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.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

If you were the nephew (or niece) of the prime minister of Cambodia, and you were returning from a late-night party with your best buds, hot-rodding it through the crowded streets of Phnom Penh, and you 'accidentally' plowed into a group of people minding their own business by the side of the road, and an even larger crowd started to gather (as it always does here) to check out the commotion, what would you do?

The answer is obvious, right?

Take out an AK-47 and start shooting.

That's just what the Prime Minister's nephew did last year. He was caught. He was tried. And he was put in jail. The ancient, glorious bells of justice and freedom rang throughout the land.

Kind of.

Sort of.

Well, not really.

You see, just last week the right and honorable Prime Minister Hun Sen gave a very lovely, moving, tear-inducing speech about freedom and justice and punishment, in which he stated that it was not fair or proper or right for the children of the rich and the powerful to get off scot-free; it was good, very good, that his nephew was in jail, because then he could not get into any more trouble, and the citizens of the glorious kingdom of Cambodia could sleep soundly at night.

All very well and good.

Only problem is, he's not in jail.

Some enterprising reporter decided to check out the validity of the prime minister's comments, and, lo and behold, the nephew is now in China, studying computers.

Good for him, reforming his life and all. What a guy. There was some sort of secret trial for him back in August, and a decision was reached, and off to the orient he goes.

I'm sure, of course, that Hun Sen knew noooooooothing about it...

Yet another example of blatant, every-day corruption in Cambodia. As striking and out-of-place here as the blue sky and the hot sun. Reading The Cambodia Daily or The Phnom Penh Post on a regular basis will make you laugh or weep, or probably both. Just yesterday a high-ranking official announced that massive quantities of oil had been discovered off the coast of Cambodia, which could easily be utilized to rejuvenate the economy and the engine of his Mercedes, and all was well with the world. Until experts in the paper today said, well, yes, there was oil discovered, sure, but it's not really good for much of anything, anyways, so let's just settle down a bit, shall we?

And so it goes.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I never realized how fundamentally crooked most of the world is.

Case in point:

Another story in today's paper details the corruption charges levelled against the former Prime Minister of Panama, who diverted twenty-five million dollars worth of discretionary funds traditionally spent on emergency disasters and medical care for the poor, all for a perfectly logical, reasonable reason: since she didn't want to look like a pauper, you see, her being the leader of a country and all, she decided to spend those millions on clothes and jewelry for herself and plastic surgery for her assistants. (And Canadians get upset about their politicians secretly buying a few extra flags. Which is not to minimize the recently unearthed scandal back home, but believe me, Paul Martin and Jean Chretien have got nothing on these folks. But Martin's young, he's still got time to learn...)

You can't think about this stuff for too long. Because, if you do, you will then put down the paper, and walk outside, and be forcefully, unavoidably confronted with human squalor in all its messy disorder, and the issues are connected, these two are, the waste of money and the waste that is poverty, and you can't figure out how, or why, and that's that, as they say.

The thing is, growing up in a nice, safe country like Canada, you don't really have to think about politics, or politicians. The mechanism is in place, and there are people doing their work, and all is well and good. Somebody's running the show; let's hope they do a good job, we wish them well, and what time is the game on, again? Eight o'clock, was it?

I remember being in Grade 3, answering Mrs.Knevel's question about how the prime minister of Canada was. (And I just realized that I'm probably older now than Mrs.Knevel was then, and that's impossible to believe, inconceivable, as the little dude says in The Princess Bride, so I'll move right along.)

"Elliot Trudeau," I said. Confident. At one with the universe and my nation's leader.

Ah, no. Close, but no cigar ( given that I was seven, and not allowed to smoke.) Pierre Eliot Trudeau, to be precise, but I had answered wrongly in front of a group of my distinguished peers, who probably decided that and, well, that was it for politics and me until Oliver Stone's J.F.K.

It's only now, confronted on a daily basis with the sheer, unending, monstrous inequality that exists in developing countries that I can appreciate and understand (a little) how good we have it back home compared to places like here.

I can also see the danger of complacency. The threat of inertia that exists when we treat politicians as somehow higher than ourselves and beyond our (limited?) reach.

If the nephew of Paul Martin (or George Bush) pulled out a gun and fired at innocent people, would he do time? Most likely, yes. Would he be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, free from any kind of judicial favor whatsoever?

I hesitate before answering that one, which indicates, perhaps, that we still have a little bit to work on back home, too.

Maybe a lot to work on.


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As an interesting (?) annex, did you know what AK-47 actually stands for? I didn't think that it stood for anything (not that I had given it a lot of thought, true), but it means something like 'All Kalishnikov'. How do I know? Because there was an article in the paper about the gun, and the guy who invented it, whose name is, get ready for it, here it comes, Kalishnikov. He's still alive, this guy. Some Russian dude. Very proud of his work. Created the weapon in WWII. Famous in his village. Still looks like he could kick the living hell out of me with his big toe, and I bet he pours vodka in his corn flakes and orange juice every morning. Has a face not even a mother could love.

Can you imagine if that was your legacy, being the guy who created the AK-47? To have your name live long in the annals of eternity, not through your offspring, but through an endless round of bullets?

That'd be awesome, as Christ Farley (may he R.I.P.) used to say.

(I'm joking. I swear. Now, if it'd been an Uzi, sure, now that's a legacy to be proud of. But an AK-47? Not so much.)