Gormenghast

2 August 2013

Pingtung

It’s now evening, past 9 PM, humid, dark and warm.  In our house there is a terrace off the landing between the kitchen and, on the floor above, the Master Bedroom.  It has two chairs and pots of flowers and looks inward on the small, gated cul-de-sac that is the interior of our small community here in the center of the town.

Sitting out in the dark, the buildings all stretch up above where I’m seated – five stories, I lean against the canvas back of the chair and smoke reflectively, sipping on a tequila. 
The architecture of our complex is Japanese inspired, each household having as small a foot print on the valuable soil as possible but reaching up, floor after floor, providing an interior living space that rivals and even exceeds those of American homes. 

But tonight I stare at the straight exterior lines of the buildings, each structure hosting two or even four families.  They are faced with tile, neutral, tan in color.  In the crepuscule their outlines are foreboding.  The windows are large but, apart from the lower floors where people live the bulk of their waking lives – cooking, eating, watching television, visiting with family – they are dark.  The combination of sharp corner angles, of which there are many on each building, and the darkness against the contrasting lights of the city around us, highlighting the starkness, somehow reminds me of an oriental and contemporary Gormenghast.  There are balustrades around each roof terrace and most are covered, metal supporting some man-made material that is opalescent and translucent but which provides shade against the sun or, on a clear night, the moon.

The notion of Gormenghast comes from the depths where thoughts churn and make links that are not possible in the quotidian world.  It is the result of intellectual fracking.  Tequila is the fracking medium, splitting open deep fractures in the mind, fomenting connections between neural links from years before and more recent ones.

So I live in an intellectual fantasy world created by Conrad and Lowry but decorated by Mervin Peake, he of the darkened visage, staring at the world through tinted spectacles on a black night.

Aedes Aegypti - How I hate you!

2 August 2013

Friday

Pingtung

The hot season has given way to the wet.  We await the first serious typhoon though there is none in the forecast at the moment.  So far this year we’ve been brushed by the edges of a couple that crashed through Mindanao but that only meant rain and some wind for us, nothing serious.

Each day the mountains are visible for a bit of time in the morning when the air is clear.  As the heat builds and the ineluctable Taiwanese coastal sea fog covers the lower lands where Pingtung sits, clouds build up across the peaks and then smother the lower slopes, turning dark with rain as the day progresses into evening.  Sometimes the rains roll out into the river plain where we sit and then the temperatures drop from the stifling.  The falling water somehow seems to suck the humidity from the air and then the night is cooler and pleasant and I sit on the roof terrace, training the fan on my bare legs to keep the mosquitoes off.  I drink a beer or a whiskey or even rum with ice and water.  I smoke some cigarettes; at times I angle the television so that I can watch it through the sliding door (which I leave open) and I follow an American or, in its absence, a Taiwanese baseball game.  Somehow the juxtaposition of heat and humidity and the lazier pace of the game are right.

But today, like yesterday, is overcast and there is a continuous, spitting rain, seemingly light but persistent enough that, out in it, you are wet within moments.  But the option is to put on a rain coat, even one of those flimsy yellow plastic jobs that every scooter driver carries for times like these, and that is not conceivable for the humidity is high, somehow wetter, and just walking up the steps from the kitchen to my den leaves me perspiring. 

I turn on the air-conditioner and a fan, not because the temperature is so high but to remove some of the moisture which films up the screen of my iPad and leaves the back of my neck sweaty and uncomfortable.

Outside, behind the house, there is a field, a valuable one for its unbuilt emptiness in the center of the town.  An unrepentant green now, the field has nurtured low trees and bushes that have mushroomed in the hot-warm and wet air; this verdure pops back seemingly within weeks of the occasional haircuts it is given by the municipal authorities.  Even now, in the rain, I can see the yellow butterflies that are so numerous, many hiding under the plants’ top layer, still darting from leaf to leaf and bush to bush on a mission who purpose baffles me.  Deeper below where water stands, I know that there are breeding mosquitoes and, as well as typhoon, we are now entering the break-bone fever season.  Mosquitoes laid their eggs down there as long as a year ago.  With the coming of the rains, the eggs hatch.  Last night I was bit, twice.  The itching and swelling did not last and I live under the illusion, which I will not research to destroy, that the creatures that bit me are more relative to a midge than the larger, Aedes Aegypti, an African export that has spread across the world.  I fear them more than wild dogs, spiders or mice; they are killers.

When Alex was younger and we lived in Manila, in a beautiful suburb, gated, built around green spaces, a wonderful golf course and with gentle hills, I fought a one man battle against the pests in our back yard, spraying continuously in my campaign to protect my baby girl from the predations of that awful beast, Aedes Aegypti.  In the event, I probably put her more at risk from the chemical side effects of whatever insecticide I was spraying but my intentions were noble.  Alex never got dengue or Japanese encephalitis or any other mosquito vector disease.  Now she lives in Canada where the creatures are large enough to mate with cars and leave welts where they bite but that’s it, they don’t kill you.