A Long History of Impermanence: Cambodia

The temple ruins all around Angkor Wat were alive with ghosts of the past, the ancient past and the just-yesterday, playing in the dance of light and shadow on intricately carved and tree-root crumbled temple walls, and playing, too, on the bodies and faces of living people. There were orchestras of land mine victims making traditional Khmer music and selling CDs outside of every temple. Buying one of these was the only time I felt like a complete idiot for attempting to bargain, which is the norm and is expected. I listened to the music, bought my CD, turned away, and, as I turned, burst into tears, real tears with shaking shoulders. People jumped to make sure I was okay. “Yes,” I said, “I am fine, but I want to cry because it hurts and it is beautiful and it just wants my tears.” One of the men was playing a leaf in his lips and it was gorgeous, the vibration of man and leaf interacting! Not to mention blind man on xylophone, legless man on flute, maimed woman on strings, all making traditional Khmer music on grass mats under the giant trees and in the steaming heat. Later, we stopped at the landmine museum, but I did not go in.

Our tour guide, Bunrith, described himself as an orphan whose father was a soldier and whose brother died in ‘the war,’ and whose sister starved to death as a child. His mother died fairly recently of a relatively normal illness. Bunrith is a university graduate in business who also trained in tourism for a year after graduation. He is now 35 and married with four children; he is intentionally recreating a big family, and he is proud of his work in tourism. He works twelve to fourteen hour days, seven days a week during the high season, with some time off in the low season. He is very proud of his life, of his country, of his work, and of his Buddhist monk King. The country is The Kingdom of Cambodia; so says my passport, and so says Bunrith. In his story you can feel ‘the story,’ of haunted memories combined with bright hope that is everywhere. People work long hours of every day and school is either morning or afternoon (because the kids need to work, too) six days a week. Siem Reap (pronounced Sim-Rip) is full of huge hotels and buffet restaurants and is hungry for tourist money, and the child peddlers are everywhere, selling bracelets made of wooden beads, postcards, interpretive books, bags, woven scarves and woven fish.... “Madame! One dollah, tree for one dollah, you buy from me! Remember tis face, see? You buy from me, okay? when you get back, you buy from me… where you from? California, oh; Sacamento!” Yes, they know the capitals of all the countries and all the states and their English is very good, so much better than my Cambodian.

The Temples are a good draw for tourism. Often I experience my camera as something of an impediment, obscuring actual experience in the process of trying to record it. Not so in Cambodia! The light and story and characters, contemporary and ancient, were compelling -- such that my camera and experience and I were one, and I am happy with resultant photographs. The temple carvings are various permutations of Hindu and Buddhist, as one generation reforms the preceding one. One builds the Shiva Lingas (abstract geometric sculptures of male and female genitals mating, with the male Shiva Linga making the statement that the yoni simply receives and contains, ‘his’ is fairly representative, ‘hers’ is a square box); and the next generation knocks these out to replace them with Buddhas. Then the next wave comes and knocks out the Buddha, replacing him with a new Shiva Linga; the dualist and monist versions of reality competing, as everywhere they seem to do. In the walls of the temples are carved Buddhist depictions of the heaven and hell realms, and Hindu depictions of the Mahayana, gods and demons churning up the sea of milk, and then humans and animals fighting in bloody procession. All of these carvings (including one very vivid stegosaurus from the 10th century!) are in various states of intactness and decay. And, over all, a few serene Buddhas, themselves in various levels of cohesion, look upon all of it as so much coming and going, impermanence in procession before the witness of consciousness.