Were one uninterested in corresponding with a diary
As is the practice of utmost privacy
Should that be the case dear Sir/Madam or Whom to Be Advised
What follows is a consultation between the conscious and unconscious facets of one’s mind Wherein the deliberate subjection of the latter to the fore
Through conjuring it from the depths of suppression
Will cure it of its facelessness
Or of having to live in the recessive premises of its rival
If thou will
Abridge them, Dr Sigmund Freud: in eliciting thy counsel, I hereby volunteer my repressions
To save thou of having to excavate them thyself
And in doing so
To liberate myself
That is, to wield a catharsis that duly unifies my cogitation
I pledge to commit transparently to my admissions
And am no fool to believe I would have robbed thou of further unmasking
The authorial veil of my psyche
As is the undertaking of psychotherapy
And its heresy conventions thereof
Dear Founder
The Father of Psychoanalysis
Take this not as a deposition of thy psychotic philosophies thus
But an armistice between the author and patient himself
By necessity
For he will sustain
His suffering otherwise
Construe of the following accounts what thou will
As one would assume thou would
Regardless:
I have come to fetch the monk from his temple
For Bà Ngoại is dying in the hospital
Which is filled with many people around the bed housing her
Consuming the little oxygen
She has left for her lungs
I am steering through the rows of streets of suburbs quite frantically
Unbeknown
I am on an expedition of steadfast determination
Which one may allude to as one’s sense of Duty
My mission is thus:
To escort a monk to Bà Ngoại’s bedside
Who is in dire need of his presence and the prayers to be issued
Henceforth from him
The holy expert of admitting the entitled to their utopian residences
Beyond the realms of mortality
Which one may know of as the Pure Land
I have deprived myself of any weeping as I ought not yet to, or ever
To entertain the catastrophe that is myself losing itself
As does consciousness in discharging its vile ordeals onto or into the unconscious
On this excursion
Whereupon the people’s houses convene on either side of the paralysing perimeters of a long laborious route
Oblivious toward the tragedy befalling this passer-by
And them the bystanders
Of an otherwise paradise I am praying for Bà Ngoại’s ubiquitous hereafter
An abundance of street signs successively
I am passing till I have dozens without the temple in sight
I am petrified of the suffering I am capable of inflicting upon myself
As if the sea is conscious of the tsunami brewing inside its abyss
Its conscience, then, is the only preventative safeguarding devoted shore-dwellers
From its hysterical annihilation
What does it take to summit the mountain?
My consciousness flickers like a wuthering candle affixed to the Fansipan
Would the unconscious mind that the conscious is without any conscience
Does it pity it even, therefore ironically?
A traffic light morphs into a time bomb that wilts in the depravation of the destruction
Destined of it
To terminate the motives of drivers with decadence
On the road I am halted by yet more amber
I am held a hostage inside this vehicle
Or is my unconscious being bombarded?
Which feels progressively like a tank that hereon should be referred to as such
As if this enterprise was not an affliction in and of itself
Enough!
On the asphalt
I envision armies of ants bearing the burden of desperate tyres like these
Finding themselves lost
Frankly, I am uncertain who this is that commands my consciousness anymore
If what is currently conjured ordinarily resides in repression
Is this but a stream of the unconscious unfolding consciously
In which one diverts and digresses as one does
Or a symptom of the conscious and unconscious minds discoursing
Within one’s brain – the respective workforces of the front and back of house
Quarrelling
The conscious and unconscious respectively
Whose stance I know not
To side with, or who I am
Even therefore thinking, I interrogate myself as a scholar might
In the mirror, which usually clogged of cars, now reflects a rather vacant rear
And I think to myself I look very empty
Also
I am particularly pale
Today
I am the designated driver of Bà Ngoại’s fate and thereby, therefore mine
Under the bright boundless sky
Harsh in its joyous fluorescence
Shimmers indifferently
Is it not slightly cruel for the sun to be shining
On me when my world’s disclosure of its consequential demise
Coerces me, its involuntary audience, to devour what it divulges
One might empathise with this as the collapse of one’s own civilisation, too
If only they knew Bà Ngoại
The way that I do
For every accomplishment
I wholly attribute to her, conventional or substantial
Professional or personal
The fruition of who I am is all but her doing
The architect of my fortunes
Who had built the futures of her eleven children as a widow aged forty-two
Having fled the conflict and famine of Vietnam
Smothered in napalm the skies of saffron that stretched endlessly she had traversed
Now ninety-two
Remains the roots of an ever-growing tree
And I a bud of a flower of a fruit of a stem of a branch of the trunk of the tree
That is her breathing legacy
I have today assumed the privilege of facilitating her dwelling
In heaven
Awaiting her at the top of the hill
Surely is I see now:
The flag of Buddhism flung for the salvation that it so signifies
Marks a territory as a destination
My place of refuge
Overcome with nostalgia
I inhale the frangipani and the opulent incense of agarwood
I kneel before Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara
Smiling, whose name Bà Ngoại had chanted each morning
Thus, taking my cue from her, I hold my hands in prayer and surrender my vision
As if in not seeing reality will rid itself
Of its prevalence
Nam Mô Đại Từ Đại Bi Cứu Khổ Cứu Nạn Linh Cảm Ứng Quan Thế Âm Bồ Tát
I greet the monk as he emerges with the Dharma and feel my face as cold as stone
Abruptly, my phone rings
My voice crackling as if my mouth spontaneously is an intrusive firepit
Crackling
Like a twig that yields on the forest floor
In retrospect:
In reiteration:
I scarcely could believe myself:
Thầy ơi, Ngoại con mất rồi!
We force ourselves on to the road
The monk now my passenger; anyone who is not a bystander
Is a blessing
In times like this, I believe, and pray even harder than I had before
Under these fluorescent planks of an artificial sun
I am standing over Bà Ngoại
Observing the quiet that presides over an entirety of eight years shy of a century
Before me
Beneath the golden silk sheet
As still as a pond…
That is Bà Ngoại
And I think that this is what the elusive looks like:
Nirvāṇa, after all
