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

write energy

In 1979 I smiled at the Irish women on a Donegal provincial bus. I was heading for Tra-na-Rossen, an isolated youth hostel to work as the warden in dead winter.

I said, I use yellow legal paper called Evidence. It’s perfect for this adventure. It collects source material, because WE, the royal I, remain open. We acknowledge we are from the source, in a sense beyond sense data, a fundamental energy force field. A conduit.

Each of us possesses the innate ability to create and embrace Metta, loving kindness that permeates through the meridians, we tap into the source, we transmit fields of energy, flowing from the source, the infinite vibrations of love.

Many writers prefer using this yellow paper to capture stories, characters, intention and motivation from scene to scene. It flows. I write with a cloud pen nib on mirrors. Creating amnesia. The clouds should know me by now. It’s a strange mixture of life and death, so it is.

I was on fire. I showed them a notebook. It’s tight, flat, hard rough parchment, badly stitched and while it is useful and shaking in laughter it is not quite as free as this Evidence. Two more Moleskine are filled. One sits empty and blank. I am happy & empty. The women stared in amazed silence. Asleep with eyes wide open. Stoned dolmens.

Mandalay

*

Tran hobbled into the ancient citadel in Hue. Children tune violins, cellos, flutes and recorders in bomb craters and the shadows of demolished brick walls. Humid sunlight filters through banana leaves. He relaxes against a crumbling wall hearing his melancholy Vietnamese music language.

Storytellers re-calibrated their true compass bearing on a dirt road in a third world country.

They opened a ragged existential foreign dictionary. It spilled:

myths, creation stories,

symbols, forms, sensations,

perceptions, images, ideographs,

pictographs, virus inoculations, musical interludes,

sonatas, vibratos, journey notes,

broken hearts, haiku poetry

and type-A negative blood donor manifests.

The lexicon illuminates Sensation, Form, Symbols, Nothing and Silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 Bhaktapur, Nepal

Vietnam Wall

Omar said, In silence 58,235 angels sing as hammers and chisels work on a long black wall gouging earth. A team member cleans dusts off the name of Captain Harry G. Cramer of the 14th Special Forces Operational Detachment, October 21st, 1956. He was the first.

Maya Lin was 21 when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial design was selected out of 1,421 entries in 1981. Her entry was #1026.

I thought about what death is, what loss is, she said. A sharp pain that lessons with time but never quite heals over.

She visualized a knife cutting open the Earth and the Earth healing itself. The black granite wall is 493 feet long rising from the ground to a height of 10.1 feet bending at the center at a 125.12 degree angle.

Monument shadows lie heavy over men and women with memory tools. Slivers of black granite are collected by museums. They catalog memories for future generations. The exhibition goes on a Rolling Thunder tour.

Students receive questions on final exams pertaining to names, dates, places, over-sense of space and the under-sense of time’s prayer beads massaged by whorls leaving fingerprints on cave walls, Buddhist deity stones, tools and discovery evidence. Hammer music, chiseled symphonies and soft brushes sing forever.

As long as forever is, said Eternity.

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines. She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention.

She releases repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated obese white tourists.

  

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan.

Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Be The Brush

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden.

It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ...

Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged