My herpes is acting up again. It’s the heat. The heat draws all the energy right out of you. There is no sleeping in the heat, just dozing off fitfully in exhaustion. Everything blurs; the mind is worn like in the last days of a manic stretch. Sitting out of the wind you can’t stop sweating. Everything smells; pants, shirts, underdrawers, and bedding reek of urea. Everything smells; stench backs up from every drain and sewer. The road smells, tables and chairs smell, iron smells; things that don’t otherwise smell in some other place. Heat radiates; the source of the heat seems to be near; if you close your eyes you can sense a boiler is up and next to your face. Everything rots without exception; leather goes putrid in the heat and turns to ooze; papers and cash go soft and disintegrate; a fish is a thousand tiny worms and flies from yesterday; even the rocks rot in the heat. You can also see the heat, as it treats other things, the visible world warps and bends under the heat, the straight edges of things melt and ripple and seem to evaporate.
You don’t live with the heat; you don’t either live in it; you merge with the world through the heat. Self and environment join; there is no distance at all with the heat, the world around is right on top of you, crushing into you, radiating in and out of you, drawing you to the most intimate immediacy with the heat. Erotic, tantric sex with the world in the heat. No character is cool enough not to be torn apart by the heat’s energy; the body and the mind and the soul all come asunder along with the disintegrating world in the heat. Everyone is a sensualist in the heat. There is no emotion but the heat, just variations to the dominant feeling of the heat; angry heat, lustful heat, scared heat, only the strongest emotions can be sensed at all against the heat. Thoughts are much too subtle to be thought in the heat; if they are still going on under the heat they go unnoticed.
The heat had its affect on history. The heat favors life because life is an instability. Life overflows from the heat. Multitudes grow out of the jungles like wild vegetation. But the heat does not allow stability and order. Civilizations of the heat have a commonality; multitudes, ruled only by rulers more brutal than the heat. This is how the wats at Angkor and Aytthaya went up. And only Ganeshas and thousand-arm Bodhisattvas, so freakish that they would be noticed against the heat were worthy of worship. And their stories can only be recorded in exotic and bizarre scripts the likes of Pali, Tamil and Sanskrit.
A whole host of arts and literature reflect on the heat, from the very serious Camus’s L’Étranger or The Sheltering Sky with John Malkovich, to the lighter Some Like It Hot and Aliens. There are also prominent heat related scenes in Sartre’s The Age of Reason, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Soylent Green. In the wonderfully understated In the Heat of the Night starring Sydney Poitier, a young, black, detective “Mister Tibbs” finds himself accused of the murder of a Southern industrialist in Mississippi. While Mr. Tibbs is painted as an intelligent and good Northern man fighting the bigoted and backwards South, Hollywood can not hide the meaning of the heat which is not about race, but about place: the Southerner is infected with the same barbarity that the African is, not because of race, but because of the heat. Virgil Tibbs, like anyone sitting in an air-conditioned room, becomes detached from the immediacy of the world, becomes intellectual, becomes straight. The heat is life.
