Department of Truth

According to Zeynep, a scripter in the present, I speak because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or value meaning. So. Help. Me.

1. Truth is classified. The source of truth about everything is classified. I am authorized to say with complete anonymity without revealing sources that truth is filtered, compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified inside a buried locked black box.

1a. The crypto key is top-secret for your blind eyes only. Grave Digger knows the combination and algorithm. The encrypted key is not on a hacked social network site designed to distract your face, mind, heart, consciousness or Lifebook personal profile time bandit. Real friends are few.

1b. Artificial friends are aliens on life support. The key for Time is inside an arrow piercing Greater Complexity with Entropy. A woman, man, child in country XYZ carries the world on their back. They are the key.

2. Truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke, the laugh track.  If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get the joke. Your tears speak and mangle fictional truth-story. They distort and strangle it. Truth is a figment of your imagination. Literary outlaws lie to tell the truth.

3. Truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia, author of Voices, being authorized to speak said, Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

4. Truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source. Eat your broccoli, walnuts and almonds. Biolabs will purify water and distribute free medicine and C-19 vaccinations to every human on Earth. Genetics will create Socratic open-ended educational dreams.

4a. Truth is a starving homeless mother pulling a heavy two-wheeled trash cart with flat tires through a dusty Cambodian town as her daughter forages in garbage containers for food, water and medicine. She is a qualifier, a split infinitive in infinity where someone’s leftovers are another’s banquet.

5. Truth will provide more than 1 billion people access to safe drinking water.

6. Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people who cannot read. Women are 2/3 of this number.

7. Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day. Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

8. Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world who have ZERO access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools.

9. Truth is a terminal disease like peace, love and blindness.

10.Truth is a sledgehammer in Mandalay, Burma.

Love is not truth.

11. Truth is food in your stomach.

This is The Truth Channel. Game, Set, Match.

Media dumbs down sheep.

Technology eats humans.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Chiroptera

Outside a Hanoi balcony is a palm tree. I am an Old World bat. The family name is Chiroptera.

The sub-orders are Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera. I am the only mammal in the diverse animal kingdom that can really fly, sustaining myself on wind currents, up/down drafts and rough drafts of manuscripts before they get cut down or become extinct.

I am too agile to get cut down. My size is perfect. I am a very valuable important and productive member of the eco-system. I will explain. It happened like this. After a night of flying through black skies illuminated by a faint moon and eating insects with delicious fruit for desert I rested in a fifty-foot tall coconut palm tree between two squashed homes in a Hanoi suburb.

Yangon, Burma

I’m roosting under a long thick leafy branch now. It’s a temporary home until my younger brother gets his wings. Soon I hope because we need to expand our territory. It’s a comfortable habitat away from predators like snakes, cats and humans who enjoy tasty grilled bat meat. I’m a flying delicacy with C-19.

Anyway, like I was saying, I was upside down which is normal for bats during the day using my claws to grasp green fibers and I had an itch. I needed to stretch out my voluminous wingspan membranes. Natural enough. I rustled around and then, due my superior enhanced navigational audio and visual systems to find food and survive, I detected a pair of eyes on me. Yes me. I was seen. Discovered.

I shriveled into myself. I pondered this dilemma. After remaining as quiet as a mouse, easy to catch at night when I'm feeling hyper aggressive, I peeked out from under my wings through the leaves. Much to my surprise, sitting in a third floor room looking at me was a strange creature. I hung on for dear life. He seemed harmless enough. I smiled.

To tell the truth I am a hybrid bat and to be scientific about it, a CHIROPTERA. Write that down. Try and say it fast three times and you can impress your friends at nocturnal parties using sonar. I am the MEGA and the MICRO in the Bat Kingdom. Like the Alpha and the Omega.

I have the most highly developed combination of DNA characteristics found in bats. The Mega has large eyes, excellent vision and claws on their second digit.

The Micro has small eyes and uses echolocation to find nourishing insects. I have amazing visual and hearing genetic traits. Twilight calling. I roost in the shade and protection of wide green fronds. Nap time  ... Shhh.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Yangon, Burma

Dance

Mr. Easy Rider took me to the Hue train station. He was a gaunt gap-toothed happy man riding his ER cycle.

The next time you come to Hue you find me, I take you DMZ, Ho Chi Minh trail, Highway #1. He looked at me. You’re old enough to remember that I know.

Yes I’m young enough remembering our eight minute spin to the small red & pink art deco station seeing hearing smelling remembering V trains filled with scared young men and war equipment rolling north and south to fight the French, VC, Americans and ghosts.

Tribes of Australians performed luggage contortionist tricks manipulating mountain size rolling bags clacking up pink stairs. Tattooed blond feminists with white elephant bellies and Mohawk cuts mixed with retired well shoed businessmen and their smart bagged wives.

A diminutive Viet woman arrived on her motto with big goodie bags destined for transport. She struggled to unload everything and drag it upstairs to the shipping zone.

A bored mom waited with two rambling kids as loud European tongues played tag.

A detached thin well-manicured high heeled beauty either going home for a hot shower or heading north to take a sperm bath in the Hanoi skin trade sat alone.

The W.C. in the SIE 4 waiting room smelled sweet. A potent extract of high acidic aroma. Every blue plastic chair bolted to the floor was occupied.

All the film extras in a long running performance milled around playing bamboo flute river music. Old eyes remembered everything from years and tears swallowing dark natural amazement.

A young woman with delicate hands and perfect posture wearing scuffed white ballet slippers and a five-point gold star painted on her forehead turned to me.

Did you hear Mercy Cunningham, the dancer died.

No. What’s the story.

I study dance, that’s how I know. He was amazing. Dance is all about ambiguity, poetry and acceptance. He had independent detachment. He had creative imagination. He said dance was isolated yet cooperating and independent. He believed in the magic of dance.

When you dance for a fleeting moment you feel alive.

I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, a language in space, I said.

It’s more than that, said Tran a one-legged dancer leaning against nothing.

There are five rhythms in dance.

You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.

Really, said the woman.

Yes. Then you have a line, from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

Chaos follows, a combination of circle and lines where male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.

After chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.

She danced away.

Movement never lies. 

Seeing through soft eyes I visualize a language in space, said Rita.

A spoken language dies on Earth every two weeks, said Tran.

Yes, said Devina. Storytellers sing and dance oral stories. The world is made of stories, not atoms. WE memorize seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies, create and exchange clan and tribal myths as children listen, memorizing, chanting, reciting songs and the dances of their ancestors. They receive and transmit future oral traditions.

Historians try to understand what happened through the arrow of time.

Cultural anthropologists try to understand how people communicated their stories, said Omar.

The more I see the less I know, said Leo. WE ride beams of light. Let’s dance.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

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

Book of Amnesia, Volume 3

Gonzo journalism. Creative nonfiction. Jazz prose poetry.

Life experience. System analysis and social autopsy.

Genius kid friends share adventures and stories.

This is a flawed masterpiece.

Everything you need to know is in this book.

This work incorporates stories from Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia and Utopia.

Book of Amnesia, Volume 3

ISBN: 9798859766413