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

Children of the dust

Omar said, Down on mean street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Like Tran, she is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one good leg after finding a landmine on her way home from school. She is one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by landmines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflict.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million landmines buried in 45 countries. It costs between $300-$900 to remove a single mine.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, Ukraine, Laos, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia is unused because of landmines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee. She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from their skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked through pristine rice paddies near her village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around her.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2. She never saw it coming. She didn’t die of shock and blood loss.

A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot her up with morphine. All the strangers and happy ghosts carried morphine. Standard issue. Grateful, she speaks the language of silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Visceral Realists

By Rita

We are in a small sleepy river town in southern Cambodia, said Rita. Faded yellow neglected French colonial buildings face a river, corroding iron bridges and green mountains.

A block long incomplete cement shell of a new market to revitalize neglected downtown failed. $70,000 start-up costs. Nada. No takers. It will never be built because of Fear & Superstition & Ghosts.

From 1975-1979 the Khmer Rouge hung severed heads along the walls to teach survivors Life Lesson #1.

Shut your mouth and blend in.

Survivors stir woks and sell the same thing. Boredom.

Don’t speak of gruesome true facts, said Leo, It reminds me of my Chinese atrocious atrocities, genocides, purges and 40 million peasants starving to death. Let them eat grass, bellowed Mao waving his little Red ideological book. Eat my red words comrade. Peasants stole copies from the Friendship Store. This makes great toilet paper, said the proletariat.

Kampot is famous for black pepper, which is nothing to sneeze at, said Rita. The Shakers live in Ohio. One minor quest of the literary outlaws is to get the pepper from Cambodia to Ohio. Buy land. Two buy sea. Water dilutes the effectiveness, taste and aroma. The pepper will need to be grinned down by hand. A Khmer laterite stone pestle and mortar is ideal. Most adults here are confused and sullen and apathetic breeding happy children, said Rita.

For good reason, said Tran. I know how it feels to be an abandoned ghost with a disability in double jeopardy. I’m laughing because I am a survivor … everything is fucking hysterical above ground. I lost my right leg when I stepped on a landmine playing in a field near my village south of Da Nang. I was five. I lost my family in the war. Maybe they died. Maybe they wandered away.

You never know.

The sleepy town, villages and country are famous for people experienced in Milling Around, said Rita. For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity.

This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like Tran’s missing leg. It needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate fact and way of life.

Limited job opportunities, substandard education, lack of medicine, faint hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around.

It kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling Around kills the human spirit. No Initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to clean it up with high hopes. Cambodia is alive with ghosts.

Zeynep, Rita, Tran, Devina, Leo and Omar are invisible ghosts feeling comfortable with energies, vibrations and frequencies. They are floating experiences.

Immediate and direct, said Zeynep. I am western on the outside and eastern on the inside, a chameleon and a prescient systems analyst.

This is a talk-story.

Impermanence and non-attachment is reality. Movement is my mistress and my meditation. WE are here to go. The deeper the silence means deeper the bliss.

I am the music between the notes. I am the silence between hammer and anvil music. I am the poetry between the lines.

I became my ghost-self in 1970 after 364 days in never-never land, leaving Vietnam in one coherent piece, said a reliable narrator. Where I met Tran in a hospital. He taught me courage. After a war everything is easy.

Z: As a writer and artist I bear witness revealing my imaginary sense data using a Mont Blanc 149 piston driven fountain pen, Moleskine notebooks, watercolors, brushes, and cameras. I won’t go into the technical details about the optical equipment.

I am two cameras said Rita. Kinds?

I am a sweet little Leica D-Lux 6. I am a bulky Nikon D-200 with a 35mm 1.4 lens. Ya gotta Leica the Leica. Play sounds. It’s small with excellent optics. Black with a cool little red circle on the front. Small and powerful like me. One for my left eye and one for my right eye. Dual dynamic visual acuity.

How do we interpret visual sensation? I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes, said Omar the blind seer.

Begin with a telescope then use opera glasses then a microscope.

I am a prime lens, said Z. From the spotlight to the floodlight and back to the spotlight.

I am the truth of your imagination, said Leo.

I am synesthesia personified possessing the ability to hear colors and see sounds, said Tran.

I may grow old, but I will never grow up, said Rita. She shared a story about Cambodia. The kingdom has a long violent history. Remember the Killing Fields, S-21 high school prison, and genocide with 1.7 million people killed, slaughtered, raped, mutilated, gone, erased. Year ZERO. Can you wrap your mind around that factoid?

It was a third of the total population. People don’t talk about it because they are super superstitious. Survivors live with the cold hard unpleasant fact. Old people are rare. It is curious. It’s 2023 in the long now.

Writer: After writing and editing The Language Company in Kampot for five months I moved to Battenbang for three months. A Khmer boy in a Battenbang java & tea joint said the reason everyone stares at me is because all my generation was killed. They see you as a ghost, he said.

I am Happy Ghost.

I am surrounded by happy, laughing, curious, kind, childlike, grateful and beatific humans. Comedic. Sweet. How simple life is. How monosyllabic.

Yeah, yeah. Let’s dance, said a survivor.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Lit Agent Speaks

Give me international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Asian countries, greed, corporate monopoly play money profit and an orphan with no motivation but survival.

Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, drastic home foreclosures, massive unemployment, millions dying of C-19, jealousy, pride, and make sure pride is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashes empires, creates and resolves conflicts.

Give me disabled homeless angry American war veterans struggling with PTSS, divorce, authenticity, domestic famine and revenge, a central motivating factor  ...

Give me imaginary borders on a crazy fucked up planet.

Crossing borders is a transcendental act of courage.

Ascertain the intention before the motivation, said Zeynep staying on a true line. The agent climbed a literary mountain.

If there’s no literary mountain the publishing road would be flat, short and paved with gold.

Give me a new paragraph with short dirty realism sentences, said lit agent … Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts … Give me romance and treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem  ... Humans are the only animals that can scheme and deceive. 

Give me a life sentence with no chance of parole … Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by ghosts … Give characters fear, forgiveness, shock and awe … Like Orwell give me the unpleasant fact about a Burmese man, on his way to the gallows, stepping around a puddle of water … Give me his awareness of impending death and quick generous insight into his frail gentle human life.

Strap me into my chair living in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes, the metaphor of a single drop of lethal mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling drama intrigue and chaos. Entropy - the 2nd law of thermonuclear dynamics. The center cannot hold, said WB Yeats. Find the big metaphor Zeynep.

Give me revenge and betrayal - the how and why wars began … Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faust … Give me humans selling their soul to the Devil down at the crossroads at midnight to achieve immortality. Ain't nothing but the blues … Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in hope, the last thing that dies with gravity and arc.

Hope walks through the fire. Courage leaps over the fire.

Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, and reactions with total comprehension knowing the scientific fact that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY. Some refer to total complexity as God.

You may want to move this fact to the brutal satisfying conclusion, said the agent. This means the long now or 20,000+ years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. There’s a huge difference between complicated and complex. If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried few are chosen. God has a huge slush pile.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Cadiz

Omar and Akiko entered a student cafe for pan, butter, strawberry jam and coffee. The place hummed with readers, writers, calculators, talkers and dreamers. Students checked their phones to tell time. They told time where to go. Silent time told them to eat faster and get their sweet ass to class. White gamma rays bathing the room sang through skylights.

I visited Ashiakawa on the island of Hokkaido one fall, said Omar. Speak memory, said Akiko. Beached summer red and yellow canoes were tied up for winter. Ducks and mallards rested on water. Women gathered leaf shadows along wide paths. At a Shinto temple on a small island an old brown structure imposed its sentinel protection. Sacred space.

There was a Tori gate, cement bridge and guardian lions in the small courtyard. Crows cackled. At the temple was a square stone basin of water with four wooden ladles resting on a crossbar. A single cup of water dipped and poured back into the basin created a visual ripple effect. A drop on the surface released a thousand colors as a golden and brown pebble bottom exploded. One drop created smooth colors before emptiness and stillness.

A visitor dropped single splashes. Ephemeral beauty. I inspected paper prayers and 1,000 white crane offerings fluttering near stone steps. Two women arrived at the water basin, drank deep, spat water out, walked up steps, clapped their hands three times, bowed in prayer, clapped three times, threw coins through wooden slots into the temple, clapped twice, walked down stone steps and threw remaining water on stone lions, laughed and crossed the stone bridge. Leaves floated reflection shadows in the world.

Akiko laughed, I don’t have a particular god.

The Dali Lama said the only true religion is one of love and kindness, said Omar.

I understand.

They walked to the Playa de la Caleta beach past a shit-covered statue of Simon Bolivar on his bronze horse singing his mercenary exploits in Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, and Bolivia. They felt sand below a blazing sun. Men in blue coveralls raked and shoveled trash into a wheelbarrow. Violent foaming wild southern flanks of green blue black sea smashed rocks. East water was calm.

Spanish women under umbrellas knitted gossip with bright red yarn. Memory cards captured digital coastlines, long human shadows and a solitary cane as an elderly person performed her rebirth in water transformation therapy.

She swam to Kampot, Cambodia and married a pepper farmer. She gave him twins named Alpha and Omega. She taught them Spanish and oral storytelling magic. They introduced her to orphanages and Zen meditation practice. She swam back to Cadiz to find her crutch. It was gone.

Tavia Tower next to the Music Conservatory displayed a 360-degree perspective with tight white Moorish cubist homes slanting into cupola cathedral spires tolling eternal songs.

Religion is larger than human existence because we promise eternal salvation, said a friar, a monk and adept Brahmin.

History’s ocean was vast, spectacular, sad and incomprehensible.

Akiko cried farewell. Waving into an empty blue sky Omar vanished in Islamic, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Shinto shadows. Akiko’s energy spirit, strength, freedom and dignity was a sweet memory called the past. Stable and fluctuating mirages.

Playing his Honer blues harp in the key of C he wandered deserted Cadiz noon streets singing about a train leaving the station with a red light on behind. Taking my baby away. All my love’s in vain.

Good love story said Tran.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged