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peakwealth · 7 years

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FIVE YEARS ON

An Anniversary (2012-2017)

Hazy night in Hong Kong, Kowloon side (March 2006)

English is not my native tongue and it shows on every page I write. The older I get the less certain I am that my brain can actually operate in English. I get my tenses wrong. There are gallicisms and other unwitting perversions borrowed from other languages. I have never mastered the proper order of things in an English sentence (see!), nor have I figured out how to balance that sentence so that it lands softly on its hind legs. Punctuation is haphazard. The musicality of the language eludes me. Example: Mary had a little lamb and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go. I could never ever write a sentence one-fiftieth as eloquent as that - in any language for that matter. I lack the poetic instinct for no other reason that I am a natural skeptic, not a poet. But I try. And I keep making corrections as I reread material and ask myself how I could get it so wrong. How come I did not spot a repetition, a typo, une maladresse, etc...

I think I'm learning. This blog has helped me to do that, though I have no illusions about ever getting it right. It ain't literature, I’m not Nabokov.

***

When I decided to start a blog five years ago, in January 2012, I called it 'Sniffaround' because that is basically what I do when I go walkabout. If you see a canine analogy there, you're right. While 'Sniffaround' certainly isn't a proper online record or 'log' in any sense of the word (certainly not the impulsive sort of thing that social media like Tumblr are intended for), it vaguely tracks my movements. And it is true that travel still triggers my curiosity. Once I'm on the go, I start noticing things. As for the word blog, I'm no more comfortable with this ugly neologism today than I was five years ago. What can I do? I'm from another century.

***

Five years is not a long time. Many things change but not so much as to render them truly passé or belonging to a bygone era. On the other hand, the wheels of history do grind perceptibly in the course of five years, especially if those five years happen to be as historic as these: the undoing of Western democracies, the continued rise of violent jihadism, Donald Trump's election, looming environmental collapse and a wider sense of gathering chaos.

It leaves me more than a little apprehensive about the next five years.

***

Chinese tourists (Beijing, September 2016)

Not all of the blog posts, 257 in total, deal with such weighty subjects. A few were written at the spur of the moment, but most took a long time to concoct, sometimes months, sitting in a corner of my desktop, evolving, mutating, waiting for clarity to rise from the heap of ideas. Others just popped into my head and then lingered there, unfinished. (I know one should beware of sudden ideas but I am one of those people who still get up in the middle of the night to write down a thought that somehow seems too valuable to ignore. Ha!)

The outcome has been an unpredictable mix of subjects: from noisy tractors in China or the decline of public transport in Malaysia, to the price paid to Colombian coffee farmers or 'the demographic elephant in the room' (a recurring theme). I wrote about the Inquisition, about the culpable proliferation of junk food around the world, about the forgotten tragedies of European wars ("local boys plucked from their family farms, dressed up in silly uniforms and shipped to their cheap, irrelevant deaths") and sometimes I just wrote rambling pieces about the lack of hot water in Ethiopian hotels or the idiosyncracies of in-flight video maps. In the last two or three years I have inevitably become more concerned with serious matters as the global balance of power shifts away from the old 'West' and things start to look shaky for ‘us’.

After a visit to San Francisco in the spring of 2012, I touched on the cult of Diesel jeans which, when you look at it now, accurately prefigured the rise of populism and the political gangsterism that has brought us the likes of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Diesel marketing celebrated the idea of "stupid" as embodied in the slogan ‘SMART MAY HAVE THE BRAINS BUT STUPID HAS THE BALLS’. I thought it was eye-opening. Suddenly soccer hooliganism and neo-fascism no longer looked so hard to understand. But I hoped it was just a blip of the Zeitgeist and that it would go away.

Not so. Stupid, the diffuse pushback against reason, civility and tolerance has gained a lot of political traction since then. With Donald Trump in the White House, the pushback is no longer diffuse. Trump is its very incarnation.

***

The single most frequent subject has been China with some 25 posts if I include Hong Kong, which perhaps I shouldn't. Some of these posts were quite substantial. Clearly I could not let go of so fascinating a subject, perhaps because I've been a visitor to the PRC since the beginning of the eighties and have thus witnessed China's unimaginable transformation. Not that I ever developed a great affinity for China, hardly surprising since I do not speak the language. As for Hong Kong, which has changed so very little by comparison, I immediately took to it and still think of it as the world's greatest city. I shall return soon as the territory marks its 20th year under increasingly heavy-handed Chinese sovereignty.

Ageing Japan (Central Tokyo, September 2016)

If I have not gone sniffing around Japan as much, or written about it, it is mostly because of cost. For too long it was a frightfully expensive place. But after inflation flatlined for two decades, the relative cost went down and I returned. Today's Japan's is an eerily static society, a nation-state approaching retirement. It is the first major country to settle into civilized decline.

Japan's post-war transformation had already peaked by the time I first got there, thirty-five years ago. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Tokyo today is not terribly different from what it was then. Although it faces almost insurmountable challenges of population collapse and eventual bankruptcy, Japan has shown remarkable wisdom and restraint in managing its decline (at least so far). It remains quirky, non-violent, noticeably more egalitarian than other rich countries; the people lead healthier, longer lives than anywhere else. And I like the food.

***

A few topics were not the fruit of travel but of sedentary summers in Montréal, none more so than my battle with the magnum opus of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, 'A Secular Age', which kept me intermittently busy for a long time until I gave up, though not until I had vented my displeasure at so much 'professorial incontinence' in July 2014.

I didn't stop there. The widespread renaissance of divine sentiment, obscurantism and religious militancy kept me on my toes to the extent that I unburdened myself in a six-parter called 'In Bad Faith' which I started more than a year later, after a great deal of reading. I then illustrated it with religious street music recorded during Semana Santa in Málaga, a musical ritual so dark and soaked in centuries of genocidal conflict and religious madness it hardly bears thinking about.

***

Writing is, of necessity, a solitary, reclusive activity. Readership has never been a concern of mine. I have no idea if anyone reads or listens to what I post, except for the odd friend who will give some feedback in person. It does not matter. Although blogs are public by nature, mine serves primarily as a tool for extracting clarity from the avalanche of ideas and confusion that surrounds me (just as it surrounds most other people). In my case, it has become a ritual of intellectual hygiene, however modest.

My friend George often tells me to add more pictures, believing they would attract readers (or somehow mitigate the dullness of the writing?). The thing is that I'm not an intuitive photographer. Still I do use my own pictures (with one or two exceptions) and give them some thought. I tried my hand at three photographic explorations or essays: along the militarized Green Line that divides the Greek and Turkish sides of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus; the aesthetic magnificence and architectural balance of a Chinese mansion in Songkhla, in the deep south of Thailand; and, recently, the startling reconstruction of the imperial city of Datong, in the north of China. All three were planned and gave me great pleasure.

***

Finally, there is the audio. How I got into sound is a long story, probably going back to childhood when my father gave me a toy tape recorder. It was a plastic box from Japan with a beige lid and a single lever, but it came with a schematic notice, printed on yellow paper, explaining the theory of magnetic recording. I disassembled the machine and was hooked.

Before the advent of digital recorders with built-in microphones, I used to travel with a set of microphones, cables, spare batteries and a lovely cassette deck (repeatedly stolen), taping all over the world. The blog has featured thirty-five audio posts so far. Some were just personal musings, walking around Paris or travelling by AMTRAK train across the USA. Others stood out for the sheer beauty of the sound: Bosphorus ferries blowing their horns on a fogbound morning in Istanbul; trains passing in the night in Assam, Northern India; the official Thai time signal at 8 AM; polyphonic singing in the Georgian capital Tiblisi or soppy ranchero music in deepest Paraguay.

A few times I tried more ambitious recording projects, like audio landscapes of Tokyo or the parades of Easter Week in Málaga. I also used my own archives to check the acoustic evolution of Milano Centrale railway station over a quarter century. I realize that hardly anyone ever listens to these evocative things, certainly not with the adequate playback gear for which they were intended. I keep a vast archive of unused material gathering dust under my bed in Montréal. More may be coming!

Derek Vertongen

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