bangers and dash

On the flight from Sydney to Bangkok, I read Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. On the plane, this loose set of essays about California – as it is, as it was, and as it has been dreamed – seemed entirely appropriate reading. I followed Didion with pleasure as she scrutinised the contradictions and misrecognitions in the mythology of California via her own experiences and family history. Taking the great western expansion as a beginning, Didion unsettles the Californian fables of independence and community, examining defence spending and employment, the deceptive rhetoric of water, landscape painting, the mental health system with her habitual cool intelligence. In the controlled limbo of the aircraft, I was able to contemplate my own departure from Sydney, a city with more than its fair share of myths and misrecognitions. Neither here nor there, stripped of any specificity, planes and trains (less frequently buses) have always been to me spaces wide open to such contemplation and so I am generally quite unflummoxed by solo transit.

Touching down in Bangkok, though, – here – left me in a state of disorientation, suspended somewhere between mild panic and delirium, as intense as any such state I can recall. I can find some reasons for this fervour: the jolt of leaving Sydney – where I was from – for an as yet indeterminate period, the heat and humidity, the very newness of the place, mild jet-lag, the adjustment to anti-malaria medication. Nonetheless, the shock of the new, necessary, desired, invited as it is, still occurred to me as a shock. It’s not that hot, is it? It’s not that new? I came to Bangkok under very different circumstances with my entire family twelve years ago. It seems that everyone I know has been to Bangkok at some juncture. It’s only a nine-hour flight from Sydney, for crying out loud. And Thai restaurants are so ubiquitous in the inner-city as to eliminate any culture shock, aren’t they? It would seem not as I found myself entirely defamiliarised and managed, in the course of a single morning, to get lost, to get driven down a seedy alley by a tuk-tuk driver on an unsolicited mission to show me the best silk in Bangkok and then get dropped I don’t know where, to extract myself from the aforesaid, to forget how to say thank you in Thai, to meet two middle-aged New York women fruitlessly looking for Chinatown, to avoid collision with all manner of vehicles, and again to get lost. I climbed to the top of the Temple of the Golden Mount, Wat Saket, in order to take in the promised panorama of the city, an attempt, I think, to physically orient myself in Bangkok. I climbed down and wandered around, looking for landmarks, trying to avoid touching monks, trying to embody the spirit of flânerie in the hot, odiferous sois, far from Benjamin and Baudelaire’s grands boulevards. I had no hat and wondered what would happen if I fainted in the heat.

Somehow, the neighbourhood in which my guesthouse is located suddenly surrounded me and I took myself into a shaded café to drink cold sweet coffee with ice and watch the traffic. Once I had calmed a little, I thought I would turn back to Didion in the hope that her froideur would cool me further.

I’m changing my readings processes. For years I have been reading either under some pressure or with a measure of guilt, reading against the clock to extract some sense for research purposes, or furtively for late-night pleasure, aware that there are classes to be prepared and abstracts, articles, papers to be written. I’m determined to read more slowly and more carefully, without a clear object in mind. I wanted to look more closely at Didion’s economical and exact sentences, at her interweaving of her own experiences with trends and events in Californian history, at the meticulous structure of her prose. Actually, I wanted to figure out how to write like Joan Didion, but this is a project which will take more than one morning in Bangkok. There is also a pragmatic element to this re-reading. I left Sydney with too many books and I must jettison Where I Was From to lighten my pack and make space for another volume down the track.

I found myself, however, barely able to focus on the page. Didion’s prose is ordered and regulated; it is concerned with the strangeness of the very familiar. She conveys, coolly, elegantly, her bewilderment in the face of received wisdom. I cannot imagine Joan Didion as anything but cool and elegant. It is inconceivable to me that she should be flustered, or lost, or without the nous to find a cool, air-conditioned bar in which to order a drink, organise her notes and proceed from thence to dine with a literate member of the diplomatic corps. In other words, the Didion of Where I Was From and of my imagination is entirely incongruous to my brief experience of Bangkok. Just as there are few gimmicky metaphors, flashing lights, or tacky figures in Didion’s writing, it is hard to find cool, clear spaces for reflection amidst the frantic movement of Bangkok in April. I had to abandon her and instead started reading Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a book that is far more suited to Bangkok in that it is digressive, wonderfully gaudy, delivered by a hapless young female narrator, and shamelessly, hilariously hybrid in both its content and allusions. Tomorrow, though, I take the bus to the Thai-Cambodian border from whence I will make my way somehow to Siem Reap. My sources tell me that the only reason to pack any warmth for travel in SE Asia at this time of year is to withstand airconditioning in buses. I think I’ll carry Didion with me for one more stage and see if the highly regulated environment of the bus allows me to follow and admire her with a little more ease.