DAILY PHOTO: Three Scenes from Bangkok
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There are cities where the veneer of normality is so thin that it feels as though one could fall through at any time, plummeting into the true city. Varanasi, New Orleans, Tokyo after midnight, parts of Prague & Bangkok I can't say what's beneath the veneer, but, oh, does part of me want to know! These are places better visited than lived in, for their magic cannot survive extended proximity.
Stepping out onto a city street in the cool, unclocked hours of the morning. One looks about, but not as one does in daylight -- i.e. in response to sound. Instead, one looks about in response to the lack of sound. A clawing sound from a burrowing rat isn't worth one's attention. It's the silence that calls upon the mind as to a sailor on shore leave.

There are cities that grow upon cities, piling them up and spreading them out; amoeba-like false feet reaching down the cold run corridors of transit Markets grow up through the cracks - some vast and hardy tumors of commerce while others are little card table kiosks kicked into corners The view becomes uniform & undifferentiated - like an ocean, sprawling to infinity in all directions; more complex than the sea but equal in its dispiriting sameness In some room or another, in that vast repository of rooms, everything that can happen is happening -- loving, killing, praying, torturing, healing, and so on Rooms are the city's cells; the buildings - its organs; the neighborhoods - its systems; and we are but molecules in the city's scheme.