The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  There it sits, in the icy atmosphere that surrounds it. If you look at it long enough it’ll turn into the spitting image of an old vulture. When you ask it Do you have the programme? it remains impassive. That’s why, during the show, you can curse the son of a bitch at will, point your foot at it, open your flies and wiggle your hips under its nose – you can do everything. It remains impassive. It doesn’t say a word, as if it were already dead. And you can be cutting with it if you so fancy with questions such as What’s your sex? Male, female or hermaphrodite? (Should you add Your Grace at the end of the sentence?) And let’s see: ask him what’s its matrimonial status, profession, monthly salary, favourite pastime, ambition in life. Let’s see: ask it if it’s Death by birth or from some later dubbing. Let’s see: ask it what the most exciting experience in its life is. You see? It doesn’t turn a hair. It remains tense to the extreme, braced against the frame of silence. It doesn’t watch your show as would a critic who must pen an article for some magazine or newspaper. It isn’t interested in this kind of lowly job, even if it’s acknowledged as the sharpest and most nuanced of critics. If you happen to be bored during the show, deride it. Don’t forget, every time you’re bored, that Death, which sits in the darkness of the house at the moment, isn’t ordinary death, but it’s your death exclusively, it’s the death that’s been especially reserved for you. That’s why, from a linguistic standpoint – and don’t ever forget it – Death is always in the singular. And it’s this very same Death, isn’t it, that finds men clothes in a public phone booth without knowing that they are Clark Kent’s before he turns himself into Superman! And it’s this very same Death that goes gossiping with the locals and pretends it’s interested in philosophy while stating that Plato is Belgian! And it’s this very same Death that likes to tell the story of Socrates and the Socrates in its story keeps quoting Shakespeare! And who is it if not it again that poses as an intellectual while discreetly sending back vouchers of all sorts of consumer goods to try and win raffle prizes. By the way, since you were born you’ve never tried to taste Death fried in batter. Hey there, waiter, one fried Death in batter, please! Crappy poets like to dress up Death to make it more solemn and sacred than it really is. In reality Death isn’t happy, not by a long chalk. It worries constantly that at the very end it won’t be able to avoid dying either. You’re feeling better, aren’t you? Talk to the dead that are still alive, talk to the living that are already dead, talk to Death, talk to it as a dead man. You must do it, it’s necessary. And over there, can you see? Yet another dead person, a woman. Actually, more of a young girl than a young woman. She died before her time because of you, but you pretend you don’t remember her. Open your eyes. It isn’t the moonlight that’s blurring your eyesight, but some aberrant phenomenon within your eyes – eyes that have contemplated death for too long, eyes that have contemplated the abyss for too long. Your heartbeats are slowing down. Your pulse too is weakening. Your head slumps onto your chest, compelled to go down under the staggering weight of memories. Your eyelids too are closing down as if you were about to sleep like worn-out worms that fall asleep or dead. A few fireflies rove over your mop of hair, a few more cling to your mop of hair. It isn’t nine thirty in the evening yet, but for here it’s very late. Reddish yellow moonlight flows in through the windows, at once ghastly and mild. The moon itself looks like a flame deep-frozen in white fog. You look asleep. You look dead. Can you hear the silent crackling of mist particles? Do you hear it, the silent crackling of mist particles? Further into the night you’ll probably become more alert. But in any case for the time being your thinking is most tenuous. The dim glow of your thoughts is faltering and flickering like the glow of a moribund firefly, faltering and flickering like the flame of a meagre stump of candle caught in the gusts of a wind from the far end of the sky that sweeps across burned fields littered with the ruins of your life. You can’t escape from her any longer. You can’t turn away from her any longer. In the dark sky of your cranium you see a white star. You see a white star’s face – nothing else but the darkness of the sky and the white star. A white face. A white body. Even the hair is white, white like the tusks of a mammoth, white like the tusks of a mastodon, white like the tusks of an elephant, out of which billiard balls used to be carved in the old days – billiards, the favourite game of the blue-blood in Europe, a luxury built upon cruelty to man and animal in the colonies. Elephant tusks from India, elephant tusks from the Belgian Congo, elephant tusks from the Ivory Coast. The ivory billiard balls you met in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – Flaubert, the Master without equals. Of what must the billiard cues that go with the ivory balls be made if not ivory also? And the felt must be woven by a goddess’s hand. And the billiard table must be placed under the glass dome on the top floor of the ivory tower, obviously, and the games must take place under the light of the morning star, of course, but the white star hypnotises you with its ice-cold, vacant eyes, and you keep struggling to resist the power of this hypnosis, behaving at times like a retarded god and at times like a genius chimpanzee. Everything has its limitations and you’ve reached yours. So wake up. Stop sleeping. You’ve slept enough as it is. Your life is so empty as to be worthless. For how many years have you been pretending to be ill like this? Everything has completely failed. Your mind is steeped in the night of all sorts of bitterness. There is but pain, deception, shame and malignant revenge, and right now you’re exhausted. Isn’t it time for you to make something of yourself? It’s imperative that you do it. You’re at the end of your tether. For ninety-seven, ninety-eight days you’ve been here in the isolation you relish, in the silence that makes your hair rise from terror in a way you couldn’t imagine was possible. And in your panic here you’ve gone as far as trying to find a means to get in touch with the supernatural. What makes you think the supernatural really exists? The machine that churns out your cheap ratiocinations has overheated or what? Or has it turned turtle? On a whim, you told yourself you’d take enough sleeping pills to kill yourself. You thought of committing suicide, but it didn’t amount to anything tangible. You looked determined and strongly motivated, so that I told myself you were about to resume your trip toward death. The next moment, you take a U-turn and start thinking about the white naked body of a woman and take a nap and sink as if you’d lost consciousness. Every time you expend yourself too much physically through fornication, you sleep like the dead. But when you thought you were going to use sleeping pills, you were no longer hesitating. You’d thrown all of your doubts overboard. And you woke up groggy and realised you were still alive, the same old life as before, the same old torments as before, the same old memories as before and the same old death as before that was trying to find a way to you amid the same old flimsy obstacles. Crisis! Crisis! you told yourself. You’ve been saying this for a long time. But you didn’t try in the least to move in order to defend yourself. You’re tired, you’re lethargic, you sink deep every time. Slowly and surely. I must do something, I must do something, you kept telling yourself. But you did nothing, including before Itthee died and even after her death. Your life has deteriorated steadily, spoiled, gnawed. Pulverulent wounds that stink… Cancer of the soul… If you must be told in a beautiful and provocative way, a cancer is sponging off your soul. Such things as infirmities of the soul do exist, my friend! Even when you’re most self-confident, you aren’t sure you can win over the infirmities of your soul. You may well end up in jail. Your looks attract attention. Your behaviour attracts suspicion and it’s already in your nature, like the demeanour of a jumpy murderer. Here in this deserted house you thought you were going to write, but it then reached the stage where you had to summon all your courage to take your pen and come up with a sentence or a phrase, and you wrote at full speed, untidily, without proper forethought, ignoring all chronological order, all progression. I’m tormented, you wrote. Don’t worry, John, I already gave myself the baptism of blood. A flame is burning in my chest. I’m conscious of neither place nor time. I don’t know why I cam
e on this planet. Don’t try to understand my emptiness. I stride along the roof of the sky all by myself. I only know that even the twenty-first century won’t be able to hold me captive. Tell Christ he can come down the cross: I’ll replace him there. These were obviously inane ramblings. What you wrote was a web of absurdities, time and again. So that you gave up writing. Before you came here you merely let your life go down the drain from day to day. You only trusted your instinct. You floated about, often drunk for days at a time, puking aplenty, sometimes puking blood. You sailed single-handed into the greyness of time. One night, very late, on New Phetchaburi Road, a police patrol stopped you. Around three in the morning there were few passersby and the few cars drove fast. The cops asked for your ID. It was during Crime Prevention Week or something of the kind, you don’t remember any longer. You only remember it was soon after Itthee’s death. The cop who drove stopped his bike. His colleague on the back seat got out to search you. He found nothing illegal. He didn’t find your ID either – the absence of ID being, as everybody knows, liable to conviction. He only found your manuscript in a sorry state. He only found the sentence Even the twenty-first century won’t be able to hold me captive, only found the sentences Don’t try to understand my emptiness. I stride along the roof of the sky all by myself – all of that squiggled like those graffiti high school students like to write on walls. He switched on the five-battery torch he held in his hand and began to read. Loony, that bloke, isn’t he? he said and stared at you. Loony, that bloke. Spaced out like this, and shoeless too. You nodded in approval. You mimicked his words in a low voice. Yes, loony, that bloke. Spaced out like this, and shoeless too. The cops left empty-handed. At the time, it had been days you hadn’t changed, hadn’t washed, hadn’t brushed your teeth, and it wasn’t only your hair that had dandruff but your beard and moustache also. At the time, Itthee had just died and you too had begun to die slowly and ineluctably. Slowly but not regularly, because at times you recovered. You went to lie down on the sand at Seeracha, on See Chang Island, on Samet Island, at Bang Lamung. You turned vagrant, staggering in every direction, putting up at some friend’s or other. Meanwhile you were still trying to write, but it came to nothing. For three months here you’ve gone without writing, even though writing may be the best cure for what ails you. You don’t take pleasure any longer in sitting down to your writing desk, looking through the window, drinking coffee, smoking or gazing at the flowers wilting in the vase, calm and patient, waiting for inspiration. The blank page doesn’t tempt you any longer. You leave it blank just like that. Sometimes you draw flowers, trees, houses, suns or female faces, but nothing written. At the same time your dreams have shattered one after the other, and the fangs of truth tear into you and grind you alive, shred by savoury shred. Wake up and get down to your last work in life. Dawn is still far away. You must do it. You must win over it or else accept defeat with sleeping pills – Polynon or Moganol as you wish. Altogether you’ve got more than forty pills. It’ll be the end once and for all. The tangled threads of life so difficult to untangle will be broken once and for all. You won’t have to worry any longer, you won’t be conscious of its presence any longer, you won’t be conscious of the way things are any longer. The Earth is but one star amid myriad stars, a tiny star drifting in the night of the boundless universe, and you’re but one small living thing on the surface of that star, a two-bit animal on a two-bit star of that universe. You’re a small living thing in the universe. This is one sentence you’re totally certain of. Remember it well. Keep it in mind always. Thinking about the origin of the universe will drive you mad. Thinking about the Big Bang theory will drive you mad. Thinking about the origin of life on Earth will drive you mad. Thinking about the origin of matter and of mind will drive you mad. It’s only when there’s a mind that mind can reflectively conceive of matter. You rotten son of a bitch! You’ve never been interested in anything except the mind, which has turned you into chronic melancholy. You were amazed when you began to think about the life of the very first cells on Earth, the evolution of living beings, the origin of instinct. Man is but an animal derived from a particular species of monkey. Man has nothing at all to do with the divine. And you look down on this particular species of monkey. One Homo sapiens, actually, is one mind. You’d forgotten that way of thinking – but then, completely. Without matter there’s no mind. Without mind there’s no matter. Scientists are at the same level of excellence as spiritual masters. But to think like this will drive you mad. It’s perfectly conceivable that Homo sapiens will colonise several other stars in the next thousand years. Science hasn’t merely altered the face of the Earth: it has also altered, at the very least, the faces of the Moon, of Mars and other planets of the solar system. When the time comes, there will be people to flee the Earth to go and die Elsewhere. From the first Homo sapiens to the latest opening his eyes this very moment, not one has yet succeeded in fleeing the Earth to go and die Elsewhere. Those that hate the whole world are very much to be pitied. For how long will the Earth still have to house mankind, H G Wells asked last century. The NASA budget is puny compared to the Pentagon’s. Ray Bradbury has just provided a satisfactory answer: the knowledge Homo sapiens has of the universe is limited; there may well be other forms of intelligent life on other stars, perhaps even gifted with superior intelligence compared to which Homo sapiens may be nothing but a chimpanzee, an orang-utan, a tamarin, a macaque or a marmoset. It’s the kind of thinking that’ll drive you mad. From a single cell to the mammals, from inchoate matter to the ultimate mysteries of the mind, what a prodigious transmutation! The cells that combined to form the Buddha – that’s the kind of thinking that’ll drive you mad. All the time spent daydreaming over a considerable number of books, merely to find out that you are but a sick and solitary Homo sapiens born in the greyness of time, quiet and silent in the greyness of time, moving in the greyness of time, waking up in the greyness of time, sleeping and dreaming in the greyness of time, dying in the greyness of time – no! Don’t think about it! It isn’t your problem. Give it up. Don’t interfere. As far as you’re concerned right now there’s only your own problems you must hasten to untangle. It isn’t difficult to bay at the moon that you love mankind or love the mighty masses. You’re a phenomenon that appears only once on Earth, as is the case for all of us. The world before you were born had never borne you – all living beings without exception are in the same case. You’re a phenomenon that will last for a while – all living beings without exception are in the same case. You who at your worst are but an unhappy animal, you who at your best are but a happy animal, you who dream that One day I’ll no longer be a happy animal or an unhappy animal. I’m fed up. Has the time come yet or not for you to tackle the question Must I live or die? Yes, it’s more than time. You’re one of those, aren’t you, on this planet that must confront this kind of problem. What you must do is more than a child’s game: it’s a decisive test, a vital confrontation. Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog played that game, but without conviction. But you aren’t him. You love weirdness that hurts, don’t you? You’ve got all the coarseness of the Romans of the end of the Empire, haven’t you? No! There’s no Coliseum in which you must fight to survive. There’s no physical violence to be feared, or if there is any it’ll be your doing. What’s to be done in times of crisis? Come now, you know perfectly well what the answer is. The bank to be reached doesn’t make the confounded superman, but it’s the bank left behind that’s the real condition of the monkey. You can’t hesitate like this in the middle of the abyss. You know perfectly well what the answer is. Try to imagine, and make sure what you imagine comes true, that you’re dying or are already dead, lying still nailed to the spot. All those that have had any dealings with you directly or indirectly are about to enter to look at your corpse. Those that you love, those that you hate, those you came to know in life, friends and foes. Would you like to tell them something? What do you feel towards them? Are there among them some to whom you want to explain, justify yourself, th
reaten, yell, insult, supplicate, comfort, beg for forgiveness, reminisce, chatter, speak? You can do all of the above. You’re a corpse gifted with speech. You must control yourself with the following formulas: I’m dying and I’m already dead. Repeat them non-stop and make sure they come true. Here everything is solitude. Here we have an atmosphere of mystery and forlorn loneliness. The night here is empty and numbing. What a marvellous atmosphere for your funeral! Yes. Just like that. Slowly and deliberately. Ah! Here they are. Can you see them? Like shadows, all around you, in the darkness of your memory. Can you hear them? You’re aware of their appearance, aren’t you? Yes, they’re already here, some as dead as can be and others still alive, some impassive, some shedding mute tears, some with a jubilation in their eyes they aren’t bothering to hide, some that resent and hate you. Talk to them. Bid them welcome. Tell them that first of all, you must beg their forgiveness for the bareness of your funeral. You must do it. It’s of the highest importance. The ghosts know perfectly well why this is so. Well now, you’re here and they’re here. Some have taken the trouble to come all the way from hell, some have taken the trouble to come all the way from the horizon, some have taken the trouble to leave behind the confines of madness and some have taken the trouble to leave their cool and quiet monasteries. Some have brought tuberoses and some have pocketed a knife to cut your corpse to pieces. May the ghosts be your witnesses! You’re lying still, silent, your hands white, your face ashen. You look so much like a dead body. What! You’re trying to slip away, are you? No way! Don’t ever do this again. Don’t even try, it won’t help at all. You must travel through the abyss of your life. It’s really necessary. Much time has gone by, day after day, month after month, year after year, and you’ve nothing to show for it. You must travel through the abyss once again, as a sinner and a defendant, not as a mere tourist. You look thoroughly bored, weak and bruised. Hopelessness gnaws at you and turns you into pulp. You take flight with your dreams, your books, your pure music, your travels, your sleeping pills and barbiturates, with your meditations on the mysteries of the universe and of death, with your drinking sessions that make you puke endlessly – and you become increasingly aware each time that you have no way out. Wake up and produce your last work. Return to the past. Travel the length and breadth of it and try to understand what it is that made you what you are today. You have no other option. The other methods are outdated. You’re gravely ill and you must be operated on. Even if there is no anaesthetic and the bistoury is rusty, the operation is necessary. How many times, how many times, how many times did you promise you’d do it? But you’ve always slipped away. It isn’t a whim, but the outcome of deep reflection over a long period of time. You can no longer put it off, even by one night. You must do it, because it’s your last work in life. You must do it because everything in your life has been destroyed. Ah, you can see yourself now, can’t you? Yourself as a still incomplete foetus growing in your mother’s uterus, huddled up in the bag of amniotic fluid, your eyes closed tight. Every so often you move. And you see them, don’t you, your wrinkled face, your scarce and sticky hair hugging to the skin of your skull, your wide-open mouth when you open your eyes in the darkness before dawn on a day of the rainy season under torchlight and lamplight? No, you aren’t dreaming. You truly see them. That’s good. Do you see yourself walking barefoot, slate in hand, to the primary school of the Phraek Narm Daeng monastery? Do you see the silence and sadness and the scars of your mother’s feet? Do you see the silence and the bitterness and the panic of your father when he came face to face with your mother’s lover? That was hell. Do you see yourself as a child with sun-toasted head pedalling your racing bike in the Phra Jormklao military camp in Phetchaburi? Do you see yourself, a teenager by then, sitting lethargically steeped in ganja smoke? Good. Do you see yourself in the Architha camp in Pattani? That was hell, and a most interesting hell to be sure. Good. Your mother no doubt wants to hear many things from you. As does your father. And Phraek Narm Daeng. And Daen Chartiya-wan. But Nartaya Phisutworrakhun seems more afflicted than anyone else. In death she’s bewildered and terribly sad. She’s been waiting for this night restlessly for a long time, but you’ve always ignored her and turned your face away. So she doesn’t quite know who you are and how you could have done that to her. Look at the glances she’s casting at you. Don’t turn away again. Use your brain, rather. In such a situation, whom should you address first? Actually, it’s an old problem: how to behave with someone at a given place in a given time? Make up your mind fast, or will you wait until there’s no more coffee left in your glass?