Katherine Mansfield noted that there ‘there is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw’.
Waking in Oslo, just before midday, with the sun at its zenith slung low in the sky, shrill crystallised rays clip the tops of trees, reflect and are refracted by the snow and ice and cast the city in a light akin to that described by Mansfield. These are high-pitched rays, rays on the edge of the tonal spectrum, rays coming not from a source of light but from darkness in the negative—darkness inverted—grey rays that like heat-seeking rockets, programmed, find a retina with the precision of a scalpel, rays that reduce sunglasses to a whimper, rays so sharp and keen most parts of the world can only accommodate them for one hour a day, one season a year. This is winter in Norway, where a hand lodged between forehead and sky is the only way to bring to relief objects directly in front of you, and even that hand glows with a halo that itself is sharp enough to punish more than a casual glance. Norway in winter is twilight. Norway in winter is betwixt and between, neither here nor there, a integer or a fraction, a solo numerator, one arch of the rosy crucifixion, a masturbating Adam, an amputated Jesus, a purgatory so profound that green foliage and brown trunks turn black, white is illuminated holy, frozen tundra appear at night great wastelands to Hades or mythological landscapes of the frozen lunar poles. A winter where the sun makes oblique and hurried arcs from horizon to horizon and at night an unknown light source fires the frosted trees, houses, cars and streets a pale and ghostly hue. A winter where every breath is a cloud of steam, every indoor passage an elegant ritual of dressing and undressing. A winter where the New Year is marked by the cascading slipstream of bonfire sparks and the horizon is lit up with the thunder and lightshow of fireworks as dull and mute air-strikes in a distant town.
In Norway I paid twenty New Zealand dollars for a whiskey and dry. In Norway I discovered that I really do snore. Not just snore, but cough out great sonorous, startorian gasps—enough to prompt an industrious uncle, when faced with the problem of woken and complaining children sleeping in the same room, to stuff their ears with plugs and hold them in with duct tape. Said uncle even brought duct tape to Paris and, to his credit, used it often. Whether he used it because he brought it rather than because of an innate need to have duct tape is hard to say. He would argue that it was essential, being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I’m not so sure—that reverberate and perplex others while leaving me restfully sleeping. Snoring is a rather peculiar affliction. I have no control over it and it has no discernable effect on my own health. An analogy: I once lived in a house that, in its decrepitude, was an anomaly in an otherwise very fine neighbourhood. I wondered, often, where the exact point in the house’s decrepitude would be when it started to negatively affect the value of the houses adjacent. That is, if my house had a slumping ceiling, a blotchy paint-job and overgrown lawns, it would, presumably, detract from the value of the house next door. Thus, it would be economical for the next door neighbour to invest in the repair of my property as that investment would add value to their own. Snoring, while having no effect on me personally, affects those around me. It seems that I have reached the point where those around me are losing sleep themselves because of it. What happens next, I know not. And yes, twenty dollars for a whisky. Fifteen for a beer. Ten for a Big-Mac. The price of, well, everything in this country is absurd, nay grotesque, nay odious! That such a discrepancy can exist between one country and the next is, again, beyond me.
It's a Small World After All EuroDisney, December '07
Norway, it seems, in sharp contrast to my last two days in Paris. Or, rather, at the Paris EuroDisney. The theme park is an almost perfect institution. It is both the source of the craving (escapism, thrill, fantasy, et cetera) and the source of the fix (themed ‘wonderlands’, rollercoaster-esque rides, ‘magical’ lands). EuroDisney, and presumably its other iterations are a a perfect one and minus-one, the yin and the yang, hot and cold, dharma and karma, déjà vu and jamais vu. The park as a mathematical formula would sum at zero. It is the alpha and omega, literally, the beginning and the end. EuroDisney is set apart from Paris. From the centre of the city it takes about thirty minutes to reach the park. Surrounding the park is a monopoly set of hotels and motels designed to accommodate the park’s patrons. Connecting these hotels and motels with the park is a series of shuttles and busses. Servicing these hotels and motels, as well as the park itself, is an assortment of restaurants, souvenir stores, and imitation gimmicks. Another analogy: a common profession for anthropologists to pursue is advertising. Companies pay anthropologists to identify ways in which products can be more successfully marketed. In this manner, in one instance, an anthropologist was called on to help market a particular game. This anthropologist began by visiting a school and identifying the most ‘popular’ students. Once this task was complete, six of the most popular children were given the game, along with an extra to give to a friend. Within a week nearly student at the school wanted the game. Within two weeks nearly every student at the school had the game.
Returning to EuroDisney, one very quickly gets the impression that every element of the theme park has been conceived of at some higher level by some omnipotent board of scientists, advertisers and specialists. The purpose of this conception is unclear. It is likely to maximise profit, to sell merchandise, to promote television programmes while maintaining the guise of simple, honest fun. A conspiracy theory this may be, but when you consider that every physical detail of the park has been thoroughly considered—the concrete floor of the outdoor Frontier Land, as an example, was textured to resemble the trodden mud of a real ‘ye olde’ frontier town. Horse-shoe prints were even intermittently stamped and era-relics were casually discarded at the roadside—it seems reasonable that every other aspect of the park had been similarly considered.
It was unnerving to experience that kind of perfection. EuroDisney is a kind of totalitarian dictatorship sans politics. Resistance, in the form of aversion to spending, is promptly stamped out by child-luring rides, signs, and furry characters. Detractors of the park either don’t attend at all—which is fine for an self-containing institution—or are led their by their children. Further, detractors cannot air their grievances as disliking Disney Land is akin to disliking puppy-dogs, or orphans, or ice-cream. Revolutionaries there may be, though I fear that—like the lead-droog in Clockwork Orange, who was brainwashed with Beethoven’s Ninth—their revolutionary character has been driven out by endless repeats of It’s a Small World After All, surely the most disturbing ride in the entire park.
See photos from Oslo at:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=82654&l=d244a&id=585700346 and
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=81967&l=f4afb&id=585700346
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