Ruminations on the Ontology of Morality (a Philosophical Novel)
BOOK I
The Environment and Self under Distant Scrutiny
Chapter 1
My Dead Wife, Luklawan, the Gecko Muse, Stabbing Me with Her Pen
and Inducing a Preface to the Work
“What are you doing?” demanded the Gecko while maintaining a condescending gaze from its stance on a paint peeled strip of the wall. Smoking, as was my wont, there was the smell of cannabis in the room, and from this, it appeared as though the oblong creature were in a low cloud hovering over it like a descending fog.
“Thinking,” I said, still reeling from the hybrid, but smiling and pretending otherwise in such a consummate performance that even I began to believe it myself. Its hair--it had hair--was long and unkempt, and to some degree it obscured but did not successfully camouflage the familiarity of the face. Even in this lesser form with slight cosmetic differences, the face that I could see was that of my deceased wife. Diminutive as it was, it had that same elongated and distended loss of elasticity that I was familiar with and was distinguishable from all others in the realm of faces. And while seated on a chair in the kitchen, I kept wondering if in defying gravity by walking on walls, as it did, youth might return unto it once again. It was a rather erratic and nonsensical thought, I must admit, so I do not know why I entertained it seriously, but I did.
“Thinking, are you?” mocked the gecko derisively. “Thinking about what?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Something ponderous.”
“Thinking and not doing. You’ve always been this way. A professor of philosophy but with little to show for it. What’s wrong? Has the gecko got you by the tail? Don’t you like green skin, or is it that you are bothered by the fact that now I am too diminutive for you to penetrate? But then, with all those others, had I slipped into the green raiment extra petite size during my earlier human incarnation, it wouldn’t have mattered all that much, not that it matters now. Nothing matters with enough time—not even the existence of an entire species or the incineration and freezing of gaseous debris at the collapse of a star.”
“I have no prejudices, one way or the other, Luklawan. I just don’t understand why you have come back like this.”
“Like what?” she smiled. “Is one way of being better than any other? A gecko might be a predator of insects but it is innocuous in its impact on life. You can’t say that of human beings. I said we would meet again. I didn’t say how or in what form, or whether your mind, mine, or both in reciprocity, would be the agent behind it all--all realities being nothing more than states of perception.”
“You mean the dried psilocybin, the mushrooms I took earlier.”
“Among other substances.
“There has been a void since your passing, Luklawan. It has taken me to this—not every day. Just sometimes, especially when there is a lot of time on my hands and I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“You have someone staying here.”
“He’s with his parents in the province now. I need to feel as though I am giving back, that there is more than predation and death to it all. So he stays here.”
The gecko then became silent and stayed mutely condemning and motionless on the wall for several more minutes before crawling over to the desk in the adjacent room. When it returned it, it said, “You know what to do,” and it shoved a pen into my hand so forcefully that it pierced the skin, causing me to bleed.“Don’t allow me to catch you abandoning your scepter again. Take it and spill your blood in words. There must be an account of the void. A philosophical treatise must be written.”
Preface to Ruminations on the Ontology of Morality
Just as Lek, the Thai word for “small,” has always been my sobriquet of insignificance—a nickname first given to me by my parents who, surprisingly, did notice me when sliding out noiselessly and unassumingly from the birth canal, as diminutive as one of Democritus’ atoms1, and thus not bumptious as most babies are in having gone up against the odds as victorious sperm cell penetrators over hundreds of millions of adversaries, zygotes, viable fetuses, and then successful newborns—so it is lek to me in consequence that you find yourself perplexed by my multi-lane syntax, my compound-compound complex engineering feat, a bridge of truth that has as its aim something higher than you.
Although you, like me, are a mere hominid of all the hominids that were and are, including the nine or ten species of men who came before you2, part of a transitional link, and not my ultimate audience, it is not as though you are inconsequential. For perceiving this record of my droll thoughts as something to be scoffed at—and I want you to scoff at it as it will keep it in circulation, and what stays in circulation will go on to the extinction of men and beyond – you are the mitochondria to the cell. This is the hope.
But you say that just as Rousseau3 gained his fame by eschewing Thomas Hobbes,4 conking him over the head with a shovel, and burying him into a jungle-Eden so deep that today no one has rediscovered the sinew of his thought, so I, an obscure part-time lecturer at two universities in the land of Siam, seek the same fate, the same fame, amongst human inhabitants, but that can hardly be right. After all, I am Thai, and my role it these nondescript universities are of such little merit that I might as well be teaching the Koran at a Madrassa along the Pakistani/Afghan border. Who would publish my material and pay attention to me in the conventional sense? No one. No, I must entertain my moronic Neanderthal friends. Well, as Neanderthals had larger craniums than Homo sapiens5, perhaps I should refrain from such denigration, but then as they are no longer around, there is no one to apologize to. Perhaps it is the species that is so ruthless and cunning that they will do whatever they can to cling to life and obtain hegemony who are more pestilence than morons.
As for the reasons to write, it seems to me that there are two: one which is to make a name for oneself, and the other which is to name the times that one happens to be witnessing; and as the most prescient and maligning of works will not be written in New York City or London, but in the most remote parts of the inimical global community, it is conceivable that they will be written here, despite all the claims that Bangkok is where men cum in the banging of their cocks and not the exertion of their brains. But I retort that it was only last year the city, in Amazing Thailand, was able to plaster posters proclaiming that it had been awarded the World Book Capital of the Year. Of course, city authorities, men and women of learning like the Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra (sort of our Nancy Sinatra) who at earlier junctures of their lives went respectively to America to procure advanced degrees and returned without the ability to say cat or dog had paid the requisite bribes to secure the honor; but then the question is who is worse: those who bribe or those who are bribable?
“What are you doing? You are on the sofa once again watching movies, aren’t you? One would think you would have more pride than to be one of these herds, scared of loneliness, wanting noise to drown out all thought, never befriending deeper dimensions within themselves.”
The universities are shut down, Lookie. There is fighting in the streets. There is no point in preparing for classes that don’t exist.”
“Where is it? Where are your ruminations on the ontology of morality?”
“Nobody cares what I have to say, Lookie. I think that you just want me to stay inside and to stay out of trouble.” The gecko went to the desk and began looking at the preface. “Is this all?” asked the deceased fishwife, examining the two pages I had writt
en. “It is shit! Yes, I want you to stay safe, but also to stay productive. ”
“None of us is safe,” I told her. “You are dead, and death now or later seems immaterial, doesn’t it?”
“To stay alive for as long as one can to be of assistance to others, evanescent as they may be, for as long as health holds out is not immaterial, but noble” said the gecko. “But to really live requires giving to the ages. Thousands of generations of millions of people, scarcely more than societal functions mixed with some personal pleasures, habits, and appetites, hardly beings at all but avaricious shadows, have come and gone. I, of course, had been teaching at the business college, that business college in which you are now sending your friend to study, and then when I least expected it I had pancreatic cancer, the removal of my spleen, and death. It happened so quickly—life to all happens so quickly-- and one, if she is as lucky as I am, comes back as some diminutive green thing. That’s all there is.”