A Retrospective
Part Nine: Star Projector …
Thoughts drift in and out of mind, they are visitors. We let them go until we write them down and claim them. But even then, they do not belong to us. They belong to the people.
A few months back, I bought a lovely star projector. As I sit here, recovering from a sleepless night, I gaze up at the ceiling fan. The little lights dance around it, swirling in a blue nebula.
There has been a recent trend in Thailand, so it seems, to cease use of the Asian version of the Swastika for a sort of little fan amulet. It must be terribly frustrating to have had your holy symbol co-opted and used for political ends to justify a Genocide. I can’t imagine what that feels like (I feel the small black Star of David necklace in my hands, the chain has broken. What must this symbol mean for other parts of the world, now? What has G-d, in his infinite wisdom, done to further pervert the nature of symbols?)
I crawl from the bed. Smog wafts in the air. I remember a time that a beautiful Go-Go dancer shared a bed with me. The next day, my previous Bearded Dragon had a stroke, and died. I gave the Dragon a funeral by water, and she rests with the sea. I do not know where the Go-Go dancer went. I was disinterested in calling her after so ominous a sign.
Signs. I can read them now, in Thai. It makes life easier. Sometimes I find signs in words I overhear in conversation. I remember a time that I stood in line at a Starbucks near Rangsit university. An old Thai man and his wife stood behind me. He turned to her and said something along the lines of, “this buffalo is slow.” Slow, perhaps. But one must look in a mirror if one wishes to see a Buffalo who is slower.
I am staring at blank, bloodshot eyes. The face is recognizable, but I’ve looked better. The haircut and shave, I do like. I think it’s just the weather, and the fact that I haven’t slept.
Well, this is what I get—for drinking a large Tim Horton’s coffee at 2 pm yesterday. Thoughts of the past kept me awake, racked me like a paranoiac, forced me to contend with them at my weakest hours of the day. I turned to reading. I tried to sleep. The hours drifted by so quickly. Nothing really seemed to make much sense.
It’s a few days into Hannukah, that holiday we celebrate for the sake of a rebellion against the Romans and a miracle of oil lamps and menorahs, and the recapture of a sacred temple. Of a triumph over an unjust occupation. Of all the sorts of things they teach us, or taught us, when we were young. And here we sit, accused of being the Romans, of being Goliath before them. I shake my head. One thing, invariably, leads to another.
A friend mentioned that he’d watched some awful sort of far-right propaganda film. An Instagram post from a stranger’s site passes me by that reeks of anti-Semitism. I am confronted with a student in the classroom who has a sort of unexplainable fascination with Hitler. Little annoyances, but they give me pause for thought. Because evil is terribly banal, as Hannah Arendt pointed out. Where we perceive great evils, greater ones may be hidden in mundane tasks. And what of the banality of good? Does this exist as well? Evil is whatever distracts, and good is whatever does not. If I am not distracted from this banal task, as I place a razor to my face to cut off the little hairs that cling to it, could it also be perceived as good? Or is this banal cutting of my beard also to be an evil? What of the bacon I eat for breakfast?
Such thoughts drift by, I claim ownership to them by writing them down. But truly, they belong to the people. And the people scream back at me, the chanting grows louder, and I yell in shock. Suddenly, there is shaving cream upon the mirror. I control myself, and wipe it off.
I should really get some sleep.
