Ruminations on the Ontology of Morslity

by Steven Sills

  Chapter 22

  Heraclitus on Change

  Contrary to that which is arbitrarily considered “good” or “bad” based upon being efficacious to a particular party, acceptable and productive behavior sanctioned by society at large, but of course often mitigated by the makeup of that society, seems to be as close to the good as a human being is able to obtain, except when acting nobly by extension from merely taking care of and aggrandizing himself and that which is his own, the parochial of his shell, to an outreach to others with no particular gain to be had. As to why any altruistic act is noble, with repeated acts molding character,112 perhaps it is such because this particular action, especially of a noble cog, is more deliberate, more indispensable in enveloping and clamping onto the macrocosm instead of being one more limited, inconsequential act of a petty part in the gigantic mechanism known as society, that which together with myriad other cogs, makes up the macrocosm, albeit inadvertently. A social, and especially a noble act, defy instinct, emotions, pleasures, and reflexes as well as norm and inclination, and concentrates on fulfillment rather than happiness.113 And a youth who witnesses that survival instincts govern every organism is all the more reliant on his family for any model of the good that might, to some degree, attest otherwise; but most often in this institution the good is merely the defining of the bad, and the bad, more times than not, is violating the sensitivities of parents in the venal quest for procurement.

  And of poor farmers with their huts on stilts, like cabins along a river bank, any little addition of an extra room tacked onto the structure or a motorcycle parked in front of it, and one has proven to neighbors and self that he is not stagnating in time but moving with it to possess, making more material the adumbration of self, and garnering the neighbor’s admiration up to a point so long as it does not go much further than his or her own social economic status; for to go beyond it would be considered inordinate and would incur his or her enmity.

  My father objected to the scholarship initially on the grounds that he never went to high school, so his son should not go either. His conviction, his stricture, firm as any Roman structure made with a concrete that uses volcanic ash, seemed unshakable, and yet she shook it nonetheless. Although it would be a loss to have the indenture in school for so many days each week, the perception of others that the family had enough resources from which to allow him to go to school would raise its status in the community. That was, more or less, what she conveyed to him. But in the early morning of that day I was to leave, as I was feeding sorghum to water buffalos and pigs, she came out and clung to one of my arms. “I had to give you up once,” she said, “and now you are trying to give us up.” But the doll that she adored at its homecoming, for lack of a better word, which she had fed sweet treats to, and inappropriately, sang belated lullabies to each night before he went to sleep, was now entirely gone. She knew that. After all, she had caught the doll naked and urinating with a naked girl from an adjacent cabin less than a kilometer away, discovered a pornographic magazine under his mattress, and identified a smell on the linen attesting of one finding other fluids and usages for the male apparatus, shooting it off as a cap gun when enveloped in temporary night and perennial void (in both cases, she trembled and stated how mortified she was in having a son who would do this to her). “But Siriporn and his family think that I will be going to school,” I said. She, the tremulous one, became mute. Then she held onto my arm tighter than before; and placing my hand next to her face until looking at it and perhaps imagining the things it had touched, she then dropped it. “I don’t know why you have to keep growing. You were so cute before.” “Grandma would want me to go to school,” I said boldly, speaking of a being that had been banned from speech. “Would she have? And who’s to say,” she said. ”And how would you know anyway what she would have liked, or what she was like?”

  As we walked back, my father, the man who often called me “Broom handle” or “Stick” was outside. It was most ironic nom de guerre as he was the one who had curved shoulders, and despite his profession as a farmer and temporary construction worker, possessed a fulsomely thin, almost emaciated frame. He was watching the dark billowing storm clouds rolling ahead. It was weather that he simplistically inferred as the palpable mood and expression of God, this Buddha that needed the adoration of men in prayers and chants, although how different it would be from man needing the adoration of ants I would not know. To me there were no gods; only the devils of two individuals who had stolen me from my grandparents, serving that greater monstrosity, the Earth, which at this time, for what I knew, had my grandparents interred within it. As they were Moslems, they would be buried if they were indeed dead. And at the time I thought if only the Earth would spit out the rinds of my grandmother, or at least allow the everlasting soul that she so adamantly believed in to be belched up from its stomach in a myopic gas then I would know their end; but I never knew anything. “He’s got to go now,” my mother said, as my father looked away to another patch of sky, indifferent to the human forms near him.

  Inside, she gave me ten baht the way Newton’s mother, also adjusting herself to the reality that her son would not be working on the farm, begrudgingly gave him ten pounds for the entire semester,114 and then some bread made of sorghum, as though I were a special farm animal. Then, I got on my bicycle for the long trek to the nearest school. And as to the whys and wherefores concerning a given boy’s treatment in early family, Buddha only knows, and if He does, which he doesn’t as he doesn’t exist, he should be compelled to author a thousand page book elucidating the convoluted intricacies of even this nominal issue. Things happen in this sublunary domain; and like parents in Siam placing their uniformed school children on the front of motorcycles to which any crash would render them instant projectiles to an early trajectory with death, so one acts as he does as practical short term solutions to get through the day. And as God to exist in any relevant way would need to intervene in human lives in the here and now in a restorative capacity, so family would have to do the same or the issue is moot.