The Faraway Nearby (13 page)

Then the legend relates the crux of the story, how he goes out on roads his father has carefully stripped of “afflicted common folk . . . those whose limbs were maimed or senses defective, the aged, sick and the like, and the wretched” to spare him from pain and questions. The gods intervene. They send the four sights that are the pivot of this story, and the sights lead to the four noble truths that are the foundation of Buddhism. The first is an old man, and the sheltered prince's response is one of shocked dismay. He turns to his charioteer and friend for an explanation. This is old age, “the murderer of beauty, the ruin of vigor, the birthplace of sorrow, the grave of pleasure, the destroyer of memory,” replies the charioteer, and adds that it is the fate of all who live long enough.

And then they meet a sick man, panting, with bloated belly and emaciated limbs, crying in pain and leaning on a companion for support, or a god in the form of such a man. The prince “trembled like the reflection of the moon on rippling water.” They go out again on roads the king has cleared, and the gods send a corpse. The gods are impersonating the most dreaded and the least beautiful human conditions, with the clear premise that witnessing these states prompts us to wake up. The fourth sight doesn't occur in
Buddhacarita
but does in many other versions: it's a
bhikku,
or ascetic wanderer, devoted to finding and addressing the cause of human suffering. Siddhartha Gautama turns away from his pleasures and toward the life of a bhikku.

It's hard to imagine a thoughtful person could remain literally oblivious of the facts of old age, sickness, and death, but most of us have a degree of obliviousness, willful or otherwise. We know the facts, but we don't always realize them with that imaginative, emotional engagement that makes them vivid forces and deciding factors. And then they do realize, or we do, or you do, and everything changes. I felt a little that way that apricot season when the drama of my mother's old-age illness was quickly followed by my own medical adventure, Ann's slow dying, and Nellie's daughter's turbulent birth.

I've met privileged young people who were shocked when they discovered the destructive force of injustice in the lives of others around them. Some left their careers to work for human rights or to teach or to tend the damaged. Many lives have a moment of rupture that is an awakening and a change of direction. Another aristocratic firstborn son left his comfortable Buenos Aires life and a medical career because of one.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was particularly affected by the unemployed miner and his wife shivering without blankets one night in the Chilean desert and by an old woman in Valparaiso dying of asthma and poverty. They were apparently not sent by the gods, but they woke him up and changed his life, and he took his own path, for better or worse, to end suffering. Siddhartha was twenty-nine when he left the palace to take up the life of a wandering ascetic, a seeker, a few years older than Che was when he got on the back of Granado's motorcycle and began the encounters that would change his life.

The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don't change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through a new identity and new purpose, whether it's that of a nation or a single human being.

I've envied the people whose lives suddenly rupture and afterward dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to a cause or a community. The new life seems the product of an urgent certainty that clears most of the ambiguities and ambivalences away. It was not, however, so simple for the prince. In one account he shaved his head and donned the robes of an ascetic as his family wept in the palace, but in the
Buddhacarita
he stole away in the night on his horse, cut off his long hair in the forest with his sword, and sent sword, hair, and horse back to the people he left behind without a farewell or an explanation. For the reader of fairy tales and Genesis, the startling thing is that he walks out of paradise of his own accord. Adam and Eve are driven out of paradise as punishment.

Buddhism takes change as a given and suffering as the inevitable consequence of attachment and then asks what you are going to do about it. Suffering, though, is not the most accurate translation of the Pali word
dukkha
.
Dukkha
means sky, ether, or hole, particularly an axle hole. Sukkha was a good axle hole for a wheel, while dukkha was a poor one, one that made the wheel wobble and bump, jolting the load. It could be translated as discord or disturbance, the antithesis of harmony or serenity. Everyone knows well that feeling of being out of tune, at odds, dissatisfied, anxious, full of dread, heartsore. Siddhartha said in his first sutra, the
Dhammacakkappavattana,
“Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha.”

Though many are drawn to Buddhism as a way to address their own suffering, the teachings emphasize care for others, compassion for all beings, as well as transforming the self who experiences pain, rather than extirpating the external causes of pain. These are ways of overcoming the attachment to self that is the experience of separateness. The Burmese monks were doing this work. They were doing it by performing the basic act of Buddhism, sitting still and paying attention to their breath, and by going out into the streets on behalf of the people of Burma.

Paying attention to your breath is about being present in the moment—I heard a formerly homeless woman who became a Buddhist priest say you do it so that you can be present enough to be compassionate toward others and not so caught up in your own drama. You sit still, count your breaths, watch the stories your mind makes arise, let them go, and maybe learn a little about your propensity to spin stories and the fact that you yourself make them. Even the absolute sufferings of the body can be regarded from various perspectives, though, for example, hunger or injury cannot be dismissed. Many of our emotional pains are yet more malleable, yet more responsive to perspective.

Zen priests and Burmese exiles and Buddhist teachers who'd spent time with the forest monks of Thailand and Burma were good company while I was thinking about stories, pain, and empathy. So was the photographer Subhankar Banerjee, whose work I knew well before he wrote to me a few days before I left for Iceland. I wrote back, we corresponded, and we met a little less than a year later, at his house made of windows in New Mexico while it was snowing outside and steamily fragrant with Indian cooking inside, as if we were in two places at once, and perhaps he always was. An enthusiast with a head of unruly, wavy black hair who punctuated his narratives with laughs and with “Oh my God” when he exclaimed about how awful, wonderful, unexpected, or extreme something was, he was one of those people whose lives had ruptured and who had walked away from what was easy, safe, and lucrative. His empathy, however, was with a broader community than the human.

Born and raised in Calcutta, he had a great-uncle who painted and instilled a love of art in him when he was young, but an Indian youth with no particular means could not contemplate becoming an artist. He got an engineering degree instead and managed to enroll in a southern New Mexico university to study computer science and then physics. From there he went to do research at a national weapons laboratory, but Subhankar's real passion was outside his job.

When he arrived at the university in Las Cruces, he encountered a vast desert with few people. It gave him “the shock of space,” he told me. “Because in Calcutta—you're lucky to have a square foot of space. But here I was in the middle of all this space and I didn't know what to do about that.” He began exploring it; friends took him backpacking; he hated it; and then he was hooked, began camping, climbing mountains, became the outings coordinator for the local Sierra Club and then the vice chair. He started taking photographs, and after he had switched to a research job outside Seattle, he went on a commercial photographic expedition to Churchill, Manitoba, the easiest place to see polar bears, and photographed them.

In Churchill he made a photograph that has haunted him ever since. It shows one polar bear eating another. One creamy white bear stands up, its body pointing left and its head at center, small ears, black eyes, black nose, clean fur, its tongue out but a mild expression on its face. The other bear's head is at center too, its eyes shut, its fangs exposed, its head stained with blood, and its body torn open and partially gone, as much red meat as white fur on display.

What's disturbing about Subhankar's image is how much the two bears look alike, except for their expressions. It's an image not just of cannibalism but of a kind of narcissism, of devouring the self. You devour yourself because there is no one else you can reach. Though male bears kill others of their species and bears will feed on anything dead, there is an apparent rise in polar-bear cannibalism tied to the bears starving because the summer ice is failing.

Barry Lopez's
Arctic Dreams,
a disquisition on people, animals, ice, and light at far northern latitudes, is a lyrical book whose undercurrent of warning is more obvious today than when it was published in 1986. Climate change was an idea just being assembled by scientists at that moment; it would begin to enter the popular imagination a few years later. Lopez quoted an earlier traveler in Alaska, the Scottish-born American environmentalist John Muir, saying that polar bears move “as if the country had belonged to them always.”

Though their country is both land and water—they are technically marine mammals—their survival depends on the expanse of sea ice on which they hunt. Or hunted. You could call them neither land nor sea but ice mammals. The ice is fragmented, vanishing sooner, appearing later, turning what was once the solid mass of the farthest north into open water. The country no longer belongs to them. At the end of his chapter on polar bears, Lopez describes seeing and touching an immobilized female polar bear about to be radio-collared “as though examining a museum specimen” and seeing her genitalia “in size and shape like a woman's. I looked away. I felt I had invaded her privacy. For the remainder of the day I could not rid myself of this image of vulnerability.”

Almost twenty years ago hermaphrodite polar bears began appearing, mutated and sterile. These changes that brought them closer to extinction were due to the contamination of their bodies by chemicals that had been swept north with currents and migratory creatures. And then came drowning bears, bears trying to operate in a realm of summer ice that no longer quite existed. Mary Shelley imagined nature violated in isolated examples beyond which were the constants represented by the wild places and the order of things. She never imagined that all of us could become Dr. Frankenstein, chasing and fleeing our altered creation that is the landscape all around us and its invisible contaminants, everywhere, from within our bodies to the ends of the earth.

All these polar calamities represent a world that is itself monstrous, a manmade creation gone astray. It was part of what drew Subhankar to the arctic, this sense of need. He was thirty-three. He quickly quit his job, pulled out his savings, cashed in his pension plan, began talking to biologists, and made preparations to be gone a long time. He went forth into the utter unknown of the arctic winter and back to the artistic vocation he'd had as a boy.

Before long, he found the Inupiat hunter who'd become his mentor and guide, Robert Thompson, of the village of Kaktovik on Barter Island on the Beaufort Sea near the border between Alaska and the Yukon. Thompson taught him about cold and survival. They went to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to watch polar bears, this time not in a place where the bears were surrounded by viewers in tanklike cars, but where no other humans or settlements were near. The place had been photographed a lot in summer, but it was often described as an uninhabited wasteland in other seasons by those who wanted to ravage it, and Subhankar set out to show that this was not so.

Early on in their encampment, they saw a mother bear and her cubs play near their den, and he took photographs of the yellow-white creatures on snow so white that its shadows are pure blue. They look as though they are the only creatures in the world, one mother, two cubs, in the white world under a white sky, as though time has not been invented, as though the world has just begun, as though nothing can go wrong.