Jilbab

All in a rush to be at the mosque on time, I dashed in & bought this ($2, Italian silk) jilbab at the nearest mall.

The woman helping me to pick it out also pinned it on. "My friend," she said to me, indicating another woman behind the counter, her voice poignant, "She says you're so pretty; you're so white. Your skin is just so pretty, because it's so white."

White it is. Still, for me there's an untested edge to accepting a compliment that's essentially on my race. In a veil shop, in Jakarta, is a compliment on the color of my skin different than a saleswoman's compliment on the color of my eyes or the shape of my face? Here, as in many countries, the 'prettiest' Indonesians on TV are half white, very pale, & these women are dark skinned. Does it matter who's giving the compliment or how many people of my complexion there are around?

But I said thank you, because that's what you say.
In the moment, it was simple. Maybe it still is.

To my surprise, the jilbab felt almost normal to wear on the street, in the cab, at a restaurant. Or, rather, I should say it didn't feel very strange. Being unaccustomed to it, however, I fussed (& failed) to keep it from slipping off my forehead (as it has slipped in the photo here). As with wearing makeup & fancy clothes, it improved my bearing a little.

For me, this was fashion for a day & an easy hoop: a requirement for my entering the giant Istiqlal mosque, the largest mosque in southeast Asia. It was not everything else that I tend to think about when I think academically about hijab--the general term for Islamic covering--or about how many women are now wearing jilbab around the world these days (more & more), or their highly varying reasons why. Women are not permitted to enter the Istiqlal mosque at all during Friday's mid-day prayers.

But all this is another story. Suffice it to say: I was not at the mosque on time.

Arbor Day in the Citradel

Happy Arbor Day, everyone



A quiet celebration here in the unleafy metropolis of Jakarta, but 2 chapters away from a full draft of The Lime Tree. I ordered unsweetened lime juice with dinner tonight. They served it to me HOT.

I'm planning the research trip to Sydney with greater earnest now. The annual Sydney Writers' Festival will be going on the week I arrive, starting in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. My list of details to discover on site grows daily.

Due to Sorcery

Opening the Indonesian dictionary, in pursuit of other words, I happened upon this:

Sakit Muno: Silent & without willpower due to sorcery.

Immaculate Misconceptions

In Christianity, Jesus Christ is the son of God. This is a very peculiar statement if you didn’t grow up with it. Frankly, it’s a downright ambiguous statement even if you did. Christians themselves, highly varying by sect, interpret this in many different ways.

Taken too literally, however—as is all too easy to do with no Christians around to correct someone’s wrong assumption—it rather makes the Christian God sound like Zeus, who one day took human form, walked up, impregnated a human woman with holy sperm, & created a demi-god. And then left.

Even to Christians—but certainly to Muslims—that god would not be God. That would be an intolerable blasphemy against the unknowable power & Mystery of the divine. People who worshipped that god would be pagans…or, infidels. Any suggestion that there is any similarity between that “Christian” god & the Islamic God, therefore, would be instantaneously & deeply offensive….& require a 4 hour conversation in Indonesian to remedy, as a Lutheran friend of ours just did.

And it seems she did. At the end of this conversation (by her report), the previously-offended man agreed that in fact the Christian God & the Islamic God DO sound remarkably similar. Which many religious scholars from the world's three main monotheistic religions—Islam, Christianity & Judaism—more or less take as read. They continue to talk.

Do such conversations make a difference in the world, where there is an endless re-supply of wrong ideas about totally basic things? I like to think so. I bet every one of us knows a guy, who knows a guy, who once talked for hours with a Whosit who was great, very cool & smart & funny & nice--not at all like what we'd thought of Whosits all this time--& so now we like Whosits, too. We make important decisions based on our stories.

That’s a talkative guy; maybe he’ll tell different stories about Christians now. Better than nothing.

From the Bottom of My Liver

Over here, your LIVER, not your heart, is the seat of emotion.

This has a virtually one-to-one correspondence with the way we use ‘heart’, so far as I can tell. In love, you feel it in your liver. Sincere, you wear your liver on your sleeve. Pop stars sing it from the liver. When we obliged a friend in watching together her favorite Indonesian soap opera—Wulan—the emotionally tormented hero suffered from a metaphorical case of liver cancer. That is, given his troubles with women, he was literally dying of liver-ache. Heartache. He was miraculously saved.

There’s a pop hit Islamic single by Aa Gym that’s out (& played everywhere) called “Jagalah Hati”, which is translated as “Guard Your Heart” but which literally means: “Guard Your Liver”.

The problem with this, of course, is that most everyone here knows perfectly well that the English speaking world—that is, the greatest exporter of pop culture—doesn’t think much of the liver, emotionally speaking. English lyrics are everywhere & so “heart” is also on everyone’s tongues & brains. Sometimes it’s all a big jumble of organs. I watch young Indonesian rock stars croon lyrics about their livers, while gyrating their hips & but clutching their chests (their hearts) in the now-universal gestures of western heartache.

An unsubstantiated claim: According to some, this has begun to change the language. "Hati"--liver--is so often translated as "heart" now, & the soap-operatic imprecision of where one's liver-heart is exactly (as the pop star I mentioned demonstrates), that Indonesian DOCTORS are beginning to use a third word to refer to the liver organ, in order to eliminate the ambiguity.

Completely Color Blind

One day, I noticed that I was intentionally avoiding white people.

White women, especially. Once I realized that I was doing this—studiously failing to meet their eye on the street, in the gym, in a market—I also noticed that white women, in turn, are studiously avoiding me. Some white men do this too, with other men, especially.

There aren’t so many of us white women here, strictly speaking, so we stand out. Particularly the blonds. It’s an effort to keep my eye from focusing on another white woman along the way because my roving brain cheerfully, passively fastens onto her in a crowd as Familiar! a full half-second before my mind kicks in to remind me that: 1) staring is impolite, & 2) it is not socially appropriate to look interested in somebody just because of their race.

But I am, a little. Often, so are they. Secretly, of course.
We quickly avert our eyes.

No one walks the streets believing she is in a special club with everyone else who is white, but you sure don't want to be thought of as someone who does. A person unaccustomed to being a racial (& gender) minority is fighting her own eyeball for that microsecond of lost dignity in which she happily recognizes another solitary woman by race. And then remembers to look nonchalant about it. Or like she didn’t even notice. Because we are, naturally, being seasoned travelers, completely color blind (ie: mutually invisible).
Aren't we?

There’s an old saw here whose sensibility is taken very seriously, even stridently, by a majority of foreign travelers that I’ve encountered abroad:

"Tourists are those who bring their homes with them wherever they go, and apply them to whatever they see... Travelers leave home at home, bringing only themselves and a desire to see and hear and feel and take in and grow and learn."

--Gary Langer, Transitions Abroad, Vol. 1, #1 (1977)

I still like this quote very much, though I know first hand that pursuing the nobler values of the Traveler can become a vanity project more easily than the useful, worthy aesthetic.

Here’s how I caught myself avoiding white women.
First off, I was waiting in a Starbucks to interview someone about the calls to prayer. Meeting at Starbucks was my Indonesian contact’s choice. It being a Big American Chain, this is exactly the kind of comforting ‘home away from home’ that a Tourist (&, ironically, a local) would visit. For the first few minutes, I found myself self-consciously wanting to hang a sign of explanation above my head reading: ‘Although I am obviously a westerner, being in Starbucks was not my idea.’ This purely for the benefit of other westerners, for no one local would blink.

After all, Starbucks is well air-conditioned, has wireless access, poofy drinks, great tables & the most comfortable chairs in all of Jakarta. It’s really NICE in there. (I’d scheduled the meeting for 6pm, to coincide with the evening calls to prayer, but these were inaudible from inside the Starbucks. Which somehow figured). While I’m sitting there going over notes, a tall, lean blond woman sweeps in the front door with a studied nonchalance.

Sure enough, my head pops up, our eyes lock ZING, hers & mine, though we are at opposite ends of a busy café. I’m sure everyone else is looking at her, too, but in that first moment it’s just us.

That instant, gendered, simultaneously assessment: What are you? What are you compared to me? An immediate, mutual twick of shame: to be caught in a Starbucks & to be looking at another white woman, when we know perfectly well that we are completely color blind! That instantaneous breeze away before one commits the inexpressible faux pas of acknowledging the other, making the glance look incidental, each other invisible, our minds gently preoccupied with other things.

Okay! I didn’t really realize how far I’d gone with all this nonsense until I caught myself enacting it there. It's too bad, too: I didn't really have time then, but I did sincerely want to know who she was, & why she was here, too, & I don't assume we'd be friends, but I already know we have something in common, & frankly I'm curious.
Etiquette be damned.

Still, in seeing myself perform this in the mirror of another woman, inside a Starbucks, the spell broke.

E now catches himself doing this, too. All the time: avoiding white strangers because they are white, because we take ourselves for serious people with reasons to be here & not some freaked out tourists. It’s a silly thing, but there it is. He’s more philosophical about women: “Walking the streets of any country,” says E wryly, “I am accustomed to being studiously ignored by women of all races.”

Since then, I’ve made several efforts to say hello to white people when it’s a situation that I would say hello to anyone (tempting to throw out my arms & boom: Hey, bule! How’s it going?) & it’s funny: at the most innocuous greeting, they generally will not meet my eye. Virtually everyone else in Indonesia greets us as we pass (though, to be fair, that is most likely also because we are white). THEY say hello to other people. But not to other white people. I guess that is what tourists do? Heaven forbid.

EPILOGUE:
As a side point of assimilation, the incidental strangers & by-standing crowds that populate my dreams have begun to be largely Indonesian, & now include many women in jilbab. A relevant reflection of how such perceptions echo through the brain.

Addendum to Swastikas

Last night on "Indonesian Idol", one of the final 24 contestants—a long-haired, gentle-looking soul—belted out his song wearing an army green T-shirt endeared with a giant, black swastika.

Context.

Impressionist Cowherd

This photo was taken from a moving train on the way to Bandung, Java. The man with the umbrella is standing in the rain, tending the two gray cows grazing nearby.

Swastikas in Paradise

If you’re not prepared for it, the swastikas in Bali can be a little startling. They’re on rooftop eaves (photo) & the foreheads of gods, they’re on children’s necklace pendants & on the stone buttresses there to divert evil spirits at entrances of family compounds.

The Nazi swastika is an inversion of this sign (the Nazi swastika is always is knees to the left, feet to the right; the Buddhist / Hindu sign often (but not always) oriented the other way), but odds are that’s not the first thing you'll notice when you’re peddling along down some Eden pastoral, children running out to stand in a line with their hands out so they can do ‘high fives’ on your ride past, & then pulling up face to face with a big, cheerful swastika at the bamboo gatherers’ place.

When I was teaching Composition at UC Irvine, I once drew a giant swastika on the blackboard & asked the class to write down the first word that came to mind. It's a fairly (& potentially literally) arresting way to begin a discussion of signs & symbols. Virtually everyone wrote down one of 3 words: Evil, Hitler, & Nazi. In that order. That's what I would write down, too. Fair enough.

The one Indian kid who provocatively wrote: LOVE got a dirty look from his neighbor. That's where the lesson on Context would begin. Because he knew that ‘Swastika’ is a Sanskrit word, denoting things associated with luck & well-being, & it’s a commonplace Buddhist / Hindu symbol to this day.

Of course, it’s hard to see it that way straight off, coming from the West, where it's never been asked of most of us to see the flip-side of that sign’s overwhelming, negative potency. The symbol is entirely black & white where I come from, & history has earned it its Manichean morality: Good! & Evil! There may be no symbol so instantaneously, aggressively offensive as the swastika.

School kids who ink it onto their notebooks, even just to act out, are sometimes, suddenly engaged in a school-board-rallying act of transgression, a hate crime that might get him expelled. What single word, what other sign, can do that? I remember the bad boys who did it once at recess, wrote a swastika into the dirt & then quickly rubbed it out, having no idea what it meant beyond the fact of its sheer power. It was like playing with explosives.

Recall Charles Manson tattooing the swastika onto his forehead—the quintessential image of evil, shockingly perverse…& now, here you are all happy in the rice paddies suddenly facing a multi-armed god with the same sign engraved in the same place, & it doesn’t mean anything remotely like what you’ve been taught.

And you've been TAUGHT about this one.

The true power of the disconnect is in finding the swastika here, in the “paradise island” of Bali, famed for its beauty & gentle culture, the islands of the gods & smiling children, marketed for its friendliness, & openly advertising its Hindu / Buddhist ethic of yin-yang, the ‘good’ inextricable from the ‘bad.’ No capital letters. Not Manichean. Just a swastika here & there, some covered with moss, playing its ultimately subtle role as a religious symbol of well-being.

As someone who is trying to use words & symbols for a living, it continues to amaze me that language actually works. In fact, the more I use language, & the more contexts I travel through, the more unlikely it seems that we can, merely by writing down symbols (like words, swastikas, numbers) or by the power of speech, ever genuinely, accurately communicate with one another.
This is a magical thing.

Most of the time, I think we actually do NOT communicate accurately, but only well enough. The ART of it is both in the efforts to say a thing & the efforts to hear a thing. This is also why I play contact sports: sometimes you just need to close your mouth, rush in & KICK--without meaning anything by it.

Brilliant Delicious Chocolate

When I was in pre-school, one of my favorite foods in the world was Hagelslag.

That’s the Dutch brand name for chocolate sprinkles (jimmies), which good friends of our family, having grown up in Holland, ate on soft buttered bread for breakfast & snacks. I loved eating it at their house. So when I discovered rows of Hagelslag in grocery stores here, in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, I bought a five-month supply.

It comes in big sacks. In little packets. In cardboard boxes. Dark & milk. In cylindrical tins with the winning epithet: “Brilliant Delicious Chocolate”. One grocery had devoted an entire shelf to various forms of Hagelslag.

Today I learned the Bahasa Indonesia word for chocolate jimmies is kotoran tikus: MOUSE POOP. Which is exactly what it looks like.

Strangely, that makes me like them even more.

Totally Authentic

Bali's economy is based on tourism, both of its natural beauties & its culture. But this is not a one-way system in which the locals serve up some unadulterated “Culture” for outsider consumption; Culture is the explicit product here, & so as in any good market, the supply is heavily determined by demand.

I first visited Ubud with E 10 years ago. In 1997 we came to pick up some painted wooden masks that he’d commissioned from a local artist, for a production of the Croatian “King Gordogon”, which he directed at Stanford. We trekked through rice paddies & down rural roads to find the mask-maker’s family compound (smiling children, pigs & chickens, walls & walls of hairy masks), everyone along the way (bathing in the ditches, doing laundry) asking us Where are you going? We’re off to see Ida Bagus, the maskmaker! Are you married? Belum, we said, again & again. Not yet.

This time, 10 years later & married, we came as tourists. I knew that the Bali bombings in 2002 had hurt the economy & so (without researching it) fully expected to find Ubud in a sorry state. I wanted to spend some dollars here. To my surprise, however, the main tourist street of Ubud is easily twice as prosperous looking as it was a decade ago. To all appearances: it’s packed & thriving. That’s good for people here, but if I’d known this in advance, I might not have returned.

What I struggle to wrap my head around is what it really means to be a cultural tourist in Ubud. On the one hand, the place is chock full of things that you can only find in Bali: temple festivals, dances, stone carvings, puppets, masks, textiles, artifacts. It’s why you go. On the other hand, none of this would be happening at all—certainly not like this, anyway—if there weren’t a demand from foreigners to produce them.

And that demand changes the product.

An example: driving down the main street, one big change in the last decade is textile dye lots. What I mean is that the COLORS of sarongs, quilts & fabrics in every shop & market, effectively painting the entire downtown, are now both darker & richer in tone, no longer primarily of the lighter Balinese palette, but more suited to western tastes. My tastes. And sure enough: I like them more now. So what exactly have I bought?

Take the kecak fire dance. Kecak [pronounced: k’chawk] dances are amazing. If you come to Bali, definitely go see a kecak. It’s good spectacle & you won’t see it anywhere else. However, the kecak dance was invented in the 1930s for tourists by the Russian-born German artist & musician Walter Spies [pronounced: Speese]. Our hotel Tjampuhan was Spies’ house, where he stayed at the behest of the Prince of Ubud (& may be responsible for the pornographic wall of monkeys over the pool). We stayed there in part because of that history. During Spies’ time there, he started an entire painting movement as well, which continues in the shops of Ubud to this day.

So: is the nearly 80 year old kecak Balinese? Is it traditional? Is it authentic? Is it Disneyland? Would you fly across the world to see it? You can only see it here.

When we go to see an “authentic” traditional dance performance at the Lotus Café the following is also true:

1—It starts not “in the evening” but at 7 PM, as advertised in ubiquitous printed programs.
2—It starts exactly on time.
3—It lasts a very watchable hour, instead of, say, going all night long, which “traditional” Balinese dance, wayang puppet performances & festivals commonly do.
4—The costumes are even brighter, more spectacular & expensive than anything you’ll see at a “real” temple festival.
5—The dancers are professionals, because they do this for a living, rather than doing this devotionally, say. Which means this is a much better show, artistically-speaking, than an “authentic” dance.
6—You can’t always, positively identify the form, because it has been heavily adapted to the tastes of tourists. The picture above? What are they, rabbits? They are too old for the Legong dance it’s advertised to be.

But all right: they’re awfully cute & I’ll pay five bucks to see them hop, & to have a pina colada, & a view of the ‘temple’ & lotus pond. None of which is “originally” Balinese. All of which I enjoy.

When E was here 11 years ago, he suited up in full Balinese ceremonial dress & went to the Besakih temple in the mountains, even though it was entirely closed to outsiders. A major temple festival was underway. He was adopted by a Brahmin family, who took him into the temple—one of the only westerners there. He was there all day, praying along side the family, watching the entire proceedings. Arguably, THAT was authentic…even though he wasn’t Hindu. It’s not like wandering through Notre Dame during services.

We toured the exterior of the same gigantic temple complex during a minor festival with a guide this time, but were not allowed inside; you cannot buy a ticket for that. You have to be a worshipper.
YOU have to be "authentic".

So where am I exactly & what am I doing here? Is it worth flying around the world to see a thing made up just for me? I guess it depends how you get your kicks. I had a very good time, but I don't know that I'd do it this way again.

Leaving the market one day, I over-heard a set of Australian tourists laughing to one another over a watch-seller’s “Rolex” pitch: “Authentic reproduction!”

Third Hand

Another “safe landing” today on Garuda Airlines, screeching into a Sulawesi airstrip with a burst tire. Passengers didn’t panic until they exited to see the welcoming parade of fire trucks & ambulances. No harm done.

Garuda is the name of a giant mythological bird, which in Hindu / Buddhist lore is the god Vishnu’s mount. The airline’s recent series albatross aperies—burst tires, ‘hard landings’, outright crashes—slanders the mythical bird in ways that might inspire fears of divine vengeance.

As Spaulding Gray, may he rest in peace, once said of Garuda air: he “won’t fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.”

On our one-hour Adam Air flight to Bali, E noticed two old signs still posted in the Indonesian airplane’s bathroom: one was American, warning of a US dollar fine for smoking; one read: ‘Tampering with smoke detectors is prohibited by Icelandic law.’

Good: third-hand plane. Nevertheless, we arrived without incident.

The Elixir of Life: When Kala Rau Ate the Moon

Learning the (mixed & conflicting) stories of this stone panel, found on a tower in Bali’s Besakih temple complex, I began to hear it as a junior high school vengeance play. A sort of ‘He said, She totally said’ voice. Without pretending to authenticity, I’m going to tell you what I’ve gleaned of this story in the naturally-caffeinated, wandering narrative voice of my junior high school days:
____________________________________________

So this gigantinormous bird—Garuda?—he flies up & gets the elixir of immortality.

It’s called Amrita, right? Yeah, like our friend. She’s named after it...only this is a nectar, not a girl. Nectar means it’s a drink. A thick drink, like a smoothie but not creamy or with boosts, & stuff.
Well, I guess it has one boost: immortality. Yeah, it’s like mead, whatever….Wait, dude, you drank mead before? Whoa.
Anyway, amrita is for the gods. They drink it.
It’s WHY gods are immortal.

I don’t KNOW where Garuda found it! It was just, like: UP THERE. In the heavens. Yes it is, TOO, possible. He did it, didn’t he?
So obviously it is possible.

Okay, fine!
If you fly up high enough into the air--somewhere behind the permanently-exhausted manicurist-of-the-Hindu-gods’ shop--there’s this big heavenly pantry filled with things like elixirs of life & FIRE & demon paste & magic lamps & end of the world juju. Way in the back, there’s this crusty jar of opened-but-not-quite-empty, millennium-old mustard-of-everlasting-good-posture, but none of the gods will admit that it’s theirs. No one will touch it, but no one will throw it away either…because it’s not EMPTY yet. It might come in handy some day. It might help win a battle. You never know.

Satisfied? I don’t want to talk about heavenly pantries anymore. This is not even part of the story! Stop asking me these questions. It is rude to interrupt people. The giant magic bird Garuda, whose egg hatched in a world-consuming ball of fire?, he just GOES UP THERE and GETS it.

The elixir of immortality. Amrita.

Okay, so then he brings it back & Kala Rau, this demon? he sneaks up & steals it! But the demon can’t EVEN keep his mouth shut, so Kala Rau blabs all about his big plan to steal the elixir of immortality to the moon goddess, Ratih, & then Ratih tells Vishnu, & Vishnu gets pissed.

Vishnu’s like, 'Dude! A DEMON is stealing the elixir of immortality!? That is NOT okay.' Very uncool. So he chases down Kala Rau. Kala Kau runs. He runs fast. Because when the blue-skinned, 4-armed, preserver of the world with a thousand names decides to come get you: you are totally screwed.

I don’t KNOW! Shut UP! Yeah, okay, FINE: in the heavenly pantry? Behind the mustard? Someone has wedged this dog-eared copy (with “Property of Zeus” written in purple crayon inside the cover) titled “101 Animal Forms Mortal Women Find Irresistible” & also a nectar-stained: “Ares is from Mars & Venus is from Venus” with sections of it double underlined & starred.

ANYWAY.

The god Vishnu catches Kala Rau the demon just as he’s about to drink amrita, the nectar. A DEMON drinking the GODS’ elixir of immortality! Majorly bad juju. Vishnu’s like, ‘Back away from the goblet, 'mon.’ (I’m just assuming it’s a goblet. It could have been a Dixie cup or a dipper, like the Big Dipper? But it doesn’t matter.) Kala Rau, he’s like, no WAY, because, really, what does he have to lose? And so he starts to drink it anyway. Vishu completely freaks & throws his magic discus at Kala Rau, & it cuts his head off. Completely off. Decapitation. Demon head: on the ground. BUT.

Kala Rau had already started to drink the elixir, right? Just a little bit before the god’s discus comes up & whacks him? It, like, touched his lips & his throat? But he hadn’t SWALLOWED it, technically, yet. So get this: now Kala Rau’s HEAD is immortal, but the rest of him: toast. Vishuized. Dead.

NOW he’s this immortal disembodied demon head.
Wicked, man.

AND: he’s super extra pissed at Ratih, the moon goddess, for blabbing his secret plans to steal the elixir to Vishnu, which is what got him decapitated. So now he goes flying around the sky—this crazy-ass immortal disembodied demon head?—trying to eat the moon in vengeance. Old school, dude. Very, very OLD school.

Sometimes he catches her, too, & the demon head eats the moon: then it’s an eclipse. But then she gets out again & goes, like,
‘You think you’re so bad? Eat me!’ And runs.

End of the Line

The spectrum of reincarnation
goes from human to bamboo.

So our Bali bicycle guide informs me.

That is to say: being a very good human is the last incarnation before a soul moves on to be one with the Gods & experience the next journey. If you exhibit poor karma in each successive life, your soul is demoted down through the line of incarnations, passing through large, long-lived animals, down to lower animals, & eventually settling in BAMBOO, where you are doomed to sprout & be cut down with great frequency.

If you are very, very good bamboo, you might eventually start to ascend back up the line. I don’t know what it would take to be good bamboo. Our guide, who gave it an earnest think, wasn’t sure either.

Spirits Everywhere

No calls to prayer in Bali; instead the air is filled with spirits. Unique in mostly-Muslim Indonesia, the population here is virtually all Bali-Hindu, heavily influenced by its animist history.

To be simplest about animism: spirits are everywhere, some of them rooted in beings (people, animals, certain trees), some of them roaming. If you build them a good house—say, a mask, a statue, a temple, an object of beauty—an appropriate spirit will inhabit it.
Sort of a ‘build it & they will come’ philosophy.

Arguably, this is only giving a face & place to elements that are always, already there. In that sense, statues & idols are very civilizing; better than having spirits roving about like mischievous parrots.
Maybe it’s a little like giving the djinn a bottle.

Signs of animism are everywhere in Bali, most prominent in the statuary, most chaotic in the tourist areas. I say chaotic for two reasons: First, because a demon statue that would normally be, say, a Vishnu temple guardian is posing as a hotel decoration in tourist areas. Second, because tourists really dig these statues, there are simply zillions of them. Which follows that there are simply zillions of corresponding spirits in Ubud. Is it a good statue? Definitely. Do I actually want a Vishnu demon guardian in my hotel?
I most emphatically do not.

The exquisite Tjampuhan spa-resort, where we stayed in Ubud, is teeming with alarming statuary (if you look at it closely), all of it decorated daily with red hibiscus flowers. Take a look at the Bali photo set [click on More Photos from the Citradel, right] for examples. Walls of sly frogs line pathways. Dragons guard temple stairs. Enormous fish-like demons inhabit the spa, some of them larger than the main desk. A frieze of lascivious stone monkeys—who, on closer inspection (which I suspect few people make), are engaged in a rambunctious sexual orgy—overlooks over the family pool.

To the uninitiated, entertaining the notion that each one of these vessels is in fact inhabited by an appropriate spirit can quickly inspire a kind of delirium. I’m on the fence as to whether it’s better or worse that I can look them in the eye. To be fair, all this probably disquiets no one but me.

Living in Muslim Jakarta, visiting Hindu-animist Bali on Christian Good Friday lands me in a strange estuary of cosmologies. Atheism seems a practical defense, if one could design Belief to order. Then I recall the Christian retort: “God believes in YOU.” Sobering: what would that mean before this large pantheon & enormously diverse spiritual ecosystem? If THEY believe in ME...well, perhaps I will be reincarnated as bamboo after all.

Maybe in order to sleep soundly all that’s important is to demonstrate that I myself am already inhabited.

Bali High

or: Where do your ideas come from?

One midnight in Ubud, I lay awake in fear.

Why? It didn’t make any sense. Just suddenly, after a pleasant day, now at rest in a lovely resort, I couldn’t sleep for a subtle buzz of indefinite fear. This happens to everyone occasionally, I like to think: we lie awake stewing in some metaphysical terror. But this felt different. This had the mundane feel of a reaction to something I’d eaten. Some Balinese spice. A bad peanut.

Or maybe it's an allergy, I thought—a sensitivity, to be medically correct—to the intense Hindu-animism all around us in Bali; as my body was being harried by mosquitoes, so was my mind being harried by rogue spirits. I wasn’t accustomed to fending them off. In an hour or two it went away & I fell asleep.

So that happened & as one does with minor mysteries, I passively continued to ponder it for the rest of the week. Today, clearly emerging from that unconscious ponder, I woke up from a dream about a Balinese beer that affected its drinkers with a minor sensation of acrophobia: a fear of heights. You didn’t get drunk on it. Rather, the more you drank, the more afraid of heights you got.

E was delighted with this dream, as was I, & we spent breakfast talking about the ways in which this would make a great comic premise to a short story or a play. (It would be an excellent basis for an improv exercise, if nothing else.) Think about it: How would an Animal House party behave under the influence of AcroBrews?

I’m imagining light drinkers doing things like standing on step stools, a seated crowd daring each other another to go one rung higher (drinking songs called “Upseedaisy” & “One More Rung!” & “Falling Off the Wagon”), catching each other when someone balks & hunkers down again, impressed with the bravery of getting to the third & final step; most impressed if they jump. People might fling themselves onto mattresses or into swimming pools, just to feel the exaggerated rush of falling.

A few more drinks & standing up by itself becomes a little crazy, one’s feet being So Far Down. Dude, I was like, Soooo HIGH. Literally. Giggling friends might start on their knees, holding hands for strength, then rise to their feet on the count of 3—each of them ducking a little—and (leaving behind one guy who just can’t do it but waves them on), running across a courtyard screaming & laughing, triumphant when they reach the other side & all sit down again in a rush.

Staircases would become centers of ruthless party games. People would get injured, of course. Take it from someone who has broken her foot jumping for joy (sober): you can hurt yourself falling very short distances.

Near overdose, being on anything but the bare dirt is too high up & when you’re close to passing out you lie there hugging the earth, forehead pressed to the ground, terrified that even that is not solid enough, for what if the ground caves and you fall anyway, right through the earth, all the way through, & then fall & fall & fall forever.

Who would drink such a thing? Lots of people, I think. A buzz is a buzz, & fear is a good buzz. (Anyone remember Louis Wu’s freefall bed in Ringworld?) Teenagers would drink it, of course. Extreme sport enthusiasts who have lost their respect for actual dangers. Maybe a therapy for adrenaline junkies: a way to feel the danger without risking life & limb. A controlled means to challenge & master your fear, used as part of a physical discipline. Depressed people who no longer feel anything, but crave the sensation. A test for mountain climbers & bridge building crews.

If holding your liquor is an accepted test of manhood, I think a tolerance for fear would be even more attractive. It would really mean something to 'Stand Tall'. Or to 'Hold Your Ground'. Biker dudes would sit on cushions on the floor, Japanese style. Bar fights would be spectacular & strange.

Anyway: in answer to Where Do My Ideas Come From—that’s one story.

Bali Barba

By any casual poll of passers-by, the very most resplendent & astonishing sight to be had in all of Bali is
Evan’s beard.

Ah, the beard! An elusive beast on the chins of Bali, where even the most virile men manage only a mustache.

It’s more than that, though. In the iconography of Bali, a beard denotes the visage of KINGS (...& ogres). Wherever we go in Bali, men stop E on the street to compliment his beard, nodding to one another & saying, “Bagu-u-u-u-s!” goo-o-o-o-d with the deep, extended tones of admiration one usually reserves for feats of strength. “Like a king!”

Extra Joss

A correction:

EXTRA JOSS is an energy drink, not the mojo of cigarettes. It's a nuclear yellow-green, Red-Bull type beverage, advertised with a power fist & the clear but illogical: "Who needs rest when you can keep moving?"

Click here to see a ridiculous YouTube TV ad for Extra Joss featuring a soccer player & Balinese Kecak dance, which is a famous local performance form designed by foreigners for tourists.

"Extra Joss" is one of those highly successful made-up words that's simply fun to say aloud. It seems a likely enough synonym for "mojo"; I think I'll make it a regular part of my English vocabulary.

Appetizers

Tonight we ate a school of minnows.

Fried crisp in chili. Served with tiny peanuts.
I drank melon juice, which was bright green.