I observe the gecko
07/02/11 11:54 Filed in: Logbook
It’s been a long time since my last post. Here’s a little story telling why.
I observe the gecko. It’s motionless under the lamp that casts a weak light on the table. It’s small and looks as though it’s made of rubber. I don’t move my hands, I try to stay still and keep watching it. Observing a gecko is useful: it teaches you attention, patience, perception of territory. We should observe animals more often, as the ancient Chinese wise men used to do.
Then, in among these esoteric meanderings, a quote from Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now comes to mind: “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving”. This unsettling thought distracts me from the gecko. I make an imperceptible movement and it scuttles off the table and under another lamp on the railing that stands between me and the river. I look back to the notebook next to me, seeing the three lines of the haiku I was writing before the gecko appeared.
Wet following the
Rain opposite the
Temple at dawn.
The syllables don’t add up, and I can’t fit in the required five, seven, five pattern. For some unknown mental dysfunction, I am unable to scan the syllables.
This is how I sometimes end up spending my evenings in Bangkok. Holed up in an inn next to the river, perhaps in front of a bowl of crab curry and rice, I feel I am exactly where I should be. I don’t know why. It’s as though the end of the day gives me hope. Mornings scare me, as they bring the idea that I have to face my thoughts again for the rest of the day. During those evenings, though, I often get a flash of mental presence, a sense of synchronicity, a connection between subjective and objective events that occur at the same and between which there’s no relationship of cause-effect but a clear communion of meaning. I see the stories I would like to tell. And that often, by the time morning comes, have disappeared into my uncertainties. I end up just waiting for something to happen.
As Captain Willard says in the first scene of Apocalypse Now: “I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.”
I observe the gecko. It’s motionless under the lamp that casts a weak light on the table. It’s small and looks as though it’s made of rubber. I don’t move my hands, I try to stay still and keep watching it. Observing a gecko is useful: it teaches you attention, patience, perception of territory. We should observe animals more often, as the ancient Chinese wise men used to do.
Then, in among these esoteric meanderings, a quote from Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now comes to mind: “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving”. This unsettling thought distracts me from the gecko. I make an imperceptible movement and it scuttles off the table and under another lamp on the railing that stands between me and the river. I look back to the notebook next to me, seeing the three lines of the haiku I was writing before the gecko appeared.
Wet following the
Rain opposite the
Temple at dawn.
The syllables don’t add up, and I can’t fit in the required five, seven, five pattern. For some unknown mental dysfunction, I am unable to scan the syllables.
This is how I sometimes end up spending my evenings in Bangkok. Holed up in an inn next to the river, perhaps in front of a bowl of crab curry and rice, I feel I am exactly where I should be. I don’t know why. It’s as though the end of the day gives me hope. Mornings scare me, as they bring the idea that I have to face my thoughts again for the rest of the day. During those evenings, though, I often get a flash of mental presence, a sense of synchronicity, a connection between subjective and objective events that occur at the same and between which there’s no relationship of cause-effect but a clear communion of meaning. I see the stories I would like to tell. And that often, by the time morning comes, have disappeared into my uncertainties. I end up just waiting for something to happen.
As Captain Willard says in the first scene of Apocalypse Now: “I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.”
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