Ring of Fire
Page 5
With a prickly, reptilian skin, the durian can reach the size of a football and weigh 15 pounds. Every year several people are killed by these preposterous objects, ripe and fermenting, plummeting onto their heads from a great height. You cannot harvest a durian, but the first person to reach a fallen fruit, even on another’s land, may claim it. It smells and tastes so richly revolting that it is claimed to be the only fruit expressly forbidden in the plush Mandarin Hilton hotel in Singapore. Even in Jakarta’s 16-storey Kartika Plaza hotel the fruit may only be consumed on three floors specially set aside for it. A durian dilettante is a breed apart: there are even special clubs which devote themselves to following the durian season round the entire archipelago – feasting and waxing lyrical on the fruit’s narcotic delights.
Tigers are also particularly addicted to ripe durian. Sumatra is the only place left where tigers are on the increase, and with the human population expanding in inverse proportion to that of deer and wild pig, the tigers have begun making the logical dietary transition. Shooting a known man-eater used always to be done by attracting it to fresh meat, until it was discovered that a ripe durian is a much stronger lure. There’s even a joke about the ‘reverse run’, which can happen when several people converge at speed towards the sound of a fallen durian, to find they have been beaten to it by a possessive and alcoholic tiger.
The Sumatran tiger is more closely and deceptively striped than his larger Indian cousin, and quite a bit more intelligent. In 1956 a Dutch ship was bound for home up the Malacca Straits with a cargo of animals for the Amsterdam Zoo, when a large Sumatran tiger burst out of the forward hatch, scattering deck-hands. It sniffed the air once, went to the starboard railing, where the coastline of Malaysia was clearly visible only four miles away, and returned to bound over the port railing 60 feet into the sea, to begin swimming directly for the shores of Sumatra, a further 80 miles away and still beneath the horizon.
But more than elephants, big cats and early man moved down from continental Asia across that early land-bridge to the islands. In later years wave after wave of Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic influences swept from the flowering civilizations of Asia and entwined with the pre-existing ‘oceanic’ animism of the islanders. The Wallace Line also appears to mark the division between two very different kinds of mind – the ‘continental’ and the ‘oceanic’.
There is increasing evidence that the original island peoples did not migrate eastwards from continental Asia, but evolved independently for millennia amongst the isolated atolls of the south Pacific – resulting in a different turn of mind. 7 Little is known about early Micronesian Melanesian culture mainly because they developed no writing, passing down their knowledge through words and music instead. But we do know that they reached a high, technology-free civilization, practised a sophisticated form of navigation, and ranged over the entire Pacific in ocean-going outriggers.
Severed from the rest of the world by sea and sky, an atoll-dweller, unlike a continental people, cannot easily resolve his differences with neighbours by simply fighting or moving on if he loses. He must adapt, turn inwards, integrate with his community. Food and possessions become shared, rather than bought and sold. Decisions, too, tend to be collective, rather than autocratic. So limited are the staples, materials and real estate of an atoll-dweller that every food, object and square yard of his diminutive space becomes invested with mana, an invisible, inter-connecting kind of holy force, making everything individually ‘alive’. Rein is given to the intuitive, or ‘right brain’, faculties which perceive wholes, rather than their parts. Whereas the ‘continental’ mind is logical, monotheistic and autocratic, the ‘oceanic’ mind tends to be holistic, polytheistic and democratic. The ‘earth’ mind is more practical, the ‘water’ mind more mystical. The difference between them is further revealed by the barriers which each had to overcome in its discovery of the other. In the early days it was water, in the form of the ‘endless ocean to the west’, which was the first major obstacle for continental European explorers. For the oceanic explorers their obstacle was land. This is well illustrated by the oral history of the Gilbert Islanders’ discovery of South America in the distant past. On sighting the desolate Andes after a voyage of four months, they were far from delighted, and apparently turned round and sailed back towards their atolls. They described it as Maiwa, ‘the wall at the side of the world, four moons’ sail to the eastward... a land which stretches to the north and to the south without end... beyond the furthest eastward island it lies – a wall of mountains up against the sun’. 8
Indonesia is aware of being strung between the two worlds of eruptive land and tempestuous water. The nation refers to itself not as ‘this sovereign land of ours’, as do other countries, but to ‘this, our land-and-water’ – and considerable ritual effort is devoted to maintaining a balance between the two. The hereditary sultans (of which there are only two officially left) are still called ‘Susunan’ – the ‘Life-Giving Mountain’, or ‘Volcano’. The Sultan of Jogjakarta annually gives the royal substances of his hair and fingernail cuttings to be deposited as placatory offerings in the crater of the great Merapi volcano. Only a few years ago, during the ‘Hundred-Year Ceremony’ propitiating the Gungung Agung volcano on Bali, Indonesia’s President Suharto attended the sacrifice of over 80 animals, including leopards and eagles, which were cast into the smoking crater.
At the other end of the spectrum is the powerful Loro Kidul, ‘Goddess of the South Seas’. We met her under various guises throughout the islands: with the Bugis pirates in the Moluccas, where we cast offerings into her whirlpool; and amongst the tribesfolk of Sumba who rely on her signal – in the form of the one night each year when Sumba’s beaches briefly swarm with red sea-worms – to initiate their deadly warsport between lance-throwing armies of mounted warriors.
We met her, too, as the patron goddess of the birds’-nest gatherers of southern Java, who pursue what must be one of the world’s most hair-raising professions. Much of Java’s bleak southern coast consists of 300-foot cliffs which are assaulted by breakers which have swept, uninterrupted, from Antarctica. The swiftlets which produce what the Chinese consider the most desirable edible birds’ nests roost in caves beneath these cliffs. The gatherers descend the sheer cliff-face on coconut-fibre ropes to an overhang some 30 feet above the water where a rickety bamboo platform has been built. From here they must await their wave, drop into it, and be swept beneath the overhang into the cave where they grope around in total darkness filling their bags with birds’ nests. They must then choose their wave again to carry them out and up with the swell so they can seize the ropes dangling from the platform. The timing must be very precise. We talked to a gatherer who had misjudged the tides and found himself unable to leave the cave for 32 days. In utter darkness, breathing rank air and deafened by the breakers outside, he kept himself alive by groping around for newly hatched swiftlet nestlings and the grubs which thrive in the dung on the cave floor.
It is perhaps understandable why these men, who earn their livelihood in the very embrace of the Goddess of the South Seas, should take her so seriously, but it came as more of a surprise that the Sultan of Solo should do the same.
Sultan Pakubuono XI of Solo comes from a lineage reaching back to the ninth century and, despite Indonesia’s official birth into the modern age with her independence in 1949, the Sultan, like his ancestors before him, remains the uncrowned ‘Pope’ of pre-Islamic Javanese mysticism. For many years we sought access to him and the inner sanctum of his medieval palace, until in 1981 he finally gave us the first filmed interview ever granted by one of his line. It was then that we made the surprising discovery that the Sultan, ‘the Great Mountain’, is officially married to Loro Kidul. Rising from the palace courtyard is a 90-foot phallus-shaped tower. Once a year his ‘Superlativeness’ is ritually cloistered in its upper chambers for a night of passionate consummation with the Goddess of the South Seas. The outer walls of the palace are thronged thr
oughout the night by crowds eagerly awaiting news of the outcome. For it is on her satisfaction with this supernatural tryst that the stability of the following year depends, and the equilibrium between Indonesia’s volcanoes and oceans – her earth and water natures – can prevail.
It is hardly surprising that the Indonesians have been so profoundly affected by their kinetic environment, for theirs is the most tectonic nation on earth, boasting some 34 per cent of all the world’s active volcanoes, and registering an average of three earthquakes a day measuring over 4 on the Richter scale. Of a total population of some 160 million Indonesians, about 151 million of them dwell on or near volcanoes, thriving on the rich nutrients which make their islands so fertile.
Here in Indonesia, at the most fragile geographical division between the earth’s outer, congealed crust and its inner, molten magma, we also found amongst the peoples themselves the thinnest division between our more recently evolved left-brain, rational faculties, and the millennia-old storehouse of right-brain intuitive wisdom. The supernatural is constantly present, and what the West considers in the realm of the paranormal the Indonesians have raised to a fine art; the islands seethe with sorcerers, healers, sages and mystics.
Whereas the continental mind prefers a firm division between the ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’, the oceanics see no such clear distinction. The Dyaks of Borneo, for instance, have always referred to the orang-utan as the ‘man of the forest’, treating him at least with the dignity accorded to neighbouring tribes, whereas the Europeans, on examining the first Tierra del Fuegans brought back to the West, could not decide whether to classify them as humans or animals. This approach characterizes much of the brief and rather shameful history of anthropology, where the study of Man has not been of you and me so much as of those other strange folk whose bodies, habits and beliefs were alien, but whose lands, raw materials and pagan souls were so promising.
Only now, when the tribal peoples have almost gone, has the West awakened to the fact that, rather than their lands and possessions, it is their subtle abilities and specialized environmental wisdom, forged since the beginning of time, which are of paramount importance to us all. The new psychologies of hypnotic suggestion and ‘creative visualization’ are increasingly aware that we are capable of infinitely more than the assumed constraints of ‘physical laws’ on our bodies and minds would have us believe. The Indonesians have no such constraints to overcome. From earliest childhood, through trance and possession, they practise surrendering to other than themselves. In High Javanese the word for a man means ‘half a woman’ and that for a woman means ‘half a man’; when a couple are separated, the individuals can be possessed by the energies of their mate. Entire communities may become possessed. In the Moluccas we watched people piercing their cheeks and arms with swords, submitting to having their backs and chests beaten with boulders, eating glass, rolling in fire – and suffering no ill effects.
In Ceram and Borneo, when a villager is taken by a crocodile, there are shamans who specialize in possession by the apologetic spirit of a crocodile god, who leads the community to the guilty beast. Whereas ‘animal familiarism’ is now only a fading memory in European folklore, it is still common in the islands, and there are shamans who claim regularly to enter the bodies of creatures to stalk the woods and fly the air at night. Like the sages of India, there are individuals with ‘animal power’ who can sit alone in the forest, attracting wild animals to them. Conversely, people can become possessed by animal souls. In Cilicap in southern Java we have watched old men being most convincingly possessed by what they call the spirits of horses, monkeys and pigs. They began eating hay, nuts and even raw offal in enormous quantities, until slapped out of trance by the overseers. There is also a form of transferred possession in northern Celebes in the rite of the ‘dancing bamboos’. It begins with two entranced dancers fencing with short bamboos, and ends with the dancers unconscious in the arms of the community, while the bamboos continue dancing on their own as if they were slivers of paper on an electrostatically charged diaphragm.
The dramatic arts of masked dance and puppetry are also but thin excuses for shamanic possession. One of the more sinister involves the Segale-Gale puppet, which is occasionally still seen during the funeral rites of Batak chieftains in north Sumatra. Human-sized, and resting on a wheeled platform, the puppet is operated by a shaman through wires and levers extending some six feet behind it. With articulated limbs and facial expressions which even allow the effigy to weep tears and gnash its teeth, it springs fully to life before the hypnotized community, dragging the priest behind it, speaking recognizably in the voices of the recently as well as more distantly departed.
It was a form of meditational surrender and possession by a higher form of energy which first drew us to Indonesia, and the Subud ashram in Java. But this only gave us a taste of the variety of altered states we would encounter ahead. Isolated for long periods amongst little-known peoples, our sole defence lay in a sort of encounter therapy, a complete vulnerability to our hosts’ ways of being and seeing. There were places where we were the first Westerners ever to have been seen, though we pre-existed in their racial memory as ugly, dominating invaders. To be a highly visible minority of two in communities which were often as expressive as they were antagonistic was an abrupt reversal of the roles we had so unthinkingly come to accept in our British prep schools. To be greeted by complete strangers with instant derision was a sobering experience, and it vividly reminded me of what it must have been like for those first black people, in the 18th century, walking the streets of England freely. There were coastal villages in Celebes and Borneo where the men would scowl and stride away, the women would slam their doors and window shutters in our faces, and the children would follow us down the street in howling, baiting hordes, challenging us to lose our poise. This was more a psychological war of attrition than a physical threat, but it was on just such an occasion that we used what might be called our only ‘weapons’ – a couple of pairs of plastic, luminous, blood-shot eyes which I had picked up in an American novelty store over Hallowe’en. An aggressive mob of youngsters had been closely dogging us for some time and, emboldened by our apparent failure to notice them or to quicken our pace, had begun throwing stones. When we stopped and slowly turned, with our bulging eyes in place, the gang scattered with such blood-curdling screams that we wondered if we hadn’t overdone it, and felt sufficiently ashamed of ourselves never to use the eyes again.
In Bali, amongst the community of wise and loving farmer artists where we have our home, such a stunt would be as unbelievable as it would be unnecessary, for when it comes to the supernatural – or human trickery, for that matter – the Balinese are old hands.
The full power of trance possession first came through to me in Bali while watching the all-night shadow plays by the great dalangs, or puppet-masters, such as Madra. Though tragically killed in a recent motorbike accident, Madra was an undisputed maestro of the art, as well as an easy and informative friend whom I had known for some time, so it was a shock to witness the epic genius which came through him, and the transformation which both he and his audience underwent in that open village square the first time I saw him perform. I had to leave my place in front of the screen frequently and go behind to convince myself that each new voice was indeed coming from the same man.
The dalang is the supreme shaman of the community, and requires rigorous yogic training in breathing, fasting and energy-conservation techniques, as well as in languages and mythology. Above all he becomes a technician of controlled trance, to which he then surrenders totally – perhaps rather unknowingly as do our greatest actors and musicians. The dalang may perform for up to 10 hours without a break, while singing and speaking in different voices for each of as many as 125 different shadow-puppet characters. Alternating between four different languages, ranging from the archaic Pali of medieval India, through Javanese and Balinese, to the coarsest of contemporary ‘market’ Indonesian, he will s
imultaneously conduct a full gamelan orchestra with his feet. Through his voice and hands will pour all the archetypes of the great Hindu epics of existence, their battles and heroes, gods and demons. The national news, local gossip, your neighbour, too, all come alive and take their place to strut briefly with the immortals on the shadow screen. The dalang is the apotheosis of the wizard priest, the shamanic bard who conducts the Eternal into the presence of the community, confronting them with their deepest values and beliefs. The Balinese talk of the great dalang who, when ‘possessed by light’ beyond the shadow screen, are occasionally seen to glow with a flickering nimbus, as they speak in voices not their own.
The shadow-screen becomes the battle-ground for the eternal conflict – at least in this illusory world of Maya – between the primordial opposites of Light and Darkness, Chaos and Order. Neither the demonic nor the angelic are suppressed. In the dramatic arts, which children are taught as soon as they can walk, each participant has a chance to become personally possessed by the soul of the character he is playing. One of the most fascinating of these rituals is the rarely seen ‘Sangyang Dedari’, in which exquisite 11-year-old girls, dressed in the silk and gold of the Star Maidens, stand unsupported, with eyes closed, perfectly upright on the whirling shoulders of adult dancers.
I recently returned to Bali for the first time since my Los Angeles house burned down. I feared to find that it had changed, as many had told me, beyond recognition. But this was not so. There are more roads, there’s even a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a small supermarket by the beach. Our house in the hills is now closer to the beaten track: Batuan’s painting community has grown much larger, and more sophisticated, but its exuberant creativity is if anything richer still.