Dead Father, Dead Mother, Death Has Arrived!

[Siem Reap, 11/19/22]

Title consists of three Vietnamese expressions of alarm or just exasperation, “chết cha,” “chết mẹ,” “chết tới nơi.” Since they’re nearly always expressed in banal situations, they’re rather comic, actually. “Dead father, I forgot my keys!”

To shout dead father or mother in alarm is also childish. If you’re old yourself, it may indicate relief, if only as a guilty thought, quickly suppressed.

Dead relatives, usually just parents, grandparents and siblings, lord over each Vietnamese living room, but the term is only ironic in English, for Vietnamese call such spaces “guest rooms” [“phòng khách”].

As photos, the dead live on. In L’Amant, Marguerite Duras charmingly describes this phenomenon:

All these photographs of different people, and I’ve seen many of them, gave practically identical results, the resemblance was stunning. It wasn’t just because all old people look alike, but because the portraits themselves were invariably touched up in such a way that any facial peculiarities, if there were any left, were minimized. All the faces were prepared in the same way to confront eternity, all toned down, all uniformly rejuvenated. This was what people wanted. This general resemblance, this tact, would characterize the memory of their passage through the family, bear witness at once to the singularity and to the reality of that transit. The more they resembled each other the more evidently they belonged in the ranks of the family. Moreover, all the men wore the same sort of turban, all the women had their hair scraped back into the same kind of bun, and both men and women wore tunics with stand-up collars. And they all wore an expression I’d still recognize anywhere. My mother’s expression in the photograph with the red dress was the same. Noble, some would say. Others would call it withdrawn.

Further, Duras points out these Vietnamese would visit a photographer’s studio “just once in their lives, when they saw death was near.” Preparing for oblivion, they posed for a formal photo, which would be deftly retouched to grant them that nobility, or just dignity, if you will, most likely never had in life.

There’s a Vietnamese saying, “Each bite of food is a bite of humiliation” [“Miếng ăn là miếng nhục”], meaning one must go through so much to have that honest cheeseburger with dill pickles, ketchup, mustard and a slice of tomato.

As I type this in Best Mom, there’s a 18-month-old having the time of his life just running around, playing with a plastic bottle. Passing that sand-colored dog, he would give it a harmless whack on the head.

This is my last evening in Siem Reap. Tomorrow, I’ll take the 8AM bus to Bangkok, from where I’ll fly to Bangalore on Sunday. I'm featured at the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators annual event, as organized by Australia’s Griffith University. Kudos to Sally Breen for inviting me. Sane, confident people welcome a diversity of opinions.

I can already taste that Creamy Mushroom or Double Cheese at Paper Burger in Ari. If feeling especially decadent, I’ll go crazy at Wraptor, a Tex Mex joint. Foodwise, Bangkok kicks ass.

In Vietnam, if a patient only has days or weeks left, the doctor will tell his family, “Let him eat whatever he wants.” Death is ready to barge in!

Yesterday, I translated for a friend a short text from Vietnamese into English:

Patient was diagnosed with Parkinson’s with muscle cramps around 2005-2007, with convulsion to the left side of her face. Patient also had kidney stones, causing fluid rentention. Patient has been treated at many hopitals […] Currently she’s in the last stage of Parkinson’s, with pain in her joints, cramps in her muscles, swollen limbs, shortness of breath, difficulties in swallowing and constipation. Plus, patient can’t control her bladder or bowel, can’t sleep, often loses her memory and can’t recognize loved ones. Because of her advanced age, she can’t recover, with life sustaining treatment her only option.

It concerns one of his relatives. A mess, she still wants to live, naturally.

At 20-years-old, you see those over 40 as pathetically senile, a joke, really, so out of touch, but at 80, a 40-year-old is just a baby, and a 60-year-old is a youngster. When I was around 30, a 60-year-old Bill Kulik said to me, “You just never think of yourself as old.” You are ancient, I thought. Kulik translated Max Jacob.

Egon Schiele died at 28, and Seurat at 31!

The French discoverer of Angkor, Henri Mouhot, was just 35 when he died of malaria in Laos. His rarely visited grave is near Luang Prabang.

Here’s Mouhot’s majestic assessment Angkor Wat:

One of these temples—a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michael Angelo—might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.

Such monumental ruins were deader than dead, for their history had also disappeared, as is the case, still, with the funeral urns in the Plain of Jars, or the bronze drums of Vietnam. Giants once lived there.

Mouhot:

There exists a tradition of a leprous king, to whom is attributed the commencement of the great temple, but all else is totally forgotten. The inscriptions, with which some of the columns are covered, are illegible; and, if you interrogate the Cambodians as to the founders of Ongcor-Wat, you invariably receive one of these four replies: “It is the work of Pra-Eun, the king of the angels;” “It is the work of the giants;” “It was built by the leprous king;” or else, “It made itself.”

The work of giants! The expression would be very just, if used figuratively, in speaking of these prodigious works, of which no one who has not seen them can form any adequate idea; and in the construction of which patience, strength, and genius appear to have done their utmost in order to leave to future generations proofs of their power and civilisation.

Surrounded by the supernatural feats of giants, we’re incomprehending piss ants so pitiful, we’re begging to be squashed, though not by the likes of Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Rochelle Walensky or Yuval Noah Harari. They’re the worst of our species.

Though repelled by all places touristy, I did spend hours at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. How could I not? There, I joined the legions of living dead in gaping at the unfathomable.

I, too, was armed with a camera. In fact, I had two, a Canon 80D and a Sony A6000. Endowed with flawed bodies that will soon break down then rot, we love to wed ourselves to clean, unsmelly machines like cars, cameras or even fighter jets. Though our shit certainly stinks, our liberally defecated bombs are smart, awesome and, frankly, Godlike. Even if no one is impressed, as in shocked and awed, we will worship ourselves, so eat shit and die!

There’s an elegant insect on my screen. I have no idea what it is. Like a cat, it is cleaning itself, or so I think. With its six black legs and two black whiskers, it’s almost dancing, and perhaps singing, too, but you better speak up, young man! Thanks to us humans, most insects have been wiped out, not that we give a flying fuck.

Deader than ever, I still write and take photos, because that’s what I do, until my mind, eyes and heart say no more, but that won’t mean the end, hardly. As zombies, we can still raise hell. With our organs putrid, we can still rant, be mindlessly abusive and stand in line to vote. Just look at the United States of America!

How to neatly dispose of the dead, with some dignity, even? Wandering around my neighborhood, I’ve noticed two pancaked rats on asphalt. One even had a few teeth scattered by his abstracted head. In Cairo, I even saw dessicated cat corpses on sidewalks.

With larger mammals, this wouldn’t be feasible, however, for a man would stink too much before trucks and buses could flatten and imprint him onto the urbanscape. Man generates unique problems.

Immortally, Susan Sontag writes, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

Sontag melted. Her name means Sunday, a day of worship. I’m certainly melting.

Cambodians believe there are four types of ghosts: Those who drink blood and pus; those who are always burning, thus always hot; those who can be fed, if only once a year; and those whose sins are so great, they can’t even eat.

If you don’t know your type, just play it safe and declare, with a firm, even proud, voice, “All of the above!”

Cheering me up, the 18-month-old is laughing over something stupid. Scorched and starving, I now order something to eat. At Best Mom, a taste of paradise doesn’t even cost three bucks.

I ain’t quite ghost.

[Angkor, 11/19/22]

[Angkor, 11/19/22]

[Siem Reap, 11/19/22]