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.