If you spend enough time in traffic jams in Bangkok you realise that the road isn't necessarily long, simply impassable, and yet, at the same time, that life is quite short. I've been thinking, in the back of taxis, about life and about building up a bit of a personal philosophy. I think it will form around the ideas of Michel de Montaigne who, in 1580, seemed to have a lot of things worked out. I think he died at about 45 which was a good long life in those days; so I have easily outlived him already.
I was thinking that we are born into all this: family, traditions, races, religions, nations, rights, obligations, ideologies, the times, even personality, etc without really having much of a say. We were born simply because our parents had sex. That was that and this is us. The rest: the rights and wrongs of societies, of human endeavour, of, well, everything as it is, is all totally arbitrary and based on the fact that people had sex.
If one is born into a Catholic system, the idea was that people had sex to somehow form a special marriage with God. I expect islam is much the same. Buddhism is a bit whackier but less torturous but all three of these, ahum, Great Religions do seem intent on controlling sex so that it complies with someone's righteous vision. The Real Terrorist is Uncontrolled, Unmanipulated Sex between adult consensual people who really like it; who, for a time, find themselves in each other's stream of being.
I hate the word 'appropriate'. It is used so often now and not only in talk, speeches, schools etc but also within the self-chat of a person. 'Appropriate' is simply the new 'god-fearing righteousness' of a secular world.
I'm very fond of the secular world and I think all churches, synagogues and mosques and temples and stupas would make great coffee-shop/book stores/bars (with very luxurious smoking areas) and the world would be far better if they were; but at the same time I think we need to get rid of the word 'appropriate'. Why? Because it's just another attempt at control of the human mind and heart, and is based upon the exact same illusion as the religions and the political ideologies that still run rampant around here there and everywhere.
Human life is not 'appropriate', nor is it righteous, moral or full of god-granted grace; it's just part of this flow, for now. This flow is just what Michel de Montaigne noted it as being in 1580.
The thing that was so remarkable about Monsieur de Montaigne was that he was a strong intellectual pillar of French Catholicism in the Renaissance yet he thought and wrote with a remarkably open mind. Some would say a modern, eclectic mind free of bullshit and pretty well honed the tool that is functionally atheistic Existentialism. His most famous question "How do I know?" When I think of Michel de Montaigne I picture him as the stuck-up bright French Prince that he most certainly was in paintings of him but I also see him, in the words of the songwriter Roy Harper, as 'a white dove, with a hawk's head, and an Open Mind before me'. I particularly like Montaigne because he was the first person to formally write anything Against Human Torture...and in 1580 when torture was all the rage and was seen as both righteous, godly, and appropriate. Just like Guantanamo Bay.
I don't really think generations learn much at all, ever. There's no 'progress'. I think it's all new with every life, with every flow. A new Hitler or Pol Pot etc is always at the gate and often loved and believed in. He/She is often inside the gate and sometimes in the lounge room, and is just as likely to be cooking in your kitchen or buying you dinner from time to time. Little Hitler takes his lunch to school in the same kind of brown bag that we all do. We just have advances in gadgets and weapons, but that's it. Apart from that, we don't learn anything that can be passed on except perhaps the capacity to be curious and to sometimes love, blinking from our little well at the sky.
This is my own thinking as best as I can make it out, from time spent in taxis in massive traffic jams in Bangkok where no one honks their horn, where ambulances can't possibly get through, where no one can be on time, where no one gets too angry or worried simply because...it doesn't matter. Mai pen rai, krab. Sabai sabai.
No comments:
Post a Comment