1.
Something new happened to me earlier this month. For the first time in my life, I wished I had a gun.
My wife and I were driving to a Buddhist temple for my brother-in-law’s ordination ceremony. Entering the monkhood for a brief period is a common rite of passage for young men here, and it is filled with symbols and rituals.
Those include: lots of chanting and pageantry; a haircut in which those in attendance take turns cutting one strand each; a head-shave that is preceded by a head-washing and followed by a head-rinsing; a change of clothes, from what was worn on arrival into a white garment; the application of lipstick; more chanting; a second change of clothes, this one from the white garment into a saffron robe; three clockwise walks around the temple, taken as a group and led by another group of drummers drumming; exultations; offerings; precisely one farang to write home and tell the tale.
When all is said and done, the man becomes a monk and goes on to live at the temple for a time. In my brother-in-law’s case, that time is about two weeks.
He’s still there as I write this, in the afternoon on his tenth day.
2.
It was a little after 6:30 in the morning on the day of the ceremony. My wife and I were on my motorbike. I wasn’t driving very fast, but I slowed down a little anyway when I saw a sleepy dog start to make its way across the highway. I looked down at my righthand mirror and saw a white SUV speeding through it. Neither it nor the dog ever slowed down, and there’s no way to unsee or unhear any of it now.
I looked away as I drove past the aftermath, saying, “I can’t look I can’t look I can’t look.” My wife, meanwhile, said something that both asked and answered the question of whether or not we could do anything to help. We could not. Somewhere in the mix I heard a faint whimper that made it all, somehow, so much worse. The dog was done. There’s just no way that it wasn’t. But the whimper is why I’d wanted a gun, just to speed the process along, to give the dog a faster death, a deliverance from pain. I couldn’t understand how or why that transition wasn’t instant. I still can’t.
3.
The other night, my wife pointed her phone in my direction to share—unbeknownst to me—a video making its rounds on one of the misery-making social media machines. The blue one, I think.
After its swift awfulness had ended, but only just begun to linger, she shared more details.
As I understand it now, the driver of the car, which had a dash cam in it, dropped her phone while driving. The video was what happened as she leaned over to pick up her phone. And what happened was she drove directly into a motorbike with two teenagers on it. The one on the back died. The one driving, luckily, did not. The driver of the car survived as well. And if there’s anything but deep sorrow to feel for each of them, I’ve got none of it in me.
4.
I love my wife and will forevermore, but I’m not a fan of such sneak attacks or snuff films. Seeing that one, unfortunately, reminded me of another.
A few years back, when I was still teaching 12- and 13-year-olds, a student approached me with her phone held out and asked very calmly, "Teacher, what's this?" It took me a minute to figure it out, in part because I'd quickly assumed it was just going to be some bubblegum K-pop clip or something. But no. It was that Danish girl getting beheaded in Morocco that I’d read about. I didn't know what to tell her and don't recall what I landed on. But I still find that video and the innocence with which it was shown to me hard to square and kind of haunting.
Have I mentioned my extreme distaste for social media and the many, many, many, many ways I think it’s damaging our species?
5.
I’ve been rewatching the early aughts HBO series Six Feet Under. I was in my early to mid-twenties when I first saw it. I’d forgotten much of that initial viewing. But two memories in particular have stuck with me.
The first is of the episode where David gets carjacked across two-plus dark hours—the psychopathic nature of the carjacker, the scene where he forces David to smoke crack, and just the whole grim vibe throughout left a mark. As I watched it again the other night, I observed that it had lost none of its bite; it was at least as unsettling as I’d remembered.
Looking now at the original airdate, July 2004, I can deduce that I’d been robbed at gunpoint already. That had happened either the previous March or the one before. In any case, my guess is that that’s no small part of the reason that the episode affected me as much as it did.
What’s changed since that first viewing is the addition of a new memory, the one where I shared a hotel room in Pattaya with a mentally unwell man who made an impression on me and whom I still think about, a decade on now, way more often than I should. Every now and then I google him. Occasionally, those searches result in another disturbing mugshot atop a sad story from a local newspaper’s crime section.
Terror takes many forms. It’s the gun in your face, the knife at your side, the shadow under the streetlight engulfing you, the encounters and conversations with the unwell on those many days in the Chicago Cultural Center and Harold Washington Library, not to mention the many other ones in public buildings and spaces dotted about the world.
Terror is also lying in a hotel bed in Pattaya in the middle of the night and pretending to sleep while mental illness incarnate hovers above you in the room. It matters if the mental illness is yours or someone else’s. But the feeling is terror either way. And besides, it might even belong to both of you.
6.
My other notable Six Feet Under memory is of a man backing out of his driveway in the morning. He leans out of his SUV to get the paper, which is just out of reach. He keeps reaching down anyway, though, which causes him to fall out of his oversized technology purchase, which then runs over and kills him.
This scene has come to mind many times over the past two decades, serving, I suppose, as a reminder of how absurd and tragic and dumb both life and death can be. There are 63 episodes of Six Feet Under in all, though, and each of them begins with a death scene. So it’s beyond me why this one stuck with me more than the others. But there it was again the other day. First, on my mind. Then, on both my mind and my laptop screen. Just as I’d remembered it.
After driving over the man, the SUV rolls lazily into the street before coming to a soft stop on an otherwise peaceful morning.
Later in the episode, people speaking about the man’s death (apparently unaware of the newspaper’s role in his mishap) wonder aloud how someone manages to run themself over. I suppose this counts as a kind of dramatic irony—where we, the audience, know something that the characters don’t.
Rewatching the episode now, though, ~20 years later, it struck me that we know about far more than just the newspaper. We know that the smartphones are coming for us, and that the newspapers are coming for our smartphones. We know that media will infect our screens and break our brains, and that ancient spirits of evil will transform media’s decayed form into Moloch, the Ever-Living.
We know that the culture warriors will sacrifice themselves and all others to the gods of status and might, as the cultures themselves rot.
And we know that, as well as smartphones, we will invent new ways for people to “run themselves over,” new ways for them to survive and stay profitable and productive for longer, and new ways for their punishment, their penance, to be simply staying that way: run-over and whimpering, but contributing dutifully to the economy.
We also know that there will be some positive advancements, and that, of those, some will even be objectively positive. It’s only fair that I mention those, at least broadly. But broadly is as far as I’m willing to go with it right now. As you may have noticed, I don’t feel much like painting with the positivity brush today. I’m not oblivious to the good things of this life or our modern world. I truly am not. I’m just following other trails at the moment, and I left all my emojis and exclamation marks at home.
7.
It is now my brother-in-law’s thirteenth day at the temple. Who even is he anymore? Is he the same person he was before? I honestly don’t see how that’s possible, or how it’s so common for us to see each other—or ourselves—this way from day to day.
Who are any of us? Who are we as a whole? Where did we come from and where are we going? Why?
I’m not religious (not yet, anyway), but I’ve started to pray. So far, it’s been like cutting my questions and confusions open with a hunting knife, waiting alone beside their bodies for the answers to swoop in and heal them, having faith that they will, or that the questions and confusions will at least exhaust themselves.
8.
In part 1, I argued that our ability to navigate through both physical and mental landscapes (“fields of knowledge”) has degenerated, leaving us less willing to blaze trails or produce path-breaking innovations and generally lacking in agency and adventurousness. This degeneration of our navigational faculties has been caused by our reliance on automated wayfinding technologies and, more importantly, by an excessive “gridification” of the world, both materially (in our street networks and architecture) and socioeconomically (with our factory model schools and corporate ladders).
Here, we return to a theme that was only briefly touched on previously—the problem isn’t just that the world has become too grid-like, it is that, “nothing and nowhere escapes the techno-social net which we have cast over the planet. Uncharted territory has become a thing of the past.”
The seriousness of this problem cannot be overstated. Man feeds on terra incognita. The wildness of our imagination, the vitality of our spirit, the boldness of our dreams—these can only swell to their greatest extent when we feel as if there are hidden treasures or secrets waiting to be discovered.
For eons, our minds and cultures have evolved in delicate symbiosis with the Unknown, that place on the map labeled “Here Be Dragons”. Without this Unknown, that place where there may be cities of gold or fountains of youth, the heroes (but not just the heroes, all of us) have nowhere to journey and all of the things which can make us into heroes—bravery, fortitude, ingenuity, daring, and the like—begin to atrophy. Without this Unknown, we begin to feel confined, trapped, like a beautiful and dangerous animal in a small cage; we develop a claustrophobia; imagination and inspiration wither. For some reason, we aren’t as hopeful as we used to be, but we don’t know why. (part 1)
If the inaccessibility of physical terra incognita were the only problem, then that would be a good thing as the solution would be straightforward: colonize space, the so-called final frontier. Unfortunately, the issue is just as much epistemic as it is geographic—the frontiers of knowledge are too distant and too unreachable for most of us, and our zeal for mental exploration is suffering as a result, thus trapping us in a sort of self-fulfilling apathetic prophecy.
So begins a wondrous mindfuck of an essay by
. I could frustrate myself failing to summarize it, or you could just go read it. I prefer the latter.After I first read it, a little over a month ago, I unleashed my unedited thoughts on Bacon’s comment section. I was moved by what he’d written but also angry about where we humans were, where we are now, I mean, in this sometimes very depressing story of us. Moved plus angry often equals messy. But it also equals something a notch above, or at least beyond, bullshit. And messy non-bullshit is worth salvaging in my book. So here goes nothing.
The Book of Salvaging:
The way I see it, part of the "lack of innovation/adventurousness" problem that Bacon describes is that, all these years after humans' discovery of ignorance—and in turn, all these years deep into our scientific and technological and supposedly moral “progress”—many of us moderns feel that the societies we've built are spiritually depressing, depleting, disconnecting, and unrewarding; in large part because they are so incongruous with our evolutionary adaptations (a la Daniel Lieberman's concept of dysevolution). And so we now hold serious doubts about whether the progress made beyond, say, our hunger-gatherer days was really progress at all, or just an unfortunately long and deleterious (but, hey, also super action-packed) edition of Big Brains Gone Wild.
Maybe that will be our great discovery. That a return of some form to our ancient ignorance is what's needed. By a “return to our ancient ignorance,” I just mean a return to the (way) before time, when we weren’t being constantly guided and pulled in all directions toward ephemeral information that is often useless and/or damaging to us in our everyday lives. I mean a return to existing in greater congruence with nature (I know, too vague and too woo, but I mean it nonetheless), with a simpler and more well-defined purpose. I mean a return to living in smaller and more manageable and rewarding groups, with no use for the endless assault of information about what's going on in every minute of every day in every coordinate across the earth, most of which, according to The New York Times, et al, is either a crisis or a breakthrough—and probably also racist and transphobic and more than likely rooted in sexism and patriarchy and supremacy of some sort that we should all hate ourselves for, unless of course we're one of the victims, in which case we should identify as one above all else, and love ourselves for it and be celebrated for it and be called things like “hero” and “brave” for it.
I wonder if our "visionaries" and "seers," as Bacon puts it, will be those who find ways out of the more miserable aspects of the modernity that we made and baked into the cake, not through more dysevolution and technological advancement, but through restoring some of the lost connections to our ancestral roots. Maybe this is the path to un-stunting what Bacon calls "the intrinsic magic of the human mind." Because I think the opposite path, i.e., the one we're on now and have been on for ~hundreds to tens of thousands of years, is exactly why we’re seeing so many devoted humanists and atheists and vaguely secular tech types (and so on) speaking in woo and/or being drawn to woo or woo-like concepts. And fair enough. I find myself doing the same. It’s just that I also keep finding a lot of the woo to be gross and desperate and ultimately little more than neutered religion.
Bigger picture, I think humans are realizing more and more that living as brains plugged into (and bodies strapped to) productivity machines kind of sucks, as does being locked into a system where continuous economic growth and technological advancement are necessary and inescapable, lest we slow down our collective progress and veer into the widespread impoverishment and death and societal collapse that now seem all but inevitable absent more economic growth and technological advancement.
As Bacon writes:
When you are constantly in a narrow and focused visual mode, you are primed for detail, for problem-solving, and tipped ever so slightly towards anxious and aggressive states of mind; you become less likely to think holistically, to wonder (to wander), to ponder the mysteries of the universe, to stretch your imagination to its fullest extent. Magnify this effect over the billions of people who spend the majority of their lives indoors and glued to screens (especially those who should be best at thinking about the big picture and the far-flung future: our philosophers, scientists, and technologists) and you have a massive shift in the psychological state of our species.
As Bacon also writes:
The prescription is simple. Open your eyes. Look to the horizon, to the sky, to the stars. Pick up your head from the phone and put it in the clouds. Do as Newton did and see further. [...] In this age of rampant reductionism and rabid analysis, we must turn to perception and imagination for deliverance. The first step is to open our eyes and see further. The next is to open our minds and see the thing whole.
Amen to all of that. As I see it, a giant, missing piece of that whole that we need to see is something we've been burying and paving over for eons already under our mess of insatiable human progress.
Clean air; clear skies; visible stars; food that was alive just a minute ago; bodies that move and run and wander, liberated from the drag of content creation; minds that don't move or run or wander away from every hint of sadness and discomfort and boredom they encounter; lives full of what Bacon calls "childliness”—”a kind of radical ignorance […] (not to be confused with child-ishness)”—set free from the worship of endless progress and productivity; souls less squandered—may these be our new adventures.
9.
There was once this restaurant at a house near the river in the town where I live in northern Thailand. It was run by a man and woman who, I believe, were married and lived in the house together. That was the first of the two times I’ve lived here, though, which means that a decade has now passed. The house is still there, but it looks abandoned and the restaurant, man, and woman are nowhere to be found.
One day, the woman gave me a small, illustrated book that had brutal but, at times, weirdly poetic English translations: The Buddhist Sutra Of Rebirth: Sutra of the Buddha say the causes and effects of rebirth.
After leaving Thailand that first time and returning to Chicago, a friend invited me to dinner at her and her partner’s home. I wanted to bring them a gift from Thailand, but I had nothing but the book, so I gave them that. Before I did, I typed it up in full. It was one of those rare, wise moves on my part. I’m reminded of that little book often. Like every time I drive by that house, for example, which is usually at least once a week. Or when death or rebirth come to mind, which is usually only a few times a day.
Here’s the whole of it:
Why are people able to own carriages and sedans?
Past life repair bridges make roads person.Why are people able to wear silk and satin clothes?
Past life donate clothings to poor people.Why are people never short of food and clothing?
Past life gave food and tea to the poor.And why are some without such?
Past life not donate even half a cent.Why do people possess abundant wealth and prosperity?
Past life donated to build Temples & rest houses.What makes a couple's marriage lasting and faithful?
Past life philanthropy and donate together.What makes people look noble and dignified?
Past life give flowers to Buddha front.What makes people wise and intelligent?
Past life recite Scriptures call Buddha (name) person.Why do people's parents enjoy long lives?
Past life respected the lonely people.Why do people become orphans in childhood?
Past life mostly shoot birds person.What makes people have many offspring?
Past life open cages free birds person.Why a couple has no child?
Past life hate people's children & grandchildren.Why does people rear children not big?
Past life always hate people.Why are lonely widow alone and the old without children?
Past life not love wife and children.Why do people enjoy longevity this life?
Past life buy & save free animals.Why do some die young?
Past life kill many reincarnate beings (animals).Why do people have clear bright eyes?
Past life donate oils light up Buddha Lamps.What makes people become blind?
Past life many see pornography books.Why do people have harelips?
Past life many say bad things person.Why are people born deaf and dumb?
Past life bad mouth scold parents.Why do people have crooked arms?
Past life hand hit parents person.Why do people become cripple leg?
Past life destroy roads person (or public treasure).Why do people become hunchback?
Past life laugh at pray Buddha people.Why do people who Body smelly?
Past life jealous other people's good lives.Why do people become slaves?
Past life forget gratitudes of people.Why do people be jailed?
Past life see danger not save person.Why do people remain lonely and no wife?
Past life rape adultery people's daughters & wives.Why do people live alone and helpless?
Past life they viciously infringed on others.Why are people many sickness?
Past life happy people disasters person.Why do people enjoy healthy life?
Past life donate medicines cure sick person.Why do people vomit blood?
Past life create trouble apart people.Why do people suffer from sores and boils?
Past life bully those in animal bodies.Why do people are bitten by tigers and snakes hurt?
Past life many make enemies person.Why are people hit by thunderstroke and fires burn?
Past life attack scold cultivators.Why do people be poisoned to death?
Past life block rivers poison fishes person.Why do people die of hanging?
Past life disadvantaged people advantage self person.What were the previous lives of cows and horses?
Past life owe debts not pay person.What were the previous lives of pigs and dogs?
Past life intentionally deceive people.
10.
The day may come when I know what to make of all that. But for now, I’m just grateful to still have some record of it to return to.
Specifics (very, very) aside, suppose there’s some general truth to it. Suppose there’s such a thing as rebirth. Suppose there’s something beyond this. Suppose we go to it. Now suppose we come back again. What does that mean for the teenager on the motorbike who died? Was that death a punishment for a previous life? A point of entry into a new and better one? What about the teenager who lived, or the driver of the car that hit them, or the dog, or that guy in the hotel in Pattaya, or that friend or family member of yours, or you, or me, or any one of us, or the big bewildering whole of us? The same questions apply.
If you think you’ve got the answers, then, well, I’ve got some skepticism. But I’d like to learn your thoughts anyway. Please leave them with the bodies at the feet of my faith and knife.