Khmer new year april 14-16

On Khmer New Year’s day, a bitter mother at a guesthouse wearing blue cotton floral teddy bear pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, yellow candles, red candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling vicious fucking canines, balloons, clouds, condoms, clones and clowns. She has a terrible temper.       

“Wake up idiot!” she yells at her infantile hubby.

She is one among millions of sad angry neglected women.

She turns on the Idiot Box. LOUD. Her daughters, 4, and 6, are entranced by the visual Apsara circus. They never read books. This is weird because their father was a bookseller in the capital for six years. What happened to literature, what happened to paper, books, education, and critical thinking wonders Ice Girl.

Now he sleeps alone with Boring, having performed his sexual duty, rents out rooms and roars around the forgotten river town on a souped up 125cc noise machine alleviating suffering, spinning his loss, his intellectual wheels, pretending to be important, stirring up dust.

It’s rare to see anyone in Cambodia reading anything on paper, unless it’s a directive from unaccountable government command and control centers sustaining their economic dominance perpetuating 20 years of passive hopelessness. Or forged land paper deals screwing illiterate peasants. So it goes.

Survivors read empty streets on swivel necks. Survivors read rice. Survivors read (empty) bowls. Survivors read money. Survivors read blank faces in rear view bike mirrors. Survivors fall in love with their reflection pretending it is real. Hello Beauty.

Beauty is the mother of Death.

Leo and Ice Girl turned a page away from morning, away from scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows.

They are blacker than shadowed faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Ice Girl. Their eyes live in the present dancing over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice, or watching palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding thatched bamboo stilt homes as naked children harvest dream kites.

They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. They wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees, and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON always ready to observe minute cosmic details and subtle movement across miles of land mined flat horizon country penetrating thick green sweet foliage.

Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers do: close, feeling fluttering lids, retinas trembling with visual sensory information, data, sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient.

Watching without seeing is their Zen. Living in perpetual darkness they have a small immense critical survival responsibility. They stare far away with telescopic floodlight acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, and speaking.

Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent. They watch past another person during a conversation. They watch each other’s back. They face watching beyond wild where everything unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

One anxious dreaded moment in their short sweet life recognizes fear.

Fear is disguised as indecision and loss and ignorance. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

Children's story hour

He was in Morocco on 9/11. He didn't take possession of that event. Fate said hello, hah, hah, hah. 

After two months he shifted to Cadiz, Spain with Omar, a blind Touareg writer.

His forward observer position allowed him to witness young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. They hid in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

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. He read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy. The world of floating images.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds. Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenician, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía citizens 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.

Cadiz was founded by Phoenicians 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 growing 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 discovered 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.

Scientists collected anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance. Minute grains of mica. Archaeologists and mobile blood donation units explored rain forests and hacked through Angkor Wat jungles discovering isolated oceanic islands above simmering volcanic eruptions.

ACIN

STC

kampot Peppers

A wandering minstrel happened into a Kampot place.

He saw a player with a sax and a stage with instruments.

Wow, this is great, said the minstrel. Live music, need a blues harp player?

Ask Shawn, said the sax player. He plays slide and sings.

Sure, said Shawn. Join us.

He did.

Here's a clip from their blues jam. Going to Kansas City.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_OdHB4VK8w

Enjoy. 

flowering tears

neurotic tourists leafed temples

flowers waved goodbye

we grow without you

elephant cried

freedom

Big Game, Little People

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.”

Leonardo was so far removed from 9/11 reality he took no possession of the event. He read Ahmed’s open palms and eyes. Leonardo’s facility for unspoken tongues was legendary. It was all body language and he was fluent in every language. Gestures were a work in progress. Gestures used 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.'"

Ahmed 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.

Leonardo 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.” They were just two nomads in the desert. They did not talk about Being and Nothingness. They tweaked reality by breathing.

He 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." 

ACIN