THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science."

--Albert Einstein


I was wandering around the Russian Market today, a rag-tag collection of food stalls and gift stalls and what-the-hell-are-those stalls that seems to symbolize Phnom Penh in all its messy glory. (But I'm not sure what the Russian angle is. I'll have to get back to you on that one, 'kay?)

This is the place where you can not only buy stuff -- food stuff and cool stuff and useless stuff -- but you can also always come in contact with the most pitiful, wretched people on the face of the planet.

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Like so much of Cambodia, it simply is, and you have to determine how you deal with it.

You ever see that old movie The Elephant Man, with John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins? This lady today in the market came up to me asking for money, half her face shrouded by some kind of makeshift shawl, and beneath the shawl I could make out these bulges and bumps and bony protrusions that sprang out from the side of her face. Her smile was kind and her eyes were pleading, and the rest of her face was, well, if not an abomination, something pretty damn close.

Again -- it is what it is. The market is one of the places where the unwanted come to ply their trade. They come to beg and grovel. They come for mercy, if mercy can be classified as a few thousand riel per day, if they're lucky. They come to be seen, and are rewarded for their
deformities.

It's pretty heavy stuff, as Marty McFly would say. It's also heavy stuff that you can very quickly get used to, which is even more heavy, if you catch my drift. Not easy to process, seeing people like that, and then after awhile it gets easier to process, which increases the heaviness quotient by a factor of ten the more you think about it.

Which brings me to Einstein's quote. (You were wondering when I was getting to that. Thank-you for your patience.)

You enter Cambodia and you enter that realm of the mysterious.

I'm not talking about the genre, here; I'm not talking about the kind of stuff James Ellroy or Robert Parker or Agatha Christie get off on writing.

I'm talking about the kind of mystery that most of us have probably forgot even existed within us, that searching, restless wonderment at an inexplicable world. The kind of feeling you had as a child, laying on the grass, staring up at the sky. Why is it blue? There's never been a satisfactory answer to that. In space, there's no up and down, right? How can that be? 'Up' and 'down' are what orient us, right? So if that's all gone, there's...what, exactly?

These are the kind of thoughts I had, and still have, and the essence, the root, the base of these thoughts are what I'm talking about. The source of them. That sense of mystery that kids live with and embrace and run shrieking and weeping and wailing from on a daily basis. The monster under the bed, feral and there. The wind shrieking outside of the window. The supply-teacher who has a black welt on the side of her face. Things you feel but can't locate.

When you're in elementary school the specter of junior high looms every close, and what will it be like? At my elementary school, Pine Grove, it was 'open-concept', see, and what that meant was that there were no classrooms per se, with separate doors and windows, but only big rooms that contained four different classes separated by chalk boards on wheels. I don't know what the point of it was, since whenever you had your class you could look ten feet across and see what was happening in the other class, and you'd hear the Grade Three math lesson whether you liked it or not, but it made me wonder, it did, made me wonder what it would be like to have an actual classroom classroom, self-contained, with a door and everything, like the kind I saw on Different Strokes and Happy Days. Junior high held the promise of those classrooms. How big would they be? Could you actually, like, lock the doors? Would there be a window on the doors?

Oh, the mystery...

You may think I'm making a joke of all this stuff, but I'm not. I think we forget how unexplained everything is to our younger selves. The rest of the world, especially the adult world, gets what's going on, are in the loop, got the memo, but kids are cruelly, casually kept in the dark, waiting for someone to switch the light on, because they're too damn short to reach it.

Think.

Think back.

Think back to when you were seven and eight and nine, and try to remember what you knew about cars and driving and paycheques and aftershave and how records were made and how cigarettes somehow managed to drop down from somewhere deep inside the strange and unseeable centre of the cigarette machines. (Remember those things?)

And what was the deal with records, I used to wonder. (Incidentally, one little nine-year old boy who I used to teach in Japan, after hearing that I used to have a small record player as a child, said: "I've never seen a record", which made me feel old.) Where did all the music come from? I used to think that every time you dropped the needle down onto the record, it triggered some kind of light in some studio somewhere, and it let the band know that it was time to play the song, because someone had requested it. So I used to try and trick them -- whoever 'them' was -- by quickly taking the needle off the record, then putting it back on, and jeez louise they managed to play the song at the right point each and every time.) And traffic lights? How did people know when to go, stop, pause? I didn't know that people were following the lights; I thought the lights were somehow controlling the flow. I used to think there was some dude below ground controlling everything in some James Bond-like control centre, watching the flow of traffic, determining when it was a good time to go and when it was a good time to stop.

It was all mystery, these minor minutiae of life, and slowly and sadly the mystery disappears, is explained, becomes mundane and routine. And then we are in our twenties and trying to figure out our own lives, so we leave behind questions that were once very, very important to us, like:

Why does the man always, always, always miss meeting the Polkaroo?

(If you're not Canadian, you ain't getting that one...)

Which brings me back (somehow, a little belatedly) to the lady in the market. Where does she come from? How does she live? How did her face get so tragically wrong? To think about it is to revert back to the essence of who we were for the first ten years of our lives. To ponder a simple, everyday Cambodian greeting like this is to force us to confront a little bit of the uncertainty that lies beneath the surface of even the most placid of contemporary commerce and communication.

You can say I'm exaggerating things, or thinking about things a little too much, making tenuous links, or even exploiting some poor woman's daily existence for the sake of a semi-interesting, mostly roundabout, randomly written blog, and you'd be right. Can't deny it. Guilty as charged, councilor.

That's what I do. That's how our thoughts and our minds and, hell, our lives work, I think -- they bop around from here to there, looking for connections, hoping for connections.

Einstein was right. I'm not sure what he means by 'fairness', exactly, but I guess there's no shame in admitting that Einstein confuses me.

But it's something along the lines of: Art makes sense of the senseless; science gives form to the formless. And at the intersection of both is an unending, depthless mystery that we chip away at from the day we are born -- learning to smile, to walk, to talk, to speak, to read, to write, to learn, to love, to teach -- only to discover, if we think too much and feel too much, that the mystery can never be solved.

When I was a kid I used to love to write my own Star Trek stories that had Kirk and Spock and Uhura and McCoy and Scotty and Chekhov and Sulu struggling not to fall into the dreaded 'bottomless pit'. (How can a pit be bottomless, I'd wonder?)

That pit is it for me -- the black and endless symbol of mystery itself, the nagging, unknowable question given a cruel and illogical shape.

Our questioning of the how and the why of that poor and pitiful lady who spends her life wandering around the Russian market, hoping her ugliness generates pity, is a pit without end, a dark and vibrant hole, but also an affirmation and rejection of all that life generates and discards. Our questioning is what makes us and keeps us human.