Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

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Knowing and Believing

It is not answers that pull many people into the religious life, it is questions. The person who lives deeply and enduringly with, and within, a religion often finds that he is surrounded by ever more doubts as he goes on, not convictions. In an eloquent monk like Thomas Merton, say, the religious impulse is almost fired by a kind of holy restlessness, as if, each time the traveler ascends a peak, he sees nothing but the larger peaks that now confront him. “Our knowledge,” as Isaac Bashevis Singer, setting golems at play amidst highly fallible humans, puts it, “is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge.” Religion is in that regard like that other (one hopes lifelong) affair of the spirit and the heart, marriage. I may know my partner inside out, in terms of her habits and her gestures, and yet the more I see of her, the more I have to acknowledge how much will always lie beyond my reckoning–and in that very space of unknowing, my hunger for a continuing relationship may be quickened.

This is not always what people want when they turn to the imagined solace and sustenance of religion and that, perhaps, is why many of us take shelter inside belief systems, which lay down unequivocally what is and is not kosher, who’s with us and against us, a creed that is fixed and even finished product. As James Carse puts it, in his typically quotable and suggestive way, in his latest book, belief systems depend on boundaries as much as the religious impulse (as he defines it) relies on horizons. A boundary is clear-cut, and (its makers sometimes hope) will never change; a horizon, dependent on where you’re standing, alters every time you walk towards it.

A longtime director of the religious studies program at New York University, Carse is the author of five previous books, such as Breakfast at the Victory, which show him to be an engagingly witty and compelling spirit, who can plunge into discussions of the Unsayable and the mysterium with a striking gift for the memorable epigram and for the fine distinction. True to the very ideas he speaks for in The Religious Case against Belief, this does not always make him an authoritative, or even persuasive, writer; rather it turns him into a kind of agile provocateur, eager to prize us out of our set positions, to get us thinking, even perhaps to move us to form counter-arguments of our own. A professor (emeritus now) who writes for the enquiring common reader, he contrives to make the thrashing out of essential issues both urgent and enjoyable.

In his new book Carse builds upon a typically intriguing and contentious distinction between religion and belief–or what is really a subtler distinction between open-ended, tolerant enquiry and a doctrine that knows what it knows and is not keen to hear about anything else (implications for our current political situation and for the argument between liberalism and Fundamentalism run beneath every sentence in the book, though Carse chooses not to bring many of them explicitly to the surface). “The act of belief,” as he has it, “is always an act against {itals}; it requires an opponent who holds the contrary belief.” Knowledge, for him, is “corrigible,” and belief “rarely so.”

This will not convince the believer, and in fact the attempt to rescue the religious life from the “true believer”

may be the secret impetus behind this work. By creating his own highly subjective and perhaps questionable definition of terms like “knowledge” and “belief,” Carse in some ways loads the argument and settles it before he undertakes it, a kind of philosophical preaching to the converted. Yet the very conviction and fluency with which he advances his ideas gives his work something of the debater’s charm and engagement of such counter-works as Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. And though he never tells us what his own religious affiliations might be–this reader guesses tolerant Christian–Carse, as a lifelong professor of religious studies, is in a strong position to argue that the recent broadsides against faith fail to acknowledge the fundamental divisions within religions–or between enlightened skeptics and believers–that are in fact true religion’s life-blood.

In order to give flesh and immediacy to his position, Carse begins by re-telling the story of Galileo, a man who had a profound and unshakable religious conviction–as well as an unswerving devotion to science and its principles of empiricism and objectivity. Galileo, in other words, was able to give himself entirely to both faith and reason, as one might to one’s job and one’s spouse, seeing that they belong to dimensions as different as the apple and the orange. The Inquisition, by contrast (in Carse’s characteristic phrasing), represented the real heresy, precisely because its prosecutors were not inquisitive enough. They were what Carse would call “believers,” locked inside a system they were determined should never budge– where Galileo, for him, was in the party of religion, true knowledge, a genius at “finding questions at the heart of the most certain of answers.”

As he goes on, Carse takes us through the life of Martin Luther, again to show us how the very changes that most of us undergo throw into question the validity of unchanging beliefs; life, in other words, is much more fluid and contradictory than the ideas we sometimes impose on it (I was reminded at such moments of the sign I saw up this year outside the chapel at Gethsemane, just outside Jerusalem–aimed at too-voluble tour-guides: “PLEASE No Explanations Inside the Church”). The obvious point to make about Luther’s confrontation with the Roman Emperor Charles V is that each of these learned, committed Christians saw the other as an agent of the devil, because each sat inside incompatible (and inflexible) sects within the same Church and readings of the scriptures. But the deeper and more interesting point is that once the excommunicated Luther retreated into a cell and intensified his studies in the Bible, he decided that his greatest adversary was the enemy within, and called himself simul justus et peccator {itals}, at once a just man and a sinner. Once (in Carse’s scheme of things) an immovable believer, he grew into an apostle of true religious knowledge.

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Posted in The Perils Of FaithPosted on

High, Dry, and Exalted

On the longest day of the year I found myself on what is billed as the “highest motorable pass in the world,” though “motorable” seemed as much a stretch as did “road.” Icicles were hanging from the mountainside and plaques around every turn recalled those fellow travelers, most of them soldiers, who had “left for their heavenly abode” after plunging over the precipice that runs along the edge of the barely paved, loose-stoned road. As my ever-cheerful driver clambered out of our rickety Toyota (no license plate attached) to fiddle with a loose starter–emergency repairs at 18,350 feet!–ominous pink fluid the color of Pepto-Bismol began to trickle out of the truck in front of us.

It was hard to believe that only ninety minutes earlier we’d been in the Ladakhi capital of Leh, 8000 feet below. We were now stranded in what seemed like snowfields, ragged prayer-flags hanging between great boulders all around us. Here and there Indian soldiers shivered in their tattered encampments. The Sikh officer who had checked my passport some minutes before, at 15000 feet, a helicopter whirring overhead, had startled me by suddenly bursting into song, along with his radio. Perhaps he had decided to live out the first rule of survival at high altitude written up on a nearby board: “Always Have a Cheerful Attitude.”

Then, as we nursed the car back to health and crossed the pass, we began to nose down along the sheer, single-lane road, marmots scrambling across the road in front of us, kiang, or wild asses, visible in the distance. Very soon we had arrived in the most pristine and surreal landscape I think I have seen in more than a quarter-century of traveling. A huge flat plain extended towards the snowcaps, dry riverbeds visible against sculpted rock formations and, in places, a few small patches of green with fortress-like white buildings sheltering among apricot trees and willows. Two-humped Bactrian camels were foraging in sand-dunes within the emptiness and the sententious reminders that decorate every few hundred yards of an Indian mountain road–”Check Your Nerve on My Curve” and “Love thy Neighbor, but not while Driving”–had been replaced by pithy words of wisdom from Jimmy Buffett and Naomi Judd. The sky was so blue, as everywhere in Ladakh, it almost hurt to look at it, and the area was so rugged, so unvisited and so otherworldly I half-expected the Taliban to appear.

As we rounded a turn in the road, suddenly we saw a gompa, or Ladakhi temple, above us, situated, as nearly all gompas are, on a precipitous hilltop, so improbable that it seemed to have risen half-way to the heavens. We clambered up to it and soon found ourselves in a typically rich and aromatic Tibetan Buddhist compound, its chapels thick with the smell of centuries of melted yak butter, its white terraces looking out on miles of noiseless valley. Ladders led up to rooftops that seemed to give out on an almost allegorical landscape of sand and space and blue emptiness. And as in every such place I’d scaled in Ladakh, there was not another visitor to be seen on this peak-season day–until, minutes later, there appeared a Tibetan photographer who lived, as it happened, in Kabul. “It’s strange,” he said. “The houses clustered along the valley; the barren mountains; the snowcaps: we could be in Afghanistan.”

When we think of Ladakh, the high, dry region in northern India that borders Tibet and is often called “the world’s last Shangri-La,” we nearly always see in our mind’s eye one of the planet’s last centers of Himalayan Buddhism, whose people still live in sturdy whitewashed houses, amidst fields of barley and wheat irrigated by glacial snowmelt, as they might have done several centuries ago. We forget, amidst the images of an almost vanished pastoral purity, that Ladakh borders Pakistan, too–hence all the Indian soldiers–and officially, linked to Kargil, has a population that is 50% Moslem. Indeed, Leh has for centuries been one of the great cosmopolitan trading-posts of the Himalayas, through which travelers have transported silk and indigo, gold and even opium to Kashgar, Kashmir, Yarkand and all the great caravan-stops of the Silk Road. Even today, when you walk along Main Bazaar Road in Leh, the ever more crowded and noisy street where women sit on the sidewalks selling vegetables–not far from a large mosque crowded with skull-capped Moslem sages–you see faces that speak of Lhasa, Herat, even Samarkand. Some of the people here belong to Ladakh’s Dard population, Indo-Iranians who trace their ancestry and blue or green eyes back to Alexander the Great.

And these days, of course, precisely because of its dramatic beauty and unspoiled air–more spectacular to me than anything I’d seen in Bhutan or Nepal or Tibet itself–Ladakh is home to all the latest kinds of nomads and itinerant traders. You can learn “Traditional Thai Massage” in bustling Leh, sign up for a “Trekking Meditation Camp” or dine at a Korean restaurant called Amego. You can sit under red-and-white umbrellas advertising cell phones on the rooftop Pizza de Hut restaurant and munch on tacos and fries while you look out on signs advertising “Ecological Footprint Travels” and “TIBET EXPEDITION (An eco-friendly travel company).” You can enjoy video conferencing at login Himalaya, hear bands from Athens, Georgia at the Christian-run Desert Rain coffee-house and watch Pirates of the Caribbean: World’s End on a video screen in a garden restaurant only days after it opened at the Cineplexes of Times Square.

On one side of town Israelis in harem pants stroll between Nepali-run “German bakeries” and advertisements for “Full Moon Parties,” while on the other, middle-class Indian tourists, almost unknown here only five years ago, fill new hotels in search of ethnic exoticism and cool summer nights that offer relief from the monsoonal heat of the plains. The hills are alive around Leh with the sound of construction crews and revving Suzukis.

Ladakh has thus become at once one of the legendary tourist treasures of the world and a test-case of sorts for an escalating discussion on what tourism can do to and for an area, and how much gross national product can compensate for a challenge to gross national happiness. Because of its sensitive location between two of India’s rivals, Ladakh was not opened to the wider world till 1974 and to this day the roads that link it to the outside world are closed for at least seven months of every year (and though planes fly in daily through the winter, even they are delayed, for days or weeks at a time, by the heavy snowfall). What remains, therefore, are vestiges of an unusually self-sufficient, isolated-seeming Paradise where people lived according to unchanged patterns for hundreds of years–and all the outsiders who are now promising to rescue it with images of a foreign paradise.

To this day, Ladakh is a long way from the conveniences of the global order. Hot water remains a luxury here, streetlighting did not arrive in Leh until 1995 and when occasionally I managed to get online, my screen said, enigmatically, of recent messages, “Sent to you, 235,105,786 seconds ago.” Yet at the same time, the young of Ladakh are ever more fluent in the words of “Hotel California” and have found that they can ensure a bright future for themselves by abandoning (or packaging) their past. “When you talk in terms of development, development always happens with a plan,” said Jigmed Wangchuk Namgyal, son of the last king of Ladakh, when I visited him one morning in his apartments in Stok Palace, ten miles outside of Leh. “When I look at Leh at this moment, there is no individual thinking of a plan. It’s all very chaotic.”

There are two reasons, really, to visit Ladakh: the heart-stopping gompas situated on mountaintops across the region, their many-storied grandeur made more magical by the emptiness that surrounds them; and the silent valleys above which they sit, whose New Mexican desolation is lit up, here and there, by little clusters of houses linked by mud-brick walls and by the ties of traditional community. The very word “gompa” means “solitary place,” and almost all the classic temples in Ladakh are reached by winding, half-paved roads and discovered, suddenly, as you round a corner, towering above you on a clifftop or tucked into a mountain. Hemis, perhaps the most famous, seems to have been carved out of the hillside that cradles it; Ri-dzong is hidden by folds in a mountain that recall, locals believe, the folds in a monk’s robes. To get to distant Lamayuru, you drive through great clefts in the mountainside, ochre and purple and brown, on a one-lane road that winds its way up above a river 1800 feet below. As you approach, the signs say, “Welcome to Moon Land View” and “Moon Palace Restaurant.”

The gompas stand before you like eight-storied complexes of red and white terraces and chapels and schools, stretched across the sand-colored rock–cities on a hill, in effect–and when you arrive at one, a monk will appear with a huge key and, in exchange for a few pennies, take you from one massively padlocked prayer hall to another. You walk into the bare-floored spaces and see shafts of sunlight streaming in from skylights and lighting up the dusty thangkas that hang over the rows of prayer-cushions. On the walls frescoes from many centuries ago show Buddhas and demons and mandalas that reveal, for believers, the hidden order of the universe. And when you step out again, all you can hear are prayer-flags snapping in the breeze.

At Tikse Gompa, only thirty minutes by car from Leh, is a whole settlement of monks whose chants you can attend if you arrive at dawn; at Likir the sunlit, silent courtyards are full of young novices who took me back to the great monasteries of Tibet I first saw in 1985 (though even then seasoned travelers were saying that to see the “real Tibet,” you had to go to Ladakh). In Alchi, a quiet village of whitewashed houses and running water, the small temples are set in a garden, among birdsong and flowers, their frescoes (painted by artists who had studied the forms of faraway) sometimes Kashmiri, sometimes Mughal, sometimes seemingly Central Asian.

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Posted in Holy PlacesPosted on

A Monk's Struggle

“Since China wants to join the world community,” the 14th Dalai Lama said as I was traveling across Japan with him for a week last November, “the world community has a real responsibility to bring China into the mainstream.” The whole world stands to gain, he pointed out, from a peaceful and unified China—not least the 6 million Tibetans in China and Chinese-occupied Tibet. “But,” he added, “genuine harmony must come from the heart. It cannot come from the barrel of a gun.”

I thought of those measured and forgiving words—the Dalai Lama still prays for his “Chinese brothers and sisters” every morning and urges Tibetans to learn Chinese so they can talk with their new rulers, not fight with them—as reports trickled out of Tibet of freedom demonstrations that have led to some of the bloodiest confrontations in the region since similar protests preceded a brutal crackdown in the late 1980s. The violence has left 99 people dead, according to Tibetan exile groups; the Chinese government says 13 “innocents” were killed in the riots. Soon after monks began demonstrating in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, Chinese forces moved to contain the marchers, but the disturbances spread to other Tibetan cities, and their causes clearly remain unresolved. Working out how best to avoid further embarrassment as they prepare for the start of the Olympic-torch relay on March 25 will be a tricky challenge for China’s rulers. As a diplomat told TIME, “They need to get this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality.”

How the crisis unfolds will be determined not just in Beijing but also by the words and actions of a man who protects his people from afar, in his exile home in the northern-India hill station of Dharamsala. As a Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama speaks unstintingly on behalf of all people’s rights to basic freedoms of speech and thought—though as a Buddhist monk, he also holds staunchly to the view that violence can never solve a problem deep down. If the bloodshed gets out of control, he said in recent days, he will step down as political leader—a symbolic act, really, since he would continue to be the head of the Tibetans and the democracy he has set up in exile already has an elected Prime Minister. In China meanwhile, Tibetans are still liable to imprisonment for years just for carrying a picture of their exiled leader (who by Tibetan custom is regarded as the incarnation of a god, the god of compassion). Some have been shot while walking across the mountains to visit cousins or children in exile.

As soon as you start talking to the Dalai Lama, as I have been doing for 33 years, you notice that his favorite adjectives are logical and realistic and the verbs he returns to are investigate, analyze and explore. The Buddha was a “scientist,” he said the last time I saw him, which means that a true Buddhist should follow the course of reason (recalling, perhaps, that anger most harms the person who feels it). Contact and communication are the methods he always stresses—to this day, he encourages every possibility for dialogue with China and in places even urges Tibetans to study Buddhism under Chinese leaders whom he knows to be capable.

This determination to be completely empirical—as if he were a doctor of the mind pledged to examine things only as they are, to come up with a clear diagnosis and then to suggest a practical response—is one of the things that have made the current Dalai Lama such a startling and tonic figure on the world stage. There are few monks in any tradition who speak so rarely about faith while rejecting anything that has been disproved by scientific inquiry; on his desk at home, he keeps a plastic model of the brain with detachable parts so that he can take it apart, put it together again and see how it works. And there are even fewer political leaders who work from the selfless positions and long-term vision of a monk (and doctor of philosophy). It’s easy to forget that the Dalai Lama is by now the most seasoned ruler on the planet, having led his people for 68 years—longer than Queen Elizabeth II, King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand or even Fidel Castro.

This all has deep and wide implications for a world that seems as religiously polarized now as it has ever been. Always stressing that the Buddha’s own words should be thrown out if they are shown by scientific inquiry to be flawed, the Dalai Lama is the rare religious figure who tells people not to get needlessly confused or distracted by religion (“Even without a religion, we can become a good human being”). No believer in absolute truth—he eagerly seeks out Catholics, neuroscientists, even regular travelers to Tibet who can instruct him—he is also the rare Tibetan who will suggest that old Tibet may have contributed in part to its current predicament, the rare Buddhist to tell foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest.

As the world prepares for the Olympic Games in Beijing this August—and as Tibetans (and those in other occupied areas across China, like Xinjiang) inevitably use the world’s attention to broadcast their suffering—a farmer’s son born in a stone-and-mud house in a 20-home village in one of the world’s least materially developed countries has, rather remarkably, become one of the leading spokesmen for a new global vision in which we look past divisions of nation, race and religion and try to address our shared problems at the source. Acts of terrorism, he said when I saw him in November, usually arise from some cause deep in the past and will not go away until the root problem is addressed. He could as easily have been talking about the demonstrations of discontent being staged in his homeland nearly a half-century since he saw it last.

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Posted in The Xivth Dalai LamaPosted on

Sydney: Onscreen City

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the artist most constantly invoked on my first day at the Sydney Readers’ and Writers’ Festival this spring was not Patrick White or Orhan Pamuk or W.G. Sebald, but that mumbling icon known as Robert De Niro. “I don’t want to start thinking of novels as if they were just film-scripts in disguise, waiting for Robert De Niro,” a best-selling novelist whose latest book seems eminently filmable told me over lunch. I turned around, to meet a Lebanese writer from Montreal who had just published his first novel, about his country’s civil war. What’s its title, I asked. “De Niro’s Game,” he said, with magnetic intensity. “As in Robert De Niro.”

At breakfast three hours earlier, the most memorable moment had come when a novelist told me he had actually received a call “from Robert De Niro’s people, from the set of The Good Shepherd. They wanted to tell me, ‘We’re going to get Paramount to option your book.’ ” The convergences were so memorable–and unexpected–that I began to wonder if there was a part for the man who made Travis Bickle a household name in my upcoming book on the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Perhaps this all says something about Sydney, too, though (since I certainly hadn’t had conversations like this at similar festivals in Edinburgh, Auckland a week before, or even L.A. the previous month). It is, pre-eminently, a city on show, a place of bright, seductive exteriors; where Melbourne prides itself on its secrets, its privacies–everything that can be discovered only on second, or twenty-second, meeting, in its sometimes rainy and certainly weathered interiors–Sydney is a city that advertises itself right off with everything it discloses on arrival: the floating light sails of the Opera House, the heady blue (and for the most part unpolluted) skies, the blondes who drive their red sports cars with the top down through the Central Business District (or “CBD,” as its sparky nickname has it).

A Los Angeles without fuss or urgency, a San Francisco alive with the alfresco pleasures of the moment–tapas bars along the wharf where all the tanned bodies and free-and-easy fashionistas park themselves on couches under the gorgeous skies–Sydney might be a billboard for the Good Life in its latest sleek, hyper-visual incarnation. The city has always seemed to lie midway between Ireland and California, peddling a “g’day” irreverence that comes from living a long way from other people’s standards and codes, and making up its rules itself; even in its sparkling new multicultural duds, it can have the (fresh) air of a London that’s got a tan, scrubbed its face very clean and shed its clothes. Bankers head home from work on the ferry in white shirts and backpacks, and when you look up amidst the new high-rises, what you see, at end of day, is a huge moon rising over tropical palms.

The “tyranny of distance,” as it’s been called, gives Sydney, like the country around it, its own unimpressible savour, just like the man beside me at a very formal lunch who, as soon as a speaker began talking of her Pentecostal girlhood, whipped out a business-card on which he was identified only as “Atheist.” Jesus “is the only one who gives you spirit without damaging your liver,” announced the sign outside the church as I drove in from the airport, turning the same bravado in the opposite direction. Two tall blond boys were walking hand-in-hand among the skyscrapers as I disembarked at my hotel, insouciant advertisements for themselves. And when I went up to the gym at the Intercontinental–at 6:00 a.m., no less–it was to find the whole city laid out in panels through the wall-length windows, as rugby players and P.R. girls burnished their strengths and the city and its stunning vistas–blue, green, white–played out like streaming video through the glass.

Sydney, in short, is openness, unasbashedness, the girls in white, the men with shoulder-length locks arranging themselves in yoga positions along the walk from Bondi Beach to Bronte at first light, as perfectly framed against the rising sun as posters for a Club Class New Age world. “In Melbourne we believe in keeping everything behind closed doors,” a theatre director from that second city assured me. “You see a street that’s completely empty, and you go through an alleyway and come to an inner courtyard. Sydney thinks heaven is a pair of ugly shorts.”

Even though she was trying to put down her urban rival, though, she couldn’t help confessing that “there are many people in Melbourne who would love to live in an English vicarage. Their image of heaven is a small plot of green, sipping tea with Jane Austen with their pinkies raised.” Sydney, she might have been saying, is really, by contrast, a city of the future, a shiny, three-dimensional trailer for the pleasures of the new century, Wallpaper magazine extended across a series of picturesque suburbs. “We believe in seasons in Melbourne,” she went on, “in textures, moods. Things are turned inward for us, back towards the past.”

At the same time, none of this makes Sydney an obvious home for the word. The city, like the continent it cradles, is more and more famous for supplying the global screen with its most potent talents–the Nicole Kidman or Toni Collette who have become among the most commanding figures in our planetary Hollywood precisely because they can play to perfection Californians or old Britons or themselves. Fox Studios notoriously makes many of its “American” movies in Sydney these days, and the Sydney Film Festival was arriving in town the very week the Readers’ and Writers’ Festival subsided (festivals themselves a way a city shows itself and its unofficial pleasures off to the world). Yet the people we are more likely to associate with Sydney are the ones–Elle Macpherson, Hugh Jackman, the imported Naomi Watts–whose very beauty tells us that they were raised in that part of California that comes equipped with irony, intelligence and a natural acquaintance with the world.

I had not seen Sydney when I arrived to share my words since 1988, so naturally I was startled most by how much the city had become part of the larger world, less an afterthought than a major player that just chooses to regard London and New York from the blithe, ironic distance of a boat out on the harbour, looking back at the puffed-up skyscrapers. Twenty years ago, the centre of the city seemed just a small cluster of grey buildings surrounded by green parks, the engulfing harbour, the hourly attraction of the skies; now Sydney is much more obviously a grown-up, plugged into the global circuit, bristling with importance and post-Olympic confidence, as able to position itself near the centre in a cyberworld as any European city with a thousand years of history, or any Middle Eastern place that just happens not to be ten thousand miles from the other famous cities.

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Posted in City SketchesPosted on

The Writing Life

Arriving in Japan twenty-three years ago, on holiday from my job writing for Time magazine in New York, I knew just how I would master the alien and impenetrable island: by treating it as my weekly assignment. I read all the current books on Japan, I mastered all the standard ideas and explanations, I dutifully spent my two weeks in the country seeing the temples of Kyoto, the Peace Museum in Hiroshima and (ingeniously, I thought) the newly opened Disneyland in Tokyo (cleaner, more compact, more all-American even than my favorite theme-park in Anaheim). I took notes, voluminous notes, on every magazine called Lemon and video arcade called “We’ll Talk.” I scribbled down the notices seen in tiny Japanese inns–”Please have friendly relations with foreign people at meals”–and even wove in an account I’d read of Bruce Springsteen’s recent tour (“Kyoto ?” said a member of his band. “It was just like New Jersey”).

I couldn’t speak any Japanese, but that was no problem, I decided: I would just capture the country through baseball. A strike-out (or so I thought) is a strike-out in any language. Japan can be the most obliging and efficient of countries, very anxious that no foreigner comes away disappointed, and so, sure enough, I saw what I wanted to see: mysterious local heroes, who wrote the Zen word for “spirit” or “patience” when asked for an autograph; massed figures in the black-and-white stripes of their Hanshin Tigers, at once strikingly lyrical and yet ready (so I decided) for war; aged Major League stars come to make money in their retirement who–I knew–had to symbolize Japan’s equivocal relations with the Western world. My first days in Japan generated probably two hundred pages of notes and forty pages of finished, handwritten prose, saturated with detail and irony, and, I was sure, the definitive wisdom of a 28 year-old journalist, on what linked the silent rock gardens of Kyoto to, in fact, Tomorrowland in Tokyo Disneyland (this all went into my first book).

And yet beneath all the great movement and the excitement, something had caught inside me in Japan, and it was perhaps (I see now) all that I couldn’t explain, something I couldn’t begin to put into tidy boxes and pinwheeling sentences. I had walked around a temple near the airport at Narita, during a morning layover, waiting for my flight back to New York, and something in the mild October sunshine, the gathered quiet, the shelteredness of the scene took me back, unanswerably, to boyhood and England: something in Japan made me feel more at home than I’d ever been in a life of traveling the globe.

So I quit my job in New York and decided to come over to Japan for a year, to try out the premonition. I would do what every other earnest foreigner did in Japan in those days, join a Zen temple and study the nature of nothingness. I would sit in front of the rock gardens and pen haiku, with the autumn moon rising above a rustic tea-house, and put myself into the very scenes I’d savored in the novels of Kawabata, the woodcuts of Hiroshige. I’d also–since now I’d left my job and published a book (about my travels in Japan and nine other Asian countries)–make it an assignment: whatever happened in my year in Japan I would annotate, and whatever came of all this, I would turn into a book.

Within a week of arriving in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto, I found, of course, that it was nothing like the pretty pictures I’d been admiring in New York. There was work involved, cooking and cleaning and raking and scraping. The hours of meditation were part of a strict military drill that included bowing and scraping, and not sleeping for days. It wasn’t an aesthetic domain at all; it looked, in fact, suspiciously like real life. I slipped out of the temple into a foreigners’ guest-house, fell in love with a Japanese woman and decided that her story would be my book and my way of understanding impermanence and egolessness: by evoking the changing relations of Japanese women (or one woman at least) as the country left its traditions behind without quite finding anything to replace them.

That book (The Lady and the Monk) found some friends and readers, as my first book (brilliantly titled by my editor, Video Night in Kathmandu) had done. But as books have a habit of doing, it threw off any number of unintended consequences. I now had a strong attachment in Japan (that lady). A part of me relished living thousands of miles from any life I knew. I could write my books to support myself–I’d been writing essays for Time while sleeping on a bare tatami mat in my temple–but there was something else in the country that tugged at me and tugged at me, and it was something I hadn’t quite got down in 338 pages of antic episodes, sonorous essays and–again–pages of chatter and analysis.

I came back to Japan, perhaps for good, and found myself (with that lady) in a two-room apartment, completely Western, in an entirely Western neighborhood, far from temple or shrine or aromatic backstreet or lanterned inn. Japan was now dry cleaning and tax receipts and taps that suddenly went kaput; nothing remarkable at all. I still had to work for my living–novels on Cuba and Iran, heavy tomes on globalism and the wars of our planetary neighborhood–but Japan now became my backdrop, not my subject. After all, I’d already written down everything I knew about the place.

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Posted in The Writing LifePosted on

No Disguises in the Dark

He bounds onto the stage, dressed to kill, and roars into a rendition of one of his classic songs as if he’s been storing up his energy for fifteen years to make it new. He’s bent before us, crouching, trying to squeeze out every ounce of blood, and he’s looking into the wings to summon a fury, a devotion, a power most of us would not have words for. An innocent in the audience might wonder what this courtly coyote is trying to sell us, with his references to Robert Frost and stories from the Bible. Then she may notice that the singer is looking at the ground, as if admitting us to his private cell. He has no designs on us at all.

Is this cabaret or prayer-hall, you may wonder as the show goes on? Haunting or celebration? Some of the songs have the dark, chill atmosphere of a graveyard after nightfall; others reveal to us the man before us, hand on his undefended heart. We’re used to thinking of Leonard Cohen as ladies’ man and monk, master of chansons and koan. But if you’re in the right place, he might be telling us, all of them look the same. You can make your home in some place behind the smoke of all distinctions.

I watch this godfather and grandfather–a mystic in a gangster’s hat–command the stage and give it up, hold us without effort and then disappear again, and I think how far away the tortured young seeker of the past appears to be. He’s still shaking at the knees, wearing his fedora at a rakish tilt, offering himself up to us with his hands in his pocket and a crooked smile. But he’s down from the mountaintop now, master of his discipline, and it’s easy to see he’s at peace, accepting of his contradictions.

So don’t try to assign him an age or nationality, I tell myself; just let him take you to the space we all bear witness to: the empty room, the empty heart, the place where god and goddess become one. Even here in the Sony Centre, in downtown Toronto, the city where he first recorded his songs forty years ago, he’s ready to let his voice be still, or to raise a cold and broken hallelujah. The music all around him, now raucous, now hushed, has the sound of an ironist’s surrender.

You notice, perhaps, as the songs pulse on, how he reminds us of his age just before singing, “Forget your perfect offering.” You catch the transparent modesty with which he salutes and introduces his musical companions, again and again. The show is artfully shaped and structured, you realize, from the “Golden Voice” on the tickets to the final song of farewell. The meticulous players around him, so sharp you could cut a finger on them, look like a group of hit men (and femmes fatales) from a monastery.

But beneath all that, what Leonard Cohen on tour in the 21st century tells us is that all of us, in our solitary trembling, can come together in a kind of communion. So many of us have been listening to him alone, or sharing the songs with a single love as the night comes on and the candles begin to gutter. But here, for the first time in fifteen years, we’re all together in our observances. People stand up to welcome the stranger home, and rise up again, and again, in battalions as they recognize their old lives coming up. No one needs flashing lights or changes of costume; the words and the feelings are enough.

A young woman beside me–barely alive, I suspect, when he wrote “The Gypsy Wife”–exults, “They love him! Who wouldn’t love him?” A portly grandmother from rural Canada another night starts shaking her booty and jiving back and forth as he dances her to the end of love. A celebrated novelist is picking out favorite lines during the intermission, and C.E.O.s are trying to remember (or not to remember) who they were with half a lifetime ago when they first heard “Who By Fire?” Tattooed boys and sleek young women, men in suits and perhaps a shadow monk or two are all giving themselves up to the droll beauty of it all.

I–with a sweetheart who’s enjoying her first day in Canada, having flown over from Japan for the event–notice all the new verses he shares with us, the way a “broken” turns to a “shattered” in one verse, and, later, “There’s going to be a meter on your bed.” I think of the time I saw him walking barefoot on the icy ground after midnight in his Zen monastery, not having slept for seven days and nights–and then, with the next song, I remember the dapper double-breasted gentleman who entertained me in his house while the most beautiful singer I’d ever seen decorated his growls with harmonies in his back-yard studio. I hear his signature words come back again and again–”naked” and “touch” and “heat” and “kneel”–and realize that the point of a concert is to do what all his songs do: take us out of ourselves, so that we can look down on the discarded skin and chuckle.

At some point, in any case, all the pretentious words run out, and all I think is: this is a man with no disguises, no agendas. He’s giving us himself, and no one could ask for anything more. He’s telling us that he’s old and grey and aches in the places where he used to play, and he isn’t, as most aging stars do, trying to reverse the clock. He’ll introduce gravitas and even wisdom to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and regret or deny nothing. I realize I’ve been taken somewhere deep and rare and strange, by a guide who never pretends that the journey is going to be easy or smooth. And then I hear the kind of line only Leonard Cohen could deliver, stretching our sense of what “popular” and what “music” mean till they snap: “The last time I was here, I was sixty years old, just a kid with a crazy dream.”

Hallelujah, I say, and may all of us (and none of us) rest in peace.

Posted in Leonard CohenPosted on

Chandler's Women

The classic British public-school grooms its inmates perfectly for taking on (or over) the world, and not at all for that half of the world known as the other sex. Its charges are trained, in effect, to see women as a foreign country (most of the old boarding-schools are still all-male), and even as they are taught just how to give or take orders, and how to bring their curious blend of stoicism and fellowship to Afghanistan or the Empty Quarter, they receive no instruction in what to do with that alien force that awaits them every night at home. Much of 20th century English literature comes, not surprisingly, from products of these half-military, half-monastic institutions (not least because self-discipline and getting things done are part of what they impart), and the result is a grand corpus of books written by men who seem at once fascinated and unsettled by that mysterious Other known as woman.

The archetype of this tradition might be said to be Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, about a crippled (quite literally) young medical student and sometime artist who is so determined to act in the chivalric mode, and so unused to dealing with real women in all their complication, that he alights upon a waitress who clearly has little time for him, and sets about trying to rescue her, even if the consequences are disastrous for everyone concerned (in The Razor’s Edge even the pure-hearted saint Larry Darrell turns his sights on a fallen woman whom he is sure he can save–and again her demons turn out to be much stronger than his good intentions). Throughout the works of Philip Roth, a similar tangle between weak, too trusting man and manipulative woman is constantly on display, but the tone is strikingly different from that in Maugham if only because Roth’s men want merely to be good boys, not parfit gentil knights. They are just regular, somewhat bookish, largely bewildered young men, in love with their parents, and not with their schools and a code of Tennysonian valor.

Or look at Wilson–to take an almost random example from Graham Greene–in The Heart of the Matter, composing love-poems for his old school magazine and blurting out “I love you” to a woman he’s met just once; his room-mate in Africa, from the same public-school, confesses, “To tell the truth, women scare me.” It is in fact the very heart of Greene’s creed of paradoxes that it is the impulse to help or save others that always condemns us, and that “Innocence must die young,” as he puts it in the same novel, “if it isn’t to kill the souls of men.” In works like The Quiet American the action turns upon the dialogue between an older man who barricades himself behind a pretense of not caring and a much younger man whose chivalry the older man mocks because he feels its vestiges so strongly in himself. John le Carre, the clear heir to this tradition, did not have to write a book invoking Schiller’s terms of The Naive and Sentimental Lover for readers, especially female readers, to come away with the unquiet feeling that he seemed to know about all the esoteric conspiracies and hidden currents of the political world, on every continent, and yet to be moony and even helpless when it came to women. His character George Smiley can solve any problem of espionage, but the wound and secret flaw he cannot conceal is that he does not know what to do with his misbehaving wife.

For those intrigued by this distinctly British type, played in the movies these days by Ralph Fiennes or, for Wodehousian moments, by Hugh Grant, Raymond Chandler offers a casebook of evidence. Though born to an American father and an Irish mother, in Chicago, Chandler was brought up in England in his formative years and sent by a rich uncle to the 17th century public-school of Dulwich, from which Wodehouse (who seemed to live in the cloudless, protected world of school into his nineties) graduated the year of Chandler’s arrival, and the iconic explorer Ernest Shackleton had passed on only a few years earlier. Though he moved to California at the age of 24, in 1913, and lived there until his death at 70, Chandler held onto his Englishness as if it were all that could protect him amidst the rapacious and unstructured vacuum of Los Angeles in its early years; much of the poignancy and intensity of his depiction of the crooked world around him come from his sense of himself, wearing tweeds that smelled of mothballs, and shopping for antiques with his wife, bringing the courtly code of Rupert Brooke to a hungry young society that had no European past and was determined to set up its own hierarchy based on money, ruthlessness and greed.

In every Philip Marlowe novel the action seems driven by a woman, usually an easy, alluring woman by whom Marlowe is at once attracted and unnerved; the first page of the first novel, The Big Sleep, finds him looking up at a “knight in dark armor” on a stained-glass panel who is trying to rescue a naked lady, and thinking that the knight himself could do with some help. Marlowe’s heroism comes from the fact that he is tilting single-handedly against the official corruptions of Los Angeles and usually trying to rescue a damsel in distress from the squalor and compromises all around; his interest comes from the fact that it is the woman who is usually playing him, and who is at least as corrupt as the society around her. In six of the seven Marlowe novels a murder is committed by a woman; and in none of the great books till the last, The Long Goodbye, does Marlowe even spend the night with a lover. When once a woman is shown in the nude, three references to “shame” appear in two sentences.

It is the inspired idea of the novelist Judith Freeman, played out in her atmospheric and unusual The Long Embrace, to try to tease out something of Chandler’s nature by looking at his relations with women, and particularly with his wife of thirty years, Cissy. The book, Freeman stresses at the outset, will not be a biography (at least two solid Chandler biographies, by Frank MacShane and by the young English journalist Tom Hiney, already exist); nor does she pick apart the novels for clues as many of his admirers, who include W.H. Auden, Albert Camus and Edith Sitwell, might do. Hers is, at heart, a more personal and curious mission: she confesses that she is obsessed by Cissy and the man she habitually refers to as “Ray,” and drawn to them for reasons she can’t explain. The book becomes, therefore, a series of desultory, brooding, solitary meditations in which she drives around contemporary Los Angeles, looking, often in vain, for the places where Cissy and Chandler lived, and seeing what little she can dig up of a relationship that has always been mysterious.

Cissy Chandler was born Pearl Eugenia Hurlburt, in Perry, Ohio, though from an early age she seems to have had a rich sense of the theatrical. Even when she first got married at 27, Freeman discovers, she was already taking four years off her age, having by then rechristened herself with a name (“Cecilia” and then “Cissy”) that sounded more up-to-date and coquettish than Pearl Eugenia. She was on her second marriage by the time she met Chandler, among a group of cultured Bohemians in L.A. who called themselves The Optimists, and had studied piano in Harlem and posed, sometimes nude, for painters and photographers.

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Yorick in the Tropics

Their ages when they died were 24 or 23 or 74 days; they are described in the barely legible letters on the headstones as “infant daughter”s and 17 year-old sons. The names beside them might make up an atlas of homesickness–Epsom and Abingdon and Surrey, as keenly remembered here as in the buildings all around (called Glendower and Ascot and St. Andrew’s) that try to make home seem less far away with hot water bottles and Anglican bells, billiards tables and books called Kava for Johnny in their small libraries.

The words aspire, in the classic British way, to hold their heads high, but something else keeps slipping through. “Man appoints but God can disappoint.” “We walk by faith, not by effort.”

As you keep surveying the ages–6 months, 26, 24, 7 months–you see the real, unwritten story of the island. Diseases that had never been heard of in Britain; or “cirrhosis of the liver,” as one longtime English resident in Colombo assured me. The dead might have been victims of foreignness itself.

I suppose, as the son of products of British India, born in Oxford with a complexion that speaks of Bombay, I’ve always been drawn to cemeteries and the shadow stories they tell, especially in places where the mingled unions of Empire are most visible on headstones. In once British Indian Aden, in Patagonia, certainly everywhere across South Asia, the elegies you find in country churchyards tell the story of Britain abroad with a human directness our textbooks shirk. But few graveyards I had visited were more redolent of all the spirits in the air than the British Garrison Cemetery, which sleeps on a small unmarked ridge just a few minutes walk from Queen’s Hotel and St. Paul’s church in the Buddhist capital of Kandy, in the hilly heart of Sri Lanka.

Just below you is the Temple of the Tooth, the single most striking and gorgeous image of what was long a separate kingdom here in the island’s interior, and sits around a lake. Yet nowadays the Temple of the Tooth is reached through inspections more rigorous than in a U.S. airport, thanks to an attack on the country’s most sacred Buddhist relic by Tamil Tiger guerrillas in 1998. Everywhere are signs of Sri Lanka’s 24 year-old civil war, and when I was looking at what is said to be a relic of the philosopher of peace, the day before, suddenly I had been hustled out as alarms sounded and armed soldiers chattered away on walkie-talkies, blocking off the entire town with empty local buses.

What the British brought to Sri Lanka, and took from there, acquired a whole new meaning in a country that, as soon as it gained independence, in 1948, reverted to age-old tribal divisions and started to tear itself apart. The graveyard’s headstones, I would learn, had once been shipped all the way from Britain, on vessels that took back to Blighty tea and cocoa and rubber from the “island of gems.”

I walked around the silent tablets one hot day in late June last year–the third highest man in the Sri Lankan army had been assassinated by a suicide bomber, the day before, not far from where I was eating breakfast–and looked at the headstones recalling some poor soul who “died suddenly of sunstroke at Rozel Estate, Ambegoda.” As I leaned in closer to try to make out the full inscription, I saw a movement in the trees, and then a man, who had been lying in a tree-trunk, as if in a hammock, reading a Sinhala paper, came out of his perch and greeted me in his language.

I turned away–Kandy swarms with unwanted friends, as do most poor places where the occasional visitor is a lottery-ticket on two legs–but this man, clearly used to such brusqueness, said, “I work here. My name is Charles Carmichael.”

I had taken him (of course) for yet another Sri Lankan drifter, but now I looked again–the beetroot-bright shirt, the crisp, sandy grey hair, neatly parted on the side, the grey trousers–and I saw that the Carmichael was no lie; it’s common in Sri Lanka, as in parts of India, to meet Johns and Thomases and Abrahams, and especially to meet De Souzas, Fonsecas and Fernandezes, whose names recall the Portuguese settlers of the 16th century, but a dark-skinned Carmichael is rare. And the keeper of graves had taken me, too, perhaps for a mongrel product of Sri Lanka, who didn’t know quite where he belonged.

Now, as he switched to fluent English, I saw the “Charles”  in his brisk syllables and intricate, easy diction–almost too intricate–the kind of English I had yet to meet anywhere across the island. “I come from an English-language household,” he said, to deflect the question that he knew was on the way.

His grandfather, Charles told me–a good, upstanding Carmichael–had visited a Hindu priest on the island and been very taken with the holy man’s daughter. She was only fifteen, but the English were used to getting what they wanted, and soon she was pregnant by the Englishman. Not much later he headed off to Calcutta, never to be seen again, but, vunusually, his grandson told me, he sent back money for his–well, his child’s mother, and for the boy’s education. Another Englishman came across the young, unattended mother and made her pregnant a few more times.

Charles Carmichael had a due irony towards the British, I noticed–it was he who stressed to me that the gravestones were all the British left in exchange for the tropical treasures and spices they took away from Sri Lanka. But he was keen to stress the good they had done, too, now and then. Things were shoddy in Sri Lanka, he took pains to tell me; the solid constancies of Britian were nowhere to be found.

“Most of these graves have been torn up,” he went on, a little like a host apologizing to a guest who has surprised him in the middle of a shambles. “By looters. people looking for treasure. They thought there would be jewels here, family heirlooms. They didn’t know the English don’t take their treasures to their graves. So it is in a state of terrible neglect.”

It was for that reason that he had been appointed by the church to come and clean up before Prince Charles was due to visit, in 1998. “And after the visit, they asked me to stay on, to keep it intact.”

I looked around at the stunted grass, the undisturbed silence. The previous day there had been rumors of a guerrilla attack on the country’s schools and people had raced into the classrooms with sticks and swords to bring their children out.

“Do many English people come here to find their roots ?”

‘Oh yes. I’ve been working here for eight years. And there have been seven visitors.”

“Seven in eight years ?”

“They’re getting old. It’s hard to climb the hill to get here.

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Still Life

It begins as a shock. A hooded figure is seated in the dark, so close to us that he seems to be made of wood. The camera pulls back to disclose a single form kneeling against a bare wall. There’s no patter, no background music, very little movement: you’ve entered another country, in this silent, snowbound building, with its own distinctive language (the language of silence, and of sunlight). Each long, unwavering take is a still life that says there’s still life—vibrant, shifting, human life—in this other world. The only thing that’s likely to move is you.

Very soon, though, even you are moving more slowly, as the film does, and you are paying attention to every detail, as the camera does. Bells begin to peal, a monk is shown snipping some fabric, another sits motionless with a book. As the prolonged, exact images go on, you start to notice the texture in the wood, to see how the light slants across the floor, to hear birdsong in a sunlit garden. When a clock begins to tick, you not only hear it but seem to breathe it. A clatter of monks assembling for prayer sounds like thunder. Then one of them begins to sing, and the music is transporting.

Into Great Silence (a direct translation from the German would be “The Great Stillness”) is probably not like any film you’ve seen before, though it has some of the meticulous patience of the reveries of Terrence Malick and some of the uncompromising intensity of Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s less a film than a meditation, a 162-minute observation of life in La Grande Chartreuse, a thousand-year-old charterhouse of Carthusian monks in the French Alps. There is no story here or script, and certainly no characterization. Yet it does just what films are meant to do, if you think that films, like all good art, are meant to transform. By the time you leave the theater, you many find that, as the movie’s repeated refrain has it, a heart of stone is turned into a heart of flesh.

At a time when more and more of us are ever more hostage to our beeping phones and our blinking machines—our agendas, in short, and the chatter and clutter of the world—a monastery represents a new kind of liberation. It fills up the spaces that information can’t touch, and it speaks to those parts of us that feel we cannot engage with the surfaces of the world until we have built a solid foundation from which to put those surfaces in place.

I have been spending much of my adult life in a monastery, and sixteen years of sometimes visiting on retreat, sometimes staying within the cloister, have shown me that the contemporary world offers no more abundant and transporting kind of trip (neither the Caribbean nor Santorini nor Bhutan can compare). Christian monasteries may be losing numbers, Buddhist retreat centers may be filling to the point of overflow, but the basic human hunger for space and spaciousness—a larger whole (and a deeper reality) into which to fit all that we see and are—will never die.

Maybe that’s why in the New York Times, of all places, this movie was described as “entrancing,” and no less than Variety, the organ of Hollywood, called it “exhilarating.” In a world where we sometimes seem sated with complexity, simplicity can pierce us with new intensity. In 1984, the director of Into Great Silence, Philip Gröning, asked the monks if he could film them and received a green light all of sixteen years later. They would be happy if he joined them, the white-hooded fathers said, so long as he attached no commentary and came to live with them for several months, carrying his camera and sound equipment alone and in silence. To make a movie about a monastery, they might have been saying (as many a Zen master would), you have to become a monastery.

The point of monasticism, in this age as in any, is to take you out of the world of time (and change and loss) and back into the realm of the changeless. The anonymous monks we follow through their seasons in the film, therefore, do very little other than what their counterparts would have done in the Middle Ages (and very much what their Zen colleagues do around Kyoto, where I write this). They chop wood and kneel down to pray. They feed the local cats and pray again. They tread the hallways of the silent cloister pushing a big clangorous cart, delivering lunch boxes to the monks in their cells. Once a week they are permitted to take a walk in the fields nearby. You feel a wild release as the men suddenly clatter out into the sunlight, gossip and gambol in the snow, and talk about other monasteries like boys on holiday.

The camera records all this not as if it were offering a documentary on life within an old enclosure, but as if it were being carried by a member of the cloister, showing us his world from within. We feel and share the strain as one father, very elderly, clomps about and almost falls in the snow, shoveling and shoveling in the depths of winter to make a clearing. Then, as the season changes, we watch with him as the seeds he’s planted begin to shoot up from the ground he’s cleared, and our heart lifts with the sense of seasonal fulfillment.

It’s all a metaphor, in short, and indeed part of the beauty and mystery of any monastery is that it teaches you to see everything metaphorically. The monks cutting one another’s hair are trimming one another’s vanity and claims to individuality. The black and white cloaks they wear represent nothingness. Toward the end of the film, one blind monk speaks, to say that he regards even the taking of his sight as a blessing; it’s not what you see that matters, in a sense, but how. Everything’s an adventure when you’re in love.

There are certainly many other movies that could have been made about a community of hermits—I think films of like Kundun or the films of Khyentse Norbu. Into Great Silence declines to explore who these men are, what lives they’ve left, what doubts come to them in their long, silent nights. It does not dwell on the charity that arises from their meditations, and if you want to find out some of the inner clamor beneath the surface stillness, you’ll have to pick up a book by Thomas Merton, or by any of a number of Buddhist practitioners. Yet instead of developing, the film deepens. Before long, as in any monastery, all sense of division dissolves.

“You have seduced me, O Lord, and I have let myself be seduced,” says the line from the Bible that comes up again and again, filling the black screen, in between the images, and though the origin of the line is Christian, you might as well be in the realm of Rumi or Rilke (or, for that matter, Leonard Cohen). Names themselves, the distinctions between one doctrine and another, are one of the first things that dissolve when you enter silence or a film about silence. Really, this is a film about surrender, and the love affair every one of us has with the invisible. When each of the monks in turn stares back at the camera, unmoving, we search in vain for answers in the light-and-shadow that looks back at us.

Indeed, the power of a film like this—a silent film in a sense much richer than we usually understand the term—is that it deals with something deeper than we have words or ideas for, whatever lies at our source, beyond and behind a sense of you and me. It is what you see when you watch a Peter Brook play—Hamlet produced on a bare stage, with Indian and Iranian music, and rearranged by the director to resemble a metaphysical soliloquy; what you feel when you lose yourself in an artwork by Bill Viola—Catherine’s Room, for example—which compresses all of human life into five panels in a monastic cell; what you sense when you listen to U2, and their sonic landscapes carry you far beyond the realm of what’s right and wrong, what ought to be done, or what out to be undone, into a larger dimension.

The point of a motion picture, after all, is to move you and take you somewhere that you’ve never been before. And the deepest point of a movie is to show you real life. Into Great Silence challenges—by transforming—our very sense of what is real and what is life, reminding us that the world is no more, finally, than the perspective from which we look at it. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear: This is not about twenty men in white in an old building in the Alps. It’s about you and me and that part of us all that sometimes we fail to see through the mind’s oscillations and distractions. Here is the rare film that goes so deep into the practice of Catholics that it might as well, in the end, be a film about Buddhists.

Posted in The Secret JourneyPosted on

The Island of Waiting

Ronald Reagan was preparing an invasion that was going to rescue the whole island next week. Fidel was about to be airlifted out to a new home in Miami, the guest of his secret patrons and supporters, the U.S. government. The soldiers were already lining up for Bay of Pigs II and a new constitution had been drawn up for the island that was going to emerge tomorrow. There was a shortage of everything except rumors–wild and impossible imaginings, crazy stories and flights of inspired imagination–the first time I set foot in Havana, in the spring of 1987, and the only thing I could be sure of was that none of it was likely to come true.

I was walking down streets called Virtues and Solitude, Hope and Liberation, towards a capitol building that was a perfect replica of the one I had just seen in Washington D.C. (though, Cuban friends assured me, a little bit larger). I had flown in to Jose Marti International Airport, named in honor of the Cuban revolutionary and exile whom Fidel Castro had made his alter ego and official hero–even as the Cuban exiles and passionate Castro-haters in Florida also claimed him as their hero, a fighter for an independent Cuba while exiled in America. Three months later I would be standing with a large crowd in the tiny town of Artemisa while a torrential midsummer rain drenched us all and, at the far end of a soggy field, a bearded man in fatigues talked and talked, in a lucid, forceful Spanish that even a five year-old (or a visiting journalist from Time magazine, myself) could follow. Castro had already been president for twenty-eight years at that point, and across the waters all his enemies were convinced he was ready to give out at any moment (his own people, many of whom had never known another leader, mostly seemed to believe that he would never die, any more than a bad dream or vision dies).

The only visitors I saw then, along the tropical, yawning, carless streets, in the Mafia-built hotels still creaky with hand-operated elevators, along the sea-wall where kids sat looking out at America ninety miles away, were eager Bulgarians, North Koreans traveling, like missionaries, in pairs and Soviets who kissed their fingers and thanked the heavens they didn’t believe in as they watched near-naked dancers sashay past during Carnival (rescheduled by the Revolution to coincide not with the Christian period of austerity, but with the anniversary of Fidel’s first strike, on the Moncada barracks, in late July 1953, and a different kind of quasi-religious privation). And when, four years later, the Soviet bloc collapsed and even those visitors and supporters fell away, a “Special Period” began, which meant that I found even more of nothing in the Cuban shops and the Soviet-sponsored bare shelves were replaced by Soviet-deserted bare shelves. More books came churning out: Castro’s Last Hour, Cuba The Morning After. The island of waiting was on the brink of transformation.

Fifteen years on, the story, the stories are the same, even though the evergreen Cuban leader, now 80, really does at last seem to be saying his goodbyes. By now, however, he’s already survived nine American presidents, outlasted more than three dozen assassination attempts, by some counts, and endured the hundred millionth rumor of his impending demise.

The story of Fidel’s reign is as paradoxical as that of any Revolutionary, bearing out the uneasy global truth that every son turns into the father he rebels against. Castro came to power to rescue his island from the tyranny of the dollar and widespread prostitution and has somehow, after decades on his throne, turned his island into a place where the governing obsession is the dollar and prostitution is everywhere. His main ally in all this is, perversely, a Washington that, by maintaining an economic blockade on the tiny island, allows Castro to present himself as a genuine David standing up to Goliath and a lone voice of independence who is an inspiration to revolutionaries everywhere. The beauty of Cuba is the complication of Cuba, a tragic place of infectious effervescence where fading buildings that are collapsing and filled with nothing but dust are lit up with an energy, a vitality, even at times an ebullience like nowhere I have seen in a lifetime of traveling.

Imagine Brazil compressed into a small, claw-like island with half the population of Greater Mexico City. Picture New Orleans reborn with an African beat and European intellectuals, so that you can hear drums beating from every park as darkness falls, while inside the bare rooms the kids you meet are as definitive on Franco and Camus as on Shakira and Oliver Stone. When you land at the airport at two in the morning, and walk out onto the long, jungly roads, with nothing but huge billboards–empty promises–hovering above you, you can still feel a buzz, a spirit, an intoxication in the air that makes you really feel that, as the billboards weirdly say, it is always the 26th of July (1953).

Nearly all the figures you are likely to meet in Cuba are, of course, the ones most drawn to foreigners, desperate to get out; the ones who have spent their entire lives hating Castro, as restless teenagers will hate the puritanical father who grounds them for the next forty-eight years. Yet even they, in my experience, will always assure you that their leader is brilliant, supple and more crafty than any other character on the global stage. He has turned their speck-like homeland into a major international player, and he has created excellent doctors (albeit with no asprins to give out), wonderful schools (with no textbooks on offer). The only thing worse than having Fidel in power, they sometimes tell you, is having anyone else. If he is succeeded by his younger brother Raul, Cuba will suffer under an even more oppressive tyranny run by a man as brutal as Fidel–perhaps more so–but with little of his fire or intelligence. If it is taken over by the exiles from Florida, who have been redecorating for fifty years an island that no longer exists, it will become disfigured in a different direction. Never has “better the devil you know” had a keener or more anguished implication.

And in the middle of all these nervous complaints, guitars are being strummed along the beautiful Malecon, the corniche that stretches its arm around the fading tropi-colored buildings of Central Havana, and girls are asking you to marry them to get them out, while an old man requests pictures of Jackie Robinson and Ava Gardner. In the absence of almost everything, people fill the emptiness with sex, with music, with flamboyant embroideries. All the time they are supposed to be working for the government, they are busy working around it, keeping the island afloat somehow through sheer resourcefulness and determination and genuine, unscripted companero-ship alone. The party subverts the Party at every turn.

It is presumptuous, I know, to speak of a country and a predicament not my own, and I leave to political pundits the job of telling us that Cuba is sometime socialist utopia and longtime repressive hell. For me it has always been, more than anything, a human place, and even after six eventful trips there I find that I have seldom seen people so disenchanted, so passionate, so engaged in all the possibilities of every moment (because so exiled from the chance to change anything deep down). Strangers ask you for jobs with the C.I.A., or offer you jobs with the Cuban C.I.A. A kind man with watery eyes approaches you in the Cathedral and asks if you will take a letter to his mother in the U.S. (I did so, and only just before sending it, looked inside to find that it was in fact addressed to a desk officer at the State Department). Everything is permanently dancing and shifting, and nothing is going anywhere at all.

Like almost every foreign visitor who has set foot on the island, from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Merton, and from Graham Greene to yesterday’s bedazzled new fiance, I fell almost instantly under the island’s spell the moment I visited. Perhaps what I really fell in love with was a unique mix of vibrancy and ambiguity. The day I returned from my first trip, I went to my travel agent in Santa Barbara and bought another ticket, to go down a few weeks later (through Merida, and in years to come, through Canada). Going to Cuba became my annual way to remind myself of what stood (and slouched and shimmied) outside abstractions and ideologies, a political and emotional and moral conundrum that asks you what you will do with smiling new friends who say they’re happy to be thrown into prison because they can get food there, and relics of the American Empire that preserve old American dreams more lovingly than anything in America does.

My very first morning in Havana, as I surveyed a futuristic building along the once-modern boulevard of La Rampa, stranded there now like a crumpled I.O.U., a Cuban with Chinese features leaned in and whispered a hello (he could tell I was a visitor, despite my scruffy clothes and dark complexion, by the fact I was looking at the ghostly showpiece). Minutes later I was following Carlos into a cavernous, dusty apartment in Central Havana, being introduced to “brothers” who looked less like him than I did and then bumping back across town to his two-room apartment on a rooftop in the suburb of Vedado. Kids were conducting heated conversations on Michael Jackson’s skin color, a rooster (called “Reagan” in honor of his speech patterns) was strutting about calling reveille, a boom-box was blasting Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Carlos was asking me what I really thought of William Saroyan and whether Spinoza had it over Leibniz.

Twenty minutes later, he was asking me if I wouldn’t mind giving him my passport so he could go off to the land he’d been dreaming of for all his thirty-five years. It was a variation of the appeal I heard from almost every Cuban I met–better the reality you don’t know, in this case, then the one you do–and four or five visits later, I did at last help Carlos escape, as a political refugee (and without parting with my passport), to America. So quick-witted and enterprising and sophisticated a spirit could only flourish, I knew, in the Land of Opportunity. Yet when he touched down in New York, and later in Miami, Carlos saw drug dealers for the first time, and homeless people, and gangs. In America you can do anything, he told his friends back home in Havana, but you can also be nothing, with no family or community or overarching vision to hold you up or to rebel against. You’re better off, he told them, to their shock and disappointment, in the Havana that you know.

Cuba was–still is–a cluster of sunlit streets with shadows everywhere. It is a proudly patriotic island that, like nowhere else in the Americas, draws Madrid and West Africa and the Antilles together, so you are seeing Truffaut while talking of the Mets, with Yoruba deities being placated in one corner. It is as physically beautiful a place as exists on earth, it wins more gold medals per capita at every Olympics than any other nation and it is famous for its oppressions and the hatreds it inspires, an intense family dispute that has been going on now for half a century or more.

As the hundred millionth rumor of his departure hisses across the Central Havana rooftops, Castro himself appears to be giving way to something even more chaotic and repressive, thanks to those who have hated him, or followed him, for longer than is healthy. But the Cuba that I, and more and more Americans, know seems unlikely to follow any script, except insofar as it can jeer at it and riff on it and embellish it with the confidence that little on this loose-limbed island listens to either 19th century German philosophers or 21st century American potentates. Cuba is the home of a permanent revolution against all the ideas we have of it.

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