Tuk-tuk by Rita

A Cambodian loudspeaker blasted: Now Here This!

The tuk-tuk leaves in five minutes departing for points unknown. A massive short celestial event known as Your Sweet Life on the tourist conveyor belt departs in five minutes.

You are advised to assemble all necessary documents, certified approval stamps, water, greasy guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on. You will visit Raw Mind on your short, fast, easy tour.

Bring your life with you and a glossy germane Laughing Co(s)mic Planet guidebook with creased missing pages.

If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second - you will discover a new sensation and perspective in another dimension beyond sight and sound.  

You are a vanishing particle in space. You will be surprised or traumatized depending on your sensitivity to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing and feeling temple magic and energy.

You will DO Angkor. Check it off your to do list. Less is more. Please conclude all private and group discussions, agreements, disagreements or false reasonable arguments with your fellow travelers. Talking time is finished. 

The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. He will lose his job.

If he loses his job he will return to his village with his ten children sleeping in hammocks. He will plant rice and provoke white cows with Marxist control sticks. He will manipulate plowshares through mud. The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to be a tuk-tuk driver.

If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family may starve to death. This is a common problem here - Death by starvation. If you survive you win. Life loves a winner.

If he dies you will be held in escrow. - Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment.

A tuk-tuk driver has an easy job. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. You pay him and he goes home. He gives his wife some money. He spends the rest drinking Angkor Draft with friends.

He makes $15-25 for the day.

The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $3.00.

Woman drivers are rare in Siem Reap. Like clean drinking water, sanitation, quality health care, OK condoms and student talking time in robotic factory schools.

Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guesthouses. They are the guest and you are the house. Your house has 1,001 symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious demon fears and ocean dreams live-breath-laugh and dance revealing inner visions.

Clean all your rooms. Your word janitor takes out the garbage.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff. Atoms make up everything.

You are a housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols, silence & nothing.

A woman doesn’t work as a tuk-tuk driver because:

- it’s too dangerous

- it’s inappropriate

- it’s foolish

- they lack the cash

- they lack education, intelligence, drive, initiative

- they haven’t broken free of ingrained social and cultural oppressive stereotypes. The System believes her place is in the home, producing offspring, nurturing kids, cooking, feeding the dead incense, feeding the dying, feeding the elderly, feeding the kids, feeding hubby, washing, and cleaning. She’s happy.

- her family will kill her with love and affection.

Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish primary or 9th grade like in Sapa, Vietnam. She married young. She stayed home forever and a day. She produced children in assembly line operations with high quality control standards, modern medicine and umbilical cords.

It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers.

Your mother was appointed to have you. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Bayon

The Bayon is a three-tiered pyramid temple with 49.5 towers and faces. Archeologists theorize the multitude of faces symbolize Buddha looking over the entire country. Eyes are everywhere, angled degrees. Detailed bas-reliefs.

Energy, cunning, silence and exile avoids crowds by discovering solace and serenity in secluded places. Not a single tourist explored Western walls or courtyards.

Playing with rocks Rita and friends created small Mani statues.

You cannot photograph space, said Rita sitting below shaded faces.

You cannot photograph a memory, said Tran.

A photograph has an aura of death, said Z.

Temples are hidden in deep forests, labyrinths with mazes and magical light-shadow play.

This is the day of my dreams, said Devina.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Day of My Dreams

Dance in serious moonlight  ...  

Dance-sound-letter-word-music-silence.

There are 50+ million bloggers in the states. States of confusion. Let’s be various. Live forever. Young/old people love social networks like Facelookbook, You R Fabulously Boring and Twitter Little Sparrow. Fast, short, deadly.

It’s exciting to live fast, short and easy. Deadly is short, fast and deafly.

If I suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder and everyone suffers because existence is suffering, or the illusion of suffering I’d be a hummingbird practicing social twittering. Kiss my type.

Anxiety meets a tourist, I love you. Tourist whispers, I’m behind in getting my images up on Instant Grandmama and Where Is My Face?

Hello Beauty, said Mirror. Once upon a spacetime dance there was a humbling life changing experience. Laughter is life learning dialogue.

Rita hoped to teach at a rural school 50 km from Siem Reap.

HOPE4NOW, a Danish crust-based charity organization sponsors the proposed school, My Grandfather’s House.

They require volunteers to have a criminal background check. As everyone knows knowing unknown all powerful authorities do not issue this forged bureaucratic paper to aliens, nomads, tricksters, orphans, amputees, landmine survivors, vagabonds, poets, mendicants, blind seers, Grave Digger, word janitors, itinerant weird genius storytellers or literary outlaws.

Someone passed the Talking Sheep Test. Proceed to go green. Nothing to declare.

I exist outside adult time.

If I begin this dance by calling it Angkor Draft you may surmise in theory it is about a local beer, said Rita, archeologist. The swill is popular with tourists and locals, the latter consuming huge quantities to cement circumspect construction deals. It’s a urine-based liquid syntax favored by thirsty red dust-covered grammar-based human naturalists unloading huge backpacks with a weary sigh of relief.

They’ve traveled far and wide to reach this epic point on their life quest.

The average tourist spends 3.5 days of their life in temple city consuming 9.6 large bottles of Angkor Draft.

*

Angkor Wat was built in 1113. It is the largest religious monument in the world.

It is dedicated to Vishnu. A symbol of the divine, Mount Meru towers in the center, surrounded by smaller peaks, courtyards (continents) and a huge moat (oceans).

After the 13th century it was a place of Buddhist worship. Extensive wall galleries and carvings depict battles, regal processions, heaven and hell and the Hindu creation epic, “Churning The Sea of Milk,” where gods and demons cooperate to create the elixir of immortality.

Galleries include conflicts between Devas and Asuras and the Battle of Lanka.

Angkor reinforces a minute human scale.

How did we feel here, asked the storytellers. Serene. Impermanent calm and centered.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Apsara Dancers by Rita

The dancing hall at Preah Khan is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. He is the god-king. He resurrected his desire creating new temples and new decrees for dancers.

They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer myths and stories about families, war, conquest, harvests, seasons, sun and moon.

They are life/death dances. They dance to celebrate life. They dance the celebration of tranquility. They dance or die. They wear tinkling golden bands around wrists and ankles. They wear diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

One dances to escape the tyranny of life.

She’s danced all her short sweet life. The Hall of Dancers is surrounded by columns, portals and broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisper dance.

Thick gnarled silk-cotton roots crawl toward dancers. Dancers weave through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life. Dance is motivated by emotional expression. Movement never lies.

Dance is about itself. Free creation is a playful way of existence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Hand Luggage by a Nurse

The Australian nurses prepared to return home to family, friends and medical school after three weeks on Ground Zero living short-term personal evolutionary variables of medical, emotional and scientific truths.

Before leaving one arranged her heavy deep real life changing Cambodian experience in her hand luggage. She wondered, How can I get my entire heavy deep real humbling life changing experience into this very tiny bag?

This serious question troubled her for a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year and remaining sweet existence. It’s her experience. She knows it’s impossible to check it all the way through. She will have to carry it. 

She assembles it on the floor along with fragrant spices, Khmer cotton cloth decorated with elephants and yellow silk scarves.

Her profound experience is a poor slum village near Siem Reap. She loves everyone there because she lived with them. She took care of the people. She held them. She gave children medicine and water. She cried herself to sleep every night. She suffered from nightmares surrounded by dying crying children, Save me Save me.

One woman in the village takes care of sixteen children.

Thirsty, hungry, exhausted sick children, women and men exist.

She puts the survivors of this one little village into her bag. She discards everything else.

She saves weight because there is no clean drinking water. She throws in handfuls of rice and fried bananas for nourishment during the long flight to Sydney.

She doesn’t know how many will survive. She’s ready to carry her experience home.

She knows it will scare the hell out of her friends, family and colleagues.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged