The Daily Drool

Final thoughts from the archipelago

Tomorrow night I cross the International Date Line and return to San Francisco.
21 hours in transit, but only five hours lost. This last blast of time
compression seems fitting somehow; my five months of travel leave as deep an
imprint on my soul as any two years of my life before.

Although my friends and I describe this arrival as a homecoming, it is hard for
me to really see it as such. Having shouldered a tortoise shell and swum for
half a year, I find myself adrift. The only place to call my own when I land
is my car, which begs to be driven cross-country in search of further adventure
and a new life. My only real plan is to strafe my former homes – San
Francisco, Boulder, New England, Milano – to answer for myself that perennial
traveler’s question, “where are you from?”

My experiences here in Indonesia have made this confusion startlingly clear.
When Francesca and I climbed the Rinjani volcano crater on Lombok (50 km
covering a 2000 meter ascent), I reveled in the imminence of nature’s power,
the joy of forest trails, hilltop horizons, and cloud-covered peaks. A hot
spring pool at our highest point showed me a clear reflection of Colorado
Mountain Boy, his new surroundings betrayed only by the occasional monkey
sneaking up to steal his nasi goreng. Atop the cliffs I scoffed at
lackadaisical beach dwelling and the soul-numbing hum of cities. I began
trying to fit Boulder’s Naropa University into my touchdown plans.

But then, after Rinjani’s descent I sprinted into the ocean waters to cleanse
trail grime from my skin. As the sun set beneath the waves I caught myself
dreaming of Baker Beach in San Francisco. Full moon solstice parties beneath
Santa Cruz cliffs… how could I think of leaving the west coast behind?
Surely I can re-immerse in my Bay Area reality when I return. Then a shower
and a stroll into dinner with Francesca and our minds lock into the depths of
philosophical debate, bridging political economy with quantum physics and
modernist art, and I feel a pull back to the ocean of mind that is Boston. MIT
scenarios creep into my periscope.

Now I sit in Kuta, Bali, my final destination, and suddenly I find that the
clearest reflection of myself leers all around me. This is a place out of
place, where Indonesian art (“Primitive Designs Made to Order”) sits betwixt
sushi joints and Circle K’s. I learned today that the entrancing “traditional”
kecak dance that so stunned us during our first week here (and landed opening
scene of the global epic Baraka) was practically designed from scratch by
Balinese dancers in the 1960′s as the ultimate tourist attraction. Even the
Bahasa Indonesian language itself is a pruned and sculpted melange of
aboriginal, Sanskrit, Dutch, and English roots. This island’s culture seems to
have picked and chosen from its seafaring passersby, manifesting fantasies of
paradise and obliterating any concept of “genuine” or “real.” When I sit on
the beach and muse about my life, past and future, my buffet-style selection of
Boulderite, Bostonian, San Franciscan, Italian, and Jewish rituals blend me
right into the cosmopolitan backdrop.

At a certain point, I try to just let go of any attempts to define, categorize,
constrain things, to admonish the world for not remaining true to its “roots.”
The world is shrinking and this swirling miscegenation is inevitable. Today I
visited two Balinese friends of Scott who mark the yin and the yang of cultural
interchange. Pertu Agung met me with white paint still fresh on his face from
a dance performance marking the final stages of his father’s funeral ceremony.
His father was his mentor, conveying to Pertu the traditions of gamelan music
and dance since age six, and now the son will continue the artistic family
line. He has traveled to Japan to perform his art, sharing the Balinese beauty
with the world at large, but retains a deep sense of home in his village. His
eyes lit up when I brought him the gift Scott had suggested, two vials of skin
glue to help him perfect his dance costumes. He thanked me with a patient
lesson on the flute and percussion instruments of their home orchestra.

Bayu, Pertu’s cousin, presented an opposite extreme. For him, an autographed
copy of the AC Milan soccer player Maldini was the ultimate joy. He rushed me
into his room to show me his binder of newspaper clippings depicting Maldini’s
career (and that of his super-model wife). On one side of us hung a giant
American flag, on the other a TV blasting pirated videos of his favorite Irish
rock band. At the end of the evening we sped off in his black Land Rover so he
could meet his new girlfriend here in Kuta, leaving Pertu to deal with the
final rituals of the mourning week.

I might lament the fall of this local into the vapid shallows of western
culture if I had not met Clay and Charlie just two hours before. Natives of
the U.S., they had come to Bali on cultural pilgrimage and had holed up in a
small village to study gamelan in preparation for classes they would teach back
home. The three of us shared the shadows outside a classroom at the performing
arts university in Denpasar where they criticized the introduction of western
forms into the gamelan education process. It is almost as if a Law of the
Conservation of Culture were taking shape before my eyes when I met Bayu, an
ebb of traditions to leave room for those cosmopolitan ethnophiles. Airplanes,
broadcast media, and internetworking have brought strange phenomena to the
world.

Now when I think of what to do with myself when I return, I can only think of
myself as an anthropologist of this new global era. How do rows of pirated MP3
CD’s mixing gamelan greats with the best of Bon Jovi mutate the local culture
here? How are Westerners and Japanese accepted as students in the traditional
structures of village education? When locals line up at Internet cafes to chat
online across the ocean, what do they discuss? Could online communities
connect local musicians with global ethnomusicologists and keep local
traditions alive? Is this happening fast enough anywhere to replace young
natives fleeing to the metropolis? Any loyal fans of my travel snippets (if
people in fact read these things anymore) will notice that these ideas about an
online cultural preservation network emerge here for the second time, having
originated when I was thinking similarly about Flamenco in Spain. These
questions and ideas fill my mind, and have solidified the closest thing I have
to a plan upon touchdown. I’m going to try and convince the MIT Media Lab to
let me study past attempts at cultural enthusiast networks and design some for
the future (all solar-powered, of course). Then I’ll bring my understanding to
someone like Greenstar and test my master plans. Now if they could only move
the Berkshire mountains a little closer to Cambridge and convince the sun to
set east over the ocean…