Nothing but concrete
October 31st 2019Here in Sai Ying Pun on the west of Hong Kong Island, the closest I get to nature is stroking the wide-wax leaves of the pot plant at the end of my bed. Its lungs working hard in the humidity.
I exist in concrete.
Nature is scarce.
I decided a trip to the Zoological and Botanical Gardens of Hong Kong (“ZABGOHK”) in the mid-levels would provide me with a brief return to nature. An oasis in the concrete slabs. I thought of the concrete carrying me and rising all around, lines of shadow formed on the street.
Béton brut, raw concrete. Monoliths of grey, rigid geometry. Brutalism came from brut — French for concrete. It saw beauty in the car park and the block of flats. Form in the function, in the uniform and the practical. Unnecessary embellishment was outlawed. The movement in architecture declined in the 1970s as it was criticised for being inhuman.
Walking along past the ticky-tacky flats of pink, ochre or violet pastel with consistent windows and air conditioning, the occasional sight of undergarments, hosiery or socks flapping a greeting from above in the altitudinous breeze. Streets and alleys in the sky, as J.G. Ballard writes in ‘High-Rise’, his protagonist Robert Laing stares up at a beastly structure:
Looking up at the endless tiers of balconies, he felt uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty.
Cage mounted on cage up towards the white clouds that listlessly drifted in the blue sky like swans in the brim of a pool. I whistled and hummed an old Dubliner’s tune:
We went out there on our honeymoon
Says she to me “If you don’t come soon
I’ll have to get in with the hairy baboons”
Up in the zoological garden…
Once inside the ZABGOHK, the sun was harsh and made itself known to the thin skin around my nose through the swanning clouds. I took a moment to stand in the shadow of George VI.
Robes and crown and sharp nose cast in bronze. Absorbing the heat.
This statue was installed to commemorate the centenary of British Colonial rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1941.
Before George, there was a statue of Sir Arthur Edward Kennedy, 7th Governor of Hong Kong — 1872–1877. A man from County Down in Ireland. He oversaw the construction of the ZABGOHK, a lover of a groomed hedge. Alas, tragedy befell the statue of Kennedy, during WWII and the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong, he was taken from his plush podium and melted down for arms in the Rising Sun.
Puff-Cheeked Gibbons flapped their little arses in my general direction and picked chewed food from their puffed cheeks full of yellowed teeth, passing their discoveries of oral exploration to a grateful friend. Long spindly arms let them swing in sideways tree brachiation.
An Orangutan gesticulated its limbs in a claustrophobic frustration.
It flailed a burlap sack at another and stole a leaf to swat away the flies and move the hot air around them, turn it to cool. It looked at me. We shared a stare and a hair colour, eyes too.
For a moment, I felt caged.
I remember befriending a rotund orangutan in Dublin Zoo, a decade or so ago. I thought of him in that moment. He would put his black-leather hand to the glass and lick his lips with the bulk of his tongue. Sibu is his name and he is still alive at 37. Of late he has been refusing to mate with female orangutans. A Dutch zoo reported his preference now is for well-tattooed human blondes.
Dublin Zoological Garden was founded in 1830. In the 1830s in Dublin, the law changed regarding the study of cadavers. People in the medicinal profession set up the garden as they could study and observe the animals not just in life, but also in death.
Back in the ZABGOHK, in a blink the long arms of the orangutan swung off for a nap, happy to play with his sack.
A Pincushion Tree tattooed in moss, nineteen metres up and a century of growth rings spreading from the centre of the trunk, like ripples in a wide lake.
Leaf-branch like a wish bone with tiered veins holding an affinity to the architectural structure of high-rise flats. Admiring a Bald Cypress, my eyes looked over its short description at its base, “a durable material for construction and the manufacture of cars, ships and furniture.”
When will this tree be torn down to make a Peugeot 206, a ferry or a chaise longue?
An avuncular Yellow-Casqued Hornbill eyed with his cobalt cornea, flickering fanatically through the thin iron cage. A wrinkled gullet of fading blue wagged from his proud bill. A snout of carved marble and an auburn mohawk worthy of an aging punk, leather clad in his own nostalgia.
Across the path pop-art-pink flamingos dipped their spindles in a pool, occasionally pissing themselves under the hot sun. Craning down for a sip of their own flamboyant flavour that dribbled into the blood orange pool beneath.
This pilgrimage to the zoological gardens did not provide me with a return to nature.
It was artificial nature: the trimmed hedges, sculpted lawns and bubbling granite fountains did not provide a sense of hunter-gatherer sustenance. I was far from a loin cloth, meat and two veg existence. The caged beasts and fowl, yawning orangutans and the lifeless stare of a hornbill or a flamingo drinking its own piss made me look inwardly, that I too am caged.
In the endless tiers of balconies, of vertically mounted cages, up and up, as far as the eye can see.
Raw concrete swirling around, eventually turning solid and remaining in proud permanence.
Concrete swallowing the lush vegetation.
A Return to Nature
The lonely sardine squeezed into a crowded tin wants to escape back to the wide ocean.
A return to nature has been desired throughout history, more so since the revolutions in science and industry. They caused an exodus from nature and an influx into urbanity. This new urban being, its lungs black from chugging machinery and dense air began to seek the cleanse of a simple existence — a detox away from modern society.
In Discourses published in 1762, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote:
Most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided them by all adhering to the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature.
Embracing nature — the caveman existence — can liberate the mind and soul.
Rousseau wrote of a ‘Noble Savage’, a person who was one with nature, one who requires no excessive luxury, an individual who relies on himself and no other for survival.
A famous pre-Enlightenment and Industrial Age example of the return to nature is Saint Francis. He spent his youth in the late 12th century living lavishly as a lothario with a love of luxury. In a moment of beatific catharsis he changed to a simple life of poverty, refusing his patrimony and embracing the simple life.
Francis spurned his life of wealth and luxury — the ills of society — and he entered a state of nature. A noble savage in the wilderness. Out there, there would be meaning in the trickle of a stream, in sunbeams driving away shadows, in the chirp of a bird on a branch above.
Bare feet slopping in mud.
Sleeping under constellations.
Potato sack robes.
A primitive life.
Francis went out in search of clerical retribution, in search of tranquillity following in the footsteps of his own personal shepherd, but whatever your pilgrimage — a return to nature can quench the thirst of a lost soul.
In modernity, this process has become more and more cherished as the shackles — urbanisation, science, technology — continue to push nature away. Society has corrupted man. As Rousseau opens in his Social Contract:
Man is born free but everywhere he is chains.
Humans must return to nature, must appreciate it and only then will they find happiness, like a pig rolling in muck.
A set of black-tar Dickensian lungs going out into the country to be clear of the smog of industry. To breathe in air, breathe out the gunk.
The move from nature accelerated exponentially with the Enlightenment. It put humans at the centre of the universe. Disregarding nature as servile to humanity.
The more you know, the less you know.
Cartesian dualism — cogito ergo sum — and the works of Isaac Newton of the 17th century separated the mind and body. Through calculation, rational thought, statutes and formulae, it seemed man could now control nature. Scientific and technological endeavour would result in social progress and more importantly place man above nature.
As T. S. Eliot proclaims in The Rock:
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
[…] Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.
In this pursuit of knowledge — in enlightenment — much is lost.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
In Leviathan from 1651, Thomas Hobbes said that man’s life is
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and too short
A similar statement is in the opening scene of ‘Annie Hall’, a film made just over four centuries later.
There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says: "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such ... small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
Hobbes and Singer are essentially saying the same thing, despite all of the misery and brutish experience, despite the unhappiness and suffering, life is over all too soon.
There was a realisation that life before death must be cherished, that people must stop focussing on the life after death.
A move away from religion and closer to an appreciation of life.
Romanticism was a response to Enlightenment.
Romantic artists of the 18th and 19th century celebrated nature through their work. To embrace the beauty of it all as the transcient, insignificant human must embrace all the beauty they can throughout their ephemeral existence.
This beauty was seen in nature.
A constant battle between Enlightenment and Romanticism, between concrete and earth. There are two songs that deal with this battle. ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell and ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ by Talking Heads.
Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ on a trip to Hawaii, releasing it in 1970.
One morning, Mitchell threw open her curtains wide and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the spreading lush green hills that spread out before her. However her amazement grew to anger, as under her nose, she looked down and saw a car park.
A realisation of humanity scraping cement over the earth.
A blight.
Her heart, broken.
She sings:
You’ve paved Paradise
Put up a parking lot.
The green hills epitomize the Romantic movement and the parking lot can be seen as a representation of the Enlightenment.
It is showing the true tragedy of modernisation and how it is all too late for a return to nature.
‘What have we done?’ she thinks.
The Romantic movement in art and literature glorified the authoritative power of nature over ephemeral humans: mountains, rivers and valleys, rain, wind and plump clouds towering over the insignificant human. It was a counter-cultural movement in response to the Enlightenment which extolled the values of science, technology, organisation and rational thought and praised the pursuit of all-knowledge.
The Enlightenment was the bedrock of the invention of the car and the car was what facilitated the need for a concrete grey car park in lush Hawaii. The lot dotted in a few loitering automobiles, engines turned off, waiting to chug again.
‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ is the fifth track off Talking Heads’ 1988 album Naked. A smiling chimp is framed on the sleeve.
Written by David Byrne, the song goes through the anxieties of a man living in a world devoid of urbanity; a society that has returned to nature.
Initially happy with a hermit lifestyle surrounded in flowers, tree, cascading waterfalls — an Eden rid of urbanisation, the man now feels estranged, robbed of the conveniences of consumerism and modernity.
For the man in David Byrne’s song, this idea of Paradise is distinctly overrated — where are the 711s, the shopping malls, the Pizza Huts and parking lots?
As he sings:
If this is Paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
Enlightenment in the lawn mover.
Here in this couplet of lines — ‘Paradise’ is Romanticism and Enlightenment is embodied in the lawnmower he requests — a fuel powered machine that suppresses nature’s power.
Tame the wild grass and make a landscaped lawn.
Shear down a few wild hedges.
Swung axe to your bough.
Prune with long secateurs a wind-battered oak-tree.
Decapitate a dwindling dandelion.
This man is frustrated due to the fact there is nothing, nothing but flowers!
Pleading he sings:
Don’t leave me stranded here
I can’t get used to this lifestyle.
The man yearns for what was before, nature isn’t convenient. It is a comedic gibe at environmentalists, that if we abandon the comfortable trappings of modern life, it may not be all that much fun.
I listened to both songs as I left the ZABGOHK, the Gardens had failed me.
It gave me no real feeling of a return to nature.
I felt more caged in the concrete around me.
I felt a sense of sad solidarity with the caged animals.
Men are not made to be crowded in anthills… the more they congregate the more they corrupt, Rousseau wrote.
I was a fool looking for solace amongst imprisoned gibbons.
I had to summit the anthill.
In reading Robert MacFarlane’s ‘Mountains of the Mind’ I realised I had to look elsewhere for true nature:
The mountain top became a ubiquitous symbol for the city-bound spirit, a crystallisation of the Romantic-pastoral desire to escape the atomized, socially dissolute city. You would be lonely in a city crowd, but you could find solitude on a mountaintop.
I would be the wanderer over urban smog in the lush trees of Victoria Peak, cushioned and wrapped around to the south of central Hong Kong.
The ebb and flow of the ants below, the cars and lost wanderers beneath.
I will find solitude on this mountaintop.
I will re-enact the image of the archetypal mountain climbing visionary, a sole figure surrounded by the power of nature, the symbol of the microscopic man and the authoritative shape of nature.
A symbol ubiquitous in Romantic art and the work of Caspar David Freidrich.
Through the overhanging foliage the glimpses and glints of buildings down below. Long-leg arachnids stuck to their webs taut between two thin branches. Threatening to land on unsuspecting scalps bobbing below.
Knuckles of budding leaves.
The steep concrete path snaked through the trees deeper into the green. A reservoir hugged the bosom of the hill below. A typhoon has caused a tree to fall. Bark peeling off as its long life came to an end. The roots cut off from the slanted soil.
After an hour I reached the top. Sweating and relieved, I pushed my way through the trees into nothing but shopping malls, photobooth and restaurant chains.
Slapped in the face with wet phwish of a dish cloth stained in the all-too-familiar-stink of grubby consumerism.
Immediately I saw a man eating a waffle on a throne of sprinkles, dripping ice cream rolling down his chin. A woman waved a selfie stick with the pride of a Mongol swordsman. A lone queue snaked from a shop serving cheap trinkets and merchandise. A video of Gordon Ramsey on a large screen implored people to try his classic Beef Wellington. At the other end of the gastronomic spectrum, a casual trader sold floating frankfurters from a bucket full of cloudy brine.
I was sweating from my hike and from the rain. Whereas all others there were bone dry. They had travelled to The Peak by taxi or tram or bus. This was unacceptable.
David Byrne would certainly approve of this. The convenience of having a creamy ice cream sundae after a hike to the top of a peak. I went up escalator after escalator, criss-crossing from green screens of what the peak used to be like to “I Heart The Peak” shops with branded merchandise. They were charging to go to the observation deck. This is the commodification of nature!
In protest and given my fear of heights I refused to pay the fee of 52 Hong Kong Dollars.
I was a wanderer over urban smog in a multi-storey mall complex and my stomach made me aware of its emptiness. I slunked off to Burger King and ordered a ‘New Crispy Chicken Sandwich’. It was horrid. The lettuce was browning at the edges and the inside of the breaded chicken, as I bit into to, resembled the sole of a well-worn boot.
I can’t get used to this lifestyle
Absolute defeat. On the way down I pondered concrete again and nature.
The only way is to accept and realise that they simply have to co-exist.
There is one more port of call.
A FLOWER IN CONCRETE
In Northern Kowloon, in the district of Prince Edward I found my answer.
An enclave in the concrete buildings that surround it.
The flower.
The bird.
The goldfish.
I stood at auction for a withered bouquet. People raised their competitive hands, swearing under their breath as floral clusters were given out at an alarming speed. Money changed hands. A perfume, constant. Purring air conditioners swept my shirt in ripples as large green wax leaves, ran through my outstretched hands. Plastic terracotta pots at the bottom held the plants upright. The wind, through artificial, made me feel as if I was face to face with a breeze breezily blowing its way through a thick forest.
The veins on the leaves resembling the structures of skyscrapers as they spread out from the spine. Concrete coexists with nature, a pot with flowers sat on a concrete block.
The lotus flower grows out of deep mud, far away from the sun. Though with patience and time, the lotus finds light. A symbol of purity, of rebirth, of enlightenment. Even from the dirtiest muck, true beauty can emerge. Buddha is often depicted atop a lotus flower, as it denotes this process in the human condition, surpassing hardship to find a strip of glimmering sunlight and in that, a beam of hope.
At my feet, a flower bloomed from a crack in concrete.
The Bird
In Yuen Po Bird Garden, on the path old men walk their birds as they hold them in cages. They meet others, also with their birds, and hang them from a low wire or branch and sit and play mahjong. At the start of the game, the tiles are shuffled and it is known as the twittering of the sparrows due to the clacking noise the tiles make as they slide between hands like sliding tectonic plates. They feed live crickets to the beaks of their birds, the cricket dances a peculiar move in desperate panic as a tip of a pair of chopsticks clasps them tight.
I moved from the men to the market stalls of chirrups.
Crickets sealed in a plastic bag Chewed on a leaf, a sort of death row meal for the insect. A tub of wasps grow more irked by the second, stingers erect in distress.
Maggots massaged each other in a beige orgy.
A wizened parrot picked away at a piece of string. Turquoise and chrome, his scaled talons gripped his thin iron pedestal. His beak curved like a marble sculpted head of a Roman Senator.
A patrician parrot, watching his plebeian insect subjects expire around him.
Beside him a small bird chirped and others echoed to a car beep below.
The honk reminded me I was not in a tropical jungle but above a busy street where fumes filled the nostrils of small birds.
I thought of the Four Pests campaign of 1958.
As part of Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, he called for the elimination of four pests:
The Rat
The Fly
The Mosquito
The Sparrow.
Mosquitos were responsible for malaria; rats spread the plague; the pervasive, irritating airborne flies were signs of rot and decay; and the sparrows ate seeds, grain and fruit.
The Party announced that scrounging sparrows were inherently capitalist.
They only take and give nothing back.
They must be destroyed.
The people answered the call. Sparrow nests were destroyed, eggs were crushed and chicks killed. Birds were shot down from the sky with handmade catapults and slings.
There were contests between villages, neighbours and workers to get as many sparrow scalps as possible. The same for the rat, the mosquito and the fly. Pots and pans were banged so sparrows could never rest in the trees. They would fall out of the sky from exhaustive, desperate flapping. The population of sparrows was driven close to extinction. Sparrows sought refuge in extraterritorial areas. In the Polish diplomatic mission, sparrows hid in the leaves of their trees. The embassy was surrounded by the beating of pots and pans and makeshift drums. After days of thumping drums, piles of sparrows were shovelled out of the gardens.
The systematic, widespread, government encouraged eradication of the sparrow caused ecological imbalance, a disaster that contributed to the Great Famine of 1959–1961.
In 1960, the campaign against sparrows ended.
Mao Zedong turned his attention to another pest — the Bed Bug.
Goldfish
Turgid sacks with wandering fish, an ocean in a transparent pouch. Bonks the corner, in refraction it undulates between warped and shrunken. Bulging eyes zapping aimlessly in this ductile prison. To the locals, Goldfish are vital in feng shui, bringing abundance and prosperity. A goldfish tank contains all five elements: the fire of the gilded scales; the earth in the miniature pebbles that sit at the bottom, the water flowing in the bowl, the wood in the swaying plants and metal in the net or the filter or the container — this depends on whether you treat your goldfish to a tank or a bowl but either way the five elements are present, even if somewhat tenuous connections being made.
I bought a goldfish.
I have named him ‘Potplant’.
He swims in a bowl with pebbles and green leaves and a small terracotta bridge.
He shits where he eats and enjoys his own filth.
A noble savage bringing feng shui energy to my compact flat.
Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the world with 6,300 people per square kilometre. Due to this, space is such a valuable commodity that people living in flats, high rise concrete buildings, have rare access to nature.
Federico Garcia Lorca wrote that:
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscraper’s battle with the heavens…
So, nature is condensed high up in the apartment blocks in the form of a blubbing goldfish or a waxy pot plant, a pink rhododendron or the rattle of a bird perched in a cage.
The flower and goldfish and bird market allow people to have their own personal nature on their sill and perching at their window, together with their neighbours giving a varying palette of colours to the high-rise — mixing into the poetry of this battle with the heavens.
As Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins sings:
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage
Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved…
And despite all my wanderings I am still just
A goldfish in a bowl
A gibbon in a cell
A flamingo in its own piss
And you know what –
I am happy
I am happy amongst the concrete slabs,
A drooping flower rising from the cracks.
A beautiful lotus from out of the mire…