Storm
clouds over Bangkok
Bangkok Love Letter
VOICE of the BEAST
(Why I’m Not Worried
Really)
19 September 2016, Bangkok
Dear Foreign Friend,
There’ve
been many weddings & other tribal gatherings this September; the stars must
be propitious for attempting lifelong unions.
Reconciliation meanwhile is
nowhere in sight. Weddings force us to mingle with varied chatty crowds. From
such brief psychic skimming of these light and some not so light (or desperate
avoidance of real) conversations; from riding the skytrain, from street
vendors, the motorbike taxi guys up the road, and weddings, it’s possible to
get a more accurate reading of the city’s emotional state than can be gleaned
from the strangely flat, 2D selfie reality contained within a tiny rectangular
screen. You’re actually a part of everybody & everything, not merely
observing & commenting from afar.
People are waiting. As Mor’s
cartoon of a plunging stock market threatened by a thundercloud named Rumour
shows, there is a lull in the air as the storm appears to pause, gathering its
strength for the coming blow-out. The sky is full of phantasms; spectacular
late monsoon clouds stack up, Godzilla-like.
Mor’s cartoon, Bangkok Post, 13 Sept 2016
As
a caveman & soundmixer (current occupation), my ear is finely tuned to hear
the slightest shade of a giggle or a sigh, as I sit all day on a ratty swivel
chair cleaning up sound on ‘Bangkok Joyride 2: Shutdown Bangkok’. The
main character’s voice in this film is composed of an orchestra of thousands,
occasionally millions, of protesters each with a child’s noise-maker of choice:
the hand-shaped clapper with its midget rattlesnakes or dry descending locusts
sounds; the ear-splitting whistles of all sizes, each one sending the sound
level into the hot zone; each clap & clatter, each shout & laughter
requiring its own personal attention. One is forced to be very meticulous.
Voice of Outrage
There is always the lazy way, of
course. You could just pull the whole sound line down to its lowest common
denominator. But then all the texture, all individuality contained therein, is
lost. You’d only hear the screech of those infernal whistles, loud cheering and
applause. Doing it with love is tedious but the end result is clean &
satisfying. Sudden crystalline sentences leap out from the heaving mass of
humanity, against the background wash of a curious buzzing, excited and
insectile, like angry bees or the growly bass of hornets bursting from a hive.
This, literally, is the Voice of
the People, I soon realised. The faceless silent mass propelled from inertia
into an irresistible riptide; anonymous millions morphing into one
awe-inspiring entity, the Beast, which, once aroused, cannot be denied.
Immersed in its voice day after day, week after week, I become aware that
nothing & nobody can resist the Beast, now silent but unquiet. The Beast
has a roar unlike anything you’ve ever heard.
Voice of the Beast
‘The
Beast’ is not meant here as a derogatory term, as in ‘beastly’ or ‘bestial’.
I’m trying to describe the tremendous majesty of the voice I’m hearing &
distilling on my timeline. I want to conjure up an entity so huge, so majestic
that, as it passes by, the whole world bows down like wheat before the wind.
Individual voices also come with
their own distinct challenges. Dem MP
Julin Laksanavisit is the easiest. You can see why he’s so effective. His voice
rarely goes into the red. Former PM Abhisit Vejjajiva ought to be easy but his
habit of rocking, moving away from the microphone & then closing back in
for the kill, poses problems. Yingluck is the most labour-intensive of them
all, with an unpredictable pattern of sudden squeaks, nervous slips, odd pauses
& movie queen sighs. Every syllable
needs attention. Of course the fact that I never interviewed any of them but
got all this from TV news means an extra layer of a murky hiss to be cleaned.
(Whatever I may feel about what
she did as Prime Minister, as a filmmaker I have to fall in love with her.
Squeaky voice & lack of fluency aside, there’s no question that Yingluck
Shinawatra is a scene-stealing movie star, with her classic Northern Girl looks
& sensual charisma. That beautiful face, so pale, so stricken, a damsel in
distress. It is an image to intoxicate and stun. It has the same power to
entrance as that poster of Farrah Fawcette or Marilyn holding down her white
skirt with difficulty against a stiff wind from the NY subway. What? Are we
so heartless? We’re really going to make her pay for all that corrupted rice,
seriously?)
Yingluck’s voice, an exotic soundscape
Last Sunday I went to
the Italian Film Festival to see Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘Youth’. How very
poignant to hear Michael Caine’s dialogue with the Queen’s Emissary which opens
the film, right after the whole audience had just stood up for the Royal
Anthem, which (instead of the usual footage of the king working hard) at this
cinema is accompanied by portraits of the King in various artists’ studios,
redolent with nostalgia for a time already past.
After refusing to perform a
concert for the Queen of England, the Michael Caine character, a composer, says
he has nothing against the Queen, in fact “I find monarchy endearing.” Queen’s Messenger: “How so?” MC: “Because it
is so vulnerable.” QM: “In what way?” MC: “One person dies and everything
changes.”
People want the King to live
forever. But the King is a man. The monarchy, the throne, on the other hand, is
an institution that represents our collective soul, the core of the national
family. People desperately want him to live forever because they think that he
alone is the core, when in fact we, all of us, our collective dreaming, our
morphic field, form the essence and sanctity of the national soul, which does
not die with one man, however beloved. And being sacred, the national soul can
only be embodied by virtue.
In Thailand—in Siam—when we talk
of soul and spirits, it’s not in idle speculation. They are as real as you and
me, in fact more real, since they endure after we’re gone. They are to be
feared, as the recent bone-chilling news story of the bamboo-shoot picker
reminds us, as if we need any reminding.
About 2 weeks ago in Chonburi, a
middle-aged woman went into a sacred forest to cut bamboo-shoots with several
other women. Against their warning that it was taboo, she peed in the forest.
As they headed home at the end of the day, she fell behind without anyone
noticing. They returned to find her but she had vanished.
That night hundreds of miles away
in her home town of Supanburi, she ‘entered her niece’s dream’ to say she (the aunt)
had offended the jungle spirits who sent a snake to kill her. She is lying
there in plain view but nobody can see the corpse as the spirits have ‘veiled
the sight from man.’ Her niece must travel to this forest in Chonburi &
perform a ceremony to beg the spirits’ forgiveness. The niece unquestioningly followed
the dreamed instructions, and the aunt’s dead body was soon discovered, with
puncture wounds indicating that she had been bitten by a snake with very large
fangs. This is why all experienced Thai hikers (including myself) always raise
our hands in supplication to request permission from the invisible realm before
we relieve ourselves in the forest. You never know whose skull or temple ruins
you might be peeing on. I hope you realise that I’m not joking.
In our world view, the fairies &
the ancestors own the land which they lend to us for this brief moment of our
lifetime. We are their respectful guests & temporary caretakers. In the 19th
century, after his country “miraculously” escaped conquests as all his
neighbours fell to master race empires, King Mongkut (known in Broadway &
Hollywood as a dancing barbarian clown in ‘The King & I’) decided to honour
the national soul with an icon and a name, ‘Pra Siam Devatiraj’—the Presiding
Guardian Angel of Siam. There is a shrine to him at parliament which is usually
alive with incense. Small replicas, replete with sword, are also placed inside
the spirit houses of private homes & businesses, to represent the ‘Jao Tee’
or spirit of place.
Shopping Mall (MBK) spirit house
“The King and the Land are One,” is the message of the Holy Grail brought back by Sir Galahad—the knight whose blade is sharp because his heart is pure—to his grief-stricken king (so end your self-pity & perform your duty). That’s why I’m not worried, really. Even as surreptitiously the aunts begin to send their best black clothes to be dry-cleaned, I have decided to surrender to the will of the Beast. Let’s ignore all the white noise and relate to each other as from one gut instinct to another. I know the Beast is wide awake, well-trained and ready for anything.
With Love from Bangkok,
Ing Kanjanavanit
____________________________________________
A pioneer of environmental investigative reporting, Ing Kanjanavanit is a filmmaker, painter & bilingual writer, best known in Thai for the cult classic travelogue/handbook for environmental activism, ‘Khang Lhang Postcard’ (‘Behind the Postcard’) under the nom de guerre Lharn Seri Thai (136)—‘Free Thai Descendent/Force 136’, to evoke the Free Thai Movement against fascist forces during World War 2, which fought for the Allies then after the war was betrayed by the Allies. Sadly, she no longer attends Free Thai merit-making rites, not since Thaksin’s redshirts appropriated the name & equated Thaksin with Free Thai leader Pridi Banomyong, which is a travesty & a sacrilege.
