October by Rita

Affect your environment. Do not let your environment affect you.

Take the blue line … celebrate red ink with a Chopin fountain pen … see how the ink bleeds on new paper … how it feels, this dancing wind song, point and line … take a line for a walk.

Hanoi air is cool before dawn when the landlord’s dog trapped in a long cement tunnel howls at 3:30 a.m. The dog is an apt metaphor for residents trapped in long cement tunnels called home sweet home.

Elsewhere the canine is grilled and basted on a spit at low heat allowing the flavor and juices to penetrate meat for a family feast.

Someone passing through is awake seeing stars, hearing the shriek of fruit bats returning to roost in long green palm branches gathering membranes, silent before dawn amplifiers at Lenin Park sing heavy DUTY patriotic songs with yellow grumbling bulldozers moving dirt, filling in lakes, drowning algae, plankton and fish habitats before the Party Leader plugs in her cassette machine to play aerobic madness in orange light before brainwashed human-birds preen ruffled dream feathers, screw their darling, feed incense to the dead, turn on plasma televisions, cook rice, fire up motorcycles and well before women sweep leaves from night’s tears.

Who will write the history of tears?

Free air raptors and Finch, destined to die in a bamboo cage, sing. Bats sleep in deep green leaves near the balcony of a narrow Hanoi home.

I don’t remember the century. Maybe it was The Glorious Year of Reconstruction.  Men hammered, shoveled and hauled Hanoi toward a glorious future.

Night stars dream before dawn hearing heavy machines at the park. Workers truck rocks to fill in the lake. Old Russian bulldozers shove piles of granite along paths creating new boundaries in citizens’ imagination limiting their curiosity and freedom. The ceaseless mechanical rumbling of machines sounds like a broken Teutonic alarm clock with geologic earthquake Richter intensity.

Echoes of crashing, tumbling granite stones shatters stillness. Reconstruction machines have a schedule, a deadline, a force of progressive development.

Inside bamboo an invisible scripter blends into a natural environment weaving a thread with unconditional love. Music perforates starlight silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Hanoi Job

After walking through a narrow Hanoi concrete passageway and dodging motorcycles on chaotic dream streets I ate in silence with young desolate hardhat construction workers.

I visited Jasmine, 21, a tall regal aristocratic beautiful virgin with a trembling lower lip allowing her to develop English fluency and confidence. She has a university degree and works as an office girl at DUMB, an international shipping company. Their office is on the 101st floor of Ocean Parking, a silver & glass business monster with many empty offices.

Her manager, Sonny Boy, invited me over for breakfast on the top floor overlooking Lenin Park and massive traffic gridlock. He has an MBA from Hollandaise.

This is how it works in a Socialist country, he said, People are not paid enough so they figure out how to make more money by ... shall I say, using their position, their opportunity to increase their profit ...

at Level One people need to get a good education and get a job with a multinational company ...

at Level Two they need connections with the authorities, they need to move up the food chain with government people having no ethics and no morals it’s all about Survival, this is the empirical reality derived from experiment and observation and connections and facts rather than theory.

Dancing wind and lightning bolts send shock waves through the atmosphere.

Jasmine sleeps her noon dream.

Her mother cleans glass display world windows downstairs in unconscious soup zones.

A woman adjusts her bamboo hat above a face mask resting her lungs from morning’s bike pedal adventure loaded with heavy duty plastic five-gallon containers of cooking oil.

A temporary consumer boredom passes through a metamorphic Carpe Diem, 24/7 below a solace solarium.

Wagging tongues inside language laughter weave a crème silk linen blend as an old blind woman wielding a bamboo staff leads her blind husband along a narrow cement path past high cracked walls dreaming about their long lost free orphan children prospering in green villages away from the madness.

Hanoi LOUD Speakers by Tran

Garden is a green dawn. Mynahs high in early breeze whistle Living Is Happiness.

Keep your hand moving yes no maybe automatic central nervous system electrical impulses dance ink in a notebook as a Hanoi train whistle signals its approach to a crossing.

A low frequency of rumbling engines pulling thirteen green cars penetrates a thick hazy pollution cloud cover.

An authoritarian female voice echoes from rusty loudspeakers at Lenin Park.

SUPPORT YOUR FAMILY

LOVE YOUR PARENTS

REMEMBER YOUR ANCESTORS

REPORT UNUSAL BEHAVIOR

PRACTICE GOOD SOCIALIST BEHAVIOR

DO NOT PEE OR SPIT IN PUBLIC

CARE YOUR NEIGHBORS

WASH YOUR PAJAMAS

CLEAN OUT YOUR DREAMS

SACRIFICE FOR THE COLLECTIVE HARMONY

Every street corner in Hanoi wears million-year-old wired concave loudspeakers mounted on tall grey cement pilings. The city is crisscrossed by pilings, black spider wires and speakers before, during and after wars.

At 7:45 a.m. they blare out tinny indistinguishable news propaganda blather and martial music. Residents marching to new economic tunes ignore ha noise.

Making Money Is Glorious Comrade!

Impatient frustrated motorcycle people beep-beep-beep to negotiate a thin street filled with kids, elderly walkers and young exercise addicts going or coming from Lenin park after crossing congested wide boulevards as mercenary maniacs increase 125cc speed.         

Women carrying bamboo baskets filled with vegetables, bricks, recycled steel, bread and dreams mix with residents sitting on tiny plastic kindergarten forever young chairs crowding homes and store fronts, drinking beer, peeling, peeing, cooking, eating incense, screwing, living and dying.

Inside numerous open portal homes fronted by rusty gray metal accordion gates motorcycles nestle in the front room. Central parking. Volume idiot box images flickers phosphorescence, marketing, branding and economic advertising:

WE DON’T HAVE WHAT YOU WANT

WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED

into brains and faces of comatose kids, parents, grandparents and dead ancestors. An old woman sits slumped against a doorframe staring at the box.

She hasn’t seen the sky for years.

If she looks left and up she can see a slight sliver shiver that’s it, said Tran.

Let’s eat. Let’s watch TV. Let’s look at our phones. Give up your consciousness.

Fill your stomach. Everyone is happy. Life is amazing and short.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Chiroptera

Outside a Hanoi balcony is a palm tree. I am an Old World bat. The family name is Chiroptera.

The sub-orders are Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera. I am the only mammal in the diverse animal kingdom that can really fly, sustaining myself on wind currents, up/down drafts and rough drafts of manuscripts before they get cut down or become extinct.

I am too agile to get cut down. My size is perfect. I am a very valuable important and productive member of the eco-system. I will explain. It happened like this. After a night of flying through black skies illuminated by a faint moon and eating insects with delicious fruit for desert I rested in a fifty-foot tall coconut palm tree between two squashed homes in a Hanoi suburb.

Yangon, Burma

I’m roosting under a long thick leafy branch now. It’s a temporary home until my younger brother gets his wings. Soon I hope because we need to expand our territory. It’s a comfortable habitat away from predators like snakes, cats and humans who enjoy tasty grilled bat meat. I’m a flying delicacy with C-19.

Anyway, like I was saying, I was upside down which is normal for bats during the day using my claws to grasp green fibers and I had an itch. I needed to stretch out my voluminous wingspan membranes. Natural enough. I rustled around and then, due my superior enhanced navigational audio and visual systems to find food and survive, I detected a pair of eyes on me. Yes me. I was seen. Discovered.

I shriveled into myself. I pondered this dilemma. After remaining as quiet as a mouse, easy to catch at night when I'm feeling hyper aggressive, I peeked out from under my wings through the leaves. Much to my surprise, sitting in a third floor room looking at me was a strange creature. I hung on for dear life. He seemed harmless enough. I smiled.

To tell the truth I am a hybrid bat and to be scientific about it, a CHIROPTERA. Write that down. Try and say it fast three times and you can impress your friends at nocturnal parties using sonar. I am the MEGA and the MICRO in the Bat Kingdom. Like the Alpha and the Omega.

I have the most highly developed combination of DNA characteristics found in bats. The Mega has large eyes, excellent vision and claws on their second digit.

The Micro has small eyes and uses echolocation to find nourishing insects. I have amazing visual and hearing genetic traits. Twilight calling. I roost in the shade and protection of wide green fronds. Nap time  ... Shhh.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Yangon, Burma

Ang

Way of the empty hand.

Be inwardly humble and outwardly gentle, said Ang, a Hanoi student lawyer with a 5th degree Dan black belt. She was small fast and deadly. A quick tiger without a motorcycle license.

We rode around Hanoi. I knew the city and showed her diversions.

It’s strange having a foreigner give me directions in my town, she yelled into the wind as we negotiated a dusty section of congested road works for a new subway while speeding south near Lenin Park.

Take it easy baby I whispered as we swerved through a phalanx of cycles, cars, trucks and bike spokes.

We stopped near a lake for iced java. Hanoi has many lakes. The Vietnamese coffee comes from the Central Highlands. It is high quality. Vietnam is the world’s second biggest coffee exporter after Brazil.

Hanoi, like Beijing, is the conservative cold capital. It was bombed during the war. Hanoi survived the Chinese, French, Americans and Vietnamese. War by proxy like now elsewhere. Same-same but different. Saigon is the new young economic vibrant city where anything goes 24/7.  Beijing-Hanoi. Shanghai-Saigon.

My name means heart in Vietnamese, said Ang.

I am a Bui Doi, I said.

I know what that means, she said and she wasn’t laughing when she said it.

Dust collector whispered Tran.

An old man with heavy ropes eating his shoulder skin, tendons and bones pulled a wooden cart filled with bags of cement down the street. His rhythm, cadence and rubber sandals slapping pavement burned his energy doing his daily labor inside the people’s labyrinth surrounded by horns, cycles, cars, bikes, push carts and pedestrians as he strained forward, shoulder muscles bouncing, flexing, extending his action, thick thigh muscles grinding his momentum like a shark always forward.

Iceman arrived with his cart and long crystal blocks. He sawed ice into manageable chunks and carried bags of frozen water into the cafe. Light glimmered crystals.

A man in a white government shirt stood on the sidewalk picking his teeth with a sliver of wood demonstrating his ability to eat food.

It’s a slow gradual invisibility, said a witness at life’s moveable feast.

Today would be a good day to be a kite, I said to Ang.

You’re crazy, no one wants to be a kite, she said and I said, Maybe you’d rather be the string. She didn’t think this was funny.

Sure, I said, If you were the kite and others the string they would, could, should, control you, as a willing victim of circumstances outside your control with no free will. You’d have no responsibility, flying free.

Yes. I like having no responsibility except for myself.

You’d have free choice with amazing potential, I said stringing her along with The Analysis of Consequence.

Teach me something about photography she ordered in a domineering tone because she was small powerful AND angry with repressed regret because her mom abandoned her for economic reasons to work in a town 150 clicks north so Ang went to school to be a lawyer, to hopefully immigrate to England someday and attending daily karate practice with displaced aggression while taking care of her spoiled whining 11-year-old brother then her older sister had a baby and it meant more housework for Ang as a domestic servant being younger so she was frustrated at the mean dirty tricks life played on her.

I have a camera on my phone, she said. Advice?

Move slowly. Incorporate your karate skills into street movement. Practice. Be. See. Shoot a lot. Always have your camera ready. Anticipate. Try new angles and see geometric patterns of light. Paint with light. Prowl the streets. Ignore the main event. Focus on the spectators. Shoot through things and get close enough to touch your subject, dance around your subject, use RAW format.

I grabbed my Leica, got down on hands and knees angling between bamboo chairs, framed, composed, exhaled and squeezed the imperceptible impeccable shutter. The image of bamboo lined close to the eye, depth of field, legs, and blurred feet. Visual metaphors. See?

Yes, thanks.

It’s like karate or sex, I said. Practice. Do it 10,000 times until you get it.

A man walked by. He saw a foreigner with a local girl sitting on a bench near the Lake of Swords. Milk him, he joked. Ang walked over and severed his spinal cord in a blue flash of beauty and dexterity. He crumpled, dying instantly.

She sat down. That’ll teach him. A blind man with a cart collected the body. Physicians at Peoples’ Hospital #4 dissected the cadaver to recycle organs. Where do the eyes go, asked Doctor Death. In the eye bag, said a blind nurse.

See Beauty and Cruelty without hope or fear with a sense of humor, said Tran balancing on his strong leg in deep shadows.

What is the purpose of Beauty, asked Rita. Beauty held up her mirror, See for yourself flaneur.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Dead Dog

Hope is the last thing that dies, yells Dave’s wife. Take out the garbage fat man, lose face idiot, hide your shame, raise your voice like a torn flag of authority, signaling your displeasure with infants, get them in line, shape them up because you can’t ship them out.

You will raise them to yell with the best of them. They will yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep and cackling crows sending shivers down your spineless pitiful form filled with regret, anger and fear manifesting your tight choking life under long cold florescent lights in a shattering glare.

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers. They will burn you and carry your photo to the village artist who will memorize your face in black and white tones. On the family altar we will look at your frozen 8x10 face forever and give you fruit and water offerings.

We  burn incense so your spirit can eat, so it will not be angry and return as a yelling, demanding, hungry ghost or an invisible reliable scripter. You will perform your filial duty

One day in the near future of now, your dead ancestors will remember sounds, words, phrases and life sentences called talk-speak until they achieve the decibel level required to rejoin the family’s formless form. They will compete in yelling contests with speaking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, spouse, child, boss, lover, or stranger yells. I ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells again a little louder. No answer. I wait for them to yell louder, said a ghost hiding in Silence.

Silence is Form, Style, Sensation, Nothing and the Reality of Death.

After I’ve made them yell three times I answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living nightmare. To teach them a lesson I answer with a Whisper. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with other yellers around them.

They are distracted by sensory stimuli overload.

I embrace chaos in the glare of ancestor memories. My sweet revenge.

I reject them with silence, a deadly comprehensive weapon.

Two ghosts whisper - give them 1,000 lashes with your tongue.

I have 1,000 arms and 1,000 eyes.

My name is Avalokiteshvara.

I am a Bodhisattva of compassion for all beings.

I churn the Ocean Of Milk at Angkor Wat.

I am infinite wisdom in the ocean of wisdom.

*

Ha Noise people evolve in small tight spaces where voice people practice perpetual eternal racket over each other and don’t listen and yell louder while others ignore them and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, Feed Me!

Angry Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas, the Vietnamese national costume  ... They are a cheap red pastel cotton decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had no choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to pay big money and marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents while growing up which is how they grew into this higher intelligent life form  ... to reproduce.

Their destiny is to breed, work and get slaughtered down on the killing floor.

I pass narrow minded little hovels guarded by locks, doors and rusting metal curtains. Alleys are crammed with sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in alleys using round perforated compressed coal, workers haul cement, bricks, wire, and stones creating glorious Marxist production methods using a knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, and control stick elephant. All fine well and good being a means to an end everything.

An end to a means the end, the means steams beans, streams data.

Lying in a neighborhood street packed with screaming, beeping careening manic cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling wilting produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs, glassy brown eyes. Inert. This spectacular spectacle attracted everyone. They escaped homes/shops holding something valuable and precious.

CUT! yelled the Director

Characters froze in place.

Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens a leaf, a man oiling a bike a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood  ...  

a girl held her red balloon, a retired man his glass of urine beer  ...  

a grandmother gripped her grandkid everyone staring at the dead dog as twilight rush hour motorcycles beeped impatient musical cacophonies negotiating through the blind crowd to get home to families, sex, food, television and safety before dark.

ACTION!

A thin old man emerged from his small dark space, perfect for hiding from strangers, invaders and dust. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs lifting it in the air, dripping blood. He was a hunter holding a wild hare following a successful adventure on the moors. Wild hounds flushed it running wild, filled with fear and free. They treed it, trapped it and killed it.

His inscrutable face showed no emotion. He held the dripping dead dog.

Blood formed a small pool on pavement surrounded by angry confused voices of friends, neighbors, and strangers pealing like bells in his cerebral cortex offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas and significant silences minus appropriate words inside or outside the mystery and quality of death personified so he stood there holding the legs until he laid the dog in the gutter and the dog’s body relaxed itself into itself.

He turned away from neighbors and beep-beep fascination. He entered his dark interior space with shadows and ghosts.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged