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

History Remembers

The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. The Vietnamese army kicked their ass back to North Korean borders. China won the economic war do the math.

Broken glass of an elegant universe arrived with the invention of mirrors, reflecting humanistic narcotic narcissistic fear, doubt, healthy uncertainty, surprise, and adventure in beauty salons and frontal lobotomies.

The French brought pastries and baguettes to their colonial party, introduced fine wines, produced intricate mosaics for Dalat spring gardens and monumental great fire walls preventing strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass gems composed of minuscule myopic minimalistic molecular musical and colonial architecture co-existed with political ideology. Yellow buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day.

A black and white butterfly named Psyche kisses your forehead.

The Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and random Death unleashed their fury on the poor suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels outside Saigon below the surface of appearances.

They carpet bombed Laos and Cambodia (allowing the Khmer Rouge to run crazy) back to the Stone Age playing a proxy gambit under the guise of liberation.

Dave lived this history with his grandfather’s father and his father’s family all the way back to drowsy dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and family altars inside brown temples welcoming silence and meditation.

In daylight they worked rice paddies before evaporating underground when nightingales brought carpet bombing, napalm, Agent Orange and defoliants, screaming naked children, amputees, visionary legacies of death and long term catastrophic disaster, disfigurement, misery and horror in the long now.

Quick! Run into the tunnels. Escaping from fields they sat cowering in FEAR sweltering, crying, still. Hearing the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded earth, shredding forests and fields of dreams as land and homes and lives danced in flames. Dragon heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went deeper.

Deeper into subterranean unconscious dream rooms following hollow carved Earth trails like blind worms burrowing good dirt. Earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep. Ancestors ate incense.

Sweet silence remained after all the foreign devils ran with crying wounded survivors fleeing in terror as liberated peasants streamed down mountains, emerged from dark caves and tunnels, poling rivers, everyone desperate to begin again, walking on water, swallowing oceans in their creation myth stories, draining land of blood to plant rice, new futures, drowning evil in a dancing sea of tomorrow’s dream.

Their evaporating voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard in tight Hanoi. Cement walls blocked everything but their wailing anger, frustration and repressed bitterness in life’s twisted Confucian reality.

Their memory was a truth-story & this story creates their memory, said Tran.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Mrs. Pho

A female garbage collector rings a bell daily at 16:55 alerting residents in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their waste. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready, willing and able. She’s arranged her family’s consumption debris in two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink fat shreds. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does.

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected, bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and long gone to be remembered infinitely with their stoic black and white ghost face images resting above glowing electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue and white lights on her family altar. It’s decorated with plastic flowers, fruit offerings and spirit food incense.

She hears her father whisper in her burning ear as he carried her away from their napalmed village during a war. She doesn’t remember which war. They were endless. Remember where you came from, he said. She never physically returned.

It didn’t matter which garbage bag went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled schizoid alley blocking sincere fading light, she tossed the bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing height pushed by a masked woman in a green city garbage vest.

The accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing exponentially it became part of the collective mess, their collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s civic mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not elaborate. Just enough to get her away from cold walls and plasma idiots to gossip with neighbors as cracks of white twilight filtered past musical hammers  ... creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes

... marveling at this visual epiphany as 21 shovels of Earth were moved and manipulated this and that way by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities or laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from AIDS, exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers

... while hearing young Sapa Hmong children speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after grade eight reduced to selling handicrafts to tourists, their bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold winters as storms howled, Have mercy, Have mercy on the war weary inoculated objectivists savoring an inferno of their eternal nightmare now reduced to survival and No Exit save fate, death and dust inside a universal spiral.

A shattered mirror reflected her dignified stoic face.

To survive, a young migrant prostitute finished fucking a young migrant boy behind a corrugated curtain at a construction site. Plow my field buddy. She moved down a crooked alley to another construction site singing, nobody loves me but my mother and she could have been lying too. When she wasn’t screwing the quick and the dead she cooked food for laborers. This gave them the strength to handle her wildcat ways. She never slept alone being destiny’s child.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with rusty brown barbwire encircling his URL domain name and social media sites before easing past shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Hanoi

I arrived in Vietnam from Indonesia. It felt excellent returning to Asia.

I wandered with a notebook and camera. One life, no plan, many adventures. I explored crowded streets, back alleys and remote zones getting a feeling for the energy and language. Orientation.

I started at The Temple of Literature, one of the oldest universities in the world. Carved steles with names of scholars on the back of turtles lined the courtyard. Confusion emphasis on filial piety. Local woman in white silk ao dais played stringed instruments in a timbered brown hall under circular red lanterns.

The Museum of History had fire, tools and agricultural development. Visual stories illuminated hunters-gatherers, pottery, clay, axes, wood, bamboo and sharpening stones.

The Museum of Ethnology illustrated hill tribes with nine reconstructed authentic home styles, agricultural tools, textiles, weavers, baskets, pottery, bows and arrows. Old pictographs of pre-writing focused on Lao-Thai-Khmer-Burmese and Tibetan script.

Diagrams showed Chinese expansion from the north. Maps depicted human migration establishing languages and cultures with extensive Champa and Khmer civilizations from central and southern Vietnam into Cambodia.

On a beige wall hung Marxist means of production:

 1. knife

2. hoe.

3. scythe.

4. axe

5. hammer

6. control elephant stick

An ancient bowl of carbonized rice sat in a glass case. Let’s Eat.

Shirts were made of tree bark. Huge wooden drums. Brass cymbals. Musical culture.

Be the drum.

The Fine Art Museum contained patriotic oil paintings of Vietnamese fighting, dying, pulling artillery through jungles, being welcomed in liberated villages, people screwing for the motherland, blue silk paintings, red lacquer art, pastel dioramas of ship battles on curling tsunami waves, bronze and Champa clay sculptures, leather and wood skin drums, Buddhist meditative statues and Red Communist party flags.

The history of collective artistic efforts depicting work, education and communal efforts laughed.

The Old East Gate in Hanoi is hard to discover. The walls are gone. The oval entrance is covered with graffiti, weeds and black spider electric lines.

In a narrow market alley an invisible caged eagle sang it’s revolutionary song, How did I get here?

Women hawk fruits, veggies and fish, slice pineapple and haul cardboard. They load bikes with anything and everything they can move and sell.

This is my serenity, sanctuary and simplicity.

Wabi-Sabi - imperfect, impermanent, incomplete.

Bamboo sleepers wear cotton face masks. Pale Vietnamese women protect their skin with latex. The world of commerce and economy rides a motorcycle loaded with STUFF swerving through swarms of bees selling honey.

A bike woman canvases sidewalks from dawn to dusk selling bouquets of red roses.

Petals drift along congested Hanoi streets named for medicine, gravestones, tea, funerals, jewelry, spices, silk, nuts, coffee, musical instruments, flowers, incense, altars, glass, calligraphy, barbers, stone workers, bamboo, hairdressers, toys, food, fire, air, earth, water, wood, authors, kites and love.

Rubies and sapphires come from Nam and Hong Kong, imperial green jade from slave labor mines in Burma. Glitter eyes. Keep walking. Court the vagabond mistress.

A pinyin sign in a Chinese herbalist shop with battered brown drawers spilling herb aromas sang, Make it new day by day make it new. The journey is the destination.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Hanoi Alley Bell

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect and authenticity. Sex is fun.

Responsibility is a duty.

Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. He is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in a circular abstract desire to create art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to celebrate life.

His voice manifestation expresses human auditory tendencies in a tight space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank cement wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows ...

about life next door where a hunched over family sits on cold red floral tile slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths while yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television ...

featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, the national anthem about survival and rampant greed ...

on land, sea, and air as water pianos played by a young wisp her fingers a delicate blur of fast incantation musical channels

dance near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 1655 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage.

Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s arranged her family’s daily consumptive waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, shreds of fat pink. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s faces, dead, gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost images living above eternal electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue, and white on the family altar.

Plastic flowers, daily fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food.

Let’s eat.

Weaving A Life, V1