The Eucalyptus Journey and The Tree of Life
By Luu Nguyen Dat, PhD, LLB / JD, LL
Mon: October 17, 2015
In 1957, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and director Edward Dmytryk finished the film RAINTREE COUNTY in the United States, based on the story of Ross Lockridge, Jr. into French and took the name L'ARBRE DE VIE (roughly translated as "Tree of Life"). Among the actors, the most prominent is Elizabeth Taylor, who plays the beauty of the South, Susanna Drake, and Montgomery Clift plays the sage of the North, John Wickliff Shawnessy. Both characters share a confession, a desire: to find "The Tree of Rain of Flowers" / Raintree, to find "Tree of Life" / L’Arbre de Vie.
Indeed, in the opening music of this film, Nat King Cole sang: “It is said that in Raintree District, there is a towering tree with clusters of iridescent yellow flowers. You will see a rain of flowers, as an interior…, or a dreamlike dream… ”[4] Then it was time for Susanna to ask," A rain of flowers? " What will happen when you see that rain of flowers? [5] John Wickliff replied: "That tree will open all doors and heal all injuries". [6] Susanna said: "How long have I been searching for a similar tree" [7] ̶ the tree of miraculous life, to save the world.
In 2008, I embarked on a similar search, under the account of a route dubbed “Đường Khuynh Diệp", or “Eucalyptus Journey”, [8] which somewhat echoes the old "Silk Road" of the adventure of buying and selling, transporting silk intercontinental, from Asia, through the Middle East, to supply the European market. But in particular, the Eucalyptus Journey is a journey with many existential meanings, through many forms of merging narrative.
In terms of layout, the Eucaplyptus Journey fragments in space and time into paths of searching, meeting, and becoming "stations" of existential narrative. The author has distracted, or fragmented the Eucaplyptus Journey into four main segments in the plot, which are Eucaplyptus Journey (Parts I, II, III) and also Eucaplyptus Journey (The End).
First of all, Eucaplyptus Journey opens like an autobiography. I, the actor in this autobiography, after months of treating breast cancer with chemotherapy, or chemotherapy, traveled from the United States to Asia to heal, "change the air, clear the mind, find more vitality." [Business Registration, Part I]
The agent has chosen Eucaplyptus Journey as a long life road, because he believes in the magical power, the reincarnated kucchini of eucalyptus tree, so decided to return to the country "immersed in the scent of leaves, ... to see increased capacity. " The impact of finding eucalyptus leaves is aimed at herbal treatment, after the disease has been "smoking tamarind medicine, picking papaya leaves, drinking grass". But because the cancer occurred on the body of Jenny, a woman born in Vietnam, the agent wanted to find out with Vietnamese eucalyptus, with "innate" shades and flavors, Stick to the ancient country. From a pilgrimage of sick people, an open-minded follower, Eucaplyptus Journey has gradually gone deeper into the interior of life seekers, gradually becoming a dedication to the past, attached to your own origin meaning. Seeking to enjoy the "eucalyptus in memory" is like that.
But that search for that ideal tree was not possible through very realistic circumstances, in too cruel spaces. Land "Sunshine Kampuchea" does not have a shadow of eucalyptus. Therefore:
"The smell of eucalyptus did not come to me in Phnom Penh ..."
"I absolutely could not find the eucalyptus flavor in the land of the wonders of Angkor Wat" ... [DKD, Part I, "Sunshine Kampuchea"]
The cold was too dire in Hanoi to paralyze Jenny's efforts to find the vitality. There, the agent did not have a chance to find eucalyptus. Even the plum flower of Hoa Binh land, as an alternative image for eucalyptus, could not be found:
“Plum blossoms are still different. It turned out that this year the plum blossoms bloom early and have fallen off when the cold comes. We returned empty-handed back to Hanoi ”[Business Registration, Part II]
From station to station, the path that connects the searches of "eucalyptus flavors" continues to fail to reach the desired destination, in the integration of failure in failure, of void in void, of emptiness. so in the void, every time more fragments are added, so that the aroma of the leaves changes, faintly unnoticed, even when the eucalyptus suddenly appears:
Doc Let was also wild, but after a few wandering meals, I finally found the shade of the eucalyptus I expected. I rubbed the eucalyptus leaves all the time to make my hands more green, but for some reason my hands were still white and the scent was just faint. What does that mean? My hands are different and the smell of eucalyptus has changed? [Business Registration, Part II]
From station to station, the path that connects the searches of "eucalyptus flavors" continues to fail to reach the desired destination, in the integration of failure in failure, of void in void, of emptiness. so in the void, every time more fragments are added, so that the aroma of the leaves changes, faintly unnoticed, even when the eucalyptus suddenly appears:
Doc Let was also wild, but after a few wandering meals, I finally found the shade of the eucalyptus I expected. I rubbed the eucalyptus leaves all the time to make my hands more green, but for some reason my hands were still white and the scent was just faint. What does that mean? My hands are different and the smell of eucalyptus has changed? [Business Registration, Part II]
Leaves or people are "different old"? Scenes or people have "changed"? It is a choked question or judgment when the female guest does not see the sign or taste of the expected human tree.
But such a statement is not enough to decode the inner impact, which is both spiritual and surreal, but the agent changes each time. The taste of eucalyptus, in the quest of an antidote, antiseptic, is not a viable, visible entity, and cannot be accepted intact by sight, taste, or smell. In fact, eucalyptus oil is not a venerable keratosis medicine but rather a metaphor for another profound symbolic value: finding "eucalyptus” and looking for the taste of eucalyptus is looking for reason to know its meaning. and the existential value of life, in which suffering and death are contagious, immense, collective. Of the majority, of many different broken and exiled circumstances.
The author cleverly helped the autobiography to remove the fragment on Eucaplyptus Journey each time multi-faceted, multi-faceted, broadening the horizon, in the journey to find liberation, with pieces of mirrors to illuminate life and death. suffering, concentricity of sentient beings, of human beings. It was the pre-work technique of incorporating "story in the story", which André Gide called "mise en abyme".
In the context of each sideline meeting station, the agent becomes the bearer of suffering, as in the background of mass massacres on the chaotic Myanmar:
Nearly 3 million people have brutally lost their lives on this land, some of whom are not small Vietnamese. Few of us can imagine how deep a human cruelty is.
While visiting the Choeung Ek burial camp, I was faced with an unprecedented horror. In addition to mass graves sprawled on a wide area, outside the building of a skull that was shudderingly tall, in addition to stacks of clothes stained with mud and dried blood, sandals with open muzzle, piles of bones of limbs, The cup containing the victim's molars, I also saw trees with bowls of incense and fruit baskets hanging from the branches. I tried to suppress my emotions. Wondering why people worship these trees. A few seconds later, I broke. On the tree trunk there are deep knife marks across the limbs. It turned out that the children were being pressed against these trees before their bodies were cut. In the human burial holes have been found around, there are many bodies that have not been intact. There is a pit where most women and children have no heads and no clothes. More than 30 years have passed, yet visitors to Choeung Ek can still see the victim's bones and clothes scattered somewhere on the banks of the mass graves [DKD, Part I, “Sunshine Kampuchea "].
Just like the ancient people who had traveled through the dry, grim deserts, on the path of the journey of silk for welfare, now Jenny on his journey back to Asia to find a source of life, has passed through the land " Sunshine Kampuchea ", to see firsthand the killing fields, the mass graves of more than three million victims, after being tortured, miserable," miserable ", unjustly slaughtered, barbaric. These terrible phenomena are the blatant consequences of a dark period of human history that is dark, depressed, and chaotic; of the thought of alienation, genocide; of the blind, inhumane communist ideology, bred by the wicked hatred of the party leaders, the ignorant, bloodthirsty chiefs, the Pol Pot and his Cambodian companions.
Human life no longer depends on the natural existential reason, harmony with the environment, with morality, and reasoning. Human life is no longer explained by religious beliefs or by arranged, acceptable fate. The massacre of the three million innocent people turned into a bizarre phenomenon that went beyond all rational, rational, and plausible explanations. Those nonsensical, mass massacres become a metastatic cancer, ulcers, devastating within the heart of humanity, a dangerous disease, to this day still mutilating, killing, incurable. There are also many other mass slaughterhouses, due to environmental pollution, artificial disasters, conventional and impermanent warfare, atoms, terrorism ... Pol Pot and his accomplices are still deformed. ghosts, at times atrocities, to continue to annihilate humanity. They are evil qi, derived from the outside, and also erupted within the inner realm. They are "frivolous" things, the notions of extreme action, too much, greedy, being advocated by human beings and created to rob and destroy people. And also to self-destruct. Samsara becomes an extremely fast, irresistible breakthrough, like an extreme, extravagant, meaningless test.
The phenomenon of suffering and danger is also related to the personality of a depraved society, with the most vile survival needs, under the pressure of hunger, deprivation, ignorance:
“If yesterday the Cambodian and the Vietnamese were victims of Pol Pot's genocidal movement, today they are the victims of a new crime. It is a crime of human trafficking. The purchases of Vietnamese and Cambodian people for slavery are continuing every day in Kampuchea "[Business Registration, Part I," Sunny Gua Kampuchea "].
Kampuchea became a land that contained harbors disguised as tea rooms and corrupt "black worlds," whose sex workers were beautiful women, most of them Vietnamese. According to the TIP (Trafficking In Persons Report) of 2005-2007, a large number of women and children aged 9 or 10 have become victims of "trafficking" in Kampuchea. They were forced, lured, sold, sometimes by relatives and relatives, in a miserable livelihood, depending on the needs of the world "buying incense".
On the sun-drenched Camodian land, the desperate agent could not find the desired eucalyptus tree, because the pure scent of the aromatic leaves was overwhelmed by the perverted "scent" of women, and children were tormented, defiled by immoral, sensual humans:
“I have absolutely no taste of eucalyptus in the land of the wonders of Angkor Wat, but I feel my body has added an invisible new vitality. I have to do something. ” [Business Registration, Part I, "Sunshine Kampuchea"]
In the midst of the above painful situations, the agent "forgot all of his illness" when he understood that, in the ancient district, people live and die very hard, who resent. The agent no longer holds in hand traces of eucalyptus leaves, because it is heavy hearted and preoccupied with "carrying coffins" for others [DKD, Part II], or indignation at the "machinery of exploiting labor" of the local, inferior and disadvantaged people:
In this intimidating scene are thin, sick, men and women workers, standing in line with their hands doing movements that are like chasing other machines. In this group of people I noticed eyes that were too young, too immature. Besides those eyes I saw familiar brands like Albertson's, Gamestop, Pizza Hut, 99 Cents, KFC, Safeway, etc. Area after area, I cannot estimate how many of those swarming people are working in that situation. They work in extreme heat, in the threatening hum of machines, no helmets, no gloves, nothing to protect their ears. I can't imagine how they would work day in and day out. [Business Registration, Part III].
The Eucaplyptus Journey has been transformed through many partner "stations" one after another, in which the scene is the "end" cases (cas-limites) that cause the insiders to choose between bondage and dissolution, between the dam. destruction and integrity, between life and death, between personality and alienation. Suffering and death are all significant, have a nourishing effect on life, on the level of omnipotent existence:
After Thi lay down, Thi's parents asked to give all the donations to the Friends of Hue Foundation to help other children. Thi's grave is not yet green, we have received news from the Central region that there are 6 children in urgent need of heart surgery. If not, you will not be able to escape. Including a child with the same date of birth of Thi. Each heart operation costs about 1000 US dollars. Thi's mother asked the Association to take action immediately. We immediately transferred the commissions of about 5000 US dollars plus another 1000 from another family to save the six children. And we will also take care of the procedure of buying a wheelchair for the two children in Thi Nghe ... [DKD, Doan Ket]
In the end, looking for the "eucalyptus", like looking for the "human" tree, does not mean finding a solution to reincarnation, renouncing death, but really just understanding the reason of life, knowing the meaning and the existential value of life, in which suffering, death, samsara, kindness, kindness is impermanent, infinite, non-self:
On the way of eucalyptus, I came across hungry birds that broke their flight path, limping wooden legs, rays of rays, small shoulders twitching in the cold, flesh invaded and tortured. , mortal deaths, innocent bodies executed on tree trunks, trembling hands receiving rice, compassionate smiles, loving eyes, circles of cause and effect ... I went throughout a circle. Thought the scent had a revitalizing effect. To find it again in the most unexpected place. At the starting point.
Eucalyptus is like that. Not long but very round. The circle of life and death. Relay circle. This is a circle of people looking for someone to find themselves, to find and give back, but still there, still divided among each other, a little human love, a little mutual love, a sympathy, simple but drastic. I went looking for eucalyptus in the past. But the eucalyptus is still around me, in the present. And in the future. Mine. And everyone's. [Business Registration, Ending]
Khuynh Diệp is a plant with fragrant leaves [eucalyptus] that easily causes a comfortable feeling [movement] where people are close, receive and enjoy. So, in essence, “eucalyptus” in a metaphor can be implicitly compared with a work or a work, because both represent fragile flavors, fluttering and emotional values. If positive, those are fragrant shade, end of season plum blossoms, kind, human thoughts. If negative, it is the crushed bodies, destroyed because of hatred, self-interest, jealousy [predisposition, inclination] with inferior, inferior faculties [bias, bias].
A true humanistic work, by itself, is odorless, colorless, impermanent, infinite, and selfless. Consumers want to stick to its neck narrow slavery, scraps for points, after taking profits, trading reputation.
So to stay intact, the journey to find "The Tree of Eucalyptus", in front of the work, must be looking for the path of creation again. Starting with the author's multi-bearing manipulations. In the middle of the road by coincidence an infinite discovery, impermanence, no-self. At the end of the road, or at the meeting stations, with the participation of readers across the street, hitchhiking, assisting, relaying leaves, grafting from the tree of thought, to open a continual journey by yourself, finding his own taste of "Eucalyptus". When the original seeker is no longer there.
