Random Friday - Tribute to Spalding Gray

They gave me money to go to Cambodia to take in the music, to revel in the humidity and the culture and I refused to go. I went to Bali instead - much safer then I thought but not now. That beating bronze is wonderful. The low notes are the gently swaying body, the mid-range melody represents the arms while that fluttering of fingers is the stereo of the Kotekan, the interlocking parts in the top-end. There is so much grace in this land that it hurts to watch and listen. The dogs are used to this noise and stay asleep in the cooler parts of the village. We had to drive over rice to get here, laid out on the road to dry or cure or some other food processing I could not make out in the squall of information they gave me. I felt guilty as I though that this might be all they had to eat but then you see the piled up offerings, the reality of the plenty that is this island. There is poverty here; I have photographs of beggar children in the road with sticks that could be threatening or could be just self-protection; there are I am sure plenty of people from both sides of the world who want to hurt them.

There is a continuous sound track to this place. If it is not the distant interactions of two village orchestras competing in the night, it is the sound of frogs and insects, the almost sub-sonic scuttling of Geckos over the walls, or the ever-present wind which makes the island so good for kite-flying. But there is little distinction between the music and the natural sounds for they are rooted in the same thing. The music tells stories of the natural world and the natural world is not bothered; it does not listen but instead carries on with its own melodies and dramas. Everywhere you ste there are animals and plants growing and fighting and eating and making noise and music. Here is a performance of the Ramayana a shadow play that lasts for an hour and takes up all the attention of everyone in the village. It is fire behind the screen, an orange glow which makes everything that takes place on the stage of the screen seem to have a heavenly off-island quality.

Everywhere here is defined by its direction relative to the mountains. There is no North or West, just towards the sacred mountain or away from the sacred mountain. Their mountain is therefore the centre of the universe, the thing from which all others are derived. These islanders with water in sight at every gap in the green hills, are not great mariners or even great local fishermen but they know fish and they cook it well whenever they can, firing it up with things that would be off any normal range of the Scoville scale for us. We eat chillies for fun here and guzzle the water for which we have to bargain. Your first offer is always an insult to the seller's entire family but you will leave with a smile after having paid only a few pence over that first figure. Water is good at any time; cold water could be traded for the Holy Grail.

The radio plays some Balinese/Hip-Hop hybrid, a meld of metalphone and big beats, the sound of a filing cabinet being dropped down a lift shaft. I should have bought as many of these records as I thought I could safely get back with me. They have done this once - who can say that they will not try again? Are we not safer here now than we were before. This peaceful race was violated by that bomb. How can you not see that? I love everybody. The whole world is vanishing before my eyes given a lift to the sacred mountain with an explosion. Hell is that way boys but I expect you already know that. Don't expect Virgil to show you round just because he is in Limbo. Sad place but the conversation is great. Up and up to the stratosphere. I could not think I would get this far. Does this repeat like that poor man blown up by his own bomb in the book about the policeman gradually becoming one with his bicycle? A book written entirely in foot notes. We have no space for the novel itself. De Selby and the Anchovy, just one, a little one but one which tastes so much of the distant world from which you have come. I have forgotten my own name now. I know that something bad happened here so many times. Brother killed brother and the valleys were filled with the results of political violence.

Life is so safe here. The music is safe; the roads are safe. It is just in here (points to head) that the danger lies. Music ties up with some bad thing in my memory and becomes that terrible repeating error that makes you ill. The morning in the showere when you realise that you have had one line of some inane song which you hate going round and round in your head. I go hazy like the sight of this island through the mist and low clouds. It rains here so often, a warm rain but then again you wouldn't expect snow would you. We sat in the van in the middle of fields. Anyone could jump me here but I knew they would not. The outsiders are not liked but they always smile nicely. The music fades in, a gentle drone with no percussion. It interests me for a few seconds until I realise that it is not music but the sound of a billion insects flying down from the mountain. The rains have flooded the crater lake and washing away everything they have started the journey to the sea, to the resorts, the gold-courses, the two islands. All that vegetation will be like mud in a few minutes and we will be in the warm sea with the turtles and the parrots. Europe is so far away. I cannot get back. They must send me back before I drown, here I can pay the tax you ask for. What is that powder on the baggage? Just chalk! A cross to indicate the exoticness of my destination. The butterflies are over my head, an eclipse of powdery wings, showering us with coloured scales until the landscape is no more than grey. We need to money to see this sight reserved for millionaires and billionaires. The bomb in the baby carriage took out half of downtown Denpasar and yet we do not have mines and missiles. This war is so strange. They have the non-vertebrate world on their side. Whole armies of insects and cephalopods have made there way here to get their own back they say, to hurt the exploiting owners of the planet. It is not ours they tell me. Here is a laughing squid held up in some jar of blue water, mad and single-eyed. It speaks only in adjectives, which makes conversation difficult. But of course it did not have the advantages I had, the education, the learning to talk. I was crawling while this mass of edible jelly was just about dragging itself along the sandy bottom of the shallow bay. I am hungry now. This is obviously lunch, the sweet and crunchy antagonist. I take the glass-bound enemy and slice him up, fry him quickly and then eat him. He has no concept of hell but this must be close to what we think he would imagine.

This is hell. The orange glow of the Ramayana becomes the orange glow of petrol tanks burning. The storm has taken so many away here and made so many cry. The cause of grief has no remorse and thinks he will get his reward; the pornographic movies he sees in his head keep with him until the trigger is squeezed or better still those many years in front of him roll out as boredom and the point of death comes to his smiling face in some damp cell. And a split second before the oblivion hits him, the truth is known; self-knowledge defines how he dies. I know he is wrong. And now so does he.