Down
with something. Started out
yesterday morning. The runs all day.
Then, towards the night, whether as a result this inability to hold
things, or as a cold grew in ascendance I got weaker and weaker. Crashed out early. Slept late. More than anything I notice how long it’s been since I’ve
been sick. Two hundred and forty
one days running I don’t think I’ve had to write about being under the weather
once, when it wasn’t self imposed.
Sickness notwithstanding I needed to do a shop this
morning. The bright sun and
ferocious fresh-off-the-Gobi-desert wind were so at odds with the murky
weakness I felt inside. Not sure
why, but I reached for the gelatinous Boards of Canada album, “Geogaddi” which
has the commentator saying things like “When lava flows underwater it behaves
differently.” It and the sun and
wind and my haze gave the morning a strange, “high-dynamic-range” 1950s
postcard look to my suburban Beijing, like it was a day of no importance or the
last day of the world.
Tossed fitfully last night. But this was not merely a function of being under the
weather. I had just finished reading
the second ten pages of “1984” to my older daughter last night before I went to
bed. This has long been
planned. I couldn’t wait to finish
“A Brave New World” so we could begin.
And whereas Huxley’s vision of manipulated, happy passivity, may
ultimately be a more realistic pathway for long term, post modern manipulation,
or at least seem a more likely American cautionary tale, Orwell writes so well
and, written of course in 1948 has more too say about the nightmares that were
to immediately transpire in China or were already underway in Europe.
I think I may have had half a dozen toss and turns, emerging
from a “Two Minute Hate” session here, or looking around defensively as I wrote
in a journal entry there. Guilty
of 执法犯法[1] writing down your thoughts freely is a
crime! My daughter is
wonderfully curious. “Why does he
hate the girl?” “How many
countries are there in this world?” “Can’t you just leave?” She’s familiar with “Animal Farm” which
we read together a few years back.
So instead of Snowball, we have Emanuel Goldstein as the Trotsky fill-in,
etc.. It is already such a bleak
and inescapable life sentence, twenty pages in I wasn’t prepared for how
effectively it would lock me in, during my dreams, as well.
Back now from my morning shop. It can’t be “1984” when you have bags and bags of groceries
to unload. Our local market has
built out the back and introduced a new, brightly lit meat section. There are a few more pre-cut selections
of meat and yet I don’t think the sourcing, preparation or ultimately the
quality of what it is you buy has changed in any way. It just looks brighter and cleaner. My wife, accordingly now thinks its OK
to buy meat there. How comparatively fortunate we are to
have such fretful concerns like where to buy meat and cheese, and how to get
over the common cold, as the vexing matters of the day.
Listening to our man Clifford Jordan the other day I came
across dozens of tracks I knew as recorded under Kenny Dorham’s name. An archetype for all that’s underrated,
he’s blowing his trumpet now, filling up this study, staring down my cold with
his attack. This is a 1957 set I
hadn’t heard before called “Round About Midnight At the Café” and now, we’ve
got “Autumn in New York” on. It is
such a beautiful, moody feeling that casts you somehow immediately back into
the middle of the Manhattan in your memories.
Do you remember the scene in “Casablanca” where Bogie as
Rick is talking with the Nazi officer, Major Strasser about whether Rick can
imagine the Nazi’s in Paris, or London or . . .
Major Strasser: “How about New York?”
Rick: “Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I
wouldn’t advise you to try to invade. “
What New Yorker can watch that moment and not feel a rush? “Yeah.
You got that right. Like he said!” It “feels” like New York City is a
place that could never have been tamed by the Nazis or by soma or by Big Brother.
The swirling, expressive, greedy home to anyone is always to remain
unbowed. But there were places you
wouldn’t have advised people to invade in 1930s’ Shanghai either, and they did,
and, in time, it was all over.
I fear we need new; plausible, dystopian metaphors to
consider and have unsettle us when we sleep so we’re cognizant when were awake,
and buying groceries on a nondescript windy day. For now I’m content to be anachronistically shaken in the
masterful hands of Mr. Blair, from Bihar.
No comments:
Post a Comment