Lovely smog here in Beijing, and a lovely odor, that mix of sweat, heat, garbage, and fried food. In the haze of jet lag and exhaustion the memory of my initiatory foray into the city yields little more than the odor of it. It’s not an unfamiliar smell, peculiar to the air of development. In my experience it is exactly this stale odor that accompanies the clash of construction and decay. Everywhere there are big buildings going up, the twenty-story kind, mostly apartments where I am, and old buildings going down to make room for the new ones and the new international face of the Chinese capital. Many of the construction and destruction workers come from the country and, according to Adam, work until the project is done, at which time they receive a paycheck. They are young and old, some conspicuously skinny, others more robust, all the ones I’ve seen with a certain look that differs from the look of passersby, who are of all types, their range equally dichotic. Skirts and suits and the fashionable mixed among the indigent walking barefoot and riding rusted bicycles from some time more coincident with the idylls of 1950s America.
These depictions are easy and incomplete, as first impressions always are, and so I look forward to spending a week and a half here with a guide as experienced in the language and the culture as Adam. I’m spending today inside to recover from travel and the whir of multiple time zones. I stayed up all day yesterday to shock my body into Beijing time, but my body struck back by sleeping until one o’clock. When I woke up I had the strange sensation that my limbs were attached only tenuously, and that any quick movement might sever their association with my body. So I lay for some time, vaguely afraid of that prospect, drifting in and out of sleep, until my consciousness coalesced and consistent feeling returned to my body. I’ll spend the remainder of the day convalescing, I suspect, and catching up with emails and the business of maintaining the contiguity of past and present to make it all fit under the tiny word “life.”
In the meantime, a shout-out to the Risk Management department of the Credit Union, which provided me upon my departure with a bag of goodies, including the expired instant oatmeal and the unexpirable soup powder that I just had for lunch.
2006.08.08
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The world is too much with us --William Wordsworth
3 comments:
So what happened to England? I mean, doesn't the Saab deserve some treatment at least?
It's in the works, m'boy, and can't be hurried. (Waiting for special piece of information from familial art expert.) And with the convenient tool that allows me to adjust the date of the entry, it will also be in place.
oh yeah, I still haven't found that name. I've looked with my most creative google searching logic and can't even remember the name (or locate it, for that matter) of the gallery. All I come up with is the name of the structure (I'm also blanking that at the moment) that houses the gallery along with the symphony. Drat.
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