Heirs to the Wreckage

I haven’t been posting much recently. Perhaps I’m running out of steam. Or I’m just going through a period of my life where I wonder if I’m sure of anything, or whether I truly have anything to say on a weekly basis. But then again, that’s the paradox of anybody who writes. We all want to be original when everything is derivative. Worse, because originality and authenticity become social goods, commodities. A cute photo of a person isn’t cute in the way we think; cuteness is a state achieved by a particular pursing of the lips, a certain head tilt, a delicate hold of the wine glass. What we truly admire about a cute photo is the supreme bodily discipline and facial control on display. I sometimes think on whether writing is basically the literary form of a cute photo. Are we being authentic, or rather trying to be authentic by fooling our audience with prose? In typical metaphysical fashion, the answer lies somewhere between the two. In any case: “words will only flow once castration—inadequacy—is acknowledged. They will always flow imperfectly. But at least they will flow.” (Ruti, 2018) 

It’s fair to say that I’ve lapsed into the unsavory position of The Cynic. The Cynic is a dismal character composed of toxic self-pity and narcissism. They feel as if they have been wronged by the world, yet they feel uniquely enlightened in their perspective on the world’s wretchedness. “I alone observe that everything is fucked, that you people are fucked, everyone else is beneath me for not seeing the shit sliding down the walls” (a college professor once humorously observed that we literally live with shit in our walls- sewage pipes running from our bathrooms into the ground). Lacanians are fond of saying “les non dupes errant” (those who are not duped err most); this saying describes perfectly the position of the Cynic. In any case, this week I’m going to conduct a little self-analysis, and tell you a story about myself.

Sometime in Mid-October:

            I am sitting across from a man named Chak. Over the past few weeks, he’s become something of a mentor figure to me, as he is the only one who speaks English. We are in Thailand, sitting on wooden floorboards. Never could I have imagined I’d find myself here. 

Chak is an interesting character, he has a very severe facial expression, his face wrinkled and weathered like a topographical map. Yet- he also erupts in childlike laughter at the most spontaneous of times. With the haze of cannabis in the air, I find myself more intently studying the geography of his face rather than listening to his words- but he is telling me something important, something about my future. Smoking has never been my pastime, but here, without being familiar with the language, it’s the most natural way for me to connect with people. He tells me, in a gravelly voice that matches his face, about local knowledge, about human-natural relationships, about how balance can be found between the modern and the traditional. He tells me that no matter what I want to do there is a way to achieve it, to find balance between freedom and constraint, to find a career where I can find balance with the natural world. He tells me all of this, and deep down I feel a twinge of some obscure emotion as I wonder if any of what he’s saying will actually matter to me in the long run. 

You see, despite me coming to Thailand to work with the NGO Chak represents and speaking often of climate change to those around me, I am not sure I actually could identify as an environmentalist. I don’t merely mean that I lack the obvious synergy with nature that Chak has, cultivated by years of experience and local knowledge, I mean that I have never even been a fake environmentalist- preaching greenwashing and “green innovative solutions”. Moreover, while I sought to develop my understanding of nature as a non-anthropocentric concept, I enjoy nature just as much as the average individual and not much more. Climate change is a problem of culture and environmental relations, one of changing our value-system to appreciate trees and animals, but it can never be reduced to just that. For me, the issue is inherently political. So, I cannot help but feel people have missed the mark when I speak of my views to those around me and they wish me luck defending the animals, as if I also do not have their interests in mind. Plus, the tree-defender characterization in our culture is typically played with a patronizing bent, many still regard environmental causes as trivial. No, the genesis of my interest in climate change was that I saw it as the clearest symptomatic expression of everything that was wrong with the world. Climate change is a byproduct of the same pathological process that produces wealth inequality, a politics of polarization, unregulated technological advancement that destabilizes livelihoods. 

Through studying climate change, I hoped to grasp that the problem is not only the anthropocentric domination of nature by cultural and economic means, but also the lack of a political/social project at the center of our economy, the protracted erosion of an informed working class, the persistence of post-colonial world orders, and perhaps even a grievous mystification of the human condition. In short, it is modernity, so caught up in itself that it cannot imagine any other future for its subjects, even as its own future grows more dismal by the day. Through tackling climate change as a political problem, my hope was to have a basis to understand and rectify the other defects of our world. But I do not tell this to Chak, he already knows that my experience with nature is pitifully minimal, he knows I have come here to develop that experience. There are many things I do not tell him, or when I do, I disclose it in far milder form than how it manifests in my mind. I do not disclose to him for instance, that despite the time I have spent living with him, I still feel the need to run to the nearest MiniC once a week and stock up on snacks, despite the locally sourced alternatives he has taught me how to cook. I feel guilty for this, then I feel the deception is the greater sin, and I feel guilty for actively not telling him…I then start feeling guilty for feeling guilty and conclude that the whole affair isn’t worth further reflection. I don’t tell him that I’m still quite inexperienced in the use of a bong, but I see him crack small smirks at my fits of coughing in-between. 

I also do not tell him about my mixed feelings regarding China, despite us speaking extensively about the time I spent there studying. I don’t tell him that despite marveling at their technological progress and the social safety net they’ve built- plus the fact that at this point I trust their judgement on global policy more than I do the American government- I found myself unnerved by how intensely pressurized life is there. You see, in order to arrive at their illiberal socialism, the Chinese have embraced a government-controlled hypercapitalism, accompanied by its inherent problems of surplus production, a massive wealth gap, and little in the way of worker protection. And despite the facetious promises of the conservatives back home, the American economy will never truly stay ahead of China because our government lacks the centralized authority and popular support to push labor to the same brutal extremes as China does. With wise old men, I find it sacrilegious to disturb their train of thought with my juvenile conflicts and confusions, even if I still do it.

Watching the sparks leap from the bowl as Chak solemnly puffs out the last one of the night, I ask him about my career again, about how to find that balance when it seems so difficult to find in the working world. And he simply replies “You can, you can find balance if you spend less time worrying about how to find it and simply look for it. The propaganda makes us worry about focusing on one thing, on advancement and paycheck. There is always room for life.” And with that, I receive the cue that our night has concluded by his packing up the bong and retreating to his room, and I walk out into the night listening to the choral ambiance of the insects. It’s simple…too simple for me, I think. It’s an answer that I would expect from him, nothing revolutionary. But then I realize the difference between a line like that when it’s uttered as a cliché in a TV show, and when it’s delivered with conviction by someone who’s spent decades practicing that mindset. Then I realize just how far the gap is between me and that man. I don’t think I’m at the point where I can be fully sure of myself, maybe it’ll take years of living for me to do so and finally be comfortable with my position in life. Maybe that’s just the nature of being in your 20s. But clearly, there is a way to reckon with the politics and demons of the world while finding that peace (or at least come close to it). Maybe it is as simple as not giving into anxiety and just doing things. I can’t help but feel as if I’m hamstringing an ending here, but that’s all I have for this week.