admin, Author at Pico Iyer Journeys

The Times, They Are A-Changing

A moment comes back to me, unbidden and far too often, that probably speaks for many such moments in many too many lives. A fifteen year-old classmate is lecturing a few of us, and a bewildered Classics teacher, in a little room in Berkshire, in 1972, on the timeless literary brilliance of Pink Floyd’s recent record “Atom Heart Mother.” I, of course, have no time for such pretensions; when it comes to my turn to speak on some powerful work of deathless poetry, I turn my exegetical eye to the unplumbed subtleties of Cat Stevens’s “Tea for the Tillerman.” Drunk on formative readings of Bob Dylan by Christopher Ricks and the like, young minds blown apart by the mytho-poeic riffs of Greil Marcus and other early professors of rock, we knew that the only poetry that counted was the kind going round and round on our turntables (and in our heads).

Yet even as we were trying to work out whether Yes’s “Tales from Topographic Oceans” really belonged in the tradition of Tolkien or LeGuin–and what did the road and the sky signify, exactly, in the eschatology of Jackson Browne ?–the people who were giving us such fodder for teenage speculation were growing older and, in a few cases at least, wiser. No American memoir I have read in recent years is as at ease with its presentation (or anti-presentation) of self, so casually novel in structure and diction, as Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume 1. And having heard, perhaps, that Dylan’s name has been mentioned in the context of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and certainly the Pulitzer Prize in America, one Canadian broadcaster last year began talking up Leonard Cohen for the Nobel, too; the growling Zen monk and laureate of unrequited yearning had, after all, won Canada’s equivalent to the Pulitzer, the Governor-General’s Award, almost forty years ago.

As it happens, Cohen has just this summer released his first book of new writing in more than twenty years, Book of Longing, whose very title announces its interest in both Rumi and Rilke. At the same time, with typical craft, he’s released a new record, “Blue Alert,” in which his dark threnodies are given silver light and sweetness by being sung by his much younger companion, Anjani. A published writer now for fifty years, he is in effect advancing once again his idea that songs are just a form of poetry made flesh: some poems in Book of Longing have appeared as songs already in their entirety, some in part or with slightly different words, and one song on “Blue Alert” is a rendition of a poem he published forty-five years ago. Playing with the notion of what it is to be a rock star, a 71 year-old singer-songwriter who is choosing not to sing the songs he writes, turning to the monastery where he recently lived for five years to generate verses and sketches of naked eroticism, Cohen, a longtime mischief-maker, might be asking us why songs should be excluded from the canon when the same words, appearing on the page, are treated with literary seriousness.

It’s a good question, if only because the lines between the forms are blurring and it’s becoming frequently apparent that some of the most eloquent (and certainly the most public) writers of the day are, in fact, the ones with that dismissive tag “song” attached to them. Bono, the lead singer of U2, writes essays for Time magazine, and in the pieces he has written for Henry Luce’s little red book, on Aung San Suu Kyi and the economist Jeffrey Sachs, he throws down propositions like challenges, and with a reckless, open-hearted intelligence that puts every other newsmagazine-writer to shame. And Bruce Springsteen, when inducting Bono and the other members of U2 into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame last year, summoned up the same unembarrassed intensity: “A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible fire that fuelled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire. You want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out.” When was the last time you heard another writer introduce a colleague like that ?

Perhaps it is that very unembarrassedness–the freedom from self-consciousness–that allows those who are thrown into the category of singer to address the essential themes with such head-on sincerity. Norman Mailer took on (and gave body to) demons and angels in the air in his essays of the 1960s and a few novelists today, like Cormac McCarthy, evince no shyness in writing about God and Eternity and all the other stuff with capital letters. But for most, such ideas are infra dig, or somehow too difficult to try to put into words. The same writers who think nothing of writing of masturbation, sanitary napkins or their midlife crises take a breath, and usually walk away, before addressing the religious or romantic ideas that Shakespeare or Donne would have taken on daily. Gospel singers, meanwhile, court the heavens shamelessly, and the most eloquent among them bring the metaphysical tradition up to date with a beat that burns.

In one poem that appears in his Book of Longing, Cohen writes, quite typically, about, it seems, his return from the monastery to his civilian life:

‘by the rivers dark I panicked on I belonged at last to Babylon.”

It may not be an immortal verse, but it does cleverly bring down the cadences of the King James Bible to describe a movement in the other direction, away from the mountaintop and into the traffic. It has fun with its rhymes, the way Cohen did when throwing “what’s it to you ?” against “Hallelujah” in perhaps his most accomplished later song. It charts the progress from one world to the other with the song-like device of four verses that begin “by the rivers dark,” and ends with “Babylon,” though each time by way of something else. And it freights that “at last” with a curious resonance, since in the theology of most believers one’s final destination is some kind of Eternity, and not the world. As in all his songs (since he recorded this one, too), there is a concentration in the lines that suggests someone who has collected himself, for long years, in silence and the dark.

Dylan plays games with mystery, you could say, where Cohen tries to annotate its features, like the Judaeo-Zen theologian he often appears to be. Dylan pushes song towards the literacy of poetry, while Cohen, beginning as a poet, moves in the opposite direction again (the “Stranger Music” rubric under which he has published his work seeming to bring together Albert Camus and Merle Haggard, with a nod to the writer he most resembles in recent years, Thomas Merton). Dylan, in other words, takes us off on long, vivid journeys into the unexplored parts of the subconscious; Cohen exercises great conscious control to push all his songs into a tight quatrain. Between them they show how surrender is made more poignant by irony, and vice versa.

The classic argument against songs is, of course, that they are meant to be seen, not heard, and cannot be compared with poems, which lack the ornamentation–as well as the distraction–of musical accompaniment. Yet the classic answer has always been that although not all songs are poems, much poetry consists of song. The history of literature sashays from Cademon’s lyrics through Shakespeare’s songs to the antic ditties that Thomas Pynchon throws into every novel. Cole Porter and Noel Coward will not and should not be placed in the company of Auden or Stevens; but they belong in every anthology of light verse, as surely as Patti Smith appears in the new Oxford History of American Poetry, and Joni Mitchell sits near Sylvia Plath in Camille Paglia’s recent book of explications de textes.

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Posted in Leonard CohenPosted on June 30, 2006

A Modern Fairy-Tale

Once upon a time there was an implication. He didn’t get picked very often when the other kids were choosing teams, and he tended to live in the shadows. But he always had a sense of pride, deep down, because he knew that people would call on him in their most important moments: in bed beside someone they loved, or whispering to what they believed in on their knees. Life wasn’t black or white, he knew; implication was a friend of all the colors.

As he grew up, implication found himself running with a not very fast crowd. Irony, irreverence, adoration, poetry: they all got together, though they came from different worlds, in unlit places away from the main streets. The smoke was heavy in these places, and the heat was palpable. Passersby would hear a snatch of music as they went, and then there’d be a silence. It was like a different universe from the marching bands that liked to parade down the avenues; it said that what we couldn’t see, or say, had as much a part in life as what we could.

And then one day implication woke up and heard he was on a blacklist. He hurried outside and saw a poster on a wall. “Wanted Dead or Alive,” it said, and there was a picture of him in the shape of a question-mark. There was no room for him in the new dispensation.

He couldn’t believe this was happening, and he went to look for his friends. But they were all gone, too. Cacophony, simplicity and outright confrontation had taken over. Implication had always been the warrior’s enemy, and the lover’s friend; but now mano a mano was more in favor than tete-a-tete.

Implication didn’t know where he could go, what he should do. For as long as he could remember, he’d had a job to perform, a role. People looked to him when they were joking, when they were flirting, when they wanted to spare someone’s feelings (when they wanted to hurt someone’s feelings). They followed the principles he carried with him; that power is measured by what you keep at home, that silence makes a deeper impact than shouting. Implication had been made an honorary citizen of the Land of Trust.

But now there’d been a coup d’etat, and stony-faced policemen, all marching up and down in step and wearing the same uniforms, were carrying placards scarred with exclamation points. Implication opened the daily newspaper, and saw that the whole front page was taken up with a single screaming headline (the other pages were given over to photographs); he turned on the TV, and heard men in suits shouting at one another as if trying to convince themselves of their own authority. At the radio station, it was the same. “Sorry, chum,” said a security guard, showing him the door. “We’re taking a commercial break for the next few years.”

Everywhere he went, it was the same. “We don’t have time.” “We’ve got to run.” In the past, he’d always been able to call upon his colleague the telephone. People loved to leave things hanging on the telephone, to hint and giggle and let sentences trail. But now the telephone too had a screen, and people were transmitting furious messages to one another every second consisting of squashed words and images and acronyms. “We’ve got to get there yesterday,” the data roared. “No time to linger.”

Implication walked around the streets and realized he was an outcast now, a true foreigner. When he knocked on the door of his favorite magazine, he was told his services were no longer required. When he went into a residential suburb, he saw people watching the small screen and taking their cues from it. When he went into the post-office–the place he’d always felt at home–he saw a listing of the “Ten Most Wanted.” Subtlety was there, and ambiguity, diplomacy and mischief. His face was next to the sentence that said, “These are the ones we need to lock up forever.”

Implication walked along the shadows of the boulevard–the shadows where life had really taken place–and thought back to the friends he’d known. His great companion Henry James was strange, he knew; he could hardly order dinner or declare his love, he was so attached to implication. That woman in Bath had used him as a manservant to deliver her round-about love-letters. Over in Japan they’d almost made a cult of him, saying so little that the poems they called him in for were almost blank pages.

But all these people had had friends, and had brought happiness to others; none of them was a threat to anyone who could see clearly. They all had something to say because–this was the point–they all had something not to say, too. A life that was all fluorescent lights was no real life at all.

Implication saw the casualties by the side of the road as he walked out of town: caresses were gone now, and limericks, and whispers, and threats. It was almost as if humans were becoming just machines made from computers, 0s and 1s. Or kids again, in the playground: “Love it or leave it.” You’re with us or against us.”

In the past he’d been employed by the Department of Education; implication was how people began to learn understanding. But now a sentence was running by, no time for him, and seconds later the sentence had crashed into another, and they were both lying lifeless on the road. Implication cried out, but no one heard him. Data were rushing past at top volume, and so many people were shouting, no one could hear anyone else. This was a time of war, they were saying, and there are no shades (they said) in war.

Posted in The Death Of NuancePosted on February 13, 2006

The Emptiest Part of Emptiness

This is what an English country town might look like, you think, after it had been emptied out by a nuclear disaster, and airlifted down upon a dry and semi-tropical Californian landscape. The buildings are one or two storeys high, no more, and the eentre of town runs out almost before you get there; the cathedral in the state capital is roughly the size you expect of a country town in Shropshire. There’s no sense of hustle-bustle anywhere, and the world, as driving, real-life concern, feels a universe away. This is what living in a zoo might feel like, in a beautifully-landscaped, wild, lush place, lavish with green parks and the pleasures of an alfresco life, with buses that run free, streets that are clean and empty and pelicans, as the city’s distinguished novelist Tim Winton writes, that “hung over the freeway like billowing newspapers.”

Almost as soon as you arrive in Perth, you will hear that it is closer to Singapore than to Sydney (geographically, but also, you soon come to see, culturally, too); then you will be told that Western Australia is the largest state in all the Empty Continent, eating up a third of the land, while housing scarcely more than 1.9 million people (put more dramatically, the Kimberley, in the north of Western Australia, boasts a population a third the size of Wembley Stadium when it’s full, scattered across a territory three times the size of England). And the emptiness is almost palpable everywhere around you, whistling in your ears as soon as you drive out of town, charging the red-dirt paths with an almost ancestral sense of intensity. The first thing you have to do on arriving in Western Oz is readjust (or simply give up on) your sense of scale, and realise that the world is spherical; it takes less time from Perth to fly to Dubai, or to Johannesburg, than to Tokyo.

To travel across Australia, from Darwin to Tasmania, from Cairns to Ayers Rock, is to confront a desolation, an elemental wildness so extreme that you get used to oddity on the one hand, and ancient emptiness on the other. To come to Western Australia is to see Australia’s Australia, in a sense, the emptiest, quirkiest, and most unworldly corner of the whole otherworldly continent. Near Broome, to the north, there is an 80 Mile Beach which, true to its name, snakes around the milky green-blue waters for a seeming eternity, unremittingly white and completely unpeopled. The nearest McDonald’s to the little settlement, the centre of the world’s pearling industry, was, until recently, almost 400 miles away. Goods are trucked in from Perth, a drive of 27 unbroken hours.

Australia, you will often hear, is the most urbanised society on our planet; what that is a way of not quite saying is that its few human habitations are huddled up in little corners, with the vast, enfolding wilderness all around. “NO FISH OR MANGOES TO BE CARRIED ABOARD,” says the sign in Broome’s tiny hut of an airport, and the 13-mile beach nearby tells you how to call the police if bitten by a box jellyfish. “Miles and miles of beach,” as a sadistic Taliban commander in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner says, of the “slice of heaven” that is Western Australia, where his parents now spend their days playing tennis and golf. “Green water, blue skies.” The counter-Afghanistan, he might have said, where a lifestyle culture is built on the edge of red vacancy.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that fully a third of the population of Western Australia is foreign-born, and Korean accents mix confoundingly with Cockney ones till you give up trying to match a voice to a face. The central pedestrian arcade of the state capital seems to be filled with more Japanese kids than you’ll see in Osaka, ostensibly here to study English, but really come to escape the straitened compartments of their home country and lose themselves in open space. Along a walkway in the great grassy space of King’s Park, overlooking Perth’s rivers, commemorative stones are offered up by “the Macedonian Community of Western Australia,” the Bahai Office for the Advancement of Women, “the Burmese Association of Western Australia.” Soon, you’re no longer surprised to see mango frappes served up in the local McDonald’s, and halal o-bento shops in the central mall.

Yet even with all these foreign flourishes, Western Australia remains the place where you can see Australia naked, in its pure, essentialised form. Fly up to Broome, the tiny colonial outpost in the middle of tropical wilderness–two and a half hours in a Qantas Boeing 737-400, and you’re still in the same state!–and you see tens, hundreds, actually thousands of miles of red-dirt emptiness below you, running, without warning, into the gorgeous green waters of the tropics. The ramshackle pearling town is still filled with the Japanese, the Chinese merchants and the Aboriginals who made it in the last century the capital of 80% of the world’s pearling industry (at a time when Broome had only 5000 people, it had 400 pearling luggers going out to sea regularly). Not First World, really, or Third, but 13th, perhaps, the sort of half-dreamed place where people arrive and are never seen again (because they’ve fallen out of the rat race, or been swallowed up entirely by the elements).

“Beware of waves breaking over groyne,” says the sign at Cottesloe Beach, only a few minutes from central Perth, and in Western Australia more than anywhere, you can meet a blunt and brawny Angle-Saxon lingo in which words seem to have been scuffed and cut short by the spaces all around. The lovely, white-sand island of Rottnest, 45 minutes by boat from central Perth, here becomes “Rotto”; the pretty, low-slung port of Fremantle, 30 minutes away, all brightly coloured expresso cafes and girls sauntering past the “Backpackers’ Resort” in pearls and flip-flops, is called “Freo.” The Australian language mixes casualness and compression to turn family members into “rellies” and what Americans call shades into “sunnies.” A single page of the brawny, sea-splattered prose of Tim Winton will give you “bong” and “pukes” and “hoiks” and “swag,” “thrums” and “clanks” and “drone” till you’ve attained a kind of 4 X 4 poetry (“As a nurse she’d copped a swill of curses”).

For a few days in Western Australia recently, I drove up to New Norcia, a whole town run by 14 monks, who at times over the years have controlled more than a million acres (and even now own more than 5000 sheep). For ninety minutes driving up to the “bush oasis,” I saw (on a summer Saturday afternoon) not a single other car. Another day, I went to the wine country just north of Perth, in the Swan Valley, and saw a vineyard that is no more than a shed with sprinklers on top, and two picnic benches laid out beside the grapes where visitors can more or less pick them from the vine.

Australia’s great blessing, its promise has always been, as I see it, this sense of unfinishedness, the openness that comes from being a work-in-progress, with one foot in the future. It is America without a care in the world, the somewhat purposeful “How you doing ?” of California turned into the more rambling, “How yer goin’ ?” And Western Australia enforces that sense of female (pretty, sun-dressed) surfaces most visibly inhabited by men (boisterous, tough and matey). Australians mock and undercut themselves to get the pretensions out of the way at the outset, but underneath the swagger and the attitude there often seems to be a real, almost grudging sensitivity (“Please do not ask for key,” says a sign outside the Greyhound station outhouse in Broome, in the unmistakable cadences of Russell Crowe, “as refusal might offend”).

In Western Australia, you can see, more powerfully and lyrically, than anywhere in New South Wales or Queensland, how “feral kids,” as they’re locally known, stalk the subway stations and shiny arcades of the sunniest state capital in all of sunny Australia. Open the yellow pages on a bright and stylish afternoon in Perth, and you’ll find that the “Dogs” section is much longer than the entry for “Churches,” and travels from “Complete Dog Management” to a “Mobile Dog Wash,” by way of “Perth’s Only Doggy Day Spa,” which provides “Body Wraps” and “Skin Treatments” for Rover. The most refined and pampering pleasures of a comfortable city set against constant reminders of the wilderness just inches away (the “Pest Control” listings in the phone-book cover three and a half pages). When I flew out of Western Australia, I picked up at the airport a list of saw all the things I could not bring back into this fragile, deeply rugged country. “Electric flyswats,” said the notice, “blowpipes, knuckledusters, nunchakus and cobras.” The shrinking violet, I thought, will never be the state flower of any part of Australia.

Posted in AustraliaPosted on February 12, 2006

Terrence Malick's Brave New Worlds

The very notion of a man who translated Heidegger into English (The Essence of Reasons; Northwestern University Press; 1969) being allowed to film mega-budget Hollywood movies starring George Clooney, John Travolta and Colin Farrell is enough to make some of us believe there’s justice of some rough kind in the world. Terrence Malick grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, the son of an oilman, and, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, won a Rhodes Scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford. He was well-embarked on completing his doctorate (on Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Heidegger and their conceptions of the world) when he fell out with his advisor, Gilbert Ryle, and returned to the U.S. to teach philosophy at M.I.T., to dabble in journalism at The New Yorker, to go through the inaugural program at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He made his first feature-length film, Badlands, in 1973, and won instant comparisons with the other bright new wonder, Steven Spielberg, who had recently made Duel. In the 33 years since, Malick has made exactly three more movies and given not a single interview.

Around such a man, the Thomas Pynchon of the modern cinema, rumors inevitably cluster. He lived in Paris for many years, and studied Buddhism in the Himalayas, people say. He was all set to make a movie based on the Jerry Lee Lewis story (which is hardly surprising if you recall that Lewis is said to be possessed, and plays out the all-American tale of devils in the wilderness speaking through a graduate of the Southwestern Bible Institute and cousin of Jimmy Swaggart), and spoke of filming Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In an industry where the important thing is to keep your name and face in the news, Malick went twenty years between his majestic second film, Days of Heaven, in 1978, and his third, The Thin Red Line, in 1998, a brooding meditation on the idea that “We’re dirt” and “We’re meat.” The actors who work with him are always asked to comment on the mystery, and tend to use words like “very, very gentle,” “very kind” and shy; Nick Nolte grumbled that all Malick was interested in was light–he was filming the whole Thin Red Line, unbeknownst to the studio, in “the magic hour”–and that the director would hand him six pages of exquisite prose poetry and ask him to reduce them to a single line he thought he could deliver.

The other important thing to say about Terrence Malick is that he does in the cinema what that other uprooted child of West Texas, Cormac McCarthy, does on the page. Both construct flawlessly beautiful grand canvases on which scenes of the most fearful, even apocalyptic violence play out. Both plainly believe that God has given man a bounty, especially in the Promised Land of America, and yet man, men, squander their blessings always by going where they should not go. Humans are no more than disposable ants in their landscapes, pawns with which such grand, abstract forces as Nature and Fate and Time fiddle. In Malick’s most recent film, The New World, it is fair to say that almost nothing happens in its almost two and a half hours. Yet what the film underlines is that he is a Plains mystic, much like McCarthy, who finds in the American grain the charred ashes of the paradise we’ve lost, and the haunted echoes of the possibility of recapturing it again.

I hurried off to the Cineplex as soon as The New World arrived in my town, knowing that Malick movies are as rare as the sightings of a comet (and illuminate the landscape as comets do in the fourth acts of Shakespearean tragedies). Very soon, the handful of other heads in the theater seemed to be nodding off, as voice-overs played out the arrival of British settlers in 17th century Virginia, the romance of John Smith and Pocahontas and then the Indian maiden’s transportation to the British court in sentences so uninflected at times, so unfallen, that I was reminded that visionaries pay a price at times (this is certainly true of McCarthy) for living so far from the daily world. Yet when the credits came up, I could hardly move from my chair, so strongly had I been taken, now and then, to the heavens.

He’s not for everyone, I told my friends, but what Malick does by not bothering with a complex narrative or cluttering the space with characters and words is take us, very occasionally, to places inside ourselves beyond the reach of words, to what seems to belong to the realm of Eternity as much as to time. Indeed, the fact that one of the most articulate men in Hollywood (quoting Homer in the Greek while men roll in the mud near Guadalcanal) is so clearly under the spell of silent movies–and that one of the most learned men in film is so committed to the dissolution of the mind–shows just how deeply Malick is devoted to catching the Ineffable where it hides.

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Posted in The Death Of NuancePosted on January 1, 2006

The City of Angels at 3:00 A.M.

The night in Bangkok is like nowhere else. The smell of mint, of jasmine and perfume as I step outside the airport a little before midnight. Stalls still lining the streets, fragrant with lemongrass and tangerines. Long-legged ladies stepping over streets turned into rivers by the night’s downpour, as dainty as duchesses about to be presented to the Queen. On the Chao Phraya River, the day’s last rice-barges drifting between temples like illuminated dreams while river-cruisers whoosh past, leaving disco tunes and flashes of light in their wake.

As I negotiate my way into town, through an Escher-like labyrinth of overpasses and freeways, I see three 7-Elevens open on a single block, next to them wonky, lamp-lit family places that might have been here when Somerset Maugham was staying at the Oriental Hotel. The beauty of Bangkok is that the new does not so much obliterate the old as know how to turn it to dazzling advantage. Everywhere the city is buzzing with fun and commerce, and its inimitably stylish gift for turning fun into commerce.

I sometimes think that you could make up a global calendar, with each of its hours given over to one of the world’s great cities. To New York I would assign noon, its great avenues choked with streams of yellow taxis, from out of which pour the dance-tunes of Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa, Lahore. London these days has claimed 10:00 p.m., on the far, long-forgotten side of the Thames, from which, as you sit in the sleek new Wagamama noodle bar, you can see the great bridges and Houses of Parliament lit up across the water. Paris is its pristine self in the hour after dawn, when the bakeries are just beginning to tickle the corners of the streets, and not a footstep can be heard on the cobbled lanes. Kyoto I tell my friends to visit in the hour after nightfall, when white-faced figures in kimono step out of their wooden houses and into smoothly purring black taxis.

Bangkok by contrast is the queen of 3:00 a.m., the spiritual home of those hours that are dead in most places in the world but lit up with a gaiety, a brightness, a carnival intensity in a city of professional charmers thtat has long known that it can best get what it wants by giving visitors everything that they want. The rulers of the land of the free (as “Thailand” literally means) have always been of two minds about the fact that their country’s great source of tourist revenue (the “one night in Bangkok” mystique) is also its great source of shame. So as I flew into the eastern city of angels, on roughly my 50th trip in the last 22 years, I decided to explore it in its native habitat, the temporal microclimate known as 3:00 a.m.

I dropped off my bags at my hotel, and, as soon as I stepped out of it, at 1:45 a.m., I counted more than 50 lit-up taxis jamming the little one-lane length of Convent Road. Bangkok is alive with Night Markets in every corner of the city, and in the one beloved of tourists, near the Patpong alleyways, demure young women were still nonchalantly peddling almost-designer sunglasses, Osama bin Laden t-shirts, DVDs of movies not even showing yet in California and fake Rolexes in three different categories (cheap, moderate and actually quite expensive). “Free Pool All Night Long,” a sign announced, and just around the corner from a tapas-cafe jazz bar, a tattoo removal joint seemed to be doing roaring business. In the nearest all-night pharmacy, long lines of customers were buying soft drinks, snacks and Prozac in both over-the-counter and generic form.

Night is obviously the best time for examining the city’s subconscious, as it were, charting the mechanisms that have helped it to become the world’s supplier of dreams, fantasies and the sensation of not quite being awake (even when Maugham was here eighty years ago, a man was approaching him from the shadows and whispering, “Oh, gentleman, sir, Miss Pretty Girl welcome you Sultan Turkish Bath, gentle polite massage, put you in dreamland”). But the night is also the ideal time for navigating a city notorious for its traffic jams, and sullen daytime monsoonal skies. Bangkok is a city of transformations (those outrageously feminine characters flouncing down Patpong 2 on high heels are only males with a “fee” attached), and at night every other rain-worn little building is reborn as a gaudy playground. Spas as large as Las Vegas casinos take up whole blocks and even the Government Savings Bank, I once read, had remade itself in gold and pink (gold for grace, the bank’s governor-general had declared, and pink for liveliness).

The natural place to observe one side of this often pious Buddhist city at 3:00 a.m. is the underground landmark that has stood at the center of the Bangkok night for decades, the Grace Hotel. Around it, in Soi Nana, as the little street is called, an elephant was standing blearily, awaiting tourist cameras, and another Night Market was peddling laser-pointed mini-keychain lighters and “magic,” two-sided wallets. Inside, at 3:05 on a rainy Wednesday morning, more than 100 people were milling around a lobby worthy of Dubai. Indians just flown in from the Gulf, sheikhs (as they seemed), their black-veiled ladies by their sides (shy glances from huge, kohl-rimmed eyes), two Eastern European women I took at first to be back-packers, what might have been one of the local Nigerian druglords who moonlight by selling false passports and send mules around the world with heroin in their stomachs.

Those who take Bangkok to be a cutting-edge Gomorrah, the most evilly red-lit paradise in Dante’s hell, could easily do their field work at the Grace. And yet the confounding thing about Bangkok, what sets it apart from anywhere else, is that it bends every rule with a sweetness, a charm and a natural sense of flair that disarms one’s every preconception. Nine of the ten bowling-alleys in the Grace’s lobby were being put to cheerful use at 3:30 a.m., and all four bowling alleys were clattering with laughter and falling pins. Furious games of ping-pong were taking place next to signs that said, “No Sit or Sleep on a Table Tennis” and in the Arabian Nights club down the hallway, Arab men in desert robes were twirling their arms around on the dance floor like intoxicated dervishes.

On the counter of Disco Travel, across from the security desk, three visitors were seated cross-legged, shoes placed neatly on the floor below them. Across from them, a shop selling expensive Cambodian antiques was still open for business. Down some stairs two stalls were flogging giant teddy bears under a clock that showed the time in Bahrain. I might almost have been in some Middle Eastern souq on Eid, the day after Ramadan ends.

Part of the special allure of Bangkok is that it marries exoticism to efficiency, serves up the faraway in a form that every visitor can claim as his own. Here are all the conveniences of Japan, say (iris-reading machines at the airport, more than 1300 7-Elevens across the city, tickets on the Sky Train mass transportation system as glossy as corporate credit cards), yet served up with a panache that Japan seldom musters. At the latest place of the moment, the Bed Supperclub, waiters in spotless “I AM NOT TRYING TO SEDUCE YOU” t-shirts (the eastern equivalent of the Cretan liar) offer up crab meat in chilled guava/melon soup with walnut oil and green-tea pindan cake with strawberries and basil in a drop-dead white-on-white interior that would make Tokyo blush.

The second grace of Bangkok, especially visible at the dead of night, is that it is supple and accommodating enough to make itself over in the image of every foreign need. Even as the Grace had turned into a giant bazaar of the illicit (the Thai ladies there sporting hennaed hair and billowing harem pants), across town, in Soi Thaniya, young women in Singapore Airlines costumes were bowing sweetly, and in perfect Japanese ushering salarymen out of buildings filled with the Excite Club, Charmy Nights and U-Smile. Around the corner one Dr. Smile can give you clean white teeth in one hour in his Smile Zone.

This natural, evergreen complaisance is the side that Bangkok shows the world. But even in those parts where foreigners seldom stray, the sense of enterprise is sleepless. I get into a taxi just before 4:00 a.m.–Tammy Wynette huskily enjoins me to “Stand By Your Man” on the radio–and, driving across town to the Khao San Road, the back-packers’ Mecca, I see block after long block in an otherwise deserted area full of stalls that sell Che Guevara t-shirts to local students and orchids to shopkeepers (or to Russians who send them on the next plane back to Moscow). On Sukhumvit Road, a row of figures is seated next to tiny candles under the awnings of closed shops with cards beside them that read, “FORTUNE TELLER. WORK MONEY LOVE LIFE.” Outside an all-night department-store, ten Thais are huddled around an elaborate sheet pushing down banknotes in a furious version of Thai roulette.

The city remains, of course, the center of a country that is often impoverished and still developing: a rat is scuttling along busy Sukhumvit at 4:15 a.m., and a blind woman taps her way among the all-night food-stalls singing a tuneless melody and holding up a sign that asks for money, in English. Need is one factor in the city’s eager seductions. But still there is a sense that more and more Thais can also enjoy the fruits of global production in their wildly eclectic city (a small hotel I look in on at 4:25 is putting out trays for its buffet breakfast: baked beans, tropical fruit, French pastries, stir-fried vegetables and (itals) Thai curry.

Since it is time for lunch, according to my stomach (4:30 a.m. in Bangkok is 2:30 p.m. in California, where I woke up), I stop off at the nearest restaurant I can find, and enjoy a celestial ravioli (dished up from a central kitchen down the street that is also serving up steak frites, tacos and teriyaki). Next to me, what seems to be a Vietnam veteran is dispensing what sounds like Buddhist advice on his cell phone. “Your vessel just grows lighter. Don’t think about it. Just look at it. Neutralize it. Just stay with it, and–you know what?– it dissolves.” Dissolutions are very much the order of the night.

Tiramisu licked clean, I stop off at the nearest Internet cafe to check in with my bosses on the far side of the world. Tucked into an alleyway next to a massage parlor, the seven-seat place greets me with a sign that (wonderfully mistransliterating the Thai unit of currency, the baht), announces, “1 MINS–1 BATH. MINIMUM CHARGE–20 BATHS.” Every other terminal in the place is taken up by falling angels from the nearby bars gleefully video-conferencing their faraway foreign amours. As I take the last remaining seat and thrash out fine points of the Gelugpa tradition in Tibetan Buddhism with an editor in New York, all six screens around me light up with shirtless men in Edinburgh, Vienna, Paris, while my fellow customers loudly confer on whether they should type, “You take my heart away” or “I want your body now.”

As the sky begins to pale, I go out again and take a taxi to the river, and then a ferry across to the Temple of the Dawn, Wat Arun. Around me, in the back-canals, monks in spotless orange robes are paddling from water-house to water-house, women at each stop bending down to hand them bowls of vegetables and rice. Secretaries are stepping out of broken shacks in immaculate skirts, off to their jobs in the high-rises, and schoolchildren in crisp white-shirted uniforms with crests on them are sashaying off to class.

The final grace of Bangkok is that every night is washed away by the regular ablutions of the dawn. The sun is glinting off the gold-leaf in the temples now, and birds are singing from the eaves. A cock is crowing across the water, and stalls are already set up next to the landing where I exit from a water-taxi, serving up pork with chilis, beef and jackfruit and spicy noodles. Fresh loaves of bread are set up along the windowsills of shuttered shops. And when I look in on the Internet cafe I had visited before–a final question from New York–I see that all six customers are still there as the light fills the sky, exporting Bangkok at 3:00 a.m. around the world.

Posted in City SketchesPosted on November 1, 2005

A Day in the Life of the Marvelous, Desperate City

By eight in the morning, the crowds are already beginning to form, huffing and puffing along the gorgeous strip of coastline that curves around Ipanema’s two miles of beach. Old old men in thongs and bathing trunks, wrinkled women in their two-piece swimsuits, power-walkers jutting their elbows back and forth as they waddle along the concrete–they’re all in evidence this buoyant midwinter morning, when (because it’s Sunday) half the wide boulevard stretching along Ipanema, and Copacabana around the point, is closed to traffic. A nun, with more clothes on than the rest of the dawdlers combined, a roller-blading mom, pushing along a pram as she glides in and out among the near-naked bodies, a man on a bike with speakers attached to each handlebar so he can blast his enthusiasms to the crowd–all of them are contriving to turn the stretch of pavement into a neighborhood gathering of sorts. Air-kisses, hellos, rumors. What’s happening to Fernando (“Sit!” to a yapping dog) ?

The young are nowhere in sight, still claimed by the night before, and to the north, in Copacabana, two fishing boats are bobbing on the water and the illuminated shacks have yet to turn off their lights to greet the day. But here in privileged Ipanema, bronzed men who might be the older brothers of Picasso are diving into the sand to retrieve a volleyballer’s spike, and matrons are parading past as if serenaded by a new song called “The Old Girl of Ipanema.” Age–or care, or time itself (not to mention all the settlements in the hills)–is nothing that can’t be wished away in free-and-easy Rio. In the tourist brochure I’d read over breakfast this morning, the back-page interview was with a cosmetic surgeon.

The carnival in Rio never seems to stop, even in the 51 weeks of the year when mayhem is not official policy. And though it is the most underdressed urban center in the world, Rio has worked hard to make nonchalance a large part of the way it markets itself, bewitching the world (and, more dangerously, the countryside around it) with images of the “Marvelous City.” Display is the city’s currency, it’s easy to believe, and shyness the only taboo. The day before, after I passed through immigration facilities at GIG (Rio’s international airport is the only one I know that is named not after a head of state or a fighter for social justice, but a bossa nova singer, Tom Jobim), the first Brazilian to greet me was a young man in an old lady’s unflattering dressing gown, hairy legs shown off to disadvantage, holding up a sign under his Bozo-red nose and bathing cap that said, “Did you bring your swimming pool ?” (a catchy, if oblique, incitation to the duty-free store nearby). Driving in to the city from the airport, past bicyclists taking in the sun, and joggers in the park, around the main lagoon, I’d seen clowns prancing around outside many stores, and tall figures on stilts waving their arms about on sidewalks, adding their yellows and oranges to the city’s tropical blaze.

Ipanema could be said to be the largest health-club in the world (with one of the world’s largest swimming pools next door–though no one goes into the ocean, and in places it’s actually polluted). Rio in its public aspect is a cathedral to the Body Beautiful, its chapels the hundred of jiujitsu parlors and body builders’ gyms tucked among the bookstores and the juice stands (which sell vitamin supplements and what they call “Natural Viagra”). Four scuplted men are dribbling and swerving on the sand as if playing soccer on level ground, and an old man is selling CDs of himself playing “I Just Called to Say I Love You” on acoustic guitar, bossa nova style.

Yet the one thing that startles me this bountiful holiday morning is that through all the long blocks of Ipanema and neighboring Leblon, at least in the early hours of the day, I see not a single colored face. No Asian features, no dark-skinned Hispanics, none even of the Africans who have given the world much of what it imagines of Rio (soccer and samba and the love-potions, the jaguar teeth and bats’ wings of Yoruba magic). I could, in effect, be walking down Munich a la plage. After a long, long while I see a nanny wheeling a German woman along the beach, and a woman in African head-scarf trying to sell ice-creams. In Copacabana, farther along, the scene is always more mixed, and to that extent more dangerous. But in Ipanema when it is most relaxed, showing itself off to itself, the mulatta chic and racial mingling on which Rio prides itself is nowhere to be seen.

I first came to Rio when I was eighteen, and after three months of bumping around Central and South America on a bus (and on a busboy’s wages, to boot), I felt as if I’d landed in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when I arrived in the Brazilian city, took in the wide expanse of ocean, the Gavea golf course near my friends’ parents’ house, the most tropical urban wonders I’d ever seen. A few years later I came down again for Easter, on my way to Paraguay, and eager to contrast Rio with the enclosedness, the unvisited privacy for which Asuncion is famous. Now, though, I want to take in the city’s contradictions at a deeper level: my plan is to spend one whole long day just wandering the city, trying to absorb its moods, its quirks and secrets and preferences the way one would do if spending eighteen long hours with a stranger. Every city has its tensions, which define it as they define most people, and you can best tease these out if you surround yourself with them for a day that reaches into night.

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Posted in The Global CityPosted on November 1, 2005

Writing Undoes Me

To write is to step away from the clamor of the world, to take a deep breath and then, slowly and often with shaking heart, to try to make sense of the bombardment of feelings, impressions, and experiences that every day and lifetime brings. The very act of putting them down—getting them out of the beehive of the head and onto the objective reality of paper—is a form of clarification. And as the words begin to take shape and make pairings across the page, gradually you can see what you thought, or discern a pattern in the random responses, so that finally, if all goes well, you’re convinced you’ve got something out of your system and into a domain where it creates a kind of order. Random experience becomes teaching, cautionary tale, or even blessing.

To write is to make a clearing in the wilderness in which, almost literally, you can see the wood from the trees. In the thick of anything, you hardly know who you are or where you’re going (which is the redeeming power of experience); at your desk, recollecting emotion in tranquility, helped by memory’s editing devices and imagination’s hunger for possibility, you take something that might only have been heartache and turn it into something more provocative, enriching, and even instructive.

That’s the theory. And it works. I know what I think of many things because I’ve wrestled them into clarity through long, long hours at my desk. I’ve told myself that I’ve made a shape, an argument, out of a barrage of sensations, and now I can tell you where I stand on Thailand, on the late romances of Shakespeare, or Susan, and her infuriating habit of talking about herself.

But there is a fatal catch in the process that any Buddhist might mournfully savor. The very process of sitting at the desk day after day after day, alone, somewhat removed from the world, one’s eyes literally or metaphorically shut, makes one able to see through (in every sense) the whole process of thinking and concluding, the very construction denoted by “I.” The very fact of trying to explore the mind and its responses, intensely and inwardly, without stepping back, moves one after a while to see that the mind, and the self that talks about the mind, feels no more real than that cloud formation over the mountains, where the sun is beginning to set. To give oneself over to the objective business of writing is to see how subjective the whole business of the self and writing is.

I find that if I spend four weeks, say, on a project, there comes a time, toward the end, when I can no longer take it or myself seriously at all. I’ve seen that what I believe today I can hardly remember tomorrow. The radiance that arises as I contemplate the little epiphanies born in one mood becomes despair in the next. The self that imagines it’s so objectively scrutinizing the passing show of appearances is a passing show itself, as fickle, as impermanent, as the weather outside my window. I draw a definitive conclusion today; tomorrow, when I pick up my papers from the day before, it doesn’t seem real at all.

The Buddha famously spoke of the “jungle of opinions.” To still the mind, he suggested, is to move past layer after layer till you’re in a place where the chatterings of the mind, the jungle of opinions, this contention and that certainty, seem as remote as the hubbub in the street when you’re seated in a church. There is a space behind the mind, and that is where all the things that really endure exist. Speech is where we give and take the wisdom of the world, silence is where we absorb a wisdom that makes the world dissolve.

The deeper I’ve entered into this process, in short, the harder it’s become for me to believe in it. Writing is the practice I maintain going to my little space (at a schoolgirl’s desk decorated with Hello Kitty images and pictures of Brad Pitt), and stilling myself and my monkey mind to see what remains when everything burns away. It feels, often, like a journey into and through the jungle, each day providing some new revelation, often contradictory of the previous ones, till finally I’m out on the other side, and see that the revelations of impermanence were impermanent too. The more I practice writing, therefore, the less I believe in it. The more I get down what I believe, the less I really have faith in it. All the words, the hours at the desk,are just gestures, it comes to seem, to the emptiness that lies behind the curtain at the back of the stage, unseen by spectators and even actors. I write and write and write and what I come up with is a sense of the arbitrariness of everything that’s written; I know I’ll believe something else tomorrow. It’s no more to be relied upon than that play of light through the trees.

Writing is a form of meditation, I sometimes tell myself (though no doubt I could say the opposite the next day). But it’s a form that deconstructs itself, so finally you come to feel that writing is just the convulsive exercise you do to get to the place where all writing ceases. You can take a notebook into your retreat, I can imagine a wise man saying, but when you emerge, you’ll only want to throw away everything you’ve scribbled.

Posted in The Writing LifePosted on November 1, 2005

Jeeves and the March of Progress

High spirits were rather rampant as I emerged from my morning toiletries that day. There was to be a New Year’s do at the Drones the following week, and I’d come up with the rum idea of asking Bingo Little to put on a foxtrot or two to give the new millennium some bounce.

“What ho, Jeeves!” I shouted, depositing myself in front of the new machine Aunt Agatha had given me for Christmas. There was a silence. “I can’t seem to get this deuced thing to say hello.”

“I believe you may find the on-off switch helpful,” offered Jeeves.

“Right ho!” I said, still bright with expectation. Bingo was a good egg when the light hit him right, but he was given to lying rather low. This Windows johnnie seemed the very thing to bring him up to earth.

A moment later, high spirits were rather dashed. “Jeeves ?”

“Sir ?”

“It’s asking for a `Password’ !”

“If you’ll allow me, sir,” said Jeeves, bending over to tap out the letters, “P-A-S S-W-0-R-D.” The man’s taste in neckwear was dubious, but I’d have been nowhere without him.

Within seconds, the contraption was spitting into life like Aunt Agatha during a three-legged race. Next thing I knew, a voice was calling, “You’ve Got Mail!”

“Someone at the door, Jeeves.”

“I suspect, sir, you will find your mail inside the machine.” The man-servant was looking a trifle technological. “E-mail, I believe they call it, sir.” It all sounded uncomfortably close to “female” for my liking, and when I pushed the button he had pointed out, further words started winking at me. “A.A.:New Year’s Festivities.”

“I believe, sir,” said Jeeves, “we now know why your aunt elected to give you a Power Book.”

The thing spluttered and whirred some more, and then a message appeared, roughly the length of Paradise Lost. “Bertram,” it began unpromisingly, “I have arranged for my godson Lord Ponsonby to visit you on New Year’s Eve. I trust you can find some suitably wholesome entertainment to share with him.”

“Lord Ponsonby ?” I cried. “New Year’s Eve ?” It was enough to give a chap a headache. I hardly had the stomach now to address the other two messages on the screen–one from Gussy Finknottle, looking for some lucre, no doubt, the other from Bobbie Wickham, waxing melancholy, I’m sure, about the marmoset in the Father Christmas suit. “We’re finished, Jeeves,” I said, not rosy with the holiday spirit. Jeeves, too, looked far from his jauntiest.

“I trust, sir,” he said, after a few moments, collecting a touch of the old sang-froid, “no one but your lordship has seen this message ?”

“And Aunt Agatha, of course. And Ponsonwallah.”

“Ponsonby, sir.”

“Quite so.”

“I wonder, sir, whether Y2K might not prove providential ?”

“ `Y2K’ ?” It sounded like one of those Highland flings that had led to Tuppy Glossop’s expulsion from Gloucestershire.

“The Millennium Bug,” Jeeves went on. “The Glitch to End all Glitches.”

No one can accuse us Woosters of unsportingness, but this was all a bit much before the cocktail hour.

“This time next week,” Jeeves continued, “your machine may be `history,’ as they say. That should, however, be of no consequence in Marseilles.”

“Marseilles ?” The morning was yet young.

“I was merely suggesting, sir, that if your aunt knows of this malfunction, and you are otherwise engaged in seaside activities, she will naturally assume that her message to you went unread.”

“And the do at the Drones ?”

“Perhaps I can convey the message to Mr. Little by more traditional means ?”

“Jeeves,” I said. “Where would I be without you ?”

The man looked positively triumphant.

“Sir–if I may make one further suggestion ?”

“Suggest away,” I said, preparing myself to toss out the canary-yellow plus-fours. “Were your lordship to change your handle–to `Bingo,’ say–you might find yourself less besieged by messages from your aunt.”

“Capital, Jeeves,” I cried, as I went off to pack my swimwear. “The end of the world, don’t you know ?”

“Your world, sir, will never end.”

Posted in The Joy Of What's FleetingPosted on October 17, 2005

A Place I've Never Been

You come in over a grey, flat desert that looks like lunar emptiness: the great shrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini as you pull out of the southern suburbs of Tehran, a mosque here and there along the road, and then, for hours on end, nothing but the no-color, arid vacancy. Your mind grows almost numb from the spaces extending all around you, nothing leading on to nothing, and then, without warning, suddenly you see a blaze of blue across the horizon, and you are in the middle of the imperial city, the blue from the central domes of the mosque so strong in the desert sun it hurts.

Boys are walking along the riverbank together, children are running this way and that in the dusty medieval streets. The eyes of an old woman meet yours, sharp and olive-black. From the teahouses comes the sound of backgammon tiles being slapped down, while the Peykans judder along the wide boulevards.

Once you’ve put your things in your hotel and returned to the central mosque, at one end of the largest square you’ve ever seen–all of Persia’s history laid out before you, and the goal-posts of a former shah’s polo fields still visible at another end–you enter a world of swirled devotions. You could be entering a believer’s mind, so rapt and intense are the lines from the Quran rising up, and up, to the blue dome till your eyes give out and you just surrender to the patterns; some of the holy lines are written out with such passion that even a learned sheikh could not make out the words. The point of the place is simple surrender. There, in the secret heart of the old culture, which has withstood shah and ayatollah and revolution and then stillness, you are close to the beating center of what links Persia to Iran, in a city that combines shimmering beauty with a kind of melancholy, as in a woman who once commanded the world but is aware now that her time has gone, and others are coming in to wreak havoc on her handiwork.

Isfahan is without question one of the great cultural treasures of the world, the jewel of one of history’s most elegant and cultured societies. And unlike the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids, unlike the temples of Kyoto, it has been preserved in recent years through the whims of politicians, and protected from the flashbulbs of too many cameras by the unfriendly policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet to come in to the great city over the desert, the bus laboring as it turns the corner towards the town’s great sqaure, is to feel that you have stumbled upon one of the secret corners of the imagination.

Isfahan may be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Yet really I should call it, in the strictest sense, one of the most beautiful places I’ve never seen, for when I offered a palpitating, vivid description of the old city in my recent novel Abandon, I’d never been threre. I haven’t been there to this day. I haven’t been to the Tehran I described so pungently, I haven’t seen the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, I haven’t been to Qom, or anywhere round Iran. (I haven’t been to the Palm Springs that plays a part in my novel, either). I have seen them all quite distinctly, but only with the inner eye that is a writer’s secret instrument. In the flesh, they remain quite unknown to me.

I should hasten to point out now, to the anxious or skeptical reader, that I spent the better part of nine years reading and rereading Sufi poems, steeping myself in the travel records and novels and memoirs and guidebooks of Iran that describe every courtyard, how dinner is eaten among the family, when the seasons change in the north and how people respond to an invitation of tea. I talked to friends who had been fortunate enough to visit Shiraz and Isfahan, either before the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution or after, I consulted the films that come out with increasing regularity from contemporary Iran and lived in libraries (as any writer does who’s composing a piece of historical fiction, about a time, if not a place, he’s never seen). One friend even showed me her snapshots from a recent trip, so I could savor the exact yellow of the pillars around the mosque, and see how the holy lines were slashed across the walls in white, asking the mind at some point to give over.

But Isfahan still belongs to the special part of my mind that is reserved for all the many, many places I’ve never seen. Almost a decade of research gave me a clear sense of how it might sound and smell and feel, but it still has something of the unreality of sharp bracing mornings in Darjeeling, when I step out from my guesthouse, the winter cold a slap on my face, as I walk to where the snowcaps are clearest early on December days, or the teemed intensity of Jerusalem. It is as real as the mud mosques of Mali, oddly silent on a high blue morning in early January, as real as the Varanasi and Goa and Kerala of my ancestral homeland that every tourist has seen but me. These places have the parallel reality of longed-for sites that I have seen with every sense except my eyes.

The places I’ve never been: they could fill an atlas, or a heavy album made for photographs. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world almost constantly since I first took myself alone to school in England, on a plane, from my parents’ home in California, at the age of nine. I traveled through almost every country in South and Central America while I was in my teens, and have been to Tibet again and again. I’ve had the chance to visit Thailand more than forty times, and to go to Easter Island and North Korea and Bhutan. I’ve traveled to places that no one in his right mind would want to go to (Paraguay, south Yemen), I’ve been to places, from Angkor in the dead of night to Damascus at dawn, in the Umayyad Mosque when it’s closed, that are for many people at least the equal in mystery and wonder of Isfahan. But the places I’ve never seen still have a pull on me (of course), and still exert a hold on my imagination, that gives them an intensity that other places cannot match.

When I sat down, at my desk in rural Japan, to write a story of the dialogue (the conflict and the romance) between the Islamic world and the far West, in the spring of 2000, I could easily have taken myself to Iran, to get some details for the section set in that intriguing country. But a part of me was interested in the Persia that has fascinated people for centuries rather than in the modern-day Iran that would confront me with very differernt kinds of details. My sense was that the meaning of the cultural Iran that has withstood all political changes lies as much in the poems of Rumi and Hafez, in the miniatures visible at the nearest museum (even in Japan), in the memories and stories of the Iranians who are now such a presence in California, as in the streets and squares that I might take in through my viewfinder. Besides–and this was a large part of the point of the book–if you were looking for a treasure from old Iran today, a missing manuscript or a family heirloom or a forgotten miniature, you would be much more likely to find it in Santa Monica than in Tehran: half a million Iranians left the country almost overnight as the Iranian Revolution began to gain momentum in the late ‘70s, and they brought their pasts, their treasures and their stories to Los Angeles and Paris and Vancouver. Part of the beauty of the modern global order is that you don’t have to go across the world to see and meet the customs, people and traditions of Vietnam, Ethiopia or Tibet.

In the book that followed I deliberately tried to set this place I haven’t seen against the places I had seen and the places I had seen almost too much of. The book begins in Damascus, which I visited twice in the space of eight months while writing the novel. It has central scenes in Andalusia (which I’d visited once, eight years before) and Delhi (which I visit quite often now, though without taking very much in). Certain critical revelations are set in parts of the American desert and New Mexico–a counter-Iran–that I haven’t really seen either. If I were going to make up characters I’d never met, Sufi dances I’d never witnessed and a world of academic politicking that I could only guess at, it didn’t seem such a liberty to visit Iran only in my head.

A reader is, perhaps, a little shocked to hear that a novelist may have the chutzpah to offer detailed, documentary-like descriptions of a place he’s never seen. But that is the nature of Shakespeare’s Illyria and Arthur Golden’s Kyoto teahouses and Michael Ondaatje’s evocations of North Africa in the ‘30s: the purpose of fiction is to dream yourself into the Other, into all the places and people and dramas you’ve never seen except through the lens made by imagination and borrowed memory. The places we have seen, the thoughts and feelings we entertain, keep us company almost every waking moment; to travel, on the page or in life, is to go into the places you’ve never seen, but only intuited.

I had a sobering reminder of this when I wrote the novel that preceded Abandon, called Cuba and the Night. At the time I wrote it (again at my little desk in a non-descript suburb in Japan), I’d been to Cuba five times in the previous six years. I’d celebrated Carnival there and heard Castro speak and gone to baseball games and deserted islands and prisons. I’d been offered jobs as a spy, received more proposals of marriage than I could count, been thrown off beaches (on grounds of resembling a Cuban) and been taken into many lives and homes as if I were a newly discovered relative. I knew the streets of Vedado so well I could visit them in my sleep (as well as in my memory).

So I sat down in Japan and described a place I had seen so vividly that I knew it better than my hometown. I retraced my night-time walks among the broken buildings of Central Havana, and the trailing mornings I had spent along the seawall below the Hotel Nacional, the spray from the sea crashing all over me as a single ancient car drove along the tropi-colored houses. I described the place as carefully as if I were writing non-fiction.

When the manuscript was complete, I decided to take one more trip to the island to double-check all my details: even in fiction, the trust of the reader shouldn’t be taken advantage of, I believe. I wanted just to make sure that the walls of the Hotel Capri were blue and not green, and that the Coppelia ice-cream park could be entered from the south as well as the west, I wanted to be certain that a santeria-parlor could be found within sight of the Capitol downtown. I returned to Cuba, walked all along the streets I knew by heart and found–of course–that the island stubbornly refused to look the way I had remembered it. The trees were in the wrong place, the view from the cannons on the lawn wasn’t quite the one I had recalled in Japan; Belascoain was at least three minutes farther from Virtudes than I had thought. I made all the necessary changes, though I’m not sure if the Cuba I imagined gained anything in the process.

Three years before that novel, I had been sitting in my home in California, surrounded by all the notes and outlines and verbal snapshots I had accumulated over fifteen years–my savings account, effectively, for a life of writing–when I’d looked out the window to see 70-foot flames all around: one of the year’s forest fires, which destroyed my home, as well as more than 600 others, and stripped me of every possession, plan and memory I’d ever had. When I called my editor in London the next day to tell him that all the books I’d been promising him were no longer–every note and detail was reduced to ash–he told me, “Excellent! I think that’s a good thing.” Writing isn’t made only from observation, he was saying; some writers–and I was probably one of them–remain too hostage to their notes, and not responsive enough to other parts of themselves that may tap a deeper source. Close your eyes, and you can see certain things much more clearly than when you’re hovering over your papers.

I must assure the worried reader here that, in the case of my descriptions of Iran in Abandon, I took pains to make sure that every detail I had dreamed up had some substance in fact, and that I wasn’t taking too many liberties. After I had finished my next-to-final draft (this was after nine years of working on the project, and thirty drafts of many of the passages), I sent my typescript to two friends who’d grown up in Iran, one of whom lives in London, and the other of whom lives in Los Angeles. Tell me exactly what I’ve got wrong, I said, and all the faux pas I’ve committed that anyone who’d spent even a day in these cities could see through in a moment.

One wrote back saying that it was all as she remembered it, but that one Iranian character I’d made up was more rude than was likely (she was right, but in fact he was a Spaniard, and I’d given him reasons for his brusqueness). The other said that I must have secretly gone to Isfahan; the only glaring mistake she found was that a young man in today’s Iran would be very unlikely to have a room of his own, as in a scene I’d written (I quickly made the appropriate change). When the book came out, I heard many more complaints about the scenes I’d set in my hometown, of Santa Barbara, than the ones I’d written of the places I’d never seen (this isn’t at all the Santa Barbara I know, many of my neighbors might have said, with justice, while others eagerly said, “I know just the house, or person, you mean” in referring to locations or characters I’d completely made up). I knew the imagination was working well when someone told me she recognized the translator I’d placed in a hut in Santa Cruz; he was just like that. In fact, the whole character came out of a dust-jacket author’s photo I’d seen on a bus on my way to the airport.

The modern world is more generous than any society in history in offering us glimpses into the places we’ve never seen. Anyone with a computer today can walk around the Louvre without leaving her study, or see Tibet and Rio de Janeiro even in a dusty Internet cafe in southern Yemen. Isfahan comes to us on our screens, large and small, and when I drive down the road from Santa Barbara to Westwood, I can see many of the shops and cafes of Iran meticulously reconstructed by that country’s exiles, their calendars and bookshops and cups of tea a poignant monument to nostalgia, and recreation of home through memory as much as imagination. The places we’ve never seen in the flesh with our own eyes are everywhere around us now, where our grandparents would most likely have had to content themselves with written pictures in books or newspapers.

And yet not seeing them gives them a special potency. I was much more alert, more engaged and punctilious, in describing Iran in my book than in describing California; I was much more moved to steep myself in details and school myself in what the place really looked and felt like. When, the day that I proofread my manuscript to send to my editor, terrorist planes flew into New York and Washington, and a new chapter of the world’s history began–a chapter in which nothing was more important, arguably, than for people in the West to have a keener sense of what the Islamic world might look like (and vice versa)–I felt that the imagination had a wisdom to it that the rest of me certainly did not. I still write frequently about the places I’ve seen. I walk around them from dawn to midnight, I transcribe their details in my notebook, I recreate them back at my desk in Japan. But I’m tempted to believe that all the many places I’ve never seen have much more life and substance in the end. They have come not just from my always fallible memory, but from something beyond me that I can’t claim to understand.

Posted in Why We TravelPosted on October 1, 2005

The Light I Found

When I walk out of the little apartment where I live, for much of the year, in Japan, I have to shake myself and tell myself I’m not in southern California. The little lanes are straight, and run between two-storey Western houses with two-car garages and name-plates on their front walls to commemorate their owners. Many of the cars parked outside of them are Jaguars, BMWs, even Cadillacs, clearly never meant for streets as narrow as these. There’s no hint of tatami in the area; there are no temples or shrines or neighborhood sushi bars or jagged lanes in the entire neighborhood. We are living in a sanitised, synthetic world here, in the shadow of the ancient capital of Nara, Stephen Spielberg’s suburbia polished to a high, strange sheen.

And then I notice that the maples, in our small park, are turning with a five-pointed brilliance in the warm October days. There’s an almost indefinable sense of elegy, of gathering chill in the blazing aftrernoon, a suggestion of what the Japanese call “monoganashii,” or an exquisite sadness.

The little children are playing neatly in their school uniforms, their grandparents seated on benches taking in the stately sorrow of the scene. But the mix of elegy and celebration in the air, the sense of coming darkness and even death, under skies more exalted and cloudless than any I have seen in California, remind me that I’m on the far side of the earth, and caught up in a frame that sings a faintly Buddhist tune of impermanence and loss.

And then–since I am an Asian at heart, Indian by blood, if not by residence–I go back to Santa Barbara to visit my mother (who lives alone there) following the ancient logic that parents are more to be listened to than pleasure. And when I get there, I find myself surrounded by Japanese gardens, the small pieces of stillness and meditation that friends have built in their back yards, stepping stones to tiny ponds of koi, or stone lanterns set next to hermits’ sheds, and I see how the people in the New World try to escape their immediate surroundings through these little splashes of the East, like a single foreign term thrown into a sentence (wabi, sabi, Zen). There are many more sushi bars in Santa Barbara than I ever see in Kyoto, and my friends are all talking there of giving things up, going back to the country, finding a self that my Japanese neighbors have never had a chance to lose. It’s a song of homesickness they’re singing silently, perhaps, and sometimes it seems to rhyme with the songs of longing, or restlessness that surround me on the far side of the globe. The person yearning to put a frame around his freedom, the woman wishing she could find more room for her destiny than the tight grid around her allows: sometimes they meet and find that their impulses are reflections of one another’s.

I think of all this whenever I see the work of Isamu Noguchi, and especially when I lose myself in the roaming, fascinated works he made between 1949 and 1956 on a series of trips across the globe funded by the Bollingen Foundation (named, appropriately, after the little village in Switzerland where Carl Gustav Jung made his personal retreat). Each side of the world longs for the other, and occasionally the longings meet in mid-air, in the place where transformation happens. Japan is Japanese enough to take in large swatches of America without losing its soul or its sense of continuity. America is American enough to call judo and origami and green tea its own now. The son of a Japanese poet (who wrote in English, in San Francisco), the husband of one Yoshiko Yamiguchi, depicted in many of his photographs (sometimes known as Shirley, sometimes as Li Xanglan), Noguchi could afford to move ceaselessly around the globe because everywhere was equally foreign to him, and unforeign. “My longing for affiliation,” as he wrote, “has been the source of my creativity.”

It’s a commonplace now, but it wasn’t when Noguchi was born, that East is West to some, and the frustrations of one culture the possibilities of another. In the age of frequent fliers and multinationals, we take it for granted that our identities will be assemblages, makeshift things drawn from this world and that one and the children of them both. You can’t place nationalities on art any more than you can on fire or water or grass; the passports they carry are as irrelevant, finally, as their patent numbers.

Noguchi intuited all this, I always feel, and lived it by always remaining on the move, not allowing his art to settle down, and playing games with our expectations of it (and of his name), long before we had heard of Issey Miyake or Kazuo Ishiguro or Arata Isozaki. He took on his father’s name when he went to Europe in 1923, knowing that it would open some doors and close others. He kept the company of artists from Mexico and India and Europe, knowing that his own work “had to be universal or nothing at all.” Later he would move from the Pyamids to Sri Lanka to Stonehenge to Burma, always on the lookout, one senses, for whatever could link cultures and steady them beneath the presence of borders. Movement, the converging of traditions, became the slab of granite out of which he would shape a life.

At the time he took off with his first thirty-six month fellowship from the Bollingen (on what is now known as “The Bollingen Journey”), he was clearly anxious to repair something in himself and the world around him that had been broken, it might have seemed permanently, by World War II. A sense of trust, perhaps, of connections across boundaries. At 45, he was half way through his life; and as the world stumbled into what would be called the atomic age, it was obviously searching for new certainties to protect it from new fears. The dropping of nuclear bombs by America on Japan could only have reverberated strangely inside a shifting soul who was born in Los Angeles and raised in Tokyo, never entirely a part of either place.

Noguchi arrived in 1949 in his adopted home of Paris–home to his adopted father, Brancusi, who had told him to forswear decoration–and from there looked in on Italy and Spain and Greece, before hurling himself into Egypt and then India, Bali, Angkor. Looking at the many drawings and photographs he brought back from the trip, one can see something of what he was after. Faces that are wild, untamed, in an unbroken continuity with the spirits around them and the landscape that has made them; movements of the body that had withstood the sudden propulsions of the nuclear age and spoke in the ageless language of water and springtime and wind. Buildings that seem to be hewn out of the earth, and statues that sit next to children as if each is a part of the same unchanging story.

It wasn’t exactly serenity he sought, or the pristine, but, rather, something aboriginal, uncontaminated, that stands in our midst as opaque and irreducible as the monuments of Stonehenge in the Wiltshire countryside. The eyes he caught in his images are often unquiet, and at the edge of what look like ruins; many of the people look to be marginals, tribals, like himself, peering out at the modern world with a stare of defiant bewilderment. But most of all, these spirits are dancers, sculptors, craftsmen, players with masks, as seen by someone with a familiarity with all those arts; compare his photographs with those Henri Cartier-Bresson brought back from India and Bali at around the same time and you see focus, intensity, fear where the French master delighted in something human. Noguchi’s faces are often half-veiled.

In some ways, it is a touching image, the one we imagine behind the camera or with his sketchpad: a universal Other who, in every work, seems not entirely inside the culture he describes, and yet never entirely removed. The restless soul who will never be tourist or resident. When Noguchi had volunteered his services to America in the wake of the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor, he had been dismissed as a “half-breed,” and yet when he had taken himself to an internment camp for Japanese in Arizona, to teach, he had felt himself “completely alone” even there, neither captor nor captive. In the West he would be called a “wily…semi-oriental” by critics, while in Japan, with his blue eyes, he would always be a “gaijin,” or outsider person. Returning to Japan on the Bollingen Journey, for the first time in 19 years, the man who had previously been looked on with suspicion as an “irregular verb,” in his own nice formulation, was now hailed as an emissary from the conquering West (he is commemorated these days on Japanese postage stamps). The traveller who listened to such praise no doubt acknowledged that it was not he who had changed, but the world around him. As fast as he was going around the world, the world was making its own strange counter-revolutions around him.

But what makes Noguchi’s work lasting, and original, and what lies behind his Bollingen works is, to me, what he made of his permanent outsiderness. He looked, at every turn, for those moments in art and worship and expression–in ocean and tree and stone–that make a mockery of the divisions we impose on things. He mixed up East and West so thoroughly that it became impossible to tell one from the other, as it was inside himself. He kept out every trace of national division, or imposed distinction, from the art he brought back from his travels; it celebrates, in fact, that part of humanity that will always be larger than its institutions or labels. Out of his predicament he conjured possibility.

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Posted in Home Is Every PlacePosted on June 1, 2005