Sunday, November 15, 2009
Preface: The Return of Color
I prayed to God, God couldn’t be bothered. The Buddha remained Gone Beyond. Who showed up was Clarice Lispector (died, Brazil, 1977), wrapped in a shawl the green of dragonflies and looking entirely ferocious. She had no tolerance for self-pity. She took me by the wrist. She used her nails. The door was flung open. She led me out of the house, away from the alcohol and the collection of benzodiazepines. “You are going to the park,” she said.
Ten days later, out the door of the Malaysia Hotel in Bangkok. The taxi cabs are flamingo pink, the motorbike men wear orange vests and the vendors blue caps. Everywhere death has not been nailed down there is green. I clutch the door frame. The guard (pink shirt!) smiles encouragement.
Sweet Mary Mother of God: someone has turned on the color.
Depression is such a misleading word I wonder if the government isn’t somehow behind it. “Panicked frenzy of self-loathing” is somewhat more accurate, but I prefer to vote with tradition and say demons. And I do not believe in demons either – but try telling that to them.
The demons steal away the color, the world goes out of reach – it can be bumped against, it cannot be touched. What remains is a flabby putrefied fly-swarmed maggoty self. The easiest test for depression is with a mirror: check for a corpse. (This also works the other way. Occasionally I think I’m just adorable. And this is a very dangerous sign.)
The demons are not impressed by prayer. They like to see me beg and bang my head against the floor. The demons like liquor and adore psychiatry. In Tokyo it is possible for them to get a visa to stay almost indefinitely.
Nonetheless a moment comes when one is released. Fuck if I know why. There is not a moment when the guard opens the door and says that one is free to go. More like the kidnappers throw you from the car. I find myself suddenly out on the street and still in prison clothes.
And there is a breeze, an actual breeze, which touches your skin and is not off-limits to you. There is a space around things. The sky goes up and up. Men are wearing pants that don’t hide much.
Almost immediately I become busy. That’s all right: the nice thing about being functional is you can do things. Life is underway and demands attention. Oh, hello, I’m in Thailand! Oh goodness gracious, I’m married aren’t I?
Looking around me now, I walk a little faster. This is no permanent reprieve. This open window may hover for a month, or be gone in an hour. There are repairs that need to be made, windows to be taped, books to read and suicide notes to burn. (Suicide notes must be written afresh for each occasion: this is how one buys time.)
Above all, there are people to be loved, people with sharp voices or curly hair, people smelling of shampoo and sweat and curry. People with problems of their own. Actual people with hands to be held, with real mouths and real ears to hear as you walk around together exclaiming, “My god, look at the colors!”
Ten days later, out the door of the Malaysia Hotel in Bangkok. The taxi cabs are flamingo pink, the motorbike men wear orange vests and the vendors blue caps. Everywhere death has not been nailed down there is green. I clutch the door frame. The guard (pink shirt!) smiles encouragement.
Sweet Mary Mother of God: someone has turned on the color.
Depression is such a misleading word I wonder if the government isn’t somehow behind it. “Panicked frenzy of self-loathing” is somewhat more accurate, but I prefer to vote with tradition and say demons. And I do not believe in demons either – but try telling that to them.
The demons steal away the color, the world goes out of reach – it can be bumped against, it cannot be touched. What remains is a flabby putrefied fly-swarmed maggoty self. The easiest test for depression is with a mirror: check for a corpse. (This also works the other way. Occasionally I think I’m just adorable. And this is a very dangerous sign.)
The demons are not impressed by prayer. They like to see me beg and bang my head against the floor. The demons like liquor and adore psychiatry. In Tokyo it is possible for them to get a visa to stay almost indefinitely.
Nonetheless a moment comes when one is released. Fuck if I know why. There is not a moment when the guard opens the door and says that one is free to go. More like the kidnappers throw you from the car. I find myself suddenly out on the street and still in prison clothes.
And there is a breeze, an actual breeze, which touches your skin and is not off-limits to you. There is a space around things. The sky goes up and up. Men are wearing pants that don’t hide much.
Almost immediately I become busy. That’s all right: the nice thing about being functional is you can do things. Life is underway and demands attention. Oh, hello, I’m in Thailand! Oh goodness gracious, I’m married aren’t I?
Looking around me now, I walk a little faster. This is no permanent reprieve. This open window may hover for a month, or be gone in an hour. There are repairs that need to be made, windows to be taped, books to read and suicide notes to burn. (Suicide notes must be written afresh for each occasion: this is how one buys time.)
Above all, there are people to be loved, people with sharp voices or curly hair, people smelling of shampoo and sweat and curry. People with problems of their own. Actual people with hands to be held, with real mouths and real ears to hear as you walk around together exclaiming, “My god, look at the colors!”
Mad Relative
After a long time abroad, Randy Mesmer returned home to discover that he'd become the mad relative. Of course he did not realize it right away. Everyone seemed only unusually interested. His father ceased to criticize; his brothers grinned at everything he said. His mother stood often in the doorway, gazing at him with tender brimming eyes. And Randy Mesmer's heart grew warm. He thought they'd really missed him after all. For weeks he didn't have a clue. In fact he felt quite pleased with himself. He thought, it's about time they start to respect me!
The mad relative: every generation must have one. Like Aunt Lucy, his father's sister, who was brought from the state hospital in Laconia to attend all family occasions. There she sat, grinning in her folding chair, smoking menthol Salems, and mumbling into the air. Now and then she groped one of the nephews. She was getting old, poor Aunt Lucy. She'd had surgery for cancer and afterward no one could say for certain what had been removed.
After a few weeks home, Randy began to make suggestions about the future of the pumpkin farm. His father, Ulysses Richard Mesmer, was also getting on in years. Certain decisions must be made. Randy was relieved to discover that everyone agreed to his suggestions immediately.
He was so pleased it took him weeks to notice, and weeks longer to admit, that his suggestions and opinions had absolutely no effect. Everything went on exactly as it always had. Dick Mesmer remained firmly in charge. (His father hated the name Ulysses and used only the first initial.)
One day, when Randy became particularly insistent, he was taken to the furthest corner of Pumpkin Field #12 and left there for nine hours with only a peanut butter and honey sandwich and a deplorably dull hoe.
Certainly it is disconcerting to discover that one has become Puerto Rico in the family: you go right on voting, but your vote counts for nothing.
Every member of the family felt pleased at the way Aunt Lucy was treated. They removed her from the madhouse for special events the same way they took the big punch bowl from the back closet, always careful to give it a good rinse first. They considered themselves extremely enlightened. Randy had felt this way too. He was ashamed to think of it now.
Every generation must have a mad relative. Now it was his turn.
"I'm not crazy," Randy Mesmer insisted. "I can quietly give reasonable and pragmatic reasons to support my moderate opinions!"
His brother and sister-in-law nodded at him and smiled beneath sad eyes. He was the mad relative. There was no court of appeal.
Actual madness, you see, had very little to do with being the mad relative. The entire family was mad. It was more about power and plain bad luck. Traditionally of course, a woman generally got stuck being the mad relative. Now it was more equal opportunity.
If being the mad relative were determined by actual madness, his father would win hands down. Instead he was in charge of the farm and took turns persecuting his sons and imagining himself to be prominent figures from history: Lincoln, Trotsky, Madame Blavatsky, Harry Houdini, Helen Keller. If you questioned him you were promptly demonized. This was a miserable and dangerous situation -- you could very well be declared the mad relative.
Why, he wondered, must there always be a mad relative? Certainly it must have stemmed, centuries before, from pragmatic reasons. One less way to divide the pie. The mad relative forfeits everything.
It is true that the mad relative usually did end up being actually, factually mad. After all, it is enough to make anyone crazy, being the ghost/dream voice/dependent protectorate in the family. Also it is natural to want to fulfill family expectations, just as, in other families, one son becomes a priest.
Aunt Lucy had begun years ago to drool. She drooled more as time went on. Nephews learned to dodge her hands. Who could blame her, Randy thought. There was no prize for obedience, nor penalty for misbehavior. You are a ghost in the family. You might as well not exist. You are the mad relative and you will always be the mad relative.
The mad relative: every generation must have one. Like Aunt Lucy, his father's sister, who was brought from the state hospital in Laconia to attend all family occasions. There she sat, grinning in her folding chair, smoking menthol Salems, and mumbling into the air. Now and then she groped one of the nephews. She was getting old, poor Aunt Lucy. She'd had surgery for cancer and afterward no one could say for certain what had been removed.
After a few weeks home, Randy began to make suggestions about the future of the pumpkin farm. His father, Ulysses Richard Mesmer, was also getting on in years. Certain decisions must be made. Randy was relieved to discover that everyone agreed to his suggestions immediately.
He was so pleased it took him weeks to notice, and weeks longer to admit, that his suggestions and opinions had absolutely no effect. Everything went on exactly as it always had. Dick Mesmer remained firmly in charge. (His father hated the name Ulysses and used only the first initial.)
One day, when Randy became particularly insistent, he was taken to the furthest corner of Pumpkin Field #12 and left there for nine hours with only a peanut butter and honey sandwich and a deplorably dull hoe.
Certainly it is disconcerting to discover that one has become Puerto Rico in the family: you go right on voting, but your vote counts for nothing.
Every member of the family felt pleased at the way Aunt Lucy was treated. They removed her from the madhouse for special events the same way they took the big punch bowl from the back closet, always careful to give it a good rinse first. They considered themselves extremely enlightened. Randy had felt this way too. He was ashamed to think of it now.
Every generation must have a mad relative. Now it was his turn.
"I'm not crazy," Randy Mesmer insisted. "I can quietly give reasonable and pragmatic reasons to support my moderate opinions!"
His brother and sister-in-law nodded at him and smiled beneath sad eyes. He was the mad relative. There was no court of appeal.
Actual madness, you see, had very little to do with being the mad relative. The entire family was mad. It was more about power and plain bad luck. Traditionally of course, a woman generally got stuck being the mad relative. Now it was more equal opportunity.
If being the mad relative were determined by actual madness, his father would win hands down. Instead he was in charge of the farm and took turns persecuting his sons and imagining himself to be prominent figures from history: Lincoln, Trotsky, Madame Blavatsky, Harry Houdini, Helen Keller. If you questioned him you were promptly demonized. This was a miserable and dangerous situation -- you could very well be declared the mad relative.
Why, he wondered, must there always be a mad relative? Certainly it must have stemmed, centuries before, from pragmatic reasons. One less way to divide the pie. The mad relative forfeits everything.
It is true that the mad relative usually did end up being actually, factually mad. After all, it is enough to make anyone crazy, being the ghost/dream voice/dependent protectorate in the family. Also it is natural to want to fulfill family expectations, just as, in other families, one son becomes a priest.
Aunt Lucy had begun years ago to drool. She drooled more as time went on. Nephews learned to dodge her hands. Who could blame her, Randy thought. There was no prize for obedience, nor penalty for misbehavior. You are a ghost in the family. You might as well not exist. You are the mad relative and you will always be the mad relative.
A Lost Soul
Sorry -- I can't explain it. I don't understand it myself and I was there. The nicest couple. Pillar of the community types. Sure, a little starchy. He's a manager at my company, not my branch but another. Been there forever. He volunteered his dining room.
His wife was -- very much a manager's wife. Very polite, not a chit-chatty type, but then she had a huge amount of food to lay out. She did it all herself, that's unusual, and the food itself was -- different. At least not what folks around here are used to. As we had our meeting I could see her setting the table. Formal for us means a salad fork and a cloth napkin -- but she laid out a huge amount of silver, spoon after spoon, like a kid copying out a composition. I thought gosh she must be anxious to make a good impression.
Everything she cooked had curry in it, or avocado, or eggplant. Fish with the head still on. The kind of bitter salad that nobody in the world eats unless other people are watching. Mollusks. Nothing for the white bread crowd in sight and I know for a fact that several people went out for a burger later.
We were all seated at the table. I was wondering if there was any way to mix things together so it might taste normal. The guacamole turned out to be mustard so hot it was like getting whooped in the head. And somebody brought up Sean, who had to be let go. He didn't have the charisma for sales. Frankly I don't think he had the charisma for accounting. He may have had a little drinking problem. And he got caught once with porno on his computer. He didn't have the right professionalism, shall we say. So we had to let him go.
Mr. Arlington didn't say anything that hadn't been said before. Mr. Arlington always agrees with everyone -- which frankly may be why he's risen so far even though he's not, shall we say, an innovator. He wasn't adding anything, just putting his seal on the conversation. Mr. Arlington sighed and said, "He's a lost soul." We nodded and said uh-huh, and looked up to see a jalapeno glazed drumstick hit Mr. Arlington right between the eyes.
The guacamole followed, along with a pitcher of sangria. At the opposite end of the table, Mr. Arlington's wife had erupted: she was hurling dishes at him just as calmly and methodically she'd laid them out. A Cornish game hen in a clay pot, tuna in raspberry sauce, venison in molé . She was a helluva good shot too. She would have killed him if she'd started in with the cutlery. And for his part he just sat there and stared at her, like he was seeing her for the first time in his life, and then he looked down at his Brooks Brothers shirt, which, he discovered, now had wine, chocolate, curry, hollandaise, and tomato stains.
Obviously the rest of us had scattered as best we could. Johnson, Stuckey, and Young -- the vice presidents -- spent the whole time under the table and got away with little more than mustard stains. The president was already on his cell phone pleading for a fresh set of clothes.
The wife had been entirely silent except for an umph! when she hurled the platter of duck curry and assassinated a painting of sailboats in a harbor which I believe was very valuable.
Now she started to howl. A sound you'd never think a lady like that would have in her. The same thing over and over. A lost soul! A lost soul! A lost soul!
The wife really was a beautiful woman, though I guess she wasn't young. Pitching dinner at her husband had put some nice color in her face. She was wearing a crisp peach pant suit which I swear did not get one spot on it and which I bet she wore again.
She cleared the entire table right straight at Mr. Arlington. He got the mango chutney last and took it too, like a man receiving final judgment.
Last thing she did she pulled up the linen tablecloth, the silver slid and clattered, the crystal smashed on the hardwood floor. She walked right up to him and tossed the white cloth over his head and he just sat there, wrapped in it.
Of course we didn't blame poor Mr. Arlington. He kept his good job. Lately he is more agreeable than ever. Mr. Arlington, as I have said, is not an innovator. No one blames him or teases him, though I'm sure the combined dry cleaning bill was astronomical. The only thing that's different is we don't have dinner at Mr. Arlington's house anymore. The poor man can't be expected to do all that cooking on his own.
His wife was -- very much a manager's wife. Very polite, not a chit-chatty type, but then she had a huge amount of food to lay out. She did it all herself, that's unusual, and the food itself was -- different. At least not what folks around here are used to. As we had our meeting I could see her setting the table. Formal for us means a salad fork and a cloth napkin -- but she laid out a huge amount of silver, spoon after spoon, like a kid copying out a composition. I thought gosh she must be anxious to make a good impression.
Everything she cooked had curry in it, or avocado, or eggplant. Fish with the head still on. The kind of bitter salad that nobody in the world eats unless other people are watching. Mollusks. Nothing for the white bread crowd in sight and I know for a fact that several people went out for a burger later.
We were all seated at the table. I was wondering if there was any way to mix things together so it might taste normal. The guacamole turned out to be mustard so hot it was like getting whooped in the head. And somebody brought up Sean, who had to be let go. He didn't have the charisma for sales. Frankly I don't think he had the charisma for accounting. He may have had a little drinking problem. And he got caught once with porno on his computer. He didn't have the right professionalism, shall we say. So we had to let him go.
Mr. Arlington didn't say anything that hadn't been said before. Mr. Arlington always agrees with everyone -- which frankly may be why he's risen so far even though he's not, shall we say, an innovator. He wasn't adding anything, just putting his seal on the conversation. Mr. Arlington sighed and said, "He's a lost soul." We nodded and said uh-huh, and looked up to see a jalapeno glazed drumstick hit Mr. Arlington right between the eyes.
The guacamole followed, along with a pitcher of sangria. At the opposite end of the table, Mr. Arlington's wife had erupted: she was hurling dishes at him just as calmly and methodically she'd laid them out. A Cornish game hen in a clay pot, tuna in raspberry sauce, venison in molé . She was a helluva good shot too. She would have killed him if she'd started in with the cutlery. And for his part he just sat there and stared at her, like he was seeing her for the first time in his life, and then he looked down at his Brooks Brothers shirt, which, he discovered, now had wine, chocolate, curry, hollandaise, and tomato stains.
Obviously the rest of us had scattered as best we could. Johnson, Stuckey, and Young -- the vice presidents -- spent the whole time under the table and got away with little more than mustard stains. The president was already on his cell phone pleading for a fresh set of clothes.
The wife had been entirely silent except for an umph! when she hurled the platter of duck curry and assassinated a painting of sailboats in a harbor which I believe was very valuable.
Now she started to howl. A sound you'd never think a lady like that would have in her. The same thing over and over. A lost soul! A lost soul! A lost soul!
The wife really was a beautiful woman, though I guess she wasn't young. Pitching dinner at her husband had put some nice color in her face. She was wearing a crisp peach pant suit which I swear did not get one spot on it and which I bet she wore again.
She cleared the entire table right straight at Mr. Arlington. He got the mango chutney last and took it too, like a man receiving final judgment.
Last thing she did she pulled up the linen tablecloth, the silver slid and clattered, the crystal smashed on the hardwood floor. She walked right up to him and tossed the white cloth over his head and he just sat there, wrapped in it.
Of course we didn't blame poor Mr. Arlington. He kept his good job. Lately he is more agreeable than ever. Mr. Arlington, as I have said, is not an innovator. No one blames him or teases him, though I'm sure the combined dry cleaning bill was astronomical. The only thing that's different is we don't have dinner at Mr. Arlington's house anymore. The poor man can't be expected to do all that cooking on his own.
Don Quixote Does Escalators
In Yotsuya station, at the bottom of an immensely tall escalator, a cleaning lady stands holding a cloth soaked in antiseptic against the handrail. Even though the escalator is a hundred meters long, she can clean it all this way, just standing there, enjoying a small break in her arduous day.
This is exactly the sort of thing I would never in a million years figure out myself.
Oh no, I'd be dashing up and down the escalator, flinging myself at the arm rail, gasping for breath, getting my pants caught in the jaws at the edge. Running up the down side, then down the up side. Of course! Let no one accuse me of being lazy or taking the easy way out! Unrivaled in my ferocity! Famed for relentlessness! Day after day I battle the escalator and lunge with my cloth at the rail, wiping six inches here, six inches there, as sweat and grime coat my distorted face, a man at war.
But I wouldn't complain, oh no. Not a word of complaint would pass my lips -- not even as I jostled a businessman, or sent a schoolboy in a sailor suit into a headlong plunge as I battled, desperate and fearless, to clean the handrail of the escalator. One brave and reckless man stands alone between Tokyo and contagion!
Not only would I not complain, I would respect myself even more. My hard work! My sacrifice! Oh no, I'd insist, I'd never trade shoes with anyone. This is my dharma, my sacred duty. The Emperor and MLK agree: Do your job and do it well. Oh I would really give it my all. . .
At the end of the day I would collapse in a heap at the base of the escalator. I would die young -- and cheerfully, knowing that I had saved the lives of millions of Tokyoites.
Because not even the greatest of heroes are entirely free of human frailties, among them resentment, I would often wonder why I had not been discretely passed a medal, why I had not yet been declared, to unanimous and thunderous acclaim, a Living National Treasure.
If, by chance, on my way home, I passed another station, another escalator, where a woman stood, holding the cloth against the moving rail, I would shake my head and feel very sorry for her. "Oh isn't that just the spirit of the times! Sure you can do it that way -- but then you miss entirely the spirit of the thing."
This is exactly the sort of thing I would never in a million years figure out myself.
Oh no, I'd be dashing up and down the escalator, flinging myself at the arm rail, gasping for breath, getting my pants caught in the jaws at the edge. Running up the down side, then down the up side. Of course! Let no one accuse me of being lazy or taking the easy way out! Unrivaled in my ferocity! Famed for relentlessness! Day after day I battle the escalator and lunge with my cloth at the rail, wiping six inches here, six inches there, as sweat and grime coat my distorted face, a man at war.
But I wouldn't complain, oh no. Not a word of complaint would pass my lips -- not even as I jostled a businessman, or sent a schoolboy in a sailor suit into a headlong plunge as I battled, desperate and fearless, to clean the handrail of the escalator. One brave and reckless man stands alone between Tokyo and contagion!
Not only would I not complain, I would respect myself even more. My hard work! My sacrifice! Oh no, I'd insist, I'd never trade shoes with anyone. This is my dharma, my sacred duty. The Emperor and MLK agree: Do your job and do it well. Oh I would really give it my all. . .
At the end of the day I would collapse in a heap at the base of the escalator. I would die young -- and cheerfully, knowing that I had saved the lives of millions of Tokyoites.
Because not even the greatest of heroes are entirely free of human frailties, among them resentment, I would often wonder why I had not been discretely passed a medal, why I had not yet been declared, to unanimous and thunderous acclaim, a Living National Treasure.
If, by chance, on my way home, I passed another station, another escalator, where a woman stood, holding the cloth against the moving rail, I would shake my head and feel very sorry for her. "Oh isn't that just the spirit of the times! Sure you can do it that way -- but then you miss entirely the spirit of the thing."
The Turquoise Stone
By the side of the street, in front of a shop, I found a large geode. Gray and rough on the edge: brilliant blue-green inside.
I carried the geode into the shop and said, "I want to use this stone for a project. Of course I won't harm it any way. I'll even give you my contact information so you can check up on it."
The man at the counter was reluctant. Of course the stone didn't actually belong to anyone, but still it was well-known in the neighborhood. Folks had become rather fond of it, like a friendly homeless person who's always on the same corner, and always humming the same funny song.
The stone wasn't valuable, its shape was irregular, even the color was actually quite tacky, but people really liked it. The shop clerk wasn't sure it was fair of me to think I could just go ahead and monopolize it.
I said I didn't want to monopolize it, I just wanted to take it home for awhile. Because I was absolutely certain we could do interesting work together, the stone and I.
I carried the geode into the shop and said, "I want to use this stone for a project. Of course I won't harm it any way. I'll even give you my contact information so you can check up on it."
The man at the counter was reluctant. Of course the stone didn't actually belong to anyone, but still it was well-known in the neighborhood. Folks had become rather fond of it, like a friendly homeless person who's always on the same corner, and always humming the same funny song.
The stone wasn't valuable, its shape was irregular, even the color was actually quite tacky, but people really liked it. The shop clerk wasn't sure it was fair of me to think I could just go ahead and monopolize it.
I said I didn't want to monopolize it, I just wanted to take it home for awhile. Because I was absolutely certain we could do interesting work together, the stone and I.
Symmetry
This is from the crippled boy -- who is a man now, except in the way that a cripple remains always a boy, attached for life to his leg, which does not grow.
I do not think there is a heaven, where my stray sad-hearted wishes will be answered, but just the same those wishes hang round me like unsent letters -- and so there is this wish of mine and nothing to be done with it --
The wish to stand on two whole legs, two legs the same length, with functional equal calves, ankles, knees, with two whole feet which both point forward, with everything the mirror of what is on the other side.
Take a moment to rejoice, those of you immersed in such a form, which seems as remarkable to me as flying through the air might seem to you.
I long to go run barefoot on the beach in such a form, to be seen thus, with legs that would draw no attention to themselves because, well, one is just like the other.
In recompense I possess the crippled arts -- the absolute persistence, the knack of appearing harmless, the air of apology, the small-toothed viciousness. The air of something not expected to survive, which did survive.
The boundless hunger, which goads me cross the world. To Bangkok and the Super A, the sleaziest bar in Bangkok, which, come to think of it, is no small accomplishment.
I find it comforting to rest sometimes on the very bottom of the ocean, deep in the muck, with everything else that is stunted, and half-born, and did not turn out as hoped.
The boys in white underpants perched round my chair, poking at me half-heartedly; they knew I was not buying anything except another beer. Engaging in the usual timid immoral anthropology.
The bored boys found my crippled leg encased in its plastic brace. I tried to shy away. (No one is allowed to touch the leg, none of my funhouse lovers. It is my only private part.)
The boys smiled at me and one said, sympathetically, "Army?" One boy aimed an invisible gun, another mimed a landmine exploding, and what astonished me was the way this made the leg, for the first time in my life, entirely all right. Suddenly I was no longer a freak -- I was a soldier. The leg was a scar in recognition of my service, a commendation, worthy of a star.
If its five bucks to get groped, and ten bucks for a blowjob -- how much do you tip the bar boys when they perform a miracle? The leg was not a deficiency. And it wasn't my fault. I was a veteran, one of the brave. A patriot. Not like I was some freak. Not like I was born this way.
I do not think there is a heaven, where my stray sad-hearted wishes will be answered, but just the same those wishes hang round me like unsent letters -- and so there is this wish of mine and nothing to be done with it --
The wish to stand on two whole legs, two legs the same length, with functional equal calves, ankles, knees, with two whole feet which both point forward, with everything the mirror of what is on the other side.
Take a moment to rejoice, those of you immersed in such a form, which seems as remarkable to me as flying through the air might seem to you.
I long to go run barefoot on the beach in such a form, to be seen thus, with legs that would draw no attention to themselves because, well, one is just like the other.
In recompense I possess the crippled arts -- the absolute persistence, the knack of appearing harmless, the air of apology, the small-toothed viciousness. The air of something not expected to survive, which did survive.
The boundless hunger, which goads me cross the world. To Bangkok and the Super A, the sleaziest bar in Bangkok, which, come to think of it, is no small accomplishment.
I find it comforting to rest sometimes on the very bottom of the ocean, deep in the muck, with everything else that is stunted, and half-born, and did not turn out as hoped.
The boys in white underpants perched round my chair, poking at me half-heartedly; they knew I was not buying anything except another beer. Engaging in the usual timid immoral anthropology.
The bored boys found my crippled leg encased in its plastic brace. I tried to shy away. (No one is allowed to touch the leg, none of my funhouse lovers. It is my only private part.)
The boys smiled at me and one said, sympathetically, "Army?" One boy aimed an invisible gun, another mimed a landmine exploding, and what astonished me was the way this made the leg, for the first time in my life, entirely all right. Suddenly I was no longer a freak -- I was a soldier. The leg was a scar in recognition of my service, a commendation, worthy of a star.
If its five bucks to get groped, and ten bucks for a blowjob -- how much do you tip the bar boys when they perform a miracle? The leg was not a deficiency. And it wasn't my fault. I was a veteran, one of the brave. A patriot. Not like I was some freak. Not like I was born this way.
Hazelnut
Out the farmhouse and down the dirt road, past the swimming pond and the cemetery. That night I did not swim. I did not even stop to visit with the dead. To the hazelnut tree that juts out slightly toward the road, that now and then must withstand the strike of a car, some teenager's car, out for a joyride. Or lightning.
On the hazelnut's trunk, on a smooth knot, I placed my hand. I knocked. I demanded entrance to another life. The tree admitted me and I stepped through.
I have not been back
On the hazelnut's trunk, on a smooth knot, I placed my hand. I knocked. I demanded entrance to another life. The tree admitted me and I stepped through.
I have not been back
Monday, October 12, 2009
Meaningful Living at the End of the World
Tokyo, October 2009
1.
When actual beauty arrives I am more scared than hungry. Just as when fumbling in the night my fingers find, instead of the switch, the electric socket. This man, startling me now on the train: he's not beautiful like a smooth skin commercial, or a Bel Ami porn angel. He's beautiful like stepping off a cliff in the dark. Suddenly I'm dangling 100 feet in the air, skewered, vulnerable.
What I want to do now is stare. To stare and stare until I understand, until I get it, this force and how to be free of it. But I can't stare. To stare is to be caught hungry, to be exposed -- he'd holler, someone would push the emergency button, the train would stop, security would hurry aboard, and I'd be shot in the interest of human safety because, well ma'am, nothing can be done with them once they've tasted human flesh.
Beauty's a pharmacy-bright fluorescent. Suddenly there I am, with my jug ears and my sad skin. My face, which a moment before was empty on the way to work, now contorts with longing and posturing. With nerves. Oh Jonathon Mock, why can't you just act natural?
Not for one moment in all my life have I ever acted natural. Shot through with longing, I pin my eyes to my clipboard (these words I wrote as I tried not to stare) and it occurs to me suddenly that this must be what God is like. Or as close as I am ever liable to get. The presence, the pressure of God, that dark radiance, an itch at the corner of one's vision.
Even if you turn to look it can't be comprehended. Doesn't really answer the question. I've looked three times already -- I am not eligible to look again. The contrast of dark lashes stubble eyebrows against that bright skin, the lean intensity of the face, those eyes! Once in my life I want to know what it's like to be born into the body of a god.
Don't look! Once more and he'll be irritated, I'll be exposed for ravenous hunger, caught with this dog-begging-at-the-table face and so I pin my eyes down and I feel that yearning, a pressure at the edge of my vision. I turn to him behind my eyes and silently say Oh Krishna
Storm god Krishna accept my adoration, this oil lamp, garland of jasmine. Krishna who multiplies in countless forms, one for each of the milkmaids and the buffalo boys, one to accost me on the train, Monday morning Tokyo commute, Mita Line to Onarimon. Pray to the longing. Oh Krishna.
Don't look again!
2.
Dear Zot,
Thank you for fielding my questions regarding meaningful living amid environmental catastrophe. I accept, and am highly disappointed you do not have some simple formula for me, directing me instead to my own still voice, pearl of discrimination, whatever.
i don't stay on the positive side. i just keep going, doing what makes sense as i see it from where i am. i also keep doing what last made sense the last time anything made sense, which if i'm saying it well enough means i get through times of nonsense or insensibility or senselessness. Sometimes it's like that. i get assignments in times of clarity. When out of clarity, i make myself continue to do the assignments.
Buddha nature is supposed to be boundary-less. Instead it's like trying to find one wad of gum beneath one chair in a porn theater the size of Yankee Stadium. OK, you're right, maybe the problem is I'm always watching the porn.
You asked me what I was expecting -- I guess I meant a book. Some NYT bestseller I'd overlooked: Meaningful Living at the End of the World. Some handy 1,2,3 guide on how to matter, use less plastic, maintain one's dignity and look great here at the end of human history. Evidently this book has not yet been written.
Perhaps we should collaborate?
3.
It's a lousy picture. When it appears on screen the narrator apologizes and explains it was the best they could do. The camera battery was dead, I think. Someone took it with their phone. Almost all you can see are the riot police with their silver shields and helmets. Behind them is a yellow gate with a plain red banner overhead. You have to peer, lean forward a little, to see the gate is in fact open, just wide enough to reveal a thin woman standing there, her hands before her, joined together in reverence. You can just make out that she is crying.
No, that's not true. I cannot see that clearly. I say that the woman in the picture is crying because I am crying whenever I look at the picture.
Aung San Su Kyi, is there any hope at all?
I found the picture on the Internet, very small. I printed it out and taped it to the wall above my altar. Above the buddhas and the Mother of the Universe. When I see this picture I see the state of truth and justice in the world, peering out at us through a narrow gap in the wall, behind a line of police. Greeting us from a distance. Standing straight and reverent behind a line of thugs.
4.
I dreamt I was back in the green kitchen in New Hampshire. A sheep was there with me in the kitchen. It started talking in a dry quiet voice best described as 'secretarial'.
"The quota of surprises for this year has been exceeded. Therefore, for the remainder of this year nothing expected will occur."
My first feeling was relief. But then I thought, "Can I really trust this sheep?"
5.
Finally they were able to travel but it was too late. Rido and his wife were over 80 by then and not well. They went to Paris and hardly left the hotel. They went on a cruise and stayed on the ship.
Maybe it wasn't too late. The maid had taught him how to count in French, he said. He got up early and watch as the streets were washed. The year before that his great grandchild was born. The year before that he'd found a dead cat on his roof covered in oil. And then there was the time when a policeman accused him of stealing a bicycle!
Rido sits at the table without moving. His eyes are gummy. His last tuft of hair grows long in the back. He speaks only when spoken to. He is so busy finding everything interesting he does not pause to ask what is good or bad.
The cruise ship stopped at Bangkok, but he and his wife stayed on board and watched a movie. Did you enjoy it, I asked. Yes very much. When the movie was finished the lights came on and we saw that we were alone in the theater!
6.
My sister, who is lovely and bored out of her mind with me all the time threatening to kill myself, says there is no point in trying to figure it all out. Instead she asks me to chant AH and imagine a white light, chest-high, surrounded by a rainbow.
There was a time I had spiritual beliefs. I still do. I used to believe in the Buddha. Before that I believed in God. Now I believe in my sister. And so I follow her instructions to imagine a white light (step one) collapse the universe into it (step two), collapse my body too (step three) everything together down to a radiant ball (step four) which becomes a star and (step 5) finally vanishes into space and stillness.
Each time creates the sadhana it requires. A horse sacrifice or a warrior, space man or holy mother. Thus it does not surprise me that we are trying now to collapse the universe and dissolve it all. AH, Nevermind. Start over.
7.
Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh have composed gathas -- short verses which aid to practice mindfulness in everyday life. There are gathas for waking and eating, gathas for hugging or inviting the bell to sound. There is even a gatha for using the toilet. However, I have not yet found a gatha to recite upon seeing a really luscious man. So I took the liberty of composing one.
May I always act
To care for and preserve
The beauty and the wonder
Of the world.
You say it silently of course. Otherwise the guy may be alarmed.
I admit I'd prefer a spell of infatuation: Om Ah Snog With Me. (I tried. It doesn't work.) As it is, the best I can do is remind myself that beauty is not an invitation for mindless devouring. There's a lot to be said for enjoying the vistas. Or at least not leaving marks.
The downside of the gatha is that it's really long. So, when there is an abundance of really gorgeous men around, you can just repeat the word "Wonder". Or, in times of extreme incessant beauty, at a South Indian bathing tank, say, or Turkish soccer match, Italian locker room, when you're just about to swoon from awe and lust, it's enough to repeat the holy seed syllable DUH, which is probably all you'll be able to think anyhow.
That gatha, one more time:
May I always act
To care for and preserve
The beauty and the wonder
Of the world.
1.
When actual beauty arrives I am more scared than hungry. Just as when fumbling in the night my fingers find, instead of the switch, the electric socket. This man, startling me now on the train: he's not beautiful like a smooth skin commercial, or a Bel Ami porn angel. He's beautiful like stepping off a cliff in the dark. Suddenly I'm dangling 100 feet in the air, skewered, vulnerable.
What I want to do now is stare. To stare and stare until I understand, until I get it, this force and how to be free of it. But I can't stare. To stare is to be caught hungry, to be exposed -- he'd holler, someone would push the emergency button, the train would stop, security would hurry aboard, and I'd be shot in the interest of human safety because, well ma'am, nothing can be done with them once they've tasted human flesh.
Beauty's a pharmacy-bright fluorescent. Suddenly there I am, with my jug ears and my sad skin. My face, which a moment before was empty on the way to work, now contorts with longing and posturing. With nerves. Oh Jonathon Mock, why can't you just act natural?
Not for one moment in all my life have I ever acted natural. Shot through with longing, I pin my eyes to my clipboard (these words I wrote as I tried not to stare) and it occurs to me suddenly that this must be what God is like. Or as close as I am ever liable to get. The presence, the pressure of God, that dark radiance, an itch at the corner of one's vision.
Even if you turn to look it can't be comprehended. Doesn't really answer the question. I've looked three times already -- I am not eligible to look again. The contrast of dark lashes stubble eyebrows against that bright skin, the lean intensity of the face, those eyes! Once in my life I want to know what it's like to be born into the body of a god.
Don't look! Once more and he'll be irritated, I'll be exposed for ravenous hunger, caught with this dog-begging-at-the-table face and so I pin my eyes down and I feel that yearning, a pressure at the edge of my vision. I turn to him behind my eyes and silently say Oh Krishna
Storm god Krishna accept my adoration, this oil lamp, garland of jasmine. Krishna who multiplies in countless forms, one for each of the milkmaids and the buffalo boys, one to accost me on the train, Monday morning Tokyo commute, Mita Line to Onarimon. Pray to the longing. Oh Krishna.
Don't look again!
2.
Dear Zot,
Thank you for fielding my questions regarding meaningful living amid environmental catastrophe. I accept, and am highly disappointed you do not have some simple formula for me, directing me instead to my own still voice, pearl of discrimination, whatever.
i don't stay on the positive side. i just keep going, doing what makes sense as i see it from where i am. i also keep doing what last made sense the last time anything made sense, which if i'm saying it well enough means i get through times of nonsense or insensibility or senselessness. Sometimes it's like that. i get assignments in times of clarity. When out of clarity, i make myself continue to do the assignments.
Buddha nature is supposed to be boundary-less. Instead it's like trying to find one wad of gum beneath one chair in a porn theater the size of Yankee Stadium. OK, you're right, maybe the problem is I'm always watching the porn.
You asked me what I was expecting -- I guess I meant a book. Some NYT bestseller I'd overlooked: Meaningful Living at the End of the World. Some handy 1,2,3 guide on how to matter, use less plastic, maintain one's dignity and look great here at the end of human history. Evidently this book has not yet been written.
Perhaps we should collaborate?
3.
It's a lousy picture. When it appears on screen the narrator apologizes and explains it was the best they could do. The camera battery was dead, I think. Someone took it with their phone. Almost all you can see are the riot police with their silver shields and helmets. Behind them is a yellow gate with a plain red banner overhead. You have to peer, lean forward a little, to see the gate is in fact open, just wide enough to reveal a thin woman standing there, her hands before her, joined together in reverence. You can just make out that she is crying.
No, that's not true. I cannot see that clearly. I say that the woman in the picture is crying because I am crying whenever I look at the picture.
Aung San Su Kyi, is there any hope at all?
I found the picture on the Internet, very small. I printed it out and taped it to the wall above my altar. Above the buddhas and the Mother of the Universe. When I see this picture I see the state of truth and justice in the world, peering out at us through a narrow gap in the wall, behind a line of police. Greeting us from a distance. Standing straight and reverent behind a line of thugs.
4.
I dreamt I was back in the green kitchen in New Hampshire. A sheep was there with me in the kitchen. It started talking in a dry quiet voice best described as 'secretarial'.
"The quota of surprises for this year has been exceeded. Therefore, for the remainder of this year nothing expected will occur."
My first feeling was relief. But then I thought, "Can I really trust this sheep?"
5.
Finally they were able to travel but it was too late. Rido and his wife were over 80 by then and not well. They went to Paris and hardly left the hotel. They went on a cruise and stayed on the ship.
Maybe it wasn't too late. The maid had taught him how to count in French, he said. He got up early and watch as the streets were washed. The year before that his great grandchild was born. The year before that he'd found a dead cat on his roof covered in oil. And then there was the time when a policeman accused him of stealing a bicycle!
Rido sits at the table without moving. His eyes are gummy. His last tuft of hair grows long in the back. He speaks only when spoken to. He is so busy finding everything interesting he does not pause to ask what is good or bad.
The cruise ship stopped at Bangkok, but he and his wife stayed on board and watched a movie. Did you enjoy it, I asked. Yes very much. When the movie was finished the lights came on and we saw that we were alone in the theater!
6.
My sister, who is lovely and bored out of her mind with me all the time threatening to kill myself, says there is no point in trying to figure it all out. Instead she asks me to chant AH and imagine a white light, chest-high, surrounded by a rainbow.
There was a time I had spiritual beliefs. I still do. I used to believe in the Buddha. Before that I believed in God. Now I believe in my sister. And so I follow her instructions to imagine a white light (step one) collapse the universe into it (step two), collapse my body too (step three) everything together down to a radiant ball (step four) which becomes a star and (step 5) finally vanishes into space and stillness.
Each time creates the sadhana it requires. A horse sacrifice or a warrior, space man or holy mother. Thus it does not surprise me that we are trying now to collapse the universe and dissolve it all. AH, Nevermind. Start over.
7.
Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh have composed gathas -- short verses which aid to practice mindfulness in everyday life. There are gathas for waking and eating, gathas for hugging or inviting the bell to sound. There is even a gatha for using the toilet. However, I have not yet found a gatha to recite upon seeing a really luscious man. So I took the liberty of composing one.
May I always act
To care for and preserve
The beauty and the wonder
Of the world.
You say it silently of course. Otherwise the guy may be alarmed.
I admit I'd prefer a spell of infatuation: Om Ah Snog With Me. (I tried. It doesn't work.) As it is, the best I can do is remind myself that beauty is not an invitation for mindless devouring. There's a lot to be said for enjoying the vistas. Or at least not leaving marks.
The downside of the gatha is that it's really long. So, when there is an abundance of really gorgeous men around, you can just repeat the word "Wonder". Or, in times of extreme incessant beauty, at a South Indian bathing tank, say, or Turkish soccer match, Italian locker room, when you're just about to swoon from awe and lust, it's enough to repeat the holy seed syllable DUH, which is probably all you'll be able to think anyhow.
That gatha, one more time:
May I always act
To care for and preserve
The beauty and the wonder
Of the world.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
“Candor ends paranoia.” – Allen Ginsberg
Easy.
I am an extraordinarily difficult person to flirt with. I tend to agree to any inappropriate suggestion immediately. Sometimes this catches people off guard.
As I unlock my door at the Malaysia Hotel, a drunk unshaven Filipino lug peers out next door. Leans against the doorframe and leers cheerfully. “Well, well, well! I had no idea I had such a cute neighbor! I ought to come visit you.”
“That’s a good idea. Give me five minutes, okay?”
Five minutes later there’s a knock at the door. But it’s not the drunk Filipino. It’s an impish young
Soliloquy from Dick’s Café, Soi Twilight
“Who am I in
Voyeurism.
In the window directly above and facing the pool at the Malaysia Hotel, there is a head. A white old round head with even whiter hair. Behind glasses with thick black frames eyes stare unblinking at any young man swimming or sunning himself. That head is always in the window, as if it has been mounted there, on a post. It is there in the morning and there in the afternoon. I was here years ago; the head was there then. And it is always staring. If you stare back long enough, the head will finally turn, and a hand will appear and toy nervously with an ear.
How is it possible to ever do anything useful or true with a mind designed for deception? A mind that continually tells small but crucial lies and seeks out poisonous consolations. A human mind.
Obituaries.
Imagine if newspapers told the truth and you opened the obituary page to the words
Addict, 72 Addict, 46 Addict, 19 Addict, 84
Wouldn’t that be excellent? We would be warned and we would not feel so all alone. Also we would have more respect for this Mrs. Joan Tatro, 68, formerly of
It’s extremely unlikely anyone will be able convince the obituary page to boldface the word cocksucker. Maybe I could learn to be a secretary?
∞
The frog in a pot on the stove is slowly, slowly, slowly coming to a boil. Everyone around is smoking, or admiring themselves for not smoking. Even the frog is full of resolutions.
Survey.
I used to wonder if other people felt as lonely as I did. Or as frightened. Or as depressed. And the answer turned out to be Yes. I am still trying to figure out, however, if other people are actually this horny. Please -- take a moment to respond below.
Aunt Lucy.
My schizophrenic Aunt Lucy, lifetime resident of the state hospital in
So maybe I have a condition and other people are actually reasonable. Not the people I’m meeting of course, but other people.
God speaks to Aunt Lucy. God speaks to me, too. Not often. Perhaps semi-annually. I am also sometimes afflicted with the sense that everything is meaningful and people are basically good. Pathology!
Then there’s the tendency to endlessly compose long story/poem/essays consisting almost wholly of inappropriate information. (There’s a word for this too: hypergraphia.)
Isn’t this writing, which adheres to no genre and contains no structure, akin to the mythological kingdoms unemployed plumbers build secretly for 38 years in their garages using only aluminum foil, bottle caps and chewing gum?
Creativity is for other people. What I do is probably a symptom of something.
Bodhicitta.
When I sit down to meditate, I set my motivation. And at the end I dedicate the merit. I aspire to wake up and to be of benefit to every living thing. I know, it seems ridiculous for someone who can’t pay his student loans or keep his zipper zipped to pray in such a way but, nonetheless, I aspire.
The innocent
can
get
donations.
Or
fend
for
themselves.
I don’t want them.
Holy Mother, bless me one day to be the Deep Shit Bodhisattva.
Bulge.
Night after night, a man calls me at
He is not young; he has spent far too much time in the sun. His body is still sleek however and, most importantly, the bulge in his turquoise-striped Speedo is impressive. I’ve noted this, repeatedly, and double-checked to make absolutely sure. He caught me at it, got my room number from the pool sign-in sheet, and now calls drunk at
Cold Shower
What I have in mind is a portable shower, ice cold and dousing. The kind they use in science labs for emergencies, with a broad steel sunflower head and a chain to pull.
This is what I need above my head at all times. (Perhaps they could somehow attach it to my spine?) When overcome with flaming lust I could just pull the chain and at once douse myself. The water would have to be very, very cold.
Also it would be convenient for other people. Sturdy tourists commando in flimsy shorts with thick tanned calves adorned with golden hairs -- and sick to death of me staring -- they could just pull the chain! The whole world could help me to be virtuous, instead of aiding and abetting my unending perversities.
When I am supposed to be concerned with Real Adult Things – the future of the farm, the bills, elections, schedules – and I instead I am lost in a masturbatory haze because some cocky Israeli buck has sauntered past brandishing his delectable armpits – pull the chain! pull the chain! Instantly I am soaked, shivering, and able to return my attention to the details of the lease agreement.
I’d need to wear some light fabric which would quickly dry (and nothing see thru, Porno Boy!) since I would presumably be dousing myself, or being doused, 18 to 36 times a day.
Or course it would hideously embarrassing, to walk around all day beneath a broad metal shower head. Constantly wetting myself! I’d be shivering, cold and wet. I might catch pneumonia. Yes -- but I would be good.
If this is for any reason impracticable, my next idea is a special ice pack I could wear in my shorts. Very very cold. But I fear this would not be sufficient. I think some small electric shock is also very much in order.
(This is the twelth and final essay in the series "What I Found When I Was Lost".)
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
Rivalry
They arrived on Soi 4 grinning, dressed as twins in white dress shirts with sleeves rolled and ties knotted halfway down their chests. (“Like Japanese schoolgirls!” they said.) They looked very much alike, except that one was gorgeous and the other just good enough, as if they were two versions of a single person -- one perfect and one botched.
I grinned back, and when the table beside mine was free, they came and talked to me. “It is our first time to Asia! We are having the most wonderful time! We are busy from 6am until midnight every day. We go sightseeing and shopping and then always to have a massage! We cannot believe how fast the time is going – in only two days we must return to Berlin!”
They approved heartily of everything in Bangkok – the food, the shopping, the massage – they liked everything but Chinatown. “It is very dirty! There are garbages in the street. Men spit! Men piss! We decided we never go to China.”
“Please feel my leg,” said the plain-looking man. He was not really so plain. He was actually quite good-looking. He looked plain because he was beside the gorgeous man -- who now invited me to feel his arm.
I approved heartily of both and believed that my night was, at last, headed in the right direction.
“So smooth!” said the plain-looking man. “Today we had tried the body polish. They polish you all over! Then they use powder. It smells so nice! Afterwards you feel so smooth. You do not sweat.” Then he teased the gorgeous one. “He often uses powder. And he is shaved everywhere. I mean, everywhere you can think of! He also wears a little makeup. And never once in his life is there a hair between his eyebrows. It is not allowed. Even in Asia he travels with mascara!”
This is the trouble I always have with threesomes. It’s hard to keep both guys happy – somebody always gets jealous. “Both of you are excellent,” I said. “How long have you been together?”
They laughed and waved their hands, as if to scatter my words in the air.
“No! No!” said the plain one. “We’ve always been together. We’re brothers.”
“I’m straight,” said the gorgeous brother. I checked to see if he was serious. His big brown eyes certainly looked earnest. But maybe it was just the mascara.
“He is so girly,” said the plain brother.
“I am a personal trainer in Berlin,” said the gorgeous brother. “My body is my asset.”
“He is the ultimate number one metrosexual. He is so girly!”
Over the next dozen or so beers they continued in much the same fashion. The gorgeous one gave me workout tips. (Three times a week is perfect. Twenty minutes cardio, then weights, then twenty minutes cardio again. And drink enough water!)
”He is so girly. So totally girly! I do not understand why he does not just give up and be gay already. His girlfriend is sometimes so bitchy. Sometimes no sex for one month. Always he must talk sweetly to her and give her massage any time she asks for it. I told him, you go gay, you can have sex every night!”
I ran my eyes over the beautiful brother. “You could have sex every hour. That’s the good part of being a gay guy. Also the bad part.”
“I love her,” said the gorgeous brother. “We have been together five years now.”
“So girly!” protested the plain brother, who had just broken up with his lover after seventeen years. They’d met when he was twenty. “All that time I could have had anyone I wanted! Now I am free and nobody wants me. Nobody! Everybody, all the time, they only want him.”
There was a short pause then, as sometimes happens when one has arrived at the heart of the matter.
I laughed and rubbed his back a little. “On this subject, sir, I am an authority.” I explained that my unfortunate parents had suffered diminishing returns when having children. Each son was two inches shorter, and less handsome, and duller than the one before. I was the youngest and had inherited nothing but the runt’s sharp-toothed determination. Every beautiful person in the world paraded right up to me to beg. “Please. Introduce me to your brother.”
It bothered me for a long time. Then it didn’t bother me anymore. I have an awkward stumbling soul – this Quasimodo shape of mine is its natural physical extension.
All right. Maybe it still bothers me a little.
“You’re fine,” I said. “You’re cute. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.” The gorgeous brother enthusiastically agreed. We were both insulting him. We knew it and couldn’t help ourselves. The plain brother sat there, drinking his beer, getting smaller and more homely by the minute.
The gorgeous brother continued to counsel me. He reminded me that there was no point to using supplements, except perhaps Creatine and salmon oil, but it was very important to always remain balanced. The plain brother had his hands all over me now, which the gorgeous brother politely ignored. He assured me there was nothing at all wrong with beer, except that it dehydrates one. Dehydrate was a very serious word in his vocabulary. For each pint of beer I must drink half a pint of water. Then I’d be all right.
The plain brother interrupted. “How much for you?”
“What?”
At last the gorgeous brother winced. “Stefan!”
“Come on. We are in Bangkok. Everything has its price.”
I smiled and pretended I’d understood nothing. Anyway it was absurd. The plain-looking brother was still better-looking than me. Nothing was wrong with him at all, in fact, except for the baby shit stink of self-loathing and need that rose off of him. How well I knew that smell, which became stronger the more one tried to eradicate it. It had never occurred to me to try to cover it with powder.
The gorgeous brother announced it was time for them to return to their hotel. The lights of the bar had already turned off. It was almost 2am and he still had to do his evening routine: remove his makeup, rinse off the powder, moisturize, care for his feet, calculate the number of beers he’d drunk and drink a half a pint of water for each. Maybe he’d do some stretches too, or even a few sit-ups. Alcohol is only empty calories.
It had never occurred to me before that it must be tiresome, too, to be the beautiful brother. To keep to routines and maintain your advantage. To be trailed always by a hungry brother who praised you and blamed you. Who begged you. Who loved you and desired you. Who hated you.
(Bangkok, 09.15.09)
Friday, September 04, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
Two Hustlers
I only ever saw him on the edge of places. I met him on the way to Dharamkot; I saw him on the far side of Bhagsu. I’d seen him at least twice before on the path around the temple. Each time he asked me to ‘help him out’ and when I refused – he was young and strong – he walked off muttering Jesus Christ. A young Indian guy, though his accent sounded like Newark. Yesterday I saw him at the monastery guesthouse where I’m staying – he was asleep behind the shower block, just barely out of the rain.
Today he was sitting on a bench beside the temple path. I sat down beside him. “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Listen to me, okay? Are you going to listen to me, man? Maybe you will not believe me, but I’m going to tell you anyway. My father’s name was Patrick Kevin O’Brien. Do you know him? He was a great man. I lost my parents very young; he took me in. He paid for me to go to a school. Very expensive school, man. The best. He was like a father to me.
“We came to this place for a holiday. I did not think I would stay here forever. One night he fell. He was a heavy drinker, see. Nobody would help me. I paid two coolies a thousand rupees to take him to the hospital. I went to the Embassy. Nobody would help him and he died. I went to my school to get my certificate but they wouldn’t give it. He didn’t pay the last six months you see. Give us fifteen thousand rupees, they said. But where could I get that kind of money? Are you listening to me man? Are you believing me?”
I was listening. Even if I didn’t want to, I listened. I made a promise years ago. I guess it is a kind of vow. I must listen, and buy him lunch, and never lay a finger on him. I could shake his hand, if he offered it. That’s all. I couldn’t ruffle his hair or touch his shoulder. I made a vow. Because I have been this kind of boy.
He was still good-looking in a sly, rakish way. He had early lines from his face from cheap cigarettes and whiskey. Looked at everything out the corners of his eyes.. He said he was 19. He was lying. I reckon he was 26 and figured 19 was the maximum age he could be and still win sympathy. I could imagine how beautiful he must have been a dozen years before, when he’d attracted the attention of globe-trotting do-gooder pedophiles. Men who paid for everything during the day, and thought highly of themselves -- and at night drank, and figured then that they were within their rights.
I am certain this was the case, though I can show no proof, except to say that I have been this kind of boy.
If you really want to fuck someone over, if you want to pulverize their integrity and reduce their dignity to a fine powder, if is enough to give them money unpredictably. You can destroy a person very efficiently this way. And you can assure yourself that all you ever did was help them.
“Another guy came. He was a German. He sent money for awhile and then I never heard from him anymore. One French man came. He got me a job with a non-profit. I had a staff of six people working under me. But he stopped sending money too and then they said I had to leave. Bad luck, man! Just bad luck!
“I started to work a job then. Because I speak English well. I worked in Bhagsu at a very fine hotel. I worked at the Himalayan Queen. And at the Simla Plaza Hotel. Finally I had to work at the Green Hotel. I did a good job, a very fine job, man, but every place let me go. Because they said I was a thief. I am not a thief. But everyone they say I am a thief. They are fucking liars, man. Do you believe me?”
Obviously, this guy was seriously twisted up. His morality was shot. Boundaries and integrity gone. How could he ever be good for anything now?
Of course, as the son of privilege, I can never truly understand this young man’s situation. After all, my rich father paid for college. Or said he would. Sometimes he did. Other times he changed his mind. If he felt I didn’t respect him enough. Mostly he forgot I existed. He was a very important man, see, and I was not among his priorities.
I was not a poor boy, but I reckon I understand something about benefactors. My father was a benefactor in the grand old style. He liked to be thanked -- he could not be thanked enough, and he enjoyed it very much – but most of all he liked to be begged. Of course we’d agreed to everything in advance, but he never once remembered that. Nothing ever came until I called, never less than three times, often six or eight, each time more desperate, until I’d say “this is the last day I’ll be eating” and then he’d send a check. I’d hurry to pay my bills. And then the check would bounce.
“Everybody knows me, man. And I know everybody. I saw you yesterday, man. You’re staying up at the monastery. I said hello to you, man. You didn’t hear me. You were sleeping in the room with the broken window.”
I reminded myself that I must always keep my valuables out of sight.
“Did I tell you, man? I’m a Christian. I had a dream last night. I dreamt of Jesus. I dreamed of Jesus and he told me I had to get out of here. If I could get to Bombay, I could just start over. All I need is a bus ticket, man. Can you help me out? Nobody helps me, man.”
“I totally agree with Jesus,” I said. “But all you’re getting from me is lunch.”
I gave him thirty rupees. He beamed, took off to buy a bottle of the vicious local liquor. I didn’t blame him. I’d want the same thing in his situation. I did want the same thing. Each day I practiced not drinking it.
Prayer beads in hand, I resumed my pious circumambulation of the temple. I reminded myself that I must warn the guest house. There is a thief in the area.
I only ever saw him on the edge of places. I met him on the way to Dharamkot; I saw him on the far side of Bhagsu. I’d seen him at least twice before on the path around the temple. Each time he asked me to ‘help him out’ and when I refused – he was young and strong – he walked off muttering Jesus Christ. A young Indian guy, though his accent sounded like Newark. Yesterday I saw him at the monastery guesthouse where I’m staying – he was asleep behind the shower block, just barely out of the rain.
Today he was sitting on a bench beside the temple path. I sat down beside him. “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Listen to me, okay? Are you going to listen to me, man? Maybe you will not believe me, but I’m going to tell you anyway. My father’s name was Patrick Kevin O’Brien. Do you know him? He was a great man. I lost my parents very young; he took me in. He paid for me to go to a school. Very expensive school, man. The best. He was like a father to me.
“We came to this place for a holiday. I did not think I would stay here forever. One night he fell. He was a heavy drinker, see. Nobody would help me. I paid two coolies a thousand rupees to take him to the hospital. I went to the Embassy. Nobody would help him and he died. I went to my school to get my certificate but they wouldn’t give it. He didn’t pay the last six months you see. Give us fifteen thousand rupees, they said. But where could I get that kind of money? Are you listening to me man? Are you believing me?”
I was listening. Even if I didn’t want to, I listened. I made a promise years ago. I guess it is a kind of vow. I must listen, and buy him lunch, and never lay a finger on him. I could shake his hand, if he offered it. That’s all. I couldn’t ruffle his hair or touch his shoulder. I made a vow. Because I have been this kind of boy.
He was still good-looking in a sly, rakish way. He had early lines from his face from cheap cigarettes and whiskey. Looked at everything out the corners of his eyes.. He said he was 19. He was lying. I reckon he was 26 and figured 19 was the maximum age he could be and still win sympathy. I could imagine how beautiful he must have been a dozen years before, when he’d attracted the attention of globe-trotting do-gooder pedophiles. Men who paid for everything during the day, and thought highly of themselves -- and at night drank, and figured then that they were within their rights.
I am certain this was the case, though I can show no proof, except to say that I have been this kind of boy.
If you really want to fuck someone over, if you want to pulverize their integrity and reduce their dignity to a fine powder, if is enough to give them money unpredictably. You can destroy a person very efficiently this way. And you can assure yourself that all you ever did was help them.
“Another guy came. He was a German. He sent money for awhile and then I never heard from him anymore. One French man came. He got me a job with a non-profit. I had a staff of six people working under me. But he stopped sending money too and then they said I had to leave. Bad luck, man! Just bad luck!
“I started to work a job then. Because I speak English well. I worked in Bhagsu at a very fine hotel. I worked at the Himalayan Queen. And at the Simla Plaza Hotel. Finally I had to work at the Green Hotel. I did a good job, a very fine job, man, but every place let me go. Because they said I was a thief. I am not a thief. But everyone they say I am a thief. They are fucking liars, man. Do you believe me?”
Obviously, this guy was seriously twisted up. His morality was shot. Boundaries and integrity gone. How could he ever be good for anything now?
Of course, as the son of privilege, I can never truly understand this young man’s situation. After all, my rich father paid for college. Or said he would. Sometimes he did. Other times he changed his mind. If he felt I didn’t respect him enough. Mostly he forgot I existed. He was a very important man, see, and I was not among his priorities.
I was not a poor boy, but I reckon I understand something about benefactors. My father was a benefactor in the grand old style. He liked to be thanked -- he could not be thanked enough, and he enjoyed it very much – but most of all he liked to be begged. Of course we’d agreed to everything in advance, but he never once remembered that. Nothing ever came until I called, never less than three times, often six or eight, each time more desperate, until I’d say “this is the last day I’ll be eating” and then he’d send a check. I’d hurry to pay my bills. And then the check would bounce.
“Everybody knows me, man. And I know everybody. I saw you yesterday, man. You’re staying up at the monastery. I said hello to you, man. You didn’t hear me. You were sleeping in the room with the broken window.”
I reminded myself that I must always keep my valuables out of sight.
“Did I tell you, man? I’m a Christian. I had a dream last night. I dreamt of Jesus. I dreamed of Jesus and he told me I had to get out of here. If I could get to Bombay, I could just start over. All I need is a bus ticket, man. Can you help me out? Nobody helps me, man.”
“I totally agree with Jesus,” I said. “But all you’re getting from me is lunch.”
I gave him thirty rupees. He beamed, took off to buy a bottle of the vicious local liquor. I didn’t blame him. I’d want the same thing in his situation. I did want the same thing. Each day I practiced not drinking it.
Prayer beads in hand, I resumed my pious circumambulation of the temple. I reminded myself that I must warn the guest house. There is a thief in the area.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
Chants (and Rants) from Zilnon Kagyeling
I wake to the sound of cymbals crashing in the gompa upstairs, a man chants softly in the room next to mine, and my eyes open on the walls of Room #5 here at Zilnon Kagyeling Monastery. Sky blue walls are spotted with mildew, one window is busted, the window above the door must be propped open with a bottle. The fog has slipped under the door and into bed with me. It feels like happiness – and it smells damp.
Wonderful, I think. Lucky. Why can’t I make good choices more often?
Years and years ago, I often stayed at Zilnon Kagyeling. The first time it was very basic: two buildings, a small gompa, a few guest rooms. At Losar (New Year) they invited us into the gompa for a ceremony and afterwards fed us beautifully. There was an African-American nun staying here then, in three year retreat. She glowered at us and said we should all go away. She knew the value of what we were being given. She didn’t reckon we deserved it.
When I returned a few years later, Zilnon Kagyeling seemed like just a big guesthouse, with a few monks attached. White walls, hot showers, and rules. A dozen years later, the place is in disrepair, and most of the tourists have left. Now it seems like a boarding house for wayward monks. I feel very much at home.
I should not say wayward; I should say independent. Most of the monks I’ve known have been Gelugpa – and those Gelugpa always seem to be on a schedule.
Strange things used to happen at Zilnon Kagyeling. There’d be shouting and windows broken, and the next day someone would be walking around muttering about black magic. These are Nyingmapa monks, remember -- you don’t want to mess with them. They understand the nature of reality and they know how to manipulate it. They have a reputation for being magicians. This monastery is said to use tantric rituals to influence the weather, to make seasons turn, to prevent hail storms, et cetera.
All I can say is -- if these monks are doing rituals to make the rain come -- they are succeeding big time. If I were a little more brave, I might go upstairs and see if I could talk them into fifteen minutes of sunshine. My laundry is about to dissolve.
I sit in my little room and recite the mantra of Guru Rinpoche, who brought the dharma to Tibet and is especially revered by the Nyingmapa. I visualize his bulging eyes, his red tricorn hat, and his moustache like Salvador Dali’s. He is warm and tender and tough. Guru Rinpoche bears down on me like a rainbow.
Hopefully the monks will peek in my busted window, spy me slouched on my meditation bench in front of a Guru Rinpoche postcard, and put in a good word for me with the dharmakaya. This despite the fact that delusion, anger and desire (desire!) continue in me unabated, and my Buddhist Report Card clearly reads: Shows No Sign of Improvement.
On the other hand, an entire month has gone by, and I haven’t once wished I was dead.
Lucky, lucky, lucky life. Allowed to travel, allowed to write and to read. And my husband. Absolutely first-rate. What are the chances that someone so adorable would also have such an excellent heart? Why can’t I celebrate all these things – and accept that Tokyo is the price of them? Why?
Return to the breath. This moment. Now. This is what I am taught. Here in India, how easy it is come back. The present moment accosts me. Now insists. Speeding Maruti van, smell of cow shit, shoeshine boy, an old monk stumbling down the road clutching a fresh head of lettuce. India issues me continuous invitations, in the form of warm brown eyes and uneven pavement.
Returning to the present moment in Tokyo, I find myself alone. Even on a crowded train. Especially then. Who wants to be present in Tokyo? Who wants to be aware? Look around the Namboku Line, look on the platform at Meguro. See how we clutch our phones and stare dead-eyed into space. Who needs to be aware in Tokyo? The train will arrive at 8:11, exactly as if did the day before.
We are encouraged not to be aware. Drugged cattle are more easily transported. Should you happen to regain consciousness while riding on the train, you will find yourself staring at an advertisement for beer.
All day in Tokyo I move like a capsule through a tube. Like a ghost. If Tokyo were a picture, the caption would read: Let’s pretend none of this is going on.
Hopefully in time there will be monuments and museums to honor Tokyoites, who sacrificed their lives, and their children’s lives, to comfort, efficiency and convenience. Please disagree, if you like. But I have been watching for seven years -- and I do not intend to play dumb now.
The city of Tokyo is devoted singlemindedly to testing a hypothesis. It’s the largest experiment in the history of the world. The MacArthur Hypothesis, let’s call it – that happiness is achieved through ever-increasing amounts of technology, isolation, predictability and consumption.
Supposedly this hypothesis is now being tested all around the world. This is completely unnecessary. We in Tokyo have tested it already. We have taken it very, very far. And the results are clear. Happiness does not result. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work!
Generally it is enough to disprove a hypothesis a dozen times, or a hundred. But we go on and on. We disprove it 30 million times. And then we try again. And we are shocked when it does not work. How about more? More speed! More consumption! No matter how much it hurts, we go on, destroying our environment and wasting our lives, trying again, no matter what it costs us, no matter how much it hurts, like an alcoholic who is already coughing up blood, like an aging sex addict waiting to get fucked in the sling.
How can these monks believe that they can change the weather by waving a bell in the air! Then again, maybe I’m not one to judge. I come from a city where women believe they will be fulfilled by handbag.
As for the spectacularly dumb things I’ve done in pursuit of happiness – well, just scroll down.
I don’t have the answers obviously. (Actually, I was hoping we could work out the details together.) All I know is -- it’s time for something else.
Write in with suggestions, won’t you?
In the meantime, I’ll be here kneeling in front of a postcard, and trying to let the rainbow bear down on me.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
An Unseemly Love : Notes On Returning to Delhi
(Delhi, Aug 17.09)
From this rooftop the main bazaar appears a ruin. Or at least, the mud has won -- the details of the surrender are still being worked out. Meanwhile a gang of boys (blue, pink, orange, red shirts) have climbed to the highest crumbling rooftop and they are flying kites.
People told me, when I said I hadn’t seen Delhi in eleven years, that it had changed immensely. I’d hardly recognize the place. I braced myself accordingly, put my nostalgia on a leash. Well, I’m sure it has changed immensely and that everyone, out of regard for me and my fine feelings, worked overtime to put it back almost exactly as it was before, the last time I was here.
Of course, the sacred word internet is painted on every other wall and Pahar Ganj now sports more ATMs than chaiwallahs. The TVs are all flat screen and everyone who appears to eat regularly, and some who do not, is holding a cellphone and talking to it continuously in a loud authoritative voice. But to me it still seems the same Delhi, with new and glittery earrings. The new Metro must be truly significant. The middle-class may now teleport from place to place.
I was told auto-rickshaws had recently been banned. Cycle-rickshaws were banned some time ago. The streets are full of both. Last night I stumbled out of my hotel at midnight to find no one but the omelet-wallah and a man feeding his two camels. “Dude.” I said to myself. “I told you I was not making this shit up!” Camels, of course, are also banned.
Obsessing about camels, about cows and monkeys and elephants, about saris and sadhus – this is what foreigners do in India. We patronize, we exoticize, and we miss the point entirely. I am a recalcitrant repeat offender, shackled as I have been for almost twenty years with an unseemly love for India. Foreigners should come, and spend, and then go home again. It’s wrong for us to come back again and again, and involve ourselves, and pretend to appreciate things that are obviously beyond our comprehension.
The main bazaar looks as it did in 1991: as if a skinny cycle rickshaw wallah, stiffed on a fare, might bring down the entire district with a single well-aimed kick. In the rain the road is bubbling vat of brown mud. Even the elegant young ladies, who ordinarily walk around all day without a spot, as if defended by the god of hygiene, stand now at the edge of the street, peering out, figuring in advance exactly where they will step.
To tell the truth, it is quieter than I remember. The hassling seems less intense. I used to say “No thank you” 150 times between the gate of the railway station and my hotel. Now one refusal is often enough – what India is this! There was a time when, if I was accosted by a dreamy green-eyed Kashmiri carpet salesman, I’d laugh and wave and start to run. They’d pursue you for half a mile – until you had no choice but to go with them, drink six cups of tea, book a houseboat and buy a carpet. Now the merchants hardly try. Perhaps it just doesn’t work anymore: these travelers seem to move in sealed containers.
I have a fear -- maybe I’m paranoid -- but I worry people will think I love India because it’s spiritual. Let me make clear: I love India because I love Indians and this is where they live.
So often – crossing the street, peering from a rooftop, crammed onto a bus – a stranger meets my eye and shrugs and grins, as if to say, “It’s a madhouse isn’t it? But you and I will keep our sense of humor.”
And there is the way that questions are asked in a way that includes the correct answer: “You come to my shop yes you would like to buy something.” Last night, when I gazed longingly toward a South Indian snack shop, the cook just beamed at me and said, “Yes!”
Or this: today I went the ITDC office to book a city tour. The amiable young man wrote a ticket and passing it to me said, “Sir, I am asking you seriously -- if this tour is no good -- that you will not complain to me, sir – and that you will not let small money come between us -- because this is only one chicken, sir -- and I must eat this chicken every day.”
Reduced to a small puddle of language joy, I gazed at him adoringly. (The above is only a ham-handed approximation of his freewheeling spontaneous improvisation.)
“That was beautiful,” I said. He proudly raised his hand and we high-fived each other.
This afternoon, sitting on the rooftop at Sam’s Café, watching the boys fly kites, I came upon a poem by Elizabeth Bishop titled “Arrival at Santos”. Here’s a little of it:
. . . oh tourist
is this how this country is going to answer you
and you immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?
Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.
(Delhi, Aug 17.09)
From this rooftop the main bazaar appears a ruin. Or at least, the mud has won -- the details of the surrender are still being worked out. Meanwhile a gang of boys (blue, pink, orange, red shirts) have climbed to the highest crumbling rooftop and they are flying kites.
People told me, when I said I hadn’t seen Delhi in eleven years, that it had changed immensely. I’d hardly recognize the place. I braced myself accordingly, put my nostalgia on a leash. Well, I’m sure it has changed immensely and that everyone, out of regard for me and my fine feelings, worked overtime to put it back almost exactly as it was before, the last time I was here.
Of course, the sacred word internet is painted on every other wall and Pahar Ganj now sports more ATMs than chaiwallahs. The TVs are all flat screen and everyone who appears to eat regularly, and some who do not, is holding a cellphone and talking to it continuously in a loud authoritative voice. But to me it still seems the same Delhi, with new and glittery earrings. The new Metro must be truly significant. The middle-class may now teleport from place to place.
I was told auto-rickshaws had recently been banned. Cycle-rickshaws were banned some time ago. The streets are full of both. Last night I stumbled out of my hotel at midnight to find no one but the omelet-wallah and a man feeding his two camels. “Dude.” I said to myself. “I told you I was not making this shit up!” Camels, of course, are also banned.
Obsessing about camels, about cows and monkeys and elephants, about saris and sadhus – this is what foreigners do in India. We patronize, we exoticize, and we miss the point entirely. I am a recalcitrant repeat offender, shackled as I have been for almost twenty years with an unseemly love for India. Foreigners should come, and spend, and then go home again. It’s wrong for us to come back again and again, and involve ourselves, and pretend to appreciate things that are obviously beyond our comprehension.
The main bazaar looks as it did in 1991: as if a skinny cycle rickshaw wallah, stiffed on a fare, might bring down the entire district with a single well-aimed kick. In the rain the road is bubbling vat of brown mud. Even the elegant young ladies, who ordinarily walk around all day without a spot, as if defended by the god of hygiene, stand now at the edge of the street, peering out, figuring in advance exactly where they will step.
To tell the truth, it is quieter than I remember. The hassling seems less intense. I used to say “No thank you” 150 times between the gate of the railway station and my hotel. Now one refusal is often enough – what India is this! There was a time when, if I was accosted by a dreamy green-eyed Kashmiri carpet salesman, I’d laugh and wave and start to run. They’d pursue you for half a mile – until you had no choice but to go with them, drink six cups of tea, book a houseboat and buy a carpet. Now the merchants hardly try. Perhaps it just doesn’t work anymore: these travelers seem to move in sealed containers.
I have a fear -- maybe I’m paranoid -- but I worry people will think I love India because it’s spiritual. Let me make clear: I love India because I love Indians and this is where they live.
So often – crossing the street, peering from a rooftop, crammed onto a bus – a stranger meets my eye and shrugs and grins, as if to say, “It’s a madhouse isn’t it? But you and I will keep our sense of humor.”
And there is the way that questions are asked in a way that includes the correct answer: “You come to my shop yes you would like to buy something.” Last night, when I gazed longingly toward a South Indian snack shop, the cook just beamed at me and said, “Yes!”
Or this: today I went the ITDC office to book a city tour. The amiable young man wrote a ticket and passing it to me said, “Sir, I am asking you seriously -- if this tour is no good -- that you will not complain to me, sir – and that you will not let small money come between us -- because this is only one chicken, sir -- and I must eat this chicken every day.”
Reduced to a small puddle of language joy, I gazed at him adoringly. (The above is only a ham-handed approximation of his freewheeling spontaneous improvisation.)
“That was beautiful,” I said. He proudly raised his hand and we high-fived each other.
This afternoon, sitting on the rooftop at Sam’s Café, watching the boys fly kites, I came upon a poem by Elizabeth Bishop titled “Arrival at Santos”. Here’s a little of it:
. . . oh tourist
is this how this country is going to answer you
and you immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?
Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.
What I Found When I Was Lost
Days (With No Proper Container)
(Delhi. Aug. 19. 09)
This rat is obviously on a schedule. Every morning there he is, beside my table at the Appetite bakery, every day at the same time. Whenever he appears, I stand up, as though he were a prominent politician or religious personage. The rat darts straight up the wall – to work presumably – and all at once the foreigners start to chatter with each other, as though the rat has given us permission to speak.
*
The French tourists always want their breakfast served in a particular order. Every morning they explain this carefully. Never once do they succeed. They get it when it’s ready. But they do not think this is right.
*
I wanted to see Delhi’s new metro, so I chose a destination at random from the map. How about Mansarovar Park? Isn’t Mansarovar a sacred lake in Tibet? Or am I making that up? And “park” is always an attractive word, bringing to mind trees full of delicate flowers, and bushes full of pent-up marauding homosexuals. I am always in favor of parks.
Delhi’s new metro is exuberantly modern, except for the lighting, a flickering skim-milk gray blue, and the manners, which Delhiites brought with them from the bus. How many times have I wailed in Tokyo, “Why can’t they just act human?”
Well. Now I have my answer. No one lets anyone out or in, everyone pushes and shoves. Men sit serenely beneath the green ‘Ladies Only’ sign and do not even think of giving up their seats. Half the passengers have just this moment received an extremely important call. They shout. In Tokyo a man hurls himself into a seat – and at once turns his face to ‘off’. In Delhi a man grabs a seat and looks around smug and exultant, like a toddler who has just now mastered the potty.
*
At Manosarovar Park station, I did not find a park, much less a lake. Instead I found a busy village beneath the elevated train tracks, beneath a cool gray concrete roof, beside towering elephantine pillars. The place was strangely reminiscent of the vast temple complexes at Trichy and Thanjavur, somber somehow, worshipful. At the bottom of this was a paved road lined with cycle-rickshaws, charpoys, mounds of trash mulching in brown heaps, stands selling betel in shiny packets, walls built from the dirt and burlap or blue vinyl ceilings. Extreme poverty beneath a cathedral ceiling. The women tended small fires in pits; the men sprawled on charpoys woven from silver rope. Every minute or so a lorry barreled down the street, blanketing everyone with another coat of dust. If the residents of this village ever decide they need a motto, they could always use Thoreau. “We do not ride upon the train. The train rides upon us.”
*
Back at Connaught Place, I can’t handle it anymore and so I choose an a/c restaurant at random, climb two flights of steps, and find myself surrounded by Indians in enormous black cowboy hats. Mexican food in Delhi? Apparently so. I order some nachos. The servers glance nervously at my clipboard, afraid that I am writing a review. I ought to put it away, but I have to keep writing because every time I look up I start to giggle: big black cowboy hats, black western shirts and pants, red kerchief knotted at the neck, black cowboy boots with silver buckles!
*
This young man with the purple shirt and the long stick, who walks the way I’ve seen a fisherman steer a boat in shallow water. When I see his soft eyes and fledging beard at the window, I leave the café and stand in the street with him. I give him bills not coins. The tourists at the Apetite Café are annoyed with me. I am making the problem worse. As it is, we must keep our eyes on our plates lest we see grubby children touching their fingers to their lips as we savor another bite of hot buttered croissant. I can ignore the children. This man, however, is my kinsmen. We share the same defect. The withered leg I hate. I strap my leg into the brace and shove it in an elevated shoe. And I walk. He begs in the Main Bazaar; his dangling dead foot is his qualification. I see that he is beautiful -- and whole. We are brothers. I want to hold his face in my hands and kiss him.
*
If they ask,
I will say
I make
the days
experiments.
From these experiments, I make days.
*
An old woman in a soiled white dress pushes open the glass door and enters Café Coffee Day. “Good morning,” she addresses the room, as though she were a teacher and we were all assembled for class. “Is there going to be a sandwich today? Is there going to be coffee? I certainly hope so.” The old woman is smiling, her eyes are bright blue. She’s British, I think. Her diction is impeccable and her voice is as smooth as glass. She advances to the counter. She speaks but doesn’t look at anyone, as if she knows we are there but cannot see us. As if we are ghosts.
“I have, in my bag, water from a holy spring in Burma. It is absolutely precious but I have no proper container for it.” She waits at the counter, but she does not receive a coffee or a sandwich. The young Indian woman at the counter ignores her, sits there looking bored.
The old woman is now standing in the center of the room. “This woman does not want to be promoted. That is why she does not give me a sandwich. I have been robbed of everything and I am forced to beg. Which is a tradition in this country.” She speaks very carefully, as if this were a recitation and she has to get it perfectly right. The poems of Emily Dickinson would be ideal for this woman in a white dress, for this voice which is sweet and pure and entirely unnerving.
“She has been asked to feed me. The President of India asked all these restaurants to feed me. But she does not. Because she does not want to be promoted.” She walks back toward the glass door. “I am sorry but I cannot hear anything. Because of hypnotic suggestion that has been absolutely beautfully done. So I am very sorry but I cannot hear a word you say.”
When I paid my bill, I asked the lady at the counter how long the old woman had been coming to beg. “Oh it’s been about a year now.” Her voice was flat and bored. “She comes in every day.”
(Delhi. Aug. 19. 09)
This rat is obviously on a schedule. Every morning there he is, beside my table at the Appetite bakery, every day at the same time. Whenever he appears, I stand up, as though he were a prominent politician or religious personage. The rat darts straight up the wall – to work presumably – and all at once the foreigners start to chatter with each other, as though the rat has given us permission to speak.
*
The French tourists always want their breakfast served in a particular order. Every morning they explain this carefully. Never once do they succeed. They get it when it’s ready. But they do not think this is right.
*
I wanted to see Delhi’s new metro, so I chose a destination at random from the map. How about Mansarovar Park? Isn’t Mansarovar a sacred lake in Tibet? Or am I making that up? And “park” is always an attractive word, bringing to mind trees full of delicate flowers, and bushes full of pent-up marauding homosexuals. I am always in favor of parks.
Delhi’s new metro is exuberantly modern, except for the lighting, a flickering skim-milk gray blue, and the manners, which Delhiites brought with them from the bus. How many times have I wailed in Tokyo, “Why can’t they just act human?”
Well. Now I have my answer. No one lets anyone out or in, everyone pushes and shoves. Men sit serenely beneath the green ‘Ladies Only’ sign and do not even think of giving up their seats. Half the passengers have just this moment received an extremely important call. They shout. In Tokyo a man hurls himself into a seat – and at once turns his face to ‘off’. In Delhi a man grabs a seat and looks around smug and exultant, like a toddler who has just now mastered the potty.
*
At Manosarovar Park station, I did not find a park, much less a lake. Instead I found a busy village beneath the elevated train tracks, beneath a cool gray concrete roof, beside towering elephantine pillars. The place was strangely reminiscent of the vast temple complexes at Trichy and Thanjavur, somber somehow, worshipful. At the bottom of this was a paved road lined with cycle-rickshaws, charpoys, mounds of trash mulching in brown heaps, stands selling betel in shiny packets, walls built from the dirt and burlap or blue vinyl ceilings. Extreme poverty beneath a cathedral ceiling. The women tended small fires in pits; the men sprawled on charpoys woven from silver rope. Every minute or so a lorry barreled down the street, blanketing everyone with another coat of dust. If the residents of this village ever decide they need a motto, they could always use Thoreau. “We do not ride upon the train. The train rides upon us.”
*
Back at Connaught Place, I can’t handle it anymore and so I choose an a/c restaurant at random, climb two flights of steps, and find myself surrounded by Indians in enormous black cowboy hats. Mexican food in Delhi? Apparently so. I order some nachos. The servers glance nervously at my clipboard, afraid that I am writing a review. I ought to put it away, but I have to keep writing because every time I look up I start to giggle: big black cowboy hats, black western shirts and pants, red kerchief knotted at the neck, black cowboy boots with silver buckles!
*
This young man with the purple shirt and the long stick, who walks the way I’ve seen a fisherman steer a boat in shallow water. When I see his soft eyes and fledging beard at the window, I leave the café and stand in the street with him. I give him bills not coins. The tourists at the Apetite Café are annoyed with me. I am making the problem worse. As it is, we must keep our eyes on our plates lest we see grubby children touching their fingers to their lips as we savor another bite of hot buttered croissant. I can ignore the children. This man, however, is my kinsmen. We share the same defect. The withered leg I hate. I strap my leg into the brace and shove it in an elevated shoe. And I walk. He begs in the Main Bazaar; his dangling dead foot is his qualification. I see that he is beautiful -- and whole. We are brothers. I want to hold his face in my hands and kiss him.
*
If they ask,
I will say
I make
the days
experiments.
From these experiments, I make days.
*
An old woman in a soiled white dress pushes open the glass door and enters Café Coffee Day. “Good morning,” she addresses the room, as though she were a teacher and we were all assembled for class. “Is there going to be a sandwich today? Is there going to be coffee? I certainly hope so.” The old woman is smiling, her eyes are bright blue. She’s British, I think. Her diction is impeccable and her voice is as smooth as glass. She advances to the counter. She speaks but doesn’t look at anyone, as if she knows we are there but cannot see us. As if we are ghosts.
“I have, in my bag, water from a holy spring in Burma. It is absolutely precious but I have no proper container for it.” She waits at the counter, but she does not receive a coffee or a sandwich. The young Indian woman at the counter ignores her, sits there looking bored.
The old woman is now standing in the center of the room. “This woman does not want to be promoted. That is why she does not give me a sandwich. I have been robbed of everything and I am forced to beg. Which is a tradition in this country.” She speaks very carefully, as if this were a recitation and she has to get it perfectly right. The poems of Emily Dickinson would be ideal for this woman in a white dress, for this voice which is sweet and pure and entirely unnerving.
“She has been asked to feed me. The President of India asked all these restaurants to feed me. But she does not. Because she does not want to be promoted.” She walks back toward the glass door. “I am sorry but I cannot hear anything. Because of hypnotic suggestion that has been absolutely beautfully done. So I am very sorry but I cannot hear a word you say.”
When I paid my bill, I asked the lady at the counter how long the old woman had been coming to beg. “Oh it’s been about a year now.” Her voice was flat and bored. “She comes in every day.”
Saturday, August 15, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
Breakfast at the Mali Restaurant
When I was 24 I threw myself in front of a train. Naturally, my timing and my aim were off. Sissy boy. Couldn’t hit a baseball, couldn’t throw a punch, couldn’t hit a Light Rail train -- not even with myself.
The Light Rail was new in Denver -- and turned out to have excellent brakes. The conductor stopped the train and cussed me out. “What is it you are trying to do?” Frankly, it was more embarrassing than anything else. I stumbled back to my friend’s house and didn’t tell anyone. My clothes were soaked. I said I’d fallen in the snow. As suicides go, it wasn’t much, but, hey, it was an attempt.
The next day I decided that, since I was going to kill myself, I might as well go back to India first. I’d been going to India since I was 18, prostrating to swamis and lamas, reading novels, getting dysentery, and cruising the bamboo at Cubbon Park. I stumbled off to India and got hooked back into life. Whatever works, right?
More than a dozen years passed, several different lives and countries, but, despite setting records for sustained neuroses, I never seriously considered killing myself again – until about two weeks ago.
I live in Tokyo now, where the trains are very fast and doubtless would have done the trick, but thankfully I was trying to be modern, also painless, and so I googled ‘Ativan lethal dose’.
Do you know what you get when you do that? You get 15,000 online dealers trying to sell you Ativan. Which pretty much extinguishes any warm and fuzzy Ronald Reagan- type feelings I have toward capitalism. On the plus side, there were so many budding capitalists that it was impossible to find the information I was looking for.
When I am lost to myself, when the demons have spirited me away, I sit in the corner drinking beer, writing little notes to myself on scraps of paper. Two weeks ago, the morning after a hopeless night, while tidying up the beer cans and the scraps, I found a little note that read: I’m not going to kill myself because I want to eat breakfast again at the Mali Restaurant.
“Dude.” I said to myself. “Nice idea.”
I bought a one way ticket to Bangkok and here I am, eating rice porridge with pork, suspended in a humid cloud of fish sauce, green onions and monoxide, sitting outside at the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok.
Now that my insanity has been firmly established, I would like to tell you my mystic theory of restaurants. I believe in soul mates basically. Not for romance, but for dining out. Each soul receives, at conception, the name of a restaurant and that restaurant is the soul’s destiny, where the soul and the stomach are perfectly satisfied. (It’s better if you pronounce this in your best Osho-faux guru accent.) For some souls it might be a sushi bar, for others a hot dog stand on a sunny corner. Some tragic souls never seek out their restaurant -- they keep going back to Panda Express at the Food Court.
I’ll leave it to Hollywood to work out all the dramatic implications.
Anyway, the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok is the restaurant of my soul, the very best restaurant in the world. The Mali Restaurant has excellent food, of course, Thai and Western both, all very reasonably priced. Inside it’s dark and cozy with cushions and photos and bric-a-brac. Outside there’s an intricate wooden verandah that’s glorious if you don’t mind the street noise. The management and the waitstaff greet you tenderly, as if your mother had called ahead and asked that they be especially sweet to you.
However I suspect that the Mali Restaurant’s principal attraction for me is its strange and occult power, a bit of benevolent witchcraft. At the Mali Restaurant it is impossible to feel afraid or hopeless.
I have fled to the Mali in the thick of a panic attack, or after a day at the baths when I could have torn out my eyes from self-loathing. Demons can’t get inside the door. Mine can’t anyway. I can’t explain it otherwise.
Naturally I have my theories about this.
The Mali Restaurant is run by two men, a couple, one American and one Thai. Of course they are ordinary men, with complaints, with aches and pains. They are ordinary and at the same time I think it can also be said that they are beautiful experiments in human goodness. Experiments may have unforeseen peripheral effects.
The American was a soldier in Vietnam and, from what I’ve overheard, is haunted still. I heard him say once that he keeps his room smelling like a French whorehouse so that the smell of corpses won’t revisit him. It could well be that, in constructing a refuge from his own fear, he has created a safe haven for everyone.
The other man, the Thai, has a compulsion for preserving life. At the market he will buy frogs and even goats to save them from being slaughtered. Eavesdropping as I ladle up rice soup with pork, I note that he does not speak like someone who woke up and decided to be virtuous, but rather like a man who cannot help himself. He cares especially for dogs. He saves dogs the way other men drink.
The leftovers from the Mali -- the unfinished lunches of embassy staff, the leavings of sex tourists with too big eyes -- all go to stray dogs. But it goes much further than this.
Driving one night three years ago, he saw ahead of him a truck full of dogs. And he knew these dogs had been kidnapped and were being taken up North where they would be slaughtered and served in a restaurant.
Very upsetting, isn’t it? I would feel outraged if I saw such a thing. And I could also be relied upon to not do a damn thing.
From what I understand, he forced the truck to the side of the road, threatened the kidnappers, convinced them that he was a legal authority, and took possession of the dogs. A happy hijacking, in other words. Robin Hood for dogs.
And he brought the dogs all home. Dozens and dozens of dogs. Thankfully the managers of the Mali have some land of their own. He now operates a dog shelter and works to stop dog trafficking.
Courage on such a scale is bound to have effects. Don’t you think? Unintended, peripheral effects. By which I mean to say that I am just another of the dogs. Another stray, or house pet that got lost. A lucky dog rescued at random on the way to its destruction, who instead winds up eating breakfast at the Mali Restaurant.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
Cheerful, Lucky, Lost
I’m no slave to fashion, but I like to think I do all right. Understated, masculine – i.e. undershirt and muscles showing. Overall I think I’m just as cool as any guy could be who carries a clipboard everywhere he goes.
No use for me is found and so I wander taking notes. Each page dated, printed neatly, labelled Hinduism, Ginsberg, Winesburg, Ecology. Notes on the streets of Bangkok, on the round-faced woman selling chicken with rice, hair tucked into her white cap beneath the tattered green umbrella. Ice melts from the cart of the melon vendor and drips beside the bicycle wheels. The British tourists wear plaid shorts, have awe-inspiring calves. I spend too much time looking down, I know.
If anyone looks at me I duck, bow, and smile wincing with vast agonized longing. Quite a little production, really. Then I resume taking notes.
The visiting Italian ladies have blonde-streaked hair and look always as if they are squinting at something bright – and suspicious.
There is a certain cheerful kind of being lost that, loneliness and small anxiety notwithstanding, seems an enormous privilege. All day I wander the street, eating noodle soup, chugging milk on the stoop of Family Mart, the one near Soi Twilight (or Soi Boy) that’s always full of spiky-haired young men in tiny powder blue shorts and white tanktops who shiver in the a/c as they wait to buy hair gel or a Coca-Cola.
Wandering then down the road to the Sri Mariamma Temple where the goddess is taking her afternoon siesta behind the curtain and the brahmins wake up just long enough to apply tilak and receive donations. I love this temple because everyone comes here – Thai, Chinese, Indian, European – to offer a tray with a coconut, a garland of marigolds and a carton of milk. No one notices one more foreigner. Even a few Theravadin monks are here, not bowing to anything but taking a good long look.
I do not believe in anything – all hokum as far as I’m concerned – but when the curtain opens to reveal the goddess I prostrate along with the others, then slip a 100 baht to Lord Venkateshwara, whose job it is to preserve the universe. Think about it: a job more hopeless than Obama’s. Naturally, I check in with Ganesha, who handles beginnings and writers. I do not believe in anything. I hold out some slim hope that I may yet be found mistaken.
At the travel agent nearest the temple I stop in and speak with ‘Rani’, who clearly views her size as one more reason to dress impeccably. Her English is precise and aristocratic, her tone world-weary. She has the quality I look for in a travel agent: an air of being in charge of the universe. Money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy plane tickets and that is close enough. In three minutes she has booked me a one-way ticket to my own heart.
Back up the road to Soi Twilight, where it is twilight now: the boys are just arriving, playing pool, and laughing at each other. Here at Dick’s Café, a few johns are already in attendance too, red-faced men who smoke staring at the ground and glower at everyone except the boy across the way – last night’s boy or last week’s boy and maybe tonight’s boy as well – who waves, blows kisses and makes funny faces.
The johns. Trim well-moisturized well-to-do white men with angry puckered faces: the products of forty years of gay liberation. A liberation that turned out to be primarily a training in consumption: lube, poppers, draperies, gym memberships, vacations. Most of all, we consume each other.
Who has the manifesto for some other path? Who is calling us away from gaydar and manhunt, from our voracious pornographic cave? Where are our mentors? I fear that we have killed them off with the meth, or the bare-backing craze, or else trained them for nothing better than pouty-faced old age, buying boys on Soi Twilight.
Squinting beneath the color lights, I take notes and dream along with Bill Morgan’s new biography of Ginsberg: I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. It’s a great book -- though I fear it feeds my delusions of poetic grandeur. Most of all it makes me yearn for mentors and community. Some company, please.
Most of all, I love to read of William Carlos Williams and his open-hearted generosity even in broken-down old age. By 1956 Williams was going blind; Allen had to read his poems to him. Allen even showed up one night with his dad and Corso, Orlovsky and Kerouac. They got drunk and no doubt wore out their welcome with Mrs. Williams. Still, it appears the good doctor was charmed by them and wanted to hear what they had to say. William Carlos Williams, I love you.
Despite my obvious deficit in beliefs, purposes and social graces, tonight it is enough to be a quivering and observant fool, a fool half-hidden by the potted palm in the corner of Dick’s Café, keeping an eye on the johns and the boys in powder blue shorts, taking notes perpetually on my fool’s clipboard.
I’m no slave to fashion, but I like to think I do all right. Understated, masculine – i.e. undershirt and muscles showing. Overall I think I’m just as cool as any guy could be who carries a clipboard everywhere he goes.
No use for me is found and so I wander taking notes. Each page dated, printed neatly, labelled Hinduism, Ginsberg, Winesburg, Ecology. Notes on the streets of Bangkok, on the round-faced woman selling chicken with rice, hair tucked into her white cap beneath the tattered green umbrella. Ice melts from the cart of the melon vendor and drips beside the bicycle wheels. The British tourists wear plaid shorts, have awe-inspiring calves. I spend too much time looking down, I know.
If anyone looks at me I duck, bow, and smile wincing with vast agonized longing. Quite a little production, really. Then I resume taking notes.
The visiting Italian ladies have blonde-streaked hair and look always as if they are squinting at something bright – and suspicious.
There is a certain cheerful kind of being lost that, loneliness and small anxiety notwithstanding, seems an enormous privilege. All day I wander the street, eating noodle soup, chugging milk on the stoop of Family Mart, the one near Soi Twilight (or Soi Boy) that’s always full of spiky-haired young men in tiny powder blue shorts and white tanktops who shiver in the a/c as they wait to buy hair gel or a Coca-Cola.
Wandering then down the road to the Sri Mariamma Temple where the goddess is taking her afternoon siesta behind the curtain and the brahmins wake up just long enough to apply tilak and receive donations. I love this temple because everyone comes here – Thai, Chinese, Indian, European – to offer a tray with a coconut, a garland of marigolds and a carton of milk. No one notices one more foreigner. Even a few Theravadin monks are here, not bowing to anything but taking a good long look.
I do not believe in anything – all hokum as far as I’m concerned – but when the curtain opens to reveal the goddess I prostrate along with the others, then slip a 100 baht to Lord Venkateshwara, whose job it is to preserve the universe. Think about it: a job more hopeless than Obama’s. Naturally, I check in with Ganesha, who handles beginnings and writers. I do not believe in anything. I hold out some slim hope that I may yet be found mistaken.
At the travel agent nearest the temple I stop in and speak with ‘Rani’, who clearly views her size as one more reason to dress impeccably. Her English is precise and aristocratic, her tone world-weary. She has the quality I look for in a travel agent: an air of being in charge of the universe. Money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy plane tickets and that is close enough. In three minutes she has booked me a one-way ticket to my own heart.
Back up the road to Soi Twilight, where it is twilight now: the boys are just arriving, playing pool, and laughing at each other. Here at Dick’s Café, a few johns are already in attendance too, red-faced men who smoke staring at the ground and glower at everyone except the boy across the way – last night’s boy or last week’s boy and maybe tonight’s boy as well – who waves, blows kisses and makes funny faces.
The johns. Trim well-moisturized well-to-do white men with angry puckered faces: the products of forty years of gay liberation. A liberation that turned out to be primarily a training in consumption: lube, poppers, draperies, gym memberships, vacations. Most of all, we consume each other.
Who has the manifesto for some other path? Who is calling us away from gaydar and manhunt, from our voracious pornographic cave? Where are our mentors? I fear that we have killed them off with the meth, or the bare-backing craze, or else trained them for nothing better than pouty-faced old age, buying boys on Soi Twilight.
Squinting beneath the color lights, I take notes and dream along with Bill Morgan’s new biography of Ginsberg: I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. It’s a great book -- though I fear it feeds my delusions of poetic grandeur. Most of all it makes me yearn for mentors and community. Some company, please.
Most of all, I love to read of William Carlos Williams and his open-hearted generosity even in broken-down old age. By 1956 Williams was going blind; Allen had to read his poems to him. Allen even showed up one night with his dad and Corso, Orlovsky and Kerouac. They got drunk and no doubt wore out their welcome with Mrs. Williams. Still, it appears the good doctor was charmed by them and wanted to hear what they had to say. William Carlos Williams, I love you.
Despite my obvious deficit in beliefs, purposes and social graces, tonight it is enough to be a quivering and observant fool, a fool half-hidden by the potted palm in the corner of Dick’s Café, keeping an eye on the johns and the boys in powder blue shorts, taking notes perpetually on my fool’s clipboard.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
What I Found When I Was Lost
Return of Color
I prayed to God, God couldn’t be bothered. The Buddha remained Gone Beyond. Who showed up was Clarice Lispector (died, Brazil, 1977), wrapped in a shawl the green of dragonflies, looking utterly ferocious. She had no tolerance for self-pity. She took me by the wrist. She used her nails. The door was flung open. She led me out of the house, away from the alcohol and the collection of benzodapines. "You are going to the park," she said.
Ten days later, out the door of the Malaysia Hotel. The taxi cabs are flamingo pink, the motorbike men wear orange vests and the vendors blue caps. Everywhere death has not been nailed down there is green. I clutch the door frame. The guard (pink shirt!) smiles encouragement. Sweet Mary Mother of God: someone has turned on the color.
Depression is such a misleading word I wonder if the government isn’t somehow behind it. “Panicked frenzy of self-loathing” is somewhat more accurate, but I prefer to vote with tradition and say demons. And I do not believe in demons either – but try telling that to them.
The demons steal away the color, the world goes out of reach – it can be bumped against, it cannot be touched. What remains is a flabby putrified fly-swarmed maggoty self. The easiest test for depression is with a mirror: check for a corpse. (This also works the other way. Occasionally I think I’m just adorable. And this is a very dangerous sign.)
The demons are not impressed by prayer. They like to see me beg and bang my head against the floor. The demons like liquor and adore psychiatry. In Tokyo it is possible for them to get a visa to stay almost indefinitely.
Nonetheless a moment comes when one is released. Fuck if I know why. There is not a moment when the guard opens the door and says that one is free to go. More like the kidnappers throw you me the car. I find myself suddenly out on the street and still in prison clothes.
And there is a breeze, an actual breeze, which touches your skin and is not off-limits to you. There is a space around things. The sky goes up and up. Men are wearing pants that don’t hide much.
Almost immediately I become busy. That’s all right: the nice thing about being functional is you can do things. Life is underway and demands attention. Oh, hello, I’m in Thailand! Oh goodness gracious, I’m married aren’t I?
Looking around me now, I walk a little faster. This is no permanent reprieve. This open window may hover for a month, or be gone in an hour. There are repairs that need to be made, windows to be taped, books to read and suicide notes to burn. (Suicide notes must be written afresh for each occasion: this is how one buys time.)
Above all, there are people to be loved, people with sharp voices or curly hair, people smelling of shampoo and sweat and curry. People with problems of their own. Actual people with hands to be held, with real mouths and real ears to hear as you walk around together exclaiming, “My god, look at the colors!”
I prayed to God, God couldn’t be bothered. The Buddha remained Gone Beyond. Who showed up was Clarice Lispector (died, Brazil, 1977), wrapped in a shawl the green of dragonflies, looking utterly ferocious. She had no tolerance for self-pity. She took me by the wrist. She used her nails. The door was flung open. She led me out of the house, away from the alcohol and the collection of benzodapines. "You are going to the park," she said.
Ten days later, out the door of the Malaysia Hotel. The taxi cabs are flamingo pink, the motorbike men wear orange vests and the vendors blue caps. Everywhere death has not been nailed down there is green. I clutch the door frame. The guard (pink shirt!) smiles encouragement. Sweet Mary Mother of God: someone has turned on the color.
Depression is such a misleading word I wonder if the government isn’t somehow behind it. “Panicked frenzy of self-loathing” is somewhat more accurate, but I prefer to vote with tradition and say demons. And I do not believe in demons either – but try telling that to them.
The demons steal away the color, the world goes out of reach – it can be bumped against, it cannot be touched. What remains is a flabby putrified fly-swarmed maggoty self. The easiest test for depression is with a mirror: check for a corpse. (This also works the other way. Occasionally I think I’m just adorable. And this is a very dangerous sign.)
The demons are not impressed by prayer. They like to see me beg and bang my head against the floor. The demons like liquor and adore psychiatry. In Tokyo it is possible for them to get a visa to stay almost indefinitely.
Nonetheless a moment comes when one is released. Fuck if I know why. There is not a moment when the guard opens the door and says that one is free to go. More like the kidnappers throw you me the car. I find myself suddenly out on the street and still in prison clothes.
And there is a breeze, an actual breeze, which touches your skin and is not off-limits to you. There is a space around things. The sky goes up and up. Men are wearing pants that don’t hide much.
Almost immediately I become busy. That’s all right: the nice thing about being functional is you can do things. Life is underway and demands attention. Oh, hello, I’m in Thailand! Oh goodness gracious, I’m married aren’t I?
Looking around me now, I walk a little faster. This is no permanent reprieve. This open window may hover for a month, or be gone in an hour. There are repairs that need to be made, windows to be taped, books to read and suicide notes to burn. (Suicide notes must be written afresh for each occasion: this is how one buys time.)
Above all, there are people to be loved, people with sharp voices or curly hair, people smelling of shampoo and sweat and curry. People with problems of their own. Actual people with hands to be held, with real mouths and real ears to hear as you walk around together exclaiming, “My god, look at the colors!”
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