The Valley Below

cw: (historical) political violence and suicide.

Another passage from Revolusi (David van Reybrouck), on the Balinese puputan of the early 1900s:

“More horrifying still were the scenes in Bali, where in 1906 and 1908 the complete courts of a number of principalities chose to commit collective suicide (puputan). Hundreds of men, women and even children walked straight towards the Dutch rifles and artillery. They were dressed in traditional white garments and carried only staffs, spears and the finely wrought traditional daggers called krises. ‘The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire went on, the fighting grew fiercer, people fell on top of each other and more and more blood flowed.’ A pregnant Balinese woman was one of the few who lived to tell the tale. ‘Persisting in passionate fury, men and women advanced, standing up for the truth without fear, to protect their country of birth, willing to lay down their lives.’ The KNIL [Dutch] soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes: women hurled their jewellery at them mockingly, courtiers stabbed themselves with their daggers and died, men were mown down by cannons. The wounded were put out of their misery by their relatives, who were killed in turn by the Dutch bullets. Then the colonial army plundered the corpses. In the puputan of 1906, an estimated 3,000 people died. ‘The battlefield was completely silent, aside from the rasp of dying breath and the cries for help heard from among the bodies.’

“And this event, too, has left traces. In December 2017 I travelled around a near-deserted Bali. Mount Agung’s volcanic rumblings had put a stop to tourism for the time being, and in the ancient capital of Klungkung, I found the desolate ruin of the royal palace. It had been destroyed after the puputan of 1908. ‘My grandpa, Dewa Agung Oka Geg, was there that day,’ said Tjokorda Gde Agung Samara Wicaksana, the crown prince of Klungkung. We were sitting in the new palace, opposite the ruin, and drinking tea. It was Saturday and his servants had gone home; he had made the tea himself. ‘The puputan of Klungkung was the very last one. After that, Bali was entirely subject to Dutch authority. My grandfather was only thirteen years old and nephew to the king.’ Almost the entire royal family died; the king and the first prince in the line of succession were killed, the king’s six wives stabbed themselves to death with krises, and 200 courtiers followed their example or were murdered. ‘But my grandpa survived.'”

It isn’t emphasized in front of tourists—the hedonistic hordes landing on Bali every day, who come for sprawling villas, endless traffic jams, cheap labor, and the monetization and destruction of the island’s natural and cultural resources. But the Balinese valiantly, fiercely resisted Dutch colonial control. They did so, notably, by puputan.

I’m not sure it would make any difference, if tourists were universally informed about the puputan. The days even of pretense seem to be gone. Ubud has transformed into an urban shopping complex, bloated by money, overrun by beach bodies. We rarely go there anymore, the traffic and high prices make it inaccessible. Locals have converted family homes to expensive boutiques, restaurants, and villas. Foreign-catering establishments occupy an upper echelon of public space, not unlike colonial resorts in the Dutch East Indies. These fantasy realms are inaccessible and undesirable to most working-class Indonesians, whose labor builds them, whose work is to wait on and serve the foreigners. Ubud, like Canggu and Kuta before it, has been smothered by gentrification.

But my fantasy is that everyone is always remembering the puputan. These acts of solidarity are still alive—I know it—deep in the meaning of this island. We, following the Balinese, make offerings to the ancestors, in a sangga at our house, to show that we remember. And the mountain holds the memory.

The puputan are a testament to a people and a place.

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Now, Love—An abrupt change of topic? no—Love is difficult. I’m not sure it’s possible to love, outside of a context such as this.

In my life, I have found it difficult to feel contentment in love. As soon as I feel a moment of contentment, I watch it happen—I’m gripped with terror at the thought that my beloved will die and be lost to me forever. I’m inundated by images of death—mine, his, that unthinkable loss. Love is terrifying because loss is terrifying.

My husband (E) has always stated, plainly, his conviction that he will be there waiting for me, in the next life, and that we will live, in the afterlife, together forever. This is the deal, the very basis of our marriage—our marriage is truer than death. And it lends courage to love.

I say to myself—“You needed to find someone who believed in monsters, to find someone who could believe in you.” Well, E was that person. He believes. Drunk off his imaginative capacity, I stopped disbelieving too. So at our house, we believe in Wewe Gombel, Kuntilanak, Tuyul, and countless others. There are more monsters and ghouls and djin and demons and mer-folk than I ever expected. It’s amazing. I believe in all of them!

And if I ever feel a moment of cleverness, superiority, or doubt, concerning the reality of a ghost or spirit, I remember—I myself am the most dubious of all. I am, very truly, the dubious one! It’s a miraculous kind of bargain. I suspend disbelief in Wewe Gombel, and I suspend disbelief in myself. I couldn’t do it without E, I’d never heard of Wewe Gombel before him.

That’s the grim overtone to a deeper harmony. What I also needed, was not just someone who believed in monsters, but someone who believed in mercy. I had booksmarts coming out of my eyeballs, but I didn’t know anything about mercy, until I met my husband. Mercy, itself a kind of monstrous irrationality, had also been unbelievable to me.

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Cut to the dialogue, Plato’s Phaedrus. A relevant passage comes later in the text than where I am now. And yet the text is simultaneous with itself (unlike the blog). Here, it pierces into the beating heart. To paraphrase, from memory—and I’ll stop vouching for accuracy here, because why should I?—Socrates says he has no time for a skeptical inquisition against mythical beings, as being true or false, fact or fiction. His Wewe Gombel is Boreas, the North Wind, storied to have abducted Oreithyia, a maiden princess. He has no time, because he doesn’t yet know, of himself, whether he is full of rage, like a Typhon, or capable of mercy, partaking in the divine.

The imperative, more urgent than doubt, is of divine provenance—Know thyself—and credited to the oracle at Delphi.

The dialogue, having arrived at its poetically designated place—in the shade of a platanos tree—hints at things: that Socrates is, in his living truth, a mythical being; that Socrates is a character in a poem, of dubious reality; that Socrates is a monster. If Socrates doesn’t know, then how would we? Did, or does, the poet know? And if I fail to know Socrates, shall I forget myself?

Maybe so. And if I am so unsure of myself, then by what desire and on what grounds shall I interrogate the truth of anything else? Am I only a monster, for monsters, reading a monstrous poem, written by a monster, about monsters?

Is it monsters at war, this very poem, or is it a creature of mercy?

These become inevitable and appropriate questions in this dramatic context, as Socrates and Phaedrus have left Athens. They have exited the city walls, in a poem that was written, historically, not long after Athens was defeated by Sparta and overtaken by the thirty tyrants; not long after Athens put Socrates on trial and killed him. That death also was a kind of suicide. And history bleeds into the poem.

Now, we find ourselves in a lovely fantasy—is it the poet’s? Socrates and Phaedrus, for the purpose of the poem, are leisurely wanderers, or an infatuated lover pursuing his flighty beloved (two competing interpretations of the same dramatic action), beyond an unstable and oppressive political reality.

And look—the questions out here are different than the ones in there.

If the city serves as a container for self-knowledge, in the form of Justice, Virtue, or even the Good, what happens when you leave that container? How does anybody leave behind their city, and its laws, without becoming utterly lost? And what when the city crumbles, and a person survives? What basis is there for self-knowledge, if a human being is, as in this paradisical afterlife of the poem, an on the way thing?

This question of human nature reflects the personal identity of the poet—exiled, abroad, otherwise absent—from a failing democracy. When there is no city to support or to limit you; when the laws have lost their definitive hold, by unlikely accident, a miracle, an error in your favor; or when they have destroyed the very foundation of their claim to Justice—who or what might you become? What is left for you to be?

And why would you carry this poem in your pocket?

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My husband and I have a pair of matched krises, these sacred daggers. They were passed down to E through his grandfather. Each has a wood sheath carved around it. These are ceremonial krises, not big dangerous daggers. And still, they feel heavier in the hand from the steel inside. His is smooth and broad, with a face like an inquisitive fish. Mine—witch-made, I am told, specifically for a woman—is sheathed in sandalwood, shaped like a bodkin, with a slender, split hoof at the end of the handle. E gave it to me after we married. I had a general idea of their meaning, like an athame. But I had never made the connection with puputan.

My kris fell into my lap, as these things do. Now it sits in my bedside table, mundanely inherited, more-or-less imposing its presence. Now, who is the instrument of whom?

Histories are alive with mythical animals. Always on the way, through wildernesses, we glimpse clearer selves—ours, theirs; past, present. Lightning flashes as responsibility in the dark. We follow the shining; that is love. We are seized by the wind, over edges of cliffs, bearing witness—to what? As unable to save others, as we are ourselves, we become unknown, are dead and gone, living among immortals. Any of these, or all.

So the pen takes lessons from the puputan. A kris is an instrument of truth as freedom, the life of exit, wholeness through cutting. The blade makes a container for the uncontained. Clad in white, tossing its jewels at tyrants, bleeding itself into self-possession—

Poetry is the puputan of logos.

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