Hilton Head Island: Bali: sixteen shades of darkness and intimation of mortality

 

I recently had reason to reread part of THE OCEAN WAITS, here are two sections I particularly like.

The first was written the night I approached Bali on the thousand mile passage from Darwin, Australia.

The second describes a cremation Suzanne and I saw there now more than forty years ago.  That boy is now likely a father who has held his own sons on his shoulders to look into the flames.

The photo is of gujungs, local one man fishing boats, which I followed through the pass into Benoa Harbor.

And here is a photo taken during the cremation and a forgotten one of me rarely unmustached.

For the present, while I do not feel ill, my full energy has not returned and I am still testing positive for COVID.

On a moonless night I found sixteen shades of darkness. 

Six were in the sky: an overall blackness of the heavens; a diffuse gray to the west, although the sun had set hours earlier; the pinpricks of the stars; a few scattered shadows that were clouds; the flow of the Milky Way; and sporadic flashes of lightning far to the north. 

The sea revealed even less than the sky. It seemed to have turned in upon itself and to be studying its own depths for hidden memories. It breathed with deep, low respirations, in rhythm to a long, low swell from the south. The waves, only inches high and from the east, were a lighter gray than the swell, or—rather—than the back of the swell, for it was not visible until it had passed. The shadows of clouds, shadows of shadows, were impenetrably dark. And there were a few flashes of phosphorescence as Chidiock Tichborne ghosted forward. 

On Chidiock could be found six more shades. The featureless triangle of the mainsail undulated above me. Around me was an indistinct cockpit. A solid black line marked the teak gunwale's absorption of all light. And there were the vaguely golden columns of the varnished masts; lumps of bags; and my own form, clad in foul weather gear. 

The foul weather gear was worn in this instance not in anticipation of bad weather, but because everything was covered with evening dampness. For me, on even the best of nights, foul weather gear serves as pajamas. I wondered about the impressionist tenet that all shadows have color.

In all that I saw, only a few stars, the masts, and the foul weather gear revealed even subdued color, hidden as though beneath a thousand years of soot. Yet perhaps more color was there.

When I had exhausted these permutations of darkness, my mind moved outward. 

We sat waiting on the steps of the temple. The sun was very hot, and others sat beneath palm trees or beside the houses along a track leading away from the village. From time to time we had to move aside for women going up or down the steps or for girls selling cold drinks or clothing, which they carried tied in bundles on their heads.

Everyone waited patiently, although even in the shade sweat ran. For the first hour most of the people in the crowd were tourists. I found myself watching a beautiful, tall, blond girl in a purple sari with metallic threads that flashed in sunlight when she moved, and a German who kept making adjustments to a movie camera on a tripod. After a while, though, the crowd began to swell with villagers.

Just before noon a man climbed the stone steps of the temple and began beating out a slow rhythm on a gong.

As soon as the gong stopped, men burst from the compound and ran to a bamboo tower. The tower was ten feet tall and covered with white and gold paper and with streamers of every color. It was tapered and capped by a gold canopy over a narrow pallet. With a grunt, the men lifted the tower and carried it around to the entrance of the temple.

Women filed silently down the steps and began shuffling along the road. Over their heads, they held a long train of white cloth. From a distance they looked like the legs of a giant centipede.

A bamboo ladder was positioned against the tower, and the body, itself wrapped in white cloth, was brought out of the temple. This was a heavy bundle, and the men strained as they handed it up the ladder.

One man remained on one side of the tower and tied the body to the pallet with bamboo lashings, while another placed offerings of clothing and food and cups and ornaments in the tower. Two live birds were tied to the corner of the canopy.

When everything was in place, curtains were drawn around the pallet until only the end of the bundle could be seen.

The procession was a parade.

The men sweated and strained as they carried the tower through the village, but they were happy, not solemn.

Traffic piled up behind us, but when the drivers saw the reason for the delay, they did not lean on their horns.

People came from the shanty shops to join us, crossing the drainage ditch beside the road on planks of wood, as though crossing a moat.

At the crossroads in the middle of the village, the tower was turned in a circle three times. The crowd cheered at the completion of each revolution and each time the tower was successfully tilted to clear over head power lines. Once, the tower leaned over so far it seemed certain to fall, but men rushed from the crowd to help and the body did not touch the earth.

Our way, even after we left the narrow paved road for an even narrower path beside a rice paddy, was always bordered by walls: walls hundreds of years old, hidden beneath thick layers of dirt and green-black mold; ruined walls, carved with crumbling gods; new walls of cinder block or brick; walls so high we could not see over them; walls so low they were mere suggestions of ownership; well cared for walls, covered with fresh paint; forgotten walls, reclaimed by the jungle.

I had not realized before that Bali is so much a place of walls, but after that day, I saw them everywhere. On so small and so crowded an island, walls are a necessity.

Thousands jammed the cremation grounds. The heat and smell became stifling as we jostled and swayed against one another. Bamboo towers rose like islands from the sea of people. Some were shaped like animals; some, like mythological beasts; some, like flesh-consuming gods. Three held bodies.

The body we had followed was placed inside a giant white paper cow, along with the offerings of food and clothing, but not the live birds. The squawking birds were tossed like a bridal bouquet into the clamoring hands of the men who had carried the tower through the village.

It seemed to take much longer to transfer the offerings from the tower than it had taken to place them there. The crowd sagged as people began to faint. Finally the back of the cow was lowered.

A cloud of smoke drifted down on us. Then there was smoke everywhere and flames shot up into the sky as all the towers were lit.

The white cow crumbled in a wave of sparks. Beside me a small boy sat on his father's shoulders. His eyes were huge, as though he was seeing himself, someday, there in the flames.

Ashes. Filled the sky. Covered the ground. Caught in our hair and eyes. We breathed shallowly behind our hands.

The smoke had dispersed the crowd. Low flames licked at the frames of charred towers.

As we made our way from the grounds, the smoke thickened, then swirled and thinned to reveal a monstrous face, a mask somehow untouched by the fire, striped red and black and white, its great mouth turned upward in a hideous grin.

I wondered if it was a vision of death. Or a symbol of life renewed beyond the ashes. Or just a final, appropriately ambivalent image for Bali.