Teardrops of Time

Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong

Arnika Fuhrmann

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480756
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria asiática

Focusing on one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century, Angkarn Kallayanapong (1926–2012), this book makes a unique contribution to understandings of non-Western literary modernity. Arnika Fuhrmann investigates how the Thai poet adapts Buddhist understandings of time to create a modern Asian aesthetic imaginary. While Angkarn's poetry conjures the image of an early modern Thai cosmopolitanism, it also pioneers a poetics reflective of present-day globalization. The result is an experiment in Buddhist cosmopolitan aesthetic modernity. Teardrops of Time contextualizes the poet's work in the literary history and cultural politics of his time, tracing the transformation of a modern Thai cultural and political imaginary through the political history of the country's authoritarian governance since the late 1950s and the exigencies of an increasingly globalized economy since the 1980s. As Angkarn's work aligns itself with contemporaneous global trends in poetry, the book reads it alongside the work of Paul Celan and Allen Ginsberg.

1

Introduction

Buddhist Aesthetic Modernity

In his 1969 poem “Wela Khue Chiwa” (“Time Is Life”), modern Thai poet Angkarn Kallayanapong (1926–2012) presciently combines the cultural critique of a globalizing, commercializing, and art-averse era with a remedial vision. As a piece of modern Thai poetry, “Time Is Life” stands out in that it incorporates all at once a critique of the contemporary world, an expansive ontology that includes the cosmos, and a Buddhist-informed reparative vision:

Heaven has given us Time,

Like a lord of heavenly status.

Every single minute is life,

Destroying time is destroying oneself.

Does this existence have ideals,

Or is the heart evil, dissolute, without aim?

Worse yet, scores of lowly creatures,

Are carelessly enmeshed in the refuse of worldly entanglement.

One day, feel deeply about something,

Cut a newer gem of wisdom.

All over the earth there is no taste of divine efflorescence

As food for the soul.

The Wheel of Time will approach slowly,

Abducting life and executing it.

Should one merely eat, sleep, reproduce to one’s heart’s content

Before the end of this life, before death?

Greedy, infatuated, insatiable, crazy for wealth,

The spirit, sorrowful, disintegrates.

The glow of life adverse diminishes,

Lacking dignity, the glow of the heart is lost.

Awake, arise and seek value,

Traces of the way of the great Bodhisattva.

Render the value of your life to the world,

Offer it for everlasting miraculous happiness.

Revolutionize the view of philosophy,

So that the world be pure like heaven.

Have loving kindness and pity, don’t kill one another,

Turn the flow of blood into the planting of flowers.

Salvage the heart to the height of the incomparable stars,

Like glimpses of great dignity,

Immortal, far above the turning of the Wheel of Transmigration,

Sacred new power, brave knowledge of discursive thinking.

Clearly perceive the entire value of earth, water, sky,

Long until the day of the kalpa’s end,

For contentedness throughout time eternal,

For the universe’s calm, to erase suffering and peril.

In Teardrops of Time, I investigate how Angkarn Kallayanapong’s poetry makes Buddhist concepts available to the creation of a modern Thai aesthetic and ethical imaginary. The poem “Time Is Life” represents an example of the ways in which Angkarn adapts Buddhist temporal frameworks to create scale for cultural critique, to inform modern ethical paradigms, and to invent a lexicon and poetology that adequately reflect the dilemmas of a transforming country and region.

In a primary oeuvre that spans the late 1940s–late 1980s, Angkarn inhabits scales of temporal enormity as his poetry simultaneously moves through a contemporary global world, through the universe, and through Buddhist eons—the kalpa that “Time” references. This immensity of time serves to underline both the vehemence of the poet’s critique of the present and the magnitude of the alternative worlds that he envisions. Angkarn works through questions of time in Buddhist philosophy, negotiates a literary historical legacy, and wrangles with subjectivity in the contemporary world. What is more, his work presents a diagnostic of an era in which US Cold War policy leaves an indelible mark on Thailand.

The use of imperatives in “Time Is Life” points to the fact that Angkarn’s poetry aims to build modern, postcolonial ethical paradigms, taking seriously the question of cultural continuity and inquiring into what proper action for a postcolonial individual might look like. One of the important conceptual moves that the poet makes is that he resacralizes temporality and reenchants the modern world. The contemporary world that has become claustrophobic in his view is thus expanded to encompass the dimensions of an enchanted universe. In this universe, which the poet claims as distinctly Thai, it is possible to inhabit the same time as “the great Bodhisattva.” What is more, this universe even offers the possibility of an existence that is “immortal, far above the turning of the Wheel of Transmigration”—a prospect that confers dignity upon and opens up opportunity within a dispiriting modern existence.

For those reading in Thai, “Time” exemplifies the ways in which Angkarn creates a novel poetic language that captures the problematics of globalization from the location of Southeast Asia: a poetry that wields the lexicon of a Buddhist universe with such facility that it manages to label the shortcomings of contemporary culture with precision, while outlining a redemptive scenario of artistic and ethical endeavor.

My analysis in Teardrops of Time further provides insight into the transformation of the cultural and political imaginary throughout the history of Thai authoritarian governance since the late 1950s and the exigencies of an increasingly globalized economy in the 1980s. During this entire period, Angkarn’s work centrally debates Buddhist notions of time, refunctioning Buddhist ontologies and engaging pedagogies related to the Buddhist truth of impermanence.1

In five analytical chapters, I examine how Angkarn’s poetry engages fundamental problems in Buddhist thought about temporality to propose desirable ontologies for the present; draws on the historical temporality of the Ayuthaya period (1350–1767) to furnish modern ethical and aesthetic standards; debates the status of the modern subject in time; introduces a novel poetic language to address the vicissitudes of Thai modernity; and how the poet’s cultural critique and formal innovation produce a lyrical postcolonial politics that engages global concerns. With the aid of these building blocks, Angkarn shapes a comprehensive poetic and philosophical framework for the Thai present.

As the formally most innovative Thai poet, Angkarn at the same time centrally mobilizes the literary, artistic, and intellectual pasts of Thailand. Thus, his poetic lexicon stems from Thai Buddhist cosmology and classical literary heritage and makes these available as aesthetic and ethical features for the present. Christian Bauer describes the seemingly incongruous features of the poet’s work succinctly:

Formally it is consciously marked by the use of older meters, familiar from the canon of classical Siamese poetry.

…

His great innovation lies in his simultaneous systematic break with the conventions of traditional poetics: on the one hand, he explodes metrics through varying the number of syllables—but retains the ‘correct,’ that is, the expected, rhyme schemes—, on the other hand, he combines opposing expressions with each other, and includes even the use of obscenities. Readers were at first perplexed by this breaking of taboos: the literary dictate of ‘euphony’ (Thai bayrauḥ), or the expectation of the reader, is challenged by the content in this oeuvre.2

What I append to this widely held understanding of the character of Angkarn’s work is the argument that, while his poetry is marked by strident critique of the hybridization of Thai culture that has taken place as a result of globalization, it advances a language that is itself exemplary of such hybridity. His work thereby combines an intentional content that conjures the image of an early modern Thai cosmopolitanism with a poetics highly reflective of present-day globalization. What results is an experiment in a Thai Buddhist cosmopolitan aesthetic modernity. As one of the globally most significant poets of the twentieth century, Angkarn thus not only pioneered much of Thai modern prosodic development, but his work also provides unique insight into a non-Western literary modernity and modern Buddhist aesthetics.

In its linguistic innovation, Angkarn’s work aligns itself with contemporaneous trends in poetry across the globe. In chapter 5, I therefore draw Angkarn’s work in relation to Paul Celan’s. The Thai poet even drew the attention of American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who proceeded to translate three of Angkarn’s poems into English, a textual and personal encounter that chapter 6 explores.

In this book, I label Angkarn’s concern a postcolonial one. Official versions of Thai history continually foreground the country’s noncolonization, but critical historical work has persuasively detailed its semicolonial status.3 I describe Angkarn’s poetry as postcolonial not only in accordance with official or nonofficial designations of Thailand’s colonial status, however, but due to this poetry’s overriding focus on cultural survival and its very preoccupation with time. My analysis includes first-time translations of poetry and poetic prose from the poet’s entire oeuvre.

Temporality

In Angkarn’s large-scale project of cultural recovery, Buddhist frameworks of temporality assume an especially important role in the critique as well as the remedial ontologies that he develops for Thai modernity. In 1969, the poet writes “Su Krasae Chara,” a poem in the volume Lamnam Phu Kradueng, the title of which translates as “Against the Stream of Aging” or “Fighting the Process of Aging.” The following three stanzas of the poem detail the immensity of time’s power and the poet-narrator’s efforts to transcend its destructive power.

The universe combats time’s endlessness,

Brave for the timeless ages to come.

The human race may presently become extinct,

But Time will always be paired with the earth.

Why should the heart tremble in fear,

Leading the defiled world to utter sadness?

I, floating higher than the clouds fly,

Am used to grazing the spectrum of the stars.

Taking the mountains, streams, forests, and oceans,

As divine medicine, a tribute to heaven,

The manifold diverse precepts of all of eternal nature,

Come like magnets with the power of a miraculous, sacred heart.

“Against the Stream of Aging” moreover further elaborates the world that Angkarn’s poet-narrators inhabit. Rather than traverse merely the world of the social or of feeling, the poet inserts the speaker into a world in which the universe as a whole plays a role and natural phenomena appear as philosophical agents (“The manifold diverse precepts of all of eternal nature”). To build such a world for his readers, the poet draws on Thai Theravada Buddhist as well as Mahayana Buddhist—and Hindu—imaginations of cosmology. These Buddhist and Hindu paradigms are marked by the vast dimensions of space and time that they delineate. Thus, the kalpa, or Buddhist eon, that the poet references in “Wela Khue Chiwa” (“Time Is Life,” 1969) above, designates the age of a world and spans billions of years—4,320,000,000 years, to be exact.

The majority of Angkarn’s publications stem from between 1964 and 1987. His first collection of poetry, Kawiniphon Khong Angkarn Kallayanapong (The Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong), was published in 1964. However, this collection also contains poems that were originally published in the 1950s—and the earliest even dates to 1947. Throughout his writing from the 1950s until the 1980s, the theme of time emerges as an overriding concern. This becomes evident throughout Angkarn’s first volume of poetry, Kawiniphon, as well as throughout the subsequent volumes, Lamnam Phu Kradueng (Kradueng Mountain Song, 1969), Bangkok Kaeo Kamsuan Rue Nirat Nakhon Si Thammarat (Lament for Beloved Bangkok or Nirat Nakhon Si Thammarat, 1978), Panithan Kawi (The Poet’s Testament, 1986), and Yad Nam Khang Khue Namta Khong Wela (Dew Drops Are the Tears of Time, 1987).

In these works, time becomes the trope that unifies the poet’s aesthetic, historical, and ethical concerns. The poet works through quandaries regarding time in the ontological sense of “What is time?” and in the sense of “How much time do I have in the face of time’s passing?” Angkarn begins his poem “Kala Khue Arai” (“What Is Time?,” Lamnam Phu Kradueng) as follows:

Time, a rapid powerful current, what is it?

Why is it great, all over the skies?

That the title and beginning of the poem take the form of questions is apt, as the poet addresses issues of temporality in the format of a problematic, rather than as something already known. In particular, Angkarn’s work takes up the problem in Buddhist philosophy of whether time is to be regarded as substantial or not. Thus, in the 1987 prose poem “Nimit Nai Sai Rung” (“Nimitta in the Rainbow”) the poet writes about the nature of time: “It is possible to say that it has a self and possible to say that it has not.”4 I direct detailed attention to this question regarding time’s substantiality in chapter 2.

In addition to debating the substantiality of time, the poet experiments with temporal scale, setting vast cosmological temporalities and Buddhist temporalities of impermanence against the minuteness of human life. These inquiries into the ...