Agitation. Aloft in the sky the agitation finally starts to subside. I am again flying in the direction of my childhood.

It is an incredible spectrum. The last time I traveled was to Helsinki and eventually 600 kms north of the arctic circle. Now my destination is below the equator. A spectrum of 4 decades of almost ceaseless journeys that seem to follow no organized chronology but a mysteriousness that still continues to surprise me. The islands of Indonesia were accessible from either a stopover in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. It is not very different this time. The Malaysian airlines flight is punctual to the dot. There is not the usual high security despite the month of continuous bomb attacks. The airport in Kuala Lumpur is the epitome of sterile modernity. A showcase of the trendiest commodities. Luxury shops one after the other. Many young women wearing tight hijabs as its sale representatives. Alongside the business & first class lounges, islamic prayer rooms. . Recently the main fatwa council has issued a fatwa on malay muslim women having short hair on the grounds that it leads to the crime of homosexuality. I look at one of the curtained young women and inadvertently run my hand through my hair. She averts my eyes and runs away. This reality too is its modernity a far cry from the easy colorful headfree sarong culture that the airhostesses still display. Happy diwali says the chief steward with an endearing smile. I had chosen to fly on this moonless night to get away from the exploding earsplitting firecrackers that the festival has degenerated into. Originally it was the moon cycles that decided this festival. A no moon night on which one lit candles and lamps to make and celebrate light. For some convenient reason the festival was preponed by a day. He offers the greeting as a generous bridge. I am the only Indian passenger on this flight to Bali. Later he comes to me and asks if I am a textile designer. After I answer him, he says I knew you were an artist immediately. And adds you will find what you are looking for, you will go behind the evident. I too go every few months. As soon as one lands one feels this other sensuousness he conveys to me with his hand movements and words. Hinduism is plural, different here, different there. We too have the same practices, he says as a reflective afterthought only enshrouded by the veil of islam. As I flip through the newspapers, the hindraf party has been banned, a new fatwa on muslims learning the yoga. As I flip through the audiochannels, an Arabic voice reciting the Koran. The hand that he offers stretches over the immense political abyss. I recall a true story told to me many years ago. There was once a devout tamil. He worshipped the god, Shiv. One day a snake appeared in his bedroom, he was ecstatic shiv had graced him with his presence. Meanwhile his Christian wife disgusted ran out screeching in fear. A curious crowd gathered, meanwhile the Chinese lay await to kill and eat the snake. What is divine in one, becomes a demon in the other and in yet another has only material value.. The snake meanwhile slinks out of this living stage. As if reading my thoughts, just before landing my friend comes again to me. come in front, you will see the view better. Here you see mainly the wing. He sends one of his boys, eyes laughingly rolling, singing very lucky as he brings my bag. to the empty business class. Its because we have another sensitivity he says. And his extra sensitivity bathes me in an intoxicating spirit as he takes me from the seats on both wings and many angles to show me the different aerial perspectives of the sea, of the floating islands and the flying clouds. *

The landing is as he has promised. Its quality can hardly be described, only be felt, seen and experienced through subtle vibrations, which touch the body and mind chakras. as if inside one hears a lilting flute playing to the gentle breeze. Windows open up of the senses of the emotions. The warm tropical sun, the extending sea coasts, the low slanting roof architecture landscaped by gardens and the abundance of nature. The exquisite bamboo and woodwork, the champa flowers in different colours swaying to the mild breeze. It is as if everything sings. Even the English spoken by the Balinese is not staccato but sing-song. It is an explosion of vivid colours in an abundance of green. Flowers everywhere, the shirts and sarongs too that both women and men wear are floral and multi colored. I watch the champa flowers dropping down and every now and then, men and women alike stretch out and with a delicate flow of the hand place the flower behind their ear. It is a gesture that is infectious, after a few days even some of the visitors are offering each other flowers and learning to wear them behind the ear. As if its perfume whispers a mysterious melody into ones ears. I hire a motorcycle and a young driver to take me to the southernmost coast and the temples on the west shore Tanah lot. The ancient temple floats on the sea But everywhere there are temples and houses and temples within houses. There is no centralizing jealous glorified god and for the most part the gods & goddesses nap but there are spirits everywhere. Spirits before one crosses a bridge, spirits of the trees, spirits of the sea and spirits unique only to oneself. * Sitting on the sea, the red champa flowers gently swinging away amidst the bamboos, a young girl brings her offering to the yoni like votive on the white sands. It is gesture of deep interiority as is the devotive quality. Different flowers, grains of rice & incense in a small leaf plate. It acknowledges the relationship to what nurtures and to what protects. Aradhana as it was named in Sanskrit - A daily practice of constellating the divine in the micrososmos of ones being. Grace in easthetics. She returns my glance with a gentle complicit smile. Overwhelming happiness. Equally suddenly extreme grief as if Bali is only a civilizational mirror in which one sees the shards of ones own civilization. So much of what is akin desecrated in India. Dirty temples, the earlier lotus tanks filled with stagnant water and plastic. Only every now and then a yellow champa, a vibrant red hibiscus offered. It lights up. A moment of harmony amdist the dissonance of loudspeakers. Here one lets the gods and goddesses continue in their slumber. One can hear that old meditative quietness. * In the room, the sounds of gamelan. It entices me and I follow its sounds via the lotus pool and the temple passageway to the other wing of the hotel. A segregation of sorts. The wing that I am staying in has mainly Asians, whereas here it has the westerners. A stage has been laid out in the open air garden along with a lavish buffet in which is contained the price of the dance. The waiter recognizing both my interest and my pocket, beckons me to the only free non western table saying have a glass of Indonesian wine if nothing else. Besides the temples, the hotels are the other doorway to seeing these different dances. The dances are intricately linked to the space of the temple and to different mythologies, ceremonies, festivals, rituals, seasonal cycles & conceptions of constellating, shamanizing, transforming and mediating the energies outside the limited human dimension. It makes one ask the question, what is that fine line between the sacred and profane. What is that extra. Though there is a marked distinction in performing for outsiders the quality is professional and allows the spectator to get into the basic kinetic vocabulary of the dance.

One of the key characteristics of the barong dance is that of the mask. The mask is not simply a superimposed face but rather the active persona of the dancer. The movements are elaborate and like the majority of Indian dances have very fine hand movements. The gamelan has a complex history. Etymologically it relates to the Balinese word gambel" and Javanese word gamel to make sound/music by striking. The post position an rendered the verb into a noun and today it has come to symbolize a single orchestral unit of different musical instruments, mainly xylophone like instruments, chimes, gongs, flutes and drums. It is a confluence of many different east asian and south asian traditions. The pitch relationships only 5 notes may be used even in the 7 note scale deriving from the Chinese, the modal practice from the Indian raga. The bronze instruments from south east Asia and drums akin again to India. Simple repetitive harmonies, that comprise the gamelan as one musical body, yet highly complex rhythms that synergize with the dance and above all the exquisite hand vibrations that correspond to the reverberating techniques of the struck instruments that are never pounded. Slowly the intricate performance returns to the human level and the dancers take off their other faces. Women and men now, not embodiments of energies and spirits. * After the southernmost point, I head north eastwards. The sea shows a different face like the civilizational mirror that the person who brings me to Sanur offers. Cultural autonomy we have retained in the face of new tourism but economically it is big money through Java that controls property . His ancestory is from east java forcible exile from the choice not to convert and to submit to the universal arab god. The history of colonialism, of extreme theological conflict between the One and the floating plurality continue whether here or there. It is as if there are two scales one only a monotone that is hammered over and over again, the other where the point of return is only a new zero that enfolds into the potential of the infinite. * And though we struggle to communicate in English, there is something that returns us the communication of a shared past. No longer do I feel the earlier despair but the sense of a continuing syncretic continuum. Something complements, something completes the inner geographic image. * A beautiful young woman, exquisite silk costumes and elaborate crown, descends onto the stage, performing the legong dance, another appears as her mirror and slowly as the dance unravels becoming more intricate, more intense, constellating its reflection becomes yet a third dancer. For decades I have been working on old Sanskrit texts, minimal in form, dense in cognition, engraved a few thousand years ago. Now, the long arduous task of deciphering and seeing the cosmology with the inner eye is entwined in its presence. Cumulative memory, its potential its performance. Cosmologies are not about belief; it is the act of another kind of perception an awake trancelike consciousness * Journeys are entwined both in pilgrimage and exploration. The routes are as important as the destination. Whilst researching the islands natural geography, I came across two lakes, both of which are related to the goddess Danau. Both are close to the northern coast. But there appear to be no direct roads between them. It is like the boundless rivers that seem to flow in one curving south-north line. It is the same with the road network. There is either a circular road that curves around the sea shore or there are roads on a vertical axis. Only a few small roads occasionally provide a horizontal link.

These paths to the interiors of the island are adorned by terraced rice fields, sparkling rivers, underground streams, waterfalls in rain forests and gorges. Simply music to the eyes. On the way to the temple-lake lies the palace-temple complex of Pura Taman Ayun. The royal complex is only a larger version of the engraved house-temple architecture. It is governed by the philosophy of trihita Like many words in Indonesian, tri hita comes from Sanskrit. Tri three & hita principles. It characterizes the different relationships of harmony to the divine, to the environment and to the social living. Each house has its own shrine set to its own garden landscape. Artistic form emerges from the organic. The main path into the temple complex leads to a tree that emits an incredible incorporality. There are many offerings made to it and I too am propelled to look for a beautiful fallen flower and put it to rest at its roots. Its branches arching the small shrines like a window to the Bratan lake as the mist weaves it spells, wafting through the clouds as if in an ethereal waltz. Being in its ambience is being cloaked in the quietness of the harmony to the intangible. Mist filled lakes are seen as having mystical quality! For the first time I experience a musical association that is European, Liadovs Enchanted lake. * The quietness is suddenly broken by the blaring loudspeaker of the new mosque atop the complex. A group of young hajj tourists from Java are busy playing the game of catch me photo. It is a grotesque sight to be a voyeur to ones own culture, to exchange the resplendent verdure for an arid piece of the desert that one has possibly never seen. Luckily they do not remain long, luckily the crackling noise stops as if only a temporary dissonance. The iconography of some of the outer shrines glitter in gold color, counterpointing the deep brown of the wooden roofs. I have been studying winged deities in many different cosmologies and here on the wooden beams, there are women flying at several angles. I painstakingly photograph them The main temples are inaccessible as if as small islands suspended on water, enveloped by the mantle of mist. * The memory card downloads onto the computer but the winged feminine have flown away. Not a single image, yet every other image before and after is there. * After a circuitous route, visiting temples with extensive painting, temples at waterfalls, temples tucked into ravines amidst rainforests and natural springs, I finally come to the next destination. It is Ubud, the centre of culture and marks the middle of my own pilgrimage. Instead of a hotel, I deliberately look for a private home stay and on the second try find the room that I have been looking for. The entry into the house is from one of the crowded main roads but the topology of the house is much like a temple complex. It goes from space to space, yet everything is interconnected. Arriving, from the front, one side is the small temple, the other a small room with paintings and musical instruments, then rooms possibly for one set of the family, then another living area and finally the room that I have is at the back. On the right side a desk faces huge glass panes. Behind their transparent screen, a

fish pond and garden. In front a large verandah that looks onto the lotus pool and the rice fields submerged in water. The principle of trihita continues here in the subak irrigation.- a very complex collective way of canalizing, managing and distributing water in accordance to its cosmology, the rice goddess Shri.. The ecological balance, the way of terracing, working with the natural water flow and other time cycle of planting and harvesting rice is intricately engraved in the different ceremonies. Early morning, I sit out and hear only the sounds of birds, insects, rooster cocks and water. Every day there are fresh lotuses in bloom. The owner of the house comes quietly to place the offering in the votive between the lotus pool and the rice fields. A small cup of coffee is also offered to the invisible form. The young man who brings me the breakfast has the same quality of gentle stillness. He has specially arranged the fresh fruit, banana pancake in such a way that a yellow champa flower presides in the centre. The pavements too are full of offerings, strewn flowers, incense being lit, smell of clove cigarettes and the small boutiques, despite the commerce offer an abundance of beautiful craft and art. In traditional sculpture and painting, a generic cosmology is given. It all depends on the intertwined quality of the aesthetical, devotive and interpretative relationship that the artist gives. Much like with composed music. The more affinity that one has with a composition, the more one can differentiate the interpretative quality as well to which one has more resonance. But the difference is that a complex musical fugue cannot be used as a decorative trophy brought back from exotic lands. The visual culture is so developed here, that it can easily absorb. The traditional, the culturally different blending styles, coexisting like multiple spirits, each partaking of each other. Flaneurlike I let my eye take me around, from an exquisite sculptural masterpiece in a property brokers shop, to roadside carvings, to sculptures under trees amidst scattered flowers. An open doorway, by the lotus pool, a Saraswati with a stringed instrument, a golden umbrella as her crown entices me to come in. Inside are the many rooms of the art gallery, winding around the gardens, the temple and the residential area. In the first room, a young modern painter who evidently loves Klimt. Yet it is hardly a copy but a natural absorption of his style in the uniqueness of his own sensibility. The next has contemporary art that works in a traditional idiom. Again a Saraswati catches my eye. She is completely different to the saraswati in the doorway, different too from many of her known traditional forms, yet for the cosmological eye, it is the discovery of yet another new generic form as traditional as it is modern. I have the thought what would Gauguin be here just one more painter. It is only the persisting hierarchy that accords a western painter who is able to absorb another culture a genius while in the inverse, the easterner can only copy the original western maestro. * But there is always an exception on that fine edge. One early morning in Sanur, just before coming to Ubud, an Australian woman Barbara introduced herself to me as she had read my writing. A long breakfast conversation, journeys together and a farewell dinner to an ensuing long friendship with warming Australian red wine followed. It was through her stories that I become aware of the figure of Walter Spies. A well known name in Ubud, as someone who not only made his idyll there but was also partially responsible for creating a doorway to the paradise of Bali. Yet both in the country of his birth and the country of his nationality, he has long faded away into oblivion. Born in Moscow in 1895 in an affluent art interested german family, as a young child he met both Rachmaninov and Scriabin and started composing early on. During the first world war, like his father and many others he was arrested as an alien enemy. Sent to the Urals, he somehow made his way back to Germany in I919. Acquainted with expressionist artists, working and traveling with the film director Friedrich Murnau, he occasionally made his living as a ballroom dance teacher. He was an avid tango

dancer as well. Exhibiting his painting works in Netherlands, he came across the imported or perhaps plundered art works of Dutch India in the then Kolonial museum. In fact, Indonesias etymology is derived from latin, Indus = India, and the greek nesos = island. The initiation into this art proved to be decisive and in 1923, working as a seaman, he jumped ship at Bandung. Initially, he accompanied silent Chinese films on the piano, subsequently he worked for the sultanate in east java as the conductor for their European orchestra. Meanwhile he engaged himself with the gamelan. However the rupture that had occurred in the 14th century with the islamisation of Java and the exiling of its non converted earlier cultures to Bali had left its mark in the artistic and musical traditions. In Java, artistic expression lost its deep link to its surrounding cosmologies and could survive only partially in the elite court tradition. Its complex symbology became a mere ornament. In Bali the continuum continued. It was as if there had been no rupture. Many instruments of the gamelan here are exactly the same as those recorded several hundred years ago in the temples of Java. And the tradition keeps evolving with new compositions, new styles. Even its rituals are not completely fixed. Therefore settling in Bali was not an exotic choice but a natural progression of going to the source. Unlike Java perhaps because of this divisional wedge - which had been colonized much earlier, south Bali had just been colonized a decade ago. It was fresh from the dutch oppression, suicides of thousands of Balinese after the lost battles. The native art patrons had been disposed off. It was in this context that Spies received hospitality from the Sukawati royal family. It was equally in their interest to setup another cultural window to Europe, thereby hoping to challenge the imperial domination. Thus the theories of Margaret Mead are as much a reflection of what the Balinese cultural patrons wanted to convey. Spies become a wonderful medium. The artistic alliance continued to be vibrant, even by Balinese standards. However, this was not in keeping with the colonial powers. The price had to be paid. Exactly like the English and its missionaries, the right sexual morality had to be imposed on this digressive and subversive backward decadence. In 1938, Spies was arrested by the Dutch for his homosexuality. In prison, in Surabaya, in east java, he painted two of his key paintings, The Landscape and its Children & Scherzo for Brass Instruments. Whereas the landscape painting is clearly Balinese in depiction, the idyll that he had lost, the Scherzo was a play to the preparation of his own death and to the possibility of new life. Karmic and psychoanalytical cleansing! The painting of the Balinese landscape survived. It was auctioned 60 years after his death for a sum that went into millions. The musical scherzo, dedicated to Leopold Stokowski embarked on sea to Chicago, It never arrived. Its only record a photograph that Spies took in prison. Freed in 1939, he was rearrested soon again as an enemy alien and in 1942 as a prisoner, deported on a ship to India. The ship was torpedoed by the Japanese in west Sumatra. The dutch made their flight, yet leaving their fettered human cargo to drown, not far from the epicenter of the Tsunami. The European alien found his final resting bed in Rangdas womb in the Indian ocean. * Hospitality is about absorption. The legacy of Spies has countless reincarnations. The door that he helped open is only an invitation to step over the outside threshold - into the magical layers of the inside. To which invisible destination does ones own journey lead to which secret revelations.

Back on my street, a shop beckons me with more barong faces. I know them immediately from their indian kindred. As I put on the skull face with flowing hair, then yet another with even longer tresses, a long red, gold tongue lolling out, the cosmology of rangda takes on its own avtr. Avtr is a wonderful word, it is to bring about celestial descent into the human. A state that every artistic form here strives for. It takes about 2 and a half minutes of playful haggling to work out the price, followed by an hours conversation on the inner metaphysics. For Spies, only the tradition of the evil witch counted. Here it is raw unbridled energy, its potential of transformation of magical protection. A few doors further is the temple entrance. A few chairs have been laid out in one of its wall-less roofed pavilions. The fire dance starts, the lamps are slowly lit up, a chorus of men take their seats on the ground, a red champa behind one ear, a yellow behind the other. Slowly the monkey chant starts and as it starts arriving at its crescendo, the women dancers start their erotic twinlike dance. It is a far cry from the ramayan mythologies that it is said to depict. In the harsh Indian mythology, Ram is hardly a romantic figure, far from any feminine attributes, only the ultimate of the male hero that wins through treachery. The third woman dancer comes in, incorporating the magical deer. Mythology breaks down into its primeval source, however much its narrative may try to enclose it otherwise. The rain torrentially pours down on the roof but not one drop comes inside. Its direction is vertical. Fire inside lightening outside. The dancer with naked feet , is propelling the burning coconut shells into rings of spiraling ember. Pure dynamic energy accelerating with every new spiral. Entropy. The dance reaches its anti-climax, the spirals turn into ashes and the dancer lies exhausted on the floor. The rain too has ceased. Equilibrium * Volcanic lakes are a fascinating and rare geological phenomenon. In the north of the island, the danau batur is the largest lake. It forms a natural crib surrounded by the massive caldera of the gunung Batur, an active volcano. On the other side is the gunung Agung, a stratovolcano, the apex of the island. Together they form the most important part of the ecological cosmos, governed here again by the lake goddess Danau. Originally the temple was in the crater itself but was destroyed by the volcanos outpouring. Now it has been reconstructed in an overlooking village. It is here that I have constellated my final destination. The way from Ubud is again an abundance of green but as one starts nearing the crater, the desolation starts. It is the first time that I encounter ravaged earth and the double edged phenomena of the volcanic terrain. It provides fertile soil, its lake is the main source of irrigation but its waters are also matched by the potential of its fire. Kedisan, the village adjacent to the lake is a far cry from the lush green that I have become so habituated to. There is a kind of bleakness here that the surrounding geography only accentuates. The way to the temple curves through the barren crater. In contrast to its other twin other, a seemingly impervious and harder atmosphere marks its mysterious quality. There is not a single other foreign visitor. Being extra cautious, I carefully record each image many times. By early evening mist heightens this earlier unfathomable ambience as if providing it with a continuously weaving cloak. The cosmology merely mirrors the raw starkness of the landscape and falling light.

The gamelan feels completely out of place here as I watch the different nuances of mist, the rings it forms over the volcanos. It is much more the form of the symphonic poem. For the first time here, I hear Liadovs enchanted lake. Complete synergy of synaesthesia. * As I start to transfer my visual diary onto the computer, I am struck by rational disbelief. Each and every image of the surrounding landscape towers on the screen but not one form from the danau temple. I look for a possible scientific explanation as I scan through the manual. It informs me that in strong magnetic fields the memory card may not work! To me it is the experience of the Zero that makes all forms vanish, yet is the enigma of all forms the volcanic paradox. * Mist fleeting through the early morning skies, mist floating on the waters. Each hour of the day reveals yet another quality as the sky manifests its turbulence, as the clouds erupt into thunderous storms. The rain finally makes its halt and like the night before, there is not a single star to be seen, not even its moon counterpart. Only overwhelming mist. * On my last day, I go to the other villages further away from the crater. The fields are again fertile, the grey has again yielded to the rainbow spectrum of colors and a beautiful tree whose roots form many chambers cradles an abandoned ancient temple. Nameless are the countless spirits, yet each distinct in its wild and serene quality. Fairylike they engage one in their own scherzo. To be or not to be is not the question, much more the infinite play between what is lit up and what remains obscured. Slowly as night descends and as the mist starts to ascend, for a few brief moments the full moon. The tangible is always linked to the intangible. *