elsewhere

SCAVENGERS

15 September, 2009—Taipei Airport, Taiwan—

BAGGAGE

9 October, 2009—Taipei Airport, Taiwan—

IN HARNESS

(18 September, 2009—Bangkok, Thailand—

Who’s this old man staring at me in the mirror this morning?  And what is this journal—filled to bursting with anecdote and description, with name and place and date—which, though resting before me, feels more like something attached to my shoulders and dragged along behind?  Only one day in and already I’m in harness to the mule cart of memory.  The passage of time yesterday was counted out moment to moment by the dull clomp clomp clomp of a workman’s hammer on the floor of the room above me—the ticking clock of hotel renovation marking time as I attempted to perform within its set parameters.  It does seem that my trip this year, short and full of work as it will be, has already become all about the incessant tick and tock of scheduling—and so I dutifully exchange my currencies and arrange my arrivals and departures at regular five day intervals, steeling myself for yet another full-on day-long traveler-in-traffic scavenger hunt.  I did take manage to my customary initiatory walk yesterday—my injured foot felt up to it, yet the return trip proved that foot’s falling arches still too weak for the sort of long distance meander that I am so attached to when traveling.  An old man with a sore foot, hauling the years behind him: suddenly the pages of this journal are heavy as lead and best turned while sitting down.

PROCESSION OF THE GHOULS

Halloween, 2009—Saint John The Divine Cathedral, New York City—

 

 

 

 

 Alas, I must apologize to those

Who read this written chronicle. I chose,

I know, to paint with words and letters

Yet now I find such tools of speech but fetters

That bind the tongue. A hopeless task, indeed,

For words to summon all the power they’d need

To catch the overwhelming tone and tenor,

The pinnacle of skill, the depth of terror,

Which Zann’s accursed music now attained!

Such wild extremes just cannot be explained—

No string of phrases could do justice to

The sounds which that mad cello now produced.

I fear I have exhausted them already.

I have used up all my vocabulary.

No words remain. There comes a time

When language and the truth refuse to rhyme,

When further metaphors do but belie

Those things they are most desperate to describe.

I’ve hauled out all my adjectives, alas,

Before the climax of my tale has passed.

I pile them up with growing impotence,

A senseless heap of vowels and consonants:

Mad, terrifying, horrifying, strange,

Nightmarishly sublime, ghastly, deranged,

Crazed, dreadful, awesome, hideous, inflamed,

Unearthly, wild, fantastic, weird, untamed...

Such words seem only baubles, toys, mere tokens—

While those that I need most remain unspoken.

And yet I plod on like a man possessed

To an expressive end unknown, unguessed.

Forgive me—and take my tied tongue as proof

That’s Zann’s strange harmonies remained aloof,

Far from the costume jewelry of speech,

In realms where even poetry can’t reach.

(from: The Strange Music Of Erich Zann, Hippocampus Press)

LOOK AGAIN

16 September, 2009—Bangkok, Thailand—

FIVE DAY FORECAST FOR OVER 10,000 CITIES

16 September, 2009—Bangkok, Thailand—

IF ONLY I COULD GRASP ONE THING

(7 October, 2008—Petulu, Bali—)

Thunder booming from a distance so great that it overwhelms even approaching dawn, it is as though the sun were rising far away in some other garden than this one with its persistent shadows dripping.  Under the eaves a shower of sparks, of electrons, of whirling wings reflecting low watt bulb light, insects frantically seeking shelter beneath saturated islands of illuminated thatch whose little leaking outposts colonize this garden which bears little other trace of man’s designs.  The goldenish mango tree leaves that litter the paths are glowing brighter than any horizon—as if this morning, rather than sun rising, we have stars falling, or at least a precipitation of angel wings dropped from drenched angels’ shoulders. 

It’s light enough now to write and read without the porch lamp which attracts too many insects before dawn to be of much use.  Yet why write or read when one can simply sit, looking, listening: at lightening and glistening, to booming and dripping?  To simply sit, eyes and ears focused; to let mind wander through the past few weeks, traveling backward now through that time and those spaces which this booming dripping lightening glistening garden seems to have done away with; to let mind seek out those arcana, those pictures to which it will hold with all of its formidable pitiful might; those images around which, in scintillating dance, it recalls  the bugs round the lamp in the dark in the damp beneath thatch all alone in the garden until the entire central nervous system is no more than one dim bulb beneath a hairy patch of thatch attracting briefly golden flies.  —Hold them!  Hold on to them!  The orange curtains of the monastery stirred by a bit of breeze, perhaps the last bit of breeze, wafting out through the open windows as I pass by in a boat through a network of neural canals never to be navigated again.  Hold them.  Describe them in heart and mind; without moving a muscle or turning a page let heart and mind describe them to themselves.  And those other darker curtains—the ones drawn across the windows of the quaintly barbaric village gymnasium, framed by unpainted cinderblocks, glassless and gaping out over the steep gorge that manages to remain majestic despite the stew of plastic garbage bags that cling to the contours of its slopes like some paper mâché mask.  Hold those dirty sheets, folded and faded and torn, and those bare-chested weightlifters appearing and disappearing with each flap and billow of burgundy cotton, and those prayers spilling forth unheard through a stiller orange silk, hold them all, build a house of every window and every curtain you’ve ever looked through or out of during a storm or in sun, drifted with snow or beaded with rain, or melted by summer’s glare, open or closed, heat or cold on either side, hold them, hold them.

Thunder booming in the distance, hold them.

HELLO KITTY TIME WARP

15 September, 2009—Taipei Airport, Taiwan—

ON VAGUE AVENUE

23 September, 2009—Chiang Mai, Thailand—

 

TEA AND STONES

28 September, 2009—Petulu,Bali—

SIGNAL

9 October, 2009—Taipei Airport, Taiwan—

DEPARTURE

(8 October, 2009—Petulu, Bali)

I left the skittish kittens whose darting pre-dawn shadows are all I usually catch sight of, I left them in the darkened restaurant once and for all—for when I return they will either be grown, or (no use denying it) dead—and so this particular precarious moment is not to be repeated.  The darker of the two flashed like a tiny bolt of negative lightning across the paving stones; while the yellow one, though ready to flee at any moment, was crouched down behind one table, gnawing away at a piece of trash meat.  I boiled my water, left a single frangipani blossom on the tea kettle as a final offering, and as I stepped back out into the garden I spied the paler, bolder one cowering in a corner, eyeing me as much with its big sharp pyramids of ears as with its wide eyes glistening in the dark.  We had our intimate feral moment, and then I departed.

HELL AND HEAVEN (WITH COURTESY TELEPHONE)

11 October, 2008—Taipei Airport, Taiwan—

TRAIL

24 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

THE TWINS: ENTRY & EXIT

20 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

Half In, Half Out

1 October, 2009--Petulu, Bali-- 

 

The phone is in a plastic bag, or half in, half out, ready to be used but prepared as well for the leaks that accompany the deluge.  And the deluge has arrived.  It threatened all afternoon yesterday, then teased throughout the evening, but come dark it was unleashed at last and has not let up even now, an hour past dawn.  My roof has finally become saturated enough to begin leaking, and I was awakened about 4AM by the hollow drum of a single steady drip dropping from the roof's hidden peak of cracked tiles to the rotting wood of the ceiling. None of the water has made it down to the floor, not yet--not like in the long out-of-service restaurant where the plastic-bagged telephone now sits on a wet table in the center of an amoeba-like puddle growing ever larger as the rain continues falling on and on.  And despite the flood, the early morning trash fires still continue somehow to smolder, perfuming the air with a delicate taint of decay and adding a slightly sour haze of smoke to the mist and splash of the storm. Not a single cockcrow this morning, and barely a bewildered bird or two, while the garden paths are littered with glistening golden leaves and palm fronds fallen from the drenched canopy.  Indeed the sun seems to have ceded its power to these fallen leaves and palms, the light seems to emanate from them rather than from the sky--the garden glittering with dropped lanterns, pale embers, and skeletons of flame. I'll need to wade through a shallow lake to reach inside that plastic bag to use that phone this morning.  Unlike other more leisurely days of rain here, this one will be filled with work, necessary work, which involves all sorts of human contacts in real time as opposed to that sort of reaching-out-in-reverie which such weather usually inspires in me here on my wet porch.  It took me almost an hour this morning to lift my pen through the shadows that lay across this journal after I'd opened it upon the porch table--the only muscle I was able to move was that of mind. Hand and foot have had quite a work-out this year, so much so that even eye has been lagging behind.  How lovely, at night, to give hand and foot and eye their much needed rest.  How lovely to lie motionless in bed, and let ear drift through that gentlest of all the dins, rainfall--to let ear divert all the other more practical streams of the senses toward the unrecoverable details of dream. Yet dial that phone I must this morning. I must seek out a motorbike ride into town, I must tap-tap-tap out letters and words and sentences on the computer in the internet office, I must partonize the money-changer in his temple, I must pack my wood and my bronze and my nickel-silver, and I must find a rain poncho in the local market to protect me in the gaping spaces between appointments. All this even though my wide world of "must" shrinks to insignificance under this perpetually falling sky that has kidnapped dawn and given a distracting voice to every dripping leaf in the garden and every hissing tire on the long wet road that that runs insistently by my soggy, termite-ridden door.  I will try to be like the telephone today: in a plastic bag, half in, half out, ready for use and yet prepared for the deluge.

FIRST LIGHT

22 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

CHICKEN IN THE KITCHEN

27 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

GREEN FIRES

20 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

 

 

 

EXILE'S NEST

10 October, 2005—Petulu, Bali—

THE TOPS OF THINGS

7 October, 2008—Chiang Mai,Thailand—

AFTER THE FLOOD

6 October, 2005—Chiang Mai, Thailand—

DEPARTING STORM

9 October, 2008—Chiang Mai, Thailand—

LET'S RELAX!

6 October, 2005—Chiang Mai, Thailand—

FINDING WINGS

17 September, 2009--Bangkok, Thailand--

Accidentally flipping this journal open to a page dated sometime in 2007, a page in which five pressed Monarch Butterfly wings had been inserted, seems almost a sort of rebuke this morning, albeit a gentle one.  My departure was less graceful than usual, my resistance seemed a force to rival gravity: the opposite of the bob and weave and flutter that once animated these bright black and orange wings.  It's love that has fed this attachment that makes travel more terrifying, and it is age that has made it more exhausting--or so I tell myself.  But that can only be an excuse, and I must reject such excuses if I am to remain alive to the unknown. I lose nothing by faring forth, the heart retains the fullness of all that has entered it, and the aches and pains of age are a joke I had better learn to laugh along with.  It seems fitting that I have forgotten to bring along a calendar this year--my graph to plan and mark-off the days.  It seems fitting that I am not even sure exactly how to date this journal entry. Of course, despite any loss of co-ordinates I must go on collecting details regardless, even those summoned to the attention of a reluctant and weary traveler seeking corroboration of dread: it's no fucking picnic, this life on the road. Thus on the final lap of my airplane journey, from Taipei to Bangkok, I sat a few seats across from a 350 pound monk in a somewhat soiled orange robe who continually blew his nose into a small towel folded neatly into quarters, and then spat into a small plastic water bottle he kept handy on the seat beside him.  By the end of the three hour and eighteen minute flight the bottle was full of something really awful, something similar, I suspect, to the urban viscera that I could smell flowing in Bangkok's gutters hours later during my first walk down the little alley behind the hotel. That first assault of Urban Asia on the senses was almost unbearable given my state of jet-lagged debilitation. My forays were brief: one to one of the ubiquitous hyper-airconditioned 7-Eleven markets for milk and peanuts, one to a restaurant for a dinner which I wolfed down before heading straight to bed at 7:30 pm. The first drops were just dropping as I entered my hotel cocoon, and drifting off or rather plummeting down to sleep I could hear it pouring outside my window.  Now, this morning, at 4:30 am the cocoon has burst open at last and the book-pressed orange and black wings catch my attention as they almost tumble from between an old page and this new page--and from the nightmare of too-much-distance-covered there tentatively emerges that lightness of being which still, even after all these years, can only be tricked out into the open by such an ordeal of travel.  And it is the sort of lightness which, when focused upon, grows lighter rather than heavier, the sort of weightless attachment to detail that is the wide world's most generously vivid lesson--.   
Ok, then. I've crossed over.
 

DECONSTRUCTING A LANDSCAPE

10 September, 2008—Bangkok Thailand—

UNRECEPTIVE

7 October, 2008—Bangkok, Thailand—

UNREAL

7 October, 2008—Bangkok, Thailand—

UNBALANCED

16 September, 2008—Bangkok, Thailand—

THE VIEW THROUGH MAGELLAN'S WINDOW AT THE HOUR OF DEPARTURE

27 September—Petulu, Bali—

THE DARK HALF

7 March, 1999—Kuta, Bali—

I swam for an hour beneath a sky half dark as death, half burning blue—then flinched, and fled at last for shelter, the dark half nipping at my heels all the way home.  And though I felt always only one step ahead of the storm, it seems I have outpaced it after all.  I‘m back in my room now, I’ve already showered all trace of sand and salt from my skin, and the only thing that has fallen from the sky are these shadows.  I settle down, protected on my porch, to face the threat of thunder in the distance—convinced that there’ll be violence yet.

HELL AND PURGATORY

18 October, 2005—Jungjungan, Bali—

14 September, 2008—Taipei Airport, Taiwan—

TEMPLE GUARDIAN

18 October, 2005—Jungjungan, Bali—

TEMPTING THE DEMONS

18 October, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

OGOH OGOH

19 March, 2007—Petulu & Nagi, Bali—

They are theatrical masters of the deft stroke of illusion here—a few lines on a mask, for instance, suggesting all the mysterious life of a face.  The giant paper-mâché and sponge figures swaying and trembling above the crowd seem utterly fantastic and yet quite real at the same time.  Such a ferocious fantasy can only be so convincingly conjured by those who believe in it already.  For the men of my country it takes a million dollars worth of digital technology; for these islanders a little paint and plaster and some moonlight. There is an eerie quiet just before the ritual begins, the streets almost emptied of traffic—everyone beginning to drift out to curbside only at the last minute, only at dusk.  And then, at the designated hour, at some tipping point of twilight, the giants and monsters materialize from their dark sanctuaries, lurching forth from the alleyways of each and every village on the island, emerging onto the main roads with whole populations following devotedly in their wake.  We follow from our own adopted village—marveling at the dexterity of the two men with long hooked bamboo poles whose sole job it is to shift the electrical wires out of harm's way when the towering demons threaten to snag them.  A rudimentary spurt or two of fireworks shoots approximately skyward along the route of the procession, and a small but earnest gamelan band follows close on the hellish heels of the most spectacularly ghoulish of the figures, clinging and clanging against the darkness as it deepens.

Once we are out in the road, the flickering of dozens of coconut oil torches (the kind used to light the darkness when Frankenstein's monster was hunted down in Hollywood) beckon from the next village to the south—so we head down to investigate.  Each village has its own celebration, each spends weeks constructing its own demons—and an uncrossable boundary line is drawn between them.  As Wayan explains to me, those who bear these monsters on their shoulders through the dark are so drunk on arak (the local palm-based firewater), so electrified by their exertions, so mesmerized by the trance-like din of the gamelan's bronze gong, that were they to meet head-on the clash would be a violent one. There would, he assures me, be war in the streets, a war ruled by those fearsome titans the men themselves have created and are now possessed by.  All habitually elaborate rules of calm social interaction set aside, this is a deliberately dangerous night in Bali: tonight all devils are brazenly tempted out into the open, invited into the streets—where they can be publicly exorcised for another year.  

The ritual in this wealthier village is far more extravagant, more brutally spirited than in our own.  Two wrestling demons tower twenty or thirty feet above us—one struggling on its back, the other bent over it threateningly, both with teeth bared and claws unsheathed.  Perched in the battlefield between them, one of the villagers—an ordinary young man by day, an intoxicated referee tonight—showers the crowd with sparks from the burning brand he waves over their heads, and shrieks out commands or curses to the men upon whose shoulders he is tossed about like a rider on the bare back of a bull.  The creatures themselves are mounted on an enormous platform made of bamboo poles lashed together like a checkerboard, into each of whose open squares is wedged a single straining man.  They tire often, for the load is heavy and awkward, and periodically they let the frame settle to the ground at their feet, still trapped within its grid.  A herd of adolescent girls then approaches, shaking those coconut oil torches that had attracted our attention from down the road, taunting the exhausted men—until a signal is given for them to re-summon their strength. One or two more swigs of arak and they are on their feet again, hoisting the harness to shoulder height, often one corner at a time, unevenly, so that the monsters tip and sway aggressively from side to side.  Shouting and howling now, they charge off down the road in pursuit of their tormentors who flee before them with bloodcurdling schoolgirl screams—as the gamelan increases in intensity, its great bronze gong reverberating through the steamy night air, the monsters careening from side to side with the abrupt ebb and flow of the strength of the men, the crowd gathering and scattering, gathering and scattering—until once more the demon’s army collapses with fatigue and settles back down to the ground, panting for air.  And all the while the people in the crowd douse the overheated men with water, soaking them until their bare torsos glisten in the flickering torchlight, their wet skin a screen reflecting the jets of flame emitted by one fire-breathing man who spews burning mouthful after burning mouthful of petrol into the air.  And this goes on for hours, this charging up and down and up and down the roadway, from the borders of one village to another—always getting close enough to be seen by their neighbors, to show off their own demon's workmanship and their own strength in possession, but never crossing over that line—a boundary which remain closely and calmly guarded by those village elders who have seen so many demons come and go.  

When it is all over, the road empties quickly. We stroll home under the stars, kicking at the hundreds of empty plastic water bottles and the bits of paint-and-plaster horn or tooth that litter the landscape.  As I settle down in bed I think I hear an occasional howl or shriek in the distance, a remnant of the night’s scarcely controlled chaos. But this morning there is silence.  This morning is the first day of the New Year, Hari Nyepi—there will be no traffic on the roads, no work, no light, no noise, not a human sound—everyone will be hiding indoors from those demons they'd roused forth last night.  And those demons, disappointed by this calm, duped by this apparent lack of exploitable mischief, will pass by the island of Bali and leave it in relative peace for another year, seeking trouble elsewhere.  Strolling to the east side of the garden just as dawn breaks, I see the edge of each still leaf in the bamboo grove etched by sunlight, I see each sharp leaf tipped with a tiny perfectly round droplet of fresh dew, each droplet glistening diamond-bright, each a lens focused (were I near enough for a proper view) on an entirely different world beyond this one—and yet the whole hanging, from a distance, like a beaded curtain in the doorway of a green tropic whorehouse through which the mist disperses like shreds of last night's lusts and opium smokes.

REMAINS

24 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

STILL LIFE WITH MOTION

9 March, 1999—Kuta, Bali—

On my walk home along the beach, after a day of burning and drowning, I saw a man hopping out of the surf on one leg.  At first I thought he’d hurt his foot , sliced it on some coral or on a tin can lid—but as the distance between us narrowed I saw that his leg was missing entirely from the knee down.  From the corner of my eye I watched him hop all the way across the hot sand to the shade of his umbrella where, laying alongside his towel, was his artificial limb—its fiberglass foot shod with a bright blue sneaker, the laces neatly knotted and bowed.  

MINIMAL WORLD

29 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

THE FLIPSIDE OF SWEET DREAMS

1 August, 2009—Massapequa, Long Island—

 

THE DREAMER AND THE DREAMED

11 May & 1 August, 2009—Massapequa, Long Island—

TO MY PUBLISHER

28 February, 1999—Petulu, Bali—

I dreamt that I was dying last night.  It was terrifyingly funny (at least in retrospect) due to the fact that my doctor was none other than JM, my publisher—and due to the fact that he had a habit of disappearing, of wandering away at crucial medical moments.  The initial crisis stemmed from my inability to breath, and it was he who calmed me and placed the oxygen mask firmly on my face.  The problem was in my left lung, he explained as he led me through a series of white swinging doors—gently guiding me with soothing tones through the details of my life-threatening condition.  The odd thing was—he would suddenly walk away, sometimes in mid-sentence, distracted by some equally pressing concern—and I would be left there, stranded, with the seed of death lodged in my chest.  Once, while following about fifty paces behind him, I watched helplessly as he simply vanished around a corner. I soon found myself on the threshold of some inner sanctum of sickness which I was forced to reconnoiter on my own, ostensibly in search of either doctor or publisher.  I did locate him at last, unflappable as always, but only after stumbling through two library-like rooms lined with row upon row of beds in which the terminally ill lay in a meticulously choreographed catalogue of sickness, their limbs the letters of an alphabet of calm suffering.  I think, when I finally caught up with him, he said something like—“Oh, there you are!”—and laughed lightly.

FRANGIPANI AND BEANS

2 October, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

CAT AND POET

13 February, 2000—Petulu, Bali—

The cat that has toppled the garbage bin overnight now passes silently by the porch without even looking up at me.  Were I to make the slightest noise or movement she’d dart away instantly and vanish into the pre-dawn darkness of the garden, beyond the reach of my weak porch light.  But I write without a sound, and she likewise glides silently on by—. It is only during an hour like this one, all alone and a foreigner, that I recover the perfect indolence that can make of a man a beast or a poet.

WHY DO I FEEL AS IF THE PATH I'M TRAVELING IS SHIFTING BENEATH MY FEET?

6 September, 2008—New York City—

THE SMALL STONES

2 March, 2007—Bangkok, Thailand—

It's too early to be up, but a palpable dangle of thoughts awoke me at 3AM.  And though I am no longer lying level, I am not quite upright either—rather, slightly tilted—like the flavor of the is-this-milk? in my cup of is-this-tea?—.  As usual the notebook long-hand I am scribbling in is rusty: each word I start gets interrupted about two thirds of the way through, my mind moving too far ahead of the muscles of my hand whose physical memory jerks along like water with small stones in its path—or with small stones beneath its tongue, if the obstacles are indeed in the flow of mental voice rather than merely in the flow of the flex of the fingers.  I do have a burning desire to write this year.  I must confess that meeting up with B in room #1008 an hour after arrival seemed almost a distraction from this journey toward something that has little to do with intercourse with other people.  Not that social intercourse has nothing to do with the reflections I am already filling with—but—well—it's more the eye of a painter that links me to the world here, a world which I would just as soon pass through without engaged comment so that it can ripen inwardly, without interference.  And what then of the look over my shoulder? Of course there on the horizon is the peak of all that’s been left behind, the who and the what—nothing jagged or overly dramatic, no violence of landscape, just a gentle rise, a delicious hump, gradual, sensual, like a gaze grazing the back of my neck and shoulders with the warmth of late-in-the-day sun as I turn and head off along the curve of an earth whose paths always end where they began if one travels far enough and patiently enough over the small stones with which they are strewn.

SELF PORTRAIT WITHOUT SELF

1 October, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

LATE AFTERNOON

October 1, 2008—Petulu,Bali—

ONE LAST LANTERN

20 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

AT 5AM SHADOWS ARE VERY REAL

25 September, 2008—Petulu, Bali—

Just before dawn there are upward of ten to twenty bats convened under the moldy bamboo beams of the restaurant roof, swooping and diving.  Cast onto walls and floor by two bare buzzing low-watt bulbs, their moving shadows seem far more substantial than the bodies that cast them.  At 5AM shadows are very, very real—and I feel the need to close the kitchen door behind me, to bar them impulsive entry, while I boil the tea-water with which I fill up my blue plastic thermos every morning.  Normally I flip up the little lid on the kettle's spout to keep it from whistling rudely through the dark and silent morning air, but somehow this morning it flips itself back down and the whistle manages to escape before I can quickly douse the heat to shush it.  I pour my water and then creep back to the stillness of my porch, sweeping stray bat shadows and spider webs from my hair and face as I pass down the narrower paths of the garden.  Settling back down in my porch chair, inhaling tea-steam and brushing ants from my arms and from the back of my neck, I can see what it is the bats were up to now—.  As I write in this journal, dozens of little brief bugs are dropping and colliding with both pen and paper.  With so little rainfall, they've been absent so far this year, these wet porch-light worshiping gnats so appetizing to bats.  Could there be, in addition to my morning tea, a change of weather brewing?

LILIES AFTER RAIN & DAISIES IN DECLINE

1 August, 2009—Massapequa, Long Island—