Chiroptera

Outside a Hanoi balcony is a palm tree. I am an Old World bat. The family name is Chiroptera.

The sub-orders are Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera. I am the only mammal in the diverse animal kingdom that can really fly, sustaining myself on wind currents, up/down drafts and rough drafts of manuscripts before they get cut down or become extinct.

I am too agile to get cut down. My size is perfect. I am a very valuable important and productive member of the eco-system. I will explain. It happened like this. After a night of flying through black skies illuminated by a faint moon and eating insects with delicious fruit for desert I rested in a fifty-foot tall coconut palm tree between two squashed homes in a Hanoi suburb.

Yangon, Burma

I’m roosting under a long thick leafy branch now. It’s a temporary home until my younger brother gets his wings. Soon I hope because we need to expand our territory. It’s a comfortable habitat away from predators like snakes, cats and humans who enjoy tasty grilled bat meat. I’m a flying delicacy with C-19.

Anyway, like I was saying, I was upside down which is normal for bats during the day using my claws to grasp green fibers and I had an itch. I needed to stretch out my voluminous wingspan membranes. Natural enough. I rustled around and then, due my superior enhanced navigational audio and visual systems to find food and survive, I detected a pair of eyes on me. Yes me. I was seen. Discovered.

I shriveled into myself. I pondered this dilemma. After remaining as quiet as a mouse, easy to catch at night when I'm feeling hyper aggressive, I peeked out from under my wings through the leaves. Much to my surprise, sitting in a third floor room looking at me was a strange creature. I hung on for dear life. He seemed harmless enough. I smiled.

To tell the truth I am a hybrid bat and to be scientific about it, a CHIROPTERA. Write that down. Try and say it fast three times and you can impress your friends at nocturnal parties using sonar. I am the MEGA and the MICRO in the Bat Kingdom. Like the Alpha and the Omega.

I have the most highly developed combination of DNA characteristics found in bats. The Mega has large eyes, excellent vision and claws on their second digit.

The Micro has small eyes and uses echolocation to find nourishing insects. I have amazing visual and hearing genetic traits. Twilight calling. I roost in the shade and protection of wide green fronds. Nap time  ... Shhh.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Yangon, Burma

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