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

Bantey Kdei - Ta Phrom by Rita

Evidence of intelligent life on Earth is exaggerated. It’s a rumor and a myth. Sit still long enough and you’ll see/hear some wild, anxiety filled conversations. Filled with interruptions.

Barbarian Voice monkeys interrupt each other. They cancel each other out. It’s an endemic social disease  ... short attention span? No problem. People love to be understood before they understand. This explains their emotional fear, lack of focus and anxiety. Roll your bones. Love my bones, said a t-shirt in Sapa, Vietnam.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones, said Leo.

We are a bundle of pure sensations, said Zeynep. It is a path of authenticity.

That’s been the problem on the trip, said an American girl on a work-study NGO program in Cambodia, No one’s giving us change. Hahaha.

Change comes from within.

400 Khmer mothers and their children wait outside the Children’s Hospital to get a free pain killer pill. The placebo is blue and free. Orange pain pills cost $1. Few can afford orange. Life is a painkiller.

Sound-symbol-sign-word.

Rita and storytellers explored Banteay Kdei and Ta Phrom.

Kdei is perfect for walking and swallowing dust. A sun yellow butterfly led the way. It explored the perimeter sensing jungle and stone perspectives. Wandering outside temples gives you the feeling of natural space acknowledging deep green forests, said Rita, I do this at every temple, it’s rare to see tourists explore the outside, because intelligence and curiosity and taking risks on Earth is rare.

Tourist sheep are in a disciplined hurry. They march along following other sheep on broken stone paths. They wander around, make a lot of noise, pose for pictures and march out. The bus is leaving for another temple.

They look serious and sad. Unhappy people in a happy world.

They are controlled by unknown unconscious diabolical forces. It’s the silent ticking mechanism on their wrist near a pulse saying faster.

Leo shared a Tibetan truth  ...  

I would rather be a tiger for one day than a sheep for a thousand years.

Rita and friends explored gentle forest winds. It’s a slow walking meditation.

I engaged all my senses, said Leo.

Thick dust is a welcome relief after stones, said Tran.

I am light and shadows dancing through leaves, said Devina.

All nature all the time, said Zeynep.

Butterfly leads me into interior passages and shadow play experiences, said Rita. Butterfly shows me mysterious art and deep unconscious space, it takes one life to reach the center and then you’re back where you started, amazing  ...  Ha-ha.

It’s a long walk, said Devina.

Prohm is where the most famous photographed tree on planet Earth grows, said Rita. It entwines itself around and through soft stones. It’s a zoo as idiots line up to take a photo, pushing and shoving and jostling to have their picture taken with the tree and roots as Italian, French and German tongues wag like mongrels in heat.

Life is a bitch, said a sad tourist focusing their plastic toy.

The Japanese and Chinese are total image addicts. Obsessed with posing in doorways and passages with carvings, plants, ferns and leaves and tall trees, thick brown, green gnarled roots above the surface, scary monster leaves and yellow, black, red, golden butterflies to be overwhelming.

We don’t have this beauty at home they lament. We have cement.

Tourists on their great quest feel the experience with their cameras. They behave like the temples are a Dizzy Land amusement park.

Shatter their illusions with the power of laughter, said Rita.

And silence, whispered Omar.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Feel Experience With Camera

How many tourists only see through their camera/cell phone? Millions.

According to Rita, They feel the experience of 8th century Angkor artistic splendor with their cold impersonal little tools. Their experience is defined by camera. Obscura.

It’s not about understanding the Khmer people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It’s about feeling with a camera. They are in a big fat hurry.

They’ve learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and alienation and shallow emptiness. They don’t comprehend the intricacies outside the machine. They believe the machine will save them.

The machine controls them.

They accept this reality. They give up their consciousness.

They press optical machines tight against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image of their transient memory. They judge it. Evaluate. Crimp. DELETE.

Shoot again  ... point  ... shoot  ... delete  ... repeat  ... a snapshot  ... snap a shot  ... preserve this moment forever  ...  Quick  ... they must go  ... to the next great big thing  ... they are in a hurry  ... Death is closer than white on rice.

The tuk-tuk driver is a happy man. He waits as they stuff eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired bored faces. They eat like starving animals.

They run in, around and out of the temples.

They point shoot and delete.

Hurry. They have no time to see their obscurity. This loss and sense of amnesia envelops them. It accompanies them through electromagnetic radioactive meltdowns. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget.

They are on a Homeric quest of infinite grandeur and infinite magnitude.

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press the DownLoad switch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, temples and celestial deities flicker on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged