where does fear go?

Educational Folly is the Vietnamese Teachers’ Manual.

Rule #1 push students through

Rule #2 students memorize the text

Rule #3 ask students for donations disguised as bribes

Rule #4 students vomit material on an exam

Hanoi women do did done all the work. Buying, selling, cleaning, screwing, birthing, nurturing, raising kids, teaching, sewing, cutting hair, washing, cooking, serving, scrubbing pots, pans and chopsticks, sharpening knives and tuning musical instruments in life’s orchestra.

World women survive by sighing, singing, laughing and loving. Women are crazy and men are stupid. Stupid men makes women crazy.

Repetition education is practicing task-based activities, like sweeping dust, said Tran.

Thuy is forty-seven and labors in a public middle school in Hanoi. She makes $800 a month. Her classes number seventy.

Essence before Form, pure and simple, said Zeynep.

It’s their innate cultural disquiet Sensation, said, Rita.

I suggest it’s their representation of Symbols, said Tran, taking a cue from Leo, the Leader of Cannibals, teaching Nothing.

Devina practiced the art of Becoming.

Students’ humbling life changing experiences might be learning:

a)         how to be independent and grow their English skills

b)         how to share with others

c)         how to do their own laundry

d)         how to manage their time

e)         how to find secret places for experimental sex

Personal puzzle confusion danced across a blue lake infiltrating the consciousness of peasants. They sharpened knives, cleavers, swords, arrows and bamboo spikes.

*

Thuy in Hanoi speaks good English. She’s married with two daughters, Ben, a bright and lively 20 and V, 10. Her husband is an engineer at the largest paint company in Hanoi and speaks Russian. Thuy has a friend, a euphemism for lover, who owns a small cafe downtown she visits on Sunday. They fool around in the back room.      

Ben studies Portuguese at Hanoi University and hopes to study in Lisbon with Fernando Pessoa, the author of The Book of Disquiet.

V is learning how to ride her bike and overcome the dynamic fear of losing her balance by releasing her small fears. V thought about this.

While riding at Lenin Park one night after dinner V asked Ben, Where does fear go.

That’s a heavy question little sister.

How can a simple question be heavy, wondered V  ... It’s the gravity of thinking  ... that’s it.

That’s it keep pedaling and don’t look down little sister.

Ok, said V spinning her wheels. But I want to know where does fear go.

You got me little sister, perhaps it explores jungles swallowing Angkor Wat dancers, or maybe it’s for sale at the Fear For All Store.

V stopped pedaling. Are you kidding me.

No, ask mom about fear she’s the smartest person she knows.         

Two students talk. Why is your English so good.

My motivation is money.

Please explain.

Better English = better job = more money = more food.

What is essential is invisible to the eye, said The Little Prince. This was required reading in a 4th grade class in Indonesia, said Devina.

Find freedom you need or freedom from need. Everyone lives in their visible, secret, serene, creative, joyful, eternal garden.

Accept loss forever, said Tran, gifting V a mirror.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Ang

Way of the empty hand.

Be inwardly humble and outwardly gentle, said Ang, a Hanoi student lawyer with a 5th degree Dan black belt. She was small fast and deadly. A quick tiger without a motorcycle license.

We rode around Hanoi. I knew the city and showed her diversions.

It’s strange having a foreigner give me directions in my town, she yelled into the wind as we negotiated a dusty section of congested road works for a new subway while speeding south near Lenin Park.

Take it easy baby I whispered as we swerved through a phalanx of cycles, cars, trucks and bike spokes.

We stopped near a lake for iced java. Hanoi has many lakes. The Vietnamese coffee comes from the Central Highlands. It is high quality. Vietnam is the world’s second biggest coffee exporter after Brazil.

Hanoi, like Beijing, is the conservative cold capital. It was bombed during the war. Hanoi survived the Chinese, French, Americans and Vietnamese. War by proxy like now elsewhere. Same-same but different. Saigon is the new young economic vibrant city where anything goes 24/7.  Beijing-Hanoi. Shanghai-Saigon.

My name means heart in Vietnamese, said Ang.

I am a Bui Doi, I said.

I know what that means, she said and she wasn’t laughing when she said it.

Dust collector whispered Tran.

An old man with heavy ropes eating his shoulder skin, tendons and bones pulled a wooden cart filled with bags of cement down the street. His rhythm, cadence and rubber sandals slapping pavement burned his energy doing his daily labor inside the people’s labyrinth surrounded by horns, cycles, cars, bikes, push carts and pedestrians as he strained forward, shoulder muscles bouncing, flexing, extending his action, thick thigh muscles grinding his momentum like a shark always forward.

Iceman arrived with his cart and long crystal blocks. He sawed ice into manageable chunks and carried bags of frozen water into the cafe. Light glimmered crystals.

A man in a white government shirt stood on the sidewalk picking his teeth with a sliver of wood demonstrating his ability to eat food.

It’s a slow gradual invisibility, said a witness at life’s moveable feast.

Today would be a good day to be a kite, I said to Ang.

You’re crazy, no one wants to be a kite, she said and I said, Maybe you’d rather be the string. She didn’t think this was funny.

Sure, I said, If you were the kite and others the string they would, could, should, control you, as a willing victim of circumstances outside your control with no free will. You’d have no responsibility, flying free.

Yes. I like having no responsibility except for myself.

You’d have free choice with amazing potential, I said stringing her along with The Analysis of Consequence.

Teach me something about photography she ordered in a domineering tone because she was small powerful AND angry with repressed regret because her mom abandoned her for economic reasons to work in a town 150 clicks north so Ang went to school to be a lawyer, to hopefully immigrate to England someday and attending daily karate practice with displaced aggression while taking care of her spoiled whining 11-year-old brother then her older sister had a baby and it meant more housework for Ang as a domestic servant being younger so she was frustrated at the mean dirty tricks life played on her.

I have a camera on my phone, she said. Advice?

Move slowly. Incorporate your karate skills into street movement. Practice. Be. See. Shoot a lot. Always have your camera ready. Anticipate. Try new angles and see geometric patterns of light. Paint with light. Prowl the streets. Ignore the main event. Focus on the spectators. Shoot through things and get close enough to touch your subject, dance around your subject, use RAW format.

I grabbed my Leica, got down on hands and knees angling between bamboo chairs, framed, composed, exhaled and squeezed the imperceptible impeccable shutter. The image of bamboo lined close to the eye, depth of field, legs, and blurred feet. Visual metaphors. See?

Yes, thanks.

It’s like karate or sex, I said. Practice. Do it 10,000 times until you get it.

A man walked by. He saw a foreigner with a local girl sitting on a bench near the Lake of Swords. Milk him, he joked. Ang walked over and severed his spinal cord in a blue flash of beauty and dexterity. He crumpled, dying instantly.

She sat down. That’ll teach him. A blind man with a cart collected the body. Physicians at Peoples’ Hospital #4 dissected the cadaver to recycle organs. Where do the eyes go, asked Doctor Death. In the eye bag, said a blind nurse.

See Beauty and Cruelty without hope or fear with a sense of humor, said Tran balancing on his strong leg in deep shadows.

What is the purpose of Beauty, asked Rita. Beauty held up her mirror, See for yourself flaneur.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Babbling Tongues

Same-Same But Different screamed from tourist t-shirts. Same-same for miles along shady streets inside narrow alleys babbling Chinese and Vietnamese mixed with grilled meat, ground java and motto cycle mayhem.

Where are you from, said a Hanoi motorcycle maniac at the intersection of Yes, No, & Maybe.

It depends, whispered Devina, a genius disguised as an extra in The Divine Comedy of infinite unlimited proportions.

Dialects of babbling tongues prayed to establish a connection, a bonding through need, want and desire. Tongues played on the sympathy of strangers. Tongues lashed a cerebral cortex. Strangers suffered from spiritual poverty and guilt begging fatigue.

Everyone had their hand out. I am from heaven, said scripter. Mr. Motorman expected a place name like Europe, America, Australia. Heaven? Yes, Where is it, I pointed into a blue sky. There.

It’s about trust here, said a Frenchman with gardening experience. I know foreigners who’ve lived here ten years and they still express reservations about who they can, do trust, it’s a problem, be careful.

A Vietnamese sex worker and money-loving predator surviving in a mean old world with a moist tight vagina in Saigon took her European trick out for a sushi dinner. She said, The perfect world is to be American, married to a Japanese and eating Chinese food.

You can trust maybe 10%.

Her dark eyes contained world secrets. She was a great French kisser.

Where did you learn to kiss like that, asked her exhausted lover escaping a lip lock.

From the French, they occupied our country a girl needs to make a living harvest my bush caveman. Open wide here comes the one-eyed snake.

She knew how to milk a throbbing purple snake. She could read but couldn’t write. In her line of work literacy wasn’t essential. Raising her hips with pleasure her fingers traced an imaginary alphabet on his skin in darkness.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Burma Isotope U-235

An emaciated bald mad broken toothed male junkie in relapse approached me on a Hanoi street.

He was on his personal quest for salvation. I am from North Korea. I spent seven years as political-economic prisoner in Burma, he postulated after dawn prowling Old Quarter needing a permanent change of address with no zip looking for someone to talk at. He was a lost one.

He was the star of his reality entertainment program. He blathered a blue streak. He was naked with belief and madness.

He ranted, I tried to sell the Burma generals nuclear arms from NK. I was this close to closing the deal, making a peace sign, They need to protect themselves from the big bad hostile world. They are paranoid idiots. Anyway, I have friends in NK. Hey, business is business. They sold me the goods. I paid cash.

In Burma I got mixed up with the wrong people. Schemers and deceivers. They lied. They cheated. They played me for a fool. They stole all my fissionable material and locked me up. I had everything: triggers, U-235, isotopes, plutonium, uranium, plans, diagrams, designs, centrifuges  ... the works  ... it was the full course meal  ... you have no idea  ... you just don’t get on a plane with this stuff.

One Burmese general’s wife wears $50,000,000 worth of gold and precious stones when she takes a shit. Can you believe that?

He continued: You need to go by boat from NK to Sing Some More. In Burma they made me sing in prison. I was in the choir singing for my supper for seven years. My voice is shot. I was lucky I wasn’t shot. They tried to shoot me out a cannon. I got stuck in THE SYSTEM. Un-fucking believable, I should write a book called Seven Years in Burma. Do you have a pen and paper. I need to get it down before it evaporates like morning dew.

How did you get out?

I became an informer rat. I took care of people. I developed relationships. Relationships and timing is everything in life., I bought and sold information. I sang for my supper. I did hard time. The nuclear stuff was worth millions on the black market.

I was born in a black market, stall #101. My mother was appointed to have me. I made a killing in Iraq. Literally. Mercenary work. Black ops. I went to N.K. I made connections with the Ministry of Fear and Nuclear Ambitions.

I worked. I paid. I got the shit out. Then it collapsed like a house of democratic chad cards in Burma. I played the Joker. It was wild. The Burmese said, Show us your hand. I did. They cut it off with a rusty machete. He held up his ticket stub.

He was beyond wild. He had his remaining hand out looking for compassion in the form of an exit permit.

An empty hand holds everything.

He lived on Dream Street at noon o’clock where a dusty Vietnamese grandfather clock strikes 12 inside a deep black gravitational void. Bong-bong-bong-bong. 

He jabbered his shadow illusion away past same-same travel tour shops, same-same bored boom-boom girls waiting for same-same tourists offering them same-same cash for same-same skin merchandise and same-same sleeping motorcycle hustlers.

He was the blues personified. He had a permanent case of the walking blues. He pleaded quiet desperation with anyone who’d listen. He was trapped in Hanoi with people hustling to eat. Hustling to dream. Girls hustling to fuck Mr. ATM cash flow. Hustlers hustling happy meal to happy meal needed a bailout from IMF.

Life’s karmic wheel of birth and rebirth spun him in circles.

Conversations love distractions and you can’t step in the same river twice.

It’s not the same river and you are not the same person.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Dance

Mr. Easy Rider took me to the Hue train station. He was a gaunt gap-toothed happy man riding his ER cycle.

The next time you come to Hue you find me, I take you DMZ, Ho Chi Minh trail, Highway #1. He looked at me. You’re old enough to remember that I know.

Yes I’m young enough remembering our eight minute spin to the small red & pink art deco station seeing hearing smelling remembering V trains filled with scared young men and war equipment rolling north and south to fight the French, VC, Americans and ghosts.

Tribes of Australians performed luggage contortionist tricks manipulating mountain size rolling bags clacking up pink stairs. Tattooed blond feminists with white elephant bellies and Mohawk cuts mixed with retired well shoed businessmen and their smart bagged wives.

A diminutive Viet woman arrived on her motto with big goodie bags destined for transport. She struggled to unload everything and drag it upstairs to the shipping zone.

A bored mom waited with two rambling kids as loud European tongues played tag.

A detached thin well-manicured high heeled beauty either going home for a hot shower or heading north to take a sperm bath in the Hanoi skin trade sat alone.

The W.C. in the SIE 4 waiting room smelled sweet. A potent extract of high acidic aroma. Every blue plastic chair bolted to the floor was occupied.

All the film extras in a long running performance milled around playing bamboo flute river music. Old eyes remembered everything from years and tears swallowing dark natural amazement.

A young woman with delicate hands and perfect posture wearing scuffed white ballet slippers and a five-point gold star painted on her forehead turned to me.

Did you hear Mercy Cunningham, the dancer died.

No. What’s the story.

I study dance, that’s how I know. He was amazing. Dance is all about ambiguity, poetry and acceptance. He had independent detachment. He had creative imagination. He said dance was isolated yet cooperating and independent. He believed in the magic of dance.

When you dance for a fleeting moment you feel alive.

I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, a language in space, I said.

It’s more than that, said Tran a one-legged dancer leaning against nothing.

There are five rhythms in dance.

You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.

Really, said the woman.

Yes. Then you have a line, from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

Chaos follows, a combination of circle and lines where male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.

After chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.

She danced away.

Movement never lies. 

Seeing through soft eyes I visualize a language in space, said Rita.

A spoken language dies on Earth every two weeks, said Tran.

Yes, said Devina. Storytellers sing and dance oral stories. The world is made of stories, not atoms. WE memorize seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies, create and exchange clan and tribal myths as children listen, memorizing, chanting, reciting songs and the dances of their ancestors. They receive and transmit future oral traditions.

Historians try to understand what happened through the arrow of time.

Cultural anthropologists try to understand how people communicated their stories, said Omar.

The more I see the less I know, said Leo. WE ride beams of light. Let’s dance.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged