Life During Wartime

Yesterday, as I spent the afternoon sitting in the park reading a book, a grenade was lobbed by an unknown party into a crowd of protesters at the Victory Monument, a few minutes' walk down the street, injuring 30.

It's a cliche to say that in times of war, one should live life as normal, so as to not "let the terrorists win." And there's truth there-- after all, we run countless risks in our ordinary lives without thinking it, and besides, we need to live our lives regardless.

Over the past week or so, the streets have turned into ghostly, empty passageways leading to the loci of mass protest sites, barricaded by piles of tires and guarded by militants wearing bandannas and armbands covered in slogans. The tension has been there.

But when the additional threat of unknown and unknowable violence, committed by unknown parties who seem tied to neither camp in the current political fracas, the tension turns to fear, and that spot on Ratchawithee Road becomes blackened dread.

Terrorists, it's typically argued, use the methods of terror to project their voice. And a good Foucauldian would also say that it's a claim of biopower, the use of dead bodies for political means. But what often seems ignored is the spatial dimension, the way the active group crudely hacks out a piece of landscape. It's not for themselves, it's not claimed territory.

And when the terror itself is not claimed, there is no voice. The bomb site is pure threat, a scar across the face of the city.

It has been suspected that the leaders of the protest and their well-placed supporters among Thailand's commercial and aristocratic elite are using Reichstag tactics to levy public opinion, or to force a military takeover of the government. But there is no evidence for this, and I doubt any will arise. And as for the government's forces, they have no interest in creating chaos-- the police are being held back, and all they want is their electoral victory in a few weeks' time.

But it's this unknowability that reflects the polygonal nature of the Thai body politic. The international media, along with the more partisan members of the local media, depict a simplistic picture of two groups, red and yellow, in favor of Yingluck Shinawatra's Pheu Thai government and the legacy of the Thaksin government before her versus those against them. But you have a broad range, including red shirts who have been disappointed by Yingluck's tenure and by the self-righteous populist hucksters in the Pheu Thai party, swaths of the PDRC group led by Suthep Thaugsuban who find Suthep himself to be ungainly and corrupt, the hardcore supporters at either end, the former supporters of Suthep who are bothered by his increasingly unbending and anti-democratic demands, the hardline monarchists with their hateful phobias of modernity and egalitarianism, and you have the vast body of Thais who are alienated by the whole damn thing. Now compound this with the machine politics of the Thai parliament in which invisible lines of patronage and clientelism dominate, with cliques led by thuggish big men, old alliances formed in boys' boarding schools and military college graduating classes and century-old Chinese immigrant business alliances and common lines of descent from illustrious ancestors.

This big something, so much messier and more disparate than the 24-hour news cycle is willing to admit, creates a situation where it becomes entirely unsurprising that some cabal somewhere, meeting in the soft-lit halls of power, is willing to hand a few thousand baht to some poor peasant or out-of-work builder to lunge a bomb into a crowd on a bright Sunday afternoon.

And I know I am still the outsider to it all, the youthful foreigner who only half understands the signs and speeches in their original language.

But the notion of an outsider's perspective having any value at all seems to be at present roundly dismissed. Yes, the media perspective has been shoddy. But the PDRC has been accusing any journalist who asks hardball questions, or, for that matter, questions the wisdom of ousting a democratically elected government, as being a Yingluck supporter. Keep in mind these are the same people who tried to commandeer the media and force them to only broadcast the news from their perspective a month ago, and who lack any apparent sense of irony.

But the thing is, when outsiders are told they cannot understand an issue because of their nationality, rather than taking this a stern rebuke, they tend to be reminded of the rants of Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, of the apologists for workers' rights abuses in Dubai and Singapore, and if we're to be a bit melodramatic, of the darkest moments of 20th Century Europe.

As I walk to work, I'm haunted by two specters: that of the authoritarianism that threatens to strangle me, and that of the terrorism that threatens to bleed me out in the street.

And that authoritarianism and that terrorism are united in their opacity. I'm living in a city that seems to be blanketed in a heavy fog of disinformation and violence. In a bit of jargon that George Orwell would have been proud of, a military spokesman, when asked about the tanks being held in Bangkok, answered that "the matter will be further explained on a later date."

When will it be resolved? The government has set an election date-- knowing full well they can expect a victory-- for the 2nd of February, but maybe that will be delayed. The PDRC refuses to negotiate, demanding an people's council (read: junta), and the more extreme members of his camp are suggesting scare tactics like shutting down all air control in Thailand. I'm reminded of the little boy who refuses to share his toy, and when asked to, simply smashes it against the wall.

For now, all I see in the future is awfulness. Even in the scenario I want to happen-- a peaceable election-- we will in all likelihood, see high emotions and ineffectual governance. The reforms needed will be difficult to pass and even more difficult to  implement. Democracy can flourish in Thailand, but until then, I sleep in a war zone.

In Din Daeng

My friends live in other neighborhoods throughout the city. In Thong Lo ("Golden Forge"), with its glittering cocktail bars and valet-parked Porsches, in Aree ("Generosity") with its tiny cafes and elegant mid-century homes, its warm colors and banana trees. But here, in Din Daeng ("Red Earth"), the city expresses itself as a blank zone, colorless and without shape.

Not too long ago, I went to an exhibition of photos of ordinary street life in Bangkok, most of which was rather anodyne, the sort of thing you see in tourist guides... street vendors frying chicken, beaming classical dancers in golden dresses, monks with alms bowls, all of them counterpointed against something like a businesswoman on an iPhone to indicate the juxtaposition of traditional and modern. But also on display were the photos of Rong Wong-Savun, a sort of Thai Walker Evans, depicting my neighborhood as it once was.



In the early '60s, at the height of the first Bangkok construction boom, the National Housing Authority redeveloped the old dumping ground on the northern outskirts of the city in the Robert Moses mode. The NHA tore down the slums, and in their stead, five-story housing blocks, akin to the khrushchyovka apartments built in the USSR in the same period, rose up with modern angles and white walls.

Nowadays, Din Daeng is to Bangkok what Southwest DC or certain areas of South London are to their respective countries-- a cast-concrete backwater at the heart of the national capital. From the window of a taxi, the apartment blocks continue for what seem like miles, the doors of identical buildings illuminated by floodlights, lining street after street, interspersed with minor government ministries, the overpasses and brick walls sprayed with angry political slogans.

On a closer level, Din Daeng is the migrant workers that smoke cigarettes from tenement windows, it is discount mu katha restaurants with mournful upcountry songs playing over the grilling of meat, it is the exhaust clouds over Vibhavadi Rangsit Road, it is the harmlessly insane woman who dances to the music in her head all day in front of her family's shop at the bottom of my street.

Why then, do I choose to live there? A lot of foreigners who live in obscure Bangkok neighborhoods praise their authenticity and friendliness. And there's a truth in that. I have my coffee lady, my washerwoman, my satay man who always makes the same dumb joke about not hitting my head on the aluminum hood over his stall. But "authenticity" is a problematic concept at best. And while there are genial people for sure, there are also the meth gangs that sit around chain-smoking and practicing their tough sneers, and lately, the tear-gas clouds that covered the area after political violence on Mit Maitri ("Friendly Relations") Road.

We build up slow relationships to the spaces we occupy through our daily and repeated motions, whether they're relationships of love, or hate, or neither. My walk to the metro stop or the supermarket slowly fixes my relation to the city I live in, as the infinitesimal motion of coral polyps builds a reef.

I can, when protected by a thin layer of capital, move from place to place, and have done so any number of times, happily. Many others in this globalized era do so without that, with only an empty stomach and the hope of a job in Dubai or Los Angeles or Hong Kong. But it's hard to be truly adrift, to not have some link to place. And for this moment, I have found that link. I wake up, and the corner of the city that I see from my bedroom window is familiar to the point of intimacy.

National Anthem

My moto was stopped as we crossed the barracks that lent the Sanam Pao ("target range") BTS station its name. As the national anthem began to play, my driver, like everyone else in plein-air, immediately stopped. Three soldiers stood at attention, rifles at their sides, facing an arrangement of flags-- that of the king, that of the queen, that of the nation, before the rising eastern sun.

Like many other expatriates in Bangkok, I've come to bristle at the playing of the national anthem, a product of 1930s fascism in both its origins and spirit, with lyrics referring to blood and soil that very much fit the ethos of Field Marshal Phibun's tinpot tropical reich.

The bells that precede the anthem's play-- 8 AM and 6 PM sharp, another remnant of the Phibun era-- are Pavlovian at this point. I want nothing more than to run away and hide to someplace where I don't have to stand at attention, to prostrate myself as a gesture towards the nationalism I have always hated.

Of course, lots of foreigners in Bangkok maintain a principled contempt for the Thai national anthem, the hollow rituals that accompany it, the militant veneration of nationalist ideology, and the various flavors of gloomy propaganda pushed by Ministry of Culture bureaucrats. I certainly sympathize.

But, when so many of these Westerners are interrogated, they seem to be under the delusion that this ideology is essential and unchanging, and that an undefined "culture" prevents the citizens of the nation from actually possessing the capacity for critical thought. It's the same perspective found among British colonialists in pre-partition India (it's all caste, don't you see, if we leave there won't be a virgin left between Calcutta and Karachi) and Halliburton functionaries in the America-damaged sections of the Middle East (Islam makes them think this way, the Arab mind hates democracy). Though to be fair, what I find especially galling about the local version of this sort of intellectual imperialism is simply that I have to deal with it on a near-daily basis, so it pisses me off more, natch.

Now, there are also Westerners whose practice goes in the opposite direction, who are at pains to adopt Thai ways, and decry modernization and urbanization as a loss of "Thainess." These are the same Westerners who wai obsequiously at every turn, who are at near-constant pains to show off their (lousy) Thai language skills, and who attempt, with starry-eyed naivete, to adopt Buddhist practice.

Both of these approaches reflect fundamentally orientalist understandings. Yet both can speak to higher virtues on one level-- of iconoclasm, and of cross-cultural understanding, respectively-- but are bogged down as their practitioners let their unbending convictions obfuscate the messy complexities of human existence.

And, fundamentally, both are seen through the lens of the Western expatriate's single-minded pursuit of pleasure. What you hear being bitched about in Sukhumvit Road pubs by expats of both persuasions are the most superficial goddamn things: excessive fees imposed upon foreigners, the Asiatic obsession with fair skin. You don't hear those expats bitching so much about, say, the virtual enslavement of Burmese migrant workers, the Charoen Pokphand Group's near-criminal push towards American-style industrial agriculture, or the prawn farms that are destroying miles of the Gulf of Thailand coast. No, they get rankled by the incidentals that deny them the gloss of white privilege that they cling onto as their claimed birthright, much like the dispossessed aristocrats in interwar-period England trying to maintain their gentility.

I don't mean to tar every Westerner in Thailand with the same brush. Some of them are, even, ostensibly, close friends of mine. And these are the ones who haven't chosen either of the two above paths. They tend to be pragmatic, thoughtful, and cosmopolitan. Much like the people I try to surround myself with wherever I go.

But it is one of the central questions of living overseas. You are forced to ask yourself who you are, what your beliefs are, what your assumptions are, how to balance personal integrity with larger-scale respect.

And those questions are drawn into even sharper relief when the streets of your city are filled with marching demonstrators waving national flags and chanting slogans, when the people you knew as your florist, as your noodle vendor are out with colored armbands. When government buildings are being stormed, when students are being shot, when dismal demagogues like the red-clad Jatuporn Prompan and the yellow-clad Suthep Thaugsuban attempt to commandeer the national media outlets, when all the talk is of a "people's council" (a phrase that summons up the sound of boots in synchronized march on dusty boulevards, of slit throats and dumped bodies in the mangroves).

And those questions make me nervous about even writing this, about my position as an outsider-- after all, it wasn't long ago that an esteemed member of parliament from Chumphon Province led a crowd to assault a German photographer for being too nosy. I'm a bit anxious, but I know I'll be far more anxious if I simply remain in silence, or restrict myself to grumbling in the pub with the other Westerners.

So I write something, in order to palliate my doubts, in order to make peace with the place I've chosen to inhabit.

American Airplanes

The American airplanes that once flew over this part of the world have long since departed. Once they filled the sky in olive-green flocks, but now we only have remnants.

A concrete strip is cut into an island in the South China Sea. Chemical plumes lace the groundwater of Manila, Saigon, and Khorat. Horizontal concrete hotels stand in Southeast Asian cities, their bars paneled in wood with potted palms and velvet drapes, Jim Beam and Bacardi blended into tropical drinks for lieutenant's wives.



And of course the strips of bars with names like "Oriental Nights" where girls in pink fishnet stockings and go-go boots have been catcalling for decades, the sorts of places where Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken pointed guns at their heads, in towns where dislocated children with hazel eyes are born into uncertainty.



Sometimes the American airplanes were applauded. Other times they got spat on. And on the coraline islands of Vanuatu, they inspired the holy devotion of Melanesian fisherfolk.



Some of the Americans stayed. Others left and came back. You see the old men who live in concrete houses with local wives in old air-base towns like Nakhon Phanom and Udon Thani, or laughing over a seven-and-seven in the secret military bar on Sathon Tai in Bangkok.

Or you see them in sadder places, in sleazy pink-lit bars on Sukhumvit 22, eyes fixed in the middle distance, a Tiger beer in one hand and a slowly burning Marlboro in the other, and maybe they've got a greasy, thin burger made with gristly local beef on a chipped plate, cold fries going limp in a pool of ketchup. You see them leering in sleazy nightclubs where they listen to a band play covers of contemporary pop songs they can't stand.

And when they've reached their end you see them at the embassy in crooked sunglasses and a baseball cap that says U.S.S. NEW JERSEY, pushed around in a wheelchair by a Thai or Filipina wife who hates them, American children who pity them, signing their will.

Do you know what you're signing? the embassy official says.

The American airplanes came to Asia at a time when America was at its blindly optimistic industrial peak, when you could call Detroit "the Arsenal of Democracy" without smirking. The photos of the pilots are as bright-eyed and apple-cheeked as the Waltons.

They left Cambodia and Laos as UXO-riddled kingdoms of ghosts, Vietnam as a by-word for disaster, a legacy of hundreds of thousands of midnight murders in Indonesia, full-hearted support for the corrupt thugs running Thailand and the Philippines.

The lazy analogy is to call the Americans "cowboys"-- it's inapplicable, and yet somehow legions of clueless French and Germans still buy it-- but to be a cowboy implies self-sufficiency and a ruggedly individual spirit.

On the contrary, the American military machine in Asia in the mid-20th Century was just that, a machine, scientific in its approach, with lessons learned from cybernetics and systems engineering. War was laid out by men like the accountant Robert McNamara and the policy man Henry Kissinger, men in nerdish glasses, applying Taylorist principles of management to destruction and violent death.

And the ruins are accordingly mechanical: sulfur and phosphorus, carbon steel and vulcanized rubber. Even the food of Fordist America remains in the Carnation condensed milk poured into the coffee cups of Vientiane, in the Spam pressed into rice in Guam, in the slashed hot dogs on skewers offered as a street snack in Phuket.

But for me, the young American, it is now an antique society, existing in the same amber haze of history that cloaks belle-époque Paris and Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Things that, to a generation previous, were part of childhood TV broadcasts are now as horses and buggies.

And so, perhaps one day, I'll have nieces and nephews writing about the waning days of the imperial American urge. About their conversations with a Kurdish taxi driver, or their visit to a Pakistani town destroyed by drones. Atrocity is immediate. The process of history lets the act of killing unfold into a million subtleties.

A Gunman in New Jersey

I am at work. I periodically click on things between assignments, and I find myself on Reddit. There's a shooting going on right now at the Garden State Plaza, a large shopping mall in North Jersey.

Click. He's shooting outside the Nordstrom.

Click. I switch to a music video. I check my-email and take a sip of my coffee.

Click. The area is being evacuated.

"Real time." What an odd idea. As we follow the events in what we consider to be real time, the chances are probably higher that we don't know anything that's happening. A photo here. Some video of a distraught witness there. But, despite the zoom lens that we have on the events as-they-are, we interpret them like the Twitter feed of a B-list celebrity, with about the same degree of passion.

Garden State Plaza. Paramus, New Jersey. Is that where the Seinfeld episode takes place where Jerry gets caught taking a piss in the stairwell?

The ads tell me that the stream of updates is sponsored by the NFL Network. TOGETHER WE MAKE FOOTBALL. White font, black background.

He's stopped shooting. Or has he? What's he wearing? Is he still in the mall? Accuracy takes second place to speculation. The speculation, after all, drives traffic and therefore revenue.

The next banner tells me there is "1 FOOD THAT KILLS," next to a rubicund man with a sow-pink paunch. "1 FOOD THAT KILLS. Top doctors admit that this popular food puts deadly fat into your belly, thighs, and internal organs. Never eat this food."

The Reddit update is filled with phrases like:

• Not sure of the validity of it.
• Unconfirmed.
• Take it with a grain of salt.

We think we see something when we absolutely don't.

It's New Jersey. For me, it's the other side of the planet. I don't know if I know anyone in New Jersey. I probably don't.

But I'm first-world enough to never be too far from the 24-hour news cycle. We are endowed with a certain omnipresence. Time and space have, as David Harvey said, compressed.

These things tend to follow a pattern. Eventually, facts are established, guilty parties named, the fog will clear and bathos will set in. Melodrama supplants empathy. Guilty parties are named and shamed. Genuine analysis is smothered under the desire for a morality play.

Meanwhile, down the street, protesters are marching through Sala Daeng, Uruphong, Ratchadamnoen. I see a photo, and even though I see the same intersection where I bought my breakfast, it feels just as mediated and distant.

Christopher Isherwood, living in interesting times, could say that he was a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. My camera is shut. I am only thinking, recording nothing at all.

At the end of the day, as I'm at home with my whiskey-and-soda, the poor bastard has shot himself in a dark corner. Another unstable person, another regrettable decision. The main story is finished, and now the bottom-feeders in the comment threads will take over.

Notes on a Conspiracy

I recently watched the excellent documentary-- well, excellent story, and serviceable as a documentary-- Resurrect Dead, about the hunt for the creator of the Toynbee tiles, the odd messages that mysteriously appear embedded in streets, primarily in and around Philadelphia. The story eventually focuses on one person, suspected of communicating through the most indirect of possible means: messages in the street, pseudonymous letters, short-wave radio, intercepted late-night television broadcasts.

Which leads to my own conspiracy obsession of late, the so-called Cicada 3301 sequence of events.

An apology before I further elaborate. Embedded citations are a symptom of an attention-deficit society, and I'm normally loathe to use them, but this seems to be one of the few cases where my writing really does call for them. I recognize that most, normal people aren't especially bothered, but I do feel a certain need to apologize to myself.

We, the public, know next to nothing about Cicada 3301, the big who behind it, or even the what of its existence. Certain leaked documents have suggested it to be a group of hacktivists, or a self-identified "think tank." Obviously, these documents are of questionable authenticity, but that's about all I have to work from. But I can say, with relative certainty, that if it's a lark or a prank or a viral marketing scheme, it is perhaps the most sophisticated in human history-- suggesting it actually is an organized, directed effort of global scope.

On January 4th, 2012, an image of white sans-serif text on a black background with a dark-gray watermark of a cicada appeared on 4Chan, saying that an organization was "looking for highly intelligent individuals." Hidden in the background, a steganographic message revealed to a Caesar cipher, which in turn led to an Imgur-hosted JPEG. Later puzzles involved mysterious phone number, encrypted Twitter feeds, haunting guitar music, and flyers pasted up in cities in seven countries. The full story has been told in detail and with greater journalistic flair in an article on Mental Floss, so I won't elaborate further here.

I spent some time looking at the specific puzzles, without taking up any of the challenges myself. I discovered Cicada well after both their 2012 and 2013 puzzle series. Furthermore, I rather doubt I'd be able to complete most of them. When I go through the technical details of each puzzle, I can summon forth some understanding, but I lack both the cryptographic skill set and the computer experience to really examine such problems lucidly.

So mostly I run into dead ends. A wiki, Uncovering Cicada, covers the Cicada mystery as it is known (which is to say almost exclusively through its puzzles that were solved by devoted Internet users), but a great many of the webpages that relate to Cicada seem to be dead links. The usernames of those who took part in the Cicada puzzles reportedly disappeared from the Internet after each month-long series. And as of a week ago, on October 6th, the Wikipedia page pertaining to Cicada was unceremoniously deleted.

This near-complete lack of documentary evidence seems perfectly in-line with the nature of the modern Internet. Rumor abounds, and the activities of Cicada take place almost entirely in the non-searchable, so-called "deep" web, a vast space orders of magnitude larger than the web we see every day. IRC users claim to have heard Cicada winners talk about activities, but these are obviously unreliable. And 4Chan and Pastebin, where much discussion has taken place, are specifically designed for high turnover of content.

One leak intrigued me. It seems to have been written by a native Korean speaker-- the author refers to the game of go as "baduk" and the letter's most glaring syntactical error places the verb at the end of the sentence, indicating a writer who is used to communicating in subject-object-verb word order, a characteristic of the Korean language-- but, dealing with this much opaque information, one begins to think that these are deliberately placed decoys to make the author's identity. There is something oddly compelling about it, though, with its paranoid evangelical-Christian jargon referring to "Jesuit thinking" and the "left-hand path." And while the ideas that the writer links to Cicada are presented as shocking, they frankly seem like rather normal quasi-anarchist thinking, suggesting the writer as one of those right-wingers who can't go to bed at night without checking under the bed for atheists.
After hours of reading and searching, and hours and hours of failed attempts at finding meaning, I have to wonder why I care so much.

Most people use the Internet for purposes ranging from the mundane to the imbecilic. We plug ourselves into the emotionally hollow world of social media, shopping socially, reading socially, thinking socially, our thoughts expressed in the devolved forms of the hashtag and the selfie. We are steamrolled by the major idiocies of the present zeitgeist: mushy confessionalism, a mass genuflection to the masters of marketing and advertising, a submission to the surveillance state in exchange for a false sense of security.

The appeal of the Cicada concept lies in its negation of all of these three, at least in its outward appearance. Instead of being confessional, it is terse. Rather than marketing itself, it hides. It has been speculated that it is in fact an espionage organization, but if so, like all espionage, it largely functions in a world that, for most entities that operate there, is shrouded in mystery. It emphasizes all that is cryptic and tenebrous within the web, and it emphasizes the hermetic, the baroque, the irreal, the cavernous, and the sublime in an Internet landscape that by and large emphasizes the opposite.

And for that, I'm waiting for something from them to surface again.

Find Me at the End of the World

There is a reverie I keep having, one that I can trace to the memory of a summer day, the spin of a dust-covered and yellowed fan, a scuffed wooden floor, and myself as a boy with a globe and a well-worn atlas, afternoon light streaming in through the twelve-paned windows, highlighting neatly typed Italic fonts next to impossibly small islands scattered, like unnamed constellations, across what seemed to be the uniform, turquoise plane of the world's oceans.

The names alone were an endless source of fascination-- Tristan da Cunha and Diego Garcia, Howland and Jarvis, Palmyra and Clipperton. There were, of course, better-known places-- Easter Island, the Galapagos-- whose names have become bywords for remoteness and exotic lifeforms and bizarre histories, and which have become havens for adventure tourists. At this point, they are part of the media-driven myth of the desert island, a place where us "civilized" people can escape from the angst of modern existence. But these tiny islands, along with the icy granite massifs of the polar regions, fascinated me because they didn't conform to this fantasy. They were null spots, uninhabited or inhabited by only a few hundred people, claimed by incidental nearest nations-- Chile, Mauritius, Colombia-- or by the remnants of the French, American, and British empires.

And so many of them carry the scars of those imperial endeavors. There are the islands pocked with the remnants of phosphate mining. Ghost towns with Yankee and Aussie names haunt the atolls of the Pacific, rusted railway tracks running down to decrepit harbors, gravel airstrips overgrown, fresh water fouled and root-colored.



And there are the islands that bear the remnants of war, rusted fuselage and unexploded ordnance littering the idyllic beaches. A great many continued to have remote naval operations through the Cold War, and some do even today. Others were used for secretive negotiations. Yet others had the misfortune to be targets for bombing missions, nuclear and conventional, now transformed through imperial whim into red zones of shattered hillsides, uranium-laced soil, and malformed chromosomes.



After economic disaster and military conflict, the few remaining residents of the world's remoter islands have largely been displaced. Some are native. Others are the descendants of old colonials. And others, huge numbers, are the descendants of the slave- and coolie-labor forces that carried out the imperialist project, Africans and Chinese and Indians. As the smaller islands of the world slowly depopulate, the only people left are the military personnel that maintain the islands' connections to the metropole, and the scientific personnel that chart the motions of waves, magma tubes, schools of cuttlefish.

For the human story is only one of the many of each island. There are the odd flora and fauna that have emerged in geographic separation from the mainland, there are the underwater jungles of coral, there are the nesting sites and the seabirds' routes that cut invisible lines in the noonday sky.

My sights these days, are set especially on Kingman Reef, adrift in the Pacific, a few degrees above the equator. It's technically an American territory, although it barely rises from the surface of the water, a calcitic gravel boomerang as low in profile as an abandoned railway grade in a small town.The life all lies underneath. A single coconut palm sapling attempts, with absolute futility, to rise. It is a beach without a land, a single point where the whorl of the Pacific Ocean gives up. And I see myself on the end of that strip, looking out at the endless and unforgiving vastness that extends all the way to Hawaii, a full thousand miles to the north.

As climate change claims more and more of the world, these last isolated freeholds will, in all likelihood be snuffed out, along with the cormorants' nests, the travelers' trees, and the ruins of churches and lighthouses.

Part of me, the part of me that's been reading a lot of Rosa Luxemburg lately, wants to deem this to be the logical end result of capitalist expansion-- discover, enslave, exploit, vacate, destroy-- but most of me knows that I'm imposing a fairly tenuous narrative on something far subtler, more complex, more difficult to pin down, less attributable to any one social or environmental force.

But I know, more or less for certain, that I will never go to those little black dots on the atlas page that I used to dream about before the sun sets on them one last time and they disappear beneath the tides.