Disintegration, Beauty, Suffering and Life

[Warning: This one gets a little dark, and includes explicit language and imagery. Please take note before reading. I'm in no place to administer an age limit; just know that I'm talking about something very painful and real. There is a happy ending, though, I promise! Don't give up...]




Everything is collapsing.

The most tragic part is the futile attempt in attempting a description, the chagrin invited by typing the first feeble, puny, frail characters, hopeless arrangements of lines and curves facing off against a ravenous force that has maliciously unraveled my grip on reality.

Imagine finding oneself on some abandoned infinite beach, and being dispatched with the task to describe each and every particle of sand that fills every the space around your body, a solid moving as a liquid en masse. It is that numbing realization that to convey the intricate individual beauty of each and every particle means giving it to you audience, letting them touch it, feel it against their cheek, the way it runs between their fingers, how its myriad particles glint when held at specific angles to the passing sun. In writing about this, or anything, I’m limited to not only a handful, but an infinitesimally small pinch of substance from this endlessly expanding landscape before my eyes, begging to be described in all its simultaneous bliss and agony. Thus is the nature of reality, a fierce, furious, beautiful rebel against the forces of encapsulation, shrugging off humanity’s miserable, sorry attempts. The world around us, reality, subjective and objective, its tangible and intangible aspects, are a flurry of details that overwhelms the senses and in even existing as part of it we are simply running our small hand through the current of a tremendous river fed by innumerable tributaries, all leading to the infinite expanding ocean of collective human awareness.

Instead of encapsulation we can only attempt to work in harmony with reality, and struggle to paint a complete and compelling picture of our experiences, visions, humilities, fears, shortcomings, and so forth.

So I will try to pick out a few pinches of sand and pass it on to you, the reader, but I do so with a warning, for what I have been struggling to express coherently is so urgent that I don’t believe any amount of revising could ever produce a satisfactory result. What I aim to delve into is an intellectual journey the likes of which I have never experienced before. Its bottomless depths, its titillating, shuddering downward spiral across the fiery red apocalyptic skies of my own consciousness with both engines ablaze and smoking, rocketing me towards the unforgiving ground, the rock bottom of perception of the material world that grows closer and closer, thousands of feet closer with every passing second, mayday call still unanswered, the death force of intellectual gravity sinisterly mocking my feeble attempts at flight and harshly reminding my tattered, petrified brain that all that goes up must, after all, come down.

It all began collapsing around me. The flame retardant walls containing the system of thought upon which I have built my overarching sense of well-being and ethical security began melting.

Cambodia is numbing, and just like the inside of your mouth which you chew to oblivion after a visit to the dentist, this numbness is alike, leaving you blissfully anesthetized as you idly gnaw away on the bloody pulp of your consciousness until the feeling returns in a flurry of pain signifying the return of brutal reality, waking you to discover the dismembered remains of your perception, that while you have been chewing away with idle pleasure reality has splintered open on all sides, and now the layers peel back, excruciatingly, one by terrible one, revealing the incalculable, endless pain and suffering, that exists or remains to be exploited within every individual.

This numbness is spawned from necessity. As you walk the streets of Siem Reap, you are assailed with innumerable offers, requests, demands, pleas. Tuk tuk drivers assault you with offers to visit countless temples, hordes of children try to sell you books while beggars and amputees cling to you with the remaining functioning limbs they have, asking for 2000 riel, one dollar, 5 baht, a coke, a bottle of water, anything to feed my baby because look, sir, here she is, crying in my arms, starving to death and its your fault if she dies, I’m so hungry sir, anything, save, feed me, PLEASE, anything, anything, anything, anything....

You become numb, broke, or insane. Most people choose the blissful emotional void, shooting up with a glorious shot of intellectual anesthetic. You can’t help everyone, so you put up your shield, helping yourself and those you have pledged to serve. The beggars become simply a backdrop, just like the crumbling brick walls of every building, the flickering signs offering massages in poorly worded English, or the swollen river that lolls lazily by the town. You ignore their advances, shrug off the pleas for money, shake your arm loose from the mother clinging on desperately with her child like a shipwrecked survivor to driftwood, parched bottle dangling loosely from the baby’s blistered lips, walk past the hordes of tuk tuk drivers sleeping in their tragically ornate chariots for lack of anywhere else to go. The offers of tuk tuks, motorbike rides, marijuana, cocaine, crack, prostitutes, they and the individuals they thoughtlessly exploit in the name of hedonistic pleasure become simply obstacles to stride over. You reduce these human beings to simple annoyances, something to be surpassed. You ignore them as they are, after all, destined to muddle in the vile scum of humanity’s boundless hedonism, reducing themselves to the lowest possible standards, transmuting their body into a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder for a paltry sum. You pass them by at the corner of every block; the legless beggar crutching himself to table after table of tourists begging for food money, the prostitute swinging down the sidewalk in her sexual swagger, 6 inches of heels and one of makeup, throwing hungry eyes at you like a starved wolf eyeing its quarry. Then the pack of mothers race up to you in a furious panic at the outskirts of town, waving their infants in your face like squirming, wailing votive offerings, the ubiquitous drained plastic bottle in hand, they’re screaming, crying out in vain in the only English word they know, please, please, please, please...

You walk on. Not everyone can be helped, and so you sleep soundly nestled in the false security of an intellectual house of mirrors, each surface rigged to distort the introspective wavelengths of thought and superimpose an unquestionable ethical superiority over the challenges outside your doors over and over again, the reflections marching into the reflections in an infinite parade of disastrous optical illusions that perpetuate unfounded reassurance.

It is an intellectual fortress constructed of sticks and twigs, a ramshackle shelter that barely protects against the eroding cosmic wind of reality. The reality laying siege to the gates need only wait until the mirrors are corrected for outright internal chaos to erupt.

This day arrives, and you wake up comfortable and unassuming. Button up your shirt, wrap the belt around scrawny waist, grab your books, kick start the old moto and you’re underway for another day of teaching.

But one day you arrive in your classroom and you see the faces, eager for learning, yet so eager because they know full well the unfathomable alternative. The realization dawns that their impeccable study habits and devotion to education is not a virtue, but a response to the alternative, the precipice of poverty, a life of difficulty, struggle and suffering, and suddenly basic geometry doesn’t seem so bad.

With this realization comes the spinning, and the faces encircle you in a hopeless blur, faster and faster until they are barely discernible, and suddenly Sophal is the child wrapped in filthy rags with an empty bottle hanging from his toothless mouth, Rithyka the armless beggar on the streets with nowhere to call home and a swollen, disfigured stomach begging for nourishment. Now their gleaming eyes yearn for learning, and they obediently recite the tedious rules of plane geometry, yet they could just as easily be reciting the latest discount for the sale of their unripe bodies They are that close, one miniscule step away from the eternal tragedy of human existence that writhes and squirms uncontrollably like some malevolent, multiplying serpent beyond the walls of the school, modern Lernaean Hydra, innumerable heads sprouting and twisting with every attempt to lop them off.

We are lulled into thinking that we have stumbled upon some happy ending, but this happy ending does not exist, it never has and never will, and as we cling to the fragile ideal of education, expecting it to rocket us to such great heights, it is in fact the harsh alternative that forces education, not the idealistic goals we aspire to. What good is an education if one’s willingness to submit oneself to the perverted desires of the common pedophile with the fattest wallet will always be worth far more?


This is it, right here, the never ending, malevolent whirlwind of human suffering and wrongdoing, compounding, growing, exponentially expanding outwards like the death throes of some perverse supernova of affliction, ejaculating its infinitely condensed mass on and on until an event horizon of torment envelops the students, the Cambodian citizens, every individual living in squalor, eternally extinguishing hope from escaping its infinitely powerful gravitational field of confinement. By sheer willpower, goodwill and luck the students were snatched up into comparative safety, yet the reality of Cambodia still besieges the gates of our school with every passing hour. With every restless thought in the minds of our older students it gains ground, forcing us further and further into a corner with no escape.


Yes, here it is, every last bit of our fucked up world, a vile, putrefying orgy of hedonism where anything is possible with the right amount of money, a place that shames our American pits of debauchery, where hookers start at $5 before the bargaining begins. A place where the wishes of a backwards, deranged 43 year old Spaniard can finally come true in the cherubic form of a 12 year girl; she submits herself to his every perverse whim and desire, every forced grunt and moan and drop of blood a necessary offering to feed starving siblings still unripe for the oldest profession, her young, boney, underdeveloped body the sacrificial lamb, offered up right along with her naivety and innocence, the only things she has ever had and now they’re gone, stolen away and devoured by the voracious appetite for destruction along with the few dollars he paid for her, gone to her pimp, for he too has many mouths to feed, and here she is, left with next to nothing, a few thousand riel, bedraggled, bleeding, corrupted. And this isn’t just a horror story to guilt you, the reader, into donating money to an obscure organization; you must imagine it, really think about this girl, a girl I know, a girl that calls me borng-bproh, brother, who looks up to me and loves me and I love her right back. We shake our heads in despair at the problems of this twisted world, and our fucked up predilection to sweep unflinching, cumbersome reality under the proverbial rug of our collective consciousness, preferring the numbing, deafening blinking lights of our TV programs that hypnotize and turn attention away from what really matters, and what really matters is how a culture that we lift up and praise and transmit to others like some malicious infective virus is capable of producing full grown men with complete knowledge of right and wrong who pay exorbitant sums to travel across the world and have terrible, painful, agonizing sex with 12 year old Cambodian girls.

And there she is, begging your tragically anesthetized consciousness for recognition, crying in a heap of skin and bones on the filthy cum stained mattress, yet he’s back for more, the insatiable satyr of infinite corruption, fucking and groaning and beating and humping and ejaculating, appeasing a ravenous hunger that burns deep and hot, tearing at the seams, melting through the prescribed societal code of ethics and exploding outwards to incinerate those around him past recognition, an unrepentant arsonist of innocence and naiveté. He’s paid his money, and damn right he’s getting his fill, so its back to the forced grunting and moaning and screaming, but its no longer convincing through the choked sobs, the thrusting and plunging and humping far too much for her malnourished body, used to jumping rope with friends instead of receiving the angry fury of his venomous engorged voracious cock. Now the satyr walks out the door, incognito in his pressed suit and tie, but he’s left something behind, the virus coursing through her tiny capillaries to every cubic inch of her body, lying dormant for now, to awaken one day and systematically tear apart her fragile tissues with the same malice, hate and unslakable thirst which so abused her aching, bloodied body, yet the most dangerous is the newfound intellectual values that this strange man’s cavorting has instilled, deadly in that they are far more contagious, the newfound willingness to stoop to any level, for although she lies beaten and abused by this strange man, she lies among her leaking, poisoned bodily fluids several thousand riel richer, and that is something after all, isn’t it?

The most crippling aspect is the petrifying realization that every single human being, not just my students, but my family, my friends, the love of my life, everyone in this sad, aching world is an infinite reservoir of pain, suffering, corruption and perversion. Innocence, purity, naivety, these now transparent qualities are delightfully pillaged in a heartbeat, the qualities we are born with and hold so dear to us. It is intrinsic to living; we are torn screaming from the womb, snipped of our lifeline and expected to understand that in taking that first choking breath of air that defines as an individual sentient organism, we submit ourselves to the horrible potentials of this world, without knowing that it extends far past the sanitized white walls of our mother's hospital room.

I am here to help avert the terrible reality that my students are hurtling towards, however the fear of this reality, just briefly considering the potential of it, is absolutely terrifying. I became useless, every day the compounding petrification sinking me deeper and deeper like a stone tossed in the ocean into sheer befuddlement, in turn bringing less and less to my students and inadvertently ushering in the reality I so feared with every inch of my form. I was panicky, terribly sleep deprived, arguably delusional, brow constantly furrowed, the severity of the endless train of thoughts tearing through my frontal lobes, accelerating towards a crippling critical velocity.


Everything had collapsed.


What jerks you out of these trances is never some grand unifying theory to the grand questions of why, but something very simple, a pure clarion call that usually goes overlooked, and when given the chance to breathe, blossoms in your mind and brings rejuvenating life to your entire being.

It started with a cloud

One of those enormous, billowing monsoon season thunderheads gathers above my head, mushrooming upwards towards the sun and blocking its rays from my tired red eyes, backlighting its wispy limbs in glorious phosphorescence. As I crane my neck upwards to fully enjoy its beauty, I accidentally swerve my moto towards the opposite lane of traffic. Sopheak’s riding behind me, and I feel his knees involuntarily tighten around my waist in fear.

“What’s wrong?” he yells against the wind.

I nod up. The lumbering dark mass continues its exponential expansion, and the road becomes perceptively darker as the sun’s rays struggle to pierce through its moist bulking mass.

We pull over to enjoy the late afternoon sunlight and stretch our legs. Its Sunday, our day of rest, and we have little to do. Sopheak suggests driving to a nearby mountain to watch the sunset. My troubled state and tired eyes could use some natural beauty, so with hopes of catching a spectacular display of nature, we decide to set off on my small moto.

A quick conference at the wood house brings Sopheap, Jon, Soda and Tear along as well, a party of six split between my and Sopheap’s motos.. Tear and Soda, the smaller of the group, hop on the back of my significantly weaker vehicle, and we’re off, with the road and the comforting sound of the 90 cc engine ferrying us off into rural, ancient Cambodia.

Dark clouds coalesce as we gather on our destination. The road empties out, becoming a long, narrow, sun speckled alley, shadowed by tall leafy trees that hang over the road, refracting the golden late afternoon light into beautiful patterns on the tired pavement kissed by my worn tires. The road leads all the way to Angkor Wat and continues onward, zooming past hordes of tourists and tuk tuk drivers. The slow, sweeping, euphoric realization embeds itself in my consciousness that we are no longer Americans or Cambodians or tourists or classifiable by any syllabic word, but six individuals, members of this beautiful surrogate family called The Global Child, on a mission together, appealing to the basic natures of our being in pursuing adventure and happiness in a mysterious, unknown destination, clutching each other close and tight, anxiously leaning forward into the wind, ushered into the unknown by the beautiful packed sound of the engine beneath us.

The road leading to the mountain we originally embarked for is closed. The setting sun and thickening clouds bring premature darkness and threaten to end our journey, yet we press on, and suddenly we are surrounded by stone sculptures thousands of years old, a long line of wide faced warriors with neatly patterned hair, occasionally missing an arm or part of their face, in a long line tugging an enormous serpent that rises up to greet us as we fly past. Now under and through the large imposing stone gate with its welcoming, ancient, heavy wooden doors and now a sanctuary, a wilderness bisected by the narrow asphalt road, serene, leafy, and peaceful. Faster and faster now on our small motos, my tiny gears reaching their limit under the weight, floating around gentle turns, and halfway through banking into a particularly deep one I suddenly feel Soda’s fingernails dig deeper into my sides, and there it is, right up ahead, Bayon Temple, a crumbling, dreamlike stone fortress, dark and looming, fantastically beautiful, radiant, and dreamlike. Lightning arcs across the inky blank sky, backlighting the ancient stone pillars in cool white luminescence. I slow the moto as we approach the next curve, wrapping us around the temple in a slow, lazy circle.

The lightning storm illuminates this ancient relic of millennia past in stunning, breathtaking clarity, and lights a path from my dire intellectual straits, beckoning me to walk along a middle path of recognition, acceptance, and understanding

Yes, the pain in this world is incomprehensible at times, but to dwell on this pain and not recognize the inherent beauty is an exercise in hopeless self-destruction. The beauty is harder to discern, however, because we are culturally unaccustomed to recognizing it in the myriad ways its presented. No one makes movies about a child jumping rope, or a volunteer visiting temples with his students. Child prostitution is a universal, recognized evil that is ubiquitously attacked for its moral transgressions with great vigor. We know that it causes pain, distress, despair, and even the citizens of this ethical netherworld realize the terrible ramifications of their perverted desires. Yet, the life’s omnipresent beauty counteracts this plunge of the ethical altimeter, tirelessly tugging it upwards. It’s terribly easy to overlook, but once we take a step back we can begin to comprehend it. We look so closely for it, in bite sized television programs, relationships, books, art, literature. The purest form of this beauty is so large, so sweeping, so overarching, that we need to take a few steps backward to see it in its entirety.

Some hours later I’m at the wood house, buried in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, which is beginning to seem horribly selfish in light of my recent musings. I often bring a book with me, in order to both pass the time and also direct some attention away from myself and see the kids interacting among themselves in a more natural environment. A small group of the younger children, all of them in my primary class, run outside where I’m seated cross legged on one of the cushioned benches. They begin jumping rope with a jumprope that threatens to unravel with every beat against the red tiled patio. The sound of the rope hitting the tile, the rhythmic dancing of its shadow under the sole tungsten floodlight illuminating the patio lulls me into a deep trance. The kids begin counting in their beautiful native language, each number following the sharp whack of the rope against the burgundy tile. Muoy, bpee, bpie, boon, prahm, prahm-muoy....My eyes glaze over and my mind begins musing over the experiences earlier that day.

Some time passes before I snap up to find Leakena has joined them. Despite being one of the youngest, she is my brightest and most diligent student, and matches her impressive intellect and drive with an endless affinity for mischief. I look on. She is wearing this stunningly beautiful solid orange dress, and in the strange limelight emitted by the single fluorescent bulb, hopping and jumping and laughing, she is incandescent, cherubic, magnificent, her boundless soul exploding outwards into the space between us, laughing and jumping and rocking back and forth, falling over the rope, chasing her friends who she loves with all of her tiny indefatigable heart, her eyes twinkling, smiling, laughing at this crazy world and her place in it, and I realize this is it, the beauty that fights back the seemingly unstoppable tide of pain and suffering, and I find hide behind my flimsy paperback to conceal the tears streaming down my face.

This girl, this little, radiant, mischievous 13 year old girl, has taught me a lesson I have carried with me since. She dragged me back to the world of the laughing and smiling, reconfirmed my role in this life, brought me back from the ethical void that I was teetering on.

This beauty is everywhere. Slow down, take a few breaths and really pay attention to the intricacies of what is happening around you, and there it is, right in front of you where you least expected. It is in the face of a chubby korean child forgetting the words to his choir’s song at the opening of a school. In Sophal’s furrowed brow as he struggles with a geometry problem. In Chamroun’s glowing pride as she shows me around her simple abode. In the caring eyes of Sopheap as he rubs my dirty feet to keep them warm while I’m shivering in bed in the throes of some mysterious illness.

We are sitting on that great, infinite beach of life, and although we can only pick up a few grains, we have a choice. In Cambodia, the grains are coarser, more painful and difficult than back home, but the grains of beauty still exist, and when we pay attention grow and blossom into alabaster pearls, small containers of infinite beauty and happiness. We just need to be observant enough to recognize them amidst this great landscape, pluck them out, cherish them and allow them to flourish into their full beauty while still acknowledging the pain and suffering of those around us.

This is it, right here, kind reader, this is life, sweet, tragic, unpredictable, beautiful life, with its pain, bliss, triumphs, tragedies, but life, unavoidable, undeniable, unspeakably beautiful life, and we must drink it all in, with our bodies, our souls, our eyes, and when its last drop falls from our bodies we can look back with satisfaction and know that we did not shy from the one reality that we ever had the possibility of knowing: sweet, horrible, entrancing, infinite, euphoric life.