Quebec City, January '08

20 January, '08

New York is behind me, by ‘miles and inclinations’. For a good part of the last three days I have kept the front-right tire glued to the white line in the middle of the highway as mile after mile of tarmac, concrete and snow stretch and shrink and gain perspective in a thin trail aimed at the horizon. New York to Boston to Quebec City to Montreal to Toronto to New York. Two thousand five hundred kilometres, sixteen-hundred miles, all in a beige minivan, all with ballad and anthem and ditty emanating from the two working speakers, all with fine company and bad food, all with the unremitting desire to keep moving, to—feeling like Moriarty—pursue imminence, to crave what’s ahead, always ahead.

Most of the driving was done at night. The headlights on the rental were feeble—a torch with weak batteries—illuminating a length of road too short to allow for adequate response, and therefore me at the wheel craning my neck at the windscreen, studying the white line, hugging the white line, worshipping at the church of the white line until it levitated from the road, came over the bonnet, past the windscreen wipers, skirted the eyeball and lodged itself next to the optic nerve. Following—no, chasing—the white line become a religion and driving prayer, accelerating like chanting ohm until absolution explodes in cosmic fury: absolution behind the wheel the holy state, the perfect speed, where cars are passed in a gentle weave, the camber of corners and the chassis merge and harmonise and the car drives itself and the meditative Zen of it all makes the lights of small towns lose definition and the hulking number of remaining miles topple like a slot machine.

And so one night of such driving, with red eyes and an aching back, we crossed the moonlit tundra of south-eastern Canada, the sides of the highway encroaching on the car as four-lane America gave way to two-lanes, all the time the air outside falling colder until the windows of the car were slick ice and the bubble of warm air around us felt fragile in comparison. This is how we arrived in Quebec City, thrust into traffic lights and intersections and buildings after six hundred miles of highway where the warning signs about moose conjured cervine spectres in every shadow and dark, silhouetted trees lined both sides and grew soft into the darkness.

When we arrived, in the very early morning, the temperature was minus sixteen. When we woke, the sun was out and the temperature was a tepid minus five. The part of Quebec City that is old comes replete with churches, grand arches, Romanic columns and cobbled pavements. All of these were witnessed by Jon*, Toby and I whilst wrapped in as many layers as movement would allow. Minus six, you see, even with a light breeze, causes the body to leak warmth so quickly that within a minute all that is left is that which you can catch with folded arms and head bent forward. We did not, do not, have the right clothes and thus dashed from site to sight and then to a coffee shop for warmth.

Aside from the beauty of Quebec City—said churches, arches, columns and pavements were, indeed, stunning, though after seeing EuroDisney’s imitation it is difficult to see them as anything but a thin façade—what most struck me was the frozen sea. In my last transmission I talked, briefly, about the alien nature of the landscape in Oslo. In Quebec City, this alienation was even more profound. The city sits at the edge of an inlet fed by the North Atlantic Ocean. In winter, parts of this inlet freeze over, creating landscapes so solid and still that without prior knowledge I would not have known that beneath the ice and snow lay salt water. A frozen ocean is, in the limited scope of my experience, as cataclysmic as rivers turning blood red or the earth finally giving way to the oppressive weight of gravity, events so holy and unholy they emanate a sacred aura, transforming the familiar and tame to the alien and wild.

***

Included with our rental van was a GPS unit: a calculator-sized screen personified by a soft and stuttering feminine voice, resembling—as Jon noted—Clarice from Silence of the Lambs. Clara as she became known, the eponymous descendent of Foster’s character, attached herself to the dash and thenceforth the cabin rang with the peal of her directions. Clara’s usefulness, however, is difficult to gauge. By some dint of technology, Clara was usually about six seconds behind the actual location of the car. Thus, her directions sometimes came six-seconds after their usefulness expired and we had departed on some other course. Throughout this ordeal Clara did not remonstrate nor snarl. Even when the blunders were mine she silently—obediently—recalculated the route and changed her instructions. If there was admonishment, it was silent. If there were repercussions, I did not notice.

Before maps, travellers would have consulted the stars and read the myriad cardinal signs present in nature. Before Clara, the traveller would have consulted maps and paid attention to road signs. With Clara, the three of us listened only to music and watched only the cars in front. Thus, when Clara was errant we were lost. Sans global-positioning we were floating in space, errant and clueless travellers.

Clara is representative of one of the great fallacies of technology. Most of it, when you really consider it, is of negligible use. There is very little about a cellphone, for example, that redeems its obnoxious presence. The only time I have really needed, needed, to use my cellphone was when my car broke down in the Wanganui back-blocks. Of course, in that instance, I was out of range and the device was useless.

***

Today we begin the long stretch home, skirting the great lakes, driving through mile after mile of semi-industrial, semi-residential squalor, all of it testament to our species’ profound ability to transform the landscape, to build and build and level and level until everything is uniformly drab, uniformly human, and not a bit natural.

*see Jon’s perspective on the trip at knotstiedinstrings.wordpress.com

See photos from the trip at:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2129706&l=a82e5&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2129787&l=74ceb&id=585700346

Oslo, January '07

(more photos 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)

12 January '07

A couple of nights ago I flew back into New York. When I first arrived here, five months ago today, I requested a window seat. As the plane came down over the city I pressed my face to the Perspex and marvelled at the city lights that spread like a bushfire from horizon to horizon. This time, in a sterile airport in Dusseldorf, I requested an aisle seat—the more practical option—and gave but glancing attention to the city as the plane descended, preferring instead to ready my carry-on for swift alightment. Later, the shepherding through border control, then baggage collection, then customs, then transport home was met with grim resignation rather than nervous excitement.

While the loss of novelty may initially seem just that, a loss, in its place came an altogether new feeling: familiarity. Arriving in New York, this time around, was arriving home. Although most of my friends are away, and the route home from the airport was novel, there is enough that I know in this city to feel comfort just being here—the idiosyncrasies of the subway, the manner in which you hold your head when you walk in my neighbourhood, the twist-jerk-turn the mailbox lock requires—all of these contribute to a sense of belonging that, for the moment at least, is enough.*

The last few days in Oslo were covered in a layer of snow. A thick layer, as light as down, punctured only by the intermittent hoof-prints of various woodland creatures. Snow is still novel for me, a strange and alien substance. In response to my yearning for New Zealand summer after witnessing photos of bush, bach and beach, a friend remarked that my photos of Oslo induce quite the opposite response. New Zealanders are—to varying extents, granted—creatures of the landscape. Whether it is a deep-rooted symptom of our settler heritage, an extension of the Māori concept of turangawaewae, or some other psychological condition, there exists a heavy reliance on the landscape as a marker of identity. When I yearn for New Zealand, I yearn for the unique and ubiquitous rocky coastline and scraggy bush. And when faced with a different—violently different—landscape it is difficult to understand it with anything but the mute fascination that a visitor ‘understands’ a beast at the zoo. There is distance from it, little engagement with it, a curious observance of it. As such, my friend felt no connection with the Norwegian landscape as depicted in my photos and I, while there, was a disconnected spectator.

The last few days in Oslo also saw me increasingly astounded at the expense of the place. Four-dollars for can of vending-machine coke. Six dollars for a plain coffee. Eight dollars for a loaf of bread. If it wasn’t for the largesse of my family I would have exhausted in two weeks what I spend in New York in two months. I just cannot understand how the same product service can be so absurdly different from one country to the next. Especially when the countries run up against each other, are complicit in the same union, work from the same currency.

***

A friend from New Zealand has just arrived and will stay a day or three. On Monday we set off for Boston, then Montreal, then Quebec City, then Toronto, then the Niagara Falls, then home. All of this in a minivan with a dent in the door and a trunk that doesn’t open, on the right side of the road in the ice. There will, however, be good company, a fine soundtrack and another country to transgress.

* (Also, typically New York, were the occupants of my subway-carriage home. Opposite me was a bald albino repeating in a resounding clamour the financial advice proffered from the priest in his headphones. At one end was a Haitian princess in full garb, with a two-foot hat and hollow, unsmiling eyes. At the other a homeless man resplendent on a nest of plastic bags chuckling to himself while suckling on a bottle of anonymous fluid).

Oslo, 4 January '08

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

Edmund, Oslo, January '08