Visions

Two Hanoi visions wearing crash helmets collided along the road to the airport.

A confident looking man walking near a lake tripped on cracked broken tile, didn't break stride, kept his eyes ahead, w/o losing face, stoic, passive, marching.

A young girl, 10, sat slumped against a blue stone crevice. She held a small box with something to sell. Her eyes contained world secrets. 

Is this suffering, being abandoned her destiny, an illusion for a Dream Sweeper?

Will she wither away and die here, lost, alone, forgotten?

She is one abandoned child among billions in the world, said Rita.

Saigon, Fall 2009 by Tran

Saigon or HCMC is short for Ho Chi Minh City. One door closes and one door opens.

The last time here I was leaving the war at twenty going on 100 to fly over the pond to The World meeting apathy and quiet rejection. I was transformed. I became a happy ghost. See ART.

Now I am out early drinking java in the Cholon marketplace, a throbbing mercantile zone near sewage, garbage, vegetable sellers, screaming motorcycles carrying precarious precious loads of food, towering stacks of plastic sandals, wholesalers, hustlers, beggars, thieves and market women who, after the initial suspicious glance thinking, What in the hell is that guy doing here, continued their daily business of haggling, selling, gossiping, cooking, scheming, dealing and living.

I wander down no-name streets to a Chinese pagoda, light incense, make offerings and meditate.

I enjoy Indian mutton curries at a mosque built in 1932. Serenity with repose and spirit.

At night in a park across the street is live music and a carnival as Saigon hosts the Asian Games. Iraqi and Chinese kick boxers practice in fractured darkness shielded by the moon. Gaping residents watch men and women punch and kick training partners.

I am in heart of darkness. Predators wear skintight translucent red dresses and black stiletto high heels. A woman must make a living.

Are you the hunter or the prey, said Tran.

Foreign tourist tribes move through on a quick three-day visit before swimming with alligators to Cambodia. They carry tattered guidebooks and wear rubber beach sandals. They are having an adventure. Traveling is hard work when you’re a stranger in a strange land.

Travel makes you.

Tourists collecting vague specifics of language and humid heat memories look distraught, lost, angry, hungry, confused and content like people they know and love and have forgotten in their eternal quest for an identity theory.

Old expats wear masks. After fifty you get the face you deserve. One step from the morgue. They struggle forward seeking food, water, emotional connections and meaning. There is NO EXIT.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Arrival

Take the A Train from Lao Cai to Hanoi arriving at 4:30 a.m.

Rain cleans air.

Streets are deserted.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collects dreams from talking monkeys. Narrow alley dreams stream crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, sighing into The Machine. Dreams, like writing, need simplicity, accuracy, brevity, clarity and humanity.

It’s a new day. The first day in a new space, new neighborhood, this Shikumen twisted Hanoi dream alley. People share toilets and kitchens. They share their lives on Fake Space, a glorious Internet frontier of brief equality and eternal technological distractions. Walls. Barb wire. Thick rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent.

Prison is a refuge and release.

Solitary confinement with the junkyard blues. Environmental impact statements.

Climate needs spare change.

No one gets out alive. You are a Stream-Winner, this cessation of sensation, perception. U experienced this deep illusive truth in Hanoi while editing a 227 page Ph.D. thesis of Buddhist enlightenment written by a monk in Nepal sitting under the Bodhi tree.

Edited pages are returned to Thanh. She’s the manager of Just Massage, a team of seven visually challenged masseurs and masseuses in the Hanoi diplomatic area. Great people with healing hands. Empowered.

Everyone is a Buddha, she said, smiling.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

October by Rita

Affect your environment. Do not let your environment affect you.

Take the blue line … celebrate red ink with a Chopin fountain pen … see how the ink bleeds on new paper … how it feels, this dancing wind song, point and line … take a line for a walk.

Hanoi air is cool before dawn when the landlord’s dog trapped in a long cement tunnel howls at 3:30 a.m. The dog is an apt metaphor for residents trapped in long cement tunnels called home sweet home.

Elsewhere the canine is grilled and basted on a spit at low heat allowing the flavor and juices to penetrate meat for a family feast.

Someone passing through is awake seeing stars, hearing the shriek of fruit bats returning to roost in long green palm branches gathering membranes, silent before dawn amplifiers at Lenin Park sing heavy DUTY patriotic songs with yellow grumbling bulldozers moving dirt, filling in lakes, drowning algae, plankton and fish habitats before the Party Leader plugs in her cassette machine to play aerobic madness in orange light before brainwashed human-birds preen ruffled dream feathers, screw their darling, feed incense to the dead, turn on plasma televisions, cook rice, fire up motorcycles and well before women sweep leaves from night’s tears.

Who will write the history of tears?

Free air raptors and Finch, destined to die in a bamboo cage, sing. Bats sleep in deep green leaves near the balcony of a narrow Hanoi home.

I don’t remember the century. Maybe it was The Glorious Year of Reconstruction.  Men hammered, shoveled and hauled Hanoi toward a glorious future.

Night stars dream before dawn hearing heavy machines at the park. Workers truck rocks to fill in the lake. Old Russian bulldozers shove piles of granite along paths creating new boundaries in citizens’ imagination limiting their curiosity and freedom. The ceaseless mechanical rumbling of machines sounds like a broken Teutonic alarm clock with geologic earthquake Richter intensity.

Echoes of crashing, tumbling granite stones shatters stillness. Reconstruction machines have a schedule, a deadline, a force of progressive development.

Inside bamboo an invisible scripter blends into a natural environment weaving a thread with unconditional love. Music perforates starlight silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged