Death Worship

By River

Rumors of intelligent life in Hanoi is an exaggeration, said Leo. Rumor control reports existence.

Take my neighbors Sam and Dave for example, said Tran. Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. Their names and roles are interchangeable. These are not Viet names. If they were, they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone take care of them in old age when they are lying or dying on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 wafting kitchen smells.

It’s an Asian thing. It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $50,000. Cash or no deal.

Virgins have high value in the marriage market. They are have been sequestered behind fear and insecure superstitions and trapped by hovering in-laws and outlaws for centuries.

Marriage is legalized prostitution.     

Father knows best. You don’t marry the girl in Asia. You marry the family.

Cash gives them security. You pay and get the girl. The fun begins. Grandparents need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young pregnancy is always the only option. The tyranny of motherhood.

Accelerate production comrade.

Many procreating humans have more desire thinking about providing offspring for their security than the physical pleasure of sex. So it goes.

Sex is a DUTY. It aint about pleasure. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. Get on. Go for the ride. E jack U late. There are 95 million hard and fast parenthood rules according to the popular Party book, Produce & Consume.

Get married early erotic pressure is on and off, on and off. Savior a small death in 8 seconds.

You do not want to be unmarried, sad, lonely and forgotten.

Loss of face and shame haunts singles with vengeance. Fear of loneliness increases the possibility and probability of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a socialist society.

They’ve taken their hormonal cues and social control systems from Uncle Cosmic.

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Sapa females in the NW, a future fragment of this tale, illustrates the value and necessity for rural girls to marry at the ripe old age of sixteen and produce genetic replicants. Petri dish. More Y chromosomes.

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

Humans crave less suffering and neglect and more love.

Dave’s voice releases anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off cold molten gray interior Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall? His life is one long cold cement wall.

Echoes dance through his brain like sugarplum fairies. He knows the echo because he made the WALLS.

He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement.

He slathered it over red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire to create a work of realist art lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste.

His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a wall blaring news propaganda

and perpetual adolescent dancing drama programs about life next door

where the family sits on cold tile red rose floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies

slurping from cracked bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables

into lost desperate mouths and yelling over each other in tonal decibels

competing with their gigantic plasma television

featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots

devouring acres of rubber plantations, palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland

with a double bladed axe

singing a high Greek-like chorus

their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with peasants as small players.

Everyone’s being played.

(Offstage)

A female’s fingers dance a delicate blur of eighty-eight ivory incantation notes.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

String Theory

Twisted alleys and side streets were clogged with speeding manic motorcyclists texting lovers, women hawking apples, bananas, greens, meat, tofu, used clothing, used condoms and tongues babbling incongruent incomprehensible musical tonal frequencies.

Language is music.

Music is the fuel.

Words play a poor second violin or cello compared to music.

Boys sew heavy yellow plastic tarps. A woman behind her mask paints bicycle chain guards with a green spray. Men grind automotive parts with decibels and electrical impulses. A boy riding behind his friend on a bike spins out a universal red yo-yo string theory.

I sat in a red kindergarten chair near a curb at an artery eatery. The woman serves delicious grilled spring rolls filled with veggies, cold white noodles and a plastic container of greens with chilies and sauce. Using ivory chopsticks from Shanghai I dip noodles and spring rolls in sauce. I smell, chew slow and swallow. It’s cheap and filling. Great taste.

Across the narrow noisy street men drink beer. They accept you being a little stranger than yesterday. Food mama stays busy doing only the lonely lunch. She’s gone before dusk when a woman selling apples takes over the prime real estate sidewalk space.

Street pedestrians dodge speeding motorcycles and women lugging baskets of bananas balanced on bamboo staves past merchants selling goods from ground floor flats. The sidewalk is life’s marketplace extending from long dark narrow dwellings. Kids piss in the gutter.

A motorcycle kills a dog. A man drags the carcass out of the street and leaves it in the gutter. Death is fascinating. Silence covers the dog.

Mechanics hammer metal fixing bikes and broken appliances, salon girls cut, wash and dry, old women gossip how the younger generation is wild and crazy, young boys haul bricks on a deranged frayed rope pulley system up to a flat undergoing renewal, older men in pajamas playing GO slap scarred wooden pieces on a board while drinking beer or tea with friends as children scamper through the maze.

At dusk a sex worker behind a mountain of broken red bricks fondles a construction worker relieving him of fluids and Dong.

Pajamas are the national costume. Cute teddy bears, little animals, pink, red, floral designs. All-purpose all day all the way.

Knowing you live here no one bothers you. Other foreigners are not crazy enough, lost enough or blind enough to discover this dense narrow vibrant rabbit warren neighborhood filled with families and ceaseless racket.

A slouching cafe owner watches family soap opera dramas about love, hope, betrayal, and deception on an entertainment box with rapt attention. Everyone has a box here. It’s the BIG diversion, all entertainment all the time. Loud and louder.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

One Room

I found a private room in a densely packed Hanoi neighborhood near Lenin Park.

It was filled with narrow twisted alleys, dead ends, byways, rusty gates, spilling bougainvillea foliage, curious kids, workers pulling wheeled carts filled with discarded bricks and mud and tube homes on narrow land for tax reasons. 4-5 floors is the max.

I had two roommates. A mellow Frenchman working for a private agricultural farm three hours north who returned to Hanoi on weekends.

The other guy was Mr. Condescending, a young frantic Vietnamese speaking neurotic smart ass Canadian teaching English and playing weekend jazz music with his band of wandering minstrels. He was a native head case.

He’d been in-country four years, was a slob and greedy for money like the locals. He’d drifted from a language factory job to a university language factoid situation. His favorite phrase was in theory.

Give him the hook, said a Khmer playwright.

Sequestered with palm trees and small ponds, my room was a respite from streets and noise with gentle wind. A balcony vision offered red tiled or PSP roofs, jumbled homes, distant flashing light communication towers, clouds and sky.

Narrow alleys were packed with residents on sidewalks eating white noodles, spring rolls, fresh greens, drinking green tea.

Just like crowded Utopia cities, said Leo. Old dusty pagodas wafted incense offerings.

Life on Hanoi streets means 5,000,000 zooming motorcycles, hawkers of red star hats, t-shirts, bags, reproductions of famous oil paintings, silk, traditional medicines, shoes, bamboo baskets and labyrinthian lanes of aroma and mystery. Designs of family life and eternal relationships lived the blues.

Wear and tear shed a heart travel tear with shimmering noodle passion, a broth of conversation’s hunger, said Tran.

A male street hawker spoke with flair and conviction, If you don’t buy my cheap cotton hat with a national flag red star, or a cheap wooden bracelet made by an orphan, then the next time I see you while I am walking hot Hanoi streets in the middle of a broiling day with sweat streaming into my eyes trying to make a living, then I won’t know you.

My eyes will be dark and lost in my pitiful future. I won’t remember you. Ever. I will continue to walk all day in heat. No water. No rest. I walk work meet tourists. This is my social and economic reality. I ignore you when I don’t have a sale.

I began a gardening project on the balcony bringing up trees, plants, flowers and dirt. Good dirt. We have lots of dirt in Vietnam, said Fat Chance the landlord’s son. He had big plans for expanding the property after his father died.

Monsoons arrived. My dear friend a Poet knighted by William Butler Yeats in Sligo, living on San Francisco Mountain near the Grand Canyon asked about floods. Am I drowning?

I sang, row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, life is but a dream.

I am floating. Cleans the air. This is the rainy season and you know how the media likes to sell disasters, epic dramas of humans battling nature, conflicting themselves. Gotta keep the viewers amused and distracted. Media marketing never dies.

I floated with a clear awareness, sitting, writing, exploring, aligning stars and exploding galaxies, nebulas and infinite diversity. A respite from civilization’s abyss.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Garbage in garbage out

write energy

In 1979 I smiled at the Irish women on a Donegal provincial bus. I was heading for Tra-na-Rossen, an isolated youth hostel to work as the warden in dead winter.

I said, I use yellow legal paper called Evidence. It’s perfect for this adventure. It collects source material, because WE, the royal I, remain open. We acknowledge we are from the source, in a sense beyond sense data, a fundamental energy force field. A conduit.

Each of us possesses the innate ability to create and embrace Metta, loving kindness that permeates through the meridians, we tap into the source, we transmit fields of energy, flowing from the source, the infinite vibrations of love.

Many writers prefer using this yellow paper to capture stories, characters, intention and motivation from scene to scene. It flows. I write with a cloud pen nib on mirrors. Creating amnesia. The clouds should know me by now. It’s a strange mixture of life and death, so it is.

I was on fire. I showed them a notebook. It’s tight, flat, hard rough parchment, badly stitched and while it is useful and shaking in laughter it is not quite as free as this Evidence. Two more Moleskine are filled. One sits empty and blank. I am happy & empty. The women stared in amazed silence. Asleep with eyes wide open. Stoned dolmens.

Mandalay

*

Tran hobbled into the ancient citadel in Hue. Children tune violins, cellos, flutes and recorders in bomb craters and the shadows of demolished brick walls. Humid sunlight filters through banana leaves. He relaxes against a crumbling wall hearing his melancholy Vietnamese music language.

Storytellers re-calibrated their true compass bearing on a dirt road in a third world country.

They opened a ragged existential foreign dictionary. It spilled:

myths, creation stories,

symbols, forms, sensations,

perceptions, images, ideographs,

pictographs, virus inoculations, musical interludes,

sonatas, vibratos, journey notes,

broken hearts, haiku poetry

and type-A negative blood donor manifests.

The lexicon illuminates Sensation, Form, Symbols, Nothing and Silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 Bhaktapur, Nepal

Vietnam Wall

Omar said, In silence 58,235 angels sing as hammers and chisels work on a long black wall gouging earth. A team member cleans dusts off the name of Captain Harry G. Cramer of the 14th Special Forces Operational Detachment, October 21st, 1956. He was the first.

Maya Lin was 21 when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial design was selected out of 1,421 entries in 1981. Her entry was #1026.

I thought about what death is, what loss is, she said. A sharp pain that lessons with time but never quite heals over.

She visualized a knife cutting open the Earth and the Earth healing itself. The black granite wall is 493 feet long rising from the ground to a height of 10.1 feet bending at the center at a 125.12 degree angle.

Monument shadows lie heavy over men and women with memory tools. Slivers of black granite are collected by museums. They catalog memories for future generations. The exhibition goes on a Rolling Thunder tour.

Students receive questions on final exams pertaining to names, dates, places, over-sense of space and the under-sense of time’s prayer beads massaged by whorls leaving fingerprints on cave walls, Buddhist deity stones, tools and discovery evidence. Hammer music, chiseled symphonies and soft brushes sing forever.

As long as forever is, said Eternity.

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines. She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention.

She releases repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated obese white tourists.

  

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan.

Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesai Unabridged