by Steven Sills
Chapter 8
The Whys and wherefores of Becoming a God or Some Other Potentate
But the war that is waged in the mind no doubt has the same depredation, the same devastation, as that on the outside; and, of course the sublimated war within, as without, is just a less disheveled, less savage, and a more inconspicuous form of predation, evolved and extolled as it is. There are victors and vanquished in the inner war too just as in any adventitious conflict, but here the only casualties are ideas, a stable sense of reality, and peace of mind.
“You haven’t communed with me in days,” said an androgynous gecko appearing out of miasma and mist. It had the hairstyle of Luklawan and wore a diminutive form of her jewelry, but with the face of Aus and his more masculine voice. It was donning, of course, its extra petite green leather and it was mostly of her. “You haven’t written to me in your treatise, either.”
“I was happy not to write.”
“Of course you were. To lose yourself in the clutter and cacophony of other presences is always satisfying, and not just to the base who view it as a preeminent accomplishment, but to the intellectual as well, until eventually, inevitably with such dull companions, he becomes quite lonely for himself once again.”
“Lonely for the drugs.”
“I don’t think so. To commune within intelligibly enough to be able to transcribe what is glimpsed therein is hardly easy, and pitifully, you seem to need your crutches. If only you were to look at Jusepe de Ribera’s painting, ‘The Clubfooted Boy,’42 so intensely that you became him, then you would be going places, maybe.”
“People gravitate to those essences that look most real. That is my real reason for ridding myself of you and this damnable treatise—or at least trying, before returning to them again.”
“Those less real to themselves certainly do, for sure. “
“It’s real. It’s material form.”
“It’s sound and fury43 like the droning of loud machinery in a factory, and if only people were less social and more in tune with reality they would know this. But it is hard for a given man to overcome what senses and protective instinct tell him is true especially as the herd mentality is pleasant on many levels and aloneness is pleasant on several grounds and unpleasant on myriad ones.”
“Tangible bodies.”
“Carousing and indiscriminate once again? Well, as your nuptial vows did not go beyond death, and spirits can hardly afford lawyers, I’ll hardly sue you for divorce on grounds of adultery or seek alimony for that matter—money is no good to me in this less less-real state; but there is one thing I must say. Of these bodies that you are chasing, if you are in fact chasing them, material form stalking the material, when as you say, unable to find absolute truth, whatever particular gender they happen to be nowadays, they are less substantial than the ideas that you are pounding your head to procure. Perhaps to come to this awareness you should consciously think of each and every young thing you want to screw as the true skeleton that he or she will ultimately become. You might as well exhume bones and get your rocks off that way. It is certainly less time consuming than the chase of skittering skeletons on the ground.”
“You certainly have a rather wry and insipid way of putting things.”
“Yes, it isn’t pleasant, I admit. Realism never is; but nonetheless, you should devote a chapter to delusions. Maybe more. What else is there?”
“What good does it do to open one’s eyes let alone try to awaken others when sustenance of this species, or any other, is predicated on romanticism; and with too much reality staring one in the face he might as well give into leanings toward ending it all now rather than later. Philosophy just gets rid of the tethers allowing the dog to run amuck in traffic and get hit by a car.”
“Well, you have to choose: to really know as intelligent beings, gods in a sense, absorbing all facts of accidental ontological reality, pleasant or nigh, or to feign knowing so as to not have to think of yourselves as the animals that you truly are with the same 23000 genes no different than most animals.44Anyhow, for one who says that God ought to clean the world in a nice rain of nuclear missiles I cannot see how you can oppose cutting the tethers and allowing the dogs of men to get smashed in traffic.”
To impede ballots from being transferred out of an existing warehouse in the Laksri district of Bangkok one security guard for the yellows, dubbed the popcorn gunner as after shooting his weapon he hid it in a sack of popcorn, fired into the crowds that were trying to safeguard this transfer. A seventy year old man is now paralyzed after a bullet grazed across his spine. All of this was done so that this feral maniac, this true essence of the unrestrained brute of man, might gain his three hundred baht a day plus living expenses and a sense of famed manhood from the trophy of his hunt—his photograph in the Bangkok Post showing a smug, complacent grin of one basking in the spotlight, as though, in his mind, this attention was the fulfillment of the supreme purpose of his existence that went beyond the pittance usually granted for his sustenance.
To keep Aus from having more paralyzing nightmares of the skirmishes now also in other parts of the city, and the motorcyclist he saw hit by a taxi, my soothing words belie that truth I know which is that society is one more form of predation. And yet he, sentient creature, surely feels it as acutely as one would sense the tenuous nature of existence when descrying a frog flattened onto the pavement from the force and impetus that drives money and human behavior. And so I had to tolerate him clamped around me all night, so tight that it felt like his two arms were the shackles of the eight arms of an octopus. Still, as I yearned for extrication from being used as his pillow, and successfully fought to gain it for a short time before compassion shot me once again and I succumbed to this sadness I feel for all things, there was something satisfying about it as well. It is hard to explain, but is part of myriad inherent paradoxes that are in this reflective juggernaut of man, this godly brute, this empathic bulldozer.
Sleeping on the bed alone now, he is fairly calm; but his thoughts even in peaceful days are easily roiled, and his heart leadened by ghost stories from radio and television programs in particular that are imbibed amongst such a superstitious people, as nearly all of us Thais are, and like everything, propagated by the mass media for financial gain. It is one more venal aspect of a capitalistic democracy that does not enrich society but caters to the lowest common denominator of human fears of the vicissitudes of life that embodies mortality and loss, and although it does not make that superstition, it exacerbates it. Upon getting a rotten tooth extracted recently, he had nightmares as well. In one that he recalled and told me about some type of feral force was dismembering him while medical practitioners smiled from the bleachers of the stadium.
The whys and wherefores of allowing this man-child to stay with me are inscrutable, especially as this is the furthest thing from my wishes, something that I do not want which is now commandeering my life; but, on a low level, perhaps, or even higher if I were to admit it outright, I seem to be doing it in part to have something to nurture, innocence, a meaning that is not contained in the ruthless striving for acquisition, and ever seeking a larger share from the common pot which, if too large, denies others of that which would allow for their sustenance. Creatures born to seek survival and ease at all cost, there must be even more selfish reasons for any benevolence45. I do not know. However, with humans so easily disoriented without solid links, desperate to make themselves real in each other, and relationships being merely the mixed adumbration of two easily changeable and even perishable beings, how can one not empathize with the human plight? So there, several days after meeting him, this neighbor I said hello to in passing, he appeared at my door beaten up by his sister’s boyfriend, vomiting beer he had ingested hours earlier, apologetic and crying, his perennial nervousness and diffidence so puissant that it could only have no impact on the most inured an
d pachydermatous.
If my action of allowing him to stay here was good, it did not arise from my own goodness, begrudging and reluctant as it had been; and it seems to me that goodness, when it occurs, does so despite ourselves so it is never ours, but rendered as this visceral sense of cannot not, this warning that a major part of one’s decency would be effaced to do nothing. The animistic child offering solicitude to every stray animal is quickly replaced by a cognizance of mortality and a sense of the striving against competitors that is necessary to have something from such an ephemeral essence (security, money, property, and advantage).
He whose idea of cleaning the kitchen table is to blow the crumbs off of the surface has made an immaculate Buddhist and Hindu shrine on top of the closet that I put into his room. Here he lights incense and provides milk, water, and fruit oblations to his pantheon of gods. This appeasement is probably his way of trying to thwart the vicissitudes of life that can easily snatch back the “blessings” that have been granted, although, in his mind he is ingratiating himself to deities to ensure that the education and livelihood prearranged in divine plan is not quashed the way Odysseus was forced to float lost in the stormy seas of his ingratitude46. But no, nothing comes from the gods: not even the dirty rain that falls from the skies and seems to be of them pissing in urinals, as it is acid rain engendered by man’s pollutants; and the chain reaction of negative fate in which Tess of the D’Urbervilles47is sacrificed as a lamb at Stonehenge is merely the concoction of an author’s imagination in conveying with a more dramatic flair than real life allows this less than optimal reality of life.
Any half gestures of altruism can be reduced to cannot not of contemplative minds that have to some degree extricated themselves from parochial perspectives and survivalist tendencies. Such tepid extrication, if widespread in men’s lives and done by the majority of human denizens on this planet (Aristotle reminding us “One swallow does not make for a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy48”) when the conditions of material existence allow for it, would be a catalyst to the human species which, in behavior, has been stagnant for hundreds of thousands of years. Even if financially deleterious to the men who perform noble actions, those who were themselves once bludgeoned by family and injustice are especially accountable to perform the justice of seeing that younger counterparts are able to rise once again. If there is no other moral truth it is this.
