Gardening

I had a practice of spending forty minutes each morning writing about gardens that I have known throughout my life. The grounds of a former monastic property in Cambridgeshire, where my parents ran the community in the 1970s; the place we moved to afterwards, with its beds of roses and rhododendrons, that belonged to a minor Thai Princess; a narrow back garden in North London walled in by spruce slats, where I played cricket with my cousin – gardens in Greece, Thailand, and Spain. The catalogue had no agenda, but I enjoyed the exercise, mainly as an escape from monotony and Covid, a kind of interior travelogue.

It was a funny way to get outside of myself, I am not an avid gardener, unlike my mum, my knowledge of botany is scant but I needed the dirt, that mucking around outside I was lacking in Thailand; you might say that the mental garden was a way to feel less alienated. I poked around in the Gardener’s Labyrinth of Thomas Hill, published in 1651, and the Hypnoteromachia Poliphili, written in 1499, which takes place in allegorical landscapes but I couldn’t face the language:

“I grewe extreamely hoate and faynte, not knowing what to doe, but onely in a wearye body, to conteine a minde distraught through troublesome thoughts.”

In these brief forays into gardening lore, I discovered that soil carries Microbacterium Vaccae, which acts on the gut’s micro-biome to increase serotonin production: being in contact with dirt makes farmers and gardeners happy.

As I progressed, I thought about the wider significance of taming nature, the way paradise is a synonym for park, and of Europe’s primordial marshlands and forests drained and cut-back by monks, how a garden can symbolise lost innocence, transmutation, and the afterlife. I became interested in the story of Daphne, who had turned herself into a bay tree to escape Apollo, and in Thailand of the thorny Ngew tree that the lustful dead are forced to slide down. With one thing transforming into another, even though it had not been my objective, the departed began to take up residence in the spaces I was recreating: my mother, grandparents, friends.

Cemeteries

Researching gardens and parks for my writing, I locate a big blob of green on Google Maps. It turns out to be a cemetery for the Chinese Teochiu community. I have never even heard of it, even though it is in the heart of Bangkok, close to the Business District around Sathorn Road. Bangkok is a vast city, in parts dense and high-rise. Around the edges, which go on forever, it becomes a medley of small factories and housing complexes, with packs of stray dogs and canals clogged with plastic bottles. It can all look very much alike. Bangkok is a vast city but it is small in terms of usage. People stick to their districts and transit lines; it’s no surprise that I had not yet been to this graveyard.

Getting out of the car at the cemetery the psychic charge hits me immediately. It is as if the volume has been turned down, the atmosphere is thicker, sluggish. I have had this sensation at various places: in one room at my grandparents’ house, at the sanctuary of Agios Nektarios on Aegina, and the City Pillar Shrine, where Bangkok was founded. The latter is one of my favourite places in Bangkok. To access the shrine you have to step down towards the earth, which is remarkable because invariably in the Thai tradition sacred things are raised up. No matter the materials, the marble and gold leaf, and the incense, this is an honouring of the ground, and as such there is a funerary element to it.

The Teochiu graveyard is scruffy and neglected. In spite of my sensitivity, people are jogging and marching along the graveyard’s central path. The ghostliness dissipates as I venture farther inside, as though that unlikely feeling were an attribute of the gateway. The cemetery is beautiful, covered with Bodhi trees, and banyans, and overgrown tracks leading past modest tombs sinking into themselves.

The forgotten dead are mine too through my grandmother, and wife, who have Teochiu ancestry. Teochius are a phenomenally successful Chinese dialect group, they came from the hinterlands around Shantou, north of Hong Kong, and dominate Bangkok’s economic life. An explanation for the cemetery’s state of rustic abandon was that the bankers and developers, many of whom were Teochius, wouldn’t dare touch the hallowed ground. They fear the spirits, and the impropriety.

On subsequent trips, I bring my camera and a few 4x5 slides of black and white film. Like Proust, and the diminishing shudder, the psychic twitch lessens each time I visit. It is easy to dismiss such things. Grown-ups, especially European ones, such as myself, should never admit to these feelings. It is hocus-pocus, which can lead to weird thought processes. I’ll stand by that. I’ll be logical, and snigger, but a part of me will remain pleased that there’s a small corner of Bangkok where you can feel spooked. That part of me that doesn’t want everywhere to be the same, and that suspects the electric, scary, dusk sensation of Bangkok, is fading away, and after it’s gone it’ll be impossible to say what it was like, we’ll just look back with anthropological interest at folklore, and insist that people didn’t know better.

I develop my film at home, with a small tank, and then – lacking equipment – try to print them by pinning the negatives to the inside of my view camera and shining a table lamp through the glass to cast the image at photo-paper I stuck to the wall. It is a process reminiscent of early photography: camera, enlarger, and alchemist/charlatan, all rolled up together.

*

Ghosts are part of the everyday in Thailand. They pop up in reports of mass hauntings in the News, like the cases of unexplained deaths that afflict communities from time to time. Often the victims are young men. Recently there was a village where seemingly healthy men in their twenties started dying from heart failure. It was held to be the presence of a female ghost and the villagers held practices to appease and dispel her. As soon as the News arrives it vanishes. A sceptic might say that the Media goes quiet just as soon as the locals start questioning the presence of a large factory nearby or the use of various pesticides in the surrounding orchards. But who is to know? The curious aspect is the readiness for people to look to supernatural forces. I don’t think they are stupid or ignorant. If it’s environmental there is a long tradition of communities fighting for better conditions, sometimes with tragic results. I believe that the ghost world is another system for channelling injustice, by allowing individuals to give voice to their frustrations, to personify chance.

But that is also too constrictive a view. The ghost world in Thailand is a world. In this realm there are distinctions between gods, which are both Indian and Chinese in origin, deities, who can derive from hero cults, forces of nature, like the Naga, saints, or Bodhisattvas who have resigned enlightenment to help other life forms, sprites of the land and country, and innumerable ghosts. These often have names, although many do not. It is a system of knowledge that seems innate, but is part of the culture and not based on one specific source. So Thai life can be confusing.

The way to navigate Thai life is through sensitivity to the world and its signs – an omen coming from a storm cloud, the timely appearance of a bird, or a snake. Barking dogs at night might herald the presence of a ghost, you must never piss while you are swimming in a river, according to the Princely manual Svasti Raksa by Sunthorn Phu – a brilliant poet of the early 19^th century – and never urinate on a certain type of banana tree, or its spirit will come for you.

I have heard monks talking about ghosts as if they were deluded individuals or naughty children that are essentially harmless if you keep an eye out. It is common for people to say that it’s a ghost when they get goose-bumps. One of my favourite beliefs is that spirits, and things of sacred power can appear in photography. Spirit photographs often adorn shrines at temples and in houses. The ones I have seen resemble smudges, and unlikely flashes on the print. I am not saying that this is evidence, but I appreciate the way that the spirit world persists through technology.

Photography has always been associated with the supernatural – think of those 19^th century pictures of ectoplasm creeping out of Victorian mouths, or the fears that a person’s soul will be stolen, or made vulnerable by the captured image. Photography is both frozen time and, in the cinematic sense, animated stillness – via persistence of vision – although cinema is also the heir of theatre, which is to enact, relive, commune and cleanse.

Beatific Faces

A week or so after discovering the Teochiu cemetery I heard that a friend had died. Marinos complained of a sore throat that wouldn’t clear up when I called him in 2020, at the start of the pandemic. That time we spoke when another close friend, Alex, went into a coma after an accident. Marinos told me Alex had fallen into a bonfire during the Athens carnival, an event Alex looked forward to every year. He was terribly burned and the doctors didn’t think he would make it through the night. Alex’s costume had caught fire, and with the crowds it had taken a while for the ambulance to reach him. It was absurd, totally unworthy of Alex.

If I picture Alex it’s quite some time ago, he’s 36 years old; back living on Daedalou street in Plaka, in the oldest part of Athens; constantly forgetting his house key, Alex jimmies open the front door with an old phone card, which he has stashed outside on the street. His tiny flat is decked out with things from his travels; it has a small yard where he throws wild parties, in which impossible numbers of people cram into the courtyard. I got to know Marinos at one of these nights.

In spite of the poor chances, six months later Alex came back. It was a long complicated affair, in which he underwent numerous operations, and caught hospital bugs, and many times almost died. While he was in hospital the world closed down due to Covid. We said, “What will we tell him when he comes out of the coma?” His sister Leto set things straight, “We are all waiting in a line so that when Alex is conscious we can throttle him for being so irresponsible.”

Meanwhile Marinos was diagnosed with throat cancer. At one point Marinos and Alex were being treated in the same hospital, the pair of them separated by a few wards. “We fucked ourselves. Look what happened to Alex, and I can hardly swallow.” Marinos told me on one of the few times I reached him. I tried calling Marinos a few times in the weeks before he died but he had no energy and it was painful for him to speak. I sent Marinos a last message that was never read.

In May 2022 it is Alex’s turn to call about Marinos. We both choke back tears. When I find out that Marinos had gone – leaving a teenaged son and daughter – I am in an apartment off Saladaeng Road in the centre of Bangkok. I regret not speaking to Marinos for a last time. The funeral would be in a day or two, when Marinos would be buried in the Athens’ First Cemetery. Alex adds, “My family plot is not far off, at least we’ll be near each other in the afterlife.”

I look down at people passing in the late afternoon light, and up at the glass-fronted office blocks. I heard a Buddhist monk once say that there is no greater teacher than death – although we want to put it aside, this is the moment to take note. I try to form a mental picture of Marinos before he fades:

I have just watched Pasolini’s Medea. Marinos points out the way Pasolini favours handsome boys with beatific looks. Marinos mimics the face of one of Pasolini’s cherubs. Marinos is slight, we call him “Rhino,” and make fun when he loses his temper at a pushy barman yelling, “Skatofatsa”, shit-face becomes an affectionate saying in Marinos’ company. He is in fact patient and courteous. He grew up on Corfu, and had the accent when he was a boy. Other children made fun of him at school in Athens. Marinos spoke other languages beside Greek. English, Turkish – he had a Turkish wife – Japanese, from university, Italian, French, decent Spanish, and Chinese, again from Uni. He could read archaic Japanese, and classical Chinese, and studied Ottoman script for a time. When Marinos was applying for work he didn’t put all of these on his CV because he thought that no one would believe him.

Marinos ended up working as a researcher at the National Museum of Greece. Doing research about the War of Independence in the 1820s he talks of urine as antiseptic, extremely widespread in the records. He looks at me disgusted, “But sometimes it’s too much, all of this piss.” We wandered from that war to the invasion of Italy by the Carthaginians, the hurling of Hasdrubal’s head into Hannibal’s camp; and this took Marinos to a favourite: the use of Crassus’ severed head by the victorious Parthians as a prop in a performance of The Bacchae, “A very folky way of staging a play,” he chuckles sardonically.

Having access to the museum vaults he found curios, such as an unexploded Molotov cocktail from the 1980s, rags of old political banners, underground posters announcing marches, or lampooning forgotten ministers. Inspired by the collection, Marinos sought to capture the shifting discourse of public life, that ethereal history written above the thoroughfares. It became an excuse for urban forays, joined by Alex, with my very occasional participation.

While Marinos hunted posters, Alex harvested olives from archaeological parks. He would gather a few every time he passed through the sites, a handful here and there stuffed into his coat pocket. The trees in the sites were running to wild, not pruned properly for fruit, and the olives he collected were meagre things. He pickled them in a large jar at home. Alex pelted us with bitter oranges, abundant on the streets of Athens. These bombardments provoked small battles. We would end up covered in citrus follicles, and scented like bergamot.