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Entries in beauty (47)

Saturday
Jul122025

Ang

Way of the empty hand.

Be inwardly humble and outwardly gentle, said Ang, a Hanoi student lawyer with a 5th degree Dan black belt. She was small fast and deadly. A quick tiger without a motorcycle license.

We rode around Hanoi. I knew the city and showed her diversions.

It’s strange having a foreigner give me directions in my town, she yelled into the wind as we negotiated a dusty section of congested road works for a new subway while speeding south near Lenin Park.

Take it easy baby I whispered as we swerved through a phalanx of cycles, cars, trucks and bike spokes.

We stopped near a lake for iced java. Hanoi has many lakes. The Vietnamese coffee comes from the Central Highlands. It is high quality. Vietnam is the world’s second biggest coffee exporter after Brazil.

Hanoi, like Beijing, is the conservative cold capital. It was bombed during the war. Hanoi survived the Chinese, French, Americans and Vietnamese. War by proxy like now elsewhere. Same-same but different. Saigon is the new young economic vibrant city where anything goes 24/7.  Beijing-Hanoi. Shanghai-Saigon.

 

My name means heart in Vietnamese, said Ang.

I am a Bui Doi, I said.

I know what that means, she said and she wasn’t laughing when she said it.

Dust collector whispered Tran.

An old man with heavy ropes eating his shoulder skin, tendons and bones pulled a wooden cart filled with bags of cement down the street. His rhythm, cadence and rubber sandals slapping pavement burned his energy doing his daily labor inside the people’s labyrinth surrounded by horns, cycles, cars, bikes, push carts and pedestrians as he strained forward, shoulder muscles bouncing, flexing, extending his action, thick thigh muscles grinding his momentum like a shark always forward.

Iceman arrived with his cart and long crystal blocks. He sawed ice into manageable chunks and carried bags of frozen water into the cafe. Light glimmered crystals.

A man in a white government shirt stood on the sidewalk picking his teeth with a sliver of wood demonstrating his ability to eat food.

 

It’s a slow gradual invisibility, said a witness at life’s moveable feast.

Today would be a good day to be a kite, I said to Ang.

You’re crazy, no one wants to be a kite, she said and I said, Maybe you’d rather be the string. She didn’t think this was funny.

Sure, I said, If you were the kite and others the string they would, could, should, control you, as a willing victim of circumstances outside your control with no free will. You’d have no responsibility, flying free.

Yes. I like having no responsibility except for myself.

You’d have free choice with amazing potential, I said stringing her along with The Analysis of Consequence.

Teach me something about photography she ordered in a domineering tone because she was small powerful AND angry with repressed regret because her mom abandoned her for economic reasons to work in a town 150 clicks north so Ang went to school to be a lawyer, to hopefully immigrate to England someday and attending daily karate practice with displaced aggression while taking care of her spoiled whining 11-year-old brother then her older sister had a baby and it meant more housework for Ang as a domestic servant being younger so she was frustrated at the mean dirty tricks life played on her.

I have a camera on my phone, she said. Advice?

Move slowly. Incorporate your karate skills into street movement. Practice. Be. See. Shoot a lot. Always have your camera ready. Anticipate. Try new angles and see geometric patterns of light. Paint with light. Prowl the streets. Ignore the main event. Focus on the spectators. Shoot through things and get close enough to touch your subject, dance around your subject, use RAW format.

I grabbed my Leica, got down on hands and knees angling between bamboo chairs, framed, composed, exhaled and squeezed the imperceptible impeccable shutter. The image of bamboo lined close to the eye, depth of field, legs, and blurred feet. Visual metaphors. See?

Yes, thanks.

It’s like karate or sex, I said. Practice. Do it 10,000 times until you get it.

 

A man walked by. He saw a foreigner with a local girl sitting on a bench near the Lake of Swords. Milk him, he joked. Ang walked over and severed his spinal cord in a blue flash of beauty and dexterity. He crumpled, dying instantly.

She sat down. That’ll teach him. A blind man with a cart collected the body. Physicians at Peoples’ Hospital #4 dissected the cadaver to recycle organs. Where do the eyes go, asked Doctor Death. In the eye bag, said a blind nurse.

See Beauty and Cruelty without hope or fear with a sense of humor, said Tran balancing on his strong leg in deep shadows.

What is the purpose of Beauty, asked Rita. Beauty held up her mirror, See for yourself flaneur.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Tuesday
Jun112024

Question

Question? Is the problem or surprise the form, a formless form or the form of the formless forming sea foaming form? If so, can it be understood by reducing, redacting, paralleling, associating another journey? Can you break the continuity of the journey with memories of an ephemeral I ? Yes … It’s not a problem, it’s a surprise, said Impermanence.

Who am I?

I am a who to what I am.

Why am I here?

How did I get here?

How did I grow?

Q has three parts:

a)  What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil?

b)   What is the nature of evil? The question is the answer. It is not in this tale, play or manuscript.

c)   What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?

Q. Where does the real end and the artificial begin? I am a superficial person, said Grave Digger … I pretend to be who I am in my future. I know two things. My hands. My work is never finished.

Q? Does fate control our free will? Yes.. Fate cannot lie. If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get life’s joke, said Laughter Therapy … Ha, ha, ha.

Q? Should we worry about the style? No. Should we worry about the form? No. Worry is interest on a bill yet to come due. No guilt, regret, fear, or monkey mind. Monkey loves the circus of sensory overload. We live in a world of forms.

 

 

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

A C-19 virus transmitted by Asian bats to humans in late 2019 is not a surprise. A pangolin ate bat shit. The pangolin was trapped, died and ended up in a wet market. Consumers bought it, sliced it, cooked it, and served it at parties. Delicious. Infected humans traveled and transmitted C-19 to millions around Earth. So it goes.

Holy bat shit! said Robin a cape crusader wearing a mask practicing social distance.

Q: do we have to capitalize the first letter of every sentence? no is the short answer no.

Q: what is strange? Life is strange, bizarre, comic, tragic and very short … Life is a brief clear precise concise life sentence. How do stories, vignettes, jazz poems, journalism fragments, and system analysis communicate with each other?

A: They walk dirt paths, ford rivers, scale mountains, explore jungles, valleys and estuaries and cross metaphysical existential borders … they build sandcastles near the sea. They practice telepathy … they are time travelers. Aliens.

They meditate on the process of their death.

The dance and dancer are one.

As a mystic and prescient person, Zeynep you have the responsibility to be honest. Be light about it. Think big and stay in the particular. Know what keeps you motivated and happy. Autotelic. 

Next question Z, How do you stay fresh and centered? You make it new day-by-day, said Z, Make it new. A storyteller staying in one place goes blind, we move around before becoming native and dull. Before we think and act like local sheep.

Lost confused passive ones living in Inertia, a state of mind, perfect the art of MILLING AROUND in Country ABC, said Rita, They speak in monosyllables Yeah, yeah. Big vocabulary. 2% are awake. 98% are asleep. The majority are afraid to ask the WHY question.

Fear is a killer. Life is a killer.

People asking questions get slaughtered. See the Killing Fields on page 101 - the last room you want to enter. Keeping your big fat fucking mouth shut is wise and prudent behavior to survive post-genocidal truth ghosts. It is an unpleasant fact. If you open your trap someone cuts out your tongue.

In this peculiar particular situation expert scientific witnesses have proven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt and doubt has a shadow with logical coherence … that WE, being expert witnesses, reliable narrators and noble natives living with our DNA genius bear witness to alienated, lonely, bored, listless, passive Earthlings meandering with no purpose, lost, unimaginative having zero curiosity and staring with blind eyes - due to severe emotional, mental, physical traumas with memories of suffering, genocide and ghosts.

They remain childlike, tender, sweet, kind, and hospitable with a terminal case of confusion and loss forever, hiding in deep shadows, addicted to dumb phone entertainment boredom.

Their beating hearts caress resignation, despair, depression, lack of initiative or incentive based on fear of punishment, or loss of face or humiliation with hard-wired SHAME. They live a meditative Buddhist spiritual way of identity and culture.

They are easily distracted. Kids play. Forever young. Adults have perfected the art and style of Pretending To Be Busy.

What art. What beauty. What style. What form. What context. What a formal pertinacious way. What objective truth. What verisimilitude.

Here are some true facts, said Rita an orphan and independent author. Unpleasant facts are littered in this epic like lovers, countries, butterflies, social systems, food and transformation.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

 

Friday
Jul012022

Kalapuya

After Morocco, he sat down and listened in a Crow Forest.

“I am an old dialect of Kalapuya tribes. I respect the spirit energies. I hear with my eyes and see with my ears. I understand your love for the spirit power guardian. I am an ancestor speaking 300 languages from our history. Now only 150 dialects remain.

“A hunting gathering people, speaking Pentian, we numbered 3,000 in 1780. We believed in nature spirits, vision quests and guardian spirits. Our shamans, called amp a lak ya taught us how seeking, finding and following one’s spirit or dream power and singing our song was essential in community.

“I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. Dialects of ancestors who lived here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In the forest near the river all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.

“I am blessed to welcome you here. You have walked along many paths of love to reach me.

“My dirt path is narrow and smooth in places, rocky in others. I am the soil under your feet. I feel your weight, your balance your weakness and your strength. I hear your heart beating as my ancestors pound their ceremonial drums. I feel the tremendous surging force of your breath extend into my forest. Wind accepts your breath.

“I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. I am the oak, the fir and pine trees spreading like dreams upon your outer landscape. I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent in the forest hearing trees nudge each other. “Look,” they say, “someone has returned.”

“I love the way you absorb the song of brown body thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet throated song you hear without listening. At night two owls sing their distant song and their music fills your ears with mystery and love.

“I am warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time. I am the spider’s web dancing with diamond points of light. I am the rough fragile texture of bark you remove before connecting the edge of an axe with wood. You carry me through my forest, your flame creates heat of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the odor of forest in your nostrils filling your lungs. It is sweet.

“I am the cold rain and wet snow and hot sun, and four seasons. I am yellow, purple, red, blue, orange flowers from brown earth.

 “Language cannot be separated from who you are and where you live.

“I say this so you will remember everything in this forest. I took care of this place and now your love has the responsibility with respect and dignity and mindfulness.”

A Century is Nothing

 

Friday
Mar182022

Elusive

The beauty of human sadness, the song of an emotion we all can feel. - Chekhov

Purpose of great literature: to help us recognize and be conscious of what we experience but do not really notice.

Street photography is when you can smell the street and feel the dirt. - Bruce Gilden

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"Yes, the elusive beauty of human sorrow which men will not for a long time learn to understand and describe, and which it seems only music can convey."

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I can show you enough love to break your heart forever.

 

A good photographer meets chance all the time.

Friday
Feb042022

Rhythm

The author uses all the enchantments:

language, rhythm, music and spirit.

Artistic emotion provokes thought

and gives the feeling of beauty.

A work of art is a force that attracts,

absorbs the available forces

of the one who comes close to it.

Year of the Tiger