Reflections in Chiang Mai
I spoke a lot about spending time in a forest monastery in northern Thailand, a sort of follow on from the return to London where just over half-a-century ago I was one of the Piccadilly Circus street boys. I came away from that trip with someone. A teenager who for all those years had wandered the back streets of what we called “the Dilly.”
The search for him began about ten years ago. I learned a lot; the neurology of trauma, discovered Zen, and even wrote his story as a short novel. I thought time in a forest monastery would complete his journey home.
In the weeks ahead of leaving for Thailand, I felt a strange resistance. As though the street boy knew the monastery would be a gas chamber. I left anyway, asking myself why I didn’t just cancel, and waiting in Bangkok airport for the connecting flight to Chiang Mai, six Buddhist monks waiting for the same flight, gave me the horrors, and the street boy was right.
I sat watching them. One, a tall, skinny westerner. I guessed was still holding the hand of the lady boy he saw at a night market last week. He whispered something to the monk sitting beside him, who nodded his approval. Same haircut, same mind. Alone, and aside from the others, an elderly monk in a wheelchair sat with hands joined in his lap, eyes to the ground, and a slight smile of enlightened content. Men avoiding their humanity, rejecting the existence the Universe gave them, they hide from defilement, too weak to look evil in the eye and say, “I love you as my own child.”
Human in body and mind the street boy is the coincidence of beauty and the inversion of beauty. Like Jean Genet’s “Our Lady of Flowers,” he is an angelic boy who seduces and who murders. I couldn’t embrace him, only to murder him in a Thai forest.
I was supposed to head for the monastery yesterday, but instead had booked a flight back to Bangkok. The street boy is a creature whose natural environment is a city block where scripture is sprayed on the walls of alleyways, where dangerous ideas linger like toxic smoke, where in doorways men ejaculate hatred into love’s body. In this cesspit, God chose to place the source of the artist’s inspiration.
Yesterday I landed in Bangkok. Can I show the street boy that in art he can scream what he carried in silence for so many years? I have a list of contemporary art and street art sites to visit, and then street photography. Just maybe, us together, a few beers in a bar at the end of an alleyway.