Spectra and I went on a weekend trip organized by Bangkok Vanguards which is “a young, dynamic start-up with Thai-German roots passionate about Thailand, travel and social innovation” whose mission is “strengthening Thailand's communities and promoting, conserving and protecting Thailand's cultural and environmental resources.” The trip was brilliant and I wholeheartedly approved of Bangkok Vanguards but I won’t mention them again in this post. If you want to learn more about the organization I recommend checking out their Facebook page (don’t let the homepage image of a lady clearly littering bother you, I’m sure it made sense in context although I have no idea what it was). As thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening as the trip was I’m going to gloss over it to set the stage for one experience within it that someone should make a movie or write a Malcolm Gladwell-like anthropological-psychological book about.
When Spectra informed me we were going on this Bangkok Vanguards trip my gut reaction was to worm out of it even though it was basically an excuse to run around with a bunch of kids and give them presents. I just couldn’t stand the thought of being cooped up for two days with a group of people totally indifferent to my existence. So I wasn’t in the friendliest frame of mind to begin with and then the trip got off to a miserable start.
I had to wake up at 5:15 which is so early for me I was nauseous and then a ride on a slowly moving, gently rocking train pushed me to the brink of vomit. I should add that when I wasn't concerned with throwing up I very much enjoyed chatting with Michalina from Poland who referred to Thailand as "the donkey island from Pinocchio" but meant it as a compliment. When we arrived at the end of the line I sat on a bench for 15 minutes doing nothing but sipping water and focusing on breathing. I managed to battle back into feeling okay and from that point on things got progressively better.
On the boat ride upriver (or downriver… I’m still completely flummoxed by the geography of this trip and Thailand in general), which was much less nauseating than the train, I chatted with a couple of French ladies—Natacha and Fanny— and may have convinced the whole boat to see Timeline. We ate lunch with monks at a temple and then put on a kind of mini-carnival for the local kids. There were games like three-legged race and hopscotch for kids to “win” in order to get stamps that entitled them to gift bags filled with cool-ish school supplies. There were probably 120 or so kids ranging in age from toddlers to a few stray 12-year-olds and in speaking English from none to a wee-tiny bit. My ability to fully engage with them was thus limited, which was frustrating, but a pair of 12-year-old boys who spoke no English really took to me for some reason so I wasn’t standing alone in the corner either.
After that it was time for dinner which took place on a boat that I can only describe as “an old-style Asian pontoon boat.” It was just one open, flat surface. We sat on the floor around the perimeter and the food was placed on the floor running down the middle. As we ate the boat cruised up and down the river. The sun set, dusk came and went, it was dark when we returned. The experience was cinematic, the kind one might capture to send to aliens as an example of what they’d be missing out on if they exterminated the human race. I think if I allowed myself to dwell on recollecting it I’d spontaneously start crying which would derail my writing this so I’m not going to.
Spectra was sitting on my left (natch) and the brave soul who decided to sit on my right was Mamwng—that’s Thai for mango but I can’t call him Mango because of Saturday Night Live—and next to him were his friends Belle and Ning (both ladies for those not versed in attaching probable sexes to Thai nicknames). One of the skills I long ago abandoned the notion I have any acumen for is guessing people’s ages, but I’d hazard all three are in their 20’s with an average age of 25. While I’m uncertain about their ages I can guarantee you if you accidentally watched a Thai teen drama (like, oh, I don’t know, maybe... Timeline!) and these three were the leads you wouldn’t think twice about it. You’d probably think, “Yep, it’s some good looking Thai people.” I will henceforth intermittently refer to them as the Thai Trinity.
Spectra and I had chatted with the Thai Trinity a little at 6am and then a bit here and there but I doubt they got on the boat and thought, “Hey! Sawyer and Spectra!” The first half of the boat cruise dinner they were basically locked into talking to me. They couldn’t have moved or ignored me without making a scene and Thai culture is traditionally confrontation averse (protests aside). Even if they were sick and tired of my pummeling them with question after question, following up on point after point, pressing on evasion after evasion there was nothing they could do about it. They were stuck with me and I took full advantage of it.
About two-thirds of the way through the dinner cruise I turned over to the Thai Trinity an 8-year-old boy who’d taken an interest in me because I’m American, I know this because he told me so, and then an interest in Belle because he was ready for a girlfriend, which he admitted under intense questioning. I puttered off to the stern to silently bask in the setting for a while (and give my new “friends” a break) and then got caught up in conversations with other folks.
Specifically I got to chatting with Peter, a wildly affable Englishman who lives in Thailand, is married to a Thai woman, and is the aforementioned 8 year old's father; and then an international coalition of ladies (France, Poland, and Thailand) the most important of which—for the purposes of what you're about to read, at least—is Fanny. Fanny is French and one of the ladies I’d chatted with on the boat ride earlier in the day.
In the interest of reducing the punishing length of this post I shouldn't share this bit but who cares. One of my favorite throw-away moments of the weekend was trying to get Fanny to recognize a French movie Spectra and I had watched on Netflix. It was called Heartbreaker, in English, but we knew nothing about it, watched it as a joke, and were stunned to find we both loved it. We'd never heard of the star, didn't know if it had been direct-to-video or what. So I was describing as much of the movie as I could remember to Fanny and she had no idea what I was talking about until I said, "The big scene is in a closed bar-restaurant and the guy and the girl dance some silly dance."
Fanny turned, talked to two of her countrywomen for a second, then turned back to me and asked in a French accent and phrasing out of a movie, "Ze dance, eet vuz Dirty DancING, no?"
YES! That was it! I'd forgotten. Here's the throw-away moment: the look Fanny then shot me was a classic American stereotype of French highfalutin disdain. She honestly arched an eyebrow, pursed her lips, drew one corner of her mouth into the touch of frown, and lowered her chin so she could look up at me using the angle of disdain. Because I’d gotten my Existentialist playwrights backwards or hadn’t heard of Cahiers du Cinéma? No, because I didn't recognize the signature dance from Dirty Dancing! That can't be further from American stereotypes about French people. I laughed and teased her about it. That's it. Hope you enjoyed that narratively pointless anecdote. Whether it was existentially pointless I’ll leave for you to ponder. Moving on.
By the time I got back to my spot the cruise was winding down but not the evening. The final phase was a trek on foot through the jungle to a bar in the middle of a coconut grove. On the way I talked to one of the Bangkok Vanguards Thai-German organizers, David, who just so happened to have been a professional basketball player in Germany when a young Dirk Nowitzki was looking for pickup games to stay in shape during the late ‘90’s NBA lockout. So David played basketball with and against Nowitzki for a summer. This has nothing to do with anything other than... while walking through a jungle to get to a coconut grove to find a bar I was chatting with a Thai-German dude who played basketball with and against Dirk Fraking Nowitzki for a summer. Of course I did because this weekend was that kind of experience.
The “bar” wasn’t so much a bar as it was some sort of art commune living space where the communists kept a fridge stocked with beer they’d sell if you asked. There was a small one-story house, probably 30-feet by 20-feet, and the front yard was a kind of outdoor lounge that would instantly become the coolest place to get a drink in the Twin Cities if it were attached to a taproom. In one corner there was a gazebo with a DJ. In the other corner there were a couple of adobe booths (I don’t know if they were technically “adobe” but I don’t know what else to call them). There were tables and chairs clustered here and there. Trees, strings of lights, mosaics on the ground on tables on the walls. I staked out one of the adobe booths and then corralled Belle, then Mamwng and Ning, and eventually Spectra and Fanny.
I was pressing Mamwng on a question he didn’t want to answer—where he’s from—and to change to subject he asked if we were familiar with a game called Muud Magicks. Belle and Ning both got excited but Spectra, Fanny, and I had no idea what he was talking about it.
“It’s simple,” Mamwng told us, “I tell you what A, B, and C are and all you have to do is tell me what D is and D can be anything. For example, A is this table, B is this bottle of beer, and C is the moon. What is D?”
Belle and Ning both took a moment before nodding in “ahhh” fashion. Spectra, Fanny and I looked at them, then at each other, then all over the place trying to figure out what D could be. Each one of us hazarded a tentative guess.
“The lightbulb,” I said.
“No,” Mamwang replied.
“The tide,” Spectra said.
“No.”
“Is it the Earth?” Fanny guessed.
“No.” Mamwng asked Belle and Ning, “Do either of you have it?”
Belle and Ning looked at each other and silently decided which one would answer. Then Ning said, “D is this bottle cap.”
Without hesitation Mamwng said, “That is correct. D is this bottle cap.”
Spectra, Fanny, and I looked at each other and then at the table, bottle, moon and then bottle cap trying to figure out the connection. Round things? Round things above, below, and next to each other? It was mystifying.
After a minute of trying to find the connection I said, “Again. Next one.”
“Okay,” Mamwng started. “A is this lint, B is your hair, and C is her nose. What is D?”
Spectra, Fanny, and I looked at the lint, then my hair, and Fanny’s nose. Each one of us clearly struggling to find the connection. Mamwng asked Belle if she had it. She did. He asked Ning. She did too. We were flummoxed and each of us offered up a guess.
“Is it her ear?”
“No.”
“Is D her head?”
“No.”
“Her shirt?”
“No. Belle? Ning?”
Belle said, “D is China.”
“That is correct,” Mamwng said without hesitation as Ning nodded in deep and unambiguous agreement.
Fanny, Spectra, and I were flabbergasted. We looked at the lint, my hair, and her nose and then thought about China, our minds boggling at the idea there was a connection between them at all much less that someone could find it in a matter of moments. We asked batteries of questions. Made them go through it again and again and again. We teamed up, tried figure it out together and failed. Each collection of objects was just as mystifying as the last and some seemed patently impossible.
There was a telling, and in retrospect amazing, moment when Fanny got the right answer. As soon as she said it Ning, Belle, and Mamwng all burst into big smiles and celebratory postures but an instant later all three of them were skeptical. There was something about Fanny—her demeanor or the look on her face or something—that made the Thai Trinity think, “Did she just get lucky?” This can’t be stressed enough, their reactions were simultaneous. They weren’t glancing at each other or having sidebar conversations. All three of them were right there with each other on all of this stuff all of the time. They tested Fanny and she got it wrong. She hadn’t discovered the secret of Muud Magicks after all and the Thai Trinity all suspected as much a moment after it appeared she had. How in the hell were they doing it?
At this point you’re probably thinking what Spectra, Fanny, and I were thinking. They were cheating. We accused them of cheating too but the thing was it didn’t seem like they were. Their reactions were too genuine and too perfectly orchestrated. Unless they really were professional actors or grifters they were too good to be faking.
Muud Magicks was a trick and the Thai Trinity were upfront about that. A trick we could figure out, perhaps most importantly, a trick they wanted us to figure out. Ning in particular was anxious for us to get it and kept giving us hints. “Think less and listen more.” “D can be anything.” Mamwng, Ning, and Belle took turns giving us A,B,C, and D. After we’d been at it for, I don’t know, half-an-hour? an hour? Ning started, “A is a…”
Mamwng stopped her, “No, that’s too easy.” Then the Thai Trinity briefly fussed with each other before agreeing to a slightly less easy formulation.
Ning continued, “A is ___, B is ___, C is ___, so what is D?” [NOTE: Ning didn’t leave those blanks blank but I am for reasons I’ll eventually get around to.]
D seemed obvious but Fanny, Spectra, and I were all gun-shy after so many failures. We talked to each other, hashed out our reasoning for D, and agreed that D had to be ____. Spectra guessed the obvious answer... and got it wrong, Fanny guessed a variant of the obvious answer... and got it wrong, and in their guesses I finally heard the secret. It’s this moment right here, even before I gave the answer to D, that’s the first half of what I want that future movie or book I mentioned at the outset to be about.
A grin of comprehending disbelief slowly spread across my face, I slumped in my seat in utter astonishment. The secret was only a “secret” in the most limited, technical sense. What do you call a secret that’s not so much hiding in plain sight as it is sitting in the middle of the street, singing a song and selling cold beverages? That’s what this was. Less a secret and more an issue of seeing what you were looking at all along. Before I answered I looked up into the faces of Mamwng, Ning, and Belle and all three of them were on the edges of their seats, literally leaning toward me, their mouths slightly agape, eyes wide, each one beaming at me say it, say it. They knew that I knew even before I said anything.
I gave the correct answer and the Thai Trinity burst into celebration. Spectra and Fanny were beside themselves in shocked indignation. Unlike when Fanny had her false-positive correct answer the Thai Trinity didn’t ask me to demonstrate the veracity of my knowledge but I wanted to prove it so I asked them to test me.
This caught Mamwng momentarily off guard but then he agreed. “Okay, A is the boat we ate dinner on, B is Yingluck, C is a basketball.”
I took a moment to ponder it, hashing out the connections, trying to find the right D, then pointed and said, “D is this speck of dirt.”
Everyone around our mosaic table, seated in an adobe booth in a “bar” in a coconut grove in the jungle went absolutely nuts. The Trinity with glee and Spectra and Fanny (and onlookers) with incredulity. It was confirmed beyond a doubt, I got it, and in so doing it made Muud Magicks all the more magical. As soon as I divined the secret, whatever lingering “they’re cheating” notions evaporated for Spectra, Fanny, and the onlookers.
Paradoxically the fact I’d figured out how it wasn’t magic made it all the more magical because Spectra and Fanny and the others were no closer to seeing the secret than they had been in the first place (six days later Spectra still hasn’t figured it out). The subtly amazing thing about understanding Muud Majicks is the second you get it you can fully participate in making the magic. It’s not like a card trick where you need to practice alone for a while. So one moment I was totally clueless and the next I was an expert no different than Belle, Ning and Mamwng. Spectra and Fanny absolutely, positively could NOT believe it.
Here’s the thing, I’d argue Muud Magicks is a form of magic and the nature of its brilliance is it’s magic backwards. One of my 10 favorite movies is The Prestige. The 2006 dueling Victorian magicians movie that’s curiously unpopular considering it stars Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, and Scarlett Johansson and was directed by post-Batman Begins Christopher Nolan. Anyway, The Prestige is explicitly about the nature of magic and the human relationship to it. At one point Christian Bale’s character teaches a kid a magic trick and then warns him that people will beg and plead for the secret to the trick, “The secret impresses no one,” Mr. Bale warns, “The trick you use it for is everything.”
That’s true of cut-the-lady-in-half magic. Once you know there’s a mirror, or whatever it is, the illusion is ruined and what used to be magic becomes a gimmick. If you work out how the magic works there is no magic and the world is more fun with at least a sliver of doubt about the existence of magic, as Hugh Jackman’s character in The Prestige memorably explains, “The audience knows the truth. The world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder.”
Human beings crave that wonder. We’re probably biochemically programmed to seek it out and manufacture it when it isn’t provided to us. With traditional magic that wonder is one-sided; the audience gets to bask in the wonder created by the magician. When you watch a traditional magician you can see them working. Even the very best ones need to hold their hands juuuuuust so and direct your attention riiiiiiiiight now. Just because you can see the unnatural and practiced ways they hold and move their hands doesn’t mean you can see the trick, but you know the trick is in there somewhere. The show a traditional magician puts on is for the benefit of the audience.
With Muud Magicks the “show,” so to speak, is as much for the magicians as it is for the audience. Don’t get me wrong. The show for people who don’t know the trick is pretty good. There were moments I started wonder if maybe Mamwng, Belle, and Ning really did know magic. I was the cusp of freaking out when either Ning or Belle had done ABC; Spectra, Fanny, and I all failed to guess it; and Mamwng leaned back, pointed at my face and said “D is your head!” as Ning and Belle burst into riotous laughter. Granted the setting and a moderate amount of alcohol helped with the show but, still, it was there. And here’s the second critical aspect of the movie or future book about this.
The Thai Trinity, Ning in particular, wanted us to figure Muud Magicks out because part of the magic is the transition from outside to insider. Not right away, of course, you need to stew a little bit for the crossover to be satisfying. The magicians want to see you make that internal journey to join them on the other side. They want to look you in the eye as a grin slowly grows across your face and you realize the full dimensions of the simple, elegant brilliance of Muud Magicks.
Maybe it’s because I’m in a 96% Buddhist country and was surrounded by Asian people but I couldn’t help but see the Buddha’s grin on the Thai Trinity's faces. The Buddha is usually depicted with a hint of a grin because “the secret” of existence is ultimately simple. Siddhartha left home, traveled all over, had all kinds of experiences, suffered all kinds of deprivations, in search of the “the secret” but it wouldn’t come. The harder he “looked” the more difficult it was to see. So he sat down, stopped looking, and realized “the secret” was right there all along. It was essentially sitting in the middle of the road, singing a song and offering cold beverages the whole time. In order to see it all he had to do was “think less and listen more” and embrace the fact that “D can be anything.”
The Buddha’s grin is both internal and external. Internally saying, “Ah, geez, it was right there all along and I didn’t see it. That’s amazing.” Externally saying, “Just you wait, trust me, it’s awesome once you get over here, you’ll see.” That’s what I saw on Ning, Mamwng, and Belle’s faces. The Buddha’s grin welcoming me to Muud Majicks nirvana. It’s a tiny, limited and especially silly nirvana, I conceed, but it's pretty sweet in its own trifling way.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I am an not a Buddhist authority so do not quote this in the comparative religion paper you’re writing (Safia, Amira, Beckett). If you are a Buddhist please don’t get bent out of shape and keep in mind you ought not be getting bent out of shape anyway. You’re Buddhist, not one of the cranky Abrahamic faiths. At least this is what I’ve gleaned from a variety of sources and filtered through what makes sense to me.
This, Ladies and Gentleman and Beckett, is why you do not want to cheat yourself out of the experience of discovering the secret of Muud Magicks, of being greeted as you crossover to the the other side. If you find the secret online you’ll kick yourself for it someday. If you know me I promise you’ll get your chance (provided we both live long enough to get there and if one or both of us die then we’ll have bigger issues to deal with anyway). If you don’t know me just randomly ask people you know or get to know if they're familiar with the trick. That would actually be the preferable way of learning it, from strangers, because it would heighten, what for me was, the most important part: the looks on Belle, Ning, and Mamwng's faces.
The ability borderline strangers—I'd meet them that morning—had in that moment to non-verbally convey to me yep, you’re there and we’re right here with you was as humanity affirming an experience as I’ve had. A feeling I’d share with aliens as another example why they shouldn’t destroy the human race, at least not utterly. Like I said (a long time ago), I wasn't in the friendliest, most human affirming place when we embarked on this trip. And yet there the Thai Trinity was, wordlessly conveying that they knew my mind and that I knew theirs. It was a tiny version of a Vulcan mind meld and if you cheat by looking up the secret you’d miss out on that experience.
If you won’t take my word for it—which would be fair, because who the the hell am I?—then at least consider Christopher Nolan’s as expressed through Hugh Jackman's closing words (this time in full) in The Prestige, “You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth. The world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder. And you get to see something very special, you really don't know... It was the look on their faces.”
I’ve seen those faces and I’ve been those faces and I promise, you don’t want to not understand, you don’t want to not know, the wait is worth it. So, A is simple, B is miserable, C is solid all the way through. Now, Ladies and Gentlemen and Beckett, tell me, what is D?
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| Does this look like someone who knows the world is simple, miserable, and solid all the way through? |
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