Dream Sweeper Bats

At 4:37 a.m. everyone sleeps-dreams. I fire up my super-efficient Dream Sweeper Machine and collect dreams, said Tran. I sort them by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime symbolic meaning.

Words dance as hallucinations, poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and abstract art congratulates a hand clapping the hollow bells of a Cambodian trash collector boy pulling his cart along life’s fractured possibilities.

This sensation is the bell, said Zeynep, visualizing her European-Asian future. It bridges the gap, gaps the bridge connections. 

Rita, Leo, Tran, Devina, Zeynep, Omar and Death meditate on the balcony.

Pre-dawn sky dances with pulsating stars singing their light. Ferns, plants, bamboo and a cold wind hum I feel free.

Fruit bats roost upside down under a coconut palm leaf. Who turned the world over?

One emits a shrill, high-pitched echolocation squeaky frequency vibration. Perceive senses their return. A sharp sound with a definite edge to the beginning, through the middle tonal range to finalities, a welcome signal to bats revealing where they are in spacetime awareness.

They said, Hello, I’m back. It’s a pleasure finding comfort after a night of flying.

I don’t need to learn the words, said Devina, I am the music.

My name is Nature, said Leo, I am grateful to be alive and paying attention to bat’s music.

This is why we wake early, said Omar.

Storytellers witnessed ten white seagulls flying toward Lenin Park Lake. Vision’s silent gift at dawn winged freedom in orange sky. Awareness of life in Hanoi has meaning, definition, value.

I don’t know where the artificial ends and the real begins, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. I am a deeply superficial person.

90% of life is showing up, said Tran an amputee with a big heart.

Yes, said Rita in her orphan voice, 10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you deal with it. You are director, audience and players. I hear with my eyes. I see with my ears.

Stay in character. Two players practice lines and delivery.

-       I thought you’d never get here.

-       Sorry, I was delayed.

-       Obviously. Are you staying?

-       What do you think?

-       I don’t know. You’re such a mystery to me.

-       You talk too much.

Ha, said Laughter Therapy, All the clowns are not in the circus.

A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned, said Devina.

It’s the madness of art, said Zeynep, bleeding letters on parchment. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Arrival

Take the A Train from Lao Cai to Hanoi arriving at 4:30 a.m.

Rain cleans air.

Streets are deserted.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collects dreams from talking monkeys. Narrow alley dreams stream crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, sighing into The Machine. Dreams, like writing, need simplicity, accuracy, brevity, clarity and humanity.

It’s a new day. The first day in a new space, new neighborhood, this Shikumen twisted Hanoi dream alley. People share toilets and kitchens. They share their lives on Fake Space, a glorious Internet frontier of brief equality and eternal technological distractions. Walls. Barb wire. Thick rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent.

Prison is a refuge and release.

Solitary confinement with the junkyard blues. Environmental impact statements.

Climate needs spare change.

No one gets out alive. You are a Stream-Winner, this cessation of sensation, perception. U experienced this deep illusive truth in Hanoi while editing a 227 page Ph.D. thesis of Buddhist enlightenment written by a monk in Nepal sitting under the Bodhi tree.

Edited pages are returned to Thanh. She’s the manager of Just Massage, a team of seven visually challenged masseurs and masseuses in the Hanoi diplomatic area. Great people with healing hands. Empowered.

Everyone is a Buddha, she said, smiling.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

International Shoeshine Boys

By No One special important or famous.

Tools: a box, tinned colors favoring dark brown and black, a rag picker’s dream, a pair of sandals for a barefoot customer, a toothbrush for those hard to reach places and a buffing brush.

A boy in Marrakesh, Morocco plays Arabic music on his box with his brush.

A smiling Turkish boy in Bursa spins shoe polish cans with Roma dervish flair.

A Vietnamese boy in Lao Cai designs shining skills in tribal dialects.

A Cambodian orphan wearing a LANDMINE t-shirt sings about saving soles. Everyone here wears sandals. No chance said Dance.

A Chinese shoeshine boy discusses existentialism and learning disabilities with an NGO from Australia on a junket.

Where are girl shoe shiners? They are zero. They sell flashlights. When their red battery light indicator shows low power they sell their skin. Feeling empty they barter their interior semi-moist flexible vagina dialogues with a dark-eyed sullen abject apathy. Their emptiness increases silent oral heartbreak and viscous density before their mark comes in 8 seconds or less singing the blues.

Tran sells books at the Main Train Station. What are the titles?

a. My Life is a Beautiful Accident. I am a Fluke of the Universe.

b. Travels in Empty Space w/ Stardust Memories

c.  Cambodian Woman Pure Drinking Water

c-1. No Money No Honey Abridged

c-2  The Language Company, A Century is Nothing, ART, Grow Your Soul, Book of Amnesia Unabridged- Leonard

d. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

e. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

f. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

g. A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe – Fernando Pessoa

h. Song Lines - Bruce Chatwin

i. The Book of Disquiet - Pessoa

j. The I Ching

k. Facing Unpleasant Facts, Animal Farm, 1984 - George Orwell

l. Seven Japanese Tales - Tanizaki

m. The Art of War - Sun Tzu

n. The Tao Teh King - Lao Tse

o. The Book of Tea - Okakura

p. Invisible Cities - Calvino

q. Through The Looking Glass - Carroll

r.  Here Bullet, Phantom Noise - Brian Turner

s. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Joke - Kundera

t. The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut

u. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe - McCullers

v. Travels with Herodotus - Kapuscinski

w. WE - Yevgeny Zamyatin (precursor to 1984, Brave New World)

x. Fate is A Cruel Joke - Monkey Face

y.  Why I Always Look Back - Genocide Survivor S-21

z.  The Little Prince

aa. Against The Day, G’s Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

bb. Fairy Tales: The Short Attention Span of Biped Mammals

cc. Yeah, Yeah - Two immortal words: by Asian students

dd. How & Why Asians MILL AROUND with Panache

ee. How Simians Saved Earth with Stealth, Cunning and Deception by Whining

ff.  Blindness, The Stone Raft, The Cave,  -  Jose Saramago

gg. The Book of Chameleons -  Jose Eduardo Agualusa

hh. Pale Fire, Ada, Lolita - Nabokov

ii. Hunger - Kurt Hamsun

jj. The Glass Bead Game – Hesse

Disenfranchised junkyard dogs share mediocrity and human adolescent listlessness with rolling thunder microscopes. They create extensive noise. No meaning or value. There is USER value and EXCHANGE value.

What is louder than a group of Khmer / Lao people? Another group of Khmer / Lao people. Everyone celebrates two fleas dancing on a dog. Exciting.

Bored humans wander around. Dogs sniff butts, yap, fuck, and chase blind tourist rats down blind alleys careening into dynamic futures where the sound of one hand clapping echoes with growling gamelan cymbals. Dogs form a canine club, Bark n’ Bite.

Escher’s perceptual art includes elements of line and tonal quality. A dot, a line, a circle, zig-zag, oval. Seven basic forms create all art.

Synesthesia. To feel or perceive sensations in one part of the body produced by stimulus in another sensation. See sound. Hear color. Taste light. Smell conversations. A lie’s smell is disguised as truth flavor.                 

Every day I walk through a mine field where any false move could be fatal, said Roberto Bolano, a poet from Chile dialing 2666. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

October by Rita

Affect your environment. Do not let your environment affect you.

Take the blue line … celebrate red ink with a Chopin fountain pen … see how the ink bleeds on new paper … how it feels, this dancing wind song, point and line … take a line for a walk.

Hanoi air is cool before dawn when the landlord’s dog trapped in a long cement tunnel howls at 3:30 a.m. The dog is an apt metaphor for residents trapped in long cement tunnels called home sweet home.

Elsewhere the canine is grilled and basted on a spit at low heat allowing the flavor and juices to penetrate meat for a family feast.

Someone passing through is awake seeing stars, hearing the shriek of fruit bats returning to roost in long green palm branches gathering membranes, silent before dawn amplifiers at Lenin Park sing heavy DUTY patriotic songs with yellow grumbling bulldozers moving dirt, filling in lakes, drowning algae, plankton and fish habitats before the Party Leader plugs in her cassette machine to play aerobic madness in orange light before brainwashed human-birds preen ruffled dream feathers, screw their darling, feed incense to the dead, turn on plasma televisions, cook rice, fire up motorcycles and well before women sweep leaves from night’s tears.

Who will write the history of tears?

Free air raptors and Finch, destined to die in a bamboo cage, sing. Bats sleep in deep green leaves near the balcony of a narrow Hanoi home.

I don’t remember the century. Maybe it was The Glorious Year of Reconstruction.  Men hammered, shoveled and hauled Hanoi toward a glorious future.

Night stars dream before dawn hearing heavy machines at the park. Workers truck rocks to fill in the lake. Old Russian bulldozers shove piles of granite along paths creating new boundaries in citizens’ imagination limiting their curiosity and freedom. The ceaseless mechanical rumbling of machines sounds like a broken Teutonic alarm clock with geologic earthquake Richter intensity.

Echoes of crashing, tumbling granite stones shatters stillness. Reconstruction machines have a schedule, a deadline, a force of progressive development.

Inside bamboo an invisible scripter blends into a natural environment weaving a thread with unconditional love. Music perforates starlight silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Leaving Sapa by Tran

Singing farewell to friends and strangers I’m reminded of a quote by Georgia O’Keefe, “There are times when one spends an afternoon with someone whom they will never see again.”

We roll inside flying clouds through deep mountain passes, past deep brown running rivers, sculptured terraced green rice paddies. Thin bamboo walled hut homes, teams of boys driving water buffalo home, invisible valleys, forests, mist shrouded habitats tucked into distant hills.

Peaks obscured by fast clouds, road construction crews dreaming/living in hovels with one change of dry clothing, past women nursing infants near wood fires inside dark dirt floor interiors where smoke escapes through porous bamboo splinters.

A smiling Red Dzao women thumbs a ride, heavy laboring trucks and we rolled into Lao Cai.

It is a noisy miniature Hanoi. You notice the heavy air, polluted by vehicles dancing commerce, irate impatient motorcycle beepers, horns, whirling traffic, people competing for time and money. Drivers from Sapa get a kickback from hotel owners.

At a restaurant near the station is supply and demand value exchange. Touts are on us like flies on shit. They scramble, Here, Here, you can leave your bags here. Sit down. See the menu, says a suave hustler boy.

The sidewalk is littered with tables and chairs. The woman owner offers green tea.

Japanese, French, English, Thai and Vietnamese tourists drop their packs and collapse. There are three evening trains. Blow whistle blow. Southbound.

Tables are packed with middle-aged Thai tourists. The fat men wear watches studded with blood diamonds. Fat wives’ hair is styled. One woman is the jokester. She teases people. She laughs long and LOUD. The men swill beer, the women green tea. They talk loud and fast. Their tour group is on a four-day buying mission from Bang Cock. Their numerous bags, suitcases and boxes of Chinese appliances fills the restaurant, spilling into the street. Their cargo will clog train passageways.

A seven-month pregnant Vietnamese woman serving people moves around tables toward the sidewalk and slips on a cement slope. She hits the street. Flat on her belly. People rush to help her up. She’s shaken not stirred recovers her composure and collapses in a flimsy plastic chair.

A shoeshine boy in his late teens on a serious economic cleaning mission wearing a torn white t-shirt and baseball cap points at my dirty climbing boots, Mister, your shoes need waving a white plastic bottle of liquid in the air. I stare at him. No words. He tries again. No thanks. He doesn’t understand. No, thanks.

This is English 101 on the street of dreams with life’s economic expectations hustling and selling a quiet determined desperation.

He waves the bottle, pointing at my shoes. His confidence wavers. He loses eye contact. He knows he has no sale but tries again  ... Your  ... before he can repeat his pitch, I level his glance with a slight tonal breath. No thanks.

He wanders to another potential sale trapped in a plastic chair waiting for food, waiting for their train to leave, waiting for their next destination, waiting to die on their tourist trail of quest love. Smart ones avoid his words, his eyes. This always works. Avoidance.

Pretend someone doesn’t exist. Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is fear.

A young angry spoiled girl-child in the diner with her grandfather plays with a mechanical Santa Claus sleigh toy. He winds it up, sets it on the floor and lets it go. It plays Jingle Bells, rolls along the floor and crashes into a glass door. The sleigh rocks back and forth as Rudolph bashes his red nose into glass as spinning wheels ring Jingle Bells. Dancing all the way. The girl plays with this toy for three minutes gets bored and whines. Her grandfather collects her babbling esoteric poem.

Two kitchen girls at a table shucking green beans peal the skin of whining children.

A guy comes in and makes small talk. He pulls out an 8GB iPod. He fiddles with the dials, displaying photographs. Want to buy this, cheap, $200.

No thanks, I have one.

Yeah, this is new, I bought it from a tourist before they died of beggar fatigue.

You’re very clever, good luck selling it maybe you can trade it for a landmine.

The 2015 Lao Cai express prepares to depart for Hanoi. The boisterous group of Thai tourists reading gold time watches grasping Gucci Florentine handbags wrestle impossible suitcases and cheap Chinese appliances into the train.

Their leader works for Herbie Lives Organic and a freelance tour guide. He leaned over with unmitigated glee displaying his lapel pin with the bamboo company logo and heart saying, All Natural.

Sapa was magnificent, just what a traveler needed for peaceful fresh air nature and human connection. Bliss. Mountains fog mist clouds rain sun valleys and rivers. You know you’re in the zone when ten days feels like ten eons.

After dismissing Hanoi taxi touts Tran’s Dream Sweeper collects dreams from sleeping monkeys. Shh, the bats are roosting in palm tree serenity outside the window.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged