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21.05.12
So. Lots of stuff happened. Partly I was too lazy to boot up the slow laptop (I still love you) and post. Partly I went away for two weeks (Madrid, work conference and being a tourist, London, visitng my sister) and still haven't sorted out everything from that. Work things happened, and yeah... stuff. So here's a random and uncurated selection of things from the past three months or more.
One of the magic things about travelling is returning to your own city and still being in “tourist mode”, more aware, more open, noticing the names of the businesses you pass every day and the items in the window. Feeling the sweet cleaness and sea-moisture of Vancouver air. The dense, conifer quietness of the night. Finding in the grocer’s offerings the tastes of a city. The personality of the buses. The way people dress, the knotting of a scarf, the balance of practicality and fashion. The character that makes someone a Madrilenos, a Londoner, a Vancouverite. The frame of mind in which you are aware that in a very small space of time, your life, your outlook, and a little bit of who you are has changed forever.
We were in the “Enlightenment Room” of the British Museum, a long, high sweep of books and objects reflecting a curiosity cabinet worthy of a King (George II, in this case). Leather-bound tomes nestled with antiquarian objects and natural history specimens. The Rosetta Stone (a copy) lay in its original display cradle, open to the fingers of inquisitive visitors. Monumental urns set an appropriately neoclassical symmetry to the grandioise space.
Toward’s the middle lay a plaque: “The King’s Library” it proclaimed, which was odd, because we had come across an identical name elsewhere. Sure enough, underneath it read: “The original library was moved to the British Museum, the books you see here are on loan from the Parlimentary Library.” Next to the natural history specimens was another plaque saying “The natural history collections became the Natural History Museum.”
The one museum became several, and now those offshoot institutions (now centuries old) are so large and so cognitively incomprehensible as to be ready to spawn yet again. The Natural History Museum is at least three museums put together. This spirit, I think, is true for all of London. The original idea of the city grows and grows until it reaches a point when it no longer has any business being a single city, but it can’t just pick up and start another city. So the city grows on top of itself, and underneath itself, and reinvents itself. The first time I visited, it was as a home base between two other trips, a couple days in the city, then a completely new environment, then back again, and so the city seemed fragmented; disconnected experiences between tube stops. This time I stayed in one place for a week, and the city still seems fragmented. Landmarks of centuries of history, worlds of cultures, incredible wealth and beauty and suffering, all packed together shoulder to shoulder over a greater span of space and time than so provincial a mind can fathom as a whole.
London photos
Madrid photos
I received eleven consecutive emails of pictures of a recent family get-together celebrating, what else?, a wedding. Only thing: not my family. Same name, obviously somewhere in SE Asia (nowhere else have plastic chairs indoors been such a staple) and there’s always the possibility of a distant relation. But there was Uncle Whatshisname, and their kid is really growing fast, and wow she’s looking more like her mother every day. You can swap the sets and actors, but it’s all the same drama.
It was supposed to have worked, this new improved version; gravity-fed, capillary regulator, directional containment apparatus, overflow tray. It passed the test run. And yet, this self-watering system seemed not to ever exceed the sum of its parts; a repurposed milk carton, string, plastic bag, and part of a plastic tub. When I got back from a week away, the water reservoir was still full and the needy plant for which this Rube Golberg machine was designed was brown and crispy, save for half of one leaf. Most people, normal people, would have chucked the thing and cut their losses. I watered it and set it aside to see what would happen.
Not much did. The half-leaf stayed green, the brown bit stayed brown. When people came over, I hid the thing to avoid awkward questioning. This went on for three months. Then, a week ago or so, a new shoot, brown like most of the plant, emerged. From it, a green leaf unrolled itself, like one of those marine worms around deep-sea vents. The new leaf is dark, glossy green, variegated with a chevron of lighter green, and maroon on the reverse; tender, tropical, a marvel of adaptation to adverse conditions, still unfurling itself, half-leaf, half-funnel, the shape, it seems, of forgiveness.
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©d.tan  |
