MISSISSIPPI SAMADHI: YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN… BUT YOU CAN’T STAY

Don’t go looking through your cookbooks for this one, trying to find what comes after masala, trying to figure out just how this guy might mix and mash a single metaphor for public consumption without resorting to various linguistic chutneys and high-flying adjectives that might be seldom used and therefore perfect for describing the indescribable, the little upward-flowing diverticula of consciousness and lapses in synapses that occur when a sentient being becomes caught in the cross-fire between his responsibilities and his desires, his past and his future. No, samadhi is meditation, pure and simple, hopefully, and more than a little appropriate considering my own Asian leanings, precariously toward the horizontal, and the birthplace and birth race of my wife. Every people get the religion they need I suspect, and meditation founded in Hinduism and grounded with Buddhism, certainly fills the bill. If anybody needs to stop the internal dialog and take a chill without taking a pill, it’s them, and by extension me. It could have been disastrous, after all, taking my copper-toned slanty-eyed succubus of a wife home to meet the homies after years of whisperings and wonderings and educated guesses gleaned from the pages of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Of course most people don’t know the difference between Thailand and Taiwan, so facts tend to be half-baked at best, three minutes in the microwave of public opinion, stir, then serve liberally, for Mississippi at least, with ketchup, as in catching up with the present. She charmed them of course, just like she charmed the pants off me seven years ago. The Asian dragon-lady image is the stuff of downtown Hollywood after all, not Thai Town, and anybody who has tasted the forbidden fruit of inter-racial Biblical knowledge knows that those fetching displays of exotic product are much more likely to have a stuffed animal lying on the bed back home than whips and chains or pipes and papers.

Broken English itself can even be charming at first byte, full of wild gesticulations and broad non-grammatical vocal inflections full of heartfelt if inarticulate meaning, washed down with frothy smiles. That shit gets old of course and there’s no substitute for correct grammar, something few Asian immigrants over the age of thirteen ever accomplish. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, climbing ladders and accomplishing through wiles and intuition what she lacks in vision and technical expertise, gaining more by standing under than by understanding. That’s not the history they teach in books of course, full of wars and conflicts, generals and majors, general snafus and major disasters. It’s the history of cultural drift, following paths of least resistance and imitating successes, long before anybody thought about writing it down and claiming credit. The Industrial Revolution may have had its heroes, but the Agricultural one didn’t, just people following their instincts and their neighbors, to better pastures and a better future. Governments notwithstanding and frequently falling, Asia is more a continent and culture of accommodation than enforcement. That’s what’s held China together for millennia, the culture in continuous transmission, outlasting and even absorbing hostile governments. That’s the basis of ancestor-worship, essentially time-worship, dedication to a lineage extending back into time immemorial, all converging on a single point presumably. If many cultures pride themselves on their individuality, Asia prides itself on its conformity. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, favoring compromise and conciliation over conflict, the perfect breeding ground for either Buddhism or Communism; take your pick. Asia’s pretty cool, but can become stifling and over-stuffed, silly and superstitious. It can become full of itself and full of IT, the smell of decay overwhelming.

So can Mississippi. If LA reminds my wife Tang of Bangkok, then Mississippi reminds her of Chiang Rai, my home of birth reminding her of hers. I guess there’s some poetic justice there. Her parents didn’t come from there originally any more than mine came from Mississippi. My grandmother was born in Harlem back when it was full of German immigrants. They came south for opportunity and land. Tang’s probably did the same, except north, and from Lampang. Ironically while Chiang Rai is relatively prosperous nowadays by Thai standards, Mississippi still lags in most standards of US development. That’s not all bad of course. Land prices in Mississippi and Chiang Rai are similar right now. Wages are not. If anything Mississippi is more beautiful, probably the greenest place I’ve ever seen, including Brazil and Ireland. It has its problems of course, not the least of which is a crime rate in Jackson that must rival that of Johannesburg in creativity, if not sheer numbers. The latest fad is car-jacking. The thief pirates your car while you’re still in it. That way the engine’s running and you can open the door for the new recipient of your old car. It saves time that way and you get to inspect the sidewalk. That somewhat mitigates the circumstances of the other major problem: a police-state attitude toward law enforcement. If that only applied to the mugger fuggers of course then no problem. But no, it applies to me. They wait on the highways at night like fishermen monitoring a pole for any slight wiggles in an imaginary line which represents your trajectory from the immediate present into an indeterminate but well-defined future. They can help you with that; no meaningless infinities allowed here. Ever had a gun held on you by Bozos in Blue talking like the characters on ‘King of the Hill?’ I have. I’ve got a witness. It ain’t pretty. They had the wrong guy. Imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been the right guy. Imagine infinity.

Mississippi has come a long way since ‘the nigra problem’ and its attendant bifurcation of society into rednecks, blacks and so-called ‘nigger-lovers,’ i.e. me and a few others with errant DNA. There were also a few ‘Uncle Toms’ but they usually didn’t last long. It’s truly gratifying to see blacks and whites working together at all levels of public service and if they aren’t mixed together at all levels of society, that’s mostly an economic problem, not a racial one. White flight to the suburbs didn’t start in Jackson nor will it end there and many blacks are counted in those numbers also. As a friend says, “every murder in Jackson means six new residents of Brandon,” my old country home and now suburb. Still old habits die hard and some whites just don’t know how to act around blacks as equals. Mexicans have arrived in heavy numbers also, presumably doing many of the jobs that blacks used to do, or as the president of Mexico once famously said, “even blacks won’t do.” Old habits die hard. Thais are routinely scared of black people and excess body hair. It’s as much esthetic as racial. Thai women spend millions trying to whiten their skin and pluck those pesky underarm hairs religiously. You heard it here first. They’re scared of ghosts, too. As for Mississippi, the few Thais there pretty much got the run of the place. There’s only one Thai restaurant in Jackson so sales are good while the food is uneventful by Thai standards, ditto with Mexican food. Good things take time. Coming back to LA is like landing in Bangkok for Tang, Thai Town a half-way house for recent immigrants. She can even speak northern Thai dialect there, eat Northern food, and talk Northern gossip. I can even be an ex-pat in my own country of birth, hell of a deal. It saves on flight costs. It’s a way of life, crossing borders in minds if not on maps.

Thailand and Mississippi-- Tsunamis, Hurricanes, and Home

When the tsunami struck southern Thailand three years ago to this day, Christian Thais asked me, “Is this it, the Apocalypse?” That’s what I want to know. You tell me. I felt that one, too, the earthquake that is, hundreds of miles away up close to the Golden Triangle. I was lying in bed on the upper floor of a house we’d just moved into. I thought it was falling down. Then I turned on the news a couple of hours later. Of course, other countries got hit much worse, but they were not major tourist destinations. Thailand had less than five thousand casualties, while Indonesia had more than one hundred thousand, but Thailand got the movie. Indonesia got dried food. India and Sri Lanka both had far more casualties than Thailand, but Thailand got the sympathy vote. Thailand markets itself so aggressively, that sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just publicity. It’s doubtful that half of what is taught in Thai schools as history is accurate. Immigrated from Mongolia? Huh? Why, because the region is called ‘Altai’? O-kay. Nobody’s sure who ruled the historical kingdom of Nanchao, so Thais claimed that, too. It’s like the old SNL ‘liar’ character played by Jon Lovitt. “Yeah, that’s right…” The psychology section of a typical Thai bookstore is filled with books on marketing. I shit you not. “I’m OK, you’re OK?” Naaa… How about, “I’m rich, you’re not.” The local Big C supermarket in Chiang Rai goes by the textbook in its marketing ‘techniques’ designed to confuse the customer, get him lost, and make him overpay. They’re evil. They’re the only game in town. I don’t want to talk about last week’s elections.

Then the next year a swath of coastline from Mobile to Houston was removed from most maps, and even worse than that in New Orleans, which got something of a double-bypass ‘soulectomy’, unlike anything seen since the War of Northern Aggression. I watched that from a stool in my favorite watering hole back home by the triangle. Let’s clear the air right here right now- nobody could have prevented the Katrina disaster, short of moving the entire city. I’m no big fan of the Bushmaster, but calling ‘racism’ because of N’awlins is a little irresponsible. He IS sleeping with Connie after all. It’s true; I read it on the Internet. But everybody ‘down there’ always knew that the Big Easy was a disaster waiting to happen, just a little too big and a little too easy for its own good. Maybe the people actually straddling that river of denial didn’t know, or care to acknowledge it, but in Mississippi we all knew. N’awlins was where you went to get lost, where you went to die if nobody loved you any more, where you went to do things ungodly. Sometimes those things ungodly would find you whether you went looking for them or not, part of the Napoleanic Code of Injustice. Everybody was in on the corruption. It can’t go back like it was before. Everything’s different now. Everybody’s watching. New Orleans will be re-born better, if not bigger. Global warming? Apocalypse? Why Aceh, New Orleans, and Phuket, home to thousands of jihadis, junkies, and other assorted pragmatists? Eschatology is the starting point of religion, mortality sandwiches.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about home. This is America. This is Christmas Day. Channel 28 here has nothing but a fire burning on TV all day. Talk about reality TV! But that triggers memories, just like it’s supposed to. You can go home again. Maybe Thomas Wolfe can’t, but I can. I have to, to see what I missed. Many histories are possible. How do you know which path you took until you actually arrive somewhere? Everything is relative to the point of measurement. That’s what time travel is all about, experiencing the same place at different times, without necessarily having to travel the entire distance to get there. You’re only limited by speed and memory. You can do it in pure memory alone or you can actually get up off your butt and go there. The only question is: what home? Americans have no ‘home of birth’ the way Asians do, the way Latinos do, the way most of the traditional world does. In Thailand you never lose that; that piece of land is your claim to nationality. Without a house registration, you are nothing. Rents are low, btw. A few years ago all Thais had to go to their ‘birth home’ to vote, like Mary riding Joseph’s ass all the way to Bedlam, belly full with baby and the future of the world. Fortunately it was a bright clear night. Except for the Deep South, America knows little or nothing of this. Up north the kids grow up and move out west while the old folks move to Florida. Nobody’s left on the old block except the second-string team, the ones who wanted to go somewhere and be something but couldn’t break the pull of gravity.

Hub and spoke traditional systems still hold sway only in the old South, so maybe you move away then move back, on and on in some succession of tentative pokes at the outside world, testing its limits against your own, with some sort of ‘breakthrough’ more to be feared than welcomed. This is possible largely because most ‘outsiders’ don’t especially want to move there in the first place, though that’s changing. Little by little the restless mobile virtual America is taking over, allowing people the freedom to fail without being subject to ridicule ‘back home’, simply because there is nothing there. Killers go berserk to seize their moment of fame simply because that’s all there is left in a virtual world, a body count and ads sold. In Mississippi everybody still knows everybody, and you can go back and find your best friend still sitting in the same old comfy chair you left him in ten years ago, older Budweiser. This conveys a certain responsibility upon all parties involved, kinda’ like village Communism, rule by jealousy and judgment.

But that’s still the dark side. This is not N’awlins, long drowning in the swamp, choked on its French roots and its Spanish moss, and Mississippi’s maybe a little too close to home. That’s the hand I was dealt, after all, not the one I chose. I still love it, of course, but with the love of family, not the love of spouse. I’m not Asian, my wife keeps reminding me. I’m American, forever young and rebelliousness by definition. After many trial runs, Flagstaff was the home I chose, or at least the US ‘home base’. It’s a dry cold. After ten years of semi-residence, I still keep a mailbox and a storage unit and a contingent of safe havens and various unresolved projects. Welcome to my world. After many more geodesic meanderings and tentative pokes and partial penetrations of South America, the elliptical orbits began to center around some ‘strange attractor’ in Asia. This took the form of a little brown-haired brown-eyed girl that could figure out a way to be a pain in the butt to the statue of Lincoln, all the while propping him up with enough faith and courage to keep coming around for more, though not enough to ever feel totally fat and sassy. I stay hungry. Who really knows what ol’ Abe is doing when not looking honest for the tourists, anyway? Scratching that pain in his butt, probably.

Well, the girl and I tied knots, literally wrapped at the wrist in white twine, and that meant that Thailand was to be the home I inherited, albeit with conditions. Chaotic love keeps you in random orbits that only appear normal when averaged. Call it the ‘flutter-by’ effect, related to the inverse ‘squared squared’ law of love in chaos, in which gravitational love is felt in direct proportion to the square of the distance from the source, not the opposite as in classical physics. Any closer and you crash on the rocks of bankruptcy and dependence; any farther and you drift into the ether, attached only in memory. The moon is slowly drifting away, after all. We just tend not to notice. It looks to be the same size as the Sun. That will change. This is a quantum world, after all, contrary to common sense, where familiarity breeds contempt, and everything is the opposite of what it seems. Your beer-drinking good-time buddies are the people who hold you back and you rely on the kindness of strangers to accept you at face value, your own best face. Only a few friends transcend the ordinary back-slap of gratuitous condescension and become a surrogate family, still there when the old man’s long gone and old age is coming on. This is my America, positively Fourth Street. Every city’s got one.