter-word-music-silence.

There are 50+ million bloggers in the states. States of confusion. Let’s be various. Live forever. Young/old people love social networks like Facelookbook, You R Fabulously Boring and Twitter Little Sparrow. Fast, short, deadly.

It’s exciting to live fast, short and easy. Deadly is short, fast and deafly.

If I suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder and everyone suffers because existence is suffering, or the illusion of suffering I’d be a hummingbird practicing social twittering. Kiss my type.

Anxiety meets a tourist, I love you. Tourist whispers, I’m behind in getting my images up on Instant Grandmama and Where Is My Face?

Hello Beauty, said Mirror. Once upon a spacetime dance there was a humbling life changing experience. Laughter is life learning dialogue.

Rita hoped to teach at a rural school 50 km from Siem Reap.

HOPE4NOW, a Danish crust-based charity organization sponsors the proposed school, My Grandfather’s House.

They require volunteers to have a criminal background check. As everyone knows knowing unknown all powerful authorities do not issue this forged bureaucratic paper to aliens, nomads, tricksters, orphans, amputees, landmine survivors, vagabonds, poets, mendicants, blind seers, Grave Digger, word janitors, itinerant weird genius storytellers or literary outlaws.

Someone passed the Talking Sheep Test. Proceed to go green. Nothing to declare.

I exist outside adult time.

If I begin this dance by calling it Angkor Draft you may surmise in theory it is about a local beer, said Rita, archeologist. The swill is popular with tourists and locals, the latter consuming huge quantities to cement circumspect construction deals. It’s a urine-based liquid syntax favored by thirsty red dust-covered grammar-based human naturalists unloading huge backpacks with a weary sigh of relief.

They’ve traveled far and wide to reach this epic point on their life quest.

The average tourist spends 3.5 days of their life in temple city consuming 9.6 large bottles of Angkor Draft.

*

Angkor Wat was built in 1113. It is the largest religious monument in the world.

It is dedicated to Vishnu. A symbol of the divine, Mount Meru towers in the center, surrounded by smaller peaks, courtyards (continents) and a huge moat (oceans).

After the 13th century it was a place of Buddhist worship. Extensive wall galleries and carvings depict battles, regal processions, heaven and hell and the Hindu creation epic, “Churning The Sea of Milk,” where gods and demons cooperate to create the elixir of immortality.

Galleries include conflicts between Devas and Asuras and the Battle of Lanka.

Angkor reinforces a minute human scale.

How did we feel here, asked the storytellers. Serene. Impermanent calm and centered.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Apsara Dancers by Rita

The dancing hall at Preah Khan is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. He is the god-king. He resurrected his desire creating new temples and new decrees for dancers.

They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer myths and stories about families, war, conquest, harvests, seasons, sun and moon.

They are life/death dances. They dance to celebrate life. They dance the celebration of tranquility. They dance or die. They wear tinkling golden bands around wrists and ankles. They wear diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

One dances to escape the tyranny of life.

She’s danced all her short sweet life. The Hall of Dancers is surrounded by columns, portals and broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisper dance.

Thick gnarled silk-cotton roots crawl toward dancers. Dancers weave through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life. Dance is motivated by emotional expression. Movement never lies.

Dance is about itself. Free creation is a playful way of existence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Hand Luggage by a Nurse

The Australian nurses prepared to return home to family, friends and medical school after three weeks on Ground Zero living short-term personal evolutionary variables of medical, emotional and scientific truths.

Before leaving one arranged her heavy deep real life changing Cambodian experience in her hand luggage. She wondered, How can I get my entire heavy deep real humbling life changing experience into this very tiny bag?

This serious question troubled her for a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year and remaining sweet existence. It’s her experience. She knows it’s impossible to check it all the way through. She will have to carry it. 

She assembles it on the floor along with fragrant spices, Khmer cotton cloth decorated with elephants and yellow silk scarves.

Her profound experience is a poor slum village near Siem Reap. She loves everyone there because she lived with them. She took care of the people. She held them. She gave children medicine and water. She cried herself to sleep every night. She suffered from nightmares surrounded by dying crying children, Save me Save me.

One woman in the village takes care of sixteen children.

Thirsty, hungry, exhausted sick children, women and men exist.

She puts the survivors of this one little village into her bag. She discards everything else.

She saves weight because there is no clean drinking water. She throws in handfuls of rice and fried bananas for nourishment during the long flight to Sydney.

She doesn’t know how many will survive. She’s ready to carry her experience home.

She knows it will scare the hell out of her friends, family and colleagues.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Bantey Kdei - Ta Phrom by Rita

Evidence of intelligent life on Earth is exaggerated. It’s a rumor and a myth. Sit still long enough and you’ll see/hear some wild, anxiety filled conversations. Filled with interruptions.

Barbarian Voice monkeys interrupt each other. They cancel each other out. It’s an endemic social disease  ... short attention span? No problem. People love to be understood before they understand. This explains their emotional fear, lack of focus and anxiety.

Roll your bones. Love my bones, said a t-shirt in Sapa, Vietnam.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones, said Leo.

We are a bundle of pure sensations, said Zeynep. It is a path of authenticity.

That’s been the problem on the trip, said an American girl on a work-study NGO program in Cambodia, No one’s giving us change. Hahaha.

Change comes from within.

400 Khmer mothers and their children wait outside the Children’s Hospital to get a free pain killer pill. The placebo is blue and free. Orange pain pills cost $1. Few can afford orange. Life is a painkiller.

Sound-symbol-sign-word.

Rita and storytellers explored Banteay Kdei and Ta Phrom.

Kdei is perfect for walking and swallowing dust. A sun yellow butterfly led the way. It explored the perimeter sensing jungle and stone perspectives. Wandering outside temples gives you the feeling of natural space acknowledging deep green forests, said Rita, I do this at every temple, it’s rare to see tourists explore the outside, because intelligence and curiosity and taking risks on Earth is rare.

Tourist sheep are in a disciplined hurry. They march along following other sheep on broken stone paths. They wander around, make a lot of noise, pose for pictures and march out. The bus is leaving for another temple.

They look serious and sad. Unhappy people in a happy world.

They are controlled by unknown unconscious diabolical forces. It’s the silent ticking mechanism on their wrist near a pulse saying faster.

Leo shared a Tibetan truth  ...  

I would rather be a tiger for one day than a sheep for a thousand years.

Rita and friends explored gentle forest winds. It’s a slow walking meditation.

I engaged all my senses, said Leo.

Thick dust is a welcome relief after stones, said Tran.

I am light and shadows dancing through leaves, said Devina.

All nature all the time, said Zeynep.

Butterfly leads me into interior passages and shadow play experiences, said Rita. Butterfly shows me mysterious art and deep unconscious space, it takes one life to reach the center and then you’re back where you started, amazing  ...  Ha-ha.

It’s a long walk, said Devina.

Prohm is where the most famous photographed tree on planet Earth grows, said Rita. It entwines itself around and through soft stones. It’s a zoo as idiots line up to take a photo, pushing and shoving and jostling to have their picture taken with the tree and roots as Italian, French and German tongues wag like mongrels in heat.

Life is a bitch, said a sad tourist focusing their plastic toy.

The Japanese and Chinese are total image addicts. Obsessed with posing in doorways and passages with carvings, plants, ferns and leaves and tall trees, thick brown and green gnarled roots above the surface, scary monster leaves they find yellow, black, red, golden butterflies to be overwhelming.

We don’t have this beauty at home they lament. We have cement.

Tourists on their great quest feel the experience with their cameras. They behave like the temples are a Dizzy Land amusement park.

Shatter their illusions with the power of laughter, said Rita.

And silence, whispered Omar.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged