Thursday, October 27, 2011

Where the Cruel Waters Flow

From the window of my apartment, the world looks well enough. For now, bright sun on the roofs of houses to my right, a line of clothes strung up on a neighbor’s balcony, a blue sky, clouds. The people from the shanty down below are bathing again, a daily ritual in which water from a yellow bucket pours across their backs and shoulders. An elderly woman in the corner of the lot harvests something green from a patch of weeds and concrete. I wonder what it is, if she can eat it. From here, eight stories above the world and safe in my apartment, I can even hear the street dogs barking back and forth between themselves four blocks down, a distant conversation, constant and somehow reassuring. This is the scene I wake up to everyday in Bangkok, even when it’s flooding. In other places, not more than twenty minutes from here, the streets are rivers filled with garbage, abandoned animals, the rain.
           
The problem is my city is about to become an island, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone can do about it. Cutting directly through the heart of Bangkok, the Chao Phraya River, one of the country’s major water ways, is also the river into which the majority of Thailand’s northern rivers empty. Given the incredible flooding in the north this last rainy season, the cresting of the Chao Phraya has now become the problem of the central provinces, mine in particular, home to about 10 million people, many now without their homes. We are pressed between the mountains from which the northern rivers flow and the ocean below us to which they’re drawn, a flat and incredibly populated expanse of land and city which hasn’t seen this kind of water in over fifty years.

For the last week or so, the messages coming from the news and from the government have been pretty mixed, half assuring us of their control over the situation, half retracting that assurance and telling us to ready for the worst. Currently, especially in districts nearest the river, there are people and places that are thoroughly and utterly in trouble. I think about three hundred or so have died so far, but I can’t be certain. So little is for certain. I do know that evacuation centers have been set up, but, unfortunately, some of these have already had to be evacuated. Similarly, the FORC, the government organization in charge of dealing with the flood, currently operates out of the Don Mueang airport and are quickly being surrounded by water at their headquarters. The international airport, so far, continues to operate, though the majority of flights out of the city have all been booked.

The worst case scenario is that all three major defensive positions at the city’s northern edge fail and do so utterly. Every day they reinforce these walls with sandbags, but an article I read this morning warned that the country was quickly running out of sand. Kids across the country have even started digging up the fields where they play soccer, bagging up the ground to make a wall of earth that all of us pray to god can hold. If it doesn’t, the water, which has been building slowly for the last few weeks, will over-wash the capital in an estimated 5 feet of water, last for about a month. The flatness of the landscape makes the drainage of water incredibly slow, which is good in a way because it allows a more sustained attempt at holding the water back, but should that attempt fail, it means the water is here to stay. The prime minister said today there is about a 50/50 chance of slowing down the water long enough for people to be prepared. The goal, I think, is to control the amount of water so no single area gets hit all at once. The idea is to disperse the water slowly, spread it out. But if the water does suddenly get through, and if it stays, at that point I don’t know what happens to Bangkok, or to the country for that matter which relies heavily on its capital as the financial epicenter of its economy. If the walls to the north go down, I will probably have to leave. Granted, if they go down, I probably won’t be able to, so, well, I don’t know then. I really don’t.

What I do know is that now that Riley’s back in Chaing Rai, I’m here alone, for the next week at least. They’re building an impromptu brick and mortar wall around my building, about five feet high and reinforced with sandbags, so hopefully that does the trick. Also, I think we have a generator, so I should be fine. Although the government recently declared an emergency “holiday” so businesses have an excuse to close and people can evacuate, there is a shortage of ways to leave. Planes and buses have all been booked, and I don’t have a car. At the moment, I have enough food and water to last me about two weeks, but I hope it doesn’t come to that. Also, next Wednesday I leave on a flight out of Bangkok to India. There, I will take refuge with Kelli for two weeks traveling. I pray that by the time we return, the world, or at least my portion of it, is still alive, afloat and breathing. I love this city very much. I want her to remain. 


Thursday, October 13, 2011

A Day in the Life of Hammers, Ants, and Fatness

Today I woke up early because of hammers. There are men in the rooms around my room, and they are hitting things. Every now and then, they take out drills, buzz saws, and really get to work. I sit at my table wearing ear plugs for a while, drinking instant coffee, looking out my window. Down below me, what passes for a public bath, a big concrete square filled with rain water which people from the shanty shack like to stand around in wearing just their underwear. They take buckets and pour the water over their heads and backs and shoulders. Usually, a little naked brown kid jumps around and giggles as his/her mother tries/fails to bath them. I like watching them, the naked and mostly naked people, though it makes me out to be a creeper.

When the hammering doesn't stop and I can't take it anymore, I decide to get some groceries. I go to the wrong train stop, get off, and fail to find a store which isn't there. I try again, this time at the right stop, but the store is mostly empty. The city's flooding at the moment, in fact the whole country is, so I guess the delivery trucks aren't bringing us any food. That, or else everyone but me stocked up. Typical. I go for water, but that too, the water, has all been taken. I wonder for a moment what I'm going to do. I buy some rice and a pot. I will boil water. I will then eat rice. Great. I take my rice and metal pot and get back on the train.

Back at home, hungry, I grab a bag of cashews left over from the week before and I dump them in my mouth. Even though they’re stale because I left the bag open, they still taste pretty good. I chew and chew them. Suddenly they hurt. They hurt again. What the hell? I spit them out into my hand where little half chewed ants squirm around amongst the soggy chewed up cashew bits. I look in the bag. Yep, totally ants in there, little monsters. I take my finger and start to hollow out my mouth. I spit their bodies in the sink, turn the water on and wash them down the drain.

Ear plugs in, headphones over ear plugs, the hammering becomes somewhat manageable. Also, I am naked, which is the best. I sit back down and try to finish the essay I’ve been working on, the one in which I try to turn my first three weeks in Thailand into something clear enough to read. I want it to make sense of things for me, like tell me word for word what the hell it is I’m doing here and how do I stop thinking about a girl I'm pretty sure is over me. I’m supposed to be here writing poetry, but, for whatever reason, it comes out wrong, in sentences, most of which are proper, or at least I think they are. Also, I’ve started reading novels. What the hell? In the essay, I get to a part where I’m trying to remember meeting my old girlfriend for the first time, but I don’t remember it correctly. I don't remember it at all. I remember a different moment, so I lie and use that one. Is this ok? Why don’t I remember right? I’m pretty sure she’ll kill me when she reads it, if she reads it. In all likelihood, by then it won’t matter much to either of us, which is the way it goes sometimes, though I wish there were some other ways it went sometimes.

Now I’m in the gym, staring at my muscles in the mirror the way my friend Jacy taught me back at Gold’s in Wisconsin when we used to go there. “Physical fitness/physical fun?” he’d text me in the mornings, but it isn’t as much fun without him. In fact, it isn't fun at all. Mostly, I just get tired and give up. Now, instead of lifting weights up over my head, I’m sitting by myself in an empty room, slumped over on a padded bench and staring at my sneakers. I’m getting fatter by the minute, I can feel it. I stand up, pull my shirt up around my chest, and push my belly out. Yep, totally getting fatter. I pull my shirt back down. Tomorrow, I tell myself, tomorrow I’ll do better.


Monday, October 10, 2011

Like What Wall Street Looks to Me Appearing Here that I am Far Away from You and With

I’m not really sure what’s happening in America. I read about it on my computer, links on Facebook posted by my friends, brief comments and calls to action through the internet. There are people occupying Wall Street, and I feel strange about it. Although I'm proud of them — I like the images of strangers sleeping side by side, together in the street and covered in each other’s cardboard signs and placards, borrowing the sleeping bags of friends they’ve only known hours — I live in Thailand, or at least for now I do, and I feel incredibly far away. Like their fight isn’t my fight, though I hope some good will come of it. Like somehow, terribly, I’m not a part of things in the country that I’m from. And in a place where I can’t speak to people, this means that I’m alone.

I don’t want to be alone.
           
Maybe I’ve been gone too long. No, it’s only been a month. Maybe, then, I left before I left, the spirit leaving long before my body did. Maybe it was years ago. How much time has passed since I actually really cared?

When I was young, I used to make believe I was a youthful revolutionary, dress up dark in filthy patchwork clothes and scream in punk bands on the weekends, loud as I could. At the age of sixteen I went to an EarhFirst! rendezvous in Crandon, WI. There, cops chased us onto an Indian reservation. Half terrified, half proud, I called my dad to tell him I'd be in jail. Also, an occupation of a park in Minneapolis. In the middle of the night I hauled cement which we mixed and placed in holes so protesters could physically attach themselves to metal bars cemented in the ground, their wrists chained within the earth they were trying to protect. “Dragon Traps” I think we called them, or something to that effect. The worst, though, and this I still feel sick about, was the way I used to pride myself on a riot I was in and partially started, like being beaten up by cops meant my life was meaningful and more important than the lives of people who hadn't been in riots. At the time, I really felt it, passionate and full of rage, raw love in a world of mediocrity. Sometimes I wish I still did.


Somewhere, though, maybe in my middle twenties, the spirit kind of faded, puttered out and changed. Focusing instead on pretty girls and poetry, and ultimately on school, I cut my dreadlocks off, put my favorite pair of pants away. Instead of Chomsky, I started reading Beckett. I gave up screaming in a punk band, got good at writing poems, and learned to cook. I’m not sure why this happened, or what it was that I got tired of, what it says about me as a human being, but lately, especially when I read about the people in New York and in other cities across the country expressing solidarity, I’ve been feeling a whole lot like I need to say I’m sorry.

The problem is: to whom do I apologize? The second problem: what do I do to stop this feeling altogether, kill it quickly where it hurts, right here, right now in Thailand.

The first person I need to say I’m sorry to is a friend of mine from Iowa, a poet named Adam, whose work, both in and away from poetry, is about as good as work can get. He’s been in the city, at the occupation taking care of protesters, making sure they're warm. I feel bad because he’s done so much. I haven’t. And I don't want to let him down. The other day, in Bangkok, after not hearing from him for very many months, I turned on my computer, an email, and started reading this:



#occupywallstreet
#happywiththewaythingsaregoing
#writingandactivismmerging
#inwaysthatareexciting
#andnew

spending time
in the occupation
in new york
recently
was wonderful
i joined the comfort working group
which helped people get blankets
and tarps
and warm dry sweaters
it's been raining a lot
i worked with
great people
it reminds me
of how you like the country
and your punk past
and how much of an asset
you are
and will be
in the revolution
you're always invited
to come stay with me
wherever
we are


Unlike Adam, I am incredibly uncertain how to be political anymore and continue writing poetry, a problem which Oppen, perhaps the most important and influential poet in my life, solved by abandoning poetry altogether. I am not, at least by most standards, and most certainly not anymore, an overtly political personality. Obviously Adam is, my friend in prison, Ian, was, and of course there’s the mass of bodies huddled in New York. But me, I faked it so I could listen to punk rock and not be called a poser. And now I don’t even listen to punk rock. I live in Thailand where the government my friends are attempting to affect gives me money to be a poet. I’m not even writing poetry. America is far away.

Last year, I was living with my girlfriend in Montana when the men, women, and children of Wisconsin tried to take their state back, my state. My parents were down in Madison. My friends from Minneapolis, from Chicago, from Iowa, they were all in Madison as well. They, and however many thousand others, seventy or more if I remember right, god. Every morning, I’d get on my computer as though it made me closer somehow, more back at home than not home. I’d listen to the news on NPR and shake with excitement in my living room, I was that proud. "Jane!" I'd say, "You'll never guess how many are there right now!" When people in Missoula talked about the protests, I’d make sure they knew where I was from. Those were my people, my friends and family filling up the streets.

Ultimately, I think, I want my life to be a part of the lives of the people and the places I belong to, the men and women standing there together in Wisconsin and in New York, whose beliefs are my beliefs, or at least I hope they are. I can’t be certain, which is a problem. I only think I have beliefs, I know I used to, but these days, given the complexity of trying to make sense of everything, it isn't quite that easy. Again, I can’t be certain. It isn’t clear how much of me authentically responds, and I mean actually authentically responds, to the sentiments expressed on Wall Street. I can say I’m with them, click on links and "like" things, I can put up a lonely blog post, but at the end of the day, I’m here. I write poetry which only occupies the page.

Part of this is that I don’t totally understand the situation. I know there are the less rich people upset with the more rich people, the 1% referred to on the signs raised high against the New York City skyline. That, I get. Our country's in a lot of trouble and it looks like a select few made a big fat killing helping it to be that way. Furthermore, I’ll never be a rich person, so, for me, the extremely rich are easy targets. Plus, it doesn’t seem much like they really give a shit about me either, or about most people for that matter, or about the planet on which the rest of us depend for absolutely everything. But this, the extent that I “get it” and to which I share and hold beliefs, not only am I severely limited in my knowledge of the situation, my faith in what I think and feel is rooted almost totally in abstract, shaky ground, an unclear ethic turning over in the gut that feels a lot like hunger. 


My hope is that maybe hunger is enough. If it really is a kind of hunger, a need for nourishment at the level of the spirit which isn’t full without it, a craving for something bigger and more meaningful than what I am alone, than that is my one demand. I mean this in the biggest, most beautiful sense, passion and companionship, a desire to be numerous, fodder in the form of love. I get it and I demand it because its happening, right here, right now, the process of the feeling rising up and slowly taking over, my nascent solidarity. Maybe, if Adam's right, this, the process of beginning to feel, is what all the fuss is actually about, a demand by people for people to finally be people, a process going on en mass and then, hopefully, in each of us, a way to feel alive in the face of forces, too numerous to name, that tell us we're apart. Lately, the further and further I feel from the people and the places that I care about, the more I read about New York, look back upon Wisconsin, the louder and louder it seems to get, the hunger, screaming from my stomach, no longer abstract. The more I listen, the more it’s there, growing, political and more than politics, the more and more I’m home.