Sunday, February 6, 2011

Mendengarkan (listen)

©2011 Rudolf Helder
Listen. No, really, do yourself a solid with this one. Listen for a little while to nature itself. Mother Earth it's called. Spaceship Earth. Call it what you want, the void outside the window. Turn off any audio equipment, the air conditioner, the friggin' fridge, your freakin' phone, and listen. It's a symphony out there, or a cacophony if you will, of bird calls, chirping crickets, crowing cocks, burping frogs, and faraway barking dogs among a million other sounds down to the flapping of butterfly wings and the curses of dung beetles. If you listen attentively, all the noises our busy lives produce are filtered out by these natural sounds.
I just rediscovered this. Rediscovering is what Columbus did when he returned to America and found that everything had changed.
Like me, instead in Bali.
Recently, in Honolulu, a woman was arraigned in court for killing a peacock with a baseball bat. The free roaming birds in her compound interfered with Oprah and the commercials for hemorrhoids and one day she  snapped. The prosecutor had no other laws he could invoke than cruelty to an animal, which she contested because the bird had died instantly. Her lawyer had entered a no-guilty plea for reason of temporary insanity. She was acquitted.
In a nutshell, that's the insanity I escaped, or rather exchanged for the sanity that is Bali, which is a crazy place. In our Western eyes cruelty to animals is despicable and rampant in Asia, where they eat animals we keep as pets. We always want to be the ones who know what's best, but we don't want to talk about a meat industry giant like Tyson because whenever their soon expiring drumsticks go on sale we scoop them up, addicted as we are to tranquilized poultry and drugged cattle that are butchered conveyor-belt style by human robots. It's easier to get upset about a few squatting sinewy Asian farmers next to a cage with yummy puppies at a village market as seen through some sweaty tourist's camera.
Westerners, and perhaps city folks in general are so removed from what living in a close-knit community and interacting with an immediate environment is like, that the fact that they breed loners with baseball bats and mentally challenged with access to guns, both slowly going berserk on slime squeezed into their living rooms and cars by lunatics like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh is merely an unwelcome side effect of the fact that we no longer know how to distinguish between separate realities.
Over here, in Ubud, where mopeds and motorbikes, cars and buses churn around Monkey Forest Road in an insane maelstrom of cacophonic noise and nauseating exhaust, you're always just a few steps away from the sounds of chattering schoolchildren on their way home from school, cackling geese, a fast rushing stream near the rice fields, a softly clanging bamboo wind chime, an unseen child practicing violin, and the symphony of silence I mentioned at the beginning. Quiet is an avalanche of sounds.
Just step off the road, listen, and you will be presented with your true sane self. You don't have to be in Bali for that, but somehow I forgot.