Downtown Jakarta. The most depressing place on earth. Thousands of bedraggled little roadside stalls with car-oil concrete cardboard floors hundred-year-old weathered shelves selling Chinese walkie-talkies rubber boots broken microphones copper springs plastic rubies, and everyone crammed in there perspiring mumbling working around each other like maggots in a box, waltzing across the cardboard shuffling papers slurping dish-water Bakso flicking ash from the corners of their weary mouths. Seven million streets like this, full of woe-begotten god-forsaken sons of the soil working their fingers to the bone 14 hours a day until they die for nothing, for the absence of knowing any other way, making enough money to buy another day’s rice, scratching off another day of life, a few cigarettes, a cinema ticket once a year, and pay for their offspring to do the same, until they wind up with a mouthful of smog too and a cigarette at the corner of their lips, worrying, passing it on, all in the name of Allah the merciful and the honey-skinned virgins that await you once all the dirt has been shovelled. Jakarta, they say, is sinking. I doubt it will look much different after. A decaying concrete cesspool of smog and suffering - even the water tastes of misery. The second day started more pleasantly - somewhat ethereal in fact! A beautiful girl I’d been sweet on for months finally came to spend the night and we embraced until dawn curled up practically cooing together. I could have married her right there and then. Kind smile, good heart. I tried to avoid having sex in the morning, because a little 18-year-old firecracker called Adella was coming over after my massage. But it happened anyway. She looked like an apparition sitting there in the morning light, held me against her breast afterwards. Then I banged the masseuse. I was exhausted by the time Adella walked in, but she was spectacular, the pre-Raphaelites never sketched a finer figure: so plump and lithe. Insatiable, wanted it every hour. Fit right in the palm of my hand. Had me hard with a wink of an eye. Said she was in love with me. Maybe she was. Pleaded with me to stay with her forever. We rolled around together the whole afternoon. The sheets were soaking by the time we’d finished and “I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind [...] having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon” (Kerouac). After she left I got drunk, smoked a few cigarettes and jumped in the pool to let everything cool off. Found a billiards hall nearby. The idea of sitting alone, breathing in smokey sexless air, seemed like heaven. I walked down an alley, opened the door, the place was dark, full of old men smoking and playing pool. Perfect. They gave me a cold glass of beer, chalk, a cue, a quiet table in the corner under a spotlight. Perfect! “And wanting girl partner for play billiards iya sir?” What? A girl? No! Well. Seriously? Alright then. Ritna was pleasant enough; a little dead-eyed from one too many smokey nights at the bar, drinking halves of Guinness and listening to lonely old Chinese men’s drunken sleeze. But she seemed at ease: I was in good spirits and went easy on the sleeze. High heels, stick-on eyelashes, black cocktail dress. By the second drink of course I was in love. Pathetic. “My eyes keep me in trouble,” sang Muddy Waters, “want every woman I see.” Ritna’s eyes shone in the spotlight when she smiled. It finished four games all. She went over to another table and I went home to sleep. On the way back, got talking to this light-skinned Chinese girl at the supermarket. She said she'd come over after taking her groceries home, but never showed. Thank god. There was no way I’d’ve been able to satisfy her. Only air coming out by then. I’m not even sure if it’s enjoyable anymore, just masochistic. But, for better or for worse, it’s what I’ve come to love: the hunt; a young woman’s haunches; that sly little come-hither love-smile she makes you think is just for you; the slow pleading moans. Perhaps it’s the only thing I’ve ever really understood or truly loved. It all sounds sublime, to be sure. But reading this back reminds me of something Henry Miller once wrote: “Going back in a flash over the women I've known. It's like a chain which I've forged out of my own misery. Each one bound to the other. A fear of living separate...” I tell her “I miss you”, but what I’m really saying is “I miss that look in your eyes that reminds me I exist. But the more I let myself love you, the less I know who you really are." Really the mechanism is the same: that blind sudden flash of craving: for food, photos, females, places - it's all the same really - the childish craving of the ego wishing to capture and covet. But which ultimately moves us further away from the things we seek to appreciate. For all the thrills and ecstasies - the slow swell of early love, the wild moments and tender afternoons - we know we are bound to solitude and that, when the feast is finished, even the reddest rose is a ghost. I forgot who said that, but it will ring true for all eternity. When I sit down quietly, as I am doing now, with an open heart and a quiet mind - a rarity these days - I know that what I really need, what any of us really needs, is just to get back to the old ways, the earth's own rhythms, then simply being there is enough, when we let the universe go about its changes. If you asked people in the villages here what their job is, they wouldn’t understand: they just get on with life. For me, there is nothing I would like to do or see that I could just as well not do or see. The world is a blank. I don’t remember when it happened: when I lost the thrill and wonder of this being alive. I know I should learn to be curious again - that's for sure - to listen, really listen to what people say when they speak, and listen to the earth again and to my own senses quietly, which is nothing less than the earth becoming conscious of itself. I do not yearn for new experiences, only to record them, like this sorry diatribe. Yes, better I learn to listen again: to those things that can be taught in no other way than through silence - remembering that it is through my speech that the earth sings itself into existence. And I should remember, at the end of the day, just to take it easy - because everything will happen in its own time anyway. For the most part, we lead very ordinary lives, but not very simple ones. I miss the peace and quiet of the hills, the open country roads, the mountains and rivers without end, the clear stars, wind, trees at night. I don’t remember when I became lost in this voluptuousness of looking, when my eyes clouded over. Just that I’ve forgotten how to let go - craving, instead, from one moment to the next, for the object of my desire: that dark delicious flash, that is not an antique of first-love, but a factory-made plastic replica. Now too many exclamations marks have spoiled the page! But oh for the chance to hold her flesh, to hold her ecstasy, in the palm of my hand! In that privileged moment, a truth comes rushing forward that we simply cannot find in ourselves, or a habitual mate. And it only ever blushes onto the page. Our hands stutter to say those things that only really exist in the fissures between words or “in the heart” as they say. Last night Adella the firecracker came back and brought her friend. We rolled around for hours on the bed playing and caressing, rutting in the dark. At some point, though, Adella's face changed: she had become insanely jealous and ran off into the bathroom, shouting she was going to kill herself. I heard the door lock and a glass smash on the floor. I banged on the door and she opened it with a piece of glass pressed against her wrist. I grabbed hold of her, shook the glass away and carried her out screaming. She calmed down. The two girls left. I slept like a baby. Maybe only a pregnancy will change me now. But there are ways around that too. I deserve whatever happens to me now anyway. I’m sitting in Jakarta airport, waiting for a flight to the Indonesian island of Lombok. Thinking about my (four) girlfriends back home and wondering what I'm going to do. I do have some morals left and feel guilty. Any one of them would make a perfect wife. I have a room booked in Lombok by the sea, a quiet cove east of Kuta overlooking a nice deserted strip of shore where I will swim each morning [I swam once] and drink [had to stop because of my sciatica] and read [Colossus of Maroussi, never left my rucksack] try to climb Mouth Rinjani volcano [no chance, the sciatica] and hope the thing goes off and that I think of Romina’s smile when I go, or look up at the sky and see it again for the first time. The true meaning of ecstasy. Ex-stasis. To be outside one’s body. Your feet find their way somehow along the boulders, never miss a step. Leaping, bending, taut. Maybe in a flash you catch a thought of the age of the rocks. Otherwise no thoughts. Yes, back to the old ways. Up with the dawn. Climb. Cool off in the sea later. Jim Morrison's question was a good one: How many of us really know we’re really alive? It all gets lost, and we just get swept along after a while. Quiet country roads cross-cross the island. No rain for 8 months, but still green. I was walking for hours, set off at dawn shirtless, unhurried, through overhanging trees, rice paddies, scorched hills, farmers out there already quietly toiling, kids going to school laughing at the “mister,” no cars on the roads, just the occasional motorbike, the sound of Cipoh birds, roosters, butterflies, a cool breeze, cumulus, all the families in little roadside bamboo huts, dusty patches of land in the yard, placid cattle grazing there, torn clothes drying on a wire, man chopping wood, woman chopping food, baby cooing in the shade, what more really is there? Well, there are beautiful young dark-skinned Balinese girls going by, tiny, laughing on motorbikes, fixing their bright eyes as you fall in love with the blur-face, your imagination going wild, heart pulling itself out of your chest, set loose on the wind. I try to let it go. Remember what Exupry said: love doesn't consist in staring into each other's eyes, but looking out together in the same direction. Never a truer word spoken. But sweet Jesus those honey-coloured thighs. I got lost, headed for the coast to follow it west, scrambled up the hillside to get around to the bay, feeling like a tropical mountain goat, rather than a sweating hairy pale shapeless beast. The cold water tasted so sweet in the village. One of those mornings completely given over to the senses. So vivid. The sound of the palms fanning the sky, the swell of the tide, the changing light. Sometimes it all becomes so sublime, reaches into you, that each sensation is a feeling unto itself. After a few cold beers by the sea, watching the waves break far out and come in slow, the tropical languor sets in. A breeze so soft you have to close your eyes. I met a beautiful young Javanese girl called Kartika on the beach. Cut-off jeans, long black hair, kind eyes. She invited me to her bungalow and we ate rice, played ukulele, I ran my fingers through her fine long hair. She said it was too soon for a kiss, but would see me on her day off. That was enough to send me into a frenzy for the rest of the day. I wrote her a poem right there on the way home [stole Neruda’s line about wanting to do to her what spring does with the cherry trees, but used Melati trees instead], found a barbers and had a shave, cleaned my shoes with a rag, even rented a motorcycle so I could pick her up. A sad state of affairs, really, as deep down I knew she wouldn’t show. Every day she'd meet handsome young surfers at the bar where she worked. She saved her smiles and kisses for them, and yet it's me they stay with now. Better news in the morning. My Egyptian girlfriend - buxom, smile full of joy - had slept with a girl and would bring her to join us to “celebrate Christmas” when I got home. Iranian Qatari. Tattoos and big breasts hidden under her abaya. At 14 fucked her teacher and the teacher's husband. Hard to describe just how pleasurable it is to have all those hands and tongues and eyes working over you at the same time. The mere presence of another person in the room is an indescribable magic. [Better to read David Abram Spell of The Sensuous than Greta Thunberg as, although pressure is mounting on governments to act, without the psychological (phenomenological) underpinning, any changes will not be sustainable, and lack substance.] Came upon a quiet bay where a hundred people were wading in the shallows picking seaweed ($1 per kilo). Out on the village’s only street (muddy from last night’s downpour, the first in 8 months) everyone was dozing on the bamboo benches in front of their houses. I walked passed gesturing for a haircut. One guy stood up and went to get his neighbour who came out yawning and told me to go to another village. Then a fisherman came running out waving his clippers, sat me down in his living room and went to work. I don’t think he’d cut a human’s hair before: it was pure guess work - but how different could it be from plucking a chicken or sheering an animal, I thought. His face said he wasn’t so sure and apologised each time he buzzed a clump off. When he was about half way through, my hair in patches, beard half shaved, patches of blood, he whipped the towel off my shoulders and said with a triumphant smile: "mister finish!" He didn’t wait for any money, just scuttled off to morning prayers while I finished myself off with the clippers, his fat son inspecting me, grinning nervously with his thumbs up. Hung around by the roadside after missing the early bus, hoping someone would stop and take me to Mataram. Word must have got around as a guy approached on his motorcycle carrying a spare helmet. He wanted 100.000 to take me, and I said yes without bargaining. Big fancy 4 star hotel for 15 pounds a night with breakfast. Checking in got the receptionist's phone number and an upgrade, so my room opens out onto the pool. Will stay here in discomfort and luxury for a few extra nights, like some kind of forlorn colonial beast, eating and swimming, in a stupor, fucking beautiful young Indonesian girls and getting $5 massages and ah the sweet dream sometimes, of this being alive, living in the realm of the senses. A strange revelation at the hotel. I was sitting in the lobby, between girls and massages and beers, hunched over with crippling sciatica back pain, when an old Chinese lady noticed me listening to the music coming from upstairs and invited me to join her - it was her church group singing. Everyone smiled as we went in and shook my hand. So many people came over to greet us that I felt dizzy after a while. It was as though they'd be waiting for us. The gospel singing was so powerful, and still everyone coming over with humble joyous smiles known only by those whose souls have been unburdened, blessed, forgiven - washed so clean even their eyes shine. I felt my own guilt welling up inside. Years of it festering there. Lust and selfishness. The singer closing her eyes now, making a fist, the spirit of the music moving through her. The choir and band reached a crescendo, a huge swell of sound shook the walls and everyone there. I began to weep uncontrollably. Yet, at the same time, as this River Jordan of renewal was washing over me, my gaze went on seeking out the most beautiful girl in the room: the Chinese keyboard player with the slender neck. I noticed the old woman, sitting there beside me with her eyes closed, praying, her wrinkled hands clasped together. I felt ashamed about my life. I know I belong to this earth, though we were thrown here - but everywhere I go I feel like an imposter. Maybe it’s the Jewishness in me, but it sometimes seems more satisfying to possess a thing than consume or use it, saving it for a rainy day that, deep down, you know will never come. And there is something about families that makes me feel a deep heart-wrenching sadness. The simple care and dignity and day-to-day chores of clothing and feeding and teaching as they young ones develop and grow and take their turn at raising the next wave of offspring and like this forever perpetuating existence. It is the most natural thing on earth and yet, for some reason, it seems to me to have a strange core of sadness. Until love seems to be nothing more than a photograph faded in the sun. Living in the realm of the senses has rotted my soul. Couldn’t be more shallow or self serving. But when I try to settle down with a woman I always feels trapped, bored, alone, take her for granted. That organic bond, the Care, is never there. The only lesson really worth learning now: let things happen in their own time. Be grateful for, and receptive to, the simple things, the earth itself.
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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