by Steven Sills
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.”64 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,65 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,66that 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”67 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.68