Chinese Diorama

I’m between things, again, but feeling more positive: I’ve always said I bounce when I fall.

A day or so ago I sent this to Twitter:

[…] I think I got my eyes back (for now, at least).

I was wan­dering around at the time, looking and occa­sion­ally seeing, and some­thing felt like it was returning. The pho­to­graphs I took will probably remain undeveloped for quite a while, as I have no imme­diate plans to get back into the scanning game; but it isn’t a problem as it as all part of some or other process.

A couple of days before I wrote that note on Twitter, I was on a train, or had just gotten off of a train, and wrote this in a notebook:

Earlier today […] the scenery outside looked like mini­atures in some large and incred­ibly detailed model train diorama […]

And they did. It was a little unnerving: nothing, par­tic­u­larly the clusters of trees, was the right size.

Per­spective and scale can be strange things. This place, Songjiang, has had me thinking about the size of cities, their spread and their pace. When taking the Metro out here I noticed how the stations gradu­ally became more and more distant from each other, the heavy mass of Shanghai thinning at its edges, ebbing out into a strange, greener, wetter land­scape. New devel­op­ments cut through fields and new roads crossed over rivers. But it wasn’t annhil­a­tion, it wasn’t tramp­ling: things were making incur­sions onto the terrain, but it looked rel­at­ively (and I don’t say “rel­at­ively” lightly: so many things here are relative) peaceable.

And when I reached the end of the line I found myself in an urban island seem­ingly situated in the middle of nowhere. Ballard’s urban worlds came to mind, images from Cocaine Nights and Super-​Cannes; and I still have that feeling now, a few days into my stay here. It’s a trans­itional place, recently birthed, a “new city”; and it is apiring to some­thing, to some dream of life, perhaps, but can’t quite remember the details of what was dreamt. It will have to be added to the list of places that need to be tracked, mon­itored over time, returned to later and reappraised. Right now it doesn’t really make sense. And I’m used to things not always making sense, living here in China; I’m used to things changing so fast that one day they make no sense, and the next are as clear as crystal. But I’m less used to things some­times seeming smaller than they really are, some­times bigger: that can still freak me out.