How Did I Get Here?

There were tears at the surface of my eyeballs and my bottom lip was dropped like I was ready to catch an early, still-flapping breakfast.  People flowing backwards, down the causeway away from the lines and colors that my eyes were trained on ahead, stared, smiles dancing on their lips.  I must have looked like a small child, my feet skipping over the randomly sunken and raised sandstone blocks, head slowly bobbing right and left and right, or else like one whose mind has slipped down the slopes of an obstacle-filled life or up the ladder of drug-induced nirvana.

"Wow, you look so happy."  A man who looked about my age stopped directly in front of me.  Perhaps I didn't look as crazed as I thought, or perhaps he was looking for the adrenaline rush or dehumanizing amusement that might be induced by an encounter with sanity's shadowy side.  He seemed sensible enough, though, and I was, in fact, blissfully saturated in wonderment.  Angkor Wat.  Angkor Wat.  No photo had done it justice.  No guidebook could capture the abstract crux of a moment like this.  Some people wait a lifetime.  Oh, I couldn't believe it was happening to me.

Even Kelly Clarkson's ponderous lyrics on the stupefaction that living a distant dream can induce, though, even these words cannot accurately describe how the outlines of my body vibrated at the edges of my soul that morning.  The pink streaks had nearly faded into the gray-blue of a morning sky considering, but not yet anticipating, a release of rain onto the sun-warmed ancient wisdom of the temple stones.  The triplicate gopura towers ahead projected the foreboding power of backlit masterpieces, the edges of their pyramidal levels like upturned lotus-petals praising the universe.

I knew nothing, yet, of the subtle histories embedded in the laterite and sandstone ahead.  I was like an ignorant baby, emerging from a watery world, here both the moat and my tear-submerged eyes, to fresh glories, to shadowy crevices full with exploration's call.  I did not yet know anything of the ancient stones saturated with histories and knowledges of feet past, or anything of the bas reliefs clear and deep with antique narrative.  My admiration was a romantic one, not classically-induced by study and systems of historical knowledge, but prompted by the overwhelmingness of the textured moment before me, prompted by the sensation that precedes conceptual classification, the thing that drives people in the first place to memorialize in the annals of history.

I am aware that overwhelmingness is, by many standards, a nothing word, a superlative that, by its very definition, does not describe anything tangible.  It floats beyond the intellectual analogues of language.  It is a greatness, a largeness, a fullness.  I choose this word intentionally.  That is precisely what this moment was for me.  It was neither the stones, nor the moat, nor the beauty of a sunrise.  It was neither my feeling of awe, nor was it these things combined.  It was something behind all that, a deeper something that all those things combined manifested, but could not fully capture as separately-conceived, component parts—the grandeur of the whole.  Fullness.  Overwhelmingness.

Now, I am not megalomaniacal enough to claim that I experienced something akin to spiritual enlightenment merely by making contact with this place, but encountering Angkor Wat was, in a levelheaded assessment of the experience, momentous for me, not in a hyperbolic way, but in a very real, deeply felt way.  Of course, the temple complex itself is an overwhelming achievement of physical manifestation of spiritual awe.  The affective reality of honor for divinity and spiritual truth is embedded in the architecture of the place, manifested in the careful carvings, exemplified in the positioning of the entrance at the west, where the quincunx towers sit just before the rising of the sun.

I realize this, too, is largely an empty description.  But how can one describe the deepness of a moment, the overwhelmingness of a place, in prose without broad conceptual sentences about affective realities?  It is not simply the factual largeness of the towers that represent the Hindu Mount Meru or the attention to detail the carvings manifest or the eternal longness of the galleries.  It is affective.  The place vibrates with spiritual reverence.  And even as words fail to fully capture it, you would have to be dissociated from your own surroundings to miss it, or numbed to the unique spiritual achievements of this place by commonplace exposure or else by the demands and frills of modern society.

Enough with the abstract meanderings.  I was floored.  I was floored, too, by the realization of where I was geographically in the world and conceptually in my life.  Travel.  I had dreamt of loping through the world with an eye to curiosity my whole life and here I was, walking through a place uncountable souls had passed through in a location thousands of miles from the places I had dreamt in.  The beauty and enormity of that realization was overwhelming, too.  What I felt was respect.  Gratitude.  Incredulity.  The reality of the privileges I am receiving.  Humility.

Yes, what I felt was deep, enduring humility.  Among a million other things, I felt humbled by this and the successive moment and the one after that and the one after that.  Thousands of moments, thousands of breaths, one right after the other, pulling me along the present of an awe-inspiring reality.

The Talking Heads come to mind now.  Darkly appropriate considering the many statues lining the galleries whose own craniums have been stolen from their bodies.

And you may find yourself living in another part of the world.  And you may ask yourself, well, 

how did I get here?

Remembering Anne Bryan

There are plenty of people who knew Anne Bryan better than I did, some of whom are good friends.  I hadn't spoken to Anne for a long stretch of time.  We didn't hang out too often when she attended Scripps.  But I still feel the news of her loss in my gut.  Twenty four and vibrant and alive.  Young, in years and soul.  Anne was a light.  I remember her as someone who was always ready to share a laugh, always ready to genuinely engage with people, to share her joy.  One time, when I was at the Mudd hole waiting for my order to be filled, I saw Anne at a table on the right side of the soda machine.  I was up to my ears in a paper, I don't remember about what.  She called out to me, waved me over.  We hadn't hung out too much at this point, and I was still a shy little social wall fly, but she reached out to me anyway.  No hesitation.  I don't know what we talked about, but I left feeling light, refreshed.

I remember dinners at Mudd with friends.  Anne was a vegetarian.  That feels right somehow.  She seemed to live from a place of compassion.

I remember a conversation we had about something we had learned in class.  We conflicted on some point, and she said something about human pain.  I had been talking about conceptual social politics, and it was jarring to me.  It took me a long while to see the relevance, but I see it now.  She was talking from the heart, thinking from the heart.  A rare thing to behold in academic spaces, which are often hostile to that kind of thought, to putting the heart and human compassion first.  But it is a sacred thing, something we all can learn from. The heart matters.  People matter.  Interpersonal contact matters.  Anne was saying something about this.

I remember Anne as someone who always looked me in the eyes when we spoke, who seemed to really want to hear what I was going to say, to really want to know how I would respond to her, to really want to know how I was.  She was genuine in a way a lot of people don't know how to be.

And she was hilarious!  Quirky in her humor.  Always ready to express herself, she never seemed self-conscious in her jokes, in her words.  She seemed honest.

Yes, she was honest.  I helped her with a paper once, informally, I think, when she wanted an outsider's perspective.  She was so forthcoming about her thoughts, and was so sincerely invested in developing them.  In remembering that conversation, I see no ego-tint in it.  She wasn't trying to prove anything.  She wanted the paper to be good.  That was all.

I remember that Russian accent everyone has been mentioning.  So lighthearted.  So quirky.  So hilarious.

I remember a conversation about killer squirrels.  Those damn conspiring Scripps squirrels, simultaneously sneaky and bold.

I remember some crack about jungle juice.  What was it, exactly?  We had been talking about the college party scene.  We were wee freshwomen.

I remember joining Anne and other friends outside, laying in the sunlight on the Scripps lawn, talking about nothing, laughing about everything.

I remember Anne Bryan.  Anne Bryan, I remember you.  I remember you as a beautiful human soul, whose unique sense of humor filled the world with laughter.  I remember you as someone who never hesitated to share your joy with others.  I remember you as inquisitive and bright.  I remember you as a warm, youthful presence who I know will be sorely missed for longer than anyone can tell.  I remember you.

Rest in peace, Anne.