There is something mysteriously iconic about this place. It is almost like it is the prototypical instance of a trope that has captured our imagination for years. Shangri-La, El Dorado, Atlantis, the Lost City of Z all quicken our pulse and they all have something in common with Angkor: the promise of discovery in a world that otherwise seems largely disclosed. The discovery of ‘lost cities’ has a romantic gestalt of pushing back the relentless encroachment of entropy to reveal the story of an expression of humanness that was ahead of its time. But Angkor has one unique quality over all of the other cities listed…existence.[1]
The Angkor Archeological Park doesn’t primarily market history, or even culture. People don’t primarily come here to brush up on their 12th century Khumer timeline or to track the story of innovation in sand stone architecture or even (for the most part) to investigate the 8 fold path.
This place traffics in a particular brand of wonder.[2] It offers an experience of otherness. It reminds us that reality is bigger than we generally give it credit for. And every time reality surprises us, it can enlarge our realm of the possibilities of existence.
But why? What is it about carved piles of rocks that is not only a source of wonder but an iconic source of wonder? I came up with at least 4 answers.
Wonder of Scale: Angkor recalibrates our scale in three intertwining ways: old, big and many. But scale is the easiest way to generate wonder, and therefore the most common. Because of this, the capacity of scale to invoke recognition of strangeness[3] has dimmed for most of us.[4] So it has to be something else.
Wonder of Human Capacity: We have become accustomed to the resourcefulness of humans. In fact we have become underwhelmed by it. It is almost cliché for us to say stuff like: “We put a man on the moon and we can’t do ____.” and, “It’s 2012, where’s my jet pack.”
But the degree of difficulty for an ancient civilization can shake lose this sense of innovative entitlement. It can remind us of the seemingly supra-biological capacity humans have for ingenuity and beauty. It can generate a sense of species solidarity…a patriotism for humanness…as if these ancient people won a gold medal in the cladistic Olympics and somehow we share it.
Wonder of Impermanence: There is something terrifying and comforting about the ruins of a great civilization. It’s silent, losing battle against the relentless assault of biological and abiotic entropy is a reminder that entropy wins. As the strangler figs’ slow flow through the rock destabilizes the work of centuries it is as if this place whispers to us ““Show me, Yahweh, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is“. These temples improbably endure but also stand as monuments to history’s relentless forgetfulness.[5]
This could be comforting. We are relieved of the pressure of enduring…of the temporal tyranny of mattering. But it is also terrifying…because these great and decaying structures are a trophy to entropy. They are a reminder that entropy wins…
…at least until it doesn’t. And that is why I found these great monuments to an alternately Hindu and Buddhist society made a poignant backdrop reflection on Christian eschatology: that reality ends with a great roll back of brokenness and a great restoration of beauty as Jesus establishes his kingdom on earth. And I suspect if he plans to furnish the eschatological kingdom with the ships of Tarshish[6], there is some way that the makings of the Khumer kingdom will echo there as well…which leads to..,
Wonder in the Space Between Difference and Likeness: There is a strange juxtaposition between the startling recognition of an arbitrary mode of humanness and the recognition of a shared, universal humanity.[7] Seeing someone else live differently (and well) kind of shakes us free of the assumption of inevitability of certain behaviors.
However, sensing a fundamental kinship with a people so spatially, culturally, and temporally distant, argues that there are parts of being human that are non-negotiable…that are beyond social construct. And this recognition that part of who I am is arbitrary to the point of being silly (and thus I can’t take myself too seriously) but that there is something fundamental to ‘being human’ makes a pretty good tension from which a robust world view can spring.
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[1]***Spoiler Alert (Lost City of Z)*** Yes, I know anthropologists found evidence of an unexpectedly robust civilization in the Amazon about where explorers expected Z to be, but the evidence was so subtle that it is hardly the same as stumbling upon immense rock structures covered in moss and infiltrated by trees.
[2]It promises fundamentally the same experience as the African Safari or Iguazu Falls. The two other epic weekends I have managed to fit around work trips.
[3]I think one of the primary modes of spiritual development is to build pathways of wonder that do not require novelty. But that is a different topic.
[4]I have heard this described as one of the great benefits of parenthood. Things that have ceased to have any meaning, suddenly become magical again through the astonished eyes of a five year old.
[5]When I was a kid there was the shell of an old cheese factory built out of limestone into the face of a hill about a mile from my house. The structure was intact but it showed no signs of recent use. It was a relic of a previous, less technological but somehow more prosperous era of Northern New York agriculture (before my friends dad’s had to scramble for new work after the closing of their family farms). We biked to and explored this little ‘ruin’ countless times. I think Angkor is a quantitatively not qualitatively different experience.
[6]I owe this insight to Andy Crouch’ “Culture Making’ and it has affected my eschatology pretty dramatically. He argues that the description of God’s eschatological kingdom in Isaiah include the very best ‘makings’ of the known cultures including ‘the ships of Tarshish’ (the finest examples of nautical engineering of the day). He argues that this is evidence that the makings of beauty and utility that we construct in this age will somehow (in a mysterious but more than metaphorical way) echo in the next. Or to paraphrase NT Wright’s take on Christian eschatology, nothing beautiful is lost.
[7]I have been reading a lot of Foucault and a primer on deconstruction on this trip. So I can almost hear Derrida label that sentence as phalologo-whatever. I find the whole Sartre-Structuralists-Foucault-Derrida thing (yeah I know, they are like, sooo different – but in my mind they are a single oscillating trajectory – like a dampening sine wave) to be periodically helpful but, on the whole, to be a self referential language game without a lot of explanatory ‘power’ or insight on how to be meaningfully human. Like so many innovations, they were a useful corrective but make a poor center and the liberal arts are poorer for making them ‘the game.’......
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