I have returned to Bangkok, a city which I know nothing about. Knowing nothing, I feel the freshness, wonder, awe, the smallest things having a significance which fades under the scrutiny of a bulky knowledge which grows day by day. The time to wander the streets is now, before the sin of knowing clouds my eyes and jades my heart.
I walk along Rama IV, seeing things which make my memory jump. A restaurant sign, a bus bench where a man had slept with his arm twisted into his bicycle, a mangy dog roaming the same small patch of white bedazzled concrete. My aim is to wander streets which I do not know the names of, to arrive with a body which is not my own, wondering about a planet which may or may not be earth.
The MRT station is nearby, I am looking forward to shedding the afternoon heat in the cool and dark subterranean tunnels. I walk in, a security guard looks passively at my bag before waving me through. I buy a token from the self serve machine, press the black plastic disk on the shining metal gate and walk down a flight of stairs to the platform. The cold yellowish light makes me squint and I feel exposed. I stand beside a shiny tiled wall to remove myself from the gaze of unseen eyes. I can't stop my own self from gazing, the passing moments becoming more significant in ways which are just beyond my understanding, and this makes me want to look at things and people which are raw and exposed in this anonymous tunnel.
The beauty of time is coming on, I crave the sense of it, a world resembling a panorama painting altered with every glance and tug. What do others see, are they wondering about love and beauty and the pulse of their lives? I sense the peculiar plight of existence, everyone living inside their own station of time, and I wonder - does anyone else pull the sublime beauty of it from an underground corner wall?
I can't escape the sexual charge of women, they forever lure me inside their red rooms of desire - greedily eyeing bare white legs, pink cheeks, full hips, shining black hair. My eyes pass to dull metal and stone and the patterns of light tacked onto surfaces. I remember there is a camera in my hand, such a wonderful thing, and the time inside this room can now be etched onto...something. Two people stand in the yellow gloom, there they are, close by, but their time cannot be touched or photographed. No one else is photographing, and I wonder what my own shade of time looks like, trapped and frozen. The train rolls into the station....
The train rolls and I am thinking of painters because life looks as if it is a clearly colored dream at the moment - sharp lines blending with light and I don't know if things are alive or if oiled paint is being squeezed upon my senses. My breath quickens for an instant when I see the thick, curved legs of a woman standing in the train. I use the camera to gather the time into my small hands - I close my eyes for a moment to concentrate upon her image, the erotic beauty washed and absorbed, reassembled - is her warm flesh to be touched and admired, or is it merely a yearning fantasy which is locked outside of time?
I want to stand up and photograph each sagging and deflated face in the car, intently look into their past and future, but I don't. I know they are real, they must be...
I am standing in an anonymous station, gazing at a map secured to a gray blue wall, wondering where to go. Although I desire the uncertainty of lostness, I can't rid myself of the desire to have a plan. I will ride another train, move deeper into this exotic dream city, but where to go?...
I ride an escalator, ahead of me is a figure in black which bends into the light, while a stream of blurred faces pass quickly down the other side. I make a photograph because it seems significant.
I am going to another train, this one above ground. I will alight at the Victory Monument because I like the name...
The train is packed tight, I give my seat to an old woman with missing teeth. I am in the midst of lostness, having untied my anchor to the known and familiar. Abandoned,spongy buildings pass, and I again think of Chicago. Poor folk living on the fringes in weedy streets enclosed by busted window warehouse lots, its fate sucking at the feet of rich flower gardens and perfected lawns of the sparkling tinted window washed skyscraping works of art...
Planless now as I gaze at Victory Monument and photograph it.
The heat and intense light make me squint, invisible sweat beads forming on my neck. Four months ago I stood on this same platform, wondering where to throw my empty water bottle. Bangkok does not have many public trash cans, yet somehow the city remains clean. I carried my full pack, the heat and vastness of strange streets a burden. Later in the day I jumped a train to Chiang Mai, a swift and painless escape, but today is different. I have a small pack, the heat does not seem so terrible, and I aim fearlessly for the center of nothingness. I make more photographs, looking out from the platform to the street below. My mind brings forth images from twenty years ago, where I stand on a train platform in Chicago, camera hanging from neck, gazing into the gray and black markings of a rain slicked Wells Street. I become nostalgic - how did I come so far, travel so long - shouldn't I be exploring some other planet? I remember the picture of a man with bulky gray hat, moist cigar held arrogantly with sharpened fingers, walking like a god among steel beams and mortals. At the top of the picture a woman with white shoes comes on fast but she never makes it, her face forever lost. I connect that picture with the woman I met on a commuter train a few weeks later. She was in her 50's, alone and apart like myself. After talking we decided to see a film together at the Art Institute, an Italian black and white story made years ago. As we watched, our eyes distracted with autumn musings, the purple heaviness of the theater shadows eroded our separateness and for a few moments in the flickering electric twilight we were beautiful and happy. Later, walking on the long bridge under a cold and gray late October sky, Grant Park laid out like a banquet meal below, she asked "have you ever sold a photograph?" Shame crept quickly along my chilled skin as I struggled to explain that the pictures were somehow alive, taking up space like a dull stone, and what did it matter if nobody liked them? Much later the man with arrogant fingers holding the moist cigar would hang on an obscure Swiss gallery wall, bought like a pack of gum or jug of milk. I am taken away from my memories by movement below - buses, scooters, people, all on the move, reminding me that I too should be moving...
I walk down the station steps and find myself a part of something which until now I did not belong to. Light scatters and chases a three legged dog, a sour expression, a bag balanced atop a graying head - it settles into me and I swat it away like an unwanted fly. A row of buses stand idle and I decide to board one the color of rusty lime. The driver gives me a quizzing glance as I approach with hesitant steps, searching for my place among silent strangers. I stand beside a large window and gaze out into the yellow Bangkok heat. A man in a blue uniform moves to the center of the bus and opens a book of photographs. I listen to the words, a musical plea without pause. I glance quickly at a page of his picture book and turn away at once when I see the body and face of a deformed child laying bloody on a bed. A woman sitting nearby gives the man a look of skeptical scorn and I deduce that he will gather no sympathy, but as he approaches each passenger languid hands drop notes and coins into his purse. The bus throttles forward and the man and his book disappear into the white light. A man, his mouth covered in a blue mesh mask, stops beside me and asks for the fare. I hope, perhaps in vain, that the bus is traveling in the direction of the river, whose name I cannot remember. "Going to river", I say, and he does not understand. "River boat ride", and he nods, but my impression is he is as confused as I am as he hands me a red square of paper after I give him a 10 baht coin. The bus rolls and stops, people stepping on and off. The river is in sight - ! - it is wider than I had imagined, brown and muddy, a Buddhist version of the Mighty Mississippi. I exit and wander along in a neighborhood which reminds me of Buffalo, NY, dusty, faded, and tourist-less. I am lost, but I know where the river is, and my feet turn toward it...
