Dissociated drive from Suvarnabhumi, part 2

Posted by Art man on December 2nd, 2007 filed in Bangkok

Money flows, and sex sells in a more invasive fashion than the faroffedness of an expressway billboard peddling model-touted scents to distract from the smog. This place is why Chiang Mai is full of plow-horses. The surgeon city toils to suckle its sycophants and painted facemask ladies. The pettiness of beauty is Bangkok- and we can’t stop the émigré. The curses laid upon the beautiful are contagious, here aptly patroned by JW Marriott, who is no longer a man but more (and also less). His bodies are not flesh; they only facilitate its waste disposal and absorb the corpsy odours as inanimate memory.

You can see the high rises rising high all around, indifferent, snobby; but the tartar sauce smelling stopover hotels and the street urchin leprosy sweat, the toe jam sour mash are what make this jungle grow. You are the soil that spawns these elevated highways and it’s your birdie regurgie baht bile that nurtures the grey foliage along its squat rise to the prominence of the weightlessness above. But that was always there.
 
Nothing personal.
The interesting aspect is this: If the soil was to erode (and in a sane and moral sense it began long ago), the rocky fruits of our labour would obstinately stick around, still connected with the cables of fibrous telephone ivy we’ve connected them with – Their attachment to time being much more understated, lackadaisical and staid than our own. We scurry under their bolted branches of overpass welds (welts?) and piss against the perpendicular trees. Our soft bellies placate compatibility with the antithetical surge of weight and heft and our lecherous corporeality becomes host to pathology.

Nothing natural.
The buildings don’t move with us. No sync. The legless man dragging himself facedown on the sidewalk, pushing a plastic alms tray forward between lunges can’t bear to look up anymore. Not at us, not at the hissyfit neon, not at what’s above that. Certainly not at The Paragon, whose name-dropping designer signage helps us forget he is there. That or marks his exhaust halo on a tourist map of the sewer system. Landmines under the sidewalk wouldn’t hurt anyone here. Our birthright has been paved. The cellular stress and strain is tangible, and you wonder how it came to be that we convinced ourselves we wanted to be automated versions of ourselves to escape the fear of our automatic tendency to want to be someone else.

You attempt to revive your concern despite invasive blaring pop music and are disgusted with yourself when a modern masterpiece of suffering (played up or not); a skytrain platform pieta misses the emotional mark, even though the filthy child in mother’s arms indeed looks deader than a meat wagon Buonarroti Christ. You are aware of your detachment, and powerless to attempt compassion of any worth.
You can stare. But you can’t cry. How will you get that back, that which you never knew you lost? The tracks still grin their symmetrical grin, a grin incompatible with whimsy, borne of the same artifice as your stoic weeds of commercial exchange.

And they wait, happily. They are that, too. We made them, and they have no use for us. These will be the powder sheds of the Olmecs when either we come to our senses or nature demands that we repent and flee. Our bits will be bitten by our ancient, patient watchdog, and our bytes will burst as our history is erased from this fixture of digital certitude that is nothing more than a sour pucker on the greatest timeline that will soon prove it has no use for our little games. We don’t control the microwaves, and we can’t unhinge celestial rotation.

I don’t feel much like repenting today. But I must flee now, actually, the cabaret novelty starts soon. I know it will be crap, but I can’t help looking, I’m caught between two worlds, this peculiar state is the nadir of the modern psychosis: irreconcilable yet in cahoots. klean mai khaw, klay mai oak. I step out into the steam and clang, feeling the peoples huddled, bony protection of tarnished yet dimly shining souls, always on the look out for the form to give face to my vagabond, hovering love. I’ve sought her for years, and she’s not here either. Such density can weigh heavily in the chest and on the mind. But I carry on; making sure the gnarled artifice and all the collected indifference is still capable of bringing me to tears.
It takes a while this time, I’m that much less sentient human and that much more Gurdjieffian robot.