An End To Hedonism (part 2)

Daniel had strong views about the world, and this made I drinking bouts close to the main square of Krakow more fun. He spoke of how feminism had gone too far. I don’t know exactly what he meant but I thought that to the extent feminism wanted to take away the comfort that women had been to me after my break with the Biblical God, he was right. It was going too far to take that from me �" from us men. Was this old white man’s psychology? Were we expecting women to be the providers of our needs? No. Women are special, Daniel argued between swigs of beer and later staggering on the cobbled streets. Between men and women exists a mutual exchange of benefits.
This was a question that would be present in my mind over coming years. I had found salvation in women. After I lost my faith in a God I found succor in the arms of women in Thailand. I am not ashamed to say it. Men need mothers and lovers. There has been nothing in life, ever, not past, nor present, that will surpass those early days in the arms of Thai women and them in mine. Who was holding who? They were visceral moments of release in more ways than that conjured by crude minds. Ultimately, we would like to think we would chose intellectual and mental comfort over regression back to the comfort of a woman’s embrace �" something like a mother’s love, as it was in part. But those moments of touch and love are their own sacred mountains and ones I at least felt had to visited to make life complete. It’s one of the ways men and women get to commune with God.

I don’t know what salvation Daniel had found in women or whether it had always been a mutual exchange. He was married and had a kid. As for me, I had lived wildly in the past. I had lived amongst women making a living from farang �" mostly white foreigners. They were sexually powerful women. I had had relationships with these women, mostly sharing the costs of our lives fifty-fifty. They were my angels who brought me out of the darkness of religion. They lit my heart again with a flame to brighten the path before me. I have always wanted to defend both those women and the value that they can bring to the world, and yes, to lost men.

I don’t know that the path I took was the best for me, considering all paths open to me at that time. But, if Daniel was to be believed, it was the only path I could have taken. How could I have taken a different path, what with those thoughts in my mind at that time, that history, that biology and need? You reader, perhaps you don’t dispute that. You dispute the ethics of treating women as one’s angels �" those bar angels, as you imagine them. When you have lived a life, seen a world, held them, lied for them, drunk with them, and stood up for them, you feel that you know more about them than one’s interlocutors. I have not repaid them for how they lifted me up to heaven and then rested me back down to earth on my feet.

But that was my history. I was in Krakow to make something better of myself. I had been a drunken frequenter of Chiang Mai and its bars and surrounding countryside, with skin to touch, lips to kiss, warmth and that feeling of for once not being alone �" that is to say comfort in the heart. I was now following that deterministic progression in my life, changing into someone who would work abroad, and with this came challenges to my way of seeing the world. I couldn’t conjure those illusions with the drinking women of Chiang Mai anymore. I couldn’t dip into those waters again with the same naivety �" nor with the same bliss �" even if I were to still have those same urges.

In Krakow, I tried to be decorous and pure in mind as I conversed with my fellow student, the beauty from Ukraine. Ulyana and I went to lunch together on a few occasions, purely as classmates. I saw the other trainee teachers look at us walking across Krakow’s main square together and up one of the streets leading away from it. She was married and had a son. The husband was in Krakow looking after the baby of yet to walk age, while she studied for her CELTA. She had that serious beauty’s look. Austere beauty. The kind I liked. Something of that which I’d seen in the face of my previous Polish intimate. But they were quite different as subjects in my life. The other trainee teachers thought that the Ukrainian was some kind of ice queen �" that she was too proud to mix with the lower echelons of society, at least in the beginning. But that was not true. Some people are not natural socialites and have a sterner disposition.

Over lunch in a traditional Polish restaurant she told me of how she’d been in Libya during the so called liberation by the western forces. She spoke disparagingly of the Libyan fighters. She said that they took breaks when the weather wasn’t good. It came across as though she was saying that Libyans were innately lazy, but of course this might not have been her intent. Her husband was a Libyan. She did say the “liberation” had done Libya a lot of harm. The country had been a better place beforehand. It was another case of western powers destabilizing an area for their personal gain �" the power games of geopolitics. I admired her strength of mind and this added to me slight awe of her. To listen to her talk was a pleasure beyond those of the carnal man.

Ulyana was a nationalist who I would later see support her country vociferously online. Her soldiers engaged the encroaching Russians along the more northern border around the time they lost the Crimea in the south to the old fatherland �" the old oppressor.. She stood tall, praising her men. She was both beautiful and strong. She had a faith in God and a duty to her country. That was something special. It was something to live for and perhaps to die for. It wasn’t me. I had neither God, nor patriotism, unless one were to count those times people criticized British food. I had found, through my years of being abroad and occasionally hearing the mocking of British fair, that I would stir to its defense.
I was a gentleman throughout my lunches and conversations with Ulyana. However, I did not always maintain this standard of behaviour with the others. One night, sitting in a lively bar with the orher Brits, grasping a pint of beer, Lucy, one of the English trainees shared with me how she had been a dancer in exotic clubs in the past. I felt there was an openness between us at that particular moment. Maybe there had even some flirting from her over the past hour or so. After more drinks and pizza, we stepped outside for a cigarette. I went out with her for company, as she had requested, as I wasn’t a smoker at that time. I was drunkenly forward with her and gently pushed her up against the wall and touched her breasts and tried to kiss her. She let me touch her but prevented the kiss. The desire for hedonistic abandon still rose up when out and about and drunk with a pleasant young woman. She said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea. We have to study together for the rest of this course.” I agreed and thought her honorable to not make a thing of it. We sat back down inside with the others. I never mentioned anything of it again and as far as I know, nor did she.

Those days in Krakow were part of the tail end of my hedonistic years. It all seemed right at the time but times change, and we change. The purpose of my stay there was to gain some confidence in the classroom and to learn a little about how to teach. I didn’t believe the bravado of those in the bars who said teaching English was a piece of piss. I knew it would be a massive challenge for me, and it was. But I learnt some things. Those big Polish woman trainers taught us to elicit. Elicit, elicit, elicit. Draw the answers and the learning out of the students themselves. Make the classroom a place for an active learning experience, rather than merely somewhere to listen to a teacher and repeat. This was something I took to heart and maybe one thing I became quite good at in the coming years. Teaching was facilitating learning. Ultimately, the student must do the work. The teacher could teach, but it should be with limited talk-time. Learning by actively engaging with the words, tasks and activities, was by far the most effective way. Rote learning was over in the western mind.

By the time I had left Poland, I’d spent over two thousand pounds for the course and the cost of living and drinking and eating. My savings were getting low. I wanted one last fling with wild abandon before what I thought might be a settling down to a life of teaching and quieter pursuits. I decided to hike the Spanish Pyrenees. This hike ended after eight days, when I got to a section where the snow had not yet melted on the mountain passes. An old gent mountaineer told me that I couldn’t continue. It was too dangerous and too difficult without the right equipment. I looked at the pictures of him on the walls of his guesthouse, up high on snowy mountains, and I thought he was someone to listen to.

I took a bus to Barcelona and drank more. I wanted to squeeze out more fun. I sat in an Irish pub on Las Ramblas, drinking and looking at the happy folk around me. What was I doing wasting my life? What self-respect did I have? But the inebriation felt good. This was the hedonism my moral philosophy led to and, in fact, I didn’t mind it. Coming out more drunk than I realized, I saw some women get up from where they had been sitting on a wall. They surrounded me, like sweet singing birds. One put her hand to my crotch. My was mind diverted. A second woman’s hand went down into my pocket. I lost my phone that night. But I didn’t know this to begin with. I went down an alley with one of those women. I was a man true to my beliefs that night, though I walked out of that alley feeling much shame. Later, I lay on my hostel bed racked with guilt more than with concern over the loss of the phone. There was not much hedonism in that self-loathing, which seemed to stick whichever way I tried to make sense of it rationally. Even though, according to my beliefs, I had done nothing wrong.