Feb 22nd, 2011 – The Sanctuary, Thailand: Blue Lagoon Time

Blue Lagoon Palms

I think I’m moving into the groove of time slip. Time slip is where recognized sequential, normal time slides into the slip stream of altered time, the time zone beneath clock time, the time zone of dreams, hallucinations, reveries and all spatially disjointed twin time, the transvestite half-cousin that breeds collared iguanas and tracks the course of freak galaxies across the skies. It’s happened to me before, in places as disparate as Mexico, Morocco and Greece. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not unwelcome. Jarring, yes, discordant, maybe, but never unwelcome. In fact, very very welcome. Shocking and slightly strange as time begins to have a vertical more than a horizontal dimension. Things begin to move sideways in time. It’s like the way time moves when you are having an orgasm as opposed to the way it moves when you’re stuck in traffic on the way to work. I would say it has something to do with perception. The perception of time does a somersault, and you are rocketed, or drawn slowly into another dimension where star trails occur over extended periods of time. Or no time at all. The thing is, you don’t really know which it is…

This lateral time I best describe as being Blue Lagoon time. Here in south Thailand, on the island of Koh Phangan, time has slipped into Blue Lagoon by Laurie Anderson.

Days, I dive by the wreck...

This track by Laurie Anderson best describes the state of mind I am currently in. You need to listen to it, hearing the lyrics is not enough. You have to hear them placed in the bizarre, evocative music that she sets them in, a scene so utterly disjointed from normal time as to open up a chasm, a rent in the very fabric of time, into which you slip, you slide, down a wet slippery rabbit hole, but slowly shifting, nothing harried or rushed about this at all. Like right now, for example. I am smelling frankincense. There is absolutely no reason why, with late sixties American swing music playing and cicadas trilling in the veil of darkness beyond the rattan and bamboo matting of the roof  lighting I should be smelling frankincense. And it’s probably not frankincense at all, but the way the barbeque is interpreting itself in air, cross-pollinating with the Thai jungle air and creating a fragrance reminiscent of European renaissance cathedrals. Something distinct and ethereal. Something that gets under the skin. And everything plummets down into an embracing otherness a step away from the normal plumage of sequential time. A different bird altogether. One like the one that swooped across the beach today like something out of a 60s dinosaur movie. Very large, black and white with a huge bill that had a great orange overhang and peacefully fed on chunks of banana proffered by the staff. This bird was one of those sign-posts directing you towards Blue Lagoon Time. In Laurie Anderson’s words, it goes like this:

I got your letter.
Thanks a lot.
I've been getting lots of sun.
And lots of rest.
It's really hot.
Days, I dive by the wreck.
Nights, I swim in the blue lagoon.
Always used to wonder who I'd bring to a desert island.
Days, I remember cities.
Nights, I dream about a perfect place.
Days, I dive by the wreck.
Nights, I swim in the blue lagoon.
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade.
But that suffers a sea change.
Into something rich and strange.
And I alone am left to tell the tale.
Call me Ishmael.
I got your letter.
Thanks a lot.
I've been getting lots of sun.
And lots of rest.
It's really hot.
Always used to wonder who I'd bring to a desert island.
Days, I remember rooms.
Nights, I swim in the blue lagoon.
I saw a plane today.
Flying low over the island.
But my mind was somewhere else.
And if you ever get this letter.
Thinking of you.
Love and kisses.
Blue Pacific.
Signing off.

So now I go in search of lagoons. A lagoon is a salt water lake cut off from the sea by a slip of land, like the way a marriage can distinguish one member of the family from the poor cousin twice removed. But the lagoon is no poor cousin. It’s a geographical feature in its own right.

A brief update on the hornbill. Coming back from wi-fi-ing at the next beach with my camera out, really thinking that the inventors of Myst the PC game came here to Koh Phangan for their inspiration for the 2^nd game, the one set on the island with the constant sound of the waves in the background informing the high-toned ambiance.

Myst-style walkways linking beaches of Had Tien with Had Yuan

Seeing  the rickety bridge-walks over the rocks, and the nature of the rock formations themselves, huge and rounded like multiple stone buddah heads erupting out of the jungle green – and also the occasional pyramid shaped domes on structures, it really had me in mind of that game, and it induces in me a somewhat similar feeling: that this is a parallel world, running alongside the other one with timetables and cars and business meetings. It is temporally challenged, spaces opening out of ocean, shooting up between palm trees, Blue-Lagoon time where the mind is ‘somewhere else’. Like the gears of a car it becomes disengaged, rolling along in neutral to its own tune.

Bob Marley and the Hornbill

There I was walking that sea path when a guy came out from one of the little cafes built into the rockface, noticing my camera he said, ‘You wanna take a picture of the bird?’ He led me inside where the giant black hornbill was busy on the window ledge that stretched the length of the café overlooking the ocean eating the heads off the potted flowers. The light wasn’t quite right with the dimness of the café too contrasty to the external bright sunshine for any good photo, but the clever bird obligingly trundled down the other end, where this other Bob Marley type guy suddenly materialized and sat down beside the hornbill and started up a bit of a conversation with it. Photographic paradise…