Brass gecko

I have a small and now-tarnished brass gecko that was given as a gift by someone - I forget who - when I was a youth in Thailand. "Good luck," they said. I was young enough and had lived extensively across Asia enough to have a faint belief in Asian symbols of luck, without knowing much about what "luck" meant. For years, I wore a Buddha figure around my neck for luck.

Friends of my parents always offered gifts. Asian societies are gift societies, replete with an intricate system of the social balance and reciprocality of gift-giving that Marcel Mauss so eloquently described.

The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (Mauss, 1990). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse...

As a child, however, the reciprocality requirement was dropped apart from ongoing friendship. I was therefore a simple, though grateful, recipient of abundant gifts. I'll always remember the dead lobster encircled by a decorative arrangement of shells and starfish under vacuum plastic wrap, suitable for framing. It was the kind of gift in Taiwan that always made my tasteful mother giggle. It turned out that the lobster was never gutted. It rotted, stunk up my bedroom with the pungent odor of rotten fish, and was soon thrown away by our amah, Kwan, who could tolerate it no longer. There's also nothing like an intricately carved Chinese warrior with his ample penis extending from his armor, sword raised for battle. My parents still have this wooden sculpture in the entryway to their house. I love it. It's a combination of a grandiose statement of virility and the humiliation of standing in front of the classroom with one's zipper thrown open, except in this case it is open to the thundering winds of the fields of glorious battle.

The gecko. I received the gecko as a symbol of good luck. Nice. I like it. I like geckoes, and used to catch them on the front veranda of our house in Bangkok. I carried the brass gecko with me for years, decades afterwards. There are boxes in storage, in the closets, of things collected during childhood abroad. But the brass gecko hs always been on the desk in front of me. Good luck, after all.

What is luck? In Asian societies, even the most ultramodern, "luck" still plays a role. Clouds of incense, gold leaf on erawan, the Happy Buddha with his extended belly, the names of Chinese restaurants in the US and Europe, forms of social etiquette, the prayer, the pilgrimage, the blessing of the priest, the red New Year's packet of money, the tangerine, the narcissus, the temple dog, the jade dragon, the snake, the stone, the pig, the rabbit. All of these are symbols of luck in Chinese and other Asian folklore. Luck, however, remains a vague and unidentifiable qualitative feature of life. Prosperity, yes. The good spouse, yes. Good health, yes. The talisman forces the issue. Unlike the "it's God's will" fatalism of Christianity, applicable to all occasions whether good or bad, Asian luck functions as a kind of acknowledgement that the caprice of fate is ever-present and not predetermined. Luck, in other words, is both hope and reminder. Hope for a better future. An existential reminder that accident is ever-present. The symbol comforts human experience in a delicate balance between desire and actuality.

Luck, in other words, is fundamentally mysterious because it is uncontrollable apart from hard work, good sense, and talismans that draw upon whatever unseen forces just might work in or against our favor. The talisman is a kind of Pascal's wager. In my childhood, it opened the way towards wonderment that something not of my own doing, something unmoved in the flux in front of or behind me, could change the course of possible life routes in the simple terms of the desires of a child. Looking back, although it's now vague, I think I believed.

I've held onto the brass gecko for years as a reminder of the "luck" of Asia - the concept of luck, the generous sharing of hope. But as time passed and my Asian childhood slowly faded into increasingly vague memories concretized in some cases into various forms of unconscious behavior (it has taken a long time, for example, to overcome the precision of Japanese time in cultures without that conception of time). The brass gecko is a talisman of sorts for me - a quaint notion of the supernatural which flowed away with childhood into a talisman of nostalgia for an Asian childhood in which luck had mystery and its talismans' power.

Many years later, I'm in a hot and humid subtropical Texas college town working on my MA. I live in a small wooden house where I do my course readings in a comfortable chair next to a window that receives a semblance of a breeze. I placed the brass gecko on the window sill - a decorative trinket. My former talisman of luck now a trinket for which even nostalgia had faded into the uber-rationality of Kant and Wittgenstein, where childhood "luck" had folded into discussions of Peircean tychism. The trinket on the windowsill now represented an expression or reminder to fellow student travelers of the exotic dimension of my own experience. It was a small vain performance, a stand-in, for something I didn't wish to explain in any more detail, but simply use to impress. A small part of my personality existed in the brass gecko as inaccessible but, I hoped, inviting or intriguing. Perhaps this is because I had forgotten the belief in luck. Now I viewed "luck" as a spawn of a particular kind of wisdom - the ability to arrange probabilities and contingency plans in light of those probabilities to one's own advantage.

One night, sitting in the study chair next to the window, I looked up from my book and saw that live geckoes had congregated around the brass gecko on the windowsill. They rested calmly on the screen. In an instant, I saw the rationality of luck. Geckoes are lucky because they eat mosquitoes. In tropical climates mosquitoes carry malaria - or, previously, "evil air." Geckoes cleared the evil air somehow. That somehow was related to eating mosquitoes that carried malaria. The presence of geckoes signified potential good health. The brass gecko attracted live geckoes, which ate the mosquitoes. Luck. A rational luck, like bug spray. The rationalistic philosophy Master's student has an epiphany about the good luck of the gecko based in basic ecological processes prompted by a little, perhaps unconscious, human intervention. The conclusion is that the brass gecko is explained as a scientific matter. Luck disappears into simple good health practices. The gift is on a par with chloroquinine or penicillin, and I am no longer benighted by the mysterious nature of the luck of the gecko.

We could say that this is a shame. That the world became a small bit less mysterious at that moment. At the time I thought so positively, under the spell of the great germanesque systems of rationality. Now I know I was wrong. Luck may indeed be a matter of an intuitive calculation of probabilities combined with a facility for acting according to longer-range odds. I don't wish to say otherwise.

The brass gecko, however, represents something more than that. It is a little feature of my own experience that reminds me that luck is never controlled (tychism is, after all, a doctrine of radical, universal chance). More importantly, it is a small feature of a life in which however far we wish to go with rationalistic explanations, they always confront a realm of mystery, a fringe of inquiry into which our all-too-human trial-and-error approach to experience is always just that, no matter how well-informed by the state of the art in science, philosophy, mathematics. If the world trucked no mystery and luck, we would have no use for inquiry for there would be nothing to question into and explore. We would be perfect, gods. That is the mystery, since we're clearly all-too-human.

The little brass gecko on my desk is an infinitesimal corner of a vast, incomprehensible universe, reopening the childhood fascination for a mysterious world.