Some Effects of Seclusion

" When asked if the French revolution was a good thing, he replied that it was too soon to tell"  I cannot source this, perhaps it is apocryphal.

Money, wisdom and faith are triple pillars that will never taint me with legitimacy. Think of this as a fishing boat while the weather blows. The hook of the anchor in the feathery seabed while you orientate yourself round the relativity of the shore. Can you recognise your place too by the iridescent hues of greens and blues that roil about the disappearing chain into the abyss?

Slippage.

My first monk was Brother Thaddeus, a Jesuit, in some London half squalid squat, half a lifetime ago go. He was recently defrocked or more correctly unfrocked, devoted but de-vowed perhaps and talked milkily of the priapism of coming out. We shared the front room upstairs and there was another there who has gone on to become a widely respected historian, according to those who can still remember but are not to be trusted yet.

Elsewhere, years later, if we hadnt been in the Landmark's coffee hall, within a tome's throe of Asia books then that other farang brother might never have entered our lives.

Though now I involuntarily jump through to the poor Khmer/Lao village backed up against the Cambodian border, Surin province, and her three-walled house, the open side to the dogleg in the main street at the heart of the settlement. There was untypical exquisitely light rain like music and weeping. The orange robes were not clean at least not pristine as so many urbanites manage. He gave an impression of great weariness perhaps annealed by hunger and paused in front of my beautiful lady of the day. Almost a stammerer, being forbidden to articulate need. She without a word likewise hurried inside to fetch  food and water to supplement the sky.

Did the tide of my life ever spring highter?

Another time she was upstairs at the bar in front of the shrine a long time so that I became impatient and later she laughed, teasingly me that I thought her engaged carnally when being already more; so involved by the weightless acumen of her religion, meaning her spirit was in momentary seclusion, belonging elsewhere. They make a fist of it here where I am now. The West has got to them already before they snatch at the noble truths and they are so earnest. One comes to my son’s school every year from Tibet…but I digress.

Him of the Sukumvit's hotel complex no longer a benchmark, superseded by the Marriott and the Grand this and the Royal that… had books for sale in the iconic continental bookshop, first to do good work and to popularise if I may write so vulgar. Catherine herself was pleased. By the humour and the resolute accessibility mostly and besides she never likes to move anywhere without having a job, which may be seen just as primary hygiene.

They started to correspond via the email address printed at the back of his books.

He was scriptually forthright but suffused by a pellucid remorse for his erstwhile life; as a floor trader in the frothy years of last century’s Capital deregulation. She understood his new ‘Foundation’ which existed to give money to adolescents up-country to complete what they had already started, usually to become teachers. There was the righteous hunger of charity which now with my greater sophistication seems another artifice of attachment. He arranged a job for Catherine.

One early incident which might have told of the iridescent roiling waters if you like, down in a play area on Brighton beach where Kit would go during 2000, the year spent in the UK for Catherine to study. Through the chaotic infants’ bustle we made acquaintance of a falang woman recently back from Bangkok. She darkened on hearing the name of our Brother and when we disingenuously wrote him about her, he entreated us to tell her nothing of him. Go figure.

By the time we arrived in Thailand and were starting to be established in that provincial town Catherine and he had exchanged some exasperated mails. I think she expected him closer as a mentor now we were nearer physically and he the reverse. “Don’t you understand that I cannot easily have contact with a woman” written to her as if explaining something simple to a child.

But one afternoon we did go up there slightly toward the backdrop hills inhabited by the huge Buddha. In a very old black Mercedes, driven by one of Catherine’s colleagues with big hair and whose husband owned the ice factory. Outside his cell (there is a more technical word which I forget) was a pond filled with copper and pink coloured fish.

A notebook on the floor

Prostration

He chided her gently by inquiring after the newer Benz. Laid up in the garage she said.

I was angry and wanted to say he was responsible for everything. The swampy hinterland around the river which winds down to become the Chao Praya and the oily smell of the neat engineering shops at the main crossroads even the sullenness of the stall holders in front the mosque. The un-Thainess of this town. How dare he mess with my prejudice!

But nobody will admit the fine balance….. How anything you do may become a fulcrum in another’s life… still less somebody who has renounced the world.

He was interested in what Catherine did contribute.

Never had contact again though except glancingly. Before we left, just after the immense thwarted threat of the flood, which is another story, Catherine became friends with a woman up from Bangkok whose father sold beer Chang and knew his bank manager who gossiped;… “had so much money for a monk, for a farang, for anybody, for that matter.”

Later living in Bangkok, of a Thursday I would often go with Min to the Wat beside the Klong at On Nut down from Phrakanong. This was her day off from the massage place and she was lonely.

We’d collect 20 baht notes, one to pay toward coffins, another for blessed water, and another to release creatures. The boys would crowd round. There for an education they mostly said which may be another vocation. Many of their superiors were fat.

Then this painfully reminds me of visiting you on the far shore of the Mekong, out of state. From your house the short walk riverside to other novices, part too of the roiling waters…..

When you fuck a Thai woman do you notice modesty without shame?

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