Laundry day and questionable behavior. //
Midnight, distant crowing, and the helicopter sound from the living room of wings beating before Frankie replies with a hoarse cry (a “doodle”?). He claims supremacy over all. Cocks through the sawah commence with a back-and-forth, in the dark, that teeters out around 00:07. (Some bird woke from a dream, got everyone else involved.)
(Shortly thereafter, I fell asleep, a while after that, woke again, and started laundry in the machine.)
A small adventure yesterday, we all (six of us) drove into the city in Sweet Orange to receive a gift from my visa agent, (of all people), three beautiful, fragrant (and old) jepun trees. My husband doesn’t do business without making friends. (We have two gardens full of jepun trees, all of them gifts.) And the magic of watching relationships evolve from friendships of utility into deeper things.
(But I think all music sounds bad in Sweet Orange. Sweet Orange might have only a subwoofer.)
Something extraordinary about Bali is just how fast things change. We’ve been gone from Ubud for maybe one month and it already feels different. Development, almost all related to tourism, appeasing the bottomless (foreign) appetite for servitude, pampering, the extraordinary…
So urbanized Bali is a scene from the end of the world. Being beautiful and not costing much money, foreigners come here to live out their fantasies. (I don’t exclude myself from this group.) They are visible on the streets in a patchwork of the improbable, (sometimes deeply disrespectful), alongside the ubiquitous ravages of colonial exploitation. This becomes visibility of the same thing that is wrong with everything, everywhere. So Bali’s beauty besmirched is a visible indictment of human being. Not anyone in particular, (the irresponsive anonymity of grouped humans), but the imbalance of the whole (of us).
(Letting anger wane, and) just taking in (again) our utter disarray. (Disco-trance-yoga, anyone?)
Back home. Pak and Bu S. stopped by to help us do a house ceremony, because it was a holiday here. (We were not prepared, I was napping, oops.) They’re an elder couple from the village, like adoptive parents, taking the place of our adoptive parents from Ubud.
(In case you’re not familiar.) Balinese Hindus keep a demanding schedule of ceremonies throughout the year. We don’t do all of them, (religious ceremony is genuinely exhausting), but we do some, including for purnama and tilem (full and new moon) at our house altars, assisted by Pak and Bu S. We observe Balinese customs at our house because the land is Balinese, because these align with ancient customs of Java people, (from the time of Majapahit), and not least, because it keeps us connected with the people of our banjar (village).
(And we don’t do business without making friends. I am still bad at this, I feel like that goes without saying. Sometimes it seems every institution in my “old life” was designed to prevent “making friends”.)
Mostly everyone in E.’s family (and currently staying at our house) is Muslim, although not all have received upbringing in the “old ways”. Interesting conversations happen around this, our seeming plurality of cultural practices, all the time. (Hypothesis, secret: there is only one practice.)
E. said yesterday, (in a bathtub conversation), I don’t care about the music as much as I care about the sound. Sometimes you need to “put the music” in order to make people hear the sound. When he was young he would drop objects into the village well to experiment with sound. Then he got in trouble because too many spoons disappeared.
In the same conversation, me discovering/declaring, (not for the first time), (and he looks at his wife with a serious silence), that writing is a kind of necromancy.
Salam to all.