Siamese Bestiary
written & illustrated by Kristiaan Inwood
Orchid Press (1978) 2005 Second revised edition, index, 136 pp., 70 b & w drawings, 254 x 191 Softcover.
ISBN 974-524-058-3
Rediscovering pockets of pastoral peace
Book review by Steve Van Beek, (The Bangkok Post, 26 March 2005 )
Welcome reprint of a unique book on local fauna and flora which are brought to life in a series of charmingly perceptive sketches.
When this book first emerged from a British publishing house in 1978, I was enchanted by it. The concept and the text were engaging and the illustrations were amazing, both in subject and execution.
A local publisher, Orchid Press, has chosen to re-issue it and as I reread it recently I was pleased to see that it has lost none of its freshness. It's a timeless book about a timeless element of Thailand and the meticulously penned illustrations have lost none of their magic.
The inspiration that led Kristiaan Inwood to produce it was twofold. He had recently relocated to a house in a Thon Buri plantation and the move coincided with the birth of his first son, now a doctor. Struck by the prospect of becoming a father, faced with the newborn himself, and surrounded by the fecundity of nature, Inwood recorded his impressions in a series of vignettes that he illustrated with fine, pen-and-ink line drawings of the plants and animals that crossed his threshold and path.
This is not delicate nature, prettified into Disneyesque grace, but nature as it is: beautiful in its simplicity and in the fundamental life force it expresses, even when confrontations between one species and another erupt into violence. As such, it has an honesty and perspective not often found in personal accounts of the Kingdom.
I felt, on first reading, that no book in Thailand equalled it in approach or theme and wondered if another of its ilk would ever appear. In the 25-odd years since then, none has; Siamese Bestiary is unique. The author's voice when musing on his helplessness in dealing with his tiny bundle of life - and his wisdom in seeing that his wife has an innate ability to cope with anything - rings true; anyone who has been a father will recognise it.
Inwood has also managed to meld that into an appreciation for all the plant and animal life that surrounds him. It is to his credit that he doesn't seek surcease, to escape into it, but sees it as parallel with the life struggles his son is enduring. The reader can almost feel that, as Inwood was sketching a particular scene, his ear was ever-alert for cries of distress from the house; he is fully aware that he inhabits a microcosm of the broader world.
In this, the second edition, he has augmented both text and illustrations, enhancing the book through hindsight and wisdom gained in the intervening years. By and large, the book is better for it.
A word on the illustrations: They are superb but what makes them brilliant is not simply superior craftsmanship but that they are drawn from the inside out, as though the artist had observed his subjects for a long period, watching their moods and movements until he understood them thoroughly. Thus, the sinuosity of his serpents, the contorted stances of dogs, the portrait of a boatman silently pushing through a monsoon rainstorm on a dark night; they all reflect scenes the way we have seen them, the way they are.
In short, Siamese Bestiary remains a unique look at a quiet but everpresent aspect of Thai life at a time when Bangkok still embraced pockets of rural lushness. We city dwellers have concreted over much of this greenery but remnants can still be found, in compact copses, quiet ponds and unexpected places. Inwood helps us to rediscover it.
Scenes from an Urban Jungle
Book review and excerpts from Bangkok Airways In-flight Magazine
(Fah Thai, July-August 2005)
Bangkok resident Kristiaan Inwood, a talented writer and artist, first published Siamese Bestiary in 1978. Long out of print, the book has recently been reincarnated, with changes and additions, in a fine new Orchid Press edition.
Living in a traditional canal-side Bangkok community with a new wife and, as the years went by, a growing family, the author and illustrator found himself chronicling the diverse and always fascinating local wildlife that presented itself even here, in the heart of Thailand's capital. The book is full of finely observed and sometimes moving accounts, not only of interactions among the various species of wildlite, but between these creatures and the writer's pets, wife, children, in-laws, and passing street hawkers.
Despite the passage two and a half decades and the apparent wholesale transformation of the city since the book's first appearance, the kinds of experience chronicled in these pages remain familiar ones in many little Bangkok communities. Siamese Bestiary makes a distinctive and very welcome addition to the ever-growing number of books presenting Western expatriate perspectives on Thailand . The text that accompanies the selected drawings that follow has, with the writer's and publisher's permission, been excerpted from the book.
Buying crabs for her precious salad was not enough of a challenge for Muang. She caught them herself in pools around the house, attractive land crabs, bodies never much larger than a baby's clenched fist. ... During Muang's stay, I was making drawings of crabs, none of which were good. Every evening, she inspected the drawings and once brought me a plastic bowl containing two crabs to be used as models. That same evening, she decided to impart her knowledge of crab lore ... One of the crabs kept circling sideways inside the bowl and looked extremely aggressive. I asked Muang why. Her answer was something about crabs having to move sideways because they have too many damned feet and only trip themselves up if they walk forwards.
Without chinchoks, houses (hotels, restaurants, gambling dens, palaces, warehouses, bars, massage parlours, gaols, garages, temples, hospitals, brothels, museums, morgues and, damn it, beachside bungalows) seem incomplete - once I counted seventeen covering my studio ceiling and walls. And without them, another form of cheap entertainment would be lost. A chinchok stalks a butterfly, inching forward, belly crawling like a Sioux scout in a vintage western, avoiding rocks, seeking the sparse shelter of small bushes, snaking through short grass, distant tomtoms throb, an owl hoots, camp lights flicker. The final few inches are covered in a vicious sprint - a near miss, tomtoms stop, a blink and another hunt.
With rare exceptions, chinchoks are extraordinarily playful, transforming walls and ceilings into nurseries, effortlessly defying gravity thanks to uniquely formatted feet. If Isaac Newton had ever seen a Thai chinchok ...
The lizard population in and around the house has to be seen to be believed. Many, many shapes, sizes, sizes and colours. Sometimes there seem to be at least as many lizards as there are matchbox labels.
Least attractive of them all are the chinchok's large cousins, the tukaes. Irascible, as graceless as rampaging pigs, they eat whatever they come across - insects by the kilo, young birds, chinchoks, snakes (reportedly), young tukaes , anything edible will do. Beady-eyed, unattractive, fearless, they tramp all over the house (my house, at least), patrol the roof, gobble prey under the eaves and terrorise everything and everyone.
Chinchoks are far nicer. Despite the superficial similarities, differences between the two creatures are many. Long, dark nights are punctuated by the chinchok's whispered squeak chuckles; the tukae emits a harsh, eerie, onomatopoeic ttt-kaaae. Chinchoks are always playing; tukaes never play. Chinchoks lose their tails and look cute; tukaes lose theirs and look even more sinister. Tukaes are megalomaniacs; chinchoks dig Sesshu, Bach, John D. MacDonald, Miles Davis and Zen Buddhism. The list is endless.
A tortoise or a turtle. We weren't sure. I'd seen films of turtles laying pingpong balls on a Malaysian beach, but couldn't tell what this was. We half filled a washing bowl with water - not full to avoid drowning it - sprinkled lettuce leaves inside, and inserted the creature. Then we waited to see what would happen. We figured that if it didn't like water, it would have to be a tortoise, or a turtle that couldn't swim. And if it did like water, it would have to be turtle; or an amphibious tortoise.
The creature passively sank to its neck, ignored the leaves, and remained motionless.
"Why doesn't it move?"
"Maybe it's embarrassed."
"Animals don't feel embarrassment. Only humans do."
"That's not true. We had a goat at home that wouldn't relieve itself when people were around."
It was late, so we went upstairs, leaving it alone in darkness.
The following morning, we found he or she in the same position, although many of the leaves had disappeared. Later, a hawker identified our guest as a turtle. The rain had long since stopped, so Anong took the turtle to a large lotus-filled pond beside the main road. She placed it in the water, and away it swam. Thereafter, each time we passed the pond, we found ourselves looking for a sight of 'our turtle'.
We never saw it again. Soon after, the pond was filled in preparation for widening the main road.
Coconut trees girdled with tin. Nibbled cakes of soap. Shredded moist paper beneath the stairs. Yellow teeth, brown-black pelts, squeak, squeak. Rats. Loners. Ship-in-a-bottle, rat through a hole. Elastic girth, slim, slim, slimmer but fierce, oh yes, fierce. Stand off cats. Noses to the ground, fast movements, hop, skip, crunch, squeak. Buck teeth chew refuse, away long fence tops, under houses, into undergrowth, corporeal ghosts in moonlight, black phantoms, scratch and scratch, disgust me as much as cockroaches, don't need poison, a cat or traps, just a tame snake. Tame snake.
I... visited a one-time farmer turned professional snakecatcher, named Kasem, who live in an isolated house where the orchards opened into rice fields.
I wanted to ask him how to deal with snakes, and was even toying, I repeat, toying, with the idea of asking him to teach me how to catch snakes.
The first time I met him, he gave me some memorable advice about pythons. (Pythons are the most valuable snakes to him - tanned python skins from which shoes, belts, wallets or handbags can be made are worth about $15 each.) He had been explaining how he catches them.
"What if they can wrap themselves around you?" I had asked.
"You have to squeeze their hearts. Eventually they weaken enough to be manageable."
"But supposing they are still too strong for you?"
"Then there's only one thing to do."
"Pray?"
"No," he grinned. "Bite them. Bite them hard."
"You're not serious!"
"I am. Bite them, and they'll release you immediately."
"Come on!"
"It's true. I've had to bite them several times, and they've always released me immediately. I hate to do it, though. It ruins their skins, and makes them almost worthless."
The klong nearest the house ... shared other waterways' innumerable moods. High tide and sunlight made it sparkle. Blue water mirrored the sky and distant buildings appeared weightless, restrained from levitation by anchored rejections. Low tide revealed the defoliated jungle of stilts supporting klongside architecture. Robbed of reflections, some houses appeared tired and dispirited.
Indeed, they, no less than people, aged under the tropical sun. They lost vital juices, blistered and scarred, sagged and warped, bent and creaked. Cracks split walls, floors buckled and tin roofs tilted precariously. It seemed unlikely anyone could inhabit them without becoming similarly deformed. It was always surprising to see well-groomed beautiful and handsome individuals emerge from such dwellings. The sight seemed as statistically improbable as finding pearls inside oysters.
Many houses crowded together for mutual support. If one collapsed, the whole lot would topple like dominoes. Such communal togetherness seemed more like 'united we fall' than 'united we stand'.
Klongside architecture encompassed a multitude of styles. Most houses were wooden, unpainted and sun-bleached, and blended with their environment in a way that would have delighted Frank Lloyd Wright. Houses of the nouveaux riches were immediately identifiable. Their dwellings were painted lemon yellow, shocking pink, bilious green and boudoir blue. Sere 70-year-old houses, laced with filigree, drooped like trendy, high-healed grandmothers, while newer dwellings 'supported them' like younger relatives. Strategically affixed corrugated tin sheets spaced many splendid Thai-style houses with high-gabled, steeply sloping roofs and glassless windows the ignominy of collapse.
Dreams of yesteryear
Book review by James Eckardt, (The Nation, 29 May 2005 )
The easygoing side of 1970s Thailand is revisited in this imaginative and hilarious work
KRISTIAAN INWOOD is that rare bird: a painter and a writer. Back in 1979, he published "Siamese Bestiary", a handsome 136-page meditation on his life in a traditional wooden house on the rustic outskirts of Bangkok . Orchid Books has now republished it with additional material.
With meticulous attention to detail, Inwood drew exquisite sketches of his house, his wife Anong, his infant son Hilary and the bestiary that surrounded them. He sketches the tumbledown homes along a canal, a market woman paddling her sampan in a rainstorm, a tattooed neighbour and his fighting cock, a fortune teller with his paraphernalia, a wizened labourer cracking an egg into his breakfast lao kao .
His writing is just as luminous: prose, poems, low comedy; profiles of his neighbours, whimsical reflections. He tells us nothing about his past or his wife's, except that she is the daughter of a farmer and doesn't speak English. Here he sets the scene of his idyll:
"An old wooden house stands in the middle of the orchards. Trees crowd against a balcony girdling three sides of the house to bring insect chatter and birdsong through open windows. A dirt track drops from a road two hundred yards away, twists through overgrown trees, around a few scattered houses and many shallow ponds, like a frenzied snake, and abruptly stops a few yards beyond the house's front gate. Perpetually widened by trampling feet and wooden ox-cart wheels, the original footpath either avoided long removed obstacles - a stream, large trees, houses - or was blazed by a capricious drunk."
Inwood gets the idea for the book while he's waiting for his wife to come home from the hospital with their newborn son. At the hospital he finds his wife looking radiant and his son "bright pink, screwing up his eyes against a bright outside world merely three mornings old. Take him into my arms and talk with Anong. As Anong and self gabble happy nonsense about everything and nothing, Hillary urinates into my breast pocket." The book is baptised, blessed, fertilised, christened and launched.
"This is it."
Next comes a wonderful chapter of pratfall comedy. Anong has gone to register the birth, leaving the author to cope with a screaming baby: "Coax, soothe, cradle, croon, desperately try to insert a milk bottle teat between his gaping jaws. No luck. Incredible screams. Fantastic lungs.
Anyone passing outside would think I am trying to strangle him."
Inwood suffers from a pathological fear of snakes. When Anong informs him that she has just killed two snakes in the kitchen, Inwood falls into panicked reverie: "Move into a tenth floor apartment. Buy a mongoose. Better, buy a dozen. Emigrate to Ireland . Or New Zealand . Advertise for a suit of armour. Walk on stilts."
Inwood's life is mostly one of rustic tranquillity and whimsical musing. On the subject of his neighbourhood dogs, he writes:
"If the dogs share one characteristic, it must be that a disproportionate number are neurotic. Their standard diet - leftover rice, vegetables and meat scraps - and the incessant heat combines to weaken them and addle their brains. Imagine human beings having to And nourishment from equally unsuitable diets (dog biscuits, minced horsemeat and jaw-breaking bones) and wearing fur coats and hats in sweltering tropical weather, and you have a reasonable idea of local dogs' physical and mental states.
"Their neuroticism takes many forms. For example, one particular dog, a black mongrel bitch, loveable and friendly was indubitably the Attest, ablest, swiftest and cleverest cat I've ever seen."
Among her talents were catching birds, rats and snakes: "Too often would she approach strangers with the snake in her mouth, and mistaking their frenzied alarm for the start of a new game, pursue them pell-mell through the trees."
Beyond the ever-present comedy, Inwood captures quotidian events in prose poems of simple but stunning lyricism: returning home at night in the rain, a morning walk with his son through the countryside, the daily rhythms of klong life.
He concludes a day of observing boat commuters, charcoal and noodle vendors, market women, schoolchildren, with a cold drink at a klongside restaurant where "the klong's magic triumphed stealthily osmotically. Bougainvillaea appeared psychedelic against a cloudless sky. Children happily splashed in water nearby. Balmy Thai love songs softly escaped a radio. A passing vendor's straw hat speckled sunlight across her wrinkled face, highlighting serenity and remnants of a formerly striking beauty. A butterfly sunbathed on a window sill."
The book ends with Anong pregnant again and the little family happy in their wooden house. If you're an expat who has lived happily in Thailand for a long time, give this book to a newcomer. It will explain why.
Bhikkhu:
Disciple of the Buddha
by Kristiaan Inwood
Second revised printing Orchid Press 2005 (1st ed. privately Printed 1981). 208 pp., 178 b&w pl.,, 215 x 152 Softcover
ISBN 974-524-059-13 $22.00
Records the first monastic year of a 38-year-old Californian who was ordained in a Thai Buddhist monastery.
The Californian neither sought nor received special privileges. In every detail, he lived the celibate and abstemious life of the orthodox Theravadin bhikkhu, and embarked on a spiritual quest as relevant in today's troubled world as it was 2,500 years ago when the Buddha taught the original bhikkhus.
In many respects, the Californian's story is as old as Buddhism itself. In others it is as modern as tomorrow.
The Westerner in SAFFRON
Closely observed, an expat shaves his head, dons the robes of the Thai monkhood and begins a noble quest
Book review by John Cadet
(The Nation, Sunday, September 4, 2005)
'If you're an average Westerner like me, society will have taught you to believe that life is a rather jolly affair. Moreover, if you're a middle-class Westerner, like the subject of this book, you'll have internalised the belief that, so long as you strive, very little that's desirable in life will be denied you.
This roseate view is in no way darkened by the fact that the West's global economic dominance ensures that, while others have to struggle for the necessities, we are virtually guaranteed the enjoyment of a great deal more.
Even if life has its disappointments, we tend to feel safe in the security of our ego bubble. A little more money, a better house, a more understanding partner, and I will be finally fulfilled, which is precisely the way life was meant to be - at least for me.
Well, we shouldn't feel too bad about this. The Buddha himself took a while - as a prince - to come to the shattering realisation that old age, sickness, death - all would actually, physically, come to him, eventually. And we know the result: a view and way of life so changed we're still confronted by their challenge 2,500 years later.
Mind you, those of us - East and West - who've had our lives modified by the Buddha's message, prefer to put off the more drastic changes his doctrines advise. Chat na, we're inclined to say, next time round. Let's not rush into this.
That wasn't the response, though, of 38-year-old Californian Roger Clarke Welty, the subject of Inwood's meticulously conducted, excellently written and beautifully photographed study of his year in the Buddhist monkhood.
Welty decided to go for it in this life, to ordain and, under expert instruction, actually practise what the Buddha taught. You know: shaven head, forest robes, bare feet, no sustenance after midday , meditation, 227 privative rules - the whole bill of goods, in other words.
There was nothing capricious about this decision. A student of oriental languages and culture, Welty had had 15 years of doing and having it all - much of it in Manhattan . Also sessions on the analyst's couch.
In his own words, though, "It became plain to me that pursuing the rainbow ends of the rat-race was purposeless; it was busy-ness for the sake of busy-ness."
Already partly liberated by his readings of Walden and the Dhammapada from "untrammelled materialism, the infamous tyranny of things", Welty sought a sanctuary in which to go further. He visited India and was the guest of monastics in Sri Lanka and Nepal , but in Bodhgaya, the place of the Buddha's enlightenment, he received a rebuff.
"There I first asked about becoming a monk and received some concrete advice: Don't."
Foreign monks hadn't been a success, he was told, ordaining for the wrong reasons, not knowing what they were after, and finding "it didn't work out".
But following more positive advice, he came to Bangkok , where he became a university lecturer. But he still felt that the monkhood would provide "a magnificent opportunity to seek and benefit from the eddy of calm in the world's current that is life in a Thai wat".
Inwood follows this introduction with admirably concise summaries of the Buddha's life and doctrines, the courses Buddhism has taken over the millennia, and its manifestation in Thailand . "And if Buddhism is the jewel," he writes, "its Thai setting is no less remarkable."
Then comes the description of Welty's year-long odyssey, which Inwood follows almost literally step for step, writing and photographing as he goes. The journey begins in Wat Pleng in Thonburi, where Welty's preceptor is the abbot, Ajarn Praderm, one of the country's finest meditation teachers. And after a month or so of settling in, it continues with the next step, ordination.
Now I have to admit, long in the tooth as I am, I have a strong attachment to my hair, and regret that it's gradually leaving. Lobha, of course: craving, clinging. Nothing stays the same, impermanence one of the basic Buddhist teachings.
But there's a particiflarly fine series of photos of Ajarn Praderm, smiling calmly, cutting the aspirant's hair, with Welty also calmly smiling as he receives a couple of locks in his cupped hands and becomes a naag, or serpent-novice.
The following day, with the performance of a complex of ceremonies, "Welty" is no more, replaced by the fully ordained monk Phra Mahaviro.
For the majority of ordinands, this is the point beyond which they do not venture, but Mahaviro's journey continues. As well as adjusting to the routines of daily monastic life, he continues to study the Thai and Pali languages so as to benefit fully from his abbot-preceptor's personal tuition. And when the time comes, the serious practice of meditation begins, in retreat.
Inwood presents a concise description of the processes of meditation, as well as a vivid analysis of both the physical routines and the mental struggles the meditator faces in the 500 hours of awareness.
But avoiding the pitfalls, the outright dangers that observing the mind and seeking to tame its wilfulness entail, Mahaviro comes through unscathed, and continues both to meditate and perform the monastic routines.
The final section of the book takes us to a hillside refuge on Koh Pangan, where his practice is now conducted with the island's bays, beaches and flowery forest as background. And there we leave Mahaviro, reflecting on his year's experience of monastic life, and pondering what lies ahead: verdancy all round, and the sea a shining mirror below.
This is a remarkable book, not only because it provides a uniquely intimate picture of the monastic way of life and the communities and environments sustaining it, but because Inwood himself is nowhere to be found in it.
Think of that. He followed Welty/Mahaviro like his shadow for a year, and yet manages to exclude himself entirely, a testimony to the decision of the prefatory note, that he would "allow the facts to speak for themselves".
One final fact that deserves a voice here is that "Bhikkhu", faultlessly produced by Orchid Press, deserves a place in the bookcase of everyone interested in Southeast Asia .
Both as a narrative and an artwork, it is outstanding
