“In the 20th century, the number of ‘past times’ that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency.” — Marshall McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype (1970)
I have a lot of sky.
The fourth wall of my long living room is entirely composed of sliding glass panels.
I peel back the sections of glass, and the balcony becomes an extension of the room. A warm breeze blows through the apartment, funneling through the kitchen with a low moan and out into the vertical spaces between columns of concrete and glass.
I stand on my balcony smoking, contemplating a horizon roped out by the encroaching towers of Ho Chi Minh, the highway, and the feint baleen-like arrays of two suspension bridges beyond it.
The sky is always changing. I see monsoon squalls approaching, blocking out the city or the bridges. On nights after rain, my fourth wall open, the apartment is filled with through-breezes and night-dazzle, and my place is more outdoors than in, the whole room one huge balcony facing a glittering horizon.
I sit at my big black-glass table writing, pausing between sentences to listen.
The apartment has high ceilings, and thick walls. I hear nothing from behind me, nothing from other apartments above, below or beside. Only dogs barking, the serial music of frogs and crickets, a scrunch of gravel from the perimeter road; deep horns of ships negotiating the bends of Saigon River. Tinny voices in a slow pan echo from motor-stalls crawling past. Garbled chants reach me from the nearby temple complex.
My scriptorium of breezes. My god, I could stay here for ever. But I can’t. I have one month left on my visa, one month to write, to ride up and down in the talking lifts, to the gym, to the pool, to my motorbike.
The corridors are open to the air, channeling breezes. Light and lights, a white, windy space, cityscape and skyscape, a black-glass table, an erotic ashtray, a small wooden dragon exhaling incense through its nostrils.
Everything’s coming into focus now. This is what happens, I think, when the end approaches: the past comes rushing back, and everything is revealed, just… not for long. Moments before the end; and then it’s all forgotten again. And again, and again.
The year is 2559 and I’m as old as the century.
I always said I would write, when there was nothing else.
One month. Is it enough?
Make that two. I’ll head for Phuket for a while, and maybe Bali, with everything I own in one case. The clothes I’ve been buying recently weigh almost literally nothing.
Two cases. I can’t go anywhere without my yellow Fostex.
After that, I may find myself back in 2016. Not a thought that makes me happy.
At times this place hardly seems real.
Too bad it won’t last. But then again, what does?
Satia found the hub for me, when I was looking to move out of the city. That’s what it calls itself – not just any luxury condo but the ‘MOST SOUGHT-AFTER LIFESTYLE HUB’, according to the posters. And it stops there: not the most sought-after in Ho Chi Minh City, or Vietnam; the most, period.
‘It’s like another world in there,’ said Red, and she was right. It was what I needed. Living here, I’ve been in my own world, following a quiet and disciplined life – well, you know: relatively speaking. There are lapses. But most days I get to the gym, if only for half an hour. And most days I’m at the pool, preferably in daylight so I can soak up some D through the cataracted, injected air. And every day I write. Almost every day, that is. Almost every day, I almost write.
The most sought-after lifestyle hub consists of a cluster of high-tech towers, like a vertical village in two concentric henges, connected by little Rialto bridges in the air, whose only purpose is to support trees and plants silhouetted against the sky, and all centred around a magnificent pool, the glittering blue eye of the hub. The pool is a thing of beauty, fringed with dwarf palms, a complex tessellation of azure pools and wooden decks, jacuzzis and salas, fountains and falls, with a long main stretch which is great for doing lengths — if lengthing is your style, your lifestyle at the lifestyle hub.
The people of the hub – the people, I presume, who most sought the hub – are sophisticated, and when not in work-attire present themselves in matching sports gear with electronic accessories. Koreans, Japanese, and rich Vietnamese mainly, with a smattering of Europeans and neo-Europeans, but the style is mostly well-heeled Asian: handsomely-shirted dads and yummy mummies with the latest strollers and toddlers with super-cool shoes; teens with good ball skills who stop and let you pass in the leafy walkway before continuing their game; trim grandmothers in their loose, comfortable day suits.
I’m always friendly to the people of the hub — a few lines of chat in the lift, a little bonhomie and the gift of an orange for the old security guard who does twelve hour shifts watching my section of the perimeter. I smile at the pleasing receptionist in the Club House as I head up to the gym. I smile at the slender mothers and their adored, well-behaved kids. Otherwise, I keep myself to myself to a degree that I realise is bordering on the sociophobic. I hardly see anyone from work, just a couple of people who know me from Bangkok and literally two other people I’ve met here. Red and her adoring Satia come to stay every couple of months. Literally seven pairs of feet, including my own, ever cross this threshold. My social life is an extension of the minimalist style of the apartment, the equivalent of a black glass dining table. I even got rid of my Vietnamese maid, because he was just too eager to please and kept bringing me things: a table-cloth; a frame for the only hard copy photograph in my possession; a mat for my life-sized red ceramic crocodile to pose on. The reasons for this social minimalism are complicated; they are the reasons I can’t make small-talk any more. There has always been a tendency towards self-exile, and now it has reached its logical conclusion. I always knew what I wanted to do with my life, but somehow I forgot. And the purpose of the whole process, the whole crazy, centrifugal process that has led to this moment, has been to force me, in the end, to write.
Don’t we all love that teleological error?
Purpose, effect – it’s academic. An illusion of the narrative form.
I see now that for ten years I have been working for a cult. I’ve struggled with it, tried to find a voice within it, but now I have stopped believing I can influence it or serve the interests of its young acolytes. I crave a return to reality. On the other side of the highway is An Phu, where the cult is based. HQ is an international school, recently bought up by a globalist corporation. This is only my third job in such institutions — Amsterdam, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh — but I will not take another. I have a wonderful diploma group, but my students will have to survive their final year without me.
I don’t spend much time there, in any case – I go in for a couple of hours each day to teach, eat lunch at my desk where students can find me, then drive home past the improbable mansions of District 2, where most of the cultists live in huge, wedding-cake structures, architectural chimaeras nodding in all directions, with their Greco-Roman porticos, Georgian windows and Renaissance towers, sunny atriums and tiny private pools.
I stay on my side of the highway as much as possible. I stay home, or fly up to town over bridges and through echoing tunnels to visit my old haunts, buy leaf or pills or listen to my Japanese guitar heroes and Vietnamese drummer-gods in tiny rock-clubs in District 3.
When I do cross the highway I see the people of the cult gathering in coffee bars and restaurants, or powering their push-bikes, panting virtuously through the tropical heat. The initiates of the cult – its teachers and administrators – have become increasingly strange in my eyes. Utopian globalists, rule-followers and mental gymnasts, carbonazis and feminists almost to a man, the people of the cult have some bizarre beliefs.
They believe, for instance, that one of the essential components of the life-cycle — sunlight, water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide — is out of balance and will destroy the planet, which has no control systems of its own. Because humans beings produce carbon dioxide, they see humanity as a disease, inferior to the rest of Nature, and acquiesce, consciously or unconsciously, in the necessity of depopulation.
They believe that injecting toxic metals, engineered DNA, animal viruses and human fetal tissue directly into the bloodstreams of their infants will make them immune to disease, while viciously excoriating anyone who wants to protect their precious ones against these poisons.
They believe that only the devastation of the immune system by toxic chemicals can heal the body of cancer. Rather than resisting this absurdity, when one of their number is caught by the white-coats they organise head-shaving rituals, or dress up and dance around in pink clothing to show solidarity with the victim.
They believe that the white race – predominantly their own – is the only race which has ever done wrong on this planet, and that its cultural suicide is therefore necessary and virtuous. Meanwhile they celebrate ‘Diversity’ by reducing children of all cultures to a homogeneous pseudo-Americanism, which qualifies them to be a global citizen.
They are appalled by the notion of a free man or woman possessing the means to defend themselves.
Fearing the sun, they are obsessed with hats and smear themselves with scented carcinogens.
They carry not their hearts but their virtues on their sleeves.
The people of the cult do not understand what they are part of, of course. To them, I must appear equally strange. I took me a while to understand what I had signed up for when I entered the international sector. In the summer of 2001, my own political awakening had not yet begun — though it would soon enough, on that day of impossible things in September. I stayed in Amsterdam six years before moving to South-East Asia. Before long an administrator was asking me: ‘Just how far out on a limb are you?’ after I discussed the profitability of war in a poetry class. I kept crawling – and the further out I went on that limb, the sturdier I felt it grow. I made myself unpopular with my peers — but no one wanted to debate. Everyone was on a two-year contract, and no one wanted to jeopardise their sought-after lifestyle. I challenged school authorities on propagandising students over global warming. I was called to numerous meetings where lists of complaints based on hearsay and petty bureaucratic requirements were levelled at me. Nevertheless, they kept renewing my contract, because even ideological education centres need some real teachers on their roster. Not too many, but they still need a few. The problem of me was that I actually used the ‘student-centred’, ‘inquiry-based’ principles they claimed to represent in their Public Relations. I thought, and read, and ‘modelled’ curiosity and critical thinking; all the things I was supposed merely to simulate, I did for real. Mainly in time I saved on paperwork, it has to be said.
But there’s a limit. At the beginning of this year, my second in Vietnam, before school opened, the entire faculty spent two whole days lying flat on its back with its eyes closed in a darkened assembly room, meek as mushrooms, listening to a couple of Kiwis in elephant pants schooling them in pseudo-Buddhist meditation techniques, with a view to inflicting such ‘mindfulness’, in turn, on their own students.
Flat on their backs, they jumped the shark.
I was out of there in ten minutes, and heading for the pool. My spiritual life is none of their business, and that of my students is none of mine.
I find my mindfulness in the azure eye of the hub.
I close my eyes and float, my eyelids lined with a blaze of light.
I open my eyes and float, looking up at the sky.
I have a lot of sky.
I first noticed it in Amsterdam, relaxing in friend’s motorboat as we pottered around town and out into the countryside south of the city. It must have been 2009 or 10.
All afternoon, lying back in the bow, I watched plane after plane laying down white trails in a blue sky — trails which twisted like ribbons, ruffled at the edges, spread out and formed a haze. By early evening it had grown into comprehensive cloud-cover.
A student had told me about this phenomenon – ‘chemtrails’, she called it – but I’d never witnessed it myself.
How many times have you heard someone say: I never would have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes?
On the other hand there’s that old Mafia saying: If I hadna believed it, I wouldna seen it.
Which one is right?
In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argues that the interaction between memory, imagination and visual information is essential to the act of seeing.
“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them […] And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception […] For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.
In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”
For me, the more arcane mystery lies in the act of not seeing. What the culture has not defined for us, we may not perceive at all.
In Bangkok a friend’s apartment had a great north-westerly view of the city skyline out towards the airport. Again, I saw planes laying trails, which spread and merged and formed a haze, rolling out over the city. In England a couple of years later, spending the summer with my father, I was shocked – the spraying was much heavier than I’d seen before, and seemed to be happening at lower altitudes. I was seeing big, fat, smoky trails like great hazy caterpillars. I saw it in Berlin, and again in Malaysia, where it was just as thick and heavy: great hanging nets and sheets of dull white, visible in the gaps between the cumulus. I haven’t been anywhere in years where I haven’t seen it, except for Sevilla where there was a little jet-scuzz over the airport but the rest of the sky was the same intense unbroken blue I remembered from the time I spent there twenty years ago.
Once Bangkok had chewed me up and spat me out, I dragged myself to Ho Chi Minh City, where I rented a skinny little house behind a temple in District 3. There, my life had a soundtrack of temple drums, bells and chants. Not much sky in those narrow streets. After a year, once my relationship with the cockroaches and the ghosts had reached an all-time low, I moved to this light, airy modern apartment with acres of window, a mile outside the city.
Now I see it every day. Not so much planes in the process of laying down lines, but every morning a drift of trails, shapeless mats and veils of the stuff blowing in across the city from the sea. Alumino-cirrus, occluding the sky as the day wears on, lurid as neon at night. Some evenings as the sun goes down the whole sky ignites like a furnace.
You can look at a sight like that and perceive whatever has been defined for you. But seeing must surely, at the very least, be wondering.
HO CHI MINH CITY. PHOTO: PAUL DUNBAR
My favourite time to swim is around nine or ten at night, to clear my head and cool my skin. There’s hardly ever anyone in the water at this time. One or two other lengthers, invisible at first among the ripples and reflections; a young couple sprawled together on cushions in one of the poolside salas, their faces illuminated by electronic devices.
After dark the pool area is tastefully lit from below water and behind trees, creating counterpoints of waves of shadows and shadows of waves. I especially love it if it’s raining a little, each drop creating a tiny spout of light a couple of inches high. Cruising with my eyes at water-level, it’s like swimming through a luminous, flickering forest of tiny saplings.
I lie on my back in the water and admire the monolithic reach of the towers against a blank sky. A big moon is rising in a gap between the blocks. Refractions and reflections wriggle below and around me. Bats turn like keys in the air and skim the water close to my head.
I lie on my back in the enormous, sub-lit pool and look up at nine towers leaning in on me. I drift in blue tears in the bright eye of the hub, which floats like a hologram on a pool of darkness.
The lifestyle hub could be a settlement on the moon.
Any moon.
Back in my night-filled room, I light my joint and stare out at the city of Ho Chi Minh in its primary neons and pulsing, light-sucking clouds. A wall of iridescent blocks; other, darker ghost towers sketched out in construction lights.
In front, a dark bowl of vegetated land occupies the middle-distance, ringed with trees, a mallowy sweep of swampy ground crowned with fluffy-headed reeds which catch the light nicely in the late afternoon. Beyond that, a Vietnamese village of grass-roofed long-houses almost hidden in a ruck of palm trees, a kinked column of smoke lazily rising. There are, if you look, lakes and fish-ponds, and a long flimsy bridge you can ride a motorbike across very carefully. A net set up on a patch of shale, where ten or twenty boys play volleyball after school. In the evening I see their mums and dads trooping home in yellow hard-hats and matching shirts. The village is an itinerant workers’ dormitory; they’re making the best of things down there, while they build District 2 into the new fashionable heart of the city, a hub for foreigners and the fantastically wealthy elite of this communist country.
As Marshall McLuhan said, in the future all times will coexist.
And just before the end, the past comes flooding back.
Terminal lucidity.
There are no stars, only the noctilucent clouds.
Only they’re not clouds – not real ones, anyway. Clouds used to be formed in certain known ways. They had recognizable structures, different types. I learned them as a kid. Now I remember only cumulus, cumulonimbus, stratocumulus. There was something called mackerel sky.
What I see in the sky every day, I know, is different. Formless flat sheets of suspended particles – lakes and pools of chemicals – different from clouds, with a different sheen, and different behaviour. A lifeless canopy above the drama of the clouds.
It’s there every morning. Sometimes you can see the trails within it like veins in meat, but usually it’s just drifting in like this, in hazy milky-opaque mats and striations. Or it gets blown into wisps and mare’s tails or beach-sand patterns, but none of it is natural.
The media says nothing. Official discussions and references exist, but are rare. Climate Remediation, they say, an artificial albedo to save the planet from our exhalations. Solar Radiation Management.
Aluminum, barium, strontium.
Nobody else seems to notice it. Nobody talks about it. Nobody looks up.
Filaments, polymers, nano-tubes.
A self-propelled boy glides past without moving a muscle.
Cross-domain bacteria, mold spores, dried red blood cells.
A girl walks with her father, her face illumined by what she holds in her hand.
Synthetic biology, pseudo-life.
The breeze animates the banana leaves, throwing shapes on the wall.
Time was, if a man stood in the street and stared up at the rooftops or the sky, a knot of people would gather around him, wanting to know what he saw.
People hunch past, faces illuminated by their upturned palms.
I stare out at the milky-blue, cataracted sky.
The most sought-after lifestyle hub: as good a place as any to wait for the end of the world.
Ho Chi Minh City, 2017
To read more of my work, please visit
https://thelethaltext.me/
Yes. Funny how that happened after I wrote piece criticizing Robert Malone for his role in the Karen Kingston affair.
Two things: you were in my dream this morning. And Google tells me I am blocked from accessing your site due to "malicious spamming"..
I'll email you