The big general picture (floodlight)
The small specific picture (spotlight)
Sleeping alone is boring, said Sunflower, a blind masseuse in Kampot.
The blind man plays a flute.
His young son leads him through life.
Music guides their quest.
Mindfulness, breathe, ease god out.
On the meridian of time there is no injustice; there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.
After a year eating Turkey with a side order of Mudanya olives he landed in Jakarta. If you don’t have an onward ticket blue uniformed ones shake you down. You know the drill. Extract a crisp green C note. Insert into a worn passport. Slide it across a counter. Man smiles. His golden shoulder braid shudders. He gestures just a minute.
You stand aside as Europeans and ill-informed internally displaced desiccated immigrants stream past paying with their lives to receive an entry stamp for thirty days before heading to another gold braided computer man.
Your man comes out. He escorts you through The Quest-ion Line. Incoming. Quest-ions screaming help ran for cover. He hands your documents to another gold braided scam man.
He says, Wait outside the NO ENTRY zone. You observe men, women and orphans waiting for one last stamp, one final slim to nil chance for freedom from tyrannical vagabondism a disease with no known antidote.
Computer friend nods, accepts documents and does his thing. Opens removes cash slides passport through a scanner darkly stamps it hands it back. Hands down. Deal. Ace high. Genius returns it to you, Good-bye my little butterfly.
You grab your bag and hit the bricks.
230,000,000 (+/-) humans struggling to survive with a little luck eat you with their eyes.
On one side are 1,001 females with Women For Hire signs. They swing brooms, caress irons, dance with mops, feed infants, hang washrags, burn trash and stir woks. Visual acuity. Rancid re-cycled cooking oil penetrates universal collective unconscious.
On the other side are 1,001 males with I Will Do Anything placards.
Small print reads, “I can clean, drive, escort, bribe, talk, build, hammer, make bricks, carry bricks, stack bricks, break bricks, sleep, eat, pretend I am busy and freelance vaginal come and go construction projects are my specialty.”
A gamelan orchestra of eighteen copper gongs and brass symbols creates a melodic meditative refrain with gentle persuasion. You follow effervescent notes into the dark night of the soul with lost quest-ions whispering to you, The Mark.
Quest-ions tout you:
Want a maid? Want a driver? Want a cleaner? Want a cook? Want transport? Want boom-boom? Want a room? Want a job? Where do you go? Where are you from? Want a quick fix? Want an exit permit? Want a new passport? Want inoculations? Want to get lucky? Want to meet my sister? Want a butterfly? Want to change money? Want to die here? Want to be cremated here?
Want to hang out with talking monkeys near Ubud? Want to eat? Want to meet my friends, liars, cheats and thieves? Want water? Want a map? The map’s not the territory. Want to take a chance? Want an answer? Want a way out? Want love? Want massage? Need AIDS or HIV? Want a friend?
Want boredom and loneliness and alienation your highness? Want a guide? Want a SIM card? Want a taxi? Want ice?
Want to join a Brave New World? Want to be a charter member in a New World Order manipulated by politicians, greedy geo-political banks and fraudulent financial institutions? Want a secret identity theory and off shore tax-free bank account? Want to torture humans with water molecules in a friendly country’s secret black prison?
Want to die before you get old? Want to fade away? Do you have plan tomorrow? Where do you go? Where do you go tomorrow? What’s you (sic) name? Where is this line of quest-ion-ing going? Are you the hammer or the nail? How did you get here? Why, tell me why. What is life?
All the quest-ion words were brought in for interrogation. Zeynep, a savage detective looked for motive and opportunity.
A ghost plays a six-string Kemil instrument in shadows. You follow phantom notes into the night.
Black is the night. Cold is the ground.
Masks hide the consciousness of fear.
Molecular structure.
Reconnected with a beatific shy lover on the edge of town after 17 dazed.
The dirt road is lined with salons, massage parlors brown hearts and shattered dreams.
Her thin gentleness is tempered by the fear of others,
the ugly fat one is disappointed in memory.
No one wants me.
Others eat vegetables.
She has a diamond implanted in a canine.
The two of them stay behind a curtain. Plywood walls.
They have an hour.
She is not impatient. They accept the implied unspoken gentle nature, the infrequent dressing.
All her clothes fit in a plastic box. The mattress is thinner than her. Two pillows.
Her cell phone and used phone cards litter a Boeing 747 used as a table.
O
She is 20+ and rail thin. He considered taking her away to the coast. Another poor girl will take her place. They never go. The coast is too far away.
The absurd human condition is illuminated in a nano-second.
My blind massage.
Strength - points of muscular reference.
Left eye is glazed blue.
In broken hearted silence
A yellow butterfly approached white night fragrance.
Live the questions.
The world is the stage and we are but the players.
See with soft eyes.
You're led to believe a lie
When you see WITH not THROUGH your eyes.
Saved by singing. The heart's compass.
The spirit of the universe.
Love is a blind whore
With a mental disease
And no sense of humor.
+
Slow.
Lesson? Sustain the art.
Siem Reap
1) motorman sings his sad tale of "no money"
2) the endless hard luck story
3) rows of empty ugly hotel monstrosities line the Highway of Death
4) being Sunday Someday, SR is more destitute than a hungry girl waiting to go to bed with a hungry man
5) people salvage trash in the rain
6) air is thick with moisturizer and masks
7) Carl died. He left a young Cambodian wife and two boys, 12 & 6. Heart attack.
8) I feel this deep loss. Profound sadness.
Needs. Drama. Story. Conflict.
Give it an edge.
Theme : loss, passion, alienation, boredom, loneliness.
One week ago he sat in a Lao garden. It rained.
Everything smelled deep, pure, beautiful.
Five months in Vientiane helping grades 6/7 be more human.
Sitting in the garden writing - polishing manuscripts about Turkey, China, Indonesia, affectionately called Amnesia.
For the last three months while playing with kinder garden kids from 8-3 he'd been involved with Ling who came from the war ravaged interior and worked the massage biz.
During the course of their pre-meditated hot sexual relationship interspersed with gestures and broken Lao-English guttural intentions, he bought her a phrase book and dictionary and English primers, and a hand-made paper notebook. He gave her colored pens and watercolor paints. She had the skill and artistic eye.
At night he read as she created in precise detail large Lao images of dancers, village life, coiled serpents, and vivid representational fantasy/reality cultural art.
He was astonished and supportive.
She was happy. They were in temporary attraction, lust, desire, passion. They shared lives. She relished the generous and serene outpouring of her emotion and creativity.
He told her he'd leave the school, town, country and her after a month.
They cried. They hugged. She painted a final picture of the holding hands, walking up the street lined with flowering lilac trees. Another had them hugging, shedding tears.
He suggested she keep her art alive. She said she would. He suggested she make a portfolio of her work and show it to galleries.
He flew away.
A vanishing point on life's canvas.
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