Storyteller - Laos

I am big seven said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator in Vientiane.

Your life is a test. Test first lessons later. It isn’t a dress rehearsal. If it’s an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear. Get to the verb.

My dad’s not very smart. It’s his DNA, a string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

Rain pours like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over poor rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

It’s amazing what people do when they don’t have anything to do. Maybe it’s an innate creative instinct. Like milling around. I’ve learned there are three kinds of people in the world.

people who make things happen

people who watch people make things happen

people who don’t know what’s going on

My grandmother sits on our 1924 austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony.

Every day is a ceremony.

At dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She earns merit in this life. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

Grandfather sits staring at rain collecting in pools.

Father’s very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

My mom’s also smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever?

After the rain, when it’s dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and yellow flaming candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It’s a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character said in Apocalypse Now, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kind of like that smell. What’s the word? Acrid. 

When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby delivery machine. What’s another mouth? In China I’m worth $3-5K on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

Mom ignores me mostly. She’s busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She’s a soft kindlater.

People like parents and teachers and lazy humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

Lao people are soft and gentle. We have good hearts. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera.

The trick is to tolerate with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be, zap, like a white zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

The kid continued, for cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity.

This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

I used to complain I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.

This fact needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance milling around.

But what do I know? Milling kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get educated. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

A human’s existence is one long perpetual distraction.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to go and finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you build self-control and grit, asked a visitor to Earth.

Through failure and hardship, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance. Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

Thanks for the life lesson, said traveler. You are the future of Laos.

I have my junior philosopher’s badge, said the kid.

tai dam weaving village

escape the tyranny of life

I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.

Silence is everything. I am one with everything. A singularity.

All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, forms, symbols, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.

Everything floats away. Mu. Nothing. Maya. Illusion. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, and texture feeling regret, loss and a death of the spirit? I witness sad lost blank faces. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.

I never hear laughter as I pass through life with my Dream Sweeper Machine.

What does laughter sound like?

What color is sound?

This is my Beauty. Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.

I am a stone cold Apsara silent dancer dancing with my revolutionary evolutionary soul.

I feel like screaming.

The dancing hall inside the Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. 

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

I dance to escape the tyranny of life. I use my dance to express life. I’ve danced all my short, sweet existence.

The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisperdance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots below the surface of appearances in deep burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” 

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” 

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” 

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” 

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.” 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 6 March 1927 - 17 April 2014

On Style: "In every book I try to make a different path [...]. One doesn't choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that and they see things I hadn't seen. I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean.

On Magical Realism: Literary critic Michael Bell proposes an alternative understanding for García Márquez's style, as the category magic realism is criticized for being dichotimizing and exoticizing, "what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimentally the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed." 

García Márquez and his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza discuss his work in a similar way, "'The way you treat reality in your books...has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it...' 'This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.'"

On Solitude: In response to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's question, "If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood perhaps?" García Márquez replied, "I think it's a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously."

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Solitude of Latin America", he relates this theme of solitude to the Latin American experience, "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."

On Macondo: In his autobiography, García Márquez explains his fascination with the word and concept Macondo. He describes a trip he made with his mother back to Aracataca as a young man:

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant...I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the Ceiba.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (wiki)

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