(Long-time visitors here will no doubt notice the, um, un-Fridayness of this week’s “whiskey river Friday” post. Chalk it up to the vagaries of life, and all that implies.)
[Video: from 2016, aerial views of night traffic in Los Angeles, on what was apparently the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving Day in the US. Most such “city at night” videos anymore are brief; they’re filmed by drones, and lean heavily on time-lapse and stop-motion effects rather than just showing the movement of lights in real time. They rattle my nerves — hence, this. (P.S. I had to turning the sound off; the video has a very distracting voiceover, which may or may not be in English. Youtube seemed to think it was Dutch.)]
Over the past week, I read a strange novel, both concrete-solid and ethereal, from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro: The Buried Giant. The story, which includes many elements of common legends, takes place in Dark Ages Britain. King Arthur died some uncertain time ago; there are knights, and a dragon, Angles and Saxons, stone fortresses and entire “villages” dug into hillsides. The point of view shifts among several main characters, including a (now elderly) Sir Gawain and a (likewise elderly) couple making their way from one village to another — all on their own quests. Mostly I just read the story, without highlighting passages much at all, but I did single out this brief excerpt towards the end of the book:
Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history. You are in any case part of an ancient procession…
(Kazuo Ishiguro [source])
I liked the idea of monuments being erected not to the conventional “heroes” of so many stories — generals and politicians and 19th-century industrialists — but to the heroes’ victims. (And I have to say, I regard that as a mark of progress in recent decades.) With age, of course, one eventually wonders what it must “be like” to be remembered or forgotten after one’s passing, when one no longer has any sense of memory of one’s own. People talk casually of wishing to be cremated, their ashes scattered as seems appropriate; then I turn to sites like Ancestry, for example, and see how much — more often, how little — of all those people’s lives remains. It’s almost as if, with or without monuments, with or without cremation, their ashes have been blown into a far country inaccessible to us…
A few weeks ago, The Missus and I were driving down an interstate highway, from Columbus, Ohio, to Louisville, Kentucky. All the mapping tools we’d checked estimated the trip duration to be between three and four hours — in other words, typical of our drives from one overnight destination to another.
But other things “happened.” For one, although we knew there’d be a chance of rain along the way, a truly ferocious version of “rain” developed at just about the halfway point. (It would continue until after we arrived in Louisville.) Then it turned out that the highway’s bridge over the Ohio River, in Cincinnati, was completely closed in both directions, requiring a crossing via another bridge — traffic, accordingly, was completely snarled. And finally, a few moments after our car’s GPS detoured us off the interstate into downtown Cincinnati, the GPS completely died: the screen went blank… at which we also discovered that both of our phones had no Internet connectivity…
Some time later, after we’d finally made it across the Ohio River, the rain was still pouring down. And we got none of the hoped-for relief from crossing into (haha) “rural Kentucky”… because there was soooo much traffic, and it was still raining hard, and it was so freaking dark.
But it was fascinating, nonetheless, to sort of step back intellectually from the whole thing to regard what we could see of the world: in both directions on the interstate, three and sometimes four lanes of solid light (red one way, white the other), winding sinuously around that quite hilly portion of northern Kentucky. It looked, in fact, like the video above: a shining, unending river, rain-streaked and slow, at every interchange and every minute losing a dozen or so photons and picking up a dozen or so new ones. All of us on the highway were inarguably, well, doing something… each of us certainly unique in our preoccupations, our reasons for being there, our level of anxiety or tranquility, our anger at or our happiness with or our utter unawareness of one another… but it was still doing the same thing when viewed from that chilly dispassionate vantage. It was remarkable.
So then here came whiskey river, with this tidbit:
No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.
(Sasha Sagan [source])
I don’t know how sincerely and fully I accept the “cause for celebration.” The closer you zoom into any given human scene, the more likely it becomes that you’ll find something really appalling — and it’s hard, if not impossible, not to zoom down to that level; our minds seem made for observation of the near: the micro rather than the macro. The son of a bitch who just cut me off!, right? not The beautiful point of light that just brought all the other points to a sudden standstill. But yeah: if chance or intention gives you the opportunity to regard things from a distance, it really is remarkable, magical even — and maybe worth celebrating.
Froog says
Glad you’re making progress, after so many delays and setbacks. And I hope you and The Missus are able to enjoy a good Thanksgiving ‘on the road’. Best wishes for the holiday!
John says
Thank you very much — it was a bit uneven, but a two-week break without worrying about our next destination? That made it absolutely worthwhile!
Always good to see you here, as you know. How’ve you been keeping, anyhow? Still (?) teaching? And now that I think about it, where’ve you been keeping?
Froog says
I have been happily unemployed for 18 months now (occasional clouds of panic on the horizon, as my savings dwindle), and still trapped in Lao. I would like to get back to Cambodia early next year, if only to make sure that my few worldly possessions in my little apartment there are still safe. I need to get back to China at some point to lilberate all the money I still have in inaccessible bank accounts there; but it looks like they are determined to maintain the zero-Covid madness indefinitely.
Cross-border travel (and even more so re-entry here) remains difficult or impossible. But at least, after several months of irksome internal travel restrictions, it looks like it’s now becoming possible to move around within the country reasonably freely again. And we have our new railway just opened (a ‘gift’ from our Chinese neighbour, part of the neo-colonialist ‘Belt and Road’ project, which is all about “love me for my Aid”, “take a bunch of infrastructure loans you can’t afford, and we can discuss other ways you can pay us back….”). So, discomfort with the politics of it aside, that should be a nice way to see more of the country. And I am starting to think that my ‘traditional’ (for the last four or five years) Christmas break in the lovely northern Lao town of Luang Prabang might be possible again after all.
Where are you expecting to be for Christmas?
John says
Luang Prabang does indeed look lovely. I shall cross my fingers, touch wood, etc., for your holiday break there (or elsewhere, for that matter!).
You must have friends back in Cambodia — or China — who could help alleviate your anxiety about the (as the saying goes) things you’ve had to leave behind. I’ve always assumed someone with as wide-ranging a geography of residence as yours must have loads of trustworthy contacts!
Right now we’re in Oklahoma, headed tomorrow for the Texas Panhandle (the “square” bit at the north), then on Thursday for New Mexico. Sunday it’s off to Sedona, Arizona (The Missus’s spa treat!). Finally, a week before Christmas and at least to mid-January, we’ll be in Las Vegas — staying with The Stepson. After that, well, who knows? Covid has already taken its toll on so many plans and schedules!
Froog says
‘Christmas in Vegas’ sounds like it should be a movie; but, amazingly, no-one seems to have made it yet. Only a matter of time. Maybe you could work up a treatment while you’re there??
I made fairly few friends in Cambodia, and they’d nearly all left long before Covid came along. Among the younger expat community, there’s a very high churn rate, most folks only out there in the first place for a short-term NGO gig; others, digital nomads or people dabbling with a small restaurant or guesthouse business, generally get bored and move on after four or five years, at most. And since Covid eradicated the tourist business on which they all depended, I think the few that remained have now returned ‘home’.
And China – well, China is ‘purged’. Just about everyone I knew there quit 5 or 10 years ago, leaving in disgust at the corruption and pollution and the rising cost of living, and at how just how nasty and ruthless Xi is (right up there alongside Putin as a real life ‘Dr Evil’). For the last two years, it has been impossible to enter the country; so, most foreigners still there have got cabin fever after so long being trapped, and are desperate to leave.
Anyway, trying to close a bank account by proxy is an elaborate affair (heck, it’s China: trying to close a bank account yourself can take hours; having someone else try to prove their authority to act on your behalf would probably take a whole day), and would require me trusting my passport to courier services for a few weeks – which I’m not prepared to do, as it would be very difficult to replace if it went missing; and it is my only form of ID, so I need it for absolutely everything here.
So, I have no choice but to go back to China in person to do that stuff. But I’m doubtful if that will be possible for at least another year. (Maybe never: they are getting increasingly watchful of ‘subversives’, and I’m sure I’m on a blacklist or two by now.) I am trying to reconcile myself to having lost that money… telling myself that I never really had it anyway, since China money is kind of ‘unreal’, difficult to convert or export… telling myself that I never really expected to have it, fully anticipating that my slippery employers would find excuses to withold all or most of it (they did screw me out of a bunch of benefits, like terminal airfare)…. telling myself that I deserved to lose it, as returning to work in a country whose government I so loathe was a culpable moral compromise. Etc., etc. I think I’m nearly there!
Well, you did ask.
I hope you and the Missus will have a great month or so in the south-west – though I can’t see the desert sunshine being conducive to ‘Christmas spirit’ (but then you’ve been living with the year-round sunshine of Florida for so long, you’re probably used to that?). Luang Prabang at least gets a little nippy on occasion during December and January (my laptop died briefly on last year’s trip because the battery had got so cold overnight! I was wearing ALL my clothes in bed to keep warm!). Hmm, maybe that wintery component of the Christmas image is something we’d be better off without.
Here’s hoping for better things in 2022!