I See Dead People - Part 1

Thailand is a strange weird place sometimes, and strange weird things can happen to one when living there. In Thailand many people believe in things most westerners laugh at. We are too sophisticated to believe this silly superstitious nonsense of these ignorant peasants and funny different people from another world than our own. We are smug in our beliefs and superiority; our minds are based in reality, in the solid world, in the modern world. Our ghosts are our failures, our regrets in life. We are haunted by debt, the latest fashion, the newest gadget, the scratch on the door of our BMW or Saab. Our other-worldly spirits are sanitized and safely hidden away in our churches; holy ghosts, spirits of our God.

Our demons are safely digitalized onto DVD’s for entertainment at our leisure. We chastise our children for their nightmares, “It was only a dream, honey. Now get dressed for school. I have to be in work early today for a big meeting. Stop this nonsense and go shower.”

There’s nothing under our beds any more except the dust bunnies mommy is too busy to clean out and the maid too lazy; vampires are only in stories written by a woman from New Orleans and made into cool hip movies, where the blood suckers have been changed into handsome gay, or seemingly at least bi-sexual, creatures that any woman would want to have sex with, vampire or not. Boris Carloff they are not. The boogie men have all come out of the closet. Nothing to fear in there anymore, it was just some gay guys hiding in there all along, not some real monster, but Freddie Krueger with his cool hat and funky slashing fingernail swords. There are no monsters now except our own human ones; the rapists, the serial killers, and high school kids with access to guns who have been teased once too often by the bullies in school and decide to blow the whole damned school up and kill a few dozen students and teachers, as well as themselves.

These are our monsters, this is our reality, the newspapers and TV news our horror shows. I ain’t afraid of no ghosts, especially Casper, or the blobs of slime in Ghostbusters, a comedy, an old children’s cartoon. He’s just too damned friendly isn’t he that Casper? I wonder if he ever came out of the closet. We’ve moved on. We’re in the future, the 21st century man and woman, virtually nearly indistinguishable at times. The diaphanous veil separating the spirit world and the solid mortal world we live in in the west has been thickened into a solid concrete wall; pierced only by Hollywood, and Anne Rice and Stephen King books, for entertainment purposes only. No one actually believes in ghosts anymore, do they? Well, maybe some, but we look at them in askance mostly, don’t we?

We’ve turned ghost hunting into a science; all infra-red goggles, and video with thermal imaging sensors and all that ala Poltergeist the movie. It’s a science now, a quaint interest in the paranormal a few still pursue trying to find evidence of an afterlife, the alternate universe, the godless weight of a soul, measured with atomic scales and possible to bring back with electric shocks to the heart and machines to do the breathing, feeding, pissing and shitting and muscle massage. Science has taken over. There are no ghosts, spirits, demons, devils and monsters in our daily lives, except on the tube or in a book. We like to be scared, but we know there is nothing really to be scared of; except ourselves, our neighbors, our work colleagues, or our school children.

This is not so in Thailand. In Thailand the people believe, some more than others, but they do mostly believe in the spirit world; in monsters, vampires, demons, nature spirits, ancestral spirits, and ghosts. They wear amulets and other Buddhist/animist paraphernalia to ward off these spirits. They have small houses everywhere for the spirits to live in. They feed and water them, buy them clothing and toys, wai to them and ask forgiveness or protection from others from them. They tattoo themselves with spells and incantations to ward off evil, or knives and bullets. They believe in witches and magic, the evil eye, and flashing mirrors in the setting sun that shine on them and bring spiritual harm to them and their homes. They believe the spirits of aborted and miscarried children live on, and even age, and believe that some monks, the powerful ones, can harness these spirits to do good for them, bring them luck, and keep them safe from harm and mischief. The veil we westerners have closed off in our modernity and concreted over in our disbelief is thin and replete with rents where the spirit world can flow through into the world of the living here in Thailand.

Here they believe, and their firm beliefs make it possible; the spirits live where there is a belief in them. Here they are real, as real as the mortal world. They speak to us, they show themselves, and they take on physical form and matter. They live amongst the living, and affect daily life, through the faith the living have in their presence and validity in their lives. Here there are monsters, spirits and ghosts and goblins, vampires and ghouls. And here is where I live most of the year now each year, among these believers, and amongst these spirits.

And here is my story.

(to be continued)

Cent
(The Central Scrutinizer)