by Steven Sills
Chapter 24
The Whirring of Helicopters and Time
On a sidewalk of a bridge over the Chao Phaya River, along frustrated, congested traffic and above the occasional barge and cruise boat, the waters beneath hearken unto me, and, were it not for Aus walking along with me, a part of my will would not be beyond throwing myself off into the oblivion that, in time, will ultimately take me irrespective of any volition on the matter. Cellular division, imperfect with aging but functional, cannot go on indefinitely; and whether ultimately it be death by cancer, a continuum unto old age, with the desiccated, shriveled leaf at last torn from the branch at the slightest wind, or termination at my own hand, it could hardly matter much to impartial others, alterity, and within the vantage of time that makes all things miniscule and insignificant (a major war among Australopithecus that is so completely effaced from memory as to never have happened, Caesar Augustus having become a vacuous name and abstraction even in the days of Aurelius,117or the petty aspects of my personal domain in early and later family all too fleeting).
Suicide as a whole organism or cancer, cellular failure to commit suicide and thus the replication of that which is not right and is detrimental to the whole organism, or the breakdown of a being in time are not so different from each other; and any moral case that the latter is better than the former is fabricated for the stability of society and has nothing to do with reality. So in my perennial ambivalence, assisted this time by being accompanied by a friend, I make excuses to myself, temporize, and, continue to survive: classes to be held soon that require a teacher (not corpse), chili seeds that we now need to purchase so that he can take them to his family during the Thai New Year festival, Songkran, a book that needs to be written, as though I would actually write one—tasks, the enemy of thought, to avoid serious subjects that man would go insane contemplating for very long. If Luklawan had had even more influence over me, which she should have had, I would have repudiated them long ago, and given myself over to the real task of man which is to make money for himself and ease his discomfort on the planet, never mulling the fact that every baht, every cent earned, is a crumb of the pie denied to others; for to be happy requires a self-centeredness to tune out all other issues of life.
We go into the seed store. Knowing little, we get whatever they recommend which will in all likelihood, we are told, germinate in the Sa Kaeo area. I show them my identification card and driver’s license which they photocopy as the purchaser is under full scrutiny and has to justify his purchase. So it seems that the poor with a parcel of land under their names have no means of purchasing these genetically engineered, patented seeds with vastly overinflated prices in these artificial times unless one has a son or a son’s patron to dole out money. But that is what patrons do: they ease the discomforts of those who are also temporary beings, but the satisfaction gained at being used in such a capacity is often cloyed. It is only the flawed instrument of the written word, a form of logic predicated on the reflexes of emotions, with multi semantic words and vague multi interpretable text, which is permanent and can transcend generations, more or less, when languages also change. And yet words, having no material substance can do little to alter the material world. Apart from making the author a more permanent shadow than all the other fleeting presences on the planet that have not authored a book, they accomplish little, for an idea of a better world hardly makes one.
Military helicopters, harbingers of incoming doom, hover in this area as well, mincing the air amongst the fall of democracy. They presage billions of indigent masses, epidemics in the faltering ecosystem, the fight, tooth and nail, for fresh water and other scarce resources while the wealthier nations fight verbally for more access to the global market to make the wealthy wealthier, and Islamic extremists here in the South, and in all South, the whole world, as cries of desperation and aspirations to return to medieval conservatism and mysticism. Wars, holy and otherwise, climatic changes from global warming, and epidemics, shall be conjoined forces to eradicate man to which a new artificial power, androids, will gain hegemony to fill the vacuum that other animals, as of yet, cannot fill.