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.