by Steven Sills
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,60the 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 foci61-- 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 organisms62—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 arrangement63 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.