Love in the Time of Cholera. (A moment.)

“Despite the perpetual rain, the sordid merchants, and the Homeric vulgarity of its carriage drivers, she would always remember Paris as the most beautiful city in the world, not because of what it was or was not in reality, but because it was linked to the memory of her happiest years.” - Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Marquez Garcia

I’m reading (continuing from three months ago, because ‘reading for pleasure without needing to write an essay’ is unthinkable while at uni) this right now, and I came across this passage which is breathtaking in its beauty and truth. A case of someone else setting down what I’ve always felt and never said (c/f Alan Bennett!).

It always amazes me how much places become infused with the memories of certain experiences or people (and I guess obliquely, people are experiences). I don’t think I could ever conceive of Oxford or London without certain people; London would be much sadder and without half its excitement/charms for me without Someone, for example. Paris – which is, for me also, the most beautiful city in the world! (although I didn’t encounter the ‘Homeric vulgarity’ of any carriage drivers….what is  Homeric vulgarity?) - is so linked to memories of experiencing winter and Christmas in all their European glory: vin chaud from outside St.-Pierre-de-Montmartre; chocolat chaud; crepes in Montmartre and the Quartier Latin; the Christmas market along the Champs-Élysées!

The Seine.

One lives out one’s life in emotionally distorted spaces: every walk along the Thames or every step in the Tate Modern becomes value-laden, feeling-laden – it constantly gestures back to another time and another feeling. The problem arises in time, because people fade in and out of one’s life and places do not (although there is the transience of rooms and homes, which is another matter entirely – I guess I’m thinking only about cities here). I suppose when that day comes traversing along streets of happy memories will be the saddest thing of all.

Until then though – there is little or no seeing places for what they are in ‘reality’, as Garcia writes; the only reality they have is one which is redolent of anticipations and fears, filtered through desires or one’s particular and momentary mood on a day.

This is also wonderful and not all sad, in its own way: stories lie over cities for me like palimpsests; London is never just my London but has traces of Dickens’s London, and Austen’s; Naipaul’s and Virginia Woolf’s.  Paris is never just my Paris but Djuna Barnes’s and Jean Rhys’s; Choderlos de Laclos’s, Flaubert’s. I cannot dream of New York divorced from Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, or Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Places become soaked in the memories of books too, and while I may romanticize this excessively, it definitely adds infinite amounts to their beauty and charm for me.

Parisian streets.

Edit: Oh golly! And merry Christmas everybody! That was a bit of a downer note to end a Christmas post on, now I think of it….!

A love-letter to cities (in pictures)

This post will focus mostly on my favourite photographs (& memories, because the two are by and large synonymous in contexts like these) of two particular cities: Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. A love-letter to South-East Asian metropolises; to the shapes of the lines that demarcate sky-space and city-space in this particular region of the world.

μητρόπολις - mētrópolis

Orig. Ancient Greek: ‘mother city’

OED on contemporary usage: ‘a very large & busy city’

So without further ado. (On this note – I always hear people say ‘without further adieu‘ with a very pointed and falsely French stress on that last word. Am I entirely, entirely wrong in thinking ‘ado’ makes more sense? Have I been getting it wrong my whole life? Maybe it’s time for a quick grammar-induced panic-attack Google search…)

What I love most about cities are their lights: the colours they emanate, and the sheer state of life & being it signifies. So lights are for rooms, homes, cities: all of those spaces are lived in, loved in and loved by. The above is Kuala Lumpur, and the bottom is Singapore.

I love this picture for the stories it tells: people are hugging, posing, staring, photographing, holding hands, etc. - all in the glow of the omnipresent city. It watches like a mother; not far away from its root definition - μήτηρ (mḗtēr, “mother”). I guess I'm having a ''plump Buck Mulligan" moment - "she is our great sweet mother". This is a view of Singapore's gorgeous skyline, from the Esplanade area. It's beautiful because people really do live and love in the glow (I won't say shadow) of the city behind.

Dear Malaysian skyline. I see it every night before bed, and every morning when I wake up (though not in such glorious close-up... this was taken from Sky Bar, which has alcohol & the most amazing view - double win!).

Took this just last night, in the pouring rain, in the center of town. Life is lonely for an umbrella in the big city. Capitalism reminds me that life has some sort of sense of constancy: it isn't all tragedy & soul. Some of it is just plain soulless and that's beautiful. It's wonderful.

(This is how I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s too: in a world of goodbyes and love stories, Holly Golightly finds comfort in the clinically mass-produced (and yet exclusive, of course); in shop windows and their perfectly pre-arranged world. Nothing is out of line. Everything is designed to attract. There is simply no room for tragedy, soul-searching, hello and goodbye, love or loss on those window-display shelves, I’m sure. And so Holly goes-lightly. I always find pretty shops and big glass windows with lots of expensive, over-valued things extremely comforting. Almost the most comforting thing in the whole world. Isn’t that slightly disgusting?)

Dawn.

Mustyfustyjazzy Parisian corners…

… and a bit of Vergangenheitsbewältigung for that which one has never experienced. (New word, thank you The Economist! German is an amazing language.)

I was reading this article in The Paris Review today – one of the first by them I’ve actually (sadly) read – but it infused me with this crazy longing for all things dimmed and jazz, feather boas and crazy, inspiring little old ladies. It tells the story of a woman called ‘Bricktop’, who drove F. Scott Fitzgerald home every night in Paris (that city-saddened man); who exchanged wry jokes about lynchings with Cole Porter; who had Django Reinhardt and Fred Astaire playing and dancing on her bar floor; who was comforted by Langston Hughes… well, the article has a hundred other names to drop, and it’s just incredible.

Couple that with an episode of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Great Lives’ series on Samuel Beckett a few nights ago (I find it hugely relaxing to listed to podcasts while pedaling away in the gym; it’s a desperate bid to expand my mind and simultaneously contract my bodily fat) – and it seems like I am fated to dream of bohemian Parisian circles tonight.

Paris seems to have been where everyone fled to in a bid to escape the smallness of their own societies and lives – whether the racism of old America, or the religiosity of an emerging independent Ireland – and Paris was a city of Bricktop‘s and Shakespeare & Co‘s. A beautiful cluster of random things and poetic moments (smoky jazz; pornographic publishings; folies bergères; and error-ridden typesets) – which in many ways, I suppose, it still is: I got the strongest sensation when I visited Paris that it was (as I so eloquently/pretentiously wrote in my journal at the time) “a conglomeration of times & times & times…it’s organic history”. History that never stays still – but lives, thrives and symbiotically fuses with the future and the present and its own past like some kind of throbbing amoeba. It’s like a highly fertile soil covered in different kinds of fungi – the Napoleonic fungi-buildings; the Revolutionary fungi-buildings; the opulent imperial fungi-palaces… etc. (A tenuous analogy, but I can think of no better – except, I sincerely hope no mycologist comes to shatter my simile by telling me that different kinds of fungi cannot grow on the same soil.)

On the other side of the Seine... And some Mallarmé, fatally, and oh-so-pretentiously, scrawled at the bottom.

This post was meant to be an ode to Josephine Baker (who oddly enough hasn’t featured at all yet…), and the redolences of jazz and smoky Parisian corners that that article called up – but it wound up being an ode to Paris. Oh well. But maybe it’s not unfitting: she was emblematic of Paris in the most beautiful of ways, after all. But here it is at last, then – to make this post a truly synaesthetic experience (you’ve had Paris in poems, and Paris in purple hues – now have Paris in music). I’ve heard many versions of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, and most of them don’t do to me what this particular version does; they are too slow, too drawn out in a desperately ugly attempt to be that kind of cooling, drawling jazz – but Baker’s really jumps with her special brand of joie de vivre.

Now… all I’m waiting for is Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ to be released. Taking… so damn long!!!!

‘The World Through A Plastic Lens’

When I bought my Holga 120cfn on the Internet, it shipped in from Hong Kong with a little book by its side – the book was called The World Through A Plastic Lens, and it contained the most amazing photographs taken by people all over the world, with colours that popped in one’s eye and announced themselves dramatically; with cities charted out and translated into skylines, etc etc.

Since that day, about 4-5 years ago, my own little Holga has sort of become a way for me to not only experience the world, but also capture it. I have experienced it through the senses (because it’s terribly sad to know the world only through a plastic lens) – seen its towering buildings and endless waters, tasted its dusty air and lain on its grasses – but none of that is really permanent.

Luckily, the world as captured through a plastic lens is firmly ensconced on my wall. One of my favourite books by Susan Sontag (On Photography - sadly left behind in a plastic box in England, now!) says it all about how I feel: “Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality, that anyone can make or acquire.” Acquisition is so important (even if it sounds dangerously powerful and wrong!) when memories are so unreliable.

Magdalen College Fellow's Garden, Oxford.

Left: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Right: Oxford, England.

One of my most-loved pictures – an accidental double-exposure (I’d forgotten to wind the film properly!), but which gave me the view from my balcony at home (in KL, Malaysia) alongside the Radcliffe Camera (in Oxford). It seemed to encapsulate my life pretty well, flipping between Malaysia and England all the time!)

University Parks, Oxford. England in the springtime is heaven!

Marina Beach, Chennai. I went there a few years after the tsunami had struck - but there wasn't a sign!

Malaysian skyline - as seen from home!

Chennai, India (near Apollo hospital). India is all about yellows that pop!

Tiruvanmiyur (sp?), India. My great great grandfather built a temple in this village, and so the family 'pilgrimages' every now and then.

Belle Paris! Needs no explanation really.

Paris (again)

Bridge over River Seine. It came out funny, but I sort of like this daguerreotype effect.

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. I love that skylines and road signs can meet in one frame.

On the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.

The Isis, Oxford. "I married Isis on the fifth of May..."

I feel a bit like I’m painting the world different colours, all with a few chemicals and some colour flash! And I love that something small, plastic and uglily-coloured can have accompanied me on so many adventures, seen so many places, and captured so many memories! All hail cameras.