Saigon

Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

*

"I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole." - Elias Canetti

Die Twice

Before going to Cambodia I discovered a Saigon museum named for Uncle Ho. He’s the patron saint of Diehard Marxist Mania. It is a popular location for virginal couples posing for wedding photographs using expansive interior halls and sweeping stairways. Happy grooms escorted joyful brides in rented sparkling jewelry trailing gowns, frozen on stairs, in corridors, on window ledges. Jump!

In a dusty display case along a forgotten corridor were piles of medals, stamps, currencies and Zippo lighters. A Zippo was ubiquitous among soldiers with engraved inscriptions. One lighter said:

There are two times you face death.

Once when you’re born and once when you face death.

Hala, a Muslim girl I knew in Lhasa said, There are people who are born laughing and people who are born crying, I was born laughing.

Parked outside the museum was a U.S. Air Force F-16, ambulance, jeep, Huey helicopter and the tank North Vietnamese forces commanded to flatten gates and liberate the South. Rows of antique French cars used to ferry the wounded and ammunition around Saigon during the war collected dust in meticulous gleaming historical automotive fashion.

Hexagram 34 - The Power of the Great

Perseverance furthers. Ask what is right. Be in harmony. Movement. Not stubborn. Yielding quietly preserving work to remove resistance.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Practice

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden. It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ... Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Practice allows you to wake up.

Mandalay

*

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a calm velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.   

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesia, V1

String Theory

Hanoi.

Twisted alleys and side streets were clogged with speeding manic motorcyclists texting lovers, women hawking apples, bananas, greens, meat, tofu, used clothing, used condoms and tongues babbling incongruent incomprehensible musical tonal frequencies.

Language is music.

Music is the fuel.

Words play a poor second violin or cello compared to music.

Boys sew heavy yellow plastic tarps. A woman behind her mask paints bicycle chain guards with a green spray. Men grind automotive parts with decibels and electrical impulses. A boy riding behind his friend on a bike spins out a universal red yo-yo string theory.

I sat in a red kindergarten chair near a curb at an artery eatery. The woman serves delicious grilled spring rolls filled with veggies, cold white noodles and a plastic container of greens with chilies and sauce. Using ivory chopsticks from Shanghai I dip noodles and spring rolls in sauce. I smell, chew slow and swallow. It’s cheap and filling. Great taste.

Across the narrow noisy street men drink beer. They accept you being a little stranger than yesterday. Food mama stays busy doing only the lonely lunch. She’s gone before dusk when a woman selling apples takes over the prime real estate sidewalk space.

Street pedestrians dodge speeding motorcycles and women lugging baskets of bananas balanced on bamboo staves past merchants selling goods from ground floor flats. The sidewalk is life’s marketplace extending from long dark narrow dwellings. Kids piss in the gutter.

A motorcycle kills a dog. A man drags the carcass out of the street and leaves it in the gutter. Death is fascinating. Silence covers the dog.

Mechanics hammer metal fixing bikes and broken appliances, salon girls cut, wash and dry, old women gossip how the younger generation is wild and crazy, young boys haul bricks on a deranged frayed rope pulley system up to a flat undergoing renewal, older men in pajamas playing GO slap scarred wooden pieces on a board while drinking beer or tea with friends as children scamper through the maze.

At dusk a sex worker behind a mountain of broken red bricks fondles a construction worker relieving him of fluids and Dong.

Pajamas are the national costume. Cute teddy bears, little animals, pink, red, floral designs. All-purpose all day all the way.

Knowing you live here no one bothers you. Other foreigners are not crazy enough, lost enough or blind enough to discover this dense narrow vibrant rabbit warren neighborhood filled with families and ceaseless racket.

A slouching cafe owner watches family soap opera dramas about love, hope, betrayal, and deception on an entertainment box with rapt attention. Everyone has a box here. It’s the BIG diversion, all entertainment all the time. Loud and louder.

Life During Wartime - Talking Heads Live

Hoi An

We took a bus to Hoi An. We passed through Da Nang, a mess of glass and brass mega resorts swallowing farmland with miles of beachfront developments creating imaginary golf courses faster than speeding high finance and rabid speculation.

Up early I am on the street. A winged shadow caressed my forehead. A black and orange butterfly fluttered in front of my eyes. Touched, grazed, blessed by Psyche. Magic.

I am a prime lens on a 35mm tool. I capture soft light inside the old city. I slow down, feeling free, curious and open, wandering. Before noise and lightning bolts of laughter’s language fills the air. All the tourists sleep off heavy European food and distilled beverages. Streets are empty.

A young woman under a bamboo hat shovels sand. It takes her 21 gestures to fill up a wheelbarrow. No more, no less. 21. Blackjack. She pushes it down a street to a new home project. She dumps it. She repeats the process. All day. Every day. Her Tao.

I walk to the river near an ancient Japanese Bridge built in 1593 and sit near two elderly women. They’re surprised to see a foreigner sitting alone with coffee. Black with ice. I smiled. They smiled and whispered  ... strange man alone has a camera it’s so early for him to sit here with us.

We shared humanity, silence and morning light. We communicated without words. I see their lives, childhood, growing up here, families, surviving wars, meeting every morning for conversation, walking and tea.

Supporting each other they walk through quiet streets, past yellow walled homes with red tile roofs protecting long deep brown wooden interiors. Ancestors whisper stories from the 15th-19th century when Hoi An was the major port in Southeast Asia and the first Japanese settlement in southern Vietnam.

Ships unloaded cargo and loaded high-grade silk, paper, porcelain, tea, sugar, molasses, medicines, elephant tusks, Sulphur and mother-of-pearl. Now 400 tailors measure, cut, sew, iron, hang and sell threads.

Women in teddy bear floral pajamas play badminton chasing a shuttlecock. Pajamas make utilitarian sense. Cotton is cheap and easy to wash. You sleep in them, get up, cook, eat, talk to your pajama neighbors, sweep dust, yell at your kids because they are spoiled brats and terrorized since escaping the birth canal, go to the market, buy food, admire new pajamas, return home, eat lunch, talk to your pajama neighbors and take a nap. Pajamas have a warning label on the collar. Remove Before Sex.

Pajamas are cool. One size fits all.

Residents stretch and talk. A leather-faced canoe woman set up her small clay figurines under a tree. The two women finished their tea, gestured goodbye, held hands and walked across a wooden bridge taking care of each other.

Book of Amnesia V1

Death Worship by River

Rumors of intelligent life in Hanoi is an exaggeration, said Leo. Rumor control reports existence.

Take my neighbors Sam and Dave for example, said Tran, Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. Their names and roles are interchangeable. These are not Viet names. If they were, they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone take care of them in old age when they are lying or dying on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 wafting kitchen smells.

It’s an Asian thing. It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $50,000. Cash or no deal. Virgins have high value in the marriage market. They are have been sequestered behind fear and insecure superstitions and trapped by hovering in-laws and outlaws for centuries.

Marriage is legalized prostitution.  

Father knows best. You don’t marry the girl in Asia. You marry the family.

Cash gives them security. You pay and get the girl. The fun begins. Grandparents need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young pregnancy is always the only option. The tyranny of motherhood.  

Accelerate production comrade. Many procreating humans have more desire thinking about providing offspring for their security than the physical pleasure of sex. So it goes.

Sex is a DUTY. It ain’t about pleasure. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. Get on. Go for the ride. E jack U late. There are 90 million hard and fast parenthood rules according to the popular Vietnamese Party book, Produce & Consume. Get married early erotic pressure is on and off, on and off. Savior a small death in 8 seconds.

You do not want to be unmarried, sad, lonely and forgotten. Loss of face and shame haunts singles with vengeance. Fear of loneliness increases the possibility and probability of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a socialist society. They’ve taken their hormonal cues and social control systems from Uncle China.

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Sapa females in the NW, a future fragment of this tale, illustrate the value and necessity for rural girls to marry at the ripe old age of sixteen and produce genetic replicants. Petri dish. More Y chromosomes. It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

            Humans crave less suffering and neglect and more love.

Dave’s voice releases anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off cold molten gray interior Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall? His life is one long cold cement wall.

Echoes dance through his brain like sugarplum fairies. He knows the echo because he made the WALLS. He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement.

He slathered it over red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire to create a work of realist art lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama programs about life next door where the family sits on red rose cold tile floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies ... slurping from cracked bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost desperate mouths and yelling over each other in tonal decibels ... competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations, palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland ... with a double bladed axe singing a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with peasants as small players.

            Everyone’s being played.

Book of Amnesia, V1