Saigon

Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

*

"I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole." - Elias Canetti

Die Twice

Before going to Cambodia I discovered a Saigon museum named for Uncle Ho. He’s the patron saint of Diehard Marxist Mania. It is a popular location for virginal couples posing for wedding photographs using expansive interior halls and sweeping stairways. Happy grooms escorted joyful brides in rented sparkling jewelry trailing gowns, frozen on stairs, in corridors, on window ledges. Jump!

In a dusty display case along a forgotten corridor were piles of medals, stamps, currencies and Zippo lighters. A Zippo was ubiquitous among soldiers with engraved inscriptions. One lighter said:

There are two times you face death.

Once when you’re born and once when you face death.

Hala, a Muslim girl I knew in Lhasa said, There are people who are born laughing and people who are born crying, I was born laughing.

Parked outside the museum was a U.S. Air Force F-16, ambulance, jeep, Huey helicopter and the tank North Vietnamese forces commanded to flatten gates and liberate the South. Rows of antique French cars used to ferry the wounded and ammunition around Saigon during the war collected dust in meticulous gleaming historical automotive fashion.

Hexagram 34 - The Power of the Great

Perseverance furthers. Ask what is right. Be in harmony. Movement. Not stubborn. Yielding quietly preserving work to remove resistance.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Practice

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden. It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ... Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Practice allows you to wake up.

Mandalay

*

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 calm 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 her 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 rich 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 Amnesia, V1

Freak Show

Gonzo journalism. Creative nonfiction. Jazz prose poetry.

Life experience. System analysis and social autopsy.

Genius kid friends are storytellers.

This is a flawed masterpiece.

Everything you need to know is in this book.

*

... Write about that unpleasant fact, said the literary agent. Literate types want something to read while stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their mundane superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Life happens where sheep feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s an adventure.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret and exhausted by their monkey mind where it is very comfortable … They absorb static or moving pictures to escape their terminal condition needing electronic reality and soft machine material…They burn out brain cells staring at little screaming screens … Cheap effective pervasive advertising permeates their consciousness speaking of Faust and making a deal … Dying is a grim comic business … It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

There’s nothing more expensive than poverty.

Ask Grave Digger about plot development, said Rita, Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear the future. Not me! Why me? The ego loves the CIRCUS of daily distractions … it wears them down … they become lethargic, depressed, suicidal, lazy and so on… lazy people never kill themselves.

They die of boredom, alienation, loneliness and neglect. Fate and Death conversed, I’m a funny thing, said Fate. Yes, you are said Death.

Healthy individuals respect the monkey mind. They are present now. They meditate. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. Sheep don’t read being lazy to face their fears with courage and honesty to learn their truths. Brave ones ask why exploring flow with their microscopic pure energy … A bag of bones … Atoms … WE are pure light.

Everything is energy, frequency and vibrations.

Many are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level. They want fast food and a remote to operate their 46-inch plasma screen with 500 channels … They eat their phone … They enjoy simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest … They want happy endings like orgasms. Got it?

Keep it simple stupid. KISS. Experiment with dirty realism. Give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities.

            Don’t write about what you know.

            Write about what you need to know, write to find out.

“The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” - Nin

Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover, an old idea with shiny tin foil packaging like a love sock named OK condom. Write about a decisive moment, like the condemned guy stepping around a puddle on his way to the gallows in Burma.

The Savage Detectives by Bolano is about poets searching for a lost Chilean poet in Europe, another quest to consider. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end, one more unpleasant fact about publishing and life. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher.

Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors leave or die laughing. New editors read the work. Maybe the first editor helped us. Maybe a new editor thinks it's garbage needing a major rewrite, revisions, deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations.

If so, a narrative HOOK leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it? Yes, said Zeynep, Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no values, morals or principles?

It’s all about money honey, said agent XYZ, And eyeballs … everything has a price, a user and exchange value in the world market of ideas, weapons, drugs and humans…don’t give me any philosophical arguments.

You’ve been very helpful. What a great saga, said Zeynep, Now let my storyteller friends and an omniscient blind scripter show the tale. Yes. It’s all yours. I have one question, said lit agent, how long have you been here? All fucking day, said Zeynep  ... Here’s your ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth.

Book of Amnesia V1

Fear is a killer

Question?

Is the problem or surprise the form, a formless form or the form of the formless forming sea foaming form?

If so, can it be understood by reducing, redacting, paralleling, associating another journey? Can you break the continuity of the journey with memories of an ephemeral I ? Yes … It’s not a problem, it’s a surprise, said Impermanence.

Who am I?

I am a who to what I am.

Why am I here?

How did I get here?

How did I grow?

Q has three parts:

a) What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil?

b) What is the nature of evil? The question is the answer. It is not in this tale, play or manuscript.

See Ukraine - visualize beyond wild.

c) What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?

Q. Where does the real end and the artificial begin? I am a superficial person, said Grave Digger … I pretend to be who I am in my future. I know two things. My hands. My work is never finished.

Q? Does fate control our free will? Yes.. Fate cannot lie. If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you don’t get life’s joke, said Laughter Therapy … Ha, ha, ha.

Q? Should we worry about the style? No. Should we worry about the form? No. Worry is interest on a bill yet to come due. No guilt, regret, fear, or monkey mind. Monkey loves the circus of sensory overload. We live in a world of forms.

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

Q: what is strange? Life is strange, bizarre, comic, tragic and very short … Life is a brief clear precise concise life sentence. How do stories, vignettes, jazz prose poems, journalism fragments, and system analysis communicate with each other?

A: They walk dirt paths, ford rivers, scale mountains, explore jungles, valleys and estuaries and cross metaphysical existential borders … they build sandcastles near the sea. They practice telepathy … they are time travelers. Aliens.

They meditate on the process of their death.

The dance and dancer are one.

Visually impaired man receives help making change

As a mystic and prescient person, Zeynep you have the responsibility to be honest. Be light about it. Think big and stay in the particular. Know what keeps you motivated and happy. Autotelic. 

Next question Z, How do you stay fresh and centered? You make it new day-by-day, said Z, Make it new. A storyteller staying in one place goes blind, we move around before becoming native and dull. Before we think and act like local sheep.

Lost confused passive ones living in Inertia, a state of mind, perfect the art of MILLING AROUND in Country ABC, said Rita, They speak in monosyllables Yeah, yeah. Big vocabulary. 2% are awake. 98% are asleep. The majority are afraid to ask the WHY question.

Fear is a killer. Life is a killer.

People asking questions get slaughtered. See the Killing Fields on page 101 - the last room you want to enter. Keeping your big fat fucking mouth shut is wise and prudent behavior to survive post-genocidal truth ghosts. It is an unpleasant fact. If you open your trap someone cuts out your tongue.

In this peculiar particular situation expert scientific witnesses have proven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt and doubt has a shadow with logical coherence …

... that WE, being expert witnesses, reliable narrators and noble natives living with our DNA genius bear witness to alienated, lonely, bored, listless, passive,

... Earthlings meandering with no purpose, lost, unimaginative having zero curiosity and staring with blind eyes - due to severe emotional, mental, physical traumas with memories of suffering, genocide and ghosts.

They remain childlike, tender, sweet, kind, and hospitable with a terminal case of confusion and loss forever, hiding in deep shadows, addicted to dumb phone entertainment boredom. Their beating hearts caress resignation, despair, depression, lack of initiative or incentive based on fear of punishment, or loss of face or humiliation with hard-wired SHAME.

They grow and live a meditative Buddhist spiritual way of identity and culture.

They are easily distracted. Kids play. Forever young. Adults have perfected the art and style of Pretending To Be Busy.

What art. What beauty. What style. What form. What context. What a formal pertinacious way. What objective truth. What verisimilitude.

Here are some true facts, said Rita an orphan and independent author. Unpleasant facts are littered in this epic like lovers, countries, butterflies, social systems, food and transformation.

The Book of Amnesia, V1

Visually impaired guitar player

String Theory

Hanoi.

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.

Life During Wartime - Talking Heads Live