Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (27 page)

I had finished serializing my rain tree stories and could only respond with silence. Presently, I sensed my thoughts turning to another rain tree about which I had not written. The actual rain tree. When, standing in a grove of tall trees, I had heard a guide say rain tree, as though by way of explanation, I had glanced quickly over my shoulder in the direction of the voice. In that instant my next action, directly connected to my son, was determined, and I conceived the sort of poem I have just mentioned.

The place where I gazed at the rain tree from a distance in this manner was the Bogor Botanical Gardens. If I ever revisit Indonesia with Eeyore along, I shall go straight to those gardens and almost certainly confirm that the tree in question was a samaan tree of the genus
Samanea.
This is the tree the Japanese refer to by a variety of names, including the American mimosa; in America, it is commonly known as the monkey-pod or rain tree. It is possible that the tree I had in mind was the American mimosa after all, but I preferred to think of it as a samaan because what I had read of the American mimosa, that it folds its leaves before a rainfall, created a problem for me. I doubted that such a tree would be capable of storing raindrops as they fell, and, as is clear in the following lines from my novel, my image of the rain tree required that special quality: “It's called a rain tree because when it pours during the night the tree sheds raindrops from its foliage until past noon the following day, as if it were still raining. Other trees dry right away, but the rain tree's branches are covered in tiny leaves the size of the pad of a finger and each one can hold a few drops of water. It's a clever tree, wouldn't you say?”

I had spent three hours alone in the Bogor Botanical Gardens on my way home from a trip to Bali with friends. My encounter with the climate and topography and the mythological folk arts of that astonishing island, and being in the presence, even as a passerby, of natives who seemed descended from the universe itself, had triggered in me what I can only describe as a transcendental experience that involved both my spirit and my emotions. I was also aware of a connection being made deep down with Eeyore, from whom I had been separated for ten days for the first time in a long while. I felt the connection being made at the Buddhist excavation at Borobudur, on the way to Bali, and, after arriving at the island, at the “temple of death” in Pura Darem—moments that seemed to strike at my very soul. Later, when I had left my traveling companions and was visiting the Bogor Botanical Gardens on my own, the distillation of my accumulated experiences on the trip flared up to compel me toward a choice. In the instant I learned that the rain tree I had been longing to see was right next to me, I chose to walk in the opposite direction, toward the maze created by a variety of other trees growing in orderly rows.

With no map to guide me I had been wandering through the gardens, making my way down one path or another when my intuition told me it would lead to trees I wanted to see. I had come upon an area that seemed more like an English garden than a tropical island, bright and open rather than lushly overgrown, and was standing in front of a baobab tree. A group of refined-looking men and women who appeared to be American tourists, the men in linen suits, the women in white summer dresses, was halted down the path in front of me. Their guide, speaking heavily accented English with a confidence that suggested his pride in the job, said with emphasis, as though he were interrupting himself to make an announcement, “This is the famous rain tree.” In the bright Java sunlight I shuddered. For an instant, I squinted up into the sun at the airy canopy of slender branches that had shed their leaves, then lowered my head and moved away in the opposite direction. I had to see this rain tree with Eeyore, I thought, I couldn't look at the tree alone having abandoned him. Beneath the thought was another, that eventually I would be leaving Eeyore behind and setting out alone for a more peaceful world. I felt certain that looking closely at the rain tree without Eeyore at my side to bear me up would be more than I could endure; I felt wobbly on my feet.

I mentioned experiences that had planted this feeling in me so it was there inchoately, waiting to be activated by the words “rain tree.” I want to describe those moments. The stone Buddhas beyond counting that covered the mountain of stones at Borobudur were in the process of being restored; the coexistence on the mountain of a construction site and an archaeological ruins side by side struck me as impossibly valiant. At the bottom of a long flight of stone steps, in the very best location for a vendor's stall, a little old man—or was he roughly my own age, I wondered, withered in appearance, not only his skin but even his posture, by the tropical sun and exposure to wind and rain in his life out of doors?—was selling thick tea and purplish-silver frogs made of paper and clay. The frogs were toys: the head was hinged like a bellows, and when you tilted it up it croaked like the Indonesian frogs I had heard frequently along the way.

The man wore a faded batik shirt with long sleeves, and on his left hand where it protruded from the sleeve I glimpsed a baleful sixth finger like a spur. Doubtless, that finger had secured him the prime location for a stall at one of Java's top excavation sites. Accepting a paper-and-clay frog and my change from his six-fingered hand, I stepped into the meager shade of a tamarind tree and imagined that Eeyore had been born and raised in Java; the object attached to his skull like a second head would likely have earned him his own prime location for a vendor's stall. I reflected wistfully on the communality of Indonesian society.

The philosopher N, the principal authority in our party, has written about the universal significance in island folklore of the “temple of death” in Pura Darem, the scene of my moment on Bali. If I can summarize the gist of his essay, it will help me to convey my own sense of just where I was when I stood in the courtyard that day. In every Bali village there are three temples that together comprise a single institution. The seaside of the island has negative value and stands in opposition to the mountains, which are positive. Pura Darem, at the sea, is a temple for the souls of the dead before they have been purified, that is, before their funeral. When they have been purified, the souls of the dead are celebrated at a second temple. And there is a third temple that directs the communal life of the village. The patron spirit of Pura Darem, the witch Randa, invades a variety of people and possesses them. She also uses her magic to cure the sick. Following is a direct quote from N's essay that reveals the creativity he applies to developing a thesis that is grounded in Bali folklore: “The persona of the witch Randa permits human weakness and evil to be rendered manifest and even celebrated rather than suppressed or ignored, and this superbly effective mechanism in Bali folklore protects the islanders from
pathos
even as it vitalizes their culture.”

We entered the village of Pura Darem. It must have been a festival day; girls with flowers in their hair moved across the ground still wet from a cloudburst in their bare feet and entered a high stone gate bearing offerings on banana leaves. In the courtyard, little girls wearing sashes of red cloth watched from a thatch-roofed building resembling a barn. As we walked around inside the temple grounds, pausing here and there to observe the function of holy space, the young women and the little girls began to leave, perhaps because the sun was setting. Finally, only one girl remained, with two children who seemed to be her siblings, and appeared to have no intention of leaving. It was as if they intended to offer a special prayer in the interior of the temple, and were waiting for everyone, including us, to leave first. We became aware of this all at once, and in a subdued mood that was clearly a response to the temple space, conversing in lowered voices, we walked toward the entrance to the courtyard. But I had left my notebook on the sturdy, raised floor of the thatch-roofed building. When I went back alone to retrieve it, the girl and her younger brother and sister had just descended to the courtyard and were heading for the stone gate that rose in the dusk like a pagoda. As the girl turned toward me I saw that one half of her lovely, charming face was horribly disfigured by what must have been a congenital deformity. Even so, she exuded a calm and graceful naturalness that included her deformity and was somehow reinforced by her bearing, which was elegant, and by the obvious respect and intimate affection for the siblings accompanying her. As if I were again a child crossing the grounds of a Shinto shrine by myself, I bowed respectfully to the space of the enclosure where I was standing, and withdrew. Had Eeyore been born on Bali, we would have made it our solemn custom to present ourselves each evening to Pura Darem to offer a prayer to the witch Randa. I felt certain of this deep inside me, and my certainty encouraged and even inspired me.

Returning from Bogor to my hotel room in Jakarta, inside a loneliness that was close to panic and not the variety that could be left behind by an early round of predinner drinks, my first and only such attack on the trip, I worked on my sort of poem until it was time to join my friends for dinner downstairs, and I called it “Beyond the Rain Tree”:

Later, I realized that these lines had been influenced by my longtime mentor and my friend, the composer T. Even the title, “Beyond the Rain Tree,” was based directly on a piece for violin and orchestra that T was composing at the time and had spoken to me about, called “Beyond the Distant Call.” Later, when I was working on the rain tree stories that had their origin in my sort of poem, revising my manuscript, I would encourage myself by singing aloud, “
Somewhere over the rain tree way up high / there s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby,
” or again, “
Somewhere over the rain tree blue birds fly / birds fly over the rain tree, why then, oh why cant I?
” and both the melody and the lyrics were from T's arrangement for guitar of “Over the Rainbow.” T had not accompanied us to Bali, but he had visited the island earlier, and it was his talk of the deep and lucid beauty of gamelan music that had laid the ground for the trip. Accordingly, as I sat in the courtyard of that temple whose stone pillars and even the trees pointed toward the sky as though by design, raptly watching royal Balinese dancing to the accompaniment of gamelan music with the stars high above me in the dark sky, I could almost hear T's quiet voice as though he were squatting beside me in the Bali night. In my rain tree series I related how he had been inspired to compose his rain tree chamber music by the metaphor I created in the passage I quoted above, and how in turn I had been inspired to create a series of stories when I took my wife to hear a performance of his composition.

As it turned out, I didn't include my sort of poem in the rain tree series: in the heat of writing one story after another, my “rain tree” caught fire and burned to the ground. I did make notes for a draft of a full-length novel that was intended to bring the rain tree back to life, but I decided to leave things as they stood at the end of the collection:

Today, at work on the concluding chapter of this chronicle of William Blake superimposed on my life with my son, which I intend to complete for his twentieth birthday, I sense that I am fully aware for the first time of the meaning lurking inside that sort of poem I wrote on the island of Java four years ago (I would almost rather say, imitating Blake, that I had merely copied down what was passed on to me by the spirits of the trees in the Bogor Botanical Gardens). Having completed my initiation into Blake with a tour of his mythological world, I am also certain that I shall continue reading him for the rest of my life. I need hardly say that my own lines had become clear to me through reading Blake. I was already aware of the importance of his esoteric thought, which subsumes neo-Platonism, when the cultural anthropologist Y, who was on the trip to Bali and gave us a lecture on the mythological universalism in the island's folk arts, loaned me Kathleen Raine's book
Blake and Tradition.
The subject of this monumental work was precisely that aspect of Blake which I hoped to understand in more detail. It helped me bring into consciousness and reformulate the scene in the final chapter of my novel
The Contemporary Game,
which I recall having completed the day before I left for Bali, in which I described a landscape I had pictured to myself in the valley in the forest and then had actually discovered in a dream. Raine also delivered into my grasp the significance of my vision in “Beyond the Rain Tree.” I went so far as to consider that Blake's esoteric thought had found a new expression in my rain tree metaphor.

Perhaps the chapter I am writing now about Blake and my son might also serve as the conclusion to my “rain tree” novel: “Toward the rain tree and through it to the world beyond”—when I wrote these words I was thinking of my own and Eeyore's deaths. “Our spirits merged, consubstantial, we return….” Eeyore and I cross over into death's domain and remain there beyond time. As though illuminated by a reflection from that image itself, the significance of my life with Eeyore in the present seems to rise into the light.