We are also exposed to the rhythms of our village of Pengosekan, and its remarkable community of healers, farmers, mystics and artists. Nyoman Batuan, our landlord and village headman, became our friend, mentor, and in many ways our gateway to understanding the psychology of the nation. It was Batuan who explained that, although only the Gods can own land, they can lend it to man for his temporary use. Through his assistance our house was built in the traditional manner, and we learned that what had first seemed simply a glorified jungle treehouse actually contained remarkable hidden know-hows.
The craftsmen knew, for instance, the precise critical angle beyond which an elephant-grass roof will begin absorbing rather than rejecting rainwater. The thatch is kept dry through a subtler technique. The cellular structure of a coconut tree is such that it convects moisture from its roots to its branches. Our home’s eight coconut support-trunks were planted upside down so that they continue, even in death, to draw moisture from the roof thatch down into the ground, where it belongs.
It is customary to assemble the final roof in a single day. The owners provide a feast, with plenty of palm wine, to which the whole community is invited. The roof goes on in a few tumultuous hours. In this way, they tell us, there is a piece of each person in every home in the village – which helps bind the community together.
The Balinese are remarkable in that they give but half their time to the chores of food and shelter; the rest is devoted simply to the celebration of life. The festival days, the sacred plays and dance, the processions which move jangling through the villages at night quicken us to the hidden rhythms by which the island lives. Time belongs to the gods, not to the clocks of the linear West. The Hindu-Balinese calendar is annually calibrated by the astronomer-priests according to lunar and stellar relationships, so that the rites of fasting and planting, rejoicing and reaping, weeping and cremating are synchronized with the actual bio-rhythmic pulse of the island.
With Batuan and the community we have shared the all-night pilgrimages to the Mother Temple shrines on the slopes of the Gunung Agung volcano. We have felt the earth quake with them, helped when the paddies were swept away by floods. We have surrendered our fears and our dreams to them – and they have shared everything with us. In the early days, when we had some money to spare, we would contribute to the village festivals and later, when we fell on harder times, and they had become richer and more famous for their art amongst international collectors, they would support us.
Here, when I came closest to watching my own slow death from septicaemia after a motorbike accident, and Western medicines had ceased to work, I was nursed back to health by their healers. It was they who made very clear how the body is but a reflection of the life force within it. The illusory world of ‘Maya’ revealed its meaning – not only through the constantly shifting physical environment, but also through the all-night Wayang shadow-puppet dramas, where the shadow parade of gods and demons, creatures and people reflects the eternal dynamics between order and chaos. They recount the trials of mythological heroes on their quest for enlightenment through the tempestuous waters of illusion. Their shadow images, like our own lives, are seen as merely the surface reflection of an unseen fabric of energy which majestically moves beyond time. Living amongst the Indonesians, where the pursuit of wisdom virtually amounts to a national pastime, the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Ether became real for me in a way they had never been in the writings of the Gnostics or the Pythagoreans. Expressed in their paintings and sculpture and stories, these elements are seen as the successive thresholds, or levels of initiation, which the warrior of consciousness must broach on his path to enlightenment.
In our 10 years of wandering, we had tasted something of these trials in near-drownings, starvations, falls and fevers. We faced trials by Earth, hunting for pythons deep in caverns of human skulls; Water, too, and Air, driven by storm through mountainous seas in tattered pirate ships, or dropping vertiginously into jungle clearings in light aircraft. We ran Borneo’s uncharted rapids in Dyak canoes, dived with sharks in the rip-currents of Komodo, and were sluiced off Javanese roads in monsoon flash-floods.
I thought we had also faced our trial by Fire, when in 1983 we had ignored government safety warnings and climbed the newly erupting ‘Child of Krakatoa’ volcano in the Sunda Straits. This was on the last day of an exhausting 11-month shoot tracking down the healers, mystics and wise men of the islands. It was to be the opening sequence to our whole 10 years of Indonesian adventure filming. Scorched and chastened, with the entire footage for our series finally in the can, Lorne returned to London to process and store the film, and I to my Hollywood A-frame to collate the slides and assemble this book. Here, over the years, I had gradually collected an Indonesian treasury of rare and beautiful things – as well as an uninsurably valuable archive of some 14,000 slides. My laser and holographic equipment lay fallow and cobwebbed. My girlfriend, after my 11-month absence, had understandably left me, and it was in the company of my two still-faithful black cats that I threw myself into writing. They would sit patiently either side of my word processor as I wrote into the small hours, purring appreciatively when I was pleased with myself, and opening their eyes enquiringly when I was not.
At 10 o’clock one morning one of my cats leapt on my face. Until very late the previous night I had been writing about Krakatoa and trials by Fire, and was deeply asleep when the cat woke me. Suddenly I heard the guttural roar of fire from my studio above. I bounded naked upstairs to find the place merrily ablaze. I tried grabbing my slide-albums, but they were melting like a cauldron of boiling oil. I lunged for the computer which contained my first four hard-laboured chapters, and it literally burst into flames at my touch. My next thought, since saving my life’s work was out of the question, was for a pair of underpants in the probable event that I would shortly find myself in public. Evidently deciding that prudery was the better part of valour, I hotfooted it down to the bedroom again in time to witness half the ceiling crashing in flames on to the bed I had been sleeping in moments before. Quickly beknickered, I attempted the stairs to my treasures again, but they, too, were now burning. Geodesic sculptures were dropping from the ceiling and exploding around me, and my giant perspex magnifying mirrors, like contorting windows on to hell, were melting down the walls. My tapestries and books were turning into pitch-thick smoke, and the heat, from which I had hitherto been protected, it seems, by the initial surge of adrenalin through my body, now made it plain that this was the last window of opportunity for effecting a dignified, if empty-handed, exit.
I just made it out of the front door and to the end of my 20-foot path, when the picture windows imploded inwards and the house erupted behind me through its triangular roof like Krakatoa herself. I stood there wretchedly in the street, watching the unbelievable actually happening in front of me, while my neighbours nervously hosed their roofs against flying sparks. I had no insurance, and nothing in the bank. When the firemen finally arrived I pointed at the sacrificial pyre still burning and burbled something about my priceless slide-collection. They responded by giving the general area a few desultory squirts with their foam, but informed me the place was a total loss, and that I should be fully content with having got out of it alive. The City Fire Inspectors later concluded that the fire was caused by a ‘freak focus’, due to the rising sun catching and reflecting off one of my holographic magnifying mirrors. Being struck by light, the Inspectors informed me, was statistically even less probable than being struck by a bolt of lightning.
Lawrence completely burned out in Hollywood. (JAN BUTCHOFSKY)
My notes and books and shells and treasures, the tools of my precarious trade, had utterly gone. The vinyl binders which had contained my slides were discovered amongst the ashes as a single, solidly welded lump. Hard and sharp as a meteorite, this carbonized giant clam finally yielded to saws and machetes, razor blades and tweezers. At its centre were several hundred perfectly preserved slides. Radiating outwards were different sta
ges of transformation, giving an eerily beautiful look to the already exotic subject-matter. The firemen’s water had contained an extinguishing agent which at specific temperatures has an exalting effect on colour emulsion. Thus my trial by Fire had shriven me of all but the Dyak tattoo I stood up in, and enough imagery to illustrate – something of both the linear and the dream dimensions of an odyssey into the oceanic hemisphere of our beginnings.
1. Lawrence Blair, Rhythms of Vision: The Changing Patterns of Belief (New York: Schocken Books, 1976).
2. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang Utan and the Greater Bird of Paradise (London: Macmillan, 1869).
Fire-fading images of a vanishing world. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)
Into the Ring of Fire
In the summer of 1883, from the Sunda Straits between Java and Sumatra, the volcano of Krakatoa suddenly blew 11 cubic miles of ash and rock into the stratosphere, sending a shockwave seven times around the globe. The dying ripples of its massive tidal wave lapped up the English Channel, and the volcanic debris, wreathing the planet, altered weather and harvest patterns around the world for years afterwards. Despite Kipling’s dictum that ‘Never the twain shall meet’, the East had reached out and touched the West – with a premonition, perhaps, of the planetary holism which was to grip our minds less than a century later when we walked on the moon, looked back, and for the first time saw the whole earth rising as a single bubble of life. It was also a foretaste of the explosive energy which, within a life-span, would be ours to control or abuse.
Within a few decades, forests and animals had returned to the shattered islands which were all that remained of Krakatoa’s outer rim; and from the waters between them emerged an ominous smoking mound, sometimes growing at a rate of more than three feet a month. The locals call it ‘Anak Krakatao’ – ‘Child of Krakatoa’. It has actually raised and submerged its sulphurous head five times since its first appearance in 1925, and when Lorne and I reached it in September of 1983 it was nearly 300 feet high and so active that the government had denied us landing permits. Under these circumstances we were obliged to reach it at night, in a small open boat crewed by two very anxious and expensive local fishermen.
We approached the crackling silhouette through floating fields of pumice which rattled against our wooden hull, and when we stepped into the surf to haul our boat on to the beach, as black as the night around us, our bare feet sank into sand too hot for comfort. Moving like ants in a sand-trap we gasped slowly up the near-vertical rim of the secondary crater, into a storm of ash which masked the gathering dawn.
It was nearly daylight by the time we reached the summit. A few miles away, in three directions, lay the crescent islands of Verlaten, Lang Eiland and Rakata, which were all that remained of the original mother volcano’s metamorphosis. Beyond them, against a curiously speckled sea, we could survey the distant coastline of Java on one side and Sumatra on the other. We could just see the hazy point where, in that August of 1883, the Dutch administrator of south Sumatra and his family, had observed the tidal wave rise inexorably 150 feet right up to the veranda of his residence, pause, and withdraw again, taking some of his flowerpots, half the hillside, and the entire town with its population of some 800 people. To the south, off Java, we could detect where the mouth of the Lampong river lay, where another survivor, a fisherman, had found himself floundering in a furious inrushing sea, and had seized and ridden for miles inland what he had thought was a log, but discovered to be an equally terrified crocodile.
The grey ash cone on which we crouched pared away beneath us to blend with the leaden sea like an optical illusion. The only reference point to give us a sense of our height was the tiny boat on the beach beneath us, with the two fishermen, who had not only declined to follow us up the crater, but also expressed an urgent desire to avoid even setting foot on shore. Around and beneath us coiled an oily, uneasy water, flecked with floating stones. We had read in our Admiralty Pilot that the temperature of the sea round here could vary very suddenly by hundreds of degrees. Ships are advised to give the islands a wide berth, as the seabed is constantly shifting and massive magnetic anomalies cause compasses to swing wildly round the rose.
It was these haunted waters which had swallowed up nearly all the 36,000 victims who had perished in the first blast. A crewman in Samoa, which passed through the Sunda Straits shortly after the eruption, described seeing bodies and pumice stretching all the way to the horizon. Floating pumice fields were so thick that sailors could walk on them – and some bore bleaching human remains 4,500 miles across the Indian Ocean to deposit them along the beaches of Zanzibar.3
By the time we reached the volcano’s outer lip it was deafeningly noisy. It was erupting rhythmically at about eight-minute intervals, which were preceded by two separate and terrifying sounds. First, as the whole island trembled like jelly, from way beneath us came what sounded like a giant rustling great sheets of brown wrapping-paper. This was followed by the bowling-alley racket of stones and boulders ricocheting off the walls of the crater as they ascended from a great depth to gush out over our heads in billowing clouds of debris and smoke. Our equipment, clothes and bodies were penetrated by the finest, hardest black dust. Every so often a football-sized boulder would thud into the ash nearby. I was reminded of the Javanese guru we had recently interviewed who claimed to teach his students how to walk through rain without getting wet!
As the sun rose, the sky became perfectly clear and blue all around us, except for directly overhead where the island was creating its own weather. It wore a personal mushroom cloud which fired sheet lightning directly down into its crater, with thunder so head-shattering that it was hard to convince the body it had nothing to worry about. With each blast came a drizzle of hot stinging ash, which settled on our eyelashes and blistered their roots. We had difficulty in breathing, our hair stood on end, and the tape-recorder and camera electronics began initiating a synch-pulse all their own, transforming our voices into a sort of demonic rasping.
Our shooting permits, after what had been 11 months of filming, were due to expire that evening and, though shot at the very end, the sequence on Anak Krakatoa was intended to introduce the very beginning of our whole 10 years of adventure films. This was indeed a place of power, shunned as studiously by modern shipping as by local fishermen, and yet it was also a chance to pay homage to the mysteries moving beneath the surface of this strange island region. Here, at the site of the most devastating explosion in human memory, we wished to demonstrate both the unity and the fragility of the earth by blowing soap bubbles across the crater. One might hardly suspect that so simple a task for so few seconds of film could prove so practically trying and, on reflection, so symbolic of our whole chain of adventures, attempting to keep aloft and alive a consecutive string of luminous mirrors against rather ridiculous odds. Considerable effort was spent first on locating the appropriate soap powder and the pharmaceutical glycerine, and then on experimenting with proportionate mixtures and blowing techniques for producing the strongest bubbles. But these glistening globes, though blown by the panting thousands, lived in that rain of ash only for frustrating fractions of a second.
Lawrence at Anak Krakatoa. (LORNE BLAIR)
Standing on Anak Krakatoa we could see and feel the fragility of the world, for we also stood at the gateway to its oceanic hemisphere. Krakatoa is merely the first of a whole chain of active volcanoes which arc down through the Indonesian islands and round the Pacific to form what geologists call the Ring of Fire. To pass beyond it is to cross the threshold into another dimension which, for all its pragmatic gifts to the West over the centuries, remains as mysteriously little-known to us now as it was for the first explorers.
It was really a scent, the aroma of spice, which first drew the West’s attention to the Eastern islands. Exotic substances began arriving in medieval Venice, brought through overland trading routes and via Arab mariners across the Indian Ocean. Spices, together with tales of phoenixes
and ape-people, filtered into the bloodstream of the sleeping Europeans. Nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and curry-powders enabled us, for the first time in history, to preserve and stockpile food across the seasons. With insurance against hunger came the ability to plan ahead, and a different structuring of time emerged. The ability to store more food than we could eat at once also meant being able to buy and sell it in real quantity – and the merchant cities arose. The resultant economics was to lead directly to the Renaissance, and thence to the Industrial Revolution. No sooner had we caught the first heady whiff of the East and altered the chemistry of our food with it than we made a quantum leap in our cultural and artistic range as well. The Age of Discovery was launched by our greedy desire to bypass the traditional trading routes and find the source of spices for ourselves. Christopher Columbus was actually looking for a quicker route to the heart of Indonesia when he stumbled on America. Spice drew us round the world, showed us it was round, and led us to confront ourselves again.
Whereas Indian, Malay, Arab and Chinese merchants had by and large traded peacefully for the exotic treasures of the islands since before the time of Christ, the marauding European buccaneers sought to own and control the real estate itself, and began four centuries of infighting. Regional spice monopolies were bitterly fought for, claimed and lost again by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English adventurers, who spilled as much of the locals’ blood as each other’s in the process.
Ring of Fire Page 3