Guest Blog: Travel Writer Max Gladstone
Jul. 4th, 2008 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alanajoliI had the good fortune recently to have one of the letters of traveler and freelance writer Max Gladstone shared with me through a friend. A Yale alum, Max is currently living in China, and he often sends e-mails of his experiences abroad back to friends who knew him as an undergrad. This is an excerpt from one such letter, which Max has generously allowed me to quote here. After hearing his analysis of the theology of video games, I knew I wanted him as a guest blogger.
The following excerpt comes after Max has suffered a bicycling accident in Cambodia. I've clipped some of his descriptions of Angkor Wat for length's sake but have tried to keep the theme intact. If you're interested in keeping up with Max's adventures on a regular basis, he's advised me to send you to his blog at blog.maxgladstone.com. Thanks for the excerpt, Max!
(And to my U.S. readers--Happy 4th! Here's wishing you colorful fireworks.)
--
Carl and I continued on to buy our tickets and explore the temple city complexes of Angkor Wat. And as we did so, we realized what had caused the bike to wreck, outside of course of all the usual factors: evil temple spirits.
Because this is the kind of place that *has* Evil Temple Spirits. It's also the kind of place that has irate giant Shiva statue golems, Cambodian warrior zombies, giant rolling stone boulders, and a John Williams theme cued at the appropriate moment, or a treasure chest down the side route that you know when you see it won't lead out of the level. Angkor is ancient - temples built over a time span of around 400 years, nearly a millennium ago, practically as old as Oxford - and Angkor is immense, but it only became known to Westerners after a visiting French friar published his memoirs in 1868. French explorers visited it as they searched up the Mekong for a hidden water route into China, shades of the Northwest Passage in Canada, and in the early 20th Century restoration work started, and preservation against the jungle. The French left in 1970 only to come back and resume restoration and preservation in 1995.
But it's difficult to recapture now what those original explorers saw when they came up the Tuol Sap lake and trekked through marsh and jungle to these ruined cities and vast temples. Not because restoration has harmed the landscape, or even tourism, but because this place (and places like it) have grown so large in our collective cultural imagination. Indiana Jones runs through the corridors I walked through today, forever; countless zombies have been fought in countless video games. Children dream of great stone faces in the jungle. As I rode up the Tuol Sap on small, blue-and-white sliver of speedboat, sunning myself on the roof because I didn't have a ticket to sit inside and glad of it (the inside windows were tinted orange and there was a strange smell, giving the entire space the air of an infernal waiting room), stilt-houses and boat-houses passing on the shore as we proceeded inland, reading once in a while from the New Science of Giambatista Vico and from rich, self-indulgent Saul Bellow, the great question in my mind was just how much was real, and how much fiction created by overenthusiastic Hollywood propmasters.
The answer is: it's pretty much all real. That is, I haven't gotten chased by zombies or sword-fought giant Shiva golems - YET - but I know such things are waiting for me around every corner. Consider Angkor Wat, the City-Temple, or the City that became a Temple, basking and burning in morning sunlight, accessible only by ancient stone causeway across its great moat, the causeway guarded by lions and those multi-headed cobra Naga god-guardians I have mentioned before. The structure is four stories high and carved, everywhere carved, on the outside with some Buddhas (no Bodhisatvas - this is a Theravada Buddhist country, where monks sit in temples and read scriptures and aim at the snuffing out of the lamp and the end of eternal consciousness, check please) in some places - Angkor was a Vishnu temple first, then three hundred years later co-opted as a Buddhist temple - but mostly with Aspara, the divine dancing girl nymphs who thronged these temples in the Old Days, before the Thai invaded and carried them away. Inside the gaping stone mouths of the main gate, you proceed across a great field down a causeway lined with gods, to the rising temple-mountain pyramids inside the temple complex proper - the entire outer wall that you've just been staring at in awe is just the fence....
So yes, impressive, even beautiful, but, as I said, creepy. The stares of the statues made me feel unclean - of course I *was* unclean, covered with sweat and dirt and sunburned (Cambodia's tropical if not equatorial, and the sun here is powerful stuff), but this was uncleanliness of the more moral sort. And around every corner, the constant worry: Cambodian warrior zombies now? No... how about *now*? It didn't help that the holes in the ceiling and the gaps between walls and tower made the entire place feel like a Prince of Persia level.
In repose atop an ancient stone monolith, Carl and I discussed the religious/existential thinking inherent in video games, where doing something like lighting incense can have long-ranging effect on what really happens in the real world - see comment in subject matter. Sympathetic magic works, and what we do in Important Places *matters*. So in some ways games give us practice for a certain kind of religious thinking. Or existentialist/absurdist thinking, c.f. Mario, working man in strange world filled with critters that can and will kill him but are absolutely ridiculous, turtles, carnivorous mushrooms, always running, and when he gets to the goal - love, political power - he finds it's actually in the next castle over. Or maybe I'm over-thinking this...
The following excerpt comes after Max has suffered a bicycling accident in Cambodia. I've clipped some of his descriptions of Angkor Wat for length's sake but have tried to keep the theme intact. If you're interested in keeping up with Max's adventures on a regular basis, he's advised me to send you to his blog at blog.maxgladstone.com. Thanks for the excerpt, Max!
(And to my U.S. readers--Happy 4th! Here's wishing you colorful fireworks.)
--
Carl and I continued on to buy our tickets and explore the temple city complexes of Angkor Wat. And as we did so, we realized what had caused the bike to wreck, outside of course of all the usual factors: evil temple spirits.
Because this is the kind of place that *has* Evil Temple Spirits. It's also the kind of place that has irate giant Shiva statue golems, Cambodian warrior zombies, giant rolling stone boulders, and a John Williams theme cued at the appropriate moment, or a treasure chest down the side route that you know when you see it won't lead out of the level. Angkor is ancient - temples built over a time span of around 400 years, nearly a millennium ago, practically as old as Oxford - and Angkor is immense, but it only became known to Westerners after a visiting French friar published his memoirs in 1868. French explorers visited it as they searched up the Mekong for a hidden water route into China, shades of the Northwest Passage in Canada, and in the early 20th Century restoration work started, and preservation against the jungle. The French left in 1970 only to come back and resume restoration and preservation in 1995.
But it's difficult to recapture now what those original explorers saw when they came up the Tuol Sap lake and trekked through marsh and jungle to these ruined cities and vast temples. Not because restoration has harmed the landscape, or even tourism, but because this place (and places like it) have grown so large in our collective cultural imagination. Indiana Jones runs through the corridors I walked through today, forever; countless zombies have been fought in countless video games. Children dream of great stone faces in the jungle. As I rode up the Tuol Sap on small, blue-and-white sliver of speedboat, sunning myself on the roof because I didn't have a ticket to sit inside and glad of it (the inside windows were tinted orange and there was a strange smell, giving the entire space the air of an infernal waiting room), stilt-houses and boat-houses passing on the shore as we proceeded inland, reading once in a while from the New Science of Giambatista Vico and from rich, self-indulgent Saul Bellow, the great question in my mind was just how much was real, and how much fiction created by overenthusiastic Hollywood propmasters.
The answer is: it's pretty much all real. That is, I haven't gotten chased by zombies or sword-fought giant Shiva golems - YET - but I know such things are waiting for me around every corner. Consider Angkor Wat, the City-Temple, or the City that became a Temple, basking and burning in morning sunlight, accessible only by ancient stone causeway across its great moat, the causeway guarded by lions and those multi-headed cobra Naga god-guardians I have mentioned before. The structure is four stories high and carved, everywhere carved, on the outside with some Buddhas (no Bodhisatvas - this is a Theravada Buddhist country, where monks sit in temples and read scriptures and aim at the snuffing out of the lamp and the end of eternal consciousness, check please) in some places - Angkor was a Vishnu temple first, then three hundred years later co-opted as a Buddhist temple - but mostly with Aspara, the divine dancing girl nymphs who thronged these temples in the Old Days, before the Thai invaded and carried them away. Inside the gaping stone mouths of the main gate, you proceed across a great field down a causeway lined with gods, to the rising temple-mountain pyramids inside the temple complex proper - the entire outer wall that you've just been staring at in awe is just the fence....
So yes, impressive, even beautiful, but, as I said, creepy. The stares of the statues made me feel unclean - of course I *was* unclean, covered with sweat and dirt and sunburned (Cambodia's tropical if not equatorial, and the sun here is powerful stuff), but this was uncleanliness of the more moral sort. And around every corner, the constant worry: Cambodian warrior zombies now? No... how about *now*? It didn't help that the holes in the ceiling and the gaps between walls and tower made the entire place feel like a Prince of Persia level.
In repose atop an ancient stone monolith, Carl and I discussed the religious/existential thinking inherent in video games, where doing something like lighting incense can have long-ranging effect on what really happens in the real world - see comment in subject matter. Sympathetic magic works, and what we do in Important Places *matters*. So in some ways games give us practice for a certain kind of religious thinking. Or existentialist/absurdist thinking, c.f. Mario, working man in strange world filled with critters that can and will kill him but are absolutely ridiculous, turtles, carnivorous mushrooms, always running, and when he gets to the goal - love, political power - he finds it's actually in the next castle over. Or maybe I'm over-thinking this...
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Date: 2008-07-05 04:29 am (UTC)