LIGHTNING WITHOUT THUNDER

Lightning without thunder has its own special grace. Flashing across the sky, in subtle streaks or golden brush strokes, but absent the onslaught of echoes and bowling-pin strikes -- in this manner, with those shimmering, almost elegaic tints, even lightning can seem benign.

(Especially while running by the river shortly after five, watching the light poke and prod at the fading black night, feeling the faint but steady patter of rain on one's head, shirt, shorts.)

At such times, this land seems peaceful, almost serene. But then I read the paper, and I see that Cambodia has a received a ranking by the World Economic Forum that places it near the bottom rank of competitive nations, 112 out of 117, ahead of only Benin, Paraguay, Guyana and Kyrgyzstan in terms of risky places to invest money, and I see, in local news, that a teen accused of robbery was hacked to death with a machete by an angry mob, that a drunken man was arrested at the temple for scaring worshippers with a fuck-you sword, that two men have been arrested for furthering the illegal-monkey trade that is (apparently) rampant in this country, and, to top it all off, I learn that a 'Khmer Rouge-style' restaurant has opened opposite the Tuol Sleng torture museum, where diners can dine on rice gruel identical to that served in the Pol Pot regime, where the waitresses wonder why they've had only two foreign customers in two weeks.

I read that, all of that, and I wonder if it's true, if Cambodia is nothing more than 'an insane asylum with beer', as an expat friend of mine once creatively dubbed it.

I wonder.

It's something to think about, though. How wounded and strange and tilted this land can be. How full of human dimensions -- squared, cubed, sideways and skewed. This whole country is like lightning without thunder, I've come to think -- flashes of electric madness and despair in ragged streaks, but absent of any lasting echoes. Everything distant, nothing audible.

What am I doing here? I wonder. More importantly, what are they doing here, all of them, the people of Cambodia? Where will I go and where will they go?

Things to think about at other times, on other runs, as I watch the light do its relaxed but kinetic dance across the darkened sky.

A MOVEABLE, ROTATING FEAST

Over here, even when it's cool it's hot. The rainy season is reluctantly drawing to a close, sporadically, in sloshy spurts, and soon the late-afternoon showers that have become a familiar midday treat will disappear. Just like that. No more water descending from above in the hours before dusk, falling and swaying in drippity-drops or extended sheets, like natural, liquid licorice, minus the red. No more temporary respite from that savage sun, how it daunts me so.

Even in the Cambodian cold, the heat. Just think: One can wear nothing more than a t-shirt and shorts all day, every day, year round. No exceptions necessary. Flip-flops, every flippy, reliably floppy, are footwear of choice in these here parts. (At work, of course, one must don the tie and the pants and the shoes shined black, but in a simple, rural land like this, such attire seems foolish, even arrogant. In old countries, poor countries, one feels ridiculous wearing more than the bare necessities of life. A country that was once the focal point of Southeast Asia, that developed its own language, whose people labored for decades to build temples that rival Egypt's finest monuments -- in this ancient place, of what real use is a well-tucked shirt, a slick taut tie?)

Such are one's thoughts on an average day, for what is commonplace in Cambodia would be considered a sign of bereavement anywhere else. (And what would we mourn over here, you ask? Dark clouds threatening snow. Early-morning frost on dew-slicked windows. That howling winter wind, that icy shriek, primal and midnight and bellowing.)

Reliable reports state that elsewhere, somewhere, autumn has arrived, complete with falling leaves and cross-country races run through winding trails in hidden forests. Could these electronic accounts be authentic? Difficult to determine, when here the sun stays high, the air hot, the blades of a fan alive in constant, rotating motion. In other lands, the temperature is checked daily, if not hourly. Its continual ascension and decline must be monitored and assessed, for what is at stake is nothing less than the emergence of turtlenecks and gloves, scarves and slippers. (How cold those Canadian kitchen floors can seem on a frigid February night!)

There is something almost tragic in the daily loss of one's own, remembered weather, as if the very cadence of life itself had decided to subtract a few errant, useless beats. Consolation comes with the gradual realization that the heat -- still mysterious and intricate t0 a sweat-sodden western soul -- has its own unexpected, beneficial allures. A day of sun. Perpetual sun. Tranquilizes the soul, it does, in its own bludgeoning way. It trivializes the mere notion of melancholy, eliminating all self-indulgent emotional artifice. How can one embrace a melancholic view of life while steeped in such sweat? The messy liquidity negates such dramatics. Leave such glum and gloomy notions for Russian winters and Scandanavian nights. Here, the sun assumes its position, daily, and one must accept its radiant, overbearing personality.

Which is easier than one might think (the aforementioned histrionics aside). After all, even over here, the sun must set. And when it does, wrapped in the dark cloak of night, we wait, patiently, till morn, confident it will return. In Cambodia, one cannot count on much, if anything. But the sun is a moveable, rotating feast that is loyal and true.

MAILER AND ME: A MEMOIR OF LUCK GIVEN, LUCK RETURNED

News that Norman Mailer, American novelist, has recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation reaches my ears only one day after I finished rereading, for the first time in years, Mailer’s masterful account of the ‘Rumble In The Jungle’, that epic boxing match whereupon Muhammad Ali regained his Heavyweight Championship belt by defeating the towering force of nature that was George Foreman in his ferocious prime. At last! The luck that Mailer had effortlessly passed on in person to me over ten years ago had been returned. Our psychic paths again had crossed, I thought.

To conceive of this news as some form of coincidence is egotistical at best, delusional at worst; how many others around the globe were reading Mailer’s works when they, too, heard of his recent honor? Just because I finished The Fight, his Ali book, does not mean that any psychic forces were at work, or at play, in the nature of the universe. After all, in my more rational moments, I can rest assured that such a distinction given to Mailer was decided weeks, if not months ago; my recent reading of his words had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his honor. To think otherwise is to give oneself a place in the cosmos that is tantamount to a Queen Bee at the centre of the hive, directing minions of masses to do her bidding.

But one cannot be sure. Perhaps our individual souls hold far greater sway in the accounts of others than we at first care to admit. After all, was it not Mailer himself who drunkenly climbed, or attempted to climb, between his balcony and the one next door while staying in the hotel in Zaire all those years ago, before I was born, waiting for the injured Foreman to heal so the fight could finally commence? The sheer momentousness of the fight that loomed before Ali deserved an action of equal daring by Mailer, his fervent supporter. A drunken hop by a fifty-year old man from room to room may not seem rational to you or me as a means of implanting victory in a thirty-year old prizefighter, but Mailer is not you or me, and nothing if not a mystic at heart.

To read Mailer is to believe that there are larger forces at work in the universe, and only authors as talented as he, as daring as he, allow us to consider that we, too, may have the opportunity, if not the obligation, to bend luck towards ourselves and those that we root for and care for and live for. Who else but Mailer could gain fame as the best young novelist in America (circa 1948) for his autobiographical war novel The Naked And The Dead, only to shift spiritual gears completely in the coming decades, helping to create the ‘new journalism’ whereby the reporter himself becomes as central to the narrative as the events he describes? Who else but Mailer could write interpretive biographies of such disparate American icons as Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali and Lee Harvey Oswald, not to mention Pablo Picasso? Who else but Mailer could conceive of such staggering fiction whose range extends beyond the narcissistic confines of a writer’s usual domain – his own psyche, his own life: Ancient Evenings, set in the Egypt of the pharaohs; Harlot’s Ghost, his mammoth attempt to unravel the mythic resonance of the C.I.A. in American life; The Executioner’s Song, his Pulitzer Prize winning ‘non-fiction novel’ of love and murder that obliterated the critics’ view him as a show-boating blowhard by creating a masterpiece of lean, minimalist prose that would even have made his idol, Hemingway, blush with envy. And who else but Mailer, a non-observant Jew, could have the cojones a write a novel like The Gospel According To The Son, told from the first-person point of view of the most famous Jew of all, Jesus Christ. Nobody but Mailer.

To enter into Mailer’s mind is to understand, if only briefly, that the parameters of life of man could be more accurately described as parabolas, whose borders touch us all. So who is to say that my return to Mailer after such a long absence did not, in fact, hasten the award that was announced only hours after I finished The Fight? Absurd, such influence I’m claiming! I concur, and I dare say that Mailer would, too. We recognize our own illogical impulses best in others, simultaneously rejecting then embracing them.

Using such logic, I could very well say that the one and only encounter I had with Mailer himself, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 1995, changed the course of his life. Ridiculous! As mentioned long ago on this blog, after watching Mailer’s presentation of the life of Pablo Picasso, complete with pictorial slides, our intrepid chronicler somehow found the courage to take hold of the microphone during the Q and A to ask: “Did you see any similarities between Lee Harvey Oswald and Picasso?” A question only an unsuspecting nineteen-year old could ask, followed by a response that only a collection of wealthy, pampered prigs could provide. I heard every last one of their titters, felt every single smirk, smelled every grating whiff of expensive perfume and fuck-me cologne. The question did not seem absurd to me; Mailer had recently spent a year immersed in the life of Picasso, and even more years investigating Oswald’s life, even traveling to Russia to investigate the alleged assassin’s past even deeper. Surely there were points in common between the two biographical subjects. (And besides, I thought, you hoity-toity motherfuckers, I had the balls to stand toe-to-toe with Mailer and ask him a question, while you sat in your seats and flicked the lint off of clothes designed to impress the indifferent whims of arrogant strangers. And I at least have read his book!) Mailer answered my question thoughtfully and carefully. Aha! Here is a mind as strange and agile as my own, I thought. (Again, the ego of adolescence! To compare myself to Mailer!)

Later, while waiting in line for Mailer to sign my copy of his book, a kind soul approached me and said: “ Actually, I thought yours was the most interesting question asked.” Somebody had spotted my embarrassment, and thought to console me. Emboldened by such generosity, when my turn came to talk to Mailer I asked him for advice for a young writer. He told me; I listened. (And I still remember it.) He then signed my book, adding a phrase after the scrawl of his signature that I could not recognize, prompting me to ask his assistant to interrupt him in the midst of signing the book of his next fan. “What does it mean?” I wanted to know. “Sverta,” he said. “It means ‘good luck!” (Is it Jewish? Yiddish? No matter.)

So! From his mouth to my soul. If luck is a tangible thing, then it was passed from him to me that fateful night, and perhaps, just perhaps, my recent return to his prose nudged something in the fabric of the universe. Perhaps the luck he passed on had lodged itself carefully into the lodestone of my psyche, and perhaps, just perhaps, I was able to, unknowingly, hand it back to him.
Such are the thoughts one has when encounter Mailer – in person, in prose. If reading is the most intimate act of all – the sharing of one’s private thoughts with another – then reading Mailer is enough to make one believe that such communication not only has a purpose and a trajectory, but also a mystical necessity, a vibrancy, that lies at the core of who we are and what we can become. Luck may not be tangible, nor transferable, but even Mailer’s conception of such a concept, the potential of it, makes me wonder if the Gods that rule us all work in prose.

PONDERING FLIGHT

Let us go deeper, as the day grows long and the clouds begin their familiar drift across the landscape of the sky. The girl, the girl who I run past on my daily runs down by the river, the teenage girl, the teenage girl whose name I can never seem to recall, the teenage girl whose name I can never seem to recall wishes for me to give her money, sixteen dollars, cash, American. Not for drugs or food, no, of this I am certain, but for school.

Outside of my old apartment as I waited for the van from work to pick me up, I would sometimes see her and her friends stroll on by, dressed in white shirts and blue skirts, and I would joke with them in English. To understand humor in a foreign tongue is a simultaneously heady and innocuous ordeal. If one can laugh at another's nonsensical utterances, empathy results. To do so while listening to such words in a language other than one's own, one both alien and unfamiliar, is to allow oneself that random, learned luxury of believing that such a connection may be proof of a common emotional conduit that links human to human. They say that laughter is universal; it may also be primordial.

Such are one's thoughts while conversing with a fourteen, fifteen year girl on what passes for a cool day on those particular Cambodian mornings. Those other days and times were long ago and for now there is the matter of sixteen dollars. There is humor, yes, as always, but laughter not only has its own time limit and place but also its own sense of security. There are difficult locks that need to be massaged before mirth can emerge once again, carefree and fluid.

To be a Cambodian girl by the river selling guidebooks and travel books is proof of either a God or a Devil at work in the world. For no identifiable future exists for such a girl. If she is poor, poor enough to see books on the banks of the Tonle Sap, then she is certainly poor enough to soon become a prostitute. Perhaps not this year, or next year, but there certain limits of time and place in life and this young girl may very well reach hers sometime soon. If she is selling books, daily, she is not able to learn any kind of marketable, manageable skill, and if she is unable to acquire such a skill then it is quite possible, if not certain, that around the age of twenty, if not sooner, uneducated, her future will have been decided for her. This is not certain; there are garment factories and other modules of enhancement that exist in the dusty fringes of this world. But still. One must project. I do not know if a God or a Devil plays a hand in determining fates like this one. I suspect not.

(But what if I am wrong -- how lonely it must be for God and the Devil! To be the perfect embodiment of grace and wisdom is a burden that must make even a perfect God shudder at times. One imagines such an entity longing to embrace his most wicked counterpart, because who else but the Devil himself could conceive of such an awesome responsibility. For the Devil has his own inverted responsbility, lest we forget, one that is no less momentous. To be wicked, continuously. Even the Devil must have days and nights when he no longer wishes to tantalize Cambodian teenagers with the darkening prospect of a live lived in seedy rooms on spunk-stained sheets. At such times, the Devil must reach out, upwards. Would God find within him the strength to embrace the Devil himself? Think what sparks, what energy, novalike in intensity, would ensue from such an encounter! The concept is too large for a mind such as mine to pursue further. It is akin to imagining one's own creation, attempting to isolate within the soul of one's own psyche and memory why this sperm chose that egg. Best to retreat into the safer, familiar confines of the agnostic and atheist. Best to image the lives on these lean and mean streets guided by their own hands, not those of isolated, enclosed lords on either end of our spiritual scale.)

Sixteen dollars, to this we return. What would it do, peform, enable? A month at school. Education is not enforced only within the scholastic confines a too-hot classroom, no, but one does not need to explain this to a fourteen, fifteen year old Cambodian bookseller. She has had enough of the real world. Give me some white shirts and blue skirts once again, her eyes implore, if only for a month. At least for a month.

Oh, the sway and grind of one's own intentions. At a certain point, it is inevitable that benefactors will fall short of their recipients expectations. Such providers will leave for home, or, even worse, here, be diluted of cash. At that point in time the real world will once again reach between the ivory (piss-yellow?) walls of one's scholastic cell and drag her, possibly kicking, certainly screaming, back into the bright and dusty day with a fierceness that would certainly do the Devil proud.

Is it better to learn now and remorse later? One cannot say. A handful of American bills can alter the trajectory of one girl's life, but who is to say that a boomerang is not lurking within the psychic parameters of such an ambitious act? Spiritual decapitation could result for both the girl and the benefactor.

At a specific point in time -- ten, twenty years hence -- a cloud will drift across a bright blue sky, aimless and puffy. A young woman will spot that cloud and for no reason all recall an offer made years before, a loan enacted, a textbook bought, a room brightly lit. Whether that memory, fleeting and sweet, bordering just this side of bitter, is false or true, one cannot say. Not yet. One wonders if God and the Devil -- should they exist, should they emerge -- can balance the future on the widened palms of their outstretched hands the way a tiny, wounded bird ponders flight. And, if so, can we mortals do the same?

Regardless, at a specific point in time -- ten, twenty years hence -- a Cambodian woman will see that cloud, wipe a lock of hair away from her sweat-stained brow, remember an offer, a chance, a gate. The cloud will drift on. The moment and memory will pass. And she will return to whatever the day has left to offer.

ONCE JUST A NAME

Cambodia! What is one to make of such a word, let alone such a place. One can think of it as second cousin to the native names that dot Canada's landscape, I suppose, a fraternal twin to Ottawa and Saskatchewan, Kanata and Winnepeg. Yes, I suppose that the name 'Cambodia' would not seem entirely odd or unsual on a map of North America; its inclusion would cause barely a ripple on our consciousness, I suspect, were it to be suddenly added to the dreary atlases designed for the daylight boredom of our western schoolchildren. For how many youths could suspect, let alone verify, that 'Cambodia' does not, in fact, designate a particular Canadian locale but is, instead, a place and a state of mind in Southeast Asia? Upon hearing his novel The Apprentice of Duddy Kravitz slagged, in person, by a group of prep school snots, Mordecai Richler drolly declared at the podium: "It's always been a dream to mine to be criticized by the children of privilege." Ha! What would these very same 'children of privilege' make of such a place, this 'Cambodia', this refugee name that belongs not on a map of the west but on another, eastern globe, one that is hotter and dirtier, more weathered and despairing. What would we all make of such a name, I wonder.

But it exists. I am here to say that it is real, that the name exists, the place exists, nestled between Vietnam and Thailand and Laos, a bastard stepchild unloved and unwanted by the children of privilege that surround it. Privilege is a loaded word, conjuring up images of Mercedes Benzes and gold-flaked watches, but all of that is here, rest assured -- those cars, those watches. From where does this wealth descend? From the aid agencies that dot the landscape like a benevolent form of measles, for what is the use of millions of dollars designed for the poor if they could not also grease the sweaty, swarthy palms of the rich? It is my job as a westerner to point out the money that is lost and swindled and carried away in the equivalent of Santa Claus sacks deep into the night, my job to sit back, critical and satisfied, pointing out who does what to whom, and why it is bad, worse than bad, the equivalent of a bargain with the devil, only with the guarantee that the devil will not come collecting for a good many years, if at all. It is my job to decry those corrupt officials who seek to elevate their families, those officials who lived through death and despair the same way that I lived through an epsiode of a sitcom already watched two, three times -- with a numbing, automatic rigidity. My job to sit back and point and sigh. To point out its existence. To be inert.

Cambodia! Such are the thoughts that can arise should one stay too long. This is not a place to live in. This is a place to catch four, five minutes of while scanning PBS between afternoon commercials. It is a black-and-white newsreel place. It is over there, and yet I am here, and so a logical disconnect takes place. One's conception of the world simultaneously diminishes and expands upon residing in such a country. To enter a country knowing nothing of its people or history or culture is the work of an ignoramus, a fool, or both, so say I, and so I am. One can read as many books as possible on 'the tragedy' and the 'the people' and 'the language', and yet the result is the same. The door opens, the street beckons, and one is pelted in the face head on by a water balloon passed by a laughing teen on a speeding bike. Oh, the water festival. Yes, yes, I remember that mentioned, in a footnote, from that book, the one you lent me. Yes, yes. The real world collides with whatever perceptions of it that one preconceives. Reality laughs in the face. Repeatedly. The book is shut and the sun is out, and still, that disconnect.

Life prepares us for many things, but can it prepare us for Cambodia? This I know not. It is here, and it is a place, but I suspect that Cambodians are not prepared for Cambodia. A truism of my own invention, true, and suspect because of it, but still, it has a certain ring that pleases my aesthetic soul. I can live in a country like this and still worry about something as mundane and futile as a well-wrought phrase. I can sit in a Phnom Penh apartment and not contend with what a lack of fresh drinking water entails, from the dirt and the colour, to the intestines and the vomit. It is a mere bus ride away, true, but the day is long, the chair comfy, the water cool and slick across my brow, an Evian smeared across my forehead, heaven's definition, some would say. Even so, from my vantage point equidistant between comfort and nihilism, I stand by my statement. Cambodians are not prepared for Cambodia; Canadians are not equipped for Canada. This is the adjunct. A Belgian cannot possibly encompass Belgium. It is too much. I sense a logic at work here that is either ridiculous or profound. One cannot possibly assess one's own land, because the very act of assessing will render the viewed-upon object subjectively, thus destroying the entire experiment. It becomes null and void, instantaneously. This may or may not be true, but being an exile, by choice, is an experiment in a similar folly. One can look at the landscape and the people and, with the aid of a few well-chosen, well-regarded tomes, attain the level of expert, or at least that of a competent grad student who has studied the area for two semesters (including Spring Break). We rarely seek to understand our own lands, but give me a Cambodia, and I will let 'er rip. Such are the hazards of travel: the confidence of fools.

Cambodia! Would that I watch her ways. To see is different than to watch. I have seen much, but watched not enough. To get closer is to akin to the child reaching out for the red-hot stove. The light is tempting but fierce, the heat soothing but containing within it the very kernel of its own eventual destruction. Touching the flame is tantamount to entrace.

At some point in time this flame, this name, Cambodia, will return to its rightful place on a map, and I, too, will open the atlas, spin the globe, looking for its location, waiting for the orb to rest in place, while I trace my finger across the bumpity bumps of all those other upsized lands that surround and exlcude it, searching in vain for that distant place that was once just a name.

CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

After watching part of a CNN program on the discord and distrust that exists between India and Pakistan, after following the blame-game that is ongoing in the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina, after living in a country for two years where everything the Vietnamese say and do is regarded as a potential precursor for another invasion of Cambodia, I'm reminded, constantly, of the most prophetic, powerful, eloquent words spoken in the twentieth century -- not by Churchill or Chamberlain, Carter or Clinton, Kate or Allie, Puffy or Diddy, but by Rodney King, victim of the L.A.P.D., who said sometime after getting the holy shit kicked out of him: "Can't we all just get along?"

That's what it all comes down to, doesn't it? That's what are parents try to teach us from the get-go, isn't it? Get along. Behave. Listen to others.

But the older I get, the more I realize that we all are infants. We all want to do what we want, when we want it, to who we want. This does not discount goodwill, no, because every aspect of human nature has its flipside that sometimes cancels out its own inverted image; it does, however, seem to say that we never really do 'grow up'.

Just think up the shit that we fight over. Land. Money. Pride. The fact that you believe in one spiritual deity, and I believe in another. I mean, seriously. Just look at Northern Ireland and Lebanon and Iraq; just examine the histories of these places, the wars of these places. It's all about people with different beliefs not listening to others of other beliefs. Over the years, over the centuries, the original beliefs become almost irrelevant to the violent cause; what matters is the grudges that have been developed. The great thing about kids is that they are born without grudges. They don't know jackshit about diddlysquat, and that's a great, almost holy thing. They are blank slates waiting to be filled. It's just so often that we give into our own, baser natures, and paint those slates with darkness. We paint them black, as the Stones might say.

I don't know. It's just, this is a fucked-up country. The news out of The Cambodia Daily seems to be getting worse and worse. The convenience store down the road from me had two of its clerks shot in the legs a few (late) nights back, the shooter being a customer who took umbrage to the fact that the staff actually asked him to actually pay for the bottled water he was holding in his drunk, trembling hands. And the Phillipines Embassy, another place just around the corner from where I live, had the apartments across the street from it attacked by drunk s.o.b. with an AK-47, out to settle a grudge.

People in the west truly underestimate the pride involved in 'saving face' over here in the orient. If you insult somebody, if you demean them, accidentally or otherwise, you could get killed. (In Cambodia, I'm talking about.) What usually happens, especially in the countryside: A group goes dancing; somebody's toes get stepped on; a fight ensues; shots ring out. Add alcohol and AK-47 and the bad shit starts to go down. As a foreigner, I don't stay out late and mind my own business, and everything's cool. (Usually.)

But in a poor country, when the gap between the have and havenots is fucking monstrous, when everybody, I mean everybody, has in some way, shape or form been affected by five years of Khmer Rouge rule, the normal rules of what we consider civil society don't apply. The rich keep getting richer, and the poor stay poorer. The rich get drunk, arrogant, and offended. The poor sap working the till at the Star mart gets shot in the legs. And the homeless and the motodops will stroll on by, looking for an accident, waiting to see if anybody's dead, and, if so, what comes next. Who cleans up the body? Who takes it away?

The thing is, I see the news and read the news and all of these huge, important, complex international issues are little different than the dude who steps on the toes of a wealthy drunk. Can we all get along? I don't know. The evidence says no.

Except for the other parts, the daily 'please' and 'thank-yous' that make life worthwhile, the endless examples of kindness and mere civility that we take for granted. I notice the bad stuff and forget about the good stuff.

Maybe we can't get along, collectively. But individually, man to man, woman to woman, we can and do still reach out -- not in malice, but in tenderness. And often, more often than one would think, somebody is more than ready, almost anxious, to reach out to us, too.

INXS, SEMI-ERECT SCIENCE FICTION, AND WHY THE FACT THAT WE'RE ALL DESCENDED FROM PRE-HISTORIC SLUDGE IS NOT NECESSARILY A BAD THING

The other night I was crashed out on the couch, simultaneously watching the second-to-last week of Rock Star: INXS, reading the final few pages of a nifty sci-fi book titled The Light Of Other Days, and eyeing my newly-bought copy of philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven-Storey Mountain, that lay abandoned on the floor on the other side of the room. In my world, these three things are related. (My world is just like your world. Only skewed.)

For those not in the know, Rock Star: INXS is an American Idol style competition, the end result being that the winner becomes, you guessed it, the lead singer of INXS; I've caught a few episodes here and there, and, given that there's only one week left to go, I'm somewhat intrigued as to who will be the eventual winner. Moving right along in my capsule summary, The Light Of Other Days is a novel written by Stephen Baxter (who writes hard SF, 'hard SF' being science-fiction that has a lot of science on top of the fiction, but, come to think of it, this one particular book is not all that hard, in terms of the science -- let's call it 'semi-erect' SF) and Arthur C.Clarke, of 2001 Fame. Thomas Merton is a famous (?) writer and monk who spent most of his life in a monastery in the United States but still managed to connect and correspond with the outside world, and given that he spent most of his life trying to maintain a spiritual relationship with the universe, is it somewhat ironic that he died while slipping on a bar of soap while washing in the tub in Thailand? You tell me.

This is the thing. I don't usually like to read while I'm watching TV, because I'm not bright enough to do two things at the same time, and even if I were, I'm sure that something would get scrambled in the process. Something would be lost. This night, however, I desperately wanted to see who would be voted off Rock Star: INXS, but I also was eager to finish the last few pages of this really cool science-fiction novel because it was, well, really cool. So I did both, read and watched. And learned something in the process. I think.

The Light Of Other Days is about a time in the near-future where science has developed to a point where wormholes in the universe can be harnessed to basically be used as viewing devices -- meaning, you can log on to your computer and 'create' a wormhole through which you can spy on anyone and everyone you like. Want to see what's happening in a suburb of Moscow? Just type in the coordinates; the wormhole allows you to shift the perspective, zoom, do close-ups, whatever. The book's characterizations are a bit clumsy, me thinks, but the development of the legal, political, and, ultimately, moral developments are fascinatingly explored.

Because this is the thing: not only can you 'watch' what's going on in the world through these womrholes, but you can also use them to view things in different time periods of the past (but not the future). So historians can look back at the war of 1812, or Vietnam, or the second season of Lee Majors' The Fall Guy, when shit really started to get good. Oh, but that's not all. Eventually the technology develops so that you can link the wormholes to a person's own personal DNA, which means that one can, theoretically, view the developments of one's own life, of one's own ancestors, as easily as watching an A & E miniseries. Think about it. You could see your mother being born, your mother's mother, your mother's mother's mother, watching the events of life like a movie made just for you and your heirs. But that's not all. The end of the book pushes this concept to the ultimate limit, where two of the character's view the history of their own DNA.

What does that mean? Glad you asked. It means that they go back in time. I don't just mean 'back in time' like Bill and Ted or Marty McFly went 'back in time'. I mean baaaaaack in time. They see their grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's grandmother being born. And then further. They trace a single chromosome of their own DNA to its ultimate origin -- meaning, past people, past apes, past dinosaurs, all the way to single celled organisms, to half-celled organisms, to cells that exist in way pre-historic rock, to...

I don't know if I should tell you this part. Let's just say, the book goes back to before the beginning of life on earth, and provides a conclusion that is startling, sensible, and a harbinger of what humanity needs to do in order to avoid or prevent a piece of asteroid from destroying the earth five hundred years from now. It's a fanastic end to an intriguing book. Too many science-fiction or horror stories don't really push their concepts to their ultimate conclusions. This one does, then beyond. Big time.

And yet, I'm reading the truly cosmic, near transcendent final few pages of prose while trying to figure out if the Canadian chick or the Canadian dude are going to get booted off of Rock Star: INXS. Here I am, through the beauty of fiction, realizing that all life is ultimately futile, that all humanity is, essentially, descended from primordial sludge, that life is nothing more than a neverending series of evolutions that leave us, the people, the ones intensely involved in the process, as little more than bystanders to our own eradication, and yet fuck, was that a good song that Marty sang, the one called 'Trees'. He deserves to win, that dude.

I don't know how humans do it. Thomas Merton didn't either, the monk, which was why he disconnected himself from the world -- to be closer to the God he loved. We could all do that, true, but then we wouldn't be involved in the really important decisions of life, like deciding who fronts an Australian rock band most famous for the fact that its lead singer killed himself while jerking off with a noose around his head. Contemplating the essential mystery of life while secretly rooting for one rock star wannabe over another is something that only a human could do. Something only we would want to do.

I know that it doesn't matter who wins or loses the competition. I know that speculations about the future are a random game at best, a futile, cautiounary warning. I know that what works for one soul will not work for another. But I watch reality rock shows, and read science fiction, and wonder about the lives of monks. And sometimes I do all three at the same time.

I don't think all of this proves the existence of a God, no, but it does prove the existence of myself, the acknowledgement that I exist, that I ponder, that I can consider cosmic themes while listening to cool tunes. That may not mean anything, no, but if feelings are all we have to by, then I'll take those. If only for a night.

(And I do hope and think that Marty wins the competition, by the way.)

THE LOOK

The other night I saw the look in the eyes of one of my students. I had had that look many times in the past, but it's rare that I see it reflected back at me. She had something she wanted to say, and she was nervous about saying it, and it was not because of a lack of confidence in her English abilities but because she was concerned, deeply concerned, about what my reaction was going to be.

The day before she had begged, pleaded, practically demanded that the final exam be held three days earlier than planned. Go figure. A student wants a test earlier than scheduled? Whatever. I just wanted to make sure proper protocol was followed. She talked to the administration, the administration talked to me, and it was a done deal.

Ah, but that was then.

Because now she stood before me humbled, chagrined, downright embarrassed. The words stumbled out of her mouth. She had talked it over with some of the other students, and a few of them were upset about the change in the date, and well, you see, would it be possible, by any chance, to go back to the original test date? She would talk it over with the management herself, if possible, and she was very, very, very sorry to have caused any disturbance. It was all her fault, she said. All her fault.

She was scared shitless to tell me that she had backtracked. She was worried what I was going to say. I was the teacher, and teachers are given a great deal of respect over here, and she was probably anxious about the fact that I might be ready to rip her a new asshole.

I almost smiled, but stopped myself from doing so. I remember -- long, long ago -- approaching teachers and asking them something difficult, asking them for a favor, asking for forgiveness. It is not an easy thing to do, because our teachers are not people but alien beings from a solar system far, far from our own. Gauging their potential reaction is slightly hazardous, if not downright nuclear.

I told her not to worry about. No big deal. Problem solved.

She looked relieved. I hope she was relieved.

At some point in time, I have become the guy at the front of the room. (If only for a little while.) The guy who you approach with a certain degree of caution. When did this happen? Why did this happen? Not sure. But there it is.

I haven't felt like she felt in awhile, but I'm almost certain that I'll feel that way should there be an afterlife, and should I stand before any kind of Christian/Muslim God whose precepts I should have been following a little more diligently.

"But this is the thing," I'll say. "I had an inquisitive mind. I didn't necessarily doubt what you were saying, no, but I wanted to keep my options open."

"Right," this skeptical God will say, followed by his own David-Spade-from-SNL-impression: "Bu-bye..."

And down I will go, to that other place.

So I can empathize with my student, because I've been there, done that, and I'm sure I'll be there again, in her position, asking sympathy from a strange and unknowable ruler, at some future point in time.

And in case you were wondering, she sheepishly came by the next day and asked that the test be changed yet again. The fear was a little less in her eyes the second time around. I guess that's progress.

AH, ASIA

Even while watching only a few minutes of what is surely one of the worst movies ever made, The Next Karate Kid, I can detect a glimmer, a gleam, a smidgen, a barely concealed taste of what brought me and keeps me in the Orient. Or thereabouts.

(And yet, who am I to declare that it is a terrible film? Who am I to judge what does and does not bring comfort to the afflicted? Banal and simplistic it is, but so is life, and perhaps a young girl watched this film on the last night of her grandmother's life, the two of them seated by side, the child slightly annoyed by her Grandma's labored, restless breathing. The next morning, with the grandmother dead, that is all the child could remember -- her breathing, and the film, that silly film. It is what she will remember for the rest of her days, whenever she scans its title in the video shop shelves, and it will remind her of the cruelty of children, and also of the goodness of children, how the mere comfort of their presence can ease our final days.)

The fourth installment of the series features Noriyuki 'Pat' Morita as the wise old Okinawan sage named Miyagi, and two-time Academy Award Winner Hilary Swank as the young, troubled teenager named Julie. (Are there any other kinds of teenagers in the movies?) The flick is filled with the usual stereotypical karate hokum and eastern mysticism, but I happen to eat that shit up like it's Captain Crunch. (After all, you're talking to the guy who actually thinks that The Karate Kid III is a brilliant capstone to the Daniel-san portion of the series, masterfully showing the young lad's torment as he istempted by the Dark Side, personified by the Cobra-kai dojo's minions, only to be ultimately redeemed by his long-standing friendship, dare I say love, with Mr.Miyagi. Very underrated, this third installment is. Daniel looks into the abyss, and the abyss looks into him, and he emerges triumphant. The film ends with the same tournament that ended the first film; his cycle of growth comes to full and final fruition. It is all that my thirteen-year old self desired. It is enough. Hey, I never said I was sane.)

When you live in Asia, you're confronted by Asia -- the reality and the myths, intertwined. You see what you want to see. And sometimes what you don't want to see forces itself upon you. It is as vile and corrupt and wondrous and comforting as the emotion-filled streets that line the hometown of your youth. It is what you want it to be, Asia is.

For me, Asia has been been, and always will be, mystery. Intrigue. That which has somehow slipped through the cracks of life back home, glimpsed only in the fleeting glances provided by the Chinese restaurant kitchen door as it swings to and fro. Why are people drawn to the incense and the rituals, the martial arts and the philosophical Buddhist malarkey inherent to the region that are otherwise unrelated but grouped together under the nonsensical heading 'Asia'?

Because in western, secular life there is little need or regard for those questions that we cannot answer, or shudder to answer. In western, religious culture the answers are laid out before us in grim, humorless tablets of stone that are filled with tales that read as if they were the bland, ghostwritten memories of a celestial C.E.O.

But Asia. Ah, Asia. Asia is filled with fucked-up food and wandering monks and ancient rituals and stifling heat and nonsensical languages. In Asia it is possible to stroll into a community of citizens that have somehow amalgamated the musings of Confucious, Buddha and freakin' Victor Hugo into one spiritual stew of contemplation. (As happened to me in Vietnam in June, at the Cao-dai temples.) In Asia the traveller is reminded, should he delve deeper, that life is ancient and simple and messy and clean.

It is an illusion, of course; there is nothing exotic about Japan for the Japanese, and nothing mystical about Cambodia to the Cambodians. (At least, not the way that I would define it.) But we choose our illusions, and, as Guns 'N' Roses knew so long ago, we use our illusions, too. As the comic once said: "It's not that life is short -- it's that death is so damn long." Knowing that, believing that, some find the illusions of Asia more palatable, more three dimensional, than the cold and familiar tomes and tones of home.

Give me Mr.Miyagi trying to catch that buzzing fly between his chopsticks, if only for a little while longer. Give me blood-red sunsets on oversized picture books. Give me the chanting monks and the cadence of confusion that exists, for me, at the heart of Asia, at least for one more day. Give me the throb of life, real or imagined, that beats beneath the surface of this land, and others like it. The illusion will end, sooner, perhaps later, but for now, let the facade do its magic dance one more time, and I will try with all my heart to keep up with its erratic and desperate beat.

ORWELL, STONE, NADER, LIFE AS A FAILURE AND THE TONY DANZA DOCTRINE

What most people fail to realize about Who's The Boss is that the whole show went to shit when Tony Danza shaved his head. Out came the crewcut, down came the ratings. The fact that he and Angela, his live-in employer, finally became a couple that season, thus depriving the show of the core of its reluctant romantic sparks that flew between the two leads like errant drops of fire, has been cited by some as the source of the program's demise. (A similar change in relationships happened to Moonlighting, when Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis finally toppled into bed together. That was a big deal, that particular episode was; I remember discussing it with my Grade 6 class and teacher Mrs.Macmillan in our daily front-of-the-room discussion group, so I guess even eleven-year olds were hip to the show. I actually thought the show got better when the romance angle died down; it allowed room for Willis's partner, Curtis Armstrong, to show off his comedic chops. You may, or may not, remember Armstrong in his brilliant performance as 'Booger' in Revenge of The Nerds, surpassed only by his low-key but magnetic performance as Jamie Foxx's manager in last year's Ray.)

I think what happened, however, is that Danza lost his hair, then lost his zeal. His power. His confidence. You don't cut Samson's mane, you don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't slice Tony Danza's locks. So say I.

And yet recently, as far as I've been able to gather from this side of the Pacific, Danza's career has been positively booming; he's rebounded nicely from the crewcut calamity of a decade past. He got nominated for an Emmy for The Practice, popped up in last year's critical smash Crash, and even hosted his own talk show. He probably pees regularly throughout the night, too. (Nothing, of course, in either his personal or professional life, will surpass his brilliant performance in the criminally underrated Cannonball Run II.)

After Who's The Boss tanked, he tried two other sitcoms, which also tanked. But I'm sure these failures invigorated Danza. I'm sure there were dark and lonely nights when he wandered the streets of Los Angeles, forlorn, desperate, wondering if it was his radical haircut that did him in, or a public tired of his folksy Italian-American persona. He probably became the modern equivalent of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, is what I'm thinking. From those depths, that despair, he plotted his eventual ascension. I'm sure of it.

Living in Cambodia, I've come to see despair and despondency and failure as some of the more common traits of the human condition. (Tony Danza cutting his locks and bombing big time has more in common with Cambodians than Bill Gates or Donald Trump, is what I'm thinking.) The rich get away with anything and everything, getting even richer in the process; the poor remain powerless, becoming poorer. On days when I'm feeling low and broke, when I think that I should be in a higher status of life and living, I look around at the myriad people even lower than myself and think: This is real, this is good, this is noble. One of my favorite quotes from Oliver Stone is his own recollection of reading Down and Out in Paris in London by George Orwell, when Stone, too, was in a similarly dark and gloomy time. He learned then that it was okay to be down, okay to be fucked-up, okay to not know who you were or where you were going. That is the place where you learn. And he learned and learned and learned.

So much of the TV I see and the movies I watch are about what we want and how we can get it. It's about things and status and glitz and bullshit. So much of it is designed to our baser, insecure natures, warning us that we, too, could soon become losers. I'm reminded of a quote I read from social activist Ralph Nader in an old biography, where he tells a group of high-school students that they should disregard all the media advertising that is highlighting their own petty facial insecurities and concentrate on something bigger and larger than that. Don't buy into their game, is what he was saying.

These are thoughts that elevate and ennoble; these are thoughts that are worthy of a Danzanian-like renaissance within all of us. As I've written about before, so much of life tells us to fear failure, shun failure, beware of failure, but failure can contain within it the seeds of our own ascension. Sometimes you cut your hair clean off, your show bombs, and you become nothing more than a late-night joke from a third-rate comedian. But the hair grows back, right? And who's to say that more talk-shows and film roles don't loom on the horizon? And if failure comes, and defeat is inevitable, well, let it be a failure of the soul and the spirit, not a failure centred around the fact that we just, can't, get those damn pimples to recede. Let it not be a failure of the human condition that is, at root, nothing more than the equivalent of a botox-like regression into our past.

My recent skin-tight haircut has nothing to do with Tony Danza's experiment of ten years ago, of course, but now I'm starting to see the benefits. A cleaner, sleeker feel. Less to worry about. Less to stress about. Maybe that haircut doomed Danza in the short-term, but propelled him into his own long-term. Who knows. All around me are the dregs of society, the ones who will work their entire lives but have nothing to show for it, and yet I can't help but feel that they, like the immortal Danza, like you, are concentrating on the real stuff of living, the true arc of life, independent of others' expectations and goals, and that they (and you) will eventually achieve a moment in time, somewhere in time, that will allow a certain sense of enlightenment to brighten their day, like a supernova, before burning out and leaving only the resonant afterglow behind.

THE ETERNAL VIAGRA OF THE SOUL

'Despondency makes one hanker after lives never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor." '

David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas



The above sentiment, especially the last two sentences, spoken by a character in David Mitchell's fantastic latest novel Cloud Atlas, pretty much sums up everything of worth (and I do mean everything) that was taught to me in countless Creative Writing and Screenwriting seminars over the years. Save yourself the money, read the sentences a couple of times, and start writing.

(Oh, and David Mitchell, in case you're wondering, is a phenomenal young novelist out of Britain. He spent a few years teaching in Hiroshima; his second novel, number9dream, is set in Japan. His first novel, Ghostwritten, is an astonishing book about a creature that passes through the centuries hopping in and out of bodies, eras, continents, and his latest novel is, well, something I can't quite figure out. He is a serious, literary fantasy writer, one who writes, sentence for sentence, the wittiest, most meaningful prose going. Check him out.)

I've often thought the same thoughts as Mitchell's imaginary chap. For a good many years, I did little more than read and (try to) write fiction. Lived and breathed the stuff. Imagined anything and everything around me as something suitable for a fictional story yet to be written.
It was, and is, a great way to live. Fiction puts meaning into life, which is inherently meaningless. And the love of words, the love of language, is a passion that can only get richer and fuller as one ages; it's an affair that never ends. It's the eternal viagara of the soul, I guess you'd call it. (Okay, maybe you wouldn't, but I would.)

However, the best thing I've learned during these past six years abroad is that books, and fiction, have a limit. When life got to be too much for me (which started at about, oh, two), I delved into books. Into stories. Living abroad, I've maintained my obsession with the printed word, but a great deal of my interest has shifted towards history and biography, of Asia in particular. Of Japan and Cambodia. Of evil men and great men. I never used to care much about the real world, but now I think about it a lot. That may sound strange, but for many years there was very little in the actual world that held my interest as much as the fictional worlds Stephen King or Clive Barker or John Irving or Sherwood Anderson or Joyce Carol Oates or Norman Mailer or Ed McBain or, occasionally, when I was brave, Faulkner.

It's funny. The other night, in one of my evening classes, I did a quick survey and found out that none of my students followed the news, on TV or in the paper. I started to give them (lighthearted) shit about it, until I stopped and thought. When I was their age -- sixteen and seventeen and twenty and twenty-one -- I didn't follow the news either. So what the fuck was I was fulminating about? (Full disclosure: I'm not sure what 'fulminating' means, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with blowing off steam, blabbing, whatever, and I needed an 'f' word for the alliteration to work.)

Now I like the balance -- sometimes ficiton, sometimes non-fiction.

But oh, that pull. That gravitational suction that fiction gives you. It takes you in and takes you away. You delve inside and dive inside and lose yourself and wonder if the real world can ever be as magical and rounded.

It can be, is what I've found out. Books like Cloud Atlas reaffirm your faith in fiction and your faith in life -- that it, too, could be, if you're lucky, as wondrous as the words on its pages.

SOMETHING ELSE

The students over here are something else. This morning one of them asked me if I would look over a story that had been translated from Khmer into English. I said, sure why not. Had he done the translating? No, his friend. Okay. So, why, exactly, was I looking over his friend's translated work? Well, his friend's teacher had given them an assignment in which they had to translate a Khmer story into English.

So follow this chain of logic. My student gives me an English document that he wants me to correct for his friend's school assignment. Upon completion, he will then give this document to his friend, who will then give it to his teacher, who will then, most likely, give it a high score, because it has, of course, been double-checked and corrected by a native speaker. Which goes against the whole point of the assignment, which was to see how well he could translate something on his own.

I tried to explain to my student after I finally figured out what he was asking that this was, you know, wrong. And that it's also slightly loony -- asking your own English teacher to correct your friend's English assignment for his English teacher.

The thing is, over here, everybody helps each other out. I understand that. That's part of the culture, and it's a postive aspect of human nature that should be nurtured. The other thing, though, is that cheating is so common and bland that it's not even cheating anymore.

Or let me put it this way: If you've gotten to the point where you don't see anything wrong in asking your own English teacher to essentially do your friend's English homework, then that says that something is slightly off-kilter in the mainstream educational system. There was no hint of deception or malice in his request, either; it was matter-of-fact. Even took me a bit of explaining for him to get what I was saying.

It also illustrates a blatant stereotype that is, I believe, a little bit true -- Khmers are much more intuitive than logical. Meaning, they don't reason things out. They rely on emotion more than we westerners do. So doing the math and wondering what his English teacher would say regarding this request when given the full details was probably not on my student's mind.

What followed in the class was an intriguing discussion related to the reading in the book, which had featured extracts from a wonderful little novel called Sophie's World, which basically traces the history of philosophy through a series of letters written from an unknown philosopher to an unsuspecting young girl named, you guessed it, Sophie. I asked the class to think of five philosophical questions, and so the rest of the time was spent discussing the existence of God, reincarnation, the feasibility of evolution, Buddhist female monks telling children that heaven exists below the clouds, and what, exactly, the Big Bang is. (Not that I'm sure.) Philosophy is a tough subject to broach in an ESL class, but their instincts were sound, their questions original, their inquisitive impulses human and deep.

Like I said, they're something else, these students are.

BAD SHIT HAPPENS IN THREES?

What's that old saying? 'Bad shit happens in threes'? I may be in the running for that right about now, is what I'm thinking. Or I may have eluded the third. Time will tell.

(Let me amend that. 'Bad shit' is what's happening to all those poor folks down in New Orleans. How about 'annoying shit'. That sounds more appropriate.)

Annoying Shit #1 -- A small constellation of ugly red pimple-like orbs hovered near the periphery of my right armpit last week, slowly spreading out towards my arm. (Also towards my bum, oddly enough.) A fungus, is what it was. One of my students is an assistant at a medical clinic, so I took here advice and got some medication from her boss, a friendly Vietnamese doctor who was trained in America and somehow ended up practicing medicine in Cambodia. (Does it worry me that his degree is from 'The American University of the Caribbean? Yes. But given how bloody expensive the western doctors are around here, I'll take my chances.)

Annoying Shit #2 -- As the fungus slowly started to recede, a very painful insect bite below my right knee started to swell and swell and swell. (At least I think it's an insect bite; I'm not sure.) It got so bad that I could barely walk. Yesterday I went back to the same doctor I saw last week, and he shoved a needle in my ass, while my student, his assistant, watched. (That's embarrassing. Before I came to Cambodia, I had a perky, pretty Japanese nurse shove a needle in my ass, and I thought that was embarrassing. It was, but having your student see your ass is, well, something else. Not that I'm ashamed of my ass or anything.) After that, I watched him drain the pus out of my wound. Fun stuff. Today I went back, had another needle shoved in my ass, got some more pills. Have to go back again later today.

But here's the thing. The other night, leaving a friend's house, I was looking for a moto to take me home. (They roam around Phnom Penh at all hours.) A Khmer man, obviously quite drunk, approached me. He said he had a moto; I didn't quite believe him. "Why do you betrays me?" he asked me, as I flagged down another moto. His body brushed against mine. Again: "Why do you betrays me?"

Let's just say that I got the fuck out of there. Quick.

That was the third bad thing. I'm convinced of it. I dodged it, avoided it, averted fate and broke the dictum in two. A third bad thing was supposed to happen to me, but, for reasons beyond my understanding, destiny had a different plan in my mind.

This is what I'm hoping.

But who knows?

Given the (somewhat) dodgy credentials of my seemingly-competent doctor, you could, very soon, be reading a post about how all those cliched truisms we grew up on are, in fact, right on the money.

HITLER

I'm not saying that plowing one's way through a thousand page biography of Adolf Hitler is an enjoyable experience, no, but it's certainly an educational one.

Having recently finished John Toland's excellent 1976 biography of the Fuhrer (picked up for a couple of bucks down in a Sihanoukville used-book shop), the maddening thing is that I know a hell of a lot more than I used to about the twentieth century's most maniacal madman, but I'm not sure I truly can grasp the depth of his depravity.

Who can? It's almost a cliche, comparing someone like Saddam Hussein or Milosevic to Hitler, but his nefarious reputation certainly stands up well under scrutiny, like some kind of inverted, perverted Horatio Alger story run cruelly, abominably wrong.

There was so much I didn't know about Hitler, starting with the fact that he was Austrian. News to me. (Hey, I passed on Grade 12 History where all that stuff was explained!) I always thought he was a bona fide, from the cradle German, but no -- only in his early twenties did he wander into the country of his obsession, penniless, a mere sack or two his only possessions. How he then slowly but surely insinuated himself into the highest ranks of the German political leadership, eventually reigning supreme as their, well, supreme ruler -- it's scary stuff, is what it is.

Scary, because it seems to arise not from hell but from the thwarted dreams of a frustrated painter; seems like all the old cliches and speculations regarding Hitler's art school days are true -- he really was an aspiring artist, and if he had been accepted into the prestigious art schools he so craved entering, World War II would most likely never have happened.

And his infatuation with the destruction of the Jewish race -- where did that come from? Toland thankfully refrains from offering too much armchair psychology, but it's no secret that Hitler was bitterly disappointed as a young man at the Jewish doctor who was unable to cure his mother's terminal cancer. Was that enough to slowly push him over the brink? Who knows? Some questions, especially those involving the psyche of another person, let alone a demented person, cannot be answered.

How one individual can rise from nothing in a country not its own and lead it to the very brink of destruction is instructive, to say the least. It shows how gullible we are as humans, and how much power, true power, we invest in our leaders. (Which makes choosing those same leaders all the more crucial.)

And yet. Ironies abound, not the least of which something I had never considered before: that Hitler's determination to eradicate all the Jews he possibly could eventually led to the creation of a Jewish state, thereby ensuring their longevity and prosperity. What this says about humanity I'm not sure, but, at the very least, it illustrates our ability to rise up above ourselves and find the courage to start all over again, even when faced with something as monstrously inexplicable as genocide.

As for me, I'm wiped. (Reading so much about Hitler in such a short space of time will do that to a person.)

I need something jolly. I need something jovial. Which is why I've just started Patricia Cornwell's non-fiction investigation into the true identity of Jack The Ripper.

Because hey -- after Hitler, even Jack the Ripper and his limited, small-scale atrocities seem almost, well, quaint in comparison.

But who knows. One can only take so much Victorian blood and gore. That compilation of Charlie Brown cartoons I've seen floating around town seems pretty enticing right about now.

THE LADY IN THE TREE

“This not the America I’ve grown up in.”

So said the CNN reporter, standing in the darkness and the wind, staring into the faceless camera, trying to make sense of something so patently senseless. New Orleans, sinking; a city, decaying; and all of this, the looters and the snipers and the thousands of black faces crying for food and water, in America. Not the Sudan, or Niger, but America.

The subtext of his words: This isn’t supposed to happen here. It’s supposed to happen there, yes, but not here. (The ultimate irony, of course, being that our ‘there’ is somebody else’s ‘here’, and vice versa.) As if there were some kind of geographical and moral symmetry at work. As if some nations are destined from disaster and destruction because of their locales and varying levels of decrepitude, while others were exempt due to their superior structures of government, their better organization, their stronger sense of urgency and action when it comes crisis time.

Not that I’m mocking what the reporter said, because fragments of the same thoughts surely floated through the flotsam of my own brain. In some sense, I don’t think he was talking about the United States at all; he was talking about humanity, about the individual, about how we would like to believe that death and destruction are not coming for us, no, at least not today. To imagine oneself at the centre of an unspeakable tragedy is to imagine oneself vulnerable. To imagine oneself vulnerable is to invite that which would destroy us.

So we go on, trusting our governments, trusting each other, to bail us out should the heavens happen to fall. In New Orleans, and Alabama, and Mississippi, the heavens fell, and the government was not there, at least not right away, and there is only so much we can do for one another. Only so much we can do when water and food are absent from our daily existence.

The story of New Orleans is a story that will reverberate, on the national and human level, for decades to come. It tells us that the people we think our looking out for us are, perhaps, no better, no more resourceful, than ourselves in our weakest moments. It tells us that there is a serious gap between the underclass in America, and their needs, as opposed to the boys in the back room, and their needs. (If New Orleans had been predominantly white, and wealthy, and full of senators’ and governors’ sons and daughters, would the response time for aid been much, much, quicker? You tell me, but I say yes.) It tells us that no nation can do battle with nature and win. All you can do is hang on.

It’s like that lady in the tree. You remember her? The one in Africa a year or two back, the one who gave birth in the branches while floods ravaged the land beneath her feet. When reduced to a human level, that’s what New Orleans was, the lady in the tree, giving birth while the tempest of life did its best to drop her from her perch. That’s who we all are, I guess – people in the trees, hanging on, hoping that our children will not be borne away by the current.

The good thing, the tangible thing, is that lady survived. The one in the tree. And so did her child. I’m not sure what that means, for her or for us or for the people of the Southern Delta down in the States, but it sure as hell must mean something, is what I’m thinking.