State of Becoming

One Saigon day a nomadic TEFL facilitator having a look-see visited ELF, a local English Language Factory.

He didn’t go in. He’d researched the business from Hanoi. It was a large well-funded managed operation with branches.

At a nearby java joint he met a teacher from the State of Becoming, SOB.

He said, We have good support. They offer a CELTA certificate costing you $1500, we have resources and a wide range of ages, groups and abilities, I’ve been here one year and my experience is positive, we have good team focus and professional development, they take care of work permits, new teachers without the CELTA are required, at a 50% discount, to take the course. Education is a business. There is flexibility and structure, the educational level is higher than Hanoi, one piece of advice, if the student is 28, they have the emotional level of 21. (-7)

This EI  is common in Asian schools. Teachers tell sheep what to think not how to think.

Poor schools makes it easier for systems to control citizens.

Serious factoid. Push passive kids through The System minus critical thinking skills.

Oh, to be human…

Old man, young woman...

Wordsmith danced his final farewell Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble twenty words. Write one clean honest sentence.

Twenty words. Twenty quick painless illuminations about the 60-year-old man in THE BLINKING LIGHT. Retired American or European.

Smoking, drinking a beer, wearing a flower print shirt. Alone. He called someone. Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He grasps both her hands expressing deep gratitude. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love and salvation from loneliness, alienation, suffering and life’s blues. She comes to his emotional rescue.

He handed her the wine list. Anything you want, it’s yours. He is grateful to know and receive her. I want your heart, she said. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation. He is Mr. ATM from a lonely-hearts club band first aid. Mouth to mouth recitation.

After a quiet romantic candlelight dinner they returned to his hotel room. They danced naked for dessert. She traced his spine with fingers. He rested his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat, hearing the thump-thump-thump drum muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arterial aerated erotic aortas. Be the drum.

For one brief night in their healthy beneficial addiction they held each other with desperate desire before Tran’s Dream Sweeper machine collected everything at dawn. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Saigon Ice by Tran

Tran requested ice java in an alley off Dream Street filled with jolly plastic Santa Claus armies and tinsel. Tis the season.

Rita opened a large insulated orange box. Her left hand wrapped in a blue cloth picked up a chunk of white ice. She slammed a hammer on ice. It cracked. Fissures of released pressure, jagged lines, perfect beautiful lightning spread deep through ice.

She held global warming in her hot little left hand.

She smashed it again with all her power and strength creating fragments of elemental particles.

A sharp piece of ice pierced Tran’s left eye. The sensation of pain was immediate and direct cushioned by a delicious feeling as ice melted through his retina, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue and layers of perception altering visual organic matter as light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex.

Ice quality reflected everything around him. The stimulant of ice was a mirror.

The world is a mirror, he reflected with crystals shimmering inside kaleidoscopes of ice.

Illusions were smooth and clear. Buried inside the chunk of white ice he witnessed long jagged magic, mystery and sparkling universes emitting glowing crystal rivers.

The world is ice. Everything you see, hear, touch, taste and feel is ice, a sibylline language of clarity.

She dropped the block of ice back in the box.

She collected chips in a glass, added thick brown coffee, condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon.

Here you are, she said, handing it to Tran. You look thirsty.

I am, thank you.

End of ACT 1

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Saigon Woman Metaphor

You are an object of fascination and speculation. A stranger among strangers is alive, happy singing a blues song about creative disorientation and the dynamic unfolding process. You are a ghost and survivors have seen millions of them before now and later. 

Survivors pray to soul spirits because they are afraid of ghosts.

Many sheep have an EI or Emotional Intelligence of -7. This simple truth or unpleasant fact is revealed through behavior, attitudes and verbal communication. It’s a lack of maturity, a generation’s reality.

Zero incentive, initiative and opportunities have nothing to do with chance, fate, destiny, luck, education or life social skills.

I witnessed this reality facilitating in Utopia, said Leo, a survivor of Gulag #101. Living and learning comes before teaching.

Everyone is a student where life’s lessons are small and magnificent, said Zeynep.

There are book smarts and street smarts, said Tran.

The Theatre of the Street is opening on Broadway and coming to a country near you, SRO, every performance is sold out for infinity. Its free for amputees and orphans in Asia where life is pure street theatre, hustler heaven on earth and I am pretending to be exactly who I am. My little story is filled with contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguities.

Discover a Metaphor, said Devina.

Ok, said Tran, Here’s one. Vietnam is a Saigon woman, 18, she costs $28 an hour, living in a room with other girls down a long series of narrow twisted dead end back alleys in Area 51 on the dark side of town. They are radioactive rural chickens. They have no identity cards. They are the living dead. It’s an in-out job.

The fat boss plays cards with friends. Neighbors chew the fat. A customer arrives on the back of a cycle. The boss tells his son to get three chickens.

They walk into view and stand silent. Which one do you want, asked the boss. He doesn’t care. They are a commodity with an exchange value. Human life is cheap.

The man looks at the girls picks one the others shrug and leave the man hands the boss money he unlocks a green metal door the man and girl go in the boss locks the door behind them you can never be too careful there are two dimly lit curtained areas with thin mattresses and a bathroom in the back shy she undresses with her back to the man she is supple they play around like greased monkeys getting warmed up for the big climatic scene they’ve forgotten their lines and ad lib their silent film in slow-motion her breasts are small points of light it isn’t about her pleasure she warms up big daddy applies a love sock climbs on for the ride takes control of the action priming the pump she majored in Vertical Mergers & Acquisitions at Quick & Easy U moving with the grace of a river reed caressed by warm sea air in suspended animation finished with the climatic action they wash dress knock on the door the boss unlocks it she returns to her room friends TV and boredom waiting for another curtain call the man rides into night smelling naked metaphors and the boss deals another hand. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Spirit Dream

Spirit dream rides clouds. Ancestor ghost eats incense. Feeling slow and clean in the temple zone.

Leo discovered new Chinese ink, stone and brushes. He remembered Mr. Li, his calligraphy teacher in Utopia.

How to stand.

How to hold the brush.

How to rub the ink stone inside the black oval with water.

How to caress the brush and black ink along an edge.

Create simple strokes.

Be the ink, be the brush, be the paper.

Museum

The Saigon Museum is filled with glorious death defying historical struggles: wars, artifacts, diagrams, maps, tanks, planes, final assault plans, old cars used to haul the dead dying wounded and ammunition, statues of men making pistols, old medical equipment, typewriters for propaganda material, flags, posters, pamphlets, a burning monk in 1963 as Kodachrome blazes his life, villages, corpses, soldiers, politicians, dog tags, gas masks, knives, guns, tools, radios, helmets, baskets, pots and pans, shoes, shirts and skeletons.

Papier mâché people exhort the masses, Independence or Death!

They’ve traded illusions of independence and freedom for a one-party Socialist state filled with greed, corruption, nepotism and economic opportunity.

Life - contradictions and paradoxes.

Where does the artificial end and the real begin, asked a blind beggar.

Thich Quang Duc

The Amputee  - Knife Sharpener

After eating noodles in a cold alley, a man, 60, remembering how wars and hard survival ages humans, sat sharpening a knife for a woman customer redefining steel. No left foot. He rested his curled leg stump on a boot.

In the afternoon he walks past with a shuffling gait. He’s wearing a green fatigue shirt, floppy hat, motorcycle helmet and carrying his worn red plastic bag of simple tools. I know his truth not his story. A landmine or a stray bullet?

His left boot is a discarded war object and split down the front.

It is brutally hot. The sun is behind him. How does he feel? Where is he going? Home for lunch and rest? Looking for more dull edges.

I am always walking, he said. I stop, find work, sit, sharpen an edge, get small money, put away my tools, put on my boot and walk. I eat noodles or rice on the street. 

I walk and work until dark. Then I go home. Home is where they have to take you in. I am a storyteller with tools for sharpening life’s dull imperfections.

I am surrounded by amputees, he said. They approach me on their crutches, their hands out. Without legs they wheel themselves down the street on little trolleys low to the ground truth.

____

A one-armed young man wears an old blue baseball hat. He sees local businessmen approaching. They wear fresh pressed white shirts, leather shoes, and pressed pants with shiny belt buckles.

He takes off his hat. Holds it out. It is empty. They ignore him. He puts it on his arm stump, runs his good hand through his black hair, puts on his hat and moves down the street.

I am in the army now, he said. An army of the legless armless physically and emotionally wounded forgotten humans. They know you and you know them. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged