Coming back to Cambodia after a short stint home in Canada last September, the first thing I noticed when walking out of Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh was the smell. It wasn't even the heat that struck me the most, after the pleasantly cool air of an Ontario autumn, because you get used to the heat, expect the heat, almost wait for the heat to begin its long and slow process of breaking you down, second by second.
The smell, though, is so strange and potent that its presence eventually, somehow, becomes an afterthought; its unique aura is in and of itself the very reason it sinks into those beautiful and hideous natural phenomenas that we take for granted, like sunsets, or rain, or Richard Simmons' hair.
This is the smell of life, intensified: gas and dust and roads and rice and grass and sweat and motos and people screaming and laughing, dirty and alive. It hovers in the air, this smell, following you around, clinging to your memories. It is not an altogether unpleasant smell, truth be told; after a few days, it simply is, a fact of life, a reality of Cambodia. It is earthy and real.
In Canada, there is a clean and freshly milked glow to the air, for lack of a better word. The air is good. The air is alive. The air, when you are in parts of nature that are pure and unspoiled, feels and smells and tastes like whatever air is supposed to be, in all its pristine glory, the apothesis of our hopes for our future selves, healthy beings at one with the world.
In Phnom Penh, the air is the way we actually are: unkempt, indifferent, intrusive, fundamentally the opposite of what we could and should be. It stinks of people and their efforts, mechanical and natural. It lays claim to our worst-kept secrets, and reveals them, constantly, effortlessly, as the day dies down to night. As we're left in the dust.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
WHERE'S PERRY MASON WHEN YOU NEED HIM?
The Phnom Penh Post reported the other day that prison authorities here in Cambodia are in a bit of a bind, given that there aren't, in fact, any laws on the books forbidding prisoners from breaking out of prison.
Kind of a Catch-22 thing, I guess. You're put into prison for doing something bad. You're not supposed to break out of prison, but if you do, well, there's not much we can do about that, because it's not against the law.
Sorta defeats the whole point of a prison, doesn't it? Having a sort of 'revolving door' policy and all.
Just one more example of how seriously twisted the Khmer justice system is.
Where I work, a lot of the, like, really smart and important and talented people are actually working on important and relevant stuff, a lot of which has to do badgering the Cambodian government, pleading with them, cajoling them, convincing them that, yes, laws are, contrary to what you might believe or have heard, important. (I've never used the word 'cajole' or any form of it in a sentence before. I swear. I don't know what got into me. I try not to use words that sound totally strange and ridiculous in everyday conversation, but I think I just violated my own oath.)
Case in point:
A lot of the tsunami coverage has focused on the fact that (gasp) orphaned children may, in fact, be sold into the sex trade.
Guess what? It happens all the time. Every day. Every hour.
And a lot of these kids that are kidnapped or coerced into working in Cambodia or Thailand or Vietnam eventually, for various reasons, find themselves trying to sneak back into their native lands any which way they can. (I also try not to use titles of Clint Eastwood movies in my writing, but I think that that last phrase was the title of a flick featuring Clint and an ape. And wasn't it a sequel, too? But I promise there'll be no 'pink cadillacs' or 'magnum force' phrases.)
You know what often happens when the authorities catch them? The kids are charged with being illegal immigrants! (As if they had any say in being, I don't know, sold.)
Back home, if you're a kid, and if you do something bad, no matter what it is, they can charge you with something. Here, there's no, I repeat no, laws for young offenders. They receive the same sentences as adults, and, not only that, they're put in the same prisons.
Scary stuff. As functional and seemingly thriving as Phnom Penh is, it's little details like that that can make you shiver, if you think about them too long, if you ponder them too much.
Lots of work remains to be done here. Lots of rules to be written up. In the meantime, lots of boys and girls wait. Crossing borders, passing through hands, travelling over unfamiliar roads to destinations they'd rather not think about, as the indifferent machinations of government continue their creaky ways.
Kind of a Catch-22 thing, I guess. You're put into prison for doing something bad. You're not supposed to break out of prison, but if you do, well, there's not much we can do about that, because it's not against the law.
Sorta defeats the whole point of a prison, doesn't it? Having a sort of 'revolving door' policy and all.
Just one more example of how seriously twisted the Khmer justice system is.
Where I work, a lot of the, like, really smart and important and talented people are actually working on important and relevant stuff, a lot of which has to do badgering the Cambodian government, pleading with them, cajoling them, convincing them that, yes, laws are, contrary to what you might believe or have heard, important. (I've never used the word 'cajole' or any form of it in a sentence before. I swear. I don't know what got into me. I try not to use words that sound totally strange and ridiculous in everyday conversation, but I think I just violated my own oath.)
Case in point:
A lot of the tsunami coverage has focused on the fact that (gasp) orphaned children may, in fact, be sold into the sex trade.
Guess what? It happens all the time. Every day. Every hour.
And a lot of these kids that are kidnapped or coerced into working in Cambodia or Thailand or Vietnam eventually, for various reasons, find themselves trying to sneak back into their native lands any which way they can. (I also try not to use titles of Clint Eastwood movies in my writing, but I think that that last phrase was the title of a flick featuring Clint and an ape. And wasn't it a sequel, too? But I promise there'll be no 'pink cadillacs' or 'magnum force' phrases.)
You know what often happens when the authorities catch them? The kids are charged with being illegal immigrants! (As if they had any say in being, I don't know, sold.)
Back home, if you're a kid, and if you do something bad, no matter what it is, they can charge you with something. Here, there's no, I repeat no, laws for young offenders. They receive the same sentences as adults, and, not only that, they're put in the same prisons.
Scary stuff. As functional and seemingly thriving as Phnom Penh is, it's little details like that that can make you shiver, if you think about them too long, if you ponder them too much.
Lots of work remains to be done here. Lots of rules to be written up. In the meantime, lots of boys and girls wait. Crossing borders, passing through hands, travelling over unfamiliar roads to destinations they'd rather not think about, as the indifferent machinations of government continue their creaky ways.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
DIFFERENT SPEEDS
He was there again last night, Tom, the Khmer kid who hangs around the Galaxy Web Internet cafe, hoping to sell some newspapers.
I'd already read what he was selling, so I just chatted with him for a moment or two, his English broken and hesitant, but good, all things considered. Great, in fact.
He's a short kid, like most Cambodians. Guessing their ages is always tricky. My first instinct said: He's twelve.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Fifteen," he said.
Me, half-surprised, half-not: "fifteen?"
"In Cambodia, people small," he said.
True, but that's not only Cambodia. In Japan, too, people are short, and hell, I'm not that big myself. Here, though, it ain't necessarily genetics, though that plays a part. Most Cambodian kids and teenagers have stunted growth.
I did some teaching for awhile at an orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (www.futurelight.net). A lot of the kids were from the countryside, where their meals mostly consist of rice, rice, more rice, and rice. You have kids that are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old that look nine and ten. It's unnerving at first, but like anything here (or anything in life), you get used to it.
They grow at their own speed, that's all. Then they stop. Simple.
We all do. Some people are tall at eleven years old, towering over the hopscotch courts. (Do kids still play hopscotch anymore?) Some are short until nineteen, then bam, it's Kareem Abdul-Jabar time.
I would like to think it's the same thing in life, too. I'm not sure about that; it's just one of those strange theories of mine that refuse to go away, like the mosquitoes in my room at night. Things I've learned in Japan and Cambodia over the last five years are things that some kids, kids whose parents are aid workers, or missionaries, or just really-rich-and-powerful-embassy-type-people, would have learned by age seven. The allure of foreign lands, the confusion that results when you are immersed in them, the gradual unfolding of peoples and cultures that can envelop or smother you -- it too me by surprise at age twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five (and still does, at twenty-nine), but maybe embassy kids go through all that before adolescence. (Me, before adolescence, I was mostly going through Spider-Man.)
We all move through life at different speeds. Where you are now -- in your job, your family, your (hopefully) life -- is not where I'm at. We started at different places. We rested at alternative points. You got a bit of a lead, and I'm still catching up, and vice versa.
Tom, the Cambodian boy who sells the papers, he's hustling out of bed at five a.m., going to make some bucks. He's fifteen and too poor for school and chasing down foreigners for the 500 riel cut he makes from each and every sale. (That's about twelve cents, U.S.).
He started at a place far different from me, in time and space, and, let's face it, plain old luck. My position's better than Tom's, and Tom's is better than the kids around the corner, the ones you see with their mothers, rummaging through the garbage at night. I'm a bit ahead of him -- in terms of comfort, occupation, sustainability.
I still have some bumps (craters?) in the road ahead of me. I can't see the next time I'll be knocked to the canvas.
I hope Tom somehow, in the face of all rational logic and plausibility, catches up to me, if only for a moment, a second, an instant. I really, really do.
I'd already read what he was selling, so I just chatted with him for a moment or two, his English broken and hesitant, but good, all things considered. Great, in fact.
He's a short kid, like most Cambodians. Guessing their ages is always tricky. My first instinct said: He's twelve.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Fifteen," he said.
Me, half-surprised, half-not: "fifteen?"
"In Cambodia, people small," he said.
True, but that's not only Cambodia. In Japan, too, people are short, and hell, I'm not that big myself. Here, though, it ain't necessarily genetics, though that plays a part. Most Cambodian kids and teenagers have stunted growth.
I did some teaching for awhile at an orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (www.futurelight.net). A lot of the kids were from the countryside, where their meals mostly consist of rice, rice, more rice, and rice. You have kids that are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old that look nine and ten. It's unnerving at first, but like anything here (or anything in life), you get used to it.
They grow at their own speed, that's all. Then they stop. Simple.
We all do. Some people are tall at eleven years old, towering over the hopscotch courts. (Do kids still play hopscotch anymore?) Some are short until nineteen, then bam, it's Kareem Abdul-Jabar time.
I would like to think it's the same thing in life, too. I'm not sure about that; it's just one of those strange theories of mine that refuse to go away, like the mosquitoes in my room at night. Things I've learned in Japan and Cambodia over the last five years are things that some kids, kids whose parents are aid workers, or missionaries, or just really-rich-and-powerful-embassy-type-people, would have learned by age seven. The allure of foreign lands, the confusion that results when you are immersed in them, the gradual unfolding of peoples and cultures that can envelop or smother you -- it too me by surprise at age twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five (and still does, at twenty-nine), but maybe embassy kids go through all that before adolescence. (Me, before adolescence, I was mostly going through Spider-Man.)
We all move through life at different speeds. Where you are now -- in your job, your family, your (hopefully) life -- is not where I'm at. We started at different places. We rested at alternative points. You got a bit of a lead, and I'm still catching up, and vice versa.
Tom, the Cambodian boy who sells the papers, he's hustling out of bed at five a.m., going to make some bucks. He's fifteen and too poor for school and chasing down foreigners for the 500 riel cut he makes from each and every sale. (That's about twelve cents, U.S.).
He started at a place far different from me, in time and space, and, let's face it, plain old luck. My position's better than Tom's, and Tom's is better than the kids around the corner, the ones you see with their mothers, rummaging through the garbage at night. I'm a bit ahead of him -- in terms of comfort, occupation, sustainability.
I still have some bumps (craters?) in the road ahead of me. I can't see the next time I'll be knocked to the canvas.
I hope Tom somehow, in the face of all rational logic and plausibility, catches up to me, if only for a moment, a second, an instant. I really, really do.
Friday, January 28, 2005
ONLY YOU
Quick question:
If you had grown up on the streets of Phnom Penh, or in Canada's verison of America's projects in the Jane and Finch section of Toronto, would you be where you are right now? Working in the same job? Living in the same house?
I'm betting no.
The other night on DVD I watched the new Samuel L. Jackson film Coach Carter, about a California high school basketball coach who locked his team out of the gym, banned practice, and forfeited games until the students improved their academic standing and fulfilled the contracts they had signed with him at the beginning of the season. At one point in the flick he says: "The system has failed these kids."
The line resonates.
There will always be the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Oprah Winfreys of the world, people who, though uncommon will and focus, manage to transcend their roots and plant themselves firmly on the foundation of their dreams.
For the rest of us, we need help.
It's scandalous to even consider, but it's true -- the systems are sometimes purposefully designed to hold people back. Or sometimes there's no systems in the first place.
In Cambodia, you usually can't go to school unless you have enough money to pay the teachers alittle bit every day. Why do you have to pay the teachers? Because the teachers ask for bribe money? Why do the teachers ask for bribe money? Because the government pays them twenty American dollars a month. They can't live on that much; nobody can live on that much. The government doesn't care -- not when they're living the high life, driving Benzes and raising children who tend to scream through town on their motorbikes and ram into civilians.
It's funny. On TV yesterday there was a live panel debate from the Davos conference in Switzerland, that yearly gathering that assembles the best and the brightest from the world of finance and politics, technology and business. The members of the panel? Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bono, Tony Blair, the Prime Ministers of three or four African nations. Not bad. Their concern? How do we help Africa? Their solution? Well, we're not sure, they said. Yes, they had many options, but implementing them, actualizing them, remains fuzzy.
The biggest problem is the most obvious problem: corruption. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has a much applauded new report stating that the way to end poverty in the next few decades is through a massive influx of cash; the only way to help the poor is to give them more money.
I agree.
It's that simple.
It's that difficult.
How do you get the money to the people? Therein lies the difficulty. How do you get past the endless levels of bribery and payoff these nations' governments demand, expect, require? You can throw all the money in the world into these countries, but if nobody's able to track it, seeing that it goes where it's actually supposed to go, then the cycle will continue.
Clinton made a point that I could relate to, because much of where I work is related to capacity building, moving away from aiding a community, city or nation, and shifting towards enabling them to build things on their own. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?
It's the hardest thing in the world. Think how long it took you to figure out how the world works -- how to tie your shoes, take a test, do a job interview, learn new software. It takes years and years and years. (I'm just realizing, after almost thirty years, that I have no idea how the world works. If anyone knows, please let me know.)
The same thing is true for countries. But there's no other choice, is there? If we just give money and feel satisfied, then nobody learns anything, nothing gets done, and in twenty years the poverty, coups and deterioration will continue, if not escalate.
It all comes down to capacity building -- having people on the ground, with the people, telling them: You do it like this and like and like this. And you do that for a whole generation, in all fields: health, education, entertainment, finance -- the list goes on and on.
There's no other way.
You have to show people how to build a system.
The system may be corrupt, and illogical, and faulty, but it has to be there to work.
If you're a kid in Cambodia, the system is barely hanging together. If you're a kid from the streets of Jane and Finch in Toronto, there's a system, yes, but what real hope is there? How good are your schools? How good are your teachers? What kind of support system is in place? Who's giving kids the self-confidence and tools that will enable them to get beyond Jane and Finch to at least the Harvey's burger restaurant at Yonge and Bloor?
The system is failing a lot of people all over the world.
And, in the end of course, the big slap in the face comes when you realize that there is no system.
Watch the movie Spartan, with Val Kilmer. It's a crafty political thriller that also kind of encapsulates everything you need to know about life. As Kilmer learns at a crucial point in the film: There is no 'they'; there is only him, and what he said he was going to do, and whether or not he will do it. That's all.
There is only you.
If you had grown up on the streets of Phnom Penh, or in Canada's verison of America's projects in the Jane and Finch section of Toronto, would you be where you are right now? Working in the same job? Living in the same house?
I'm betting no.
The other night on DVD I watched the new Samuel L. Jackson film Coach Carter, about a California high school basketball coach who locked his team out of the gym, banned practice, and forfeited games until the students improved their academic standing and fulfilled the contracts they had signed with him at the beginning of the season. At one point in the flick he says: "The system has failed these kids."
The line resonates.
There will always be the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Oprah Winfreys of the world, people who, though uncommon will and focus, manage to transcend their roots and plant themselves firmly on the foundation of their dreams.
For the rest of us, we need help.
It's scandalous to even consider, but it's true -- the systems are sometimes purposefully designed to hold people back. Or sometimes there's no systems in the first place.
In Cambodia, you usually can't go to school unless you have enough money to pay the teachers alittle bit every day. Why do you have to pay the teachers? Because the teachers ask for bribe money? Why do the teachers ask for bribe money? Because the government pays them twenty American dollars a month. They can't live on that much; nobody can live on that much. The government doesn't care -- not when they're living the high life, driving Benzes and raising children who tend to scream through town on their motorbikes and ram into civilians.
It's funny. On TV yesterday there was a live panel debate from the Davos conference in Switzerland, that yearly gathering that assembles the best and the brightest from the world of finance and politics, technology and business. The members of the panel? Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bono, Tony Blair, the Prime Ministers of three or four African nations. Not bad. Their concern? How do we help Africa? Their solution? Well, we're not sure, they said. Yes, they had many options, but implementing them, actualizing them, remains fuzzy.
The biggest problem is the most obvious problem: corruption. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has a much applauded new report stating that the way to end poverty in the next few decades is through a massive influx of cash; the only way to help the poor is to give them more money.
I agree.
It's that simple.
It's that difficult.
How do you get the money to the people? Therein lies the difficulty. How do you get past the endless levels of bribery and payoff these nations' governments demand, expect, require? You can throw all the money in the world into these countries, but if nobody's able to track it, seeing that it goes where it's actually supposed to go, then the cycle will continue.
Clinton made a point that I could relate to, because much of where I work is related to capacity building, moving away from aiding a community, city or nation, and shifting towards enabling them to build things on their own. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?
It's the hardest thing in the world. Think how long it took you to figure out how the world works -- how to tie your shoes, take a test, do a job interview, learn new software. It takes years and years and years. (I'm just realizing, after almost thirty years, that I have no idea how the world works. If anyone knows, please let me know.)
The same thing is true for countries. But there's no other choice, is there? If we just give money and feel satisfied, then nobody learns anything, nothing gets done, and in twenty years the poverty, coups and deterioration will continue, if not escalate.
It all comes down to capacity building -- having people on the ground, with the people, telling them: You do it like this and like and like this. And you do that for a whole generation, in all fields: health, education, entertainment, finance -- the list goes on and on.
There's no other way.
You have to show people how to build a system.
The system may be corrupt, and illogical, and faulty, but it has to be there to work.
If you're a kid in Cambodia, the system is barely hanging together. If you're a kid from the streets of Jane and Finch in Toronto, there's a system, yes, but what real hope is there? How good are your schools? How good are your teachers? What kind of support system is in place? Who's giving kids the self-confidence and tools that will enable them to get beyond Jane and Finch to at least the Harvey's burger restaurant at Yonge and Bloor?
The system is failing a lot of people all over the world.
And, in the end of course, the big slap in the face comes when you realize that there is no system.
Watch the movie Spartan, with Val Kilmer. It's a crafty political thriller that also kind of encapsulates everything you need to know about life. As Kilmer learns at a crucial point in the film: There is no 'they'; there is only him, and what he said he was going to do, and whether or not he will do it. That's all.
There is only you.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
DREAMS OF SNOW (A short short story...)
A 4.5 kg meteorite landed in a Banteay Mancheay province rice field on Monday morning, astonishing farmers who were harvesting the field...
-- The Cambodia Daily,
January 27, 2005
Chhaya is a farmer. He has a simple life. His wife takes care of their four children, two girls and two boys, while he minds the fields. The day is hot and the day is long, but after lunch there is always a nap, a sweet chance to rest, possibly dream, if only for an hour.
Sometimes he dreams about snow. He has never seen snow, but he has heard of it, from the foreigners that came many years ago to help de-mine the fields he called home. He has heard that it is soft and cool, and in his dreams he is sometimes buried in the snow, up to his neck. He cannot move his neck to the left or to the right, but that's fine; that's logical. He can tilt his head, though, enough to see the falling snow land on his brow, gentle and silent. He has never heard the expression 'no two snowflakes are alike', but if he ever does, he will will think about it for a moment, nod, agree. Before the snow covers his eyes and his sight, he notices that the flakes are falling on him and him alone; just up ahead, in the middle of his emerald green fields, the sun shines bright. His wife and children are watching him, laughing, which makes him laugh, too.
At this point in his dream, he always wakes up, slick with sweat, a smile on his face.
He tells no one of his dream; it is for him and him alone.
******
The air was hot and thick as he worked the fields, but that was fine, because he knew that rainy season was coming. Soon enough there would be wetness and coolness, each and every afternoon. He could wait. He liked to wait, to revel in the heat, to imagine how refreshing that first, initial drop would be. He would savor it.
Later, he told anyone who would listen -- his wife, children, even the commune chief, Samnang, who he usually didn't get along with --that he had been the first one in the whole village to see the object in the sky. He couldn't prove that, no, but he had sensed it before anyone else. Don't ask me how, he'd say. I am the one who dreams of snow, not you.
Others claimed to hear it, a steady, whirring shwoosh, but they were fools. Anyone can hear such a thing. To sense it, though, was special.
Chhaya paused. He stood up from the rice fields, his knees cracking. His heart started to beat. At first he thought one of his children was in trouble, hurt, or even dead; he often had physical sensations, even tremors, when his boys or girls were in pain.
But no, this was different. This feeling, this drumbeat inside of his chest, had not started from within; its origin was elsewhere, up.
It is going to snow, Chhaya thought, knowing such a feeling was ludicrous, and knowing that it was true, nevertheless.
He remembered his dream. He remembered the snow piling on top of him, and how difficult it was to move.
This was not a dream, and he felt free, perhaps for the first time ever. He felt fluid.
It was then his eyes saw it.
A speeding round orb racing through the sky, trailing orange and grey fire, ramming to the ground and exploding, its great and mighty boom larger than any mine Chhya had ever heard. The first thing he did was clutch the stump of his right arm, the bottom portion of which had been torn apart by a mine seven years ago, in this very same field. He rubbed it and held it and rubbed it some more.
In the days and weeks and months and years to come, stories would be told. Offerings would be made. It was a gift from the gods, many would say. Others would say no, no, it is a curse, it is a threat, it is an omen of bad things to come. There would be battles over who got to keep it, this strange and useless rock, this harbinger of unknown ills. It would be taken away, locked away, in a room somewhere in Phnom Penh. The sound of its landing, the ferocity of its fires, would be a memory, a picture in people's minds, a tale to be passed down throughout the village for thirty, forty years. (And so nice it was, to be able to recall an event that did not involve death, and blood, and children whacked against trees! So unbelievably liberating, this enigma that did not involve wailing children and unseeing, lifeless eyes, and the cold, black grip of a gun.)
All of that came later.
Chhaya came first, and he would remember that moment, so clearly and effortlessly, that slow and steady walk of his, towards this fallen gift from the gods. Already he could hear the cries and shrieks and confused conversation of farms two, three fields over. They would be here soon.
A deep, ragged pit lay just up ahead. Long tendrils of smoke weaved their way out from beneath the flames, reaching higher and higher before vanishing into the indifferent blue sky.
He watched it all, not noticing the tears that slowly made their down his sunken cheeks. He was not hungry, not thirsty, not tired. He had never believed what so many others did, that dreams were visions, that they told the future, that they could bring you fortune and happiness, if you followed them carefully. He had always thought this was nonsense.
He walked slowly, like a child, towards the crater. There were no longer any mines in this field, hadn't been any for years, but he still walked gingerly; old habits lingered. Soon, only moments from now, he knew he would have to look inside its depth. View its true shape and form. Confront the miracle, before it became common.
Still, he paused. He stopped. He closed his eyes, liking the feel of his moist tears; he had not cried for a long, long time. The day was hot, and the sun was full, and there was much more to do today, much more rice to harvest. But he wanted to listen a little longer to the sound of the flames. He wanted to smell the smoke. He wanted only to believe in this moment, the reality of it, the possibility that snow had come, finally, for him.
-- The Cambodia Daily,
January 27, 2005
Chhaya is a farmer. He has a simple life. His wife takes care of their four children, two girls and two boys, while he minds the fields. The day is hot and the day is long, but after lunch there is always a nap, a sweet chance to rest, possibly dream, if only for an hour.
Sometimes he dreams about snow. He has never seen snow, but he has heard of it, from the foreigners that came many years ago to help de-mine the fields he called home. He has heard that it is soft and cool, and in his dreams he is sometimes buried in the snow, up to his neck. He cannot move his neck to the left or to the right, but that's fine; that's logical. He can tilt his head, though, enough to see the falling snow land on his brow, gentle and silent. He has never heard the expression 'no two snowflakes are alike', but if he ever does, he will will think about it for a moment, nod, agree. Before the snow covers his eyes and his sight, he notices that the flakes are falling on him and him alone; just up ahead, in the middle of his emerald green fields, the sun shines bright. His wife and children are watching him, laughing, which makes him laugh, too.
At this point in his dream, he always wakes up, slick with sweat, a smile on his face.
He tells no one of his dream; it is for him and him alone.
******
The air was hot and thick as he worked the fields, but that was fine, because he knew that rainy season was coming. Soon enough there would be wetness and coolness, each and every afternoon. He could wait. He liked to wait, to revel in the heat, to imagine how refreshing that first, initial drop would be. He would savor it.
Later, he told anyone who would listen -- his wife, children, even the commune chief, Samnang, who he usually didn't get along with --that he had been the first one in the whole village to see the object in the sky. He couldn't prove that, no, but he had sensed it before anyone else. Don't ask me how, he'd say. I am the one who dreams of snow, not you.
Others claimed to hear it, a steady, whirring shwoosh, but they were fools. Anyone can hear such a thing. To sense it, though, was special.
Chhaya paused. He stood up from the rice fields, his knees cracking. His heart started to beat. At first he thought one of his children was in trouble, hurt, or even dead; he often had physical sensations, even tremors, when his boys or girls were in pain.
But no, this was different. This feeling, this drumbeat inside of his chest, had not started from within; its origin was elsewhere, up.
It is going to snow, Chhaya thought, knowing such a feeling was ludicrous, and knowing that it was true, nevertheless.
He remembered his dream. He remembered the snow piling on top of him, and how difficult it was to move.
This was not a dream, and he felt free, perhaps for the first time ever. He felt fluid.
It was then his eyes saw it.
A speeding round orb racing through the sky, trailing orange and grey fire, ramming to the ground and exploding, its great and mighty boom larger than any mine Chhya had ever heard. The first thing he did was clutch the stump of his right arm, the bottom portion of which had been torn apart by a mine seven years ago, in this very same field. He rubbed it and held it and rubbed it some more.
In the days and weeks and months and years to come, stories would be told. Offerings would be made. It was a gift from the gods, many would say. Others would say no, no, it is a curse, it is a threat, it is an omen of bad things to come. There would be battles over who got to keep it, this strange and useless rock, this harbinger of unknown ills. It would be taken away, locked away, in a room somewhere in Phnom Penh. The sound of its landing, the ferocity of its fires, would be a memory, a picture in people's minds, a tale to be passed down throughout the village for thirty, forty years. (And so nice it was, to be able to recall an event that did not involve death, and blood, and children whacked against trees! So unbelievably liberating, this enigma that did not involve wailing children and unseeing, lifeless eyes, and the cold, black grip of a gun.)
All of that came later.
Chhaya came first, and he would remember that moment, so clearly and effortlessly, that slow and steady walk of his, towards this fallen gift from the gods. Already he could hear the cries and shrieks and confused conversation of farms two, three fields over. They would be here soon.
A deep, ragged pit lay just up ahead. Long tendrils of smoke weaved their way out from beneath the flames, reaching higher and higher before vanishing into the indifferent blue sky.
He watched it all, not noticing the tears that slowly made their down his sunken cheeks. He was not hungry, not thirsty, not tired. He had never believed what so many others did, that dreams were visions, that they told the future, that they could bring you fortune and happiness, if you followed them carefully. He had always thought this was nonsense.
He walked slowly, like a child, towards the crater. There were no longer any mines in this field, hadn't been any for years, but he still walked gingerly; old habits lingered. Soon, only moments from now, he knew he would have to look inside its depth. View its true shape and form. Confront the miracle, before it became common.
Still, he paused. He stopped. He closed his eyes, liking the feel of his moist tears; he had not cried for a long, long time. The day was hot, and the sun was full, and there was much more to do today, much more rice to harvest. But he wanted to listen a little longer to the sound of the flames. He wanted to smell the smoke. He wanted only to believe in this moment, the reality of it, the possibility that snow had come, finally, for him.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
THE (CRIMINALLY) UNDERRATED STEVE GUTTENBERG, THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF LITERATURE AND THE AUTHORS OF OUR LIVES
My fouth year Creative Writing instructor informed us on the first day that by the end of the year we should be producing material that was written at a professional level, ready to be published.
(Strange, considering this was a man who had never published anything, and the one time that the topic of real-world publishing advice was even broached, he went into a twenty minute rage about how his own academic purity and the sanctity of art would not be violated by anything as crass as reality. I'm so glad to be out of school, but I'm less glad that I used the word 'broached' in the previous sentence, 'cause I'm not sure I used it correctly, given that it's the thing you pin on your date's dress for the prom, right, so how can it be a verb, too?)
And yes, there actually are degrees in Creative Writing. I swear. Most people look at it on a c.v. and get a kind of puzzled expression, as if I majored in Paper Airplane Design or something. (That's so patently ridiculous;I only minored in Paper Airplane Design, alright? And I still can't make one of the damn things...)
This was all back in 1997. I was not on-line. I didn't know what that term even meant. To be a writer was a worthy, back-breaking calling; it took years and years of precise honing, discipline and dedication. After killing yourself day after day for decades on end, you might be able to get something published by the time you were, say, forty.
Cut to now:
How difficult is it to publish this post?
Um, not so difficult. I write; I push a button; voila.
In essence, the entire notion of 'writing' and 'publishing' has been turned upside down, shaken upside the head the way I used to shake my little cousin as a newborn. (That's a joke. I swear.)
Recently, Stephen King was given a lifetime achievement award by the group that hands out the National Book Awards. His speech centred upon the divisions between 'popular' fiction and 'literature' -- and how those chasms are largely elitist, self-imposed and arbitrary, since the overflow between the two realms is now constant and abundant.
There's another, even greater gap that is being filled, and it has to do with writing itself, the notion of writing, the point of writing.
You have kids ten, eleven years old that have blogs far more sophisticated (and probably more entertaining) than mine. They have their own code, some kind of linguistic shorthand that is impenetrable to my twenty-nine year old eyes but perfectly clear, I'm sure, to those under fifteen.
At first I thought e-mail was somewhat troubling, because notions of grammar and spelling were no longer, um, necessary. Now we have websites and blogs written by everyone and anyone in the world, available for all to see at a moment's notice, and words and concepts can be spelled and expressed any way at all.
Is this good or bad?
I dunno.
I still think it's mindblowing that you can write something, push a button, and have it (potentially) read by millions within a second or two.
You have kids in orphanges in Cambodia (www.futurelight.net) who are able to shoot the breeze with the CEOs of major corporations -- theoretically, true, but everything begins theoretically, right?
If you want to write a novel, you can now have it published with the push of a button. (True, this doesn't mean you'll make any money off of it, no, but it can be out there, in the world, ready and waiting for all to see.)
If you want to write a manifesto proclaiming that the later Police Academy films, the ones without Steve Guttenberg in the lead (Assignment Miami Beach, City Under Siege and Mission to Moscow) as the height of cinematic artistry, surpassing The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda and even, believe it or not, Cannonball Run II, then bang, it's out there in the cybersphere, ready for argument.
(I would disagree, because Guttenberg added so much more than he is ever given credit for to the series, especially the third and fourth ones, Back in Training and Citizens on Patrol, where the quality started to drop but were saved, if not redeemed, by Guttenberg's mere presence. Ditto with Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run sequel. )
The future Faulkner or Barker or Grisham or Atwood or Mailer or Mishima doesn't have to wait; they can post their stuff now, get feedback, make adjustments. I'm not saying that this is how the publishing world should work now, or how it will work in the future, but the point is, there are so many permutations that pop up even when you think about this issue for a moment or two. What's going to happen in five years, ten years? How can we hold authors in esteem when everyone's an author, if only online?
It's a wildly democratizing process, to be sure. No more snootiness. No more condescension or insecurity because one's own, deeply personal ramblings were rejected by the misunderstanding publishing elite.
No more excuses, either.
At its best, what this process means is that you can hard-wire your thoughts to another's within the space of moments. You can see something on the street or in the sky that makes you pause, or reminds you of something you once believed in, but have now rejected, and you can then transform these erractic musings into poetry, instantly, and let it fly.
Your vision of poetry, untouched by others hands and invisible editorial adjustments.
It's a brave new world we're in, shifting second-by-second, and the true authors of our lives are now ourselves.
Which, paradoxically enough, is how it's always been.
(Strange, considering this was a man who had never published anything, and the one time that the topic of real-world publishing advice was even broached, he went into a twenty minute rage about how his own academic purity and the sanctity of art would not be violated by anything as crass as reality. I'm so glad to be out of school, but I'm less glad that I used the word 'broached' in the previous sentence, 'cause I'm not sure I used it correctly, given that it's the thing you pin on your date's dress for the prom, right, so how can it be a verb, too?)
And yes, there actually are degrees in Creative Writing. I swear. Most people look at it on a c.v. and get a kind of puzzled expression, as if I majored in Paper Airplane Design or something. (That's so patently ridiculous;I only minored in Paper Airplane Design, alright? And I still can't make one of the damn things...)
This was all back in 1997. I was not on-line. I didn't know what that term even meant. To be a writer was a worthy, back-breaking calling; it took years and years of precise honing, discipline and dedication. After killing yourself day after day for decades on end, you might be able to get something published by the time you were, say, forty.
Cut to now:
How difficult is it to publish this post?
Um, not so difficult. I write; I push a button; voila.
In essence, the entire notion of 'writing' and 'publishing' has been turned upside down, shaken upside the head the way I used to shake my little cousin as a newborn. (That's a joke. I swear.)
Recently, Stephen King was given a lifetime achievement award by the group that hands out the National Book Awards. His speech centred upon the divisions between 'popular' fiction and 'literature' -- and how those chasms are largely elitist, self-imposed and arbitrary, since the overflow between the two realms is now constant and abundant.
There's another, even greater gap that is being filled, and it has to do with writing itself, the notion of writing, the point of writing.
You have kids ten, eleven years old that have blogs far more sophisticated (and probably more entertaining) than mine. They have their own code, some kind of linguistic shorthand that is impenetrable to my twenty-nine year old eyes but perfectly clear, I'm sure, to those under fifteen.
At first I thought e-mail was somewhat troubling, because notions of grammar and spelling were no longer, um, necessary. Now we have websites and blogs written by everyone and anyone in the world, available for all to see at a moment's notice, and words and concepts can be spelled and expressed any way at all.
Is this good or bad?
I dunno.
I still think it's mindblowing that you can write something, push a button, and have it (potentially) read by millions within a second or two.
You have kids in orphanges in Cambodia (www.futurelight.net) who are able to shoot the breeze with the CEOs of major corporations -- theoretically, true, but everything begins theoretically, right?
If you want to write a novel, you can now have it published with the push of a button. (True, this doesn't mean you'll make any money off of it, no, but it can be out there, in the world, ready and waiting for all to see.)
If you want to write a manifesto proclaiming that the later Police Academy films, the ones without Steve Guttenberg in the lead (Assignment Miami Beach, City Under Siege and Mission to Moscow) as the height of cinematic artistry, surpassing The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda and even, believe it or not, Cannonball Run II, then bang, it's out there in the cybersphere, ready for argument.
(I would disagree, because Guttenberg added so much more than he is ever given credit for to the series, especially the third and fourth ones, Back in Training and Citizens on Patrol, where the quality started to drop but were saved, if not redeemed, by Guttenberg's mere presence. Ditto with Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run sequel. )
The future Faulkner or Barker or Grisham or Atwood or Mailer or Mishima doesn't have to wait; they can post their stuff now, get feedback, make adjustments. I'm not saying that this is how the publishing world should work now, or how it will work in the future, but the point is, there are so many permutations that pop up even when you think about this issue for a moment or two. What's going to happen in five years, ten years? How can we hold authors in esteem when everyone's an author, if only online?
It's a wildly democratizing process, to be sure. No more snootiness. No more condescension or insecurity because one's own, deeply personal ramblings were rejected by the misunderstanding publishing elite.
No more excuses, either.
At its best, what this process means is that you can hard-wire your thoughts to another's within the space of moments. You can see something on the street or in the sky that makes you pause, or reminds you of something you once believed in, but have now rejected, and you can then transform these erractic musings into poetry, instantly, and let it fly.
Your vision of poetry, untouched by others hands and invisible editorial adjustments.
It's a brave new world we're in, shifting second-by-second, and the true authors of our lives are now ourselves.
Which, paradoxically enough, is how it's always been.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
WHAT DID YOU KNOW AND WHEN DID YOU KNOW IT? (Or, The place where lost things congregate...)
If you don't have time to read actual books, you can always check out the 'Books' section at www.newyorktimes.com and pretend that you do. (It works for me.) The other day there were reviews of two new books, one about Shakespeare and his times called Will in the World, and another about the recent prisoner abuse scandals perpetrated by the Americans and Brits over in Iraq. One book is about the modern-day military and what it does and does not do, what it should and shouldn't do, while the other is set in Victorian England and concerns itself with a playwright's life and its impact on his work. (Or is Shakespeare pre-Victorian. I should probably know that, right? I saw Shakespeare and Love and everything, but I still get all these eras-named-after-queens mixed up. And who decided that they were going to name an entire time period after prominent and successful women, anyways? Nothing wrong with that, but if it were to happen today I guess we'd all be living in the Oprah era. I guess that's better than the Sally Jess Raphael era...)
Not much correlation between these two books, true, but I will find illogical connections even if none exist, damnit, because that's what I'm built to do.
Dealing with historical and literary works like Shakespeare is a guessing game, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify --
Wait.
I'm getting carried away.
When people write about Shakespeare, there's so much that's speculation, right? His intentions, his jobs, his influences, and even if Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written by the historical-person-known-as-Shakespeare. (Kind of like 'The Artist Formerly Known as Elmo'.) When you start going back four, five hundred years, you're in the 'pre-Welcome Back Kotter era', as I like to call it, and primary sources are rare, if not non-existent. (Is 'not non-existent' a double negative? Oh, and this reminds me of a great anecdote about this famous teacher that died a month or so ago, a real philosophical dude, I forget his name, but he was always a wise-ass with his teachers. One day in college his philosophy teacher stated that it was lexically impossible to create a negative statement from two positive ones. To which the smartass in the front row rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, yeah."
Get it? I think that's pretty funny, personally.
Anyway...
On the other hand, you can't more contemporary than the here and the now, and the military's actions in Iraq, and the abuse scandals that really shouldn't be all that scandalous. I'm not condoning these things by any means; I'm glad that that dude last week got sent to prison, but it's a freakin' obscenity that Bush didn't penalize anyone involved at the higher level -- Rumsfeld keeps his job, Gonzalez, who authorized the tricky memos basically validating the torture, gets promoted. Sweeeeet.
But it seems a little schizophrenic to me, this view of warfare and what constitutes shameful, despicable acts. War itself is a good thing, in this particular case; torturing the prisoners is not. Okay. Got it. So if you kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, you get the accolades of your peers and your country; if you shove them in a cell and beat 'em around a little bit, you get ten years in the military clink. Aren't both of these acts, like, the kind of things that you don't necessarily want to talk about over your morning juice? Aren't both of these things the kind of things that give you the cold sweats well into the morning hours? Maybe this should be the definition of a fundamentally wrong act: If you have nightmares about it, and it keeps you up at night, and you wake from your dreams screaming, then that act which precipitated these symptoms is not worthy of a medal, or promotion. Period.
But I digress...
My point is (or was) that we still really don't know the full extent of what went down. That old line from the Nixon years haunts us: "What did you know, and when did you know it?"
The eternal question of this time, and all time.
What did Shakespeare know? At what point in time? What did Bush know? When?
We can pinpoint events, dates, people and places. We can create the scenarios. The great works of art, the great wars, are impervious to inspection. They emerge, exist, are. We do our best to sort all of this stuff, but when you involve organisms as fundamentally fragile as humans, well, things get lost. There are always those shadowy corners where the lost things congregate, where light doesn't penetrate, and those are the places where history is made and our lives are shaped, for better or for worse.
Not much correlation between these two books, true, but I will find illogical connections even if none exist, damnit, because that's what I'm built to do.
Dealing with historical and literary works like Shakespeare is a guessing game, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify --
Wait.
I'm getting carried away.
When people write about Shakespeare, there's so much that's speculation, right? His intentions, his jobs, his influences, and even if Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written by the historical-person-known-as-Shakespeare. (Kind of like 'The Artist Formerly Known as Elmo'.) When you start going back four, five hundred years, you're in the 'pre-Welcome Back Kotter era', as I like to call it, and primary sources are rare, if not non-existent. (Is 'not non-existent' a double negative? Oh, and this reminds me of a great anecdote about this famous teacher that died a month or so ago, a real philosophical dude, I forget his name, but he was always a wise-ass with his teachers. One day in college his philosophy teacher stated that it was lexically impossible to create a negative statement from two positive ones. To which the smartass in the front row rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, yeah."
Get it? I think that's pretty funny, personally.
Anyway...
On the other hand, you can't more contemporary than the here and the now, and the military's actions in Iraq, and the abuse scandals that really shouldn't be all that scandalous. I'm not condoning these things by any means; I'm glad that that dude last week got sent to prison, but it's a freakin' obscenity that Bush didn't penalize anyone involved at the higher level -- Rumsfeld keeps his job, Gonzalez, who authorized the tricky memos basically validating the torture, gets promoted. Sweeeeet.
But it seems a little schizophrenic to me, this view of warfare and what constitutes shameful, despicable acts. War itself is a good thing, in this particular case; torturing the prisoners is not. Okay. Got it. So if you kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, you get the accolades of your peers and your country; if you shove them in a cell and beat 'em around a little bit, you get ten years in the military clink. Aren't both of these acts, like, the kind of things that you don't necessarily want to talk about over your morning juice? Aren't both of these things the kind of things that give you the cold sweats well into the morning hours? Maybe this should be the definition of a fundamentally wrong act: If you have nightmares about it, and it keeps you up at night, and you wake from your dreams screaming, then that act which precipitated these symptoms is not worthy of a medal, or promotion. Period.
But I digress...
My point is (or was) that we still really don't know the full extent of what went down. That old line from the Nixon years haunts us: "What did you know, and when did you know it?"
The eternal question of this time, and all time.
What did Shakespeare know? At what point in time? What did Bush know? When?
We can pinpoint events, dates, people and places. We can create the scenarios. The great works of art, the great wars, are impervious to inspection. They emerge, exist, are. We do our best to sort all of this stuff, but when you involve organisms as fundamentally fragile as humans, well, things get lost. There are always those shadowy corners where the lost things congregate, where light doesn't penetrate, and those are the places where history is made and our lives are shaped, for better or for worse.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)