Samhain Winter Moon
It was nine years ago the first of November that I left for Southeast Asia, visiting Mary when George Bush again won the presidency. Mary and I went to the American Club for brunch around 8 a.m. to watch the polls close and night-time punditry begin.
Later a Singapore taxi-driver, Chinese, explained how much he disliked Bush and how much an American election, 12 time zones and 12,500 miles away, affected him. It was, he said, a strange and not a good feeling to have so much of your future tied up with a foreign land and its peculiar decision making about leadership.
Singapore has a distinctly pro-Western bent for all its declaiming about Asian values; it is capitalist and materialist to its fingernails. Mary and I experienced Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, saw firewalking in a Hindu temple and broke the Ramadan fast in Arabtown.
Bangkok came next, a $60 introductory rate flight by Tiger Air, a cut-rate airline beginning to service Southeast Asia. Bangkok’s ChinaTown, my home base for the two weeks I spent there had sidewalk fold-up restaurants at night, vendors during the day and always people, lots of people and cars streaming by on Yaowarat. The neon lights gave the after dark old main street of Bangkok a garish look, but also made it enticing. Exotic.
After some time in Bangkok, I got on a Bangkok Air flight for Siem Reap, Cambodia. We landed next to a plane from the Republic of Vietnam. On the flight from Bangkok bomb craters had been easy to pick out in the fields below. Taxiing up to a spot beside that plane, in Cambodia, brought back anti-war memories from the 60’s.
The highlight of this trip was still ahead. Angkor. Most people identify this complex with
the name Angkor Wat although all that means is Angkor Temple and there are many, many temples. The temple widely known as Angkor Wat is closest to the small Cambodian city of Siem Reap. It is huge and well preserved. I spent a full morning climbing its ritual and mythic architecture, it recapitulates a sacred landscape, and took most of my time at the object that made me travel all this way: the churning of the sea of milk.
(This bas relief, carved intricately at all points, runs round the bottom most walls of the temple, roughly 1/4 of a mile. The panels are maybe 12 feet high.)
This sentence from the Unesco world heritage website will give you an idea of why Angkor Wat is just a taste of what’s in the area. “(Angkor) extends over approximately 400 square kilometres and consists of scores of temples, hydraulic structures (basins, dykes, reservoirs, canals) as well as communication routes.”
This is not a week’s journey, not even a month’s. Three months would be a good start, especially since early morning and late afternoon are the only times you can really visit since the temperatures are so intense in midday. I had four days.
All my photographs are on an old hard drive and I haven’t retrieved them yet, a project ahead of me. There are a lot of photos: Bantay Serai, Ta Phrom, Bayon, Preah Khan.
Morning and night for four days I explored, dodging scorpions, nodding to saffron robed monks, amazed by the kapok tree roots reclaiming these 9th through 14th century sites.
A memory that stands out came on evening the third day. I had clambered around the temple mountain of Bayon, the temple with the four-faced stone monuments you’ve probably seen in pictures. Incense drifted over from a contemporary Buddhist temple across the dirt road, following the smoke was music from cymbals and gongs.
Sitting on tumbled down stones near Bayon’s west entrance, a reverie overcame me and I drifted back, back, back in time to the days of the Khmer and the god-kings who built these monuments to politics and divinity. To a time when the Khmer carved living rock from quarries far-away and floated the carved rock down river to these sites, using an elaborate system of canals.
(Bayon’s west side.)
This was when I realized a strong part of me was a soul in ruins, captured by the past, most alive while picking my way through Ephesus, Angkor, the Forum, Delphi, Delos. Through ancient texts like the Metamorphoses and the Odyssey and the Iliad. Learning the ancient Roman language. That realization has shaped much of my work since then.
