My
Shanghai residence has a view out over a little park. When I stay in a hotel, in this metropolis, as I often do,
I’m generally stuck in a tower, looking down on everyone. From forty-eight floors or so, the city
is miniaturized, and fascinating, but dehumanized. 高高在上[1], it isn’t any place you’d have
compunction kicking over or stepping on if you were God. From eight floors up conversely, you
can see the trees move. They’re
real trees. They aren’t things
you’d want to destroy lightly. Their
hues are relevant in contrast. You
can watch the individual leaves pull and turn in unison like a school of fish, or
species of fishes, that the wind choreographs with a thousand strings holding
them upward and backward and forward as it likes.
I had hopes for a swift pass out this morning. My intellectual mooring for this,
weighty: It isn’t rush hour. But now,
indeed, we’re stuck in traffic on the elevated highway, just a few hundred
yards into the airport dash.
Outside there are no leaves to muse on. Rather, countless windows stare down at our little
Volkswagen from every angle, Panopticon-like. What if you could pull the windows of the buildings as the
wind does the leaves into a coordinated sway, so they all arced and danced.
The Detroit trumpet player Marcus Belgrave’s 1974 album
“Gemini II” on the headset. Tutored
by Clifford Brown himself, this his first release as a leader. The tune “Glue Fingers” is more
traditional then the opening number “Space Odyssey.” I presume “glue fingers” particularly this second, slower
take is all about not feeling limber on the valves. The NASA mission flew years before this album and is usually
written with the numerical symbol rather than the Roman numeral. Perhaps Marcus was shooting for the
constellation.
Isolated aches.
Why is the space directly below my right shoulder sore? There is that point where the muscle
connects to its anchoring that is announcing itself, definitively, as
aggravated. It has been pulled or
forced to rest with too much weight atop or in some way do what it didn’t want
to do and it is letting me know that it is mid-ache. I assume it is the bed I slept in last night and the night
before, since I first felt the pain when I rose this morning, turning, enduring,
not satisfied with the pillow. I
blamed this bed. It’s not my bed,
which I’m not so fond of either but it’s a known quantity. I might have lurched left with the bag
over my right shoulder and thrown something returning home from dinner last
night, I suppose. But I don’t
recall any such difficulty and so I assume the culprit is what I’m lying
on.
Did I hug the pillow wrong? Is it just a bit softer than my normal bed so it lets my
mass sag and press in a manner that would otherwise be upheld? Perhaps I was fending off a wolf in
some steep wooded incline in my dreams and I’d lashed out. Patrick Leigh Fermor is talking of
antlers and wolves and men who had their feet sniffed by wolves in the hills of
Transylvania. My copy of “Between
the Water and the Woods” sits in the bathroom for micro-reads. Could be I picked up on this thread and
don’t recall. But my dreams are
rarely so action packed, and more often just fascinating combinations of times
and places set to some banal tension like being late. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Woods_and_the_Water
One accident can really slow the traffic down. We just passed a fender bender and
we’re like salmon released in a stream.
Lovely now. The gills are
aerated. The sense of hope
returns. You may just make that
plane after all Mister. The driver’s back in his element, as well. Then two kilometers up, a merge of
highways, rocks again in our stream and we must slow down again. Moods shift with the speed, fretting,
considering other lanes, other trout. Then, moving again and its over. We’re surging, until, I notice a sockeye Volkswagen overtake
us and I want my driver to be more aggressive.
Hope soars with the speed until someone pulls the aeration
out of the tank. Gils now suddenly
ineffective once again and we all must decelerate to a crawl, waiting. Dread returns. Could it be another accident? It is another asinine fender bender
treated like a homicide scene wherein whatever bump has transpired necessitates that neither car shall move at all and both parties must wait for the police to arrive. Pull over to the side and let the other
fish pass.
Accelerating slowly again, leaving behind this man in the
road on his phone. We’re close
now. Close enough to hope but far
enough away to know that it isn’t over till the lady smiles and hands me my
ticket. I don’t know why I insist
on cutting it this way. I’ve a
different routine in Beijing. A
different sense of how late is too late.
Something about this city and how it works, has me behaving this way
time after time.
The exit is up ahead.
Time to get off the main highway and circle into the airport. Time to go back up north for a little
while before returning back down here later this week. Dizzy. Apparently it is raining in Beijing, as
well. “Just drop me off at number four, over there.”
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