Ruminations on the Ontology of Morslity

by Steven Sills

  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 nows35 to which some, like subatomic particles passing through Higgs field, pick up more mass and plausible reality.36 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 imagination37 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.38 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 o
f 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.39 If Kant is right, and I think he is, the principle matters more than the end result40for character, as Aristotle phrases it, is the composite of one’s actions41; 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,