Chapter 9
Bangkok as Eden in Crepuscular Existence
Last night, unable to write, I was stir-crazy in my confinement, with practical worries of future retirement and not being able to materially sustain myself or anyone else fifteen or twenty years hence the predominate thoughts that were pressing upon me in late hours. Then this concern, partially that I will not have the resources to be of benefit to others (a vexation to the virtuous no real consolation49 especially as I am already in debt over all that the insurance company refused to pay on Luklawan’s hospitalization), morphed into onerous regret over tuition money I had given to others in the past, or the money that went into operations on Aus’ legs; and it was only the dull repetition of this ruefulness and imagining dire scenarios in the future that exhausted me to the point of sleep.
Now, in the morning light, the earlier worries seem petty and less significant; but with sleep only reviving me nominally, I retain this morbid mood in which I remain wordless, without any vision to impart and with a sense of the futility of seeking truth when life functions on delusions. And because of the news (the sinking of a ferry boat of hundreds of school children in Korea, and the mysterious disappearance of a commercial airliner in the Indian ocean with a similar number of human treasures) I sense an individual life, of whatever profession or social ranking, or its alleged value and significance for humanity, to be the garbage that it in fact is with the greatest individuals and accomplishments, even that of Einstein himself, compacted under the weight of further facts and conjecture in the relentless and undeterred thrust of forward moving fads, experience, and time until at last becoming irrelevant and garbage within garbage, old explanations of the scarcely explicable. Thus, I am reminded that a species itself is rendered as nothing but a transitional link to something else with enough time. Thus, I have chosen to go downtown to clog my mind in grandeur and opulence, for there are areas of the human psyche that no anodyne of drugs and alcohol can penetrate.
But everywhere I go, just as I tread on insects, I tread on human life. To buy some soymilk at a convenience store, as I did half hour earlier, and I have relegated this life of the cashier to a base assumption that it exists to serve my whims. Most likely, the cashier had already suffered the indignity of having to pay a 3000 baht guarantee against financial mishaps and liabilities or compensation for potential theft to obtain this position at all, so to add injury to insult, here I am, a customer demanding to be served. And if loud and crude, her Thai, like most Thais, rougher than the bark of a tree, the environment, more than the tonal aspect of the language, made her such—this pachydermatous character charging her way through life’s vagaries. In deference, when Thais pass a teacher they lower themselves like cowering cats or in approaching him or her or extend to a given teacher the gesture of the “wei,” but it is to the worker whom I owe deference. Here is a mind like mine, like my mind, this individual could have been all things but, for survival, has been lured into this cage.
Likewise, it is so of the workers at a restaurant where I eat my vegetable tum yum, slurping, savoring every mushroom, and masticating the little galangal within the tum yum that is edible. In the bus, half expecting to see a young child belonging to a half toothless ticket seller or bus driver (the latter on his methamphetamines like me, the same and no better than me, going the same direction as me—of course he would be as the driver, or so I would hope), lying on a front seat, instead I see a ten year old ticket salesman. Sometimes Thailand is as it was thirty years ago-- with education compulsory now, I do not know why. With the apparition of the young and diminutive ticket salesman, I fall briefly into memories of being a boy feeding the water buffalo at my grandfather’s farm or loading rice into his makeshift silo. A saffron robed elderly monk is seated next to him. As forty minutes into the journey he is still asleep, I touch his hand and awaken him. “Phra [Honorable monk],” I say. “May I be of assistance? I don’t want you to miss where you are going.”
“You are so kind. Wat Phow, he says. It should be on the right.”
“Oh, I don’t think you are on the right bus. You need 117. This goes to the Bayoke Tower.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe you should get out here.”
“Never mind. Someone always finds me and pulls me in. I haven’t lost the monastery yet. A destination just needs another destination to bring one back, and as the second destination is destination it seems that it is one and the same. But then as I get older I do not imagine differences in everything any longer. Everything is everything.” He looks out the window into the froth of the yellow shirt sea. “Seeing differences is the sin that has brought us to this. All of these sirens” He means whistles.
“Odysseus and the Sirens,”50 I say.
“What?” he asks.
Waiting in front of the ticket desk to the observation deck of the Bayoke Tower, as it is not yet open, I, all alone, always wanting to be alone in the intensity of thought, sit on a bench and look out onto life buoying on the yellow sea. It manifests itself in the form of Thai peddlers as linked to their carts as if they were respirators, IVs, and umbilical cords, all three: those in front of fruit and meat grilling carts, souvenir salesmen catering to foreign tourists, those with a nexus to their makeshift restaurants (some with already prepared fast food, and some catering more to the Moslem diet and palate prepared by women in head scarves or hijabs), and those operating coffee kiosks and juice squeezing stands. I descry a couple lottery ticket salesmen with open wooden briefcases tied around handle bars of their bicycles selling to those seeking to have enough to get them through the day and a bit more for their one and only daily gamble to radically alter their lives. An emaciated woman with a son in a wheelchair and donned in a school uniform looks distraught an hour into my wait, as no customers appear to her towel of wooden trinkets. Periodically, she makes readjustments in the realignment of the objects as though this more orderly arrangement might make it more visually appealing as the paralyzed son dressed for school does not garner many sympathy purchases, which of course he would not with those who would sooner give to singers, dancers (especially those in a striptease joint), tricksters, and cute dogs with signs in front of them saying don’t forget to feed me money, but not a genuine reminder of how bleak the world really is. I step over and buy a wooden piggy bank that I decide I will give it to Aus until noticing that the coins that are to be ingested therein have no aperture for excretion. I buy the pig nonetheless to brighten her day as, no matter how bleak life is we live enough in the future to cling to our rays of hope, and then a ticket into the sullied heavens.
And if opulence can be equated as munificence, the latter can even be said of the magnificence of the city of Bangkok, the city of myriad downtowns with endless clusters of skyscrapers built like pyramids on the backs of its plethora of pittance-salaried workers and maintained and staffed the same. It is there in every direction as attested in the spinning observation deck; and beneath layers of smog is the mellifluence of its myriad sweet effluvia (in outdoor markets in particular, it is the thick black smoke of grilled chicken, sausages, and other eviscerates cooked from makeshift sidewalk restaurant takeaways, its plastic sacks of garbage nocturnally torn asunder by scavenging canines that are allowed to propagate and starve along with their rat counterparts in the substrate of this “ higher” mammal’s concrete Eden, its sidewalks of evaporated urine residue most palpable, and the emissions of dark carbon dioxide that trail millions of vehicles of these frenzied individuals chasing money.
But this metropolis, this attenuated and milder version of predation, savage in its own way especially to those who are homeless and without employable skills, those deemed of no commercial worth, is a monochrome Eden not merely for its ever growing scaffolding florid around the ordure of fetid slums or its languorous plebeian consumers, Western philosophy professing bums like me, who circle around this
great city within the kaleidoscope of the hot sun and within the kaleidoscope of their thoughts while so many others are suffering automatons. It is an Eden for being the great crucible of spiritual survival in material survival; for whatever acts of genuine kindness are born in such a place are bound to be noble indeed.