POLITICAL, SPIRITUAL STRUGGLES INSEPARABLY LINKED "Kaleidoscope"
Letter From Burma (No. 7)
4.8.97
MAINICHI DAILY NEWS
Aung San Suu KyiThe toys of my early childhood seemed luxurious in post-World War II Burma, but in fact they were quite modest. I had a series of round-eyed, hairless dolls made of thin, pink plastic, which buckled and cracked easily, and with moveable limbs attached by means of brittle elastic string that could ill withstand the attention of restless little hands. Few children could resist the temptation to put the chubby arms and legs through vigorous acrobatic maneuvers until the ill-used articles either snapped off or hung dejectedly from a sad gray cord wrung out of all elasticity. In spite of their lack of durability and beauty, I regarded these dolls with vague respect, as I had heard some adults expound the theory that the metamorphosis of Japan into a modern, industrialized nation had begun with the manufacture and export of such objects. Apart from the dolls, there were dolls' tea sets (made of plastic much harder than the dolls themselves), wind-up toys (a velvety little monkey clashing a pair of cymbals stands out in my memory among a motley fleet of painted, tin vehicles), jigsaw puzzles, board games, colored pencils and water colors.
The toy that I considered most fascinating was a kaleidoscope. It filled me with wonder that the slightest turn of an unassuming little metal tube should result in a beautiful visual experience, which was completely new each time. Somebody said that the patterns formed in the kaleidoscope were similar to the structure of snowflakes, making the toy doubly exotic for me as snow was a thing of remote, unreachable beauty in our tropical world. The kaleidoscope did not last long. My two brothers and myself, numerous children visitors and grown-ups who did not consider it beneath their dignity to display an interest in toys, subjected the tube to more twirling and shaking than it could take without collapsing into bits. After the kaleidoscope had gone the way of all over-used toys, my brother put together a crude, home-make version from three strips of mirror and chips of colored glass. It was neither neat nor convenient, but it served its purpose, which was to create enchantment. When I came across the translucent brightness of stained glass in my adult years, I was reminded of the jeweled mosaic wonders of that rickety little homemade kaleidoscope.
A fall down the stairs a couple of months ago brought back memories of the favorite toy of my early childhood. This was not because as I tumbled down I saw starts and technicolored flashes as might have happened to characters in the comics I read in those days. It was because the weeks of enforced rest that followed the incident put me in a position from which I could get a panoramic view of life as a series of vignettes, the components clustering and dispersing and shifting and changing with kaleidoscopic virtuosity. In this age of advanced medical technology there must be devises that make it possible for a person to read comfortably while lying flat on her back. However, since I have not yet acquired such devices and in any case my doctor had advised me not to strain my eyes, I found myself with a lot of time for contemplation. As I lay with one hand resting on my brow in conformity with proper poetic convention, the permutations and combinations of human problems arising out of samsara, the continual cycle of life and death and suffering due to karma. Its nature appeared before me, more varied than snowflake patterns but hardly possessed of such delicate prettiness.
Although the pattern of life changes constantly, sometimes echoes of old configurations recur. As a student, I was caught up in the 1960s concern about apartheid, contributing my tiny bit of support for the struggle of the black people by refusing to buy products from South Africa. Now in my mature years, I am caught up in the question of economic sanctions against the military regime in my own country. The hows and whys and wherefores, the analysis of possible consequences, the weighing of the pros and the cons, the never ending argument about the relationship between politics and economics. (How can those who know that Japanese were given honorary white status in South Africa under apartheid because of the economic status of Japan deny the intimate link between politics and economics?)
Mixed into the familiar and the deja vu are the unpredictable, the unexpected, and the sense that life is continual process of learning. As my 52nd birthday approached in June, I remembered a friend at university quoting the lines of Horace:
Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume Labuntur anniWe were both in our very early twenties and we imagined we could feel the cool draught of fleeting time on our well rounded cheeks. The thought of our youthful world-weariness makes me smile now, and it occurs to me that in many ways the young are probably tougher than the old. Largely untried and untouched by the "vicissitudes of life," a phrase that has a comic ring for those who have not know the twists and turns of capricious fortune, we were clad in a steely armor of innocent prejudices and expectations, barely pierced by uncertainty. Fifty seemed old to us then, an age when we would know just about all that has to be known about life, blase as Betty Grable in her prime with narrowed eyes and hard mouth. Well, of course now that I am well established in my second half century, it turns out to not like that at all.
Birth and death are the two faces of the alchemist coin of existence. A month after my birthday came the 50th anniversary of my father's death. He died when he was 32 years old, and it is difficult to imagine him as an octogenarian. The year my father would have turned seventy, an old friend of the family remarked that we should not mourn his early death because he was blessed not to have become old, not have know, as she put it, "the destroying years." He remains forever preserved in the tender sternness of his youth and in the intense gravity of the struggle that was his life. But still, it saddens me and many others among my countrymen and women to remember that he had been cut off in his prime, before he was able to complete the task of setting Burma firmly on th path to strong, stable nationhood. Had he lived long enough to guide our country through the crucial first decades of independence, there is every likelihood that we would now be enjoying the fruits of justice, unity, peace and a confident, well-nurtured, well-educated people.
This year's Martyrs Day, which commemorates the assassination of my father and eight associates, coincided with the full moon of the Burmese month of Waso, which marks the beginning of the rainy season Buddhist retreat. The National League for Democracy arranged a ceremony for offering food and robes to fifty monks for the sake of merit to be shared between those who have passed away and those who have been left behind. It was an occasion that afforded us with an opportunity to reflect on the three aspects common to all conditioned things: /anicca/ (impermanence), /dukha/ (suffering) and /anatta/ (the unresponsiveness of objects to one's wishes) and on nirvana, the unconditioned, undefiled state where anicca, dukha and anatta become extinct. Spiritual matters are as much an integral component of the fabric of human existence as politics, which has to do with how man relates to others of his kind. Whether we like it or not, the spiritual and political will remain part of the design of our lives.
Aung San Suu Kyi
