by Steven Sills
Afterward
(Journal, or Reflective essay)
It is doubtful that any writer would be an effective critic of his or her particular work as overweening pride would indubitably make him either inordinately protective of it if, to some degree, it was wrought in pretention and self-indulgence, or superfluously critical of the whole if he is a perfectionist seeking to write the best that he can within a particular genre. And if the latter, he will change the work unremittingly in the hope of achieving a state of perfection which he may be very far from achieving, and due to these many changes, he will ultimately come to despise the work that he has created. He may gain satisfaction in the completed achievement, but will be too apprehensive to look back on it for fear of finding the work spoiled in imperfections or just not as perfect as what he may have wished or originally envisaged. But then, very few people outside of Walt Whitman144 would care to write on one single book all the rest of his life.
So again, if appointed as his own critic, he will be caught between Scylla and Charybdis145 as a self-indulgent writer, a perfectionist, or, more likely, a mixture of the two extremes and as such will be unfit to render any impartial criticism. Thus, a work must go out into the world to be appraised by others more objective in their assessments, and these assessments differ because a work when read is a conflation of both the writer and the given reader. Although anything that I say in these pages can be construed as superfluous, I do believe that I have the capacity to elucidate the work a little and I will try to achieve that the best that I can in these brief pages.
I suppose that it was in December of 2013 when nearly for the whole month members of Pheu Thai held a counter-demonstration in Rajamangala Stadium in Bangkok near Ramkamaeng University, where I work, (demonstrations that only dispersed when it all became very violent and ugly as students protested against the protestors near their campus and against the retention of the corrupt Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra) that I first envisaged Cartesian skepticism not of empiricism which is Descartes’s nonpareil achievement, but one of ethics. In many ways that is ironic, as for the past ten years I have considered Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics not only the quintessence of all ethical treatises but the greatest of all books, although obviously the style of my own writing is not similar to the prosaic and methodical logic and analysis found in a translation of Aristotle--not that this sage who wrote “Poetics” wasn’t artistic or that his writings would not have been flattened by multiple Islamic and Latin translations. In a style a bit metaphorical like Plato, and with an effusive and even a baroque display of words and clauses that is somewhat unrestrained and cognate to Thomas Wolfe’s “palpable” language in Look Homeward, Angel 146 (a recurrent word in his work) albeit with a lot more syntactical complexity, this novel in style and substance encapsulates doubts about the existence of morality while affirming the existence of trace values of sentience and compassion which are of course not unique to humans but witnessed in all mammals if not the whole animal kingdom, giving us no right to consider ourselves the only “moral” creatures on the planet, and perhaps, given how we behave toward each other, toward other species, and the ecosystem, no right to consider ourselves moral at all.
I envisaged a book in which the collapse of democracy would be a pretext for further philosophical inquiry as the main character, Lek, a teacher of Western philosophy who is unable to work for a period of weeks during the protests, begins to indulge in recreational drugs and dabbles in writing a philosophical treatise. The characters that appear in the book are the dead wife in the form of a gecko, a young friend as a gecko and as a real person, a monk, a prostitute, and a hotel maid as a gecko. So the work might in some ways evoke certain similarities to Naked Lunch or Gargantua and Pantagruel in its interplay of “fantasy” and “reality.” Of course all fiction is fantasy. Real life, like that of my own, might not be any more real either when viewed from the passing of time, but I think that in fiction the only thing that distinguishes “reality” and “fantasy” is merely the amount of plausibility in a given passage. Of course the time element in this novel is all wrong. The demonstrations lasted for a period of months, not weeks, and only ended by the mandate of the military under the new, and rather self-proclaimed Thai Prime Minister, General Prayuth Chan-Ocha. Whether or not he is Plato’s philosophical king (certainly he has waged a campaign against loan sharks and other vile aspects of Thai society and their adjunct vices) or whether the whole situation in Thailand suggests that in a democracy this dysfunctional people hearken and then give their support of a tyrant who can lead them out of the turmoil, in either case, I assume, Thai politics will attest Platonic ideals147 and make the world weary of calling the political gridlock of democracy as particularly noble.
The Thai conflict is a complicated imbroglio that evokes memories of the civil war in the Roman Empire under the populist leader Gaius Marius who used grain doles and other pleasant ruses to gain popular support of the masses and Lucius Cornelius Sulla who loathed the inefficiency of the check and balance system within a republic and sought to restore complete power for the senatorial oligarchy148, only in this case it is between two groups to which one is led by supporters of a rich telecommunications tycoon in exile who has become the champion of the masses and a seemingly less corrupt group who seem to care little about the indigent masses. In any case, the two groups are so dissimilar from each other and so intransigent that democracy is rendered ineffectual, so this, of course in the thought process of the fictional character, seems to have allowed me to spring off into myriad other inquiries , then examine what happened in the protagonist’s childhood background that may have induced this skepticism, and then, if there is no morality, determine, in his perspective, what values do exist and cannot be easily repudiated; and of course this scrutiny being done during a time of grenade attacks, gunfire, and military helicopters as self and environment as well as the evanescent nature of life and the meaning of existence are more fully scrutinized under such situations.
The work has around 150 citations from a large array of books which was needed as the novel borders the academic and scholarly with original philosophical inquiry and literary fiction. It has been my worry that I could have created a Frankenstein’s monster here with patches of skin from the three disciplines and it took a lot of rewriting and vigilance on my part to see that it maintained an even blend.
Ideas in the work are predicated mostly, and surprisingly, on logic, discernment, and creativity, but also on decades of studies of classics in the Western Canon, and extend over such a sundry of different topics that I cannot even begin to enumerate them all. Again, Thai politics, or the subject of democracy, is merely the springboard for moving into a panorama of various topics, most which have even graver significance than merely how humans govern themselves. Clearly there are a lot of citations of the great philosophers in the work but I believe that the novel goes beyond that. Uniquely, it wants us to examine the types of material creatures we are, how our selfishness and a need to procure wealth are for the purpose of restoring our diminishing qualities as material creatures, and how best we should relate to each other in lieu of real morality. The friendship of Lek and Aus is in part for the ideal of defying self-interest, but it also exists because of empathy that Lek has for Aus that in part is the result of similar childhood experiences. The feisty dialogue, hallucinated by Lek, between himself and his deceased wife in the form of a gecko creates philosophical challenges in action that has a bit of the flavor of Plato with Aristotle. It attempts to be humorous and entertaining while at the same time edifying, and does not ignore the ideas of notable scientists, psychologists, and astrophysicists as well, building off of these ideas or reinterpreting them in the context of the psyche of the protagonist.
And corresponding to my aforementioned claim that a writer is not the best one to evaluate his own work, especially when broaching on a new field (in this case, philosophy, a field which
should be more inclusive of all intellects as attested by the writings of Montaigne149) I provide the following appendage which is a review of a book of my poetry for a fuller understanding of my contributions to the humanities as seen through other perspectives.
Papyrus: An Eloquent Ode to Life's Many Gritty Moments
by Amy L. Wilson
Arkansas Gazette
Little Rock, Arkansas
April 1990
An American Papyrus
Steven Sills
The Chestnut Hills Press Poetry Series
63 pages; $6.95 paperback
Twenty-six poems make up this first published book by Steven Sills, 26, of Fayetteville. Sills' vision is often a dark one. He writes of the homeless, the abused, the forgotten people. He is also intrigued with the mystical, the sensual, loss--as in losing those whom we hold dear, such as a spouse or lover--as well as the lost, such as someone who is autistic, who seems unreachable. Sills' skillful use of the language to impart the telling moments of a life is his strength. He chooses his words carefully, employing a well-developed vocabulary. He is thoughtful about punctuation, where to break lines and when to make a new stanza. He's obviously well versed in "great" literature.
Sills' command of language helps to soften the blows of some of the seemier passages found in his poems. Seamy may not be the best word to use. Perhaps gritty is a better word or just plain matter-of-fact and to the point, as in this descriptive passage from "Oracion A Traves De Gass," about the hopeless feelings of a respiratory therapy worker: "With the last of the air drawing in/ Begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it/ Like he could imagine from inexact memories/ The woman last night at the hospital, whom he began to like---/ Her body pulling cell by cell/ Apart before he had a chance to finish the rescue with the hose."
The book begins with "Post-Annulment2" a poem with a poignant description of society's displaced--"As the sun blazes upon the terminal's/ Scraped concrete/The shelved rows of the poor men"--and continues by describing a city scene through the eyes of a maintenance worker at the Hilton Hotel. The protagonist's wife has left him and he is taking the bus to work that morning, his mind wandering as he looks for the key to why she is gone. "He rings the bell. / The idea of her not home and legally annulled/ From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his desperate thrusts/ Makes him feel sick. He gets down from the bus. / He goes to work. He suddenly knows that he is not in love."
As many poets will do, Sills could not leave this work alone. So a hybrid of this poem, "Post-Annulment" ends the book. In it, he has kept many of the original lines and added parenthetical remarks to expand on his ideas. It is in this context he allows himself to comment on religion: "Religion is a lie! Everything is a lie!" and on marriage: "Marriage, that sanctified legal rape, fosters the child-man to be a destined societal function as he grows up in the family unit."
Not all of the poems are so bleak and cynical in every passage, however, as is apparent in "The San Franciscan's Night Meditations": "The night is full of impulses to live and run and seep heavily into its dark robes of silence and morbid rightness." People who do not feel comfortable examining in detail the darker side of life--the details that the average person overlooks because it just hurts or feels to strange to look--will not enjoy this book. Serious writers of free verse, contemporary poetry and/or those who study it will not be disappointed.
Sills, a native of Missouri, is a recent graduate of Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He currently is working in Fayetteville. Sills dedicated his book to Mike Burns, a poet and teacher at SMSU who helped him edit his work. 150
Notes