The Shadow Play of Life
A short walk from our Balinese house there is a temple, in a sacred forest, towered over by a giant Banyan tree, which the Balinese say links heaven and earth. Dedicated to Durga, the goddess of death, it is a dark gateway, carved with hideous demons, festooned with human skulls. It is known as the ‘monkey temple’ because, according to the village, the spirits, in the bodies of monkeys, rule there, and even the locals can find themselves tricked or even terrorized by the bandalog.
The monkey folk must be kept in their place. Not, we were told, by any outer show of force, but by inwardly never letting them forget that you always remember who you are, and what you’ll put up with. After a number of years, I no longer dropped my peanuts; but neither, in the presence of the monkey folk, did I ever want to nod off. But things seemed very different, after Borneo, when I returned one soft evening to pay my respects to the monkey forest and its sacred Banyan tree.
I sat very still, cross-legged, at the foot of the tree. The tattoo was still as fresh on my chest as the words of Nanyet, the Punan sage, were in my mind. The bandalog arrived, but sat down in a semi-circle some distance away, quietly watching me. The dominant male, with enormous yellow fangs and a wilful, unpredictable nature, was feared by some of the Balinese, but he usually remained in the background, disdainfully aloof. This time, he stalked up to me alone, looking closely into my face as he came. Then he gently laid his warm, coarse paw in my palm, and left it there. I closed my eyes, and his paw remained. When I opened them again some time later, he was still studying me very closely, his wrinkled, rather brutish old face seemingly on the brink of cracking into laughter. Something seemed to have changed.
On the day we returned to Bali from Borneo, Gusti Nyoman Lempad, the great Balinese artist, died a conscious death aged 116 in the nearby village of Peliatan. John Darling, our Australian anthropologist friend and an immediate neighbour of Lempad’s, brought the news. I was shocked at first, but the Balinese attitude was that it was high time he moved on, and that after 116 years of conscious living a man ought to know how to die.
Gusti Nyoman Lempad in the last of his 116 years of life.(JOHN DARLING)
I had interviewed Lempad a few years earlier, for a BBC film called ‘Balinese Vision’, in which he had discussed some of the secrets of his longevity. He was very small and extraordinary – rather like an extra-terrestrial – and I feared that just touching the long-nailed claw he offered me in greeting would cause him to crumble and vanish.
Lempad spoke Balinese, and his son translated into Indonesian for us. When I asked him if he was frightened to die, he replied not at all, but that he just couldn’t see the way or the time yet, but would know them when they came.
‘How do you manage to be so old and healthy?’ I went on.
‘Compared to my grandparents, I’m still just a baby.’ He grinned.
‘But when I was young an old sage told me that if I never learned how to read and write, and my soul remained unburdened with worldly learning, then I would flower into my destiny and live out my time.’
Despite his nominal illiteracy, Lempad became the oracular source of every variation of Balinese Hindu/Buddhist mythology and teaching, and even in Europe in the 1920s was recognized for his remarkable religious and erotic art. There was hardly a medium to which he did not turn his hand – from making musical instruments, to designing and carving scores of spectacular temples. His peculiar characteristic was never quite to complete any of his works. ‘Perfection is for the gods to achieve,’ he would say. ‘Foolish of me to try to emulate them.’
Not only had Lempad chosen the holy day Kadjeng Kliwon on which to die, it was also when the sun rose at its closest point to Gunung Agung, the Volcano of the Gods. He had had himself bathed in holy water from the temple spring of his patron, Saraswati, goddess of Wisdom and the Arts, and then formally dressed in white. He called his large family about him, and when they were patiently assembled he sat up, said a few words, smiled, and died.
Given that the island was littered with his almost-finished masterpieces, his final words were rather wry: ‘I leave it to you, my descendants,’ he had said, ‘the task of completing what I haven’t had time to finish in my short life.’
In his hand was the wooden mask he had been carefully working on for three years, and had laid aside that morning. It was unpainted, peaceful. ‘The face of a young soul’, he had called it.
When John Darling, as is customary for immediate neighbours, had asked the family what he might contribute to the funeral, he’d been told to get our assistance in making a film of Lempad’s life and death.
‘A film may be the only funeral gift to last,’ John told us. ‘Most of Bali’s top artists were his students at one time and they’re all contributing to the funeral pyre. Imagine, all the best painters of the West donating one of their canvases for a burning!’
Over the next weeks the family were to reveal to us the intimate details leading to a cremation, from the tender washing of the body, to the progressive releasing from that body, before it is burned, of the layers of spiritual essence. Although a corpse is legally required to be either buried or cremated within two weeks, Lempad had insisted on six weeks elapsing between his death and cremation. He smelt, as they said – and I smelt it, too – like frangipani and myrrh, right up to the 42nd day. Making the resulting film, Lempad of Bali, opened our eyes to the fact that the arts of dying still flourished in the islands.
It was the scent of living mysticism which had first drawn us to Indonesia. We had escaped the ashram walls and had rambled instead through many an outer, Boy’s Own adventure, yet each time we returned to Bali to digest and heal. It was this flavour of mysterious wisdom, forgotten in our own lands, which eventually led to an eleven-month filming marathon, with Zac and our Balinese soundman, Bobby Radiasa, in search of the sages, mystics and healers of the islands.
We found ember-eaters and hypnotists, fakirs and charlatans. There was trance of every kind – even, in the Gorong Islands, a sinister form of mass possession, in which an entire village was victimized by a giant money-eating serpent, cannily articulated by prancing shamans. We also encountered some very impressive sages and skilful manipulators of unseen energies.
Perhaps the most remarkable was the enigmatic man we named ‘Dr Dynamo Jack’, an ethnic Chinese of many generations in Java, whom I first met at his spacious home on the outskirts of a burgeoning East Javanese city. He claimed only to be a healer, using acupuncture needles in the traditional points, but he sent a powerful ‘electrical’ current through them, from within his own body. He claimed to have derived these powers from a Taoist master, a forest hermit, since dead, with whom he had studied for seven years.
‘I use acupuncture needles some of the time,’ he told me, ‘but usually just my hands, from a slight distance. Look, I’ll show you.’
He stood up, undid his belt, lowered the top of his trousers and underpants, placed the flat of my hand on his bare stomach a few inches below, his navel, and ordered me to try to keep it there.
I found myself having to lean against him with all my strength, and still my hand was being pushed away from his stomach by what felt like a dry but irresistibly strong jet of water. Then he exhaled, and my hand shot back to his stomach again, nearly sending him off his feet.
‘That’s one of the two chakras I use to generate the energy,’ he said, tightening up his belt again and stretching out his arm. ‘This is another!’
I touched his outstretched hand. He inhaled and released such a powerful jolt through my arm that I howled and snatched it away.
He then asked an assistant, a tall, serious-looking man called Mohan, to bring us a wooden stool and a new packet of bamboo chopsticks, and invited me to push one through the inch-thick wooden stool. I tried several times, nearly broke the chopstick, and failed to make the slightest dent in the stool.
‘No, it’s like this.’ And taking my chopstick between the tip of his thumb and two finge
rs, he pushed it with one swift movement vertically down through the plank and halfway out the other side.
I touched the points of entry, both above and below, for some clue as to what he had done. I could push the chopstick no deeper, but was able to withdraw it easily; the hole, rectangular, like the chopstick, was perfectly smooth-walled and compressed back into itself.
‘It’s very simple,’ Dynamo Jack said. ‘Just a matter of practice. Like an electric eel, we all have this Yin-Yang polarity,’ and he pointed downwards from his navel with one finger, and upward from between his legs with the other. ‘I use these two chakras. My positive and my negative. One comes up from the earth, the other comes down from the sky. It’s just a matter of learning to harness and project them outside the body. I’ve been practising this for 17 years now, meditating every day. One has to be very careful of one’s emotions, though – like anger, for instance, which can be very dangerous. It can kill as well as heal. My student, Mohan here has been practising for four years. By the time he can do these things he won’t be too interested in them any more. It’s what’s awakened inside you that gets interesting, much more interesting than impressing the world, or even yourself.’
Over the ensuing months we saw him on many occasions, followig him around the country, questioning him, watching him heal his patients, and occasionally demonstrating his astounding powers.
I even managed to take my mother, a rigorous judge, to meet him in a suite on the ninth floor of a plush hotel in Jakarta.
‘Very difficult to work with these energies when so far from the ground,’ he told us. ‘Hard to earth.’ He then crushed our newspaper into a ball, held it in his left hand, pointed at it with his right, and ignited it into a blossom of flame. There was a sudden strong smell of ozone in the room, and I remember the scramble to get all the burning, floating pieces into the metal wastebasket before they singed the carpet.
But he would never consent to our filming him.
‘I’m not interested in tricks,’ he said. ‘I am a healer. If Western people see this on film, they will assume I am a market conjuror.’
I knew he was right, but I was frustrated not to return with some evidence on film of what we had seen and felt him do, and under such varied conditions. On a final trip back to Indonesia, in the midst of writing this book, I decided to try once more. It was a hurried journey through the islands, to gather some last footage for our series. We had the luxury of a film crew for a change, and found ourselves in Jakarta, with a full seven hours before our plane took off for Northern Celebes, and I used it to track down Dynamo Jack again, 400 miles away.
‘How are you doing? What do you want?’ he asked, immediately recognizing my voice over the crackling phone line.
‘I’m with a film crew. Lorne’s got a sick eye. Can we fly down to see you for half an hour? It’s all the time we’ve got.’
‘The eye isn’t very sick, is it?’
‘No, not very sick,’ I replied. The phone line crackled for a while, then he said: ‘Bring all your eyes down. You can’t film me, though.’
When we got there, not only did he treat, and cure, Lorne’s infected eye, but he suddenly agreed to appear on camera. He explained that he was depleted from the healing he had done that day, but went on to ignite our newspapers, push chopsticks through stools, and ‘electrocute’ our bodies and those of our sceptical film crew. When Lorne first had his temples touched he began jerking around so violently that I asked him not to ham it up so much, or no one would believe anything on camera. I shut up, though, when Dynamo Jack touched my hand, and jolted me into remembering what it had been like the first time.
After eight years, "Dynamo Jack" finally allowed us to film him setting our newspaper on fire - without the use of matches. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)
When I asked him why he had suddenly consented to being filmed, he replied that, now his students were starting to get the hang of it, it seemed time to show more of this to the world.
‘Even if most people do think it’s simply a trick,’ he said, ‘some will recognize that we all have these powers, sleeping within us.’
To believe in our ‘superhuman’ ability, is one thing, to see it is quite another, but actually to capture it on film, however fleetingly, seemed like a final benediction on all our travels.
It had been four years since we had returned to Indonesia. After our struggle to produce the series, and my shaking off the ashes of the Los Angeles fire, and then this breathtakingly fast trip through the islands, we finally managed to spend two blissful days at home in Bali.
In the ketjak, or Balinese monkey dance, the movement and the chanting of the dancers create a living mandala. (BILL & CLAIRE LEIMBACH)
As usual, Batuan and the village of Pengosekan embraced us like returning prodigals. The house had grown, like a tree, into a fragrant haven, enveloped by palms, hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine. Carved in the sandstone blocks at the foot of our roof columns were new beasts and deities, already enmossed with the illusion of age. The resident gecko population in the roof thatch was large and talkative, and the walls glowed with the new forms of painting with which the villagers were experimenting. A number of the villagers were now artists of some repute, selling paintings to foreign collectors for several thousand dollars apiece. There were several jeeps in the community; they were richer, more cosmopolitan, but as creative and ingenious as ever, and still spending most of their income on the festival rites. But they were not that impressed by my stories of Dynamo Jack: his remarkable feats made no ripples in their already supernatural view of the world.
On the final afternoon of our stay we joined Batuan and his family on their annual pilgrimage to the mother temple, high on the slopes of the Holy Mountain. It was raining that evening, warm and scented, and the peak of the volcano was hidden by cloud. The towers and carved escarpments of the mother temple, built over layers of thousands of years of earlier shrines, sprawled above us through the mists like an abandoned science-fiction city.
We paused at a stone chair set above us which stayed empty waiting for Sangyang Widi, the invisible Balinese God of All Things – beyond all the deities. Batuan said he might sit there now, if we were very still. We were still, and the mountain rumbled; but it often does.
The Bird of Paradise, it seemed, had beckoned us on and led us in, to stand here in this place high in the land of volcanoes. It was here in Bali, after returning from the Toraja Star Children, that I first recognized what they meant by us all being born half of heaven and half of earth. And after the mounted warsports of Sumba it was in Balinese ritual that I saw with new eyes the battle for balance between light and darkness. And after Borneo, returning to the sacred Banyan tree and its simian custodians, I had felt that all great trees, what’s left of them, do indeed link heaven and earth in a single forest of life.
Standing there on the sacred mountain, I felt very much like the man who wasn’t sure whether he was asleep, dreaming that he was awake, or awake not knowing that he was part of a larger dream. After all these years we really were about to fly back to 18 months of film editing and word-processing and a chance to unburden ourselves of some of this adventure. It was to be a chance, too, to point towards the Ring of Fire hidden at the bottom of our garden, which remains, it seems, both a cauldron of our earliest beginnings and a womb quickening mysteriously with our unknown future.
Supplementary Reading
Chapter 2:
T. Bigalke, A History of Tana Toraja (USA: Wisconsin University Press, 1981).
David Devine, Certain Islands (London: Macdonald, 1972).
Robin Hanbury-Tenison, A Pattern of Peoples (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1975).
R.A. Kartini, Letters of a Javanese Princess (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1976).
Walter Kaudern and Henry Wassén, Art in Central Celebes (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1944).
J.F. Sheltema, Monumental Java (London: Macmillan, 1912).
Chapter 4:
&nb
sp; Shirley Deane, Ambon, Island of Spice (London: John Murray, 1979).
Clifford W. Hawkins, Prahus of Indonesia (London: Macmillan ‘Nautical Books’, 1982).
Chapter 5:
Willard A. Hanna, Indonesian Banda (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1978).
E. Thomas Gilliard, Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds (New York: The Natural History Press, 1969).
Chapter 6:
D. Eyde, Cultural Correlates of Warfare (Yale University, Doctoral dissertation, 1967).
A.A. Gergrands (ed.), The Asmat: Journals of Michael Clark Rockefeller (New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1967).
Milton Machlin, The Search for Michael Rockefeller (New York: Putnam, 1972).
Chapter 8:
Monie J. Adams, System and Meaning in East Sumba Textile Design (Yale: University Press, 1969).
Fritz A. Wagner, Indonesia: The Art of an Island Group (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).
Chapter 9:
Carl Bock, The Headhunters of Borneo – A Narrative of Travel Up the Mahakam and Down the Barito (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1881).
Tom Harrison, The World Within: A Borneo Story (London: Cresset Press, 1959).
John Mackinnon, Borneo (Amsterdam: Time-Life Books ‘The World’s Wild Places’ Series, 1975).
Redmond O’Hanlon, Into the Heart of Borneo – An Account of a Journey Made in 1983 to the Mountains of Batutiban with James Fenton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
M.T.H. Perelear, Ran Away from the Dutch – Or: Borneo from South to North (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1887).
Guy Piazzini, The Children of Lilith (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1960).
B.E. Smythies, The Birds of Borneo (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1960).
Chapter 10:
Miguel Covarrubias, The Island of Bali (New York, Knopf, 1956).
Ring of Fire Page 28
