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.

Spiral Foundation

In Hue the Healing The Wounded Heart shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.

The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization in Nepal and Vietnam.

            Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love.

At the SPIRAL workshop they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College. All net proceeds from handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries.

Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.

Hue Help, an educational charity, works with an orphanage, mobile health care units and supports volunteers creating educational vocational projects. They work with the visually challenged. They have three schools providing supplementary education.

The Vietnamese attitude is to be perfect in school so they fear failure, said the short-term British volunteer coordinator.

How do you survive here? I said. Always incorporate a condom in your lesson plan, hide your money and trust only 10% of the people.

The Hue Embroidery Center on the bank of the Perfume River has a fine art gallery.

*

The House of the Artist at Night with 12 Emotions

30 breaths whisper leaves changing color

invisible dialects dance mysteries

open heart women do embroidery

30 Japanese tourists in wheelchairs with guidebooks

behind a white haired woman in a rickshaw dawns attention span

30 single-minded awareness diamond minded white butterflies flutter

Perfume River flows as women laugh at unknown possibilities

30 singing girls on 30 bikes under 30 trees on 30 paths see

30 lightning bolts escape 30 clouds inside 30 central nervous systems. three o boy o

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

lanterns

Hoi An women unload the night catch of screaming silver fish into baskets, weighing, selling, slicing and frying protean. I wander through the market smelling fish, meat, vegetables, inspecting fruit in broken light.

I am Lucky Foot. Wherever I am I bring good luck to universal money exchangers, manicure salon girls, banana woman, schools kids, tailors, cloth sellers and craggy faced Dan the local boat captain who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the war.

I bring good fortune to the 125cc motorman, water seller girl, barber, high-heeled sandal seller, massage love sock girls, noodle mama and rent-a-life companies. HCE – Here Comes Everybody.

A girl searches Tailor Town for magic silk, linen, cotton cloth and an invisibility cloak. Everywhere every day everyone on their quest meets the old woman with a basket sitting outside the cloth market discovering the exact threads they need.

Everyone has a quest. Some have quests for air, water, food, sex, shelter, clothing and money. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs feeds the sheep. Someone else owns the grass.

I stop at a salon. I ask for a pedicure. The women are shocked. They are familiar strangers. Everyone smiles and laughs. Ha they chatter in musical frequencies. The old snake wants to shed his skin.

It’s good to know all the walking, treading movement and sole memories are so easily erased as curling epidermis falls away.

How slow can you travel?

You discover ice in the market. It is a floating world of light and shadows.

Ukiyo-e.

In the old town past the Japanese bridge is a serene shady street lined with trees, homes and shops. An abandoned temple once used as a school is jammed with jumbled desks and dusty forgotten Communist party political posters. It is now a workshop for bamboo lantern production.

Hoi An is famous for circular red bamboo lanterns. Their reflections line the river at night and decorate streets and homes. Boys carry long bamboo poles into a courtyard, set them on a chopping block and split them lengthwise with a machete. They cut long pieces into ten-inch sections and split them into the thin fragments. Three women chat while shaving the narrow green bamboo pieces.

Boys drill holes in the pieces using a simple punch machine. Girls and women assemble wooden lacquered bases for tops and bottoms by wiring pliable bamboo staves into bases to shape and curve frames with circular dialogue.

A young girl does her homework using a chair for a table as her mother works. An old frail woman arranged lines of fresh lacquered staves to dry in the sun. Every generation has their role to play.

A boy loops piles of round bamboo skeletons on his bike for merchants who’ll wrap diaphanous red cloth skins around frames.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Hoi An

I 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.

I am on the street early. 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. 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, and 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.

 *

Nature is my inspiration, said Eric, a sculptor from Europe. He has a gallery with an elegant hard gray marble sitting Buddha in the central window facing the street. Eric is 45 and thin with a deep lined brown face and brown eyes. He sits below a large leafy tree surrounded by his huge marble flowers, Buddhas, Jesus, bowls and delicate petals. He drinks milk. I drink green Chinese tea.

I’ve been depressed for three months. I feel sad and empty now. I haven’t had any new ideas for a long time.

He’s had his gallery for four years. The landlord wants the place back I need to find a new space for my gallery, he said. He has a workshop six kilometers outside town near Marble Mountain. I lived in a Swiss forest for thirty years. Nature is my teacher. I studied with a Hungarian master. I have to go now. Goodbye.

*

I wander along the river and stop at a food stall. A young German eating noodles shared his story.

He looked at the river as blue boats ferried people back and forth.

This place is a little Disneyland, I love Mali and Ethiopia, it’s what happens when countries and governments save historical places and they become well known to tourists. Governments develop them with monetary and cultural motivation to capitalize on a place with potential profit. Local people often get squeezed out. Others adapt and make a decent living.

Tourism = money = tourism.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Phu Bai

In Phu Bai I shared my story of arriving when I was older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow. I arrived from Saigon in 1969.

I stayed at the 8th Radio Research Field Station for a couple of days and volunteered to join the 265th Radio Research Company supporting the 101st twenty miles north. Screaming Eagles. Chicken Hawk. Saigon bar girls called us the Chicken Fuckers. They were the chickens.

Going north was a wise choice. The 8th enjoyed stateside amenities. Rosie cheeked donut dollies from O Hi O gave crochet lessons on Saturday and banged officers.

The 265th was a life lesson in teamwork, respect, trust and relationships. People rotated in. People rotated out. I put in my time and paid my dues for 364 days.

I returned to the world and became a happy ghost on a flight from S.F. to Colorado in 1970. Traveling became my mistress, motivation and meditation. I collected and invented stories about life’s ebb and flow in a long film with diverse characters, fate, chance and opportunity.

I put my Nam experience in a memoir called ART, Adventure, Risk and Transformation, a memoir published in 2019.

I discovered a piece of paper in the parking lot at Phu Bai airport. I turned it over. It was from a Vietnamese Airlines container/pallet cart. In big blue letters it said EMPTY. I slipped it into my Moleskine.

A perfect Ah Ha moment.

*

In 1970 three of us drove over the Perfume River and through the Ngan Gate into the Citadel in Hue. It is a masterpiece of Nguyen architecture. Five massive stone slabs with Five Phoenix Watchtowers and nine yellow glazed tiled roofs resembled five birds in flight.

A benevolent Blue Dragon sculpture guarded the East. The aggressive White Tiger protected the West. Harmony. We passed through the Southwest Ngo Mon Gate (Noon), one of five into the Imperial City.

The citadel was built in an auspicious location preserving the harmony of heaven and earth, man and nature. Welcome, said a Vietnamese intelligence liaison officer. He led us through a courtyard to the Thai Hoa Palace, or the Palace of Supreme Harmony, constructed in 1805 for ceremonies, coronations and receiving foreign ambassadors. It glowed with red and gold lacquers.

There were once large bronze pots and urns in this courtyard, he said. During the Tet offensive in 1968 they were melted down for ammunition.

Twenty-five days, including ten days of house-to-house combat killed 5,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, 384 Southern troops, 142 Americans and 1,000 civilians. Described by one journalist as the bitterest battle of the war. War is hell.

A two-story building with pink paint was divided into classrooms for artists studying music, art and sculpture. Painters created behind easels as a young man posed as a Greek archer. Off a verandah sculptors worked around a kiln with tables of bronze warrior figures.

Music students tuned delicate instruments creating soft melancholy sounds, weeping energies, ancient cultural memories. It was the perfect place to meditate and inhale venerable music in a calm way.

The Swiss and I visited eight ostentatious tombs south of Hue. Ancient sites with pristine carvings of dynasties. We climbed stone steps and wandered corridors seeing gilt carved thrones and photographs of kid emperors. History was guarded by statues of civil and military mandarins, horses and elephants.

Hard to imagine they built all this for one little emperor, said Sam.

In twilight we explored old tombs, thick forests and an ornate wooden pavilion extending over a lake where 108 concubines recited poetry to a lucky little emperor once upon a time.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Be The Brush

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.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

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