Confinement Four

Ban Apinihan 29/4/2020



On Facebook people are posting videos of empty cities. In places like Cincinnati or Melbourne wild animals roam the streets. It has taken them such little time to reclaim that which is ours. I heard on the BBC that Yosemite Park has become itself again and that bears are sun-bathing in parking lots. Waddles of ducks are walking down the streets of Paris, past the grey pierre de taille buildings and closed charcuterie shops.



All of this because human movement, if not human activity, has ceased. Humans have receded to their technological trickles, grasping at their civilization with whatever tools we still have: Internet, books, Netflix…



In my generation the radio was our tribal drumbeat. I remember when John Lennon was murdered and an entire swath of baby boomers turned off their television sets and just listened to Beatles music on the radio. We didn’t want the image pollution and reporters’ questions, we didn’t want to see the blood on the sidewalk. We just wanted his music.



We have far more distractions today. I myself confess an addiction to House of Cards.



Vientiane itself is so close to being invaded by nature anyways, despite the native blindness to garbage, that not much has changed here.



Near our house a huge tract of land is being levelled to make way for a future impeccable suburban project. Fine. Come what may.



Have any of you noticed that when people only consume what they need the economy tanks?



Singing the song from The Book of the Jungle, my children as me to explain the English expression, ‘the bare necessities’.



You can watch the empty world here: https://www.skylinewebcams.com/

  

Confiement Three

Ban Apinihan, 28/4/2020



Is it a forgotten city? I have always thought of her as such. A mole of forgetfulness in the Mekong plain going about her little business.



During the days of the lockdown the city, never a strong force in our lives, receded into a distant noiseless approach. Parties were at a muffled distance, traffic a seldom rumour.



Last night blended perfectly in from yesterday afternoon when I had some errands to run in town and instead of coming home directly I rode along on the city’s ring roads, past the Settatirat Hospital and into the courtyards of the open and illuminated temples there to confide amongst the gold-tinted reclining Buddhas and lone courtyard trees.



The streets were growing. People were out, shops were open and men sat drinking beer together. The lockdown is to be lifted on Monday next, in one week and already the people of Vientiane are spreading their wings. The traffic is buoyant if delicate, subdued yet flourishing. Everyone wore a mask as a concession to the orders.



Like every man with a family to care for at the edge of this brave new world, like every blindfolded sucker waiting for the axe to drop and the future to come smashing on our plans with its sharp and inevitable blade… like all men everywhere I sometimes look into the precipice and ask myself, wondering out loud. Whether there will be a world for my children.



In the midst of dark and frightening thoughts, thoughts like a granite gargoyle, thoughts as welcoming as a cob-crypt I found a meadow, a spot of forest and then, just then, I got a telephone call from people I had not seen or spoken to in twenty years; people who have always stayed in my heart, tucked like a reserve diamond in a refugee’s coat; a little wooden box I would open now and then to preserve their beauty.



And there they were. On WhatsApp. Older, yes, and still the same grace and humility, still the same love song to life and it came to me – the dry stone hills of the Galilee, the little hippy community of goat-cheese makers, the lone wood-burning stove in the living room of the old stone house. Rosh Pina.



The call from my past, their accented Hebrew, the inevitable joy and resignation. Sickness, old age, forever flourishing.



That is when I went temple hopping. The gates were open and the lights were on and at every corner the bright and accepting silent receiving of the Buddha statues. The delicious placidity and sweet gecko calls, the flying ants smothering the naked light bulbs carving halos through the night.



From temple to temple, like sailing through Greek islands until I made it home.

Confinement Two

Ban Apinihan, 26/4/2020







In the face of a hangover all bravery, every indication of salvation, runs busy body past the starting line; in the opposite direction, cheered upon by the adversaries and to the dismayed exaltations of the losing side.



Alcohol is the great flattener, the fermented or distilled answer to longevity. Morning lungs are sore, the head pounds inexplicably, members shatter their previous mastery and tremble precariously.



I remember sunrises full of grace, sunlight peering from below a purple horizon and filling the sky like a breath. I remember dotted stars fading before the majesty. I remember the sliver of the moon made transparent by sun’s rising tide. I remember heartfelt thanks as morning dew kissed grass blades and petals farewell. I remember the dank dark soil murmuring its Song of Ascents while butterflies and dragonflies caressed the air.



But today I awaken at noon to my darkened room, for I had the foresight to close the impending light out before collapsing the night before. Slivers of light at odd angles crash in through the wooden tiles and settle there, blinding if small, a concentrated hit, on an ancient beam or illuminating a fastidious spider web.



Outside voices from the lake tell me that the fishermen and women are out, foraging amongst the sweet water weeds under the shade of shore trees. Life, the thing I left behind with my half-finished glass of Cahors, has somehow managed to go on without me, has somehow managed a kick start of cockcrows and ruffled feathers and with that the villagers exchange gossip or talk about food. I can hear their sturdy palms flatten the water to drive the fish into their nets. In my mind’s eye I can see them peeling the tiny black shellfish off the river grass and can hear them being dropped into floating baskets.



I stumbled from bed this morning, made it to the balcony door and opened it as an old man would a birthday present. The light of day collapsed upon me, exclaiming Holy! Holy! Holy! From your vicious and head wracking hangover, from this debilitating state of affairs we – the water and the light, the ripples and the spider webs, the voices and the pounding, the trembling and the weakness….



….from all this we will sublimate a morning.

Confinement One

Ban Apinihan, 25/4/2020





In the meantime the ancient lake, home of battles and battalions, armoured Indochinese knights wrestling cursing mythical snakes, is cloud-washed, drenched in its own circle of rain and pause, a place where some things will never surface.




Blue-grey clouds, their visible layers melting off into a light grey blanket; a line of distant cocont trees with one standing naked and bereaved; the slow moving fishermen and women casting their triangular bamboo nets into the murky waters; the silence of the pre-monsoon plain as it veers toward smoothingness, distant rooster calls and the fishermen walking stealthily through the waist-high water, their bodies bent forward as though they could see their feet through the primal muck.




A fisherwoman lifts her net out the water to examine her catch but is only rewarded with drops of water, rivulets streaming down the white net; nothing more. She is dressed from head to foot, her hat covered with a plastic bag and floating beside her is a tiny boat filled with drinking water and food and cigarettes and a lighter.




The sun, also rising, does so behind a canopy of cloud and the air, untainted by the smell of burning garbage is as clear as Creation.




And to think this will all happen and has always happened and is happening now: an insect call, a flutter of wing, a bending blade of grass, wavering flowers crowning every bough, the tight brotherly coconuts huddling against ripening time.




There are no silent killers here. All of them can apply as much stealth as they wish; there will always be a munching. There will always be a distant cow and somewhere in the lost and tucked-in country side beyond a morning fire will cackle and blaze for sticky rice and breakfast vegetables. Somewhere a father will be collecting his tools and a mother washing out a black and dented pot, somewhere the wood plank and bamboo kitchen veranda will be awash with splashed water, bits of food scattered between the floor boards to feed the chickens, geese and pigs below. Somewhere the eternal Asian morning will begin afresh as though no one had ever turned off the lights, as though the sun had never set the evening before and as though the stars had not dotted the shrill tropical night with its drowsing bird calls and insect rushing cackles.




And yet the morning freshness is there to tell all and to speak of the evaporating night chills to speak to the dews upon the naked mountain flanks, to speak to the heavy clouds calling out of the valleys.