Artwork © Richard Spisak

 

Chapter 21

Senior gentle janitor I may well be, as knowledgeable and influential on world events as the crumbs, lint, and dirt caught in my vacuum bag, and thus, unequivocally, a commoner in a common refrain in that sense, or potentially, in every sense. At least so I sense. But then, if Emerson is right, should I not accept the environment and society I am ensconced in? If the fetid smell of burning marijuana in downtown Honolulu is perceived as an aromatic incense wafting through the skyscrapers and streets of windy Honolulu, the mind can make a paradise out of the most desolate landscapes.

Some people I had met and had hoped to have friendly associations with in this native land so foreign to me have disappeared, presumably, from the gusts of these winds, swept up into the skies to live the rest of their days on alternate islands of clouds. Should I not embrace this area outside of Chinatown a little bit even if it is a minor Manila replete in philistines and sybarites, so many so insane and high as kites, and native Hawaiians with a most novel use of English solecisms with language never static but evolving anew despite the attempt to hold it to what it was by circumscribing it with grammar books, spellers, and attitudes of propriety? That they, these Hawaiians, seem to me Neanderthals uttering their first words after being dragged out of caves in Spain could just be an attitude problem on my part. If Emerson is right, should I not be accentuated by this land and people ? I don’t know.

A year ago I lost a continent–a whole continent in an unholy buffering of the winds of fate like any leaf dangling from a tree. But then had I not, wouldn’t I, as all, still be reeling from life in general, at least on a subconscious level, as from infancy to old age each year that we live that which we hold dear, and thus become, is stripped away. That so many of us are not perfectly mad by all this is short of miraculous, and that miracle is the defense of erased memory. Losing that which we might recall sustains us to deal with what we are and have now and the limitations it poses to the molting men within the shell of man. I am tantamount to an asylum seeker to my country and at the threshold of old age at 60. That it is the prime of life if compared to the age of Moses– undoubtedly anything under 499 would be–is of little importance. Everything is relative and a contrast of opposites, and that too is a nugatory truth. I am as I am in Honolulu, an environment of my choosing in the sense of having purchased the plane ticket to come here. Albeit not penniless any longer, having more than a few pennies with my baht to date, I came here willing to suffer its aftermath, its after-wrath, of job and status reversal. Diminished and diminutive I seem to be, but then in whose eyes would it be so unless my own with societal disapproval my own imagined construct. Others are fixated on themselves and do not see me let alone concern themselves in chastening my existence.

So if not a complete failure, what am I? Next to AI even an Einstein would be diminutive. Artificial intelligence lacking human experience directly for logical assessments has millions of vicarious experiences and factual evidence of the brightest men at its fingertips, so to speak, to more than compensate for this deficiency and so its logical assessments would have to be vastly superior to any I might concoct from my little life, so what value have I unless my value is of being the perplexed feeler of my own impulses and complexity, and my own flawed attempt at logically grappling with the chaotic life I am wearing. As Seneca phrases it, “Only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes or according to his social position which after all is something we wear like clothing.” That it is underpants with bedbugs in the elasticity accentuates instead of diminishes its value; that I walk amongst poor and homeless souls of downtown Honolulu to which areas like Bishop Street and Palli Highway have decaying, fallen flowers of trees like cherry orchards that reek a sweet perfumed scent fetidly that is similar to the residue of evaporated urine accentuates instead of diminishes its value.

The logic of all men simultaneously jumps hurdles of antithetical thoughts while clashing and boomeranging against others like desultory billardballs, but in so doing it allows a given man understanding of similarities in the dissimilar that artificial intelligence cannot do. Creative intellects do this with supreme acumen, while with average men in normal uses it is often referred to as “thinking out of the box”. Maybe this thinking I can do well, or maybe I am just a janitor with an attitude whose sense of superiority is unwarranted, and who thinking himself special alienates himself further.

Upon a month after landing here I got a job as a janitor and janitor I stay when everything from a security guard to governor of this Hawaiian state and beyond is replete in documenting one’s role more than in doing it, and/or performing the role in such a way for the customer that allows a company to acquire more wealth. Fish well for an organization and every now and then it will cut off a scrap of the head of a fish and throw it to the given worker. But we do what we must, and what we must do is that which allows us to survive. Far better it is to prostitute the body than the mind, for where the mind is prostituted the body prostitutes itself too by respect of being unable to be unfettered from it.

Another voice, although not as a friend in the sense of a Ciceronian “second self” per se–to have one of those would mean the first is incomplete–but another respected self, and all would be well. So come with me while I vacuum seven floors and more. Let us start at the 15th floor and move upward, deviating defiantly from the perfunctory and the drab. Reversals bring a bit of novelty to the mundane and the jejune of the routine by reprioritizing events thixotrophically.

Look! In this particular office one bank executive has a circular wicker swing overlooking the Iolani Palace for, presumably, brief respites of being higher than royalty.

 

While I work a work, that true to life itself, producing nothing of lasting value, you can sit there overlooking the residue of Queen Liliokulani and imagine her composing fiats as well as inspirational lyrics for her Hawaiian subjects from the palace balcony. This executive, I imagine (I would not know) paid a heavy price for his/her lofty job with its illusionary securities and perks and so as to procure ostentatious possessions. The homeless often live longer than such gilded overwrought sedentaries. When we finish this job, unlike the burdened executive, we can meander on and around palace grounds, marveling at the beauty of the blue peacocks, the semi feral peafowls, and the totally feral chickens with their line of chicks. A family like that greeted me at the airport when no one else did, not that anyone was required to do so. So that brings us to the subject of friendship that needs to be expatiated if you wouldn’t mind hearing it which I suppose you wouldn’t as you are this 6 year old’s imaginary friend. I will leave off the zero if you will be kind enough to forget it as well.

Seneca states that a complete person–complete in the sense of finding an academic discipline that imbues being with a glow no matter how pitch dark his surroundings–is happy even when friendless. By that we can assume that he means that such an individual would be predominately happy as all, regardless of how complete they are, are chemical beings subject to varying moods and subject to vagaries and vicissitudes. He also alleges that we are gregarious by nature and so friendship is a pleasant and natural activity that, if we excel in it not like broken beings seeking repair but functioning wholes, would involve nurturing and prodding others forward as constructively as possible. Certainly, even those who prioritize befriending and exploring hidden dimensions of self instead of being in perennial flight of it can feel forlorn at specific times, and none of us is exempt of the need of some scaffolding outside to the greater environment so as to have more than merely a solipsistic awareness of life. That scaffolding includes myriad persons alive and pass through our lives, some of the millions who passed on but left their legacies in their thoughts, and the myriad species one encounters in the natural environment that despite the crude brutality many employ to survive are grandeur than any one human presence.

But even with the best of whole beings, it is doubtful that in the traumas of life such individuals are altogether of sound construction. Flaws exist, and such inadequacies do lean us toward completion by connecting with those who have our missing attributes, although of course not in the ridiculous way that way that Plato’s fictionalized Aristophanes portrays it in the Symposium .

But society did not come about from tenancies toward the belligerent, the refractory, and the reclusive that are also inherent in every man, but by that social urge that in time allowed man to acquire his mental prowess, and then, eventually, his hegemony in the world as well. And although ethics, like science, is a composite of the academic and the lab (the laboratory here being the real world with the velleity of positive emotional responses like empathy conflated with volition impelling virtuous acts to improve something or someone), there is truth in Seneca’s statement that every time a good man leaves his home the purity of his intentions are sullied by the impurity of the unscrupulous masses of course functioning largely on instincts to survive and thrive and accompanying feelings, and the practical necessity to compromise to make a bit of his intentions fulfilled when in the maddening crowd–Toqueville and Thoreau reminding us that the choice of the majority does not always mean the good or the logical. Also, there is truth that often extroverted people seek noise as a means to deflect internal monologue and other mental cognition referred to as conscience that registers feelings of guilt (Plato saying that no one would be more miserable and no more desirous to escape his own thoughts than a tyrant), and that those who seem to love being with others do not love them per se but want to be loved to have a vast array of friends stored away for use.

When Cicero says that real friendship can only be had amongst good men who share an appreciation of virtue he surely meant the strictest definition of that word–that which Aristotle called friendship of goodness. But to say that there can be nothing other than this misses the fact that friendships of goodness in which two persons express different aspects of virtue or different virtues and grow by being in each other’s company is extremely rare; and if this were the sole definition of friendship, all of us have been misusing the word for all these forms of amity that are not friendships. When, as children, Jim Lapsley and I made the long bicycle trek from Kahoka to my grandparents’ farm, dismissing our respective paper routes for an adventure of mobility, autonomy, determination, and physical prowess, or clothed, acted out what sexual positions would entail I cannot gainsay its significance by saying that it was not friendship any more than this roaming through obscure back corridors dredging up thought for these essays can be thought of as exclusively solitary.

This childhood friendship was more special than most I had experienced, and although both a fleeting friendship of pleasure and a fleeting friendship of utility, and thus a temporary contract in that respect, as Aristotle would say, what else could this childish connection be than a friendship as it had positive impact that helped the growth of both parties. This is not to say that it would not pale next to this elusive friendship of goodness, if such a thing does actually exist (often friendships like relationships settling for the less than ideal as we have to exist in the environment in which we find ourselves). And that is not to say that it would not seem callow, flawed, and experimental for self discovery in adult estimations as we tend to require friendships that expand or reinforce us instead of being a means to find ourselves.

Emerson qualifies friendships of goodness by saying that such a group would only be possible amongst two whole units admiring the other enough to allow the other party to exist unchanged. He states that groups involving three or more parties would require too many compromises to be called a friendship. Then, much earlier, there was Montaigne who further circumscribes these “perfect friendships”–his term for friendships of goodness–as being on a higher tier than marital bliss. He says that a man and his wife cannot have a “perfect friendship” as they would be using each other to induce and satisfy an instinctual appetite. However, even though most platonic friendships of pleasure would involve more intellectual interactivity as there would not be the pleasure bond of sex it would seem more fleeting in most situations. And I cannot deny that falling under the spell of serotonin, dopamine, testosterone, and other chemicals in a long lasting fog to satisfy cravings that cause an individual to fall into the trap of family responsibilities is not nature in its most miraculous, albeit most manipulative grandeur.

 

Everything is so inscrutable. If even the exact reasons as to why one sits where he does on a city bus are unknown beyond it having a comfortable level of reclusive security and interconnection, how am I supposed to tell you, oh dear imaginary friend, of my friendship with Somchai Kesnok, also known as Aus. It all defies logic. Even Aristotle states that inordinate pain causes ruptured relationships; and if Adam Smith’s more playful and literary explanation stands up to scrutiny that butchers and beggars and everything in between function exclusively on the motivations of selfish acquisition what I say seems absurd. This falling into someone’s magnetic pull of pain is like one following religious principles that allow him to walk on hot coals or a saint that inherently loves everyone. I am too much a libertine to be the former and although I do think there are saints out there whom I would love to emulate, my abused background would never allow such to occur. Within me is still the boy who rides his bicycle into abandoned fairgrounds to escape family, and the individual who still has a phobia of phones because a grandparent might ask how he was and the truth could never be told. It is true that I met Aus when I was highly influenced by Aristotle’s friendship of inequality in which a man generously assists another and has no right to complain about it as for the money he gives he gets virtue. But it was much more. From the first moments I spoke with him I could tell that he had arrested emotional development from trauma. I suppose I knew intuitively as one who went to Missouri State University in Springfield with luggage containing clothes and a concept of self that was in fragments in the bowl of the skull. I wanted to save him so much as to me he represented millions of other survivors of family whom I wanted to save through him and so he stayed with me for 15 years. I tolerated his tantrums, his pleas to leave Thailand, and when I ran out of money to continue our stay at the townhouse I never severed the relationship–not even after he kicked me in the head and attempted to throw my passport into the canal that was behind the townhouse. I could never sever the relationship. Even though I am just a janitor here in Hawaii, far from Thailand, I still send him money every month. He destroyed me financially and still does, but the idea of allowing a tender child to perish has always seemed too sinful, so as much as giving hurts me to not give is excruciating. This is platonic love at its best and it is a most unpleasant thing. But this experience changed me for the better which is what important friendship is. It is a metamorphosis of two people for the better–or at least one for the betterment of the other, and the consequence of being caught up in a deep sympathy for another being.

There of course were other transformative friendships–at least singularly if not mutually so (Gary Gass, his sister Cindy, and David Brumfield, college friends that brought me to Roman Catholicism (Gary and David spraying air fresheners and deodorants from spray cans and lighting it on fire while residing on the top floor of the Newman Center above where the priest had his office, and subsequently, a year and a half working and living with those Catholic nuns of Joseph House in Salisbury Maryland, learning about perennial altruism and service which understandably was not always rendered warmly. There were three months of swimming in the Sea of Japan with David Ayer and reading literature out loud to each other on the beach which for the first time gave me a living companion who had the same affinity for great books. I still remember the sweet lassi that we drank at an Indian restaurant in Niagara Japan and the stories we shared about our respective sexual lives. One girl he nicknamed “Spanky.” I even returned there years later drinking the same sweet lassi alone as he was gone by then. I just hoped that in revisiting he might be seated there at one of the tables. How sad I was that he was not. And in Bangkok there was the elderly Paul Illert, the retired philosophy teacher whom I thought I had a friendship of goodness with until telling him that I felt one of his companions was using him for his money to which years of philosophizing at Dick’s Cafe came to an abrupt end. All relationships are swallowed up into the mass like the sounds of yesterday and so much of our energy is expended in trying to sustain that which cannot be sustained. Priorities, agendas, and personalities of respective individuals are so different with human beings being like the mutating of cancer cells. I who was abused spent decades with that constant hope of getting some feeble apology from what was left of the abusers and believed that in hoping long enough it was bound to happen, as though a parent in exerting the power of that title was likely to admit misuse or failure of a decades long role.

In such an imperfect world happy endings are few but it is one where that which is far from the ideal can be perceived as an experience that was one hurdle one did not so much jump over so much as devastation one passes through that gives the texture of the fabric of transcendence.

Are you keeping track of this? I haven’t a clue what friendship is outside of not being totally secure inside our own heads, in which case friendship is not a strength of the virtuous but the cane of the cripple. And it would have to be that way really considering the fact that even with government and society smaller forms of human predation are rife in all institutions, and friendship helps stabilize human emotions the way Smith depicts it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: party A is upset, party B, the spectator, hears him but is unwilling to empathize, and then party A brings down the emotional volume to gain the needed sympathy and counsel that will help him process the predicament for a better resolution.

It is an unsubstantiated supposition by classical authors–Adam Smith being the exception–that friendship is such a great virtue. Considering the complexity of all animal minds, the likelihood is it is a strength and a liability, a virtue and a vice. We better hurry. It is Saturday and I am here all alone –I mean apart from you–and I have to clean the shit off of the pavement. The security officers have just reported it to me in a text message. The merchants of this Aloha state are so averse to the homeless population that toilet doors require numerical codes which one only gets with a purchase and the city of Honolulu has park toilets locked most of the time.

“‘But he is a slave,’ You say. Is that really to count against him? Show me a man who isn’t a slave. One is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition, all are slaves to hope and fear.” So says Seneca. “You’re quite mistaken though if you imagine that I’d bar the table of certain slaves on the grounds of the relatively menial or dirty nature of their work.” So says Seneca once more. “It is chance or fate that decides his choice of job. Have some of them dine with you because they deserve it, others to make them so deserving”. I am feeling hungry. Lets hurry through all of these tasks so we can go home. Look! The outline of the balcony of the palace is distinct enough, and even from here, you can almost imagine Liliokulani beckoning our names just as I almost believe that there is a you who would fulfill some tiny need in me–if it is indeed tiny–for an us.

Sadly, with title and position pulled out from under them in retirement the elderly couldn’t be any more petty. Real life is those in decline reminiscing of yesteryear and talking about present ailments with chances of mutual pleasures and ambitious striving becoming fewer with every year that passes. Ambitions and pleasures of the here and now seem to elude the elderly as they crumble to pieces like cookie crumbs under the tables of the Starbucks coffee shop downstairs.

And if friendships of goodness and perfect friendships seemed in youth to only be the fanciful ideals of intellectuals and not real substance in the dirty affairs of the dust of man, they are more preposterous notions now. Only I am my companion and, lonely as I may be, there are enough unexplored caverns of me to last two lifetimes. And to make a living, clean on I must. A mother leads her baby cockroaches. Patterns are stamped into the smallest and biggest of things. Let’s let them be. They are assets to Central Pacific Plaza and Central Pacific Bank specifically.

 

Steven Sills is a writer living in Honolulu Hawaii. His book of poetry from 1990 was edited by the poetry professor Mike Burns at Missouri State University and subsequently published by Professor Clarinda Harris at Towson State University in Baltimore Maryland. He has an MA in classical studies and has written novels in addition to his poetry as well as this column on ethics.

Richard Spisak began his artistic career as a light artist in the Lumonics Studios of Mel Tanner, a legendary Light Artist. After serving under Jack Horkheimer as a planetarium operator at the Miami Space-Transit Planetarium, he left to begin traveling with Lumist Kenvin Lyman, whose show Dazzleland Studios traveled across America. Richard later worked as a Laserist with LASERIUM and Laser Productions, served as a technical producer for the festival company PACE Concerts, and later as operations Manager and Senior Producer at WWHP and WTCN-TV in Stuart Florida.

Richard writes for Theatre, TV, radio, and the web. He published two short story collections, Two Small Windows, in a Pair of Mirror Doors, and Between the Silences. Followed by his poetry collection 7370 Allen Drive and the recently released STONE POETRY. Richard also produces “POETS of the East,” a televised webcast featuring poets from across the globe.

Chapter Guide

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty