Bantey Kdei - Ta Phrom by Rita

Evidence of intelligent life on Earth is exaggerated. It’s a rumor and a myth. Sit still long enough and you’ll see/hear some wild, anxiety filled conversations. Filled with interruptions.

Barbarian Voice monkeys interrupt each other. They cancel each other out. It’s an endemic social disease  ... short attention span? No problem. People love to be understood before they understand. This explains their emotional fear, lack of focus and anxiety. Roll your bones. Love my bones, said a t-shirt in Sapa, Vietnam.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones, said Leo.

We are a bundle of pure sensations, said Zeynep. It is a path of authenticity.

That’s been the problem on the trip, said an American girl on a work-study NGO program in Cambodia, No one’s giving us change. Hahaha.

Change comes from within.

400 Khmer mothers and their children wait outside the Children’s Hospital to get a free pain killer pill. The placebo is blue and free. Orange pain pills cost $1. Few can afford orange. Life is a painkiller.

Sound-symbol-sign-word.

Rita and storytellers explored Banteay Kdei and Ta Phrom.

Kdei is perfect for walking and swallowing dust. A sun yellow butterfly led the way. It explored the perimeter sensing jungle and stone perspectives. Wandering outside temples gives you the feeling of natural space acknowledging deep green forests, said Rita, I do this at every temple, it’s rare to see tourists explore the outside, because intelligence and curiosity and taking risks on Earth is rare.

Tourist sheep are in a disciplined hurry. They march along following other sheep on broken stone paths. They wander around, make a lot of noise, pose for pictures and march out. The bus is leaving for another temple.

They look serious and sad. Unhappy people in a happy world.

They are controlled by unknown unconscious diabolical forces. It’s the silent ticking mechanism on their wrist near a pulse saying faster.

Leo shared a Tibetan truth  ...  

I would rather be a tiger for one day than a sheep for a thousand years.

Rita and friends explored gentle forest winds. It’s a slow walking meditation.

I engaged all my senses, said Leo.

Thick dust is a welcome relief after stones, said Tran.

I am light and shadows dancing through leaves, said Devina.

All nature all the time, said Zeynep.

Butterfly leads me into interior passages and shadow play experiences, said Rita. Butterfly shows me mysterious art and deep unconscious space, it takes one life to reach the center and then you’re back where you started, amazing  ...  Ha-ha.

It’s a long walk, said Devina.

Prohm is where the most famous photographed tree on planet Earth grows, said Rita. It entwines itself around and through soft stones. It’s a zoo as idiots line up to take a photo, pushing and shoving and jostling to have their picture taken with the tree and roots as Italian, French and German tongues wag like mongrels in heat.

Life is a bitch, said a sad tourist focusing their plastic toy.

The Japanese and Chinese are total image addicts. Obsessed with posing in doorways and passages with carvings, plants, ferns and leaves and tall trees, thick brown, green gnarled roots above the surface, scary monster leaves and yellow, black, red, golden butterflies to be overwhelming.

We don’t have this beauty at home they lament. We have cement.

Tourists on their great quest feel the experience with their cameras. They behave like the temples are a Dizzy Land amusement park.

Shatter their illusions with the power of laughter, said Rita.

And silence, whispered Omar.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

State of Becoming

One Saigon day a nomadic TEFL facilitator having a look-see visited ELF, a local English Language Factory.

He didn’t go in. He’d researched the business from Hanoi. It was a large well-funded managed operation with branches.

At a nearby java joint he met a teacher from the State of Becoming, SOB.

He said, We have good support. They offer a CELTA certificate costing you $1500, we have resources and a wide range of ages, groups and abilities, I’ve been here one year and my experience is positive, we have good team focus and professional development, they take care of work permits, new teachers without the CELTA are required, at a 50% discount, to take the course. Education is a business. There is flexibility and structure, the educational level is higher than Hanoi, one piece of advice, if the student is 28, they have the emotional level of 21. (-7)

This EI  is common in Asian schools. Teachers tell sheep what to think not how to think.

Poor schools makes it easier for systems to control citizens.

Serious factoid. Push passive kids through The System minus critical thinking skills.

Oh, to be human…

Old man, young woman...

Wordsmith danced his final farewell Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble twenty words. Write one clean honest sentence.

Twenty words. Twenty quick painless illuminations about the 60-year-old man in THE BLINKING LIGHT. Retired American or European.

Smoking, drinking a beer, wearing a flower print shirt. Alone. He called someone. Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He grasps both her hands expressing deep gratitude. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love and salvation from loneliness, alienation, suffering and life’s blues. She comes to his emotional rescue.

He handed her the wine list. Anything you want, it’s yours. He is grateful to know and receive her. I want your heart, she said. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation. He is Mr. ATM from a lonely-hearts club band first aid. Mouth to mouth recitation.

After a quiet romantic candlelight dinner they returned to his hotel room. They danced naked for dessert. She traced his spine with fingers. He rested his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat, hearing the thump-thump-thump drum muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arterial aerated erotic aortas. Be the drum.

For one brief night in their healthy beneficial addiction they held each other with desperate desire before Tran’s Dream Sweeper machine collected everything at dawn. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Donegal, Ireland Typewriter

By Ghostwriter

Once upon a time wearing a crash helmet of bamboo leaves before inventing the Internet I created poems, stories and comprehensive travel dreams using paper and pen. Very archaic tools, I admit. Notebooks are layers of strata flattened by geological pressure hearing Fibonacci sing spirals. Using a fountain pen or watercolor brushes is process oriented.

Be the paper. Be the brush, be the ink, be the water. Flow.

It was clean neat and simple creative fun, experimental joy and a beautiful organic mess.

You never hear a kid say I’m going to take the day off and be creative.

In the late 70’s I pounded on a Smith-Corona portable typewriter for two years in the Emerald Isle.  A manic-depressed divorced Dublin lover with an angry drunken jealous boyfriend gave me the machine. I was her back door man.  He tried to kill me in a snowstorm.

I lived to tell the tale.

Working for An Oige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association as a troubleshooting warden, word janitor, Grave Digger and reliable narrator I carried the red machine from a simple stone mountain habitat in Wicklow to a wild northern conservative Donegal sanctuary in hard rain then south into peat bog Mayo where I created in a desolate hostel haunted by a young girl’s suicide, then to the Killarney hostel and again east south east to Devil’s Glen where J. M. Synge wrote verse.

All the while using inexpensive thin paper, carbon and ribbons.

Carbon paper was the original SAVE feature. Flat sheets in thin box. Valuable and recycled until every space became bone blackened as dream words escaped like free wild geese in Ennisfree.

Ribbons were solid black on stainless steel spools packed in small clear plastic bags purchased from a stationary shop on a Dublin side street off St. Stevens Green. A toothbrush flossed keys. It was a sweet, fast deadly lightweight machine on fully automatic.

I prefer the heart-hand-eye connection holding a fountain pen feeling a nib on paper seeing ink marry papyrus.

Can you find the DELETE key, asked Zeynep. It’s your best friend.

Before leaving Dublin for Donegal I visited a Liberties antique shop. “These are very old,” said the seer woman behind the wooden counter. She wrapped mirrors in newspapers.

"Yes, they are. I will take good care of them.”         

“They come from an old estate sale down in the country.”

“Whereabouts?”

“It’s been awhile, and my memory’s not so good anymore you understand my dear. Perhaps the Synge place near Devil’s Glen, a manor house with large stables and shed dating to 1867. It became a dowager house, a house where a woman of means would go to live after the death of her husband. Views extended across valleys filled with old beautiful brown, green and golden trees.”

“That would be J.M Synge, the famous poet and playwright?”

“Yes, my dear. He was born in the nearby village of Rathfarnham and probably only visited to pay his respects to aunts and uncles. I heard a story about a blind Synge family member who visited the place and knew every room, every corner.”

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine Devil’s Glen rivers rocketing from higher ground hurtling past bleak peat bog earth factories below rainbow sunlight skies with quick rising rainstorms inside twisted glens of lush green streams bounding through history’s birth, past slate gray stone thatched houses as wild sheep by the hundreds roam the land.”

“Good on ya. Yes, that’s the place. Another story is how grandfather Synge was in danger of going bankrupt from having established many walking trails around the area and planting trees during a time when the farming life wasn’t paying. The story goes that the butler, when they were living at the Granmore Castle nearby, knew the bailiffs were coming so he gathered up all the silverware and hid it in the forest. They owned the estate for years and sold it to the Irish Land Federation in 1943. It was completely self-sufficient with abundant land for grazing, pastures, vegetables, and livestock. Somebody died.”

“I see.”           

“What will you do with the mirrors?” she said. 

“I’ll treasure them and protect them. During journeys we will share secrets of truth and beauty. I will receive their visions and gift them to others along the path.” This didn’t scare the woman. She was from the ancient school.

“Hmm. Well then, I shall make a small gift for you. Take this.” She handed me a piece of cloth. It was a coarse, mottled, brown and white checkered wool with faded cosmic symbols running the edge.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

“Carry it with you and only use it to clean the glass,” she said. “It’s older than sand.” She rolled it up.

“One kindness deserves another.” I rummaged in my pack and pulled out Kamben gringsing cloth. “Here, this is for you. It is a magic cloth woven by hand on Bali, an island in Indonesia. They use bark and roots to make the dye. The cloth is essential for every social ritual from birth to death. It will protect you from evil energy and if you ever get sick soak an edge in water and drink the moisture. It will cure you.”

“Wonderful. Many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.

“After Mayo you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8th hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry. You will ride a bike down wet streets and meet a nun opening black church gates and you will tell her what happened. Together you will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, bless yourselves, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence then you will ride into town and go to news agents and buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking Guinness reading remembering John’s creativity and his dream Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”

Source: A Century is Nothing

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Dream Sweeper Bats

At 4:37 a.m. everyone sleeps-dreams. I fire up my super-efficient Dream Sweeper Machine and collect dreams, said Tran. I sort them by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime symbolic meaning.

Words dance as hallucinations, poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and abstract art congratulates a hand clapping the hollow bells of a Cambodian trash collector boy pulling his cart along life’s fractured possibilities.

This sensation is the bell, said Zeynep, visualizing her European-Asian future. It bridges the gap, gaps the bridge connections. 

Rita, Leo, Tran, Devina, Zeynep, Omar and Death meditate on the balcony.

Pre-dawn sky dances with pulsating stars singing their light. Ferns, plants, bamboo and a cold wind hum I feel free.

Fruit bats roost upside down under a coconut palm leaf. Who turned the world over?

One emits a shrill, high-pitched echolocation squeaky frequency vibration. Perceive senses their return. A sharp sound with a definite edge to the beginning, through the middle tonal range to finalities, a welcome signal to bats revealing where they are in spacetime awareness.

They said, Hello, I’m back. It’s a pleasure finding comfort after a night of flying.

I don’t need to learn the words, said Devina, I am the music.

My name is Nature, said Leo, I am grateful to be alive and paying attention to bat’s music.

This is why we wake early, said Omar.

Storytellers witnessed ten white seagulls flying toward Lenin Park Lake. Vision’s silent gift at dawn winged freedom in orange sky. Awareness of life in Hanoi has meaning, definition, value.

I don’t know where the artificial ends and the real begins, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. I am a deeply superficial person.

90% of life is showing up, said Tran an amputee with a big heart.

Yes, said Rita in her orphan voice, 10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you deal with it. You are director, audience and players. I hear with my eyes. I see with my ears.

Stay in character. Two players practice lines and delivery.

-       I thought you’d never get here.

-       Sorry, I was delayed.

-       Obviously. Are you staying?

-       What do you think?

-       I don’t know. You’re such a mystery to me.

-       You talk too much.

Ha, said Laughter Therapy, All the clowns are not in the circus.

A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned, said Devina.

It’s the madness of art, said Zeynep, bleeding letters on parchment. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Barbers

Inside a Bursa barber shop at 9:30 a.m. TV wall news blasted Kabul heavy alliterative artillery literary fire.

Dust explodes. Images flood the consciousness - trains filled with tanks, armored cars, firefights in Iraq and Syria, suicide bombers, machine guns, rata-tat-tat-tat, expose yourself for a flash of sight, aim, fire, reload, as smiling wealthy diplomats shake hands for the cameras and media propaganda value.

They gesture peaceful intentions. We agree to disagree.

Smile.

An old man gets a close shave. The barber is short, white haired with trim black mustache in a white smock, brown loafers, working the silver blade down elastic cheeks erasing yesterday’s growth. The old man closes his eyes, feeling steel blade sensations as lather evaporates his existence in a calm, gentle way.

A small bell rings as a man pedals his portable mango and pineapple fruit cart along a dirt road in Cambodia. Does the sound come to the ear or does the ear go to the sound, asked Rita.

*

One morning Tran and I located a street barber in Saigon. He’s on the corner of Noise & Confusion, a main drag through the heart of a swirling mass of mobile humanity. Beep-beep.

His place was bare bones marketplace essentials. He works a small corner of a cement box surrounded by a wire fence. One old comfortable broken barber chair, a lopsided table and a cracked mirror completes the ensemble. Cheap blades, electric trimmer, a straight razor, comb, and brush.

Cut black hair spills out of a green plastic bag near the gutter waiting for someone to recycle stuffing stuff.

The Dark Years

It was curious seeing the Cambodian barber open on the last day of Khmer New Year. The river town was dead quiet. Merchants and families slept in shuttered shops behind metal gray accordion sheets. A tropical afternoon sun beat down. White cumulus clouds billowed in the east. The barber had a customer. A white haired war veteran. He’d fought against Vietnam, Khmer Rouge, Death and his Ghosts.

He didn’t talk about it. He survived. Silent conversation was his destiny.

He sat in a solid steel chair staring at his reflection. He saw a long thin serene brown face and wavy white hair. A long mole resembling an inverted Buddhist pagoda hung down from the left side of his chin. The mole saved him from Khmer Rouge executioners. They were superstitious peasants. They believed he was the Devil. They released him.

He and the barber conversed in French. The thin barber had thick black parted hair. He’d lived here all his life. He survived four genocide years by killing his dreams and hiding with his family in mountains where the French later constructed and abandoned a post office, hotel and casino. All bets are off. They were The Dark Years. No one talked about The Dark Years.

The old man closed his eyes. Besides gardening and playing with his grandchildren, savoring blade sensations and ointment aromas with small talk were his simple luxuries.

Using small steel clippers the barber trimmed hair. It fluttered to a cement floor meeting piles of black hair. Electric trimmers with old frayed wires collected dust on a narrow wooden table under a fractured mirror. Hello Beauty.

After trimming neck hairs he adjusted the chair, easing him back. The old man meditated on miracles and impermanence of life.

The barber extracted a thin razor blade from a small piece of paper. He severed both ends into a soda can. Clink. He opened a wooden handled straight razor edging the blade in.

He sprayed water mist around the man’s head. Moisture refracted light prisms and dust. He trimmed microscopic hairs around the outside edge of an ear lobe before shaving above sideburns angling the man’s head with his left hand. The razor slid from temple to temple across the scalp line rasping skin.

He was quick, silent and efficient. Smooth artistic hands shaved skin fast and light. Short, fast and deadly. The blade danced on skin under the eyes. He wiped the blade on a white towel lying on the man’s chest. He shaved lower sideburns. He returned the man to a sitting position. The man smiled at his reflection. Hello Beauty.

The barber snapped the towel across shoulders removing dead cells. The man eased out of the chair. He removed a roll of money hidden near his waist. He peeled musical notes to the barber.

Merci. Au’voir.

He shuffled out. His son waited for him on a motorcycle. He tried to swing his right leg over the rear seat. He hesitated. He couldn’t manage it. His left hand reached for a shoulder. His frail contorted right arm was useless. The executioners broke the Devil’s arm. They wanted to hear the Devil scream.

Bursa barber. Cádiz barber. Hanoi barber. Cambodia barber. Faces shaved, haircut, clip, clip scissors, storytellers all.

All vocal music, choral tales of imaginary love, kindness, forgiveness, journeys, beauty, creativity, travel, adventure, risk, authenticity, truth and maladaptive trust with barbers.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged