12 Noon local time, Thursday, Nov. 15 (0400 Nov. 15 UTC) 08 44 S 115 13 E.
Temp. 89, Humidity 75%, Cloud Cover 15%. Bali Marina, Benoa Harbor, Bali,
Indonesia.
We hired a car and driver for two days to take us around Bali. Those who
have been to Bali can profitably ignore the rest of this missive, knowing
well enough that even one as erudite and knowledgeable as the Captain will
not in this case be equal to the task of describing our investigations. But
as surely as Maverick's bow must rise to every sea, we must not shrink from
the attempt though it is our part in this little drama to concede before we
begin.
It may seem unfair to the rest of our ports of call, but is not really an
exaggeration, to say that any twenty minutes of our tour of Bali taken at
random would have contained more exotica than the entire South Pacific put
together. There are many reasons for this and they are the people. Whether by
design or culture, the Polynesians and Melanesians are a little shy about
sharing themselves with outsiders. There is little of this reticence in Bali,
to put it mildly. Also exotic are the prices: One night at a charming inn in
Ubud with private bath, a real--not faux--bamboo and palm roof, balcony
overlooking a rice paddy and forest, was $8, including breakfast. Of course,
there are also prices that are exotic in the other way.
One has to revisit one's skepticism about alien abductions after visiting
here, but with little doubt we believe the people we see are also the ones
who make the architecture. The crafty South Pacific Islander can make a
dwelling for free in a short time using found organic materials, and as a
result most traditional structures are temporary. In Asia the architecture of
the temple, and in Bali this is usually a Hindu temple, is highly ornate,
ancient, and meant to last. The Hindu temple is the most elaborately symbolic
physical creation of the human mind, making by comparison our gothic
cathedrals seem, aside from the flying buttress, unimaginative. The Captain
has not the space to treat it here, but the reader is assured that his time
will be well repaid by even a brief perusal of the literature on the subject.
Not only is the temple itself physically representative of animal and
vegetable fertility, the makeup of the physical and spiritual structure of
the human being and the world, consciousness and release therefrom, the cycle
of death and rebirth of the individual and the cosmos and again, the release
therefrom, various mythological stories and other abstruse theological
themes; but the very process of building the temple is structured so that
this activity also symbolizes most of the above. Just for example, when a
temple is to be properly built, astrologers are consulted and a year before
building commences, sacred cows are put on the plot to fertilize the soil in
preparation for the implantation of a seed, represented by a box wherein are
seven little fragments representing the fundamental elements of the universe.
On the appointed day, an elaborate ritual takes place and the priest, having
purified himself, places the box in the fertilized ground while imagining he
is having sexual intercourse, as a representative of the male half of the
world, with the earth, representing the female. The details of this ceremony
are so complexly symbolic they can be described here only in outline. Of
course, Christian architecture has the disadvantage of being much more
limited by its own creed, as many of the themes considered sacred by Hindus
are no-no's to the Christian and others are not recognized at all. The
temples are everywhere in Bali, and their design and construction,
influencing the houses and workplaces, by itself gives the country that
never-never-land feel.
What reaches one's ears is also exotic, and the word falls far short of
suggesting anything meaningful about the sounds of the gamelan orchestra. I
would be willing to stipulate without bothering to carry the investigation
further that this musical group creates the strangest sounds, musical or
otherwise, ever heard on our planet. For starters, each orchestra is tuned
only to itself, there being no objective tuning standard. Secondly, the group
is split roughly into two, one playing a scale that divides the octave into
five intervals, the other dividing it into seven. Among these two groups are
gongs, xylophones, metallophones (a xylophone-like instrument), and bonangs
(which are tuned, kettle-shaped gongs), as well as bamboo flutes and a bowed
string instrument called the rebab. The latter two carry a very weird melody
that relates to the percussive sounds of the others in a manner that, I'm
quite sure, cannot be described by science. There are also drums. The
xylophone-type instruments are struck by what look like geologists' hammers, and who knows what kind of pattern they could possibly be up to, even though it's clear there is a sophisticated structure, or several at once, being observed. Each instrument's tuned metal plates are separated from one another by the intervals above, but separated from their neighbor's instrument, with whom they are playing in something similar to, but not the same as, unison, by odd fractions of tones because we have that 5 or 7 tone scale. Something like that. Things speed up and slow down, dynamics are dynamic, and the general effect is that of the Furies let loose and
freaking freely in a magic forest on Venus. It makes one quite schizophrenic,
if to be schizophrenic is to be separated from what is widely considered to
be reality, to have these sounds enter your brain.
The gamelan band may play on its own but also accompanies the shadow
puppets and the traditional dances including the Barong Dance, of which we
attended two. These are performed in intensely elaborate costumes and portray
simple mythological themes from a dream universe that are no doubt as
familiar to the locals as old I Love Lucy reruns. As part of this
presentation one sees that weird Balinese dance the women do that you may
have seen on TV. They move in spectacularly strange yet graceful ways,
complete with that side to side head movement, and then strike a really
warped pose while they give out a Mona Lisa smile and do that wiggly Vulcan
thing with their bent-back fingers. It is hard convince oneself that they are
not communicating with an overlord on the home planet to tell him to take the
short one in the third row with the beard. (Where did the little guy go?) The
effect of the gamelan orchestra and the Barong Dance together cannot be
described, so I will attempt an impression. Suppose you go to a concert and
there are three pairs of musical groups playing: bluegrass band, chamber
orchestra, and a percussion ensemble. By some trick of subspace, a time warp
allows you to hear all six simultaneously, as one of each pair plays forward
and the other backward, even though they both start at the beginning, end at
the end and vary their speed independently. Meanwhile, as the lead singer
starts to sing his limbs fall off and become the Three Stooges with Dan
Rather. A skilsaw blade flies in from the sky like a Frisbee and cuts of the
top of Curly's head, revealing a musical top therein. But as Rather listens
to it, the sound makes him turn into a red and green parrot that lays an egg
which turns into a life-size replica of the Statue of Liberty, which, it
turns out, only comes up to your knee. That would all make sense, compared to
the Barong Dance.
Bali has an aroma, or perhaps several. I think I misspoke in the last
dispatch about the odors of the marketplace. It may very well be that I was
not smelling rotting vegetation alone, but a combination of that and fresh
durian fruit, which smells like rotting organic material of some sort to the
uninitiated. Among those aboard, only Ship's Fresh Fruit Enthusiast Terry Sh
rode has tasted this delicacy, and he bought one that has been lending poor
Maverick its fragrance. But that's not the main aroma in Bali. Rather, I
believe it comes from the ubiquitous handcarts from which vendors sell their
hot soups and curries. It's a reasonably sweet and smoky smell, not at all
unpleasant but definitely not London.
The landscape of Bali is nearly as dramatic as Moorea, the flora as
luxuriant as Tahaa. There are recently active volcanoes, peaceful rice
paddies from 1000 years ago, and jungle-y forests where sacred monkeys cavort
in their own temple. But the land is upstaged by the scenes one sees as part
of everyday life, as cockfights, the sometimes-pestilential vendors, monkeys,
motorbikes, and brightly costumed religious processions coexist in close
proximity, all surrounded by mysterious buildings and bathed in strange
aromas. On the way to Candidasa we saw a very colorful funeral procession
wherein the pallbearers, carrying the bier on a bamboo platform topped by a
costumed person on a throne under bright yellow and white umbrellas, were
doused with bucketfuls of water as they circumambulated a statue of Brahma
and Vishnu in the middle of a roundabout, stopping traffic. The water tossers
accompanied their assault from a pickup filled with water with shouts and
laughter, feinting this way and that as those carrying their heavy load ducked and sidestepped,
themselves laughing almost hard enough to drop their burden. One really has no suitable western
intellectual, emotional, or spiritual category to file this under, nor an appropriate response,
and the scene you just read about may never have happened, and you may never have read about it.
In this land one is subject, like Don Quixote, to enchantments.
PS to Peter Siegel (Mr. Siegel is every bit as much of a Britney Spears
devotee as the Captain, and he writes to find whether our Britney is here as
popular as elsewhere.) If the above hasn't convinced you that, with Bali, we
have parted the curtain shielding us from the weird part of the universe, you
will certainly be persuaded by the rather icky fact that NOT ONE Britney
poster was seen during our outing. Eeeeeeuuwwww. I was all it's kinda creepy
to be in a place like, so far away from reality.
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