‘We’ve got it!’ he shouted. ‘Ringo’s accepted our proposal for repeating Wallace’s search with the Bugis pirates for the Greater Bird of Paradise. He’d have gone for the Toraja “star funeral”, too, if we only knew when it was happening. It was talk of “pirates” and “spaceships” that did it! Can you be ready to leave in three weeks?’
Of course I could. Someone had to keep an eye on him. I would be responsible for sound, second-unit camera, and most of the stills although I’d never operated a movie-camera or tape-recorder in my life.
We departed from Heathrow with two still-cameras, two 16-mm cameras with an underwater housing, a tape-recorder, a small Honda generator, a ‘five-minute’ Sun Gun for night filming and a pocket-sized slide-projector. At the airport we bought a sheet of tourist slides (the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, the Forth Bridge, the pearly kings and queens of London, the Apollo moon landing, etc.) to show the Indonesians something of our bizarre world.
We took a tripod, but it fell into the sea shortly after our arrival, and thereafter twisted on its axis with the serenity of a chain saw. We took a first-aid box stuffed with Lomatils, plasters, anti-malarial tablets and insect repellents – all of which proved useless to ourselves, but helpful to our reputations as ‘white medicine-men’. We took a Boy Scout’s compass, an aviator’s map and a primitive Polaroid camera, which was to prove more valuable than our passports. We indulged ourselves with some jars of Marmite and bitter marmalade (which proved not to go well with rice) and an emergency medicinal bottle of Grand Marnier. In addition to the latest tapes by the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Neil Young, we took some reference books on shells, fishes and birds – and an 1890 edition of Wallace’s classic The Malay Archipelago.2 With these, but with no filming permits, since they were impossible to obtain at the time, we winged it to the steaming metropolis of Jakarta.
Whether by some trick of the Mercator Projection, or due simply to the natural chauvinism of cartographers, Indonesia seldom reveals her true proportions, or even her whereabouts. Sprawling across the equatorial seas between mainland Asia and Australia, her nearly 14,000 islands include the lion’s share of the world’s largest and least explored. Amongst them are the last great wild gardens of the earth still harbouring uncatalogued varieties of creatures and man. In 2 million square miles of ocean, and stretching wider than the continental United States of America, Indonesia’s geographical, legal and linguistic complexities have kept most of her, even today, effectively off limits to all but the most stubborn foreign travellers. Even the Dutch, who colonized the nation longer than any other Western power, were more interested in trading posts than in exploration, and they vested their authority in the local chieftains, who in turn vested theirs down the line so that a great many Indonesians have still never seen a European. Since winning their independence in 1949, the government, based in Java, has sought to control its vast domain partly by making it difficult even for Indonesians to travel freely throughout their own country. The nation thus still remains largely unknown to the world, and to herself.
It was here that we sought to capture a record of the least contacted tribal peoples while there was still time. This was both for the hell of it, as well as for the annals of the newly developing discipline of psycho-anthropology, whose aims are in part to define the global range of human ability. It was a pursuit which we could only continue, of course, so long as we managed to sell our films to commercial television simply on the strength of their entertainment value.
‘Psycho-anthropology’, a stepchild of anthropology and psychology, emerged as a sub-discipline at just about the same time that its purest source data – the least-contacted tribal peoples – were vanishing into extinction. Now dwelling only amongst the remotest regions of Third World nations, they represent the final fraying link in a hitherto unbroken chain of memory which stretches to the roots of the whole human tribe. Amongst them are found the last adepts of controlled altered states, out-of-the-body experience, psycho-navigation, environmental wisdom and time-honoured alternative methods of giving birth, healing, living and dying.
Reaching these peoples, of course, first required running the gauntlet of a bureaucracy which treats ethnographic film-makers with the same distrust as it does their subjects. For, having barely embarked on their first Industrial Revolution, many Third World nations tend to regard their tribal peoples with the same antagonism which caused the more mature nations to extinguish theirs just a century earlier.
Further difficulties lay in raising funds in the first place. However enlightened our investors might be, they were not always convinced we would return from improbable places with improbable footage of expeditions for which no insurance company would dream of covering. But for us the effort still far outweighed the really terrifying prospect of trying to make a living working 40-hour weeks, as our father would have said, ‘like proper, responsible adults’.
Totally isolated from our own culture for long periods, we became vulnerable to forgotten times and tribes re-awakening within us. Our journeys, we found, were to take us simultaneously to some of the least-charted regions of the planet and to the least-charted regions of our own minds. What began for us as the effort to capture a purely objective record of what we saw gradually dissolved into a quest, an odyssey of self-discovery which actually took place amongst the last of the lands of real living kings and queens, dragons and pirates, cannibals and headhunters, mystics and magicians.
Much of our material now contains footage of peoples and events which, in the space of just 10 years, have forever vanished or at least changed beyond recognition. It is odd to reflect that the firmest objective record of what we experienced now lies in the films – themselves mere illusory genii of chemicals and light, bound to 400-foot reels of processed trees and silver. Like genii, too, they must be uncorked in a dark room to dance briefly in their own time, before receding into the invisible world of memory again.
The job required the smallest possible team, for maximum mobility and minimum social impact, capable of staying for indefinite periods in unexplored territory amongst barely known peoples, while eating their food, speaking their language and sharing their lives as intimately as possible. This form of ‘guerrilla ethnography’ has obvious advantages over larger, better-equipped crews with more limited time in the field, but it does not include the consolations of insurance, institutional funding or any guarantee of selling the films afterwards.
Working sometimes independently of one another on separate teams, but for the most part together, we managed to capture some 80 hours of usable film spanning nine separate expeditions. This required juggling between us the hats of sleuths, writers, researchers, logisticians, cameramen, diplomats, doctors, navigators, tooth-pullers and leech-pluckers, to name but a few. Our film stock and equipment, which comprised some nine-tenths of our travelling weight, had to be husbanded first past the Pac-Man thicket of Customs and Immigration, thence through unpredictable months in the jungles, and finally out of the country again intact and undetained.
Apart from improbable luck, much of our success as a two-man team – and siblings at that – comes less from our similarities than from our differences of character. Lorne is diurnal; I am nocturnal. He can go for long periods without food; I can go for long periods without sleep. Whereas I cease to function if I can’t put at least something in my mouth every day or so he, beyond a certain threshold of exhaustion, falls unavoidably asleep, bolt upright, with his eyes wide open. One of them admittedly retains a glazed, half-shut look, but the other, propped open behind his monocle, continues to observe the world with bulbous attention. This can be useful during the occasional compulsory attendance at official Indonesian functions, or when waiting in government offices for filming permits to be granted; but there have been dinner parties, at which he was the guest of honour, when he was actually thought to have died at table.
Lorne doesn’t much mind what he looks like. He is not even d
isturbed by the fact that his beard, monocle and considerable size are not always the ideal ambassadorial countenance for delicate first encounters between East and West. Many of Indonesia’s peoples, for instance, who have never previously seen Europeans, grow very little body hair, and all of it is straight. To come upon someone with hair curling all over his face is astonishing enough to overlook at first a certain glassiness in his left eye – until, that is, he absent-mindedly lets it fall to dangle from its string. It is then that all hell breaks loose and we find ourselves standing alone in the jungle again. Lorne excuses his monocle on the grounds that, being long-sighted in one eye and short-sighted in the other, he needs but one lens to neutralize the problem and that one lens is harder to break than glasses and it is easier to carry spares. Since he does 90 per cent of the filming, and is astonishingly blind, the loss or breakage of his optical eccentricities is a cause for concern. On extended expeditions there were occasions when he would break or lose even his spares, and I would find myself combing deserted beaches and jungle tracks looking for a small circle of glass on which, I was acutely aware, rested the success or failure of an entire project.
Lorne with his monocle. (LAWRENCE BLAIR)
Lorne sees best when looking through his camera viewfinder – the contents of which become his whole world. It is easy now to understand why so many cameramen have filmed their own deaths. On numerous occasions I have held him by belt and legs in the rattling back of an open truck, from the edge of a storm-tossed boat, in the path of galloping Sumbanese warriors. Deaf to my shouts, he remains hypnotized by the contents of his viewfinder, which unfold before him as if on a giant cinema-screen on Oscar night, where he is an enraptured member of the audience, completely disembodied from this temporal peril.
Lorne is slow-moving, solitary, watery and, like a true Cancerian, carries his home within him wherever he goes. I am gregarious, cerebral, Geminian, and have sought, somewhat to my cost, to make the world my home. Our metabolic differences were once explained to us by a Dyak companion in Borneo as due to the fact that I belong to the tribe of gibbons, whereas Lorne belongs more to that of the orang-utan. But we are both primates, and though we have often functioned as one organism we have nevertheless brachiated through the forests of adventure at rather different levels, and have seen through different eyes. Our fears, too, are rather different. Under dangerous conditions, his chief concern is for the welfare of the film stock and equipment, whereas mine is more for keeping us both alive.
National frontiers are the ‘red zone’ for guerrilla ethnographers. There were alarming stories from a French colleague who had first been made to pay an exorbitant ‘import duty’ for bringing his film stock into the country – and then, on his eventual departure, three times as much again for ‘export duty’ because, it was argued, exposed film was clearly much more valuable than virgin film. An even grimmer tale came from an Australian team which, on leaving the country after hazardous months of filming the interior, helplessly watched officials open every can of their exposed film to establish that they were not smuggling.
In those days the Customs officers were still sufficiently unfamiliar with tourists and their toys to have difficulty distinguishing between amateur and professional equipment. Everything that could be dismantled, we carried in pieces on our person. In Singapore, Lorne had begun climbing the step-ladder to the plane with the generator in his backpack, when he lost his balance and fell over backwards onto the tarmac, waving his arms and legs in the air like a beetle.
In Jakarta they quickly found the generator and looked stern. We explained later it was to power a lightbulb so that we could read at night where there was no electricity. I remember Lorne saying something to the effect that it might look a bit bulky but, with their excellent petrol, in the long run it was neater than bringing hundreds of spare flashlight batteries along. The officials exchanged some old-fashioned looks, and then discovered our most incriminating object – the 16-mm underwater camera housing. They already considered the ways in which foreign visitors spent their money was pretty odd. The obsession, for instance, with snapping endless portraits of complete strangers to take back home as mementoes struck them as particularly humorous. When we explained that the underwater housing was to enable us to take portraits of the fishes underwater, they dissolved into disbelieving laughter and ushered us into the country.
It was to be nine months before we finally emerged again at the other end of the archipelago – shocked, emaciated, but exalted. It was a sobering introduction to the adventurous years ahead, and the start of a most fruitful – if at times near-fratricidal – partnership which, in all conscience, one could hardly advise other would-be young explorers to emulate, unless exhaustively financed and gluttons for punishment.
For me the most dangerous aspect of the job has been not so much the very real dangers in the field as the psychological vertigo of alternating for months at a time between the utter extremes of the planet; from the film markets of California’s Hollywood Hills, where I rented an A-frame, to the remotest jungles of the East. The violence of this transition became more cushioned for me in the mid-seventies, when we built our bamboo and coconut-wood home in the highlands of Bali, which for seven years now has served us as a sort of decompression chamber between the two worlds.
In Los Angeles, where I lectured for a living, I pursued my fascination for the harmonic patterns and golden-mean ratios which run so consistently through the sacred art, music and architecture of both Western and Oriental mystical traditions. With the advent of the new technology of lasers and holography it was possible for the first time in history to build the ancient consciousness-raising symbols out of pure light. With the devoted assistance of several technical wizards we converted my A-frame into an alchemist’s chamber of optical and electronic apparatus with which to visualise the unseen dimensions of sound and form so often described by metaphysicians.
We built holographic Kabbalistic Trees of Life, and revolving human-sized mandalas. We assembled laser sculptures of ‘the subtle anatomy of man’, with the acupuncture points hanging in space and the lines of qi energy flowing between them in a shimmering web. There were geodesic spheres of optical plastics which appeared to explode like novas when struck with light. We also experimented with ‘cymatics’, the relationship between sound and form, and built meditational drums (or ‘cymaflowers’) whose surfaces, scattered with powders and liquids, formed perfect harmonic patterns in response to correctly chanted tones and mantras. It was an experience which revealed a whole new meaning to the mind- and body-altering sounds ritually used by the tribal peoples of the East.
From this rarefied environment of pure light and pattern, I would suddenly find myself winging across to Indonesia again, to join my brother for months of immersion in a different dimension of discovery.
For years we had studiously avoided visiting the island of Bali on the quite false assumption that its international airport and beach hotels placed it beyond our professional interest. But when curiosity got the better of us we found ourselves almost immediately drawn to a highland community where, like a long-awaiting gift, we were invited to build a house for about a thousand pounds on a verdant piece of property. Far from the tourist beaches, this idyllically simple three-storey home would serve as a sort of Base Camp One for our more ambitious sorties into the extremities of the nation. The differences between living in my Hollywood A-frame and in our Balinese house required an organism crunching transition, which in many ways parallels the fundamental complementary opposites between East and West.
Successful living in Los Angeles requires controlling the environment, whereas in Bali it requires a total surrender. My Hollywood A-frame was hermetically sealed and thermostatically controlled. Our Balinese house has no doors, walls or windows and is protected from the occasional horizontal rain by dense surrounding vegetation, and by reed blinds which can be lowered to the floors. In Hollywood I could interact with the outside via telephones, answering machi
nes and television. My television harangued me to buy endless varieties of insecticide and creature-killer, whereas in Bali it is taboo to move into a new home before the geckos and house-spiders have taken up residence first. These creatures are part of the Balinese pantheon of animal deities, for it is they who are the mediators in a rich and harmonious ecology of wildlife with which, to be comfortable, one must become intimate.
At night, on a dark moon, lying on my raised sleeping-platform at coconut level, the stars are reflected in the paddies as strongly as if down was up, and half this universe dances round me as the mating fireflies move through the trees and the house. Some of them become trapped beneath the thatch, and whirl above me as diminutive galaxies of light.
Whereas in Los Angeles I manipulated costly hot and cold water in appropriate vessels throughout the house, Bali is a network of streams and rivers which, like veins and arteries, must be distinguished one from the other for their various uses. To wash our dishes, for instance, requires placing them for a few hours in a rattan basket in the swift-flowing stream deflected through the kitchen to the left of our house. The stream to our right is encouraged to pour through our bathroom, roofed with flowering creepers, in a perpetual shower. We live near-naked day and night, in close and harmless proximity with insects and snakes, in an average year-round temperature of 75–85° Fahrenheit. Here we submit to a deep sea-change of hormonal rhythms and intestinal flora – and prepare ourselves for unknown months of deep immersion amongst the wilder regions of the archipelago.
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