Overgrowth
From here, the city looks like one big question mark, and the clouds in the sky are swollen with rain. If you listen you can hear things growing; murky water has risen to a cascade of white-flecked foam, the golden Pagoda is all-seeing and all-seen, the breast of the city bared and shameless in the sun. The holes in the street reveal the chaos below, and smells of decay and sewage leak through the stone. The city is soaked in light and water, and a million plants shudder in ecstatic photosynthesis.
This city is a dream that has been dreamt by many people, and they have dreamed it into being. It is the dream of British colonialists, it is the dream of a thousand taxi drivers, it is the dream of two names and one city, which is the dream the country has been having, in one form or another, for a long time. The city is real, because dreams are real, it shimmers sometimes in the light, the edges shudder, and the hologram has to steady itself again and regain its grip.
In every gutter, drainpipe, roof tile and trash pile, you can see the thirsty blush of vegetation, sucking the sweat from the air and pushing green tips through brick. The plants worm through the city, are decapitated, and grow again. They’re patient – there’s always tonight, tomorrow, and forever. Sometimes it is just a shrub agonisingly generating itself from a coke bottle, and occasionally a whole tree shaking in the high wind.
Vegetative chaos, mutilated brickwork and mortar order. Gravity pulls rubble from walls, water from drains, glass from broken windows, objects tumble without warning. The exposed bricks crumble like toast; construction workers swarm like surgeons, disassembling city blocks, a state of constant flux, transformation, death, and rebirth.
In Ho Chi Minh, I heard stories of wild marijuana and kratom plants growing in the streets, but it was a tamed city, a walled garden like the Buddha’s or Adam’s. The plants and the wildlife were subject to man’s persistent pruning. Here, the fences are swallowed by the grass.
If the people of Yangon suffered a collective narcolepsy, they would wake to find themselves impaled by trees, swallowed by ferns, and hoisted high into the air on towering beanstalks. Can you hear the message, like the Mayans, the stone pyramids, and the gardens of the holy book? “Don’t forget about death! Or sex! The chaos and the order! The garden and the walls!” The Buddha peeks over the palace battlements, the trees of Eden bear plums the size of a human hand, the curse of man was to grind the flesh to death, the curse of woman to ripen and rot…
In London, in Chelsea, each house its miniature statement of artisanal chaos, a manifestation of decades of acquired taste by the owner: a picket gate hung at a slightly incorrect angle, calculated to the degree in the mind of the architect, a tree that is allowed just enough to overgrow, to give the sense of being slightly under-pruned through careful and diligent pruning.
Order and chaos, men with saws and corrugated iron, weeds and rust, bricks and trees. The plants aren’t strong enough to break the walls, the walls not strong enough to hold the plants, and there’s always space in both for serpents to slither in.
‘Don’t forget about sex”, whisper the green shoots in the corners of alleys.
“Don’t forget about death”, say the iron girders rusting in abandoned corners.
The humans bend their backs and water the ground with sweat. There’s always more work to do.
“Don’t forget about us,” they say. “For God’s sake, don’t forget about me.’
Order and chaos, men with saws and corrugated iron, weeds and rust, bricks and trees. The plants aren’t strong enough to break the walls, the walls not strong enough to hold the plants, and there’s always space in both for serpents to slither in.
‘Don’t forget about sex” whisper the green shoots in the corners of alleys.
“Don’t forget about death” say the iron girders rusting in abandoned corners.
The humans bend their backs and water the ground with sweat. There’s always more work to do.
“Don’t forget about us” they say. “For God’s sake, don’t forget about me.’