Voices

I’m sitting on the balcony. There’s an invisible guy next door. They have an infant. The guy raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing.

They get yelled at when they are kids, like the man yelling at his infant until the kid screams.

Tears stream until mother rescues her darling from the emotional abuse.

Yelling affects their self-esteem and well being. Children learn how to reject this yeller. They will learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They will be passive-aggressive turning on the yell.

As they age they turn off. They turn off their ears. Their ears are assaulted non-stop 24/7.

The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation recreation speaks sex.

The adult giant savors this power.

It’s a clear shattered mirror memory of their parents and generations raised with fear, intimidation, suspicion, insecurity, poverty, informers, empty promises, faint hopes and loud voices.

Some voices are soft. Many are pure nightmares.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

History Remembers

The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. The Vietnamese army kicked their ass back to North Korean borders. China won the economic war do the math.

Broken glass of an elegant universe arrived with the invention of mirrors, reflecting humanistic narcotic narcissistic fear, doubt, healthy uncertainty, surprise, and adventure in beauty salons and frontal lobotomies.

The French brought pastries and baguettes to their colonial party, introduced fine wines, produced intricate mosaics for Dalat spring gardens and monumental great fire walls preventing strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass gems composed of minuscule myopic minimalistic molecular musical and colonial architecture co-existed with political ideology. Yellow buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day.

A black and white butterfly named Psyche kisses your forehead.

The Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and random Death unleashed their fury on the poor suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels outside Saigon below the surface of appearances.

They carpet bombed Laos and Cambodia (allowing the Khmer Rouge to run crazy) back to the Stone Age playing a proxy gambit under the guise of liberation.

Dave lived this history with his grandfather’s father and his father’s family all the way back to drowsy dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and family altars inside brown temples welcoming silence and meditation.

In daylight they worked rice paddies before evaporating underground when nightingales brought carpet bombing, napalm, Agent Orange and defoliants, screaming naked children, amputees, visionary legacies of death and long term catastrophic disaster, disfigurement, misery and horror in the long now.

Quick! Run into the tunnels. Escaping from fields they sat cowering in FEAR sweltering, crying, still. Hearing the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded earth, shredding forests and fields of dreams as land and homes and lives danced in flames. Dragon heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went deeper.

Deeper into subterranean unconscious dream rooms following hollow carved Earth trails like blind worms burrowing good dirt. Earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep. Ancestors ate incense.

Sweet silence remained after all the foreign devils ran with crying wounded survivors fleeing in terror as liberated peasants streamed down mountains, emerged from dark caves and tunnels, poling rivers, everyone desperate to begin again, walking on water, swallowing oceans in their creation myth stories, draining land of blood to plant rice, new futures, drowning evil in a dancing sea of tomorrow’s dream.

Their evaporating voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard in tight Hanoi. Cement walls blocked everything but their wailing anger, frustration and repressed bitterness in life’s twisted Confucian reality.

Their memory was a truth-story & this story creates their memory, said Tran.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Mrs. Pho

A female garbage collector rings a bell daily at 16:55 alerting residents in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their waste. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready, willing and able. She’s arranged her family’s consumption debris in two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink fat shreds. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does.

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected, bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and long gone to be remembered infinitely with their stoic black and white ghost face images resting above glowing electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue and white lights on her family altar. It’s decorated with plastic flowers, fruit offerings and spirit food incense.

She hears her father whisper in her burning ear as he carried her away from their napalmed village during a war. She doesn’t remember which war. They were endless. Remember where you came from, he said. She never physically returned.

It didn’t matter which garbage bag went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled schizoid alley blocking sincere fading light, she tossed the bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing height pushed by a masked woman in a green city garbage vest.

The accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing exponentially it became part of the collective mess, their collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s civic mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not elaborate. Just enough to get her away from cold walls and plasma idiots to gossip with neighbors as cracks of white twilight filtered past musical hammers  ... creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes

... marveling at this visual epiphany as 21 shovels of Earth were moved and manipulated this and that way by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities or laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from AIDS, exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers

... while hearing young Sapa Hmong children speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after grade eight reduced to selling handicrafts to tourists, their bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold winters as storms howled, Have mercy, Have mercy on the war weary inoculated objectivists savoring an inferno of their eternal nightmare now reduced to survival and No Exit save fate, death and dust inside a universal spiral.

A shattered mirror reflected her dignified stoic face.

To survive, a young migrant prostitute finished fucking a young migrant boy behind a corrugated curtain at a construction site. Plow my field buddy. She moved down a crooked alley to another construction site singing, nobody loves me but my mother and she could have been lying too. When she wasn’t screwing the quick and the dead she cooked food for laborers. This gave them the strength to handle her wildcat ways. She never slept alone being destiny’s child.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with rusty brown barbwire encircling his URL domain name and social media sites before easing past shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

One Room

I found a private room in a densely packed Hanoi neighborhood near Lenin Park.

It was filled with narrow twisted alleys, dead ends, byways, rusty gates, spilling bougainvillea foliage, curious kids, workers pulling wheeled carts filled with discarded bricks and mud and tube homes on narrow land for tax reasons. 4-5 floors is the max.

I had two roommates. A mellow Frenchman working for a private agricultural farm three hours north who returned to Hanoi on weekends.

The other guy was Mr. Condescending, a young frantic Vietnamese speaking neurotic smart ass Canadian teaching English and playing weekend jazz music with his band of wandering minstrels. He was a native head case.

He’d been in-country four years, was a slob and greedy for money like the locals. He’d drifted from a language factory job to a university language factoid situation. His favorite phrase was in theory.

Give him the hook, said a Khmer playwright.

Sequestered with palm trees and small ponds, my room was a respite from streets and noise with gentle wind. A balcony vision offered red tiled or PSP roofs, jumbled homes, distant flashing light communication towers, clouds and sky.

Narrow alleys were packed with residents on sidewalks eating white noodles, spring rolls, fresh greens, drinking green tea.

Just like crowded Utopia cities, said Leo. Old dusty pagodas wafted incense offerings.

Life on Hanoi streets means 5,000,000 zooming motorcycles, hawkers of red star hats, t-shirts, bags, reproductions of famous oil paintings, silk, traditional medicines, shoes, bamboo baskets and labyrinthian lanes of aroma and mystery. Designs of family life and eternal relationships lived the blues.

Wear and tear shed a heart travel tear with shimmering noodle passion, a broth of conversation’s hunger, said Tran.

A male street hawker spoke with flair and conviction, If you don’t buy my cheap cotton hat with a national flag red star, or a cheap wooden bracelet made by an orphan, then the next time I see you while I am walking hot Hanoi streets in the middle of a broiling day with sweat streaming into my eyes trying to make a living, then I won’t know you.

My eyes will be dark and lost in my pitiful future. I won’t remember you. Ever. I will continue to walk all day in heat. No water. No rest. I walk work meet tourists. This is my social and economic reality. I ignore you when I don’t have a sale.

I began a gardening project on the balcony bringing up trees, plants, flowers and dirt. Good dirt. We have lots of dirt in Vietnam, said Fat Chance the landlord’s son. He had big plans for expanding the property after his father died.

Monsoons arrived. My dear friend a Poet knighted by William Butler Yeats in Sligo, living on San Francisco Mountain near the Grand Canyon asked about floods. Am I drowning?

I sang, row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, life is but a dream.

I am floating. Cleans the air. This is the rainy season and you know how the media likes to sell disasters, epic dramas of humans battling nature, conflicting themselves. Gotta keep the viewers amused and distracted. Media marketing never dies.

I floated with a clear awareness, sitting, writing, exploring, aligning stars and exploding galaxies, nebulas and infinite diversity. A respite from civilization’s abyss.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Garbage in garbage out

Hanoi

I arrived in Vietnam from Indonesia. It felt excellent returning to Asia.

I wandered with a notebook and camera. One life, no plan, many adventures. I explored crowded streets, back alleys and remote zones getting a feeling for the energy and language. Orientation.

I started at The Temple of Literature, one of the oldest universities in the world. Carved steles with names of scholars on the back of turtles lined the courtyard. Confusion emphasis on filial piety. Local woman in white silk ao dais played stringed instruments in a timbered brown hall under circular red lanterns.

The Museum of History had fire, tools and agricultural development. Visual stories illuminated hunters-gatherers, pottery, clay, axes, wood, bamboo and sharpening stones.

The Museum of Ethnology illustrated hill tribes with nine reconstructed authentic home styles, agricultural tools, textiles, weavers, baskets, pottery, bows and arrows. Old pictographs of pre-writing focused on Lao-Thai-Khmer-Burmese and Tibetan script.

Diagrams showed Chinese expansion from the north. Maps depicted human migration establishing languages and cultures with extensive Champa and Khmer civilizations from central and southern Vietnam into Cambodia.

On a beige wall hung Marxist means of production:

 1. knife

2. hoe.

3. scythe.

4. axe

5. hammer

6. control elephant stick

An ancient bowl of carbonized rice sat in a glass case. Let’s Eat.

Shirts were made of tree bark. Huge wooden drums. Brass cymbals. Musical culture.

Be the drum.

The Fine Art Museum contained patriotic oil paintings of Vietnamese fighting, dying, pulling artillery through jungles, being welcomed in liberated villages, people screwing for the motherland, blue silk paintings, red lacquer art, pastel dioramas of ship battles on curling tsunami waves, bronze and Champa clay sculptures, leather and wood skin drums, Buddhist meditative statues and Red Communist party flags.

The history of collective artistic efforts depicting work, education and communal efforts laughed.

The Old East Gate in Hanoi is hard to discover. The walls are gone. The oval entrance is covered with graffiti, weeds and black spider electric lines.

In a narrow market alley an invisible caged eagle sang it’s revolutionary song, How did I get here?

Women hawk fruits, veggies and fish, slice pineapple and haul cardboard. They load bikes with anything and everything they can move and sell.

This is my serenity, sanctuary and simplicity.

Wabi-Sabi - imperfect, impermanent, incomplete.

Bamboo sleepers wear cotton face masks. Pale Vietnamese women protect their skin with latex. The world of commerce and economy rides a motorcycle loaded with STUFF swerving through swarms of bees selling honey.

A bike woman canvases sidewalks from dawn to dusk selling bouquets of red roses.

Petals drift along congested Hanoi streets named for medicine, gravestones, tea, funerals, jewelry, spices, silk, nuts, coffee, musical instruments, flowers, incense, altars, glass, calligraphy, barbers, stone workers, bamboo, hairdressers, toys, food, fire, air, earth, water, wood, authors, kites and love.

Rubies and sapphires come from Nam and Hong Kong, imperial green jade from slave labor mines in Burma. Glitter eyes. Keep walking. Court the vagabond mistress.

A pinyin sign in a Chinese herbalist shop with battered brown drawers spilling herb aromas sang, Make it new day by day make it new. The journey is the destination.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged