History Remembers
Share Article 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.
