Anticipating Angkor, a Dream Deferred
ChimS1
Anticipating Angkor, a Dream Deferred
By PHYLLIS ROSE
OME people are suckers for lost cities. I am. I've sought out, among others,
Machu Picchu, Pompeii, Petra, Ephesus, Karnak and Uxmal. But Angkor, the
jungle-covered capital of the ancient Khmer civilization in Cambodia, has
always seemed to me the Mother of All Lost Cities. Imagine Manhattan, a
thousand years from now, deserted for centuries, overgrown with the native
cattails and sumacs of New York Harbor, the great skyscrapers half-swamped by
water. Angkor, constructed between the 9th and the 15th centuries, is
comparable. One of its palaces covers 500 acres; its temple mountains reach 200
feet; carved stone giants guard its gateways; the roots of giant banyans pry
apart its walls.
I learned about Angkor in my first weeks of college. In that brave new world of
culture and sophistication, white-haired men assumed statues and paintings were
as worthy of my attention as algebra. They told me about the influence of Greek
sculpture on Indian erotic bas-reliefs and demonstrated — with slides
projected on dual screens in a darkened lecture hall — how Asia was
Indianized and how it wasn't. In 1960, long before Americans learned to deplore
Eurocentrism, Prof. Benjamin Rowland led off Harvard's introduction to art
history with Asian art and presented Angkor as one of its crown jewels.
The romance of its "discovery" and exploration by the French in the mid-19th
century was part of Angkor's glamour. Weakened by malaria, the explorers had to
chop the jungle out of their way to reach the buildings. They kicked the dirt,
and stone heads were revealed. They found the features of one megalomaniacal
late 12th-century Khmer ruler, Jayavarman VII, reproduced over and over 50 feet
high on stone towers.
When I graduated, I wanted to see Angkor, but as I also wanted to get on with
what I believed was my real life, I decided to put off the trip. The ruins,
having lasted for centuries, could wait for me a little longer. That was 1964.
Within a couple of years it was impossible for an American to go to Cambodia
except as a covert operative, and it remained impossible to go there, either
because of our war in Southeast Asia or because of Pol Pot's subsequent
destruction of his own country, for more than 30 years.
Writers make notoriously lousy tourists, continually being disappointed by what
they see as opposed to what they've imagined. Proust's stand-in, Marcel,
imagined Venice so well and so loved his imagined Venice that, after wanting to
visit his entire life, he could not fail to register a letdown when he got
there. The journey to Venice, toward the end of "In Search of Lost Time,"
recapitulates what's been a major theme in Proust's novels: people arouse the
most passion when they are not possessed, places the most passion when they are
not visited. We live in the very small space between a future we anticipate and
a past we try to recapture.
In "Against the Grain," a late-19th-century novel by the French writer Joris
Karl Huysmans, the hero decides to go from Paris to London. He packs sweaters
for the cold, a raincoat for the damp. He imagines the cool, foggy city, its
gray austerity; he can't wait to be there, gets to the train station, turns
around and goes home, figuring he has already experienced London.
I learned in college to call this particular instance of belief in the creative
power of the imagination decadent, devaluing the real. But I don't see much
difference between Huysmans's "decadence" and Proust's take on Venice. The love
object in Proust is always created by the lover's imagination and better
enjoyed the less possessed, the more imagined.
Mobilized by Sept. 11 to do the things I've put off for a lifetime, I went to
Angkor this winter. I already suspected it would not live up to my
expectations, because of the nature of expectations, not because of the site,
which is intelligently managed and not overly commercialized.
To the casual visitor, the years of war and looting don't show much. Angkor is
spectacular in a way that you have to be there to feel. A guidebook can't
describe the scale of the central temple, Angkor Wat. Until you walk it, you
cannot imagine how big it is, how tired you get just from crossing the huge
moat to the entrance; until you climb the central tower, you can't imagine how
far above the earth you are, how the world seems to lie before you vast, green,
unformed, and how protected you feel being at the center of the brilliantly
orchestrated stone walls, towers and water basins.
But professional imaginer or not, when you are at the destination you've
dreamed of all your life, you're liable to be distracted by material reality in
the form of T-shirt vendors and other tourists as you strive to be moved. The
creative imagination works best in solitude and silence and not on demand. It
is hard even now to acknowledge my own disappointment, for I know it is
unattractive. What did I want: More ruin? More danger? Even less progress? To
be the only tourist in Cambodia?
I went to Angkor Wat in the morning, when it was empty, because the light is
better in the afternoon. In the afternoon I went to Angkor Thom, because the
tour groups were there in the morning. The temples I enjoyed the most were Ta
Prohm and Preah Khan, where the restorers have made the decision to leave some
of the jungle as it has been for hundreds of years and most of the ruins in
ruins. Sometimes I framed my pictures so the places I photographed looked
deserted. Sometimes I refused to do that, and included the tour groups,
insisting, somewhat bitterly, on showing things as they were. Sometimes I sat
trying to contemplate cosmology and civilization, or trying to pretend I was
Henri Mouhot, who came upon the ruins in 1861, but I would inevitably be
sitting in front of someone else's best shot at Jayavarman VII.
All this made me tired and discontented with my own prissiness. In a desperate
effort to feel the place, my husband, Laurent, and I climbed the towers of
Angkor Wat more often than our guide had ever seen people climb them. But we
might as well have been playing on a jungle gym.
By the time I got to Angkor, I was almost afraid to go there. I had wanted to
for so long that I found myself superstitiously fearing my life would be over
when I went. I believed I would die without getting home. Before leaving, I
rewrote my will and prepared my affairs. For a while, upon returning, I didn't
know what to do with myself because I'd seen Angkor and hadn't died. Then I got
to back to work imagining new destinations, as one must in life.
PHYLLIS ROSE is the author, most recently, of "The Year of Reading Proust"
(Counterpoint).