by Nigel Barley
“The panoptic inscription of otherness evokes comparable chords of difference across the whole spectrum of harmonic discourse,” he declared. “Painting is self-definitionally a frozen synchronicity of diacritical stigmata.”
The meat smell would be my lunch, skewers of grilled and spiced chicken flesh in a peanut sauce fired specially with diced chilli by Nyoman. The Balinese palate was normally shy of chilli. In Balinese cuisine, colour is more important than taste. My mouth watered anticipatorially, a spring coaxed from an arid rock.
“The contrast, collision and accommodation inspired by such cultural intersections incite a reciprocal sense of loss mediated by a nostalgia for anachreontic similitudes. The diagnostic representational power of Walter Spies’s actual works derives counterfactually from the present absence of so many of them. It is the re-factualisation of Walter Spies’s works alone that can serve to de-mythologise him.”
“A lost cause.” I said through drool. “The war. The Japanese, the shipwreck, the deplorable failings of the postal service.” Iced mango. Nyoman had perfected the trick of freezing pure mango pulp, scented with a splash of brem, into a cunning ready-made sorbet. I would have that after.
“It is the poignant coming-into-being of a blank canvas, the un-creation of self-declared art that validates and de-frames a dialogic reassessment of exercised repressive hegemony.” Hibiscus tea, infused from blossoms gathered from my own garden. No, a glass of Ersatz Australian white wine
“Young man. Nobody left an account of his last work, as I am sure you know. Scherzo and Urwald were photographed in black and white, Ezekiel was sparingly described but Campuhan was completely lost. No one knows what was in it. Forget it.”
The anthropologists, having rejected Walter as a sadly naive eccentric, all those years ago, were now feasting on him cannibalistically, stripping the flesh from his bones, boiling those bones down to gluey prose. They vaguely perceived him as the answer to something but could still not see the question.
“But the undetermined existential status of the later works hypostatises the materiality and the calling-back-into-presence of their absent artefactuality, informing their own alterity. Is there no chance of their being found, re-DIS-covering themselves? Remembering is a process of deliberate forgetting and the obverse is true.”
I waved the smokescreen away, established another by the lighting of an indulgent clove cigarette. I permitted myself two a day.
“All vain speculation, I am afraid, Dr … er, Mr … Grits. We must accept the randomising process of history – the process that we call history. In this mordant climate, an untended artwork rapidly degrades. Walter did not always use the most durable materials, they were not available to us then. That was his great hope for the continued development of traditional art – the need to replace objects subject to decay. The termite and the moth the ultimate critic. Death leads to renewal, a very Balinese concept. QED. And now, I am afraid, at my age, I need to rest. I, too, have been ravaged by the tooth of time. I am sure you understand.”
I rose, abruptly but firmly frail, invoking senescence as my get-out-of-jail card. Grits gathered his goods from the tabletop unwillingly, stuffed them sulkily back in his case. It was not the loss of my insights but the removal of an audience for his own opinions that he regretted. Kasimura, in his Kempetei uniform, was the true archetype of all educators. Now what had happened to him? I led Grits slowly towards the gate, the perfect, self-effacing host. I led him over the treacherous loose tile, that obligingly pivoted under his weight and sprayed muddy water – left from the morning watering – up his leg as he stumbled and sprawled full length, case and papers flying. Charlie would have made it funnier. I watched his confusion, unable, from age, to help, but elaborately dusted down his front as solicitude naturally required, blessed him and his works, waved him, all hot and bothered, crestfallen and pratfallen, away down the road. He would not see the comedy of it but my own tread was light enough as I headed for the kitchen to give Nyoman his orders for my lunch to be served outside. Grits’s glass stood on the table undrained. I abhor waste.
Passing from the kitchen, through the sitting room, I entered the bedroom. These days, I was the only one who ever came here. The shades were rolled down against the noonday heat and threw bars of bright illumination against the far wall, lighting up the painting that hung there. It was, of course, Walter’s Campuhan, the last painting he ever did, held back, with judicious illegality, by the leggy postboy and finally delivered years after its completion. It was a small painting, some forty centimeters square, and simply framed and he had lavished upon it all the colours I had brought to distant Ngawi. The background was one of Walter’s Rousseauish jungles, overlapping, interpenetrating plants, tendrils, flowers, every vein and pistil unstintingly delineated, but dark green to black in colour, as though seen against bright light. Amongst the flora, the fauna goes about its business. A wide-eared monkey turns its back and stares into the centre of the painting, butterflies flap, birds stretch their wings, an enormous cricket stridulates like a violinist and one of Walter’s big, red dragonflies launches itself, whirring, into light. To one side, the crumbling royal temple across the river stands out in ghostly white. When Balinese spoke of Walter, they had no doubt that all his ill fortune flowed from having set the roof of his house higher than that of the temple. In vain, he would protest that he had had it checked by the government surveyor and this was mere illusion. The gods, it seems, though implacable realists, have eyes but no theodolites to measure their offence. Below the temple, on the river bank, sits the hairy giant of myth, a chicken coop of entrapped and distressed legong-dancing virgins to hand, busily cooking the rice with which he will consume them. Two streams, one white, one blue, converge on the centre which is flooded with great shafts of light from above, an energised core, where sunbeams and water fuse into some novel compound to create a pure, swirling vortex of translucent energy. Then the rich sky above fades into tones of deepest blue and violet and there is the demon, Kala Rahu, a hideous, coarse head with bulging eyes and one hopping leg, gnawing at the moon in great tearing bites of bottomless malice.
Grits had reproached Walter for selling a vision of Bali-as-Paradise. That was not true. He had known that, in every paradise, there is a serpent but Walter had clutched it to his breast though he knew it would ultimately devour him. The myth that he purveyed was the myth of himself, as a man who had found that contentment that we all seek, who always sat in golden sunshine, who lived a life without the oppression of wage-slavery or anxiety, a Parsifalian Peter Pan for whom every day brought joy and the pleasure of beauty, what he, himself, might have called a Lebenskünstler, an artist at living. And though we knew that such a path was closed to us, the fact of another’s attaining it somehow redeemed the world, as a single holy man’s holiness can save us all. That was why the rich and famous beat a path to his door and laid their wealth at his feet. I fingered the stark curved initials of his signature, the magical index of his being. There was a soft tapping from the passage.
“Nawegang, Pak Rudi. Ajengan sampun siaga.” Nyoman, formerly the leggy postboy, grown to be my chubby helper, letting me know that lunch was ready. After the Japanese left, it had been necessary to retrain the servants not to bow and hiss as they had been taught. Then, after the Revolution, they were no longer allowed to call you Tuan, since this was unsuited to the allegedly egalitarian ethos of the new republic. So many shibboleths. So many taboos.
I stepped out into the sunlight, around the loose tile and settled to my small but appetising lunch, eating with my hands. My neighbour, pottering about his orchids, cackled at me, waggled his watering can in greeting and we did the little mime at each other of “come eat”, “no, please go ahead”, that politeness requires. Then, I lifted my glass, in a toast without words, and sipped the sharp, cold wine. Sauve qui peut.
Rogue Raider: The Tale of Captain
Lauterbach and the Singapore Mutiny
by Nigel Barley
I
t is the First World War and Julius Lauterbach is a German prisoner of war in the old Tanglin barracks of Singapore. He is also a braggart, a womaniser and a heavy drinker and through his bored fantasies he unwittingly triggers a mutiny by Muslim troops of the British garrison and so throws the whole course of the war in doubt. The British lose control of the city, its European inhabitants flee to the ships in the harbour and it is only with the help of Japanese marines that the Empire is saved.
Rogue Raider is the adventure story of how one ship, the Emden, tied up the navies of four nations and how one man eluded their agents in a desperate yet hilarious attempt to regain his native land. It is fictionalised history but a true history that was deliberately suppressed by the authorities of the time as too embarrassing and dangerous to be known. Revealed here, it brings vividly to life the Southeast Asia of the period, its sights, its sounds and its rich mix of peoples. And through it an unwilling participant in the war becomes an accidental hero.
In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles
by Nigel Barley
Stamford Raffles is that rarest of things — a colonial figure who is forgotten at home but still remembered with affection abroad.
Born into genteel poverty in 1781, he joined the East India Company at the age of fourteen and worked his way up to become Lieutenant Governor of Java when the British seized that island for some five years in 1811. There he fell in love with all things Javanese and vaunted it as a place of civilization as he discovered himself as a man of science as well as commerce. A humane and ever-curious figure, his administration was a period of energetic reform and boisterous research that culminated in his History of Java in 1817 and it remains the starting-point of all subsequent studies of Indonesian culture.
Personal tragedy and ill-health stalked his final years in the East. Yet, though dying at the early age of 44 and dogged by the hostility of lesser men, he would still find time to found the city-state of Singapore and guide it through its first dangerous years. Here, mythologised by the British and demonised by the Dutch, he is more than a remote founding father and remains a charter for its independence and its enduring values.
In this intriguing book, part history, part travelogue, Nigel Barley re-visits the places that were important in the life of Stamford Raffles and evaluates his heritage in an account that is both humorous and insightful.
“A witty, sprightly and elegantly written book” The Sunday Times, UK
“Alive with curiosity … a charming and affectionate book” Times Literary Supplement, UK
“Barley’s irreverent and amusing tone … makes his work accessible to all” New York Times Review of Books, USA
About the Author
Nigel Barley was born south of London in 1947. After taking a degree in modern languages at Cambridge, he gained a doctorate in anthropology at Oxford. Barley originally trained as an anthropologist and worked in West Africa, spending time with the Dowayo people of North Cameroon. He survived to move to the Ethnography Department of the British Musem and it was in this connection that he first travelled to Southeast Asia. After forrays into Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Burma, Barley settled on Indonesia as his principal research interest and has worked on both the history and contemporary culture of that area.
After escaping from the museum, he is now a writer and broadcaster and divides his time between London and Indonesia.
Also by Nigel Barley
The Innocent Anthropologist
A Plague of Caterpillars
Not a Hazardous Sport
Foreheads of the Dead
The Coast
Smashing Pots
Dancing on the Grave
The Golden Sword
White Rajah
In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles *
Rogue Raider *
(* published by Monsoon Books)
Contents
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Rogue Raider: The Tale of Captain Lauterbach and the Singapore Mutiny
In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles
About the Author
Published in print by Monsoon Books in 2009
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Monsoon Books
ISBN (epub): 978-981-4358-31-6
ISBN (paperback): 978-981-08-2351-8
Copyright©Nigel Barley, 2009
Cover paiting: “Rehjagd” by Walter Spies. Courtesy of Walter Spies Foundation.
Cover design by Sin E Design (www.sinedesign.net)
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