A guy on the bus said about Hanoi, ‘Everything’s a negotiation’. We were talking about how there is no undisputed, unoccupied, unclaimed space in that city. Everything overlaps. I had an image of a sort of nth dimensional Venn model. A Venn diagram is a depiction of shared modality. It illustrates where two things have stuff in common. It is generally illustrated as a series of circles of various size whose boundaries overlap creating a subset of mutual stuff.
Often ,while I am sitting at the margin of a lake, when a rain shower is approaching, I see the lake begin to be covered by a elegant pattern of bright, hair-thin radiating circles created by the precursors of the main assault of precipitation. Les chasseurs(?). When two raindrops meet the meniscus of the lake in proximate time and space a Venn is briefly created.
Hanoi is all Venn all the time. The modalities seem virtually infinite (motorbike traffic, vendor wagons, electrical wire snarls, signage, window displays, people ). Much of this is overlapping and shifting at a very rapid rate. Some of it at a much slower rate. Some of it is periodic (vendor’s stalls, motorcycle helpmeets) But it all changes – resulting in a miasmic chaos of overlap.
There is a beauty and magic in the corrupt accretion of human coral on this magnificent and complex reef. Hanoi too is a micro-environment. It has producers, shelterers, predators, decomposers, parasites, saprophytes. Too long since I took biology but I’m pretty sure it’s all here.
We see old women on rusty bikes stacked above head height with kilos of flattened cardboard boxes bungeed to the back. Sophie saw old crones sorting through discarded material from a Hotel dedication. The slightly used roses will reappear this afternoon on baskets and in panniers - sold for pennies.
Mimicry is a major feature of life in Hanoi. There are countless ‘operators’ who are looking for any opportunity to scrape a little grease from the goose (that would be me). Les Charognards circle everywhere, waiting for someone to limp, or blink, look confused or smile. Weakness. They perform the theatre of being good and honest ones but they are not. They con you into giving them money from your home country (they are ‘coin collectors’) or take you to shabby hotels saying that the one you have named is under repair. They offer to treat you to tea in a tearoom so that they can improve their English speaking skills – except when you leave there are two gorillas at the door who insist you pay hundreds of dollars for the delicious tea you consumed. No options. They are sick, poor, need some luck – a thousand entreaties and offers. Death by a thousand cuts to the weak.
On the reef, countless of operations are being conducted. All around the reef; commerce, industry – it’s grinding, remorseless.
As the rain shower intensifies the Zen-like co-centric circles that are the death echo of a raindrop’s ecstatic demise on the lakes surface begin to be too numerous to understand as independent events. The size and weight of the droplet increases and the surface is chopped and stirred into a stucco that suggests a three dimensional portrayal of white noise – in fact this is also expressed aurally. A note or a blurry ringing created by water exploding on water. The luscious hiss of summer rain on a lake.
Our experience of the city is probably to micro to be resolved as white noise – car horns, tire sounds, engine ruffling, drag of foot, clang of industry, shouting and the crinch of automated gew-gaws on the sidewalks are the stuff of city life at street level. But I imagine that if I could hover a mile or so above Hanoi it would resolve itself into a warm, orange, ambient hum of life and toil.
Hanoi is a vast, complex living organic matrix. The delicately balanced colony of flora and fauna are bound to and hovering adjacent to the constant chaff of detritus and exoskeletal remains. Life and death in a furious tango.
No comments:
Post a Comment