INEXPLICABLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All of Cambodia's political elite were out in full force this morning for the wedding of Prime Minster Hun Sen's daughter. I know because I live right across the park from Hun Sen's palatial residence, and so this morning, while I waited for the van that conveniently picks me up and takes me to work, there was a parade of, oh, two hundred or so men and women slowly making their way down the closed-off streets, all clad in their Wednesday morning best, kissing the ass of the man who could crush their lives like an ant.

I know, I know. I'm being a bit harsh. I'm sure Hun Sen's daugther and her fiancee are kind, lovely people, wise and funny, deserving of their own, Cambodian version of Friends. And I'm sure all of the guests are just ecstatic to be there. Would willingly lay down their lives for the bride's father, no questions asked.

The thing is, weddings are weird here, as I discussed a week or so back. I haven't figured them out. Funerals either, for that matter. There's lots of people dressed really nice, in jewelry and gowns, traditional shirts and ceremonial gowns, and a lot sure happens, yes, morning processions and oh so much more, but I'm not entirely certain of what it all means.

Ah, but that's par for the course in a foreign country. You can't figure some things out. No. You can't figure most things out.

When I was kid, vacationing in Myrtle Beach or Florida, we could bop into a 7-Eleven and buy a can of Coke and that mother was big, I mean large, because the Canadian kind of cans were long, thin cylinders, but the American version was, like, angular, and thick, and why couldn't Canada get its act together like that? It eventually did, round about my ninth birthday. (All praises due to Allah.)

Coming from Canada to America, you noticed the small, little differences. (Like the fact that comics and books were a hell of a lot cheaper.)

Coming from Canada to, let's say, I don't know, Japan or Cambodia, you notice the big stuff. Right away. Straight in your face.

A lot of it has to do with the Asian approach to life and death, symbolized, for me, by weddings and funerals, with Hugh Grant nowhere in sight. Weddings are big and bold and glitzy and colourful; so are ones back home, true, but Asian ones have a certain, I don't know, inbred majesty to them. Maybe it's because I'm foreign, but they have a certain, solemn dignity that is inherent in the whole enterprise. (Of course it's contrived and insincere, but Asians at least present their insincerity a hell of a lot more effectively than those back home.)

It could be because I'm a hick Canadian, but one of the fundamental differences simply seems to be a view of life itself that is more mature, realistic, pragmatic, and yet, at the same time, undeniably mystical at its core. Myth and magic and superstition and tradition all seem to battle it out over here on a daily basis; they've been around, these people have, and hard-wired into their character seems to be this subtle, perhaps unnoticed approach to life that recognizes and validates its unknowable, uncontrollable nature.

Maybe that's b.s. I don't know. All I do know is that Asia -- meaning the parts I know, Japan and Cambodia -- seems to connect to something inherent in existence that we aren't connecting with back home. I can't put my finger on it, but it's there -- this elemental, inexplicable acknowledgement of life's glories and heartaches.

ONLY CURRENTS

What's that old saying? Five people killed in your neighbourhood is a tragedy; twenty-two thousand killed halfway around the world is a statistic.

Well, I guess I already am halfway around the world, and there were a heck of a lot of people killed right next door in Thailand, making it seem very unstatistic-like.

Events like this are too much to process -- the biggest earthquake in forty years, tectonic plates shifting, tens of thousands dead. Thousands more homeless. A grandson of the king of Thailand swept away on a jetski, while an Australian tourist loses his grip on his newborn as the waves fall down.

The brain can't handle that much tragedy at once. What are you supposed to do, and how are you supposed to take it all in? You can change the channel or put down the paper or surf to another website. There are worldwide tragedies all the time, of course, and this is but another one. Turn the page and disengage, as Rush once said. (The Canadian rock group, not the American commentator.)

(Oh, but how reckless and cruel we feel for doing that, don't we? I'm glad it's not me runs through your head and your heart, and you hate yourself for thinking it and feeling it, but it's there, and where does it come from, that selfish, instinctive gratefulness? That greedy thirst for life that allows us to feel for others misery but relish our own sanctuary? Does it makes us more or less human, this proper but craven desire?)

The strange thing about this is one is the indifferent naturalness of it. Terrorists you can almost understand. (Not condone; understand.) Meaning, angry, screwed-up people lashing out -- that's something that has an identifiable human texture and resolve. There are human motivations and psychological undercurrents you can analyze and dissect, poke and prope.

Here, there were only currents, period, unstoppable waves of force that went on and on and on for six kilometres at a stretch. A quake so powerful that it disturbed the earth's rotation.

Who do you get angry at? The weatherman for not predicting this development? The scientists for underestimating tsunamis? The earth for not being more, I don't know, sturdy?

I don't know. If you believe in God, these are the times when you wonder if He has a sick sense of humor or what. If you don't believe in him, you have little solace and even less comfort.

Random, consuming waves and quakes. Children tossed aside and flung away. The same old story of death and destruction, intensified to a horrifying degree.

Soon -- in a week, maybe two -- the story will die down, perhaps quietly, fading away from page one to seven to eight. Maybe another husband will kill his pretty and pregnant wife, and the media will find something else more sexy and racy and lurid to latch onto. In the real world, the sun will still set, the tide recede, the stars emerge. Everything will revert to what's considered normal.

This almost unspeakable human, personal tragedy will regress to a flat, emotionless statistic, or an indifferent afterthought, a 'remember-that-earthquake-last-year?' anecdote to be told sometime next Christmas, after the turkey, before the cake.

We can't be too hard on ourselves, I guess. It's natural (whether we like it or not) to grieve from a distance, and even more natural to move on, live life, look ahead. After all, there's only so much we are willing to hold on to. Only so much each of us can allow in.

What luxuries we have! To be able to move on, look ahead, turn away...

A CERTAIN POINT

Yesterday morning I was walking along the beach in Sihanoukville, marvelling at how still the water was compared to the day before -- no tide, no waves, no motion.

Not far away, disaster struck Thailand and southeast Asia, monstrous waves overwhelming people and cars and bungalows in one giant swoop. (I was about to say 'one fell swoop', but then I realized that I'm not sure I've ever understood what 'fell' means in that context.) Hundreds dead, swept away, submerged.

Unreal. And Cambodia, so close! Nothing. Hot sun and motionless water and light-brown sand, all untouched.

I had been thinking about going to Thailand over Christmas -- maybe to Bangkok, possibly to Phuket.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Is it up to us, these seemingly innocuous choices that spare us or condemn us? Is the Big Guy upstairs actually in charge of the weather patterns and the size of ocean waves and the thoughts that leads us from person to person, place to place? Or is it randomness itself that guides our lives, a benevolent energy, an actual tangible force that distributes death and smiles without fear or favor?

Not sure.

I stood on the beach yesterday, looking at the calm, blue water that stretched out, out, out, and I realized that this was one of those rare moments in life when everything at a certain point in time and space is at peace. When everything is stable. Nothing but water and sun and sand. Nothing but drift. Nothing but feet-in-sand and sky-up-above and blue, above all, blue, clear and distinct.

But it was just a moment.

SUGGESTED VIEWING (BUT NOT ON, LIKE, NEW YEAR'S EVE)

If you want to watch a truly powerful, unsettling, deeply moving film (albeit one that is not exactly holiday viewing) track down a copy of 'Osama', the first film made in Afghanistan after the Taliban was ousted.

I won't say anything specific about it (except to note that the title does not refer to Bin Laden.)

It's a short movie, less than ninety minutes, but I guarantee that the impact of it will linger.

Probably one of the most moving and emotional movies I've seen in the last five years.

Don't read the ad copy. Don't scan the summary on the back of the DVD box.

Just watch it.

THE LATEST, ODDEST REMINDER OF HOME

Running along the Phnom Penh riverfront at 5:40 a.m., past the group of middle-aged, early-morning exercisers exercising en masse to a new techno-tune version of Ottawa's own Paul Anka singing 'Diana'...

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I hope all friends and family and random strangers who have somehow happened to come across this blog entry have a safe and merry Christmas and a rockin' 2005!

THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science."

--Albert Einstein


I was wandering around the Russian Market today, a rag-tag collection of food stalls and gift stalls and what-the-hell-are-those stalls that seems to symbolize Phnom Penh in all its messy glory. (But I'm not sure what the Russian angle is. I'll have to get back to you on that one, 'kay?)

This is the place where you can not only buy stuff -- food stuff and cool stuff and useless stuff -- but you can also always come in contact with the most pitiful, wretched people on the face of the planet.

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Like so much of Cambodia, it simply is, and you have to determine how you deal with it.

You ever see that old movie The Elephant Man, with John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins? This lady today in the market came up to me asking for money, half her face shrouded by some kind of makeshift shawl, and beneath the shawl I could make out these bulges and bumps and bony protrusions that sprang out from the side of her face. Her smile was kind and her eyes were pleading, and the rest of her face was, well, if not an abomination, something pretty damn close.

Again -- it is what it is. The market is one of the places where the unwanted come to ply their trade. They come to beg and grovel. They come for mercy, if mercy can be classified as a few thousand riel per day, if they're lucky. They come to be seen, and are rewarded for their
deformities.

It's pretty heavy stuff, as Marty McFly would say. It's also heavy stuff that you can very quickly get used to, which is even more heavy, if you catch my drift. Not easy to process, seeing people like that, and then after awhile it gets easier to process, which increases the heaviness quotient by a factor of ten the more you think about it.

Which brings me to Einstein's quote. (You were wondering when I was getting to that. Thank-you for your patience.)

You enter Cambodia and you enter that realm of the mysterious.

I'm not talking about the genre, here; I'm not talking about the kind of stuff James Ellroy or Robert Parker or Agatha Christie get off on writing.

I'm talking about the kind of mystery that most of us have probably forgot even existed within us, that searching, restless wonderment at an inexplicable world. The kind of feeling you had as a child, laying on the grass, staring up at the sky. Why is it blue? There's never been a satisfactory answer to that. In space, there's no up and down, right? How can that be? 'Up' and 'down' are what orient us, right? So if that's all gone, there's...what, exactly?

These are the kind of thoughts I had, and still have, and the essence, the root, the base of these thoughts are what I'm talking about. The source of them. That sense of mystery that kids live with and embrace and run shrieking and weeping and wailing from on a daily basis. The monster under the bed, feral and there. The wind shrieking outside of the window. The supply-teacher who has a black welt on the side of her face. Things you feel but can't locate.

When you're in elementary school the specter of junior high looms every close, and what will it be like? At my elementary school, Pine Grove, it was 'open-concept', see, and what that meant was that there were no classrooms per se, with separate doors and windows, but only big rooms that contained four different classes separated by chalk boards on wheels. I don't know what the point of it was, since whenever you had your class you could look ten feet across and see what was happening in the other class, and you'd hear the Grade Three math lesson whether you liked it or not, but it made me wonder, it did, made me wonder what it would be like to have an actual classroom classroom, self-contained, with a door and everything, like the kind I saw on Different Strokes and Happy Days. Junior high held the promise of those classrooms. How big would they be? Could you actually, like, lock the doors? Would there be a window on the doors?

Oh, the mystery...

You may think I'm making a joke of all this stuff, but I'm not. I think we forget how unexplained everything is to our younger selves. The rest of the world, especially the adult world, gets what's going on, are in the loop, got the memo, but kids are cruelly, casually kept in the dark, waiting for someone to switch the light on, because they're too damn short to reach it.

Think.

Think back.

Think back to when you were seven and eight and nine, and try to remember what you knew about cars and driving and paycheques and aftershave and how records were made and how cigarettes somehow managed to drop down from somewhere deep inside the strange and unseeable centre of the cigarette machines. (Remember those things?)

And what was the deal with records, I used to wonder. (Incidentally, one little nine-year old boy who I used to teach in Japan, after hearing that I used to have a small record player as a child, said: "I've never seen a record", which made me feel old.) Where did all the music come from? I used to think that every time you dropped the needle down onto the record, it triggered some kind of light in some studio somewhere, and it let the band know that it was time to play the song, because someone had requested it. So I used to try and trick them -- whoever 'them' was -- by quickly taking the needle off the record, then putting it back on, and jeez louise they managed to play the song at the right point each and every time.) And traffic lights? How did people know when to go, stop, pause? I didn't know that people were following the lights; I thought the lights were somehow controlling the flow. I used to think there was some dude below ground controlling everything in some James Bond-like control centre, watching the flow of traffic, determining when it was a good time to go and when it was a good time to stop.

It was all mystery, these minor minutiae of life, and slowly and sadly the mystery disappears, is explained, becomes mundane and routine. And then we are in our twenties and trying to figure out our own lives, so we leave behind questions that were once very, very important to us, like:

Why does the man always, always, always miss meeting the Polkaroo?

(If you're not Canadian, you ain't getting that one...)

Which brings me back (somehow, a little belatedly) to the lady in the market. Where does she come from? How does she live? How did her face get so tragically wrong? To think about it is to revert back to the essence of who we were for the first ten years of our lives. To ponder a simple, everyday Cambodian greeting like this is to force us to confront a little bit of the uncertainty that lies beneath the surface of even the most placid of contemporary commerce and communication.

You can say I'm exaggerating things, or thinking about things a little too much, making tenuous links, or even exploiting some poor woman's daily existence for the sake of a semi-interesting, mostly roundabout, randomly written blog, and you'd be right. Can't deny it. Guilty as charged, councilor.

That's what I do. That's how our thoughts and our minds and, hell, our lives work, I think -- they bop around from here to there, looking for connections, hoping for connections.

Einstein was right. I'm not sure what he means by 'fairness', exactly, but I guess there's no shame in admitting that Einstein confuses me.

But it's something along the lines of: Art makes sense of the senseless; science gives form to the formless. And at the intersection of both is an unending, depthless mystery that we chip away at from the day we are born -- learning to smile, to walk, to talk, to speak, to read, to write, to learn, to love, to teach -- only to discover, if we think too much and feel too much, that the mystery can never be solved.

When I was a kid I used to love to write my own Star Trek stories that had Kirk and Spock and Uhura and McCoy and Scotty and Chekhov and Sulu struggling not to fall into the dreaded 'bottomless pit'. (How can a pit be bottomless, I'd wonder?)

That pit is it for me -- the black and endless symbol of mystery itself, the nagging, unknowable question given a cruel and illogical shape.

Our questioning of the how and the why of that poor and pitiful lady who spends her life wandering around the Russian market, hoping her ugliness generates pity, is a pit without end, a dark and vibrant hole, but also an affirmation and rejection of all that life generates and discards. Our questioning is what makes us and keeps us human.