V Train

At dusk I severed a Hanoi alley to a lake for fresh air and sky to sit at a motorcycle repair shop with iced java. Two females dressed to kill using their hot naked sex passed on a cycle negotiating potholes, dust, and rocks with SMS direct.

A woman burned paper money in an old can to celebrate her new house, prosperity, honor and respect for her ancestors. Your location cannot be determined, said SMS.

On the balcony with pink flowering bougainvillea I enjoy green tea and white yellow clouds with quick rainstorms sharing whistle songs with free raptors as others died on balconies in cages.

After two weeks avoiding whizzing whirling dervish motorcycles, I ventured to the train station before high noon. It is a long faded yellow French cement block. I passed a window with a red sign, Brigade Leaders Collect Team Tickets Here.

I am a leader without a brigade. The narrow room has bolted blue plastic seating and numbered glass windows. At the end of the room next to the W.C. a huge mirror in a heavy brown lacquered frame creates an illusion of surreal space.

Counter #2 is where foreigners get tickets. Options include soft sleeper, soft seat, hard seat and no seat. I’m taking the SE1 overnight train from Hanoi to Hue, the ancient capital on the Perfume River known for art and architecture. Resplendent.

Omar asked me to burn his book A Century is Nothing at Phu Bai south of Hue in a symbolic fire ceremony.

I would like a ticket to Hue please. One way.

A woman behind thick glasses said, Soft sleeper.

It wasn’t a question it was a statement. She knows foreigners taking the night train want to sleep, have children take care of them when they are old and dying of loneliness while cooking over coal fires or forest shards admiring natural scenery before it’s gobbled up by corrupt companies as powerless locals improve their standard of living by hustling a little middle class economic dream.

Tonight, said the woman, sharply.

No, Sunday please.

She pointed to a calendar on the counter.

Number 19.

Yes.

She punched in the numbers. She pulled out a pink ticket.

That’s 533 Dong or $33. She showed me the number on her calculator. I paid. She handed me the ticket and dropped crumpled bills on the counter like leaves fluttering from a dying tree. Boredom enveloped her.

It leaves at 1930.

Thank you. Track #9 Car #1 Room 15/16.

Where are you from? said a Hanoi pedicab man.

I am a ghost from everywhere.

What is your country?

My country is my hand – see, five rivers.

How does it feel to be moving or sitting free and anonymous with laughter dancing down all the days? Excellent. Where do I park this empty vehicle?

*

Memory spoke: My mind is empty, said the sad old man in his small dusty Istanbul leather shop. My mother is 65. She has cancer. She has tried chemo and radiation therapy. I don’t know what to do. People come into my shop asking questions, What’s this price, How much is this, too many questions. How can I help them, what can I do?

Perhaps, said the stranger, You should just be with her. Give her the comfort she needs now. Give her water. Give her your love. Sit with her.

Yes, he said with sad deep eyes, It is difficult to be here now, gesturing around his shop crammed with shoes and bags and leather aroma.

*

A Turkish train chased moon, seawater and oil freighters. Two veiled lovers held hands at a station. Heavy green and purple grapes draped fences around barbwire stations. A sad long-faced man waiting for his life to unfold stared at the ground.

He’s married to his mother and her tomato-based history of love, regret, unemployment and zero opportunities.

A commuter ferry sailed across the Bosporus in elemental light. Visions of a Blue Mosque, spires and silver domes sparkled as blue waves swelled hearing artists carve Churning The Sea of Milk at Angkor Wat in the 9th century.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

world photography day

Tibet

Laos

Burma

Indonesia

China

Cambodia

Turkey

Vietnam

Nepal

I Lost One Day

Crows sang sunrise.

Lucky opened window blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment. Riding the blinds sang a metaphorical cryptic railroad life. Hop a fright. Get out of town. Hit the highway. Get down the road.

Ain’t nothin’ but da blues, sweet thing.

When you come to a fork in the road take it, said Zeynep.

Sun streamed to pink-red veined orchids in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled into light. Red gladioli, so glad, petaled beginning. Piano Etudes by Glass tinkled. A handful of dust labeled fear celebrated tonal frequencies. Piano fell silent. Violins picked up the slack hemming garments along life’s loom down at the crossroads making a Faustian deal with the d-evil.

In a new world order all the police are children.

They know how the world works.

Elegant clouds observed pachyderms and Staunton designed pawns, knights, bishops, rooks and queens fighting to control four center squares.

Look at the board. Absorb all the data. Recognize patterns. Analyze. Develop a strategy. Continually revise and develop that strategy as the game progresses, said Bamboo.

A black knight waving a curving scimitar and a 1* red and yellow hammer sickle flag driving a Turbo-bus filled with Russian baboons passed Hanoi beauty salons and full-body soapy massage parlors.

Girls trimming, buffing and painting cuticles greeted 1.9 million neurotic European tourists and swarming Asian locusts in a fat fucking hurry at Angkor Wats happening?

Bright yellow Turkish taxis idled coughing engines. Arabesque musicians fingered ouds as an operatic Turkish singer in Bursa lamented her melancholic love. Percussionists hammered goatskins.

Singing silver merchants chanted, Mr. Lucky Foot come here. First sale lucky sale make my day.

He joined a Jewish and Turkish man drinking tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

I lost today, said the Jewish man.

What do you mean, said his friend. You made 3,000,000 Lira.

Yes, but I lost one day.

Inside a 500-year old hammam, steam rising through rusting metal bars discovered a weak Wi-Fi signal from the Achebadem emergency room staffed by Winter Hawk, Bamboo and heartbroken howling Lone Wolf.

After a sauna Omar and Lucky entered a white marble room with a high vaulted dome. Thirty-two pinpoints of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles. In eight recessed cubicles men soaped, slathered and scrubbed off melting skin in humid heat. A robust masseuse worked sandpaper fibers over a stranger removing dead terrorist cells.

Absorbing musical notes the thermal pool bubbled natural mineral water as the literary outlaws enjoyed a sitting meditation up to their necks. I’ve had it up to here, said Omar clearing his throat.

Renewed, revived and rejuvenated after a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice they stepped into crisp spring air below blue sky.

The Language Company

16

My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

*

Give the gentle reader saatch aur himmat, Z said in Turkish. Translation please, said Devina. Truth and Courage.

Keep them engaged, said Tran, Be gentle with the reader. They are educated. Challenge them. What’s a word doctor, said Leo. Someone who fixes manuscripts with a sharp axe, said Tran waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston-driven fountain pen splattering blood red ink on everyone in his radius.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Edge focus. WE, you and I, them, he, she and us ain’t going anywhere. We live forever. In your dreams, yelled Devina. Everyone’s doing hard time. It ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Have mercy.

Rita, an orphan and independent visionary writer from Banlung chimed in with a voice sweeter than a Buddhist bell, I’m going to be an English facilitator and historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.

Where have I heard that before, asked Leo, an activist in exile from an orphanage on the Yangtze, heavy with silt and six trillion cubic meters of garbage flowing to the South China Sea.

What will you do with collected time, said Tran, Visit sick children in hospitals where they do DNA evolutionary experiments to stem the cells, can you sell the stems?

Speaking of stems, I’m moonlighting as a gardener, said Omar, There’s nothing more beautiful than nurturing nature in this impermanent life. We plant seeds for trees we will never see mature. Another leaf leaves life’s tree.

If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of the thorns give me a shout, said Tran, a one-legged Vietnamese child wearing his heart on the sleeve of a ragged 101st Screaming Eagle t-shirt.

A bird pressed its breast against a thorn singing, O what a beautiful morning o what a beautiful day.

A poet, like a chef or gardener, needs everything because they love everything.

I’m going to study Donatello, said Devina. Who’s he? He was a great Renaissance artist. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy. He was honest had integrity and was super original. Technically he worked with anything. You name it: wax, bronze, marble, clay, all kinds of rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist.

Painting with smoke and mirrors, said Tran, Hey, that’s what the Greeks said. They believed everything was beauty and order, said Rita, Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, musical notes, all the beauty originated with them didn’t it?

You got it, said Tran. Hey, you know what, I think I’ll take the day off and be creative. Ha. This present instant contains all reality, whispered Zeynep. We can call this experiment The Theory of Z, about a young precocious girl, her friends, artists and seers. Why not?

I taught a blind nomadic gardener/janitor/gravedigger and kid friends about emotional life in an alien schizoid civilization called Turkey, said Z. We shared values, stories and art with a free spirit.

I’ll tell you a secret. There’s two of me. One young and one old. The older is Kurdish and plays a cello in a cemetery. Can you dig it? Aliens and fantastic probabilities, said Rita, Tell me the difference between possibility and probability.

It’s about process not product. Whew, now that’s deep. Yeah, said Devina, We’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes. Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else speaking in the abstract.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said a demanding authoritarian Realist vomiting contrarian hypotheticals, truth, logic, verifiable data-based evidence, scientific facts, precise specifics. We must ascertain the immediate personal moral and ethical values with lofty principles and assistant principles on principal.

Z said, Speaking of aliens do you know about Iranian culture? They live south of us in the Middle Beast. It’s a violent repressive dictatorship. They have a VICE squad to control sheep behavior. Weird shit. Their oppressive culture keeps women in perpetual childhood.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Language Animals

Q: what’s the essential difference? People who think, experience life as a comedy. People who feel experience life as a tragedy. What did you expect? I ask you.

Archetypes are a universal collective unconscious symbolic truths. Humans are symbolic language animals, using abstract metaphors and cognitive ability to speak in tongues.

Oral (Voice) and gesture (Sign) languages dissipate.

Graphic (Art) languages are constant.

Incorporate your power of laughter and active imagination, said Devina. Ph.D., Education, Indonesia.

Hey, cool idea, said Rita, orphan writer from Banlung. We can use random precise episodes for stories.

To survive in this crazy world we need stories, air, water, sex, shelter, food and freedom, said Leo, activist monk. Everything here in Utopia is pure surface, said Leo, Air and water are free although the quality is dubious and getting worse … Sex is expensive like anger and stolen children. Shelters are ferns and rushes mixed with shoddy cement and crap bricks. Cheap building materials. Food is rice and gruel.

If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage, said Tran.

Will our adventure have a themes like boredom, loneliness or alienation, with a plot looking for characters and conflict, asked Devina, Timeless metaphorical motifs of love, treachery, betrayal, revenge, choices, consequences, morals, ethics, free will vs. determinism, values and abandonment with humans struggling to get something, like a glass of water? Will it have satire, irony, symbolism, and sex?

Yes. It reveals user exchange value. It speaks about the power of using money for sex and using sex for money. One hand washes the other, said a limbless amputee with no emotional connection.

It was a warm summer day. They were naked in a meadow of sunflowers. She was blind. He was deaf. They held hands. Skin was their unified electromagnetic field of tactile language beyond feeble illiterate words. Fate introduced them at an NGO charity ball.

            Blind is a famous concert pianist.

            Deaf is an explorer at Angkor Wat.

            He scaled her keys.

She explored his mountains, jungle geography and intricate hand-carved limestone designs at Banteay Srei temple.

They had a tacit agreement to be gentle and kind with one another. Peel my skin like sweet aromatic fruit, she whispered, I am your skin mistress, one must sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Play my flute, he said.

Yes, said Omar, a blind writer and a nomadic storyteller. Omar wrote A Century Is Nothing in green racing ink using a Montblanc 149 fountain pen. Be the ink. Be the paper. Flow.

You need eye & hand & heart. Two won’t do.

Few read it. Fewer understood it said Omar, Our stories contain, if an empty container can contain anything, the basics of drama, action, conflict, rising action, a climatic orgasm, falling action, resolution and empowerment with heart-mind emotions and delicious mouthwatering freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Yummy.

The emotion is so thick you can cut it with a finally honed Turkish scythe, saber, or word sword.

Word machetes in Cambodia sever families and futures. You will experience what the characters feel, taste, touch, hear, and smell revealing themselves through action … Like neglect, poverty and illusionary potentials? Yes, if the characters were any thinner, they’d be Japanese Sumi-e rice paper, or 1,000 handmade paper cranes at a Shinto shrine. Fly me to the moon.

17,000 world children die of starvation every day, said Grave Digger. Look at my hands.

Wow, Zeynep said, Let’s make it heavy, deep real immediate and dramatic. Focus a lens. Floodlight or spotlight? Yes, said Devina, Shine a light on illuminated skin with sharp bamboo needles dipped in Sumi ink.

Focus on an existential puzzle palace… Our memories make us who we are … They define our values and character … We cultivate memory’s history to sustain our lives.

Everyone builds their sandcastle with layered memories. Everyone works on his or her own personal puzzle.

I’m going to need your help with inner dialogue where characters reveal their insecurity and strength, their desire for self-preservation with values like love truth beauty compassion instinct and intuition because they have to survive.

As Rita and Tran know if you survive you are a WINNER. Life loves a winner. The soft machine loves a winner. Survivors want to prolong the inevitable, said Death. Some want fame. Some want recognition. Some could care less and don’t try. Fail better. Do.

Let’s see their fears and strengths, said Leo  ... Their fear of hungry ghosts & the poverty of food, love, and security is strong, said Devina, Strength and trust releases ego and expectations  ... all the expectations are external  ... circumstances outside character affect their psyche  ... environment affects silly humans  ... smart humans affect their environment  ... see their struggle to accept their authenticity. It requires courage.

See their fear and courage when alone with others … see their courage accepting loss forever  ... see their fear of starvation on physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological levels  ... see their courage of adventure.

Write one true sentence. See their skill to write short sentences, said Omar.

Book of Amnesia, V1