Two Graveyards

Every day I look down at two graveyards,
one Dutch, one Javanese;
one frozen in time, one always in-progress.
At long last, we wandered through the Javanese side.

The Rectangle

The Dutch cemetery is geometric & constantly manicured. The dead are foreign soldiers from old wars, visited by virtually no one. Being a cemetery, it doesn’t feel empty exactly, but its ghosts would seem to be keeping a stiff upper lip about things. There’s a pretty white chapel with a columbarium, stained glass & a lily pond. Most of the headstones are simple white crosses, many rows of which read: Onbekend—Unknown—who are protected behind the gates as fiercely as the rest.

There is almost no other space like this in Jakarta.

The Ramai

The other graveyard is RAMAI. This is a great word. Ramai means boisterous, active, busy, close-together, exciting, loud. The atmospheres of good parties, crowded waiting rooms, Graeagle, & busy traffic can all be ramai, & Indonesians like things that way. Space is at a premium, too. Which is to say, there is a lot more going on in the cemetery than burials.

First off, it is a graveyard, of course—some regular, humpy headstones, some plots set with stone crypts shaped like bathtubs, bus stops, benches, rafts, most of them overgrown with vines & grass upwards to my shoulder, a few of these humbuggily topped with lattice & barbed wire, which I suspect are meant to keep off children. Many of the headstones are graffitied, multi-ethnic (Chinese, European, Indonesian), & old.

But it’s also:
2. A commuter road for foot & motorcycle traffic,
3. A de facto trash dump,
4. Which makes it a perfect chicken, dog, cat & goat feed lot,
5. A social field around which kakilima food carts gather,
6. A shanty town full of shacks where families live,
7. A ball field (including a uniquely immaculate tennis / basketball / soccer / ping-pong table ball surface),
8. A school yard, &
9. Being one of the only wide-open air spaces in the area: a major kite flying field. We went at 5 pm, when all the school kids & workers were coming home; the place is full of people. And it’s an oddly cheerful space.

Bule Masuk Kampung II

So this experience was similar to our walk through the Cikini kampung, which I wrote about here in January [Walking: Gringos Enter the Hood]. As the crow flies, this was a simple, rectangular route. The road through the graveyard, which you can see in the photo above, is red mud & compacted garbage. It doesn’t stink; at night we can see the trash fires burning. Most people we pass are school kids in bright uniforms, kite boys, snack vendors, or people riding motorcycles home from work.

The farther in we go, the more women we see: grandmothers & mothers with babies, some feeding their toddlers mash right there on a gravestone. Several women bring their babies forth specifically to point us out up close, gently whispering brand new words into little ears, teaching them to identify People Like Us.

“Selamat sore,” I say, exhausting half of my Indonesian words by saying Good afternoon. “Apa kabar?” How are you? Now I’m done. For me, it’s all nodding & smiling from here on out.

But really, just showing up at the end of the road is enough to make about fifteen little girls zip up & dare one another to say Hello. All of them look pretty clean, healthy & happy for kids who seem literally to live in a dump. All of them look very ready for us to do something—anything—funny. They want us to say Hello back to them in English, & when we do they laugh because we’re talking to them. The brave one who dared to say Hi gets shoved & mocked good-naturedly all around.

As before, in the train-tracks kampung, the space is so dense with life that it’s too much to see or remember at once, & it’s hard to describe with any justice. Ornate bird cages hang in unexpected places: from a flowering tree in the graveyard; from a tilted green lamppost over the street; under the rusted eaves of a shack. A splendid rooster lands, colorful & dominant, & with a flourish claims a heap for his own. Little shops & carts of unidentifiable knick-knacks are tucked into corners everywhere. Wedged in among the red tile roofed houses on the adjacent street is a tiny mosque with a garland of loudspeakers on its minaret that must deafen the people who live adjacent to it. Scrawny kittens with docked or broken tails defend their hiding places from one another. It’s not crowded but there are people of all ages everywhere: napping on a gravestone, flying kites, playing ball.

To be honest, from the outside: everyone I saw there seemed to be having a much more social, relaxed & enjoyable evening than most anybody I ever see coming home from a day at work or school.

We walked back out to the street along a paved kampung gangway adjacent to the graveyard. The wall above the drainage ditch was stenciled every few yards with the plaintive:

“Thank you for not throwing trash in the ditch.”

Hello Mister! Bu Bule & Extra Bule at Large

“Hello Mister!” is the thing a bule—a gringo—hears everyday on the streets. Guidebooks actually refer to it as a noun: how many Hello Misters you’ll hear down a given route. Many Hello Misters on the way to the graveyard.

At the end of the graveyard road, a teenage girl required no translation as she stared at us with flat amazement & addressed someone through the wall of a one-room tin & scrap wood shack, obviously saying, “No, seriously, Mom, you’ve got to get out here & look at this. I swear, they’re right here in front of me right now, hurry. No, wait! They’re turning right, quick! Go out the other side, quick, quick, the other side, you won’t believe this.”

And sure enough, here comes Mom, carrying a baby, all baffled smiles, politely waiting for us to…do whatever it is we do. Maybe ask for directions out of here? What I really want to do is take pictures—for there are many good photos to be had here—but I am (lamely) far too self-conscious to do the completely obvious & expected thing of bules. Because—beautifully—everyone is staring at us, talking about us, waiting with a kind of pitched anticipation. If they had cameras, they would be taking pictures.

Years ago, Evan stopped finding this as interesting as I still do.
We might as well be wearing rabbit suits.

It’s the kind of moment that inspires odd recriminations like: why did I never persist in learning to juggle? These kids would be so happy if I could only juggle. But that’s not really it: it’s just that we’re bules. We don’t belong there. There’s no obvious reason why we’re here. It doesn’t even feel like an encounter between rich & poor (though by many accounts that's what it is), because we are much too alien for that.

I can’t not be a bule. There’s no special way to act or more knowledgeable way to be. But not only am I the whitey-whitest bule ever, I’m aware that right this minute I’d also be fairly dorky looking at home, among my bule friends. Travel clothes, glasses, tweaked out hair.

I think: Well, at least we’re funny. Funny is better than just about every other option for American bules around the world, right? I am listening to our crowd of children, waiting for someone to say the word. The only word I’ll know.

When one of the kids does, I point at her severely—which freezes her in place, a collective held breath—& then insist that my proper name is Bu Bule—Madam Gringo—while they shall hereafter refer to Evan as Mister Extra Bule (a play on Extra Joss, the key mystery ingredient (=mojo) used to advertise cigarettes).
At which everyone (but poor Mr. Bule) cracks up.

Though maybe they just laughed because I spoke to them.
But okay, whatever: laughing is good.

Anyone's Luck is Luck Enough

When I met AG—a 29 year old literature professor from Manila, via Kyoto, now in Jakarta, in the company of an Alabama Fulbrighter—he was wearing a kelly green “Irishmen” t-shirt, so that he wouldn’t be pinched.

One can’t be too careful around St. Patrick’s day, never mind the scarcity of leprechauns here.

The world is full of equal opportunity poltergeists & jinxes. Take my apartment building—the pink towers of Puri “Palace” Casablanca—which has no floors with the number 4 in it. I know why this is: the Chinese word for FOUR rhymes with the Chinese word DEATH, so 4s are unlucky. The fact that we are in Indonesia, not China, is not the point; it’s unlucky. There is no 13th floor, either; triskadecaphobia. Somehow I only noticed this two weeks ago, when a mob of little girls in the elevator ritually chanted out the floor numbers as we descended: “Seventeen! Sixteen! Fifteen! Twelve!…” without a hiccough. Fifteen, Twe--? Oh...Hey, look at that.

AG is just learning Indonesian. Over coffee at the Bakoel café, he cheerfully taught us the word for Bastard—brengsek—which he’d learned that morning. He didn’t mention how. Pooling our meager language skills, AG & I could now utter the following sentence:

“Good afternoon, may the peace of God be upon you, I would like the fried noodles with tofu, you bastard, where is the bathroom?”

A Filipino scholar, AG is here on an Asian Public Intellectuals grant. Similar to a Fulbright. To my unending delight, he is spending 6 months scouring the countryside for Indonesian science fiction.

Chocolate Post-Mortem

A Filipino scholar, AG is here on an Asian Public Intellectuals grant. Similar to a Fulbright. To my unending delight, he is spending 6 months here looking at (or: for) Indonesian science fiction. Other things, too, but specifically that:
.......the science fiction of the developing world.

He comes here directly from Japan, where he & his wife spent the last six months, investigating sci-fi trends there. AG has a PhD & is a science fiction short story author himself, though his work is not yet translated from Tagalog into English. He's promised me a book. He particularly hopes to meet with an Indonesian author whose novel: Chocolate Post-Mortem, is currently being translated. So far, however, he’s had no luck at all. The Indonesian literature professors he’s interviewed to date have all told him the same thing:
there is no science fiction in Indonesia.

Well, there IS, but it’s not, you know, literature. They say.
Well, there IS, but it’s not really science fiction, technically.
Even Chocolate Post-Mortem, some say, quickly becomes more of a crime / mystery / love story.
But there IS, AG insists. There IS Indonesian science fiction…of a sort.

Here’s the thing: Science fiction is about exploring possible worlds, futures & identities; but you have to be able to get there from here. Going into space, say, is something first world authors (categorically) can imagine, having already taken the first step ourselves. The very possibility of it is part of our unconscious identity: we can see ourselves developing such futuristic technologies, or exploring the mysteries of the universe, alien races, biology, cyberspace, all with some degree of intention & control.

That whole genre of stories, AG claims, doesn’t spontaneously emerge from authors whose nations can’t even build their own basic infrastructure. The third world is defined, in fact, exactly by those nations who were never involved with the space race. There’s no sense of ownership or plausibility to imagined technologies—or futures—of any significance. Both the realities & fantasies of being Modern rely on images & identities provided by first world powers, & third world fans can only copy it, endlessly derivative & lagging behind. It’s never their own.

So it is in fiction: third world authors writing traditional sci-fi tend to be borrowing ideas, technologies, & images set by a first world precedent & with a first world sensibility. Where would we get the technology for any of that? he says. It would have to be given to us. What would it mean to use it? It would have to be allowed.

But that’s a common premise, I say: all-powerful aliens bestowing upon us poor humans advanced technologies. And what about alien invasion & colonization? [Are we on very dangerous territory yet? Already we’re talking about what entire nations, nay entire races, cannot spontaneously imagine.] But alien colonization, now that seems fair: a native allegory for third world authors & classic sci-fi, too. Where are those books?

But by ‘poor humans’ I mean Europeans, he claims. Or Americans. “Aliens NEVER invade the third world. They only ever land in the first world.” After all, they want to be taken to our leaders. Even when they land, make war, share knowledge, & abduct people, it’s only ever as remote as the American southwest, Midwest, northwest: the frontiers. Why would they be elsewhere?

So what IS third world sci-fi about, if he’s still so sure that it exists? About alienation, he says, about encounters with foreign cultures, about identity without agency. About the masks we wear to assimilate. It’s a way to imagine alternate histories, not what we could yet become, but what we might have been.

Says Evan: Nostalgia for the future.

The Day of Silence

19 March, 6 PM

It’s almost impossible to write of perfect moments without becoming precious, especially when it involves nature. The photo’s not enough, though; I’ll try this one deadpan & curt.

After a clear, hot day: a bold rainbow over the city. That much you can see. It stays as storm clouds stack in anvils. It stays through sunset & the evening salat. The light is extraordinary; we leave our desks to sit on the balcony. Bats flicker in the space beyond the rail. Lightning in the clouds now: filaments, muted glows & incandescent tumbleweeds. There is no thunder, no rain. A haze descends. For a short time—& the first time in a long while—the call to prayer is beautiful, a pair of muezzins only, two voices rising & crossing like veils of incense smoke over the city. The air softens & grows lovely to breathe, only on this evening, tonight only scented with unlikely blossoms. A stir of wind over my whole skin. The body-warmth of it makes part of me indistinct from what I’m seeing: the city, the apricot sky, the minarets, the rainbow; for a moment I feel something close to reverence. The timing of this is important, for now the calls to prayer increase in number, in volume, in insistence. It’s so pleasant outside that this time I am not exasperated or concerned, only struck anew at how loud they are, how tight the weave of their voices over the city. Reminded that right now, on the next island over: it is silent.

Today it is Nyepi in Bali, the Hindu New Year. Today that entire island is quiet: The Day of Silence. Its planes are grounded, its markets closed, its people mute--all so that evil spirits on their yearly search will believe the land uninhabited & pass over. Not here, not here (though on our balcony we have fallen silent, too): the Muslim adhan is rising & rising, their thousands of solos sent up through the rainbow, lightning, sunset, clouds, the soft air. Through us, too. For this long, extraordinary moment, it only Is. The city grows dark & as it does: a fireworks show begins.
What a strange, good world.

For the first time I think to myself: I like it here. I like it here.

The Prince of Batavia

How Hamlet sailed to Java,
& Batavia got its name.

Jayakerta became Batavia became Jakarta.
The city was known as Batavia for more than 300 years.

The DRAGON

ON a sailing ship off Sierra Leone, the crew of Captain Keeling’s English East India Company vessel—The Dragon—performed Hamlet. Let’s imagine they did it right there on the open deck, the coast of Africa in high relief. Amateurs all, they performed for each other: polymathic sailors, merchants & fortune-seekers, soldiers, slaves, & scoundrels pressed from port-side taverns around the globe. The captain’s log mentions that the performance was simultaneously translated to Portuguese. It was 1607.

That’s only 6 or 7 years after Hamlet was written.

Keeling’s Dragon was bound for Java & the Spice Islands. Specifically, the Dragon was headed for Banten, about 70 km west of present day Jakarta, where the Brits held trading posts & the Sultan held court. There was no Jakarta then, only the vassal state of Jayakerta, part of the Banten Sultanate. It was the Dutch who’d set up shop in Jayakerta (Jakarta), & only just barely. Jayakerta means Great Victory, referring to the Sultanate’s soundly routing the Portuguese, who also wanted a trading post there. For spice traders, this was a brilliant harbor—offering direct access to markets on half the archipelago—& everyone knew it.

Back then, Europeans weren’t remotely the massive, imperial forces that I tend to imagine—that’s more 19th century colonialism. In the 1600s, the Sultans of Java were far more concerned with the maneuverings of other sultans, & Europeans represented a set of in-fighting forces who, like the Chinese, could be allied with or bullied off, depending. For hundreds of years, the Dutch, like the English, were just another shady mob of foreigners looking to do business. They didn’t conquer or convert; they brokered deals.


The Dutch

While sailors wept for Ophelia on the Dragon, the Dutch secured the Sultan’s permission—beating out the British—to set up two bamboo warehouses in Jayakerta. Their goal--everyone's goal--was monopoly. Records indicate a surrounding settlement of only a few thousand souls. Native garrisons cum township, left over from the Great Victory. Was it like Trader Joe’s setting up a Quonset hut on a village beach, everyone praying the nutmeg ship wouldn’t sink?

According to their own census—counting themselves to pass the time in the long hours of siege to come—the Dutch themselves numbered 350. 350 people & two bamboo warehouses. The Sultan was powerful. Tropical diseases ubiquitous. Jungles for land, pirates at sea. On the northern isles: headhunters.

Such is the abiding nature of business. I wonder if they knew what they were doing. Would anyone?


Building Elsinore

Well, this wouldn’t do at all. The English wanted warehouses at Jayakerta too. When the Sultan told them to piss off, the Brits went to the Prince of Jayakerta. The impertinent Prince said yes, & the Dutch got very nervous. Immediately, the Dutch began to fortify their warehouses, rebuilding them out of stone.

Consider the implications of this tactic through the fine lens of changing names: whereas the bamboo structures were called godown, warehouse, in the mercantile pidgin of Chinese-Malay, the fortified stone buildings were now called kasteel, which means Castle in Dutch; they were closing ranks & preparing for a fight. Inadvertently, they were also setting the stage.

Once the Prince got word of these fortifications, he got nervous, too. He sealed his alliance with the Brits & solicited their aid in driving out the Dutch. The Brits stormed the harbor with a mighty fleet of 3 or 4 ships & drove out the Dutch East India Company—comprised of 1 or 2 ships, at which point the Dutch had their 2 warehouses at their backs & that was about it. An important man named Jan Pieterszoon Coen led the naval retreat: the Dutch ships fled for help, as quick as the wind. A long, long time passed.


The Siege

In December of 1618, the tiny English force laid siege to the Dutch castle-warehouses. There’s no mention of a hot battle or casualties, only a hostile pressure that essentially trapped 350 Dutch East India Company employees in their warehouse district. The English were hoping to smoke them out. Then again, when all you have at hand are two castles full of goodies from the Spice Islands, it seems fair to assume that there was, at the very least, a lot of smoking out going on already.

By the end of January, the Dutch tried to surrender. They were prevented from surrendering, however, by the timely arrival of the furious Sultan, who’d gotten wind of the Prince making deals on the side. The Sultan’s forces drove the Prince out of Jayakerta, & into hiding. They swept the puny English out entirely. And then, they laid siege to the Dutch themselves.

Poor Dutch. For the next 4 months, they held out in their castle compounds, where, by all reports, they slowly began to administrate & debauch themselves to death.

So who are these Dutch East Indies guys going stir crazy under warehouse arrest? One thing we know: only about half of them are actually from Holland. Of the 350: 80 were soldiers, 70 were slaves (Asians, Black Portuguese from India, Sri Lankans…freed Portuguese-Asian slaves would become a significant population in Batavia of the near future), the others were Germans, English, Flemmings, Walloons, & who knows what else. For the sake of allegory, let’s suppose that there were also Danes & Swedes. Like most ship crews traveling at the time, it was polyglot, multi-ethnic, driven by profit, & hungry for women.


How to Pass the Time Under Siege

Records of this stand-off indicate that people began to go a little loopy after a while. One diarist wrote that they split their time between drinking & prayer. They took a census of themselves. Maybe they inventoried their pepper.

Another thing they did to alleviate their boredom under siege was to get married. The Company had not sent them with any women, deeming this port an unseemly destination for respectable girls**. Though the word “married,” in this case, should be interpreted in the broadest possible & perhaps ominous sense, there was a reverend amongst them who obliged his penned flock in performing the sudden increase of ceremonies that wedded European men to native women. They notarized the documents. Cabin-fevered clerks filed them.

Then, on March 12, 1619, they gathered together & decided in a magnificent flight of fancy, in a state of pique, in a pitched irony, in a final act of desperation, as a cosmic joke, in complete earnest, for Holland, for sheer defiance, for the sake of their growing crop of unborn children: to name their community.

They decided to name it BATAVIA, after an early Germanic tribe from the Netherlands. And what better time, really, to proclaim a new name for one’s “town”, what with the Sultan at the door, lunacy at the rein, & nowhere to hide? I wish I knew if anyone thought it was funny at the time.

And THEN, about 3 weeks later, on Easter Monday, April 1, 1619, the Batavians performed a play. Like the Java-bound crew of Keeling’s Dragon 12 years earlier, they performed it for themselves: sailors, merchants & fortune-seekers, soldiers, slaves, & scoundrels from around the globe. The title comes to us in Dutch, though we don’t know what language they performed it in. Portuguese was the closest common tongue then, & Malay the idiom of local commerce. It was titled: “Van den Conninck van Denemarcken en van den Conninck Sweden”—Concerning the King of Denmark & the King of Sweden.

Hamlet, brought in by a Dragon before the ink had fully dried, performed in translation by half-cocked East Indiamen, in Batavia-not-yet-Batavia, inside a Dutch bunker under siege. A murderous Sultan-king at the door; a broken prince in exile! And this is where E is peeking into the story: this discovery—the anecdote of this performance—will be the prologue of his book.


Batavia

On May 30th, after almost six months of siege, the Dutch ships that had been driven out of the harbor by the British finally returned—quick as the wind. This time, Jan Pieterszoon Coen entered with 17 ships. He flattened the Sultan’s forces, razed Jayakerta & burned it to the ground. At which point, the little Dutch compound was suddenly the center of everything. What was everything?
Batavia, of course.

The city did not change its name to Jakarta until the 1940s

_________________________________________________


**Mr. J. Pieterszoon Coen—who also argued for using Dutch orphans to create an inexpensive base of permanent settlers—objected to the no-women policy, writing to the Company directors:

“Everyone knows that the male sex cannot survive without women. And yet it seems that Your Excellencies have planted a colony without wishing to. To make up for this lack we have looked for funds and have had to buy many women at high prices. Just as you, Sirs, would only send us the scum of the land, so people here will sell us none but scum either…Should we expect to get good [citizens] from rejects, as you apparently expect? Shall we have to die out to the last man? We therefore request, Your Excellencies, that if you cannot get honest married folk, then send us young girls, and we shall hope that things will go better than our experience with older women to date.”


From: The Social World of Batavia: European & Eurasian in Dutch Asia, by Jean Gelman Taylor

My Gong

Now THAT's what I'm talking about.

With a little person in a toga to ring it, too.

[a still from Asrul Sani's shamelessly sedate "The Court"]

Corruption Scores Just In

Good news: On the hotly competitive Table of Asian Corruption (Jakarta Post), Indonesia has slipped from Asia's #1 Most Corrupt Nation to #2, tied with Thailand. Today's ranking champion: the Philippines. This, according to the Hong Kong (#12)-based Political & Economic Risk Consultancy. Indonesia's (actual) "Corruption Eradication Commission" has certainly been busy.

Counting lay-overs, we have already set foot in the three of the "most corrupt" Asian countries this year: 11. Japan, 12. Hong Kong, & 13. Singapore. We hope to collect all 13 by the end of the decade.

The Gong Factory

You’d think it would be very easy to find a gong factory. Just cock an ear, right? Head for the bonging.

I'd imagined a sort of cacophonous quality control room in which discerning monks sat hunched on stools, experimentally ringing newly-forged gongs while sooty blacksmiths stood by with looks of concern, disappointed when a monk shook his bald head & sent them back to the fires to try again.

In Bogor, I'd come braced to fend off gong-sellers. Anticipating my failure, I had also been trying to plan how I would ever get a giant copper gong back to the States. Because if I HAD to buy a gong—and I sincerely feared I'd work myself into some stupid moral dilemma that could only be solved with a significant gong purchase—I’d want a really big one. A gong you’d need to strike with two hands swinging the hammer. Something worth ringing & worth taking up space. What in the world I would do with it once it arrived? Who could I burden with a gong, as a gift? Maybe we could ring it at Thanksgiving, or at the conclusion of arguments. Start a tradition. I did not want a gong. But I did want to see a gong factory.

Now, when Evan tries to get somewhere new, he looks at a map & then goes there. Me, I cock an ear & then, hearing no gongs, just start walking, figuring I’ll get there eventually. Somehow we both tend to get where we are going, the primary difference being that E actually knows where he is. Also that he gets there quite a bit sooner. And is in better shape when he arrives....There’s a lesson in that, but I have not learned it; maybe I am too often entertained by getting lost.

After all, along a mapless wander through Bogor, I found puppet makers & menageries for sale in bamboo cages along the road (monkeys, flying fox, rainbow lorikeets, roosters, turtles…). The proud doyen of Bogor pensiones thrust a fresh guava smoothie into my hands declaring, "There! Ha! You don't have THIS in your country!" From a bridge, I saw a house built in the low, rocky wash in the middle of a river, facing upstream--which in the land of floods seems to me akin to resting one’s forehead against a shotgun barrel, or setting up a porta-potty over a volcano.

Looking closely enough, I'd more or less constantly arrived somewhere worth stopping.

All 3 times I paused for directions (recalled to my mission), I’d begin, “Tolong,—“ at which point, naturally, they’d interrupt with, *“Gongs?”*...I’d nod, they’d point, & in this way I understood that I had stumbled upon a Lonely Planet herd path.

That’s like being caught up by a warm current. Assuming you're interested in the LP’s itinerary, it’s a fine thing altogether. Along the way you’ll eventually see everything in the guidebook, you’ll discover the same people you met on the train at your pensione that night, & two weeks later you’ll see them again in a restaurant or a museum, in a different country. Locals you pass know exactly where you’re trying to get to & will even volunteer updates (the pancake house closed in 2003; the Titum Arum, the world’s largest flower, is not in bloom today; the gong factory is now thataway.) You don’t need a map when you’re caught in a guidebook current, you’re just buoyed along. It almost doesn’t matter where you are; it’s already familiar. You picked it when you picked your guidebook.

Still, even understanding the mundane reasons behind it, there’s something slightly mystical about several complete strangers, people with whom I share almost no language, spontaneously & appropriately saying to me, “Gongs?” It’s like successfully receiving a secret code.

Consider that this might be the only word I exchange with this person in our entire experiences on earth. Picture for a moment the whole, rich, complicated, winding stories of our two lives rocketing around through time & space, bristling with history & full casts of characters, sparking with colors & the music of gamelans, intersecting only for this single fleeting instant!—one stranger correctly anticipating the other stranger with purpose & consequence before veering off again, forever, into foreign adventures & the entire encounter is this: to knowingly utter & receive the word...Gongs?

All these silly, forgotten instants of our lives, they contain untraceable sagas of butterfly wings & storms. Every so often some trivium will catch me like this, a snag in the river. I glance back--thought I'd glimpsed the edge of something greater than it seemed--but the truth of it is invisible: either too small or too large to see clearly. If we could behold it all at once, behold the web of every Story intersecting within any given instant, we would fall out of time altogether & simply Be, suspended in the weft.
For most of us, this is not something to be desired.

But I sense a parable on the rise, so I'll stop.
Someone ring a gong already, quick!

The thing is, there are no gongs at the gong factory.

Not in the workshop, anyway, which is where the current finally beached me. It took an hour to walk there; I watched for five minutes. Inside the hot, wooden barn there's an old man straddling the fan that stokes the fire & two teams of barefoot gongsmiths in shorts & t-shirts, each whacking away at a red hot disk. The ground is dirt. There are no lights. It takes a whole day, the smiths said, to hammer a 16 kilo copper disk into a functioning gong. Where they are polished is anyone's guess.

They invited me to swing the 8 kilo mallet a few times & make a dent or two. dink-dink-dink-dink. Sparks flew. Ash in the air. Seated on a plastic bale beside them, I watched…well, here, look for yourself. I watched THIS:

[I have a short video that I'd meant to insert at his point, but the whole country is experiencing internet difficulties & so I cannot upload it yet. Until then:]

Gardens Today; Gibbets Tomorrow

One green hour south of Jakarta lies Bogor, a city fabled for its gong factory & botanical gardens. For its rain, too, & there was plenty of that.

Evan is out of town this week, attending the world’s least convenient job interview, back in the States. Meanwhile, I am minding our teak-&-tile garret, poised at the start of Chapter Next, but reluctant to hang a character that I’ve rather come to like. This is one of those adult things I should suck up & do. Kill him. The plot requires this death, but I lacked the nerve. I balked. In a huff of failure, I left the city altogether, in search of something green.

As CMC wisely advised me, “Gardens today; hang him tomorrow.”

It’s about time, anyway. It’s been 6 weeks of rooftops, too many traffic jams, too many breaths taken in the snarled, polluted, urban sprawl. (Too many hours in a row spent with no one but my loquacious, imaginary colleagues, the day broken up only by the muezzin calls.) I need mountains. Trees. To trade in fluorescents for inflorescence! It was time to get out of Dodge.



The Kebun Raya Botanical gardens were just the thing. It’s no idyll stroll, of course, let’s not forget where we are: the lavish gardens are also a jungle, humid & very slippery. The dishwater river runs with trash. The total lack of amphibians suggests the presence of poisons. It rains on the half hour & there are mosquitoes. But having studied for a time in Orange County, where I found most superlative beauties paired with some form of appalling plunder (stunning beaches paralleled by miles of oil pumps, for example; sunsets made gorgeous with petroleum coke dust clouds; women finding beauty in surgery), I also knew how to see what I wanted to see.



I saw magnificent old trees & vines. Flying fox, like black figs, hanging in the treetops. Intricate flowers. Lily pads. The details are in a Bogor photo set, which you can find to the right. I went twice over two days, just walking & taking photos, stumbling into young couples making-out on the stairs above the garden’s little mosque, or behind tangled screens of epiphytes & orchids. A bride in white posed among the great, fin-like root buttresses of a ficus tree. Mobs of school kids in their bright uniforms kicked around beach balls. I ate lunch in a breezy café overlooking the forest & lily pond, purple mountains in the background.

Nothing complicated. This was the kind of day in which no one needed to be hanged. I sipped my pineapple-lime juice, which was in fact only pineapple & lime juice. This was like…it was like a weekend.

EPILOGUE
Now I'm back & the gibbet is waiting. It’s time to write this chapter. Remember the Philosophy of Rhinos entry (March 8)? This endangered character of mine, well, his mate is alive but he is much too far away to reach his family by foot. Therefore, the decision is to ‘collect’ this specimen in the name of Art, before he is poached by hacks, & so that future readers might better enjoy him. Art aims to collect this sucker with a single page! Given my artistic marksmanship, however, it may require five or six rounds.

All Indonesia's Motor Vehicles Crash

In simultaneous head-on collision

The woman next to me on the Jakarta-Bogor express train wanted to practice her English. Sleepily, I agreed to view all the photographs of her kids stored on her phone. “Maybe you have sons, too, soon, yes?” she urged.

“Too soon, yes,” I agreed.

“Then you can be busy, too, like your husband.”

I myself felt close to fainting at that particular moment, what with the heat & the gongs & the prospect of gibbets, & found I didn’t really mind the idea of fainting if it meant I could sleep soundly for a few hours. But I could still smile & did so, & this encouraged her. I also had a tiny Indonesian-English dictionary, which I helpfully produced & immediately regretted.

She browsed it briefly, then held it to her chest as if she meant to recite from it. Her voice waxed philosophical:

“Trains. Planes. And…” she stirred the air with a hand.

“Automobiles?” I prompted, the back of my skull stuttering against the windowpane. A woman in a plastic-pearled jilbab across from us had her son’s head on her lap & was methodically picking lice from his scalp, then laying them carefully on the thigh of her otherwise immaculate white slacks.

“Yes,” said my companion, stabbing her finger toward my chest as if pressing a gameshow button. “Autowheels. Boat-ships, also. All of these things? They fall here.”

“Fall?” I said. “Oh. Yes.”

There has been a very long, on-going litany of disasters lately, natural & otherwise. AdamAir, Indonesia’s Jet Blue, lost a full plane into the ocean over New Years. They had what they call a “hard landing” last week, & have since cancelled many flights. A Garuda plane just crashed outside Yogjakarta this week. Then there’s the mud volcano, which every mud-volcano expert—except the ones contracted by the Indonesian government—say was caused by drilling too deeply, & for the love of God leave it ALONE until it subsides. (They are not leaving it alone but attempting to stop it by throwing a gigantic set of concrete balls on a metal string into it & then hauling it out again, but wouldn’t you know it: the ben wa ball approach is not working? $844 million in damages so far). Then there’s the earthquake in Sumatra, this week & last. The tsunami fears. The flood. Lice.

“Our trains—” My companion elevated our threat level with a raised brow— “they crash, kill all the people on the train. You, me, too. Vip! Dead.”

“Ah,” I said, when it became clear she required an answer. I knew I should be practicing some Indonesian words here, too, but I was approaching a dolphin state, sleeping with half of my brain at a time, & this seemed good. “It’s true. The train could derail. We could die at any moment.”

“Yes. Here, yes. Train crash. Vip.”

“Vip!”

“Too-much-water. Earthshakes. Autowheels that traffic. It is a problem with here. Why is this problem with our—“ a consultation with the dictionary, “—vehicles? People here, they do not like this! People here do not like that all vehicles: plane, boat-ships, train, autowheels, that they crash. Why is this problem here? People here do not like this, you understand?”

Rhinoceri Philosophies

Bogor’s Zoological Museum costs eleven cents to visit.
Aside from the blue whale skeleton assembled in the back shed, the entire museum is essentially a wilted taxidermy exhibit set up in scenes behind poorly lit glass cases. Because Indonesia has such tremendous biodiversity, the collection of bizarre / poisonous / flamboyant birds, insects, fish, reptiles & mammals is impressive anyway. The key disappointment, of course, is that they're all dead. Then again, that’s probably the key relief as well; 11 cents is enough to maintain them.

Two things. While the label is ambiguous, I’m pretty sure the tigers they have on display are Javans. This is striking to me personally, because years ago I wrote a short story titled “The Patron,” in which the protagonist has the last two Javan tigers—Panthera tigris sondaicus—mounted in her library after her husband unintentionally causes their death (& with them the species’ formal extinction) in 1975. I’d never expected to see a pair in real life, nor mounted just so—just like I’d written it. It’s an odd connection to feel—it was something I’d only imagined—yet suddenly, there they are!

Second. There’s a suspiciously shiny black rhino centered in one room, inside its own glass case. Black rhinos are not extinct (nor are they usually, literally, so black), but it’s highly endangered. With a discernible note of pride in claiming it, the explanatory plaque alleges that this very rhino was the last living specimen in the area. As its mate had recently been killed by poachers (ie: it had no more reason to live) & it was too far away to reunite with “its family” by foot, it was “collected” in the name of Science, so that poachers would not get to it first.

This exhibition of lacquered black rhino skin appears to be the nobler destination that Science had in mind. And lo, here I am: posterity, my 11 cents paid in full. I squint at the rhino & try to feel I am bettered by this. Whether or not that choice really was the lesser of evils, whether or not it’s even true, the plaque can’t resist concluding that Science managed to collect this sucker with a single bullet.

What really makes this an arresting story to me, however, is the fact that the big news story this week, the one cheerfully bannering the papers (solace to articles on the latest plane crashes / earthquake / flood / mud volcano), is the US graciously flying a Sumatran rhino stud—Andalas, one of the first of his kind born in captivity—62 hours out from Cleveland to Lampung, Indonesia, so that that he can impregnate the zoo rhinos here.

The last black rhino Science shot for posterity because the rhino’s mate was dead & it was too long a walk to rejoin the herd. Today, Science sees fit to fly a rhinoceros across the globe in order to preserve the species (no flash-frozen, Fed-Exed rhino sperm for us, no: we Americans deliver a FULL payload). There’s something wonderful in this insanity. That we would do such a thing. Sure, such exorbitant funds & transportation might be imagined in other uses, though saving rhinoceri from extinction seems worthy, too. They say there are only 300 Sumatran rhinos left. Perhaps today, on some cosmic ledger, one extravagant waste has been balanced by another?

I'll say this much: I have now seen the last black rhino in Indonesia stuffed & mounted in a case in Bogor. I have also stood witness to a living rhinoceros' mating, in a US zoo. I realize the different between the two choices is money: keeping rhinos happy & healthy enough to mate in public captivity is something afforded.

Still, speaking as Posterity, but addressing Science: in the future? The second event was the bettering show. Oh my.

Liberties of the Fourth Wall

The Java Jazz Festival
3 March

3 AM: I've just returned from the gigantic Java Jazz Festival. Ten hours of music! My ears are ringing. Twanky funkmeisters & blind divas in sparkles, insipid Javanese heart-throbs, Chilean prodigies, Italian bezerkers, international bongos for world peace.
Tortured Soul had the gall to cancel.

Many of these performers were far from home & feeling it. Audiences tended toward huge, packed well beyond fire code (& smoking). Yet the crowds were quiet, unjazzily passive during even the most valiant attempts to stir up the funk. The fourth wall, as you call the imagined barrier between performers & audience, felt solid.

Or, rather: mediated. Phones & other devices were everywhere, the audience talking, taking pictures & sending instant messages. It literally raised a screen between them & the stage, & it unnerved the musicians. “Are you there?” they’d ask, as if concerned that this might not actually be a live performance after all. “I can see you, you know. You’re not invisible?”

The imagined language barrier played improv, too. Every non-Indonesian group spoke in English, but often couldn’t shake the conviction (despite ample evidence to the contrary) that no one in their wonderfully enormous, distressingly quiet crowd could understand them, & so got possessed by the microphone. It was like watching people enchanted, believing themselves in an on-stage dream in which not only anything was possible, but (almost) anything was permitted.

One well-known, froggy diva, between Emmy award-winning yips & screams, described in uncomfortable detail how she missed her husband sensually, extemporizing one long, rhythmic piano riff into a thinly-veiled performance of orgasm. Also, she missed her hot tub in Dana Point, which is in the shape of a grand piano. And filled with water—‘you know about THAT here, don't you? Lots of water?’—and how it—the thought of the hot tub, where water, we imagine, stays in the civilized shape, quantity & temperature of her choosing, unlike here—just made her feel so grateful, so grateful, leading to the jaw-dropping segue: "You know I feel the presence of God in the audience tonight?" to lackluster cheers, at which she launched into Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

Less talking from the artists. But you know? Once she shut up, she was fantastic & the audience loved her anyway.

The night’s featured performer, Chaka Khan, is a mighty, mighty woman. She can raze hell with a glare & empty oceans with her scream. Intimidated at the mere sight of her bosom: mountains spontaneously level themselves. She could not, however, induce her Indonesian fans to wild abandon.

Her set started at midnight, yet she took offense at her completely sold-out, but too-passive audience, who also did not appreciate to her satisfaction her teenage daughter’s underwhelming performance at her side. Some people did shout out: "We love you!" but this was not enough by far, nor enough to convince Chaka Khan that the audience could understand English, which she doubted aloud in so many words. When, to preface the song Hollywood, she mentioned that her mother used to beat her, the Javanese girl next to me sighed quietly, in English, "Oh, nice. Great. How about a song?"

Eventually, one of her five backup singers cursed (tunefully), clearly assuming herself not understood. I was hoping for a fist fight, but they were professionals & mostly contained their obvious hatred of one another with soulful "I love yous" "You are my sisters" "You are my inspiration, my fire, my strength" as they put one another on the spot for improvisational 'Why I Love Chaka Khan' singing solos that went on for minutes, stalling. She would not come out for an encore. The audience would have liked it, I think. Maybe we were just too polite to insist.

Liberties of the fourth wall notwithstanding, this was a very good event. The MUSIC, that is, was excellent. The primary artists I heard over the course of the day were: Daughters of Soul (USA), Djanesy (Holland), Maliq & D’Essential (Jakarta), Larry Franco (Italy), John Scofield (photo below), Diane Schuur, David Benoit (USA), Dwiki Dharmawan (Java/International), & the mighty Chaka Khan.

Holi, Holi!

Going down: a family of 6 enters the elevator, all their faces & clothing splashed over with bright paint—red, yellow, blue. They’ve clearly just been flinging paint at one another & are trying to tone it down, barely suppressing giggles now that they are technically in public. I’d forgotten this was coming up & can’t remember what to say to people on Holi—that most wonderful of Spring celebrations. A moment passes.

“It’s it the Festival of Colors,” the father explains to me, struggling to sound professional & informative.

“Uh, Happy Holi,” I say, but that seems not right. Or maybe only strange coming from me. “Where are you going today?” All dressed up and…

“Oh, no where,” he says inscrutably, everyone bouncing out at the lobby. They are too happy to talk with me just now. Red, yellow & blue children hop around. “It’s a Hindu festival. We’re Indians,” and then, tragically feeling compelled to clarify that for me, “From India.”

“Yes, I-I know.”

“We’re just celebrating in the apartment,” he said. At which, by all appearances, they left the building.

Here’s a holiday I very much hope catches on in the US one day, in the way that universally legible celebrations like Halloween, Valentine’s Day, & birthday cakes with candles & singing are now celebrated all over the world. In wanting to play, too, I don’t mean to denigrate the spiritual or ethnic origins of Holi; the Festival of Colors is just a particularly glorious celebration (& asking your Hindu friends to explain the religious origins of Holi may be a little like asking your Christian friends to explain the origins of Valentine’s Day. Stories vary).

However seriously you take it, everyone running around in the spring throwing colors at one another is just a good thing all around.

Yellow Menace

Suddenly, the whole apartment smells of durian.

A sneak attack! This is definitely not all right. This is unacceptable. Someone on the 30th floor has brought home DURIAN, that beloved reeking custard of rotten egg & bad feet. That fruit is a public menace! So I'm a flaming bule: my gorge is rising. There should be laws. More laws than there already are. No one should be allowed to bring a fresh durian indoors. Not into the hot elevator, fumigating every floor in turn as it rises. I throw open the door & look around the sweltering landing: perhaps it is time to meet my neighbors.

Through one door I can hear something being unwrapped from plastic bags. A little girl is saying, “Yichh. Yechh,” a fatherly voice answering, “Yum!”

But I can’t handle it anymore and duck back inside. Excuse me, I have to go stick my earplugs up my nostrils now.

Later: I can smell that they are cooking it with something sweet. The maddening perfume settles a little. It actually smells pretty good now. I am told it is worth it, eating durian. I am not so sure.

Good News from the Citradel

Happily, The Lime Tree has just been awarded a $25,000 McKnight Fellowship. This couldn't have come at a better time.

In selecting the manuscript (the book's first few chapters), the judge--Jane Hamilton, of The Book of Ruth--wrote:

"Historical fiction requires perhaps greater authority on the part of the writer, a greater hoax--and perhaps an implicit entreaty to the reader, to be generous, to please suspend disbelief. The writer of The Lime Tree brings to life a time and place removed from our own--(and yet not--one can't help think of border crossings, of being stuffed in dark trucks for weeks at a time). She does so with the lightest touch. The language is convincing, the characters exquisitely drawn, and the details for this reader seemed without question. The writer not only has a clarity of vision but translates that vision with precision to the page. I believed in the old man in the time of 1789 without question; I trusted her vision. Compelling, vivid, funny, and harrowing--it was terrible to have to stop [reading]."

Onward, onward!