In which I leave in pursuit of the ‘aesthetic experience’
CTV#1 | Saturday, 1am, on the other side of the world
The electricity of the place had begun seeping in when I first laid eyes on the coast: a patchwork of sprawling roads lit up in obedient yellow, and the river, gentle, seen from the silent calm of above, opened the lip of the place like a finger. And then, arching and yawning, cinching and coiling, we turned closer to the delta, the blanket of the earth ever closer and soon, except for the cranes in fantastic order along the dock, the river became the only thing in sight—just a vast expanse of inky black enveloping and dawning—as the odd trade vessel, lit up like a microchip, floated by.
When the wheels hit the tarmac at Pudong International, I sat encaptured by the weight of my ambition. The fire that drew me here stang like a rock on my back; the force I’d followed for healing loomed as a source of poverty and trouble. I hadn’t moved in six and a half hours, and my legs were held in place. Maybe it’s time I let go. The transit, from touch-down to gate, is dark and long, but smooth. When we come to a halt, two minutes before schedule, the stewardesses turn on the light and we’re all bathed in evening pink.
I crane to the left. A local girl, bleached blonde, pierced beneath the lip and long black lashes: a pixie in her leather plane-seat. Strolling down the aisle, lifting her baggage from above my head, a tall young woman dwarfs everyone around her. She seems eight feet high from my hunched-in position. And I zone out and rest my attention, in a way that feels familiar, not at her breasts, full and encased in her ribbed grey sweater though they are, but somewhere in the cavity of her chest and beyond, where I sort of remain as the other passengers filter out. These are different people, I think. A different clime.
There are not many surfaces left on this earth. Cuba. La Pampa. Don Det. Sumatra. Yugoslavia. Bophutatswana. Anywhere that promised beauty; anywhere that promised poetry and upheaval. Anywhere existent more in myth than in reality, more in dream or on the wet flicker of the tongues of the young. A lifeline: bouncing between cancer and capricorn. You could forget how long you’ve been in such a spiral. Not me. I remember with punching sobriety every one of my misdecisions, the date of each boundary crossed, of every sentence stamped into the tattered pages of my passport. I had to move to keep my blood from freezing. Going is easier than you think: a moment’s rebellion will do the trick, a quick crush on the image of an overseas girl and go, young buck, the angels will clamour. Set off on your pointless safari! And if it’s not your lust for woman it’s the colour-palette, tan and myriad green; the lips of the otherworld, beckoning, the throat of humidity that will swallow and pull you into her, the stomach of the earth, the guts; and soon, a whole life, dissolving, macerating, in the fecund black soils of the equator. What had begun a season had become everything, festering in familiar humidity, fully-feeling. A circle without time. The question was if anyone had made it back.
It’s my turn to crawl out of my seat. A swivel. A reach. Five kilos from the overhead compartment: I double, triple-take, to check I hadn’t smuggled in more. I’ve been with the feeling all day that I don’t quite know how to orient in my skin without the two-by-twenty-three kilos of a fellow passenger in tow, and I wondered whether I can get away with a life in which I’m not constantly scanning and assuring the exits for an anxious other. I pick out my easel and my brushes, as it were, and head on out.
The Shanghai night is an embracing still cold. Humidity seeps through the skin and cooks you in chills. The air seems uncharacteristically clean, not even a bead of condensation to be found. Roel had asked me, as I booked the flight, is Shanghai in the south? Well, it nestles atop the thirty-first parallel. Looks pretty tasty. But if you assume humid you’re assuming summer—the rest of the year the air slaps your face like an enormous silence, yet I find myself wincing and kissing her back. This is the northenmost city in China where the government doesn’t pump the collective heating. It’s the furthest north, then, that the south could ever be; it’s a tropic and not a tropic; it’s below the belt-line, or at least the arm-pits. It’s freezing. I step off the ramp and into the airport warmth. In ten minutes we’ll turn through the spring solstice. It’s now or never, I think, and there’ll be no going back.
* * *
That was neat and tidy.
A short train to another terminal, a light walk, and I enter a cordened-off area full of machines, keyboards, and cameras. As I approach the booth I smile and nod with a Japanese lady in a furry brown jacket, dressed up like a bear, who holds the paw of her young cub, himself warmed by his little furry brown coat. We all surrender our fingerprints to the CCP. I smile further when, having filled out my landing card digitally before taking off, I show my QR code to the officer, skip a line of a dozen or so foreigners frantically filling forms on thighs with their little blue pens, and I enter China barely breaking stride. My luggage is among the first to come. I’m in China, I say to myself a few times. And it’s news enough to me, to be in China, that it gives me a feeling. Not long after, I’ve skated the floor of the outer terminal, bought convenience-store water on Alipay, even found the e-hailing space and booked my first private car. There are people all around me, in overcoats, holding phones, rolling luggage everywhere, but I’m calmly, efficiently, on the escalator down into the garage. The cab arrives. My driver, Lu, a woman, is cute.
Ni-hao, I say, swinging in, enjoying the silky drape of these green fatigues on my legs.
She gives me a shy ni-hao back.
I’m nervous I’ve just murdered her two-syllable word. Other than that, the warm feeling of victory roars from my forehead down into my toes.
I look at my watch. Saturday morning, almost one a.m. What would be open in a town like this?
I look in my phone, a text. I smile
The perfumiers of the world capture anything these days—memories, fragments, shards of decades past, photographs. I want to bottle this feeling as if it were the final trace of the eighteenth century, or some mountain elixir that prolongs human life. What if this is the last time I feel excitement for a journey? It’s become a rare scent. Eighty countries in the bag. Lately, the whole experience of the hotel, the taxi, the airport, the flight, of every other human traveler, has become one blistering sea of resentment; every global concourse, each people sucked into their phone, all the same. We are stripping all difference from the biosphere; one needs to venture in ever-deeper realms.
I was told I should write a book and call it The Eros of Displacement—philosophical enough for a Salon tour, and still, about the latent arousal one feels when adrift in foreign climes. The allure of the unknown. I’d talk about how that woman at the airport is not more attractive than any woman of the same age in your local cafeteria, that she’s merely imbued with your eroticism displaced—and when you make love to her it has almost nothing to do with her; you’re fucking the very spirit of adventure her continent instills in you, how her body itself is the threshold you’ll necessarily discard when your itchy feet take you onward. I watch the dark night pass through the window. Better suited to talk on The Displacement of Eros, I think, of all of the thrusting, creative force I might have put into building back home but instead scattered around the world like an angry wind.
A sweet and inexpensive odour keeps wafting through the back of the taxi. It grows each time we careen one of these long, gliding curves. Lu?
I look out at the black city that envelops me, its windows twinkling all about like stars. I was once asked, if you were in a foreign town where nobody knew you, and there were no consequences, what would you do—and who would you be, sexually? The man at night and his secret libido. Driven by lust or love. Travel itself is a sexual thing, to cast your eyes in wonder of the earth’s inner folds, the urge to penetrate ever deeper. In intimacy there is danger, and I remember how the feeling of stepping off a long flight alone is the exact same feeling as when you take a girl’s hand and walk away from the friend-group and into the dark. Maybe all carnal experience is the same, and an encounter is only ever real when the person you were before it gets killed. I came onto that question—who would you be, sexually—around the time I helped a traveler out of a Nicaraguan jail. He’d been arrested in his hotel on Friday night and couldn’t get a lawyer until Monday, and slept the weekend beneath the bottom rung of a triple bunkbed, sharing the floor with vermin and spit. He faced consequences for something he swore he should have gotten away with, that he was tricked, innocent, he said. I’ll never forget the streets of Granada at two a.m. when the bars close, those unwalked, crumbling alleys, the courtyards built from piedra cantera, painted yellow, and liquefying in the creep of the decades; nor will I forget the urchins who inhabited the alleyways, who’d sell cigarettes and more to anyone who took the wrong exit from the salsa joint and tripped on an upturned stone. He was from Poland, that guy. Innocent. That’s nature in the tropics: thieves meet and deal cards in the humid death of night.
But on these outskirts the skyscrapers in their curtain wall glass loom large, and the highways, coated in stone mastic asphalt, are frictionless, smooth—the engine of this car makes no noise—and I look out on the city below.
Lady Shanghai, I hold my gaze through the window, grant me the latitude to act outside of my expectations and inherited morals; I need to find myself in the dark, in the viscera, in the Yangtze delta mud. Lady Shanghai, scrap that, it’s an old and tired mantra: I spin my wheels the more I chant it. I’ve lived in your bowels, I’ve attuned to the pentatonic song of their digestion so break me down further, perhaps that’s what I’m saying, take me instead onto a cloud, grant me peace at last or a further unknowing. I have been growing dead before my time; I have grown fat from compromise, my strength eviscerated in a swamp of rotating and never-ending presents; stories that melt in the hand as quick as they’re formed. I need distance—to turn towards something great again: beauty, life, energy, overwhelm, music, death, ecstasy, the call of a siren, the call not of the earth but of the sky; of the other side of a river that, for so long, I haven’t seen. I am determined to know life again for myself, on my own terms, to LIVE again, to live a real life, to find myself again, perhaps in your arms, no longer estranged from them, that you may show me how this soul needs to live.
Lady Shanghai, I continue, help me with this crazy ambition, help me hone any artistry I might have in me before these days are numbered, help me to write, damn it, to do justice to these thoughts, to turn my guts and this see-through career inside out, to leave a message in a bottle, perhaps, for when I’m gone, a quiet one, an incendiary one, a contribution, a final worn, unraveled thread between the evaporated world and whatever nightmare comes next. Turn me now into the next incarnations of myself. Put your own magic bluster, your neon fairy dust all upon me, and multiply these efforts by a thousand. Either that, or sever me from this affliction and dispatch this longing into the Yangtze, where like a trunk in murky water it sinks to the very bottom, a trunk that sinks to the very bottom, unremembered and unsought such that, in the way of everything sunk and ancient, as with a billion other undead dreams, people will feel them when they see the ocean though they don’t know why.
Lady Shanghai—is anyone listening behind these appearances, or is it all just glass and mud?—maybe it’s time to stop that tired old conversation, to let go of great desire and this flag I think of planting on your emerald roof. Maybe it’s time to take leave of those old heroes and images, to take flight into the future; to tell, perhaps, a simpler story, about love and human smallness; about anxiety; about the futility of this protection racket I’m still, after all these years, involved with.
I talk to the city a little longer, and on speaking these prayers in the back of the cab, I can’t help but smile again for feeling, in my breast, something of a mother’s love. Strange. I came here for a cleanse, to be flushed through with river water, to court someone larger than myself; to catch up with my age and my solitude. I expected to arrive with angst and passion; I’m getting belonging and home. Why ever would I feel like home? If only I could go further into the great wild expanse, I sense, more uncertain and ever more alone, I would have a chance at returning to where I’d always come.
It’s been a long day.
The DiDi arrives at 195 Yueyang Road, and I pick out my handluggage and look at the gate. It’s now a quarter to two in the morning. That sweet smell heightens as I exit the car, and I place my hand on my behind and it sticks. Chocolate ice-cream over the back seat of the taxi, and now on my brushed cotton fatigues. They were freshly-ironed, too, and Lu, now beside me in the cold, lonely street, gasps in apologies and horror.
* * *
I leave the road and walk past the barrier and the security guard, who is asleep in his hut, and I go up the street towards my apartment. The moon is out, as are several stars, and there are trees, vertiginous, like redwoods all around. I can even hear the belch of the humid cold wafting in from the sea, still embracing.
The outer door, of iron, I easily enter. Inside, I rub, or tap a keycode onto a flat black surface, and after a few trials and errors, get inside. I look around the apartment, flick the light between daylight and tungsten, then look to find a bedlamp for some atmospheric darkness, and I flop down on the bed. Silence. The AC is above me, but I search for a radiator and, quick as I can, jump to open its taps to full.
I now lay on the bed, upside down, looking up, seeing nothing but white plaster. There is no ceiling fan whirring around, no blades of a copter, no jungle on fire, no golden hour light streaming in through the shutters. There is no window that won’t close, and no cigarette to hang from my lips as I hang over and into the street. There is no comforting madness of cars honking below, of women’s and men’s voices outside on the city road in the splashing rain. Neither are there neon signs, not in purple nor in green, nor the sort of shadows only headlights make play across the room. There is no quarter-bottle of vodka on the table, no courtesy rice-wine, left by staff or by the last suicidal guest of the flophouse. There is no warm air, not even a current, in which I might stand to perform catas in my briefs. There is not a mirror I could break. No blooded sheets, no PTSD, no vertigo—I am after all on the ground floor—no grief, and there are no sounds of distant sirens.
There is no beer street below, no hostess at my beck nor my call. I think of the night I called Elena—that mirage, that deity of a woman—I called her from Saigon, then I went and wandered the neon quarters around the hotel in a midnight daze, in the heated mundane, and took a soapy massage at the time I was practicing tantra, purely in a battle of wills. I mean… as she misled the world about the size of her chest, I said nothing to put her straight about my definition of happy. ‘Where nobody knew you’, I laugh, ‘and there were no consequences’. I check outside the curtains and see an empty courtyard. There is no call to prayer.
I then think of North Africa, how I arrive exhausted and sweaty from the boat, unknowing and young, on the first eve of Ramadan, and how everyone was prickly and hot at the bus station, how out of the tense humid air you thought an explosion were about to go off, and how I was served, by way of collective defusal, free bean soup, its only cost the waiter’s thumb pressed in the broth as he dumped it onto my table. I remember the fear in Chefchaouen when the boys in the plaza called to me, then followed me, then placed their hands all over my shoulders and back as I started to canter, and then invited me for a smoke… how we wandered into the cliffs at night and how they shared and sung their postgraduate curricula and their yearning to find appropriate work. I remember taking the boat there from southern Spain, thinking ‘I may as well hang up my dick in Morocco’ yet I arose each morning hard, then the first night lost in the medina at Fes, a hand appears out of the crowd and clasps onto mine, and holds, as we walk in the crowd, her a secret step behind me never, through the veil, to see face-to-face, only stolenly, through a side-glance, hands firmly clasped in the throng of people walking, becoming moist. When we finally beheld each other she told me she was eighteen, she had large and soft lips and enormous dark eyes. How electricity shot to the top of my head and into every bodily extremity, as we marched, hands endlessly clammy and clasped, amidst the unending throng of people bundling through the medieval maze. The more it’s held back, the deeper the fire, I realised; the passion of agency, slowly fenced in and corralled and reduced to just one pointed outcome. Her scarf fell away from the crown of her head, and soon wrapped around her neck as a shawl. Quick-thinking, I took her on the ferriss wheel where, each turn as the wheel hit midnight, our lips could touch for a few frozen seconds before one o’clock, the only pocket of time in this spiral, within this maze, where not a single uncle or brother from the Western Sahara to Papua might see us. Soon, the wheel returned us to dawn and to dusk, the foot of the circle and, as quick as she came, she disappeared into the crowd.
I’m in Shanghai, of course, for the noir. I came for the jazz-halls and the rickshaws and the gangsters in their pin-striped suits and pencil moustaches; I came to be drugged and thrown on a boat, this washed-out soul up for barter. Anything for a story, anything for aliveness, for a third shot at life. I came here for Rita Hayworth: a gun and a hall of mirrors. I guess all those stories were written long-ago now. And the river that purges and flushes away the silt and turf of our dreams, that inky expanse ever closer, is not the same as it was before.
I collect the blankets from the other two beds in the apartment and lay them on my chosen mattress, tripling up. I changed my stained fatigues for thermals; I put on a heattech beanie. Instead of smiling wickedly, instead of running my fingertips beneath my waistband and thinking of the stewardesses in their peach and violet and in their darting shyness, my body emitting sparks of fire in anticipation of future adventures, I see a plane; I see nothing and no-one clearly except clearness itself. I thus lay there in the clear, totally clear, listening for that familiar effort of the water, its gurgles and sputters that press through the pipe to heat up the room. A second of promise. Then another. Finally, the effort withers and amounts to nothing, resting, only quiet. And cold. I would sleep the whole night through without a single visitation. Just void. Not even a fantasy, or even a dream. Just a suprise: the world of travel had appeared not how I’d imagined. It didn’t happen that night, but it would happen soon, on other nights, that I’d wake from fear in the early morning, that I’d awake in blue, heart-stopping panic that, for being here, I was mentally disturbed, I was a saboteur, a red flag, a disaster story, throwing a whole life away when I was just on the cusp of being somebody. But not yet. This was the deepest sleep I remember in years. A reset sleep. In which all the memories, all the eros, all the lips and the curves and the fingers were no more than distant potentiality. What was down here in this cold, dry, humid sleep was nothing. Just a deep, dreamless sleep.
Desire | Guild | Impermanence