14 February 2010

The Original London Underground


Why is it that so many British place names sound like parodies of British place names? I imagine that I can put together any combination of roughly old-worldly sounding saxon, old norse, norman french, and middle english words and come up with something inevitably ridiculous but vaguely plausible. south kinswaite. aberswick-upon-casterthorpe.

I suppose they all have long and rich histories which I should not mock (does anyone else encounter disapproving toponymysts in their dreams?), but that is precisely why they are mockable: they are usually composed of various recognizable units that one encounters again and again, each one endowed with specific meaning. They also tend to seem rather obvious once deciphered.

(Not so with American place names, which are too often new or just unimaginative. The practice of assigning numbers to blocks in cities might be effective, but is really rather lackluster. The neighbourhood in which I grew up featured streets named after various native american tribes. Most weren't even indigenous to the area, and the ones who were had been long forced out by my neighbours' ancestors. I suppose these sorts of things happen when you build streets before you have people to live on them.)

But I digress, slightly. Today I journied to the southeast London suburb of Chislehurst (Chisle from the Saxon word Cisel, or gravel, and hurst from the Old English hyrst, or wooded hill), which is indeed a gravelly wooded hill, but perhaps most well known for what is under the hill (beneath the name). It's home to the Chislehurst Caves, which are not caves at all (perhaps the fact that they are misnamed already tells us something about them), but 22 miles of passages created to mine flint and chalk. They're old- the earliest historical evidence for their existence is sometime in the 13th century, though the tour guides at the caves claim that the Druids and Romans had been mining there well beforehand, and that the Saxons were relative latecomers. Indeed, the whole operation is much more about transmitting a kind of creative history of the caves than an actual one. It's not as if the documented history of the caves is dull; on the contrary, they served during WWII as a massive bomb shelter (harboring 15,000 people for 22 months), later as a mushroom farm of epic proportions, and most recently (though sadly no longer) as a music venue hosting the likes of David Bowie. It's just that their version of the history is better, mostly because they've had a hand in making it up, constructing fake Druid altars, ghost stories, bad models of former inhabitants, etc. You can call it cheap and dishonest, or you can see it as their attempt to not simply bow down to what history has given them for raw material. I like that mentality, I think.

What is it with this passionate insistence on fidelity to historical fact, anyway? Yes, yes, I know- it allows us to view Holocaust deniers as terrible people and enemies of truth, which isn't a bad thing. But what happened to this tendency to season history, to spice it up with a few tales here and there that are not expressly factual? This territory has become solely the property of grandparents, and the ocassional tour guide. I want it back.

05 February 2010

Until I forget to remember

Getting up late in the morning and having a cup of coffee
dark and strong would not be a lazy distraction.

It is just my least struggle to endure the time
without you, the indelible you, until my heart forgets to
remember you from my past, my old habits.

Let us possess one world: each has one, and is one.


This was written on the cover of a notebook I did not buy, but only photographed, another example of the haunting and inevitably sad dialect of Asian English that seems so ubiquitous and marketable. The photo I took turned out, appropriately, furtive and blurry. I’d taken a lot of photos that day — we went to the Nougat Museum, a peculiar and haphazard little place that sold candies called “milk cake plateaux” and “heart crisp fresh milk volumes” — and on the way there I was thinking about Louis Malle.

Two summers ago I started watching Malle’s film L’Inde fantôme, a six-hour documentary first released in 1969. The problem with Louis Malle in India was that he was incapable of living in the present. Every beach reminded him of an earlier beach; every street in Calcutta was an echo of Paris. Time had ceased to exist for him, and so when he looked through the eye of his camera there was no boundary between what was happening and what had already happened. The camera was the crux of his alienation: he was a westerner with a camera, and so a westerner twice over. When India gave him too much — too many colors, too much noise, too many eyes and voices — he became mute, and deaf, and blind, and set up his camera as a facsimile of a human being, to watch and hear and speak in his absence.

I am very jealous of Louis Malle, because he trusted his camera so much. I have a little video recorder now, a fantastic device that looks like an iPod and has enough memory to hold at least six hours of Taïwan fantôme (if I ever make it). But still I use it suspiciously, blushingly, and it’s even worse with still cameras. Quite simply, I feel it is impossible for me to both live in and photograph Taiwan. What can I photograph here? National Geographic moments; east/west confrontations that would be cliché if they weren’t so everyday; things that are foreign to me.

What can I not photograph? Everydayness and memory; the coexistence and nonchalance of grandeur and kitsch, plastic and puddles and pineapples; the overwhelming sensation of being here, and its counterpart of not being here. I cannot photograph the fact that I am simultaneously here and in Paris, and in Germany, in America, in my books, on the moon. The camera removes me from my always-already uncertain process of integration, suspends my current negotiations with Asia, and makes me again a Westerner twice over.