Dotting The i In Time

This is the third part of a trilogy which began with my blog rebuddha-redux.blogspot.com  

 

Part two was an actual dead tree book (and not self-published) Baddha, which is available wherever obscure, out-of-print and poorly-selling books are sold. The same publisher reneged on his promise to publish this.
 

None of this is about Buddhism. I don't claim to be a Buddhist, and Buddhism interests me about as much as any other ism, which is to say, not much. Ism is for ists.

...

Click.

A fond reunion of unrecognisable friends is taking place in crippled architecture. Blurred identities shuffle for the slanted seats in a collapsing funfair ride. 

At the sound of the door latch, dream remnants flap into the periphery, silent movies on wind-whipped tentcloth. I can sleep through a night booming with frogs or the jungle-muffled thud of the karaoke bar, but this soft click - barely audible when I’m awake - is as urgent as a bell. I lie still. I don’t want her to think she can’t get up without waking me.

Oh dallin’, I wake you.

Sweat-stale pillow peels from my stubbled cheek like gauze from a wound, my head a smear of spastic dislocation. I open my eyes. She’s framed by the door, my morning star, softer than the light.

I’m awake already.

My voice is barnacled. I kick off the shroud of the sheet, stiff-hipped, and the groaning barque which bears my name cants upright from the sea of sleep, tattered sails dripping with dreams. My head compasses, briny of eye, hawsers fraying in my neck. 

What time is it?

The day clears its throat - a cockerel’s dusty bluster, a furry rip of motosai exhaust, and from some high weed-throttled loudspeaker, the nasal megaphone of traditional song, impossibly nostalgic for a life I don’t know.

The ting and tick of her bike as she pedals away, her fond, graceful form, her straight back, hair up in flowers.

I look at my watch, a habit without meaning. And this is where it starts and ends. Always. The waltz becomes a march, and we must fall into step, you and I. Synchronise watches, and on my mark ...

Tick, we clock in, tock, we clock out. The habit of time is so hard-wired into our thinking and so camouflaged in our culture it is invisible. Worrying about the nature of time is generally considered a waste of time, something to occupy the navel-gazing mystic, particle physicist, or angsty adolescent. The rest of we galley-slaves row to time’s drum-beat without stopping to think about it.  Measured time, time that passes; the straight track of linear time is a scientific fact, rock-solid, constant, and reliable as clockwork. A law of nature that was discovered, or revealed, permanent and universal.

This understanding, as ever, is just another name for the shining vessel of our ignorance. The comfortingly familiar tick-tock of the kitchen clock is a fairytale sorcery we perform, a spell we cast upon ourselves every ho-hum, humdrum, dull old day. We twirl the wand around us every moment, unaware of our fabulous power to enthrall. Spells are sleeping spells, enchantment, and our understanding of time is the heroin of sleeping spells. That dull old hickory-dickory-dock, tick-tock round-the-clock workaday world is the waiting room where we pass the time until our name to be called, our number comes up. Purgatory.

A true understanding of time is an understanding of the nature of things, not their duration. The nature of things is bound up with the nature of self, and the misunderstanding of self is hell on earth.

Once upon a time ...

The first person singular watches the sun rise, traverse the heavens, and set, without knowing a single day. In Eden, day changes to night, night to day, without Adam knowing nor needing to create the distinctions day and night, to count and measure where there is nothing to count and measure. There is nothing in his time to suggest the idea of the hour or the year. His world changes in a turning, continuous cycle - a natural, whole and simple state of flux reflected everywhere, from the inconstant pump of his heart and the opening of the moon, to the bloom of the tide, and the shape of the winds. Adam’s time is uterine, measureless. Time before time. Time we have lost altogether - since we were, each and every one of us, born into self-consciousness. This is The Fall, and that which falls, breaks.

My field of vision is weedstruck, staccato with insect signals and chattered with sparrows, their bobbing weight bowing the tensile stems of the green tide that drifts across the plot. The small houses stand at intervals, shining relay stations at the outpost of some forgotten civilisation, cluttered with mesh satellites and licorice sutures of sagging cable, petrified technology now shrill with the breedle of yellow-booted birds; a language as opaque to me as the chirring grass, or the monks’ low thrum warping on pulses of heat from the temple. Above a spatulate fan of trees, the gilded tip of the chedi, the lotus parasol tapering in fractal filigree to fuse with the heliotropic mirror of the sky. It contains, in a crystal phial, a tiny shard of Buddha’s breast-bone. The air-bone connected to the Buddha-bone, the Buddha-bone connected to the temple-bone ...

Translucency made turbid by my thinking. About somewhere else, somebody else. A tangle of regret and dread, staged confrontations, re-enactments and treadmill commentary - the usual sludge in the sump. Gears grinding. Thinking about. Miles away. This (anag.) happens; the dirty business gets done without my having to get in there and pump the thoughts through the digestive tract of my brain. My thinking about (the dark glass, the cloud of unknowing) distorts the world into a hall of mirrors, showing nothing but myself in blurred recursion. The world I know is nothing but my point of view, which is nothing but here and now, which is no thing at all. 

All the king’s horses ...

Becoming self-conscious is becoming apart; a part, a disconnected, distal thing, a bloody bag of bits, or a shining cloud - a self. The blinkered point of view that constitutes the I inevitably prevents us from seeing the whole truth. The part cannot know the whole, and the central role I think I play on the world’s stage is a selfish and illegitimate hogging of the spotlight. We are not stuck in traffic, we are traffic.

In the umbral pool of the house, soft arcs of the broom feather dunes of insect husks, dog dust, tiny lizard droppings from tiny lizards - the daily harvest of an open house. A calligraphic flourish out of the back door. I look across the dun-coloured lake, its slack skin pocked by rising fish whose Fortean presence, in an arid plot flooded by torrential rain, is a mystery to me. Beyond the sun-mottled margin of mirrored grasses and sudden yellow-green leaves, a saffron straggle of monks flickers zoetropically between the paper-cut palms, one of many barefoot lines measuring the morning of the little town. The wives of the government workers whose columnated cement palaces line the road wait by their gates (regally flagged) to drop a little rice into the boys’ bowls, no looks or words exchanged. Ordinary life.

Adam, the first person singular, is ordinary, not a fantastic myth or fairy story. I live him. Birth is my personal exile, my casting out from Eden, painful and not by my own volition. Birth is breakage, a terrible violence. But it is only the traumatic separation from the mother that enables her to be seen at all. Paradise is lost, but that’s the only way I can know Paradise; by glimpsing it through a glass, darkly, as something I’ve lost, somewhere I am not. We are the lost souls, the ship of fools, adrift on a sea of troubles. We are scattered and broken, orphaned and trying to find our way home, without a clue or a compass to guide us.

The rupture of birth creates our first distinction - I am not that. Language is born here; the first word, mama, is the recognition that I am not that. Birth is the birth of want - I want what I am not, to be where I am not. Mama means I want. To want for something is to lack it. Rejected by the mother, I am born into lack and loss, and this is the weight I carry through life, the crux of the matter, my cross to bear, my original sin. Exiled from the garden, I have become apart, a part; no longer the whole. Everything is shattered into Every Thing. Each and every thing is a reflection in the shattered mirror of the self, and I want Every Thing. I want it all; the whole shooting match, lock stock and barrel, the whole kit caboodle and the kitchen sink, as a replacement for my lost Everything. This broken-bit world is the devil’s domain through which I mumble and stumble every day, trying to put Humpty together again. The accumulation of stuff; acquisition, plunder, hoarding. I’m grabbing all the bits in the hope that they will fill the hole in my life, make me whole, but of course they never do. Enough is never enough.

Just as I didn’t recognise my situation in the womb, neither do I see the mess I’m in here and now. This is the Fall, from universal unconsciousness to self consciousness, and the nature of this self consciousness is a mask, a reflection, or a dark glass; nothing in itself at all. 

I find myself here, in the living room, a tarnished self-portrait framed by the  mirror on the wall, mottled by mineral foxing, the reflection of an older man, a stranger in the house trying to remember why he came in. He leans his forehead against the glass. In the clarity of myopic focal length, the empty regress of his face in its own dark iris, generation upon generation.

In Eden, Adam sees his face reflected in a clear pool without recognition, his eyes no different, nor more distant, than the stars in the vault of heaven above him. In Babylon, self-distorted view of Eden, my reflection is everywhere. I am a hall of mirrors; I am Narcissus, drugged into narcosis by my own image (my mask, my persona, my role), beholden to it, in thrall to it. I am bedazzled, distracted, enchanted; Every Thing in my world is a reflection in the shattered mirror of my self.

The room is canescent in lost light; shapes inchoate as my thoughts wait for the sun’s definition. The table a dim altar for the liturgical silt from my lapidary labour, this work in hand - writing the natural history of a nondescript herenow - the antimatter nowhere. My computer sleeps next to a breviary of tea-coloured leaves, once a hopeful face-out paperback bearing my name. Here in the Entropics, the climate chips away at books faster than I can get published. I sit at the table, crack my knuckles, and type these words.

This is herenow - I’m pecking out the words you’re reading. As awkward and intrusive as this acknowledgement of you is, it is also necessary to state the obvious. I am writing the words, here and now, that you are reading, here and now. The book is functioning as a mirror for our seemingly discrete points of view, our apparent isolation giving us the impression that each of us owns the time and the place, the here and now, through which these words flow. Linear reading decodes an otherwise chaotic all-at-once-ness. Front to back, top to bottom, left to right, your attention (your here and now) moves through the book in ordered succession. Caveat: the satisfying narrative of beginning, middle and end is absent here; what you are reading in this instant is all there is. No once upon a time, no happy ending. Right here and right now is where it begins and ends. History is bunk, and the bunk stops here.

Through the looking-glass ...

I am distracted from thinking about you (apostle or ass) by the distant cry of the Bread Lady, cycling furiously through the town as if under fire, basket piled with creamy fresh-baked white loaves, her seeming mission to complete her reckless round avoiding customers at all costs, cursing the day she ever left Viet Nam to fire her oven in a country that doesn’t eat bread. Like the fish in the field, the whole process is a mystery to me, one I have no time to contemplate as I lurch from the house. I set off barefoot, grit studding my soft farang feet, as she flashes past the end of the track that leads to our house, her mocking ululation already fainter. I gain the road - hand pathetically aloft - only to glimpse her tilt precipitantly into a side street in a spatter of outraged poultry. I concede defeat with a symbolic fall of the arm. A short way up the soi, another thwarted customer cantilevers on his knees, breathless and breadless in the shade of a stand of bamboo. We stand on different planets.

My seemingly fixed position on this particular world, within this particular solar system, leads me to misinterpret the apparent rise and fall of the sun (beating on my head and shoulders) as an interval - an unintelligible idea for a less earth-bound consciousness. There is more than misinterpretation at work here though - this is invention, artifice, inspiration - a stroke of genius. The interval is the self’s creation, not god’s. The sun does not move in intervals. 

Nature turns, but it does not tick.

One belief, or lie, breeds others in a self-justifying system. I am running before I can walk. My self-centred, feet-of-clay perception that day follows night follows day begets the idea of series; one like thing following another in succession. And succession begets measure; I have started counting, the most terrible incantation of all. Consistent with my inclination to divide where there is no division, I slice the day into smaller intervals that refer and relate only to each other, and to nothing in nature, and I give these bastard orphans names, for without names they are nothing at all. I say the sun rises every twenty-four hours - not twenty-three, nor one hundred and sixteen, but exactly twenty-four. Twenty four hours. Having conjured the 24-hour day, I imagine greater measures in the greater universe. But the month I see in the moon, and the year I ascribe to the sun’s authorship are, as any work of fiction, representations, or interpretations. Units of time - my precious casket of jewels - are ephemera; laws I write, or a mythical bestiary. Nothing but nouns, and the universe is untouched by them. There are no measures or steps in the natural world, in molecule or galaxy. The intervals I count are the result of my point of view, and point of view is self-consciousness. Without my thumb, there is no rule. The second is not a naturally occurring phenomenon - no unit of time exists outside its human invocation. The original meaning of the word sorcery is power over the future, fate; magic directly related to time. Measured time is sorcery.

In the luminous reverie of a tea stare on the porch, the sun piercing the cuculoris of the trees, Curly scrabbles around the corner and leaps the steps to the porch in a single glad bound. It is common canine knowledge that a man nursing a mug of tea is in need of something better to do. It’s time for our walk, during which Curly flatters me into thinking I lead him. He accompanies me in irregular orbit, a fuzzy particle scribbling through a fecund soup of stink, where every stained corner pulses with news. We pass the kindergarten, blazoned with flowers, alphabet murals, and a concrete menagerie of giraffes, zebras, and monkeys. In the open hall a teacher sings the national song to an audience of small children clustered at his feet. The demanding top line stretches comfortably beyond his range, but no Thai would think of criticising a missed note - they hear the song, not the singing, in their gentle karaoke leniency.

A tuk-tuk shivers by, the three-wheeled combination of funfair ride and percussion orchestra that serves as taxi and cargo carrier, the driver grinning at me from the shade of the metal roof. I smell the exhaust, dragon’s breath embroidering the perfumed morning air, like ink in water. In this moment, I am part tuk-tuk. Smell is particulate - the smoke is absorbed into my system (my self) in order to be smelled, becoming physically part of me. Sound is no less intimately invasive; the tuk-tuk clatter and carbon coughs are as much a part of me (eardrum shaking in sympathy) as the stink of the exhaust, or its bright image fusing the receptors at the back of my eye. I consider my eye’s take on an object to represent its fundamental form, and the other sensory impressions to be secondary to this, but the focus is misplaced; the visible form of the thing is no more its defining nature than its smell and taste and feel and sound and idea. The apparent divisions between the senses are our selfish ordering of a synaesthetic universe. Not dusty rooms separated by brick walls but a lush garden. Ask a dog. 

My senses are not activated remotely before passing messages back to an isolated command room for analysis, but are part of the thing perceived. I am physically changed by the world I presume to view from an objective distance - that non-existent void between things, between senses, between us. I am absorbed into the soft, sparkling mist of the world. Perception is ingestion, being is eating; we are all in holy communion, all the time, everywhere. And the nature of this herenow is the work we do right now ... you can’t get there from here.

We stretch the timeless turning of the universe into a straight track that demands a destination and a departure point, or there is no journey, no movement at all. I’m on the eastern margin of Thailand, something that still has the power to surprise me, and my physical location, my point of view, the pin in the map, is identical to myself; wherever you go, there you are. There is no other I than here and now, this place and this time. The compass is a clock, the degree is a second, and the whole universe seems to whirl around me, wherever I am, immovably at its centre. The division between time and space is created by my self, cutting in; they are the same spell spelled differently, the same word in different handwriting. In this sleeping spell, this herenow, I set myself apart, casting a net of language over the world in order to understand, control, measure, and (crucially) own it. The net is cast, the cast is a spell; I spell names, name parts where there is none, establish boundaries where there is none, define quantities where there is none. Our whole world is whisked up by the magic wand, the hypnotic gesture, flimflam and hocus pocus.

By the mason's sepulchral art, with Baphomet’s tools - the straight edge, the right angle and the compass - we stir up great clouds of mud and dust, calling them cities, or civilisation, but the mightiest metropolis is a Bedouin tent compared to our finest architecture - the citadels of recorded time. Because every epic journey, every dog-walk, must have a departure point and a destination, we speak a stupendous incantation that not even the gods dare utter. We conjure glittering fairytale cathedrals called the past, lying behind us, and the future, waiting ahead, in order to legitimise our kingly procession through time. These magical palaces are our most enduring constructions; the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge and the 7-Eleven are fleeting shadows on the titanic walls of the Past and the Future. 

Right now, Curly (remember?) is at the end of the street, “leaving his telephone number” - in the words of my wife - on a lamp post. The morning traffic is sparse on the broad Temple Road, tuk-tuks, pick-up trucks and motosai growling past smoking foodcarts to the familiar counterpoint of amplified monk’s chants and oafish dog barks. On one corner of the junction, a stilted shack lists over a dark sump of water. Splintered planking rigged with rotting rags, roof sagging in jagged scales of rust; not even the brush of the Tamarind tree blesses the scene with the picturesque. From the darkly cluttered cabin (an ossuary of shivered timbers) a raw face twists in a yawn’s edentate wound. The squalor of fatalism; healthy acceptance of impermanence perverted into sick submission to decay, the gloating piracy of despair. This scuppered hulk is, in its way, as enduring a flagship to selfishness as a Trump Tower, or a Ceausescu Palace. My father’s house has many mansions; my father, my self, chez moi.

On the opposite corner, caryatic schoolgirls stand apart under the awning of the 7-Eleven, stupefied by their mobile phones, down-cast eyes shaded by dark blades of hair, the intimate gossip and happy laughter silenced by the mineral static of telecommunication. Behind them, the shining crystal of branded goods dazzles twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, seven days a week, three-hundred and sixty five days a year. More or less.

That solar year is as inexact as the decaying orbits of the bulging, unbalanced planets around it. The leap year, and the time zones politically tessellated around the globe, are fudges, lash-ups, papering over the cracks - loose threads in the emperor’s new clothes it takes a Zeno or a Dali to pull at. Dali was a peerless genius for painting what he knew, rather than what he saw. His soft watches aren’t flights of fancy, weirdness for its own sake, but clinically accurate representations of his direct experience of the nature of time. Far from being a Surrealist (a lazy brand for the cultural consumer), he is a piercingly unforgiving realist. And far from being the twisted visions of a madman, his paintings represent our common ground of dreams. There is no space in a Dali landscape, foreground and background occupy the same focal plane; the architecture of dream is in continuous upheaval, collapsing in upon itself, merging and rebuilding in a world where we are all over the place, all at once, and trying our damnedest to make sense of it using what we remember of our waking consciousness - a pinhole camera, a static point of view. A self. The datum point of the self is untethered in dream, and try as it might to pin the butterfly, to freeze-frame the spinning reels, nonsense (or what appears so on waking) prevails.

Dali’s universe is not his private property, not his peculiar mania, it is our own back yard; a world where an hour can fly by when we’re having fun, where the end of a working day seems a lifetime away, and as we get older the years flutter past with bewildering rapidity. We put all this down to something imprecise in ourselves, a subjective misreading of time’s chiseled tablet, never fully crediting ourselves with experiencing the phenomenon we call time as it is - elastic, rubbery, inconstant. The universe wobbles, shifts, blurs at the edges, changes. Nature is perfectly imperfect, and will never come up to the standards we set for it. The universe, oblivious of our hand at the controls, does not time itself, nor measure itself from end to end, nor divide itself into named parts and number them. The straight line, the perfect circle, the exact second; these are fantasies that exist only in the mind of man - pornography for mathematicians, spells for magicians.

Any voyage, from one room to another, from the house to the park, from one galaxy to another, from one word to the next, is a voyage through time as well as space - we leave the past behind us as we move into the future. The past - where we bought our ticket - is either a storehouse which holds the events and things that used to exist, or the contents that are in storage. Container or content or both, the past’s sole defining characteristic is to be no more, to no longer exist. The past, then, is definitively a non-existent place holding non-existent content. The past, unable by our own decree to exist in either the future or the present, must exist in the past, a place which does not exist, by its own definition. We have absolutely no problem with this lunacy of convenience, because we believe we have proof of the past’s existence - memory. And we are surrounded by things created in the past. Everything we see, we believe, is evidence of the past, right there in front of us. We inhabit a world that is apparently nothing but the remains of past actions; a museum, or mausoleum. We are entombed by the brickwork of history, shrouded by the remnants of the past, and our view the present moment is obscured by the oppressive architecture of memory.

But pointing to Stonehenge is no proof of anything except the presence of some rocks in a field. Pointing to last year on the calendar (the scratch on the cell wall) is prima facie proof of nothing except the existence of a piece of paper with some numbers on it. Pointing to a ticking clock is no argument for anything other than it always being now o’clock, in spite of our continuously changing its name; one o’clock, six-thirty, ten to four, 15:37, whatever - we’re never happy with the label we pin on now, changing our minds all the time. We’re restless nomads in a Sahara spilling from an infinite number of hourglasses. Producing a photograph taken ten years ago only confirms the actuality of (the act of perceiving) the photograph. The event pictured in the photograph which the calendar insists took place ten years ago has no existence outside the function that, for want of a better name (and the lack is total), we call memory. Pointing to anything is just the act of pointing, and telling the time is telling a tale, a story, a lie. The act of remembering is physical, immediate, associated with chemical and electrical changes in the brain occurring in the present moment. To define it as reflecting past events (that is, events lying behind us on the track of time) is a sudden leap we make out of habit, in the dark, without thinking of where we land. The most we can say about what we call memory with any certainty is that we are thinking of events we are not directly experiencing.

We believe the future is a mirror image of the past; a similar kind of warehouse holding the events that will exist, that do not exist yet, or the events themselves. Again our definition forbids the future from existing in the present. It is, like the past, a non-existent place holding non-existent stuff. We imagine the future is the realisation of the present’s potential, the outcome of changes occurring now. We believe what we do now affects the future. In spite of our admittance that we can never inhabit or even see the future, we believe we may shape it. Ignoring the grammatical deceit in the phrase the future is, realisation of potential can only occur in the present moment. Potential can only exist, by definition, in the present moment. The key is in the use of the future tense - the will be - a grammatical domain, a part of speech. The future will be, the past was - we are casting the net of time, speaking spells, all the time.

What does the future hold for us? is a question we sometimes ask of ourselves, or pay others with divinatory skills to answer. Because we believe the future is out there, as real as right now, waiting for us. The future has to be patient, however, because it never reaches us. Tomorrow never delivers, never makes good on its promises. We’re always stuck with today. Disturbingly, if the future holds (or consists of) events yet to happen, those events will already have been in existence by the time they occur; that is, they are existing now, waiting for us up the line. So, logically, the future exists now, in the present - it waits for us, in the present tense. So, by the time future events happen (when we reach them on the track) they will have already existed in the past. Evidently the future must also exist in the past, as well as the present. And the future. This is not trickery for its own sake, playing with words or twisting their meaning. It is in accordance with our linear model, keeping strictly to the straight and narrow, obeying the rule.

We habitually ascribe memories to the past, but there is an equally valid argument for memory being a vision into the future, and the past being invisible to us. It would make no effective difference to us if time, as we understand it, travels backwards. The countdown to the blast-off, to the New Year, to the beginning of the world. If the date for a picnic is moved forwards, it can mean either forwards in time (later) or towards us (sooner). We have no idea which way we’re headed on this trip. The Aymara people of South America speak a grammar (cast a spell) that puts the past ahead of them, and the future behind, and their society functions perfectly well without them having to walk in reverse. Back to the future.

Lost in memory, the figure in the landscape, standing at the crossroads. Curly waits for me at the 7-Eleven. Any apparent cultural dichotomy (Old Siam in the ruin of the shack, western capitalism in the shrill blare of the seh-wen) is an opposition which exists only from the point of view of my triangulation; the figure in the landscape. And the figure in the landscape borders an internal landscape, a field of fire, the riven refuge of the Self. Invisible to me because I peer out from it, believing the scene descried through the shattering ordnance (of my opinions, my damned understanding) to be the true picture. The self is always the foreigner abroad, the tourist in no-man’s land, turning the landscape into a self-portrait. The compass rose makes no sense unless I am at its centre - I am always at home, never away. Yet being self-centered is not a calm state; the self is not still, but adrift. Our restless dissatisfaction with our lot derives from being caught in the no-man’s land between the past and the future, a land whose borders we fail to understand; here and now, the very definition of one’s self, is bound by horizons we can only guess at. Past, present, and future are narrative - story-telling - and as any five year-old will tell you, telling stories is telling lies. Our lives, our lies, a rough furrow we plough from womb to room to tomb; it is (literally) only human to extend the line to an afterlife. It is impossible for the self to imagine a state of non-being, a landscape that is not a portrait, a world without the one it was made for, the observed without the observer, the law without the lawyer. This is the self’s hold, iron-clad; non-existence is beyond  imagination, but heaven and hell are products of it.

I ferry Curly - to his suppressed shame - under my arm through the wavering traffic on the Temple Road, because walking to heel is not natural for him and he is easily distracted. It’s an excuse to give him a covert cuddle, something I keep to a precious minimum, wary of both coddling and lice. Safely berthed on the far bank, I set him down, and he forages ahead along the narrow soi that leads to the park, checking back for me occasionally, showing big eye-whites. He circumnavigates a grazing buffalo, the great head swaying as it wrenches the grass into the pink-grey churn of its maw. Curly leads me under the rusted calligraphy of the arch into the park, our pocket Eden. Butterflies blink over waxy leaves. I lift my fingers to violet petals, a breeze moves my shirt against my back - everything here seems vivid, and real, and immediate. But the papery tickle of the petals is the page you hold, the chat of the birds the tap and clack of my keyboard, and the polychrome incandescence of the flowers is the black insect tattoo of letters across a white field. The conjured paradise is reflected between us in the mirror of these words; our heads are occupied with where we’re not, in the only here and now we know. But my walk in the park is no walk in the park - my thoughts are a caul of gritty smog, intermittently sparking with magma-light, leaving a diminishing smoky trail as I walk. I am burning with the terrors of the gone and the dread of that which is to come, legions of the past and the future fighting for possession of the no-man’s land of now. The volcanic man is in the park, but not of it; Eden, our common ground, is a killing field. The battle is without foundation, armies of mute shadow, antic spells from the grimoire cast by the self. And in this moment, this here and now as I type, those terrors - life-threatening, ruinous - are gone, nightmares I wonder I survived.

I pace the path beneath me, reeling in the bridge across the lake along the ticked circumference of time, pulling the future into the past by degrees, between paces. Now is a bridge from the past to the future. From my point of view on the bridge, time approaches from the future and moves through me into the past. So, logically, time must leave the future behind as it travels over the bridge, through me to its destination in the past. The past, from time’s point of view, is further up the track than the present, in the future; time itself is moving backwards, through me. The future is in the past, the past in the future.

Having engineered this gleaming, perfectly straight, perfectly insane track of time, and constructed the madhouses at either end - the fabulous Shangri-La of the past behind us, and the misty Xanadu of the future ahead - we need to reassure ourselves we we’re moving along the track, or our sublime architecture is in vain. To demonstrate this movement to our human selves (the universe is absolutely indifferent to us), we engineer incredible machines to show our invented units of time passing (as we like to call it) - magically appearing out of the future and - simultaneously! - disappearing into the past. As these “clocks” fail to tell us what time it is in the past and the future, bafflingly only showing us what time it is now and never even coming to a decision on that, we compensate for their inadequacy by cobbling together something called the calendar, a clock with no moving parts, which it pleases us to think shows the tick-tock time track stretching away endlessly (or as near as makes no difference) in either direction on a line we decorate with fanciful station stops called units of time. Lo and behold - man becomes the only creature in the universe to worry about next Tuesday.

There seems nothing more willfully fatuous than to claim that the future and the past do not exist. But it is no claim; the proof of their non-existence is not only in the definitions of the terms themselves, but also the ideas behind the terms - in inescapable, irrefutable, grammatical logic:

- The past and the future, by definition, do not and cannot exist now

- But: “now” is redundant, as the verb “exist” is in the present tense

- So: the past and the future, by definition, do not and cannot exist

Neither the past nor the future can be shown, seen, examined, held, sensed, measured, located, or even indicated. A claim or an argument has to be made on their behalf, as there is not a shred of objective evidence to support their existence. The statement the future and the past do not exist needs no such theoretical justification; it is as objectively and grammatically true as language allows. The only way the future and the past can exist, by definition, is in the future and the past tenses, abstract states which do not and cannot exist as anything other than parts of speech, spells from the grimoire of grammar. Grammar and grimoire are the same black book of spells, read in different accents - language is incantation, an act of magic.

That which is spelled is a spell.

The future is not. The past is not. This is as far as we need go - to complicate matters by insisting the future will exist, and the past used to exist, is to conjure up fairyland with grammar. The past and the future are acts requiring our complicity, our belief. We believe in the past and the future exactly as we believe in god, ourselves, and the dollar bill - wild leaps into the supernatural made by the most rational of us. Belief is a dangerous thing. Blue is a colour, blue is a good colour, blue is the best colour, blue is the only colour, blue is my colour, I am blue. The weed-like creep of opinion throttles everything, and belief is its swooning flower - a beautiful bloom, opiate in its seductive strength. Convictions create the convicted; convicts of their own penal institutions - the fairytale palace of make-believe. Belief is offering yourself up (the gesture of prayer - cuff me up, officer!), devolving responsibility; a great convenience, getting someone else to put out your trash. It answers a uniquely human need - for forgiveness and reward, for answers, and it’s comfortingly communal - penitentiaries (for the penitent) are nothing if not communities. Answering is what religion does best, but questioning is what we do worst. Most lifers spend/spell their sentences reinforcing the bars, rather than walking out through the open door. Belief relieves the faithful of the burden of freedom. Belief conjures, belief creates, belief brings about. A personal saviour or a wrathful lord, the punishment of hell or the reward of paradise, a cabal of shape-shifting lizards controlling the world’s economy, Lady Luck, the clock, the alphabet, Wall Street - without our belief, these wonders would have no existence whatsoever. Belief itself is the object, not the believed-in - it has the same hold over us as the object of belief would, were it actual. Belief stands on the vacant pedestal supposedly occupied by the believed-in, taking on its form and substance - an eidolon, a combination of idol and ghost. 

In the shimmering park, the empyrian gleam of Buddha’s statue through the leaves, raised on a dais, draped with cloth of gold, buoyed by flowers. Representations of him are telling in their human ordinariness, their gentleness; he sits, lies, stands, walks. He is never depicted in triumph or despair, ecstasy or suffering. As I approach, the boughs iris into a glade around him, but the stain of a dream from last night’s grinding sleep obscures the golden cloth across his shoulder: I dreamed a scaly chain-mail scab stiffened my arm, my skin painful pink beneath the fraying edge I hesitated to pick away. As the image comes to me, I understand the symbolism, one not without hope. The grey cocoon of my troubles is falling away, the wound heals, but slowly, in its own time, the scar still weeps. The volcanic man in the scented arbour; I am metaphor, and I stand on common ground. Over-dramatic? There is nothing more dramatic than everyday life, nothing more extraordinary than simple presence, and nothing duller than our self-satisfied, heavy-lidded understanding of it.

The present moment becomes problematic when we try to accommodate it between the legendary realms of past and future. This three-act play we’re all performing has no time for the second act, the sandwich is all bread. The truism “yesterday is gone, and tomorrow never comes”, widely accepted with a wistfully philosophical nod, gets crazier the more one thinks about it. Yesterday and tomorrow are here our chosen intervals of time, for which we could substitute any other, even those so small as to seem immediate. “The last second is gone, the next never comes.” We’d have to say that a little more quickly, of course, and our nod may be more whiplash than wistful, but that doesn’t compromise the meaning of the idea. These properties called the past (the gone) and the future (the never comes) encroach ever closer to the present instant without them ever becoming now, and form the legal grounds for the question how long is now? Where’s the filling in my sandwich?

And the sardonic hand raised at the back of the class belongs to Zeno.

Zeno is the little boy who points at the Emperor’s nakedness, the itch that can’t be scratched, the fart at the funeral, the grit in the gears. He saw that it doesn’t matter how short the interval is, it can never pass, because any interval is a period of waiting, by definition. Thus: no waiting, no interval - no interval, nothing to pass. The hare will never overtake the tortoise. You can’t get there from here. Zeno is playing by the rules, and speaks the uncomfortable truth which makes mathematicians writhe in denial, dismissing him with a patronising chuckle, or labouring to refute him with the inadequate alphabet at their disposal. The paradox is not in his words, but in the laws he conforms to, the tools he employs.

The smallest measured time interval (it says here) is 20 attoseconds. Aside from the observation that we seem to have invented a unit we can only measure in bundles of twenty - a dubious achievement - we can imagine our attosecond forming the basis of the phrase “the last attosecond is gone, the next never comes.” The attosecond is a geological eon compared to the djini, which is one gazillionth of an attosecond. The djini, named after one of the dogs under the table as this is being written (in this, another moment), is now the smallest defined unit of time, and it has entirely as much legitimacy and accuracy as the second or the week, which is to say, none whatsoever. Unfortunately, being a unit of time, we still have to wait for it to pass, and so subdivisions of the djini may well prove necessary to measure how long we have left until it’s over. The djini, as small as it is, also doesn’t encroach upon the present instant any more than the attosecond, or the week. Any distance up the track is, by definition, not where we’re at - the future cannot be the present. Playing by the rules (and our straight track of time is nothing if not a rule), the present instant must logically have no duration at all - by the terms of linear time which predicate the existence of the present between the past and the future, the present instant (hello!) cannot exist as a measurable interval. A time with no duration is no time at all, so the future is required to become the past instantly at a point of no dimension - the present. Under the laws we draft and impose and live by, now must be squeezed to non-existence under the pressure of the units of time ahead and behind it.

So; non-existent units of time are passing from a non-existent future through a non-existent present to a non-existent past. Not only is there no meat in the sandwich, there is no bread either.

There’s clearly something berserk about this, something that goes absolutely against direct and natural experience; we know that now exists - we experience it  all the time. I’m writing in it, you’re reading in it. We don’t have an option to now. But we leave the question how long is now to the scientists and mathematicians to resolve on our behalf, in terms and symbols reassuringly beyond vulgar understanding. We take their word for it, even if we can’t understand it. Because we don’t know how - or even why - to begin to think about it.

This unquestioned journey along the time line has another disquieting feature. There is no view up the track to where we’re supposed to be going, to the future. We’re effectively sitting with our back to the locomotive, where all we can see is where we’ve been. So the past lies ahead - recent landmarks are close and clear, but get smaller and harder to see in the perspective of distance, with the logic of landscape. Events and objects appear without warning on either side, and we take somebody’s word for it that they don’t magically appear out of nothing and nowhere, but come from the future, which is behind us. Full of horrors and marvels ready and waiting, back up the track. Yet as I walk through the park, it is the future I can see, coming towards me, and the past (where I have been) that is hidden behind me.

The linear model of time is clearly absurd; a half-baked, lazy, shoddy conceit that has us all walking backwards. When the linear model of time - and its clickety-clack measurement - is so easily shown to be wildly inadequate and self-contradictory and even impossible by its own terms and definitions, why do we continue to set our watches by it? Because it is integral to language, inseparable from it, hard-wired into our culture and our thinking. And because it works. It enables us to organise our lives. Although measured time is not a natural thing, but an idea, conjured up out of nothing, a truly magical act, it provides a framework for our artificial, magical world; it is a utility. Time is a commodity that we spend, save, eke out, divide, lose, win, take, give, sell, buy, lend, borrow, and waste. The fiscal vocabulary is key: time is money is a truer maxim than we know.

Another reason for not wasting our precious time with airy philosophical questions about the nature of the time we’d be wasting is, what’s the alternative? What other model of time is there? We may have invented it, but until something better comes along, we’ll stick with what we know, because it allows us to clock in to work, to get to church on time. But we are mistaking the model for the reality, a fiction for the truth. Modeling time in any form (certainly a measurable one) is a convenient misunderstanding, an easy avoidance of the work involved in seeing time for what it is. The idea that time measures duration - that, in effect, time measures itself - is an old ingrained ignorance, nearly impossible to shake off.

The man whose golden statue I have left behind said, forget the past, don’t worry about the future, concern yourself with now. In a world where religions are obsessed with penitence for the past, preparation for the future, and a complete disinterest in the present, this is a very strange thing to say. But he realised that the nature of time (and its physical form, place) is bound up with the nature of self. Self is the slippery snake that does not want to be held, because once caught, it disappears. You can’t get there from here.

The universal ticking clock of time is not a natural law - we imagined up the whole damn farrago, the fairy story of once upon a time, and then, they lived happily ever after - the Aristotlean three acts of narrative drama. And as any five-year old will tell you, that which is made up is a lie, a big story. In fact, there is no argument for the existence of either the past or the future that stands up to the slightest examination. We cannot truthfully say the past or the future are anything at all, because we have, by necessity, established shadowy estates (tenses) for them; the was and the will be - states that only exist in language, the grammar grimoire, the big black book of spells, the story-book. The word tense comes from to stretch. Past and future tenses stretch the present moment into a line, or a track. Time is tension. Parts of speech - our own magic - create, invoke, and define the past and the future, which are found nowhere in the natural world. These cosmically grand Absolute Truths are nothing more nor less than parts of speech. We cannot claim that these tenses were born of a need to accommodate and express a natural law, because the past and the future are found nowhere in nature; they exist only as ideas in the mind of man. Spell the past, spell the future. The word spell is in itself a an open secret; the phrase for a spell means for a while, for a time (“I did a spell in San Quentin”). The three meanings of spell - magical act, period of time, and orthography - are, in spite of their apparent disparity, identical. This is no hidden grimoire, no secret teaching. It’s spelled out for us, staring us in the face, but we don’t see it. Eyes wide shut. Language is vague and allusive; words can only be defined by other words, and metaphor is all there is. The magic we were taught in the sunny schoolroom, or on our mother’s knee: ABC and abacus are nothing more than abracadabra.

That which is spelled is a spell.

In the beginning was the word. Spell the world. The world is a spell. And every spell is a sleeping spell - this is what magic spells do - they put us to sleep. Language - any language - is invocation, a magical act. Grammar is grimoire, the black book of spells by which we conjure up our world and our gods. To speak is to speak in tongues, with a forked tongue - mutter and stutter, mumble and baby babble. To speak is to spell, to cast a spell on ourselves. Once cast (in the beginning was the world, and the word was mama), the spell of language never stops working. Speaking is thinking aloud. Our thoughts, inseparable from language, continue even when we don’t voice them, even when unfocussed, offering a banal and unending commentary on the world we think we know. Click-clack chit-chat, murmur, mutter and mumble, continuing, counting sheep, a scattered and dreaming flock, counting down the days, hevera devera dick.

There is no official, standard way of spelling Thai words in English. My home town That Phanom (the h’s are silent - that’s why they’re there) is a cluttered grid of concrete and teak, knit together with tangled hanks of cable and knuckled articulations of blue plastic water pipe. A dusty frontier town of pitted and cracked streets scratched into the banks of the shining Mekong. A town where only the temple - a startling effulgence, extraordinary even by Thai standards - is built for history and posterity. The houses and shops which tetris about it appear and disappear with disorienting rapidity. There is no cultural legacy in this sketchy palimpsest; the rare tourist may find some photogenic charm in the remaining timber buildings, or a straggle of monks, but any idea of heritage is entirely lost on the teak-dark man bent over his nets in the balcony’s ragged shade; nostalgia is as familiar to him as Champagne. 

To walk the streets of a great city is to be crushed by the mason’s art, to be rendered insignificant by the brutal trickery of architecture, the tyranny of history, which makes us believe both in its lofty permanence and the greater importance of its institutions - cities are vanity projects with pretensions to the super-human; mausolea where we commute in the funeral procession of the Sublime Architect (the Self). Babylon, under whatever name we care to bestow - Paris or London, or New York - is nothing but a grey cloud of cemetery dust, with no more mass than a theatre flat. Here in lowly, scruffy little That Phanom, the scale is immediately human, with no reference to the past or the future, and no pretence to monumentalism. It achieves a kind of invisibility for those who live here; passing western travellers may lament the loss of Old Siam signaled by the stainless steel balcony railings, the “Greco-Roman” concrete columns and other coarse translations of western vernacular, recoiling at the lurid branding that shouts from the decaying facades of the main street, but Khon Thai sees nothing at all. The town is in a continuous upheaval of dereliction and construction, and only the street pattern - a flatland grid, parallel to the river - remains constant. Small businesses bloom and wither daily. Plots are cleared and impressive gated walls erected, only for the project to stall (through lack of funds, always) until some other hopeful repeats the process. Thais see no special value or charm in old buildings, preferring to build anew rather than live with ghosts. Empty houses gape like battlefield skulls, softened by wild bough and bloom, waiting for the sledgehammer. 

There is nothing more important than ordinary life, no greater cultural context, no historical imperative, simply the relaxed immediacy of presence. Maybe there is a significance in the absence of past and future tenses in the Thai language: I go market, I go market already, I go market tomorrow. There is only the going. On these streets, the question “what time is it?” is as irrelevant as “where are you?” It’s now, and I’m here, same as always. How could it be otherwise? It is generally thought by Westerners that this is Buddhism in practice, a practical philosophy of life based on the study of his teachings, but the man on the soi is as versed in that as the average westerner is in the Bible. There is no thought behind living in the present tense, and no thinking about it.

The Thai vagueness about measured time (charming, infuriating) is of a whole with their utter disinterest in geography, personal and political. Not only is Khon Thai unable to locate his own country on a globe, he is genially baffled by maps, national and local, and doesn’t know a compass point from a buffalo horn. But it has to be more than coincidence that the Thai herenow corresponds (if at a distance) to Buddha’s insight into time and place. If the Buddha is considered as an event, an explosion, crowned by the radiant blooming of the lotus (where the atomic bomb belches the mushroom cloud), it’s pleasant to imagine a benign fall-out affecting those around him, ripples weakening as they get further from the epicentre; that the vital pulse in these little streets might be the faint echo of that distant detonation under the Bodhi tree. More likely, the Thai herenow is the same way of life as that of his era, and before that, a context unquestioned, unchallenged, and as invisible as the architecture.

Buddha’s present moment was free of the manic, buzzing distractions that swarm around us today. Crucially, there was no pressure of measured time: the ticking clock (a modern conjuration) didn’t exist. The idea of tiny intervals of time jerking by hadn’t occurred to anybody - why the hell should it? Consequently, the present moment of his age was a period for unhurried reflection. Those fortunate enough to have heard him speak have a massive advantage over us; we tiresomely have to find or make time for this. In his time, the moment was to be savoured, examined, prolonged, mined at great depth. People listened to him in a way unimaginable today, his audience learning by long and patient repetition as they listened, because there was no written form of the language. There were no trilling cellphones, no watches to check, nowhere else to be than right there and then, listening to the man speak. The two most potent spells that enthrall us today were yet to be cast: his world was free of the entomic armies of tick-tock time and the alphabet - in this sense, uncounted, unspelled, natural. A fluid, elastic world, where his repeated insistence on attention to the present moment was both easier to understand and to experience. A world where his words had a power in themselves, heard for the first time as new as now, unwritten, alive, revelatory. That his audience was very occupied with the past and the future is apparent from his frequent injunctions to forget them. Being attentive to the moment is part and parcel of ist meditation techniques to bring about a temporary peace of mind, but this was old stuff even in his age, not what he was about, and not what his audience was interested in. Temporary peace of mind, as fine and beneficial as it is, wasn’t news to his listeners. His what happened had revealed to him the true nature of time, and it is to this he returns again and again. He’s not talking about our tick-tock non-stop hickory-dickory-dock round-the-clock poppycock (which didn’t then exist) - he’s talking about change, how change is bound up with - identical to - the true nature of the self. This struck his audiences as headline news - unimaginable today, with a “reality TV” star’s saucy love romp shouting from the front page, and every shock and scandal dead soon as read. His audience - quiet, attentive, perceptive, patient - would have seen our attention-deficit click-through internet mentality as a terrifying sickness.

Curly (remember? remember remembering?) is already over the bridge at the ornamental lake, where the hollow cartoon heads of moored pedaloes goggle in astonished delight. I cross that bridge when I come to it, the park metamorphosing smoothly (no framerate flicker, no click or stutter) into a verdant soi where the air is misted with rainbows. A hosepipe sprays the pulpy walls of foliage, blazoned with super-saturated blooms. Curly dapples the obsidian water in the buckled roadway. From a fronded opening, an old man bent into a question mark turns his head to watch me pass, and I am no answer. Bare-ribbed, he wears a colourless longhi, and his polished skull pivots on the hook of his spine as he descries the farang through the amber oracle of his eye. His face is an antique parchment lantern, illuminated by a corona of sunlight sifting through the latticed canopy of leaves. His hand, an exhumed root waxed to a resinous shine, sluices a dipper of water over the mica stubble on his scalp. The dipper is translucent plastic, greener than an uncurling leaf, brighter than cathedral glass.

The walls of That Phanom are no mausoleum for the past; these houses are not reliquaries; they are falling apart/being built right now, temporary shelters for temporary lives occupied by the present moment. This is the Entropics, where habitat correctly reflects the impermanence of inhabitant. Unlike the streets of Paris or Oxford or Los Angeles or Geneva, they evoke no memories for me. Here, all I remember of my Western history is a series of strangely mute tableaux, dimly lit shadow puppets, faces and places in the drama of dream. I was born into colour when I came out here, into immediacy. My memories are less of the past than identical to it, and memories are only thinking about. Images of old homes, old acquaintances rise and fall, inseparable from their associated feelings, that internal meteorology. Memory is always and only thinking about, in the present moment, and requires an object for it to happen. Without the thought-about, no thinking, no memory, no past. The thought-about coalesces wordlessly, then gets caught in the net of language. My divorce suddenly occupies me like an invading army. This is the volcano, the black smoke and red heat of my furnace head. I’m conjuring up phantasms all the time; people, places, and events quite as potent as their “live” inspiration, and the emotional response I have to them is as vivid as if they were happening in front of me. Regretting the past and dreading the future are the same process with the same effect - I conjure up images in my mind through recollection and anticipation, and the physical effect they have on me is immediate and distressing; I am a drum beaten by my own stick.

Self-consciousness, our inherited commonweal, is an unfocussed cloud of these thought-objects, pleasant or poison, squatters in the only accommodation they have, the boarding-house of here-and-now. Thinking about doesn’t distinguish between the tenses; the dusty window onto yesterday, the veiled door to tomorrow, they are exactly the same piece of mental architecture, and open onto nothing but the lodger of the boarding-house, gazing blankly into a mirror. The glass is smeared and distorted by his constant, grinding thinking about. Phantoms flit across the surface, self-projected, self-conjured, distracting him from the moment. His constant casting of the past and future spells (thinking about - nothing more nor less magical than that) makes him not only impatient with the present, but blind to it. 

I am at the river now, the Mekong, staring across it and seeing only the snake-oil horror-show in my mind, the procession of tawdry, leering ghosts I have led half the world around. The river frontage here is a cracked promenade, backed by a haphazard row of restaurants, houses, workshops, overgrown lots splinted by bamboo, and sheets of corrugated iron like immense cocoa-dusted mille-feuilles. I stand at the rail overlooking the steep slope to the water, the staves of vegetables arpeggio from the cinnabar soil. I close my eyes, breathing the mineral scent of the river, coloured with coriander. Birdsong, the furry ripple of two-stroke exhaust, a kid’s comic-book laugh, and the Bread Lady’s cry. She rings her bell, I salivate. In the corner of my eye, the white flash of the cloth over her basket as she turns off into a soi, the mudguard clamours as she collides with a pothole. While I’m weighing the possibility of her having fallen off against the effort it would take me to reach the corner, the dogs start barking; the Rubbish Man has arrived, the dog-eater. Dogs can smell their blood in his, and they circle him warily as he pushes his spindly cart from rubbish bin to rubbish bin. He looks like he was made from discarded human elements himself; a mis-aligned, jury-rigged botch-up of a man, his thin staring head mouthing a furious internal conversation. He rummages in the bin, pulls out a plastic bottle and a beer can, puts them in his cart and moves on, followed by a bristling snarl of dogs. 

I turn back to the river. There’s no bread, we’ll have to eat toast, as someone once said. And suddenly I’m at the edge of the world. Empyrean, blue as silk, the sun skims the haze over the malachite scrim of Laos on the far shore. The water spangles in swathes of cobalt and copper, ruffled by catspaws, north to the frayed indigo wave of the mountains, south to an uncertain horizon, broad as the sea. Thin stone-coloured boats nib the glister, longtail screws moiling against the current, inking a blurring line.

Another moment, another now; I’m at low ebb on the glittering mud beach at Savannakhet, downriver. The water is green-gold, the desiccating colonial town pummeled into silence by the mid-day heat. All this illumination enters my eye without my effort or direction - seeing happens. I become aware of the tension and stiffness in my face, a graven death-mask, scar tissue fused to my head. This what I am become; a wound. My sorry story engraved in my face, easily read. I squat at the water’s edge, the hot silt squeezing between my toes, the breath going out of me, coming into me, as much the river’s as mine, the rictus mask of my face softening. The sere intaglio of my brow blurs, my eyes no longer clench in the ligature which bound them for longer than I care to think. Nothing in my manic drama has been solved or resolved, but in the golden mud I find a broken bracelet which I tie around my wrist, and know that in that now I have all the time in the world, and I am safe in the refuge of the moment. Later, on the balcony of a guest-house, I write holy, holy Savannakhet on a new page in my scrawled suicide’s notebook.

On this blank page, on this bank of the measureless Mekong where I stand with you, I attend to this ritual inaction, becoming attentive to the state of tension which is so habitual as to be unnoticed, or accepted as the way things are. The face is a complex rigging of muscles that tenses with mental activity (the brain-bone’s connected to the jawbone ...), but invisible without a mirror. We peer through a tangled net. By becoming conscious of the muscles around the eyes, the jaw, the tongue, I can encourage an untying, let it float. Easy to do, difficult to remember to do. The light floods into my spine-top bony belvedere (or stilted cabin), the sky and the sand reflected and refracted in the river’s scaled skin. I catch myself thinking the word beautiful, a fish in the net. I let it go. My face, the river’s serpentine surface, these are identical masks; Narcissus Through The Looking Glass. 

This moment is all we ever get. There is no future, there is no past, there is only the present. The logical inference is awful, unacceptable, unthinkable and impossible: everything must happen in the only time and place it can -  herenow. Everything has to happen now, because there is no future or past to accommodate it. Events that “happened in the past” and events that “will happen in the future” can only happen right now - it’s the only opportunity they get. This is not an impossibility: the instant, presence, is a bigger field than the one we think we measure, and that which limits our experience of it is the point of view that is self-consciousness. I does not experience a chaotic simultaneous collision of events. We have no problem with allowing every location a simultaneous existence, every point of view its own point - there’s enough space for it all. We create the capacity for the co-existence of (an infinite number of) different locations by conjuring up a spell called dimension, of which we can imagine three. This allows this to be here and that to be there. We do not measure time in similar terms to our spatial length, area, and volume. Time is only available in length, and to accommodate all possible events we create the dimensions of past, present, and future. But all these distinctions, including the apparently discrete time and space, are expressions of self-consciousness. I does not occupy a space or a moment in time - I is here and now; the birth of self-consciousness imposes the distinctions on an indifferent universe.

This riverside town as I pace through it is ordered by succession, a procession created by my own pinhole-point of view. I can not only predict where I’ll be when I turn the corner, but the mark on the calendar shows when I’m due at the immigration office to renew my visa. Linear time, where one thing appears to happen after another, establishes my datum point, defines my self. The order I see, the succession of events, is created by the projection of the self; the stage is created by the star. Self-consciousness is the (truly magical) act of separating and ordering universal and simultaneous change into manageable sets and measures, making time and space for ourselves. 

Everything that happens has to happen in the present - this is unthinkable, literally not to be encompassed by thought, no matter how many academic qualifications we possess. This does not prevent us from thinking about it, and inevitably arriving at an authoritative opinion; yes/no/maybe/so what?/file/forget, all of which have equal value and usefulness - none at all. What we think about it has no effect on anything but the electrical impulses in our brains. An analogy; this work, this writing/reading that’s happening for us both right now. We are each of us at the same point on this line, yet all the words exist together, simultaneously. It is our habitual ordering (left/right, top/bottom, front/back) that allows us to take it in, to make sense of it, to digest it. We are here. Right here, right now. We cannot read (think) the entire book at once, and yet that is how it exists, all of it all at once, occupying the same space and time. We are still here. Yet while reading, word by word, there is no sense of either loss nor newness as our focus moves along the line. Hello! No sense of the future arriving and being alchemised into the past through the crucible of the present. We are always here. Reading is happening, words are changing. This is an easy thing to understand; the truth of it is evident and obvious. Yet our understanding - highly valued, much respected - accomplishes nothing, changes nothing. Understanding that this book exists all at once does not allow us to read it all at once. We are pacing together, you and I, along its measured track. You are reading, I am typing, word by word. This is our blinkered point of view, our pinhole camera on the world. The selfish point of view allows us to live with constant change by imposing an order upon it, but the order we think we see is an illusion - a beautiful spell, self-cast, a net so perfectly fine as to let nothing slip, so exquisite as to be invisible.

We’re accustomed to thinking of change as happening in time. We say changes happen in or through time. We believe they take time. But this addition of time to the primal equation being = change is our own baroque filigree: time x being = change contains the redundant term time. We are blind to the nature of change because we conflate and confuse it - logically yet mistakenly - with time; we can only see change through our special time-goggles. These thick-lensed brass-bound steam-punk spectacles are just part of the formidable arsenal of scientific equipment we use to understand the world. “Understanding” - even that of the boffin in the laboratory, the guru on the mountaintop - is the beguiling glaze we put on our ignorance. Understanding is the toe-tag on the corpse in the morgue. File and forget.

The familiar lament of the funeral song crackles from a loudspeaker above a metal-framed canopy blocking the street ahead. A reedy, plangent melody for piano, fiddle and flute, there seems to be only one recording of it - I never hear the slightest variation. It carries an overwhelming and gentle melancholy, a sense of memory made more intense by the quavery antiquity of the recording - the aural equivalent of the faded photographs which hang from the dusty teak wall. Rows of pink plastic chairs wait in the shade of the canopy while women set the tables for the feast. Inside the emptied shop (a tinroof palace of patched timbers the white and gold coffin rests on a flowered dais, containing the husk of the woman who once ruled the premises. There won’t be much grieving on display, no tears. Khon Thai sees death as he sees life; in itself cause neither for celebration or remorse. The funerals that weekly block one street or another are a continuing reminder of our lodger status; why mortgage the future when we bake our bones in the temple oven? Dust is our bequeathal, and our borrowed names return to the library. We, the living, are our own monuments.

The apparent left-overs from times past - the stale cake in the icing-sugar coffin, the photographs relinquishing their pigment, the tidal echo of the funeral song - are not of the past at all. These obsequies are happening right now, the memories of the bereaved as immediate as the curl of incense, the cluck and clatter from the kitchen, the talk of the arriving guests at her last supper. There is nothing here of the past, nothing of the future. I pass by, and find myself at the river, sitting on the broken steps that lead down into the water. 

The river as a metaphor is so familiar as to be a cliché. The river is like the body. It’s recognisably the same mass, yet is changing, flowing, being replaced, all the time. It’s like the self. The disturbances in the skin (flickering expressions) distract our attention - we see only the surface, the facets, the face. It’s like time. Comes from somewhere, passes us by, goes somewhere else. The river is all these things, and carries whatever symbolic meaning we care to push into the current. It is a pleasant and calming thing to contemplate, with a seemingly direct relationship to our own lives. But this symbolism extends into the realm we consider as objective, scientific truth.

The Mekong - let’s give it a name, river is so impersonal - at this point is 2.5 kilometres wide, and (at this time of the year) eight metres deep at most. The volume of water passing is about eighty metric tonnes an hour, at a mean flow rate of just under a metre per second. These figures are necessarily vague, because I just made them up, but any quantities will do, because we make them all up anyway, just as we create the terms Mekong and river. Measuring the river is an attempt to understand it through objective values, but is actually creating metaphors in exactly the same way we might say the river is like hammered nickel, or like our lives, or whatever term strikes us as evocative. The river is like 2.5 kilometres wide. What the river actually is, is something else altogether, with no relation to the words and numbers we float on it. 

I’m looking at the river flowing, and I’m applying the metaphor of time. If we allow ourselves to reflect on the present moment - the presence - we find the experience is one of fluid continuity rather than abruptness. There’s no sense of snapshot flash, no goddamned computer click, no flicker or jump from one moment to the next. The river flows. We’re not continuously surprised by the arrival of the next instant, nor conscious of it being snatched away from us into the past. In our direct, personal experience, intervals are not apparent and the moment (like the river, if you like) neither arrives nor leaves - but it changes. The now we know, happening simultaneously for both me writing and you reading, is undefined, soft as a Dali watch, and somehow broader than the flash photograph demanded by linear time. If we limit our distractions, if we’re quiet and clear in our reflection, we become aware of nothing arriving, nothing leaving, no hellos or goodbyes, no sense of anything passing at all. No time. It’s all right here in front of us, always - going nowhere, coming from nowhere. What we are experiencing - directly - is presence, not time. It’s that simple.

Simple, unfortunately, does not mean easy.

Change does not appear from the future, and does not disappear into the past. Change happens; change and now are different labels we put on the same thing. This simple truth - and truth is always simple - is not enough for the self-conscious mind, which owes its existence to obscurity and complexity. Change does not conform to our directives, it is not there for our convenience, control, or comprehension, and it knows nothing of the word change nor the ideas we associate with the word. It will not be pinned down, frozen, examined, split into component parts and classified and named. It is not to be measured or owned, explained or described, but it is readily experienced by each and every one of us, all the time, right here and right now. What prevents us from being present is the ragged revenant of the self, constantly referring to its dusty, tattered timetable, its book of law, its grim grammar, performing the roll-call, judging and measuring, ticking off the list.

Our attempt to order change (by calling it time) is part of our woeful misunderstanding of ourselves, the natural world, everything. Now is the only time there is, but now is change, and changes continuously, smoothly, without steps or breaks, no ticks or tocks, all the time. This is useless to us. Unmanageable and unthinkable. As scientists, as ordered souls leading regulated lives and thinking sequential thoughts, we have to hold things still to define them, name them, understand them, place them in order, own them. We want digital clicks, binary bytes, a wave-form or a frequency, a set of data we can quantify and analyse. We cannot deal with something that’s always changing, that refuses to pose for the snapshot of our understanding. It’s asking a musician to play from sheet music where the notes are in a flurry of animation, leaping from stave to stave and resting nowhere. We need patterns and order, series and sets, laws and lines, because the only alternative we can see is chaos and misrule. So we hack change into bite-sized chunks, and call this digestible mess the measure of the world - time. The blade we use for this butchery is the self. We are walking shadows, a broken mirror, a glittering cloud, a wound, weather; the self is always and only and forever a metaphor.

Answering the question how long is now? is impossible, as the question is born from our illegitimate concept of time; change is something the rational mind cannot comprehend outside the context of time. Our framerate flicker of the changing now is at the root of all our misconceptions. Time is the distorting lens through which we perceive change, a way of coping with something which cannot be accounted for. And change is just another label, another flag or tag to file and forget. (Un)fortunately, words are useless to dismantle language; thinking cannot dispel (de-spell) thought. All this may seem abstract to the point of pointlessness, but it’s nothing more than the business of seeing through the bullshit, of cutting the crap. We have to start somewhere, and there’s no time like the present. In fact, there’s no time at all.

Our lives are a sleep. Learning is a fractal accretion of ignorance, a soporific clickety-knitting of the knotty web that shrouds the truth, a dream. There is no conspiracy other than our own opinionating at work here; whatever we choose to believe appears real to us. “Knowledge” and “wisdom” are synonyms for unknowing; our lazy and fatal satisfaction with our own beliefs, our own learned understanding.

Here and now, staring up the little street that leads to the archway of the Dtoo Khong, I am transfixed; thinking, perhaps for no reason, of the wan streets of the English Midlands where I grew up, the cement-coloured sky weighing the serried tiles, the endless empty pavements, the cramped cul-de-sac penitentiaries, holiday caravans displayed on drizzle-damp slabs. I was a foreigner there, too. Lost without a ticket, aware only that something was very wrong with this picture, and that it was probably me. As hard as I ever pedaled my Raleigh of Nottingham through those sullen crescents and listless Sundays, flying across the by-pass into the broken countryside, the escape was short-lived and futile, and it was back to tea-time and telly at the New Elizabethan dream-house, the rictus cuirass of good intentions and ordered lives.

On these streets, half a world away, this foreigner is recognised, at least. I do not have to pretend to be at home, and I do not feel the gut-wrenching urgency, that home sickness, to be elsewhere. Maybe my oriental counterpart paces the somnolent labyrinth of my childhood, puzzling at the skull-faced vacuity of the streets, the claustrophobia of enclosure and separation. Maybe the contemporary architectural vision of the local Roman Catholic church - a sunless, sulking bunker - would inspire him. Maybe he would be uplifted by the harrowed man, pierced with thorn and nail, blood inscribing the lewd agony of his flesh.

Miles away.

My thoughts are, as ever, dislocated, turbid, neither here nor now. The question-mark man has disappeared, unanswered. Curly leads me past an open kitchen boiling with aluminium cauldrons. Schoolchildren spoon noodle breakfasts at tin tables, origami shirts blue-white in the steaming shade. Some of them give me a wai - they know me from the school, where I learn that Thai students are not to be taught. I nod and smile back, saying gin khao! The narrow street is a dusty clutter of shophouses stitched together with fraying skeins of electric cable, fouled rigging on listing hulks. It appears haphazard, homes and businesses finding their place and rubbing along together, but there is nothing casual or unregarded in the seemingly sketchy demarcations between one property and the next - borderlines are as fiercely contested as those between nations, and a scratch in the dirt is an attenuated truce between the seamstress and the newspaper-seller, each under the same spell of ownership that binds the dictator and the investment banker. The minutest incursion of a table leg, an angle of water-pipe, is a territory invaded, and a life-long feud is started. This little restaurant - barely more than a shack on a patch of dirt - is a fortress. One sister owns the house at the back, another the business at the front, and they have not spoken for decades, their lives separated by a stretched tarpaulin with quite as much legal weight as an international border. The spell of ownership is spoken here as everywhere, in tongues, and the satanic contract signed; don’t cross this line, this place is mine by right.

We say we take sides, but in truth we make them. Our presence (our self-consciousness) in the world creates division, contest, competition. We stir things up, set one thing against another. We are the warmongers, the gunrunners, the mercenary murderers, the trouble-makers, the hot-head Hitlers, the street-corner punks and the tin-pot Pol Pots. One hand is always fighting the other.

We are expelled from the garden, at a distance from the world - the self is in itself a statement of opposition, a declaration of war. The world we see from the war-torn citadel of the self is, inevitably, a world in opposition, in conflict. I am Cain.

A line is not only a rule and a measure, it’s a border, an edge, an extremity, an end. Terminus. A boundary (or interval) between one thing and another is nothing in itself and un-ownable, a representative of the separation between them - this here, that there, and in between - nothing. Just as the present moment is crushed to non-existence by the time’s troops marching from the future to the past, so the mighty walls dividing Cain’s estate have no physical existence. We are in no-man’s land. Here is the identity of self with time and space; not alike, not related, but identical, indivisible. The primal boundary, the apparent line between us and the world (the m/other), is the self; a line in the sand dividing the world into lots, into time and place, into extremes, into schizophrenia; you take the high road and I’ll take the low and ne’er the twain shall meet. I am no-man’s land. The boundary - the self - creates opposition where there is none. Eden shows no states of opposition anywhere - this is our selfish spell, our cutting up and claim-staking, from Adam’s whole and free world to the fettered private estates of Cain. A world (a self) parceled up and owned is a world divided, and a world divided is a world at war - with itself. The word neighbour is already a wall - one man is a monk, two are soldiers. Schizophrenia is the way of the world, the way we make it - mutually ruinous.

There are no enemies, and nothing to fight over. There is no opposition but that which we imagine to either side of us, no over there at all; these are fractures and fissures in our fever-dream, troublemaking in paradise. There is no black and/or white, just blackwhite. No breathing in and breathing out, just breathing. It is the self that slices, that comes between, that divides; the self is the boundary, and the self, like any border, is nothing in itself. No thing at all.

We are mired in the mud, out of our depth, in a desperate muddle. War is always internecine, intestinal, insane - a mad bloody fight to the death over nothing at all in no-man’s land. A house divided, a family affair, Bedlam. Face-off. You there  and me here, world without end, amen.

The word Adam - our First Person Singular, I, - literally means earth, the whole earth, undifferentiated, un-owned and un-ownable. The word Cain means acquisition, ownership - real estate. Here is a great mystery, a secret abracadabra: Adam Begat Cain. This is the Fall - from Adam to Cain, from the Edenic innocence of to be to the Babylonian corruption of to have, via regeneration, begetting - the original sin of knowing, as Adam knew Eve. To know is to have. Cutting the whole earth into parcels of private property, chewing it up into bits so we may incorporate it, make it part of our body, represent us. Owning land, owning a home - replicating our own one womb around us, to exclude all others. Real estate is regal estate - every man the lord of his domain and his palace a crude model or distorted echo of a dimly-remembered paradise, our lost Eden, our Shangri-La, the womb. But we can’t go home again. We can’t get there from here.

One makes one's mark in the world - the primal claim of ownership, Cain’s signature. A fingerstripe of pigment on a cave wall, a line drawn in the sand, a wound in the body of an enemy, a burnt sigil on the chest of a slave - Cain counting to one again and again. A brand is a burn, a wound. All the troubles in the world stem from wounding the earth, staking our claim, asserting our individuality, our onedividuality. The mark means; this is my property, this is mine, this is a part of me, this is me. Keep out. Private property. 

All possession is demonic possession, a magical pact, or act, signed in blood. Being selfish is doing the devil’s work, and we never get what we bargained for when we sign a contract with Old Nick. The twist in the tale is that we are possessed by that which we think we possess. What we own owns us, holds us in thrall, captivates us. We even acknowledge this in the phrase “attached to”. We become very attached to our house, our car. They are in no way (other than magically) attached to us. They remain unchanged at every level by our “ownership”. Our attachment - the self’s investment in and incorporation of what we own - binds us, ball and chain. Demonic possession keeps us toeing the line, noses to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel on the straight and narrow. In our sick world, possession is the purpose of work. We work to earn to buy to own. The global economic system is based on the magical (and definingly satanic) pact of possession.

There is much about the error of “cleaving” in Buddhist scripture, and this is generally understood to mean a strong desiring or grasping, which lets the materialist in us off the hook nicely. We may own as much as we like as long as we can convince ourselves it doesn’t matter to us, that we’re not cleaving to it. We don’t desire what we already own, so where’s the harm? The harm is in being enslaved to that which we own, whatever it is and whatever its cost in the marketplace. The act of ownership is enough to clap us in fetters. Wanting, desiring, craving, obsessing, cleaving, falling in love with - there are many terms for the act, but it’s the same spell we cast upon ourselves every time, regardless of its focus. The object of all wanting is possession, incorporation, ownership. If I had a pair of shoes, then I’d be happy. If I had that pair of shoes, then I’d be happy. If I had another pair of shoes, then I’d be happy. But possession is always demonic possession, and works the devil’s way - inverted, perverted, twisted upside-down and inside-out, never satisfied, an unending torment. It is not the objects of our desire that become possessed through the pact of ownership, but we ourselves. We are absolutely, tragically, in thrall to what we “own”. We identify with it to the extent that it becomes part of us. We say, this is in my name, meaning, I own it, this is mine, this is in me. The simple spell of property we cast over things (living or inanimate) is a blood pact; we have sold our souls, sold out, sold ourselves up the river. Unless I can freely give it away, or walk away from it, it owns me. And the more that is owned, the more links in the chains that bind; the king’s palace is a prison, always, and it’s a life sentence. The bank a crypt guarding the devil’s currency; secrets. Encryption; we reduce the world to a code, a holy codex, a code for living. That which we have hidden, we can no longer see.

The consumer society is the consumed society; we are a conflagration of desire, a funeral pyre, and whatever we want turns to ash on ownership. Faust’s contract has our name on it; ownership is a blood-pact (French signer, saigner). Our satisfaction with an orgasm, a successful job interview, a lottery win, the seizure of an enemy’s stronghold - is momentary, a flash in the pan, leaving our appetite strengthened, not weakened. Want is the self’s selfish work, born of its expulsion from an unremembered Eden. Our unrequited desire for the mother’s womb turns to wanting stuff, wanting quantities, and, more subtly, wanting the higher things. Desiring redemption, salvation, freedom from earthly concerns, awakening, a personal endorsement from our chosen redeemer - a sign, dear god, a sign! - is evidently still wanting, exactly the same as when we lust after a new pair of shoes. Want is never satisfied - that is its defining quality, and it conjures up one object of desire after another to strengthen its hold - the quality of want is not strain'd, it riseth as flames from hell. It is born from the sense of loss, but we don’t know what it is we have lost. We don’t know how to replace it. We can’t break the code, because we will break ourselves.

Ownership goes deeper than chateaux and chattels. The primal property is the self, Number One. I is number 1. The Self is Number One. The First Person Singular. I. The similarity of the the letter I to the number 1 is not by chance: they are i-dentical, one-dentical. The upper-class English conflation of "one" and "I" is not so affected after all. By putting myself first, by counting to one, I have already counted too far. In making myself count, setting up my stall, I create division and distance. Every subsequent number, although it may be dressed in a different form and be called by another name, performs the same trick as this one. Everyman's name is One. We are each of us One. One is the proper noun, and property is the own noun. The primal property - our worldly estate - is the body. One's body is one's own. Number One is the number of the beast, the number of the prize, the number of the numb. I count means I matter; what I have to say counts for something. The King is in the Counting House, his counting house his count-ry.

The magical act of cataloguing Every Thing sets up boundaries, draws lines between one thing and another. So our universe becomes a map of itself - territories are staked out, claims of ownership made. Continents and countries, cities and nations, are nothing more than maps at the scale of 1 to 1, flat-earth legends papering the globe. From our occupation of the womb, to our appropriation of the mother’s milk, to the Roman Empire, to the flag stuck on the moon, the imposition of the self and its incorporation of the outside world is the way of the world. Looted treasure arrives in grand procession through the palace gate (the gleaming limousine parked in the driveway, the mouthful of rice). We are known and measured by that which possesses us, and we’ll fight to the death to defend it.

Without private property (countable accounts), the self is nothing - a worthless beggar in the gutter. But there is no thing owned, only the devilish act of owning, and the owner is nothing. This is the truth that right-thinking individuals spend their lives denying, clawing handfuls of mud towards them, building absurd golden towers that bear their own name, always with an envious eye on their neighbour’s heap of filth. We are the moonrakers, the village idiots dragging the moon’s reflection from the water, taking it for the moon. Or we are Narcissus, beguiled our own reflection. We always mistake the reflection for the reflected, the sign for the signed, the messenger for the message, the name for the named, the cost for the value, the quantity for the quality. The self is a carnival, a hall of mirrors, a carousel tilting to a queasy waltz, a freak show, and we lust for the tawdry prize that breaks to dust in our hands. This is ordinary life.

The territorial approach to the world is turned inwards to divide up the primal estate of the self. We increase the worth of our body by dividing it up it, and naming the separated parts. The back bone’s connected to the neck bone. We count to one again and again. The neck bone’s connected to the head bone. Just as we named the garden and all which grows in it, and so cast ourself out from it, so we classify the body into a vast estate of divisions and sub-divisions, and withdraw to a distance in order to oversee it. My father’s house has many mansions. We say we have a head, a torso, arms, legs, heart, brain, skeleton, liver, nerves, hair, nails, blood, phlegm ... our body becomes an endless treasure-house of riches. The King is in his counting house ... but where? His throne is not the brain (where he only thinks he sits), nor the heart, nor the gut, nor the blood, nor any part of his grand dominion. I am not that - by definition that is what I cannot be. If this proliferation of corporeal bounty is property, it is by definition not the proprietor - the landlord is not his house. The Fall from inclusion to exclusion that creates the distance between us and the garden, between us and our bodies, creates the self, the spectral landlord of the haunted house.

As we partition and label the universe, and dissect the body and invent names for its component parts, so do we divide the incorporeal, insubstantial self (slicing up fog) into soul, spirit, emotion, faith, personality, intellect, reason, creativity, intuition, imagination ... an endless list of properties. Ownership is the foundation of our civilisation, but the cornerstone is a cloud of dust. The act of ownership is not an action at all, but a spell cast - all possession is demonic possession, the devil’s work. The link between the owner and the owned is intangible, non-existent, magical. We sit in our house, surrounded by stuff we own, the king in his counting-house, the pharaoh in his tomb. We toil to increase our hoard of treasure to establish our worth and impress the neighbours. The king’s palace as whited sepulcher, the mall as mausoleum.

Ownership is such a powerful spell it can stretch around the world without weakening - we may own a south sea island, a cottage in England, looted paintings in a Swiss bank, and a patch of dirt in Topeka, Kansas. The power of ownership is never depleted - one may own as much as one can, without compromising the strength of the magical chains binding us to what we own. When these things are stolen from us, our suffering is acute, such is the insidious penetration of the self into what we think is ours. Just as acquisition enobles the self, its loss tears a terrible wound. But the primal possession, that which we guard most fiercely and value above all others, is another glittering dust-cloud with no foundation: our bad self, the self itself.

From the open-fronted houses of That Phanom, life fractals into the sunlit air. Bony schoolkids in crisp uniform, spooned three up on rattling motosai, swerve through tuk-tuks sagging with sacks of rice. Out in the street, dusty dogs oblivious of street sellers pedaling coppices of brushes, teetering ladders, leaf-wrapped foodstuffs. A monk blows cigarette smoke at the portable phone in his hand. A cat, skinny as a scratch, flickers into the corner of my eye. Commerce creeps out onto the street, testing its limits, exploiting every coveted inch of ownable space. The line between inside and outside is impossible to draw. The open house displays the comforts and commonalities of family life; exhausted laundry fades on splayed racks, tinted photographs of the Royal Family lean from wooden walls, and a cross-legged matriarch - imperturbable, eternal - pounds up a cloud of stinging scent with mortar and pestle in the saturated aquarium radiance of a half-regarded television. And in each common room, a high shrine, bedecked with flowers, pale wands of incense.

An unmistakable cry, programmed to shiver my nerve-endings; I squint against the dazzle of the street, see the white cloth over her bicycle basket flashing as she disappears on the far side of the Dtoo Khong. I sprint, or as nearly so as my shuffling sandals will allow, up the main road to the temple, intending to cut her off at the market. I will emerge coolly to claim my prize, a loaf of white bread as luminous as the Lamb of God, and as delicious. I am joined by a delighted Curly, and the roused Djinii, bursting weed-adorned from the patch of scrub land my wife calls “the forest”. Only monks and madmen walk in this town, and so the sight of the sweating farang, dogs bouncing at his heels, is considered newsworthy by the citizens. I grin back at their cries, but as I teeter into the narrow soi that bisects the block the grin turns into a rictus of pain. I have stitch, and it crimps me up like a drinking straw. The dogs roister hapless chickens through a bamboo barricade. By the time I stumble into the market, clutching my ribs like one fatally wounded by gunshot, I know I have missed my chance. In the dim cave of the bike shop, a crouching man fingers a wheel like a harp, his eye a nickel rivet in the oily shadow.

I comfort myself with a lie - the desire for bread is gone, I tell myself. I shall have noodles for breakfast. I want noodles. Fired by my new resolve, I set off for the noodle shop around the corner, keeping to the shade of the awnings. These little streets have names, but I know none of them. I can’t read the signs, the advertisements, can’t understand the conversations. It is communication without meaning for me; a great blessing. The world in its natural state, without significance, untouched by our naming and counting of it. In this sense it is empty; empty of meaning. Meaning is our brushwork, our gloss on things. We not only join the dots in patterns pleasing to us, we create the dots in the first place. The constellations in the night sky consist of apparent points of light with no relationship between them; our point of view turns them into flat-earth images we use to determine our location. Not just the night sky: we do this everywhere, to everything. In adding meaning to the universe, we create a utilitarian representation of it, a map we take for the truth. Here be monsters; man is not made in god’s image, god is made in man’s.

The natural world is not the work of a divine agency, whisking everything up out of a convenient void, winding the cosmic clock and sitting back with a bucket of celestial popcorn to watch it tick. To gesture around the natural world and insist that something or someone created this (because we damn well didn’t, that’s for sure!) is to see things from our own flat-earth point of view, which insists that because we make stuff, everything has to be made, that the world, the universe, is the material result of conscious intent, design, and labour. And we say if that mountain was made, it stands to reason there has to be a maker, and we give him God’s name. But it is we who create the mountain, as an idea distinct from, say, that of the molehill. We invest the meaning of mountain into something which is not a mountain (first there is no mountain ...) and our general idea of mountain allows us to specify separate mountains which express that idea, each dressed up with a name, a defining measure, and unique global co-ordinates. We believe, incredibly, we have discovered a natural phenomenon, and when we climb to the top we stick a flag in it and perform an act of ownership that affects the earth as much as if we had climbed it in a dream. Which is what we do all the time - sleepwalk up mountains in a dream, claiming them for the belief of our choice. Not just mountains: we do this everywhere, to everything. From the “newly discovered” particle to the “newly discovered” galaxy, our prideful claim is a toddler’s grab at a new toy.

Our ignorance is colossal, truly a thing of wonder, vaster than the span of the heavens, a beautiful siren song eternally seducing us onto the rocks, our very own precious treasure we covet enough to die for. We get everything so very wrong, so consistently, so persuasively, right from the start. And that’s where we have to return if we are to know the truth about the world we make ourselves live in, and the people we believe we are. But reason will rear its terrible head, our beliefs will be unshaken - that’s what beliefs are for - they’re make-believe - we are made to believe. The word lie is at the heart of belief, and i is at the heart of lie. We’re unprepared to admit we have it all so wrong, that all our jeweled palaces are pantomime scenery, that our bank vault is a stinking sewer. Our damnation is our own, by our choice. Here be monsters. Reason breeds monsters in our sleep, and waking up is hard to do - the hardest thing in all the world. Truth is not in the pay of politicians, not the property of lawyers or scientists, nor the mystic’s franchise. It is not to be heard in the priestly whisper or the prophet’s wrath, or the scientist’s formula. We - the ordinary, the uneducated, the inexpert, the ignorant - have all that is required to know the truth. We are a hair’s breadth away from it, a heart’s beat - however we wish to measure the self, that is the distance we are from knowing.

Original sin is not eating the apple (which is holy communion), but naming it. Giving it the name "apple" is a magical act, making some-thing out of no-thing. A rose is not a rose is not a rose, and would smell as sweet if called by any other name. "Rose" is a string of letters, a word, a name, a noun, an evocation of an idea. Spelling r-o-s-e is casting the rose spell, calling it up, calling it to us, invoking it, the primal act of magic. But what comes is the idea, the meaning, not the actuality. Not just the rose: we do this everywhere, to everything. As soon as a word is attached to an object or idea, it takes the place of (usurps) that which it represents. Language is vicarious, each word a vicar - and truth represented is no truth at all. The word from the pulpit, from the prophet’s mouth, from the book of law, is a lie. Literal truth, the lettered authority, is language’s artful colouring, which is meaning - our signature, our fingerprint, I. We touch everything in the world like this, filling everything with meaning, smearing the empty luminescence of the world with our childish fingerpainting.

One of the severer misunderstandings of Buddhism concerns the perceived negative aspect of emptiness, void. It’s easy to read the idea of nothingness as futility - nothing means anything, nothing matters. But Buddha knew the void as empty of meaning, empty of self. 

We hope meaning will be revealed to us in time. The meaning of life; this is the big secret we associate with revelation, the moment we understand what it’s all about. But meaning is so familiar a suit of clothes we no longer know we wear it closer than our skin.

We suppose that meaning exists independently of us, a buried treasure to be dug up, but the universe is empty of meaning, absolutely without significance. Meaning is not revealed, not a trove of truth to be dug up (X marks the spot) but something we bestow, a magical act, the self up to its old tricks. It is we who abhor a vacuum, not nature. We see the universe as an empty vessel for us to fill, and what we fill it with is meaning, our own self’s take on it all.

Consider the lily; unable to let it be, we paint it with a name, classify it, tie it up with botanical description, and pronounce it beautiful. Lily now has meaning for us - a magical spell that creates the idea of the flower in place of the flower. Nothing in nature has meaning in itself. In addition to it being empty of significance, the sunset has no physical existence beyond the narrow limits of our perception - we see it as a natural phenomenon, but it has no independent existence outside our herenow - ask someone closer to the horizon. It is our point of view that creates the sunset, that gives the idea meaning. It’s not just the lily and the sunset - everything we think we observe objectively is as dependent upon our point of view for its existence, even such apparently solid arrangements as a planet, a pyramid, or a pizza. The meaning with which we fill the world - the gorgeous gilding on the lily - is nothing but our reflection. We see ourselves everywhere, in everything.

We live in a substitute, looking-glass world, where the idea/meaning of the thing stands in for the thing - we are always mistaking the name for the named, the sign for the signed, the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. This world - our one-thing-at-a-time ABC123 world - is the magical world, the mystical, fairy-tale, make-believe world. This world is our escape from reality, and we dream it under the sleeping spell of language. We are all lost in looking-glass land, self-deluded, self-satisfied, self-obsessed, twirling in a hall of mirrors with our own enchanting selves. We are the sleepwalkers, dreamers in the Land Of Nod, a scattered flock waiting for a shepherd, counting down the days, hevera devera dick.

Revelation is stripping the dull paint of our meaning (our selves) from the world, from things, from everything. Seeing the world as new as now, nameless, naked, tearing off the veil of the self. Being the world, neither apart from it nor part of it. 

The That Phanom market hall is a pungent terminus spidered with blackened ironwork, the patched tin roof rattled by sparrows. A grid of narrow alleys slippery with dirty water separates high tiled platforms laden with produce - fly-haloed meat, glistening vegetables, fish squirming like eviscerated organs, alien fruit-beings. Here the women sit cross-legged, chatting, waiting for customers, or lie curled between bundles in blissful sleep.

I edge between altars piled with harvest I don’t recognise and cannot name. This is a wonder to me; the stuff is naked, vivid and strange and fresh. Would the sight or the taste or the smell or the texture improve if I could label it? As scientists, we are always delighted to announce a “new” discovery, animal, vegetable, or mineral, as if our noticing it brought it to life. We rush to name the new baby, to set it in its place in the extended family, for a thing un-named is no thing at all, and cannot be called. Our world is truly one word after another, and we spray names like paint over everything we come across, and everything we imagine. That’s that! This sick compulsion we have to turn everything into a noun, to categorise and quantify, doesn’t affect the universe at all. The mayfly doesn’t know the mayfly, Jupiter has no idea of Jupiter, nor its measured distance from Mars. This market cornucopia exists without my christening or understanding. The endless labeling has meaning only in our own minds - which is not to say it is meaningless - categories are the bricks of our built world. Our hive of selves is an internal architecture with no reference or connection to nature, a closed and artificial system - the tower of Babylon. And as our craftsmanship grows ever more subtle, the the bricks change into clicks, our lives are become virtual, a shadow of a shade, a glittering web spun around the world we writhe in our sleep.

Our worldly, wordy magic, necessary to determine our location and set our watches isn’t performed without a terrible cost. The fisherman casts a net which catches only himself. Our daily selfish liturgy invokes the satanic powers of ownership and exclusion. We pervert paradise into a bank, a brothel and a boneyard; this dreadful incantation - our world, our word - is a pact of complicity we sign blind, with borrowed names, in blood. Our selfish work is artifice, is art, the mark we make, and the mark is a mistake, or a wound. Whether we are conscious of it or not, whether we are attentive to it or indifferent, this is what we are - a gimcrack jury of conjurors legislating holy quality into profane quantity. Hocus-pocus, flim-flam and mumbo-jumbo, abracadabra and open-sesame, ju-ju and voodoo and speaking in tongues, the ragman’s rigmarole; these are the cracked tablets we brought from the mountain, the poisoned chalice, the curse or cross we bear.

These artificial distinctions of name and number, the ABC and the abacus, are not worthless; our civilisation (that brief cloud across the sun) consists of them, depends on them. But they have no permanent and independent reality - in this sense they are illusory, magical, and we are deluded to have faith in them, to revere them as the truth in themselves. To see time and language and measure and self as paper tigers and painted snakes; to see our ABC123 world as a teeming marketplace, or a terrible pit seething with demons; but self-created, dreamed up by us all together as we roll in our thick sleep. To see the world as it is, and us as we are; selfless. 

I come from the echoing darkness of the market hall into the broken mosaic of the street, bedazzled by the shuddering plastic joy of colour for its own sake. In this ramshackle pixellation, the familiar form of Zeno leans like a shadow against the painted wall of the Dtoo Khong, the frothy archway that frames the view of the temple. He wears a Manchester United shirt (number ten - Wayne Rooney) over a pair of pre-ripped stonewashed jeans. A plastic bag containing a white loaf pendulums from his finger. I stroll up, pointedly ignoring the bread. There is mischief in his shocking blue eye. 

Been to the market? he says. See the new cord?

I have a feeling about this, but play along. No.

It’s special cord. One-ended.

How long is it? I say.

They cut it to length.

He swings the loaf around his finger. I don’t rise to the bait. We stand there for a while, watching the people make offerings to the two lurid, gurning spirits on either side of the arch; incense, candles, small bottles of drink, bundles of brown cigarettes tied with red cotton.

Well, I say, backing away, I’m going to the shop. I lift my hand in a half-wave.

Hopeful solutions to his familiar paradoxes (essentially variants on the tortoise and the hare) use the same bogus terminology which creates the paradox in the first place: infinite, number, interval, measure. His paradoxes remain paradoxes in any units of measurement - we are taking forever to get nowhere. Zeno saw the trickery in the systems which gave birth to the paradox, and that they cannot be “resolved” using the same faulty terms that produced them in the first place, a process akin to untying a knot by tying it into more knots (or thinking our way clear of thinking). What is at fault here is the basis of the argument, the beliefs taken for granted - our systemised universe.

The statement “quartz crystals vibrate at three zillion times a second - this is a scientific fact” accepts an exotic mythological beast - the second - as a real, live animal. Similarly, that stainless, peerless creature the light year (the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1 year; 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometres, it says here) depends on the actuality of a mythical menagerie; the year, the mile, and the kilometre. Each validates and supports the existence of the others. As this is being edited, physicists at Cern amaze themselves by observing particles apparently traveling faster than the speed of light; everything Einstein knows is wrong. It’s crazy, avers physicist Antonio Ereditato.

What the particle physicist in all of us will find even crazier is that the quantities themselves (three hundred, 5.88 trillion - one - whatever) have no basis in anything outside a carnival hypnotist’s tent. There is no quantity, of anything, anywhere in the universe. Amounts of this and that, of length and weight and brightness and heat and the countless other distinctions we create, are fictional sets - commodities - we use to order and control and own the world we make. Nature is not counting itself. The truth will not be measured nor named nor owned nor spent nor invested - this is what we do, in our sleep, acts we perform. Magic.

The words we use in a measured series necessarily change to create intervals (the sequence 1,1,1,1 is of little value), and it is only the habitual associative linking of these nouns that leads us to believe in, and continue, the succession - we have to believe in Royalty for there to be a King. The vocabulary itself creates the chain and moves us - by mnemonic association only - from one link to another, as genetic association leads from one king to the next. All succession is royal succession, every count a crown. The series Thursday, 4, winter, blue, F sharp is as legitimate as any other, just less familiar, and less useful. There is no such thing as a series that exists in and of itself, outside our point of view. Units of measure are syllables in an endless priestly incantation - succession is a sentence; the sentence is, very suitably, a chain that fetters with letters. Our wristwatch is a manacle, we are sentenced to death, to the last syllable of recorded time.

Science is accepted (rather, worshipped) as the domain of fact, of discovered facts, truths that exist apart from us and of themselves, made manifest by the scientist’s divination. Yet the very foundations of scientific method - observation, naming, measurement and calculation - have no more substance than heat haze. All our bricks are clouds of dust.

Metrologists are currently, as this is being written, getting in a fret about a lump of metal kept under lock and key at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, because its mass is changing, in the inconvenient way of things. This lump of metal is, or should be, the standard reference kilogram. But it now weighs less than the standard American kilogram. There are international conferences and learned papers addressing the problem, but ultimately any attempt to impose a standard and universal system of measurement will fail, because, like language, measurement is self-referential; a kilogram, or any unit of measurement, can only be defined in terms of division (into smaller units), or multiplication (into larger) units, which in turn can only be defined by other fictional units. And the system is inadequate because that which it claims to be based upon is in itself inconstant, inconsistent, and impermanent. The stuff of the universe is in constant flux; thus immeasurable by any system which claims to be based upon its observation. That lump of metal will, frustratingly, refuse to have anything to do with any measure we try to make it conform to. Metrology is nothing more than a function of language - to say a kilogram is one thousand grams is to create a metaphor, not state an eternal standard. 

On the side of the shimmering road to our shop, a street seller sits with a flat wooden bowl of fresh farm eggs. The recent prime minister’s famous edict to sell eggs by metric weight, not quantity and size, was met with derision and, in these parts at least, refusal to comply. Weights and measures are a covenant of convenience and trust, like money, and nothing in themselves - there is no primal, abstract kilogram which sets the standard. And like currency, weights and measures are inconstant. Measurement is metaphor - a kilogram is equivalent to a thousand grams, but it goes deeper than that - a dozen eggs is only like a dozen eggs.

To learn what a word means, we refer to the dictionary, which gives us a few helpful suggestions - metaphors - in the form of other words. Kilogram, mile, watt, light year; these are words, and words only, dependent upon other words for their authority and significance. There are many extinct units of measurement, because terminology is as subject to change as the things it purports to define. How many kiles are there to the pood? How many kulas constitute a spat? These units were once current; currency. As good as gold. Scientific units of measurement are as fluctuating and unpredictable as the stock market, or weather forecasts, and as subject to fashion as the width of a lapel. The Planck is looking like a solid investment right now, but whatever unit we choose to impose requires a relationship to another for its definition and meaning, the = sign. The Planck unit artfully reduces E = mc² to E = m, but however acrobatic or convoluted or simple the terms appearing either side, the = symbol is the crux of the formula, equating each term (or set of terms) to the other. The = symbol means is a metaphor for. E is a metaphor for M. All our preciously-guarded values, our measures, our godly constant units, are poetic terms. As metrologists, economists and particle physicists, we are pareidoliacs, descrying the human face in a scatter of stars, augury in a fall of leaves. And if one thing is a metaphor for another, all things are metaphors. I = you, or I rhyme you - we are poetry in motion.

The advent of the digital age has created currency in units of “information”. That’s not the kind of information that we’d understand as information (like how to find my wife’s shop), but a new and entirely content-free kind of information that only has meaning for a computer chip, or someone interested in computer chips. The bit is the smallest unit, and eight (not seven, or ten - eight) bits make a byte. A bundle of 1,024 bytes qualify as a kilobyte. Similarly insane increments takes us through megabyte, gigabyte, and the all-terrain, military-grade terabyte to the frankly terrifying petabyte, which we can buy for 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. But who’s counting? These whimsical conceits are contemporary equivalents of the bushel and the peck, which at least expressed themselves in quantities and contexts that had direct relevance to human scale. 1,125,899,906,842,624 is unimaginable, unthinkable, meaningless, and we have to find a calculator capable of multiplying that by eight to find out how many bits make a petabyte. These impressive “units of measurement” constitute a new mythological bestiary, laboratory-conceived and perversely interbred by a pallid priesthood of laconic Doctor Frankensteins, and like any other system of currency, as factual as an astrological star sign. The curlybyte is ready and waiting for someone to fork over one hundred and thirty two quintillion petabytes, and the djinibyte, at a cute gazillionth of a bit, blinks winningly from the other end of the digital line.

The objective distance so valued by science is separateness; I am not that. But far from enabling a clear view, this distance obscures. The objective distance from which one peers at the universe is nothing more than a point of view - the self. In itself. There is, in truth, no distance between us and the world, no isolation. Our apparent outsideness is the self - that’s all we are - selfishness. And the self is an unforgettable performance; the Great Magician conjures himself out of nothing. And we interpret the world from this point of view; the nature of the self makes a neutral objectivity impossible. To observe the world is to replace it with the idea.

Mathematics (or science) is not a language in itself, a wordless grammar of numerical relationships. It is a function of language, and exists through speech and writing. There are no higher, universal truths which can only be expressed and articulated by symbols; all formulae are sentences, speech. Mathematicians like to think of their art as a universal language, yet it is no more universal, in the sense of universally learnable, than any other language. Mathematical/scientific symbols are grammar, voiced differently according to linguistic rules like any other language. Without the sounds we make, and the symbols which represent those sounds, numbers have no existence. There is not an equation or formula that cannot be spoken or spelled, and this articulation is not an afterthought, after the fact, but the fact itself. That which is spelled is a spell - the abracadabra of ABC and abacus. But science is a wonderful act of thaumaturgy - not a cheap trick. To call these systems magical is not to dismiss them, but to know them by their proper name, to see them for what they are. Science is magic that works, real magic, but not real.

Zero and one (the ideas behind the circle and the line, and the crude hammers of the compass and the straight edge) are the only numbers of any significance, and zero is no number at all. Their extension into an apparently ordered - and endless - sequence is a fictive convenience. Zero is everything, totality, universality, unbeginning and unending, unbegun and unended. Zero turns - what we see as a circle, roundness, is our blinkered view (and short-hand form) of cyclical movement; rather, change we perceive as cyclical. Zero (none, no-noun, no-one) turns, changes, moves. Number One is each and every individual thing, standing stiffly apart to be counted, a broken bit, a monument, a corpse, the crowned king, the self. Each count is a coronation.

One plus one does not “equal two”. Counting to two is counting to one again, repetition, or interval, but giving it a different name. The essential singularity and separateness of any object that makes it unique, the definition which makes it countable, makes more than one of it impossible. The Reasonable Mind will insist they can count six coins in his pocket, or 17.946 quintillion stars in the night sky, but each coin or star is definably unique, and has to be apart from the others in order to be included in a set. When we count, we are counting iterations of the coin idea, or the star idea, not the thing itself. We are cataloguing flat-earth snapshots of the coin and star cycles. Quantifying is limiting; there is no quantity of anything unless we stop counting somewhere. There may be two cars parked in the street, but there are many more in the next street. Each set must have defined limits in space and time, or there is no end to the counting; there are six coins limited by the pocket, 17.946 quintillion stars in the sky limited by our powers of observation and point of view (and patience). To quantify is to define a set in time and place. As mathematicians, the act of counting does not even need an object, thanks to the belief in numbers themselves as individual characters (a pantheon of little gods, no less) relating and reacting to each other. Calculation is a fabulous trick, but if we look behind the curtain we see it is accomplished by grammar, by parts of speech.

The rule that creates singularity cannot accommodate plurality - there is not more than one of anything in the world. Reasonable Mind will balk at this, pointing to a convenient bowl of twenty-four eggs for proof. But each egg is unique in structure, no matter how similar it looks to others, how closely it conforms to our dictates of eggness. It occupies its own unique space and time - sets its own spatial and temporal identity. There are not twenty four of the same egg in the bowl - that would be ridiculous! - so clearly we are counting something other than a discrete egg. We are counting iterations of the egg idea, within the set defined by the bowl - that is, we’re counting nothing (no thing) at all. Counting no-things is what we do all the time, creating quantities we name with a number. Magic!

Everything is all the same. Zeno puts it like this: if being is diverse, that which is must be both similar and dissimilar, in order for diversity to be apparent. But this is impossible, because the like cannot be unlike, nor the unlike, like. Everything is identical; the only true chain of association is metaphor, which is not a chain of succession or series but universal expression of the fundamental identity of existence; I am like you is like this is like that. Being is poetry. 

The primal equation (and the one on which all others only elaborate) is that x, being x, is therefore not y; that this is not that. Diversity. The terms in the equation must be given different names (this and that, one and two, me and mama, mountain and molehill, cakestall and castanet) for it to have integrity, but the distinction between them is in name only - a function not only of our hard-wired habit of set definition, of creating boundaries between things, but of our separation from them. Without a subjective (selfish) point of view, we have no power to objectify, to name and number, to interpose the = symbol, but this objectivity is a misnomer - it is subjectivity, self-hood, which creates the point of view that allows so-called objective observation. The subject creates the object - everything is seen through the self, or reflected in it. The much-vaunted neutrality - the modesty, humility, and anonymity of science - is a monstrous, delusional egomania.

We see the world in the shattered looking-glass of the self. Each thing is not only perceived in a separate shard, it is created by the breaking of the mirror. We have broken the world to bits, and we try to make sense of it by putting the shattered chaos in order, in lines and sets, and this ordering is commanding, telling, numbering, naming, diversifying. This is a process apparently without end - Zeno’s new cord, cut to whatever length we want.

Infinity, we are told, is in-finite - without end. Unless we think in terms of series, the word has no meaning - there has to be a counted series for it to be endless. So we start counting ... and we keep on going. For ever. But unless this series has a beginning, it is no series at all. The journey (and there has to be a journey if it is to have no end) starts here. So there is, necessarily, a limit to one end of this insane sequence - the start. And anything limited or defined is, by definition, not infinite; the one-ended cord is not endless. Infinity is a baseless and extraordinarily useless idea made necessary by another baseless (yet useful) idea - that of series. The reality behind the “string theory” of particle physics is that science has created a Magic Cord with only one end. Science clings to the belief that the string “started” with a big bang, and rolls out to infinity, or the heat death of the universe, whichever happens first. The idea of starting is integral to that of series, but that anything “starts” at all is only an interruption, a convenience to set the clock. Nothing has “started”; everything is already happening, turning, moving, transforming. No Big Bang, no Ground Zero, no tabula rasa, and the end of days is the end of the self. Nothing happens for the first time, and we’re late for the last supper, as always.

The Bread Lady’s scent has grown cold. She’s miles away now, resting in some palm-leaf shack, maybe hurling her unsold loaves into the river. Our shop is a one-ended cord’s stretch from the Dtoo Khong, a regatta of hanging housewares and happy toys, glorious as the Doge’s barge. Ducking into the shadows, I feel a strange sense of relief that Zeno isn’t already there waiting for me, a disquieting habit of his. My wife smiles up from the bin she’s calculating at her cluttered table. 

You eat already dallin’? 

No, I miss Bread Lady again.

Oh, dallin’! You friend take for you! She waves at the bag hanging from the wall, the beautiful white loaf. He got here ahead of me anyway.

A complex world hides behind the unremarkable frontage of our rented premises. A subterranean pool glimmers beneath the teak floorboards. In quiet moments, fish turn heavily in the dark water, silvering the seams between the broad planks. I am as at a loss to their provenance as to that of the fish in the seasonal lake behind our house. Further back, away from our laden shelves, slanting spaces unfold from awkward stairways and cramped landings that seem neither outside nor in; planked walls stop short of the corrugated iron roof, admitting kites of sunlight, fugitive zephyrs, squalls of silver rain, and a ceaseless pilgrimage of crawling, hopping and flying wildlife. Splintered ladders slope to occluded cells crammed with the remorseless debris of our landlord; electrical equipment corroded into baroque reliquaries, tools worn to shrapnel, crippled furniture corbelled by cobwebs, fasces of charred fluorescent tubes. Immured in this dim repository of dirt-poor Pharaohs, hospice of memory, the world’s glory is turning to dust.

The business of the shop - front of house - is in shining contrast to this melancholy cumulation. Here is the springtime of stuff, radiant treasure, from the chalice-bright plastic bucket to the glittering fairy-tale hair-clip, everything rejoices in happy newness. This is currency; that which is current, electrified by money. Yet this contrast between the desired and the discarded (the virgin bride, the withered crone) is the result of my own incision, looking one way or the other from a point in between. There is no interval between the old and the new, the womb and the tomb, other than my measure, the span of a man.

Our customer - broad-shouldered, burnished like the boards beneath his bare feet - piles what he needs in the aisle, a dozen this, a dozen that, to be sold from his stall at a country market. Quality is spelled into quantity by the currency of commerce; behold - we sell all things new! I shake a plastic sack into shape and squat to pack his stuff, the heavy metal first, the rat-traps and cooking grilles supporting the bottles of balm and perfumed oil, cushioned by bundles of long socks (protection against leeches in the rice fields), packets of elastic bands, sequinned purses ... I knot the handles of the bag and heft it outside to where his motosai waits, baked like a cake in its intricate patina of cinnamon-coloured dust. There is no limit to what a skinny Honda can carry in the East; a family of six, a pyramid of aluminium ladders, a tied pig, a cage of poultry - whatever can be willed to stay on. Our customer’s fat pink bag slumps on the pillion, laced to the frame with the ubiquitous plastic yarn. My wife hands him his bin, which he’ll settle after he sells his stock at the market. Market traders in Isaan wake up at one or two in the morning to drive their dangerously overladen pick-up truck out to wherever the day’s market is located, deep in the flat hinterlands, where they set up the stall they take with them, to sell the cheapest goods on the planet to people with no money. The whole process is buoyed by native good spirit and lack of complaint. The sun shines, there is a fish in the net, why worry about tomorrow?

The furthest tomorrow we can define is a supereon away, but even that seems a very feeble slap in the face of eternity, so the newly-invented largest defined unit of time is now the curly, named after the other dog under the table as this is being typed, which is equal to 3.6 quintillion supereons. But even the mighty, awe-inspiring majesty of the curly gets us no closer to eternity, which, like the instant, remains prey to Zeno’s unwelcome satires. Each division and multiplication in this ridiculous temporal sequence - from the impossibly small to the impossibly large - is a figment, a fiction. From alpha to omega and all stops in between - time is an imaginary stick for an imaginary dog to chase.

Once we tell the first lie (believing), we have to tell other lies to support it, for a single untruth is obvious. The web of lies we weave is so thick it takes a sharper blade than thinking to cut it away. Most of us are content to embroider more faith into it, to strengthen the material with more fancy opinionating and believing, such as inventing intervals between one and two. The sequence 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 is no different from 1, 2, 3, or 10, 20, 30. Or yellow, orange, red. One number (and a number is only a name) is followed by another. A sequence is a sentence, a roll-call, priestly litany, prayer beads passing through our fingers, or the knotted rope passed over the side of the ship. There is no “amount” involved, and no connection between the names other than the ritual. The Emperor’s New Clothes are woven from such threads, and worn by us all. The king is dead, long live the king!

The hypnotic incantation of series (our heads nodding together) conjures a horror. That first baby step we take - counting to one - seduces us to the second, and there is no end to this nightmarish procession. We cannot see the baleful monster we approach in the dark, but we know it’s there, and we give it a terrible name, Infinity. It has even become fashionable amongst the scientific priesthood to impress and confuse the laity by claiming the existence of more than one infinity. Why not? As the fantastic creature has no existence outside our imaginarium, a herd of them makes as much sense as one - that is, no sense at all.

Lo and behold! We started counting, and we spun a Magic String with only one end. Determined to locate the beginning of time, we search for the Big Bang, the dawn of all things, without considering that this is a snap-shot of the universal cycle, and as much an end as a beginning, and that we’d more profitably spend our precious time by trying to understand this present moment, which is all we ever get to deal with anyway, and all we need. We cast the calendar spell backwards to decipher (the word cipher means zero) the birthday of the universe, to zero in on the day before Day One. To nail down one end of the Magic String, once and for all. But there is no beginning anywhere, and no end. No fixed and permanent datum point anywhere, anytime; and without a fixed point there can be no measurement, in any direction. Zeno pulled at the fraying thread that unravels our entire world.

Infinity has meaning in the sense of everything, all that there is. Including, necessarily, any number of infinities the wily snake-oil salesman would like to dangle before our enraptured gaze. Everything is a beautiful, ordinary, kitchen-drawer term for ... all there is. All. If we are mystically inclined, The All. And it’s integral to, identical with, the true nature of now, and I. We have no need of arcane terms or hieroglyphic formulae to get at the nature of things. Nothing more mystical, religious, or scientific than our infinitely precious and rich terms I, Now, All, Be - these are the simplest words in language, and yet great mysteries to us. The simpler the word, the greater the truth. Simple, unfortunately, doesn’t mean easy. These are tough nuts to crack, and harder heads than ours have cracked trying to open them.

The primal philosophical distinctions - I and Now and All and Be are created by our flat-world perception, our shattered world-view, the intercession of the self. We see the world in cross-section, in bits. It’s the only way we can take it in, like eating. We chew the world up in mouthfuls. We are grazing ruminants, and never look up. We mumble and stumble in our sleepy fog, we dig and delve and hoard, straw men with feet of clay and crowns of twigs. Business as usual. And while we are perfectly prepared to admit that every location - all places - can simultaneously co-exist (in spite of our inability to experience them that way), we baulk righteously at the idea of all instants existing all at once. And yet time and place are made discrete by our own division, our own device.

The universe does not time itself, locate itself, quantify itself, or name itself - these are things we do - acts, play-acting, performances - not things that are. There is no quantity of anything in the universe, not a lot of this, a little of that, six and a half of that, a bushel or a peck of this. This is a game we play, a spell we cast to make the world ours. There is no quantity in the universe, there is only quality - not quality in the sense of good/bad, but in the sense of characteristics - the quality which makes water wet, and string stringy, and the dark dark. The woodiness of a tree, the waxiness of a candle - this is immeasurable, indescribable, not to be pinned down, defined or owned. There is no room for ethical judgements here - we cannot say that the sound of the wind in the trees, the clamminess of clay, the brightness of the sun, is either good or bad. There is neither room nor necessity for god or meaning in a universe saturated with quality. Quality is the is-ness of the world, in which we rejoice even as a dumb child. The exuberant redness of a plastic toy is a nameless childhood glory. I have a much keener memory of these shining qualities than I do of people from my childhood. The overwhelming clarity of the night sky, the furriness of scissored cardboard, the soft radiance of the plastic jewel in the handgrip of my cap gun (and the sharp stink of its snap!), the acid squeak of a crisp grass stem between my teeth. Sometimes I become aware of a nameless quality from childhood tickling the fringe of my perception - a powder blue texture, perhaps - without it attaching itself to the object. All these treasure pleasures are still here, in vivid luxury, shrouded in the winding-sheet of self-memory. Childhood is an endless wonder at the nature of things, a rejoicing in their characteristic qualities that is lost when we are educated to name and quantify them, to add value or reduce to rubbish. The adult murders the child with his damned thinking about. The difference between the bright, living front of our shop and the entombed relics in the back is exactly this; the adult leeching the colour from the child’s life, the spell of self-consciousness closing up and shutting everything away in the sleep of recollection. The more we try to define and measure is-ness, the dimmer it becomes. We corrupt sacred quality into profane quantity - this is the Fall, our original sin. The sin is not in eating the apple, which is holy communion, but in knowing it as an apple.

Exactly as the painter tries to reproduce the apple in a blend of pigments, or the poet toils to describe it in a string of syllables, so the scientist labours to define his own apple in sets of numbers and classifications, and with as approximate a result. Art and science are identical, not polar opposites, the one factual, the other fanciful. They are interpretations of truth based on a point of view. Both astronomy and astrology are equally valid. Astronomy prides itself on a rigorous adherence to scientific method - a reproducible and coherent system of observation, naming, and measurement, from which models of the past and the future are extrapolated. But the observation is made from the dully blinking lighthouse of the self; the naming is the magical act of calling up the idea, not the thing, and the measured intervals are spells in the grimoire we have written - an insubstantial froth of data whisked up out of nothing. Looked at in this way, astronomy is as superstitious and inexact as its black-sheep sibling astrology, which seeks correlations between the larger and the smaller patterns in life, with an understanding that everything is interconnected - the head bone connected to the neck bone. An inexact science? Not science at all? Where is one fixed, scientific unit? Where is the single, primal, defining point with a permanent and independent existence? Where is the objective, unchanging datum point from which anything and everything can be measured in space or time? Where is the star that speaks its name? Astrology at least admits to vagueness and subjective interpretation, whereas astronomy claims empirical values and objective truths, as if all this data exists apart from us prior to our discovery of it. Naming, measuring - this is apophenia; acts, not facts. And what we act is legerdemain, street magic - unconscious, pervasive, and overwhelmingly convincing. We’re continuously fooled by the brilliance of our own performance, because it is a powerful magic that works.

There is no scientific fact that does not depend upon another (as there is no word in the dictionary undefined by another) or that exists independently of language, or that is not subject to change and revision. Once upon a time the earth was flat, flat as a fact. Once upon a time it was a medical truth that one blew tobacco smoke up the sphincter of a drowned person to save his life. Once upon a time there were four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Once upon a time there were four dimensions. Facts are fickle as fashion; they are fictions, fancies, articles of faith, poetic description, metaphors. We live in Fairyland, and that’s a fact.

The sunset is not to be known (or recreated, or understood) through analysis or description of any sort - it just is, and it remains sublimely untouched by our artistic/scientific interpretations. This, of course, is an offence to our vanity, in flagrant disregard of our achievements - we demand a part for our selves in the show, and not just a walk-on. The self assumes the central role - the sun sets for me, or not at all! As of course it does - it is only our viewpoint that gives us the illusion the sun is going down at all - the sun itself remains indifferent. Our own point of view creates not only the sunset but each and every event we believe we witness - a reflection in the shattered looking-glass, or caught in the fogged flicker of the lighthouse of the self.

The self (the king in the counting house, the wizard behind the curtain) is the scientist, the observer of the natural world from a distance. But for all our fantastic technology and piercing intelligence we are unable to observe the observer, the self itself; we don't even know his address. All our meticulous research and clever invention and shining reason and dispassionate objectivity has failed to identify and locate that which identifies and locates. The accountant cannot account for himself, the flame throws no light upon itself, the blade doesn’t cut itself. The self is truly the chimera, the unicorn, the dragon, the snark - the original mythological creature. Every legendary quest is the heroic search for the elusive self. We hunt for it in the dark wood or the deep cave, or across the limitless ocean or at the heart of an intestinally winding maze. It takes the form of a fabulous beast, a fair maiden, a jeweled cup or a golden pelt, buried treasure, a magical ring ... any damn thing will substitute for the formless self; symbolism is all there is. The quest is a fight, a struggle, always, with the self as the shining prize. He(ro) who has won is number one, he owns the prize. One wins what one owns; what one owns one won. But the epic search is in vain, or vanity, and every victory hollow, a case of mistaken identity. The self is a mythological creature, never to be displayed in a zoo, or dissected by scientists. The self is a slick trick, a magic trick, but there is no trickster; the spell creates the illusion of the ringmaster.

Our customer kicks his motosai awake with a flip-flopped foot. It clears its rusty throat and he cuts away into the traffic, a circus act of dizzy skill where everyone drives to the same rule: you are the only person using the road. Mirrors are there to check minute imperfections in your complexion, or adjust the loft of your hair. The notion that they can give a view of what’s happening behind is lost on Khon Thai - what is the point of looking at where you’ve been? Telephones, fellow passengers and cartons of iced coffee frequently occupy the five free degrees of the Thai 355 degree blind spot. Exploiting a gap in the traffic, Crazy Bare-Arse Man darts stiff-haired from the shade to retrieve a cigarette butt arced from a passing Hilux. He squats between parked motosai, his eyes glittering brighter than the cigarette as he inhales. His enjoyment is as intensely sensuous as that of of the fat-cat plutocrat with his regally banded Cohiba. Pleasure is not personal. No mental activity is our  private property - it is shared. Common. Democratic. Vulgar. The orgasm transporting the supermodel on the super-yacht is, unfortunately or otherwise, no more super than that enjoyed by a masturbating chimpanzee in a zoo. The delicate sensations caressing the palate of the Parisian gourmand give rise to pleasure identical to that of the ravening Thai labourer at gin khao. The most we can say is that the context, or the set-dressing, is different. That irritation we feel on running out of petrol is the only irritation there is to feel, and not specific to running out of petrol. The worry and stress we feel about an impending court case is exactly the same as the worry and stress about paying the rent or an illness. Pleasure is pleasure. Worry is worry. The blues ain’t nuthin’ but the blues. The conditions giving rise to these feelings (the sets on your stage) change, but the feelings are common. And not only common to humans - they are universal among animals, at least. The bogus concept of anthropomorphism is another example of our colossal self-centredness. No experience is uniquely human - all mental activity is drawn from the same well. Consciousness is the sea we all swim in, not our personal pool.

C. G. Jung created the idea of the collective unconscious, an archeology of  hidden archetypes common to all humanity. He had no need to dig that deep; our ordinary waking consciousness (our barricaded property) is collective. Thoughts and feelings, ideas and imaginings, these are - disappointingly, for the self-obsessed teenage girl inside us all - not uniquely individual attributes, and nothing special at all. This is not social media, and this is not about you. Our moods, feelings, beliefs - so convincing, so solid, so very definingly us - are as fugitive as the zones of warm water we swim through in a cold sea, constantly shifting, borderless, and impossible to demarcate. Privacy (ownership under a flag of convenience) is a mask, a myth that the self propagates and jealously defends. That sense of personality - the core of our self-belief , our own precious property - is felt equally and identically by each and every one of us. Our proper name is I. The vulgar herd grazes common land.

The self is misconceived, aborted, still-born from a phantom pregnancy, a sleepwalker, a shadow. The world is an endless parade of these homeless bastard orphans. This is not to say the self as we understand the term is worthless, or bad, or non-existent, or to be done away with; it is a misunderstanding. The result of that misunderstanding is suffering - on a truly catastrophic scale. The way of the world and all its ills stems from our selfishness - property, personality and politics, economics and law, religion, nationalism, corporate business, and any other fatuous flag we march under. In our ignorance, we have made ourselves a Bedlam out of Eden, and all the king’s soldiers and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty together again. But let’s not despair - there’s no omelette without breaking eggs, and no bird hatched either. A metaphor everything.

The true self is not what we think it is (nothing is). The self as we know it - the strutting centre-stage puppet, the pampered princess - exists in a dream, as drama. Dramatis personae. Acting a part is acting apart. The self is an impostor, a fraud, a fake. All identity is mistaken identity. Not only does the king have no clothes, there is no king. No wizard behind the curtain, no ghost in the machine, no angel in the architecture, no god on high nor devil in the depths. Self is a spell, and like all spells, a distraction from that to which we should be attentive. We’re caught up in smoke and mirrors, dazzled and deafened, and we’re happier adding to the chaos than we are stripping it away. Anything to distract us, to the point where distractions constitute our world and our lives, where we move from one entertainment or occupation to the next with no idea of what we’re being distracted from, no knowledge that there is anything other than this ceaseless procession, requiring our constant commentary and judgement. What we are being distracted from (and this writing/reading we’re doing now is as smoky a mirror as any) is the self.

Now, in this moment, I am looking at my wife, inserting batteries into a radio-controlled toy car for a customer. I am vaguely comparing the pleasures of regarding her pre-occupied, as she is now, and in the communion of eye contact, that ecstatic translucency. Now, I luxuriate in the nape of her neck, its slender curve, her absurdly pretty little ears. Her celestial brow furrows, as much as it is able, and her eyes narrow at the dogged refusal of the batteries to stay in their place. My pleasure lifts me like a wave, and I am aware of the sphere of sight that holds both my eye and its cynosure, the dark matter of the shop behind her and the dazzling street. We have no relative positions in this hollow transparency, she and I. In a moment when the world seems to hold its breath, I am lifted, weightless in ataraxia.  

But where the hell are we?

Rationally and scientifically, by any measure or fact or definition or description we like to employ, we are all over the place; spinning atoms in constant recombination on a whirling planet in unstable orbit around a star whose flagrant conflagration give us life. There is no centre anywhere, no fixed point in time or space to locate us, or from which to set out or to return. I is in flux, and yet not chaotic; there is something in us that makes unconscious sense of all this, that is at home with it, untroubled by it, something that copes with continuous change, apparently (if illogically) placing each of us at the centre of the universe and everything else in order around us. That which gives us the necessary sense of stability, of continuity, of time passing, of being at the centre of things, is self-consciousness. But this apparently exclusive vantage point (a royal box for life) is the price we pay for our starring role in the Here And Now Show. I is the poison in the chalice, the serpent in paradise, the worm in the apple, the grit in the gears - nothing but a metaphor, a wriggling word in a wormy tome.

I is not an individual body as a whole, nor any part of that changing organism. In the adult there is very little matter that remains of the body of the child; cells die and regenerate continuously, materials and structures metamorphose. On a physical level, there is no single defining state of what we are, of us-ness. Scattered along our linear time-track, each of us is a ghostly army forever on the march; we are legion, no one body-state more I than any other.

I is not an individual mind, nor any mental activity. The adult mind is not that of the tantrum toddler, the moody adolescent, the dithering dotard. The mind is subject to changes as dramatic and impermanent as the weather. There is no single mental state that is definitively oneself.

I is not a tabula rasa. We are our ancestors, more or less. Physical and mental characteristics tumble down the DNA spiral (or the genome string, whatever model strikes us as new and scientific) and make us what we are. We like to think we inherit familial characteristics, but there is no beneficiary in the genetic lawyer’s office to receive the endowment - there is only the bequeathal; we are ancestry, nothing more. There is no difference between the estate and the inheritor. The curly hair may be our father’s, the artistic ability our mother’s, but our parents shared the inheritance just as we did. We are comprised entirely of that which is “passed down” to us - we are all the prodigal son, the bastard black sheep. This is reincarnation, which is not the personal continuation of the cossetted individual through rebirth, either into this world or the next. The qualities, tendencies, and characteristics of our predecessors are reincarnated (made flesh again) within the form we think of as ours, as unique to us - I. Reincarnation is recombination, a new deal from the same old deck, a new throw of the same old dice - there is no individual I to be reincarnated, no self with a legitimate claim to the estate, merely a set of recombining characteristics spiraling through regeneration. We do not individually recreate humanity at birth (or conception). There is no individual fruit, no aunts or grandfathers on the family tree, just as there is no individual apple on the apple tree. Neither are we chips off the old block. The fruit, the chip, these are the spells of the self, slicing and dicing, staking claims and cutting boundaries. I am the tree; root, trunk and branch, leaf, flower and fruit. We are family. A crowd, a cloud. We are weather. 

The idea of reincarnation is also expressed in the lifecycle of the body; the adult  inheriting characteristics from the child it once was. Not all at once, like a birthday gift, but continuously. The estate is regenerated without knowing the selfish self’s claim upon it. Yet we believe ourselves made uniquely anew - we are each our fond firstborn. Take away that which we are bequeathed - the blue eyes, the allergies, the cute little ears, the instinct for languages, the short temper or the good humour, strip away all the traceable generational similarities, and what is it that remains which could be called uniquely, singularly, originally, individually us? Who the hell are we? The self, our proudest achievement and possession, is a stranger with forged papers, an interloper, a troublemaker, a spy in the house of love.

I is dance; a continuously changing aggregate of interconnected, interdependent elements (as we think of them), none of which is in itself the self, and all of which are communal, insubstantial, and impermanent, and similarly connected to and affected by (what we think of as) the outside world. This inherited estate in direct contradiction to the vain notion of ourselves as isolated individuals springing onto the world’s stage, forming opinions, influencing events, claiming property and exercising our free will - leading our own lives. The chip off the old block can’t see the wood for the trees because he’s barking up the wrong end of the stick.

Toast, noodles, none of the above. The chip off the old block sits at a metal table covered with plastic cloth in a pattern of cartoon robots. The frontage of this tiny restaurant opens onto the street, the toy-sized kitchen steams and rattles under the awning. The place is full; the breakfast here is cheap and good. In this sun-spun aquamarine grotto, my gaze slips over the treasure - a hinged metal case of thin stamped spoons and forks, plastic bottles of mystery sauces in a plastic basket. The aluminium dish is flesh-searingly hot. A glistening crust of egg, a scatter of minced pork and sausage slices, chopped onions. A chipped cartoon mug of sweet herbal tea. On the painted plank walls, a hallucinogenic photomural of the Swiss Alps, family photographs, pictures of the King. The Thais adore clutter. The concept of zen space, the delicate accent in an empty field, is alien to them. More is more. The rule is, put it there, preferably in the way, then put something in front of it, then something on top of it. Never touch it again. The philosophy extends outwards from domestic space to the street; the hapless pedestrian is stymied by a thorny thicket of a thousand obstacles. They love cluttered soundscapes, too, noise upon noise. Here, the amplified monks’ chants from the funeral down the street, Thai pop shrilling from an mp3 player, a tablet game’s harsh carnage. I asked my wife about this love of amplified noise; “ooh, if not loud, not interesting dallin’!” The television above my head is very interesting; heads in the restaurant turn as the tidal white noise of studio applause drowns all other sound; a blurred superstar shivers the screen in prismatic decay.

We are a star-struck audience for the prime-time Self Show; front and centre for our own performance up there in the camera’s embrace. I is the main act, the principal player, the star of the show. Everyone else apparently reduced to supporting roles - they walk on to I’s stage, speak their lines, affect us in some way, and disappear back into the shadows. No matter how I plays its role - authoritatively, doubtfully, humbly, desperately, ecstatically - the I Show is always prime time, even when asleep. In our dreams, I is the only constant, trying to impose waking order onto a confused and defiantly non-linear trauma-drama, where the scenery shifts and faces metamorphose, and nothing and nobody is what it appears to be. How unlike waking life?

The inner man satisfied by breakfast. We occupy ourselves with making life more comfortable, or satisfactory, for our self. We feed it, groom and pamper it, gratifying it in as many ways as we can afford. We seek to improve it through education and exercise regimes. We divert it with entertainments, thrill it with sensations, and reward it with gifts. We spend sleepless nights worrying about its problems. And yet we spend no time at all in trying to identify the recipient of all this devoted attention - this spoilt child, this pampered darling, this special one. And who is the parent, the one that devotes the time, who coddles and cossets?

What is it that prevents us from giving I the kind of attention we routinely and happily give to the small print on a cereal packet, or an internet blog? We find as many reasons as we need to avoid the task: preoccupation (“haven’t got the time!”), disinterest, ordinary comfort or narcotic self-satisfaction, any pleasure or distress acute enough to make us aware of nothing else. A belief that navel-gazing is a vain waste of time. Embarrassment, perhaps. Lack of technique. There may also be an element of fear involved in not looking too closely in the mirror, in not turning over the rock of the self - here be monsters. If the business seems to warrant any attention at all, we generally subcontract it out to the experts: creepy clergymen, grasping gurus, pseudo-psychoanalysts, sinister scientists and fake philosophers. Diploma-wielding, robe-wearing witch-doctors. Experts.

Question whichever sage oracle we may, from the Dalai Lama to Oprah Winfrey, the answers are as wax in the ear. Experiencing here and now for what it is, knowing the self for what it is, being at one with the nature of things; this is not accomplished through an interview, not a reward for spiritual development, not a link to click. The question/answer method of acquiring knowledge and information predicated by our education systems is an adequate way of locating the nearest sports bar or the furthest star, but there’s no question we can formulate to which the answer is the truth. We’re so programmed into Q&A mode we expect an answer to life, as if it were a question.

Just as it would be unwise to entrust our breathing or bowel movements to another, no matter how expert in the field, so we should not delegate the work of identifying the self. Unmasking is the self’s proper occupation; minding our own business. But the self cannot unmask itself, because the self is the mask, the “individual person”. Becoming aware of the self’s snake-oil chicanery is not classwork, something to be shared or studied at the feet of a Master, with course notes and examinations. Nor is there a beaten path - ever ascending to some lofty peak - for the mystically-inclined seeker after truth, only diversions and dead ends. There’s nobody to get out of this maze but you, and no time but now, no place but here. One cannot take a step back to see oneself, not even to cut one’s own hair. Here is the hall of mirrors, the labyrinth - you are always here, never there, and that’s why you can’t get there from here. 

For most, it’s not an attractive prospect to be left alone with oneself. We’d do almost anything to avoid being solitary in a lonely place with distractions at a minimum. We not only actively seek distraction, but company to supply and share it, friends who play in the same team, sing from the same song sheet. 

The mountaintop retreat, the hermit’s cave, or the bottom of the deep blue sea, wherever you go, there you are, keeping yourself company (a phrase which makes less sense the more it’s examined), and nowhere is empty where you are. Reducing external distractions, activity, entertainment, and communication, gives rise to valuable and misunderstood feelings of discomfort and dissatisfaction, of boredom. This is I squirming under threat - urgent flares shot up when it feels exposed and threatened.

Sit quietly, still, and alone to get a vertiginous tilt into the abyss. My nose itches! Time for a coffee! Was that the phone? I have to pee! What? Only two minutes? Scratch the itch. Flip the switch. Click the link. Change the subject. Do anything but nothing. We need to be occupied, because only in occupation does the self have any form at all - the angel is the architecture, the ghost is the machine.

Reducing distractions to the minimum - above all disconnecting electronic communication and distancing from other people - reveals the serpentine writhings of the mind. It is not coincidence that the words slippery, self, and spell are different rolls of the same dice. A slip of the lips, the slippery slope, the hisssssss of the forked tongue. The serpent in Eden is none other than our own bad self, up to its old tricks, and however it’s spelled, it’s a spell to be broken. The self will not let go without a fight. To the death.

The self seems to conjure up all manner of mirages and fireworks and shadow-play to prevent our seeing it, and when one distraction dies it throws up another, as subtle as thought - the hydra grows two heads to replace each it loses. But smoke and mirrors are not the product or activity of the quarry hiding in the thicket, the serpent in the turbid depths; they are the self. There is no hidden entity dazzling the mirrors and pulling the strings. These sly diversions constitute our lives; there is nothing in ordinary life which is not a distraction. We rarely see them for what they are, nor does it occur to us what they might be diverting us from; what this magician’s curtain of our world might reveal if we tear it down. 

The more everything is considered as a distraction, and the less thought given to what has happened and what might happen and what is happening somewhere else, the more attention is focussed on the presence. It may not seem much, but  attention to herenow is awareness of self. There’s no apparent progress in this anti-business - it seems to come and go. There’s no self-satisfaction, no certified grades to display, nothing to pass on. It’s hard work, baffling, faintly ridiculous, and above all it’s solitary. In a culture where communication is venerated for its own sake, where community is interpreted as neurotic conformity to an internet set, and access to information is some kind of standard to live by, the asocial, uninformative nature of what you and I are coming to grips with (right here and right now) is not only alien but slightly abhorrent - hardly good citizenship. Selves will cling together for self-validation as words in a dictionary, an elective network of mutual dependency, but to acknowledge this can be seen as transgressive.

If we try to share it, or make a religion or a method of it, we lose it, because the truth of I cannot be communicated or taught. It’s not a project for a focus group, a team-building weekend. Little wonder, then, that so few of us care even to recognise the subject, let alone confront it. But worse - there is no name for this. When a name is given (and it is given many), it is lost entirely. In naming it we file it in the dead-letter card index of understanding. To understand something is to kill it stone dead.

I is an act, a peerless performance. The star of the show, the main attraction, for an enraptured audience of one, working through the drama. Theatre is witnessing the self reflected. Acting is action. There is nothing else in this world but the buzz of business. Show business. We believe that it is we who are putting on the show, writing the lines, but there is no evidence for this. Whenever an action ceases, the actor disappears - rather, is revealed to be not there at all. It’s easy to identify a walker - they are identified by the act. That’s the walker, occupied by walking. If they stop walking, they disappear; there is no walker. We instantly assign another role for them to play. They’re sitting, they’re the sitter. Whenever activity changes, identity changes. If the writer stops writing, the writer ceases to exist. If the reader stops reading, there is no reading being done and therefore no reader. We say we are the walker, the sitter, the thinker, the writer, the reader, but strangely our vocabulary doesn’t extend to exister, or be-er. Being is the primal verb, the first act; I am. Who is am-ing? There is existing, but nobody doing it. The noun that connects these acts, these identities, is the self. The monkey trickster, slipping from one act to another, playing roles, occupying territory. Acting up.

There is action, but no actor. Thought, but no thinker. Our silent, unceasing drone of commentary and opinion, concentration and daydreaming has no source; it is  the action of the brain, as taste is of the palate, sight of the eye.

Whatever we’re doing, it happens without our thinking about it. When we perform the mindblowingly complex act of sweeping the floor we’re thinking of what we’re going to have for lunch. Rainforests. Wild sex. Sweeping the floor is the last thing on our minds, yet it happens anyway. Whatever the act, it happens without an actor. If we try to consciously direct the action, controlling all the necessary movements, determining and ordering the decisions needed to make those movements, and assessing the conditions that shape those decisions, we stop sweeping altogether, don’t even start, the complexity of this simple task so easily overloading the godlike genius of our conscious mind. As Zeno knows, it all happens anyway. The hare is passing the tortoise, the floor is being swept, this sentence is being read. The vital thing is to be attentive to the action, to watch it, listen to it, feel it, to be inside it in some way without thinking about it. Simple but not easy.

Thinking is a physical act. To maintain that thinking either produces or results from electro-chemical changes in the brain is like saying physical changes in the legs are produced by, or result from, the act of walking. Walking is the material change in the legs. Thinking is the material change in the brain. Although less evident, the physical changes in the thinking brain are as locatable, observable and measurable as the changes in the limbs while walking. We believe we are responsible for physical activity, that it happens because we are the captain of the ship, giving the order make it so. Do we claim to beat our heart? To digest our food? To destroy and generate cells? These are intimately personal acts, as self-defining and self-sustaining as any other, over which we have no control - where do their orders come from? To sidestep the question, we fall to our old habit of division and demarcation; we say there is the unconscious mind at work, or instinct, or an automatic motor reflex function, or whatever term explains the problem away. And who is satisfied with this explanation? That old rogue the self, blowing twinkle-dust in our eyes again. Accept any explanation rather than admit the possibility that nobody is doing the thinking, just as nobody is doing the breathing; that the growth of a toenail and the Mona Lisa are only ephemera arising from sets of conditions. The terrible/wonderful truth is that we’re all at sea with no captain on the bridge. A scurvied ship of fools up shit creek without a paddle.

Linear thinking is in agreement with the concatenation of cause and effect. We imagine that the way things are now is a direct result of the way things were in the past, and that things in the future will be influenced by what happens in the present. If the world is predetermined, then the way things are and will be is inevitable, a fatalist philosophy in line with the common misconception of the law of karma as an it is written abnegation of responsibility that Buddha never espoused. The world is not predetermined - it is always in the process of being determined. There is a fine and difficult distinction to be made here if we are to resolve an apparent paradox, and it is at the heart of Buddha’s experience. 

This is why Buddha, uniquely, is so insistent on limiting our concerns to here and now, forgetting the past and the future. The actions we perform (and karma means action) can only be in the present moment. That is all we have to work with - the only clay we can shape is the clay in our hands. We can make everything better right now - that is the true wonder of life, the true law of karma, and the opportunity that is never lost. The idea of predetermination makes perfect sense in the context of linear time and series, as causality. For every action, a reaction. We are not in a continuous state of surprise at an avalanche of unexpected events tumbling down on us from a chaotic future, so it seems reasonable to suppose we are influencing the future by what we do now. But what we think of as the future and the past are inaccessible to us. Because they do not exist. The world is the way it is because of the conditions that are presently determining it right now, in the moment that Buddha brings us back to. But the present state of affairs is not a result, because result implies a situation that is unchanging and set, a final score - there is no end to this tale, no resolution, no state of unchanging finality. This is obvious from our ordinary lives, a process of continuing and mostly undramatic change where nothing is ever really over and done with, and the fundamental I seems the only constant. The feeling of sameness from day to day, a life being lived more between events than in them, this is purgatory - the waiting room between birth and death. Luckily the Self Show is  always there to pass the time.

By that whimsical conceit the calendar, it is now over three years since I woke up at the beginning of this book. Our new home is being constructed downriver, nearly complete. I stand in the bright empty shell, careful not to mistake it for permanency. I have had bricks and mortar rent from me before, the agony of avulsion, and I know them now for nothing but clouds. Castles are made of sand, and even the homes of the homeless fall into dust, as everything must. This is not a gloomy observation - fundamental impermanence, the weightlessness of things, is a wonder. In this airy shell overlooking the river, the desire that wired hooks to my guts and pulled me around the world is gone, and I am at home. The dread that enabled refuge is also gone, and if the lotus does not bloom at my head then neither does the plume of acrid smoke; the volcanic man no longer burns.

The image of me standing in the unfinished house is in bright and happy contrast to the self-portrait I drew so long ago, of a broken man in the ruins, although the elements are fundamentally similar. To try to see either as more true, more lasting, or even better, than the other is to revert to the frozen separation of flash photography - they are mutual, mutable.

The construction workers are taking a break, sitting cross-legged in the dust, betting on the throw of the dice, faces eclipsed by coolie hats orbiting the dice dish, shouting in triumph or groaning with loss as scraps of fiscal scripture are exchanged. The room is vague with mortar dust, flagged by shining kites of sunlight, a softness at odds with their pointed focus, their consuming belief in luck in what passes for a Buddhist country. Buddha’s voice is easily lost in the rattle of dice, but it is present there, too.

The roll of the dice is synonymous with chance, with bad luck and good. But the faces the dice show as they come to rest are determined by a complexity of circumstances, none of which has anything to do with chance, all of which are beyond our measuring. Their speed, attitude and spin on leaving the cup, and how they impact upon each other and the surface they land on, determine only one possible result for that throw. From this throw, these numbers. And how they leave the cup is dependent upon the hand that shakes the cup, the arm that articulates the hand, the electrical impulses from the brain that determine the muscle movement. The dice bone's connected to the cup bone, the cup bone's connected to the hand bone, the hand bone's connected to the arm bone. That snake-eyes could be no other result, given the circumstances that produce it. And that “result” is nothing more than a snapshot of the dice cycle; if it were anything else, the dice would always show the same faces. The numbers are changing, all the time. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock roll. Nothing chance about the way things are, just our own coarseness of perception and fondness for lazy constructs like luck. The construction workers’ dice represent any system giving a “random” result. A hexadecimal code produced by a computer, while apparently random and free from influence, is the only set of digits that could have resulted from that particular exchange of electrical impulses within the computer circuitry. Inevitable. Out of that, this. Not so much the philosophical fatalism of what will be, will be, but the seemingly useless and obvious what is, is. From a nuclear explosion to the blink of an eye, from a leaf blown in the gutter to the fluctuations of the stock market, every event is the natural and right and only possible outcome of the conditions that are presently shaping it, and no event is in isolation - it is our self-consciousness that presents them as discrete, as broken shards of the mirror. We are unaware of the conditions that determine these events - they are invisible to us, too complex to read and measure, so we hand the whole business over to fortune, to destiny, to Lady Luck. She is the bogus patron saint of free will - what is at stake here is our (god-given, we are led to believe) right to do what we want. 

Nobody takes a wrong turn and nobody gets lucky. Nothing happens in a vacuum, uninfluenced, by chance; everything we think of as a result, every state, every choice, every event, every make and break is determined by the conditions that are giving rise to it. Nobody baking bricks gets bread, and random is the name we give to a result we can’t account for, a let-out clause to legitimise the limits of our knowledge.

The choice we exercise out of that which we flatter ourselves to think of as free will - to throw the dice or not, to be or not to be - is determined by the circumstances which inform that choice. We have free will in as much that we may apparently decide to do what we damn well like, but that decision is not random. The decision we make from personal predilection, or necessity (it makes no difference) is not only determined by the conditions from which it arises, but in itself forms part of another set of conditions which shape other events, other “decisions” - wheels within wheels. Your decision is already decided. Chocolate chip over pistachio is as inevitable as a shower of rain, and as (im)personal. We may, out of perversity or to prove a point, break the pattern by choosing a flavour we dislike, but that very perversity or point-proving is part of the conditions informing the choice, and the law still applies. This is the one true law; the universe (or a better word; this) is the way it is because it is being shaped this way here and now. Being shaped; changing.

The conditions that shape us stretch much further than the self-conscious, self-important “free-will decisions” we believe are so momentous. Some choices - stepping out of the path of a falling anvil, scratching an itch - seem made for us, and not choices at all. Others, like the investment of a pension fund or the colour to paint the kitchen, may be made for pragmatic reasons after much consideration. But each decision/choice/action is a direct result of the circumstances which articulates it. This process occurs at every level of existence; elective affinities flicking atomic switches, making ice out of water, diamonds out of coal, mountains out of molehills, cakestalls out of castanets. Our choice of movie at the multiplex is no different to the choice an electron makes in combining with another - each is brought about by a set of circumstances. We like to think that our actions (choices, decisions) result from our own will to power, informed by personality, our very special likes and dislikes, or informed wisdom. To learn that they are nothing more than the inevitable outcome of certain sets of conditions is, again, an affront to the self’s toddler egocentricity. It is not merely our precious likes/dislikes which are immaterial in every sense of the word - our most considered opinions, our most deeply-held beliefs which apparently form the bedrock of our lives and our world count for nothing, and are as transient as the blur of dust in this bright room where the dice are thrown.

We can no more determine the future than the past, for the one is as imaginary and untouchable as the other. But we do continuously influence and shape - determine, condition - the present moment through acts both mental and physical - the distinction is irrelevant. The linear-thinking response to this is to insist that if there is any shaping going on, the outcome will be manifested in the future; If I plant an apple tree today, I will be able to eat the apples in the future. But that future tree does not exist, and the fruit of the future tree is impossible to eat. We put cause and effect in a line because it creates a working model of the world that we can move through and use.

The question “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” only seems paradoxical because our linear thinking suggests that one thing must be the cause of another. Sensing that setting things in series, in order, is not enough to forge the chain in a common set, we go further. We say that not only does the second link follow the first, it is caused by it. B is brought about by A, tock by tick, the chicken by the egg. But there is no interval between cause and effect, each cause is effectual, each effect is causal. Our idea of cause/effect is an attempt to make change more understandable by setting definable states in concatenation, each link 

resulting from the previous, and creating the next. There is no cause and effect, there is only causeffect, and the notion that the beat of a butterfly’s wings in Sumatra in some way causes stock market fluctuations on the other side of the globe is appealing but inaccurate. Everything happens right now - all the links of the chain exist at once, as all the words in this book exist at once. The fact that you are here now does not mean that the previous pages exists in the past and the next in the future - the book exists all at once in the here and now. All the gears turn at the same time. It is only our self-consciousness (a single-speed gearbox at best) that threads pearls, that believes there has to be a first turn of the first cog that sets all the others in sequential motion, because we can only see one gear at a time. The gearwheel cannot know the mechanism.

Which came first? What we call "egg" (we cast the egg spell together) is our snap-shot view of a changing moment on a natural cycle. We see egg as a separate object, but it is nothing more than a single frame or cross-section view of a constantly turning cycle. The egg event has no clearly defined limits, no beginning or end (as we’d see if we had access to the sped-up film). It contains the chicken as the chicken contains the egg. It is impossible to say the egg started here, or finished there, and yet linear thinking demands not only that one came before the other (creating an interval or demarcation between the two, the impossible void of no-man’s land that Zeno mapped so perfectly) but that one caused the other, as if one link in the chain caused the next. The chicken cannot be separated from the egg, nor the apple from the tree, as there is no interval between them. Their status as disconnected objects is the result of our limited point of view; there is no state of caused as opposed to causal, one or the other. The terms themselves, and the thinking which depends upon them, are solecisms based on our conjuration of time, our insistence that one damn thing must follow another. Our constant blinking slices everything up into our personal framerate, projecting the illusion of continuity out of contiguity onto our interior screen.

The precise moment at which the fertilised egg becomes a foetus, and at what stage that foetus may be considered an individual are distinctions we make with difficulty, and not only in a legal context. Yet precise demarcations form the basis of not only our systems of measurement but everything we think we know - I am not you. In our real time movie of the human life cycle, the last frame to show the egg should immediately follow the first frame showing the foetus. We know instinctively that this is not possible, yet all our distinctions are based on borders between things and states. The words themselves, egg and foetus, are, like all nouns, attempts to nail change to the cross of reason. The human life cycle is continuous and interdependent with other life cycles, and the hallowed individual - whether a sperm or an egg or a foetus or a baby or a child or an adult or a corpse - is only our stuttering shutter shot of that cycle, our herenow, I.

Each noun-state in a description of a cycle (seed, leaf, tree, fruit etc.) is our blinkered flat earth view of continuing change; none has a separate permanent existence, a solid reality in and of itself, and each is as much a cause as an effect. Neither is there any self-contained life-cycle that does not form part of another.  There is no separate object - no tree - other than that which we spell as such. A vision of the world as interdependent cycles, wheels within wheels, while closer to the truth than our serial world of disconnected objects set in linear order, still conforms to our need to divide and conquer. There’s no such thing as all trees; there is only the quality of tree-ness, unspellable, godless, empty of our staining significance and untouched by our categorisation. There are not "many cycles", one called the human, another called the sun, or the apple. These are our own magic words, incantations for our own ritual of understanding. The objects we see in our universe - from a supernova to a bowl of noodles - are happenings, events - the apparent solidity of a thing masks a complex, constantly changing and interdependent combination and recombination of energy, of simultaneous causeffect. A dance. There's no such thing as a thing, a rose is not a rose is not a rose but smells as sweet. A thing is an event, an event is a cycle, and cycles are just our wording. Nouns are nails.

All our analysis, philosophy, reason, and belief - all the king’s horses and all the king’s men - can never put us together again. Language can be nothing more than marks and metaphor - we are anagrams of each other from a common alphabet, our precious selves just slips of the tongue in the library of Babel. Language, like money, is content-free, an empty vault holding nothing but that we invest into it, a haunted house occupied by the ghosts of meaning. Language is always in the process of translation - it never delivers. A stutter, a star, a word, a self; silent movies on a cloudy sky, dim phosphenes in the camera obscura.

On Thailand’s perimeter, my camera lucida; holes in a white wall, sockets in a skull embedded in the red earth. I will create the mythical dawn here, raise the sun above the Mekong according to my own perspective; I will conjure up here and there, making things get smaller as they get further from me. I will speak the time spell, decreeing some things more gone than others, some things closer to becoming than others. The shell of the house looks as much in the process of destruction as construction - it could go either way - but it is hardly empty space, even though the workers are momentarily gone. There are buckets, tools, broken odds and ends strewn across the rough concrete floor. Space enables location; this is here, that is there, Every Thing is in its place. It is the selfish act of slice and dicing the universe into named, discrete objects (divide and conquer) that brings about the idea of a space to hold them. From our point of view, “space” holds “stuff”. Shards of tile, buckets, dice, mountains, molehills, planets ... all this material is arranged in space according to the laws of perspective and measure. Space is generally understood in terms of void, emptiness. But the universe we inhabit is evidently cluttered with stuff, from supernovas to ball-point pens. There’s no other place to keep it. All we can say about space is that it allows this to be here, and that to be there - space is, apparently, the interval between things. But just as in time, there is no interval other than the intercession of self-consciousness, the locus of I. Simple or complex observation, from direct personal experience to the remotest reaches of technology, will reveal ever more material in the void, serving to connect quite as much as to separate. A bottle and a plate are both distanced and joined by a table’s surface, oceans by a continental land mass, boats by the sea, lovers by a glance. There is no space in the sense of an inert vacuum to accommodate the where-ness of things. Space is not emptiness, it is profligacy, fullness. Things cannot be separated from the space they inhabit, they do not edge space aside to make room for themselves. Matter isn’t different from space; space is not different from matter, neither could exist without the other - they are precisely the same. Everything is all the same.

Here in the cluttered emptiness of our house on the river, Dali has set up his canvas on a bamboo easel leaning against the wall. The diffused light, he says, reminds him of Cadaques. He is barechested, wears a loincloth encrusted with paint and shit, and amulets and fetishes hang from his neck; a five-tailed lizard, and a phallus fashioned from a root, bearing a monk’s potent inscription. Dali has no sense of personal cleanliness. His greasy hair is shoulder length, and not to put too fine a point on it, his fecal fecundity attracts a retinue of flies. His incontinence is in continenti tempore, a flaccid clock stained with increments of excrement.

He is working on a whimsical self-portrait of me as Zeno, a loaf of white bread balanced athwartships on our head. Some of the canvas remains blank, and in this moment he could be erasing it just as convincingly as painting it.

Do you think it will be finished before the house? I ask. 

What about your book? he says, turning his head to eye me, his waxed mustache covered in cement dust. 

I avoid his focus. I’m working on it. Dali laughs, a contemptuous bark, and returns to his infinitely meticulous brushwork. He uses a brush made from his mustache hair, so fine it tapers to a point of no dimension where it touches the canvas. I’m working on it right now, I say, making keyboard gestures with my fingers. 

You talk to The Reader again? You do this out loud, you know. People looking at you, think you’re crazy.

I’m not about to get into an argument with Salvador Dali about who’s crazy. I watch the man, an angular mantis canting to the canvas. The Dalinear composition is saturated with stuffspace, showing no emptiness nor distance anywhere - everything is in focus, forms are simultaneously remote and intimate, interpenetrating, seen from different points of view simultaneously - this is how Dali paints, and it’s how things are. The back of my head is in what would be the foreground of a conventional arrangement. I protested that I am not quite so bald, nor my scalp so red. In the picture, I am observing Dali, who paints a picture of you, dear Reader; staring at the book in your lap. You may quibble that the likeness is not exact, but Dali paints in a dream, where even those closest to you are imposters. The open book shows these very words you are reading this instant, and the facing page holds an illustration of Dali working at the portrait he’s painting, which contains a recursive Reader holding a book with ... but you’re way ahead of me. 

Your book is boring, he says. Nobody likes to be told things. They know everything already.

We’ve had long discussions about this. Sometimes I read him the day’s writing, often hardly more than a phrase or two. He rolls his eyes, yawns openly. I’d be happy if he swapped his paint brush for a toothbrush occasionally. But what he says is nearly true - I write to tell myself the truth. If somebody looks over my shoulder and gets something from it, then that’s good. I’m looking over Dali’s shoulder, the minute precision of his brushpoint, where everything telescopes down to here and now, making his mark.

The mathemagical magi define a point as having location but no dimension. If a point has no dimension, is no thing in itself, what’s the point? And more to the point, how can it be located anywhere? The geometrick point is a line seen from the end, the line is the horizon. Not just the spatial equivalent of the temporal now but identical to it; herenow and nowhere, I. The point of the brush, the canvas, these are not only functions of self-consciousness, they are identical to it. Distance or proximity have meaning only in the self’s sense of scale - the universe is no more vast than the span of an atom without our divine rule of measure. 

Dali’s universe has its own gravity, locking everything in paperweight stasis, a kind of massive, inert weightlessness. Our individual sense of gravity - that we are the the centre around which the whole universe turns - gives us a sense of stability, even when moving. As every individual consciousness feels this way, the idea of centre as a single point is inadequate. There’s only room for the selfish one in the spotlight - and that’s you. And me. And them. Everywhere. On the map of the heavens, you are here, always, yet in a heartbeat we have hurtled thousands of miles as the earth spins eccentrically through a solar system sliding through a volatile universe. The fixed point, the pin stuck on the map by the self, is by any scientific measure all over the place, in flux, and at the centre of nothing. The sphere whose circumference is everywhere and centre nowhere isn’t a recondite Zen koan to be imagined or solved - it’s where we hang our hat.

I’s point of view creates a smaller, self-ish universe that changes, for the most part, slowly and consistently around us. A recognisable personal world we can move about in and make our own. All that cosmic turbulence happens a long way out there, or, if we can peek down an electron microscope, a long way in here. We consider the earth beneath our feet as stable and unmoving, a convenience allowing us to use our herenow as a datum point from which all measurements are projected. But here only has meaning in relation to there, and now to then. Without the canvas of time and space our own little brush would have no point. These seemingly vast dimensions are brought about by the birth of self-consciousness, and entirely dependent upon the smaller idea of individuality. As Hermetic tradition has it, as above, so below. This is not an arcane teaching, a secret knowledge, or a philosophical theory. It is the way things are. The distinctions of identity and location and duration have no existence outside the dream we dream. We’re dreaming right now, you and I, weaving our wordy work together. Space is a spell to hold our dreams, time is a spell to stop them all happening at once; both act to divide and conquer, to set in opposition and to possess. There are no cardinal points around our compass axis, no up nor down; we are truly lost in space, ships that pass in the night, alone together with all the time in the world. In our writhing sleep we dream the earth and all the beasts that walk upon it, and the birds that fly in the air, and the fish that swim in the sea, and the gods in their heavens. We dream names without number, and numbers without end. We dream of this and that, and here and there, of now and then, and you and I, and this dream is a death struggle, a pitched battle over a patch of dust that will be our grave; no-man’s land. 

Dali stabs at his buttock with his brush, leaping into the air with a yelp of distress. Ai! I am bit! He bite me! He pulls at his loincloth, his eyes starting in his head. I leave him to his particular physic and walk outside, passing the spot where Curly is buried. The great and golden, my mysterious traveller and constant companion. I rub my eyes and squint at a worker shinning up a palm tree to catch a sleeping bat - good eating, apparently. These people are the gourmands of the world, digestive systems like waste disposal units, delighting in testing the limits of the edible; no meat too curious, no leaf too corious, they graze through the day with an enviable satisfaction. I leave them to their feast - gin khao! saeb illii! - in happy ignorance of their slapdash work on the back wall which will have to be redone. Our house is almost the last one downriver on the road out of town, a point in parentheses between the Mekong and the jungle, but still an easy ten minutes’ walk from the Dtoo Khong, that playful hub. A walk which we take together, you and I, mindless of the bemused looks of the people (watching the daily parade from their allotted places in the shade) as we talk. You want to know about Dali, whose appearance took you by surprise. My talks with him are as communicative as with the builders. What should one ask him? What do his paintings mean? When I asked him that, he held up his hand - What does this mean? I had no answer. He folded in his fingers, leaving the middle erect. What does this mean? I got the message. Meaning is something we put in, not get out. When we’ve filled the void with meaning, we have a natural urge to share it. A thought unvoiced, an insight unarticulated, an opinion unexpressed, a spell uninvoked; these are unwitnessed acts, so no acts at all. Communication is imagined as something in itself, a carrier of intrinsic value and substance, but there is no carrier, no medium existing in itself; there is only message. I is nothing but communication, white noise coloured with meaning according to taste; a performance or an act. We believe the word of god is ours to declaim, that the truth may be held in the letter of the law, but the truth is not something to be inscribed (or tapped) into a tablet, shouted from the rooftops, sent down a wire or beamed from the skies.

We speak in Chinese whispers; language is always in translation, representation, each word a vicar, a dark reflection or a shadow of the idea that stands between us and the bright truth - idolatry, graven images. We are talking to ourselves - mumble and mutter, baby blather, a sot’s slur and stutter. Sooner or later, language bumps against a brick boundary, or runs out of steam. And this is where the magic stops, where the spell is broken. A profound violence, not a blissful transition - the letter of the law is toppled and shattered, decapitated. Ding dong, the king is dead because he has nothing to say, nothing to utter, no seed to sow, his mouth a hollow husk, chattering teeth and death rattle in the barren bony cave, language without meaning. Words burning like lace, into ash, into air, gone; birdsong at the break of day. Behold - I make all things now. The emptying of the self is ruinous because nothing remains; I is de-spelled, dispelled, shown to be neverwas. Here is the church, here is the steeple, entirely gone when the hands are opened from prayer.

The sparkling tip of the chedi rises like the sun from a tangle of cable above the sloping rooftops. A shard of Buddha’s breastbone in a crystal phial at the impossible point. What can we say about him? He woke under the tree by the river. And that’s nearly all that can be said. He was immediately confronted the impossibility of communicating the nature of his experience. His herenow is the single most important event in the history of what we might call human consciousness (E=mc² is a Rubik’s cube in comparison), yet because it is incommunicable it remains unknown, glossed over, ill-considered, misinterpreted, and worst of all dismissed. Even the most adept of sages can only smile enigmatically when asked for an explanation. This isn’t their fault, the man himself was at a loss. Nothing is to be explained, only experienced. There is very little he could say; such descriptions as he attempted are seemingly precise and yet useless, because language falls apart here.

Reaching the limits of language doesn’t make Buddha interesting; going beyond them does. No account of the colour red can give us the experience of seeing it. But spelling red evokes the quality of redness in us, summoning it from memory. We do more than understand what the word means, we know red, and can see it with our eyes closed. As Buddha’s experience is unknown to us, we cannot conjure it up through language. It is beyond the scope of description, of definition, of measurement. It is impossible to teach, impossible to communicate, impossible to share, impossible to understand, impossible to think, impossible to learn. So we arrive, it seems, at a dead end, here where the words accumulate around our feet like dead leaves. Together, you and I, blocked by the wall of  words, a wall of infinite thickness, its cunning masonry extending - to infinity! - in all directions. This book. The view of the chedi is obscured, the sky is covered as if by cloud, there is nothing but the page we’re on, the black columns of soldiers on a white field, the little characters we know, marching with a message from the king.

If there is no way his realisation can be communicated by language, there is no way to experience that awakening, and no point to any of this head-butting and noggin-scratching and brow-furrowing. But what happened to Buddha is not his property, his privilege, his creation, his franchise, his achievement, and he took no credit for it, claimed no advantage; I got nothing from it. His experience is not him. It is happening in the only time and place it can, herenow. We are prevented from experiencing it by self-consciousness, being locked into the time and place of personal identity. Nobody can break this wall down (this shell open) for us. Nobody has the instructions or the tools for the job. But nobody can tell us how to stand without falling over, or beat our heart, or think a thought. Information and communication are sometimes neither required nor possible, but a terrible burden. In an age of data-flow worship, where shared opinions are treasured currency, the idea that disconnection, quietude, and isolation can be advantageous is heretical. There are no friends in this business, no likes. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not about you.

What are you, a prince, a god, a saint?

I am awake.

The word awake - Buddha, in his language - inevitably became his name, but in a terrible irony it casts the heaviest sleeping spell on us, as we gather our old drowsy, heavy-lidded associations and (mis)understandings about us like a moth-eaten cloak. Buddha. Check. Been there, done that - next! We know his name too well, and it is impossible to hear it without the clichés of Buddhism obscuring the view - we immediately and wrongly conflate the man with the Ism, but he did not become Awake by being an Awakist. His experience under the tree by the river, as he was at pains to point out, was not the result of any system or religion or teaching, but everything to do with a continuing piercing attentiveness to the present moment, a process that achieved a momentum within him, a cyclical opening which shook off the self entirely, revealed it to be nothing. Buddhists may claim that he became Awake because he mastered this or that technique, studied x for n years, but nowhere does the man himself even suggest we might profitably follow in his footsteps - or that there is a path to follow - let alone hold our hand for a walk-through. If there was any such method, any learnable, step-by-step system, we may be sure he’d have taught it, and we may be equally sure the world would be illuminated by the lotus-headed. But he never claimed to teach the truth - not because he wouldn’t (he was against the “closed fist” of hidden teachings for an elite) but because he couldn’t. He considered not saying anything at all, knowing the impossibility of passing on his experience, of teaching truth. He chose to speak openly, to anybody, because he knew there would be some who could benefit from what hints and pointers the limits of language would allow. It was never his intention to redeem humanity as a whole, or even salvage a single soul, but to act as a signpost. Not to lead by the hand, but to point the way. This is the meaning of the monk’s startling injunction to kill him if we see him on the road; we want to dawdle and loiter with him, be his special friend, bask in his radiance like lizards on a rock. Anything but go in the direction he’s pointing, because there’s nothing there, and nobody will go with us, and it’s dark, and there’s not even a road. Much easier to bow at his feet with the others - and bowing a little lower than your neighbour is always gratifying. Ism is a great golden statue in a brilliant temple, and nothing at all to do with herenow. Ism is people dressed as monks chanting and meditating and learning scripture by heart, the Celebrity Monk signing newly-published collections of greetings-card homilies, and nothing to do with what happened in the shade of the tree by the river. Ism is a flattering lifestyle choice for Westerners, with tasteful Zen design touches, a stylishly hip brand in the spiritual supermarket where choice is the consumer’s divine right. Ism is Ists, isting. The idea that we can somehow be Buddha is fatuous - we can’t even be the man next door. There is no-one to become Buddha. And the idea that we should worship him is in flagrant contradiction to his words and wishes, a true heresy, a common ignorance, and the world’s tragedy.

Trying to understand the nature of his awakening, his realisation, or whatever label we choose to paste over it, is inevitably frustrating and futile - you can’t get there from here - but focussing on our own self-consciousness, our own state of affairs, is not only possible but vital. This is why he stressed forgetting the past and not thinking about the future, but focussing on the present moment, bringing our attention back always to herenow. To wake up from our sleep is to dispel the self in this moment, now, not raise it to some fancied higher spiritual plane in the future. There is no shining soul to be nourished and rewarded, no saintly pilgrimage along a rocky road, no cheering crowds on graduation day. I gets nothing out of this. Forget Buddha. Remember what he said.

The inattentive are as good as dead.

I am, then, a dead man walking. From word to word, room to room, trying to remember why I came in. Or now, sleepwalking down a familiar street. The rainy season has come and gone since my journey through the park, leaving the sky cirrus-skimmed, tenuous remnants of the towering palaces of cloud which blazed at sunset, as devoid of interest for Khun Thai as a starry sky; he is not given to celestial wonder, the panoramic. He is comfortable with clutter, the close to hand; the Thai rule of order is - put it there, put something in front of it, and something on top of it - a rule observed in any Thai temple. The Dalinian disorder of the street, slantwise timber and chipped concrete, the rooty scribble of cables across the rooftops, the meterless segue from interior to exterior; everything seems turned inside-out. The big low beds at the road’s edge, of split bamboo or teak lath under a palm-leaf roof, where the families pass the time in front of their houses, are now surrounded by the rice harvest, raked out to dry on blue plastic sheets. I envy their ability to sit comfortably cross-legged, to sleep easily anywhere they can close their eyes, because I am not often at ease, asleep or awake. What did he say again?

I am awake.

The use of the term awake directly implies that normal waking consciousness is a form of sleep, an idea which has intrigued and troubled men with nothing better to do ever since they invented the idle moment. But here, already, we are out of our depth. We may understand the concept, but that very understanding is arrived at in our sleep, in the dream from which he woke. We may agree/disagree/file/trash according to our uniquely discerning and very important personal perspective. File and forget: done and dusted. But our understanding, here as everywhere, is inevitably misunderstanding, our opinion worthless. Our knowledge is nothing more than the limit of our ignorance. In a nice twist of the golden braid, even the English word understand is little understood; its etymology a perplexity of perhapses and probablys. With the understanding that nobody understands understanding, then ...

To sleep is to be cradled in the womb. We are all unborn, yet to live; larvae. Larva means ghost or mask. From the unconscious womb of our mother to the tomb of self-consciousness; from faceless, universal incorporation to gatecrashing the masked dance of death; from nowhere to herenow, we are cradled in the buzzing, rattling cocoon of communication. And nightly falling asleep within this waking dream, the embryonic I vainly struggles to impose a personal perspective on the paranoid geometry of dreams, searching for a landmark in its disarticulated architecture, exchanging meaningless non-sequiturs with familiar strangers. There are no maps of dreamland - we are buffeted and baffled by constant change, stripped of the power to set in order and stabilise; our compass clock is crippled, our grammar garbled - we are all Babylon mad in the Bedlam bed of dreaming. Even in the ceaseless turmoil and upheaval, it is sometimes possible to realise we are dreaming, but that knowledge is part of the dream, dreamed, not in itself a state of wakefulness. “Lucid dreaming” is holding up a picture of a candle in the dark. As a child, I dreamt I found a puppy, and knowing I was dreaming held it next to me, so I’d find it on waking. The selfish spells of holding, owning, counting, naming and timing have no power in a dream. It is our power to wave the magic wand that is the difference between sleeping and waking. Our daily “waking up” is initiation into a magical world where I becomes magus - but our own seductive spell convinces us we are awake, we are lucid; a lie, a damned lie. We are but pictures of ourselves, masks, ghosts in the camera obscura. The cycle of self-consciousness moves from the confusion of sleep into the clear world of day where we can, apparently, put things in order, one after the other. A place where the spells work as they should. A world in its rightful place, as stage for our one-man show, forest for the lone wolf, or blank cheque for our signature. A world we think we understand, a world we think we know, a world where our most lucid dream is that we are awake. We see sleeping and wakefulness as separate nation states, but just as the distinctions of day and night depend entirely on our point of view (as we know, the sun never sets in the sense we know), so there is no sleeping and/or waking in the sense we know, only sleepwaking (sleepily read as sleepwalking) - the I-cycle, the only form of transportation we have.

I pedal the streets, the world in revolution under my feet, and raise the temple spire above the rooftops. The temple - one of Thailand’s richest - is a sugar show, lambent with dragon flames, blazing courtyards violent with blossom, wild-eyed statuary, shadowed arcades and mirror mosaic, pierced metalwork, all a-dazzle in the sun’s blind eye. And the chedi itself, penetrating the blazing empyrean, sensuously curvilinear, a femiphallus, gorgeous with gilding. My belief would have no effect on whatever is inside the crystal phial at its invisibly high tip, a seed-shard of Buddha’s bone or not, so I don’t trouble myself or you with shaping a hollow husk of opinion to display my ignorance. I clockwise an outer courtyard (the inner has white marble paving, uncomfortably hot barefoot), the incensed air troubled by coarse bells, subterranean gongs, and the monk’s alveolar cadence rippling through birdsnest loudspeakers. Tourist attraction and the dhamma’s domain, holy court arrayed as courtesan, clangour and calm, these contradictions split from my ceaseless riving, cutting time and space for my self, occupying no-man’s land; the shabby actor walks the bright stage in a dream. I is writing, I is reading. We share a dream of a book, of a temple in time and space.

Buddha shook himself awake from this shared dream, opening a consciousness as different from our waking state as that is from our sleep. Even the words we use to describe or name his what happened weigh like coins on our closed eyes. Enlightenment is both the most widely used and the least useful. The term commonly means understanding, and we’re all capable of understanding that. Understanding is standing under the wall of our ignorance, admiring its brickwork but unable to see through it. Buddha didn’t come away from the bodhi tree saying, now I understand! now I get it! As he says, I got nothing out of it. His understanding remained untouched by the experience. Understanding can, if the qualities of teaching and learning are present, be passed on from one to another; Buddha never claimed to be able to teach the truth, nor that it is possible to learn it. His experience cannot be transmitted or communicated - it is so far beyond what we can understand it can inspire idolatry or apathy. We throw up our hands in worship or indifference, and both reactions are misguided. Enlightenment becomes a thing in itself, a proud noun, an aspirational brand, a desirable state, something to search for. But the location and nature of this destination is completely unknown to us and unmarked on any map; we can only drive in circles, believing the shining limousine of our soul will eventually be ushered in through the gates of Graceland. We think of enlightenment, if we think of it at all, as a rapturous entering into other-worldly bliss, granted as a reward for learning and wisdom and goodness, but it was a tremendous upheaval, a violence, a fight to the death of the self. The self will not be banished without a struggle. It uses every trick in the book, horrifying, seducing, diverting, metamorphosing, scattering, hiding ... not for nothing is it better known as Satan, the hydra-headed shape-shifting monster of our most shameful nightmares. To best the self is to face down the filthy devil himself, to throw off the slimy coils of the serpent. A bloody battlefield, and yet there is no victory, and no defeat. The victor’s laurel wreath, the hosannahs of the crowd, this is the stuff of self-congratulation, and the self has been dispelled. There is no winner in the battle of the self. Everyman and the tell he tills, the tale he tells, are gone like they were never there, leaving not even the memory of an echo of a shadow of a mist in a dream. I got nothing out of it. And nothing is what Buddha offers. No promises, no prophecies, no deliverance, no miracles, no heavenly reward, no answers; all regularly petitioned for here at the temple. Nobody, it seems, asks for nothing.

Buddha’s own recounting of his what happened is necessarily sketchy. There are those pedants who insist we can only understand his words in the language he spoke, but this is elitist nonsense. Truth is not literal, the property of any one language. Truth can only be alluded to, hinted at, no matter how flexible or refined the language. Language is metaphor, and any one language is a translation of another, as any one word can only be defined by others. Buddha spoke mostly in ideas common to all of us, and avoided using a specialist vocabulary - the nuances of academic interpretation came much later, in the inevitably doomed attempt to nail the oral tradition into an authorised version - the literal truth, the chapter and verse learned by a priesthood in place of experience. What he experienced was beyond words, and his attempts to describe and explain it are different spins on the same ball. He only ever throws one ball, and if we’re lucky we’ll catch it on one spin if not another. It’s a mistake to poke around in his vocabulary as if the truth depended on literary accuracy, to be dissected by the academic scalpel. Because the truth is aliteral we must work at realising it ourselves, not learning it. Nothing is given us on a plate for our consumption, consideration and judgement. The responsibility is ours, not his. This is why we are in such very deep trouble.

My own prayers, bursting from me at the lee shore of my life when prayers were all I had, were answered. The act of prayer in itself has its effect, as all acts do, regardless of the prayed-to (no-one, in my case). The hopeful augury of the fortune-tellers was entirely accurate. I can put it down to coincidence, but the details I was given by people who knew nothing of my life were bewilderingly precise (and me pokerfaced and ungiving throughout). There are connections between this and that not shown on our maps. I stop short of turning this into a belief system; all that rich embroidery gets distracting, the lace and the litany, the incense and the architecture. The temple a frothy confection, a luscious luster, something to wonder at, somewhere to worship; a terrible distraction from what Buddha experienced and wanted us to know. But everything is a distraction from the truth; the clickety-knitting tangle of thinking, the gaudy pantomime of  opinion and emotion, the dusty-rusty toolbox of knowledge, the jangling jewel-box of the senses, grim dreads and idle fantasies, and the insistence of the body’s discomfort or pleasure. My everything. Everything I am stands in the way of the truth, and this is the truth; that I is a lie, a dream we dream together. We are bone-pierced savages, in a rapine fury at the earth and everything upon it, we - not they - are the flesh-tearers, the blood-spilling despoilers, the defilers, the enemy. There is no they. Our house is in disorder, a blood-soaked ruin, but we divert ourselves with spectacle, we gorge on novelty, on insane celebrity, and the tawdry idol we adorn with offerings is the hollow of the self. We are the self-amused, the self-abused, the self-satisfied, a capering pageant of shit-smeared grotesques, and our voices are echoes in the mad-house, talking in our sleep in the dim ward of dream. We dream in name and number, we dream we are apart, we dream we are without, we dream we are different, we dream there is opposition, we dream we are awake. 

The sun’s warmth fading in the dusk like a caress. I have held you here too long, in this spell called That Phanom. We have spun together the whole day’s span, from Eos to Hesperus, the blade of the moon now a slit in saturated amaranthine, star-pinned. The dogs shifting under the trees, coming to their dark senses, the night their own. The day’s work is done. Through the scented labyrinth that skirts the temple, the market sellers packing up their bundled roots, leaves and bark, coins and amulets, fetish and phallus, monkish totems inscribed with magic spells; dry bones to be animated by ownership, fleshed by belief. Under the gloaming gate, a saffron cluster of neophyte monks, robes like melted candlewax, pale faces flickering in the pallor of an open laptop. I pass by in shadow, out into the street where three girls chevron, bare-thighed, astride a pink motor scooter. In a telepathic snap, they turn to smile at me, as one. A smile of unthinking contentment with themselves in the unfolding flower of their lives, their friendship, and my grateful appreciation, a meaningless moment of happiness for its own sake; the treasure of the Far East.

The volcanic man has cooled, the lava has ceased to spit from his riven head, his heart no longer a knot. Walking home to his wife, past smoking foodstands and  shuttering shops, laughter and light spilling from glowing rooms. Walking home past a chatter of girls and a pace of monks, past the corner boys palming a pill with a sidelong glance. Walking home to his wife who sits and watches the river in the moonlight, a flower in the cup of her hand. To our nested bed, and to dreams. 

Click.

Time to wake up.

Tim Earnshaw, That Phanom, 2557

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