Impressions, Bali

"America is a very big island." I couldn't agree more. The man was chatting with me about Obama. He hopes Obama will win, because then his friends in the U.S. can help him out again (so they told him); it's been two months since they sent him any money.... Stopped by an art gallery by the side of this track through the rice field to have a thick Balinese coffee, with grounds & palm syrup. There was a stooped old man with a toothy smile, mouth red from betel nut, I liked him so I stopped, and of course the guy with the motorbike sat down to talk about Obama and his personal hardships. I didn't even want to be on that side of the river in the first place; it was a long story involving water buffalo, a family compound I didn't want to walk back through, a bamboo bridge, etc. It's impossible to be alone here, especially when so many people have their petrol tanks on empty; you take the shape of a full petrol tank; so many shapes one can take--





Fragments::: Exercises in making sense--


One man is working away at the edges of the field with a hoe, collecting eels. He keeps them in a blue plastic bag. They are good fried, apparently.

Cooking lessons--

"What you call this?"
"Butterfly."
"And this one?"
"Dragonfly."
"That one is good to eat."
"How you eat it?"
"Fried. With coconut."


We walk one morning in the rice field & I say, I will be sick if I don't take water. My friend commissions an old farmer with a sickle to climb up a tree and hack down a young coconut for me; through the gash, the water is sweet. Later there is a downpour; he chops off a banana leaf for an umbrella. Abundance.

Poverty: a boy of about nine strokes my arm, "Money, darling, money." They learn to pick up foreign women quite young. I have one twenty-one-year old texting me messages of love every night: he dreams of me, he feels sick, he can't sleep. There is one corner, by the football field, which is particularly bad, but to avoid the corner is so out of my way in this town that I usually just bear it. The kid in the orange-and-green jacket with the Eurotrash hipster haircut is twenty-six, I know, he offered one time to show me his ID; last week he was sitting on the step talking with a woman who had stringy gray-streaked hair. He winked at me as he went past. I guess he was feeling like it would be a lucky night. Another friend assures me that he's not a "cowboy", as they call him, though he does have twenty-five year old friends who meet ladies of sixty-five... It's a bit more nuanced than prostitution, though, because the foreign women that come here are not plainly looking for sex: they also want to be loved, romanced a bit, to feel special. At any rate, though, it's a bit strange to walk the streets with these boys basically offering themselves up for sale to you. Perhaps this is how it must feel to be a man, approached by beautiful women who are just looking at you as a walking dollar sign, knowing that you are not really valued as a person... market rules all.

There are many flags and signs for the election next year: yellow and red, a bull with black horns, the politicians looking angelic, portrayed with light, a holy air. "If you vote for that one," a friend points out, "you get 50,000 rupiah." Five bucks. Not bad, in a place where a hotel room-cleaning boy makes 350,000 a month-- about a dollar a day for eight hours at work.

Sitting in a cafe with a delicious blueberry lassi... Listening to a Bali-travel relationship play out at the next table. Foreign man, perhaps Japanese, unattractive, gold watch. Balinese woman, pink toenails. The man/woman script is made even more cliche by the simple English, for of course neither of them are speaking in their native tongue. If I leave you If you leave me Let's talk about this. Laid out point-by-point. They have known each other two or three days. "I don't marry you because you are good-looking and sexy. Just one of many reasons." You could infer the whole conversation just based on tones and inflections; you wouldn't have to make out the words to make them up. "How old do you think you like to have baby? At what age?" She is ready now. These matters are so uncosmic, stripped of any glow, mystique, glamour. But perhaps life is simple like that, here; not so many grand expectations out of Life, not the pressure to Make a Life... He tries to convince her that home is wherever you go. That you can make a home anywhere and you just follow the opportunity. "Maybe I make some business in Sumatra, a contract over there, we move over there. Maybe Surabaya." I doubt he realises that these islands are different, or that home means family to these people. The transglobal ideology is proving a tough sell. She hasn't taken off her purse throughout the whole coffee; black strap shiny across pink shoulder--

"Up through the turn of the twentieth century, more than half the European men in the Indies lived in domestic arrangements with native women."

*



But I am not doing justice to the beauty, the richness of life here. Hardly anyone asks for money outright; the smiles are genuine. A gracious and gentle spirit-- the religion is strong. Always people making offerings, rice and flowers in little baskets... unlike in so many places, colonization did not break the religion here. People believe in karma, they believe in doing good. I've never seen anything violent or mean, here; the first place in the world I've been which was like this... I mean, I guess Japan is gracious and gentle too. But not on this level.

"People are perceived as poor if they eat millets (grown by women) rather than commercially produced and distributed processed foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from natural material like bamboo and mud rather than in cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear handmade garments of natural fibres rather than synthetics. Subsistence, as culturally perceived poverty, does not necessarily imply a low physical quality of life. On the contrary, millets are nutritionally superior to processed foods, houses built with local materials are far superior, being better adapted to the lcoal climate and ecology, natural fibres are preferable to man-made fibres in most cases, and certainly more affordable. This cultural perception of prudent subsistence living as poverty has provided the legitimisation for the development process as a poverty removal project." -- Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive

When are we going to talk about creating abundance? "Rather than eradicating poverty, I mean-- such a better way to frame the problem. "Eradicating poverty" as a millenium development goal just continues the aid-relief cycle, by the way that it's framed...

but, back to Bali:

Bali is not poor; it is one of the healthiest and safest places I've experienced. Rich in life, spirit. Hopefully, it can continue to be so; its status as a cultural tourist destination may give it some protection from "development." Hotels and villas may continue to encroach on the rice fields, but the place is too strong to be "developed" in other ways... I think this development thing is an old story, a tired story, a very twentieth-century story, by now. What comes next?

I know what comes next, but not how to get there. What comes next is recognizing that traditional people had a lot of really smart ways of doing things... agriculture, building, etc... and learning from them, combining their methods with the best of our technologies to create decent lives. It's really simple, and yet, I can't figure out how to do it, how my life can help to do it. Whatever train we're on seems so fixed on its tracks, but this must be an illusion. Whatever train it is, though, it's global-- But there are still people watching it from the fields, farming their rice-- It affects them because it churns through their fields-- But it runs out of power-- Maybe the passengers can hop down, leave it to rust, before it crashes--