The Uncanny Valley

This weekend the University of Pittsburgh's theatre dept will host a Theatre & Cognitive Science Symposium. E & I--Theatre & Cognitive Science majors, respectively--feel the universe aligning ever so slightly.

E will be presenting a paper on facial expressions--a subject of enduring interest & study for Artists, Actors & Cognitive Psychologists. Among other things, this provides an opportunity to employ a term we've been eager to use in public:

The Uncanny Valley.

In brief, the Uncanny Valley is the slight but disturbing gap between a human representation that looks almost real, but not quite. We're talking about 3D animation, robots or sculpture. The hypothesis is that the 'not quite' element--this uncanny valley-- is upsetting to people, and much moreso than a facsimile that looks totally unnatural or completely convincing. Think of the creepiness of a B-grade wax museum.

The most fun thing I've seen on this recently is this graph below. This earnestly charts Familiarity across Human Likeness, comparing Moving vs. Still examples. The range runs from An Industrial Robot to A Healthy Person, and helpfully includes Humanoid Robots, Stuffed Animals, Bunraku Puppets, Corpses (still), Zombies (moving), and a Prosthetic Hand.

25 Things

This is a meme from the Facebook world, asking people to write "25 Random Things" about yourself. Just for fun. Here are mine.

___________________________________________________

1. I once spent a night alone in an Alcatraz island prison cell. This was a Girl Scout field trip. I slept pretty well, too.

2. A few years back, I almost won the Ithaca ChiliFest Mechanical Bull-riding contest. A feat of skill & bosom. But an 8 year old girl took the trophy instead.

3. I can’t decide. I’d like to do both.

4. Yesterday I dreamed I was a tiny, speckled octopus. At the ocean’s surface, I transformed into a blue dragonfly and flew away.

5. That may be my oldest unconscious hobby: asleep, I sample the proprioception of really alien bodies. Like octopi & dragonflies. Like an octogenarian mailman. An oak tree. Wind.

6. At my next birthday I’ll have been a vegetarian (pescatarian) for half my life. I marked it by eating a duck, a rabbit, a buffalo burger & bacon at five star restaurants. They were good.

7. When I was a kid I climbed trees in my yard to pick cherry-plums, green apples, pomegranates and loquats.

8. That was a good tree, too--the best loquats I’ve ever had. I carried their chestnut stones in my pocket. Then a man named Wren Morningstar poisoned the tree—on purpose, they said, vindictively—part of an argument I never understood. For that treason my father ran him off our property and never spoke to him again.

9. I pray.

10. During a month-long trek through the Death Valley desert, I hiked ten miles out to a single payphone in the stark barren howling middle of nowhere, only to learn I’d been wait-listed at a graduate school. “Can I call you back tomorrow?” the director asked me.

11. Mostly, I don’t mind shoveling snow.

12. In the throes of back-country dog-sledding, I had the thought (a common one, this life): ‘This is really not fun at all, but I’m very glad to be here.’ Looking back now, I love every part of that trip.

13. I played defense on a soccer team called ‘Sloth Explosion’.

14. During the 1980s California drought, I participated in a rain dance choreographed by my great aunt, a magnificent grand dame who played the organ and sang and smoked from a long cigarette holder. We danced, we sang; it didn’t rain. But we all felt a lot better about life. I believe things like this matter.

15. A psychic once told me I was a cheerleader in a past life. I was 16 and took offense.

16. Once I played the carillon bells from a tower over Cambridge, MA. I did it badly—total cacophony for miles—but it was really fun.

17. Around the age of 9, I woke up with a powerful sense of déjà vu: I had been this age before, had done things like this already, long ago. I wondered then if THIS might not be my fabled second chance. I’ve never lost that feeling.

18. I spent about seven sleepless weeks fastening electrodes onto people’s scalps and analyzing their brainwaves while they slept.

19. In the outback of Australia, a horny jackaroo gave me a t-shirt he’d blown to shreds with a shotgun. “I shot it twice,” he said hopefully, a little shyly, as if that extra shot just might make the difference. I turned him down. But I still have the shirt.

20. In my late twenties, a truly ancient, toad-like Turkish woman molested me in a Parisian bathhouse. I had no retort.

21. I once waded across a clear, ocean inlet, the water to my waist—the only way across—only to discover two hours later the water cloudy with feeding sharks.

22. I hate bar soap.

23. The Eolian volcano Stromboli erupted while I was camped on its black-ash cone. Both guys with me at the time—including the Aussie we met on the trail & have not (yet!) seen since—recently found me on Facebook. We’re thinking of a 20-year reunion.

24. Though I hated the town of Irvine, CA itself, the trailer park I lived in there remains one of my favorite ‘neighborhoods’ yet. They bulldozed it soon after I left & paved it into a parking lot.

25. I once broke my foot jumping for joy. A challenging omen. So far, it’s the only bone I’ve broken.
_________________________________

Congratulations, it's a _____!

TODAY JAM calls me in a state of bewilderment, all high & breathless off some emotion. She is 16.5 weeks pregnant. The obstetrician has called her at work about the genetic tests on JAM's blood sample.

The doctor, a calm & confident sort, confesses straight off that the lab has attached some wrong paperwork & that the pages are in a funny order. They don’t appear to have the test results quite yet. But she did notice one thing of interest here: Would JAM like to know the baby’s sex?

She & her husband had already decided they do want to know.

So the doctor tells her:

“It says here you have a perfect XX baby girl.”

AT this news, JAM has a huge rush of emotion, a burst of adrenaline. It’s overwhelming. The baby is not longer an It but a She. A Daughter. She's asking herself all at once: Is this what I’d expected? Is this what I’d secretly hoped for (or against)? What will this mean? How do I feel?

More: she suddenly knows her daughter's NAME---because they’ve already picked out one for each sex. She & her husband chose these, but something beyond Choice selected one & made it real.
She has a Name.

The feeling hasn’t settled but the excitement is raw & good & intense.

These are important moments. The ecstatic ones that push us for an instant beyond language. The ones you can't prepare for no matter what you expected. A state like this one can carry you through decades of memory & leagues of emotion in milliseconds. It leaves you changed. You can't predict what will send you there.

HOWEVER.

While we're off capering through the miracles of Life, part of ourselves stays removed. Some people call this the Watcher Self, the rational part of us that remains detached & coolly observant (if not always helpful) through emergencies & delirium.

It's only about 2 or 3 seconds into this reverie when JAM's own brain interrupts. She's still on the phone.

“Wait," she says to the smiling doctor. JAM can tell the doctor is beaming by the sound of the doctor's breath. Giving exciting news is the fun part of the doctor's day. "Wait a moment. I haven’t had an amnio. And you didn’t take the baby’s blood. So…how exactly do you KNOW the baby's sex?”

A short silence follows this excellent question.

“Huh,” says the doctor contemplatively. “You have a point there.”

Over the phone, JAM can hear pages flipping as the doctor consults the test results again.

"Ah-ha,” says the doctor in a lower tone. “On second glance, this says that…YOU are a girl.”

“Congratulations!” I say. “You’re a girl!”

What 34 years of life & a 16 week pregnancy left us cause to suspect, medical science has now confirmed: JAM is female. She decided to write her mother at once with the news, given what a long time coming it’s been.

The doctor was appropriately embarrassed & promised to call back when actual results arrived. They won’t find out the baby’s sex for another 2 weeks, when they'll have an ultrasound.

Hanging up the phone, JAM is now left standing alone in her office, jittering with the inertia of this huge rush of emotion but with no actual knowledge of her baby’s sex--or name, or anything.

In fact, all she's learned is that she herself is a girl.

I sent her a card.

_________________

EPILOGUE:

It's a boy.

Idylls of Winter

Glimpses of Minnesota

1. Dessert.

It is -5 degrees F. Yet we all decided to go out for ice cream.

The ice cream place was open. There was a line.

2. 25 February: Go Outside

E called me up from the university library to say, "You've GOT to go outside. It's warm. I'm walking around without a hat or gloves!"

I ran right out & took a long walk. It was amazing. Sunny! Warm! Suddenly: tricycles & inhabited tree-houses. Rabbits frolicked. Dozens of other people were outside with their kids & dogs, waving & shoveling slush. College girls mobbed along in shorts, Uggs & hoodies, singing. Beaming neighbors stopped to chat, full of bonhomie & the idylls of Winter, none of them with hats. Oh, wonderful world!

A February heat wave.

It was 37 degrees. There is not one leaf, not one blossom.

It's also the month of Muharram right now. This very day last year, I was sweltering in Jakarta, hearing choruses of muezzins lament the martyrdom of Hussein. I can't believe it's been a year.

3. House of the Seven Nymphets.

It’s 7pm and dark, 14 degrees. We’re going out. Underneath our hats, mufflers, sweaters, coats & gloves, we're dressed up. And under THAT, we're wearing long underwear. My invisible long-johns, in a vain effort at unschlumping the season, have nice lacey cuffs. Which are necessarily tucked into my pilled wool hiking socks.

The moment we step from the house, however, we see that our car is parked in. There’s a giant gold SUV right behind it & a second giant gold SUV right next to it. Our next door neighbor girls, in the House of the Seven Nymphets, have bricked us in with gold. Students.

Before we even reach the car, however (waddling a little for the ice), a blond student comes streaking out of the house, all apologies, with the keys in her hand. “My friends TOLD me not to park here, sorry!”

So this was fine. She moved the car.

Thing is, this kid is wearing nothing but a bath towel. A golden towel & fuzzy backless gold slippers. That’s all. She bounded outside in 14 degrees to move the car in a bath towel. She didn’t even shiver.

THAT is Minnesota nice. (And Minnesota tough.)

4. Running in February

It’s 12 degrees but sunny. I stretch bungee & wire crampons over my beat-up runners. I'm wearing thick wool socks. This is a life or death event, running in winter. The sidewalks are unevenly shoveled: icy, cruddy, puddled or dry. If you don’t keep your eyes down & your ankles nimble, you will die a foolish death.

Also, if you forget the dog’s gentle-leader, any lunge for a mis-hibernating squirrel could result in a far more acrobatic & embarrassing demise. I wear gloves, a balaclava & sunglasses: because the sun is blinding off the snow. I sweat & freeze at the same time. My eyes & nose run. My thumbs & thighs go numb. My shoulders nudge my ears with shivering tension, yet I am hot.

By March, I have quit. I do sit-ups in my office.

5. 10 March: Put your gloves away

It’s heated up to a balmy 27 today with promises of 40 this week. The horrible lawn is showing through the snow like a dirty slip.

Spring is on our minds, though I (alone) am in no hurry. Winter is good writing weather. A few hearty rabbits have returned. People are giving up on hats & gloves en masse, but only because we feel it’s time to move on, not because it’s any warmer, as if it’s our collective rejection of winter clothing that actually brings the sun.

Any week now: crocuses.

Persuaded

We're reading in bed, Evan and I. He's enjoying Woolf's "The Voyage Out"; I'm enduring Austen's "Persuasion". We've got our heads together, the dog cuddled between us. All by itself, this is pretty wonderful.

It's approaching 3:30 AM & we've been like this for a couple hours, frequently trading lines read aloud from our books: one astute, unveiling image after image from Virginia; one minute, stifling social trivium after another from Aunt Jane. Both these books are in some sense consumed with women negotiating social minutiae, but they come at it from different passions.

I am feeling slightly guilty, possibly vulnerable, at not finding Austen so wonderful as I 'ought'. And then, suddenly, precisely in turn, the characters from EVAN's book start discussing MY book. Literally: the set of friends in 'The Voyage Out' begin a debate over Austen's "Persuasion", some finding her genius, others finding her wholly tedious. Our fictional counterparts took over the discussion for us. When one of Woolf's characters begins to read aloud from "Persuasion", it causes another character--as forewarned--to fall asleep.

So we took our cue & went to sleep.

Life is art.

Home Again

The Remaining Months of
A Year Without Winter

I won't be posting so frequently now that we're home and working toward deadlines.

But I WILL continue to post an entry every so often.
In fact, I have a long list of stories to tell you.

In the meantime, however, I've loaded a huge series of photos from our West Coast voyages, from San Diego to Seattle, then driving back to Minnesota. [Click on More of The Citradel's Photos, right].

Signing off for now, here's an iridescent spider web I found in Walnut Creek, California. Looks a little like something you might see from the space shuttle, doesn't it?

The Scandal of Innocence

Not long after returning from Indonesia, I saw a little girl walking to a swimming pool wearing only a bathing suit & flip-flops. An arresting image to me after 6 months in the Islamic world.

We were in the California suburbs & it was about 95 degrees (F). She was 7 or 8 eight years old & holding her father’s hand as they strolled. She wore a brightly-colored, one-piece suit; nothing remarkable. He held her towel. She hopped a little, every fourth or fifth step—excited to swim. A simple, good image of summer. Here’s what stopped me:

To my Indonesian eye, she was effectively naked. Even after only 6 months away, this was genuinely startling to me. A spark of shock to see a child—a girl-child—undressed in public.

In more oppressive heat than this, no one in Jakarta, & certainly not a girl, walks about undressed like this. It would be scandalous & at least uncivilized. Not even boys wear shorts above the knee & high-necked tank tops, though a few women do wear them, are rare even in the cities. There’s a wide variety of dress in the metropolitan areas, but it’s not uncommon to see girls this young wearing long sleeves & jilbab (head scarf).

Now, suddenly, a girl walking down the street in a bathing suit.

But simultaneously my first reaction was split with a happy nostalgia! Because the truth is I grew up living 2 doors away from a public swimming pool in California & was a competitive swimmer for a decade of my childhood; I ran around dressed exactly like this little girl for 3 months of the year for most of my youth. I never thought twice about it; I was sexually innocent & I was universally treated that way.

This split reaction shows me how quickly & how much we can adapt to (if not adopt) new cultural mores. But it also shows how many contradictory values we can hold in one instant.

Here’s the kicker, though:
For all the surprise I felt at my own eye informing me ‘she’s undressed!’, this little girl looked strikingly INNOCENT. Specifically: she looked more innocent to my eye than the 7 year old girls I’d seen in jilbab. Because to me—in my outsider’s first reaction—it suggests that no one looks at this kid sexually. And that it rightly doesn’t occur to the father that anyone would.

Hijab (Islamic dress in general) is complex, of course, & people wear it for many different reasons, from cultural heritage to obedience to law, from fitting in with local fashion to expressing one’s devotion to God, & so forth, but one of the many reasons one might wear hijab is to block the male gaze. Concealing clothing, argue Islamic feminists, focuses men on the content of one’s character, rather than the too-tempting curves of one’s body.

The seven year old in hijab...I can’t know why her parents actually dressed her this way that morning, and from their perspective it may have nothing whatsoever to do with a sexual gaze. But from a distance, in general, to put a jilbab on a child suggests that some part of the public considers her—by virtue of being female—already engaged in a sexual equation.

It’s an unfortunate irony, this reaction. In certain, important ways we lose a measure of innocence exactly in the moment that we publicly declare it must be protected.

Looking Forward

29 June

Door to door, it took me 40 hours to get from Sydney to St. Paul. I had to fly back to Indonesia first. Not because it was sane, but to pick up the other half of my original ticket.

Near the local midnight I met Evan in the airy aisles of the Jakarta airport, the humid air a gentle déjà vu...back in Indonesia. I was glad for this last glimpse of it. Evan was standing between a public telephone decorated with carved demons & a shop selling nothing but dried shark fin.

We hadn’t seen each other in 5 weeks. During his last month in Indonesia he’d acted in a play, interviewed a dozen people, wrote a chapter & traveled far & wide. He’d also lost 20 pounds to Inside-Out Fever. But he’d recovered by now & looked good: sleepy but exhilarated. It's been a great month for both of us. We were so happy to see each other again.

On the plane ride home we made two lists, one of things we were most looking forward to upon returning home. The other of things we would miss about Indonesia. Here are the lists:

Most Looking Forward To Upon Returning:

• Friends & Family
• Our dog
• Irony
• Sarcasm
• Public displays of affection
• Secularism
• Silence
• Safe & tasty drinking water
• Traffic lights.
• Unpolluted air
• Public candor
• Organized ecological conservation
• Alpine mountains
• Running outside
• Tank tops & shorts
• WINTER

What We’ll Miss about Living in Jakarta:

• The organic flow of crowds & traffic.
• Rambutan, mangosteen & snakeskin fruit.
• The ease of rapport with & support from other artists, even famous, busy & powerful artists. Community is easy to find.
• Similarly, the ease of visiting or interviewing anyone we sought.
• The view from my balcony.
• The singular focus of our time.
• The street-level sense of ‘chaos’ (in contrast to the more dominant aesthetic of ‘control’ in Europe & the US).
• The sheer degree of public calm & politeness.
• The lack of street crime or sense of possible violence.
• Physical ease of men with each other (manly men will hold hands, sit with their arms draped over each others’ shoulders, touch each other easily with no connotations of sexuality whatsoever).
• In the arts, culture, & television...these freedoms are young enough that their markets are not glutted. While the quality is often poorer than what we can find at home, the field is very open. There’s a great deal of new freedom, energy, openness & room to explore & expand. There’s corruption & censorship, but no Old Boys’ network running the shows.
• The energy of a new democracy in its formation: lots of active discussion at all levels of who we are, what do we believe in, & how will we direct our laws & labors. It's a very exciting time & place to be.
• The opportunity to live in a land steeped in religion (& then to leave it).
• Affordability of food, house-cleaning, massage & child care.

A sense of cheerful pragmatism & inspiration. As Putu Wijaya said, “Make use of what’s there.”

Republik Mimpi

15 & 20 May
Jakarta, Indonesia

Twenty-five years ago, with a Masters in Buffoonery, RJ worked as a Ringling Bros clown. Later, he ran away FROM the circus & went to Harvard, where he got a PhD in theatre.
I think I'll leave his story at that.

We met this wonderful person in Indonesia as a fellow Fulbrighter. He graciously invited us to join him at the live broadcasts of several important television shows in Jakarta.

RJ was interviewing the fearless & inexhaustible Effendi Ghazali, once a Fulbright scholar himself at Cornell University, now writing, hosting & producing 3 different programs. Effendi’s shows are fast-paced, hotly topical, often funny (if not outright ludicrous), & always on the verge of government censure.

The one I saw taped was City Views, a more sedate, contemporary issues talk show. The night’s theme was domestic violence. The panel of Effendi & several experts sat in brightly lit couches. A super-sunny young pianist with a radio face & giant smile of tiny teeth played elevator music into & out from commercial breaks. On the other side of a partition, unnamed & filmed in shadowed profile, was a battered wife, a small, shy & nervous young woman in brown hijab.

Effendi casts a wide net. He’s pointedly criticized the Indonesian administration, poked at scandals of financial misconduct, beat the drum for a viable energy policy, for housing for the poor, for more affordable & available books, for flood relief....now a story on wife beating in Islamic households.

I sat on a chair about 12 feet in front of her while interns whispered into headsets & tried to pass around tic-tacks without making any noise. She was eloquent & simple, & slipped away the moment it was done.

MIMPI

E joined RJ on a further filming of Republik Mimpi—the Republic of Dreams—which I later saw on television on 20 May, the Day of National Awakening, E at my ear translating.

With some justice, Republic Mimpi is said to be the Indonesian version of The Daily Show. Not quite, but I can see what they mean. It is a political satire with sharp edges & ridiculous flares.

The rotating panel of characters are thinly-veiled mimics of actual Indonesian leaders, which is partially where all the heat comes from. Effendi hosts as their ‘communications adviser.’ Not only does the audience get a chance to hear (funny) ventriloquisms of “their leaders”, but they get to pose direct questions to those leaders. Deeply couched in jokes, the topics & the questions are real. More than a few times, Effendi said, issues addressed on the show were suddenly addressed in the actual government.
Because the government, for good & ill, is listening.

These shows are testing the edge of freedom of speech. Viewers in Indonesia can look to their success—that is to say, the shows' continued existence or their censorship—as bellwethers for their administration’s tolerance. These pretty much define how far Indonesians can go in their speech & no one has gone this far. So lots of viewers are tuning in not only to laugh, but to see what their own freedoms actually are.

(When I described The Colbert Report to an Indonesian Fulbright student, she couldn't believe it wasn't censured. Different world. There's a certain genius in the way the US government has, in my lifetime, tended to applaud (or only badmouth or ignore) its political satire artists. Or, in Colbert's case, actually invite him to perform at their own events)

‘Citizens’ of Republik Mimpi are very careful to call the show’s ‘president’ Gus Pur (not coincidentally pronounced: ‘poor’) instead of the actual Gus Dur, a recent ex-president. He’s played by a popular comic actor, Butet, who seems to be making a side career of lampooning presidents.

It's an old gambit: you can say what you like about the current regime so long as its set in a fable, or with some complete & critical difference. I think of the Croatian play: King Gordogon, which attacked the contemporary rise of fascism through the protective lens of a fairytale. Better, the wryly titled: “This Play Is Not Set in Indonesia” (really a play).

On the set, the humor is quick, politically incorrect & often improvised, the audience packed with students in colored blazers.

They all sing along with the show’s chorus:

We all know there are problems with the country
We don’t get all sad
Criticism is normal
We’re all born from dreams


EPILOGUE: Mimpi Commercials

One of the more distracting & unintentionally hilarious parts of Republik Mimpi are its commercials. Popular as it is, this is still a tough sell to sponsors who are hesitant to anger the government with their support. So their wide collection of small sponsors shows such things as:

Very clinical ads for condoms.

Cigarettes a-plenty.

Crackers: After a long day at work fishing in his little boat (already: I have never seen an ad like this), Dad walks back up the pier toward his waiting family—Look, Honey, kids, 2 fish!!—The family comes down to meet him & they all sit down on right there the ground to celebrate with dry CRACKERS. Ah, crackers. Mm-mmh!

And the best/worst: an ad for HOMOVITRON—an energy drink for pria (men)—played constantly on several large screens behind characters’ heads. The silent commercial was essentially a large male symbol whose arrow prodded at a cartoon jeans zipper until it came down. All of the actors had glasses full of Homovitron at their seats & would occasionally interject comments on their suddenly enhanced manliness & the fine, fine, FINE taste.

What Abides, What Abates

(a preview to California)

In the high corner above the Home’s front door, exactly where you’d mount a security camera, there’s a swallow who peaks down through its lens-shaped nest hole, quietly surveying everyone who enters & exits. When I stared at it, it stared back, remembering everything.

For this sentinel’s vigilance, my grandmother says, she rests easier here.

Den of Atheists

Sydney, Australia
June 2007

Coming out of Indonesia, there's something refreshing to me about the religion (& lack thereof) in Sydney. Even Australia’s colonial history is fairly irreligious, too. To me, some atheism can tail the same coin that fundamentalism heads. Nevertheless, it's awfully nice to see them again. I've so very much missed the Nothings.

With few exceptions, I don’t find reason to believe that there are significantly more or any fewer true believers in Indonesia than anywhere else in the world. The difference is the public role of religion in daily life. Here in Sydney, religion feels purely personal again, rather than this giant, active organ of the state that’s making laws & infrastructure & sumptuary codes. It's your life, maybe your whole life, but here religion (which I distinguish from faith & God) feels like a chosen, communal path rather than the air we all breathe. The difference is enormous.

At the giant, ‘den-of-atheists’ Sydney Writers' Festival, I found books & discussions of atheism & agnosticism strikingly common. It was an inadvertent theme: a reflection of the times. After Indonesia this was riveting, even alarming, to me. So many discussions of losing faith, lost faith, no faith, missing faith, & anger against the wrong-turns of religion, the role of religion in war & science & policy & personal lives....

Some of these reactions themselves, like the extreme religious views they push against, conspicuously "Lack ironic detachment," as Rachel Kohn suggested. Richard Dawkins, for example.

Under current events, Kohn said, complacent secularists feel embattled by the rise of fervent & powerful religious forces. It makes people feel a need to take a public stand & to object in similar tones & terms. Moderates tend into atheists & fundamentalists, when they’re likely actually neither.

Communism has collapsed as former vehicle of anti-religion, she pointed out, so now it’s pure atheism.

I'd come to similar conclusions at the Festival. I say ‘den of atheists’ here partially in jest, aware of the irony, because when I listen closely: it’s largely a rhetorical atheism. A reactionary recoil again organized religion & the commercial god on whose name so much is traded; not actually against God.

Quite to the contrary, actually. The Sydney Writers' Festival (among many other things) brought into sharp relief for me a large & vocal western demographic that is deeply nostalgic for faith & for God. But soured on religion.

For some, the old paths to God have been tainted. To some—& not a few—organized religion has grown to mean terrible things. This group has wearied of religion, which in some lights, some days, is also used as a smuggling route for human folly: war, killings, the blurring of church & state, vicious politics, winning elections, black & white morality, demeaning social doctrines, second class citizenry, compulsory sumptuary codes (clothing). Too often it smacks of ideologues willing to commit acts of terrorism in the name of God, to teach hate, to teach intolerance, to teach ignorance, to teach Us & Them, to advocate war, to compel ‘prayer’, to encourage vigilantism (women stoned, decapitated, beaten, splashed with acid, killed for wearing the wrong clothes), to conflate faith with political parties & patriotism, to make houses of God into bully pulpits. Organized religion—Oh, oldest of ironies!—has become associated with brain washing, with fundamentalism, with communities persecuting the outsider, with racism, with hate and hate and hate.


Which is to say: life as usual, eh? Nothing new, anyway.
In important ways, it’s been like this since homo sapiens could make intentionally rude gestures.

Every generation we raise & obliterate gods with the hypocrisies of man, with
scriptures writ larger than love, louder than peace, sharper than faith, tighter than prayer. The paths obscured, we set off into the Wilderness all over again.

Humans crave the divine. Whether you yourself are a believer or not, this is a fact of our species. Some of us remember organized religion as a peaceful experience about helping others & living rightly. Now droves have left their holy houses & wandered outside exactly because we do not wish to be infidels: we are searching for lost faith.

Or, as most people I know do: we would really prefer not to think about this or discuss it anymore at the dinner table, or to take it quite so seriously, please.

[That sort of FREEDOM--to express such things in public, to anyone, without fear--that freedom I'd too long taken for granted. ]

One day, in the middle of a series of readings at the Sydney Writers Festival, the host put a paper number on my table. She held her finger on it & looked at me questioningly: Would I like to participate in the 1-minute pitch?

I had no idea what she meant.
There was to be a contest, she explained. They’d draw numbers. As numbers were drawn, each contestant would come up to the microphone & make a 1 minute pitch for a story in front of a panel of literary editors, & the audience of a hundred or so. They would vote on their favorite, there were prizes.

“You want to do it, I can tell,” she said.
I had not prepared for this, but my suddenly racing heart said yes. Microphones can be better than coffee.

So I did this & won. They gave me a set of books (which I later sold). I prefaced my pitch with the observation of reactionary atheism & nostalgia for faith that I’d observed here. Then, completing the minute (or so) I pitched a novel about a man who could induce relig-...well, you’ll have to read it someday. I’m excited. So were they.
Just remember: the second novel was conceived in a den of atheists.


EPILOGUE:

One day in Sydney I lunched at an excellent vegetarian restaurant where a waitress in jilbab served food to 3 elderly Buddhist monks dressed in red robes, while a Chinese guy ate lunch alone, & a bunch of us white, female Christian / agnostic / atheist types browsed the bean curd. It was so peaceful & simple.

Charming the Swan

Sydney, Australia
18 June

As part of researching The Lime Tree, I arranged to sail out through the Port Jackson Heads on a 3-masted sailing ship—just as my characters did this very week, 217 years ago. I would help crew, climb the riggings & everything. Now that's the kind of research I like.

Then a powerful storm system causing high troughs, torrential rain & cyclone force winds blew through & cancelled the voyage. Clearly the rain gods have followed me from Jakarta (though drought-stricken Australia is celebrating.)

On the next dry day I walked down to the Svanen (‘the Swan’), a different 'tall-ship'. The sodden vessel nodded along The Rocks at Circular Quay. Its dock was fenced & latched with a heavy chain. I hung an arm on the gate & looked through.

“Just go in,” waved the proprietor of a nearby gift shop, appearing at my shoulder. She was not associated with the Svanen in any way. She just looked at it all day from work.
As she figured it, this gave her rights.

“It’s chained.” I indicated the latch.

“It’s not padlocked,” she said exasperated, as if I were a little slow. “Lift the chain.”

Beside the chain was a big red sign reading: Closed: No Trespassing.

I didn't answer. Maybe I was in the middle of a vendetta. Maybe she avenged herself on her floating neighbors by encouraging gullible strangers into acts of piracy, to break & enter their ship.
I did want to get onto the dock, to get on board.

"I'll give them a call," I said finally.

She gave me a look: I was too law-abiding; she thought less of me.
Obviously I didn't know the first thing about talking to sailors.

“You want the Swan? Go in there & shout at them until someone comes up on deck & sees you.” That was her advice.
Finished with me, she went back to arranging postcards.

It started sprinkling again.
One moment you’re minding your own business, the next you’re wet & an inadequate pirate.

Maybe she was right: if I couldn’t take the ship on my own,
I didn’t deserve the Swan.

Boarding the Svanen

I looked around. There was no one on the dock or the ship’s deck or anyone very close by. Just quickly, I tried the chain. But it was tight & the gate was heavy. It didn’t move. To force the chain over the peg I’d have to push on one side of the gate with my legs & pull with all my might on the other side, then pry up the chain with my thumbs. It couldn’t be done quickly or gracefully, or maybe at all.

I could feel the vicarious pirate woman watching me from her gift shop with growing disgust. Suddenly four tourists were staring at me. I tried to look casual. I have a couple characters (convict characters actually) who would be really smooth about all this, but not me.

Just then, from nowhere, a friendly-looking woman my age appeared out of nowhere & flipped the chain off its peg with one hand.
Hm. How'd she--?
“Hi,” she said amiably & strolled off toward the ship.

She was the owner’s daughter. We chatted. Pretty soon, we were standing by the Svanen’s rail. Was the vicarious pirate lady looking?

The Svanen had taken on water from the storm & it wasn’t heading out to sea anytime soon, not for charm or money. Instead, they were going to spend the week pumping the bilge & scraping the hull. I told her about my project & volunteered to help. Either way, I’d learn something worth knowing about travel on a masted ship.

It wasn’t up to her. But she seemed interested.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, searching for something she could grant right away, something within her power to bestow: “If you want to experience some seasickness, I can promise you that. People go green down there [below decks]. Literally green." Then, encouragingly: "You’ll probably get real sick. Would that be helpful?”

The captain's daughter asked me this question with a tone of complete sincerity, which made me fall briefly in love. This complete stranger, this charming sailor girl: she understood.

After all, my characters (she suggested correctly & more knowledgeably) are going to be seasick, some of them for all 6 months of the journey. It’s occurred to me many times as I’ve researched the conditions of the Second Fleet that I myself would probably not have survived that voyage. As it stands, I’ve never slept below decks on a masted ship & I’ve never been all that seasick. Maybe, she suggested, it would help me describe it?

We made some plans.
Then she said she had to ask her father & the spell broke.

You know it's gotten dire when sailors pumping the bilge aren't sure if they want your free labor.

Worse, I saw that I’d negotiated myself from a day boldly standing at the wheel, sailing through the Heads, to charming someone into letting me scrape the hull & turn green for free. By the time I got home, I’d changed my mind.

Do I actually need to make myself vomitously sea sick in order to convince a reader that a character is sea sick? No. I can ask a someone. I can read an account. I can make it up.

After all, I’m writing about aged characters, male characters, mothers of four, 18th century British citizens of a variety of classes & occupations, none of which I will experience first hand.
Many of which no one alive today has experienced.

"Write what you know" does not mean "Write what you have experienced first hand".

Convicts rowing out to the Lady Penrhyn,
prison transport of the First Fleet

A Free & Democratic Gathering

Jakarta, Indonesia

Look at this: a crowd of spirited young Muslims—many dressed in Islamic clothing—men in topi hats & dishdashah robes, women in colorful hijab, even a few in burqas—all facing forward with great intensity at a kind of political rally: smiling & laughing.

The smiling & laughing crowd of young Muslims is not an image I tend to see reported. Not even here.

In April we spent a wild evening at a ‘free & democratic’ gathering around Emha Ainun Nadjib, a self-styled man of the people. Emha—which is a nickname for Mohammad—is many things. A public intellectual, poet, musician & sastrawan (a man of letters).

Emha was a major literary player in the 1980s, counseling artists to keep their work politically relevant at a time when the regime was de-politicizing everything, censorship—even self-censorship—was at its height, & civil society stripped of its teeth.

Now, some describe him as a kind of Islamic self-help guru. He carries himself with the battle-worn calm of someone accustomed to decades of political rallying amongst The People—the kooks & the conscientious alike. To most appearances, he’s an older hippie & to listen to his straight, scrubbed young crowd, he’s hilarious. These meetings go all night.

Several hundred came to see him at this monthly Jakarta gathering, most seated on tarps laid out before an unevenly lit, low stage. Cross-legged around him sit Emha’s merry band of disciples, ranging from clownish punks with guitars who seem there for comic relief, to an intense, blond Englishman who follows Emha everywhere, writing his biography.

Some wore Emha’s signature t-shirt: “Kafir Liberal”—Liberal Unbeliever. This is a rare appearance of irony in typically unironic Indonesia, for Emha is decidedly, even ardently religious, as are his crowds. The t-shirt is making a point that we might make here in the US: That being a liberal doesn’t mean you are godless; that being a believer doesn’t mean you are a hard-line conservative.

On the Spot: a cultural exchange

Then Emha recognized our companion, DCK, ‘the American music-girl’ (ethno-musicologist) who’d once traveled with him, observing him academically as a kind of cultural phenomenon. With fond enthusiasm, he brought her up onto the stage to sit with the cool kids. She was the only woman up there. The only woman to speak all evening.

This was sort of fun until he handed her the microphone, asked her to stand up in front of the entire crowd, & extemporize—as an American—her thoughts on Democracy in Indonesia, on this 'free & democratic' gathering, on religion in Indonesia as compared to America... Yeah. Ready, set: go.
The audience fell silent & leaned forward.

I nearly imploded with sympathetic stage fright.

Emha (white shirt, left) & DCK at the microphone in Jakarta
T-shirt on the right reads: 'The Romans had their gods...'

He might like DCK, but it’s well known that Emha is no fan of America. The word “America” came up a lot all evening. HOWEVER, I couldn’t help but notice that Emha had now flanked himself with a fawning Brit & a very pretty, bona fide American, both hanging on his words. No coincidence, that. His street creds had just shot sky high.

It’s clear why many people are here. For one, they’re brimming with the ideals of a young democracy (recall Indonesia made its own transition from dictatorship to democracy in 1999), & they want to be part of making their country work. There’s a lot of frustration with the ways their own newly decentralized government is struggling.

Also, many are dismayed at the image of Islam on the world stage, feeling themselves grouped by association with terrorists. They're eager to show by their efforts that Islam--real Islam--is a genuinely higher path. To remain uninvolved is to give the violent images unrivaled reign.

“Islam,” one tremulously earnest audience member on his turn with the microphone informed us Americans: “Islam is a religion of peace. Thank you.” Then sat down.

We all want to be good citizens of our respective countries. We want to make things better in the world, but at the end of the day that’s a hopelessly vague desire. How can we be constructive when the people making headlines are the people setting bombs? How can we be active when the world is this big & complicated? We are looking for leaders---for heroes---in a world where a hero’s perfection is both required & impossible.

Not that Emha is giving them much of a roadmap. This is a democratic gathering, remember. He’s intentionally avoiding the dictator-father figure, who tells us children what to do. Much as we might appreciate it.

These gatherings are more like revivals, energizing a generation to ‘be involved’. Whatever I’m idly conjecturing about Emha’s motives in putting DKC on the spot (which he has done & she has obliged many times before) (“Once he made me dance,” she said), I suspect it does do some good letting people see & hear an actual, unpolished, Christian American.

If seeing smiling & laughing crowds of politicized young Muslims is rare for us, consider how rare it is for Indonesians to see a hip young American on the spot, one who has taken the trouble not only to come here, but to learn their language, to know their songs & heroes, & now to address them as regular people with a common interest, endorsing their free & democratic gathering.

It didn’t really matter what she said or how nervous & halting she was, or that in her stage fright she lost her Indonesian & the British biographer had to translate; just being there at all meant a lot.

Still, people also wanted to hear what she had to say. After all: everyone knows Americans are godless free-love imperialists who overthrow governments because we love oil & hate Islam, which is equivalent to saying we hate morality. Right? So no pressure. People are just a little curious about those stories, if nothing stronger. But they wanted her to hear them, too. They want to tell an American, & by extension America, things like: I am not a terrorist.
The silence for her was extra intense.

After prodding her to comment on local & global politics & religion for an achingly long time, Emha turned her straight over to questions from the audience.

The very first question was an old, indignant koan from the 1950s, essentially asking this: Indonesia is poor in technology, but rich in spirituality. It has a deep, religious understanding of how important it is to strive for a place in the afterlife. America is technology-rich but spiritually poor. Could she account for that? Did anyone in America give any thought to the afterlife, what with all our riches & holier-than-thou technology?

Hmm....

"I'm really glad you asked that," she began, stalling to collect her thoughts. Back in the day, DCK had been tracked to become a Lutheran minister. She emphasized for the audience—as a positive—that in fact America is a VERY Christian country & much more religious than people in Indonesia realize. George Bush himself, she continued, is a deeply religious man & openly concerned with the afterlife. And so forth.

All things considered, she handled it pretty well. I have to confess, though: I’d never thought of those as reassuring facts, to say nothing of ones I might offer to a Muslim crowd.

No Harm Will Come

The ideals at work here are admirable, but as the British interpreter warned us at the start: be careful. All kinds of people show up at these gatherings & not everyone is altruistic or peaceful. Emha’s dislike of America might be rhetorical & progressive, but for others it’s militant. The interpreter warned us to keep our eyes open while we were in the crowd.

I did. For a little while. Then people kept laughing & DCK got the microphone & I kind of forgot about all that.

When DCK finally left the stage, well over an hour later, Emha—in Indonesian & English—gave her his personal benediction & a careful, instructive guarantee that no harm would come to her at this gathering.

No harm would come to her? I sat up & looked around. The whole gathering snapped into a new focus. All of sudden I had to remember that even here I might be a target because of my nationality. The stage is always much bigger than the one in lights. Sometimes I forget that I'm on it, too.

Right on this cue, 2 young Muslim guys approached me on the outskirts, in the dark, & asked if I was an American. It was about 1 am. Then, as sheepishly as can be, they asked if I would please practice English with them.

One kafir liberal to another? Things like this are signs. When you receive such a sign, it is important to say yes.

I had a map of the US in my calendar & they excitedly drew a map of Indonesia in my notebook. We talked in simple language about our homes. When one drew a circle inside the blob representing the island of Sumatra, I said: “Lake Toba!” (a place I’d very much hoped to visit) & all by itself this made his day. He was so happy. He couldn’t believe it: an American knew lake Toba, his home.

Even such simple exchanges do something good in the world, I think. It’s not enough to change the course of history, but maybe it’s enough to change some minds. Tonight anyway, 3 more of us told good stories about the others' kind.

DCK was in fact gently mobbed afterwards, but only by cautious guys who wanted her autograph (& phone number), & to take her picture with their phone cameras as the famous American who knew Emha. Stars in their eyes.

Being an American is a complicated thing.

Ace Navigation

Many days, I vary my route home in the hopes of discovering something interesting. Things I’d never otherwise find.

This habit also has the effect of getting me lost sometimes (rather often, really), for long, wandering periods of time, as I have a truly lamentable sense of direction. Resistant to improvement, I’ve adapted to this by cultivating an enthusiasm for exploring new places. And a tendency to carry food & water with me wherever I go. I hold fast to Buckaroo Bonzai’s koan:

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

On one such wander, I happened upon a fantastic old cemetery in the green shade of ancient Morton bay fig trees (above). The headstones are all rust-weeping native sandstone furred over with green moss & orange lichen. The very first grave I stooped to read belonged to a William Dawes.

Lieutenant William Dawes? I rocked back on my heels. No. It can’t be. Although it could.... William Dawes was there—here—when my characters arrived in 1790. He was among the cleverest, kindest officers of the first fleet, the astronomer & ace navigator who worked at his observatory on Dawes Point (a magical promontory now supporting one foot of the Harbour Bridge). The date...well, the date on the stone is hard to read, but what I can make out is not strictly impossible...is it?

There isn’t a whole lot written about Dawes—he didn’t keep a surviving journal of his own—so he can float unqualified & unstained by detail in the few anecdotes & lovely adjectives that other officers ascribed to him in their journals. He was smart, deeply moral, & one of the only people that everyone seemed to like.

More interestingly, though, Dawes compiled a short lexicon of Aboriginal words, among the first ever. He did this with a native woman, Patye, who was his companion & probably his lover. It looks complied incidentally, rather than methodically. That's to say, he didn’t go at it from A to Z, or in order of military importance, or with a specific agenda. He seems to have recorded words, phrases & concepts as he learned them from her, as they naturally came up between them.

So you do get an unintentional, telegraphic sort of journal, a list that preserves the tone & subjects of their interactions, which are sometimes funny, coy or curt, occasionally lovely, & ultimately touching. My favorite—though I don’t have the text in front of me & so can’t quote it—is a native word describing some aspect of this: warming another’s chilled fingers by heating your own hands at the fire & then gently clasping theirs.

Oddly, I feel as if I know this man a little, maybe in the way you come to know characters of great novels. So here I’ve lost & then found myself in Dawes' old hiking grounds (now an urban center), wandered into the green graves around a corner, & suddenly: his headstone. This is a sign, I say to myself. A great & worthy sign.

We aren't so complicated really: all I need is good food & exercise, fresh air & social contact, the time & peace to do my work, & highly symbolic chance encounters with 200 year old intimates to sustain me. Basic mammalian stuff.



Epilogue

Of course none of it is true.
For when I snap out of it the next day—one of the librarians in my deepest brain cells shoots up a cranky note via pneumatic tube to my conscious awareness—I know this just can’t be right. Thinking about him doesn't summon him like this. Wanting that 6 to be a 2 doesn't make it so. It's got to be another William Dawes. So I go back. And it is. For one thing: my Dawes was buried in Europe. This is some other guy of the same name & century, maybe someone with a great story, too, but I don’t know him at all.

Still, I enjoyed the mistaken delight while it lasted.

My Neighborhood

People have asked me for nittier-grittier details concerning what’s it like where I’m living in Australia.

For 5 weeks I've rented a bright studio apartment in the Newtown area of Sydney. Nothing fancy, it’s a perfect landing pad: a place to write, sleep, store my gear & wash up between events. Through the sliding glass door, the balcony has a view of a mellow parking lot, the flag of Scotland (on a castle-like university library) & two sycamore trees where lonely crows sit & bawl.

The Newtown neighborhood is ideal for me. Near the University of Sydney, Carillon Avenue is right off King Street, which is happily bustling every night of the week til 2 am. I can walk to the bus, the train, a movie theatre & all sorts of bookshops, vintage clothiers, bottle shops (=liquor stores), cafes & great restaurants.

Bookstores like: Better Read than Dead.
Sushi joints called: Eat Me Sushi.
(my favorite was a Jakarta Mexican restaurant called: Nacho Mama)

When I work alone all day & don't know anyone in town, it's good to be in an area with a lot of people & social businesses close at hand. Even being alone in a crowd, I prefer a happy crowd sometimes. The streets throng with students & hip adults. There are white homeless men panhandling (unimaginable in Jakarta). Some punks. Plenty of tattoos & piercings. Big dogs. Vegans. Young professionals in black coats. Restaurants & cafes tended to throw doors & all their front windows wide open; you just wear your coats inside.

Campos

Campos coffee is around the corner. Here, for black coffee you order a Long Black, but most people order what’s called a Flat White, which differs from a latte, I’m told, in that it’s slightly less fluffy on top. Campos makes a truly splendid coffee with artful ‘leaves’ swirling every lidless foam. Inside it’s packed & the guys working there are not your average baristas. They’re adults for one & consummate professionals: always working at full tilt, always pleasant, but with the attitude of serious craftsmen. I don’t know why that matters, but it works on me.

Durable Goods

I came with 2 suitcases & 2 carry on bags. Upon arrival, I finally unpacked the set of gloves, wool socks & the sweater I’ve been carrying for 5 months. In Sydney I added a wool coat & hat, & 50kg of books, which I shipped back. I wear the same pair of jeans & hikers just about every day for 5 weeks, as everything I else from Indonesia is too light.

I have a little desk for my laptop, an internet connection, a frying pan, 6 eggs & a hotpot. Life is good.

The Weather

Most days it was about 60 F & rained often. In fact, there were bad storms & floods while I was there (which did NOT happen after the Second Fleet arrived here in June 1790. The weather was off script!), which drought-ridden Australia welcomed.

Some days I walked through a green park, where people walked dogs & lorikeets cheetered in the eucalypts, to attend an early morning yoga class. I had to get up early (for me) because—for my one shiver of winter this year—it got dark at 5 pm.

Relaxing to Violence

My studio had a TV featuring 5 channels of hideous violent crime: local & world news violence; hospital drama violence; police drama violence; courtroom drama violence; & forensics investigator violence, all of whose protagonists--& I’m including the news reporters here--are brilliant, beautiful but 'quirky', misunderstood, fighting the good fight & tragically screwed up. Ah, the West. Nothing like a solid American explosion or six to cap a day of researching a penal colony.

Some nights, brimming with the violence I’ve done to my own characters, I can’t watch any of these 5 channels. At those moments all I can take is a Saturday morning special. Even lorikeets squabbling in the trees can be too much. I lean out on the balcony & plead with them to stop fighting. Just work it out, you birds. Can't we all just get along?

Some nights, after hearing the latest shaken policeman / lawyer / pathologist / news anchor remark, yet again, that he's NEVER seen ANY crime this HEINOUS in his WHOLE CAREER...I just want have a drink, cry through some happy kids’ movie about ponies, & sleep soundly.

And then write a book about about blowing bubbles in the park.

Perils of Detail

IN 1999 I wrote this sentence for a short story I was thinking about, called The Lime Tree:

“On the seventh day out from Portsmouth, in the brig of the prison hulk Wotworth, I began to forge the second coin from the handle of a spoon.”

I flat-out loved this sentence. It was a little magisterial, but I thought it had read-aloud rhythm. It had action, tension & the promise of more. It had neat words like hulk & brig, & strong verbs like forge. We were already set in a floating prison, which is a reliably dramatic, even melodramatic, setting. The fact that it’s a 2nd coin suggested there was a first forged coin, which a clever reader might suppose had something to do with the narrator being in a prison hulk now. These are things I only notice afterwards.
They seemed like honest virtues.

Better yet, it happened. A first fleet convict bound for New South Wales, a fellow named Thomas Barrett, did in fact forge coins from pewter spoons on board the ship. Maybe not on the Biblical seventh day, that I made up, though he could have. I switched it to the Second Fleet & a different forger. The Wotworth is a fictional ship. But the bones of it are real, which to me makes it stronger still.

Then I wrote some more, did some research & found things like this:

• Revision of the story required me to shift the forgery a few weeks into the journey. So I lost “the seventh day”.

• The 2nd fleet set sail from Stokes Bay, so I lost Portsmouth. (Only later did I realize that Stokes Bay is part of Portsmouth Harbor, so I got it back).

• A HULK is a floating prison, but not a sea-worthy vessel. Prisoners were kept in hulks in the harbour, but they were transported to NSW on ships called Transports. So I can’t use the word hulk.

• To call it a BRIG may not even be correct. These ships were converted to have cell decks or areas, but they didn’t tend to call them brigs. So brig was out, too.

• I found lots of interesting, incomprehensible slang words for coins: like George (the king, whose head was on coins), Brummagem button, or grunter. Forgers were called smashers or bit-culls.

• Look closely at those pewter spoons up there. Or any spoon. Which end would you use to forge a coin: the handle?? No reader has ever commented on that choice, yet once I noticed it, it had to go.

The technically corrected sentence would have nothing whatsoever going for it:

“A few weeks out from Stokes Bay, on the converted cell deck of the prison transport ship Wotworth, I began to forge the second Brummagem button from the nice, coin-like round part of a pewter spoon, as any sensible bit-cull would.”

So I had to cut it. What do they call that in school? “Kill your darlings.” In the end, it's better for everyone involved. Onward to greater struggles.

Guys with Giles Guile

22 June

ON a 5km coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee beaches, I lingered at the Giles Baths rockpool to watch the boys jump.

The Giles rockpool is a brilliant natural bowl at the northern tip of Coogee beach. At the base of dark cliffs, the rocks provide a nearly circular wave break & a rough pool the size of a house. A steep set of stairs runs down to it. Adults pause at the rail above to watch.

Skinny 13 or 14 year old boys in black wet-suits perch at the ocean-side rim & hurl themselves into the water exactly as a choice wave smacks the rock, exploding upwards, & then fills the bowl with a turbulent cream. The jumper’s head breaks to the surface again like an otter’s & he paddles up to do it again, about as happy as youth can be.

Rockpools are one of these minor wonders that makes me happy to be a human. Because if there exists a rockpool with exploding waves, then people will hurl themselves into it. This is axiomatic. Just as people will climb on unusual cliffs, rooftops & chairlift towers, even though it’s dangerous & there’s nothing up there. No amount of dire warning signs will stop people from doing this. It’s just what we do: if it’s fun, we’ll play on it.

It was here that I overheard a perfect moment of early manhood.

When the 3 otter-boys tired of jumping into the bowl from the rim they shivered up the steps & leapt from the various ledges above it. These were still a little ways down from us onlookers, some of them out of sight entirely. Being directly down from me, the jumps were riveting as the boys would simply disappear over the side to what looked like certain death by dashing against hidden rocks below.

This was their pool, though. Up close I could see beneath their goosebumps that they were leanly muscled & sun-bleached: they did this all the time. Their suits were well-worn. This was their childhood delight. Sure enough, a too-long moment later they’d bob out into the bowl & wiggle right back up the steps to jump again.

Then one time, all at once, they spy another boy at the top.

This new boy is the same height as they are, but he’s crossed over: conspicuously broader in the shoulder & jaw, ruinously handsome & confident in the way of a benevolent alpha. To their adolescent skinny, this new boy is comfortably tanned & muscled from surfing & swimming in the ocean. To their plastered-down kid hair, his mop has an intentional cut & style. More, he’s not wearing a wetsuit. He’s dry &—in a ballsy defiance of winter—wearing nothing but cool, red swim trunks. He does not have goose bumps.

The otter-boys approach this new kid as if summoned, as if drawn by magnets, wearing slack expressions of awe. This is their pool in some way & if this new kid were just a year younger, I think their gang might lay down some laws. But this—they can’t compete with this. They stand with their arms limp & their toes together, blinking. Suddenly their black wetsuits seem excessive, maybe something their mother made them wear to keep warm out there, honey, with all those big waves.

Slightly agape, they wait for him to address them. Or to do something amazing, something only kids who need razors can do. Gracious in his superiority, red-trunks only glances over the side here & there—so casual—as if for a place to jump. No, exactly for a place to jump. From HERE.

Red-trunks has drawn them up to the grassy flat part of the cliff, directly opposite the observation rail, where I’m standing. It’s much higher here—death-defyingly higher. It doesn’t take but a glance to know that our 3 otter-boys have never even considered jumping from here.

“Is it cold?” asks Red-Trunks, flattering them by asking. His voice has broken, too.

“Uh. No,” pipes an otter, trying to sound off-hand & cool. “It’s not bad.” Then again, he’s not mostly naked.

“All right,” nods Red-Trunks & without a second’s hesitation, flits right off the cliff. He flew. He levitated. I saw it. He just glanced down, raised his arms & vlip! The kid was gone. I didn’t see him again.

Now the otter boys are left standing there with their knees locked. They don’t move. They don’t speak. They exchange nervous glances. Their future has been written & not by them. Then one of them, nicely summing it up for all 3, says simply: “Fuck.”

They all nod at the rightness & profundity of this. Then, one by one, with no alternative, they throw themselves over the cliff.

Epilogue to Frog Porridge

A confession:

Over the course of this trip I dined on some extraordinary dishes. Some delicious feasts (Jumbo Seafood in Singapore, near Clarke Quay). A few items I don’t ever need to eat again (bad laksa; marmite chicken; frogs; avocado coffee). Some tasty foods I’d never expected to like (durian, frogs, tea eggs). Some fruits I’d like to eat all the time (mangosteen, snakeskin fruit, rambutan, mango & chili salad). A few dishes I liked a lot but ate altogether too often (fried rice with ikan asin (dried fish bits); noodle soup) And many things I’d never tried before.

The funny part of this culinary adventure—maybe something I shouldn’t admit—is that the very most delicious thing I’ve eaten so far this year was a fresh, gourmet, chicken pot pie that I bought in the Plaza Indonesia mall, at the central café, as a snack.

Chicken pot pie was one of my favorite foods as a child. That mall pie was the best one I’ve ever had. The irony only made it more savory still.

So you see, it hardly matters how far you roam or what you try. All of a sudden, the scent of something you loved at 9 years old can sneak up & lead you right back to where you started.

Inside-Out Fever

People at home ask me: During our 5 & 6 months in southeast Asia, did we ever get sick?

Yes.

When we left, there was no recommendation of special shots or pills to take in advance for Indonesia. We washed our hands often. Many public spaces (such as restaurants & temples) have hand-washing sinks right there in the main rooms. I kept hand sanitizer gel in my purse & a big bottle of it on the kitchen counter: the first thing we did whenever we returned home was squirt that over our hands. We drank bottled water & took some care not to eat foods involving unboiled water.

Thankfully, we did not contract malaria, dengue, yellow or typhoid fever, typhus, bird flu, or any other serious tropical disease that once made these ports such catastrophically mortal hazards, & trouble the country still. We stayed away from the flooded areas as best we could, where people were starting to see water-related disease.

A big public awareness campaign against malaria focused on getting people to bury plastic containers in the ground (vs. leaving them on the ground)...so that these didn't collect water & become breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

For generally healthy people, however, we did get sick often: about once a month, but nothing serious.

The plane trip to Jakarta landed both of us with bad colds. Vectors of water, food, children, pollution, hexes & germs all contributed to a well-rounded experience of minor knock-outs. What I came to call Inside-out Fever wrung me out twice. What is that? I suspect it's a kind of food poisoning. Imagine your body making a heated, 36-hour attempt to expel your insides, all at once.

Some fun, eh? For the most part we were just fine. Everything cleared up the day I landed in Singapore. Because the Singaporeans have gone at food standards, disease & pollution with the law of hammer & tongs. They mean business.

Dross

When I think about what I would do, were I a mega-wealthy, gifted statesman in Indonesia, I often think about garbage.

With 12 million residents in Jakarta, there’s a lot of it here & no regular or well-regulated system of disposal. I think to garbage not just because it’s right in front of me, but also because unlike the even more complicated & exciting issues at hand today (like mud volcanoes, corruption, the national airlines & trains crashing, the challenges of a recently decentralized government in an enormous, highly diverse country laid out on a series of islands, or division of mosque & state), fixing the GARBAGE problem seems possible & only good. This might one of those universal issues that everyone could support.

No? This isn't Singapore with its fleet of elderly scrubbing the curbsides with toothbrushes. So far Indonesian garbage seems redolent of everything BUT a business opportunity. So long as disease is not rampant, it isn't a paying priority. What's in place works well enough.

You’d at least have to, what, assemble some public & private bins, people to collect it, equipped trucks & drivers, train everyone & create a culture of making use of all this (maybe some laws against littering once the system is in place). And, of course, you'd need a huge place to put it all. If only it were that simple. Because there are high costs & many hazardous things that people dump, diseases would probably play a role, & then there’s the mysterious science of dumping.

The Science of Dumping

I read in the papers about someone who did take this as an opportunity of sorts. His family decided to let people use their back yard as a dump. This worked out just fine for years—people paid him to dump their things, his family made some money, the neighborhood was that much cleaner—until one day a towering wall of garbage came down like an avalanche & killed people.

Now, much of Jakarta does have regular garbage service of course—this is a functioning, international metropolis, after all, the business districts are no dirtier than some US cities, & the malls can as lavish & familiar as they come—just not everywhere & never enough. I’ve seen people peeing, bathing & throwing their garbage into the brown river right here in the city, in broad daylight. I’ve seen a guy exit his house to the street’s edge, swing a white plastic bag around & around, & then whoop! lob it right over the edge, where it opened in mid-air & scattered all his rubbish & slop into the water below.

On the eastern island of Sulawesi, Fulbrighter istri (wife) EJM & her husband actually paid someone to motorcycle their household garbage into town, to a trash bin. There was no where else to put it. They were trying to do the right thing. Then one day they caught sight of a certain cereal box in the river & knew at once that it was theirs. They were standing on a little bridge looking down to places where no one should climb. They couldn’t retrieve it. To do so would be almost meaningless anyway: there was garbage everywhere.

Even so, there they were on this bridge in Tana Toraja suddenly recognizing their own personal waste amongst it all, their own distinctive splat of squalor on this foreign riverbank, their drinking water lapping at it.

Consider what it would take—& what it would require you to do differently—for that to be possible for you where you are now, that is: for someone to motorcycle your household garbage into the next town (or the nearest river) for disposal. You’d probably have to produce a lot less garbage for one thing.

"Cleanliness is Part of Faith
Let's Increase Cleanliness in the Work Environment"
sign at the Sunda Kelapa pier

A Dream: Awake

14 June 2007

Last night I dreamed of leaving this world for the next.
Something about helping to re-join the long-separated shards of Man & moving on to the next evolution in consciousness. Hindu? More likely a lost memory of The Dark Crystal. I was excited about this. I was ready. I wanted to help.

With some sense of imminent doom to this world, now seemed the time to go. I made my good-byes, walked across a field to a little white annex room with a door, & shut it behind me.
The world was gone.

Inside I found a small office with a slightly alien woman behind the desk. What was it, her mouth? Its cut across her face unnaturally large? She was a bureaucrat but friendly enough. A little frumpy. She pulled out a series of forms & began an interview to see if in fact I was serious & willing to make this transition.

For awhile, I believed that I was. I started to sign things.

Then it became clear that what was going to happen was that I would literally be reincarnated as a newborn infant on a new world, a journey that seemed less & less like a true evolution of spirit, than simply starting over in a different, more alien society. Yet this society had some wholly familiar & mundane appetites. The secretary couldn't promise who my parents would be, she explained, but all the candidates had applied for a baby & had been vetted as truly wanting one.

For the first time I began to think about what my interviewer's motives really were.

There was a current fashion, she felt it fair to warn me, all the rage, really, but nothing to fear, of some (but not all!) parents using hormone technology to keep their children's bodies around 18 to 24 months of age until they were ready to leave home, at which point they'd be rapidly grown, straight through puberty & to adulthood, which sometimes had its complications.

She handed me a set of worn, soft-bound notebooks. They were unfamiliar. I flipped through them. They contained pasted-in photos, drawings & handwritten journal entries that were my own, as well as many pages of photos & journals interleaved by someone else. Someone who liked to keep rather anal lists of unimportant things. The blending begins. I was going to be the different-than-we-expected part of someone's made-to-order baby.

I lost my conviction—a dropped rag. Thin rationalizations sprouted up in its place. Well, I can't see the whole picture from here, I reasoned, best not to judge it yet. Well, this is all just to test my resolve. Well, who's to say the soul's greatest work isn't there, & achieved through that very suffering? Which made me wonder why that wasn't just as easily achieved here.

Turning the pages, I found myself looking at old photos from my childhood, photos I've never seen. Candid, wonderful snapshots of family, of Yosemite gatherings, of Girl Scouts, of good friends, of Evan—I began to feel a powerful, visceral love lift off the pages from my life in this world.

I saw my family in intricate detail from above, watched families I'd grown up with laughing together, overhearing years of verbatim conversations, which passed in split seconds like birds past a window. I saw E and E and E again, & felt this great love grow like a tree through my body & limbs & through my head. I glimpsed the true form of my love, more whole & real than anything else I knew. The gift of it was so patent, so beautiful & rare, that all at once I could not bear to leave it. I doubted I would ever find this much again by rolling the dice like this. To give up on any of it, on any person or part of this world, or on this great, lucky true love before my life had run its full course was utterly unbearable.

Without realizing it, I'd begun to talk. I was telling the secretary anecdotes of the people I was seeing in the journals & in my mind's wide-open eye. I was telling her in that urgent way I have, when I really want someone to understand exactly as I understand it. But these were not good stories of the sort I'd tell to engage a group for fun. These were details that only meant things to me, not stories at all but human instants, emotional touchstones, & I had literally bored the secretary to sleep.

She was slumped in her chair, blouse rumpled & glasses crooked, her froggy mouth open & drooling a little. I didn't know how much time had passed. I had my doubts still. I wasn't convinced how useful I'd been with my life. Or whether these feelings were simply self-indulgent, delaying greater works. But I didn't care so much about that anymore. I knew truth when I saw it & I knew what I believed in. Whether she was faking the sleep for my benefit or if she was really out, I took my chance & slipped back out through the door.

It opened to a different place than where I'd left.

So I began to make my way back Home—to the people & grounds that had seeded that love—through an Odyssey of new dreams & chains of events, hundreds of new people, wild sexual encounters, of battles that passed in instants, & one expansive moment comforting a lost childhood friend, removing her shoes & stroking her back, herself curled on a bench at some lonely train station, sad for reasons beyond my understanding. Of long voyages.

When I woke at last, surfacing to that still pond of the morning mind, it was with the pleasure of a choice rightly made. Maybe I did it after all, I thought. Maybe I did leave this world for the next: the same world but awake. The same world more clearly seen & better chosen, steadily seeking my way back to you.