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

Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Tolerance danced through life.

Raven

The next day the tribe crossed a plain and reached a raging river. As they knew from their ancestor’s tales, the river was deepest here because deaths upstream created tears as souls migrated on their journey through the Bardo.

What’s the Bardo? asked Jamie.

A place between life and death. A transition zone. Where, after you die, for nine days, you confront ghosts and demons wearing your old masks. We need nine days to take another form and during these nine days we meet all these demons reminding us of our temporal existence.

The tribe dreamed as wood evolved into ashes. Their fire dream consumed itself as sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peaceful feelings. She fell awake.

Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses as a morning breeze delivered petals of a wild rose to her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings, and blurred prisms of light.

She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle. Her essence was joy, delight and happiness. It was a world of pure being. She recognized the world of appearances was full of suffering, desire and illusion.

Discovering her essence, her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision. People seeking to know their future and wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart to them finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity. She kept her own counsel knowing others would have to find their own way in their personal and collective wilderness.

Her hair caught fire as she gathered flames while lighting a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors. She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.

She became an angel of light. Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness.

Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self. Fire became her driver, sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine was fed by the energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.

Yes, said Omar, Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies as the world of men communicate with their world by means of music and dance.

I am a character in my own story, said Omar, a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.

A Century is Nothing

Notebook 2020

the hilarity of what it means to be human

treat other's work with loving sympathy

walk dirt to Julie's place

workers remove cement pilings for wire spiders

lines lead to tangled stories

huge cement sewage cyclinders dress dirt

overcast

village symbiosis

grandmother smiles

counts money

girls scrub pots and pans

chatter tongues

years now feeling knowing here

beauty and timeless metamorphosis

dance is a cosmic creation

stars and planets dance around universe

pyrrhic - the dance of fire

yes, the elusive beauty of human sorrow

which men will not for a long time

learn to understand and describe

and which it seems only music can convey

Pay the price

I never take yes for an answer.

What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

*

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Chengdu. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion orators

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance

Vientiane, Laos

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your Mind-At-Large, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia, V2

Yangon, Burma