Markets in Bangkok

To walk in a Bangkok market is to experience the endless. For even when you reach the conclusion of a row of stalls, there are either still yet more or a quiet darkness.

Even if you choose the darkness, the solace of a cab or tuk-tuk, there is still yet tomorrow; for tomorrow you will have to walk through the same paths, even if they are elsewhere, doomed or exalted to repeat the past day, repeat tomorrow, until each day is a treadmill of human, a revolving door that never stops, a riot of flesh, a sluggish river of elbows and eyes.

The vendors line the streets at night, springing up quickly, setting up shop for the endless stream of bodies flowing by. For their religion is sales, and negotiation their penance, these rootless proprietors of a tiny space, enclosed by plastic and fluorescent.

Traveling alone, if only briefly, one feels a certain sense of freedom; to both mourn humanity and to celebrate the heart. Writing and observing, both intensely lonely things to do, crowd close when you are alone. They tap on your shoulder, asking, “Where have you been?” Often we are too preoccupied chasing after our own highs, looking for money, women or men, or power. Money in the sense of a glad bargain or a penny saved. Women in the sense of a quick tryst or a deep longing. Power in the sense of a strong bicep or an ordered business.

All these and more clutter the obstructed mind, anchoring us to a clouded existence. Not that these obstructions aren’t important in their way, but in order to understand and appreciate something, one must occasionally distance oneself from it.