The other day I took a new student for his first lesson, since the teacher he was supposed to have was away. Nice, laid back Japanese guy, has a small construction and repair company in Bangkok, wants to improve his English in order to expand his business into the farang community. We start with some basic conversation patterns, common questions he’s likely to be asked in Bangkok, and things specific to his business. Somehow, the focus of the lesson swings around to what one says if one burps or farts in public, and, more esoterically, what to say if someone else does one of those things and excuses themselves. Should you, he asks, say “Not at all?”

I’m stumped. I think silence is best, I say hestitantly. Pretend you didn’t hear either the eruption of wind or the apology. But, I add, handballing without shame, he should ask his other teacher, who is a man, and may have a deeper perspective on public belching and farting in Western culture.

At the end of the class, the student compliments me on my Japanese. I say that I’m really not very good. He says, “But you know gepu (burp), and onara (fart) …”
But aren’t those amongst the first words anyone learning a foreign language looks up in the dictionary, right after “fuck”, “shit”, “sex”, “oral sex” and “nipple”?

Yesterday, when I was out looking for a new apartment, I came to  a street market with food and clothing stalls. A little girl was by herself at a table in the market. On the table were several old Barbies, in homemade-looking gowns made of coloured netting and various shiny stuffs, some missing limbs, one missing a head. She didn’t seem to be playing with the Barbies. Was she selling them? If she wasn’t selling them, why wasn’t she in school? It was a surreal image.

And because there are not enough male strippers on ice:
Sex Bomb

So, I had this wild idea that when I’ve finished that ridiculous doujinshi it might be cool to try something like a comic adaptation of The Art of Dying. Which would mean drawing interiors, streetscapes, a horse and carriage… but the clothes, man, the clothes are so nice. It tempts me. I’m somewhat encouraged by how the characters came out in this first attempt at sketching them.

The Star — a mermaid dives in the ocean, finds a rusty tin star in a treasure chest. She polishes it up and puts it on. It’s a sheriff’s star. She takes a horse from the waves — in Greek myth, horses came from the sea — and rides off onto land. She doesn’t have a gun, only a lasso, with which she catches cows.

The Star card, from what I’ve read about it, refers to destiny and one’s true will. I think the image of the sheriff’s star raises the issue of duty. It isn’t just fun to do what really lights your candle and expresses your most authentic self. It can be a lot of hard work, you have to face discouragements and people who don’t like or don’t understand what you do — and if what you do is from the core of your being — whatever that core is at this point in your life — then disapproval can feel very personal. But if there’s something you think you can do that’s unusual, or that you think is unique to you, then you kind of have a duty to do it. Nature keeps rolling the dice, and sometimes she comes up with cool stuff. She rolled the dice with you, too, and if you don’t show your unique colours, then Nature (and culture) wasted a chance that might not come again.

Despite being a “sheriff”, the mermaid is acting more like a cowboy; not going after criminals, but hooking useful creatures — cows — which I would identify as opportunities. I would interpret this as a reminder that following one’s true will requires both effort and an eye for the openings of chance. You need to “lasso” the right opportunities and not go after other opportunities that may still benefit you but ultimately distract you and take you off on a less optimal path.

Plants…pant…pants…

A couple of days ago I was in the park, walking down to the fountain to wash my face after a run, when a green insect fell out of a tall tree and landed at my feet. At first I thought it was a cicada, but its head was the wrong shape, so, being no kind of entomologist, I’ll just have to call it a beetle. Bullet shaped, a couple of inches long, iridescent emerald green, a posh-looking creature indeed — and dying, apparently. Its legs twitched and folded across its abdomen, and then it lay still. Thinking the impact had killed it, I scooped it onto a leaf and took it back to the walled area where I had left my water and sword bag. I spent some time looking at it. The plates of its carapace were like a perfect, minute suit of armour, the green shading to copper on each one. Daubs of orange, looking for all the world as if they were applied with a brush, decorated the join between its belly and wing case.

I did my tai chi, going back to admire my insect between routines. Gorgeous though it was, and much as I was looking forward to photographing it at home, I still felt a bit leery of it. I’m not very good with insects as a rule. Their automatism gives me the shivers. Oddly, marine invertebrates don’t upset me at all, perhaps because like most people the first of their kind that I met were prawns in stir fry, and it’s hard to be scared of your food. But land insects are another matter. The squashy ones nauseate me — I can’t cope with grubs and caterpillars at all — but nearly all insects can make me feel uncomfortable. As to beetles, they’re the insects with which I get along best — I’m even enthusiastic about them, when they’re alive — but when they’re dead and lying upside down they start to look unpleasantly totemic. Just as their life was a somewhat ambiguous thing, their dead state is also ambiguous. Insects are capable of remarkable transitions between states of life, death and dormancy. There’s something of the undead about them. With its legs folded, my green beetle looked like a six-limbed knight on a tombstone, or a metallic mummy — the sort of corpse that might very well get up and walk in the night.

So that when my little green knight started waving his little green legs and frantically excreting little bright green pellets from his pointed rear end, I wasn’t entirely surprised. He dislodged himself from the leaf, fell off the wall and landed on my bag, where he did some more green poo. Now right way up, he — as a knight, the beetle was now “he” in my mind — stood still for a little while, displaying a wing case the shape of a long pointed shield, with one orange daub on either shoulder. Then he did a little tap dance with his four front legs, as if he were a Monty Python knight getting ready for a chorus scene, and after this preparation launched himself, blurringly fast, into the air. He settled in another tree. Hopefully he hung on a bit more carefully this time.

I wonder sometimes how much inspiration early humans took from animals. Did we acquire the idea of armour from beetles, weaving from birds, trap-making (and lace making) from spiders? Would we have thought of suction cups if octopuses didn’t have them? Would we have thought of tap dancing if beetles didn’t…?

Going by what I was able to find online, I think it was this beetle from the buprestidae family, known as jewel beetles or metallic woodboring beetles.

More tarot cards.

Temperance — I see two children on a seesaw in a playground. To make a seesaw work takes cooperation and give and take. This seems a pretty straightforward interpretation of the card in regard to personal relations — a caution against putting others down, trying to hog the limelight, or letting/making someone else do all the work. None of which I think I habitually do, but they are things I worry about, and I certainly feel bad if I catch myself doing any of them, so perhaps it’s just my subconscious bringing up familiar concerns. It might also be about balancing the different parts of the personality — the part that wants to achieve things and the part that wants to bludge, say — and getting them to work/play nicely together.

The Tower — well, this was strange. I’m inside the tower, which is half ruined, though the stair is still climbable. This relates to something I’m writing at the moment, so perhaps it just overwrote the imagery. At the top, there’s nowhere else to go; unless you jump. Jumping results in flying. I think this is my optimism talking. However, perhaps it makes some sort of sense. The tower is non-functional; it didn’t last, it didn’t reach heaven, it might have been struck by lightning like the tower in the usual tarot picture. It might represent a way of doing things that doesn’t work anymore, or never worked in the first place. Standing on that failure, you try something else — maybe something quite radical. Einstein said the definition of [edit] insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I think this imagery suggests trying something different, even if it’s scary, uncomfortable or oddball. At worst, you’ll make different mistakes and accumulate some new data (like what the ground feels like at terminal velocity, heh.)

For a while I’ve been spending a short time every week or so with the tarot trumps, doing a visualisation for each one, just to see what my mind makes of these archetypes. I’m anything but a tarot scholar and I haven’t tried to become one for the purposes of this exercise. The idea is to do this without preconceptions, just to see where my reactions fall naturally. Even when I do know something about a card’s traditional interpretation, I often come up with something else. Two I did recently were Death and the Devil.

Death — image of a bull, in white, red and ochre on a black ground, like a cave painting, rearing upright. His body is painted with various markings, including several “bullseye” rings of concentric circles. I realise that the other markings designate the cuts of beef that a butcher must know. He is marked for death. By his tragic expression, he knows it. The message seems to be of unavoidable fate and the individual’s protest in the face of it.

This card is often read as an indicator of change and transformation. One might read the marked bull as symbolising particularly the inevitability of change and the futility of protesting it. But I think the meaning here is a little sterner: the inevitability of real death. Death is the shadow over life, and one day the shadow will touch you. So, with that in mind, how will you conduct your life? It might also refer to the inevitability, during life’s course, of endings, failures, disappointments, wounds, mistakes that cannot be rectified and losses that cannot be recouped. The bull feels tragic and he wants to resist all this. He knows his own magnificence and it seems unfair to him that all his strength should be useless. Death is the price of life: necessary for the species, unfair to each individual. Perhaps unfairness is also a message here. What will you do when life pours a thoroughly undeserved shower of shit on you?

The Devil — image of a tiger wearing a jade-green silk robe and emerald rings. He is seated at a regal desk, writing a letter. Green is the colour of envy. Pride is the traditional sin of Lucifer, but here the sin must be envy, which comes from dissatisfaction. The tiger is splendid, but he isn’t satisfied. He is writing a letter to God. He says with a self-mocking air that it is a love letter. Whether he wants to be loved the best by God or to become God, he is not sure, or will not tell. Perhaps he does not distinguish between the two. One thing is for certain: nothing but the ultimate will do. Nothing less is good enough. I have always had sympathy for the devil, so that instead of wanting to chide him I find myself wishing him well. To say that there is something tender and touching here, a heart kicking in human pain, sounds soppy — but there it is. We all know what shame and disappointment feel like. Those emotions, at an existential level, seem to be at the root of his troubles. I have a hunch that if he were to take off his rings and robe and leave his desk, he might have more luck in his quest. He says I am missing the point. He wants to succeed as he is, to be loved as he is, vulgar tyrant though he may be.

This one is harder to interpret. If I had to take a stab at it, I would say that it is about identifying with our negative emotions and seeing them as part of our self, which we might call foolish behaviour; however, it is very close to the idea of asking to be loved for exactly and entirely who we are. Pema Chodron (American Tibetan Buddhist nun) points out that our best is often mixed up inextricably with our worst — think of Antony and Cleopatra, magnificent in their faults. A tricky one, as you would expect the Devil to be.

So, I thought it would be a challenge to draw a lot of plants. And it was!

I tried drawing Gwynn with his hair brushed back like Bancoran’s, but that meant his eyes had to show, and somehow I’ve grown attached to the version where his hair covers them. Or maybe I just suck at drawing eyes and should practice more.

Looking at the Rev on this page, I seem drawn — no pun intended — towards eyeless representations. Even Raule has her eyes shut. Perhaps they will all end up in Gaza.

Okay, he deserves better than this. But I was in the mood. To scribble. So there.
(He isn’t meant to look like Geoffrey Rush, in case you’re wondering whether I tried and really, really failed. I guess he looks like Gwynn at 50. But I had to put in the pigtails, because no opportunity to draw a man in pigtails should be missed.)

Oh, and he was meant to be holding a riding crop and biting the end, but I forgot to draw that — obviously my subconscious hold my hand it would be too difficult.

You, the Living (Du Levande) is a new film by Swedish director Roy Andersson. I read the review because one of the characters looks like Gwynn. It sounds interesting, if you’re like me and you enjoy somewhat surreal films, and looks beautiful — the colours are all softened and the whole thing seems dreamy in a Terry Gilliam-ish way. Here’s the trailer (in Swedish). And, with English subtitles, the scene with Gwynn guy (a girl dreams she marries a rock star). Love that pearly guitar. Another subtitled sequence with a song about a motorbike.

Gwynn guy is actually Cat Casino (aka Eric Bäckman), who plays guitar in metal band Deathstars. Here he is with fellow bandmember, Whiplasher Bernadotte (best monikers ever, no?). I’ve never really been the shipping kind, but it isn’t too late to start, is it? They claim not to be gay, just really into their feminine sides.
(P.S. He is 20. I am old enough to be his mother. Oh Christ noes! D=}* << old-lady hat with flower. Mr Bernadotte — wonder if they call him Pip for short? — is a lot closer to my age, and lists his favourite bands as “Johnny Cash, Darkthrone etc.” Johnny Cash. Man’s got class!)