Five paragraphs that almost start with the word Bangkok
This was the piece I submitted in my applicaition for my Masters course. Who knew?
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Bangkok as a city defies the imagination at 7am it is gleaming white and thick with the smell of humidity. Bangkok challenges the way I usually navigate strange cities. Try and move around the city of Sydney by street map and you should have no problem. In Bangkok the space to be negotiated is vertical as well as horizontal, and traversing the labyrinth of streets on foot is not possible by map alone. This is apparent as soon as you leave the airport: your vertical position in the roadway matrix is determined by the amount of money you decide to part with. Those who can afford the expressway speed above the rest of the city on wide, empty roads; as if the tiniest escape from the earth’s gravity suddenly propels them forward into the metropolis. Those who cannot afford such luxuries are confined to the congestion and pollution that the city has become famous for, inching their way toward the servants’ entrance while the casual visitor glides sleekly to the front door.
Bangkok makes me realise that the idea of a concrete jungle isn’t simply a pithy metaphor for all the urban development that has arisen in the last century. Bangkok’s air is breathed out of concrete the same way the Amazon’s air is breathed out of its forests. Having arrived in the centre, the colossal concrete pylons of the mass transit Skytrain send the traveller once more into the vertical. Where Europe sunk its trains into the earth, Bangkok has thrust its own towards the heavens. So many metres above the crush of the streets, the traffic noise is a little less loud, the crowds of people a little less dense, the air a little less thick. On the Skytrain platform there’s a little less of everything and a much more of a dizzying vertigo that could plunge you back into it at any moment.
In Bangkok, navigation is also temporal, three dimensional space is supplemented by separate planes of three dimensional time. The city interacts with its own past and present, but also with my own present and past; all the experiences and expectations I have carried with me to this point. The physical city collides with a Bangkok of ten years past; the vague memories and alter ego of a briefly lived-in city directing me to turn right here or left there on some long forgotten sense of direction. A decade ago the plane’s evening descent was like being plunged into pure cobalt, the city dark but with a quiet luminescence retained from the heat of the day. I was delivered into a city of emptiness and possibility and stood for endless hours on its threshold while red eye flights dragged the stars across the night sky. Now in the heat of midday, the city drops over me the patchwork quilt of memory: two block here, three blocks there, a not quite uncertainty about what lies around the next corner.
Bangkok’s urban landscape is scattered here and there with giant skyscrapers, halted halfway in construction because the company responsible has simply run out of money. Symptomatic of the variables of the fortunes of the city, and the past-present-future time scale that it seems to have such a healthy disrespect for, many look fully formed from a distance. It is only close up that they are revealed as hollow, the exoskeletons of more prosperous and aspirational years. Now moving neither forward nor backward in time, they are sure only of one direction: up. Along the river, the gleaming new, upwardly mobile apartment blocks of the once gleaming new, upwardly mobile look much as they do anywhere in the world. Until you notice the balconies overgrown with foliage, rough bursts of green cascading down the once white walls, and it’s difficult to decide if the building is still inhabited or this is a tiny foothold from which the jungle might reclaim the concrete.
Bangkok is and is not the left-to-right, x-and-y lines of the map. As a city it can only be grasped at in the subjective, tangential language of poetry, not through the rigid objectivity of the Cartesian grid. It is these poetic cities I am always drawn to: from the black crows gorging on bright mangoes among immodest green countryside of Arundhati Roy’s Kerala, to the plunging eighteen degree cold of Peter Høeg’s Copenhagen where the freezing harbour water traps salt water in pockets with structures like veins, and to the labyrinthine world of Jeanette Winterson’s Venice where it’s never possible to take the same route across the waterways twice. It is these places I am looking for, knowing all the while that having arrived I will both find them and not find them.
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Bangkok as a city defies the imagination at 7am it is gleaming white and thick with the smell of humidity. Bangkok challenges the way I usually navigate strange cities. Try and move around the city of Sydney by street map and you should have no problem. In Bangkok the space to be negotiated is vertical as well as horizontal, and traversing the labyrinth of streets on foot is not possible by map alone. This is apparent as soon as you leave the airport: your vertical position in the roadway matrix is determined by the amount of money you decide to part with. Those who can afford the expressway speed above the rest of the city on wide, empty roads; as if the tiniest escape from the earth’s gravity suddenly propels them forward into the metropolis. Those who cannot afford such luxuries are confined to the congestion and pollution that the city has become famous for, inching their way toward the servants’ entrance while the casual visitor glides sleekly to the front door.
Bangkok makes me realise that the idea of a concrete jungle isn’t simply a pithy metaphor for all the urban development that has arisen in the last century. Bangkok’s air is breathed out of concrete the same way the Amazon’s air is breathed out of its forests. Having arrived in the centre, the colossal concrete pylons of the mass transit Skytrain send the traveller once more into the vertical. Where Europe sunk its trains into the earth, Bangkok has thrust its own towards the heavens. So many metres above the crush of the streets, the traffic noise is a little less loud, the crowds of people a little less dense, the air a little less thick. On the Skytrain platform there’s a little less of everything and a much more of a dizzying vertigo that could plunge you back into it at any moment.
In Bangkok, navigation is also temporal, three dimensional space is supplemented by separate planes of three dimensional time. The city interacts with its own past and present, but also with my own present and past; all the experiences and expectations I have carried with me to this point. The physical city collides with a Bangkok of ten years past; the vague memories and alter ego of a briefly lived-in city directing me to turn right here or left there on some long forgotten sense of direction. A decade ago the plane’s evening descent was like being plunged into pure cobalt, the city dark but with a quiet luminescence retained from the heat of the day. I was delivered into a city of emptiness and possibility and stood for endless hours on its threshold while red eye flights dragged the stars across the night sky. Now in the heat of midday, the city drops over me the patchwork quilt of memory: two block here, three blocks there, a not quite uncertainty about what lies around the next corner.
Bangkok’s urban landscape is scattered here and there with giant skyscrapers, halted halfway in construction because the company responsible has simply run out of money. Symptomatic of the variables of the fortunes of the city, and the past-present-future time scale that it seems to have such a healthy disrespect for, many look fully formed from a distance. It is only close up that they are revealed as hollow, the exoskeletons of more prosperous and aspirational years. Now moving neither forward nor backward in time, they are sure only of one direction: up. Along the river, the gleaming new, upwardly mobile apartment blocks of the once gleaming new, upwardly mobile look much as they do anywhere in the world. Until you notice the balconies overgrown with foliage, rough bursts of green cascading down the once white walls, and it’s difficult to decide if the building is still inhabited or this is a tiny foothold from which the jungle might reclaim the concrete.
Bangkok is and is not the left-to-right, x-and-y lines of the map. As a city it can only be grasped at in the subjective, tangential language of poetry, not through the rigid objectivity of the Cartesian grid. It is these poetic cities I am always drawn to: from the black crows gorging on bright mangoes among immodest green countryside of Arundhati Roy’s Kerala, to the plunging eighteen degree cold of Peter Høeg’s Copenhagen where the freezing harbour water traps salt water in pockets with structures like veins, and to the labyrinthine world of Jeanette Winterson’s Venice where it’s never possible to take the same route across the waterways twice. It is these places I am looking for, knowing all the while that having arrived I will both find them and not find them.