Heaven Tree

1

My friend Conrad thinks poetic descriptions of objects of art are wet. He summarized a number of poems – I was surprised to find out that so many had been written – on the subject of Pieter ‘Peasant’ Brueg(h)el the Elder—Hunters in the Snow (1565) thus:

I won’t reproduce these efforts here, because I think that the same thing is wrong with all of them—each poem uses words in a highly inefficient and inelegant way, putting them to a task for which they are singularly unqualified. De la Mare writes in old-fashioned rhymes and turns, Williams and Langland in free verse; but it doesn’t matter—they’re all telling us what they see, and unfortunately, that’s pretty much the same as what we see, only without the beauty of the original painting. None of them tells us what is beautiful about it—whether the subtle, expansive colouring, or the perfect interplay between receding detail and obscurity, or the bitter accentuation of the snow by silhouette in thick masses.

 

What elements of each poem can’t be derived from a glance at Brueghel himself? De la Mare weeps so poignantly about ‘him / Who squandered here life’s mystery’, when it is De la Mare who has squandered Brueghel’s mystery. Berryman spews out some hackneyed lines about the ’sandy time / To come. . . when all their company/ Will have been irrevocably lost’, about the moment in time captured for posterity. Williams numbly musters a reference to Brueghel as ‘the painter / concerned with it all’. And Langland prattles vapidly on about form: ‘neutral evening of indeterminate form’, ‘the fabulous hour of shape and form’. It’s all so wet. Why does poetry have to be so bloody wet?

From which I infer that Conrad, who at times seems to have read every book in creation (at least every book in creation West of Eden), has wisely refrained from reading every book on aesthetics. For if he had, he would not be blaming poor poetry: the problem he describes – that nobody can tell us what is beautiful or why – is not the problem of ekphrasis alone, it is a problem of aesthetics, too, and perhaps, more broadly, the problem of the human mind in general.

There is something about beauty which invariably escapes definition, description, explanation. Every computational theory of beauty – symmetry, Fibonacci series, Golden Section – turns out to have a critical weakness. But more often than not, we are not even capable of proposing a theory, left by the experience of beauty in a sort of helpless, dazed speechlessness. Mary Mothersill wrote about it like this: suppose someone asked us to say what is beautiful about the color of the cloudless sky, we would have to say, “why… the color.”

Indeed, what else could one say?

2

The evolutionary psychology approach to the problem of beauty follows the method outlined by Marwick: when it comes to people, at least, beauty is whatever we want to sleep with.

At first, this approach struck me as crude. I, for one, seem unable to think dirty thoughts about really beautiful women with whom I am on the verge of falling in love. But then, when I introspect – I find that I am capable of imagining kissing them, and, I find further, that once one begins to kiss in real life, matters – somehow – take care of that conceptual impotence and of themselves. So my inability to engage x-rated thoughts in face of female beauty may perhaps really be only an epiphenomenal – er – phenomenon, and perhaps at bottom things really are that simple: beautiful is whatever I want to sleep with, whether consciously or not. Perhaps I am really only fooling myself into thinking that all I want to do is sit at my loved one’s feet and gaze into their eyes with dumb admiration.

Led by this hunch, evolutionary psychologists have been busy investigating all sorts of dirty secrets: that a low waste-to-hip ratio is indicative of good reproductive health; and good, lustrous hair and clear voice of good immune system – the ability to fight off parasites. Proceedings in this manner, evolutionary psychologists have let air out of all things fine, delicate, and pretty, revealing them to be nothing but a window dressing for dirty, sordid, all-too-familiar — lust.

(And perhaps that is why these brave men and women are so universally disliked by the denizens of the arts and humanities departments, for would we not all want to believe that Leila, the true love of our life, the object of poetry and music, is somehow more than merely a prospective receptacle for our seed?).

3

Yet, as an account of art, this theory can be very potent indeed. Consider Cendrawasi (Chandarwashi).

This secular Balinese dance is one of the great favorites among all audiences, native and foreign. It is danced by two women, and represents two birds of paradise frolicking in the forests of Irian Jaya, to celebrate whose acquisition by Indonesia it was originally choreographed.

Perhaps a little background on Irian Jaya is called for.

Irian Jaya, or Western Papua, was at the time of its acquisition by Indonesia, perhaps the last virgin territory in the world. Stone age people, living in the inaccessible central plateau of the island, heretofore assumed to be uninhabited, had been stumbled upon there only in 1930s, and new species of animal and bird in remote, as yet unexplored valleys come up, it seems, every day (one only a few months ago). The land is a fount of fabulous riches. It is still covered with dense dark primordial jungles (“you should see the trees, the trees”, muses my Indonesian Chinese friend, his eyes half-shut in the transport of tycoon dreaming: “if it were only given me one day to log the whole place to extinction”); and full of immense mineral riches. There is oil. And Freeport McMoRan operates the world’s largest open-cast mine of gold and copper in the center of the island. Yes, it is that simple in Irian Jaya: just brush the top soil aside, and help yourself.

Which is why the Dutch, even after giving up on the rest of the archipelago, tenaciously held on to Irian Jaya for another 15 years. Indonesia’s acquisition was neither easy nor peaceful: the Dutch were preparing to leave the colony and establish an independent native state in its place, with the idea, no doubt, that, as the former colonial power, they would retain important influence, and perhaps some mineral rights, too; Sukarno, Indonesia’s president, and the world’s enfant terrible of the 1960’s, sent in paratroopers; there was a huge international brouhaha, UN security council and all, which took several years to settle, finally leaving the precious prize in the hands of Indonesia.

The prize was hard-won.

Cendrawasi, therefore, is a dance about – consummation. It is not a wooing dance, like Oleg, with all its delicate feelings and all its shy glances, and all its heart-thumping uncertainty. Rather, it is a dance about what happens after the wooing is done and the woman comes to lie with the man: about the unfettered enjoyment of the treasures. It is a confident, exuberant dance, danced by knowing adults for knowing adults. The dancers are full grown women in the prime of their beauty; they wear exuberant, dashing costumes which leave their round shoulders and smooth arms exposed; the skirts are broad and flowing (unlike the traditional chaste — narrow and tight — Balinese sarong); the steps are confident, broad, fast; the movements of the arms sinuously alluring, the fleshy backs delicious. The dance simply drips with erotic pleasure. The point of the dance, really, is just one: look at these beautiful women!

As a result, the dance is easy to appreciate. If you want to hook someone on Balinese dance, show them Cendrawasi. They will love it. It never fails.

An evolutionary psychologist sitting in the audience would feel vindicated to say: dance is a form of sexual display. It aims to display in best possible light, to best advantage whatever is best and most sexually attractive about our bodies: whether fleshy arms or long necks or broad shoulders or long legs; each of these features is loaded with unconsciously decoded messages about the health and fitness of the dancer, and therefore his desirability as a sexual partner. And the movements are designed to illustrate that the systems work well – the brain can coordinate all this hoopla, the joints work smoothly, the heart can keep this up: in short, the body is healthy and full of energy. It would be a good body to possess.

So, the evolutionary psychologist might continue, watching the dancer is a possession by proxy, vicarious sexual pleasure, no different from looking at a Bouguereau or a Boucher.

(Which is OK by me, I do not recoil. I like looking at both painters as much as I like looking at Cendrawasi. Perhaps men my age no longer care to dissimulate about their interest in sex; perhaps 20 years in Asia have made me less bound by rules of Chrisrtian propriety).

Meanwhile, the kill-joy scientist might continue, dancing is really nothing but toying with other people’s hormones.

4

And that’s well and good about Cendrawasi, I suppose. But what about — Legong?

For Legong, you see, is as consciously asexual as anything you will ever see danced on stage. Legong is danced by little girls – traditionally the rule was that one could only dance Legong until her menarche. (And thereafter could only teach it). And to make doubly sure, every inch of the dancer’s bodies is chastely covered with precious perada cloth.

Yet, it is, to my mind, without shadow of a doubt, the most beautiful of all Balinese dances.

It is also, in some sense, the most high brow, the most royal of all the dances on the island.

In fact, it is the fruit of a royal mind.

I Dewa Agung Made Karna, a ruling prince, first saw it in a vision, or perhaps in a dream, while meditating at Pura Payogan Agung, a temple in Ketewel, near Sukawati, nearly two hundred years ago. Legong’s subsequent development is due largely to royal patronage – and royal involvement, for, like His Most Christian Majesty, the Sun King, the kings of South East Asia choreographed and danced themselves.

It was the veteran dancers, who, required to stop dancing upon reaching adulthood, went back to their villages, taught the dance to the village girls, and introduced it to the temple. It subsequently became a temple folk dance, and such a favorite with everyone, that it survived the demise of the kings – another proof that kings are not the only people capable of thinking kingly thoughts; and that commoners, too, are capable of great art, if they only allow themselves to think like kings. (Kingship, you see, is a state of mind: we can all be kings if we only put our minds to it).

Legong is not properly a dance, but a dramatic form. There are many types of Legong, Legong Lasem, Legong Kuntul, Legong Jobog, etc. – each telling a different story and using a different choreography (made up of the same building blocks) and a different number of dancers; but they all share the same dramatic structure, and the same style of music, dancing, and costume.

The dance is accompanied by the sweetest sounding of all gamelans, the palegongan (the Balinese distinguish between several different types of gamelan, depending on the exact instrument mix). It is danced by a small group of identically dressed girls, sometimes just two, carefully matched to look as similar as possible. Though it always tells a story (sung by the narrator, usually a heroic tenor), there is no character differentiation: it is not this girl who represents A and that girl who represents B, rather, they all represent every character in the story at the same time: they represent – the story.

The dance is highly abstract – there is hardly ever an enactment of anything. And if there is, the girls take turns in the same role, in a maneuver designed to get away from any literal representation. As a friend once observed, their movements – abstract and technically demanding – are really an accompaniment to the music.

(All great dance drama teeters on the brink between two abysses, the Sanskrit nritya, or pantomime, and natya, or pure dance. Legong cuts very close to natya).

And the story is usually told in a very modernist manner: in bits and fragments, leaving it to the spectator to figure it out, or guess, for himself. (It is not for the small minds who want to know who did what to whom).

Let me illustrate this point. Legong Lasem, the most famous of Legongs, tells a story of a princess kidnapped by a king and recovered by her brothers through victory in battle. The story told on stage is a fragment. First, there is a long abstract introduction, danced first by the attendant and then the two principal dancers, while the narrator sings an old poem in Kawi (which nobody understands). Then the story proper begins: the girl and the queen beg the king to avoid battle and give the girl up. They both report having had bad dreams, omens that the battle will go badly, the king will be killed and the kingdom destroyed. (To heighten the abstraction, this part of the story, a dialogue between three people, is danced by two dancers, each taking a turn begging the other). The king rejects their pleas and prepares for battle. On going out, he meets the bird of bad omen and thus knows that he will die. He proceeds. End of performance.

(What a story! Is he foolish? Over-proud? Or has he fallen in love and will rather die than give the girl up? And what about the girl: does she beg him to desist because she, too, has fallen in love with him?)

*

To me, the central conception of the dance seems to rest on the denial of the traditional accounts of the aesthetic power of dance drama. You say dance is sexually appealing? Very well, we will use sexually inert children covered head to toe in the forbidding armor of court dress. You say, the plot is what drives it? Very well, we will have a dance with imperfect and fragmentary dramatic representation in it.

It really seems to me as if the object of Legong were to highlight the aesthetic experience alone, through that exercise of the Cabala mystics, the negative definition: God is not love, God is not mercy, God is not knowledge, God is not power. The beauty of dance drama, you see, does not lie in the girls, or the drama, or its meaning, but in something different, not this, not that, not that.

It is as if, challenged by Conrad to say what is beautiful, the creators of Legong set out not to say, but show: not this, not this, not that…

5

On July 3, 2006, there was given at the Bali Arts Festival Legong Kuntul (see a snippet here). It was given at my favorite stage at the festival venue, the Ayodya stage.

(Ayodya –or Ayodhya — is a name replete with meaning and association: it was the name of the capital of Rama’s kingdom, the perfect city at the heart of the perfect kingdom. It is the East’s Jerusalem, the ultimate Shining City on the Hill. Throughout South East Asia’s history various kings attempted to found perfect kingdoms and started out by naming their capital after it, most notable of these being Ayutthaya, the capital of the Thai middle kingdom).

The stage is an open-air stage, circular, and set in the shade of great, green 40-meter trees, and it has a stage door with a colorful curtain painted with gold and billowing in the constant trade wind, a door which is an imaginary door, for it is set in no wall. Dancers crossing it one way become whatever they impersonate, crossing it the other way, they return to their own selves. The door thus is a door between imaginary worlds, states of mind. It is a magical door.

The performance was one of the most moving I saw this year. The gamelan was sweet and the narrator had a beautiful, powerful voice, and he ornamented skillfully and with great feeling. And then the dancers came out, six of them, and danced a long strange abstract choreography, they turned, they knelt, they danced in two files, in three, they faced each other in pairs, they faced away in pairs, they danced in twos and threes, and then they became pistons, some rising on their toes while others fell to their knees, then they fell and the others rose, now up, now down, all in a glitter of their gold paint and ornaments and crowns and fans and flowers and incense tucked in their crowns, while, in gusts of delicious wind, there fell upon them, fluttering in long shiny streams, like gold coins from the sky, golden-yellow leaves from the tree, the first victims of the dry season. They were not six girls, but something else, a larger being, a kind of green and gold dragon, moving with great grace and ease, greater than all of them, and – than all of us.

In Legong Legodbawa, the narrator sings the about Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu, two great gods of the Hindu Pantheon, strolling in a garden:

The sun rises and sheds light on two beings, incomparable in beauty. They are like crystal and gold; their raiment is divine. Their dance is gay and light, for they are young and fresh, as if the moon had set in their bodies. How beautiful together are the flowers of gadung and medori. They are fragrant and fresh like heavenly nymphs.

And they were.

What was beautiful about it, Conrad might ask. Well — heck, I cannot say. Everything?

6

In all fairness, Legong – like all dance – can be sexed up. And sometimes is. Consider this performance of Legong Nila Semara – a willful (and, lamentably, all too common these days) departure from the rule that it should only be danced by premenstrual girls. This performance was given on the same day as the Legong Kuntul I described above. The dancers were nubile, and beautiful, and their performance was punctuated by a series of displays of virtuoso technical control: the bending backwards of the back, so low that the dancer’s elaborate crown brushed the floor of the stage behind her. (I tried to photograph it, but the digital camera’s reaction time is too slow to capture the quick movements of dancers). It was breathtaking, the dancers appeared to have no spines but – rods of flexible rubber instead. It was a gratuitous, boastful display of skill and health, the equivalent of the high C in opera. It said: my body is healthy and I can do all sorts of things with it. But this was transparent: men my age can read the signs, we know what is going on. We understand the source of this appeal.

Who says it can’t be erotic?

But remove all suggestion of erotic stimulation, and the evolutionary psychologist is as lost as the rest of us. Why do we find Legong Kuntul beautiful? How about Hunters in the Snow?

(Was landscape painting the same sort of discovery in the west? “Look, it is not about sex and it is not about God, yet, it pleases. Why?”)

7

Is the experience of beauty a result of computation in our brain? Sure. (It can’t be anything else). But what computation? What figures go into it and what operations transform them before we arrive at the aesthetic gratulation?

In that, the experience of beauty is like the output of strong cryptography. Good, strong code, you see, takes a text we can understand, and transforms it by the encryption process into something we cannot untangle in a million years. The experience of beauty is the end result of a similar process: the brain takes some inputs – yes, but which? – and transforms them in some way – yes, but how? – and all we are left with is the perception of the utter and complete goodness of the thing, unable to tell why and how. (Sometimes, the perplexing wonder of it seems as much part of the experience as the experience of beauty itself).

That we cannot untangle it is clear: centuries of work in prime numbers, golden ratios, fractals, Farey sequences, Mandelbrot and Julia sets – and we are no closer to understanding the secret code – let alone it’s underlying structure. We can’t even say what is relevant, what it is that the eye sees and the brain locks onto, what might enter into the calculation.

 

Perhaps this is why poets, whether good or bad, are helpless, as helpless as the rest of us, in their accounts of visual beauty. Perhaps this is why all they can muster is some vapid trivia about wasting one’s life or the passing of the world.

Poets are good at discovering and exploring the beauty of language, should they not stick to that?

A sculptor friend wrote me:

If you want to get into sculpture — the thing to do is line-draw it — that tends to wash out the narrative effects — and move you into the musical world of swinging forms.

*

In other words: I should shut up, already.

Legong is well — but badly — represented on internet. There are excellent photo essays here, and here, and here. You can see my grainy video of Legong Kuntul here. But note that a keyword search for “Legong” on internet can serve as an index of general ignorance on the subject — most people assume that whenever anyone clicks two heels together in Bali, it is Legong, so much of what is said to be “Legong” is actually Cendrawasi, or Oleg, or whatever.