My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this one, my favorite image:  The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the tangled roots of a banyan tree. The place is Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, former capital of Siam and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. Founded in 1350, the city was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and today is known as Thailand’s Angkor Wat. It was abandoned until the 1950s.   I had seen the banyan/Buddha image once before, in black and white, accompanying a series of poems by the late Kenneth Fields, collectively titled “One Love,” a sort of travelogue documenting a visit to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Fields was a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and co-edited with him a poetry collection, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969). Fields doesn’t mention the Buddha head explicitly:   “Sacred figures draped in yellow Bas-reliefs crumbling away Wat overgrown returning to earth”   Fields’ memories rhyme with my own:   “Rolling through these jungles News footage in my head I don’t have to spell it out”   And this:   “I feared seeing it as a boy Then thought I never would Mekong The wake of empires Spreading out”   Fields reanimates the Imagist impulse:   “Magnificent ruins, Forest and culture In symbiotic rush”   Fields visited Cambodia in 2009, during the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison camp commander Kang Kek Iew, known as “Comrade Duch”:   “Duch is on trial today. Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old Party pols are trembling He’s not the only one”   From the beautiful landscape and temples, Fields move on to recent history and genocide:   “Decimated An entire country Many times over Some for wearing glasses”   Fields concludes the poem:   “The world is dark With us. Even Electricity darkens. Only a few— Honored in crumbling ruins Built by darkeners darkened In their turn— Only a wild heedlessness A spare carefulness for those we love Suffice”

“Happiness is the search for happiness.”  I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no happy lives, only happy moments. Those moments seem to be the byproduct of right living. A life dedicated fulltime to achieving happiness is likely to be filled with respites of pleasure, long stretches of disappointment and much unhappiness for others, like second-hand smoke. Some people, like spoiled children, confuse happiness with getting their own way. Most of us never learn what’s best for us and others. You can see the very human fallacy built into that effort: demands can only grow more insistent.   In an 1895 entry in The Journal of Jules Renard (ed. and trans. By Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964,) Renard writes: “I desire nothing from the past. I do not count on the future. The present is enough for me. I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness.” Hard to say just how tongue-in-cheek that passage is. Renard was a master ironist. He always impresses me as a realist, a rejector of pie-in-the-sky grandiosities. Bogan writes in her preface:   “Renard’s passion for factual truth and stylistic exactitude, once formed, remained central to his work throughout his career. This preoccupation never hardened into obsession; one of the great pleasures of reading Renard is the certainty, soon felt by the reader, that nothing is being put down in meanness or malice.”   Renard died on this date, May 22, in 1910, exactly one year after writing the aphorism-like entry at the top in his journal. He was forty-six years old.   [The quote at the top comes from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

My brother’s yahrzeit – the first anniversary of his death last summer – is approaching. His death was the most intimate I have experienced. I spent most of the last two weeks of his life with him, in hospital and hospice, and observed the moment of his death.  Ken could be difficult. He was contrary and often bitter. We several times went years without speaking, and our relations were often a test of character. He brought out some of my own bitterness, but also our blackest senses of humor.  He started smoking cigarettes at age twelve, never seriously gave them up, and they killed him at age sixty-nine. In hospice I offered to buy him a carton of Raleighs (our mother’s brand: “Save the coupons!”) and that was the last time I saw him laugh. We were brothers and blood won in the end.   Thanks to Mike Juster I’ve learned of the poet Jean L. Kreiling who has just published a seven-poem sonnet sequence, “My Brother’s Last Year,” in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. In the first sonnet she writes:   “But he retains his reason and his wit, so much so that it seems clear he’ll survive; they say he won’t.”   Kreiling’s poems are a detailed account of the mundane things surrounding dying and death. I remember in the hospital my brother was still reading books, able to hold his granddaughter and talk about Montaigne. His mind was intact, which, despite all the evidence, suggested he would eventually get out of bed and return to his life. As Kreiling puts it, “He’s still him.” By the time he entered hospice he could no longer speak or, apparently, listen. His son and I sang to him but I don’t think he heard.   Survivors savor their survival. We can’t help it. The life instinct is powerful. Kreiling tells us: “To grow old is a gift.” She writes:   “This may assuage my sense there’s nothing I can do, although a visit’s nearly nothing. Yes, I care; that’s what my presence demonstrates, I know, but it will make him strain for things now rare or difficult: the teasing repartee, a walk outdoors, shared meals and memories. He reassures me that he feels okay, though I watch him declining, by degrees.”   The death of a loved makes us pause to assess the state of our own values. We ask, “What is Important?” Kreiling’s final sonnet:   “Not long before the end, he made it clear: there was so little that he wanted — just  to stay with those he loved, not disappear into the latter part of dust to dust. So many of us want so much: we crave the shiny toy, the extra buck, and more when less would do — stuff that will never save our souls or bodies. I knew that before my brother’s diagnosis, and today I can’t claim to have unlearned pointless greed. I find, though, that it’s easier to weigh the worth of things desired, to measure need, to understand there isn’t much I lack. He wanted only time. I want him back.”

“You either fell under his spell and loved the wild ride of his prose, or you shunned or ignored it.”   Infatuation of the literary sort is likely possible only among the young. That’s my experience. I have discovered good writers in recent decades – Yvor Winters, C.H. Sisson – but the attraction was more balanced. I could see their weaknesses while continuing to read and admire them. While still in my teens and twenties, I would fall hard for certain writers and almost subconsciously rationalize their failings. I think of Thomas Pynchon and Sherwood Anderson, an unlikely pair. But my hardest fall was for Edward Dahlberg, a writer unknown to most readers.   Dahlberg (1900-77), an American, defied categories and most literary expectations. Between 1929 and 1934 he published three novels usually labeled “proletarian.” If that had been all he published, I would never have fallen for him. He knew all the Modernists in Paris, including Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. By 1941, when he published Do These Bones Live (retitled Can These Bones Live when republished in 1960), Dahlberg had transformed himself into -- what? In the words of Jules Chametzky, a writer of “[a] wildly baroque, some would say ornate and affected high style.” Dahlberg wrote prose in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne and Robert Burton, writers I was reading around the same time.   I wrote my name and the date of purchase in my copy of Can These Bones Live: “8-6-75.” Much of the text is underlined and annotated. Here’s a typical marked passage, from a chapter titled “Randolph Bourne: In the Saddle of Rosinante”: “All dogmas lead men to the Abyss; doctrine is the enemy of vision and the denial of the past.” By Dahlberg’s customary standards, that’s both thoughtful and moderate. He could be a real crank, like one of his heroes, Henry David Thoreau, of whom he writes:   “Great lives are moral allegories and so soon become deniable myths because we cannot believe tat such good men could have existed in such an evil world.”   The guy who first introduced me to Dahlberg, in 1974, was Mike Phillips. Eighteen years ago I wrote a post on this blog asking if anyone knew Phillips or his whereabouts. So far, silence. I’ve read most of Dahlberg’s published work. Especially good is his 1964 autobiography, filtered through the unhappy life of his mother, Because I Was Flesh. Dahlberg’s essential theme was himself. The memoir works because the focus is shifted to his mother. I’ve shed my infatuation and can value for his best work. Here is another underlined passage accompanied by a half-century-old exclamation point: “There are no abstract truths—no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man.”     [Two quotes, including the one at the top, are taken from Jules Chametzky’s Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers: a Cultural Memoir (2012).]