As we traipsed across Myanmar, we entered into another era of travel, one before ATMs and the Internet. The unpaved roads that criss-cross the country go over remote brooks, where the traffic is slowed by parades of white bulls, their horns garlanded with jasmine and chrysanthemums, a procession of the town's virgins carrying golden vases. It wasn't so much that the technology was more primitive-- this was something I'd anticipated-- it's how obviously entrenched each town was in its local culture, in its rituals and traditions, its superstitions and conventions. And when we entered into a remote town, we could count on a cup of green tea.
The tourists are slowly trickling in. You see the kids with backpacks checked into cheap guesthouses on 25th Street in Mandalay, on Mahabandoola Road in Yangon, in little towns like Kalaw, Hsipaw, and Nyaung Oo that are starting to develop a reputation for mellow vibes and cheap beer.
If you believe the press, the country in a "state of transition." Sanctions are being lifted and political prisoners released. The Tatmadaw, the military government that deposed U Nu in 1962, things that resemble what the international community thinks of as elections are being conducted.
But the people's trepidation remains. "The generals have just changed their uniforms," a Shan princess told me in the parlor of her decaying palace. "In my country, no reason, no democracy," a boozy Tamil-Catholic surveyor told me at a restaurant in the frigid hills of Pyin U Lwin.
A video plays for us on the bus, repeated Buddhist prayers in sung Burmese and whispered English, 30 minutes of a dharma talk filmed on a Camcorder, an anti-drug use anthem, followed by a military parade down Sule Paya Road in Yangon: stultifying religious dogma followed by something that looks cribbed from every Americans' elementary school don't-cave-to-peer-pressure-and-do-drugs seminar, washed down with a healthy dose of paranoid fascism.
And in Mandalay, the old royal capital memorialized by that great imperial apologist Rudyard Kipling (who never visited the city), you see the traces of the profoundly anti-democratic: boulevards that can accommodate tanks, Orwellian concrete nightmare buildings falling to pieces in the oppressive heat, bronze statues of generals smeared with pigeon shit, and the surviving banners: TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE COOPERATE AND CRUSH ALL THOSE HARMING THE UNION!
And beyond the central state, there are the multiple civil wars on the fringes, the many flavors of ethnic strife that occur when groups with long, bitter histories-- Mon and Wa, Rohingya and Rakhine, Chin and Kachin, Kayin and Kayah-- together have to deal with finite resources. It occurs in waves, with the current horror being the purges of Burmese Muslims.
Visual media have made the image of violence universal and distant. But then, as I pass through the burned down remnants of what was once the Muslim Quarter of the town of Meiktila, and see a girl staring out from a charred doorway, all of that universality and all of that distance collapses into immediate delirium and nausea.
***
Yet the persistent violence only existed on the peripheries of my trip, making itself known through palimpsests. And in my personal interactions, it all melted away, and I was greeted by a consistently kind-hearted and generous populace.
I spent much of my time reading Patrick Leigh Fermor on buses and trains, and it felt a little like we were in the old Europe of inscrutable tradition and generous curiosity towards the few travelers who passed through. And, as with Fermor along the Rhine, there were the constant small gifts en route. We were given plates of chicken and rice at a Yunnanese temple, a cup of coffee from an old man, preserved plums from a group of schoolgirls, jellied candies from a shopkeeper, the bowls of rice wine offered to us by Shan villagers, a tube of epoxy to fix a broken shoe. And, after a day of hiking, we were offered a ride back from a waterfall outside the little village of Anisakan.
Up around that part of Myanmar, it gets quite chilly at night, even in the sweat-drenched depths of the hot season. And in the back of the truck, with the wind sweeping our faces, I sheltered myself behind a canvas flap.
On one side of the road, a bright vermilion sun sank into the haze of the burning rice fields in the valleys far below. And on the other side, an equally vermilion full moon rose from above the pines.
***
There will always be that next valley, that next river, that next point on the map-- a town with an inscrutable name, the triangular symbol representing a mountain, the slightly different shade indicating a new province where the people's palms are tattooed with mandalas and compass points, or where they eat oxtails simmered in a thick turmeric sauce, or where the laurel trees sway in the high winds at the base of a snow-capped mountain.
For the map isn't just a diagram, it is a web of possibilities, a reminder of the million pathways that spiderweb out from the point at which you stand.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
The Tea That Strikes the Dust, Part 1
This is how it went every morning. In little shops, selling samosas and noodles and instant coffee, the waiters, often no more than ten years old, went through the same ritual. A few drops of green tea are poured from the carafe into white porcelain cups, swirled around to remove the stray grit and dead insects, and then tossed out into the street, slightly wetting the red dust that blows about.
What can I tell about a trip I took? To put it all in chronological order would make it plodding and false, to merely snatch impressions here and there would betray the material reality of the route I took. My traveling partner, Ms. H., captured photographs of temples and lizards, whereas I stuck to my notebook, and hoped that, somehow, I'd be able to convey to my friends back in Bangkok, America, wherever, what I felt about the benighted country wedged between Thailand and India.
Myanmar is a country of dust and iron-- it is embodied in the clatter of horses' hooves on a dirt road, black exhaust clouds from World War II-era Willys Jeeps, the intricately patterned ground sandalwood that graces the cheeks of the children, the disfigured chassis of old trucks cut down to chassis on wheels and dragged by men in wifebeaters and longyi, the red-brick pagodas that jut from the plain, their teak Buddhas too dried out to rot, pressed with gold leaf by the faithful, and the cast aside pieces of bamboo and crushed sugarcane. Its color profile is olive and gold and beige: sunlight and statuary, cacti and woven rattan, tea leaves and cigar butts, the thin layers of spice-colored oil that float on top of the food in the steam trays.
The visitor is left dehydrated, urine turning into a gamboge thickness, mouth drying out with every breath. Your only respite is in the tea shops, where strong black tea is served viscous and sweet with condensed milk. Even the drinks seem somehow deprived of water, like the last fruits of summer withering on the vine.
Amid this, the local religious doctrine makes absolute sense: all life is suffering and decay, and the only way to escape the endless cycle of samsara is to release attachments. It is embodied in a wooden folk-art statue on Mandalay Hill, the faces having the sort of misshapen harshness you see in Grünewald's famous altarpiece. Inside a dusty cubicle, is an old man, a sick man, a sadhu, and a corpse, vultures devouring its flesh, maggots writhing in its eyes. All is watched over by the young prince Siddhartha Gautama, who, sad-faced, has to leave the idyllic palace grounds of his youth.
Yangon, the previous capital, since replaced by Naypyidaw-- a sort of military-Buddhist Brasilia of pagoda rooflines and empty condos, opened at an astrologically auspicious time-- lies at the junction of the Yangon and Bago Rivers, a city dug deep into the muddy delta of the Ayeyarwaddy, a tropically Gothic place of broken spires and caved-in porticoes, clock towers that haven't told the correct time in 40 years.
And above all else, it is a city of secrets, its narrow streets lined with six- and seven-story colonial apartment buildings, steel grates on shopfronts half-shut, dark faces puffing cheroots and staring out at you, hot, late-afternoon sunlight alternating with remarkably cool shadows. In every building, a steep, unlit staircase leads upstairs to quiet, darkened hallways, open at one end, crows nesting in mildew-darkened Victorian moldings. There is the infinite tangle of pagodas and mirrored tiles at the Shwe Dagon, the gilded hallways shaped as an eight-pointed star inside the hollow stupa of the Botataung. As night sets, the handful of streetlights turn on, but mostly it remains dark, groups of men sitting in the shadows, smoking Ruby Red cigarettes and drinking tea, a sole candle flickering at the shop where a woman in a sari wraps betel nut and loose tobacco into pungent, loose quids. The power goes out, and hers is the only light.
***
We cross the vast chaparral of Lower Burma to the town of Kyaiktiyo, and climb the trail that goes to the top of the mountain in the Tenasserim Hills. We cross tumbling, rock-strewn streams, water jars for weary pilgrims, shops offering cold drinks and rich Burmese curries, shrines with blocks of sandalwood, flayed snake skins, preserved giant centipedes, and the complete heads of Himalayan deer, perched atop bamboo baskets like the heads of French aristocrats.
And at the top, there are the men with folded hands praying to the stupa that sits atop a massive golden boulder perched on the first emergence of real topography after the ironed-flat lowlands. Balanced, in legend, by a hair of the Buddha, it is, as the structuralists would say, a microcosm, a metaphor for all sacred space in the form of a vertical structure, balanced and swirling around the idea of the Buddha-- represented by an object and emphatically not an image-- on the rupture point of the mountains and the plains.
The pilgrim-tourists are camping out on bamboo mats on the massive marble floor for the night, scooping rice from massive pots and unpacking tiffins of fish soup and tea-leaf salad.
You smell the food cooking, see the smoke rising from the little charcoal braziers and the palm oil burbling in cast-iron woks, and imagine yourself reclining in one of the canvas deck chairs on a high mountain aerie, the taste of a cold bottle of Mandalay Beer almost touching your lips, and think about how, at some point, you could stay here for a very long time, stretching your weary limbs, staring out over the soot-clouded sunset, under a sky filled with emerging equatorial constellations, over the chanting of the monks, the birdlike songs and laughter of the Burmese girls that giggle as you walk by.
***
As we moved up and down the country, we charted our course by moving from remnant to remnant, leapfrogging back and forth across centuries.
In a town once called Maymyo-- "May's Hill," for the English colonel who founded it-- we drank plum wine at a lakeside restaurant, looked at the dried butterflies in an Edwardian botanical garden where the men wore pith helmets and the women wore broad-brimmed straw hats with silk daffodils. As we walked to the center of the town, we passed red brick churches and half-timbered summer lodges and horse-drawn white coaches, before arriving at the tidy clock tower, the bells of which still play Anglican hymns.
At Bagan, we cycled through the desert from decrepit temple to decrepit temple built during the reigns of-- and eventually bankrupting the empire of-- Kings Anawrahta and Kyanzittha. Despite the intermediary years of war and strife, they have survived, many complete with whitewashed walls and graceful paintings of war elephants and charging buffalo, sky nymphs and angels blowing trumpets, monks gathered around a radiant Buddha, his head surrounded by nested halos in the colors of the rainbow.
And we went to the old city of Inwa, adrift on an island in the broad Ayeyarwaddy, one of the last capitals of the Burmese Empire before its final capitulation to the British Raj. Tourists are taken to see the damaged palace tower that leans perilously to one side and the teak monastery of Bagaya Kyaung. But outside further ruins lurk, unmarked and seemingly forgotten. This place was burned and captured, re-burned and re-captured, by the Shan, the Bamar, the Brits, all leaving their traces. Who built these? From what dynasty, what era? Someone more knowledgeable could comment on lintels and ogive arches, but I am left with nothing. Among the piles of brick, I mumble the words softly under my breath.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
What can I tell about a trip I took? To put it all in chronological order would make it plodding and false, to merely snatch impressions here and there would betray the material reality of the route I took. My traveling partner, Ms. H., captured photographs of temples and lizards, whereas I stuck to my notebook, and hoped that, somehow, I'd be able to convey to my friends back in Bangkok, America, wherever, what I felt about the benighted country wedged between Thailand and India.
Myanmar is a country of dust and iron-- it is embodied in the clatter of horses' hooves on a dirt road, black exhaust clouds from World War II-era Willys Jeeps, the intricately patterned ground sandalwood that graces the cheeks of the children, the disfigured chassis of old trucks cut down to chassis on wheels and dragged by men in wifebeaters and longyi, the red-brick pagodas that jut from the plain, their teak Buddhas too dried out to rot, pressed with gold leaf by the faithful, and the cast aside pieces of bamboo and crushed sugarcane. Its color profile is olive and gold and beige: sunlight and statuary, cacti and woven rattan, tea leaves and cigar butts, the thin layers of spice-colored oil that float on top of the food in the steam trays.
The visitor is left dehydrated, urine turning into a gamboge thickness, mouth drying out with every breath. Your only respite is in the tea shops, where strong black tea is served viscous and sweet with condensed milk. Even the drinks seem somehow deprived of water, like the last fruits of summer withering on the vine.
Amid this, the local religious doctrine makes absolute sense: all life is suffering and decay, and the only way to escape the endless cycle of samsara is to release attachments. It is embodied in a wooden folk-art statue on Mandalay Hill, the faces having the sort of misshapen harshness you see in Grünewald's famous altarpiece. Inside a dusty cubicle, is an old man, a sick man, a sadhu, and a corpse, vultures devouring its flesh, maggots writhing in its eyes. All is watched over by the young prince Siddhartha Gautama, who, sad-faced, has to leave the idyllic palace grounds of his youth.
Yangon, the previous capital, since replaced by Naypyidaw-- a sort of military-Buddhist Brasilia of pagoda rooflines and empty condos, opened at an astrologically auspicious time-- lies at the junction of the Yangon and Bago Rivers, a city dug deep into the muddy delta of the Ayeyarwaddy, a tropically Gothic place of broken spires and caved-in porticoes, clock towers that haven't told the correct time in 40 years.
And above all else, it is a city of secrets, its narrow streets lined with six- and seven-story colonial apartment buildings, steel grates on shopfronts half-shut, dark faces puffing cheroots and staring out at you, hot, late-afternoon sunlight alternating with remarkably cool shadows. In every building, a steep, unlit staircase leads upstairs to quiet, darkened hallways, open at one end, crows nesting in mildew-darkened Victorian moldings. There is the infinite tangle of pagodas and mirrored tiles at the Shwe Dagon, the gilded hallways shaped as an eight-pointed star inside the hollow stupa of the Botataung. As night sets, the handful of streetlights turn on, but mostly it remains dark, groups of men sitting in the shadows, smoking Ruby Red cigarettes and drinking tea, a sole candle flickering at the shop where a woman in a sari wraps betel nut and loose tobacco into pungent, loose quids. The power goes out, and hers is the only light.
***
We cross the vast chaparral of Lower Burma to the town of Kyaiktiyo, and climb the trail that goes to the top of the mountain in the Tenasserim Hills. We cross tumbling, rock-strewn streams, water jars for weary pilgrims, shops offering cold drinks and rich Burmese curries, shrines with blocks of sandalwood, flayed snake skins, preserved giant centipedes, and the complete heads of Himalayan deer, perched atop bamboo baskets like the heads of French aristocrats.
And at the top, there are the men with folded hands praying to the stupa that sits atop a massive golden boulder perched on the first emergence of real topography after the ironed-flat lowlands. Balanced, in legend, by a hair of the Buddha, it is, as the structuralists would say, a microcosm, a metaphor for all sacred space in the form of a vertical structure, balanced and swirling around the idea of the Buddha-- represented by an object and emphatically not an image-- on the rupture point of the mountains and the plains.
The pilgrim-tourists are camping out on bamboo mats on the massive marble floor for the night, scooping rice from massive pots and unpacking tiffins of fish soup and tea-leaf salad.
You smell the food cooking, see the smoke rising from the little charcoal braziers and the palm oil burbling in cast-iron woks, and imagine yourself reclining in one of the canvas deck chairs on a high mountain aerie, the taste of a cold bottle of Mandalay Beer almost touching your lips, and think about how, at some point, you could stay here for a very long time, stretching your weary limbs, staring out over the soot-clouded sunset, under a sky filled with emerging equatorial constellations, over the chanting of the monks, the birdlike songs and laughter of the Burmese girls that giggle as you walk by.
***
As we moved up and down the country, we charted our course by moving from remnant to remnant, leapfrogging back and forth across centuries.
In a town once called Maymyo-- "May's Hill," for the English colonel who founded it-- we drank plum wine at a lakeside restaurant, looked at the dried butterflies in an Edwardian botanical garden where the men wore pith helmets and the women wore broad-brimmed straw hats with silk daffodils. As we walked to the center of the town, we passed red brick churches and half-timbered summer lodges and horse-drawn white coaches, before arriving at the tidy clock tower, the bells of which still play Anglican hymns.
At Bagan, we cycled through the desert from decrepit temple to decrepit temple built during the reigns of-- and eventually bankrupting the empire of-- Kings Anawrahta and Kyanzittha. Despite the intermediary years of war and strife, they have survived, many complete with whitewashed walls and graceful paintings of war elephants and charging buffalo, sky nymphs and angels blowing trumpets, monks gathered around a radiant Buddha, his head surrounded by nested halos in the colors of the rainbow.
And we went to the old city of Inwa, adrift on an island in the broad Ayeyarwaddy, one of the last capitals of the Burmese Empire before its final capitulation to the British Raj. Tourists are taken to see the damaged palace tower that leans perilously to one side and the teak monastery of Bagaya Kyaung. But outside further ruins lurk, unmarked and seemingly forgotten. This place was burned and captured, re-burned and re-captured, by the Shan, the Bamar, the Brits, all leaving their traces. Who built these? From what dynasty, what era? Someone more knowledgeable could comment on lintels and ogive arches, but I am left with nothing. Among the piles of brick, I mumble the words softly under my breath.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
The Rooms of My Life
It's one of those nights when I can't fall asleep, which occur with a dismal regularity these days. I turn a light on and think maybe I should try to read myself to sleep.
But somehow I can't. I pick up a notebook or a glass, and it's transformed, as if it is a simulacrum of the original object. There is something there, something in the way the lamplight casts across the room, something in the angles of the shadows that come in off the street, something in the dull reflection off the cheap leatherette sofa that came with the apartment. I don't know where I am. Suddenly I am transported. On one hand, I know I'm in my room, those are undoubtedly my books on the shelf, that's my handwriting on the grocery list on the counter. But something else has slipped in, and I'm seeing my room as through a veil.
I've been here before. I know it. Maybe you could call it déjà vu, but it's more complex than that. I could tell you everything about this place: the stacks of worn-down cardboard boxes mouldering under the stairs, the cerulean-colored industrial carpeting, the walls of exposed cinder block painted semi-gloss off-white, the 1970s encyclopedias with faux-gilt-edged pages. the rows of books on dark metal shelves, cloth-bound in bright colors with codes of letters and numbers tamped on their spines in white ink. And somewhere, on the other side of a cool, shadowed room, is a plate glass window that faces a little sculpture garden on a vast lawn that runs down to a wide road with traffic shuttling back and forth. Even on a muggy tropical night, its cool, dry climate control chills my arms.
But I don't know whether or not it is a real place. What I know is that inside my head, this room exists, an imaginary library made up of countless other libraries, countless other rooms that I may have once set foot in. The memories have coalesced into a cogent place that I call the library. It needs no further definition.
And it is one of countless spaces that lie embedded in my mind. There is the library. There is the museum, and the billiard room with red wallpaper, the basement, the cabin in mid-winter, the white room and the black room that sit next to each other on a darkened hallway, the sunny terrace by the sea, and so on. These are the spaces I revisit again and again, as familiar as my childhood home. I know them in my earliest memories, in my dreams, on long walks, and on fitful nights when I'm in an odd mood and can't sleep and have nothing else to do but to cycle through the vaguer parts of conscious thought.
Someone like Freud or Jung might try to ascribe meaning to these places, to connect them to specific memories, to complexes, to a mythology of archetypes, to the structure of id, ego, and superego. But I'm not so sure how valid those ideas are.
And there are the various schools of cognitive science that suggest that we have certain evolved capacities that lead to certain aesthetic sensibilities, or at the very least, that our brains have evolved to process information is fairly specific ways. And I find these ideas just as groundless and speculative as those of the analysts.
So I am left with a set of lonely rooms, with their variations in color and light and shadow, inscrutable and omnipresent. I don't know where they come from, but I see their manifestations everywhere, in a fanlight, in a chess set.
Consequently, when I wander around the city, I am also wandering around in my own psyche. Even when I walk down a completely new street, it's already all silted up with nostalgia.
Our lives are couched in an invisible network of signs and cryptic meanings. The curvilinear font of a street sign, the gingerbread on the eaves of an old house, the angle of a roofline, a cluster of casuarina trees, each of them is imbued with a million narratives.
And, every once in a while, the vague, flickering images we carry in our minds harmonize with the stories of our built environment. We look up, and we are, for a few seconds, transported.
But it's only for a brief moment. I am in my library, my museum, my sunny terrace by the sea for only five seconds, and then it dissipates. Maybe it comes to me in waves, but each wave is only momentary, before they subside entirely, and I am again alone on a quiet street.
But somehow I can't. I pick up a notebook or a glass, and it's transformed, as if it is a simulacrum of the original object. There is something there, something in the way the lamplight casts across the room, something in the angles of the shadows that come in off the street, something in the dull reflection off the cheap leatherette sofa that came with the apartment. I don't know where I am. Suddenly I am transported. On one hand, I know I'm in my room, those are undoubtedly my books on the shelf, that's my handwriting on the grocery list on the counter. But something else has slipped in, and I'm seeing my room as through a veil.
I've been here before. I know it. Maybe you could call it déjà vu, but it's more complex than that. I could tell you everything about this place: the stacks of worn-down cardboard boxes mouldering under the stairs, the cerulean-colored industrial carpeting, the walls of exposed cinder block painted semi-gloss off-white, the 1970s encyclopedias with faux-gilt-edged pages. the rows of books on dark metal shelves, cloth-bound in bright colors with codes of letters and numbers tamped on their spines in white ink. And somewhere, on the other side of a cool, shadowed room, is a plate glass window that faces a little sculpture garden on a vast lawn that runs down to a wide road with traffic shuttling back and forth. Even on a muggy tropical night, its cool, dry climate control chills my arms.
But I don't know whether or not it is a real place. What I know is that inside my head, this room exists, an imaginary library made up of countless other libraries, countless other rooms that I may have once set foot in. The memories have coalesced into a cogent place that I call the library. It needs no further definition.
And it is one of countless spaces that lie embedded in my mind. There is the library. There is the museum, and the billiard room with red wallpaper, the basement, the cabin in mid-winter, the white room and the black room that sit next to each other on a darkened hallway, the sunny terrace by the sea, and so on. These are the spaces I revisit again and again, as familiar as my childhood home. I know them in my earliest memories, in my dreams, on long walks, and on fitful nights when I'm in an odd mood and can't sleep and have nothing else to do but to cycle through the vaguer parts of conscious thought.
Someone like Freud or Jung might try to ascribe meaning to these places, to connect them to specific memories, to complexes, to a mythology of archetypes, to the structure of id, ego, and superego. But I'm not so sure how valid those ideas are.
And there are the various schools of cognitive science that suggest that we have certain evolved capacities that lead to certain aesthetic sensibilities, or at the very least, that our brains have evolved to process information is fairly specific ways. And I find these ideas just as groundless and speculative as those of the analysts.
So I am left with a set of lonely rooms, with their variations in color and light and shadow, inscrutable and omnipresent. I don't know where they come from, but I see their manifestations everywhere, in a fanlight, in a chess set.
Consequently, when I wander around the city, I am also wandering around in my own psyche. Even when I walk down a completely new street, it's already all silted up with nostalgia.
Our lives are couched in an invisible network of signs and cryptic meanings. The curvilinear font of a street sign, the gingerbread on the eaves of an old house, the angle of a roofline, a cluster of casuarina trees, each of them is imbued with a million narratives.
And, every once in a while, the vague, flickering images we carry in our minds harmonize with the stories of our built environment. We look up, and we are, for a few seconds, transported.
But it's only for a brief moment. I am in my library, my museum, my sunny terrace by the sea for only five seconds, and then it dissipates. Maybe it comes to me in waves, but each wave is only momentary, before they subside entirely, and I am again alone on a quiet street.
Monday, March 11, 2013
The Idea of East
The idea strikes me at odd moments. It hits me now, as a pale shaft of morning light casts across the floor, to an old wooden double door with an unpainted latch leading to a crawlspace in a tiny Muslim school. Its shape, its state of decrepitude, its rough-cut and hand-adzed quality, its position beneath an eight-paned transom window of pebbled glass: all of them seem to exemplify that idea of the Asiatic.
And when I try to figure out where this idea came from, it seems to be something I had a very early acquaintance with. Some sources are obvious-- the vast, reconstructed Chinese temple at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City comes to mind, a vast and hollow space lined with immense murals, accompanied by display cases with nephrite Buddhas, lacquered plates, celadon cups, cricket cages.
But others are more intimate and in many ways less direct-- a certain wooden drawer, an embroidered piece of silk, the opium weight shaped like a metallic rooster my parents used to put their bills under. The memories of a bourgeois childhood seem to be made up of all these tiny little marginalia, arranged in my mind so neatly, like a Joseph Cornell box.
And more mysteriously, there were whole classes of gastronomy, of music, of aroma, of image that seemed to fall under the rubric of the Oriental. As a child, the whole world seems to consist of these wholly irrational and vaguely defined gestalts, tendencies without clear origins-- a mode of thinking we can immediately revert to with the assistance of a little psilocybin, but still seeps into our adult lives. All I need to hear is a certain scale on a song playing on a distant radio, or taste the bitter, ferric flavor of water chestnuts directly out of the can, and I can trigger the gestalt of the "Eastern."
And it was a gestalt I was powerfully attracted to. On the map and on the news: Borneo and Makassar, Rangoon and Vientiane, Dien Bien Phu and Irian Jaya-- whole names that evoked a sun rising slowly over a turbid, brown river, egrets in palm trees, the morning processions of wizened monks, silhouetted against a vermilion dawn.
But of course this perception has little to do with the reality of life in Asia. And of course it holds little currency beyond childhood. Areas of Bangkok are more Californian than California, the new skyscrapers of China and the Persian Gulf states are designed by London and New York firms. Singapore, Dubai, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong now embody the excesses of American-style capitalism. Which of course is nothing new. There are the Greek statues being dug up in the old Buddhist kingdoms of Pakistan, and the Portuguese-inspired desserts sold on the streets of Bangkok.
True, huge numbers of adults-- distressingly, a huge number of them in Asian, European, and North American governments-- still cling to the notions of "East" and "West," but this distinction has been thoroughly and successfully demolished by any number of big-name intellectuals. We can decode the sign systems that connote "Easternness" in society and media, and demonstrate how they're crassly used to market consumer goods and politics to an unwitting public. We can chart the history of the idea of the "Oriental" and see how it was used as a pretext for racism and colonialism. Simply put, there is no East there. But the phenomenon of East is out there, even if it's unhealthy to ascribe a material truth-value to it.
It haunts me. As much as I want to move beyond the idea of East, to base my perceptions on materiality and evidence, it's hard to escape the daydreams of my seven year old self. And that's a form of dishonesty that especially annoys me, when people claim their own nostalgias to be the basis for impersonal truth.
So I try to simply be aware of the phenomenon, to recognize its existence as a phantom image, one of the narratives and myths-- some benign, some invidious-- we tell ourselves in a clawing effort to make sense of the world.
And now that I live in Asia, I can start to build a new narrative, a new story that I actually can ground in my day-to-day life, in the ordinary lives of the millions of people around me, their habits and quirks and beliefs and dreams. The veil is falling off, and I can start anew. I start with something simple and beguiling: the street outside, filled with fallen bougainvillea blossoms.
And when I try to figure out where this idea came from, it seems to be something I had a very early acquaintance with. Some sources are obvious-- the vast, reconstructed Chinese temple at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City comes to mind, a vast and hollow space lined with immense murals, accompanied by display cases with nephrite Buddhas, lacquered plates, celadon cups, cricket cages.
But others are more intimate and in many ways less direct-- a certain wooden drawer, an embroidered piece of silk, the opium weight shaped like a metallic rooster my parents used to put their bills under. The memories of a bourgeois childhood seem to be made up of all these tiny little marginalia, arranged in my mind so neatly, like a Joseph Cornell box.
And more mysteriously, there were whole classes of gastronomy, of music, of aroma, of image that seemed to fall under the rubric of the Oriental. As a child, the whole world seems to consist of these wholly irrational and vaguely defined gestalts, tendencies without clear origins-- a mode of thinking we can immediately revert to with the assistance of a little psilocybin, but still seeps into our adult lives. All I need to hear is a certain scale on a song playing on a distant radio, or taste the bitter, ferric flavor of water chestnuts directly out of the can, and I can trigger the gestalt of the "Eastern."
And it was a gestalt I was powerfully attracted to. On the map and on the news: Borneo and Makassar, Rangoon and Vientiane, Dien Bien Phu and Irian Jaya-- whole names that evoked a sun rising slowly over a turbid, brown river, egrets in palm trees, the morning processions of wizened monks, silhouetted against a vermilion dawn.
But of course this perception has little to do with the reality of life in Asia. And of course it holds little currency beyond childhood. Areas of Bangkok are more Californian than California, the new skyscrapers of China and the Persian Gulf states are designed by London and New York firms. Singapore, Dubai, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong now embody the excesses of American-style capitalism. Which of course is nothing new. There are the Greek statues being dug up in the old Buddhist kingdoms of Pakistan, and the Portuguese-inspired desserts sold on the streets of Bangkok.
True, huge numbers of adults-- distressingly, a huge number of them in Asian, European, and North American governments-- still cling to the notions of "East" and "West," but this distinction has been thoroughly and successfully demolished by any number of big-name intellectuals. We can decode the sign systems that connote "Easternness" in society and media, and demonstrate how they're crassly used to market consumer goods and politics to an unwitting public. We can chart the history of the idea of the "Oriental" and see how it was used as a pretext for racism and colonialism. Simply put, there is no East there. But the phenomenon of East is out there, even if it's unhealthy to ascribe a material truth-value to it.
It haunts me. As much as I want to move beyond the idea of East, to base my perceptions on materiality and evidence, it's hard to escape the daydreams of my seven year old self. And that's a form of dishonesty that especially annoys me, when people claim their own nostalgias to be the basis for impersonal truth.
So I try to simply be aware of the phenomenon, to recognize its existence as a phantom image, one of the narratives and myths-- some benign, some invidious-- we tell ourselves in a clawing effort to make sense of the world.
And now that I live in Asia, I can start to build a new narrative, a new story that I actually can ground in my day-to-day life, in the ordinary lives of the millions of people around me, their habits and quirks and beliefs and dreams. The veil is falling off, and I can start anew. I start with something simple and beguiling: the street outside, filled with fallen bougainvillea blossoms.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
The Weight of Signs
On hungover Sunday mornings, I've taken to going on long walks through the shopping malls of Bangkok. One can find secret passageways, down long, white hallways, across hot asphalt alleyways, between littered chicken bones and smashed mangoes. Somehow the world becomes less pressing-- the things you regret from last night, the noonday sun-- when you're in an air-conditioned bubble with so much sensory stimulus that you don't have to choose any one thing. Simply turn your brain off, listen to your headphones and get lost in the white noise.
Which is how I wound up at Center One, one of the handful of cheap, chaotic shopping centers clustered around the Victory Monument. In a city where the large-scale malls inspire the same degree of devotion as the golden temples of the old city, this is but a minor shrine-- a few chain restaurants, mobile phone shops, and cosmetic counters, all fitting its location next to a large technical school. But far more than anything else, there are the countless tiny vendor stalls with their piles of women's clothes.
Each shop has its name written in balloon-shaped Roman script, and each is a testament to the truly awful taste of petit-bourgeois Thai teenagers. In every stall, you see the same merchandise-- giant Minnie Mouse bows, knock-offs of dresses worn by K-pop stars, gaudy costume jewelry, gathered together in cluttered racks and particle-board discount bins.
What I find repulsive about these isn't the cheap fabric and general ugliness-- I'll leave those critiques to more fashionable people than myself-- but the sort of transcendental image that they're trying to project. A lot of this is an import from Northeast Asia. Within the Japanese sphere of economic influence, Tokyo necessarily expanded its aesthetic values to the then underdeveloped states of Southeast Asia in the years around the Second World War. And this sort of kawaii or proto-kawaii attitude has permeated international pop culture in Thailand since then, from Japanese enka singers back during the '40s and '50s to the modern hallyu-- the Korean wave of pop stars, fashion, and soap opera.
And in that mall basement, it strikes me as especially garish. The women are giggling schoolgirls-- eternal virgins wrapped in ribbon. They pair perfectly with the men-- passive, kittenish, heavily made-up male teen idols with perfectly coiffed hair and plastic surgery to give them occidental features. Combined, it is a pop culture idiom that blends the moronic adolescent consumerism of my own country with the bitterly hierarchical Confucianism practiced on the shores of the East China Sea.
I want to sit down, and wind up at a chain restaurant, with a strawberry smoothie with more refined sugar than strawberries in it.
And I have to realize that despite my own opinions, despite my attempts to learn a language, to be a part of another country, I remain so explicitly an outsider, not only through the color of my skin and hair, but through my own sense of otherness. When I'm in an American shopping mall, I can scoff all I want, but I can comfortably read the semiotics of it. But here, I barely know what I'm looking at. Not only am I alienated from consumer society as a whole, but from the form that consumer society has taken in a culture on the far side of the planet.
I'd like to think that my response is one of good taste versus bad taste... that not only am I responding viscerally, but that I'm pursuing a line of thought in the tradition of Adorno's critique of the culture industry, the Marxist and Gramscian critique of the commodity fetish, and Veblen's studies of the leisure class. These are claims that I can make with far greater confidence back in the States. But especially when I'm less aware of the sign systems being processed, I start to think that my political readings of the aesthetic are simply an intellectual smokescreen. Rather than making a lucid analysis, I'm terrified that I'm simply deeming my own bias and ennui to be an absolute truth.
This is the trap into which I fall. Everything is shaded thusly. Depression becomes reasonable acceptance of life in a late-capitalist society. Happiness becomes collaboration with the invidious forces of primitive accumulation. Loneliness is our natural state in an atomized modernity.
Of course there are countless antidotes to such a way of thinking-- religious people take faith in the idea of otherworldly salvation, capitalist enthusiasts make dubious claims about the equally otherworldly "free market," bohemian types choose to simply to inhabit a bubble, and certain types of postmodernist try to celebrate the hybrid and the liminal-- all of which seem equally lonely and/or defeatist.
I sit in my corner, hide out with my book a little bit. And then when I leave the mall I walk out into the late afternoon in Santiphap Park. Old couples picnic by the little pond, a few workmen tearing down the old love motel on Rangnam take a smoke break on the far soi. And stepping out into fresh air, the signs rearrange themselves into something more cogent. And I am here, in a port city of 15 million people, and like the countless others who pass through here I'm trying to make sense of it, trying to extract some kind of meaning.
A light rain starts to fall, and this is one of those moments, when the whole city opens up like a flower at sunrise, and it, for 30 seconds, is just as lovely.
Which is how I wound up at Center One, one of the handful of cheap, chaotic shopping centers clustered around the Victory Monument. In a city where the large-scale malls inspire the same degree of devotion as the golden temples of the old city, this is but a minor shrine-- a few chain restaurants, mobile phone shops, and cosmetic counters, all fitting its location next to a large technical school. But far more than anything else, there are the countless tiny vendor stalls with their piles of women's clothes.
Each shop has its name written in balloon-shaped Roman script, and each is a testament to the truly awful taste of petit-bourgeois Thai teenagers. In every stall, you see the same merchandise-- giant Minnie Mouse bows, knock-offs of dresses worn by K-pop stars, gaudy costume jewelry, gathered together in cluttered racks and particle-board discount bins.
What I find repulsive about these isn't the cheap fabric and general ugliness-- I'll leave those critiques to more fashionable people than myself-- but the sort of transcendental image that they're trying to project. A lot of this is an import from Northeast Asia. Within the Japanese sphere of economic influence, Tokyo necessarily expanded its aesthetic values to the then underdeveloped states of Southeast Asia in the years around the Second World War. And this sort of kawaii or proto-kawaii attitude has permeated international pop culture in Thailand since then, from Japanese enka singers back during the '40s and '50s to the modern hallyu-- the Korean wave of pop stars, fashion, and soap opera.
And in that mall basement, it strikes me as especially garish. The women are giggling schoolgirls-- eternal virgins wrapped in ribbon. They pair perfectly with the men-- passive, kittenish, heavily made-up male teen idols with perfectly coiffed hair and plastic surgery to give them occidental features. Combined, it is a pop culture idiom that blends the moronic adolescent consumerism of my own country with the bitterly hierarchical Confucianism practiced on the shores of the East China Sea.
I want to sit down, and wind up at a chain restaurant, with a strawberry smoothie with more refined sugar than strawberries in it.
And I have to realize that despite my own opinions, despite my attempts to learn a language, to be a part of another country, I remain so explicitly an outsider, not only through the color of my skin and hair, but through my own sense of otherness. When I'm in an American shopping mall, I can scoff all I want, but I can comfortably read the semiotics of it. But here, I barely know what I'm looking at. Not only am I alienated from consumer society as a whole, but from the form that consumer society has taken in a culture on the far side of the planet.
I'd like to think that my response is one of good taste versus bad taste... that not only am I responding viscerally, but that I'm pursuing a line of thought in the tradition of Adorno's critique of the culture industry, the Marxist and Gramscian critique of the commodity fetish, and Veblen's studies of the leisure class. These are claims that I can make with far greater confidence back in the States. But especially when I'm less aware of the sign systems being processed, I start to think that my political readings of the aesthetic are simply an intellectual smokescreen. Rather than making a lucid analysis, I'm terrified that I'm simply deeming my own bias and ennui to be an absolute truth.
This is the trap into which I fall. Everything is shaded thusly. Depression becomes reasonable acceptance of life in a late-capitalist society. Happiness becomes collaboration with the invidious forces of primitive accumulation. Loneliness is our natural state in an atomized modernity.
Of course there are countless antidotes to such a way of thinking-- religious people take faith in the idea of otherworldly salvation, capitalist enthusiasts make dubious claims about the equally otherworldly "free market," bohemian types choose to simply to inhabit a bubble, and certain types of postmodernist try to celebrate the hybrid and the liminal-- all of which seem equally lonely and/or defeatist.
I sit in my corner, hide out with my book a little bit. And then when I leave the mall I walk out into the late afternoon in Santiphap Park. Old couples picnic by the little pond, a few workmen tearing down the old love motel on Rangnam take a smoke break on the far soi. And stepping out into fresh air, the signs rearrange themselves into something more cogent. And I am here, in a port city of 15 million people, and like the countless others who pass through here I'm trying to make sense of it, trying to extract some kind of meaning.
A light rain starts to fall, and this is one of those moments, when the whole city opens up like a flower at sunrise, and it, for 30 seconds, is just as lovely.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
The Ruins of the Contemporary World
At least a couple times a week, I find myself on the highway that extends north from the Din Daeng area of Bangkok towards Don Mueang Airport, through a set of dismal, sprawling nowhere suburbs, past minor government ministries, bottling plants, overgrown cane fields, and gravel lots filled with abandoned buses. And immediately to the west, it is impossibly not to notice the concrete arches and columns that flank the railroad tracks. Most people assume at first that they are a project under construction-- a new highway, or a new metro line.
At first, they seem to be blank, geometric abstractions, their purpose uncertain. But as their function faded over the years, their form took precedence. One has a stencil at its base, another bristles with rusted, cement-daubed rebar. Like the terra cotta soldiers at Xi'an, their seemingly identical profiles reveal their personalities on close inspection, and you see the individual features of each pillar.
This, in the dizzy years of the Thai Economic Miracle in the late '80s and early '90s, was the first stage of the Hopewell Project, a planned high-speed rail and road route to link the Hua Lamphong Railway Station to what was then Bangkok's primary airport. The project was suspended under the Anand Panyarachun government, but was still considered a viable plan until 1997.
But after the 1997 devaluation of the baht and the accompanying collapse of most East and Southeast Asian economies, the remnants became a stark reminder of overexuberance and its consequences, an ugly precipitate of the business cycle.
But they aren't alone. Bangkok is a city of abandoned spires, of half-completed office towers and unfinished condos, its skyline broken by the gray hulks of stillborn development. And there are the projects abandoned in the earliest stages-- fields littered with concrete stakes, drained marshes with lonely cracked, asphalt roads leading into their depths-- that are as oblique and mysterious as pictographs in the desert.
It reminds me, rather, of California City-- the radically failed attempt at grand-scale modernist urban planning in the Mojave Desert. Or, more contemporarily, to the half-built suburbs that blight the edge of countless Sun Belt cities, my own home nation's equivalents of Bangkok's unfinished ruins. What could be lonelier, more fatalistic than those cul-de-sacs-- the heart of America's white-picket-fence collective fantasy-- falling to pieces amid an arid wasteland?
We don't want to see the vision of the contemporary world-- something so embodied by the image of the modern skyline (and, to a lesser extent, the superhighway and the mega-suburb)-- already going decrepit. It remind us too much of the not-too-distant era in the future when everything we inhabit will be relegated to the history books, or simply forgotten.
But it seems to me that these remnants are almost essential to contemporary life. In a neoliberal economic landscape marked by radical concentrations of wealth, abrupt crashes, and the celebration of massive fiscal risk as a healthy manifestation of the investor's animal spirit, they are in one way not images of our world destroyed, but our world distilled.
A final question: how long will the ruins remain where they are? Built with the latest techniques of concrete reinforcement, they aren't easy to demolish, and some of them remain quite structurally sound. Eventually someone will come along and clear them, no doubt. But part of me-- any pragmatic considerations of economics, safety, local wishes, and urban aesthetics aside-- wants the city to keep them as somber reminders. They are a network of monuments, commemorating this era's desire and greed, and ultimately, its fate.
At first, they seem to be blank, geometric abstractions, their purpose uncertain. But as their function faded over the years, their form took precedence. One has a stencil at its base, another bristles with rusted, cement-daubed rebar. Like the terra cotta soldiers at Xi'an, their seemingly identical profiles reveal their personalities on close inspection, and you see the individual features of each pillar.
This, in the dizzy years of the Thai Economic Miracle in the late '80s and early '90s, was the first stage of the Hopewell Project, a planned high-speed rail and road route to link the Hua Lamphong Railway Station to what was then Bangkok's primary airport. The project was suspended under the Anand Panyarachun government, but was still considered a viable plan until 1997.
But after the 1997 devaluation of the baht and the accompanying collapse of most East and Southeast Asian economies, the remnants became a stark reminder of overexuberance and its consequences, an ugly precipitate of the business cycle.
But they aren't alone. Bangkok is a city of abandoned spires, of half-completed office towers and unfinished condos, its skyline broken by the gray hulks of stillborn development. And there are the projects abandoned in the earliest stages-- fields littered with concrete stakes, drained marshes with lonely cracked, asphalt roads leading into their depths-- that are as oblique and mysterious as pictographs in the desert.
It reminds me, rather, of California City-- the radically failed attempt at grand-scale modernist urban planning in the Mojave Desert. Or, more contemporarily, to the half-built suburbs that blight the edge of countless Sun Belt cities, my own home nation's equivalents of Bangkok's unfinished ruins. What could be lonelier, more fatalistic than those cul-de-sacs-- the heart of America's white-picket-fence collective fantasy-- falling to pieces amid an arid wasteland?
We don't want to see the vision of the contemporary world-- something so embodied by the image of the modern skyline (and, to a lesser extent, the superhighway and the mega-suburb)-- already going decrepit. It remind us too much of the not-too-distant era in the future when everything we inhabit will be relegated to the history books, or simply forgotten.
But it seems to me that these remnants are almost essential to contemporary life. In a neoliberal economic landscape marked by radical concentrations of wealth, abrupt crashes, and the celebration of massive fiscal risk as a healthy manifestation of the investor's animal spirit, they are in one way not images of our world destroyed, but our world distilled.
A final question: how long will the ruins remain where they are? Built with the latest techniques of concrete reinforcement, they aren't easy to demolish, and some of them remain quite structurally sound. Eventually someone will come along and clear them, no doubt. But part of me-- any pragmatic considerations of economics, safety, local wishes, and urban aesthetics aside-- wants the city to keep them as somber reminders. They are a network of monuments, commemorating this era's desire and greed, and ultimately, its fate.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
The Museum of Inverse Reality
Every day we walk through the same spaces. We move from the bedroom into the living room, in and out of the front door. There is the same train to work, the same train home. Objects are rearranged, they appear and disappear. The impression changes with weather and light, from morning to evening, and subjectively with our moods, but mostly our relationship to the places we inhabit is one of reiteration, one of appearance repeated again and again until we cease to even recognize their forms.
Which is why, as I stared into the glass-top table of a softly lit cafe, I was so stunned to see a world I'd forgotten about.
Like so many children, I'd spent what seemed like hours looking at the world upside down. Lying, feet up, on a worn armchair, I saw an entirely different room than the one I ran and played in.
Looking into the reflection on the tabletop, I was looking into a portal, a portal on another reality, and a portal on a reality I once held dear. Here were hanging lamps standing as straight as crinoids on the sea floor, fluorescent light fixtures like low-slung Japanese tables, the long white rectangular benches formed by ceiling beams, clocks tapering at a downward facing noon.
The world as I knew it was full of scattered things, stacks of books on coffee tables, dusty lines of ash gathered around the hearth. But the inverse possessed clean lines and spare white corners and immaculate 90 degree angles. Every object accreted into a ceiling, something you only noticed if you looked up. And the inverse was not so much a true inversion as an abstraction. Suddenly, everything was stripped of its conventional meaning and reduced to an inscrutable form with the texture and shape of modern sculpture.
It was a sort of space I only associated with the museum, a chilly and sparse emptiness filled with holy relics. And so when I went into the inverse, I was entering into a very personal museum, the air conditioning turned on too high, filled with the faint, smoky smell of a disused fireplace in summer.
As I grew older-- too tall and ungainly to curl up on a beat up antique chair, too busy to spend my time in a fantasy-- I stopped staring into the inverse. But occasionally I would get a glimpse.
There was Joseph Beuys, with his crude assemblages of felt and rough-hewn pine standing isolated in a white gallery. And that, of course, was my parents' threadbare rug and the stacks of firewood in a tarnished brass carrier.
There was René Magritte, an impeccable composer of steam trains in bourgeois parlors, sunny days by the Côte d'Azur during which pieces of balsa are conjured up in thin air, lonely poplar trees that seem to grow on other planets, their leaves lit by strange moons.
And there was Giorgio De Chirico, with his empty piazzas and cylindrical towers, casting long shadows on an eternal late afternoon in a nameless Italian town.
What binds them all is a sense of the metaphysical. Narrative is absent. In its place is an infinite spiderweb of signifiers and signified, automatic response, hidden meanings, miscommunication, unsolvable mystery, structures as peculiar as the constellations, painted faces as enigmatic as playing card royalty.
Of course our aesthetic sense changes over the course of a lifetime. But there are certain things we can trace to specific initial events. I walk through the halls of museums in London, Saint Louis, Kuala Lumpur, down white passageways, past massive plate glass windows and Barcelona chairs. I stop before paintings and video loops, and I can look at them, appreciate the technical effort of their composition, fix their place in the continuum of art history. But then I stumble upon something. And suddenly, I'm transported to the imaginary museum, and I'm face to face with inverse reality. Once, I used to hide there.
Which is why, as I stared into the glass-top table of a softly lit cafe, I was so stunned to see a world I'd forgotten about.
Like so many children, I'd spent what seemed like hours looking at the world upside down. Lying, feet up, on a worn armchair, I saw an entirely different room than the one I ran and played in.
Looking into the reflection on the tabletop, I was looking into a portal, a portal on another reality, and a portal on a reality I once held dear. Here were hanging lamps standing as straight as crinoids on the sea floor, fluorescent light fixtures like low-slung Japanese tables, the long white rectangular benches formed by ceiling beams, clocks tapering at a downward facing noon.
The world as I knew it was full of scattered things, stacks of books on coffee tables, dusty lines of ash gathered around the hearth. But the inverse possessed clean lines and spare white corners and immaculate 90 degree angles. Every object accreted into a ceiling, something you only noticed if you looked up. And the inverse was not so much a true inversion as an abstraction. Suddenly, everything was stripped of its conventional meaning and reduced to an inscrutable form with the texture and shape of modern sculpture.
It was a sort of space I only associated with the museum, a chilly and sparse emptiness filled with holy relics. And so when I went into the inverse, I was entering into a very personal museum, the air conditioning turned on too high, filled with the faint, smoky smell of a disused fireplace in summer.
As I grew older-- too tall and ungainly to curl up on a beat up antique chair, too busy to spend my time in a fantasy-- I stopped staring into the inverse. But occasionally I would get a glimpse.
There was Joseph Beuys, with his crude assemblages of felt and rough-hewn pine standing isolated in a white gallery. And that, of course, was my parents' threadbare rug and the stacks of firewood in a tarnished brass carrier.
There was René Magritte, an impeccable composer of steam trains in bourgeois parlors, sunny days by the Côte d'Azur during which pieces of balsa are conjured up in thin air, lonely poplar trees that seem to grow on other planets, their leaves lit by strange moons.
And there was Giorgio De Chirico, with his empty piazzas and cylindrical towers, casting long shadows on an eternal late afternoon in a nameless Italian town.
What binds them all is a sense of the metaphysical. Narrative is absent. In its place is an infinite spiderweb of signifiers and signified, automatic response, hidden meanings, miscommunication, unsolvable mystery, structures as peculiar as the constellations, painted faces as enigmatic as playing card royalty.
Of course our aesthetic sense changes over the course of a lifetime. But there are certain things we can trace to specific initial events. I walk through the halls of museums in London, Saint Louis, Kuala Lumpur, down white passageways, past massive plate glass windows and Barcelona chairs. I stop before paintings and video loops, and I can look at them, appreciate the technical effort of their composition, fix their place in the continuum of art history. But then I stumble upon something. And suddenly, I'm transported to the imaginary museum, and I'm face to face with inverse reality. Once, I used to hide there.
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