I awake in my hotel, stunned, around four A.M. I'd fallen in with some unseemly Nigerians that evening, and we'd roamed from bar to bar around the little Saigon tourist ghetto 'til around two. I am barely able to function, and this is apparent in the eyes of suspicious airport security staff; my breath must've smelled about like that of Lazarus on Opening Day of his short-lived Comeback Tour. But it is worth it to fly domestically and spare ourselves the horror of thirteen hours aboard busses and hydrofoils. We arrive on Phu Quoc Island around seven A.M.
Thankfully, there is nothing to do here. The surroundings here are so exaggeratedly picture-perfect that one feels compelled to do little more than sit and drink and stare. There are large populations of four-inch winged rhinoceros beetles that are wonderful to watch and blurs of mosquitoes at night that are not so fine. We have a private cabana at a little seaside resort; the beaches here a powdery white, there is no surf, and so the green waters lap very gently upon the little berms. Furthermore, the pervasiveness of elderly Ensure-guzzling German vacationers virtually guarantees that I will remain well-insulted from any temptation to engage in depravities.
But come to think of it, there is little to do anywhere. Every year, I scout out a number of visually-stimulating destinations, go to them, and then proceed to the same things I'd do anywhere: read, write, drink, eat, and argue. As amusing as it always is, it has a certain ring of inertia. I am somehow reminded of collecting action-figures as a child; I would half-reason to myself that no actual "playing" could commence until I'd completed my collection to some satisfying degree. So I would obtain the necessary figures and their counterparts, the accessories, the ships and shuttles and the self-contained play-sets. And I would then sit back in horror and watch as the long-sought fantasy abruptly dissolved: I would place certain figures in their respective vessels, or plant various adversaries facing one another in the sand, and come to the difficult realization that they did absolutely nothing. I would then make some embarrassing and pathetic effort to animate them or to approximate their little dialogs from the films or cartoons, and it would make me frown and sigh and relegate these playthings to the back of the closet. Perhaps this is not an apt analogy, but it feels just about right.
I read Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip; I've read maybe some eighty-percent of PKD's work, but somehow missed this one. Because of its title, I erroneously assumed it to be among his earlier works, and thus, non-canonical. It's about as great as anything from this period; funny, philosophically-challenging, and able to negotiate the soliloquies of numerous characters with reflexive ease and elegance. Its backdrop is very near to that of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which chronicles the woes of a lunar penal colony. But it's his introduction of several ideas regarding the subjective apprehension of time among autistics and schizophrenics that interested me, as they echo a few thoughts (silly thoughts, perhaps) that occurred to me while living on the banks of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I later by accident discovered that David Bohm asked questions that were nearly identical to my own, which of course made me feel a little better.
While living in San Pedro de Atitlan, I made the acquaintance of a German named Ona, who'd lived there for some ten years. Ona dressed in long draped robes, wore a long beard and walked with a Gandolph-esque staff around town. I ordinarily scoff at such pretense, and we could not have been more different. But I found him to be sagely and even-tempered and we became fast friends. I would run into him around midnight; he would be calmly sipping some herbal tea at le creperie and I would arrive shit-faced and looking for some intellectual arm-wrestling. And he would happily oblige me, never lecturing or judging; his rebukes were never severe in inflection, he would correct me with a chuckle and a warm smile. The independently wealthy tend to exhibit this sort of mild temperament. He did not always win these little debates, but I felt the man could concede a point, which I suppose is in part what makes one sagely.
Ona had a couple of beautiful houses along the bank, and would regularly invite us over for dinner; he is a raw-foodist, and so we would dine on little concoctions of papaya, tomato and avocado, without salt. Salt, he informed me, ought to be shunned, as it prompts lasting erections in the male. Go figure. He was in possession of an eclectic library of books, and introduced me to the thought and theories of Wilhelm Reich. We would sit under candlelight on little bamboo rugs and very quietly debate for hours all manner of things within our scope: Heidegger, Jung, war, capitalism, shamanism, Free Love, telekinesis, and so on.
On one evening I felt it safe to share with Ona the problem of time that I'd alluded to previously. The problem is this: massive elementary particles in a vacuum have a particular rate of decay. I don't have the precise statistics immediately at hand, but let's say it is this: a single proton, insulated from interaction with other fundamental particles, will decay; that is, slip entirely away from existence at a measurable age of roughly 1.8 billion years (or whatever it is), give or take a few. My concern is twofold; first: how does time make itself "felt" by this object in a vacuum? It is not being impacted by any forces of natural erosion, nor any other form of degeneration. In absence of interfacing with anything of a material nature, how does it "know" that some or any time has lapsed? It is the ages-old problem of action-at-a-distance; essentially like the problem of gravity, and locating the proposed but yet-elusive graviton. Latent and spring-loaded within a thing that barely even possesses dimension is a capacity to respond not to the whirlwind of other extended things, but to the immaterial force of time itself. Protons cross a measurable temporal threshold, divorced from ordinary physicality, and then simply vanish of old age, and this is not a theory. And this brings us to my second concern.
Into what or where do they vanish? One need not look exclusively at proton decay; in everyday particle collisions performed at the world's accelerators, impacts yield a host of super-massive particles with a lifespan of a few billionths of a second. Pions and muons jump briefly into this world through such particulate train wrecks, and for a slight moment, the balance of things is upset, as the collision yields more matter than was originally introduced. It is as if you throw two baseballs at each other at near light-speed, anticipating nothing but shattered fragments of the two balls, but instead end up with a net mass of eight full baseballs. As soon as this abominable violation reveals itself, it immediately recedes back into nothingness, and therefore maintains the balance required in our second Law of Thermodynamics. But it is important to note that for the sparest of moments, that law is effectively violated. Raw being collects into our world to taunt us with its origin and then tracelessly exits; it might be the nearest affirmation we have of ghosts.
Ona fell into near hysterics, laughing on and on, saying that I am confused and that this presents no difficulty whatsoever. But he of course could not properly account for either of the two troublesome epistemological discrepancies I'd pointed out. Nobody can. But by all means, enlighten me. Anyway:
It is four days later and we return to the Hotel Lien Ha in Saigon; it is a pretty fine hotel, with a working lift and a covered pool on the roof. It's nestled in a narrow little corridor of bars and restaurants, and is considerably different than Hanoi; this hotel does not lock its doors at night, as some do. Bars and such shut down when the last man can no longer stand. Throughout this passage can be seen the hordes of fat old white westerners with their little Vietnamese prostitutes in tow. I suppose it should not nauseate me; they require sexual intimacy like anyone else, but find it nearly impossible to acquire in their home countries. They are out of shape and past their prime, and their modest successes as businessmen will fail to impress any but the most repellant women in the west. I pity them, but they nauseate me all the same.
I make some effort to write at a few of the outdoor cafes, but it was not meant to be; the hawkers and dealers collect around me like clouds of flies on the faces of those withered old National Geographic women. "Hello my friend?" they say. Cocaine? Ecstasy? No, mon ami, these well-worn neurons can handle no more stimulation than is provided free-of-charge by the city itself. But thanks. My insomnia returns with a vengeance, and the few dreams I am able to have are not of the usual abstract and colorful variety, but are instead uncomfortably mundane in character. Which makes me want to sleep even less. It feels as if an extremely boring individual, one who relishes long afternoons of filing and the CNN Market Report, has made off with my dreams and attempted to balance the deficit by lending me his own. In the event that this individual is presently enjoying this essay: I'd like them back.
So I dodge as well as can be expected the late-night degenerate scene in Saigon by spending some time in the company of the ass-backward snore-a-thon that is Vietnamese state-controlled television. The Vietnamese have a wonderful method of producing voiceovers for western films; they simply screen the film (edited for content), and the voices of all characters are read aloud in the flattest monotone by a single Vietnamese woman. The original dialogue is not subtracted from the audio track; she simply babbles the script without inflection or dynamic in an attempt to drown out the actors.
We again take to the streets and share a table with a German named Marcus; after some four half-gallon jugs of bia hoy we all decide to roam the alleys; not the ordinary streets, but down the dark little half-avenues that barely separate the open-face homes. A few blocks into the labyrinth and we are invited by a merry band of locals to share their home and their beer. They are thoroughly plastered but can manage a bit of English, and so relate a number of stories from the war and of why they so detest the North. On this point they are immovable; I mention reconciliation, make some effort to introduce a bit of levity into an increasingly prickly exchange. They respond with graver epithets and offer us a bit of their laughably-bad weed. We say goodnight and thank them for kindly sharing with us their home, and they present us with a bill: fifty dollars for the beer. We offer them ten and stumble home, slightly disheartened.
On the plane back to Taiwan I am seated next to a small older Vietnamese woman. She is reading Victor Hugo and is a practicing Caodaist. Caodaism is a kind of synthesis of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity, and they have beatified everyone from Gandhi to Oscar Wilde. And Victor Hugo. She carries with her a large plastic bag decorated with a little smiling yellow cube and the Zoloft® logo. I wondered about how much Zoloft she could fit into that bag. She says her faith alone has the capacity to liberate mankind. I say I doubt that, but maybe Zoloft might do the trick. But there was one day, I tell her, just a single day, sometime in the 1980s, when nobody died. Not a single recorded death on earth in a twenty-four hour period. Scout's honor, I say.
In an Airplane over the Sea,
11/16/07
No comments:
Post a Comment