An Education

We are serious about this 'extended holiday' thing. 

"You are very unusual," our exhausted tour guide will say to us when we travel with him in South Bali a few days from now, "I have not ever had anyone who had so many questions or anyone who actually took notes."

We did. It's hardly a difficult job this  year off, but it is at least true that we always, genuinely, want to learn.

So straight after breakfast l am off to take a class in Batik. 

At first, when my teacher speaks to us in limited English, instructing me straight away  to sketch 'my design', I am a little disappointed. How, I wonder, can I learn all about the various arts of Bali without chapter and verse? Or, at the very least, a textbook. And an exam at the end.

In actual fact, as presumably our teacher already knows, we learn the best about the Batik process by doing it.

We begin with me sketching my design in pencil on a piece of white cotton. I choose to draw a Phoenix because, ever since I made a picture of one for a close friend, I have had a thing about them - it's my signature sketch. I drew one on the paper tablecloth of a coffee house on Penang for a 'doodle of the week' competition. It didn't win.

I will allow myself a slight digression. Because I do like to go on about Phoenixes. The reason they appeal so much to me, and one of the reasons they were in my mind at all when I first chose to draw one for that special friend, who deserved so much attention, is that I think the concept is so beautiful. And so full of hope. The Phoenix is beautiful. It is depicted, usually as a stunning bird with bright, glorious tail feathers and shining golden wings. But, if you understand the cycle of the phoenix, you will know that the light in those feathers begins to fade, the tail feathers to grow sparse and that elegant flight becomes straggled and listless. Until, eventually it is a shadow of its former glory. You wouldn't recognise it. Finally, it simply bursts into flames. 

But out of those flames, out of the fierce heat of that fire, and after (I like to imagine) some time in which the fire has burned mysterious and colourful, unquenchable by human hand, out from the flames, just a hint at first but then unmistakable, the Phoenix rises. 

As beautiful, if not more beautiful, than it began. (I like to think more beautiful).

It's such a powerful image. Yes there are the parallels with death and aging, with the afterlife and the soul, but what I like best is the sheer recognizability of that pattern. How many times do we begin with good intentions, become jaded and fail? How many times are we brought low by circumstance, so that we feel we have irretrievably lost ourselves? And yet, each time, we rise again. We do. We may not believe it, we may even resist it, and in doing so we might limit the glory and colour of our ultimate rebirth, but we always rise again. The friend I made the picture for has a special ability to allow herself to fall only so far before a 'right, that's it - enough' attitude kicks in and she struggles free of what it is that's constraining her and rises, beautiful and triumphant, out of it.

I am constantly screwing up. I never meet my own expectations, fall short of whatever is 'the new regime' and do things which make me despair of myself. But there is always that Phoenix possibility. Always that new hope, that new chance. If I think about life like a Phoenix cycle, then the endless sceptre of that 'blotted copybook' with which I am haunted, burns to ashes in the flames.

So yes. I like Phoenixes. I could probably have just said that. But why use three words when I could use four hundred and ten?

My teacher is an artist. An actual one. After I have a vague outline he frowns, takes the pencil from me - and sets about improving it. In the end my Phoenix looks amazing, and would almost definitely have won the doodle competition in Penang, and netted me a free cake. He is no longer depicted rising from the flames, sadly - I think that part got lost in translation - but is perched neatly on a branch. That's OK though. He looks a hundred times more worthy of a newly reborn Phoenix - and I tell myself he was just resting happily for a moment, following his tiring ordeal.

I sign the drawing so badly that I don't manage to fit all my name in the corner, and when, gesturing me over to a charcoal burner with a runny substance bubbling on the hob, and plucking a wood twig with a metal end on it to form a 'brush' (much as you would use an old fashioned fountain pen), he goes over my name with it to show me how it's done, he misreads my terrible handwriting so that part of my name is transformed to 'hell'. I don't have the heart to tell him and anyway - it adds character.

At this stage we are using one colour and going carefully over each pencil mark to make the outline of my picture. Being dense and not at all familiar with Batik, I don't at this stage realise it is actually molten wax. It's a rather striking gold colour. When, a little later, I do realise we are drawing in wax and will therefore probably remove it later to create a pure white outline I am a little sad to lose the gold.

Outline done we move to the desk again, where I proceed to add colour, using a range of water based inks. It takes me a little while of carefully not going over the lines before I realise I can simply rest the 'brush' (more of a wad of cotton wool on a stick) on the material and the colour will spread - but will not cross the lines I have drawn. Water is repelled by wax remember?

Empowered by this discovery I eagerly colour in my Phoenix. And, predictably, after a while of presumably feeling the pain in his artist's soul, my teacher takes the paint from me, frowns, and transforms it. He has the casual confidence that goes with knowing what you are doing, and he gets his fingers out and into it, smudging one colour into another until my bird is exploding like a rainbow off the canvas. 

"Now, we leave to dry" he tells me. 

We have a bit of a halting chat about the English and Balinese languages but I am too obsessed with the painting, so I leave M (resident photographer for the occasion), to excitedly learn new vocab while I stand in the sun where we have laid out my handiwork and, um...watch the paint dry.

Once dry, I paint it rather liberally and very lovingly, with a varnish which will set the colour and prevent fading, dry it again, and then boil it in water to remove the wax. Pulling the finished artwork out of the pan you could, if you squinted a bit and concentrated on the charcoal burner rather than the water, say that my Phoenix rose from the flames.

"It's actually good" says M with an unflattering, though entirely understandable tone of amazement. And it is. Albeit I had a wee bit of help.

"This part not good" says our teacher, thoughtfully, pointing to a small yellowy green blob in the blue background where someone (him, definitely) must have smudged the bird's neck colours a little too enthusiastically.

"That's OK", says M, giving me a little kiss on the forehead, "it can be the sun."

"Yes!" I say, pleased with the suggestion.

"No," insists our teacher, "the sun would not be there. Would be up here."

He stabs his finger somewhere near the top of my 'sky'.

"It's a setting sun," says M firmly. "At least that's what we'll tell people."

So there. It's the sun. If you ever get to see it. It's a Phoenix in front of a setting sun and it's a masterpiece. By someone who appears to be called 'hell'.

After a brief pause to eat 'snakefruit' (I love it and it's only available here so I am eating like it's going out of fashion. Which it is. No one else seems to like it.) I move on to my next class. Traditional Balinese Art.

This - and I know from M's video evidence - is rather less of a masterpiece. I am greeted by a smiley teacher who yanks and twists my arms into position and somehow still manages not to be terrifying. And I discover that the beautiful Balinese dance that I have seen so perfectly demonstrated by the experts is, surprisingly, not as easy as it looks. The posture, in which you have to hold yourself permanently, requires bent legs, bottom out, pelvis tilted, shoulders back and hips out. It makes for a stunningly womanly silhouette. And thigh burn. The distinctive tilting of the head and eye movements are hard to coordinate so that I find myself turning my head rather than tilting, and tolling my eyes alarmingly so that I look like a very startled pigeon trying to cross a busy road.

M manages, solemnly, to film my first attempt at the 'Pendet', 'Welcome' dance without laughing. Not so my bright eyed teacher. When I get it wrong she does a humorous impression of it, sending me into shouts of laughter, but I am not always able to remedy my mistake. When I forget a move or do it wrong she looks at me, friendly, but bemused. 

"I think perhaps you do not understand?" she says, concernedly, worried, perhaps, that my constipated pigeon impressions are born out of some defect in her teaching.

"I do understand," I tell her, "I'm just not very good."

She, in turn, shouts with laughter.

It's absolutely sweltering, the two hour class having begun at one in an open classroom without fan, breeze or air conditioning, and from very early on I am genuinely soaked through. The sweat is pouring off me in such unladylike rivers she pauses the lesson to rush into the toilets and fetch large quantities of loo roll. I wipe my face with it. Instantly it is wet again.

"Oh well" I say.

"It is snowing in England, yes?" she enquires, knowingly.

"Yes" I say, wishing myself neck deep in a snowdrift somewhere in the blessedly frozen northerly part of Scotland.

She laughs again. "I cannot imagine it" she says.

Eventually the class finishes. I am absolutely spent but I have enjoyed every minute. The dance is bad, when I watch it back on M's phone later, but not that awful.

"And that was only half way through!" says M reassuringly, having had to leave after the first hour to attend his wood carving class.

"Mmm.."I say, unconvinced, "I'm not sure I really improved much on that in the rest of the class.

What I have started to work on though, is posture. Women here, trained in dance and in carrying things on their head, have the deportment of posh girls just out of finishing school. Head up, shoulders back. Western women I have seen since travelling, all have the same trade mark. Clumpy footsteps with bowed shoulders and slouched backs. It is as if we are trying to climb into ourselves and hide. A product of fast food and the computer age? Or our British reserve, our tendency to self deprecation? I once attended a salsa class, taught by a Cuban lady.

"You must not dance like a British person", she said, "British always are trying to hide flaws. But a Cuban finds her best feature and sticks it right out. If it's her chest, she has her shoulders back. If she has nice nails she is always fluttering and flashing her fingers. And her head? It is held high. 'Look at my boobs', she says, 'look at my fingers. Isn't it great?'"

I am still much too British for that. But I have started watching my posture and holding myself tall. I look a bit like a mannekin, or a puppet with a pole in it, but it's getting more natural. And I think I look better. M, who gets quizzed at least twenty times a day on whether it's working, tells me I do.

Having said what hard work it is, we do stop for a while in the middle to eat cake.

"I am a bit fat now" confides my teacher, "it is since I had children. Before marriage, not fat. After marriage, fat."

She tells me she thinks twenty five is the best age to get married because, apparently, after that it is hard to have children. I note that the concept of marriage and the having of children seem synonymous. And that she happened to do it around twenty five.

M and I have only been married a year. But wherever we go people assume we are desperate to have children.

"No baby?" people ask.

"Not yet," I say, "no baby."

"But soon yes?"

I try to be non committal. It is generally met with a knowing wink and a pronouncement that it will probably happen while we are travelling because we are more relaxed. 

"On the way home maybe" said B, happily, "that would be best. To come home pregnant."

Actually it would be an impractical nightmare. And I haven't had the heart to point out to anybody that it won't happen unless we stop doing what we are doing deliberately in order to stop it from happening. Everyone assumes, I think, that we are already trying. Perhaps they think we came here purely to help the process along a little. Family planning here seems to mean 'planning a family'.

Talking of family planning, I go to find M to play photographer to his carving class.

I am fully expecting him to be just putting the finishing touches on a wooden penis. 

This is not an effect of everyone's apparent interest in our reproductive processes, but because in the class write up it promised that M would carve 'a simple object' and the only simple object we have seen, carved and decorated and on sale everywhere here, is a phallus.  They are red or pink with flowers on, they are huge and veined, or they are delicate and small. No one here sees anything odd on this. They are a fertility symbol and they are pretty.

Cue some giggly anticipation and various jokes about 'not being able to wait to see M's phallus' etc. We are not as mature and well adjusted as the Balinese, it would appear. 

When I finally arrive is bent over, clutching between his feet a wooden object which is, disappointingly not remotely penis shaped. He is making a turtle, carved out of the side of a semi circle of wood, bark still attached. And it's really good.

"That's actually really good" I say with unflattering surprise. 

"It's not as easy as it looks," says M, as his teacher takes his turtle from him, grips it expertly between Hus toes, and starts to shave wood off it using his knife. The wood just curls like butter under his touch. When it is returned to M I can see the effort involved in chipping even a tiny sliver away. Even so, M is doing well. His turtle looks great. We are not going to be short of souvenirs of Bali.

We convey the turtle proudly back to our room, where he struts his stuff next to my Phoenix.

After a short scuffle in which we lock ourselves out of our room and become briefly stranded by the swimming pool, and a very nice and ridiculously cheap dinner in a Waring in town, we head for the temple for the next part of the ceremony. 

When we arrive there is a procession snaking its way into the temple and holding up the traffic. At its head is, excitingly, a Barong. The Barong, which can take the form of a pig, a tiger or a dragon, is a shaggy haired animal reminiscent of a Chinese dragon, and worn by two people, one at the head and one at the feet. Symbolising good against evil it is worshipped as a manifestation of God.

There are also, in the procession, a couple of long haired humanoid figures, known as Rangda the witch. They symbolise bad spirits and are given offerings along with the barong, in an understanding of their balancing role, their yin to the barong's yang.

Evil spirits are treated with more respect, in Balinese culture, than, for example in Christian culture, when they are hounded out or roughly exorcised. In Balinese culture, if someone is sick there is a ceremony to summon the bad spirits which are making the person ill. Once summoned, an offering is made and then the spirits are politely asked to leave. It is, o think partly an appeasement of the evil, and partly a healthy respect of it, whilst always, obviously, rooting for the barong. Balinese culture is complex and difficult to set out in a blog or, indeed, to make clear sense of in the first place. Better scholars than me have spent years on it.

Tonight, other than the procession, it seems there us little else happening. We see no dancers, and the place is heaving with activity, but it has a more random quality to it, as though people are simply making their own offerings in their own time.

It's still beautiful, the offerings being larger and even more colourful and elaborate than me he previous day, but after a while even we, dogged fact seekers that we are, drifted away to a nearby bar.

Where we sat listening to salsa music instead of dancing, because we didn't have the right shoes, only to emerge with our transport booked back to the hotel, to find that there is dancing under way at the temple. 

It's too late to call back our driver, who pulls up at that moment, so we are delivered home, me with an acute sense that we have squandered the last hour of the evening. I feel a little grumpy. The lack of dancing to salsa offended me. You can't listen to salsa music. You have to dance to it. I wasn't bothered about doing it in flip flops or bare feet. And just think, we could have been at the temple.

I become a teensy bit grumpy. And then I take a leaf out of the Balinese books, and do what various yoga teachers have been telling everybody for centuries. I summon the bad thought, casually examine it - and then politely ask it to leave.

It is the ying, after all. To my yang.