By the Sea

My first sight of the ocean was of a desolate stretch of coastline in Southern Mexico, just north of the Cancun costa del date rape. Where the tourists hadn't yet arrived in the early '90s, a stretch of beach towards a ferry port ran amid assorted wreckage. Where empty concrete lots, stained with the accumulated rust of a few hurricane seasons ran down to the beach.

On the beach lay the hulls of fishing boats. In retrospect, they were probably simple fishing boats or small ferries. But they seemed to me, as a small child without any experience of boats or the sea or the adult world in general, to be great ships. And here they were, laid out and tipped over, rusted, torn apart, encrusted in alien lifeforms, as if chewed apart by monsters, their skeletons laid out like a horror movie set.

And there was the smell, not only unique, but vast and pervasive, an unfamiliar range of metallic ions atop rotting marine life. There were of course similarities to the chilly lakes and streams of the Upper Midwest I was used to swimming and fishing at, but to compare the two was like porterhouse and hamburger, two things made of the same substance but one infinitely richer than the other.

Years later, I stumbled upon Kunstformen der Natur, published in 1901 by the German biologist, philosopher, and artist Ernst Haeckel, whose stony positivist outlook was counterbalanced by the wild flights of fancy of his drawings of sea creatures. In Haeckel's book, the natural world was cut apart, stylized, turned into elaborate spires and quincunxes, monstrosities of radial symmetry, creatures like nightmare genitalia. Animals that I recognize as animals, that have the evolutionary patterns of animals, that seem uncannily neither animal nor plant nor fungus, slippery and primal things.

Not long after, in college, I learned a term for such things-- abject-- those things that seem to evade our symbolic notions of what reality should look like. Things like a corpse, like a weeping sore. Things that seem to come from some deep and amorphous primal space. Lots of Lacanian psychoanalysts, thinking they were thinking, wrote about this in dense, allusive treatises, and lots of French feminists, with little basis and a lot of essentialism, somehow equated the abject and the feminine.

The depths of the sea somehow lurked at the background of everything, the formlessness that appeared in dreams, at the edges of everyday life.

I stepped into a pristine tropical cove, fringed with waving palm trees. Underneath, the rocks swarmed with a thousand olivine-black sea cucumbers.

Alone on the South China Sea

I arrived at Chungking Mansions on a cold, rainy April day, and anyone who's lived or traveled for an extensive period in Asia knows the drill. At every corner stands a skinny Bengali tout in a loud shirt, trying to grab your attention, get you to come to a guesthouse, tailor, moneychanger, or fly-by-night travel agency. The wider the smile, the greater the deception.

            -Hey mister, you looking for something?

I do my best to avoid eye contact, and get into my cramped room as quickly as I can. I drop my bags and try to explore the city. With a limited budget and knowing no one, I walked and walked, until my calves ached, until I just wanted to sit down and watch the boats cross the harbor.

On the one side, it is a city of stone steps tumbling down steep hillsides, narrow and vertiginous streets cutting between tiny restaurants and Chinese herbalist shops where calico cats bask in sunbeams atop pallets of dried cuttlefish and chrysanthemum petals, of mid-century apartment blocks in white brick and sea-green tile with old British colonial street signs in an elegant modernist font, of storybook trams and ferries and schoolchildren with bright red umbrellas, of the warm smells of Taoist temple incense in chilly weather and goose fat pressed into fresh-cooked rice-- a Wes Anderson movie waiting to be made.

On the other, Hong Kong is a banking capital as bland as any other the world over. Its CBD is a tangle of escalators connecting countless antiseptic, high-security structures, with the same piano music, the same black-and-white photos, men with Breitling watches on well-muscled arms and women with Hermès bags dangling from their avian shoulders. I walked through the nightlife sections, and can't find a bar that didn't pulse with vaguely "European" dance music, that wasn't filled with aspiring financial criminals and the braying voices of posh London and Lower Manhattan.

These two Hong Kongs exist parallel to each other, sometimes on the street, often kissing, their eyes closed to each other.

Yet they are bound together by their sheer density, the density of a narrow city wedged between the mountains and the sea. I walked up Nathan Road at night, past rows of old textile factories and towers filled with shoebox apartments, amid an infinite entanglement of glowing Chinese characters.

And on a fine sunny afternoon I took the subway to the north, to where the world's densest human habitation once rose up, a towering slum that is now a park filled with odd chunks of concrete and low-lying tumuli.

I ended my trip atop Victoria Peak, the lush, misty mountain that looms over Central Hong Kong, to see the whole thing at once.

Staring outwards, surrounded by cheery groups of tourists-- Singaporean families, Thai honeymooners, Malaysian retirees. Alone, in my shabby clothes and worn-out sneakers, stubble-faced, without a camera and politely refusing the audio tour, it was impossible not to feel out of place and vaguely suspect.

But what is travel if not dislocation. And this is something people don't talk about very often. And something that becomes all the more salient when you're in a place like Hong Kong, a city with a government predicated on a contradiction, a city that is either self-loathingly Asian or pretentiously Western, either a bastion of democracy in a totalitarian state or the same state's poodle. It is in a place like this, in a situation like this, that the entire world seems to be centered within the field of view of a telescope.

The Megalopolis

When I was maybe 10 or 11, I went with my family at night up into the mountains above Santa Fe. Old enough to watch horror movies, I knew this couldn't end well. The broken, wooden National Forest Service sign was warning enough. Beyond here were murderous hitchhikers, desert death cults, Indian burial grounds.

Yet what I saw when my mother finally parked the car, high up on a mountain road, chilled me far more than anything I'd seen in a theater. Above me extended a vast expanse almost milky with stars, more than I'd ever seen, framed on all sides by icy mountains and 80 foot tall, silhouette-black pines.

Stunning, yes, but I knew I was standing at the gateway to something incomprehensibly vast and formless, so much bigger, so much emptier than anything else I'd seen in my young life. And like a chasm, t threatened to swallow me into its infinity.

I ran back into the car, into the comfortable domesticity of upholstery and blinking LEDs and familiar electronic pings and cookie crumbs.

It wasn't until I was 18, in a college classroom, that I learned that there was a term for this, the sublime, a coinage of Edmund Burke, who contrasted it to the beautiful, in much the same way it would later be contrasted with the beautiful by countless conservative thumb-twiddlers who shared Burke's enthusiasm for establishment Protestantism and the free market.

As I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate that which dwarfs me, and, 200 years on, discovered that the sublime and the beautiful are not mutually exclusive. If anything, I find that the irrational and the overwhelming interest me far more than anything that suggests a divine order to the universe.

And yet that sense of massiveness and terror of the void comes at me to this day, at times when I don't expect it. I see it when I'm walking through desolate parking lots surrounded by 40-story towers at midnight, when coming out of my office on a rainy early evening into a dimly lit alleyway, high walls around me on all sides.

Or, most profoundly, when I land in one of the great Asian megacities by night. You are surrounded by half-darkness, and then suddenly it looms before you. Lights blink in icy blue marking the runways, with the cityspace cut up by massive highways illuminated with yellow sodium-vapor lamps, dotted with cranes marking the ever-expanding skyline.

But somehow they remain obscure. How many Americans have heard of Dongguan, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Wuhan in China, or Bekasi or Medan in Indonesia?

I take a commuter train out of Bangkok into the suburbs, where the contradictions between the old Asia and the new are at their sharpest.

The megacity is without profile or shape, without boundary save arbitrary political edges, primarily erected in the past 30 years or so as part of the mass influx of rural populations. They are places of constantly pouring concrete, of dusty lots and rickety scaffoldings, farmers' fields interspersed with eight-story buildings.

The handful of fugitive slums in Bangkok line canals and railway tracks out on these peripheries, and are built of sheet metal and often old billboards, including-- with no apparent irony-- those with the smiling faces of political candidates and cheery slogans about developing the nation.

Across a cinder-block wall, a few inches and several magnitudes of income away, a new gated community rises up, with fountains and avenues of royal palms. The identical houses are built in white concrete with wedding-cake baroque ornamentation and massive reflective glass windows, the architectural answer to a Bach cantata played as elevator music.

In the old center, the city groans under its weight. Old shophouses with wooden windows abut crystalline shopping centers along traffic-clogged streets below elevated metro lines. Everything is atop everything else. I sit down at a cafe slotted into the megacity's core. The exposed pipes and butcher block are intended to mirror a loft space, an attempt at a cozy spot in Brooklyn or London on a cold winter morning rendered in a shopping zone in the sweltering tropics, one simulation in an infinite sequence.

It's hard not to read the megacity as a harbinger of doom of some sort, whether spiritual or environmental or social. It's no accident that in previous eras, Friedrich Engels visited Victorian Manchester and saw in it the breeding grounds for the communist revolution he saw erupting from the inherent contradictions of an industrial society. Émile Zola documented the overgrown Paris of the corrupt Second Empire and personified it as a contemptuous courtesan named Nana-- a name later given to a spermy neighborhood in central Bangkok-- who meets her end as "a shovelful of putrid flesh." And these days, countless journalists and scientists look at smog-choked Beijing and parched Cairo and see nothing but incipient catastrophe.

One's imagination takes flight at the elaborate corpses our current cities will leave. It's remarkably easy to see the collapse of the metropolis in the mind's eye. One imagines Dhaka washed into the rising Bay of Bengal, massive housing developments uninhabited and rusting in South China, the glass and steel skeleton of Abu Dhabi underneath shifting dunes.

The reality of it will probably be far less interesting. Given the cheapness of contemporary building materials, the ruins of megacities will probably form a mass of glass and concrete, rust stains and seeping oil. And somehow it seems fitting that the largest habitations the world ever knew, erected so fast, will dissipate equally fast. The modern city becomes entropy itself.

Stendhal's Ghost

I'm not sure when I first found out about Stendhal, or heard the name Stendhal, but I remember the first time I recognized Stendhal as such, it was when I was a teenager in Italy, en route from Pisa to Florence, and I read for the first time about Stendhal Syndrome, the condition-- named for the writer upon his visit to Florence-- in which the sufferer is so overwhelmed by the beauty of his or her surroundings that he or she becomes physically ill.

As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.

But it wasn't until I was 21 that I read Le Rouge et le Noir, a novel that read much more like a soap opera than I would have expected. And for the next few months, I became haunted by references to Stendhal, and references to his protagonist, Julien Sorel. In books, in magazines, I found the names again and again. Or to the concurrence of the red and the black-- which in the novel, were supposed to symbolize the split between the liberal trends spearheaded by the nascent bourgeoisie and the conservative theocratic elements in France during the gloomy, reactionary days of the Bourbon Restoration. Or a bottle of chartreuse at a posh bar reminded me of Stendhal's other major work, La Chartreuse du Parme. References birthed other references. All led back to Stendhal.

"Stendhal's ghost is following me," I said to no one in particular.

In our lives we are haunted by names, objects, allusions. We hear old songs again and again, see a certain beat up Saab all over town, learn the names of architectural features or obscure household items. And then they're everywhere.

It turns out that there is a name for this-- the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, named for the terror organization founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof that briefly terrorized West Germany in the 1970s and later made famous by an Oscar-nominated film. Someone-- no one seems quite sure who-- heard of them, and saw them everywhere.

One could argue that this is an epiphenomenon of the archival nature of the contemporary world. Social media, news aggregator sites, links upon links, and viral videos all form a deluge of raw information, and it seems ever more likely that we are susceptible to the phenomenon.

But we've always lived in information-saturated environments. The only difference is that now this environment is something we can explicitly categorize as information. Before we interpreted the world in terms of Google Maps and Twitter, we interpreted it in terms of northward flying geese, the whorl of a sunflower, the slow movement of Cepheus across the night sky.

Did our remote ancestors experience this? Did they suddenly notice the way a certain kind of quartz veins its way through the rock? Did they find that an orchid only grew on the shady side of a tree?

On Reverie

I had gone to see a late movie, and I was wandering around, bored, alone, anxious. I wound up at a chain Japanese restaurant, even though I wasn't that hungry. To sit down in a well-lit place with vinyl booths and the air conditioning turned on too high, to stare at the reflection of hanging lights against dark glass, I knew, would somehow make me less miserable. It wasn't until I finally sat down that I realized I was trying to place myself in an Edward Hopper painting, one I used to stare at as a child in the art museum in Des Moines.

And yet I feel infinitely more alone when I'm communicating through a computer. Seeing the social world as a shimmering holograph beyond the room in which I'm sitting, it becomes so easy to deceive myself into thinking that the rest of the world lives a happier, more normal life. Either that, or my thoughts devolve into schadenfreude, and I turn the people just beyond my reach into the dumbest, most grotesque, most pathetic people I've ever encountered. Or both. I look at the happy couple and think how hideous their children must be.

A true solitude, one that doesn't keep other people at arm's length, seems at times to be increasingly rare. It is the solitude of reading a physical book, of writing in a notepad, of a long hike in the mountains.

Many things have been said by intellectuals and writers in support of this kind of solitude-- that it improves cognitive capabilities, that it allows for greater empathy by providing a yardstick for one's social world, that it heightens human perception.

What seems unsaid is that it provides a sort of freedom to wander around inside one's own mind without having to vocalize it, without having to attempt to communicate or try to impress someone. An error in grammar, a flawed perception, a socially unacceptable attitude, a flight into self-indulgence, vanity, lust, animal instinct, awkward comment, difficult to articulate subtleties, questionable abstractions, excessive bitterness, or sheer rapture. When one is alone, there is no contradiction between emotion and outward demeanor, between express communication and inward thought. Instead, the solitary reader or writer or walker is free to explore the relationships between all of these things, between one's own thoughts and what one perceives of as a "personality."

The impulse of reverie is akin to that of play. Yet as an adult, to simply "play," as it were, seems odd and regressive and antisocial, and it's hard to delink the word from any kind of sexual connotation. Ditto the word "fantasy." Outside of certain channels (explicit sexual desire, work-oriented goals, the less nerdish hobbies), to occupy the dreamy recesses of the mind, even for a short period, seems narcissistic, escapist, infantile, or some combination thereof.

Which in turn leads me to a terrible guilt, that I'm refusing to live my own life, or-- what is worse-- that I'm trapped in a narcissist's mirror maze, and the entire world reflects back onto myself, imitating love and solidarity, but never actually realizing either.

But I can't deny that to enter into reverie, and what's more, to keep it in a state of solitude, to refuse anyone else into it, remains therapeutic.

I take out my pen and write down a page no one will ever see, one I will never see again.

And I fold up the paper, drop it in the trash can, start walking home through long arcades, lights swarming with moths, and suddenly I find I'm smiling again.

Life During Wartime

Yesterday, as I spent the afternoon sitting in the park reading a book, a grenade was lobbed by an unknown party into a crowd of protesters at the Victory Monument, a few minutes' walk down the street, injuring 30.

It's a cliche to say that in times of war, one should live life as normal, so as to not "let the terrorists win." And there's truth there-- after all, we run countless risks in our ordinary lives without thinking it, and besides, we need to live our lives regardless.

Over the past week or so, the streets have turned into ghostly, empty passageways leading to the loci of mass protest sites, barricaded by piles of tires and guarded by militants wearing bandannas and armbands covered in slogans. The tension has been there.

But when the additional threat of unknown and unknowable violence, committed by unknown parties who seem tied to neither camp in the current political fracas, the tension turns to fear, and that spot on Ratchawithee Road becomes blackened dread.

Terrorists, it's typically argued, use the methods of terror to project their voice. And a good Foucauldian would also say that it's a claim of biopower, the use of dead bodies for political means. But what often seems ignored is the spatial dimension, the way the active group crudely hacks out a piece of landscape. It's not for themselves, it's not claimed territory.

And when the terror itself is not claimed, there is no voice. The bomb site is pure threat, a scar across the face of the city.

It has been suspected that the leaders of the protest and their well-placed supporters among Thailand's commercial and aristocratic elite are using Reichstag tactics to levy public opinion, or to force a military takeover of the government. But there is no evidence for this, and I doubt any will arise. And as for the government's forces, they have no interest in creating chaos-- the police are being held back, and all they want is their electoral victory in a few weeks' time.

But it's this unknowability that reflects the polygonal nature of the Thai body politic. The international media, along with the more partisan members of the local media, depict a simplistic picture of two groups, red and yellow, in favor of Yingluck Shinawatra's Pheu Thai government and the legacy of the Thaksin government before her versus those against them. But you have a broad range, including red shirts who have been disappointed by Yingluck's tenure and by the self-righteous populist hucksters in the Pheu Thai party, swaths of the PDRC group led by Suthep Thaugsuban who find Suthep himself to be ungainly and corrupt, the hardcore supporters at either end, the former supporters of Suthep who are bothered by his increasingly unbending and anti-democratic demands, the hardline monarchists with their hateful phobias of modernity and egalitarianism, and you have the vast body of Thais who are alienated by the whole damn thing. Now compound this with the machine politics of the Thai parliament in which invisible lines of patronage and clientelism dominate, with cliques led by thuggish big men, old alliances formed in boys' boarding schools and military college graduating classes and century-old Chinese immigrant business alliances and common lines of descent from illustrious ancestors.

This big something, so much messier and more disparate than the 24-hour news cycle is willing to admit, creates a situation where it becomes entirely unsurprising that some cabal somewhere, meeting in the soft-lit halls of power, is willing to hand a few thousand baht to some poor peasant or out-of-work builder to lunge a bomb into a crowd on a bright Sunday afternoon.

And I know I am still the outsider to it all, the youthful foreigner who only half understands the signs and speeches in their original language.

But the notion of an outsider's perspective having any value at all seems to be at present roundly dismissed. Yes, the media perspective has been shoddy. But the PDRC has been accusing any journalist who asks hardball questions, or, for that matter, questions the wisdom of ousting a democratically elected government, as being a Yingluck supporter. Keep in mind these are the same people who tried to commandeer the media and force them to only broadcast the news from their perspective a month ago, and who lack any apparent sense of irony.

But the thing is, when outsiders are told they cannot understand an issue because of their nationality, rather than taking this a stern rebuke, they tend to be reminded of the rants of Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, of the apologists for workers' rights abuses in Dubai and Singapore, and if we're to be a bit melodramatic, of the darkest moments of 20th Century Europe.

As I walk to work, I'm haunted by two specters: that of the authoritarianism that threatens to strangle me, and that of the terrorism that threatens to bleed me out in the street.

And that authoritarianism and that terrorism are united in their opacity. I'm living in a city that seems to be blanketed in a heavy fog of disinformation and violence. In a bit of jargon that George Orwell would have been proud of, a military spokesman, when asked about the tanks being held in Bangkok, answered that "the matter will be further explained on a later date."

When will it be resolved? The government has set an election date-- knowing full well they can expect a victory-- for the 2nd of February, but maybe that will be delayed. The PDRC refuses to negotiate, demanding an people's council (read: junta), and the more extreme members of his camp are suggesting scare tactics like shutting down all air control in Thailand. I'm reminded of the little boy who refuses to share his toy, and when asked to, simply smashes it against the wall.

For now, all I see in the future is awfulness. Even in the scenario I want to happen-- a peaceable election-- we will in all likelihood, see high emotions and ineffectual governance. The reforms needed will be difficult to pass and even more difficult to  implement. Democracy can flourish in Thailand, but until then, I sleep in a war zone.

In Din Daeng

My friends live in other neighborhoods throughout the city. In Thong Lo ("Golden Forge"), with its glittering cocktail bars and valet-parked Porsches, in Aree ("Generosity") with its tiny cafes and elegant mid-century homes, its warm colors and banana trees. But here, in Din Daeng ("Red Earth"), the city expresses itself as a blank zone, colorless and without shape.

Not too long ago, I went to an exhibition of photos of ordinary street life in Bangkok, most of which was rather anodyne, the sort of thing you see in tourist guides... street vendors frying chicken, beaming classical dancers in golden dresses, monks with alms bowls, all of them counterpointed against something like a businesswoman on an iPhone to indicate the juxtaposition of traditional and modern. But also on display were the photos of Rong Wong-Savun, a sort of Thai Walker Evans, depicting my neighborhood as it once was.



In the early '60s, at the height of the first Bangkok construction boom, the National Housing Authority redeveloped the old dumping ground on the northern outskirts of the city in the Robert Moses mode. The NHA tore down the slums, and in their stead, five-story housing blocks, akin to the khrushchyovka apartments built in the USSR in the same period, rose up with modern angles and white walls.

Nowadays, Din Daeng is to Bangkok what Southwest DC or certain areas of South London are to their respective countries-- a cast-concrete backwater at the heart of the national capital. From the window of a taxi, the apartment blocks continue for what seem like miles, the doors of identical buildings illuminated by floodlights, lining street after street, interspersed with minor government ministries, the overpasses and brick walls sprayed with angry political slogans.

On a closer level, Din Daeng is the migrant workers that smoke cigarettes from tenement windows, it is discount mu katha restaurants with mournful upcountry songs playing over the grilling of meat, it is the exhaust clouds over Vibhavadi Rangsit Road, it is the harmlessly insane woman who dances to the music in her head all day in front of her family's shop at the bottom of my street.

Why then, do I choose to live there? A lot of foreigners who live in obscure Bangkok neighborhoods praise their authenticity and friendliness. And there's a truth in that. I have my coffee lady, my washerwoman, my satay man who always makes the same dumb joke about not hitting my head on the aluminum hood over his stall. But "authenticity" is a problematic concept at best. And while there are genial people for sure, there are also the meth gangs that sit around chain-smoking and practicing their tough sneers, and lately, the tear-gas clouds that covered the area after political violence on Mit Maitri ("Friendly Relations") Road.

We build up slow relationships to the spaces we occupy through our daily and repeated motions, whether they're relationships of love, or hate, or neither. My walk to the metro stop or the supermarket slowly fixes my relation to the city I live in, as the infinitesimal motion of coral polyps builds a reef.

I can, when protected by a thin layer of capital, move from place to place, and have done so any number of times, happily. Many others in this globalized era do so without that, with only an empty stomach and the hope of a job in Dubai or Los Angeles or Hong Kong. But it's hard to be truly adrift, to not have some link to place. And for this moment, I have found that link. I wake up, and the corner of the city that I see from my bedroom window is familiar to the point of intimacy.