23rd March (2020)

 

23rd March

This morning Kosal Son and Narak, two of Colors of Cambodia’s most diligent students are in the gallery. It’s not an early morning for them, but a late night, they explain. Oh what it us to be young and full of energy.

Presently I am back at Nai for breakfast. The morning walk through Siem Reap’s alleys has set me up for a cooked breakfast, something I rarely have at home. It’s still very quiet here.

Donovan’s song ‘Season of the Witch’ (Donovan Leitch, 1966) sneaks into my mind.....

‘When I look out my window,

Many sights to see

And when I look in my window,

So many different people to be.

That is strange

So strange.’

Does this unexpected sojourn in Siem Reap, Cambodia, concede to Poe’s writing....‘is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?’ (Edgar Allan Poe, 1849). Admittedly, there were times in my younger life when, due to LSD, I would have been unable to know the difference. Those days passed half a century ago, and yet the strangeness of life is constantly reinforced. These are not ‘acid flashbacks’, or yet psychological absences but an acknowledgement of being very tangibly other, Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, maybe or an unanchored selfhood, or dare I say glimpses into an alternate reality, a ‘Sur’ reality as promoted by André Breton and the Surrealists. 

19.26

Back to Nai for curry fish and a fifty cent beer.

Here is practically devoid of tourists. Maybe it’s early. There are only two other people eating, and we are well spaced apart. It’s warm here. Not as humid as Malaysia. For the second time I see a customer light his cigarette in this restaurant. One was last night, and another tonight. There is a ban on smoking in restaurants in Cambodia, some people simply ignore it, ignorant of their effect on others. Back to pondering our strangeness to each other.

As suggested by my absent significant other, I bough cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. Earlier I bought another $1 hand of small bananas.

Whoohoo today’s total expenditure $10.50