We all have the books we've never read that lurk around our house. They sit on their shelves, ignored but for an occasional dusting, cursing us. But when so many readers use devices of one kind or another to mediate their reading, the books we've never read hide from us in unopened folders.
So I decided to take a look through the vault, and found a set of PDFs I'd downloaded nearly four years previous. I had a lot more free time back then, and was still quite dedicated to that big project of cultural studies, the "postmodern" dissection of human knowledge. And I wonder why, four years on, do so many of them remain unopened?
My first introduction to this project, so often known with a wonderful smugness simply as "theory," began a little less than a decade ago. I arrived at my little liberal arts campus, a gawky 17 year old with a boxful of my high school idols. Ferlinghetti. Kierkegaard. Camus. And god did they look fantastic on the bookshelf of my dorm room, next to the posters of R. Crumb comics, the Interpol LP sleeves, and the giant beneficent head of Jack Kerouac with that quote about the mad ones and the burn burn burning.
But these were adolescent heroes. At smoke-hazed house parties, in my English classes, I was suddenly surrounded by a whole new raft of predominantly French surnames. I knew that these writers, or at least a passing awareness of them, seemed to go hand-in-hand with any number of other things that I felt were worth my time: various psychedelia, whole bottles of red wine, noise rock, sex with arty girls.
And as a freshman, my attempts at theory-- much like my attempts with the psychedelia and the red wine and the noise rock and the arty girls-- were stabbing and met with mixed success.
But looking back, I don't think my embrace of theory was in any way insincere. The avenues of thought offered by European celebrity intellectuals suggested that whatever progress I thought I'd made was illusory, that I needed to revise my worldview. That struck me as a challenge, and off I went with a thick stack of reading material-- glossy new Verso editions, classic texts re-bound in plain, primary-colored card, LOC catalog numbers stamped on the spine in white ink. The opacity of French academic prose didn't faze me-- if anything, it emboldened me. This was not writing for weak minds, and I fully believed that it was only in the France at the height of the evènements de mai '68 that academics had the courage to fire such volleys at the system.
And, for some time, I swore by the power of theory to change lives. Each text I read seemed to swing a hammer at some bias, some invidious way in which the logic of late-capitalist society had penetrated my psyche. Reading became a giant Whac-a-Mole game, and I smashed away at orientalism, at phallocentrism, at the spatial fetish, at scientism.
But at some point, I began to read less and less theory. Slowly, I started checking out fewer and fewer library books by Gilles Deleuze and Herbert Marcuse, and instead opted for William James and Primo Levi. It happened so imperceptibly slowly that, looking back, I have to wonder why it happened.
The story of the postmodernist apostate returning to the humanist fold has, in the past decade or so, become something of an intellectual cliche. Any number of center-left magazines abound with the narratives of onetime theory fanatics recanting their heresies. These stories have a few common themes: a citation of some of the sillier claims made by big-name theorists (Jacques Lacan being a particularly egregious offender), a misty-eyed recollection of a foolish and idealistic youth, and a return to soberer thought-- typically the world of cognitive science and its unfalsifiable handmaiden, evolutionary psychology.
But that seems like bullshit too. Because a lot of theory does have value. As Terry Eagleton pointed out, we-- society as a whole, and especially those of us who like to think about things and write about what we think about things-- cannot return to a pre-theory age of innocence. The conversation has changed.
I still read theory from time to time. And not only because a lot of it is dense and interesting in the same way good poetry is-- Jean Améry, Theodor Adorno, and Roland Barthes were perhaps better stylists than philosophers-- but because a good metaphor can provoke us out of an intellectual slumber. In earlier eras, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein refused to systematize their philosophies, and no one doubts their importance and influence.
But the problem lies in the fact that it is just a set of provocative metaphors. The more I read, the emptier I felt. When you boil the world down to nothing but contradiction and a truth that might not even be intersubjective, you're left with a sickly feeling of inability.
Which of course allows for neoliberal capitalism, in all its ruthless, mechanical efficiency, to completely logroll any attempt at liberation. After I graduated from college, I spent the wet Seattle winter of 2008-09 in a rat's-nest apartment, with unemployment spiraling upwards, with working class black and Latino homeowners waking up to find the properties they'd invested their life savings in valueless. Somehow, all of the metaphor systems that suggested the predominance of the virtual, the evil of late capitalism lying essentially in its dullness, and the suggestion that the welfare state is in many ways as evil as the 19th Century liberal-capitalist state due to its totalizing quality-- ideas I can pin to Baudrillard, Debord, and Marcuse, respectively-- turned to dust when I was faced with a dwindling bank account, an empty e-mail inbox, and the marginal, insecure position I held in the much-vaunted "creative economy" when I finally found employment. All that was solid had, as Marx had put it, melted into air.
Yet whole swaths of the left still seemed entrapped in the mode of Baudrillard and Debord and Marcuse and their disciples, most of them operating under the baleful influences of orthodox Freudianism or the dark seductions of late-period Nietzsche.
A perfunctory look at any number of anarchist and left-wing blogs or the cultural studies shelf at an academically inclined bookshop or any of the manifestos issued by the erstwhile leaders of the Occupy movement-- oh how my hopes were dashed there-- will reveal a certain writing style. This cant is characterized by delirious cold opens, a sense of deathly ennui, and a poetic airiness without admitting its essentially literary character. It's been imitated enough to be commonly parodied, it doesn't sound nearly as good in English as in French, and it's something I self-consciously try to steer away from when I edit my own writing. And I hope to the god I've never believed in that anyone who reads what I write doesn't class me with those assholes.
Then what comes post-postmodernism? Being the sort of person who loses sleep over things like the correspondence theory of truth, I sort of flail about. I pick up book after book, whether it's science or philosophy or sociology or whatever. I read them with the same enthusiasm and for the same reasons my countrymen devour books by simpering self-help gurus.
So all I can say, without answers or solutions, is that I will continue to sit under my pile of books, no matter how futile it might be. Read and read and read, and do your best to ignore the abyss that keeps threatening to swallow you.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Monday, September 9, 2013
Saturday, Late Afternoon, Middle Sukhumvit
It's late afternoon on a strip of Middle Sukhumvit. I'm out for a day
of shopping-- looking through discount paperbacks at a used bookshop and
glossy coffee table books I can't afford at Kinokuniya, idling over a
cup of tea, ogling the expensive liquor selection at Villa.
The solitary walker in Bangkok will occasionally encounter sections of utter loveliness-- there are the rotting old canalside neighborhoods near near the river, the procession of white bridges with spilling bougainvilleas over the Khlong Prem Prachakon, the broad, tree-lined plaisances of Ratchadamnoen Nok and Phaya Thai, the old hyper-specific neighborhoods-- districts of luthiers and tanners, flower markets and Afghan jewellers, that dot the more antique sections of the city.
But there are also countless neighborhoods that make your skin crawl. A neighborhood like that around the Phrom Phong metro stop seems fine in the evening-- the shop windows are brightly lit, the bars and restaurants are just starting to fill up, and you might be a bit drunk yourself, you might be on your way to meet friends, you might have a date.
It's in late afternoon, during the smoggy, saffron-colored stage an hour or two before sunset, that it is at both its most horrifying and its most pathetic. The sois are exhaust-choked canyons lined with '60s shophouses, some of them left to rot, carrying the scars of typhoons, car crashes, smashed windows. Others bear garish renovations-- there is nothing more uniquely atrocious and tasteless than plaster Corinthian columns framing blue tinted-glass windows. Tourist restaurants-- the sign says THAIFOOD WESTERN FOOD VERY CHEAP-- serve up watery curries and thin, limp cheeseburgers with wilted lettuce. And above all else, there is the omnipresence of the sexualized industries-- whether as direct as strip clubs, or as indirect as sports bars with waitresses in skin-tight dresses advertising Beer Chang. And for the clannish Japanese businessmen that make their homes in this neighborhood, cracked signs indicate karaoke bars where Thai girls in bunny ears and schoolgirl outfits get felt up by Johnny Walker-soaked keiretsu functionaries.
The architecture and the commerce of the area are mirrored by the denizens. A sickly red wet-season twilight sets in. Stringy backpackers with serious suntans and filthy t-shirts cross the intersection in swift-moving twos and threes. A small group of heavily made-up young women in lacy white dresses have just finished doing a promotion for a brand of skin cream and they sit down, exhausted from having spent the day standing and smiling in four-inch heels. Toadlike white men, sweating through their shirts and their buzz cuts, mill about, led on invisible leashes by squat, flat-nosed Northeastern Thai wives with rusted complexions and knockoff Gucci bags. The beggars go out of their way to degrade themselves for extra pity. Aiming squarely for the tourist market, the legless drag themselves on their bellies across the rough pavement, and the armless wave their stumps like flags at a parade.
I often tell my friends in more northerly climes that the character of Thailand is rather Mediterranean-- Vespas and great food, coups and messily parked cars, ancient civilizations and primary colors, guitarists and prizefighters. But in the humid, sighing, late afternoon around here, Bangkok reminds me more of Weimar-era Berlin-- likewise a decadent society in perennial economic and political chaos, a furious nightlife catering to those rich enough to be insulated from this chaos, its streets filled with disfigured panhandlers and cackling streetwalkers.
And for this very reason, I've felt powerfully drawn, lately, to the expressionists and their fellow travelers.
The leering faces make up the carnival masks of James Ensor.
Half the amphetamine-riddled faces I see on the street could be in Egon Schiele paintings.
And the slum children, the old ladies, the hunchbacks, inhabit the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz.
It should be said that this sense of decadence and decrepitude is by no means unique to Bangkok-- plenty of places from Rome to New Orleans to Prague to Shanghai to Buenos Aires have similar reputations. But I've rarely been any place that has the same sense of innate rot, a flagging ferroconcrete sigh of a place sinking into the salt marshes.
I sometimes find the proximity of horror in Bangkok to have a certain comforting quality-- stare the devil in the face every day and blow him a raspberry. I can claim that I'm living comfortably in a contradiction, willing to confront the miseries that define the lives of vast numbers of working people haunted by the specter of capitalism, living without first-world blinders. I can maintain my world-weary edge, and posit myself as not one of those foreigners in Thailand, the mindless horde who refuse to face themselves or their place in the world. And while there is at least a grain of truth in these stances, they are also postures of self-deception. I construct a narrative for myself in an attempt to justify my own uncertainties, insecurities, and instabilities.
All of which leads me to something of a dead end. Now, I'm sitting here in front of a coffee, feeling glum. The sun has finally fallen behind the rain clouds, leaving only a smudge of light on the far horizon.
This neighborhood at night seems jet-black at times. Certain roads are lined with brightly lit white towers, while others project a rather jankety but homey street carnival mood with their food stalls and machinists' shops. But this stretch of Sukhumvit right now is only empty restaurants and dirty signage, the steely glare of emptied office buildings and an architecture that, after sunset, absorbs the blackness of night into its steel and masonry armature.
But some stories, I'm afraid, have no resolution in real life. No matter what stories I try to weave about where I am and where I am going and why I am here, I'm left with more questions than answers. The city yields nothing. No theme, no plot, and no real sense of character, but the streetlights do line up to form an ellipsis in the soft rain.
The solitary walker in Bangkok will occasionally encounter sections of utter loveliness-- there are the rotting old canalside neighborhoods near near the river, the procession of white bridges with spilling bougainvilleas over the Khlong Prem Prachakon, the broad, tree-lined plaisances of Ratchadamnoen Nok and Phaya Thai, the old hyper-specific neighborhoods-- districts of luthiers and tanners, flower markets and Afghan jewellers, that dot the more antique sections of the city.
But there are also countless neighborhoods that make your skin crawl. A neighborhood like that around the Phrom Phong metro stop seems fine in the evening-- the shop windows are brightly lit, the bars and restaurants are just starting to fill up, and you might be a bit drunk yourself, you might be on your way to meet friends, you might have a date.
It's in late afternoon, during the smoggy, saffron-colored stage an hour or two before sunset, that it is at both its most horrifying and its most pathetic. The sois are exhaust-choked canyons lined with '60s shophouses, some of them left to rot, carrying the scars of typhoons, car crashes, smashed windows. Others bear garish renovations-- there is nothing more uniquely atrocious and tasteless than plaster Corinthian columns framing blue tinted-glass windows. Tourist restaurants-- the sign says THAIFOOD WESTERN FOOD VERY CHEAP-- serve up watery curries and thin, limp cheeseburgers with wilted lettuce. And above all else, there is the omnipresence of the sexualized industries-- whether as direct as strip clubs, or as indirect as sports bars with waitresses in skin-tight dresses advertising Beer Chang. And for the clannish Japanese businessmen that make their homes in this neighborhood, cracked signs indicate karaoke bars where Thai girls in bunny ears and schoolgirl outfits get felt up by Johnny Walker-soaked keiretsu functionaries.
The architecture and the commerce of the area are mirrored by the denizens. A sickly red wet-season twilight sets in. Stringy backpackers with serious suntans and filthy t-shirts cross the intersection in swift-moving twos and threes. A small group of heavily made-up young women in lacy white dresses have just finished doing a promotion for a brand of skin cream and they sit down, exhausted from having spent the day standing and smiling in four-inch heels. Toadlike white men, sweating through their shirts and their buzz cuts, mill about, led on invisible leashes by squat, flat-nosed Northeastern Thai wives with rusted complexions and knockoff Gucci bags. The beggars go out of their way to degrade themselves for extra pity. Aiming squarely for the tourist market, the legless drag themselves on their bellies across the rough pavement, and the armless wave their stumps like flags at a parade.
I often tell my friends in more northerly climes that the character of Thailand is rather Mediterranean-- Vespas and great food, coups and messily parked cars, ancient civilizations and primary colors, guitarists and prizefighters. But in the humid, sighing, late afternoon around here, Bangkok reminds me more of Weimar-era Berlin-- likewise a decadent society in perennial economic and political chaos, a furious nightlife catering to those rich enough to be insulated from this chaos, its streets filled with disfigured panhandlers and cackling streetwalkers.
And for this very reason, I've felt powerfully drawn, lately, to the expressionists and their fellow travelers.
The leering faces make up the carnival masks of James Ensor.
Half the amphetamine-riddled faces I see on the street could be in Egon Schiele paintings.
And the slum children, the old ladies, the hunchbacks, inhabit the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz.
It should be said that this sense of decadence and decrepitude is by no means unique to Bangkok-- plenty of places from Rome to New Orleans to Prague to Shanghai to Buenos Aires have similar reputations. But I've rarely been any place that has the same sense of innate rot, a flagging ferroconcrete sigh of a place sinking into the salt marshes.
I sometimes find the proximity of horror in Bangkok to have a certain comforting quality-- stare the devil in the face every day and blow him a raspberry. I can claim that I'm living comfortably in a contradiction, willing to confront the miseries that define the lives of vast numbers of working people haunted by the specter of capitalism, living without first-world blinders. I can maintain my world-weary edge, and posit myself as not one of those foreigners in Thailand, the mindless horde who refuse to face themselves or their place in the world. And while there is at least a grain of truth in these stances, they are also postures of self-deception. I construct a narrative for myself in an attempt to justify my own uncertainties, insecurities, and instabilities.
All of which leads me to something of a dead end. Now, I'm sitting here in front of a coffee, feeling glum. The sun has finally fallen behind the rain clouds, leaving only a smudge of light on the far horizon.
This neighborhood at night seems jet-black at times. Certain roads are lined with brightly lit white towers, while others project a rather jankety but homey street carnival mood with their food stalls and machinists' shops. But this stretch of Sukhumvit right now is only empty restaurants and dirty signage, the steely glare of emptied office buildings and an architecture that, after sunset, absorbs the blackness of night into its steel and masonry armature.
But some stories, I'm afraid, have no resolution in real life. No matter what stories I try to weave about where I am and where I am going and why I am here, I'm left with more questions than answers. The city yields nothing. No theme, no plot, and no real sense of character, but the streetlights do line up to form an ellipsis in the soft rain.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Night Out
I spend the week in solitude, and after work, I come home to my little apartment, to eat dinner alone in front of my computer screen, to read a book on my balcony, my place marked with a Burmese 50 kyat note, to scan the city at sunset, the wispy clouds that hang over the western horizon and the first glow of the parade of skyscrapers that marches from Ratchayothin to Siam Square.
So on a Friday, I wound up at a Thong Lo nightclub, located like everything in certain trendy sections of Southeast Bangkok, in something not terribly unlike a strip mall, a planning aesthetic borrowed from the sun-kissed suburbs of Los Angeles, with the same glass-box sushi bars and gelaterias, the same boutiques with pictures of the same Slavic models, the same palm trees waving in light breeze on the median strips and along the margins of the parking lot, and it's the sort of club where the DJ is some hot hi-so girl with dyed auburn hair but who isn't bad, and we have our little circular table like everyone else and like everyone else it has its ice bucket and its central bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label or Finlandia, and we stand at our table and dance and drink whole fields of distilled grain, it's far, far better than most other options, the women I'm dancing with aren't sex workers, I'll leave that to the faded nightclubs in hotel basements and grim industrial suburbs, frequented by the older expats, the lurkers, the sex addicts who have the tucked-in polo shirts and the glasses and the bad haircuts of Nebraskan engineers, the young tourists with their backpacks back at the hostel, the Arab and Indian men that you see in uncomfortable looking quartets around the Nana metro stop, the technical school kids who shoot at each other on grim concrete back alleyways.
Instead we dance with wasp-waisted girls who wrap themselves in flowing fabric, faces made ever more sylphlike by assaultive batteries of whitening cream, exotic skin treatments, and plastic surgeries, floating on the dancefloor wreathed in mentholated cigarette smoke, their car keys dusted with stepped-on Asian coke, they take a sip of their vodka tonic and chase it with a neat yellow pill of one kind or another, which is of course the habit of rich kids from a not so rich country, most of them 3rd or 4th generation Thai-Chinese whose surnames are freight trains of auspicious nouns strung together, children of a somebody in a silk tie who owns the largest aluminum extrusion factory in Southeast Asia, employing a few hundred people who left their rice fields in Nakhon Sawan or Chaiyaphum and whose labor funded the European childhood and the airport codes-- LAX, CDG-- that dangle from the suitcases of the same girls whose closed eyes are now blinking open, two generations after their snaggletoothed grandfathers sailed out of Hainan and Amoy on angular junks towards the port of Bangkok in a day when the turbid brown river that bisects the city was cluttered with a thousand boats of bamboo and wood and the city was shielded from the sea by impossibly thick mangroves.
And at the end of the night, I'm probably not going to sleep with anyone, and I step out into a side street, under a starless sky, lined with walls of dense green foliage, punctuated by hibiscus in full bloom, I flag down a taxi, and try to keep my eyes open as I try to give my driver directions to my obscure little street, my headphones in, volume turned up, drowned in distortion, but we're going along some viaduct over Phetchaburi or Rama IV, where I can see the glitter of countless red beacons flickering atop buildings and the endless giant glowing signs for Toyota and Deutsche Bank and Samsung, until we get off on my street and I tell the driver to stop outside my building, next to the smashed glass left over from the shirtless and tattooed younger guys who spent the evening drinking on the side of the street, but they're gone now, and the security guard to my building is nowhere to be found, I walk across the empty parking lot to the cold, fluorescent-lit elevator lobby and go up eight floors, a CCTV camera staring at me unblinking, and I wonder who is watching me, if anyone, and what they're thinking, if they're thinking, if they give a shit.
I step into my apartment. I drink a glass of water in the kitchen. I probably ate a bag of chips in the taxi, and brush the crumbs off my shirt. The air conditioner hums. When I brush my teeth, I look into the mirror, deep into my irises. I lie my head down on my single pillow and wait for sleep to come.
So on a Friday, I wound up at a Thong Lo nightclub, located like everything in certain trendy sections of Southeast Bangkok, in something not terribly unlike a strip mall, a planning aesthetic borrowed from the sun-kissed suburbs of Los Angeles, with the same glass-box sushi bars and gelaterias, the same boutiques with pictures of the same Slavic models, the same palm trees waving in light breeze on the median strips and along the margins of the parking lot, and it's the sort of club where the DJ is some hot hi-so girl with dyed auburn hair but who isn't bad, and we have our little circular table like everyone else and like everyone else it has its ice bucket and its central bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label or Finlandia, and we stand at our table and dance and drink whole fields of distilled grain, it's far, far better than most other options, the women I'm dancing with aren't sex workers, I'll leave that to the faded nightclubs in hotel basements and grim industrial suburbs, frequented by the older expats, the lurkers, the sex addicts who have the tucked-in polo shirts and the glasses and the bad haircuts of Nebraskan engineers, the young tourists with their backpacks back at the hostel, the Arab and Indian men that you see in uncomfortable looking quartets around the Nana metro stop, the technical school kids who shoot at each other on grim concrete back alleyways.
Instead we dance with wasp-waisted girls who wrap themselves in flowing fabric, faces made ever more sylphlike by assaultive batteries of whitening cream, exotic skin treatments, and plastic surgeries, floating on the dancefloor wreathed in mentholated cigarette smoke, their car keys dusted with stepped-on Asian coke, they take a sip of their vodka tonic and chase it with a neat yellow pill of one kind or another, which is of course the habit of rich kids from a not so rich country, most of them 3rd or 4th generation Thai-Chinese whose surnames are freight trains of auspicious nouns strung together, children of a somebody in a silk tie who owns the largest aluminum extrusion factory in Southeast Asia, employing a few hundred people who left their rice fields in Nakhon Sawan or Chaiyaphum and whose labor funded the European childhood and the airport codes-- LAX, CDG-- that dangle from the suitcases of the same girls whose closed eyes are now blinking open, two generations after their snaggletoothed grandfathers sailed out of Hainan and Amoy on angular junks towards the port of Bangkok in a day when the turbid brown river that bisects the city was cluttered with a thousand boats of bamboo and wood and the city was shielded from the sea by impossibly thick mangroves.
And at the end of the night, I'm probably not going to sleep with anyone, and I step out into a side street, under a starless sky, lined with walls of dense green foliage, punctuated by hibiscus in full bloom, I flag down a taxi, and try to keep my eyes open as I try to give my driver directions to my obscure little street, my headphones in, volume turned up, drowned in distortion, but we're going along some viaduct over Phetchaburi or Rama IV, where I can see the glitter of countless red beacons flickering atop buildings and the endless giant glowing signs for Toyota and Deutsche Bank and Samsung, until we get off on my street and I tell the driver to stop outside my building, next to the smashed glass left over from the shirtless and tattooed younger guys who spent the evening drinking on the side of the street, but they're gone now, and the security guard to my building is nowhere to be found, I walk across the empty parking lot to the cold, fluorescent-lit elevator lobby and go up eight floors, a CCTV camera staring at me unblinking, and I wonder who is watching me, if anyone, and what they're thinking, if they're thinking, if they give a shit.
I step into my apartment. I drink a glass of water in the kitchen. I probably ate a bag of chips in the taxi, and brush the crumbs off my shirt. The air conditioner hums. When I brush my teeth, I look into the mirror, deep into my irises. I lie my head down on my single pillow and wait for sleep to come.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
On Windows
It's 10:30 AM on a Sunday, and I look out from the window of my 8th floor apartment-- an elderly woman in a housecoat tends to the birds-of-paradise in her garden, a procession of Filipinos and Vietnamese approach the Catholic church, a sex worker, still wearing the lacy dress she wore last night, steps out of a rust-streaked concrete love motel and hails a taxi home.
But my eyes are always drawn away from what's going on, upward, toward the skyline, toward the hazy sunsets. And before that, to the other apartment towers that line the narrow side streets of this neighborhood in Central Bangkok.
It's one of those less spoken joys of city life, to look out at everyone else going about their daily lives, one household atop the other. An old man is sleeping below a woman tapping at a computer keyboard next to a young, shirtless guy frying rice for dinner above a Russian drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette on his balcony. You never see people having sex-- they've lived long enough in this high rise panopticon to practice a measure of discretion.
It's an odd sort of entertainment, looking in on the lives of others. That being said, I would dare anyone to say that when walking around a quiet and unfamiliar residential neighborhood at night, that their eyes aren't drawn towards the brightly lit windows. We are attracted to the hidden dramas unfolding in immaculate, white-carpeted living rooms and parquet-floor kitchens, We all have this desire to pry in, to see the sins and transgressions that supposedly lurk behind every suburban curtain.
However, it's also hard not to say that this practice doesn't indicate some measure of alienation. There is the wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, spying on his neighbors to alleviate the boredom and loneliness and isolation brought on by his own disability. And there is Holden Caulfield in his decrepit Manhattan hotel room, alone, adrift, and vaguely suicidal as he stares out at crossdressers and alcoholics.
But I'm not drawn, especially, to the crimes and vices that go on in the apartments of my city, nor the judgment of other people's lives and lifestyles, and voyeurism leaves me cold. Rather, I'm enthralled by the plainness of everyone's life, what they eat, how they wash their dishes, the way they sit when they watch TV. Because people's lives are far less ordinary then we would like to think. Safe within our own homes, we shed our polished demeanors, we talk to ourselves, inanely tap our legs, twiddle our thumbs.
When we're alone in our own realms, we stop looking like presentable humans, and start looking like the grotesque self-portraits of Egon Schiele, almost deliberately disheveled.
Which of course means that I must be doing the same thing, looking just as roughly drawn in my own apartment.
And I'm forced to confront my own aloneness, in a tumbledown state, in my boxers and a t-shirt, some music coming from my computer speakers, a book lying open-faced on my bed, scanning the cityscape for any sign of life. Yet I don't think I'm trying to fill any kind of inner void.
Rather, it's like going to a the movies. My eyes are focused on the flickering images in front of me-- the golden, star-like glow of an elevator going up, a child running down a hallway, the Burmese maid shutting off fluorescent ceiling lights as she vacuums the floors of an empty office, silhouetted passengers waiting for a train at a distant metro stop. And like a good movie, it entrances, but it forces me to examine my place in the world. I may be by myself, but I'm at the center of a vast whirl, and it's as if I'm standing at the center of a freeway in late afternoon sun, traffic rushing by in both directions.
But my eyes are always drawn away from what's going on, upward, toward the skyline, toward the hazy sunsets. And before that, to the other apartment towers that line the narrow side streets of this neighborhood in Central Bangkok.
It's one of those less spoken joys of city life, to look out at everyone else going about their daily lives, one household atop the other. An old man is sleeping below a woman tapping at a computer keyboard next to a young, shirtless guy frying rice for dinner above a Russian drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette on his balcony. You never see people having sex-- they've lived long enough in this high rise panopticon to practice a measure of discretion.
It's an odd sort of entertainment, looking in on the lives of others. That being said, I would dare anyone to say that when walking around a quiet and unfamiliar residential neighborhood at night, that their eyes aren't drawn towards the brightly lit windows. We are attracted to the hidden dramas unfolding in immaculate, white-carpeted living rooms and parquet-floor kitchens, We all have this desire to pry in, to see the sins and transgressions that supposedly lurk behind every suburban curtain.
However, it's also hard not to say that this practice doesn't indicate some measure of alienation. There is the wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, spying on his neighbors to alleviate the boredom and loneliness and isolation brought on by his own disability. And there is Holden Caulfield in his decrepit Manhattan hotel room, alone, adrift, and vaguely suicidal as he stares out at crossdressers and alcoholics.
But I'm not drawn, especially, to the crimes and vices that go on in the apartments of my city, nor the judgment of other people's lives and lifestyles, and voyeurism leaves me cold. Rather, I'm enthralled by the plainness of everyone's life, what they eat, how they wash their dishes, the way they sit when they watch TV. Because people's lives are far less ordinary then we would like to think. Safe within our own homes, we shed our polished demeanors, we talk to ourselves, inanely tap our legs, twiddle our thumbs.
When we're alone in our own realms, we stop looking like presentable humans, and start looking like the grotesque self-portraits of Egon Schiele, almost deliberately disheveled.
Which of course means that I must be doing the same thing, looking just as roughly drawn in my own apartment.
And I'm forced to confront my own aloneness, in a tumbledown state, in my boxers and a t-shirt, some music coming from my computer speakers, a book lying open-faced on my bed, scanning the cityscape for any sign of life. Yet I don't think I'm trying to fill any kind of inner void.
Rather, it's like going to a the movies. My eyes are focused on the flickering images in front of me-- the golden, star-like glow of an elevator going up, a child running down a hallway, the Burmese maid shutting off fluorescent ceiling lights as she vacuums the floors of an empty office, silhouetted passengers waiting for a train at a distant metro stop. And like a good movie, it entrances, but it forces me to examine my place in the world. I may be by myself, but I'm at the center of a vast whirl, and it's as if I'm standing at the center of a freeway in late afternoon sun, traffic rushing by in both directions.
Monday, June 10, 2013
The Americans
I recently said a goodbye to my friends outside a little bar on Thanon Rangnam in North Central Bangkok. I'd seen them off before, on 2nd Avenue in Seattle, before they moved to Southeast Asia, on a rain-wet late winter afternoon some two years previous.
They were going back to America, a country that is undoubtedly my own, but when I see it on television, looks foreign-- not unfamiliar, simply foreign, the same way an American might perceive England or Australia, with strong linguistic and cultural ties, but unquestionably different.
But occasionally I see glimpses of America in Thailand, and it's not as if I'm seeing a foreign country, but seeing my own country immediately revealed. A bleak strip of Charan Sanit Wong near the Sirindhorn intersection-- all gritty diagonal boulevards, forlorn shop fronts, smokestacks and steeples perceived through a tangle of electrical wire-- could almost be Chicago. The dusty side streets and vacant lots and concrete plants of Bang Khen are something similar enough to Des Moines. A beloved coffee shop on a rainy afternoon near Siam Square is a miniature Seattle. And a martini bar on Thong Lo with throbbing music and women with 30,000 baht tits is Los Angeles.
My daily life obeys the rhythms of Bangkok, and my language coalesces into a non-specific English, generically North American in accent, imparted with the slang of Newcastle and Cape Town.
Which, perhaps, is why I've become so enamored of Robert Frank's photo series The Americans. It's not that they represent an America I know or remember. On the contrary, I love them because they convey an idea of America. Were I to look at the sorts of places I actually remember-- forlorn gas stations late at night, dark Seattle bars, frozen rivers-- I might feel something. But when I look at Frank's photos, they're pointing more towards a meta-image of America that pierces through my memories of the real America and lets in the dreams and strange forms that lay underneath.
Since they were taken 30 years before I was born, I automatically view them as relics, as documentary evidence of an era before mine. And it was an era that we think of, nowadays, as something of an age of innocence, a picket-fence suburban postwar fantasy that existed far more in the public imagination than in material reality. No Malcolm X or Jim Morrison, minimal levels of postmodernism. The primary terror came from a far-off and peculiarly imagined USSR.
But Frank's subjects aren't this dull fantasy that has since been shoved down Americans' throats-- by what we retroactively and moronically refer to as "golden age" television, by the American Enterprise Institute and other vipers' dens of paranoid reactionaries-- but what lurks around the margins. We have nudists and drugstore cowboys, a hormonally charged teenage couple getting a Reno marriage.
Or a young girl with a candy cigarette adopting the studied pose of her mother.
Or a hallucinatory shot of the reflection of a cinema marquee in a car window.
Of course, lots of other Europeans have tried to present an outsider's view of the United States. There was Tocqueville in the early years of the 19th Century, there was Dickens writing his American Notes, and so on. And since then, there have been any number of writers who claimed that America could only be viewed by a foreigner-- among them, giggling sociological onanist Jean Baudrillard and impeccably dressed imperial apologist Bernard-Henri Lévy, both of whom wrote almost cartoonishly hyper-Français prose about their superficial tours of the Lower 48 as Francophone star academics, ensconced in various ivory towers and accompanied by legations of fawning Yanks.
But whereas so many travelers-- photographers, travel writers, and just plain visitors-- adopt the tourist's gaze, what I admire about Frank is that he doesn't. He grants everyone he photographs their own subjectivity, rather than trying to impose some master narrative onto their actions. Like all artists, he has motifs that he returns to again and again-- racial tension, odd placements of the American flag-- but ultimately it is vérité. Frank's camera, off-kilter, shooting at odd angles, slices America open.
And I think that's the America I remember, staring out taxi windows on long, equatorial afternoons, the America I still re-visit in my dreams. There is no cohesive structure. I'm assailed with a jumble of memories, images of memories, meta-memories that shift about in kaleidoscopic patterns.
Thoughts overlay themselves onto daily life like superimposed frames in a silent film. I look at the photo, and look up, at the gritty street outside: rush hour on Din Daeng Road, a boarded-up brothel, fried chicken stands, dessicated palm trees backlit against a fiery sunset. It's all here, memory on top of memory: Thailand in front of my face, the America I remember, the mythic America in the photograph, the general myth of America, anything, everything. I see it all, a sudden unity of the signs for a moment, before returning to whatever ordinary thing I was doing before.
They were going back to America, a country that is undoubtedly my own, but when I see it on television, looks foreign-- not unfamiliar, simply foreign, the same way an American might perceive England or Australia, with strong linguistic and cultural ties, but unquestionably different.
But occasionally I see glimpses of America in Thailand, and it's not as if I'm seeing a foreign country, but seeing my own country immediately revealed. A bleak strip of Charan Sanit Wong near the Sirindhorn intersection-- all gritty diagonal boulevards, forlorn shop fronts, smokestacks and steeples perceived through a tangle of electrical wire-- could almost be Chicago. The dusty side streets and vacant lots and concrete plants of Bang Khen are something similar enough to Des Moines. A beloved coffee shop on a rainy afternoon near Siam Square is a miniature Seattle. And a martini bar on Thong Lo with throbbing music and women with 30,000 baht tits is Los Angeles.
My daily life obeys the rhythms of Bangkok, and my language coalesces into a non-specific English, generically North American in accent, imparted with the slang of Newcastle and Cape Town.
Which, perhaps, is why I've become so enamored of Robert Frank's photo series The Americans. It's not that they represent an America I know or remember. On the contrary, I love them because they convey an idea of America. Were I to look at the sorts of places I actually remember-- forlorn gas stations late at night, dark Seattle bars, frozen rivers-- I might feel something. But when I look at Frank's photos, they're pointing more towards a meta-image of America that pierces through my memories of the real America and lets in the dreams and strange forms that lay underneath.
Since they were taken 30 years before I was born, I automatically view them as relics, as documentary evidence of an era before mine. And it was an era that we think of, nowadays, as something of an age of innocence, a picket-fence suburban postwar fantasy that existed far more in the public imagination than in material reality. No Malcolm X or Jim Morrison, minimal levels of postmodernism. The primary terror came from a far-off and peculiarly imagined USSR.
But Frank's subjects aren't this dull fantasy that has since been shoved down Americans' throats-- by what we retroactively and moronically refer to as "golden age" television, by the American Enterprise Institute and other vipers' dens of paranoid reactionaries-- but what lurks around the margins. We have nudists and drugstore cowboys, a hormonally charged teenage couple getting a Reno marriage.
Or a young girl with a candy cigarette adopting the studied pose of her mother.
Or a hallucinatory shot of the reflection of a cinema marquee in a car window.
Of course, lots of other Europeans have tried to present an outsider's view of the United States. There was Tocqueville in the early years of the 19th Century, there was Dickens writing his American Notes, and so on. And since then, there have been any number of writers who claimed that America could only be viewed by a foreigner-- among them, giggling sociological onanist Jean Baudrillard and impeccably dressed imperial apologist Bernard-Henri Lévy, both of whom wrote almost cartoonishly hyper-Français prose about their superficial tours of the Lower 48 as Francophone star academics, ensconced in various ivory towers and accompanied by legations of fawning Yanks.
But whereas so many travelers-- photographers, travel writers, and just plain visitors-- adopt the tourist's gaze, what I admire about Frank is that he doesn't. He grants everyone he photographs their own subjectivity, rather than trying to impose some master narrative onto their actions. Like all artists, he has motifs that he returns to again and again-- racial tension, odd placements of the American flag-- but ultimately it is vérité. Frank's camera, off-kilter, shooting at odd angles, slices America open.
And I think that's the America I remember, staring out taxi windows on long, equatorial afternoons, the America I still re-visit in my dreams. There is no cohesive structure. I'm assailed with a jumble of memories, images of memories, meta-memories that shift about in kaleidoscopic patterns.
Thoughts overlay themselves onto daily life like superimposed frames in a silent film. I look at the photo, and look up, at the gritty street outside: rush hour on Din Daeng Road, a boarded-up brothel, fried chicken stands, dessicated palm trees backlit against a fiery sunset. It's all here, memory on top of memory: Thailand in front of my face, the America I remember, the mythic America in the photograph, the general myth of America, anything, everything. I see it all, a sudden unity of the signs for a moment, before returning to whatever ordinary thing I was doing before.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Tea That Strikes the Dust, Part 2
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.
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.
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.
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