 
Sills 129

Ruminations on the Ontology of Morality (a Philosophical Novel)

BOOK I

The Environment and Self under Distant Scrutiny

Chapter 1

My Dead Wife, Luklawan, the Gecko Muse, Stabbing Me with Her Pen

and Inducing a Preface to the Work

"What are you doing?" demanded the Gecko while maintaining a condescending gaze from its stance on a paint peeled strip of the wall. Smoking, as was my wont, there was the smell of cannabis in the room, and from this, it appeared as though the oblong creature were in a low cloud hovering over it like a descending fog.

"Thinking," I said, still reeling from the hybrid, but smiling and pretending otherwise in such a consummate performance that even I began to believe it myself. Its hair--it had hair--was long and unkempt, and to some degree it obscured but did not successfully camouflage the familiarity of the face. Even in this lesser form with slight cosmetic differences, the face that I could see was that of my deceased wife. Diminutive as it was, it had that same elongated and distended loss of elasticity that I was familiar with and was distinguishable from all others in the realm of faces. And while seated on a chair in the kitchen, I kept wondering if in defying gravity by walking on walls, as it did, youth might return unto it once again. It was a rather erratic and nonsensical thought, I must admit, so I do not know why I entertained it seriously, but I did.

"Thinking, are you?" mocked the gecko derisively. "Thinking about what?"

"I don't know, exactly. Something ponderous."

"Thinking and not doing. You've always been this way. A professor of philosophy but with little to show for it. What's wrong? Has the gecko got you by the tail? Don't you like green skin, or is it that you are bothered by the fact that now I am too diminutive for you to penetrate? But then, with all those others, had I slipped into the green raiment extra petite size during my earlier human incarnation, it wouldn't have mattered all that much, not that it matters now. Nothing matters with enough time—not even the existence of an entire species or the incineration and freezing of gaseous debris at the collapse of a star."

"I have no prejudices, one way or the other, Luklawan. I just don't understand why you have come back like this."

"Like what?" she smiled. "Is one way of being better than any other? A gecko might be a predator of insects but it is innocuous in its impact on life. You can't say that of human beings. I said we would meet again. I didn't say how or in what form, or whether your mind, mine, or both in reciprocity, would be the agent behind it all--all realities being nothing more than states of perception."

"You mean the dried psilocybin, the mushrooms I took earlier."

"Among other substances.

"There has been a void since your passing, Luklawan. It has taken me to this—not every day. Just sometimes, especially when there is a lot of time on my hands and I don't know what to do with myself."

"You have someone staying here."

"He's with his parents in the province now. I need to feel as though I am giving back, that there is more than predation and death to it all. So he stays here."

The gecko then became silent and stayed mutely condemning and motionless on the wall for several more minutes before crawling over to the desk in the adjacent room. When it returned it, it said, "You know what to do," and it shoved a pen into my hand so forcefully that it pierced the skin, causing me to bleed."Don't allow me to catch you abandoning your scepter again. Take it and spill your blood in words. There must be an account of the void. A philosophical treatise must be written."

Preface to Ruminations on the Ontology of Morality

Just as Lek, the Thai word for "small," has always been my sobriquet of insignificance—a nickname first given to me by my parents who, surprisingly, did notice me when sliding out noiselessly and unassumingly from the birth canal, as diminutive as one of Democritus' atoms, and thus not bumptious as most babies are in having gone up against the odds as victorious sperm cell penetrators over hundreds of millions of adversaries, zygotes, viable fetuses, and then successful newborns—so it is lek to me in consequence that you find yourself perplexed by my multi-lane syntax, my compound-compound complex engineering feat, a bridge of truth that has as its aim something higher than you.

Although you, like me, are a mere hominid of all the hominids that were and are, including the nine or ten species of men who came before you, part of a transitional link, and not my ultimate audience, it is not as though you are inconsequential. For perceiving this record of my droll thoughts as something to be scoffed at—and I want you to scoff at it as it will keep it in circulation, and what stays in circulation will go on to the extinction of men and beyond – you are the mitochondria to the cell. This is the hope.

But you say that just as Rousseau gained his fame by eschewing Thomas Hobbes, conking him over the head with a shovel, and burying him into a jungle-Eden so deep that today no one has rediscovered the sinew of his thought, so I, an obscure part-time lecturer at two universities in the land of Siam, seek the same fate, the same fame, amongst human inhabitants, but that can hardly be right. After all, I am Thai, and my role it these nondescript universities are of such little merit that I might as well be teaching the Koran at a Madrassa along the Pakistani/Afghan border. Who would publish my material and pay attention to me in the conventional sense? No one. No, I must entertain my moronic Neanderthal friends. Well, as Neanderthals had larger craniums than Homo sapiens, perhaps I should refrain from such denigration, but then as they are no longer around, there is no one to apologize to. Perhaps it is the species that is so ruthless and cunning that they will do whatever they can to cling to life and obtain hegemony who are more pestilence than morons.

As for the reasons to write, it seems to me that there are two: one which is to make a name for oneself, and the other which is to name the times that one happens to be witnessing; and as the most prescient and maligning of works will not be written in New York City or London, but in the most remote parts of the inimical global community, it is conceivable that they will be written here, despite all the claims that Bangkok is where men cum in the banging of their cocks and not the exertion of their brains. But I retort that it was only last year the city, in Amazing Thailand, was able to plaster posters proclaiming that it had been awarded the World Book Capital of the Year. Of course, city authorities, men and women of learning like the Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra (sort of our Nancy Sinatra) who at earlier junctures of their lives went respectively to America to procure advanced degrees and returned without the ability to say cat or dog had paid the requisite bribes to secure the honor; but then the question is who is worse: those who bribe or those who are bribable?

"What are you doing? You are on the sofa once again watching movies, aren't you? One would think you would have more pride than to be one of these herds, scared of loneliness, wanting noise to drown out all thought, never befriending deeper dimensions within themselves."

The universities are shut down, Lookie. There is fighting in the streets. There is no point in preparing for classes that don't exist."

"Where is it? Where are your ruminations on the ontology of morality?"

"Nobody cares what I have to say, Lookie. I think that you just want me to stay inside and to stay out of trouble." The gecko went to the desk and began looking at the preface. "Is this all?" asked the deceased fishwife, examining the two pages I had written. "It is shit! Yes, I want you to stay safe, but also to stay productive. "

"None of us is safe," I told her. "You are dead, and death now or later seems immaterial, doesn't it?"

"To stay alive for as long as one can to be of assistance to others, evanescent as they may be, for as long as health holds out is not immaterial, but noble" said the gecko. "But to really live requires giving to the ages. Thousands of generations of millions of people, scarcely more than societal functions mixed with some personal pleasures, habits, and appetites, hardly beings at all but avaricious shadows, have come and gone. I, of course, had been teaching at the business college, that business college in which you are now sending your friend to study, and then when I least expected it I had pancreatic cancer, the removal of my spleen, and death. It happened so quickly—life to all happens so quickly-- and one, if she is as lucky as I am, comes back as some diminutive green thing. That's all there is."

Chapter 2

Thais Tied in an Ineluctable Knot, the Fate of Democracy, and Other Conundrums Metaphysical

And Otherwise

I hear it: from the open balcony there is more of the ongoing cacophony conjoined with wafting acrid smells of gunfire around Rajamangala stadium and Ramkamhaeng University, Siamese twin monstrosities, strident misconfigurations, that pummel like cluster headaches. Life fights life defectively like the immune system fighting innocuous tissue, and one is reminded that all these minute and incremental parts of symbiotic society, like everything else, evolved from disorder most unteleologically, and in returning to their smaller pieces, disorder these shards will be once again. There is more gunfire in these skirmishes between Red Shirts, Pheu Thai dogged by their more militant faction, The United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (both formerly, most incredulously in name, Thai Ruk [love] Thai and perhaps other names as well given their chameleon appellations and my faulty mutable memory, obtuse nature, and cavalier ennui concerning the whole subject), and, presumably, in altercations with southern students, a few who might even be my students, who for perhaps no other ratiocination than patriotic fervor toward the regionally born party as conditioned onto them by their parents, as their parents before them, support the bourgeoisie Yellow Shirts or Democracy Party which has been commandeered and enveloped by the People's Democratic Reform Committee in these unrelenting street demonstrations against the prime minister, whose elongated strings stretch to a fugitive sibling and former prime minister in exile. The city has already become a fortress of cordoned roads, blockaded government buildings, and an arrogation of streets and parks for speeches and tent bivouacs, but then that is no different than when the Reds howled through the streets years earlier. It is here that these organizations are wont to form for themselves ever changing nomenclature due to earlier pronouncements of court judgments declaring these red and yellow camps illegal for endemic corruption and violent crackdowns against demonstrators in the past. To really stop these corrupt, monstrous phoenixes from resurfacing and there would be the end of democracy here as there are only these two insipid colors in the land of the Thais.

Here, the less educated pawns, these more downtrodden of all the self-interested beasts that make up a democracy, or what we call modern democracy, this representational distortion of voting for voters as though those voted in, the wealthy and influential who have access to the gilded, palatial edifices of power and can vie with others of their vaunted ilk to represent some portion of the masses as though maintaining interests other than their own aggrandizement of fortune and power, if not entirely gullible and lured by the promises vouchsafed onto them, wistfully pray for at least a portion of their fulfillment nonetheless, not that comely figures, favored with good materialistic karma, and in office by public mandate from vote tallies of the poor masses, should ever be doubted, for how can one doubt the masses who wield the ultimate power sanctioned by easily shredded constitutions?

If, in ingesting the sweet fodder of sound-bites, one is blissfully unaware of any aspect of a platform to the favored party, and is merely voting for the widest and whitest of smiles and wiles from a candidate-cognate with a common touch (George Bush, now brandishing rifle in hand, take a bow), or merely the color of a man's silk tie if not the texture of a beautiful lady's dress (Miss Yingluck, prithee, do a curtsy), one still has this most lauded vote in what Tocqueville calls the tyranny of the majority but that which hereafter shall be called non-consequential tyrantas non grata. Here, in the body of the reds, like in any democracy, it is headed by multi-millionaire leaders. And the poor like all poor, find their lives only marginally improved in social programs of Pheu Thai, and less improved but more employable in stronger economies under the democrats when thrust to power by court edicts, but in both, always and forever exploited in industry. Not all that different than the Roman Senate of yore,these industries are often owned by politicians to take care of the pleasures of the rich, but here, and in the age of democracy when wealth aggrandizement consists of selling products and services to the middle class and the rich, the middle class only briefly engages, in some nominal way, in the pretenses of the rich before becoming poor once again.

Hearing Voice of America streamed on the Internet, ironically, indubitably, cravenly perhaps, I learn about where I am from half way across the world: blocks away from me a bus and two vans are reported as being ablaze, and, I learn, also, that several students have been killed. I now hear the eerie sirens. To die for an idea that has been around for thousands of years, and no doubt, for an infinitely much longer time stayed mutely but palpably in one form or another on the tongues of Ancient Egyptians, for example, as they lowered the stone relics constructed under Ramses the Great at Piramesse and dragged them to Tanis to be reassembled there, is altogether preposterous. In a world awash in democracies, these ideas will not disappear from the planet even if in a given country they go underground for a time so that corrupt parties might be disbanded and an assembly of more civic minded individuals recruited for a provisional government that might influence an elected one. Student soldiers are not needed to protect democracy. The idea of empowerment has never been eradicated even when having to burrow away like a mole. After the posts of tribunes were abolished, much later, Sulla and Caesar were needed to eradicate the corruption of the assemblies, and then, emperors were proclaimed in Ancient Rome; and of these emperors, none of them ceased worrying about what would happen if they were to follow their natural wishes to cease the allocation of free grain entitlements to the poor, which were always given begrudgingly. In that respect government does, as John Locke indicates, emanate from the people. Whether it should is entirely a different question.

Given the fact that individuals are solipsistic and, in their more intelligent responses, cast votes based upon personal considerations from the straightjackets of their social economic statuses even when education disenthralls them from ignorance, in a world in which the super-rich are acquiring most of the wealth and the industries from which to procure it, and the poor are becoming more pervasive the result of capitalism awry and, in part, antithetical to how Adam Smith envisaged it (workers in the division of labor being paid by each piece of their production instead of monthly salaries and from this need to mass produce and do it well to earn greater sums of money, perfecting a task, and then investing their savings in a company of their own ; no monopolies of any kind permitted, which means no Amazon.com warehouses and web page stores with no overhead expenses buying in bulk and being staffed by part time employees who receive no benefits, all which allow for much cheaper products and services that destroy mom and pop businesses, and, with their proposed use of drones for delivery, will make deliverymen and postal carriers obsolete, no taxes and tariffs of any kind, no licensing of any product, service, or occupation, and a man allowed to go anywhere on the planet where his services are needed), at best, more and more political gridlock will arise to the point where a given democratic nation becomes dysfunctional, and at worst there will be corruption in every corner of government, and the dark web of corruption will be allowed to continue as vital industries will become attached to it like parasites. Is there to be nothing better than that so called paragon of capitalistic democracies in America? It is a system in which presidents are voted into power and kept hand tied by an opposition of congressmen elected for that requisition; it is a country awash in guns and gun violence that is enshrined in constitutional liberties that have no chance of ever being amended; it is a society in which the hubris to be God-commissioned, global police officers has altered it, even more than its entitlements, into a debtor nation, and wealth is siphoned so fully into one class that eventually the majority will become so poor that they will no longer be able to buy their services, and industry will collapse altogether. I must admit that I have always been mystified that capitalism, charging more than a product and service is worth, has been able to proliferate for so long without stripping a currency of all value, and bankrupting the poor and the middle class in the process.

Does it take so much imagination to envisage a realm outside of democracy or to see that it is all in reverse from what it should be? Manual laborers, lacking education, are conceptually limited as materialists, so if given higher salaries than any cerebral laborers from which to procure more goods, they who are the foundation of it in agriculture and construction will be more assiduous and proud of their places in society; and those content in ideas and pleased to be in the seats of power and discernment should be paid somewhat less. Altogether, this fosters a society of equity which is built from the bottom up instead of inverted like an easily toppled pyramid. And to further this more harmonious society, half the shares of any given business should be owned by the state, which will mandate it to hire maximum, albeit not superfluous, workers. From its shares in company wealth, the government will then pay stipends to unemployed and underemployed workers if these individuals engage themselves in volunteer work for charitable institutions and, from what is left over (and as stipends, of course), to its rulers conscripted for the task of governing the country. Education, which shall reside in the hands of government (full scholarships provided to, dare I say it, those deemed, in any nominal way, as having potential as philosophical rulers), will deliberately look at any given subject in multiple perspectives with universities inculcating students that all individuals have innate value, that compassion and kindness trump over cleverness, and that ideas are more palpable than money and material objects. Then, in osmosis, goodness will be more pervasive than what it is now. Realistic, and not idealistic, this will be a society of achievable perfection; and although in any society there will be those individuals who go against the norm—educated and exceptional individuals of bright intelligence with inordinate materialistic strivings, and those with no yearning to further their educational levels who also have no real desire for material acquisitions, and being indolent, are of no major pragmatic value that would even encourage society to give them stipends—it will be as perfect as is possible. It only guarantees to cure society of 80 percent of its woes. If nothing else, an unelected ruler with full fiat, educated in the humanities, who comes to the position as a conscript, can irradiate the scourge of the right to bear arms, and with a pen, can also raise the standard of living for the masses while ensuring steady growth in the economy. Such a system would also reduce this state of affairs in which democracy engendered capitalism provides a sense of false security as though money can rejuvenate youth and stave off death, and foremost, it delivers a country from political stalemate and inaction which is the death of any state—or, at least, this is what I think.

Chapter 3

What I Know, If Anything

To take the stance of Descartes that doubting ultimately proves existence proves nothing other than the existence of an audio of thoughts which are perhaps someone else's thoughts if not thought loose but diminishing while reverberating randomly off of the fabric of "empty" space like miscellaneous and unidentified carcasses of insects dusted away as "dirt." But then, as stating that doubting oneself doubting relegates all consciousness to that of a dream to which there can be no real consciousness at all, and so no distinction between opening one's eyes and rising from the bed or in lying down again and falling into the undulations of REM is an absurdity equal to doubting in infinite regress.

Thus, it is best to remember that we are all a little more than plausible or even scarcely substantiated beings and all decisions that we make are made based on the "reality" of that which most likely occurred, that which is the most reasonable explanation of the sensory input that we have available, if it is to be trusted at all especially after it is processed into the mind, past that it is, but perceived as present, and the likely ramifications of it all; and as consciousness is predicated on interaction, solitary confinement, especially when denied some volition or master control over one's thoughts, will lead to horrendous hallucinations. Thus Homo Sapiens, and perhaps all of the nine or so earlier human hominoids do and did what they have always done which is to think as little as possible on the subject and engage in physical activity of some sort or another (an arrow to be wedged into a target, the active hunt that might fell an animal, or merely a ball that can be easily manipulated) in a physical prowess altering matter and hormones and adrenalin coursing through one's veins, making him feel realer than what he in fact is. Civilization itself is the altering of the natural world so as to solidify man, even though the more comfortable existence represses instinctual tendencies and thereby makes him feel effete in manhood, and incomplete as a natural entity that must forever more in this state of society feign godhood. But then there are bloodless sports and the hunt for money, and the pleasure that is to be taken in arrogating from weaker men, so sublimated instinct can trickle out and a man is not completely quashed as a man in such conditions, although mostly he is.

But unfortunately, Einstein's concept of the reversible nature of energy and mass (energy converted into mass evidenced in speeding subatomic particles and mass into energy attested in the splitting of the atom by adding neutrons) is not applicable to the antithetical forces of hope and reality. The hapless mothers desperately hoping that the students who died at Ramkamhaeng University are not their own will find that this does not alter the reality of those slain. Hope is not an antidote of wizardry to alter horrendous fate, or even an anodyne to make it less grievous. These women who will be unfortunate enough to experience such devastating losses inevitably and irrevocably will know from firsthand experience how tenuous life is from loved ones who can be so easily converted into elements again, a fate not any better than if they had been altered instantaneously into bolts of electricity. Our steadiness is unsteady and our unsteadiness steady: we are what we are—something less than real, but real enough that we know that we are one of many in a generation to which generations past are interred and lost in the strata of the burial ground of life. Even the great city of Troy is actually ten Troys with each after some interregnum and changing layers of soil built on older Troys. Our insignificance is with us at every move, even for the most bumptious.

What can I know with absolute certainty? Even that which I, a social creature, attach myself to in order to feel more of a reality than I in fact am can change precipitously as my friend can become my foe tomorrow; and all my attempts to propound and posit that my most logical of pretentions are logic are proven as chemically induced byproducts of an ever mutable being. I am just a being on a long ride of not knowing anything. What I was a second ago is not what I am now; and the line of prose that I am scrawling out now with this pen, this trigger of volition will no doubt have multiple contradictions in it if I am fully alive and none if I am dead above the torso. I do not even know the substance of ideas: ideas—are they these more transferable and more objectified forms of feeling, which is nascent, non-rarefied ante-thoughts like wheat before being processed in a mill, or are they just abated, adulterated sentience? If ideas are the latter (an adulteration of sentience instead of reality fueled by the impetus of feeling), why is it that those who seem inordinately emotional rarely produce anything of genius? It is ideas that are seen as genius and wanton emotional potency the brand of a lunatic. And why is it that I am more than the substance of my ideas but at my demise they, if published, live on and I do not? Also, why is it that every hour of my ruminations (Aristotle claiming that God, if he exists, which of course he doesn't, would be in perpetual discernment, though discerning what he does not say or why God would have problems from which to discern if he is God) is killing me? We are creatures of movement and to be a cloister for literature and philosophy brings about early demise when the body needs to exercise. In any case, writing right now is torture like giving birth to sextuplets, and I cry out with the grousing scream of Arthur Rimbaud.

In smallness I am the composite of mitochondrial DNA that is foreign to me and of me, bacteria the same, and a smaller group of these more human cells. I am my white blood cells flying over selected bacteria and viruses like living drones, and consuming their prey like hunters, and these white blood cells that save me deny me of all pacifist aspirations. I am in fact a killing machine; and the civil strife, red and yellow, that I abhor and denounce in Bangkok right now is, I know, or sense, the historical materialism expounded by Marx that will be the only way for this society to evolve. Should I weep over a man's death? Should I weep over the plethora of cells that will die when I go out jogging tonight along the fetid canal—jogging at the stadium or the university I will refrain from doing at present. Every cell in my being probably senses itself as the highest and most autonomous of things, and is totally unaware that it is part of something larger. And likewise in largeness, this tiny diminutive substance of the gamut of me is part of the planet that is part of the solar system and a galaxy that might just be cells in the tissue of the universe of this thing called God. If this is the case, atheists to which I am one, and religious zealots which I am not, are both on the same page of scripture: one denying the existence of any anthropomorphic god concocted out of the limited intelligence and imagination of man and the zealots who are right all along in saying that there is a god, although they never conceptualized him appropriately. I don't know. A helicopter I see hovers around this area at a distance. Why it is there, I know not; why I was born, and to this brief generation, I know not. My own insignificance and mortality makes me something vastly less than a herald. I am a mortal being of seven billion human beings now alive in 200,000 years of hominoid species to which there might have been nine or ten, as I mentioned before, tracing their lineage to Australopithecus, the chimpanzee with less prehensile limbs that walked upright.

"Hmmm! Reality to the masses of living creatures is what they have to do at the very moment to ensure survival, what gets them through the day," said the gecko as it held the pages against the artificial light and kicked a leg, urinating a stream that slid down the lamp shade. I did not understand then why it, which is a she, did that but now it seems to me that when a female has had the shit kicked out of her through death she becomes more masculine than what she would be otherwise; but then as in the living realm I have met up with plenty of bitches in my time, maybe the issue is more complex than that. "Reality is picking mangosteen from a rich man's orchard, developing an allergic reaction to the pesticides, and spending what little one has received in hospital bills. And so, this debating of the reality of reality is way too arcane for my taste. It is also dubious unless you got a degree in astrophysics since I was last alive. To be frank, a physicist, and not you, needs to explain reality if he can and I have yet to hear of one who will broach on this matter. This is tantamount to a child pretending that he is an astronaut. All you are saying in this thing, I think, is that as things change they cannot be of solid substance. But as every three year old child knows from a game of peek-a-boo with his mother that what is hidden from the senses might still be in existence and that the world of forms changes as children do grow up, your treatise up to this point is at times infantile even for a three year old."

"I have had enough derision from you-- a first family was enough for me. You were worse. I married you reluctantly."

"You knocked me up, as they say."

"Maybe I should have knocked you down."

"I think you did once or twice which is why I miscarried in the pregnancy. You were always free to leave if you needed to, so stop complaining. Let's not be mean spirited. I mentioned a certain flaw that you should be aware of. That is all. It is not a reflection on your overall vision and not the end of the world having a few peccadillos in a creation bestirred and begotten in pain. Ideas seek to be more real, to be semi material essences through human receptors, and in so doing they make humans ideal and noble in the process. There is this reciprocity in the symbiotic relationship, and hence, there is absolutely nothing you can do about the situation, or even your situation, until I tell you to quit."

Chapter 4

Am I, a Mortal, Moral or Immoral

And should I, who do not walk around every insect, and would be totally immobile and something else than human to even try, be allowed to think of myself as a moral human being when brazenly assailing sentient life? Furthermore, from birth, I was wrought into a predator's biosphere with an ecosystem in which white blood cells of my own making contend against deleterious microorganisms, and these microorganisms contend against my cells. It is true that with innocuous or useful intestinal bacteria and mitochondrial DNA innate in every replicating cell (these diminutive beings acting for their own survival just like Smith's invisible hand extended) they unwittingly sustain me and I unwittingly sanction their existences by not sending white blood cell stealth bombers to destroy them, but this hardly makes me into a moral entity.

No, I am not a moral being, nor do I particularly aspire to be one, especially when in large crowds. After a day of teaching the dull witted of Siam the ideas of the sages, all to no avail, or spending time with people whom I am generally good to to be once again swept into the masses, I am often surprised, albeit not so much unpleasantly so, to find myself morphed into such a churlish alter ego. This being of me pushes his way through crowds of strangers and, in his brain there are these disjointed negative thoughts awry without volition despising the bumptious and boisterous alterity on city busses and water taxis, the slow, doddering and lingering who, as much as the sidewalk merchants and food venders, block sidewalks, especially when texting and talking on telephones, and these motorcycles galore that come all too close to my feet. But the possibilities of injury or death, even on a sidewalk, are very real in every step, and unless in this helter-skelter movement in all directions one cares to die in the blunt blows, he has to silently demur to the near misses that happen in urban existence.

Sensitive and caring by nature toward those whom I might help –especially the downtrodden of sentient creatures, in part because when I was a boy I was run over incessantly by the tanks of family, I have no particular need to feign goodness. I don't even feel any major compulsion to smile in the Land of Smiles. After all, smiling is just another instinct –an instinct to charm and ingratiate oneself to those around him, especially in business when smiles are not toward the customers as people per se but as ambulatory money. Nor do I feel the inclination to emulate a nonexistent god based upon what "scripture" indicates him as being. So if in the dark thickets of society, unable to know anything absolutely, I brandish my machete too vigorously for your approval, you will have to forgive me. The blade is dull and nobody usually notices anything but my grave intensity anyway, if that, and it usually changes to a pleasant enough countenance when I am able to be of service to someone.

Now, does this lack of moral certainty in a godless universe in which even the most steadfast pacifist is a killing machine, and society at large (at least during times of conflict) seems, ostensibly, to be worse than the individual, mean that anyone can go out and kill others for any perceived injustice? Are the Reds and the Yellows of Thailand justified to slaughter each other willy-nilly? A man, if not brought down by anything else, may well die by catching a common cold that turns into pneumonia, so no one should ever say that predation is relegated exclusively to the realm of animals especially when man is the main predator of animals, and microorganisms of man; but still, he is able to refrain from killing where this less than optimal world allows for it, and so he should.

Civilized man, for whatever Rousseau erroneously says on this matter (he no doubt was smirking as he wrote his idea, knowing Hobbes was essentially, but not completely right), if losing all restraint on his emotions, would become savage once again, or as Rousseau says it with his over-romanticized zeal, in the "state of nature." So, people do not have a right to kill from a moral standpoint –or at least from our limited vantage point as mere mortals-- unless we consider the fact that as Marx phrases it, to move society out of its injustices material force must be prepared to counter material force,But this sullied truth is only true in the realm of government and, luckily, does not need to be considered in most situations. However, to make the subject even murkier, when human society is revisited hundreds, thousands, and possibly millions of years from now, who killed whom will be tantamount to concerning oneself with chaffing skin cells when raking the yard. Personally, I think that the greatest of all blessings is never to have brought injury on anyone as an unsullied conscience at least to this realm of time and space buoys through one's years and needs no ablution.

Chapter 5

How we can unequivocally know that there is No God, or at Least No Anthropomorphized God,

Condign, now with the blue ink of the pen used up, I write interchangeably in black and red, for it is blood and darkness that makes a man philosophize, with successful discernment accomplishing little beyond making him see an outline of the savage in the sublimated conduct of modern man, as though in understanding, it could be altered, which of course it cannot, and thus evincing philosophy to be bereft of all practical value.

"You certainly have an opaque way of saying something. It is like deliberately crunching the universe into one sentence," said Luklawan, the gecko. "Now the trick is to go onto the next sentence doing the same but with a varied nuance so that each sentence is crunching the universe but never quite in the same way."

"Then you understand what I am saying."

"Well, you certainly are aiming at your target audience of the androids. And I have always been curious what it would feel like to be oscillating with the universe into the big crunch."

News accounts are still of the two vans and a bus that were aflame hours earlier at the stadium. The bus driver in a futile attempt to escape the intensity of the inferno cowered in a fetal position on the toilet seat which he stayed on to his demise. This was his fate in material force countering material force,when both sides of the political spectrum were attempting to embed their respective positions on democracy, an idea, onto this realm. And of course they would. An idea cannot exist unless it is imparted from one generation to the next, so despite what Plato says on this matter, ideas do not exist unto themselves as blueprints for the shaping of matter; but man, cognizant of being so temporary and insignificant, cannot bear the idea that his life is garbage, so he will do anything, kill anyone, and die as a holy martyr to ensure that his set of ideas goes from one generation to the next. In this case, as the two sides are intransigent and most likely to set Thai society toward civil war, that war may be what is needed: the heat and pressure that will wrought a durable alloy from these two disparate positions on democracy. And of the man charred on the bus, Thais will silently judge his fate to be the result of bad karma for having died in this horrific way; and yet if this were to have happened in a Western nation it would not have been all that different. Although Christ empowered the poor, only a relatively happy and stable life acquired from affluence of one's position would attest that God sanctioned a given life. What else do the religious have as proof of their relationship with God but the tangible goods of this realm?

"Indeed," said the gecko. "Perhaps if humans had been more conformable and ideas had more of a clear resonance of truth, conflict would not be needed. "But if a human is nothing without an idea and an idea is nothing without physicality of man imparting it from one generation to the next, and more than one side has an alternative idea that they want to embed onto future generations in this desperate attempt to be real rather than accept that to be put out with the garbage is the fate of both realms then conflict will come."

"When will it begin, and how long, Luklawan of the Celestial Realm, do you think the Thai Civil War will last?"

"First of all, I am a reptile, with the bone structure of the front of the side my face the bone structure of the flanks of yours. I would hardly call it celestial although I am definitely hallucinogenic, your hallucination, and I cannot think of anything more hallucinogenic than religion."

. Sometimes it is the mundane and seemingly inconsequential occurrences that make one feel the sordid qualities of the world most, as though he had been caught up in a sandstorm with the grit, the grains, felt in all articles of clothing and orifices; and even when not in belief of a God when so many injustices abound how can one not want baptism and ablution from the predation that is rife in all things? Not much happens in my life these days, as I am not working; thus they usually start at seven o'clock. I rush into the toilet to spit out the phlegm that has congealed in my throat when asleep. I jog if I can and if it seems safe to do so, feed whatever strays happen to be around, and then I head over to one of my favorite street restaurants where I like to eat and read. I usually sip tea while reading for a few hours as it is quiet there, and above all other things, I yearn for quiet so that I can hear myself think. Well, I just returned from one that I tend to go to most. The owner, if we can call him such, who set up a business for himself illegally as he is illegal, has fired an undocumented Cambodian worker like himself on the grounds that he was not productive enough; thus the adage of the big fish eating the little fish is not just true of larger entities.

Heartless and indifferent to suffering when seeking his own security and happiness at all cost, his negative emotions a protective defense like an instinctual reflex, his happiness a natural hallucinogenic like neurotransmitters of dopamine and serotonin keeping him content to be bound on this rock of the Earth spinning interminably in barren space and dark matter, and his logic the fuel of both emotions, this is man. But now it is for us to make a categorical statement about God once and for all. So lest we waste our time indicting the unindictable, or worse think that we can witness, if not visit him from a jail cell in The Hague, let us contain our arguments as to why He does not exist. I believe that despite Bertrand Russell's myriad arguments that seem to hit everywhere but the target, one simple and salient statement will solve this situation once and for all and it is made all the more tenable for the virtual reality that governs our world. As we are living in what we can term virtual realities in which even the most incontrovertible idea can be doubted, why would God be a belief, and a dubious one at best given so much injustice and brutality in the world? If He were to exist, that reality would emanate through the ether and touch all of our senses with this one solid certainty. We would no longer be living virtual realities any longer. But such is not the case. To believe, and to actively believe, is to actively invent that which is not, and those who seek to believe in Him, do not seek to know, and this we can have faith in.

The gecko used the white board marker on the white board walls and began to rewrite the chapter before fading away, vanishing to my power to vanquish. It wrote:

Condign, now with the blue ink of the pen used up, I write interchangeably in black and red, for it is blood and darkness that makes a man philosophize: to question why in this not best of all possible worlds,but the worst of all plausible ones, hatred and joy (reflexive instinct of defense of the former, a hallucinogenic of the latter) is the fuel of all "logic" for this most "intelligent" species that continues to exploit myriad other species and all mineral resources in a frenetic economy of ease exclusively for one out of millions of species while cognizant of the consequences of billowing the byproduct of societal ease in greenhouse gasses; why in modern society there is still this residual thrill of the hunt, the yearning to procure and succeed, the competitive strife, as success can only be understood in the context of others, especially if, in varying degrees, procuring as deciduous others fail and drift without possession, desiccated leaves skidding on the sidewalks of time--the competitive striving in those so cognizant of mortality making them even more avaricious to acquire instead of relinquishing that which they have in the realization that temporary beings cannot own anything); why a given man retains memories of childhood without being able to return to it again for a visit, not that he would want to if his childhood was horrific, especially as in parenthood one merely repeats the scratched records of parental mandates, bullishness, and peevishness played by one's own parents; why, as witnessed at various times from the observation deck of the Bayoke Tower, the entire city of Bangkok in all directions is so replete in skyscrapers—but then, it is also replete in the three dollar a day workers that construct, maintain, and service the businesses of these edifices like slaves (slaves, at least in the past, being beaten for failing to be more assiduous in performing the requisite tasks for the masters' profits and never fired and left to starve on the streets); and, beneath the Bayoke a woman with her trinkets on a towel, and her son donned in school clothes, sitting in his wheelchair, with their hours spent in waiting for that which will not come as they are dark skinned and compunctious blights on modern society, and that look of dread on her countenance as another homeless woman, soliloquizing and clearly out of her mind, sat down on her towel (I looked away, and ineluctably, irrevocably, I am forever diminished as a consequence, and if shrapnel from a grenade wounds or kills any one of them in future days, I too will be culpable as I am culpable for turning away from a deformed shirtless man crawling on the sidewalk a week ago, the sun beating onto him, who gave me that expressive look of anguish..

Chapter 6

Considering the Sanctity of Life in Impermanence and the State of Virtual Reality

Purportedly, Pericles made the claim that the maximum age in "ancient times" was around seventywhich means that if, like in all the circumstances needed for his fertilization, a viable fetus, gestation, and a favorable birth, one manages to overcome the odds through propitious events in one's favor and circumvents the negative, or at least is lucky enough not to stand in the wrong place at the wrong time as happened to Aeschylus when a tortoise fell from an eagle's talons and landed on his head, or at least so Montaigne claims,he could live an extra thirty years. But, bizarre occurrences aside, car accidents, smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, being the victim of stress related illnesses or, if one is really hapless, homicides, or the taking of one's life in this age when businesses are easily ruined in changing fads of the times probably more than halve those thirty years statistically for the vast majority.

In any case, surely in the immediate future with fewer physical burdens and more likelihood of individuals who are not felled in the negative vicissitudes of life living full and active lives until entropy at last sets in to a hurried demise and even a quicker hastening of the breakdown of this seemingly solid substance of man to the elements, as though God were on this planet and eager to erase the foolish cartoon he had doodled before someone important came along and saw it, the majority of individuals in developed countries in particular will no longer need archaic strictures meant to stay out of God's wrath or to delude themselves that they are communing with saints, prophets, and gods of yesteryear. Even as little as a couple hundred years ago in every part of the world, and even for the affluent who lived in rather crude conditions by contemporary standards for whatever discomforts were eased by the servants they possessed and subject to every bacterial infection with little remedy, religion in this sense of vulnerability was as dire of a necessity as a shot of whiskey when experiencing a toothache; and so the world was rife in gullible, superstitious entities equally ignorant as to how and why lives of suffering should exist as those of the present time, but much more likely to be suffering exponentially more, and more desperate for analgesic ideas of afterlife if not mystical succor and elixirs. In such difficult lives respite was death, and yet feeling the reality of this life, unreal as it often seemed to be, in comparison to abstractions like heaven that even scripture offered no conceptualization of, one could hardly end his life by his own hand so the thought of celestial realms provided justification of one's life in the here and now and endurance for those hardships.

Back then, life was even more tenuous and could be snuffed away so easily, so humans often emulated fictional essences of scripture, albeit imperfectly, propitiated the Gods in cowering with loyalty each Sunday at church services and by going to confession, and bequeathed these sacrosanct fables of celestial escapism as patrimony to their descendants. Back then these analgesics, these putative gifts vouchsafed for thousands of years to the ages were easily imbibed because of the rarity at that time of the written word and physical travails more onerous and less bearable than any, in most cases, experienced now which made afterlife compensations as real as any empirical experience in their lives.

"My God!" said the Gecko. Even she/it, liberated as she/it was from feeling any necessity to the temples to importune the sacred Buddha for good luck the way all temple goers do while offering their little oblations to the statues, and of course that would be the case as I took care of her every need as though she were a queen, could not get away from divine references and interjections. "Couldn't this be stated more succinctly? Why not just say that as life becomes more pleasant, the fabrication called God no longer has meaning?"

"I suppose so. I suppose I could; but as all life can be reduced to I woke, I slept, I ate, I shat, I socialized for pleasure, I hated for lack of it, I had sex, I committed adultery, and did as little work as I could get by with, this would not make much of a book. I thought you liked my embellishment."

"I've been having a lot of second thoughts about it to tell you the truth," said the gecko.

"What do you want from me? I told you that I could not say anything all that profound. Every time I even think I have a clever idea the words connect to other words, becoming large organisms in their own right, and force me to try to blend my intention and theirs into a systematic whole in another rewritten draft. And in reference to life, the whole damned thing gets repeated so often: two thousand and more generations of these people reruns, and I am supposed to say something new about it that billions of men never have. Oh, my God!"

"You have only one life, and this unique one is yours. This one, only, is yours with its own set of circumstances and feelings. What do you think of it all?"

"I think it is lonely. People pass away—you did; when they don't pass away, the new circumstances that envelop them and remake them cause them to negate previous friendships; language, that bridge of truth connecting insular minds is composed too much of the time in the shoddy construction material of lies, that are only found out when one is on it and it begins to collapse. If I tell a friend a joke to seal a friendship, depending on his mood from immediate experiences in his life, that joke can offend him and immediately end the friendship. We lose who we once were, as we are fluid to the end (for that matter beyond the end for also in the rot that happens thereafter), while the neurological intricacies, pathways back to the past remain like culs de sac that cannot lead backward or forward and just clog the mind. The greatest of all successful lives upon retirement or death is replaced by other talents, and the success he has achieved is merely relative to the people who believe in its worth, and when like him they are dead and long gone that success evanesces too. Even the greatest of beings and most important of events gets buried under so much of what is built up from it and new matter and clutter of future generations (even Einstein is becoming a fossil under the strata of time and ensuing generations of men). Anybody with some sense would relinquish all dreams of success and just try to enjoy his days the best that he can for as long as he can. Even in giving, one ends up taking from something else: a dog is fed with another animal, and in trying to help another person he takes resources that could be used for someone else, and thus an attempt at justice creating its own injustices. Maybe I am crazy."

"No, philosophical. What else can it be but that? There are three subspecies of modern men of the new millennium: one that is happy, lives in a provincial effervescence of romanticism in which the world is good because their lives are such, and whose perfect lives are sanctioned by the gods; those who are near destitute whose lives just consist of scavenging and survival, and the intellectuals who are empathic to suffering in all quarters and whose only analgesic is in some degree of judicial altruism."

"Again, what do you want from me?"

"As it turns out, nothing I suppose."

"I need some vodka."

"All right. Clearly you want to implode."

"Yes, I want to implode. Dark matter is all around. I just want to relinquish myself to it, and as you say implode."

"Some sub-atomic particles can become firm realities traveling through dark matter, the Higg's Field; most cannot. If you are incapacitated you should have saved me the trouble of reaching out to you."

"Let me remind you, that it is because of my incapacity in taking hallucinogens that you are with me right now. When the drugs go, you go."

The gecko stopped talking for several minutes, staying in the pensive perennial discernment that Aristotle said God would be in were there a god. However, when the gecko opened its mouth everything but the profound came out of it.

"You know, we could have lived such better lives had you just taken a full time job at Thomasat University or Ramkamhaeng, but no, you wanted your part time jobs to have time to study and to take notes, and meanwhile, free as you were of the bondage of toil, we lived in an apartment the size of a box. I guess I came back thinking that with what's left of your life you might as well be constructive in the largest sense by writing books for posterity. Maybe you could even get promoted from it."

"God, you have always been so materialistic."

"All right. So, I am materialistic, and once was a woman wanting a comfortable home for myself. Lacking solidity, entities in what they consume, in the homes they care to have, in their sexual groping, and in their possessions (the Jews in the concentration camps were most horrified by the depilation that was done on their heads and bodiesas to not even have this and one loses her last material aspect and can feel as the adumbration or the fluid substance that she really is) seek to solidify their crumbling material aspects, propping up their sand castles and the walls around them."

"With what?"

She/it grinned. "I don't know. Weren't the walls around Paris propped up with sexual organs, that one material that everyone gives away happily and is never in short supply?  Okay, stop pouting. I haven't given up on you entirely."

As societies further secularize and eschew scripture rare intellectuals in their midst will seriously undertake an examination of the ontology of morality and life unflinchingly. And as they do so, they will probably not arrive at any more logical conclusions denying the importance of human life than the writer of this work--life often fecund even in the least optimal places, free and stray as a bitch that alone, disoriented, emaciated in a hostile alley behind a convenience store, finds her bodily orifices sniffed and massaged by a competitor and foe, and soon begins an evanescent amity of several days, an intimate respite from the fears of daily survival, that leads to copulation, conception, and after a period of gestation, more litter on the streets of Bangkok. Every organism, if one were to consider it, which cannot be done as anyone considering this is part of what is being considered, is unique and inherently precious but the fecundity of life established in the social contract of strife set up by the animals under duress in which all must be very fruitful so that some offspring will survive for the next generation and some will be the prey of predators for their sustenance. But that very situation of inherent value categorically depreciated to dispensability when in so many in the fecundity of nature is applicable to all things from products and currency, and the payment of jobs and professions, and how much a given individual should be cherished. How would a man escape death at his own hand if forced to look very long at his diminutive being?

What had been a sentence an hour earlier was now, when I returned to the chapter again, shown clearly, either deliberately or inadvertently, to have been given a defecation-redaction by the gecko. Upon further scrutiny, clearly a foot or more had been deliberately used to smudge the feces, the incontinent biological functions, evenly across the entire line. Not eager to impugn or malign, had it been a whole lump on a word or a dark raining down on a few words I would hardly have imputed it as anything more than one of those mishaps that even the most scrupulous toilet trained individuals have experienced from undercooked food, a mere peccadillo were it not for the mortifying aspect of the occurrence that evokes memories of infancy and the inevitability of a doddering and feeble senior citizen; but here the subject and the predicate were an even blur, and here, a diminutive being was before me, more than a gecko or a deceased wife, but a muse to which to have a muse at all, could hardly be chastened.

"Everything in here, you as well, look dirty and disheveled," complained Luklawan. "Unwashed dishes in the sink, books strewn all over the place. Obviously you are seeking the so called 'truth' extraneously, and it has made you a wreck as there is no extraneous truth to be had, as much as you smash your brains into every line of a book. This clogging of the mind with other minds is a convenience for lesser minds but it a disgrace for one of your abilities."

"Luklawan, now that you are dead, see the truth. I am a nobody."

The gecko looked askance and stayed stationary for ten to fifteen minutes as if it had gone into a state of estivation.

"There are insects galore here," it at last said. "Even that referred to as dirt is largely strewn diminutive corpses. Do you know that?"

"I do."

"I do. It sounds like nuptial vows once again." She laughed. "Your friend does not clean the apartment, or so it seems. He could at least do that for you so that you can write."

"He isn't here."

"When a man entered me, I mean in the human incarnation, it always felt as though I were urinating him. I can only imagine what it feels like to be sodomized, bowels attempting to defecate the intruder," she said while inspecting the chapter. "Well, it is certainly verbose. I think that we can absolutely say that it is antithetical to any reader's hopes and wishes, and likely to incur their complete antipathy, but interesting nonetheless like any great philosophical treatise. I congratulate you on the efforts that have hitherto been productive enough on this project."

Chapter 7

Considering more of the same when stumbling on Personal Meaning

And yet, objectified logic distancing itself from its emotional impetus is trenchant enough to pierce through superfluous superficial layers to expose the incontrovertible truth that any process that is perennially altered or merely nascent, may be said to exist as a process or gestation, a conceivable reality, but not as a being or anything that can be construed as "reality." Thus, with energy and atoms interchangeable and always more one than the other, nothing is and is not unequivocally. We are not real. The universe is not real.

Methamphetamines, and what else? I do not know what I took exactly with all things ingesting or capable of being ingested in me; and yet it seems I should know, that to not isolate the cause--maybe not this cause, as it may not matter, but causes for most things--and one is in a rip current of surreal waves, unable to get back to the shoreline, and shoreline is as solid as fluid reality gets. It was like this but the glass, here before me, has embankments too smooth, and waters within too bronze and too fermented. In my boyhood in Chaingrai my best friend and I -–what was his name...it seems that I have forgotten his name when so much is piled onto a man and distant memories come apart when under the weight of such strata without continual bits of reconstruction, sometimes fictionalized, in active consciousness--would dive from the rocks of the quarry, into the ground water and runoff that collected below. Maybe now, once again, I am diving with him into these waters, or maybe we are both middle aged men seated together at a table drinking beer or whiskey. I hardly know: they are all plausible nows to which some, like subatomic particles passing through Higgs field, pick up more mass and plausible reality. And of those, they should be in various stages of linear time but instead they are playing concurrently. It is confusing. I do not know what in particular severed that late boyhood friendship of two creatures of physical energy and sensation, yearning to feel the force of gravity in these dives. One is never more whole than with a friend of late boyhood, plunging into nature as forces of nature, and this belonging to nature ends all too quickly, and one is a bastard thereafter.

Now I seem to be on the canal boat, a form of public transportation in Bangkok, with alterity seated around me, and at one pier, and with a few higher up from an adjacent bridge, boys in their underwear dive into the dark murky waters while helmeted ticket salesmen dangling on the edges of the boat jump off to tie and secure it momentarily before jumping back onto it again. Both groups are nothing but instant reflexes, with one in a state of nature and the other is in a state of servitude, but both better than I am for to think takes one out of life and burdens him with that which is and cannot be rectified. I get out a few blocks from Democracy Monument. Here is the largest of the yellow shirt protest bivouacs. All the streets in this area from the monument to the Grand Palace are cordoned off and the area is so thick in yellow mist and strident siren songs of blowing whistles that when not in their mouths, dangle from straps around the necks of the yellow shirts. There is something exhilarating in people believing that they are the ultimate power and as such can commandeer streets and blow out prime ministers with a discordant sound. In that sense, this, my country, is more democratic than any in the West, and in that sense, democracy and anarchy are closely aligned. Movements here are so slow in such a nightmarish condensation of yellow with its profuse sweat raining down on the perfusion of sidewalks. Incrementally, I make my way up to the overpass, but the density of people seems to be more weight than it can bear for it collapses and I fall back into what the Luklawan gecko called my box; and here I see a gecko, a male, impaling a tin cylinder that is his piggy bank with a can opener.

"What are you doing Aus?"

"Where were you?"

"The teacher's conference. You know," I say. "You came back early from the province?"

"Yes."

"What are you doing to your bank?"

"I didn't eat hardly anything for two days," he snivels. "I couldn't get the lid off."

"I left you money. What did you do with it?"

"It went for school."

He climbs up my leg and hugs as much of it as he can, clinging to it desperately the way he does after watching a ghost movie. "My father told me to get out."

"We bought chili seeds for your parents. You were working in the fields."

"He told me to leave." He cries for several moments, but on recovering he says, "I will clean after I get something to eat. Everything is a mess in here, and you have cockroaches."

"Yeah, I can't kill them, Little Baby. That's your job."

"You shouldn't be drinking. I smell it on your breath."

"I felt lonely. It helped; but I won't now that you're back, or at least not so much."

Dreams are never to be eschewed outright as, like imagination they are fading empirical stimuli and repressed and rejected feeling and thought materialized in fables crude as pantomime; and regardless if remembered or forgotten, or recalled but given no credence whatsoever, they have their own power in changing ideas and perception of consciousness ever so nominally. And so if dreams have some substance as agent of change to consciousness I will omit any long discourse on the nature of unreality as there must be substance behind everything, especially matter, albeit far less than what is supposed.

With monetary transactions deluding individuals that this is the means to make a life impregnable, and civilization fundamentally, from a philosophical perspective, further attempting to repudiate ephemeral essence, the natural response is to become venal and self-centered, fixated on money as the best means of bolstering one's material existence, but this takes one even further from the decency of forging some concrete principles that add essence, or spiritual definition, to a man's physical form. By countering injustices when they are encountered, this is the Higgs Field of man giving him eternal substance, call it a soul—of course a material and mortal one but with certain eternal properties.

And thus I have given myself to my own failures, something I do exceedingly well, caring, but never rectifying the tendency to do as little toil as I can, defying the conditioning to believe that from intense labor there will be the financial resources to sustain myself during retirement (men, if anything, are prisoners of war in their own right, albeit salaried ones, forced to build tracks along the bridge over the River Kwai to the future, securing resources for their wives and financial means of cremation and interment for themselves in early deaths). Thus I seek to amass the soul even in a world such as this in which ejaculation of sperm cells are sacrificial lubrication for stronger thrusts in gyration upon penetration, small living creatures are predators of something even smaller, and there is always something smaller just as there is something bigger than even the universe itself, miscarriages, and stillbirths, suicides, homicides, and natural disasters that are rife. It all makes terrestrial existence anything but home-- a world so far from the optimal that parents in Greece and Rome often had to abandon children so that they would die of exposure when infant mortality, normally expected, did not occur, making good fortune unsustainable. If it is absurd to think that every egg, sperm, and every skin cell chafed from the whole is holy so it is of the large organisms that these small processes comprise. I cannot be moral, but I can accumulate that which for lack of a better word must be referred to as the soul.

I leave the bathroom upon hearing a door open. The real person hugs me as he puts down his suitcase. It is a clinging embrace as though he had come into my room upon awakening from a dream of his mother being attacked by a snake that had crawled into the cabin on stilts or from the sounds of gunfire, helicopters, and ambulances that are ever more prevalent as the dominant cacophony of the city.

If he could, he would cuddle up to me to the ends of time as the precarious nature of life is never absent from the imaginations of those who know what life really is and have a sensitive disposition that retains it all. Every time I want to ask him to leave I not only hear my own father's voice saying of me, "What are we going to do with that boy" but feel an impaling of my heart and this sense that I cannot not, that I would be diminished as a human being if I were to tell him to go. So, I provide him with an education and foster the illusion of security. I do not know whether I am fostering a dependency or allowing a repressed childhood to resurface belatedly which will allow him to mature in time. If Kant is right, and I think he is, the principle matters more than the end resultfor character, as Aristotle phrases it, is the composite of one's actions; thus, I do not care to become a soulless predator of money or to be desensitized to life's sufferings. Deciduous and desiccated leaf blowing circuitously on the linear sidewalks of time, without skill, uneducated, the burdens of providing for parents when unable to maintain himself weighing upon him, of course he clings; and of course the seven billion children on the planet, lacking any higher truth whatsoever, grope and stalk each other,

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,' 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 fury 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.Anyhow, 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 benevolence. 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 and 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 ingratitude. 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'Urbervillesis 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 happy") 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.

Chapter 9

Bangkok as Eden in Crepuscular Existence

Last night, unable to write, I was stir-crazy in my confinement, with practical worries of future retirement and not being able to materially sustain myself or anyone else fifteen or twenty years hence the predominate thoughts that were pressing upon me in late hours. Then this concern, partially that I will not have the resources to be of benefit to others (a vexation to the virtuous no real consolation especially as I am already in debt over all that the insurance company refused to pay on Luklawan's hospitalization), morphed into onerous regret over tuition money I had given to others in the past, or the money that went into operations on Aus' legs; and it was only the dull repetition of this ruefulness and imagining dire scenarios in the future that exhausted me to the point of sleep.

Now, in the morning light, the earlier worries seem petty and less significant; but with sleep only reviving me nominally, I retain this morbid mood in which I remain wordless, without any vision to impart and with a sense of the futility of seeking truth when life functions on delusions. And because of the news (the sinking of a ferry boat of hundreds of school children in Korea, and the mysterious disappearance of a commercial airliner in the Indian ocean with a similar number of human treasures) I sense an individual life, of whatever profession or social ranking, or its alleged value and significance for humanity, to be the garbage that it in fact is with the greatest individuals and accomplishments, even that of Einstein himself, compacted under the weight of further facts and conjecture in the relentless and undeterred thrust of forward moving fads, experience, and time until at last becoming irrelevant and garbage within garbage, old explanations of the scarcely explicable. Thus, I am reminded that a species itself is rendered as nothing but a transitional link to something else with enough time. Thus, I have chosen to go downtown to clog my mind in grandeur and opulence, for there are areas of the human psyche that no anodyne of drugs and alcohol can penetrate.

But everywhere I go, just as I tread on insects, I tread on human life. To buy some soymilk at a convenience store, as I did half hour earlier, and I have relegated this life of the cashier to a base assumption that it exists to serve my whims. Most likely, the cashier had already suffered the indignity of having to pay a 3000 baht guarantee against financial mishaps and liabilities or compensation for potential theft to obtain this position at all, so to add injury to insult, here I am, a customer demanding to be served. And if loud and crude, her Thai, like most Thais, rougher than the bark of a tree, the environment, more than the tonal aspect of the language, made her such—this pachydermatous character charging her way through life's vagaries. In deference, when Thais pass a teacher they lower themselves like cowering cats or in approaching him or her or extend to a given teacher the gesture of the "wei," but it is to the worker whom I owe deference. Here is a mind like mine, like my mind, this individual could have been all things but, for survival, has been lured into this cage.

Likewise, it is so of the workers at a restaurant where I eat my vegetable tum yum, slurping, savoring every mushroom, and masticating the little galangal within the tum yum that is edible. In the bus, half expecting to see a young child belonging to a half toothless ticket seller or bus driver (the latter on his methamphetamines like me, the same and no better than me, going the same direction as me—of course he would be as the driver, or so I would hope), lying on a front seat, instead I see a ten year old ticket salesman. Sometimes Thailand is as it was thirty years ago-- with education compulsory now, I do not know why. With the apparition of the young and diminutive ticket salesman, I fall briefly into memories of being a boy feeding the water buffalo at my grandfather's farm or loading rice into his makeshift silo. A saffron robed elderly monk is seated next to him. As forty minutes into the journey he is still asleep, I touch his hand and awaken him. "Phra [Honorable monk]," I say. "May I be of assistance? I don't want you to miss where you are going."

"You are so kind. Wat Phow, he says. It should be on the right."

"Oh, I don't think you are on the right bus. You need 117. This goes to the Bayoke Tower."

"Oh."

"Maybe you should get out here."

"Never mind. Someone always finds me and pulls me in. I haven't lost the monastery yet. A destination just needs another destination to bring one back, and as the second destination is destination it seems that it is one and the same. But then as I get older I do not imagine differences in everything any longer. Everything is everything." He looks out the window into the froth of the yellow shirt sea. "Seeing differences is the sin that has brought us to this. All of these sirens" He means whistles.

"Odysseus and the Sirens," I say.

"What?" he asks.

Waiting in front of the ticket desk to the observation deck of the Bayoke Tower, as it is not yet open, I, all alone, always wanting to be alone in the intensity of thought, sit on a bench and look out onto life buoying on the yellow sea. It manifests itself in the form of Thai peddlers as linked to their carts as if they were respirators, IVs, and umbilical cords, all three: those in front of fruit and meat grilling carts, souvenir salesmen catering to foreign tourists, those with a nexus to their makeshift restaurants (some with already prepared fast food, and some catering more to the Moslem diet and palate prepared by women in head scarves or hijabs), and those operating coffee kiosks and juice squeezing stands. I descry a couple lottery ticket salesmen with open wooden briefcases tied around handle bars of their bicycles selling to those seeking to have enough to get them through the day and a bit more for their one and only daily gamble to radically alter their lives. An emaciated woman with a son in a wheelchair and donned in a school uniform looks distraught an hour into my wait, as no customers appear to her towel of wooden trinkets. Periodically, she makes readjustments in the realignment of the objects as though this more orderly arrangement might make it more visually appealing as the paralyzed son dressed for school does not garner many sympathy purchases, which of course he would not with those who would sooner give to singers, dancers (especially those in a striptease joint), tricksters, and cute dogs with signs in front of them saying don't forget to feed me money, but not a genuine reminder of how bleak the world really is. I step over and buy a wooden piggy bank that I decide I will give it to Aus until noticing that the coins that are to be ingested therein have no aperture for excretion. I buy the pig nonetheless to brighten her day as, no matter how bleak life is we live enough in the future to cling to our rays of hope, and then a ticket into the sullied heavens.

And if opulence can be equated as munificence, the latter can even be said of the magnificence of the city of Bangkok, the city of myriad downtowns with endless clusters of skyscrapers built like pyramids on the backs of its plethora of pittance-salaried workers and maintained and staffed the same. It is there in every direction as attested in the spinning observation deck; and beneath layers of smog is the mellifluence of its myriad sweet effluvia (in outdoor markets in particular, it is the thick black smoke of grilled chicken, sausages, and other eviscerates cooked from makeshift sidewalk restaurant takeaways, its plastic sacks of garbage nocturnally torn asunder by scavenging canines that are allowed to propagate and starve along with their rat counterparts in the substrate of this " higher" mammal's concrete Eden, its sidewalks of evaporated urine residue most palpable, and the emissions of dark carbon dioxide that trail millions of vehicles of these frenzied individuals chasing money.

But this metropolis, this attenuated and milder version of predation, savage in its own way especially to those who are homeless and without employable skills, those deemed of no commercial worth, is a monochrome Eden not merely for its ever growing scaffolding florid around the ordure of fetid slums or its languorous plebeian consumers, Western philosophy professing bums like me, who circle around this great city within the kaleidoscope of the hot sun and within the kaleidoscope of their thoughts while so many others are suffering automatons. It is an Eden for being the great crucible of spiritual survival in material survival; for whatever acts of genuine kindness are born in such a place are bound to be noble indeed.

Chapter 10

Who, or What, I am Writing to, if Anything, in this Realm of 90% Random Happenstance and

9% Incompletely Aligned Coincidences As I Isolate the Framework for More Plausible

Republics Part I

With the masses never having access to the real facts but merely reports of them in their various incarnations in speeches and mass media, and democracy, representational adulterations as pure ones, shown to be demagoguery,attitudes, here in particular, change as radically as the weather. So, as long as the stoking of tensions does not ignite into full civil war conflagrations in which the involvement of foreign insurgents with a proclivity for any type of revolution causes the government to order the exodus or imprisonment of all agitators, foreign or Thai (especially those writing on their own blogs, as I do)--claims of true power, especially in light of charges of corruption, emanating from populist and oligarch factions no clearer here than in days of the late Roman Republic\-- here I stay, for I do not relish dismantling my thatched hut along Walden's Pond, or the best that I can do here, a cheap apartment along a canal and a livelihood that allows for contemplative discernment if I plan my life accordingly, foregoing the pleasures of the moment for something richer albeit intensely painful to execute, and perhaps, if I can, to help others along the way.

"You can't," said the Luklawan Gecko. "Look at that lizard over there in that corner, lighting his incense on his makeshift shrine that you allow him to have on top of a closet—your closet."

"That is, if we own anything absolutely. He has his pantheon of gods there, Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian, whom he prays to. It is harmless enough. He gives them oblations and this supposedly gives him good luck."

"Of course it does, sponging off of a fool as he is."

"He is sinking."

"He is sinking and he's grabbing onto anything that seems to him material enough to stay afloat. The fact that he sees you in your financial state as a means to bolster his shadow shows how desperate he really is."

"I have to help."

"You paid for him to go to a business school—that same one I taught at; then you gave him cash to go to Thaksin University. Did he actually enroll?"

"I don't know. He did graduate from the business college."

"But you didn't see a receipt for the other institution."

"No"

"Or any receipts for the time that he was supposed to be in the Hattayai branch."

"No."

"You just paid."

"I just paid.

"A motorcycle appeared."

"Yes, it did. No doubt his family needed one, as stranded as they are in the middle of nowhere amongst rice patties, chili fields, and the like. And then later, maybe he asked them if he could borrow it for a while. I don't know. Eventually, I dissuaded him from driving it in this city. I don't know where it came from exactly. He said his mother bought it."

"So he is clinging to his lie."

"I don't know that it is a lie."

"Energy from a specific amount of matter and matter from a specific amount of energy,a rare and valued service or commodity allowing a transaction of a similar nature, and yet you say motorcycles materialize from the sale of rice and chili on a small farm. You might as well say that they germinate from the seeds. You know, but you just don't want to know. And so a dream, as this is, is more a substance of reality than reality, which attests to the surreal nature and fluidity of all things. Isn't that right, Heraclitus?"

"I don't want a world like this."

"What type of world do you want? One moment you are grousing that reality is not material enough to suit you and then the next that the material and all venal sentiment that arises from it is in everything. "

"Everything? You married me."

"I thought that you would be somebody. You looked less dreamy back then, or perhaps I thought that the dreaminess was enough of an incentive to rev up your engine and get you going. I admit that material substance, something, is nothing long term but humans don't think long term, and so a woman powders her face, a man his body in talcum powder, for we all sprinkle our adumbrations with dust to keep ourselves as something somewhat material. So what type of world do you want? One in which you linger with the lizard, no doubt."

"There are several things. Number 1: Like Plato, a philosopher king, although it does not necessarily have to be one man but could be an entire assembly of good men chosen by the state because of a specific character forged, as Aristotle says, by corresponding and repeated actions, however, it seems to me that the more individuals involved the more unwieldy and compromised the integrity of the executive power would be as a good man having to constrain his own selfish caprices can manage such abnegation for a greater good but two of varying perspectives are likely to slip and begin emphasizing what is good for themselves respectively when having to reach a compromise with each other. Number 2: A communist state in which all men are given fairly equal salaries, with manual laborers somewhat higher wages, and all taught to think of themselves as benefactors of the public good but with laws enacted that penalize all enrichment and hording, and these codes enforced vigorously in the interest of morality and a flourishing economy. Number 3: a pure democracy in which all individuals vote by referendum on all issues and only after having passed an examination proving an understanding of all perspectives to a given bill, and with no abstentions allowed. Number 4: a representational democracy but one in which the people who elect the representatives, and all are obligated to do so, take examinations like that mentioned above and to which all those seeking government offices are allowed to run only after passing a hearing proving themselves as having been benefactors in the past, and upon winning, are kept on the livelihood of a mere stipend. Number 5: and in the case of 1-3 all citizens must be given an appropriate stipend to cover living expenses so that individuals will regain the sense of themselves as having inherent rather than commercial worth. With improved self-concept always engendering improved moral conduct, new and unique enterprises of social value to others will be created that were never thought possible when money and profit had been the sole objective. Number 6: Everything should be in reverse. Compassion should trump over ambition. Logic should be more than a tool for securing advantage. This should be inculcated onto the masses."

"Hmm," said the Luklawan gecko indifferently as the Aus gecko resumed trying to get his piggy bank open by prying off the covering of the aperture with a can opener. "As you say, it is a material plane. Long after the ancient microbes return to life in the melting glacial tundra, causing pandemics that finally annihilate civilization during the savage wars yet to be for uncontaminated water supplies and arable land and man induced natural disasters of severe weather patterns and earthquakes from global warming and fracking—everything on Earth up to this point subject to exploitation by the human animal but not now with cities long abandoned and those humans still alive extricated once more to their true savage natures in sparse settlements in and out of nature-- it will be the androids who inherit the earth. They will run on a more stable form of electrical current and not the inducement of electrically charged chemicals that come and go. It will be a logic predicated on other factual assessments and not one predicated on emotions that are predicated on survival instincts and reflexes. For once, the world will have real logic." Neither individual understood the other or where he/she/it was coming from. Then the gecko added, "You do learn a lot from your addictions, don't you?"

"I'm not addicted to anything. I—"

"Here comes a long speech about how you even get a buzz on coffee so very little chemical substances are needed to launch you off this parochial and mundane domain and into the stratosphere, and that you deliberately mix a little of this and that—heroin one time, cocaine, hashish, methamphetamines, weed, mushrooms, or whatever the next—and this mixing does not an addict make, and makes for less of an impact crater. Then you will go on and talk about the fact that you only began this habit last year upon my death and it is only over these several weeks of protests and no classes, and strictly for a recreational use, that you have actually engaged this much and with this regularity in illicit substances. Tell me. Do you even know where you are right now?"

"Of course I do, even though there are certain waves, I must admit, that knock me over and make me stupefied at specific times. Right now? Right now, I am walking along the Chao Phraya River. A half hour ago I called Aus to tell him that I would be staying downtown in a hotel to do some writing. His jealousy was mild as he knew it was only the deeper self that I would be philandering with. A few minutes ago as I was walking along the river, I saw a couple buying some goldfish from a temple and dumping the content of the small bag into the river all so that they might feel "spiritual" giving freedom to caught entities when in fact they were just giving a quick and hideous demise to those diminutive creatures that will be quickly eaten up by the bigger fish. Then I saw some dogs and a meat salesman. I fed the dogs."

"Okay. Quite enough. Yes, the dogs. The great humanitarian that you are, you used them as target practice."

"They didn't realize they were eating chicken, so I tore it from the bone for them. One bitch wouldn't eat it at all, so in my exasperation I hit her with the chicken bone."

"Like that time a mango fell from a tree and a bitch, without the construct of language but understanding cause and effect nonetheless, pinpointed you as the culprit and instigator of this insult of a falling mango on its rear end. Sensing invective and expletives from that howling, you dropped the sack of dog food and began chasing the screeching bitch through all of Rabbit Park, the Tai Chi Park, and other parts or parks of the stadium that you have given this nomenclature."

"Hey, it happens, sometimes."

"Passing through the largest concentration of yellow and its bivouac to the river, feeding dogs from meat stands, popping more methamphetamines, watching branches float away in the waters, and feeling rain fall on your head, you seem to have found exhilaration in having gotten away from all inhabitants in the city, though I would hardly call it a commune with your deeper self"

"Well, whatever it is, I have arrived at the peaceful, remote island of myself, and to do so I had to pass through a school of fish and large yellow waves."

"But just as in sex one feels as though he is swinging and dangling on the sinews and limbs of human flesh without sensing the camouflaged trap of this cupiscence, so your recreational use is cheese in the trap for the little mouse. As for escaping from people and into nature," the gecko guffawed, "people seek the serenity of nature to escape human savagery, but when they see nature as the unrestrained predation that it is then they go back to society. Circles of inferno are everywhere."

Suddenly the incense from the shrine of the Aus gecko became a fog that interred both of them like a tomb; and a few minutes later as some of the fog began to withdraw hazily it formed sentences. In Romanized letters it read: "I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again."

Chapter 11

Who, or What, I am Writing to, if Anything, in this Realm of 90% Random Happenstance and

9% Incompletely Aligned Coincidences As I Isolate the Framework for More Plausible

Republics Part II

I have deliberately kept my room on the seventy second floor in the Bayoke Tower dark so that the lights of the city, a second universe of stars, can be seen through the windows with a small sheet of light, like a radiant shadow against the mass and matter of darkness, falling upon part of the table and the notebook paper I am writing upon most tepidly. Sipping from my glass, I then go to the toilet—of course I have urinated at other unrecorded junctures of assembling these notes of a treatise, an article, something, nothing, although rarely with such precipitous urgency, which in this case is induced by Thai whiskey that, after washing my hands, of course, has necessitated the procurement of deciduous ice cubes to plunk into my glass and more liquid to soak the reef, further elongating the interruption of the previous chapter, creating a new one.

Division and birth of something new is always commenced by such interregnums of accidental severances and growth conflated with other exigencies (species in descent with modification,the masticated, fishy severing of the limb of a starfish, the beating of a boy that causes him to run away, jump over a fence at an airport, hide in the wheel well of an airplane, and begin life anew in a new land, the tax rebellion of the American colonial insurrectionists wanting, but not wanting to pay for, the French and Indian Wars aggravating tensions that lead to secession and a country, a global police force that now impedes other attempts at secession throughout the world, the burning down of Ayuttaya that causes the burning up of the ersatz capital of Bangkok, not to mention the accidents that created the universe, the Earth, homo sapiens, and consciousness).

What of this physical body I have? It is more of a volatile water balloon than solid substance (increasingly so over the years) and it alters to gravity, interior changes, and the chemical substances I pour into it and so it isn't me. Every decade the new deteriorated self finds pictures of the old self unknown to it; every decade the self of a child within cannot accept any of these temporary rags, these older adult manifestations that are more ragged raiment with time. What little of me I garner that isn't predicated on the improvised roles that I invent to be as apposite for harmonious social interaction and memorized script that goes with the job that I have to perform to survive--what I do a compromised, unfulfilled dream of a man found not to be so exemplary with talents and skills that are mediocre at best but enable him to fall into this commonplace rut to survive the way the Earth falls into the rut and groove of space that stops it from being drawn in fully to the sun or ricocheted out of the solar system from the second of the foci\-- this deeper self that is found in discernment, is not based upon a fixed and stationary query of matters so much as motion. And even in going to the toilet, this activity gives a man vantage points and experiences of the empirical from which to fuse together a framework of ideas that staring into space would not do for him.

Ambulatory discernment machine and facile breeding apparatus that is the human animal, more efficient than ancient floral species ever evolved to do, succumbs easily from his menial exertions to sleep; and what is sleep: the demolition of the day, with debris bulldozed into a landfill, so that a new day can be built upon the very spot, thus 20,000 Troys on 20,000 strata of the self—no 20,000 selves, and each barely remembering its immediate successor let alone its distant ancestors. Smaller processes link together into something more efficacious and facile for both (the electron to the proton and neutron to become an atom, atoms to divergent atoms of the elements to become molecules; molecules plugged into large misshaped molecules, proteins that are enzymes for catalysts, which provide the means and sustenance for the defining characteristics of cells and tissue; tissues to organs and organisms—this is all that I am; and what I think of as my volition is the volition of all the cells, bacteria, and viruses within.

But there is something marginally metaphysical and enormously disconcerting in this physical process of the smaller harmonizing to create larger living and social complexities --ultrahappenstance if you will in which unlikely circumstances arise as though various nows falling seriatim in a linear arrangement in an attempt to harmonize, similar to the way first animals in duress did in the social contract of animals billions of years earlier, this check and balance of becoming more fecund with weaker offspring left as food for natural enemies. Some nows of one human being create a nexus to nows with another human being. The circumstances when they occur rarely ever materialize fully so the person one always wanted to meet is now met but not in the way that one would have liked it to be. A young maid in this hotel, for example, thinking this room unoccupied suddenly enters it, but then in seeing her mistake begins to leave in embarrassment and chagrin, apologizing to the man who views her as the paragon of beauty, the perfection of his wildest dreams, instead of taking off her panties and leaving quite a bit later with a smile on her face. If he were to take her by force the extra harmonizing of nows would become the height of discordance especially if she screams; and if she were to give herself to the man, this man, fully, she would not only be a metaphysical perfection but the best thing that room service and housekeeping can offer.

Chapter 12

Alienation

After some hours of sleep I awaken, prop myself up with pillows, and reposition to stare onto blank sheets of paper, albeit to no avail. And yet only in these multi-semantic words of spilled ink on sheets meant to symbolize the processes of a febrile intellect but in a crude language that can be interpreted in various ways and is little reflection of the feeling that actually drives a man, is there any chance at all, as feeble as the best attempt is, and with tenuous words at that, to have some impact upon the ages, some permanent worth—Descartes extolling books as "interviews of the noblest men of past ages" and "converse with those of other ages." But this purported gift, this pathetic transmission of knowledge and self, is in fact a desperate attempt to get future ages to acknowledge that one once was so as to permanently be, and only this.

If one were to give up the quest to write a book of significance, there are worthwhile charities an intellectual might become involved in that offer succor to indigent beings, but as they, like all beings, will not be here for very long and all attempt to rescue ephemeral beings who will soon perish and vanish completely regardless of the assistance given to them, dispersed as smoke, seems an even more futile project than spilling ink and blood onto pages, I continue to be stabbed by the gecko and drip my blood on whatever surface it will paint. With selves of oneself and their memories a morgue of unrecognizable corpses and the beauty of what once was like the fading of tempera on wood, I am a being of now, not able to fully conceptualize either what I was before or what, under circumstances and necessity or the channeling of faculties anon, I will become (all things, both positive and negative, tyrant and saint, capable of being me). No words come as there is nothing to say, so I descend in the ear popping elevator of the Bayoke Tower Hotel into early morning darkness. Concrete shadow of an automaton without an instructor's manual and without absolute truth, only doing what seems pleasurable at a given moment, with pleasure being a man's only compass, of course I stalk these other shadows—after all, what else would there be to stalk-- before becoming cognizant of it as they become cognizant of it, desisting, and detouring. But, in these detours, I eventually wind up on Silom Road, and then Surawong. There, I find myself entering a go-go bar, with a stage of staged, curved female forms with angular bosoms gyrating, impaling sight, and fomenting my lust while my eyes go back and forth between their nipples and my glass. Although a man should think of it as the complement, the positive reinforcement for doing a good activity, and not an end unto itself, pleasure, and only this, becomes a man's life if he no longer has to struggle to survive.

A being with a bit of money and time on his hands merely becomes a creature that lives to gain even more pleasures of life and the quest to find those hidden pleasures that are novel to him if not sui generis to all. I am imprisoned here on this gigantic rock in its own rut of distorted space moving endlessly like Sisyphus, and of course, for the sake of my own sanity, it is the pleasures that give me a sense of it being otherwise—that I am a creature of volition,that I am free, and that the world is a wondrous place. He who is a romantic and loves life most never sees it for what it is. In squinted vision, and with money at his disposal, he, like most of the tourists in the Bayoke Tower, goes not to see life but fantasy. What else is this thing called culture—these temples, and these holy monks—if not the desperate cries and dirges of indigent people celebrated by tourists.

And if a romantic were here, seated where I am before this stage of naked women, it would not be the sorrow inside a dancer's heart that his tongue and other anatomy would impale but her flesh with his own –nakedness, as Aus calls it, merely the wearing of one's birthday uniform. Thus, thank God for dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and other natural hallucinogens, and thank God for the artificial ones that save man on this barren captive rock from going stark mad.

And although it is true that "if civilization requires such sacrifices not only of sexuality but also the aggressive tendencies in mankind we can understand why it should be so hard to feel happy in it" I, an intellect, am not any happier in my pleasures nor in my addictions. I leave after several whiskeys as the dancers have all gone away and the bar is beginning to close down. Outside, there is the rustling of leaves as though it will soon storm. Tactile, its varied force, even when weak, grazes me; and palpable, the molecules it carries are pungent odors thrust into my nostrils irrespective of my volition. Dust of decayed ages, in a spate of violent wind, lodges in my eyes and mouth. At this moment I may be breathing in the body of King Chulalongkorn, or even a bit of Abraham Lincoln blown across the Pacific. Already, it is the first moments of dusk and the traffic is becoming denser. Restraunteers push their carts of precooked dishes along what will soon become heavily congested sidewalks, and a girl is seated before a cup playing her plastic ersatz flute to have money from which to go to school. Near the Bayoke Tower a monk is seated in the back of a pickup truck sprinkling those who pass by with his holy ablution. Correcting injustices a little bit seems to be the only ballast in life. Aus is one of my ballasts in a life needing stability, which is why Aristotle says that a man who gives to a friend who does not have, in a friendship of inequality, has no reason to complain.

Chapter 13

Delusions, Dissimulation, and Reconciliation

The goal, stated or implied, contrived as it is when in fact I write in part to fill the vacuum of time in this violent red and yellow interregnum, remains to scrutinize the self in various lenses, distant and objective, myopic and personal, to determine whether in the present understanding of the accidents that brought about cosmology, the atomic structure of matter, the fruition of organisms, their evolvement, or in Darwin's words, "descent with modification" and by inference, consciousness as well (the latter which could only arise from painful accidents that cause perplexity as to their origin, and because of language, more deliberate inquiry into them), any moral values can be determined unequivocally; and if it is proven to the self, after a fair amount of inquiry to which giving even more time and scrutiny would seem ridiculous, that there is none, to deliberate on the best that man can realistically arrive at irrespective of his lack of purpose in the greater scheme of space and time—ants that our scurrying around seem equivalent to as attested by any aerial view, as that from the top of the Boyoke, and the absolute irrelevance a man, or even a society of men, to that which will come afterwards whose sense of "now," if intelligent enough to ponder such questions of what was and will be, will, at best, relegate all earlier times to a vague belief in them having existed at all. But this cannot be done constructively without an understanding of the mendacities inherent in reality that keep self-replicating matter operational.

Self-deception and dissimulation are imperative for survival and to any sense of reality as attested by appetite depreciating a living presence to such a degree that in the mind it becomes a comestible that, in its insolent tendency to scurry away, has to be overpowered and made to that which the mind under the influence of appetite has relegated it as being (appetite itself, or at least the tastes that it assumes, largely influenced, if not directly induced, by the rife microorganisms and mitochondria living within that survive on specific substances), and in descrying a bitch at a local convenience store that is licked into romantic submission of an inseparable three day union culminating in her pregnancy and their rupture and a return to a more forlorn disposition—such being the state of escapism from life's travails into society and bliss that both redeems and ruins a being, animal or human animal, like a mouse at its first bit of cheese when the metal of the trap snaps down.

Of man himself, this lesser quadruped in these chemical bombardments breaking all concentration and inducing him toward amorous encounters, the serotonin and dopamine high conflated with a testosterone rush that is part of falling in love is a deliberate cloud to impair logical assessments by making an individual feel bonded in ways that he or she never would have felt if just from associations of common interest or the base act of physical penetration itself. In his state of concupiscence, which overwhelms his sense of logic, he hungers for physical intimacy to the point where all previous experiences proving it as meretricious seem meretricious and, he argues to himself, that this time it seems to be true love, and true intimacy. The marital commitment lasts long enough to force the two to have and raise children, and nothing more than this.

Likewise, volition seems to be an illusion. If man has volition, let alone a will for power this can be undermined by the macrocosm, the state, which can conscript men into soldiers, and from the war, an opposing army can cleft a society, and upset the foundation that a man predicates his life on; and as for the microcosm, it can be assumed that a sperm cell racing against others to reach an egg, if there is one, or a white blood cell encroaching on the bacterial invader that will be its prey thinks of itself, no different than the entire organism, as autonomous, not knowing how it is being used by the larger macrocosm.

And as for these solipsistic preoccupations to survive and thrive in the world with a fair degree of comfort, rushing around in a capitalistic democracy, banging into each other in the mad celerity for the procurement of money, part which is used for the sustenance of family, part horded and the lack of circulation bringing about more poverty and injustice than even assigning specific jobs higher and lower monetary value, there is no greater absurdity than plowing down others so as to bolster a self that cannot long endure.

Happiness too is a delusion, as it is empirical and must have, as Kant points out, a continual repetition of the same favorably perceived stimuli for the happiness to continue. And as this is impossible, it inevitably falters; so it is no wonder that, to have little sense of it faltering, so many change precipitously from one friend to the next and one experience to the next, dismissing the old when warranted so as to keep happiness afloat, believing it to be one consistency when in fact it is myriad waves from the exhilaration gained from all that is new. Those who prize happiness also maintain it by a deliberate parochial attitude, refusing to consider the negative realities that exist in the world unless it impacts on them directly so as not to depress their exuberance to live. As I stated before, a true romantic is one who squints his eyes most.

Chapter 14

Morality and Happiness Indicted in Abstentia

I wake up. A woman unknown to me is asleep. Her strange naked flesh is next to my own. Startled, for a moment, and in a room that also seems unfamiliar, I do not recognize her, and yet there she is nonetheless. But then, whatever I last was upon suddenly awakening (a five year old child playing with a matchbox car, a teenager anxious about using a condom for the first time, or eagerly entering monkhood for a week, a conflation of all three in brain waves meshing into each other and every other me and experience held by these mes within the ocean of being) eventually diminishes and recognition begins.

And as I get out of the bed and slip on my underwear with its trapped urine molecules in cotton screams and other subsequent articles of clothing, and inadvertently slip into the patchwork of memories that makes up a minute, an hour, a day, a year, a decade, a series of decades (that which provides texture to a being, a consistency, if merely through threads holding together motely memories and variegated beings as one being—the threads coercive attempts to retain the various selves to stay sane, with seams seemingly reinforced by relative consistency of character, ideology, and perspective that is imprinted and molded by these myriad versions of self, garnered through one's years) I do remember her vaguely; and that feeling as though I were diminutive and diminishing, I had put on her skin to feel once again like a real man. But how, I ask myself, did I acquire this smooth leather? Then I recall returning from the go-go bar, the notes I scrawled in the solitude of this room, the inability to sleep, and that same bellboy who had greeted me at my return more than willing to make a call for me to one of the nearby massage parlors that was closing its doors. Everyone in it for his or her share, there she is.

"Sir," said the hotel gecko, dressed in a housekeeping uniform, "What should I do about the lump in the bed?"

"What?"

"Sir, are you checking out?"

"Yes."

"I have to find out how much liquor you have taken out of the refrigerator. And I don't know what you want me to do about the lump in the bed."

"The lump?"

"Yes, Sir. The lump."

"Well, I guess you can make the bed over it. Just tighten the sheets and blanket more firmly than what you would do otherwise. It's human so it will rot away with enough time. It is not like it is real or anything."

"I see, Sir. Regarding the other issue, it seems Sir that you will need to pay an extra ten thousand baht for the drinks."

"Oh, only this?"

"Yes, sir."

The system of logic in these pages, if any, is nothing but the premises that have constructed it which, unlike mathematics, are never absolute. Matter must be assessed not just based upon the factors that created it which are varied and great indeed but based upon what it happens to be from moment to moment as seen through myriad lenses, and thus logic is not the desideratum in these pages but truth, with every nearly inscrutable second bringing a new truth and a new awareness—the rock of a proposition, like the rock of the Earth itself, to be turned and examined endlessly not only on all sides but against space and time and the changes that arise therein.

Like the World War II bomb that was recently found intact and sold to a scrap metal shop which tampered with it before it exploded, so I drop this manuscript. Whether it lands into the laps of posterity, or goes into oblivion with no impact capability whatsoever, I know not. I cannot construe if what is written here is for good or bad either in content or purpose, or that good does not engender the bad, the bad the good, or that initially or even afterwards, that we know what good and bad are. All I can do is to express what I believe in the moment that I believe it before I morph into something different than what I am now, in a world that is morphing around me with all denizens in it in their own respective ways, and hope that there is no destruction beyond a perspective that needed to be reset or destructed anyhow.

This is the world we live in, but I condemn it not. Like that old man brandishing a bamboo pole at me menacingly the other day for feeding puppies near his property-- precious and distinct creatures, an infestation according to some because of the fecundity of nature, probably which he bludgeoned to death and tossed into the canal-- we can trash life as needed with no compunction whatsoever. We can hardly expect anything different in a world in which life is still trying to harmonize, and in the early social contract of the animals the best harmony that was possible was fecundity of birth and predation, although indubitably, if society does not self-destruct, it will engender more symbiotic relationships yet to come. In the social contract of humans, those born to society without any say in the matter but who would hardly choose the alternative, the main rule of existence is to produce for society or perish even if the Titanic of global world commerce is crashing not against an iceberg but all of nature, and a natural corrective will take place.

"Don't forget your papers, Sir."

"Oh, I must put that in my luggage here. I've got it, thank you. Thank you so much."

"I hope that you enjoyed your time here Sir, even if the bed was lumpy."

"It felt nice. It wasn't too lumpy, at all. If everything is too smooth, I doubt that one would feel or think anything. Maybe things are too smooth now, which is why in the modern era we have no great intellects, and only mediocrity."

"Then your stay was successful?"

"Yes, I felt, and thought, and fucked. I bought some dried mushrooms. My supply was really getting dangerously low. Yes, I believe it was successful."

"I'm glad to hear that."

"Have a good morning."

"You too, Sir. And don't forget our motto here at Bang-cock's Bayoke Tower, created by our founder Democritus: "All those who derive pleasure from their guts by eating or drinking or having sex to an excessive or inordinate degree find their pleasures brief and short lived in that they last for only as long as they are actually eating or drinking while their pains are many."

Chapter 15

Fragmentation

But enough of these generalities or objectified vitiation of emotions, which Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments argues is done to successfully foist a perspective onto a solipsistic listener who, living in the insular bubble of the human mind with its daily preoccupations to survive and thrive, either is reluctant or has a feckless capacity to empathize with a given speaker. To get a nominal degree of sympathy and understanding, says Smith, an individual has to mollify his emotions so that they are acceptable to the listener. This arguably, is a natural social contract that calms roiled, effusive emotion, at least among friends, or to qualify it further, friends who seek empathy from other friends, not that the great majority readily do this when superficiality and facades are a conduit toward most pleasure and profit alliances;but if, since the inception of this species, this were a predominate mechanism in all relationships, there would never have been all this antagonism in family, city, and nation in civil strife or wars through so many millennia of this species as well as the ten or more earlier versions of man, and this planet would never have been such a sullied sphere.

If this theory of needing empathy with those unwilling to empathize, and so mollifying emotions as a result, is the cohesive black matter, or the visibility of the "invisible hand," congealing into a given society all of its discrete, frenzied, and disparate individuals banging into each other in the mad celerity to obtain money, the fulfillment of biological urges, and personal psychological nexus, it is hardly visible here. The Supreme Court of Thailand has just decided to dismiss Prime Minister Yingluck, or rather Caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck as earlier she had dissolved parliament and with it her own position so that new elections could re-legitimize her standing unequivocally and disperse the protestors, a redemption that was never allowed to occur with yellow shirts blocking voting booths, television parodies of her further undermining trust, and in underground organizations, gamblers, it is said, betting on dates that Suthep's mob would kidnap Yingluck, the chances of the North seceding from the rest of Thailand, and the location and number of casualties that would occur with the next exploding bombs.

Whether or not prostitutes were at times made up, donned, and shod to look like the prime minister so as to be gang raped in these sessions, as rumors propound, one cannot escape the fact that the vicissitudes of precarious life and its violent nature are acted out in play with fantasy fueling violence, violence fueling fantasy, and pleasures on this decadent plane of existence, in an environment not of one's own choice, are made to a large degree by whatever reality one is living in. Moles gain pleasures in being underground, birds of the sky, prehistoric man in the hunt, Romans of gladiator games, a microcosm symbolic of the macrocosm, and those in violent ghettos today in the same manly early displays of survival (Genghis Khan purportedly saying, "The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms"). In lieu of being lugubrious and miserable, one is simply compelled to enjoy that which exists no matter how repugnant it is. Examples of this go beyond casinos and betting houses. They are in all things to which, as of yet, there is no inquiry: enjoyments (the few there are) of possessing a spouse in the legal rape of marriage, of the organs that facilitate urination and reproduction, this odd combination, as much for the violence of the thrusts, and the wish to sully, and to be sullied, than the intricate sensation of frenzy, both chemical and neurological, that collude in manipulating man to reproduce as though he would not have any sense to do it otherwise.

The court rendered its unanimous decision to remove her from office as a compromise between the two sides to avert more negative repercussions, although it seems to have only exacerbated tensions as here, like anywhere, people have a proclivity, if they are in great numbers, for demanding total compliance to their perspectives and eschewing the evil of alternate concerns, especially when coming from individuals who are strangers, issues of money are involved, or there is the possibility of altering long held and cherished values—and the values here are monolithic: wealth and power indicate an individual of divine statue; and so politicians who are affluent and thus corrupt with a seemingly vigorous populist stance, or at least not entirely banning the Roman grain dole, so to speak, are predominately the Pheu Thai or UDD reds (United Democracy Front against Dictators), and politicians who are affluent and corrupt with a larger emphasis on exploiting the poor to spur the economy are predominately the Democrats or PDRC yellows (People's Democratic Reform Committee). At the same time there is a belief in major minority rule, if not majority rule, and yellows and reds tout that they are the will of the people, able to commandeer streets, buildings, and parks to establish their protest sites.

Man's whole essence is a composite of self-delusions: his ability to conceptualize enough of the dangers of future scenarios stifles appreciation of the present moment with most thoughts set in futuristic hopes enhanced all the more by pleasure inducements of endorphins and dopamine that cause him to live mostly in this imaginary realm; he, like a pederast making contributions to a boys school to have greater access to human flesh, needs to think of himself as a good being, a benefactor if only of his own pocket (the impecunious and indigent he sees around him deserving the fates that they have been allotted); as a gentleman, he treats his female friends to expensive dinners, his ideas latently fixated on future intercourse the whole time (the male bringing to the female the worm and the harmony of his song to ease her stress at being subject to predation for the purpose of securing mating rights for himself).There is pleasure in the profane of this less than optimal world, this squalid existence. With such a practical construct that manipulates even the autonomous human host, how could existence be otherwise?

No, not in the Land of Smiles, nor anywhere else--other societies and their institutions of camouflaged savagery, for that matter-- do humans want to know what they really are: the material aspirations and the fear of not having anything out of a life that make two people cling to each other for better and not for worse and have children, if they can have children, if the man in slapping his wife does not cause a miscarriage that maims her from ever having them in the future (in developing countries like this one, the poorer they are the more venal the motivation as children exist for the purpose of taking care of the elderly parents, and the wealthier they are the more those children are a status symbol and an ongoing extension of themselves); the fear of loneliness, especially in advancing years and diminishing physical attractiveness that causes a man to stay with his loud harridan, his ugly lizard; the scurrying around to make money, some more, some less, but scurrying to ground a life that will eventually blow away like dust nonetheless (inane abstractions in unwieldy written symbols of language his only means of possibly transferring some minute aspect of himself into the future, and of course his bequest more times than not rejected); those smiles and that warm congeniality that he projects onto others, especially those in his line of business in the prospect of gain, with the more extroverted more eagerly complaisant, calling everyone a friend as there might be some point in which those scarcely known friends might be of some use to him; a nondescript life used up as a social function of diminutive, even miniscule, unmeasurable significance that in consort assists contemporary, temporary man, and nothing more, paid, if he is lucky enough, money to sustain a comfortable existence, but when declared effete at sixty five and retired, knowing unequivocally, that beyond his ejaculate, he has contributed nothing of permanence into the world (even the Roman emperor Claudius no longer having presence and his histories no longer extant in the worldnever was, Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Romehaving lost sections or gained redactions, is merely a half reality in human existence, and after human existence he will be nothing, and King Ramkamhaeng with his supposed likeness on a grassy mound in the center of the university accredited as having formed the written language of Thai although this is completely erroneous, so the image that is revered is not really Ramkamheang himself); and all denying impermanence, so as to pursue roles and personal functions that will make them feel solid and omnipotent, and happy for a time.

Chapter 16

Broaching the Personal

If, when conflated with sensory input, emotion is that which is the genesis of thought and intelligence, adulterating emotion adulterates both; and if the impressions of personal experience are not to be trusted as a form of truth, then no individual has anything whatsoever to offer to posterity; and without the ability to reach posterity an evanescent life will have been proven with enough time by whatever comes thereafter with time to have never existed, although, to himself, contentment and satisfaction in such a petty life is possible if consistency over the years in job, friends, and family, that which is perennial to a man's brevity on the planet, is maintained. Certainly, to substantiate already substantiated observations of the outside world recorded vicariously in books and documentaries (better than personal experience in every sense but confirmatory observations ultimately superfluous, and thus in the absence of any absolute truth beyond the need for compassion and equity—everything in life set in accident—a man can only luxuriate in his senses: the spectacular moon he has seen as though it had not been seen before, the sheen of the waters, the sweet smells of any verdant flora he encounters, the vast complexities of his own petty personal domain, slightly different than all others) is a an exercise in futility; and that which has not yet been confirmed is usually limited to the realm of science, and a team work effort at that so nothing that can be done alone.

And it is aloneness that I seek, and it is on the gondola of words that I am transported into a realm of sentience referred to as consciousness leading to purported deeper dimensions of me. If, these flooded catacombs, these cavernous dimensions of the self, are merely sprawling and interweaving words, and not truth, that lead nowhere but culs de sac and words that are merely a nexus to other words, and I am merely a dog chasing its own tail, I will do so in my own way.

If I am a pawn manipulated by my DNA I will not be unwittingly so; and if manipulated by my society, I, just another prostitute for money, albeit an unwilling one, will choose to be conscious of it the whole time, do what little I, a professor of Western philosophy in Siam, must, and no more, to survive and retain me, and contribute to it as I see fit. If not, I will also be a dispensable part in this mechanical monstrosity of society, a tiny part of a carbon emitting juggernaut barreling onto all including itself in its own self destruction with enough time. But there is no not, as I will be lionized as a whole man. I say this as Aus, scared of the battles that are waged in this city and my earlier absence, holds onto one of my arms, making it hard to write.

BOOK II

The Self and Environment Close-up through a More Myopic Lens

Chapter 17

Earliest Memories

So, in a query on whether philosophical perspective is merely an objectification of the summation of personal experience I will now enumerate the myriad me the best that I am able to do. According to the birth certificate, I was born in the city of Chaingrai, Thailand in 1964, a millennium ago, or so it seems, as it is now 2014, although my earliest memories not induced and thus to some degree fabricated by later viewing of black and white photographs would have been of Surat Thani, the grandson of a small rambutan orchard farmer before being reclaimed and ripped from symbiotic lives that once made up a family. I hardly remember my grandparents now with ever more memories and their corresponding nows perennially avalanching onto me, and the earlier mes in their tangles of old neurological decay and sediment pulverized under the weight and strata of it all; but I can still recall that visceral experience, how upset they were upon losing me, and how it exacerbated my own sense of loss at the time. This is engraved onto the walls of my brain, onto me, and has become my being, for the parents had been impostors, juggernauts, arrogating what was no longer theirs in their selfish need to possess a being from their loins and use him for monetary gain.

According to Boethius it is the copious changes of fate, and sharp vicissitudes, that compel a man to find happiness not in external happenings, but in himself, and that the worst of all fates is to have a life so perfect and yet so dependent on the next success to retain this state of happiness, for with enough age, according to Boethius, misfortune will finally come to those possessing such perfect lives, and when it does they will not be immured to the consequences.  But then with house arrest and impending death, he would hardly have argued otherwise as it is man's tendency to mitigate travail by fictional anodynes of religion and moral justifications. But despite Boethius' comments, nothing good came of this rupture from these primary caregivers of the first six or seven years of my life, for thereafter I always understood that depredation and abrupt termination were indispensable components of human relationships, an understanding no one should have.

In Surat Thani, in the deep South, I remember at the age of four getting lost in mannequins in a department store; out of a fear of being scolded, convincing my friend that we should wipe our muddy shoes on a neighbor's doormat as that was what doormats were meant for, incurring the neighbor lady's wrath instead of that of our own respective families, or perhaps in addition to them—I am really not sure; playing alone in the street, nearly hit by a motorist screeching to a halt and the driver accosting my grandmother hurling his insults at her, which effected my banishment to her bedroom, crying on the white handmade blanket under the bed's mantle with its radio playing the mellifluous sounds of traditional music, the legends of Thai story and dance, which even now resonates in the same cognate sympathy and lugubriousness as it had back then; my grandmother exercising to the instructions of a host to a television program; the morning smells of fruit, coffee, and rice and curry; my grandfather's yellow straw hat and gloves when going to the orchard, and my grandmother kissing him goodbye whenever he was about to go away; hearing the inveigling music of the ice cream truck and running toward it with some coins my grandmother had given to me which I clutched tightly; the smell of tar emanating from roads during the summer heat and of oil on telephone or electrical poles—again, I do not remember the specificity, but only those smells; and the yellow bus that would take my cousin, donned in a raincoat to school—she who was also abandoned by her parents to their care, no doubt also due to the factors of poverty and desperation. Perhaps it rained inordinately during those years as rain and windshield wipers seem to be an ineluctable part of those memories. I remember my grandmother reproaching my cousin and the neighbor children, telling them that capturing lightning bugs and strapping them into grass plaited pinky rings was a vile form of injustice as they too were heavenly creatures—the sentiment rather than the religiosity still seeming eminently truthful and to this date making me wary about exploitation of animals, human or otherwise, and cognizant that to say that religion has only been a destructive force is a vast oversimplification when good and bad can come from virtually anything. Plato himself suggested that equity and harmony could only take place if individuals believed a mendacity that despite all appearances to the contrary, they were in fact inherently of a similar valuable substance. Although I would be reluctant to call it morality, my grandmother's admonishment engendered values and sensitivities into an ethical framework that has always made me indebted to her. And one time around sunset my cousin's friend accidently struck her in the eye with the swing of a golf club, and I remember not only the profuse blood but my acute fear which caused me to cry inconsolably. I suppose it was the first time I felt deep concern for another human being that had little to do with any personal nexus to myself—that which, for lack of a better phrase, should be called true love. Tender, caring, and innocent, I was a receptor of the world around me, and a lover of being alive. The child psychologist Piaget may call this childish inclination to perceive everything as having feeling as animistic thinking, and it is definitely true up to a point, but such reductionism is an indignity to the innocence of pure sentience and pathos therein; and St. Augustine is rather inane in imputing a protective defense of crying to original sin (selfish, it may be and has to be, but sinful it is not), and of course when he feels remorse for having once cried as a baby, he takes his ideals to entertaining lunacy. Life was burgeoning around me, and I was burgeoning in life. Nothing thereafter is as great as the early years of being an epigone of the creative force of life, the celebrator and celebration of unfamiliar being; and me, not knowing any better, having the idea that my grandparents and I would go on this way forever.

"I don't know," said the Luklawan gecko as her little paws walked between the last two lines. "It seems self-defeating."

"How is that?"

The gecko stopped walking and stared boldly at its repugnant human counterpart, that monstrosity which it did not care to look at. It grimaced. "How can your ontology of morality be trusted if you are now challenging its very foundation, the discipline of philosophy itself—its disinterested stance, its objectified focus on reality. It's a major contradiction."

"Do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. I am many, I am multitude," says Sunthorn Phu."

"He said nothing of the sort."

"Well, he should have said it. The fact that our greatest poet is a plagiarist of Indian tales tells a great deal about us, the people of Siam."

"You like stirring up the establishment."

"Yes, call me agent provocateur. I get fed up with everything—these colleagues, these professors, professing to be knowledgeable from degrees they bought overseas and never earned, walking around with such airs though they are gods for having come from the families of the haute monde. Such individuals should not teach. Maybe students would be better off without teachers."

"Are students supposed to teach themselves?"

"I think that is a great idea: the next semester of classes should be taught by respective students-- each one becoming a philosopher for the day. Everyone would learn a great deal more, I am sure."

"And you would get no respect whatsoever."

"I don't care about respect. Everything needs to be shaken up."

"Like in Thai politics now?"

"Maybe. Maybe democracy needs to be shaken to the core through wars—material force countering material force in, as Marx says, historical materialism."

"And yet you're the one who complains about your lectures on Western philosophy going in one ear and out the other; and that as universities here only have philosophy programs to appear in accordance with fulfilling the objective of a liberal arts education that you could stand on your head all day every day for what any of them would care."

"Well, I didn't mean that literally. Appearance of verisimilitude is very important here. Anyhow, don't get so uptight. I am just whiling away the hours jotting down notes for a book that I never intend to write. It doesn't mean anything. Nothing ever does."

"Where were you the other night?"

"You know. Your eyes seem to penetrate into everything."

"You called to me, and then you went to another."

"I needed to rematerialize after all this stationary deterioration in the apartment, feigning the writing a book, sinking into the abyss of myself. Action of flesh to flesh: nothing makes a man more solid as a man than this."

"It's disgraceful. You are a professor of philosophy and ethics. And then you just abandoned her in that hotel room."

"She was a prostitute. Was I supposed to take her home with me?"

"I guess not considering that you have one at home already. How can you write on morality when you commit such acts?"

"I'm not. The ontology of morality is its antithesis—that which we are and abhor." The gecko only glowered.

Chapter 18

Less than Objective Admonishments

I will spare you of most dates and locations for this inconsequential life, that like all nondescript life will, at its passing, through expedited cremation or the slow natural decomposition of an interred corpse (skeletal rocks eventually eroding as well), be proven unequivocally as nothing greater than a felled tree stripped into the lightness of toilet paper, to which in the wiping and flushing down to waterways is easily transformed into free molecules, atoms, and particles once again. Such is the use of tens of thousands of trees daily, and such is the use of the small levers of men in this unstoppable, out of control mechanical monstrosity called society, this impetus of all men over the centuries that has taken a life unto itself, commandeering men, extruding them here and there as the need arises.

That is not to say that each nondescript individual is not unique, even if personality is largely an environmental adaptation for survival as attested by observation of any group of insects of a particular area or the coarseness and guffaws of a menial laborer's language when speaking in Thai. But just as gold would cease to have any value whatsoever if it were shimmering gravel at our footsteps, or even more, were so light and plentiful that it flew around as dust, human life, unless it can mold itself into some commercial function (of course upon retirement stripped even of this pretense of significance in the commercial realm), is much the same. The inherent value of human life is nullified by the superfluous fecundity of reproduced beings, and, except in rare cases, for having absolutely no value to later generations let alone later species to which man will be just a transitional link.

As I said before, most inanely, St. Augustine laments having once been a crying and demanding infant, as though this "selfishness"—not that he would have remembered it—had no bearing on his or any infant's, early survival, or that in seeing the gentle demeanor that a smile elicits from a caregiver, that an infant, once smiling exclusively from pleasure, does not thereafter learn to manipulate others with this artifice. St. Augustine seems to have thought of infancy, and his own infancy in particular, with its emotive and vehement expression of discontent when lacking language, and hence, the means to employ it in less passionate, objectified, and socially acceptable utterances felicitous to the situation to manipulate a desired outcome without the risk of alienating the listener, as the quintessence of original sin. The "selfishness" of infancy was repugnant to him as it was oblivious of a rational principle which, of course, an infant would not possess when lacking the substance of language and for some time not even independent enough to reposition himself comfortably in a given spot, reliant on a caretaker for pleasures and alleviating discomfort in all things. In his boyhood choosing, as he did, to take peaches one time from a neighbor's yard in the categorical pleasure, the thrill of uninhibited arrogation as one wishes, a restive and a more vile act with none of the neediness or covetousness of thievery, St. Augustine says that in this instance he rejected the rational principle; but as there was a rational principle to reject, the reader is led to believe that boyhood, in his perspective, is better than infancy even if it is sometimes more deliberate in its recalcitrance.

Aristotle also believed children to be selfish and insatiable pleasure seekers, which as celebrants of the novelty of all of life pouring into their orifices during those first years (or at least the electromagnetic stimuli of life, the closest any human can penetrate into external "life"-- a fact which later can impel a man toward the subconscious, meandering inward in subconscious and conscious border crossings to new and original paths of self within this sacred space), and not sensible enough to discriminate the good and bad of pleasures imbibed by the senses, of course they would be. But then successful child rearing would, it seems to me, involve quashing the hedonist and reaffirming the curiosity of the celebrant, by encouraging children to think of true pleasure as a complement of a pedagogical or beneficent aim, as Aristotle seems to recommend for his students, and that pleasure unto itself when not linked to something higher, as evanescent and vacuous, like the cloyed sensation of eating of too many chocolates.

Like John Locke reiterating that the human animal, no different than any other, concocts an artificial sense of family from emotional bonding for that one purpose which is to facilitate a child's independence, and has no greater or longer lasting bond than this, even though gratitude and respect to ones parents, when warranted, and not obedience, should be maintained throughout life, Eric Erikson states that successful child rearing to the point of the child's independence in late teenage years is one in which parents act as safety nets for children as they stumble and fall when making independent movements away from family, an eminently wise suggestion, but still when the right pleasures, the right quantity, and for the right purpose is difficult to determine, let alone do, to just let children pursue pleasures as their caprices dictate, and support them when having to endure the negative consequences of their actions, not that there always are immediate ramifications either negative or positive, does seem a somewhat errant form of parenthood the best I understand parenthood when not a parent myself. After all, pleasurable activities that might seem good to a child can be disadvantageous or even detrimental for others, and what is pleasurable short term might militate against constructive accomplishments that foster self-esteem over many years (i.e. when dating, falling in love, and forgetting about one's educational pursuits that embed knowledge and skills which link one to meaningful employment and contributing to the world in one's nominal way beyond merely the personal domain). Romantic love is dependent on maintaining a certain dopamine and serotonin high and an inflated roseate notion of an individual, but this always diminishes in the changes of one's biochemistry, moods, perceptions of the recent past, whether or not one has solidifying relationships with others predicated mutual experiences and similarity of perspectives, and the mundane routines of existence), and when teenagers trust in it inordinately, "living" a spurious sensation often entails superseding a plethora of other experiences for this one obsession. Discerning the worth of activities and whether they are salubrious long-term as opposed to the hungers, pleasures, and pains, and their intensities that seem real at a given moment is never easy for anyone even when having developed acumen from a life time of experiences. Thus, parents must guide from plausibility, and not dictate when all future outcomes are unknown.

Unfortunately, potential parents rarely prepare themselves for this important task by learning about childhood development or even familiarizing themselves with what other parents have experienced through parental guides; instead, they trust in their feelings, those instincts, prejudices, fears, pleasures, interests, and habits, and mimic adult/child interactions like that which they experienced from their own parents, each playing an old and familiar record in a new way as though this, with the limited repertoire of negatives and positives therein, was in use everywhere. Tests are taken to prove competence before granting licenses to do even basic activities like driving a car, and yet, as licensing is not possible for parenthood, society ignores all other means to secure parental competence. It refuses to mandate even basic child development classes for every expecting parent as though individuals were free to be ignorant of such matters.

Humans are creatures of reciprocity as they are dependent on each other; so if free to be ignorant of the foundations of family and society, are they then free to be unrestrained savages following every unrepressed emotion, making violence permissible at all times as government becomes obsolete; free to be ignorant of how to read and write; free to openly brandish guns in public (well, only in America as it is enshrined in their constitution just as large minority groups commandeering the streets for a half a year of protests in the name of the people is democracy here); free to abort fetuses from any whim without proper deliberation; free to keep the children they bring into the world without deliberating on whether they might have better homes if adopted elsewhere; free to horde a savings and retire from life, making a man something other than the creature of reciprocity that he is); or conversely, that the free enterprise system should freely determine the merit and dispensability of a man based upon a commercial aim as though it were not incumbent on government to see that even the least employable are granted stipends from which to live on and are given some menial job as employment, which, if nothing else, will reconnect such individuals to their fellow men and diminish criminal activity. Obviously, even for the best and most knowledgeable of parents it can all go awry with a restive child who becomes obsessed by satiation of pleasures regardless of whether they are at all salubrious to long term growth as an individual and member of society, but that does not excuse parents from obtaining knowledge of childhood development or learning about parenting from other experiences, which considerably lessens the risk of major untoward occurrences.

Paradoxically, to even broach such a past life philosophically, and it has to be broached as that which is personal is the substance for all things believed even for one so disconnected to it as I am, he steps into personal landmines of active, painful, and volcanic memory and the remembrance of the novelty of being alive exploring body, mind, and environment for the first time, and as he does so there is a tendency to feel the need to save oneself from the barrage of memory and to take umbrage against the untoward events and their human agents, forgetful of himself as having been one of those agents, and in feeling, not understanding, equating it as happening now; but I shall try to stay on the outskirts of this explosive mire for a time and save us both from a litany of grievances of outright cowardly recriminations against family members and for all things that have passed away .

One way of doing so is to acknowledge that family, like falling in love, a chemically induced psychological dependency which mass media misrepresents as a virtue, is not a rarefied ideal but just one more sublunary experience. Even at the early stage of the two newlyweds who are about to bring family into fruition, they do so in the emotion laden behaviors of lust, escape from the negative experiences of previous family, hope of creating something new, expectations of financial security, material acquisition, and the yearning for a happier existence. Marital bonds for better or for worse would never occur if the respective parties expected worse outcomes for themselves in the union. As time goes on, and ideals become as deciduous as leaves on sullied planes, there is always a degree of bitterness: wives toward husbands for not having more active roles in taking care of the children; and husbands toward wives for receiving the pleasure of the human dolls who at all times puncture financial aggrandizement in a life that seems to require a cache of funds to stave off a large degree of life's calamities. No, philosophy is simply a means of not losing oneself completely in the chaos of personal savagery, or one would be in those jungles, blind and groping without the sense of touch; and as for this chapter, it has been my means of temporizing to avoid me and little else.

Chapter 19

Interregnum of Democracy and Chapter

Military helicopters pass overhead, but then of course they would; of course there would be a coup d'état that if not able to rectify the situation, then by absolute fiat, at least for a while, proscribes these two sides from confrontation--sides that have been increasingly dehumanizing each other in that abstraction of the "enemy" that allows them to conscientiously eradicate others the way one would in enjoining a surgeon for an abscission of tissue deemed as "cancer." It is, after all, the essence of conflict that the strongest side ultimately vanquishes that deemed deleterious to society or to the state so that this "cancer" will not be allowed to proliferate. For an animal attacks one of a different species for the procurement of food and rarely, members of its own kind when physical survival is at stake in the competition for scarce resources, but man, this species purported to be a "higher animal," actually more bacteria than animal as all animals are, assails others for mere expression of an attitude, the conveyance of a contrary idea, especially when money and the comforts it provides are in any way threatened."Runt, suck-calf staying inside with his mommy!" that father, the kidnapper or kid-abrogator, would mock as though the allergic reaction that sometimes occurred when picking the chilies--the rashes, the swelling, the fever, and the itchiness that caused insatiable scratching-- had been of my own volition.

Here, democracy is gone, as inevitably it would be with the two polarized and intransigent sides this large and in continual gridlock, and corruption as rampant as it is (one side democratically elected with the guise, the guile, of false populist promises but legitimately garnering the will of the people, and the other the artifice of a more professional elite, chugging and shunting the train into the 21st century with a new engine, but corrupt and incapable of winning enough parliamentary seats for anything but a court mandated premiership, and this imbroglio, until now, ever tilting the country closer into that oblivion of becoming a failed state). The fact that these generals have now imposed martial law and curtailed freedom of assembly and expression is undeniable; but then so is the fact that only in this suspension of democracy can extremists be demilitarized and the constitution amended, if there still is a constitution, so that there is no longer unqualified suffrage in a system without a mechanism for winnowing probity and merit of political candidates long before any voting takes place---only the allure of the rich, powerful and comely, or easily bought impressions by those endowed with greater money than good looks managing to procure seats of power in Siam. And if he caught me idle, staring dreamily into the ether or looking at the life forms that abounded beneath me--every ant walking around a leaf as though it were a boulder, making one question what he himself calls a boulder and all his other nomenclature for every natural thing, and each creature fixated on itself and unaware that it in response to its environment is merely a speck in the perspective of something much greater-- he would slap the suck-calf numerous times with only the threat of "Stop crying or I will give you something to cry about" a restraint on the vile and the lugubrious.

And yet this military coup, or stratocracy long active behind the scenes, has been summarily condemned by America and the world community as though any sick democracy that is active, when common sense would suggest it should be forced to lie down in quarantine, is better than none at all; that there are no countries with radicalized religious elements predominate in the entire populace--countries to which it would not be in the world's best interest to allow them to become democracies; that there has never been cogent and emotive declamation in Ancient Athens in their pure democracy and for us in our own impure ones that has altered this experiment into dangerous demagoguery of the worst and most beguiling kind by stroking sentiments of patriotism and prejudices as attested most horrendously early on in the Athenians' reaction to the alleged disloyalty of Mytilene of Lesbos during the Peloponnesian War;that a tyrannical force would not be necessary to abrogate the right to bear arms in countries to which guns are legal and the countries spiraling into ever worsening violence with every year that passes; that no decisions were ever made for the popularity and the good of political careers, and that all laws and their execution are done for that which is right for the long-term good of a given country; or that there are never scenarios in which a military should protect its citizens from a democracy. If the Thai constitution is not significantly altered to restrict the qualifications of politicians and reduce the importance of elections in the procurement of national leaders, little outside of confiscating caches of weapons will be achieved in this suspension of democracy. It will be merely the resetting the button of elections so that another batch of the glorified rich and venal, the powerful and the comely, will go forward, and history, which repeats itself, will be more repetitious here than anywhere else on the planet. And when I had to study for my correspondence classes, as Siam, even then, compelled, every father to provide some form of rudimentary education for his sons, he would tell me to "blow out that goddamn candle," or "turn out that goddamn light," when we finally had lights, and if I demurred, he would tell me to stop sassing or he would "mop up the floor with me." If I demurred further, he would slap me in the mouth so hard it would bleed. Loss of my pen, compelled him one time to buy a new one, and to say, "You would lose your ass if it wasn't tied to you." And often for more extensive punishment he would force me to spend an afternoon behind plow and water buffalo; and I would have to hit the creature with a stick to keep it moving, something I was so averse to doing, so that I would not be bludgeoned by a belt myself.

Outside, as inside the mind, there is a degree of civil war. Now, another helicopter is hovering above most godlessly. And of the gods or God, just because the majority believe in deities and afterlife does not legitimize them in my mind. Religion, just like being desensitized to homeless people on the overpasses or in traveling, romanticizing the world to be a glorious place, is a delusional means of giving a man a respite from the harsher realities of life. And here, also, Buddha has been anthropomorphized to a Heavenly Father, that protector from ill fate and harm, no different than our Moslem brethren, especially in the South, to which the growing extremist fringe will assist the ruination of world civilization just as once they advanced astronomy and preserved Greek thought in the era of Christian lunacy.From animism to polytheism and then briefly morphing to monotheism, and then monotheism once again emerging permanently from polytheism, man picked up cultural influences along the way: Anubis, the Egyptian deity, assisting souls of the dead for bodies that had not become putrefied in their journey to the afterlife—Egypt giving us the heavens and Greece giving us Hades or Hell. But a god, and a loving God at that, would not allow injustices to proliferate on the planet throughout the millennia; and if he is an Aristotelian God who sets all in motion and does not alter it even though he can, he has made himself irrelevant to man. Even if he cannot, he has made himself even more irrelevant to man. These are the words of Lek, Pharaoh Snefru's Chief lector of atheism.

Chapter 20

Childhood Quiescence, and More of the Boy Drugged but Functioning

But I have digressed. My goal is not to discuss the battles that will happen but, from personal experience, the battles that were, even though conflicts past, present, and future, in elements of the self, the self as a whole, and all things greater at least in scope, albeit perhaps not in purpose (the smaller being more diffused than a grain of sand on the beach next to the latter but perhaps animals and human animals in particular having a unique consciousness that the universe lacks), seem part of the same war which, like sperm cells compelled into a marathon, are part of this natural coercion to cull and eliminate the weaker of competing alternatives of the smaller to form a more perfect nexus to the larger (the cells to tissue, tissue to the organ, the organs to the organism, man to society, society to the ecosystem, the world of ecosystems to a solar system, the solar system to the galaxy, it to the universe that is one organ, perhaps, in this malevolent entity called god). The real insignificance of our being would drive any sane man insane or to the allure of suicide if, foolishly, he were to contemplate it fully, and thus man, like all animals, preserves himself in prevarication, preforming all acts that will bolster and bring comforts to the self and to make the self feel immortal and purposeful. Indubitably, man like any creature has instincts or cellular reactions, vague cellular impressions—I am averse to use the word knowledge which implies words—awareness that has been his bequest from perhaps two million years of continual inheritance since the time of Australopithecus; and of them is a sense that one cannot live alone away from society and that he must be interlinked with family, even though both are imperfect institutions and can easily lead to his detriment. Instinct, however, comes to us as a conditioned reflex of the best behavior for the best outcome, and thus they are not morality any more than casino owners are moral just because they happen to know the probabilities of various outcomes.

Whether made to feel as an immobile cockroach seated motionlessly, by his mandate, on my father's stool, or without any warning, especially during nightly self-studies or when at work on the farm (sometimes observed by my father and other times, when he was employed elsewhere in construction projects, cowering unobserved in the clods of the field, inanimate as they were), I would experience petit mal seizures, or something of this nature, to which volition was snuffed out and in the vacuum all other familiar forms became figments of alterity, morphing from the real and palpable to representational abstractions as though images in a movie with no particular meaning and of little substance. Thus, I, an indentured servant of biology, stolen from my grandparents, was becoming used to the vile, the mean, and the discombobulated. And for over a decade, due to the diagnosis of a doctor at a local clinic which was never given a second opinion, I was declared an epileptic and given an overdose of cheap sedatives that allowed me to be even more docile to the captors, not that medication of Dilantin and Phenobarbital, prescribed widely at the time would have been much better (Caesar, presumably an adult at the time, gaining control of his rather intense epileptic fits by reclaiming his own mind).

And, under the influence of these drugs, as I began to habitually forget where I placed my belongings, the sadistic games of the father and sister biumvirate (triumvirate if one were to include the doting mother, still fused and clinging to the child in a tug of war against growth and age that mutate and spoil all human dolls while despoiling them of their owner, who either from reasons of keeping solidified the materialistic marital bonds, indifference, or not knowing what to do, looked down or askance, no longer even occasionally asking them to stop their "put downs" of me) became worse. Scared to stand, to sit, to put on socks, trousers, and shirt, to part my hair, to be around them, to be scolded for going into my "cage" in my retreat from them, only the books I checked out from a library, that which Descartes said were an "interview with the noblest men of past ages, who have written them, and even a studied interview, in which are discovered to us only their choicest thoughts" saved me. Well, that and religion. Religious lies do save a person from suicide, something Russell and Dawkins neglect to mention.

And soon, I was relegated to the discomfiting realm of shadows by this queer conflated force, with a mother's enjoyment of me, love that had burgeoned at my reappearance into her life steadily declining—a woman, also a material creature, not wishing to oppose the material basis of her existence provided to her by her husband. Still, for them, I was a dull and obedient shadow rather than an imbiber of experience and knowledge, and this was what they wanted to have. And yet, although there is no doubt that my animistic thought process was intensified by the tractability that occurs when under the influence of this combination of medicines, herbal and otherwise, I hardly regret the wish to save every insect caught in a window sill, or so many times sitting on a doorstep with a cat on my lap afraid to get up out of fear of disturbing the creature. Compassion, as both commiseration and gentleness, even if half-real in that which is to a large degree imagined, is wherewithal to appreciate the grandeur of life; and any time I resent so many years of my mental capabilities stymied by this force, I try to remember that as cleverness was sacked from me, the prowess for being humane was enhanced. In learning what Rousseau said about cleverness procured in linguistic faculties and ownership of property corrupting a man's innocence and appreciation of all sentient creatures, this conviction is redoubled all the more.

In any case, scared to move or not move, to stand or sit, to talk and be sociable or totally reticent, intimidated in his guffaws and his enjoyment of getting me "riled" with all behavior, no matter what it was, to be excoriated, and with my sister a four star general in his wars of sadistic derision, I didn't kill or even think of harming these two reprobates, and to a large degree that should be ascribed to the influence of the medication that without it could have brought me into the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno, an inferno of compunction as painful as perennial flames. It is a reminder how impossible it is for us, mortal creatures, to know the good and bad of anything in this realm. What seems as the worst of all fates is often quite serendipitous.

Also, inevitably, the boy in the man, as when I take the vastly overcrowded canal boats to the center of Bangkok finding therein, not wanting, every imaginable deformity and each physically challenged person begging on and under pedestrian overpasses. Whether such visceral pain should exist at all when at best it only forces me, the witness, to drop coins in a cup and has no power to alter physical reality and provide redemption for the object, still this feeling, if I manage not to succumb to aversion, that anodyne of not consciously registering even when seeing, it is better than nature or the universe in the abstract which renders none at all. I may be a physical being struggling against other forces of life, with immune system a killing machine against bacteria and the entire organism consuming other animal and plant organisms it deems "food," something that cannot claim itself a moral being, but I am not as vile as nature itself. There, within, is compassion for sentient beings, an antipathy for what nature does to others, and a sense that had fates been different I might have been what they are, but the first, if not all three, are found in all mammals and perhaps in all animals great and small, so it is hardly a human virtue. And as humans destroy the ecosystem for their own pleasures and fruition, it is doubtful that they are any more moral than the ichneumon wasp that lays eggs in a caterpillar with the larva hatching and devouring the host which they reside in or a fly in the Hawaiian islands that deposits her maggots into a cricket's back ending its life in a similar fashion to that of the caterpillar.

Increasingly, I rode my bicycle to empty desolate spots—to bleachers of an empty fairground or an open meadow where the god of such sacrosanct trysts and assignations allowing peace of mind waited for me. And here, in the communion of deities unsubstantiated by the senses, for what little time she granted it, I had freedom from maternal governance, and was in communion with a self-fabricated sense of being loved by Buddha. So, from what has not been repressed or forgotten in order to forge a forward looking being spilling into the future, I will tell my tale. I, no different than you, smell piles of burning leaves in my Bangkok surroundings that transport me through a time warp, most disconcertedly and contrary to all wishes to do so, of being a boy jumping in lush piles of leaves raked by my grandmother yet to be burnt. I too go to Thai desert shops to taste similar tasting comfort foods despite not wanting to think back onto the past at all. And a stodgy colleague acting like a grammar Nazi teacher, reminds me of my eighth grade teacher, Miss Privy Privia, when I finally got a scholarship to go to school, and of my father calling her up to reproach her for forcing me to stand with face toward the hangers of a coat rack—the past the present, and the present the future.

So as I force you by the hand leading you down the sidewalk of a life that you never chose to walk with, the worst thing I can do is morph into a canine defecating deliberately at your feet; and yet words are a form of defecation, so all I can do is just see that you are more entertained than sullied; and thankfully, as you are reading this philosophical treatise, proving that you are rather hard up for entertainment, entertained by so little, or are an intellectual voyeur gaining pleasure from such exhibitionists—yours, your kicks, a proclivity of intellectualizing life as trudging through another man's filthy thoughts, which is as spiritual as life gets. Thus, I do not need to expend too much effort in that entertainment. All I need is to be myself, and this is what I offer to you, the best that I know it myself, a child who suffers in silence.

Chapter 21

To Early Adolescence

I remember that sojourn undertaken with my childhood friend, both of us ten year olds at the time. It was several years before that exquisite and consummate day of cliff diving with a different version of him into the waters of a quarry, deliberately taking the risk of death in an expression of the full union of the friendship right before attitudes changed and the relationship like all relationships, no matter how much the two friends might feel that they are extensions of each other, eventually evaporating as any dew in the heat of the sun. Seeking experience, a novel dimension of self, as all rebellions do in going beyond demarcated provincial limitations, we abandoned our respective farm chores and embarked on a 30 kilometer odyssey to his grandparents' house down less traveled highways and remote farm roads, which meandered up and down steep hills and sometimes in that elaborate intricacy of the shadow of the leaves of a tight network of trees in light and dark patchwork that made the sun seem as diamonds that were being crushed at our bicycle wheels, or when we were resting, stationary but glimmering impalpably at our feet. In retrospect, this nondescript outing seems hardly worth mentioning and yet a life is smelted in such triviality; and a being in society, so constrained in the yoke of labor, relishes these times wistfully, and reminisces about past occurrences, irreverent as they may seem, when he was a natural and free entity—man forever ambivalent whether to come to a quick brutish death in a time of absolute freedom in nature, or indentured to society as a pampered servant, and so often mixing the two in promiscuity and high risk thrills whenever they can be obtained.

Sometimes natural splendor, at least as human animals perceive it to be (a color, as with a smell, of course, not being of the object perceived, but of being emitted or discarded from the object, and thus what we perceive as often merely that which was and is not, so our existences often replete with certainties that are lies, which are nonetheless indispensable for our protection) is the quintessence of love and adoration of life. Lie that it is, it is the greatest of all human experiences , especially when shared, to which only the procurement of a pencil and use of the alphabet to convey a thought for the first time or the novelty of a crayon to render color and form are in any way comparable.

After being given a meal, and in their pleasant enough company shown the premises of their farm—boyhood, if anything, an exploration of one's physical body, and how it can encroach onto other bodies or environments and the contours of those bodies-- they were insistent on calling each of our parents to which we temporized by saying that they would not be in their homes and we would soon be returning to Changrai anyhow. Hot from the intensity of the sun on the ride back, we skinny dipped in a large creek, and later, partially clothed, sat along weeds and brambles, staring at the flow of the gurgling waters sloshing against the rocks under the rustling leaves of the trees. But in the flow of eternity there was the roiling of the anticipation of ensuing punishment; but attempting to be brave, we sought to define the exact nature of that punishment stoically before exaggerating the ensuing beatings and how obtainment of scarred stripes was the rite of passage to manhood. And from talk of manhood came talk of sexuality

Then, with his hand muffling my mouth for the placement of his lips upon the back of his hand, he got on top of me to give a G-rated illustration of the fruition of life--its violent thrusts far removed from any rarefied ideal of love. This position with a woman, he told me, brought about offspring, when one was enraptured in frenzy that extruded a white secretion similar to the pollen of a flower but as liquid instead of powder. Laughing as much as could be done when anxious about the punishment that awaited us, me aching and sordid, and neither of us neophytes to the actions of dogs and farm animals, nor that having children in family was anything other than a cheap means to obtain human farm animals, the only rarefied idea was the initiation that would take place in being beaten severely with a belt. Thus, there is "no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, or without fear, no more than without sense."
Chapter 22

Heraclitus on Change

Contrary to that which is arbitrarily considered "good" or "bad" based upon being efficacious to a particular party, acceptable and productive behavior sanctioned by society at large, but of course often mitigated by the makeup of that society, seems to be as close to the good as a human being is able to obtain, except when acting nobly by extension from merely taking care of and aggrandizing himself and that which is his own, the parochial of his shell, to an outreach to others with no particular gain to be had. As to why any altruistic act is noble, with repeated acts molding character, perhaps it is such because this particular action, especially of a noble cog, is more deliberate, more indispensable in enveloping and clamping onto the macrocosm instead of being one more limited, inconsequential act of a petty part in the gigantic mechanism known as society, that which together with myriad other cogs, makes up the macrocosm, albeit inadvertently. A social, and especially a noble act, defy instinct, emotions, pleasures, and reflexes as well as norm and inclination, and concentrates on fulfillment rather than happiness. And a youth who witnesses that survival instincts govern every organism is all the more reliant on his family for any model of the good that might, to some degree, attest otherwise; but most often in this institution the good is merely the defining of the bad, and the bad, more times than not, is violating the sensitivities of parents in the venal quest for procurement.

And of poor farmers with their huts on stilts, like cabins along a river bank, any little addition of an extra room tacked onto the structure or a motorcycle parked in front of it, and one has proven to neighbors and self that he is not stagnating in time but moving with it to possess, making more material the adumbration of self, and garnering the neighbor's admiration up to a point so long as it does not go much further than his or her own social economic status; for to go beyond it would be considered inordinate and would incur his or her enmity.

My father objected to the scholarship initially on the grounds that he never went to high school, so his son should not go either. His conviction, his stricture, firm as any Roman structure made with a concrete that uses volcanic ash, seemed unshakable, and yet she shook it nonetheless. Although it would be a loss to have the indenture in school for so many days each week, the perception of others that the family had enough resources from which to allow him to go to school would raise its status in the community. That was, more or less, what she conveyed to him. But in the early morning of that day I was to leave, as I was feeding sorghum to water buffalos and pigs, she came out and clung to one of my arms. "I had to give you up once," she said, "and now you are trying to give us up." But the doll that she adored at its homecoming, for lack of a better word, which she had fed sweet treats to, and inappropriately, sang belated lullabies to each night before he went to sleep, was now entirely gone. She knew that. After all, she had caught the doll naked and urinating with a naked girl from an adjacent cabin less than a kilometer away, discovered a pornographic magazine under his mattress, and identified a smell on the linen attesting of one finding other fluids and usages for the male apparatus, shooting it off as a cap gun when enveloped in temporary night and perennial void (in both cases, she trembled and stated how mortified she was in having a son who would do this to her). "But Siriporn and his family think that I will be going to school," I said. She, the tremulous one, became mute. Then she held onto my arm tighter than before; and placing my hand next to her face until looking at it and perhaps imagining the things it had touched, she then dropped it. "I don't know why you have to keep growing. You were so cute before." "Grandma would want me to go to school," I said boldly, speaking of a being that had been banned from speech. "Would she have? And who's to say," she said. "And how would you know anyway what she would have liked, or what she was like?"

As we walked back, my father, the man who often called me "Broom handle" or "Stick" was outside. It was most ironic nom de guerre as he was the one who had curved shoulders, and despite his profession as a farmer and temporary construction worker, possessed a fulsomely thin, almost emaciated frame. He was watching the dark billowing storm clouds rolling ahead. It was weather that he simplistically inferred as the palpable mood and expression of God, this Buddha that needed the adoration of men in prayers and chants, although how different it would be from man needing the adoration of ants I would not know. To me there were no gods; only the devils of two individuals who had stolen me from my grandparents, serving that greater monstrosity, the Earth, which at this time, for what I knew, had my grandparents interred within it. As they were Moslems, they would be buried if they were indeed dead. And at the time I thought if only the Earth would spit out the rinds of my grandmother, or at least allow the everlasting soul that she so adamantly believed in to be belched up from its stomach in a myopic gas then I would know their end; but I never knew anything. "He's got to go now," my mother said, as my father looked away to another patch of sky, indifferent to the human forms near him.

Inside, she gave me ten baht the way Newton's mother, also adjusting herself to the reality that her son would not be working on the farm, begrudgingly gave him ten pounds for the entire semester, and then some bread made of sorghum, as though I were a special farm animal. Then, I got on my bicycle for the long trek to the nearest school. And as to the whys and wherefores concerning a given boy's treatment in early family, Buddha only knows, and if He does, which he doesn't as he doesn't exist, he should be compelled to author a thousand page book elucidating the convoluted intricacies of even this nominal issue. Things happen in this sublunary domain; and like parents in Siam placing their uniformed school children on the front of motorcycles to which any crash would render them instant projectiles to an early trajectory with death, so one acts as he does as practical short term solutions to get through the day. And as God to exist in any relevant way would need to intervene in human lives in the here and now in a restorative capacity, so family would have to do the same or the issue is moot.

Chapter 23

To adulthood

My childhood friendship with Siriporn, as I am able to recall it imprecisely when one now instantaneously supersedes another and distant memories, like fossils, are deposited in ever deeper sediment of the mind, the neurological circuitry of decay under thickets of newer circuitry, that is all the more difficult to access, ended precipitously and inexplicably as any summary execution. There we were in a classroom in the high school building for the first time and suddenly, evinced on that day and the impression reinforced and solidified from all subsequent days, I had become an anathema, an abhorrent stranger whom he refused to speak with in his new company of friends who together scoffed at my occasional intrusiveness in accosting him (Aristotle of course stating that youth is noted for its varied pleasures and the variegated friends who are agents of those pleasures, and thus implying—or this my interpretation of it—that in adolescence one's understanding of his opinions, values, and talents, is shaped largely by the intensity of pleasures; but had I known this volatility, it would not have done me much good as the personal affront, especially sudden changes of deportment without explanation or farewell, hurts at the time it happens immeasurably) .

As the months went by, so the consternation intensified as realization set in that this separation was not from the usual causes of feeling slighted, and from piqued pride, taking umbrage for a brief period of time. This was as perennial as life was long, and there had been no provocation beyond stepping into a new building meant to symbolize a distinct and separate level of maturity; and reeling as I was, it seemed unfathomable, really, that the emotional core that I had always thought to be the quintessence of life itself should alter so unpredictably another time, and now here it was from two sources: a mother who no longer took pleasure from my being, and the cessation of this friendship. Together, the two incidents elicited and inflicted by these two personages, as they gave me understanding of life, consigned me further to the realm of shadows.

For every individual subjected to it, high school, unlike a university, or that cathedral of learning in graduate and postgraduate edification, is a veritable torture chamber that is not only not conducive to learning but almost entirely dearth of purpose except for any that might be gained inadvertently for oneself in stumbling into a discipline that he finds affinity with. From my own experience there were bullies in classrooms burning the buttocks of seated lesser entities with cigarette lighters, and to protect themselves, classmates laughing in feigned approbation at the antics that they themselves feared, teachers, as the acne scarred mathematics pedagogue whom many brazenly called "Crater face," subjected to the worse derision, and condoms stretched out in water fountains --the pleasure of liberation and destruction as natural as lightning and fire. Still, for one subject to the drudgery of plow and water buffalo it was a paradise in its own right. As that homeless man sleeping near the grating on the cement walkway along Sang Saeb canal, or khlong, who is made more material by putting a stray puppy on a makeshift leash as it allows for commentary on the dog by passerbys, so I found restoration in writing a column for the school newspaper.

"Blah, blah, blah."

"Blah, blah, blah?"

"And don't forget that your father, one time when there was a delay in the scholarship money, cut down a tree and hauled the lumber to the school, importuning them that with this compensation or "gift," as he called it, to allow you to continue to study."

"I was mortified for a few hours after he left, unable to move or look up, or concentrate on my lessons; and then suddenly the mortification transformed itself in my mind, and I saw love. I was flummoxed. It was breathtaking. I was astounded to think that under all of that invective in that old man there was some degree of warmth. The human puzzle. I saw love."

"And me."

"And you. Of course, how would I forget that? You were there squeezed in the pages of a book in the school library. You were of course much bigger than what you are now, if we can call it being as you are now dead. You were so beautiful then."

"It was love at first sight, wasn't it?"

"It was, and then attested as a strong friendship by the greatest of all senses, the rational mind. "

"In having cognate experiences and sympathies, as long as they last."

"Is that what friendship can be reduced to?"

"Only this, I am afraid."

"That explains why it can be lost so easily--why I lost it with Siriporn."

"And gained it with me. We were trying to study our way out of poverty. And, as we helped each other study, my presence made you feel that relationships were stable, which they of course are not."

"But I needed to believe that they were."

"Yes, of course, as I did, which explains why we got married years later."

"Youth is gone so quickly."

"Which to you means what?"

"I don't know. You were so beautiful and then so quickly your skin seemed to dry, and then with more time shrivel up. You became fat."

"And your love for me vanished: the love, as in that love at first sight, the desire aggravated by the senses; then the friendship, that which was based on common sympathies and experiences; and all that remained of the union was merely a desire not to end the union as it would be tantamount to losing sanity."

"So we clung to each other."

"Yes, indeed, clinging, or something of that nature. Do you like my looks now, Lek? I am not shriveled any longer, and I am thin."

"And dead."

"Yes, dead, except for memories of me that still rattle inside your haunt. Nonexistence becomes us all; so, am I more attractive in my nonexistence? Am I now equal to the bimbos whom you consorted with on the side? All those lies I had to pretend to believe."

"No, it is as if a small patch of skin a few centimeters in length had been stretched and then made green and taut around a skeletal contour that is you but in a shrunken state."

"Verdant. I am not green. I am verdant. "

"Whatever. As you like it, Lookie. What I really hate most about this life, beyond its accidental nature from beginning to end, or how people become the tools and preparation for their trade of commerce, thinking of it obsessively until it altogether becomes the person whom they are, or even how we so easily lose people in this tenuous plain of existence—who would think that I would outlive you?, is to see it all as nothing but the same types of stages. When I was young I thought my life would be so sui generis, not toothpaste extruded from the same plastic. One morning you wake up as a boy with fuzz on your face, and the next day you are shaving, applying aftershave and cologne, and thinking yourself a man; and then you get an education and a profession and for a while think you are the man until reality sets in that you are a nobody in a world of nobodies. I am so nondescript, so plain, that sometimes it makes me sick."

"How can it be otherwise? The same sublunary realities govern all our existences. Of course we are the same. For women it is the bra, and the quest for material from which to build their nests; and for men, in time desperation at seeing themselves for what they are, like reruns of the same male movie, causes them to have their adulterous relations."

"My life is so dull and mainstream. And now I am middle aged, a widower, and just waiting for my time to come."

"Death is nigh; but you need not worry about being too mainstream. Your failures are very salient. Most men your age are seeking to aggrandize fortunes. You, seek to diminish them so as to have leisure to think, not that any of your thoughts have exactly set the world on fire. That is as sui generis as a human is capable of."

"Is that a compliment?"

"Not really," said the Luklawan gecko as she became mute and glowered at the human monster. So glowereth she, Lady Philosophy.

Chapter 24

The Whirring of Helicopters and Time

On a sidewalk of a bridge over the Chao Phaya River, along frustrated, congested traffic and above the occasional barge and cruise boat, the waters beneath hearken unto me, and, were it not for Aus walking along with me, a part of my will would not be beyond throwing myself off into the oblivion that, in time, will ultimately take me irrespective of any volition on the matter. Cellular division, imperfect with aging but functional, cannot go on indefinitely; and whether ultimately it be death by cancer, a continuum unto old age, with the desiccated, shriveled leaf at last torn from the branch at the slightest wind, or termination at my own hand, it could hardly matter much to impartial others, alterity, and within the vantage of time that makes all things miniscule and insignificant (a major war among Australopithecus that is so completely effaced from memory as to never have happened, Caesar Augustus having become a vacuous name and abstraction even in the days of Aurelius,or the petty aspects of my personal domain in early and later family all too fleeting).

Suicide as a whole organism or cancer, cellular failure to commit suicide and thus the replication of that which is not right and is detrimental to the whole organism, or the breakdown of a being in time are not so different from each other; and any moral case that the latter is better than the former is fabricated for the stability of society and has nothing to do with reality. So in my perennial ambivalence, assisted this time by being accompanied by a friend, I make excuses to myself, temporize, and, continue to survive: classes to be held soon that require a teacher (not corpse), chili seeds that we now need to purchase so that he can take them to his family during the Thai New Year festival, Songkran, a book that needs to be written, as though I would actually write one—tasks, the enemy of thought, to avoid serious subjects that man would go insane contemplating for very long. If Luklawan had had even more influence over me, which she should have had, I would have repudiated them long ago, and given myself over to the real task of man which is to make money for himself and ease his discomfort on the planet, never mulling the fact that every baht, every cent earned, is a crumb of the pie denied to others; for to be happy requires a self-centeredness to tune out all other issues of life.

We go into the seed store. Knowing little, we get whatever they recommend which will in all likelihood, we are told, germinate in the Sa Kaeo area. I show them my identification card and driver's license which they photocopy as the purchaser is under full scrutiny and has to justify his purchase. So it seems that the poor with a parcel of land under their names have no means of purchasing these genetically engineered, patented seeds with vastly overinflated prices in these artificial times unless one has a son or a son's patron to dole out money. But that is what patrons do: they ease the discomforts of those who are also temporary beings, but the satisfaction gained at being used in such a capacity is often cloyed. It is only the flawed instrument of the written word, a form of logic predicated on the reflexes of emotions, with multi semantic words and vague multi interpretable text, which is permanent and can transcend generations, more or less, when languages also change. And yet words, having no material substance can do little to alter the material world. Apart from making the author a more permanent shadow than all the other fleeting presences on the planet that have not authored a book, they accomplish little, for an idea of a better world hardly makes one.

Military helicopters, harbingers of incoming doom, hover in this area as well, mincing the air amongst the fall of democracy. They presage billions of indigent masses, epidemics in the faltering ecosystem, the fight, tooth and nail, for fresh water and other scarce resources while the wealthier nations fight verbally for more access to the global market to make the wealthy wealthier, and Islamic extremists here in the South, and in all South, the whole world, as cries of desperation and aspirations to return to medieval conservatism and mysticism. Wars, holy and otherwise, climatic changes from global warming, and epidemics, shall be conjoined forces to eradicate man to which a new artificial power, androids, will gain hegemony to fill the vacuum that other animals, as of yet, cannot fill.
Chapter 25

Apology to the Tortured Reader, Singular as that May Be, for Being Forced to Clamber His Way along the Trail of Mount Syntax Denuded and Fettered

I do understand, as this is life with ever more intricate and enervating interaction in one's job to survive, and in so doing banging against others in the city like billiard balls, to which each then absconds in his or her hole before being put back onto the table again for the next day's game. Whether or not ultimately we are all the entertainment of a larger, albeit not higher being, if there is one (a billiards player, perhaps), a being who should not be referred to as God as limited human conceptualization could never fathom such a monstrous concoction, all of us, like Him, to escape the pressure of the day, seek to be actively entertained; and with the great man (Aristotle, that is, and not God) agreeing that "relaxation and amusement are thought to be a necessary element in life," who am I to contravene his notions or obstruct your own wish that I tap dance before you, or at least refrain from any superfluous writing that might exacerbate the headache you already have. My syntax has unnerved you (you, the transitional link to the androids, that is, and not the androids themselves who I seek ultimately), has it not? If it is any consolation, it has unnerved me too. But as you surely know, deep tortured souls extruded from meat grinders rarely come out as anything but Baroque patterns. When such beings, even this nondescript writer of a new philosophical genre, seek form, how could it be otherwise? Even though this disaffected writer will not cease his particular wont, he is not indifferent or cavalier to your needs. Thus, here in this chapter he offers to you

space

and quiescence.

And as he, Aristotle says, "Both excess and great deficiencies are boastful. But those who use understatement with moderation and understate about matters that do not very much force themselves on our notice seem attractive."

And thus, I proffer the following:

But peace of mind is now at an end, and it is now time to return to the project at hand with me writing and you reading, together attempting to capture it all, and in such ambition for par excellence, arête, we will fall on our faces and indubitably suffer.

BOOK III

Ruminations on the Ontology of Morality

Chapter 26

Fait Accompli: Traces of Values in Lieu of Morality in Abstentia

And of that witnessed in the state of nature, and that outside of it, society, sublimating most selfish impulses while exacerbating others (the instinct to attack, for example, superseded to some degree under most circumstances by the practical consideration of exploiting others in the division of labor, a restraint imposed for the comforts to be had by the majority in enhanced products and services and only to be achieved in some level of civil harmony, even though subjecting those without commercial skills to perish miserably in the streets and perceived vaguely in the minds of other higher animals able to do so as hedonists sabotaging the ecosystem with their one-specied pleasure dome), this, and only this, is vacuously referred to as morality as an average Frenchman considers his culinary creation to be Picasso on a plate. We shall reject both. There is kindness which is not exclusively a human attribute. There is empathy—that ability to step out of one's own skin by seeing what the eyes see and caring as one knows that this creature is equal to himself, one more being here for a short time struggling to exist for a while while he can, and all else including intellect itself is not in the realm of the good. And that which forestalls predilections contrary to natural or societal tendencies as it is viewed as unnatural or antisocial by society at large is seen as an offense to the offenders.

And of those selfish predilections from minority groups deemed as repugnant to society at large, the lesser group remonstrates, lobbies, euphemizes, converts, and blends unrelentingly until, if it is at all possible, the behavior is at last accepted by society. And in general, if it is demonstrated in the course of time that a predilection poses no real harm to the larger group, its ideals will eventually be accepted by it as a broadening of the assortment of delicacies in the storehouse of potential experiences and tastes, but anything that curtails freedom endorsed by society at large will be condemned even when there is unequivocal proof by a reputable minority group of it being detrimental to society or even to all species. The domestication of animals as chattel for the slaughterhouse to be sold as comestibles would be considered as anything but vile to the masses who are always led by tastes rather than decency, and any adverse opinion, let alone an attempt to govern the sanctioned predilection would be considered a moral offense to them. The same is true of curtailing traffic and industry to curb carbon emissions and global warming as it is with denying the right to bear arms to stop a nation from spiraling further into random violence (unequivocal, categorical eradication of all weaponry by American citizens) as bullets become the tangible expression for caprices that cannot materialize in society as constructive challenges to its—the masses of men vehement, frenetic even beyond common sense, to not allow government to curtail their freedoms. One might as well censor consumerism and material expression; for sensing that they do not have spiritual presences and that they are anything but solid, it is no wonder people are materialistic, even avaricious, instead of charitable. Like weathering statues they resurface themselves with monetary rubble frenetically; like melting snowmen they desperately bolster existence with their slush.

Thus with morality a man's concoction, the values that he has, that which can be stated unequivocally as his beliefs, is murky at best. But for me to find what I really believe and know for certain, or the amount of certainty one is allowed, the only worthy task of any man, meretricious morality must be superseded by traces of inviolable values, as scarce as they are.

Cosmology in Line with the Ancient philosophers

The issue of the universe emerging from a black hole of an abutting, parallel universe notwithstanding (a simplistic cause and effect notion of human intellect that takes us to another cause that would have to have a cause, and human intellect finding it difficult to fathom being, unintelligent essence far from a god, that ruptured and realigned in a chain reaction for no reason and from no agent), an explosion with shrapnel of black matter sub-subatomic particles indubitably occurred. Then there began a cooling and deceleration enough to engender subatomic particles, too innumerable, too unfathomable, to ever be classified, materializing and vanishing as intermediates between energy and matter. So in billions of years of cooling and coalescing in a forward expansion of lesser and more stable celerity longer lived protons and neutrons were able to smelt together and their combined gravitational forces were then able to capture electrons as satellites. Thus, atoms came into being, a quirky, unstable solid that in great numbers became the nuclear fusion of stars or burning cinders of space dust which failed to merge into stars but eventually coalesced into galaxies and planetary bodies, and then living beings on these terrestrial planes. What electrical force and heat to water was the catalyst for dual atoms, molecules, to become self-replicating carbon life forms in a marine environment is unknown or why Siam or Thailand was the first dry formation of land in which the first amphibians and kinnari (or kinnaree) dwelled; but as Thomas Paine says, as life exists in even the harshest environments on Earth, so in one form or another, it exists in other harsh environments on planets throughout the universe. It is rife, whether we are aware of it or not and water is not absolutely necessary as an ingredient. No water is needed.

Evolution

The amount of evidence amassed to prove evolution unequivocally is phenomenal and falls into around a dozen categories from paleontology to genetics, and it is observed most saliently in experiments on short-lived e-coli bacteria and reassembly of fossilized bones of whales to their ancient hippopotami progenitors in a nearly perfect delineation of this transformation. As I stated before, the mechanism of evolution cannot merely be natural selection, and isolation of a given species from others of its kind, transferring genes in a limited group that become dominant expressions therein. Clearly, every organism is able to create a model if not a detailed blueprint of itself, its challenges to the environment, and the environment itself, thus allowing for camouflaging to occur as if God himself had intervened. It is interesting that He can make a specific caterpillar, and not all caterpillars, to look like the face of a snake to scare off predators and ensures such obscurity for stick insects, but He does not make a man invisible when on a battlefield confronting his enemy or facing a murderer, which is especially odd when man is supposedly the most favored of His creations. A deceased man, interred into the dirt as any decomposing waste in a landfill, however, has, I am told, a soul. But as each soul—or at least some-- wants to be reunited celestially with parents and other loved ones, human or gecko, that happen to be rattling around in their brains, as their parents with their parents, and so on, which would include animal and microorganism progenitors as well, I suppose, it would seem that the heavens are an overpopulated hell hole much worse than the Earth in which every organism, good or bad, is temporary; hence, my only care is to be the soulless reality that I am and upon my cessation let me be equal to a dead rat that a street sweeper scoops up with other components of the day's trash.

God

There is little that I can say on this matter that hasn't already been said by the ancients. Even when Marx called religion the opiate of the people, he was merely echoing the sentiments of Xenophanes who said that any dominant species like man with his comforting anthropomorphic portrayals of "God" the father would create a deity in the likeness of that particular species. It is absurd to think that which is composed of atoms (singular atoms being the successful link between energy and ephemeral conglomerations of atoms called matter), has "spirit" of the conglomeration itself. If there is any spirit or everlasting energy to be had, it could only exist in the singularity of the atoms themselves which, for what we know, which is saliently miniscule indeed, might also be finite. And, contrary to logic, if there is spirit or resonating energy from the conglomeration of atoms or matter that would indicate, and what scriptures suggest, that individual lives are of paramount importance to the creator, why then is that material conglomeration which the spirit is supposed to represent not immortal as well, and furthermore, why with a little force, invasive parasites, or interior obstruction and breakdown is he subject to such a vast sundry of factors that might cause his death the way the moon is perennially subject to being besieged by meteor strikes. At any rate, His involvement is easily and falsely assumed by those who have managed to acquire or influence, to some degree, the means of production as they in their hubris believe that their material goods are proof that the creator favors them above all others, involving himself in their lives, the lives of the good people, and by those who are destitute and desperate as well for they cling onto any eternal salvation that they can. Regarding scripture, are these story books (to some degree plagiarized at that with the story of Noah evoking important similarities to the Epic of Gilgamesh, certain Psalms to the Great Hymn of Aten, and Moses parting the waters to Pharaoh Snefru's court magician doing the same to retrieve a lost amulet belonging to a member of the royal harem, and scriptures of various belief systems in Asian countries no doubt the same conflation of fancy and plagiarisms) the best guidebooks that God can develop for the operation of the human mechanism?

Chapter 27

Three More Values and Beliefs in Determining the Sanctity of Life

Sanctity of Life

Formed as an accidental chain reaction to myriad variables to which, I assert, a god cannot be ascribed or imputed as the cause, life, I must admit, continues to teem forth on and from earth, seed, and egg as though such a deity, He who supposedly wrought life initially, were active even now at cultivating the soil. And yet this so called divine influence is further contravened by the fact that no benevolent deity would deem the small and less able as liabilities that need to be dispensed with in the ultimate aim to make the most fit the most likely to reproduce. But natural selection, vulgar as it is and nowadays vulgarized as survival of the fittest, is therein out of the state of nature as in it. All one has to do is open his (not His) eyes.

Aus, who often calls me "Baby dog" for my solicitude toward these other mammals within this human civilization that is jungle to them, as I call him "Little Baby" for his inability to survive well in it any more than most mammals, and to no fault of his own, tends to relish life most when pointing out puppies that he sees on days that we walk together to the sports stadium; but today, instead of fulgurant and animated, he is horrified by one yelping after it was hit by a car at Ramkamhaeng University. We both are, actually. To me this incident today (the rush to a veterinarian in a taxi, when finally finding a taxi driver willing to take us with a dog, and a bleeding one at that, was unsuccessful) is an illustration of natural selection in action, even if the agent was a careless fast moving human, a teacher or student who in one respect or another was one more rapacious predator of money with the dog being collateral damage along the way.

And if desensitized to this, ignoring also the tedious and not so methodical 3.5 billion years of laborious churning that evolution took and mistook in life formations most tortuously to arrive at this latest cognizant and sentient being, flawed as he is, as well as the fact that other animals have special receptors to electromagnetic stimuli and thus other forms of awareness that humans do not possess, one is easily susceptible to believe this strange concoction called life to be a work wrought by a divine being. And in this state of innocence, which does engender a more positive outlook on life overall, one can easily reach simplistic and myopic teleological assessments like William Paley's watchmaker argument that are hard to dispel, as errant as the conclusions are.

Still, it is obvious that our particular cognizance and sentience in fairly active and robust frames, although hardly the best in the animal kingdom for physical prowess and altogether untoward and hell bent in rapacious procurement for civilizing the entire world for man's ease even when it altogether upsets the ecosystem, which is as foolish and erroneous a path as any life form can take, have allowed us to exhibit an often inordinate degree of mastery of life, for good or for ill, and with these intellectual faculties our imaginative musings have caused us to arrive at myriad assessments that have been both correct and terribly erroneous. Any reading of the Odyssey, for example, suggests that gods materialized in man's fear and awe of natural forces, and any viewing of the artwork portraying Akhenaten shows the Egyptian intrigue with the power of the sun, and yet man more times than not imagines that God or the gods created mankind instead of mankind creating the gods.

As for life being sacred, certainly it should be, or at least ought to be thought of as such, but what should be, and what ought to be imagined in order to have a safety valve on man's ingenuity are at times quite different from reality. Adam Smith reminds us (his assessments perhaps to some degree coming from an understanding of the period immediately after the Black Death when survivors of the plague, no matter how indigent, were able to demand higher salaries for themselves, which brought about the middle class for the first time in history, as from his thorough study of commerce) that professions are awarded higher wages based upon the rarity of the knowledge and skills by which certain products and services are rendered. And likewise, life itself, if it were rare, would have greater innate value at least in human estimations, but its fecundity does not allow that to happen. Furthermore, clarity of life's inception as a cell, replicating cells, or a multi-celled organism are still murky at best, which explains the ambivalence on the social position as to when a fetus is "viable" and cannot be aborted; and nature itself does not help with its myriad miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, still born births, and the rate of child mortality which although not high in the modern era of vaccinations, once was high and is still high in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, and even now attests that no individual is destined to be on the planet.

Although, on a superficial level, humans easily see in each other what they are blind to in other species, which is how each individual is sui generis in physical traits and personality, the number of human beings on the planet and their dispensable nature have made brute savagery of man to man an even easier occurrence if not an entirely commonplace daily experience. The more, however, we firmly believe that each individual has innate worth, no matter what his or her commercial contribution is, and that every species is part of a treasure trove of life, the more innocuous humans will become, and only this will take us out of our 200,000 year old stagnation to finally evolve, if we have time enough for evolvement.

Individuality

Although humans are to a certain degree unique, they take great efforts in diminishing this as much as possible in their fierce yearning to emulate the same attitudes and convictions of their peers so as to acquire friendships of utility and pleasure, which they see as their only means for survival and happiness. Thus, being as others becomes a paramount concern, if not obsession, in all facets of life. Although one might be labeled as a churlish devil's advocate if not the devil himself for attempting to be the gadfly of Socrates, or at least opposing a mainstream argument when in the midst of a group of complacent minds so singularly convicted, it has always been my idea that being the agent provocateur jolting complacency even momentarily with an opposing argument of some merit does others a great service, even if it leaves himself without friends. And certainly, wandering lost to oneself, fecklessly needing to be found continually in other people and their viewpoints is a worse fate than wandering alone in the world. To be alone and out of their noise and he enters deeper feelings and thoughts probing into and befriending various tiers of self, and if never stumbling onto an original idea, such an individual will continually stumble on unique nuances to familiar ideas which is satisfying unto itself. I maintain that to go through life avoiding the gravity of self at every turn for the levity of temporary companions and wind up as a stranger to oneself at the end has to be the most futile life there is. Aristotle says that bad individuals cannot live peacefully in their thoughts and find communing with themselves intolerable. These people, he says, tend to be very gregarious. But I have no yearning to be with the bad, no matter how good it might appear to be; and for my fulfillment give me my own unfettered self for companionship and a refractory gadfly and sullen introvert --even a glowering gecko—as a friend, and deliver me out of Siam, the Land of Smiles.

Membership in Society

However, we are a nexus to that which is greater than ourselves, and those with time to learn and think, fortunate enough to be saved from menial tasks of enslavement burdening their days in tedium and drudgery are all the more obligated to give back to society to which no level of affluence should allow dereliction. I fully agree with Marx that every individual must give back to society to the best of his ability and that assets and retirement at any age are perversions that distort man from his true essence which is to formulate reciprocal relations for survival. And for those who obtain affluence and do nothing but pursue pleasures throughout their years, they will ultimately find them cloying and vapid and that their lives have no sense of meaning whatsoever; for, except in befriending oneself and sharing his inward journey to others, and in perfecting oneself for a more complete nexus to the greater good which is society, doing what he can to contribute the best of himself for the macrocosm, there is no meaning in life—none whatsoever.

Chapter 28

Existence, Materialism, and Security

Existence, or Cosmology Revisited and Expanded

Perhaps, given the fact that any force on an object that thrusts it to 670 million miles per hour and beyond will add additional mass for that object, instead of a big bang and dark matter fragments cooling and congealing to subatomic particles and beyond, the mass of the universe is merely residue or byproduct of pent up energy propelled at extreme force but without the ability to go beyond the physical restrictions of what is now referred to as the speed of light. In any case, solid as life seems to be, it is quite fluid except to the perspectives of those who have to create lives for themselves in this state and know no other reality like ants actively building a colony that will soon blow away with any remnants to be submerged subsequently in a deluge. Or perhaps our reality is more like that of fish that in having to reside where they are and, because of the water pressure at great depths that would pulverize them were they to fully descend, have to see contours of landscape and landmarks within the ocean waves themselves and by familiarity with the residents within.

Mass to energy and energy to mass, we build homes and families and believe them to be solid and permanent for no other reason than that we must. The lack of reality might in a weaker moment make a man feel a desire to go ballistic against the contents of this dream; but if anything, he should pity his fellow creatures and himself for having no other choice but to undergo this charade, living lives as though they were solid substances without end while knowing otherwise.

Materialism

So, it is understandable why one would become avaricious, errantly believing that money, which does deliver one from a good many minor catastrophes in this networking of men of various talents and skills in the division of labor, will shore up his existence. More insightful men, always cognizant of the ephemeral nature of all things and that other sentient beings are no different than they are, will find the inequities that abound from nature and society intolerable. Men of this nature share with others to the best that they can while at the same time acknowledging that in such a world they have to look after their own interests too as no one else will; but few are they who part so far from illusions.

Security

Cannibalistic predation is rife in society, and deny it as one may, society is a sublimated version of what he sees in the state of nature. If it were the benign and stable realm that he deludes himself into believing it is, he would not need to protect himself from fellow men, the environment, and his own evanescence. Celebrate his life as he may and, at times, do it inebriated in bacchanal vigor, it does not reduce his fears that every step he takes he can be crushed under speed and weight, shot by a gun of one who has gone mad under the stress of relationships changing precipitously and the competitive strife that makes up society, that at any whim or for practical considerations he can lose his job and livelihood, and that friends and family members have more potential to harm him than a stranger.

Chapter 29

Emotions, Sentience, the Fallacy of Words, and the War Within

For all this time of deliberation, now ending, set free from all tasks of professional drudgery, as fettered and burdensome as that freedom has been, I have only succeeded in getting lost in the vast labyrinth of myself, these natural caverns of perception and sentience and unnatural catacombs of language and existence in society blended together intricately and indistinguishably. Solitary travels, vigils without Virgil through subterranean self that words can only half express, it is no wonder I have been desultory, flummoxed, rattled and rambling on matters inconclusively. But it has been in this trudging through neurological circuitry, hoping to arrive at some truth to it all as though caverns within were conduits to the heavens without, at times a thrill seeker bungee jumping from highest rock and rafter of the underworld of self, that I feel more complete as a man. And yet as I seek to be a complete man, I would repudiate manhood altogether if I could, for just one moment, hug my grandparents the way the I of yesteryear did long ago, in that time, as a child, of believing that love in the presence of those one loves will last forever, a happiness that quickly disperses when truth is known of how temporary it all is and how people slip out of one's grasp like sand in his palms no matter how tight the grasp.

It can only be hoped that in the aftermath of the demise of human civilization in perennial wars for scarce resources and against barbaric jihadist states that seek the destruction of global Rome, horrific natural disasters, and pandemics from thawed glacial microbes due to a global warming catalyst and those making deforested exoduses, calamity engendered by man's avarice, that from the android successors true logic not predicated on emotion will exist on the planet; that if humans and artificial intelligence merge into some hybrid, partially alive stature, more fully alive in some respects, where gluttony to have to bolster being at the expense of others is no longer needed there will be true equity on the planet; and that friendship of introverted and empathic beings in lieu of extroverts with specious smiles and contracts of reciprocal advantage will be had amongst all denizens on the planet.

Black celestial celerity, brooding and billowing, is at last an ablution from clouds deluging filth and stench of this muggy city, beating down the sweltering heat and the exhaust of traffic so thick, dark, and tangible that without the rain looks to be more than a gas, the smoke of sidewalk restaurants on every street now asphyxiatingly curtailed under large umbrella awnings, its decaying trash less of an obnoxious odor, minutely dulling the barbed wire and glass bottle fragments fastened onto the tops of walls around the property of the rich, and its rats that now refuse to scavenge openly and so are no longer scurry around the movements of feet. But there is no ablution to the menace of man. He goes on, rain or not, perennially without the least respite: each in every generation with that insufferable itch of hungers for pleasure of companionship and sex, the forces of life itself, that unless one gives into it from time to time, foils any sense of sanity like a pesky persistent fly, and the preoccupation with money and ambition that monopolizes over the rest of consciousness. It is now time to flush all my drugs down the toilet, prepare for classes, and begin anew.

Afterward

(Journal, or Reflective essay)

It is doubtful that any writer would be an effective critic of his or her particular work as overweening pride would indubitably make him either inordinately protective of it if, to some degree, it was wrought in pretention and self-indulgence, or superfluously critical of the whole if he is a perfectionist seeking to write the best that he can within a particular genre. And if the latter, he will change the work unremittingly in the hope of achieving a state of perfection which he may be very far from achieving, and due to these many changes, he will ultimately come to despise the work that he has created. He may gain satisfaction in the completed achievement, but will be too apprehensive to look back on it for fear of finding the work spoiled in imperfections or just not as perfect as what he may have wished or originally envisaged. But then, very few people outside of Walt Whitman would care to write on one single book all the rest of his life.

So again, if appointed as his own critic, he will be caught between Scylla and Charybdis as a self-indulgent writer, a perfectionist, or, more likely, a mixture of the two extremes and as such will be unfit to render any impartial criticism. Thus, a work must go out into the world to be appraised by others more objective in their assessments, and these assessments differ because a work when read is a conflation of both the writer and the given reader. Although anything that I say in these pages can be construed as superfluous, I do believe that I have the capacity to elucidate the work a little and I will try to achieve that the best that I can in these brief pages.

I suppose that it was in December of 2013 when nearly for the whole month members of Pheu Thai held a counter-demonstration in Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok near Ramkamaeng University, where I work, (demonstrations that only dispersed when it all became very violent and ugly as students protested against the protestors near their campus and against the retention of the corrupt Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra) that I first envisaged Cartesian skepticism not of empiricism which is Descartes's nonpareil achievement, but one of ethics. In many ways that is ironic, as for the past ten years I have considered Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics not only the quintessence of all ethical treatises but the greatest of all books, although obviously the style of my own writing is not similar to the prosaic and methodical logic and analysis found in a translation of Aristotle--not that this sage who wrote "Poetics" wasn't artistic or that his writings would not have been flattened by multiple Islamic and Latin translations. In a style a bit metaphorical like Plato, and with an effusive and even a baroque display of words and clauses that is somewhat unrestrained and cognate to Thomas Wolfe's "palpable" language in Look Homeward, Angel  (a recurrent word in his work) albeit with a lot more syntactical complexity, this novel in style and substance encapsulates doubts about the existence of morality while affirming the existence of trace values of sentience and compassion which are of course not unique to humans but witnessed in all mammals if not the whole animal kingdom, giving us no right to consider ourselves the only "moral" creatures on the planet, and perhaps, given how we behave toward each other, toward other species, and the ecosystem, no right to consider ourselves moral at all.

I envisaged a book in which the collapse of democracy would be a pretext for further philosophical inquiry as the main character, Lek, a teacher of Western philosophy who is unable to work for a period of weeks during the protests, begins to indulge in recreational drugs and dabbles in writing a philosophical treatise. The characters that appear in the book are the dead wife in the form of a gecko, a young friend as a gecko and as a real person, a monk, a prostitute, and a hotel maid as a gecko. So the work might in some ways evoke certain similarities to Naked Lunch or Gargantua and Pantagruel in its interplay of "fantasy" and "reality." Of course all fiction is fantasy. Real life, like that of my own, might not be any more real either when viewed from the passing of time, but I think that in fiction the only thing that distinguishes "reality" and "fantasy" is merely the amount of plausibility in a given passage. Of course the time element in this novel is all wrong. The demonstrations lasted for a period of months, not weeks, and only ended by the mandate of the military under the new, and rather self-proclaimed Thai Prime Minister, General Prayuth Chan-Ocha. Whether or not he is Plato's philosophical king (certainly he has waged a campaign against loan sharks and other vile aspects of Thai society and their adjunct vices) or whether the whole situation in Thailand suggests that in a democracy this dysfunctional people hearken and then give their support of a tyrant who can lead them out of the turmoil, in either case, I assume, Thai politics will attest Platonic ideals and make the world weary of calling the political gridlock of democracy as particularly noble.

The Thai conflict is a complicated imbroglio that evokes memories of the civil war in the Roman Empire under the populist leader Gaius Marius who used grain doles and other pleasant ruses to gain popular support of the masses and Lucius Cornelius Sulla who loathed the inefficiency of the check and balance system within a republic and sought to restore complete power for the senatorial oligarchy, only in this case it is between two groups to which one is led by supporters of a rich telecommunications tycoon in exile who has become the champion of the masses and a seemingly less corrupt group who seem to care little about the indigent masses. In any case, the two groups are so dissimilar from each other and so intransigent that democracy is rendered ineffectual, so this, of course in the thought process of the fictional character, seems to have allowed me to spring off into myriad other inquiries , then examine what happened in the protagonist's childhood background that may have induced this skepticism, and then, if there is no morality, determine, in his perspective, what values do exist and cannot be easily repudiated; and of course this scrutiny being done during a time of grenade attacks, gunfire, and military helicopters as self and environment as well as the evanescent nature of life and the meaning of existence are more fully scrutinized under such situations.

The work has around 150 citations from a large array of books which was needed as the novel borders the academic and scholarly with original philosophical inquiry and literary fiction. It has been my worry that I could have created a Frankenstein's monster here with patches of skin from the three disciplines and it took a lot of rewriting and vigilance on my part to see that it maintained an even blend.

Ideas in the work are predicated mostly, and surprisingly, on logic, discernment, and creativity, but also on decades of studies of classics in the Western Canon, and extend over such a sundry of different topics that I cannot even begin to enumerate them all. Again, Thai politics, or the subject of democracy, is merely the springboard for moving into a panorama of various topics, most which have even graver significance than merely how humans govern themselves. Clearly there are a lot of citations of the great philosophers in the work but I believe that the novel goes beyond that. Uniquely, it wants us to examine the types of material creatures we are, how our selfishness and a need to procure wealth are for the purpose of restoring our diminishing qualities as material creatures, and how best we should relate to each other in lieu of real morality. The friendship of Lek and Aus is in part for the ideal of defying self-interest, but it also exists because of empathy that Lek has for Aus that in part is the result of similar childhood experiences. The feisty dialogue, hallucinated by Lek, between himself and his deceased wife in the form of a gecko creates philosophical challenges in action that has a bit of the flavor of Plato with Aristotle. It attempts to be humorous and entertaining while at the same time edifying, and does not ignore the ideas of notable scientists, psychologists, and astrophysicists as well, building off of these ideas or reinterpreting them in the context of the psyche of the protagonist.

And corresponding to my aforementioned claim that a writer is not the best one to evaluate his own work, especially when broaching on a new field (in this case, philosophy, a field which should be more inclusive of all intellects as attested by the writings of Montaigne) I provide the following appendage which is a review of a book of my poetry for a fuller understanding of my contributions to the humanities as seen through other perspectives.

Papyrus: An Eloquent Ode to Life's Many Gritty Moments  
by Amy L. Wilson  
Arkansas Gazette  
Little Rock, Arkansas  
April 1990

An American Papyrus  
Steven Sills  
The Chestnut Hills Press Poetry Series  
63 pages; $6.95 paperback

Twenty-six poems make up this first published book by Steven Sills, 26, of Fayetteville. Sills' vision is often a dark one. He writes of the homeless, the abused, the forgotten people. He is also intrigued with the mystical, the sensual, loss--as in losing those whom we hold dear, such as a spouse or lover--as well as the lost, such as someone who is autistic, who seems unreachable. Sills' skillful use of the language to impart the telling moments of a life is his strength. He chooses his words carefully, employing a well-developed vocabulary. He is thoughtful about punctuation, where to break lines and when to make a new stanza. He's obviously well versed in "great" literature.  
Sills' command of language helps to soften the blows of some of the seemier passages found in his poems. Seamy may not be the best word to use. Perhaps gritty is a better word or just plain matter-of-fact and to the point, as in this descriptive passage from "Oracion A Traves De Gass," about the hopeless feelings of a respiratory therapy worker: "With the last of the air drawing in/ Begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it/ Like he could imagine from inexact memories/ The woman last night at the hospital, whom he began to like---/ Her body pulling cell by cell/ Apart before he had a chance to finish the rescue with the hose."

The book begins with "Post-Annulment2" a poem with a poignant description of society's displaced--"As the sun blazes upon the terminal's/ Scraped concrete/The shelved rows of the poor men"--and continues by describing a city scene through the eyes of a maintenance worker at the Hilton Hotel. The protagonist's wife has left him and he is taking the bus to work that morning, his mind wandering as he looks for the key to why she is gone. "He rings the bell. / The idea of her not home and legally annulled/ From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his desperate thrusts/ Makes him feel sick. He gets down from the bus. / He goes to work. He suddenly knows that he is not in love."  
As many poets will do, Sills could not leave this work alone. So a hybrid of this poem, "Post-Annulment" ends the book. In it, he has kept many of the original lines and added parenthetical remarks to expand on his ideas. It is in this context he allows himself to comment on religion: "Religion is a lie! Everything is a lie!" and on marriage: "Marriage, that sanctified legal rape, fosters the child-man to be a destined societal function as he grows up in the family unit."  
Not all of the poems are so bleak and cynical in every passage, however, as is apparent in "The San Franciscan's Night Meditations": "The night is full of impulses to live and run and seep heavily into its dark robes of silence and morbid rightness." People who do not feel comfortable examining in detail the darker side of life--the details that the average person overlooks because it just hurts or feels to strange to look--will not enjoy this book. Serious writers of free verse, contemporary poetry and/or those who study it will not be disappointed.  
Sills, a native of Missouri, is a recent graduate of Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He currently is working in Fayetteville. Sills dedicated his book to Mike Burns, a poet and teacher at SMSU who helped him edit his work.

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