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

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

Borders

“He didn’t believe in countries and the only borders he respected were: borders of dreams – musty borders of love and indifference, borders of courage or fear – golden borders of ethics.” - Roberto Bolano

*

He took a night bus to Cadiz, an ancient city of Neoclassical churches where stained glass baroque explorers named Colon sailed west, dear Nina, in search of gold importing their assimilated desire, converting heathen slaves into worlds of persecution and misery.

It was expensive raising funds from skeptical kings and queens expanding their empire. Rumor said Queen Isabella was convinced of Chris’s project over a game of chess. The queen became the most powerful piece in the game, hiss- story-ically speaking.

This explained why Cadiz women were draped in gold. Remnants from ages of reason, enlightenment and discovery. Ages of illumination, prosperity and knowing the unknown gifts of the Magi evolving from bronze to iron to gold. Alchemical reactions turned base metals into gold. Chains around wrists and necks sold by the gram were heavily displayed by Spanish patrons.

Butchers in Cadiz didn’t wear gold. Their hands gripped the sharpened edge of well honed Spanish knives paring off fat, cutting through layers of gristle.

A shop bell rang. A stranger paused in a doorway.

A steel mesh glove protected a butcher’s left hand holding meat. He slammed a sharp hatchet blade through flesh and bone. The table was littered with blood. Women lined up to buy their favorite cut. Slabs of acorn fed pigs hung in windows as white quality funnel tags attached to hoofs collected fat.

Wild boar and stag heads stared down from walls next to color photos of local bullfighters. Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway posed with famous Ronda matadors. Red rivers painted capes as bull blood flowed down muscular necks.

Dancing along the devil’s whiplash big black hungry flies buzzed around fresh red meat dripping warm blood into dust. A dog’s ribs rolled over scraping grounded shade, begging for water. A drop in the ocean, is all H20 no matter how deep you dive. A wave washed the shore day by day. Stones sang.

The sausages sounded sweet, retaining a sharpness, inextricably swaying like dancers in a choreography. Tired, frayed strings bent under a mass of weighted meat.

Manuel, the butcher stared through his jagged window of broken glass remembering the Spanish Civil War. His face was a mask of weary, solemn stillness. A quiet lying fury.

His silent words were exaltations, evaluations, the expected surcharge on an empty stomach, a tax for services rendered as reinforcements riding hard through Basque valleys, heard waves of German bombers over Guernica on April 26, 1937.

Beleaguered International Brigade freedom fighters held their own inside stone shepherd huts trapped in desolate Pyrenees Mountains spinning, standing grounded, surrounded by empty canteens, bread crusts, discarded family heirlooms, spent shell casings and decomposing bodies relishing solitude.

Survivors fled to fields or huddled in shelters. They knew the best way to survive was to remain silent. Their town was reduced to rubble. Manuel was required to remember old Fascist propaganda - the spreading of information.

He is a fleischer, one who slaughters.

In order to eat and provide for his family after peace was declared with celebrations of music, church services, wine, and dancing after burials he was forced by economics to slaughter his remaining beast of burden.

His bull was his calling card, his vision, his hope, his dream and village identity. Everything else was stolen by dictators, thieves and Fascists. All he had was his dignity, integrity, and self-respect.

Time arrived short of sympathy, sentiment or condolences. He sharpened his short axe. Standing under the brutal Spanish sun he worked steel across a grindstone removing old edges. It was sharpened with passionate ambivalence.

Laughter’s axe was ready.

He walked into the center of the red clay ring surrounded by a white clapboard fence. The bull stood in the far corner. He approached the bull and held out his hands lined with pulse rivers. The bull slowly emerged from the shade. Looking into the animal’s eyes he saw memory reflected in his soul.

He sighed, clapped his hands together twice, bowed to the bull, as a Shinto priest pays his respects to Bishamonten, the Kami god of benevolent authority. He asked for forgiveness, for his act of fate, raised his laughing axe and brought it down hard and fast on the bull’s neck.

The bull froze and slumped, straining to escape the blade carving through weathered skin, muscles, tendons, sinew, snapping final bones. Front legs folded, rear legs buckled. The carcass shuddered as a final breath exploded in red dust.

He clapped his hands again, severed the head and dragged the body to his shop. He cut it up. He hung the head in his broken window. “For Sale.”

His wife served portions to family and neighbors toasting his wisdom. They consumed his life’s work. Sharing is caring.

I witnessed this.

A Century is Nothing

Let's Go Shopping

“The fact is,” mused Phil a philosopher of unknown erudite style and substance, “the people who are most resilient have a learning reaction, not a victim reaction to bad events. The question is do they have a learning and coping reaction or a victim and blaming reaction?”

“Resilience is more spiritual, said Raven. “It means going back to your childlike nature, your curiosity and questioning nature, your playfulness, the innate morality and nobility that children have.”

“I am a teacher, ana usted,” said Ahmed, a Touareg Berber in Tamashek dialect.

“My tribe lives in the Souss valley southwest of the High Atlas Mountains. It is a land of two races. We are called Imazighen. We speak Tashelhit or Chleuh. Our written language is called Tifignagh. North Africa has been our home since before the Arabs. Our culture is 4,000 years old. Between the 11th and 13th centuries we had two great dynasties - the Amoravids and the Almohads. They controlled large parts of Spain and all of northwest Africa.

“Berbers traditionally maintained an oral culture and transmitted storytelling and song from generation to generation. We became internally displaced persons or IDP according to the United Nations. We had no knowledge of the United Nations. Our language is eye contact, gestures, sky, sand, silence and community.”

“How did you get here?”

“I walked. Touareg nomads migrated from Mali, Southern Algeria and Mauritania. Prior to 1956 there were six million Touareg on nine million square kilometers of desert. Before borders when there was no government control of movement. Now there are 7,000-10,000 in the Sahara Occidental. We call ourselves Imohagh or Imajughen, the noble ones.”

He wore a fine blue cotton robe. His eyes were far away. “Hurl your lightning bolt even unto death,” he said.

Abracadabra.

*

Centuries earlier or later depending on reference points along Time’s thin line on an event horizon as infinity and eternity played post 9/11 dirges, fugues, and blues with a full orchestra in the pits Ahmed resumed his story in the Sahara.

“Fate bites you when you least expect it,” he said waving his hands like wild kites. “Her appetite is insatiable.”

I was removed from 9/11 reality at Ground 0.

I took no possession of that event. I read Ahmed’s open palms and eyes. My facility for unspoken tongues was legendary. It was all body language and I was fluent in every language. Gestures were a work in progress.

Gestures use people.

Ahmed described airplanes and two tall towers. “I’ve read Superman by Nietzsche in Arabic. He said ‘God is dead’ and God said, ‘Nietzsche is dead.’”

He waved his arms like a Moroccan eagle condemned to freedom yet a prisoner of the sheltering sky. He raised a hand indicating height and smacked his flying hand into his stationary hand. The impact echoed across caramel dunes. He smiled through black teeth. His dark eyes held all the world’s secrets.

I had no idea where, who, how, why, or when Ahmed received his information. Perhaps from slave and gold trade caravans, perhaps through osmosis.

“Yes,” Ahmed said, “2,974 people from 80 countries died.”

“I see.”

We were two nomads in the Sahara. We did not talk about Being and Nothingness. We tweaked reality by breathing.

I handed Omar’s book to Ahmed. “Have a look-see.” Ahmed read Tifignagh words.

“He was not as surprised, stunned and scared as all the well meaning myopic tax paying, allegiance singing populace would have the world’s citizens believe in their us or them attitude. He knew they’d be catapulted into a new heavy deep reality, grounded fast, sifting soil, searching for answers, breathing through death masks, deconstructing and revising history while pleading for meaning to their existence. Postmodern dialectics.

“Now they had to figure out the big answer to the big question. Why? It’d keep them busy for life. Their children taught them to ask why? Being extremely impatient and under extreme pressure to be successful in their all-consuming reality, they became extremely frustrated with the “why” question from their children. Parents wanted to be the boss, the grown-ups in complete control. They figured they had all the answers.”

Whoops!

“In the BIG game people with a long history rolled their dice when it was their turn to play and everyone had to go back to the start. They had to read the rules. They had to read the small fine print. The details they casually accepted carte blanche, data they skipped because they didn’t think it was important, the stuff made in Hollywood, the fictional entertainment stuff with happy endings. They were well conditioned to violence, sex and reality television. Now they digested so-called reality television in real time.”

*

I pointed to a faded yellow page marked Empirical Evidence for Ahmed’s crash course in creative nonfiction techniques. Formless forms.

“Somebody off stage had triggered the light switch and their fragility was exposed. Evaporated their sense of humor. The audience sat stunned in silence when the curtain came down. It was full of holes, loopholes and wormholes. The apple was rotten. Survivors needed a card from the deck of life and did not want to see the one with the guy wearing the funny hat with bells. A small minority studied history. They knew, in a vague way, being experts on vagueness, how history repeated itself. They’d supported totalitarian regimes in the Persian/Arabic Gulf for decades burning imported Middle Eastern oil well past their bedtime.”

Only fools and madmen speak the truth.

This was a sobering reality. Ahmed continued reading.

“It was extremely frustrating. People in their illusionary magic kingdom assumed they were always supposed to be going forward to bigger, better, faster things. There was talk about a shift in Teutonic plates of awareness. Many plates showed their age being cracked, badly needing repair, requiring immediate unequaled madness assistance or UMA. Someone tried a cell connection. It was busy, snagged on assorted Fear, healthy Uncertainty and promising Doubt. F.U.D.

Minus surprise.

“Connections were a flashback to a simpler existence of peace and prosperity with model tract homes, two car garages, appliances, fast and faster food, weapons of mass destruction in the closet, renewable bonds, treasury notes, love notes, and notes on the edge of a cliff waiting for patients streaming out of their personal and collective asylums on holidays as prescribed medications rendered them insolvent, compliant and mute.

“A secure line of clear communication was caught in the undercurrent, the violent raging delight of human nature doing her infinite playful thing below the realm of consciousness. She stirred things up in a big way.

“Humans had a lot of explaining to do. Explaining how the world worked. Explaining all the moral ambiguities of truth and reality, all the fill-in-the-blank final exams. They were in big fucking trouble.”

“‘Because I said so,’” was their old standard dull, tedious and monotonous refrain when their sweet, ever-so-kind little intelligent monsters asked why for the umpteenth time. The adult’s ignorant facades had developed huge cracks. It was time to straighten the whiners out once and for all.

They went shopping to satisfy their fear of poverty and overcome their fear, a small fear growing stronger day by day being fed by hysterical know-it-alls in 24/7 media ivory soap towers of higher intellectual reasoning based on empirical evidence.

“More channels!” someone screamed. “We need more channels!” There was a preponderance of rumors. Mucho evidence was charred beyond recognition. It would need DNA analysis and carbon-14 dating.

According to Ahmed with the gift of foresight, “Teams of social workers swarmed across Earth extolling virtues of well being, hope, trust, and bravery in the face of adversity, values, free choice, and impending sales at outlet stores. People seeking outlets and outlet stores found solace in their ignorance of how the world worked on molecular, political, religious, economic, philosophical, and cultural levels. Long festering animosity and cultural bias had come full circle. An invisible Orobus constricted their heart. Their myth was part idealism and realism standing on its head.

“Socially, culturally, geographically and emotionally deprived children listened, shaking their heads, learning a very hard life lesson. One that escaped their well meaning parents. Kids knew when adults were bullshitting them.

Kids have a built-in shockproof shit detector.

“Scholars educated at global universities started speaking Arabic, reciting Sufi poetry and 1,001 stories about the rise and fall of civilizations written before their time with hieroglyphics and cave paintings. Survivors filled caves. Candles sales were brisk.

“A tisket a tasket we need a casket,” sang multi-lingual children.

“Historians, political scientists, talk show experts, taxi drivers, fortune tellers, beauticians, and morticians took hotline calls. The number of callers increased exponentially. Suicide search and rescue teams were put on alert. Citizens packed hospital emergency rooms. Medical schools increased graduation classes to meet the growing need. Demand outstripped supply when it came down to fear and consumption.”

“Wow, that's some heavy sociological shit, Ahmed,” said I.

“What happens when they run out of insecurity control programs?” a girl asked her mother. She was the mother of all answers.

“Don’t worry my sweet,” said the neurotic mother living her worst nightmare, “they’ll invent something new and improved. The manufacturing sector will rebound when shelves are empty. We’ll always have sugar and we can always go shopping.”

“How long will it take?”

“Hard to say. Could be we won’t live to see it.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“There is only F.U.D.,” said her mother twisting her hair until it caught fire.

“What is F.U.D. mother?”

“Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Been with us a long time and now it’s back with a vengeance.”

“How long?”

“You ask too many questions child,” she said fanning her daughter’s flame. “A long time. A Century is Nothing.”

“It’s good to know some things,” said the girl.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve already told you a lot.”

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Tell me the truth mother. I want to know the truth.”

“The truth is, it’s all a lie. Our insecurities are evolving. I believe in my heart-mind that life is a celebration. It is beautiful, harsh, nasty and short. A Hobbesian dream scream. There’s no rhyme or reason or social contract. It’s about realizing peace in your heart and community. Inhale suffering and exhale healing. Cultivate heart awareness.”

“I will be authentic and mindful mother. May we go out and play now? May we take the day off dear mother and be creative?”

“Yes, let’s invent a game theory my sweet daughter,” and they went out of the world.

Omar knew children suspected parents, teachers, social workers, bureaucrats, philosophers and homeless people living in cardboard shelters did not control the market on clear answers. Adults searched for the remote. They knew something better just had to be on the idiot box.

Big brown rats with sharp teeth scrambled out of dark dens scurrying through dead matter looking for food. The little animal named Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt was starving. It had a vociferous vain appetite for glorious political/economic systems. It ate it’s young with relish at picnics. It had no principles, morals, ethics or 20th century rationale, no religious ideology or neo-conservative agenda. 

It was not a vegetarian or a peace activist burning candles, sitting around wringing their bloody hands mumbling, “Oh what a pity,” or, “Somebody should have seen this coming.”

It avoided focus groups like the plague and read Arabic history and poetry by Rumi.

“A true story,” said Ahmed pointing at the sky. “Look, the north star.”

A Century is Nothing

1100 BC

My forward observer position witnessed young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. Hiding in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

My meals with a Gypsy family timed down Gades days with a simple breakfast of toast, butter, jam or muesli, a lunch of thick soup, fresh salad, bread, water, and a main course at 2:30 p.m.

I read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy.

We live in a world of forms.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds in September 2001.

Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenicians, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía they exchanged belief windows, values, attitudes, construction projects and 3,000 years of icon free Arabian art. It was about agriculture, water, light, form, and substance.

Equality was the word at a Muslim burial exhibit at the Mondragon Palace in Ronda.

Phoenicians discovered Cadiz in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir and traded amber and tin. It was a Roman navel base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies.

People developed agriculture as populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian Peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000-year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed established communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanded their nation-state.

The Museo de Cadiz was filled with Roman artifacts. Humans wandered through archeological epoch discoveries from settlements in Gades along the coast extending inland to Seville and Cordoba.

Travellers discovered estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos and rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery and faces. They examined vases, dynasties, ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, and utensils.

Three million-year old human remains slept in stoned chambers. Sharp sewing bones rested in dust.

I dissolved anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance in the wake up.

Weaving A Life, V1