One Night in Bangkok: A brief travelogue

Every time I visit or just pass through, I am always fascinated by Bangkok. In this post, I don't focus on the ornate and mesmerising temples; the churning dynamic waters of the Chao Phraya river; the simple delicate beauty of the floating markets; the aroma and captivating taste of the city's street food and the like. The city of angels (Krung Thep) invokes in me an unsettling, yet strangely attractive evocation of the feeling that opposites: phenomena and objects I reflexively tend to perceive as categorical, separate and incompatible; have highly fluid and permeable boundaries. And this is most obvious as the evening and blanket of night settles over the city. In 2012, I spent just one night as a stopover on my way to Bhutan, and this post captures my diary entry for that particular night.

The aforementioned boundaries allow the ebb and flow of energy and influence between these opposite things, things which in some cases, perhaps shouldn't truly coexist. An example was my curious stroll down Soi Nana, a street well known for sex tourism, debauchery, intoxication and essentially, hedonistic good times. A place where perhaps, a lonely farang may even find love, and become afflicted with that romantic lust known colloquially as Thailand fever (and/or, more direct transmissible nasties).

Anyway, in many of the street stalls one can find a ready assortment of available prescription-only substances: cialis, viagra and others in tablet and liquid form for assisting with your bestial lovemaking prowess; diazepam and other benzodiazepines for perhaps leashing the wild horses named "anxiety" and "paranoia" initially set free by Thai street amphetamine, or perhaps even putting one in the mood for sex, lots and lots of paid sex.

Directly next to these stalls, you can find an assortment of enablers of violence to balance the crude aforementioned aids to a hedonistic pseudo-intimacy: knives, butterfly blades, knuckledusters- I even discovered a mounted target-acquiring device for sniper rifles.

Even more fascinating, and perhaps again an opposite to all of the concerns of primal materialism and mate acquisition, one stall down and one finds a variety of Genuine buddhist Amulets, charms, incense and thangkas available for the more spiritually discerning customer.

Here, in the implicit coexistence of opposites, one may feel that there is the promotion of an acceptance of mans primal needs, perhaps as a necessary step toward the goal of release and enlightenment. An image of Tantric practices, whereby a male deva is ideally united with his female consort as a symbol of the union of opposites enabling the birth of creativity, comes to mind.

This ideal image is quickly tainted by the opposite thought that instead, here is a example where symbols of spiritual ideals have been reified and sold for material gain. They will be used by many a buyer as a superstitious and non-reflective means of assuaging guilt for their sins past committed. It does so by acting as an idealised object outside one's self and hence sense of responsibility, into which is projected the forgiving power of atonement.

Thus they enter a samsaric cycle of symbol-enabled forgiveness, nightly participation in orgaistic hedonism and forgiveness again through the lingering fumes of bodily scents and substances consumed.

With these thoughts swirling like incense in my mind, I succumb to the urge to self medicate this confusion, and happily consume a rather delicious Belgian beer in a bar off to a side lane......