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:]