OFF TO THAILAND

Life takes us to unexpected places at unexpected times, proof of which is the fact that I'll be flying into Bangkok, Thailand tomorrow morning for a week to ten days, depending on how long my rather-ill friend's surgery goes. (Let's just say that hospitals in Cambodia, even the good foreign clinics that do exist, are not equipped to handle major surgery.)

I've never been to Thailand (other than the airport), despite its proximity to Cambodia, and these are not exactly the conditions under which I wanted to visit it, but so it goes. The writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., always quotes his brother's philosophy of life: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." And this is one of those times.

Expect sporadic updates for the next week, but I'll try to write from Bangkok with a taste or two of urban Thai life.

___________ ONLY HAPPENS IN ___________

There's a series of commercials that have been airing on CNN International here in Cambodia that feature a number of tourists sampling the sights and sounds that are unique to Madrid, Spain. The food, the people, the vibe, the jibe -- all of it is captured quite well in thirty second clumps of tourist propoganda, and each commercial ends with the vistor enraptured by the city, mourning their exit, wistfully exclaiming: "Madrid only happens in Madrid."

I like that catchphrase. It makes sense. It has heart. It makes me want to quit my job and pack my bags and hightail it on out to Spain to find out what the hell is so unique about Madrid. And it got me thinking: does every city have its own, individual essence that cannot be replicated anyplace else? Fuck that -- does every person have his or her own unique domain?

We're all taught that as kids, right? No two snowflakes are alike, there's nobody else like us in the world, torturing small animals is perfectly reasonable behavior, as long as fire isn't involved. (What, you weren't taught that last part? I can't be the only one.) The thing of it is, som much of life is redunant. The asshole who cuts in front of me is not the same asshole who cut in front of you, no, but they are distant cousins, metaphorically speaking. If you've seen one small town in Ontario, I guess you haven't seen them all -- but after driving through dozens of them, it sure as shit seems that way. Identical modes of being and living are just that -- identical. The details may change, but I'm not sure that every person and every place has a secret heart and sympathetic soul; carbon copies exist. As you grow, you learn that. Sad, but true.

And yet.

'Phnom Penh only happens in Phnom Penh'. The legless female dwarf in the wheelchair. The smell of dust and dirt and shit and exhaust. The morning sun, arrogant and blazing. The row of motodops sleeping in their carts, cloaked by the night. The fast-driving Mercedes, with their fast-driving owners. The smiles of naked children picking through trash. The anger and fear lying just below the surface of the most gentle faces.

Yes. I suppose 'Phnom Penh' only happens in Phnom Penh'. And if this is true, which I believe, than who am I to say such is not the case for all places, every place, all people, every people? The maddening aftereffects of aging, I suppose. We live through the years, and the years live through us. I have been there and I have seen that, we think. Not realizing that a tiny piece of ourselves is being chipped away. Not understanding, even remotely, that we are cutting ourselves off from a kindred soul that could emerge from a flower in the pavement or the hand of a stranger. We look into others' eyes thinking that we've seen them before. What a fallacy! How routine us humans can sometimes be! To think what that particular person has seen and done! And a new town. To imagine what secrets and hearbreaks it contains! Were we to have such concealments exposed in all their human sordidness, surely our hearts and our minds would crumble with the weight of such emotion.

It's a battle, I suppose. A battle against our own boring, mechanized nature. The urge, the temptation, remains, one that still enclouds me (as you can tell by the beginning of the post.) Nothing new under the sun, we think.

Bah! True or not, we must fight such temptations. As long as we are beginning a new day, as long as we can encounter a person or a place that we have not encountered before, there is always the possibility, always the tantalizing prospect, that newness could result.

(Even when some of those small Ontario towns do feel a little bit drab after awhile. I mean, have you been to Barry's Bay?)

LITTLE GREEN MEN, CAMBODIAN STUDENTS, AND JUST WHAT, EXACTLY, DR.PHIL WOULD MAKE OF ALL THESE ALIEN ANAL PROBES THAT ARE APPARENTLY GOING ON

I'm not saying that teaching English in Cambodia and being abducted by aliens are completely compatible experiences, but, if forced, I would argue before a court of existential law that these two diverse encounters with the unknown share a similar sense of fear, awe, wonder, and, occasionally, harmony.

I think who we are and where we are at particular points in life and time augment what we are reading. I've always loved stories of alien abductions, both fictional and 'true', and have often been intrigued by the tales of those who claim to have been visited by, or kidnapped by, and rectally probed by, alien invaders.

(You'd be amazed at how common descriptions of rectal probes are in the vast span of abduction literature. Forced masturbation also, uh, pops up more often than would expect. Which is odd, because I never needed any coercion, but I suppose that's another post...)

Soon after graduating from university, I attended a book signing given by horror novelist Whitely Streiber at a New Age bookshop in the trendy part of Toronto. (Yes, I was, and am probably still am, the kind of guy who would go to a book signing by the author of Communion. We are what we are.) And it was there that I got a first-hand look at people who not only believe in alien abductions, but have also experienced them for themselves. Streiber seemingly started the aliens-visited-me boom with his own memoir, Communion, and those attending his lecture were filled to burstin' with stories of ships and probes and spacecrafts resting patiently at the bottom of Lake Ontario, waiting for that pristine, perfect moment to ascend. Each piece of information from the featured writer and the surrounding minions was received with a solemn nod of the head from the other participants, like brethern nodding in time to the beats of a sermon from their pastor that they've heard many times before.

I walked out of that little talk and that little store still not convinced that alien abductions were, but I was convinced that some people were convinced.

And now, after having read John E.Mack's 1994 bestseller Abudction: Human Encounters With Aliens, I've found insights and outlooks that are unexpected and illuminating. (And just plain fucking weird, too, but that's to be expected in these kinds of tales.)

Essentially, the book is a series of descriptions of psychiatric sessions conducted between Mack and patients that have been referred to him, all of who have had alien encounters in some way, shape form. (Excluding Neil Diamond fans, because it has yet to be confirmed that he is an alien, but I have my suspicions.) What makes the book so fascinating (and controversial) revolves around the approach Mack decides to adopt -- namely, treating his patients not as victims of a mental disorder but as people who have been traumatized by an experience every bit as unsettling as an assault or a rape. A skeptic turned believer, Mack allows us as readers to view the abduction phenomenon from a personal perspective. Listening to their stories, you will not necessarily become a believer, but you will start to recognize common human needs and longings that are either brought forth from the aliens, given by the aliens, or else emanating directly from a universal human desire for togetherness and hope all that lies within us all.

Oh, and I'll be honest -- there's a lot of anal probing going on, which leads me to suspect that the aliens aren't getting enough loving at home. I know, I know, they say it's for 'experimental purposes', but still. (God, I can picture Dr.Phil seated before a handful of silvery-skinned aliens with tear-drop shaped heads gazing blankly at him with milky dark eyes as he berates them for our amusement: "You do realize, don't you, that there are some issues in your own bedroom in your own galaxy that need to be addressed before you start deciding to invite little Becky over here in Kansas into your kinda twisted reindeer games. Am I getting through to ya? And don't tell me that because you're an alien you can't hear the whistle I'm blowin', 'cause let me tell ya, I've see Close Encounters, I know you hear the horn I'm playin', so that particular dog won't hunt.")

Once you get past the icky-gooey aspect of these testimonies, complete with cosmic dissections and incisions and strange glowing fluids from questionable sources, you discover that so many of the abductees' see their experiences, diverse as they are, as a common means of discovering more about themselves and the universe they (and we) inhabit. Some see the aliens as trying to teach humans more about unlimited compassion and love, while others see them as warning us as to what our selfish, indulgent, destructive ways will eventually lead to. In all cases, however, Mack sees these alien intrusions as a challenge to our normal, historical, dualistic scientific understanding of space and time, human and other, Bert and Ernie, individual consciousness and collective evolution. Either aliens are trying to eradicate the boundaries between these tradionally dualistic concepts, Mack is implying, or the subconscious desires of a hell of a lot of people demand that we do so. (Mack is not exactly objective, either; he believes these people and their encounters, and suggests we need to reevaluate what we consider 'reality'.)

Standing in front of a classroom in Cambodia, attempting to explain to my ESL students my own thoughts pertaining to the Prime Minister's latest crackdown on anyone who dares to criticize him or his totalitarian policies, I suddely felt a sudden emotional alignment with these abductees. For what has my adventure been, both in Japan and Cambodia, if not an encounter with the unknown, an unconscious attempt to link myself with something larger and grander and denser than my own puny mind?

The tangents of life inevitably end up being the teachers of life. One need not see a streaking saucer light up the ink-black sky, symbiotically bond with female extraterrestrials or discover that oneself is actually the spawn of little green men to benefit from what a certain sense of displacement can offer. Relizing that I was giving my students my own, admittedly naive, opinion regarding Cambodian domestic politics vis-a-vis South East Asian political machinations, I realized, too, that I had, in my own, specifically human way, had a cosmic and spiritual evolution that challenged my notions of day-to-day reality, of what is right and wrong, mundane and far-fetched. My Japanese experience certainly bore little relation to my Canadian upbringing, and my time in Cambodia has done much to expand a small-town consciousness that knew little of life that had not been gleamed from the multiplex-glow of the silver screen or the pages of a comic book.

So, yes. I will keep scanning the skies, dreading and hoping that one day, some day, I might spot a definitive glowing sign that we are not alone in the cosmos. But I will also keep scanning the eyes of my students, trying to keep in mind that what is alien and foreign is subjective and personal, and that transcendance need not coincide with a spaceship's door drawing open. After all, for the moment, the door to my classroom is near enough.

SIMPLE

Simple things are better. This is what I'm starting to believe. Simple food, simple sun, simple stories. We live in an age that appreciates complexity and endorses the maze. I like mazes too. But in the end mazes get you to the same place as a straight line.

This is not to say that simple things have to be simplistic. I would even argue that the more clearly and simply something is told, expressed and conveyed, the more complex it is. Once things are streamlined, we retain the essence but lose the appendages. The absence of those offshoots thus allows us to view what we see and hear with an imaginative exploration that would be unnecessary had everything been explained and dissected in exhaustion.

Think of Million Dollar Baby. Love it or hate it, the movie has a pretty simple story. A young boxer coached by an aging boxer. Tragedy results. People are changed. A lot of people who slagged the film slagged it because they had seen it all before, it wasn't original, yada yada yada. Well, perhaps. But as John Irving once said, after you forget the machinations of the plot, what you remember about a story is the emotional resonance that the characters created for you. You may not remember what they did or how they did it, but you remember the feelings the author instigated in your own heart. I can't remember scene-by-scene what happened in Million Dollar Baby, but boy do I remember the effect. Why? Ordinary people in a difficult situation. Bad things happen to them. I feel their pain, as Clinton would say. Simple.

It's not cool or hip or fashionable to acknowledge the simplicity of sentiment, but it's sentimentality that makes the world go 'round. I sometimes think that people don't apply the same standards to art that they accept in life. Meaning, we demand that art be rigorous and cynical, deep and multi-layered, complex and multi-faceted, but what moves us the most in life? The homemade birthday card your kid gives you for your birthday. The rise of the sun on a winter morn. The feel of the first raindrop on your palm. This is what makes our day and deepens our lives. The simple things.

I like a long book better than a short book. I like big movies with big themes and extended running times. But what I remember most from these experiences are the simple scenes and moments that serve as anchor for all that has come before or will follow. Kevin Costner choking up in the courtroom in J.F.K. Rocky pointing out that the trunks on his picture don't match the real shorts he will wear, and the promoter telling him: "It doesn't really matter, does it, Rock? I'm sure you'll give 'em a good show." The look in Eastwood's eyes when he realizes what Hillary Swank is asking him to do. Kevin Costner at the end of No Way Out wistfully quoting exiled Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, thereby succinctly explaining his entire rationale for remaining on the run throughout the film. Al Pacino in The Godather Part III shly telling the priest at the Vatican that it's been a long time since his last confession. Small moments. Simple moments.

The only ones worth remembering, really.

THE DICE MAN COMETH

Let us give in to the dictates of the dice, that shakeable plastic mandate of chance. Was it not chance that began my Asia sojurn, and was it not chance that brought me to Cambodia? A newspaper article about trafficked children; a one-week trek to investigate further. What if I had not read that particular page of that particular paper that particular day? What if I had been about to read the page when a knock came on my door -- a student early, a teacher confused? Had that occurred, I would not be in Cambodia, and would not now be writing the words you're reading. Given such odds, surely chance has a fortune and trajectory all its own.

Such are the thoughts one has after completing Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man (which I discussed in the previous post). At first the very concept -- a man deciding to rule his life by the toss of a die -- seems nothing more than a clever gimmick, a post-modern plot device designed to wring a few chuckles out of a conveniently designed narrative hook. Not so. It is, instead, a fundamentally human book, questioning why we are here, where we are going, and what, exactly, is the point of it all.

Consider a scene two-thirds of the way through the book. Rhinehart, about to be banned by the American Medical Association, must defend himself before a committee of his skeptical peers. What follows is a brilliant dissection of modern-day life, of what is expected of us as individuals, people, parents and citizens. Is it ludicrous to number a series of choices from one to six, roll the dice, and choose the option based on the number that has come up? Perhaps. But what has been the alternative, Rhinehart wonders. A world that insists on a fixed identity, that allows no deviation in thought or routine, is a world consumed by greed and envy, war and pestilence. If, indeed, modern psychiatry is such a wonderful, beneficial development, then why is everyone so supremely fucked-up? Has it to do with our stubborn denial of all of our wishes? The fireman who wishes to sail boats; the businessman who longs for a life in the tropics. We do not allow ourselves to do what we want to do, and are restricted by our very conception of who 'we' are. By using the dice, by allowing random chance to dictate our decisions, we enter an immense degree of excitement and unpredictability into existence. We allow ourselves to do things and think things and be things that we would never do otherwise. The rut of life becomes a meandering path whose ultimate destination will and must remain unknown. A life of freedom, it is.

Brilliant, the book is. Not because it endorses the narrator's thesis, but because it plays it out, advances it, allows us to see the marvels it produces and the horrors it depicts. The dice tells us to rape someone; the dice tells us to murder someone. Do we go through with it? The dice tells us to be loving and kind for no reason; the dice tells us to be gentle. Does that change us in any lasting way? Fascinating, the various permutations that result.

It has been a long, long time that I have a read a novel so full of life and so questioning of life. (The irony being, I suppose, that the book was written a good five years before I was born. How fascinating, I always think, that there were people thinking concepts way beyond my comprehension even before I was conceived. Ideas I'm contemplating for the first time were thought of, mulled over, accepted or dismissed decades and centuries ago. It makes me feel connected to a larger stream of humanity, for some reason.) For many of us, life seems to be set on a pattern: we can see what's coming from day to day, and we can be pretty sure of the results. But to allow chance to play a part, to see the means by which our own personalities could change and shift and transform if we allowed chance to become the predominant mode of our existence -- what strange twists and turns would result!

I have to admit, I'm tempted. Not to, you know, use the dice to decide whether I move from Cambodia to Timbuktu. But to choose this book or that, this movie or that movie -- yes, I can see the fun and play that the dice of chance could inflict.

Ah, but where to stop? That is the what the book asks. What would happen if you push chance to its ultimate end point?

LET THE DICE DECIDE

What if your entire life was determined not by degrees or intention but by the roll of a die? That's the premise behind Luke Rhinehart's funny and disturbing 1971 novel The Dice Man, in which a New York City psychoanalyst, bored by his life, profession and patients, decides to let the dice do the talking. Whatever the dice says, he does. Roll a five, be like Jesus for a day; roll a seven, try to seduce everyone. In a world that believes we are all nothing more than bundles of neuroses wrapped inside our own impenetrable egos, why not just let fate, in the form of dice, be our guide? Simplifies things.

And the discoveries it can lead to! Listen:


New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.

I also created problems...



And so it goes. Why live a life predetermined by who we think we are or by what others think we are? If our personalities are so rigid and dormant, simply give the dice the power to dictate change. Roll a seven, tell my boss to fuck off; roll a two, buy the first ticket to Acapulco. The dice rules. Where it leads, our psyches follow.

It's a funny, startling book, and I'm only a hundred pages into it. It postulates a kind of wacky approach to life that is also, somehow, the flip-side of transcendent, a philosophical argument for human nature that is as daring as it is frightening. It simultaneously removes the concept of personal responsibility while endorsing a random approach to decisions that could very well lead to madness or enlightenment.

What should I do tonight? Make a list, roll the dice. Should I grow a moustache or shave my head? Roll the dice. Roll a six, quit my job; roll a seven, demand a promotion. The audacity it would require to follow through on such a philsophy is a little bit more than I can handle.

And yet...

Tempting, isn't it? To just let the dice do the talking. What changes would ensue! The cover of the tattered paperback states: "Few novels can change your life. This one will." Ha! Publishing hyperbole, right? Right? I mean, who could seriously decide to do such a thing, no matter how absurdly enticing it sounds. Culturual suicide, it would be. Why, if you gave in to the dice, you would become another person. (Or the person you were meant to be?) You would do things you never dreamed of. (The things you always wanted to?) You would go to strange and exotic lands for no reason at all. (To fulfill an innate longing for adventure and exile?) Man is, at heart, a rational, sympathetic creature. (Roll a seven, stab a cat.) Man is kind. (Roll a four, insult a stranger on the street.)

Let the dice decide? Let fate and chance be intertwined forever more by a plastic green sage?

Maybe I'll roll the dice and find out. If it's a two, the dice will dictate my decisions; if it's a four, I will proceed along the orderly, mundane path of my own insecure obligations.

Maybe that's where we all are in life -- holding the dice, wondering if and when we'll give it a toss. And desperate to see if our number turns up.

PAKISTAN: A TOUCH OF THE HAND ON THE EDGE OF A SHOULDER

Out of a clear blue sky the walls came tumbling down. I'm assuming they tumbled. It looks like most of the homes were made from stone, and stone hurts. Stone is hard. Stone falling out of a sunny day, warm and bright, is harder. The pain is the same. Buildings made like that, from stone, could do nothing but tumble. The buildings themselves and the stones that sustain them. But something eased the fall. I feel it.

To lose one's life like that! So quickly! A fall on the head from a rock. Simple. Almost clean. And yet only moments before a mother and a daughter and a son and a husband were eating a meal, making love, preparing for work, getting ready to farm, ending an argument, trying to think of something to say, something. Anything. All of the above and none of the above. The entire range of human experiences and emotions from time past and time future were encapsulated into those few seconds. I am sure of it. Everything we have ever done, everything we will ever do, was there. Present. Within the space between their hands and their head existed all that we as humans can and should be. It was there, I say -- our pain and our hope and our fear and our love. Almost tangible. In the background, a rumble may have been heard. Yes, quite possible -- this harbinger of doom. Perhaps they knew, instantly, all of them, across the land, that death was here. It had come for them. Melodramatic, yes, but from my limited perspective, in conditions such as that, in a life such as that, melodrama would be the order of the day. In houses made of stone, melodrama is not even melodrama any longer. So the sound of an earthquake, while distant, almost instaneous, would have to have been heard. A familiar sound, I'm sure.

But part of me insists otherwise. I would like to believe that in their final moments on this earth something else was going on, taking place, coming to fruition, something other than a heart beating faster and a snap, grim realization that prayer was necessary, now, immediately. They knew they would be dead, or maimed, or injured. They knew that. But in that moment, when the land started to rumble, when the stones started to fall, I imagine a touch of a hand on the edge of a shoulder. That's all. A tiny, almost imperceptible gesture from mother to son, father to daugther, wife to husband, grandfather to stranger. Somebody was touched in that final moment. The gap that exists from you to me and they to them was breached in a final, futile attempt at eternity. Each knew what the other meant. They may have even been looking at each other, directly, without judgement. That would have been nice. And yet the touch is what matters. When the earth opened up all was lost, yes, forever, certainly, but one would like to imagine an exit from this realm that left the lingering remnant of contact, however brief. To think: that some were able to take that touch with them. Amidst the dust and the shrieks and the rocks stained red, no trace of such a touch remains, true, but how could it? There are some things eternity claims for itself.