The Way of Wanderlust (31 page)

I visited Indonesia in the summer of 1978, when the university where I was teaching in Japan was on summer break. I traveled to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and the world expanded in seductive sensual overload all around me: So much to do, so much to learn! Princeton-in-Asia provided a ready network of friendly Fellows all around the region, who offered couches for crashing and immersive introductions to their respective regions. The “American teacher living in Yogyakarta” mentioned in this essay was one of these, and I'm indebted to him for excavating the layers of Indonesian culture. For me, this essay captures the enchanted, almost intoxicated sense of wonder and surprise that I was feeling—and still feel today—as the world opened up before my mind and eyes.

THE INDONESIAN NIGHT WAS SO HOT
and humid that when you walked, the air seemed to part around you, like a curtain of exquisite filaments.

There was more to the night's dense weave, too—the liquid harmonies of an unseen gamelan wrapped around you, and the spicy scent of skewered chicken sizzling on a roadside grill, blue smoke curling toward a fat full moon.

The moon wove a gossamer scene: people in flowing batiks stopping at sidewalk stands, exchanging wadded bills for charred skewers; barefoot youngsters kicking up dust as they skittered through the streets; men and women ambling side by side, chattering in anticipation of the Ramayana performance at Prambanan.

Two days earlier you had visited Prambanan in the undiffused light of midday—the forests buzzing with insects, the heat bouncing off the hard-packed road and scythe-cut fields—and been staggered by the sight of its main temple soaring out of the fields like a stone thunderbolt carved by the gods.

An American teacher living in Yogyakarta had taken you there, and had told you that the monument was built between the 8th and 10th centuries, when a Hindu dynasty ruled the area.

He had guided you through the Shiva Mahadeva temple, the most fully restored, tracing the temple's intricate, encircling scenes from the Ramayana.

And when you had come upon Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, on a giant lotus petal straight out of Buddhism, you had thought about the Buddhist monument at Borobudur, less than twenty miles away, and about the intricate interlayerings of religious practice and belief you had found in Asia.

Later, in the cool of the afternoon, you had talked about the layers of Indonesian society, and other layers, too—in gamelan music, and ikat dyeing, where the threads are dyed before being woven, and the epics themselves, in which the heroes have vices and the villains unexpected integrity.

Prambanan in the moonlight was an entirely different place, but layered, too—the top layer a festive scene of shouting kids and laughing families and, somewhere behind that, a more solemn place of ghostly footfalls and consuming faith.

On the moonlit stage, seductions and battles, entreaties and flights unfolded in an exuberance of color and costume: the stylized movements fierce, precise, poetic; the music as sinuous and sensuous as the dance—the whole encircling your soul and transporting you.

You thought about the places you had been in Indonesia—the rice paddies and horn-shaped houses of Sumatra; the Makassar schooners in Jakarta's old harbor, bound for the Straits of Malacca crammed with flour, cement, and timber—and about Bali still to come, all terraced fields and bright smiles in your mind.

And for a moment you did not know where you were, how you had gotten there or why—you were one deep gong in the gamelan of night, one tiny note in a harmony so profound and all-encompassing you could not possibly comprehend it. And for a moment it was enough simply to resonate in the Indonesian moonlight.

As you resonate in moonlit memory, even now.

I began keeping a journal in high school, when a wonderful friend and fellow poet presented me with a birthday gift of a big black hardbound journal. Since then, I've always had a journal close by; it was—and still is—an essential and trusted companion, in whose pages I can pour out everything I am doing, feeling, and wondering, and try to make sense of it all. When I moved to France and Greece after college, my letters to my parents began to serve a similar function. I didn't report everything I was doing or feeling, of course, but my parents were astonishingly understanding and supportive—now that I'm a parent myself, I'm even more deeply appreciative of this—and I took delight in describing for them my adventures exterior and interior. “In the Pythion of Time” was written in 1993, but it refers at length to a letter I wrote to my parents in 1976, describing a singular predicament I found myself in on the Greek-Turkish border; reading these words now, almost forty years later, I'm immediately transported back to that unlikely way station, and the philosophical ramblings that it inspired.

HAVING JUST “CELEBRATED” THE KIND
of birthday where you go to bed in one decade of your life and wake up in another, I have found myself the past few days leafing wistfully through old letters and journals, dreaming of other times and other places.

This is a dangerous pastime, of course, but sometimes it turns up one of those little seeds that blossom into a whole world you had forgotten. So it is with a letter I have just come across, written seventeen years ago to my parents from a Greek border town called Pythion, where I was waiting for a train to Istanbul. Sometimes it is just such global synapses—way stations—that unencumber and inspire us.

Here is part of what I wrote:

“I took the 10:00
p.m
. train on Tuesday from Athens and arrived in Thessaloniki around 11:00
a.m
. the next morning. In Thessaloniki I was informed that the Istanbul train had left earlier that morning, but that I was in luck—there was another, special Wednesday-only train leaving for Istanbul at 13:10. When that one arrived, I learned that it traveled only as far as the border.

“Still, that seemed better than nothing, so I had a very pleasant ride through Thrace with a compartment all to myself, and arrived at the border—poetic Pythion—at 2:30
a.m
. Pythion being off-limits to foreigners, I was invited by the sole stirring being to sleep in the station's waiting room, which I did rather comfortably until 8:30, when I was awakened simultaneously by a policeman demanding to know who I was and someone shouting in German that the train for Istanbul was leaving in five minutes.

“I scrambled down the platform to the train, the policeman chasing after me, only to discover that the train had come from Istanbul and was bound for Athens.

“And so I sit in the Railroad Buffet at Pythion, eyed by a suspicious policeman who can't imagine what a foreigner would be doing here if not trying to uncover state secrets, and contemplating ten hours of warming my toes and fingers by an old pot-belly stove in one of the more obscure of the obscure corners of the world.

“Situations like this make me question the nature of reality. I am sitting on a hard wooden bench at the end of a long, stained table in a dirty, cold, deserted Greek border town, scratching out letters under a layering of turtleneck, work shirt, sweater, raincoat, and scarf, and eating peanuts and figs to keep warm.

“This is certainly one kind of reality, but is it any more real than that envisioned for me by my friends in Athens, who imagine me right now walking under minarets through crowded streets from Hagia Sophia to the Blue Mosque, or than the picture you may have of me right now (discussing me halfway across the globe even as I write these words) walking through sunny Athenian streets to the gleaming pillars of the Acropolis: Is my here any more real than that there?

“I am here, but in a few weeks I will be at the Acropolis, and in twenty-four hours I will be wandering Istanbul's alleys. Maybe all three are concurrent realities?

“At any rate, last night, when I was sleeping happily somewhere in northeastern Greece, I had a dream that all my traveling was just a dream, and that I was actually still living in Connecticut, and in my dream I woke up from my dream (of traveling) and felt this tremendous relief and joy to be home and still so young as not to have to worry about being out and alone in the world.

“Then, a split second later, I woke up from that dream—and found myself sweaty and disheveled in a humid train compartment speeding somewhere through the Grecian night.

“And so I wonder about this pithy waiting room in Pythion—is this too a dream from which I am about to awake? And who/what/where will I be then?”

I read these words, and life's border towns and way stations come back to me: the raggedy, muddy-streets-and-strung-light-bulbs place where I spent an itchy night between India and Nepal; the misty, barbed-wire swamp between Hong Kong and China; the snow-locked sentry post between Pakistan and China; the dusty honky-tonk of Tijuana and Nogales.

I think of a one-café town in the middle of Malaysia where I was stranded between buses, and a patch-of-grass “taxi stand” in Indonesia where cicadas serenaded me for hours while I waited for a ride; I think of a slumbering French railroad station where I passed an afternoon reading Proust and pondering the tall grasses that waved dreamily in a drowsy breeze, and a high Swiss village where I ran out of gas and francs, pitched a tent in a frosty field, and watched the moon dance to the music of Van Morrison.

As I think back on all these places, one truth becomes clear: They were all way stations to adventure. They were the gathering of breath and coiling of muscle before the great leap into the unknown. They were the portals to wonders unimaginable and unforgettable.

And so I find myself in the Pythion of time again. Just now the station master has come and checked my ticket, stamped my passport, waved me toward the platform. And here comes the train—I can see it now, all steam and gleam!

Already the pulse quickens, the mind races ahead once more: What lessons lie ahead, I think; what wonders are in store?