Eiffel Tower, December '07

Paris, December '07

When I finally left the southern hemisphere, it was to travel to China. The first two days in Beijing affected me so much I spent the third sheltering in the hotel room, anxious to avoid the madness that proliferated outside. What caused me to shelter—this considered, of course, in retrospect—was the sheer incomprehensibility of the city. Beijing and its residents operate based on a logic that has its roots in a system that is as different from mine as one is from zero. Thus, when I tried to rationalise the city, I failed. Nearly all aspects—the shops, the people, the transportation, the footpaths, the rituals, et cetera—did not make sense, and as a result, with Beijing beating down on my chest, I suffocated in the congestion of the streets, the weight of the feeling forcing a sharp intake of breath. After a full day in the room I decided to give up trying to understand the city and instead let it all roll over me like a zephyr. That moment—the moment I decided to give up—was a revelation. The city and its madness could now be viewed in the abstract, viewed with no shadow from above. No longer did I have to try and reduce it all to the limited scope of my own understanding. That revelation remained with me, thankfully, for the rest of the trip through Asia and it remains with me still. This is lucky as there are many other places and experiences on this blue planet—the United States included—that are as unforgiving to the psyche as Beijing was on those first few days.

Nonetheless, it is impossible, I think, to completely abandon the need to make sense of things. Returning to China, the only way I managed to glean any kind of ‘sense’ was to approach the country against the relief of India. China and India are the pair of upturned matching in a game of Memory. No other countries can be aptly compared and, continuing the metaphor, once the two are matched they are removed from the table. Both are colossi, both defy average measurements. Both defy, relentlessly. In this manner China—a mystery by itself—could be understood against India. India, for example, would likely resemble China if it, too, was the subject of a one-hundred-odd-year repressive regime. Both countries top a billion people, together they occupy a quarter the land on this earth, both are controlled—a flag atop a mountain—by governments in Beijing and Delhi, respectively.

It is from this angle that we get to Paris. As with China and India, Paris and New York are an upturned pair. It could be argued that London would form a triumvirate, but I haven’t been there so cannot say. Paris, perhaps, is an older brother to New York, a much older brother who is steeped in the restriction of adulthood and must be taken seriously. New York can act up, can be mischievous and daring. Paris, on the other hand, has reputation and responsibility. It is a bastion of art and culture, a centre of revolution, great battles, monuments, cathedrals, towers, and history. New York is an adolescent. It is intemperate and volatile, prone to violent change and dynamic because of it. Paris is dynamic, sure, but its dynamism comes after its maturity. Paris decided to become dynamic. New York cannot help but be. And therein, surely, lies the difference between the two. Paris has history New York cannot fathom. New York is both scorned and envied by Paris for its youth.

There is not so much different between the cities, however. I suppose that when any two entities share many of the same features, the possibility of divergence lessens. Wherever there is a polis there is politics, and whenever there is politics there are monuments to politicians. Whenever there is a surge in population, there is a concurrent surge in diversity. As diversity increases, people forge identity against the identity of others. Consequently, districts, neighbourhoods, blocks and streets take on personae. The surge in population leads people to demand the many trappings of city life; parks are built for recreation, great edifices for utility. Discarded buildings become historical sites and are eventually usurped by more historical sites and the combined effect of it all is that layer upon layer upon layer of humanity is shovelled onto the city, inching higher and higher and becoming more and more refined, and as the pile turns into a mesa turns into a hill turns into a mountain, like the survival of the fittest, the possibility for divergence from the historical tangent becomes more and more difficult. And for every mountain there is a legend of a mountain. And New York and Paris have been shrewd enough to appropriate the myth of themselves, lay it down and use it as foundation to build anew. In this manner, the myth of Paris and the myth of New York are born.

I arrived in Paris twelve hours late (my grasp of the international date-and-time line is as tenuous as my grasp of the international economic system). Luckily there was no one to meet me at the airport and as such my presence was not missed. That was almost a week ago. A long and exhilarating week of towers, arches and museums, cheap and heady red wine, language difficultly, promenades, restaurants, my family’s largesse, hotel beds, early mornings, crowds, gloves, jackets and hats. Paris is a wonderful city, in the true sense of the word. It is very hard here to do anything but flit one’s eyes from one vision to the next with a kind of religious wonder.

Much time in this city has been spent queuing. The line for the Eiffel Tower was two hours, the Louvre one, the Arch de Triomphe half. For the most part the waiting was tiresome. The alternative, however, is that you would enter immediately, experience immediately, and depart very soon after. There is a commonly-held belief—one which has been proven by various experiments—that chronic gamblers actually prefer to lose rather than win. That is, there is something in the chemical reactions of the brain that belies the fact that gamblers derive more joy from losing than they do from winning. Hypotheses about the psychology of this phenomenon suggest that when a gambler loses, they have an excuse to continue playing, to continue the action, to try and recover losses. Returning to the queues, then, I doubt I would derive the same satisfaction from the Eiffel’s summit or the Louvre’s richness or interior of the Arch if I had been able to access them immediately. Waiting, like fasting before a meal, builds expectation and desire. When you are hungry your body reverts to animalism: senses heighten and most else is forgotten in the carnal desire to eat. When the hunger is sated food tastes better as a result. A world in which every desire was sated immediately would be an insipid world indeed.

My last night in Paris was also that of Christmas Day. Paris during Christmas is a very special time and a place to be a part of. Much of the city I visited was luminous in blue and gold and white lights. A refined choice of colours, one fitting for the Parisian sensibility. Red would be too garish, silver too cliché, green downright common. Paris demands blue and white: every tree along Champs-Élysées glowed with the colours. Countless churches and castles and palaces were lit from below with spotlights so piercing that the entire buildings were lifted off the ground, hovering above their gardens like apparitions. The Eiffel Tower, high-definition in the distance, periodically took on a scattering of lights, synchronised, no doubt, to some grand opera outside the range of my hearing. All of this was set off by a Ferris-wheel at the end of the parade from which I took my perspective. Just a Ferris-wheel, nothing else—like a kamikaze-ride or bumper-cars—that would cheapen the mood. A Ferris-wheel of which every axis and strut was itself emblazoned with blue and white.

The effect of all this colour, of all these ubiquitous sights, was twofold. On the one hand Paris reinforced its mythical status, exhibiting itself as a kind of exploding star, courting the associations of an astral being, raising itself to the level of the cosmos, aligning itself with cosmogony. On the other hand, the city became an elegant and complex show. Half burlesque, a quarter parody, and an eighth each of mime, circus, aloofness and mocking humour. Indeed, Paris laughs at you not with you. The city does not need more friends or admirers. It does not need to court the casual visitor, it doesn’t even need to try and please. Paris is confident and arrogant, its residents the same. And as they should be. I applaud the gall of eschewing world trends to avoid cigarettes, obesity and excess by continuing to smoke indoors, continuing to satisfy the carnal pleasure of eating with the same fervour that many countries devote to military endeavours or patriotism, continuing to lavish cashmere, gold and diamonds on the person atop exquisite dress.

***

Tomorrow I leave Paris for EuroDisney. Forty minutes away from the CBD, it is one of the many iterations of DisneyLand. The place will be, I imagine, as surreal as Paris itself. At the very least it will be an experience in anthropology, a way into the lunacy and folly that characterises our species.

***

It is difficult in these transmissions to find a way to talk about people. My grasp of the craft is still so clumsy that I have not yet learnt how to portray without betraying. This could be a problem. Even the most spectacular photo of a landscape, the most startling photo of architecture, the most emotive photo of anything inanimate falls short—well short—of a photo of a person, any person. Although this phenomenon is likely testament to the arrogance of the human race rather than any innate quality, it is nonetheless a phenomenon that is current and real. Any form of writing, I hazard, is similar. There is very little about non fiction that is interesting when it doesn’t involve people, aside from subjects for specialists such as bird-watching or river-kayaking. Until I have more control over the ‘pen’, however, people shall remain on the peripheries and in the abstract. That does not mean, of course, that these experiences have been experienced alone. This trip to Paris, for example, first involved a dear friend from New Zealand and then an extremely generous uncle and his family. In New York I am lucky to be surrounded by very fine people, some good friends and a couple of enemies. I have mentioned before that the greatest part of this trip has been the people. This, I assure, holds true.

NB: A small selection of photos from Paris is available at (no Facebook membership required):

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=79126&l=3151b&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=79129&l=a6c81&id=585700346

Washington, December '07

(more photos at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=75213&l=21435&id=585700346)

14 December '07

It is sometimes held that in the language of the Inuit* there are more words for snow than in English. The number of Inuit words varies from seven to four-hundred depending on how many languages are counted, how flexible the categories are, et cetera. Related to this fact is a volunteer-fireman from the United States who noticed that people did not heed gas-cans once they were emptied of gas. The cans, it was understood, were ‘empty’, and thus no longer existed a fire danger. After witnessing numerous gas-can explosions (petrol vapour is, after all, violently more flammable than the liquid) the fireman—let’s call him Whorf—deduced that the cans were considered harmless because they were termed empty. That is, the word ‘empty’ was so influential to the gas-can owners that they simply could not conceive that it might be dangerous. This phenomenon got Mr. Whorf to thinking, and here we reunite with the Inuit. As the theory goes, because the Inuit have ‘n’ words for snow, they are able to recognise ‘n’ different types of snow. Thus, if we believe that in Inuit there are twice as many words for snow as there are in English, Mr. Whorf would have you believe that the Inuit can see twice as many types of snow than speakers of English. In this manner, whereas I can only recognise powder, sludge, ice, and flake, the Inuit can recognise snow that is crusted on the surface, drifting snow, still snow, remembered snow, forgotten snow, snow that falls in large wet flakes, snow that falls in small flakes, snow that falls slowly, snow that falls quickly, snow that has melted and refrozen, snow that has been marked by wolves, blowing snow, snow that has been packed down, snow in beards, melted snow, snow mixed with mud and so on. In this manner, language determines one’s view of the world. The word precedes the perception.

If there is a way I can justify reciting all of that, it lies in the fact that in the two weeks it has been snowing in New York, there has not been one day the same. The first day, for example, was Disney snow: flakes that you can catch in your hand or on your tongue, flakes that are so permanently frozen they are dry, flakes that land on other flakes forming impeccable, ubiquitous blankets. The next day the blankets shrank and melted, lining the gutters and causing perpetual torrents to chase the furrows in the middle of streets. Yesterday we had hail: small rocks of ice that bounced and ricocheted and rolled. Today there was wet snow: flakes that melted as soon as they came up against something solid, flakes interspersed with drops so that the whole street and the tops of cars, and flowers, and every surface that could bear the weight was covered in white slush. Minutes later that slush—which won’t freeze because it was too warm and won’t melt because it was too cold—was marked by footprints and stained with mud and coagulated in piles.

Now, if you and I spoke Inuit, I presume that whole paragraph would be redundant; it could be replaced by one sentence and a list of words. Perhaps I cannot justify.

It is a disconcerting experience trying to cope here when it is snows. All other residents in my neighbourhood, without breaking stride, simply change clothes, change shoes and roll on with whatever it is they were doing before it began to snow. I, on the other hand, am as inept as a child. I have the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes. I walk in the wrong places and look at the wrong things. It is considered unbecoming, so I gather, to treat snow as anything more than a dull inconvenience. Even the children here regard it with the same indifference as they would a broken appliance or a slump in the stock market. It is a phenomenon that exists outside of their control, that affects their lives by proxy. Perhaps if they could suture the snow at its source—the idea is not so absurd: the United Sates military is working on ways to induce fog and bad weather to disorient and demoralize the enemy. One method involves literally pouring chemicals into clouds—New Yorkers would. Until that time, they don trench coats, lower their heads, clasp at their chests, and carry on walking.

***

This week has largely consisted of long spells sitting in front of my computer starting and finishing essays, conceiving ideas, thinking, researching and then trying to compel them onto the screen them with blunt force. My approach is to spend as much time in possible with hands at the ready. Eight hours staring at a screen results in about two hours of actual work. Two hours of actual work produces about five pages of text. Five pages of text is about a sixth of two essays. I was, luckily, adept at the calculation. Thus, as of now, the essays are completed and my first semester at Columbia—presuming the essays are adequate—is over.

The week was preceded by a flitting trip to Washington DC. Four-and-a-half hours on the Greyhound getting there was followed by twenty-one hours in the city was followed by four-and-a-half hours returning (I shall talk of the Greyhound bus line in another transmission. There is much to talk about (the Greyhound bus line in the United States is the transport of the masses; people were frisked and scanned for weapons as they boarded; see the Onion’s parody at www.theonion.com/content/news/30_miserable_lives_lost_in). It was a fine experience to get off the island, to sit in mute awe at the industrial sprawl that extends from city to city, to cavort in the bars and walk around like a don in the hotel.

I am the owner of a video Ipod, a now outmoded device that can hold around twelve days of music. On the bus home from Washington, the right headphone coming from the Ipod ceased to produce sound and no meddling could remedy the situation. A quick test revealed that the Ipod itself was broken, rather than the headphones. The workings of my Ipod, like nearly every single other technological device, exists far outside the realm of my understanding. The internal mechanics of even the most primitive computer, for example, the calculator, are as opaque to me as that of the physics governing a black hole. I assumed, therefore, that my Ipod would either have to be discarded or salvaged by a professional. As the device is no longer current, paying a professional to assess it would not have been economical. I thus turned to the internet, which, as it transpires, is heavy with sites that aid the Ipod-owner to repair their own device. After ordering a part for a nominal investment and waiting two days for it to arrive, I followed the instructions on one of the websites and took the Ipod apart. I did not understand what I was doing, and my work was clumsy, but I fixed it. I fixed my Ipod. It was a revelation!

The reason I was so ecstatic is that, for half an hour at least, the gulf between the luddite and technology was bridged. For thirty minutes, the two were united. The feeling is, perhaps, akin to sparking fire without matches or accelerant. Or building a shelter without nails or tools. Or catching an animal, and cooking it, and eating it. The satisfaction was immense.

***

So, the first semester is now over. Next week I head to Paris and then Oslo to meet with family. New York is a fine, fine city and I have some very good friends here, but there's nothing quite like family: nothing quite like knowing you have the same ancestry, knowing you have stood on the same part of the earth, knowing you have shared memories, and above all the indelible, ineluctable bond that comes from having the same blood flooding your veins.

* Also known, derogatively, as Eskimo

Washington DC, '07

134th Street at 8am (1/2)

7 December '07

In a few days I will have been in New York for four months. This week I learnt that the weakest part of the human body is the neck. I have, for a reason I cannot quite isolate, a need to connect these two ineluctable facts. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the need arises from the kind of apocalyptic disposition this city elicits. The kind of disposition I tried to describe last week.

If I needed further proof that New York is a vision of the end of the world—I did not, by the way—it came a few days ago. On Sunday morning, when I woke, the only sound was the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.*That is, against the relief of the buildings outside my window were snowflakes. Hundreds and hundreds of snowflakes, landing on the sill, the cracks in the brick, on every edifice of the fences and paths below. Although the snow itself was a revelation (the first time ever, I would say, that I’ve been snowed on) its effects are what I will mention here.

As I waited underground for the subway later that day there seemed to be greater-than-usual preponderance of rats. Indeed, the tracks were throbbing with fat, spotty, callous rats. Rats that were all but impervious—they would pull up, hesitate, then continue—to missiles hurtled in their direction. Rats so sizeable and audacious —just one or two, basted over glowing embers, would make a good meal; they cared less about a stomping foot than they did aforementioned missiles—that the bubonic plague for an instant, did not seem so far away.

As I fixated on the rats, a busker on the platform opposite triggered his stereo, raised his violin to his neck, and after the introduction, began to play the theme from Phantom of the Opera. The background orchestra is terrifying enough by itself: dropping—no plummeting—through the octaves, then rising to new heights, all fronted by a scaling violin. Combined with the rats, the atmosphere was too perfect, too precisely apocalyptic. There was a second when the approaching train sounded like hoof beats.

There is a wonderful word in German—it escapes me now—which describes the phenomenon in which things are not nearly as bad as you thought, and you are disappointed. As the train arrived, and the rats scattered, and the violin was drowned in the screech of metal-on-metal, I experienced a similar feeling.

Back to the desire to reconcile the two facts, then. Although there is probably no link between the fallibility of the neck and fast-approaching four-month anniversary, in a world—yes, New York is a world—that has an air of immanent implosion, there is a need to connect seemingly incongruous facts. Whether it is to find order in chaos, or meaning in vacuity, I do not know. Indeed, it is likely that the need arises out of nothing more profound that a narcissistic desire to mark one’s life with transcendental experience, to rise above the mundane and heave a yard-stick into the great wheel the Fates control.

***

Tomorrow I am to bus to Washington DC to attend the Australian Embassy’s Christmas party. It was not any antipodean connections that prompted the invitation, but rather a journalist friend from Kentucky. Thus, I really have no right to attend, but welcome the chance to escape the island, if only for a night. There is a reason most of the photos I have taken in this city are filled with sky.

There are a couple of photos at the following links, should you be interested. You do not need to be a member of Facebook to view them.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=59133&l=9aad8&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=73277&l=c7f45&id=585700346

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*This line is stolen, I do not wish to give it back.

134th Street at 8pm (2/2)