Dance hall

Greetings,

The dancing hall at Preah Khan is where dancers don't smile. They dance. They are slave dancers, all the women.

They dance for the king. He is the god-king. He has resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs, new decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, conquest, harvests, seasons, sun, and moon. 

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

One dances to escape the tyranny. She's danced all her short, sweet life.

The hall of dancers is surrounded by columns, portals and broken jumbled green moss stones. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots crawl toward dancers. They dance through roots, past Shiva and Vishnu. The preserver and destroyer of life. 

Two foreign dancers dance with guide books. Golden leafed pages dance past their eyes. A guide who knows everything watches them. They are blind. He dances alone.

Metta.

Phimeamakas, Preah Pithu, Thommanon, Chau Say Thevoda...

Feel with camera

Greetings,

How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. They feel the experience of 8th century artistic splendor with only their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. It's not about knowing, understanding the people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera.

They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image, their memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept. He waited when they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry! They have no time to see with their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. 

They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press, ever so lightly, the Down Loadswitch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker and play on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.

Metta. 

Interior, Banteay Srei, 9th C. 

Jumping Thunder

"Find whatever freedom it is that you need or whatever freedom from need that you seek" - a post on Hanoian from a writer in the Botanical Garden. Everyone lives in their personal garden, visible, secret, serene and portable.

Now then. From the notebook extolling recent Hue travel. On our first afternoon in Hue, Joe, Andi, Isabella and I walked to the Citadel. It sits along the Perfume River, long walled enclosures. It's huge with many exhibits, temples and rooms filled with photographs, art objects and paintings. Old images show an arena where they staged fights between elephants and tigers. 

It rains heavy and the girls disappear. Joe and I take shelter under a pagoda roof with a young couple.

She teaches poetry. Joe asks her to tell us a poem. Thunder. Lightning. She jumps. Rain pours on fields, old marbled stone stones, inside green. Initially she is shy, then she recites a poem. It is musical and mysterious. It is about love, about two people missing each other. Her voice is strong. She feels this poem through her, it is her life, history, all the stories and songs and poetry she learned growing up surrounded by friends and family.

She gets into it. Her voice is an angel. Her melody, rhythm and voice flow as the thundering rain and lightning flashes and dances.

We applaud her performance. She is retiring, relieved. Joe and I perform "Singing In The Rain," for them, circling around stone pillars, twirling with the words, feeling the music. Rain dance. They laugh.

The intensity of the rain slows down and we all walk through the drizzle. Say farewell.

The sun comes out, reflecting diamond light on stones inside shallow water pools. Deep dark blue skies fill the air above mountains. The sun drenched fields are an amazing brilliant shade of green.

We walk over the bridge, over the river.

Metta.

Act 1

(Editor's note - this will be published as Room For Rent on the side bar. It is also available at Scribd.) 

September

“The leaves are falling fast,” I said to a ghost.

“They are falling far from the tree,” the ghost said.

“Yes, they are dancing,” I said. “Dance is about process, becoming, the passage of time. Shiva symbolizes the union of space and time and indicates creation. This is why dance is one of the most ancient forms of magic.”

“Magic is universal,” the ghost said. “People wear masks to hide their transformation, seeking to change their dancer into a god or demon. Dance is the incarnation of eternal energy. They are free. Do leaves really fall far from the tree? It’s hard to say. Did you see a diamond light off a leaf this morning? It reflected an elegant universe.”

“Yes, the diamond reflects 10,000 things.”

“What do you see now?”

“I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space.”

“It’s more than that,” the ghost said. “There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle, it’s a circular

movement from the feminine container. She is earth.”

“Really?”

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

“Fire purifies,” I said.

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

“I see. And then?”

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

“Ah, I see language in space. The word is beauty. The Greeks said it was order.”

“Speak to me,” the ghost said. “Tell me a secret. Plant a seed in my garden. Something glorious for spring. Eternal material with regeneration potential. Turn old soil. Give me a metaphor for digging.”

“They say grief for the dead was the origin of poetry.”

“What are your choices?” the ghost asked. “Choice is a powerful word.”

“Initially I chose to feel resentment for their lack of responsibility. I had to deal with my resentment. Why did I feel resentment? It was because of deception. My lack of knowing. Clare’s lack of truth. Her mask. I was angry I didn’t see behind her mask sooner. I was blind. I forgave myself and started to see.”

“Were you really angry or were you confused, sensing the sadness? What did you see?”

“I sensed the sadness beneath the surface. How they tried to fill up their emptiness. How their containers were bland and empty.”

“Is this really true, their containers were empty?” said the ghost.

“They were filled with anger and fear. I saw how they never learned. How their destiny brought them together intheir misery. How the two of them were on this endless negative spiral of energy.”

“They forecast their death?”

“I’m afraid they may end up killing themselves. It’s the chance they’ll take when they get desperate further down the road. The choice they will make. This is the way, their nature. How I process it. How I paid attention to their pain and suffering, their loneliness.”

“What do you mean? Please don’t talk nonsense. Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract. We have no time. Turn your hourglass over and talk. Remember we are all death deferred. We are all orphans sooner or later.”

“Ok, here’s the play,” I said, “a story inside a story with a through line. The inside is the outside veiled in mystery. I made a choice inside the puzzle. I am not saving anybody here.”

“Yes, I see your CPR accreditation is up for renewal. I’ve read your relationship resume. You’ve had your share playing many rescuing roles. Ok, then, stop the bleeding and start the breathing. Three compressions near the sternum. You know the procedure. It’s not about justice, it’s about procedure. You’ve always been here, wherever here is, haven’t you?”

“Sure, I’ve always enjoyed passing through incarnations. This is my nature.”

“Tell me a story. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage. I need some entertainment, some drama with character development, arc, conflict, resolution, direction and movement. A through line,” said the ghost.

Metta.

Bone script

Once he started, establishing a voice, setting and characters in the human condition on paper surrounded by illiterate simple, loud, noisy, volume addicted humans with royal blue ink it was a joy.

He sat at a warung, a cheap food place - plain white virgin rice, spicy chilly, egg, green veggies, tempe, tofu, deep fried crackers - on the other side of the Berlin Wall. He'd escaped from the tyranny of noisy educational sad robots trapped in their expectations of perpetual childhood.

A village woman piled her trash near a grove of banana trees and lit a fire. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Smoke curled around a man pushing his chipped blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cheap cloth, simple tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and basic household goods. Rolling the wheels through neighborhoods.

Cumulus clouds gathered momentum.

Nearby were the yelling village people. A tall thin woman with her 3-4 year old, monkey boy child. Pregnancy was her ticket out of hell, loneliness and misery. In a village you traded sex for security.

She and her mother tormented the kid. He cried. They laughed at him. They created a mini-monster. A boy who hated women now and later. He was dependent on them for food and affection. Mother and daughter uttered primal grunt sounds. The mother combed her daughter's hair scavenging follicles for nits and lice. Protein.

Crying children. Perpetual distractions.

Time-death.

The primordial darkness. Cosmic birth. The cave of inner being.

He saw her through a window when the metro pulled in.

Alone and cold, she waited for the green metro door to open.

It was late. She wore a thin black sweater and long gray skirt.

She was slight...olive pale skin, black hair pulled back, around 45.

She limped into the car dragging her right foot. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot looked like a case of elephantiasis. She sat twenty feet away.

She bent over and slowly raised her skirt from around her ankles. The burned and bloody skin damage ran three inches across and ten inches high. Either first or second degree burns. A layer of skin was exposed, red, lined with white. Bare and exposed. She needed medical attention.

Two men across from her stared and diverted their eyes.

She sat, fingered a phone and grimaced. No tears, just a stoic face.

The metro rolled through night. It passed a river, a neon bright Everest furniture store, fast food emptiness and an expensive private hospital filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions and potions and patients with money.

She inspected her ankle, touching an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors.

Two old women balancing collected piles of scrap wood on their heads took a shortcut through village mud.

A perfect white and yellow winged butterfly danced in a slight spring breeze.