Watching a little bit of Jon Stewart interviewing Russel Crowe on The Daily Show the other day made me think about my own upcoming jaunt to Vietnam, a country that was once, for me, simply the repository of Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone get-em'-back-alive POW movies and has now become, within the blink of an eye, a place I can actually, physically enter.
Let me explain.
Crowe somehow got Stewart to admit that he (Stewart) didn't have a passport. Which I found surprising. And troubling. And not that it should even matter, because Stewart is, after all, just a comedian, yes, absolutely, but he's also a comedian who's a sharp and witty commentator on foreign events and policies and politics; the fact that he's never been out of the country, and that only 14% of Americans actually have passports, troubles me for some reason.
Maybe it's because I often feel that I didn't know anything about the world, anything, until I exited my world, Canada; I often think that everything you read in a newspaper or a magazine has little, if any, resonance unless you've actually been there, done that.
(That's why the idea of foreign policy 'experts' like Condoleeza Rice has always troubled me, too; a Soviet expert she is, supposedly, and yet, how much time has she actually spent there? She's never lived there; she's never worked there. Never hung out in a corner pub and shot the shit with a bunch of drunken Siberians. The same goes with the people who so nonchalantly rearrange geographical history and priorities; call me crazy, but I don't think Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld had ever spent all that much time in the Middle East before deciding to do a little bit of bombing. I'm not saying this is essential, this first hand knowledge; I am saying that it's illuminating, that's all.)
Not that this is an exlusively American issue; I would bet that most Canadians don't have a passport either, and I think, by and large, on the whole, with the understanding that there are always exceptions, the majority of Canadians haven't travelled out of the country all that much.
Don't get me wrong. Travelling abroad, living abroad, doesn't necessarily make a you a saint, or a prophet, or even a good person. You don't have to leave your homeland to have a satisfactory life, a fulfilling life, a generous and useful life. You can be happy and healthy and wise merely by living down the street from where you grew up. I believe this. I do.
But I also know that I loved, absolutely loved all of those 80's Vietnam flicks that dealt with American POWs being held behind enemy lines: Rambo: First Blood Part II, Uncommon Valor (starring Gene Hackman as a dad who goes to Vietnam to find his captive son), the Missing In Action trilogy featuring Chuck Norris. (And I am a firm believer that Missing in Action II: The Beginning, is a rockin' prequel, and that Braddock: Missing In Action III, has its moments, few and far between as they admittedly are, and I will fight to the death anyone who says otherwise, anyone who is judging Chuck Norris firmly on the legacy of Walker: Texas Ranger, without even considering how he once gave Bruce Lee a good cinematic run for his money. Chuck is good people.) These films, in a sense, got me thinking about Vietnam, about foreign countries, about the globe. Not in any kind of intellectual way or even, I guess you could say, sane way, if a nine year old even can be sane, but they did get me thinking about something beyond Canada. But not enough to make me want to explore; not enough to make me want to escape my own childhood comforts. I would have to wait for that.
And, come to think of it, practically everything I knew about Asia pretty much descended from the above mentioned flicks. (Which, also come to think of it, is pretty freakin' scary.) My image of the Vietnamese was basically: somebody who Stallone killed to bring to the Americans home. Which worked perfectly well for me at nine, but at twenty-nine, well, it leaves something to be desired.
And now I've read a lot of books about Vietnam, and I've lived next door to the country in Cambodia going on two years now, but I've never, you know, been there. Never seen the traffic. Never slept in a bed within its borders.
So really, truthfully, in actuality, I don't know diddly-squat about the place.
When we allow our knowledge of the world and all its shades and textures to come from a little box in the corner of the room, something happens, as Joseph Heller might say. We substitute uninformed opinion for direct observation. We become cocooned in rationalizations that we have not discerned for ourselves. We become lesser people. We shrink rather than expand.
So, Wednesday I'll take the bus to Vietnam for a few days. I'll pass through the border. I'll be nervous and scared and wondering what the hell's going to happen. What I once knew only from Hollywood action movies will now, at last, twenty years later, have the weight and ferocity of life. The boy inside of me will hope that Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris will, against all odds, be around to come bail me out should the shit hit the fan -- but I will also be ready, alert and aware and curious, above all, curious to see what will happen to me if their rescue mission fails and I'm left alone (albeit with a friend or two) to try to comprehend this brave new world on my own.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Friday, June 10, 2005
AN AMATEUR ALL OVER AGAIN
I suspect that there's something about living in a city, any city, that leads one to forget about, ignore, and basically take for complete and total granted every car, corner and condominium that may or may not come into urban focus.
You live in a place. You work in a place. Said place has roads and streetlights and a postal box on the corner, shiny and red. You get used to it. It accentuates your life the way a sitcom's laugh track-does: always there, yes, but after awhile you don't even notice it anymore.
Same old story.
My third year Creative Writing teacher, a kind man and even kinder novelist named Richard Teleky, was trying to get at something like that when he assigned my class, for our first assignment no less, the altogether dreary and tedious task of describing a place in Toronto, any place, with as much detail and colour as we could. (I would give the same assignment seven years later, minus the 'Toronto', to my students in Cambodia.)
Me, not yet twenty-one, didn't see much of the point. I wanted to write stories, period, and so for the assignment I tossed off a philosophical and metaphysical exploration of my night at the Toronto Film Festival a few days back, arguing, when it came time to discuss my piece, that this was more than merely a 'physical' space, it was a mental one, a psychological one, this convergence of ordinary fans and legendary filmmakers that collided with angst and awe and raw, human sweat.
I remember him looking at me. Not buying it. Hell, I'd wrote the piece, and I wasn't buying it either. (Is there any feeling in the word like the one when a teacher sees right through you? There should be a word for it.)
The thing was, Teleky was a draft-dodger from the States, thirty years on. He'd come to Toronto from Cleveland; he saw the city, still, well past middle age, as an outsider. I viewed it as a kid from the (relatively) small city of St.Catharines who was in awe of any sort of town that actually had a subway system and more than one McDonald's in a three block radius. That spelled c-u-l-t-u-r-e to me, with a capital 'k'. His voice was the first to point out that, truth be told, downtown Toronto was, is, and probably forever would be, pretty damn ugly.
And I thought about it.
And I thought: He's right.
Every since, I've tried not to take a 'place', any place, for granted.
I still do, because I'm human, and that's we humans do with our lives, take things for granted. It's part custom, part ritual, part, I don't know, habitual. It's what we do.
Even the poverty of Phnom Penh, which awed me, I mean fucking AWED me when I first came here on a short trip, almost three years ago, has become familiar. The stink and the crowds and the street kids. I've allowed myself to become accustomed. Shame on me.
And I mean that.
I should know better.
There's always a building I haven't seen before. A street I haven't been down. A restaurant I haven't tried. (Jesus, I still haven't even been inside the National Museum or the King's Palace for Christ's sake, which is what most tourists pop off in a single afternoon, and here I am, two years later, still wondering when I'm going to set a date for these admittedly damn-close excursions.)
Maybe it's a good thing, though, this accustomization, I guess you'd call it. (Or I guess I'd call it -- not sure about you.) It's proof, of some silly sort, that we can adapt. We can lodge ourselves onto things and into things. We can take the obtuse and make it bla-bla-bla, whatever. We can find ourselves in something foreign and impenetrable. We can inhabit.
I'm used to the heat and the motos and the streetlights and chaos. I've seen it all here, yes, but there's still so much more to see. I have to keep reminding myself of that.
And what about you?
At some point in the really-recent future -- tonight, tomorrow morning -- you will leave your house and trod down familiar streets. You will see what you have always seen, or see what you expect to see.
But I implore you, as you get the keys out for the car, or do the laces up on your shoes:
Look closer. Before it's too late and you're too old.
Watch, linger, inspect.
You may find something new.
Something layered.
And you know that feeling, the feeling you get when you move into a new neighbourhood? The one that signals a comple and utter absence of any sort of first-hand knowledge of sushi joints, cinemas, laundromats and video shops?
It may, it might, it could come back.
Just think.
If you're aware, and alert, and try hard enough, you can become an amateur all over again.
You live in a place. You work in a place. Said place has roads and streetlights and a postal box on the corner, shiny and red. You get used to it. It accentuates your life the way a sitcom's laugh track-does: always there, yes, but after awhile you don't even notice it anymore.
Same old story.
My third year Creative Writing teacher, a kind man and even kinder novelist named Richard Teleky, was trying to get at something like that when he assigned my class, for our first assignment no less, the altogether dreary and tedious task of describing a place in Toronto, any place, with as much detail and colour as we could. (I would give the same assignment seven years later, minus the 'Toronto', to my students in Cambodia.)
Me, not yet twenty-one, didn't see much of the point. I wanted to write stories, period, and so for the assignment I tossed off a philosophical and metaphysical exploration of my night at the Toronto Film Festival a few days back, arguing, when it came time to discuss my piece, that this was more than merely a 'physical' space, it was a mental one, a psychological one, this convergence of ordinary fans and legendary filmmakers that collided with angst and awe and raw, human sweat.
I remember him looking at me. Not buying it. Hell, I'd wrote the piece, and I wasn't buying it either. (Is there any feeling in the word like the one when a teacher sees right through you? There should be a word for it.)
The thing was, Teleky was a draft-dodger from the States, thirty years on. He'd come to Toronto from Cleveland; he saw the city, still, well past middle age, as an outsider. I viewed it as a kid from the (relatively) small city of St.Catharines who was in awe of any sort of town that actually had a subway system and more than one McDonald's in a three block radius. That spelled c-u-l-t-u-r-e to me, with a capital 'k'. His voice was the first to point out that, truth be told, downtown Toronto was, is, and probably forever would be, pretty damn ugly.
And I thought about it.
And I thought: He's right.
Every since, I've tried not to take a 'place', any place, for granted.
I still do, because I'm human, and that's we humans do with our lives, take things for granted. It's part custom, part ritual, part, I don't know, habitual. It's what we do.
Even the poverty of Phnom Penh, which awed me, I mean fucking AWED me when I first came here on a short trip, almost three years ago, has become familiar. The stink and the crowds and the street kids. I've allowed myself to become accustomed. Shame on me.
And I mean that.
I should know better.
There's always a building I haven't seen before. A street I haven't been down. A restaurant I haven't tried. (Jesus, I still haven't even been inside the National Museum or the King's Palace for Christ's sake, which is what most tourists pop off in a single afternoon, and here I am, two years later, still wondering when I'm going to set a date for these admittedly damn-close excursions.)
Maybe it's a good thing, though, this accustomization, I guess you'd call it. (Or I guess I'd call it -- not sure about you.) It's proof, of some silly sort, that we can adapt. We can lodge ourselves onto things and into things. We can take the obtuse and make it bla-bla-bla, whatever. We can find ourselves in something foreign and impenetrable. We can inhabit.
I'm used to the heat and the motos and the streetlights and chaos. I've seen it all here, yes, but there's still so much more to see. I have to keep reminding myself of that.
And what about you?
At some point in the really-recent future -- tonight, tomorrow morning -- you will leave your house and trod down familiar streets. You will see what you have always seen, or see what you expect to see.
But I implore you, as you get the keys out for the car, or do the laces up on your shoes:
Look closer. Before it's too late and you're too old.
Watch, linger, inspect.
You may find something new.
Something layered.
And you know that feeling, the feeling you get when you move into a new neighbourhood? The one that signals a comple and utter absence of any sort of first-hand knowledge of sushi joints, cinemas, laundromats and video shops?
It may, it might, it could come back.
Just think.
If you're aware, and alert, and try hard enough, you can become an amateur all over again.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
EVERYTHING THE COUNTRIES THEMSELVES ARE NOT
The following is an excerpt from THE CORRECTIONS by National Book Award Winner Jonathan Franzen, in which the archetypal Middle American Mother, frustrated by her own elderly husband's lack of ambition, lack of mobility, compares him to a friend of theirs in a similar position who retains the zest and pep of life:
...He can't write anymore but he sent us an 'audio letter' on a cassette tape, really thoughtful, where he talks about each of his grandchildren in detail, because he knows his grandkids and takes an interest in them, and about how he started to teach himself Cambodian, which he calls Khmer, from listening to a tape and watching the Cambodian (or Khmer, I guess) TV channel in Fort Wayne, because their youngest son is married to a Cambodian woman, or Khmer, I guess, and her parents don't speak any English and Gene wants to talk to them a little.
It's a funny little passage, don't get me wrong. Provides some nice insight into the mind of the mother. It's clever and rings true.
(You can sense the 'but' coming can't you? Get ready for it...)
But here's the deal.
From a North American perspective, the word 'Cambodia' probably conjures up little more than vague, slightly cloudy and refracted images of THE KILLING FIELDS and Richard Nixon on TV announcing that he's going to bomb the hell out of it, and little else. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of countries in the world that I know jacksquat about (Bhutan, anyone?), and we can't expect everyone to know everything about every little place on the planet.
When you live in a place for a long time, though, that vague and unknown place becomes real. It exists. It has a tangible reality to it, defined by roads and weather and the greeter at the Wal-Mart who seems not to realize that she has a moustache, and a full one, too. If you live in the small town of Dildo, Newfoundland, then that poorly-named place is not just the butt of a million jokes -- it's real, with roads and schools and undertakers and children dying young and elders dying old and letter carriers carrying their letters.
(That's a real place, by the way -- Dildo, Newfoundland. I swear. You think I could make that up? Google it and prove me wrong.)
Cambodia is a place, too. A real place. The people here have their own language. They have a history. A civilization.
So the rational part of my brain applauds Franzen for constructing a witty little conversation. He chose Cambodia, I'm sure, because it's relatively obscure, Cambodia is, and so the fact that this particular character in Indiana is learning the Cambodian language acquires an even more potent comic charge.
But of course, Cambodia isn't obscure at all. Cambodia's been around for thousands and thousands of years -- longer than America, or Canada, or even EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. Because of its poverty and relative isolation from the world community, Cambodia has a culture that is as rich and as dense as any I've ever come across.
To see the country I've lived in for two years reduced to a punch-line in a book doesn't really offend me, or sadden me; I felt the same way after watching LOST IN TRANSLATION, admiring the writing and directing and acting, completely and totally empathizing with the main character because I, too, had felt her exact same emotions in those exact same places in Tokyo, but frustrated, nevertheless, because it reduced Japanese culture to this kitschy, cutesy, incomprehensible glob whose whole purpose was simply to accentuate how lonely and distant these two overseas Americans felt.
For cultures as fascinating and multifaceted as Japan and Cambodia are, to see them serve only as glittery comedic backdrops for Bill Murray's mopy face (as much as I love that face)or Franzen's jab at America's zest for obscure hobbies, well, it simply makes me even more aware of how bizarre and cloistered humans can sometimes behave, thinking 'this' place, the one we're in now, the one we're born into, is the barometer by which humanity (and empathy, and comedy) should be judged.
It's a funny feeling, that's all, to be sitting in a car in Cambodia, reading the quintessential modern American novel, and find this reference to Cambodia used so sparsely and humorously. It definitely works, that reference, in that context. It's funny. It's slight. It's somewhat absurd.
Everything the country itself is not.
...He can't write anymore but he sent us an 'audio letter' on a cassette tape, really thoughtful, where he talks about each of his grandchildren in detail, because he knows his grandkids and takes an interest in them, and about how he started to teach himself Cambodian, which he calls Khmer, from listening to a tape and watching the Cambodian (or Khmer, I guess) TV channel in Fort Wayne, because their youngest son is married to a Cambodian woman, or Khmer, I guess, and her parents don't speak any English and Gene wants to talk to them a little.
It's a funny little passage, don't get me wrong. Provides some nice insight into the mind of the mother. It's clever and rings true.
(You can sense the 'but' coming can't you? Get ready for it...)
But here's the deal.
From a North American perspective, the word 'Cambodia' probably conjures up little more than vague, slightly cloudy and refracted images of THE KILLING FIELDS and Richard Nixon on TV announcing that he's going to bomb the hell out of it, and little else. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of countries in the world that I know jacksquat about (Bhutan, anyone?), and we can't expect everyone to know everything about every little place on the planet.
When you live in a place for a long time, though, that vague and unknown place becomes real. It exists. It has a tangible reality to it, defined by roads and weather and the greeter at the Wal-Mart who seems not to realize that she has a moustache, and a full one, too. If you live in the small town of Dildo, Newfoundland, then that poorly-named place is not just the butt of a million jokes -- it's real, with roads and schools and undertakers and children dying young and elders dying old and letter carriers carrying their letters.
(That's a real place, by the way -- Dildo, Newfoundland. I swear. You think I could make that up? Google it and prove me wrong.)
Cambodia is a place, too. A real place. The people here have their own language. They have a history. A civilization.
So the rational part of my brain applauds Franzen for constructing a witty little conversation. He chose Cambodia, I'm sure, because it's relatively obscure, Cambodia is, and so the fact that this particular character in Indiana is learning the Cambodian language acquires an even more potent comic charge.
But of course, Cambodia isn't obscure at all. Cambodia's been around for thousands and thousands of years -- longer than America, or Canada, or even EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. Because of its poverty and relative isolation from the world community, Cambodia has a culture that is as rich and as dense as any I've ever come across.
To see the country I've lived in for two years reduced to a punch-line in a book doesn't really offend me, or sadden me; I felt the same way after watching LOST IN TRANSLATION, admiring the writing and directing and acting, completely and totally empathizing with the main character because I, too, had felt her exact same emotions in those exact same places in Tokyo, but frustrated, nevertheless, because it reduced Japanese culture to this kitschy, cutesy, incomprehensible glob whose whole purpose was simply to accentuate how lonely and distant these two overseas Americans felt.
For cultures as fascinating and multifaceted as Japan and Cambodia are, to see them serve only as glittery comedic backdrops for Bill Murray's mopy face (as much as I love that face)or Franzen's jab at America's zest for obscure hobbies, well, it simply makes me even more aware of how bizarre and cloistered humans can sometimes behave, thinking 'this' place, the one we're in now, the one we're born into, is the barometer by which humanity (and empathy, and comedy) should be judged.
It's a funny feeling, that's all, to be sitting in a car in Cambodia, reading the quintessential modern American novel, and find this reference to Cambodia used so sparsely and humorously. It definitely works, that reference, in that context. It's funny. It's slight. It's somewhat absurd.
Everything the country itself is not.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
WORD OF MOUTH
It's not every day that you see an attempted robbery.
This one didn't involve gunfire or banks or men-in-black suits wearing Richard Nixon masks. (There wasn't a befuddled, elderly security guard in sight.)
And even though I know, rationally, that Phnom Penh is not exactly Barry's Bay, Ontario, in terms of its safety, I often forget. Strike that, counsellor -- I ALWAYS forget.
Typical story: Me, on the back of a moto, heading for lunch.
(An aside: Living in Japan for four years, I took the train, literally, every day. Living in Cambodia for two years, I have not taken a train once, but I've taken a moto, literally, every day. That means something. I'm not sure what, but it means something.)
In front of me was a motorized tuk-tuk -- basically a comfy little couch, with a roof, on the back of a moto. Two foreigners, a man and a woman, were sitting in the back, travellers, tourists, the woman clutching her enormous knapsack, the kind that must be handed out automatically at the airport upon arrival.
Good thing she was clutching it, too.
Two young Khmers on a moto, both male, pulled up beside the tuk-tuk. The passenger reached out his arms and grabbed the woman's knapsack. (It's an open space, so it's easy to do.) He tugged once. The woman looked confused. He tugged twice. The woman started to get that look, the one that says: "Wait a minute -- I'm being fucking ROBBED here." The kid tugged one last time, and the woman held tight.
And that was it.
The moto with the two young punks sped off. The woman turned to her male companion with a "can you freakin' BELIEVE this?" look. My motodriver smiled and shook his head.
Once again, I'm faced with how clumsy and mundane and bewildering true crime is, the real stuff, not the Hollywood fiction, the stories we've been told for so long that we rarely, at any level, even recognize as stories.
Real crime is awkward and direct and out-of-the-blue.
And it always, always has repercussions.
You can bet your ass that that woman's view of Cambodia has forever been altered by that simple, brief encounter. Here she is, probably her first day in town, and wouldn't you know it -- somebody tries to rob her. She will fly back to Canada or America or England or Australia and that will be the centrepiece of her story, how Phnom Penh is a dangerous place, how even in broad daylight she was a victim of an attack, how she wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a place for women travellers to chill out.
And that's how countries get the reputations they get. (And people, too.)
One person does something to another person. The other person reacts, resists, survives. Lives to tell the tale. And that tale is passed on to others, mouth to mouth, word to word.
I don't know where the two dudes on the bike scurried off to. Don't know where the undoubtedly-frightened tourists ended up either, for that matter. Back to their hotel, maybe. Or a bar for a stiff drink, perhaps.
Me? I went to lunch.
We move on, all of us, the perpetrators and the victims and the spectators.
What else can we do?
This one didn't involve gunfire or banks or men-in-black suits wearing Richard Nixon masks. (There wasn't a befuddled, elderly security guard in sight.)
And even though I know, rationally, that Phnom Penh is not exactly Barry's Bay, Ontario, in terms of its safety, I often forget. Strike that, counsellor -- I ALWAYS forget.
Typical story: Me, on the back of a moto, heading for lunch.
(An aside: Living in Japan for four years, I took the train, literally, every day. Living in Cambodia for two years, I have not taken a train once, but I've taken a moto, literally, every day. That means something. I'm not sure what, but it means something.)
In front of me was a motorized tuk-tuk -- basically a comfy little couch, with a roof, on the back of a moto. Two foreigners, a man and a woman, were sitting in the back, travellers, tourists, the woman clutching her enormous knapsack, the kind that must be handed out automatically at the airport upon arrival.
Good thing she was clutching it, too.
Two young Khmers on a moto, both male, pulled up beside the tuk-tuk. The passenger reached out his arms and grabbed the woman's knapsack. (It's an open space, so it's easy to do.) He tugged once. The woman looked confused. He tugged twice. The woman started to get that look, the one that says: "Wait a minute -- I'm being fucking ROBBED here." The kid tugged one last time, and the woman held tight.
And that was it.
The moto with the two young punks sped off. The woman turned to her male companion with a "can you freakin' BELIEVE this?" look. My motodriver smiled and shook his head.
Once again, I'm faced with how clumsy and mundane and bewildering true crime is, the real stuff, not the Hollywood fiction, the stories we've been told for so long that we rarely, at any level, even recognize as stories.
Real crime is awkward and direct and out-of-the-blue.
And it always, always has repercussions.
You can bet your ass that that woman's view of Cambodia has forever been altered by that simple, brief encounter. Here she is, probably her first day in town, and wouldn't you know it -- somebody tries to rob her. She will fly back to Canada or America or England or Australia and that will be the centrepiece of her story, how Phnom Penh is a dangerous place, how even in broad daylight she was a victim of an attack, how she wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a place for women travellers to chill out.
And that's how countries get the reputations they get. (And people, too.)
One person does something to another person. The other person reacts, resists, survives. Lives to tell the tale. And that tale is passed on to others, mouth to mouth, word to word.
I don't know where the two dudes on the bike scurried off to. Don't know where the undoubtedly-frightened tourists ended up either, for that matter. Back to their hotel, maybe. Or a bar for a stiff drink, perhaps.
Me? I went to lunch.
We move on, all of us, the perpetrators and the victims and the spectators.
What else can we do?
Sunday, June 05, 2005
LIFE IS BUT A DREAM: HOW ACCESS HOLLYWOOD AND TUOL SLENG CONSPIRE TO KEEP OUR DREAM SELVES BEHIND LOCKED DOORS
I always get offended when somebody tells me: “Hey, you were in my dream last night!”
Why do I get ticked off?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we like to think of ourselves as ourselves: autonomous and in control. When somebody else is dreaming about us, it’s as if our own independence has been taken away from us. Robbed from us.
Oh, but I think it’s more than that.
I think that when we appear in somebody else’s dreams, and they appear in ours, something’s going on. Something’s. Going. On.
Perhaps our spirits are crossing in the night. Perhaps ephemeral fragments of our personalities slip loose from their bearings and cross over psychic boundaries that remain dormant during the day. Elements of our consciousnesses get entangled with one another, intentionally or inadvertently, in the slip-stream of two a.m., when the dark is absolute, rationality is absent, the moon is full.
Then again.
Perhaps this is all a dream. My whole life. Especially the last little bit. And anyone claiming to have witnessed a piece of me, a part of me, in their own nocturnal wanderings has therefore blown my rational cover, and discovered, along with me, though I sometimes deny it, that life is but a dream.
I used to think that way as a kid. (And I guess I still do.) The end of the school year would finally arrive -- the last class, the last test -- and as my pencil dropped from my cold, feeble fingers my brain would instantly revert to of its slightly odd, eminently comfortable daydreams, in which I conceived, in vivid technicolor, the fantasy of my choosing. Said fantasy involved me, emerging from sleep; my mother, her hands shaking my sleep-luvin' shoulders; her voice, saying: "Get up Scott, or else you'll be late for your first day of (insert grade number here)!"
But maybe that childish nightmare was right on the money.
Maybe the whole shebang – my four years in Japan, my two years in Cambodia -- is nothing more than another element of fantasy, whimsy, nighttime, masturbatory magic dust in the sandbox of my (admittedly) skewed life.
When you read a lot as a kid, fiction and comics, and watch a lot of movies, narrative and documentary, the real world around you simultaneously folds in on itself. You notice how maddeningly ordinary and two-dimensional it is. And yet, if you’re lucky, if you allow yourself access to those corners of the brain that others neglect to investigate, you begin to suspect that there are layers beneath layers; that there are, hidden from sight, tucked away from reality, buried treasures of insight to be found at the local convenience store, or within the weary, middle-aged sigh of your science teacher, which audibly hints, even announces, a life derailed, a dream deferred.
Oh, and then if you fast-forward ten, twelve years, and you find yourself living for the better part of six years in ancient cultures on the far side of the world, amongst people uttering words that, even if you acquire the capability to comprehend, remain stubbornly foreign despite your best efforts, the world itself, not just your world but ‘the’ world, becomes a tragicomic funhouse of distortion, defeat and exaltation that bears little, okay no resemblance to the reality that your Grade 10 guidance counselor so diligently tried to prepare you for (with foldable brochures to boot).
Life is a tragedy to those who think and a comedy to those who feel, as the saying goes. (Or is it the other way around? And if it is, does it even matter? If I’ve screwed up the phrase, inverted its intent, couldn’t some semblance of meaning be found, regardless? I’d like to think so. Because if you believe in the potency of truisms, accept their somewhat cliché but transitory insight, then surely the tweaking of them could reveal another level of wisdom, unintended but ennobling nonetheless.) To think and to feel may be mutually exclusive domains that occasionally overlap, but I would like to think, would hope to think, that they are one and the same, not different sides of the same coin but the substance of the coin itself.
And the coin itself may be the stuff of which dreams are made.
When you think and feel, feel and think, allowing each to sway the other, the world does, indeed begin to seem like a dream. How else can one explain a world where Lindsey Lohan and legless land-mine victims continue to co-exist? Can you explain that? Would you deign to try? Dare to try?
I can’t.
I guess it’s no surprise that sometimes, on again, someone dreams about me. Or I dream about them. Perhaps all of us, in our (so-called) waking states are just at various levels of REM consciousness. Perhaps Lindsay Lohan and Dr.Phil and the anchors of Entertainment Tonight are just the actualizations of a legless Cambodian’s drunken night of dreams. They, the anchors, drift in and out of the depths of his unconsciousness; he, the Cambodian, occasionally flickers through Mary Hart’s mind after a night of tequilas-by-the-pool.
I’m not saying this is the way it is.
I’m just saying.
And tell me.
This world contains Access Hollywood. It also contains the Tuol Sleng museum -- a hop and a skip and a five minute moto ride away from me -- where people were held and tortured and slaughtered for years on end.
If you randomly came across the word ‘reality’ in your leatherbound, hardback copy of WEBSTER’S dictionary, would these examples of the definition suffice? Access Hollywood and Tuol Sleng? You’d laugh them off the page.
But there they are.
You may be in my dreams tonight. I may be in yours. I may think that I catch a glimpse of your face, lit by the faint but aqua glow of your computer screen. In the morning it will fade, this image, but I will feel sad, though I won’t be able to express why.
There will be nothing left for me to do but step out the door and into the day, confront ‘reality’, go to work and pay my bills.
But somewhere, inside my head, that dream-you will hide. Will lurk. When we cross paths in dreams, perhaps we get closer to finding the fundamental pathways that link us all. Perhaps our waking-selves that trip-wire these DreamDoors block access to the true selves that unleash themselves via our sleeping, sentient selves.
I hope, almost pray, that I will keep searching to find the key to that door -- the key that links the night to the day, the dreams to the reality, the 'me' to the 'you'.
Whether I find it is irrelevant.
The search is not.
Why do I get ticked off?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we like to think of ourselves as ourselves: autonomous and in control. When somebody else is dreaming about us, it’s as if our own independence has been taken away from us. Robbed from us.
Oh, but I think it’s more than that.
I think that when we appear in somebody else’s dreams, and they appear in ours, something’s going on. Something’s. Going. On.
Perhaps our spirits are crossing in the night. Perhaps ephemeral fragments of our personalities slip loose from their bearings and cross over psychic boundaries that remain dormant during the day. Elements of our consciousnesses get entangled with one another, intentionally or inadvertently, in the slip-stream of two a.m., when the dark is absolute, rationality is absent, the moon is full.
Then again.
Perhaps this is all a dream. My whole life. Especially the last little bit. And anyone claiming to have witnessed a piece of me, a part of me, in their own nocturnal wanderings has therefore blown my rational cover, and discovered, along with me, though I sometimes deny it, that life is but a dream.
I used to think that way as a kid. (And I guess I still do.) The end of the school year would finally arrive -- the last class, the last test -- and as my pencil dropped from my cold, feeble fingers my brain would instantly revert to of its slightly odd, eminently comfortable daydreams, in which I conceived, in vivid technicolor, the fantasy of my choosing. Said fantasy involved me, emerging from sleep; my mother, her hands shaking my sleep-luvin' shoulders; her voice, saying: "Get up Scott, or else you'll be late for your first day of (insert grade number here)!"
But maybe that childish nightmare was right on the money.
Maybe the whole shebang – my four years in Japan, my two years in Cambodia -- is nothing more than another element of fantasy, whimsy, nighttime, masturbatory magic dust in the sandbox of my (admittedly) skewed life.
When you read a lot as a kid, fiction and comics, and watch a lot of movies, narrative and documentary, the real world around you simultaneously folds in on itself. You notice how maddeningly ordinary and two-dimensional it is. And yet, if you’re lucky, if you allow yourself access to those corners of the brain that others neglect to investigate, you begin to suspect that there are layers beneath layers; that there are, hidden from sight, tucked away from reality, buried treasures of insight to be found at the local convenience store, or within the weary, middle-aged sigh of your science teacher, which audibly hints, even announces, a life derailed, a dream deferred.
Oh, and then if you fast-forward ten, twelve years, and you find yourself living for the better part of six years in ancient cultures on the far side of the world, amongst people uttering words that, even if you acquire the capability to comprehend, remain stubbornly foreign despite your best efforts, the world itself, not just your world but ‘the’ world, becomes a tragicomic funhouse of distortion, defeat and exaltation that bears little, okay no resemblance to the reality that your Grade 10 guidance counselor so diligently tried to prepare you for (with foldable brochures to boot).
Life is a tragedy to those who think and a comedy to those who feel, as the saying goes. (Or is it the other way around? And if it is, does it even matter? If I’ve screwed up the phrase, inverted its intent, couldn’t some semblance of meaning be found, regardless? I’d like to think so. Because if you believe in the potency of truisms, accept their somewhat cliché but transitory insight, then surely the tweaking of them could reveal another level of wisdom, unintended but ennobling nonetheless.) To think and to feel may be mutually exclusive domains that occasionally overlap, but I would like to think, would hope to think, that they are one and the same, not different sides of the same coin but the substance of the coin itself.
And the coin itself may be the stuff of which dreams are made.
When you think and feel, feel and think, allowing each to sway the other, the world does, indeed begin to seem like a dream. How else can one explain a world where Lindsey Lohan and legless land-mine victims continue to co-exist? Can you explain that? Would you deign to try? Dare to try?
I can’t.
I guess it’s no surprise that sometimes, on again, someone dreams about me. Or I dream about them. Perhaps all of us, in our (so-called) waking states are just at various levels of REM consciousness. Perhaps Lindsay Lohan and Dr.Phil and the anchors of Entertainment Tonight are just the actualizations of a legless Cambodian’s drunken night of dreams. They, the anchors, drift in and out of the depths of his unconsciousness; he, the Cambodian, occasionally flickers through Mary Hart’s mind after a night of tequilas-by-the-pool.
I’m not saying this is the way it is.
I’m just saying.
And tell me.
This world contains Access Hollywood. It also contains the Tuol Sleng museum -- a hop and a skip and a five minute moto ride away from me -- where people were held and tortured and slaughtered for years on end.
If you randomly came across the word ‘reality’ in your leatherbound, hardback copy of WEBSTER’S dictionary, would these examples of the definition suffice? Access Hollywood and Tuol Sleng? You’d laugh them off the page.
But there they are.
You may be in my dreams tonight. I may be in yours. I may think that I catch a glimpse of your face, lit by the faint but aqua glow of your computer screen. In the morning it will fade, this image, but I will feel sad, though I won’t be able to express why.
There will be nothing left for me to do but step out the door and into the day, confront ‘reality’, go to work and pay my bills.
But somewhere, inside my head, that dream-you will hide. Will lurk. When we cross paths in dreams, perhaps we get closer to finding the fundamental pathways that link us all. Perhaps our waking-selves that trip-wire these DreamDoors block access to the true selves that unleash themselves via our sleeping, sentient selves.
I hope, almost pray, that I will keep searching to find the key to that door -- the key that links the night to the day, the dreams to the reality, the 'me' to the 'you'.
Whether I find it is irrelevant.
The search is not.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
AHNULD, SOME TROUBLING FAULT LINES IN THE INDIVIDUAL'S APPROACH TO DEMOCRACY IN THE WEST, AND THE (POSSIBLE) TITLE OF MY FUTURE AUTOBIOGRAPHY)
Call me crazy, but I really, really like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I like his drive, his ambition, his sense of sheer and focused will that has enabled him to succeed and dominate anything and everything he has put his mind to. I also find his reign as governor fascinating, if only because it exposes certain interesting, flawed aspects of democracy that would otherwise remain overlooked. Recently, everywhere he goes, Arnold has been followed by a traveling troupe of nurses, teachers and firefighters who are opposed to his policies. Fine. All well and good. In a democracy, you are more than entitled to voice your opinion and campaign for your individual voice to be heard. (You are expected to, come to think of it.) And yet, sometimes that’s what bothers me. That individual voice. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you are a teacher, and you are pissed off at Arnold for doing whatever it is that he’s planning to do to the school system in California. (I’m not completely up on all the issues, but cut me some slack – I’m not a Californian, only a Canadian. Shit. Wait a minute. Hold the phone. Maybe that can be the title of my autobiography: ‘Cut Me Some Slack: Not A Californian, Only a Canadian’. You think?) And so to show that you are pissed you travel around the state and campaign around the state and do whatever it is that you think is necessary to ensure that the Austrian Oak won’t be elected again. All well and good. But let’s just say, hypothetically speaking, that in all other regards, all other respects, Arnold is a whammo, bammbo, super-duper guv. Let’s imagine that his policies are, on balance, when you consider the whole, exactly what the State of California needs. Would you still not vote for the guy, if only because his policies are going to affect your job in an adverse, negative way? I’m betting that you wouldn’t voite for him. If he’s doing stuff that directly affects you personally, there’s probably no way in hell that you’re going put an X beside his hard-to-pronounce name. Sometimes that troubles me. Because in a democracy, an open society, we have the freedom to look out for ourselves. And yet, all too often, that becomes our rallying cry, our mantra, our credo: Me, me, me. This is natural. This is human. This kind of individuality is to be celebrated. Mostly. Living in Asia is a crash-course on how to give up your own desires for the sake of the common good. Countries like Japan do not exalt and elevate the individual; they embrace and expect contributions to the whole of the society. What you feel about a certain matters as an individual is irrelevant; what matters is your family, your job, your culture. ‘You’ bring up the rear. It’s not that I’m against all those folks protesting Arnold. They’re looking out for their own interests. They’re fighting the good fight as they see fit. I just wonder, sometimes. Sometimes, so much of what we anatagonize against are forces that affect us and us alone. Me, my family, my block. Somebody is bad because they are doing things that affect me; the fact that those same actions may very well benefit the person down the street, or the long-term nature of the community as a whole, well, too bad. Fuck ‘em. So I’m hoping Arnold can bring people together, is what I’m saying. I don’t think it’s likely – but, then again, was it likely that that little boy from an Austrian village would somehow transform himself, step by step, curl by curl, into the best bodybuilder in the world, the biggest movie star in the world, the governor of the most powerful state in the United States? It wasn’t likely. It came about through individual will, a will that was indifferent to the numerous naysayers that stood in the way of his unlikely path to success. A will that must now do battle with all of those citizens who disagree with who he is and what stands for. A will that somehow must harmonize and find a happy-medium for all of those other individual wills that are pleading that their concerns, their unions, their jobs, are what matter. Theirs and theirs alone. Sometimes I’m with Churchill (or was it Cher?) who said, I think, more or less: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” |
Friday, June 03, 2005
THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR
Sometimes I wonder.
About the knock on the door.
(Can you hear it?)
About the grid.
(Can you sense it?)
About life. About our purpose. About the fact that we are here on this earth for, maximum, one hundred and ten years, and, that being the case, how should we spend our time? Is it better to wander the globe searching for the points of intersection between people and cultures, or is it better, saner, to crash out on the couch in the living room, chilling to Oprah's rhythmic, calming, soothing voice, her reassuring vibe?
Then I think: No. That is selfish. That is unproductive. That is inertia transformed into religion. That path does not lead to wisdom, only to Pringles. There are others out there, entities beyond my fragile self, and they are part of something simultaneously grander and more intimate, and it is my duty, your duty, to become one with those fellow organisms that are searching for some sense of serenity. (However brief.)
And so now I'm here. In this place. And there you are. In your place. The sun is shining here, and perhaps the moon is glowing there. It's the same world, with the same moon and stars separating us. All around me is the hustle and bustle of Cambodian life, its dusty, grinding, chaotic flux, and all around you is...
Well.
That, I don't know.
Sometimes I think that the separation of me from you is a lie, a gross, distorted untruth hoisted upon us by family, society, religion. 'I am an autonomous entity,' I say, but if there is no hearer to assess the validity of such a claim, then how can it possibly contain even a rumor of truth?
Such a random, crowded, connected world this is! All of our passports and borders do such a fine job of keeping us contained and diverted, but I'm starting to believe, beginning to understand, that such containments, arbitrary as they are, necessary as they are, are merely smaller sections of a larger grid.
It is that grid that I've been searching for, unconsciously; it is that grid, arbitrary as it may be, imaginary as it may be, that lies within the ground beneath our feet.
I'm not sure what that grid is, precisely. Its origin, contours and endpoint remain maddenginly elusive, like a half-remembered word lying dormant on my tongue. (I can grasp, barely, its meaning, but not its shape.) There's a book by Herman Hesse called Magister Ludi and The Glass Bead Game; I've read part of that book, not all of it, but I think contained within its pages lies something that approximates an eternal, lasting truth, a map to the map to the map that leads to the memory of the grid, if not to the grid itself.
Patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, racism: the very concepts that divide us as people are also what, ironically, bring us closer together, for in their universal prejudice we find our common bond. The fear of the other; the fear of the neighbour. Americans resent Mexico and Canada resents America and Cambodia can't stand Thailand and Thailand can't stand Cambodia and Japan is pissed at China and China is freaked over Japan and on and on and ON it goes.
And so it goes, as Vonnegut would say.
You, reading these words, are scared of many things. Your past, your future, your present. If I were to combine all of those fears, personify them in the form of a single man knocking on the door of your home, if I were to do that, would you open that door? Would you be able to confront those fears? If you heard that knock -- once, twice, three times -- could you open that door? Would you dare?
Outside, on a busy street, there are no such doors, true, but there is a man. Tired, lonely, hot. I do not know his name. He does not know mine. If I were to pass by him on the road, he would, most likely, stare. Stare in wonder and curiosity and disgust. Who knows. But if I were to smile at this man, he would smile back. Of that I am sure. Maybe not in Canada, or Japan, but in Cambodia, yes. He would smile back.
That's one section of the grid, that smile. One small, almost minute molecule of the skin on the finger on the hand of that person knocking on your door. (That persistent knock.)
I'm still searching for all of the other interlocking circuits that make up this global, imaginary (?) grid of mine, but that one, that smile, I'm certain, I'm convinced, is one of them.
Sometimes I wonder.
About the knock on the door.
(Can you hear it?)
About the grid.
(Can you sense it?)
About life. About our purpose. About the fact that we are here on this earth for, maximum, one hundred and ten years, and, that being the case, how should we spend our time? Is it better to wander the globe searching for the points of intersection between people and cultures, or is it better, saner, to crash out on the couch in the living room, chilling to Oprah's rhythmic, calming, soothing voice, her reassuring vibe?
Then I think: No. That is selfish. That is unproductive. That is inertia transformed into religion. That path does not lead to wisdom, only to Pringles. There are others out there, entities beyond my fragile self, and they are part of something simultaneously grander and more intimate, and it is my duty, your duty, to become one with those fellow organisms that are searching for some sense of serenity. (However brief.)
And so now I'm here. In this place. And there you are. In your place. The sun is shining here, and perhaps the moon is glowing there. It's the same world, with the same moon and stars separating us. All around me is the hustle and bustle of Cambodian life, its dusty, grinding, chaotic flux, and all around you is...
Well.
That, I don't know.
Sometimes I think that the separation of me from you is a lie, a gross, distorted untruth hoisted upon us by family, society, religion. 'I am an autonomous entity,' I say, but if there is no hearer to assess the validity of such a claim, then how can it possibly contain even a rumor of truth?
Such a random, crowded, connected world this is! All of our passports and borders do such a fine job of keeping us contained and diverted, but I'm starting to believe, beginning to understand, that such containments, arbitrary as they are, necessary as they are, are merely smaller sections of a larger grid.
It is that grid that I've been searching for, unconsciously; it is that grid, arbitrary as it may be, imaginary as it may be, that lies within the ground beneath our feet.
I'm not sure what that grid is, precisely. Its origin, contours and endpoint remain maddenginly elusive, like a half-remembered word lying dormant on my tongue. (I can grasp, barely, its meaning, but not its shape.) There's a book by Herman Hesse called Magister Ludi and The Glass Bead Game; I've read part of that book, not all of it, but I think contained within its pages lies something that approximates an eternal, lasting truth, a map to the map to the map that leads to the memory of the grid, if not to the grid itself.
Patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, racism: the very concepts that divide us as people are also what, ironically, bring us closer together, for in their universal prejudice we find our common bond. The fear of the other; the fear of the neighbour. Americans resent Mexico and Canada resents America and Cambodia can't stand Thailand and Thailand can't stand Cambodia and Japan is pissed at China and China is freaked over Japan and on and on and ON it goes.
And so it goes, as Vonnegut would say.
You, reading these words, are scared of many things. Your past, your future, your present. If I were to combine all of those fears, personify them in the form of a single man knocking on the door of your home, if I were to do that, would you open that door? Would you be able to confront those fears? If you heard that knock -- once, twice, three times -- could you open that door? Would you dare?
Outside, on a busy street, there are no such doors, true, but there is a man. Tired, lonely, hot. I do not know his name. He does not know mine. If I were to pass by him on the road, he would, most likely, stare. Stare in wonder and curiosity and disgust. Who knows. But if I were to smile at this man, he would smile back. Of that I am sure. Maybe not in Canada, or Japan, but in Cambodia, yes. He would smile back.
That's one section of the grid, that smile. One small, almost minute molecule of the skin on the finger on the hand of that person knocking on your door. (That persistent knock.)
I'm still searching for all of the other interlocking circuits that make up this global, imaginary (?) grid of mine, but that one, that smile, I'm certain, I'm convinced, is one of them.
Sometimes I wonder.
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