Ruminations on the Ontology of Morslity

by Steven Sills

  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,51attitudes, 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 Republic52-- here I stay, for I do not relish dismantling my thatched hut along Walden’s Pond,53 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,54a rare and valued service or commodity allowing a transaction of a similar nature,55 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, Heraclitus56?”

  “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,57 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.”58

  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.”59