Thailand Vigil

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
~ Marcel Proust

A journal's refrain: "Meanwhile, I continue..."

Reading in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I reflect: after death, do I still reserve the right, on some hidden stage, to pronounce such effrontery against the cosmic will of dissolution and recombination, in face of the irrelevance of the very concept I?

I return to this moment, this seat under the red and black rebel flags of the Freeway Bar, here on this pristine beach where it is possible to walk on water.

Last night in the musical din, a voice called out, "Where's Jesus?"

A gravelly voice replied, "Who wants to know?"

*

How slow the progress of days, when one is apart from home and community, self-exiled, learning to accept the singleness of being in the world and the illusion of that separateness, so that there is no pain in the apparent separation, no issue in the singleness; all a matter of perception, choice, style of journey undertaken for certain reasons: devotion to art, respect for discriminating synchronicity, allowing what is new to come unbidden.

Beside the placid moving waters of Ao Hin Kong, I note the morning quiet of the bungalows, the single bird call, the morning motorbike traffic humming by on the road.

My morning vigil proceeds, breakfast in the belly, despite the cascade of world events... catastrophe for some and a reckoning of global chess for others, the one percent of the one percent of the one percent, seemingly protected in their vaults from the chaotic fallout of their designs.

Meanwhile, we continue: "Life is good..." however tenuous; fraught with health challenges (tenacious life holding sway against inevitable decline of the individual unit); with the vicissitudes of acceptance and rejection, attraction and repulsion, success and failure, anticipation and disappointment. There is no finality in this polarization but in the balance, the cycling through extremes and fluctuations.

We pause to recognize and celebrate, enjoying the rocking ride; else why bother?

On the ferry ride, passengers are treated to the following scenes on large video screens: drunken, half-naked youths cavorting on the beach to loud music; Thai guys pouring liquor from the bottle down the throats of nubile young white women; assorted bikini-clad partygoers. Posh resorts on pristine white-sand beaches and turquoise waters; towels on beds shaped like swans; infinity pools overlooking bays and islands. Water sports for overgrown children: giant vinyl water toys, to climb on, bounce on, fall off; in pastel colors... just like the wading pool in my backyard as a kid in a hot, bricked-in Eastern city, where I learned to cope with, perhaps developed a taste for, 90-degree heat and 90 percent humidity.

*

In the tourist destinations these days, it's Russians everywhere-maybe spending their new capitalist wealth; or maybe, like rats, fleeing the sinking ship of state that the Western corporate mafia military elite is anxious to blow out of the water in order to get their greedy big hands on all that oil and natural gas? I played drums with these guys and gals; they're just like us (people); so don't go buying the war lies and all the other baloney that's sold at the newsstands by the same shills who produced the blockbuster hits Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria... (or looking further back, as far as you want to go).

So war's a racket, as the chief enforcer General Smedley Butler famously (or not so much, downplayed by the shills) wrote... and what do the rest of us do about it, or in spite of it? Is the solution somewhere in the turn of phrase, switch of conception, where the "in spite of" becomes the "about"? Or is it the other way around? As Buckminster Fuller famously (or not so much, drowned out by the shills) said... "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Which of course is why I prefer constructing model realities known as novels or musical improvisations, or deconstructing the house of marked cards and leaving the resulting silence to speak for itself.