Meanwhile, just as we thought they’d finished demolishing the building down below, they’ve started on the foundations. They’re not using the jackhammer any more: for some time, the weapon of choice has been a bulldozer with a large drill-bit head attached. It makes a budda-budda sound from 8:30am to about 6pm with a short break for lunch and looks like a stocky metal bird pecking the ground. I have to keep reminding myself that however annoying it is up here, it must be a thousand times worse for the workers down there, who have no ear protection, and for the security guards outside our building. Usually cheerful chaps, they’re starting to look a bit stressed.

Speaking of stress, the other night Stu saw a baby elephant escape its handlers and run off, knocking down an elderly Japanese man as it barged into the traffic. Luckily the cars stopped in time not to hit it. He said the elephant was rocking, a definite sign of stress, but its owners kept it in the busy street with tourists playing their usual stupid game of teasing it with food. I’ve seen a guy do that with a full-grown bull elephant — holding out the bananas and snatching them away again. I’m waiting to see one of these morons get trampled into moron jam. But the old man was just a bystander in the road. A couple of weeks ago there was a heartbreaking picture in the newspaper of a young elephant lying in its blood on a major road, killed by a drunk driver. One of the people with it was also killed. As I’ve probably mentioned, it’s illegal to bring elephants into town — but there’s no elephant pound, so even if the cops could be bothered arresting the handlers, they’d have nowhere to put the animal itself.

On the domestic front, I went back to Chatuchak, and found on closer inspection that the giant anthurium’s leaves were badly torn from having been roughly tied up.  Way to treat a lovely plant. So I didn’t buy it after all. I did find some small shrubs with pale purple trumpet flowers that smelled gorgeously like sandalwood incense, so those are on the list of possibles for the balcony.

In other news, the v-necked t-shirt has finally come to Chatuchak. It used to be that you could only get high round necked tees there, and virtually everywhere else in Bangkok — unflattering, and too hot for this weather. But necklines have finally taken a dip. Most were still high, but maybe 10% were vees or low scoops, so I picked up one with a little bobble-headed skeleton pirate girl on it and one that I can only describe as a Team Shiva rugby shirt in green and black.

You can find some wonderfully offbeat, original designs at Chatuchak. I was particularly taken with the dress, long, grey and severe, with a wraparound front panel on which was appliqued a metre-tall picture of Jesus in loud colours, adorned with beads and sequins — a sort of vestment for the modern crusader, perhaps.

Still, it would be out of keeping with the quiet and recuperative spirit of the evening, so that it seemed not unreasonable to leave it until tomorrow.

While his thoughts ran thus, a young monk came to the open door and knocked. Rengzhe was perturbed by the possibility of a messenger from the Abbot. But it was only Dtap, with the thickly burnt face, coming with a fresh kettle of water. The youth’s hands were as covered in melted scars as his face and he held the kettle awkwardly in twisted fingers. But he set it down on the brazier without mishap and bowed to Rengzhe and Gwynn with the graciousness of a butler in a fine house.

When Dtap had withdrawn, Gwynn reviewed what Rengzhe had told him about that unfortunate young man. The cause of Dtap’s scarring was simple and horrible. When he was a child, his father had thrown burning oil over him. The man had been prone to violence all his life, but for reasons not even he had been able to express had hated his son with an intensity that provoked him, in an episode of rage, to go far beyond the ordinary cruelty of a beating. Rengzhe had used the story to illustrate the doctrine of successive lives, according to which there must have been bad blood between the two souls that had come into existence as the boy and his father.

“And yet,” he had said, “the migration of souls is not at all the most important conclusion one could draw from that man’s behaviour. It’s a possibility—one we happen to believe in—but not an incontrovertible fact. The fact is that two human beings were caught in a storm. Both experienced the consequences of an irrational, unchecked hatred and a single moment of black passion. That,” he said, “is the really interesting thing. Of course, what the man did was terrible. He didn’t experience his share of the consequences for very long—he was hanged a week later. But from the moment that he burned his son until the end of that week, he became a most fascinating person—an utterly shattered vessel. In such disasters, the soul finds its opportunities. The soul of the son, of course, found its opportunity too. He joined our brethren because he wanted to escape from the world; but since we’re all human here, this is still the world.”

After a pause that he filled with a mild introspective smile, he added, “One would think that flexibility must be a good thing, but that isn’t always the case. Inflexible persons are apt to break at least one in a lifetime, and through breaking, change and grow. Flexible persons bend, and do not change very much. Great flexibility is thus a kind of inflexibility.”

They were, at the time, in the little room to which Gwynn was confined, his leg in splints and his head a little muzzy from the dose of poppy wine of which, along with the inescapable and inadequate soup, Dtap had been the bearer that day.

“And which are you?” he had asked his caretaker, who looked rather picturesque seated in front of the window, with the green forest—it was summer then—behind him.

“To tell you the truth,” said Rengzhe, with a humorously self-deprecating look, “I don’t know yet. My life had been rather smooth, you see, until the accident that brought you here. Since it was a terrible thing, and yet here I am, sitting here talking to you quite calmly, I suspect I might be flexible. If that’s the case, I ought to leave this life here, to which storms come only occasionally, and find a more exposed position where I’ll get a real buffeting.” He laughed at himself and said, “I suppose that sounds quite strange to you. It even sounds a little strange to me.”

But Gwynn said, “I wouldn’t dream of finding any man’s thoughts or experiences strange,” and then offered nothing in reply to the curious look his statement earned from the monk.

It was only a fortnight since the violent episode that Rengzhe chose to call “the accident”. All that Gwynn had told Rengzhe about himself was that he had been in Kourbakhary and Rûm and was looking for a beetle. It was a long way from these bland facts to the hallucinatory truths of his past. Perhaps, in any case, from where he stood—lay—now, all the romantic and supernatural madness he remembered actually was, had been, no more than a hallucination; perhaps every event in his life had occurred differently, when this temple was placed at the centre of the world and all else, present and past, was viewed through its draughty windows.

(Newsreader George Putnam, who narrates the ad in marvellous style, later recanted his views, at least on homosexuality, saying that he felt gays were born that way.)

More funny: “A direct ancestor of Monty Python’s renowned “Dead Parrot” sketch has been found in a book of jokes dating back to Greece in the fourth century AD…”

I woke too early, as usual, but got back to sleep again quite easily. Slept 9 hours total, woke up groggy. Tai Chi, breakfast, back to bed. More sleep, despite having drunk coffee.  Woke up groggy again. After more coffee, lapsang souchong and chocolate, I’m finally what I think I could call properly awake, at 11:20.

I think the other three pills will be going in the bin. I worry about melatonin’s untested status — no one knows what long-term consumption might do to you — so I don’t want to just keep eating the stuff, however well it works. I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet, go to the doc and get a prescription for real sleeping pills.

Oh, and I’ve gained back the 2kg I lost after I had my tooth out and when I was walking around looking for flats. 2kg doesn’t sound like much, but on someone my height it actually makes a visible difference. I look a bit soft. Muscle tone that was showing last week is suddenly hiding. I don’t seem able to make myself work on the writing and be disciplined about exercise and diet. When I push myself to stay in shape, I get tired and my brain doesn’t want to work. But it must be possible to do both — I mean, Haruki Murakami runs marathons.

Anyway, the caffeine is kicking in properly, and I am now feeling fucking perky, so back to work while it lasts…

Rengzhe lived in a small and sparsely furnished room on the second floor of the monks’ living hall, which took up one side of a quadrangle. Although he was reasonably senior in the temple hierarchy, there was no personal luxury conferred by rank. Even the Abbot had to make to with a simple cell for his quarters. Rengzhe’s room had a single window, shuttered against the night, which had produced a wind to rattle the shutter. A lamp burned on top of the cupboard in which the monk’s possessions were kept, including the kettle and the plain china cups. Gwynn and Rengzhe sat on the floor with a cotton-backed bamboo mat laid down between them, the monk cross-legged, the other with his good leg folded in front of him and the injured one stretched out.

Rengzhe had watched his guest eat a bowl of yam soup, while he abstained from food himself, taking only tea and water. He had undertaken to fast while he built the mandala, and it was a rule that a fast could be broken in the morning only.

“May I ask,” inquired the monk in a conversational tone after pouring their third cups of tea, “whether you feel any effects from the experience of watching the ritual?”

Gwynn gave the question honest thought for several moments. He wondered if he did feel anything. It seemed to him that he didn’t, so he said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Rengzhe nodded, having expected an answer in the negative. “Well,” he suggested, “perhaps you’ll feel something later on.” To his surprise, Gwynn seemed to agree.

“The affects of art aren’t always immediately comprehensible,” the white foreigner said, smiling in a way that suggested he was thinking about something of private interest.

“Was that diplomacy?” asked the monk, with a slight crinkle of his eyes in an otherwise poker-straight face.

“I’m never diplomatic with you, Rengzhe. I can’t be bothered. You should know that by now.”

“Yes, I should,” the monk admitted. “Thank you, by the way. It isn’t necessary to have a watcher, but it’s better. The universe has one experience through the creator’s eyes, another through the watcher’s.”

Gwynn only said, “I see,” his pale green eyes holding whatever thoughts were behind them without spilling a drop. He was, in fact, trying not to think, and was having reasonable success in that endeavour. Since certain events that had taken place in a certain city approximately a year ago, not thinking was a skill he had found to be worth practising in view of its occasional, but, on those occasions, often strong, benefit to the sanity he hoped to hang on to for the rest of his life—however long that always doubtful extension of time might be.

“At any rate,” Rengzhe said, “I thought you might appreciate a different kind of boredom.”

“Well, they do say a change is as good as a holiday.”

“Speaking of change—for the better, I hope—how’s the leg today?”

“Not too bad.” Gwynn looked down at his outstretched limb, patting it as if it were a dog. “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair soon. Figuratively speaking.”

“There’s no need to be in a hurry, unless some business of your own presses you,” the monk said mildly.

“Well, the man who sent me off looking for that beetle would like to see it, I’m sure.”

Rengzhe nodded absently, so that it was now Gwynn’s turn to wonder what was going through the monk’s mind. The wind chose that moment to throw itself against the shutter, reminding Gwynn—as if he needed it—that winter would arrive in no long time. The leg was good enough for riding, but it wouldn’t be completely healed before the mountains were covered in snow. To wait out the winter in the temple would be prudent, but on the other hand there was his sanity… And there was Mrs Curzon, of whom he would have no news until he returned to the wider world.

Rengzhe, for his part, was thinking about the Abbot’s inquiry of a week ago. He had equivocated then, but the Abbot would certainly ask again. Eventually he would ask directly, if Rengzhe did not get around to asking their guest—“the man you saved”, the Abbot had said, in an equivocation of his own. It was a simple enough request, but Rengzhe felt entirely uncomfortable about making it—so uncomfortable that he wondered whether a desire not to be importunate was really the only thing stopping him from asking.

Pad used: Whisper Wings regular.
# of above already overflowed this month: 3

I coloured some water with grape juice and used a dessert spoon, since I don’t have a tablespoon. There are 1.25 dessert spoons to the tablespoon. The pad absorbed 10 dessert spoons before it overflowed. That’s 8 tablespoons.

So, if the 8 tbsp estimate were correct, the average woman could get through the average period on one average pad.

HA…HAHAH…HAHAHAHA… HAHA…HA… (insert infinite loop here)

Back home, I didn’t have this problem because I used tampons all the time, even at night. But the choice of tampons here is very limited, and the ones available tend to fluff, which seems unhygienic. I also worry about using them for hours on end in the tropics, since it’s easier to catch infections in the heat and humidity here, so I’m too chicken to use them at night. As for overnight pads, they feel like fucking diapers — I don’t see why any grown woman should have to wear such a thing.

Thais apparently use menstrual cups, which are rubber containers you shove up there, and…yeah. I think I’d need Lolrus’s bukkit.

On the upside, I hardly had any downswings in mood this month. But I was busy just before my period, there was the good news of finding the new flat, and I ate chocolate, so all of that might have contributed.

Anyway, I can has Nobel prize for biology now?

In the afternoon I went to Chatuchak market to look for plants and escape the construction noise. I was under strict instructions from milord not to actually buy anything — which I obeyed, even when I found a giant anthurium for 150 bt ($4) –not quite as big as the one in the picture, but still very impressive. Apparently you can keep these charming monsters indoors. Stu said I actually could have bought it — he was only going to be displeased if I came home with 1000 bt worth of orchids that would all die before we move because we have no balcony to put them on here. I think he sometimes worries excessively about me getting carried away by some grandiose unreasonable passion. Why I didn’t just get it and claim that it had followed me home, I don’t know. Now I’ll have to go back on Wednesday — I want that plant. I think I’ll make it the centrepiece of the interior decor.

For the balcony, I’m going to try to get potted shrubs that flower at different times of the year, so that I can rotate them, bringing them indoors when they’re in flower. I’m on the lookout for fragrant things — so far I’ve found gardenias, frangipani and what I think might be ylang-ylang. They’re all in flower now, though, so I’ll have to do some reasearch to find things that bloom at other times. I’ve seen wonderful fragrant trumpet-flowers in gardens here, but not at Chatuchak or the other plant shop I found. As they overhang walls in profusion, I’m tempted to surreptitiously take a cutting, stick it in a pot and see if it grows. I also intend to buy a large pitcher plant, which I know I can get at Chatuchak — hopefully it will deal with the slight cockroach problem we have in this building.

I admit I’m getting rather a nesting instinct about this place. It will be our first ever home with a dining table, the first with enough storage space to put most bits and bobs away in cupboards, and, after two flats without balconies, a welcome return to balconied life. Having settled on it, I really want to appreciate it, put pictures up, buy cushions and weird green things, and make it a real home.
(Note: nesting doesn’t mean kids. Just want to clarify that.)

(Continuing from here.)

The statue of gilded brass, many-armed and crowned with a headpiece of several tiers, sat coldly frowning upon a throne under a projecting canopy, with the altar under its feet. Even Gwynn had to admit that it gave off an impression of supernatural life. Some masterful hand had directed the making of its features into that sour expression of eternal disapproval. Several dozen candles surrounded it, flickering in the drafty wooden room, the envelope of restless light donating a further layer of illusory vitality to the figure within.

He felt he had the idol’s measure. A shady past, acts of terror, children snatched in the night by those supernumerary arms, libations of blood. Now roped into riding shotgun for a pittance of prayer, that it might slay the internal enemies of the soul, it was presumably waiting for the cosmic stage machinery to roll the good old days around again. It could have chosen to wait, he thought, with a better grace.

He prepared to get off the couch by first cautiously bending and straightening his right leg a few times, working the limb back and forth until the muscles began to feel somewhat flexible. The brace was under the couch. Reaching down, he found it and strapped it around his knee. With the joint thus supported, he stood, testing his weight on it. Perhaps it was only his natural optimism talking, but he thought it felt better than yesterday. It was undeniably improving. As of last week he had been walking without a stick—this development having brought on the fit of goodwill in which he had agreed to spend all day watching Rengzhe finish the mandala.

The window had no glass, only a decorative wooden grille with floral bosses at the intersections of the bars. The night air passing through from the wooded valley was damp and cold. Gwynn turned up and fastened the collar of his quilted cotton tunic. The slate-blue garment, embroidered with stylised plants and folkloric animals, was a souvenir of his eastern travels. He wore it with a wide red fur-lined belt and grey corduroy leggings that were now much too loose, and not only around the shrunken muscles of the still-healing leg: he had become gaunt on the meatless, inadequate diet of the monks.

To be cold again was still a strange novelty after his years in the desert and the tropics—and this was hardly real cold. It was only the middle of the tenth month. The moonlight out the window showed a skyline of pines reaching into a dark mist, while a lantern under the temple eaves shone on the reddening foliage of a mulberry tree on the edge of the little courtyard.

How long this old part of the world would have to wait for the young world to pay it a visit was anyone’s guess. Tucked away in remote mountain peaks, it was a railroad engineer’s nightmare. Unless there was something very valuable in these hills, mechanised transport might be a long time coming. There was no gas lighting or heating here, no running water, no heavy industry. There was nothing to hear tonight but the drone of a few voices chanting in a hall, the wind in the trees, a fox barking; the kind of night, it had to be said, full of nature’s beauty, but not lacking the human touch, that he had hoped to enjoy when he had set off into these mountains under the excuse of hunting a beetle.

He was now thoroughly familiar with such nights. However, familiarity had not bred contempt—not even boredom had done that—and he had, after all, found the beetle. Still, he felt, the opportunity to see the coming winter beauty of the peaks might be passed up in the name of avoiding the further boredom and likely discomforts of a snowed-in month or two.

He turned from the window back to look at Rengzhe. The monk had picked up the tray on which were the pots of sand and tiny funnels for pouring the colours, and was returning it to a cupboard behind a sliding panel in the wall, after which he stood ready to go, a spot of moonlight gleaming on his shaven head. He was otherwise a dark figure in bark-brown robes, short and slight in stature. He claimed to be forty-five, but looked ten years younger. If he was tired, he didn’t show it.

“What,” Gwynn asked, determined to sound livelier than he felt, “are you going to do with the sand?”

Rengzhe turned towards the altar. “It will stay there until morning,” he replied. “If there had been a congregation, half would have been distributed to the people and half poured into our stream to give it to the earth. Since there’s no congregation here, the earth will receive it all tomorrow.”

“It must be sad, not to have a congregation.”

“If sadness is observed from outside, one feels tender towards it. It’s like a bird that has fallen out of the nest. Then compassion supersedes sadness. Of course,” the monk added, looking up at Gwynn with mild mischief, “since you were here, I could give half of it to you.”

“And I could keep it in a dish and use it as an ashtray.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you did,” Rengzhe stated lightly, feeling nothing but warmth towards his irregular and reluctant student, whose sole concession to the culture of the monastery had been to agree not to carry weapons openly indoors. What a wonderful opportunity for practising acceptance this foreigner had given him, when all was said and done.

“Let the earth have it,” Gwynn replied. His gaze travelled down to the table, now sitting bare in the middle of the floor, an empty stage. Rengzhe had told him that the mandala represented the world and that its purpose was to strengthen benevolent forces that had lost vitality in the course of their everlasting battle with evil.

The monk nodded. “And let us have tea,” he said, than which no suggestion Gwynn could have found more acceptable.

***

(It’s no use — trivial though this plot bunny is, it wants to get written. This is where I’ll have to leave it for now, as I should be getting on with other things.I don’t know whether there’s much point for readers in my posting these bits and pieces, but it’s good for me when I get all extroverted.)

Sweeping with the flat of his hand in a spiral that began in the centre of the mandala and moved out to the edge, the monk erased the mandala on the low table before him. With that deliberate and measured motion, geometrical representations of spiritual forces, laid out like an ambitious decorated cake, had their physical form removed, and the painstaking efforts of two days were rendered into a mound of coloured sand which the monk swept into a round vessel of ornamented bronze which the monk placed on the altar and prayed over, his hands pressed together, for several minutes. At the conclusion of the prayer, he clapped his hands once, then took three paces back from the altar and its towering idol, bowed, and clapped his hands again. Finally, he turned around, looking towards the foreigner who lay on a couch under the dark window.

At the first clap, Gwynn had felt the sense of being awakened from a sleep he knew he had not had. He had watched the creation of the mandala since morning, becoming mesmerised by ritual and boredom, while increasing hunger and thirst had kept him from dozing off. He would have liked to say that this was the entire content of his experience, but eventually a change had occurred, as if a drug had been slipped to him, and he had felt time falling into eternity like rain into the sea. Now the shutters of time closed with a bang over the illusion of eternity. He was awake, and a monk was looking at him. Soft brown eyes went with the dark, flat, charitable face. His serenity appeared to be a complete and radiant thing, like the full moon. However, as the man himself would have said, the full moon was a fine example of a transient state.

Gwynn spoke first, after licking his dry lips. He said, “Is that how you hope to destroy yourself, Rengzhe?”

The monk laughed aloud and made a self-deprecating gesture, and immediately it was as if a monkey, launching itself from one branch to another, had jumped in front of the shining moon. “Oh, I’m not that arrogant. They say it’s possible to annihilate the illusion of oneself in an instant, but I’m a plodder, so I certainly won’t destroy myself in this lifetime.”

“There’s always the chance of an accident,” Gwynn returned offhand, at which Rengzhe beamed and laughed again. Gwynn had learned that the monk took most things  seriously and lightly at the same time, and the more seriously he took them, the more lightly he took them as well.

The idol fell outside the category of most things. Although Rengzhe would admit that it was as much an illusion as all else in all the worlds, Gwynn had not been able to manoeuvre him into laughing at it.