Word by JAMIE JAMES (is author of several books, among them
The Snake Charmer, and is at work on another abut expatriate artists and
writers ; Executive summary by
darmansjah
The Indonesian
island’s true heart beats in mysterious ways.
The joyous, hectic
clangor of a gamelan, the traditional percussion ensemble of Indonesia,
startles me awake just after dawn. Outside my bedroom window in Seminyak, one
of Bali’s booming beach resorts, a dozen men wearing batik sarongs and
headdresses sit cross-legged in the parking lot of the new nightclub across the
street, banging on gongs and xylophones. I jump into my jeans and run
downstairs. The morning din turns out to be a melaspas, a ceremony unique to Bali that is held to bless the
opening of a new building. The gamelan’s brassy notes are intended to drive
away any evil influences. Inside, the owner, a Balinese man in his 30s with a
lurid crimson-and-cobalt tattoo on his right arm and a real Rolex on his left,
gives me a neighborly greeting. “I spent $4,000 on this ceremony,” Gede Wira
Apsika says, grinning confidently. “I am Balinese. I know that investing in a
good melaspas will bring my club
success.”
Towers of star fruit and oranges and frangipani
blossoms-offerings to the gods-crowd the dance floor, along with curlicued
sculptures made from carved pork rinds. Incense smokes in front of a
state-of-the-art sound system.
The pedanda, the
high priest, arrives in a vintage black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows.
Wearing a long white robe and a black velvet crown embroidered in gold, he
ascends the canopied platform erected for him in the parking lot and begins
chanting. An acolyteties a duck and a chicken to a post; their flapping and
squawking will end at sundown, when the pedanda
slits their throats at the climax of the ritual.
Passing tourists pause to gawk as masked dancers enact
ancient legends of princes, and dragons, alternating with a pair of beef drag
artists and their bawdy version of a stately dance usually performed by young
girls. The visitors may not realize it, but serendipity has brought the ma
glimpse into the true heart of Bali: the pervasive magic rituals and beliefs of
this intensely colorful Balinese Hindu civilization. Some of the visitors will
join tours promising to transport them to the “real Bali,” with performances of
classical Balinese dance or excursions into the forest by 4WD vehicles. Yet
they will never get closer to Bali’s innermost soul than here in the parking
lot of a new honky-tonk in Seminyak.
I moved here 14 years ago, following my Indonesian partner,
who wanted to open a restaurant. In those days, the area was still largely
agricultural, with outposts of budget tourism amid the coconut groves. My
bedroom window looked out on rice fields; on a clear day I could see the
island’s volcanoes smolder in the distance. but plot by plot, farmland here
gave way to high-rise hotels, swanky restaurants, and chic little shops, built
by entrepreneurs who proclaimed their intend to create an Ibiza, a South Beach,
in rural Indonesia.
Yet this worldly modernity is just a veneer; Under the
skin, Bali’s magical belief system is as muscular as ever. After this sacred
yet profane dance show with full gamelan appears at my doorstep, I decide it’s
time to dive as deeply as I can into the numinous core of this island of some
three million people.
I BEGIN BY
TRAVELING ABOUT AS FAR FROM Seminyak as I can go in both space and time, to
the pristine forest of the West Bali National Park. Apart from a two-lane
blacktop that cuts through the park and a low-impact resort on the northern
seashore, the land is completely undeveloped. It remains just as it was when
the island’s distinctive culture emerged thousands of years ago. Comprising 73
square miles rhinos or orangutans as other nature preserves in Indonesia do;
the Bali tiger was hunted to extinction by the 1940s. yet herds of docile mouse
deer wander the park, and southeast Asian porcrupines and marbled cats abound.
On an early morning horseback ride through the mangroves,
accompanied by stocky, stone-faced ketut Sulastra, a park ranger who grew up
near here, I see a pair of Bali starlings flutter up fro ma stand of bamboo.
This elegant white mynah, beloved emblem of the island, is one of the most
critically endangered species on Earth. In the 1990s there wer only about 16 of
the birds left, but thanks to captive
breeding programs the population now numbers at least 127. When India’s first
prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, visited Bali in 1954, he called it the
“morning of the world”; traversing what seems like a primordial landscape, I
can now feel what he meant.
LIKE MOST
INDIGENOUS BELIEFS, Bali’s religion of magic began an animism. At the top of
the food chain here is the reticulated pyton, which has been known to gobble up
children. When I ask Ketut if we might see a phyton, his cool ranger’s face
melts away and he exclaims boyishly, “Oh my god! A few weeks ago I saw a big
one, over ten feet long, that had just eaten a monitor lizard almost as big as
he was.”
The lizard, in death’s throes, writhed in the python’s
belly, ripping first one foreleg and then the other through the snake’s skin.
“It was a python with legs-a dragon!” Ketut says. The bizarre chimera
collapsed: the monitor lizard dead fro masphyxiation, the python from blood
loss-about as primordial as it gets. The story reminds me of the magical
transformations common in traditional Indonesian shadow-puppet theater. In the
old plays, gods often masquerade as ferocious beasts, only to reveal their true
identity at the end of the story.
The only sign of civilization in the park lies a couple of
miles inland, at Makam Jayaprana (Jayaprana Mosoleum). Ketut leads the way
through a dry streambed rustling with the scoot of small lizards, u a steep,
densely wooded trail that winds past a small cave with the image of a python
carved into the rock around its mouth. Macaques crash overhead, swinging on
vines through the canopy. We emerge at the crest of the hill in a small paved
plaza flanked by rustic sheds clad in chicken wire, huble shrines that shelter
mossy, weathered monoliths. We buy sport drinks and peanuts from a jolly,
toothless woman who runs a refreshment stand for visitors and sit down to catch
our breath.
According to Ketut, believers built these shrines after two
graves were discovered here and identified as relics of the legendary Prince
Jayaprana. Jayaprana was the adopted son of a powerful village ruler who
conceived a mad lust for Jayaprana’s bethrothed and ordered his heir to be
killed, so he could take her as his own bride. “Jayaprana was murdered in this
very place,” Ketut says, aching his eyebrows dramatically. When the young
princes died, a heavenly fragrance wafted through the forest and all the
animals wept-all but one, a white tiger that leaped on the assassin and killed him.
When word of Jayaprana’s death reached his beloved, she killed herself rather
than surrender to the wicked king, and she was buried here with her slain
lover.
Ketut concludes with the usual caveat of the Indonesian
story teller: “I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what people say.” Some
folks obviously believe: inside the largest shrine, its low frame entrance
shaded by marigold yellow silk parasols, two women straight from the fields,
still wearing soiled work sarongs, purchase incense from the shrine’s wizened pedanda. the women light the sticks,
hold them high in clasped fingertips as they chant a mantra, and plant the
smoking incense in a pot of sand in front of Jayaprana’s grave.
I ask Ketut to explain. Jayaprana was a mortal man who died
centuries ago: Why do people pray at his grave today? The ranger shrugs, as
though the answer is obvious, and says, “Bali people pray to him because of his
power.” The mojo of the martyred prince is undiminished by the passage of a
thousand years, its magic power transmitted directly from an era of courtly
legend to the age of social networks and sport drinks.
BALINESE MAGIC
REMAINED rooted in the land until the mid-14th century,
when a kingdom based in Java, the Majapahit, conquered the island and enforced
Hindu orthodoxy and the strict caste system that came with it. A few isolated
villages refused to accept the new regime and continued living in the old ways.
They are called the Bali Aga, meaning ‘original Balinese’. From the jungles of
West Bali I drive down a wide, shady highway, deliciously deserted compared
with the jammed roads in Seminyak, to the island’s cool central highlands. My
destination is a Bali Aga village called Trunyan. Continuously inhabited for
over a millennium, Trunyan is a living connection to the world of Prince
Jayaprana.
The village occupies the eastern shore of a deep, placid
crescent lake that curves around the base of Mount Batur, an active volcano
with several craters. When I surmount the western ridge and catch my first
glimpse of Batur, it looks too perfect to be real, like a prize winning science
fair volcano, with its gentle southern slope gashed by a flow of black basaltic
rock from an eruption in 1968. Driving down the switchback that leads to
Trunyan, I pass cows dozing beneath soaring banyan trees, old women in straw
hats tending gardens of tomatoes and chilies, and bunches of purple shallots
hanging fro mthe eaves of barns. When I reach Trunyan, I meet a shy, plump man
in his 40s named Nyoman, who abandons a chess game to show me around.
Trunyan is famous throughout Bali for a monolithic idol,
likely more than 1,100 years old, of the village’s guardian deity, known by
several names, including Ratu Ged Pancering Jagat. Outsiders aren’t permitted
to see the sculpture, but I know someone who did (or claimed to). I intend to
try my luck, and ask Nyoman to take me there. We wander through narrow alleys,
and busy family compounds where men squat in the shadows repairing fishnets. An
elaborately carved basalt gateway admits us to the temple enclosure. A few
thatch-roofed pavilions dot the grassy compound, surrounding a tall temple with
a seven-tiered roof, the home of Ratu Gede Pancering Jagat.
The temple is padlocked. I blandly ask Nyoman who has the
key. His silence is my answer: The Balinese hate to disappoint guests, but I
can see in a moment that this is a line not to be crossed. Although I’m disappointed,
I realized close contact with the great stone deity might have been even more
of a letdown. Magic requires mystery to exert its power. I ask him to describe
the statue. He hesitates nervously and finally mumbles, “It is man and woman in
one.” That’s all he will say, except that the statue rises 13 feet tall, almost
to the roof of the temple. A huge boulder guards the temple’s hobbit-size door.
Nyoman says that the rock has a name, but he isn’t allowed to tell me what it
is. It turns out that access to the temple is even more restricted than I
though. Nyoman says that no one is permitted to enter the temple except
adolescent boys who perform a ritual dance as part of a full-moon festival. The
coming-of-age rite for the boys doubles as preventive magic for the village.
At dusk Nyoman rows me in his perahu (canoe) to see the local cemetery, a mile along the
lakeshore. No rows of stone grave markers here. In Trunyan, rather than being
buried or cremated, the dead are exposed to the elements. I spot two corpses
laid out under bamboo fencing beneath a fragrant sandalwood tree said to be as
old as the village itself. At the tree’s base, cleaned bones and skulls form a
neat pile-the community bound in death as closely as it was in life. I find my
visit to the land of the dead not gruesome at all. In fact, I feel oddly
tranquil. As Nyoman skims his canoe back to the village in the crimson-streaked
twilight, I envy Trunyan its stack of bones, its cultural integrity, its cosmic
security.
THE FINAL
DESTINATIONS ON MY JOURNEY takes me
south to Ubud, where my friend Tjokorda Raka Kerthyasa, head of the ancient
court of Ubud, has invited me to attend the cremation of an elderly cousin of
his. Ubud has been Bali’s most famous village since the island was ‘discovered’
in the 1930s by the glamorous first wave of world travelers that included
Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Margaret Mead (who shot a
documentary film here), and the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who wrote an
illustrated 1937 book called Island of
Bali, which is still a reliable guide to Balinese culture.
Here, the royal court of Ubud-with its reputation for
dazzling pomp and ceremony-has never lost its sway, despite the abolishment of
the island’s feudal nobility when Indonesia proclaimed itself a republic in
1945. If Trunyan is Balinese magic at its most primeval, Ubud is the religion’s
high baroque, its most elaborate expression. No ritual here is more spectacular
than the funeral rites of the royal family; when a multiple royal creamtion was
performed five years ago, it made front-page news worldwide.
The mood at the temple grounds is festive, as spirited as a
New Orleans jazz funeral. Why not? The deceased lived a long life, blessed with
a great progeny. I sit with Tjok Raka, eating fried noodles fro ma buffet. In
addition to his aristocratic status in Ubud, Tjok Raka is also a member of
Indonesia’s national parliament; no one knows more about the challenges the
island face now. Yet he remains serene. “Bali survives,” he says. “We’re
performing our rituals, praying and meditating, trying to find wisdom, the
balance between the real world and the intangible. Anyone can experience that
balance, Westerners the same as Balinese,” He looks me in the eye and adds,
“Now you are on the earth of Bali. Even if you leave, Bali will be under your
skin.”
Tjok Raka hurries off to supervise the impending ceremony.
I ask his son, sitting on my other side, what to expect. Tjok Gde, an
accredited homeopathic practitioner, says that today’s event will be modest by
comparison with other recent royal cremations-a development he very much
approves of. “Every culture reaches a tipping point as it approaches
decadence,” he says, “and Bali has reached that point. Prosperity from tourism
has accelerated the trend toward bigger and more lavish spectacles, pushing
rituals beyond what they were originally intended to be.”
Hundreds of people have gathered in the street around two
large constructions. First is an eight-foot-tall black bull made of wood, with
gilded horns and harness twinkling with fake gems, which will hold the coffin
when it is burned; next is a nine-tiered tower, twice as tall as the bull,
painted in scarlet and forest green, flapping with pennants inscribed with
magic charms written in classical Ballinese script. The white coffin is loaded
into the base of the tower, a marching gamelan begins its bright clatter, and
the procession lurches to life. The bull, with Tjok Gde sitting astride it,
goes first, followed by the tower, carried by perhaps a hundred men. Tjok Raka
stands at the base of the tower, wearing the red sash of mourning and banging a
brass gong on his hip to encourage the carriers. The procession hurtles at a
headlong pace toward the cremation grounds, nearly trampling tourist who are
trying to get good photos.
Living in Bali, you become accustomed to the islanders’
clear-eyed, unsentimental acceptance of death. In Trunyan they do it by keeping
thousand-year-old secrets, in Ubud they put on a fabulous public show; both are
expression of the indestructible core of magic that keeps the island whole.
As I drive back to Seminyak, descending once more into the
coastal heat and heavy traffic, I feel hopeful. My friends in Bali worry about
the impact of the tourist boom on the island’s social fabrics and environmental
resources, but I’ve seen now how the mystical thread that connects the modern
island with its legendary past, delicate yet resilient as the filament of a
spider’s web, is spinning into the future.
As
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