A Fly, Dioramas and Schrödinger's Cat

It’s the small things. After spending years of hammering large things into bits of useless notions – pitch pots and yarn-wrapped coffee can projects a third grade teacher assured would please Mommy – the meanings and misunderstandings of life – obsessions with dissecting self and other’s motivations – drawings, paintings and words hopelessly looking for colors that might communicate something, anything, to anyone – meanings behind everything from God’s will, to Buddha’s teachings, to a unified theory, to synchronicity, to the inscrutability of greed, human cruelty, fuel prices, fashionable clothing and gravity – a fly lands on the edge of my plate of ginger chicken and noodles and, between sucks of savory oils off my plastic dish, nonchalantly explains it all to me in a tiny, clear voice.

“Find what you can, eat what you can,” it says, “That’s it.”

A fly surviving as it can. There is no more than that. The chafe is flying in the wind and I can turn off mind-mill. I need not write on. The feasting fly explained the whole of it. There is no more. But I am desperately vain. Despite the pesky insect’s wisdom, I still find it difficult to soot my mirror and look without rather than within. I write on. I am human and continue wrapping yarn around coffee cans, hoping to transform them into flower pots; so I muse along, but I also (too slowly) strain to wean myself from the weight of heady reflection – now at least aware of the futility of it all – awareness purchased through many years of stupidities, vivid, unattainable yearnings and irrelevant catastrophes. Nothing is the whole of it and the whole of it is nothing.

At last understanding there is no understanding and that my observations cannot be conveyed through any medium, I am free to experience small things safely alone and cloaked from criticism. I expect guarded, privileged freedom to be my reward – an ecstatic, revelation-laden solitude. But, of course, there are no gifts and my rewards are imagined; transparent, fleeting rainbows known only to me.

I'm visible. Sometimes I laugh loudly. It’s impossible to hide my tears. Private isolations, desolations and ecstasies are destined to be shared communally; not totally, not as I experience them, that’s impossible, but occasionally through subtle, temporary agreements between me and whatever accidental audience happens by. Solitude, reflection and knowledge always near, but never fully experienced and frustratingly impossible to share. So the whole of it is nothing and isn't nothing - it's Schrödinger's Cat.

That's my excuse for the shallow descriptions of the countless scenes of Thai life we peer into day after day. It’s difficult enough to describe the culture of the life I was born to, but it's impossible to unravel this alien culture. It is the uncomfortable lot of expats to view the countless dioramas we peer into – wondering children looking through windows – to realize that the crèche on the other side of the glass has no meaning for us at all, only the meanings we impose - meanings that disappear the minute we look away and reenter our personal histories. So we sit on the edge of the plate, find what we can, eat what we can and, like the fly on my plate, tell everyone who asks, “That’s it,” and hope they go away without taking a swat at us.