ShadowplayBy Norman Lock Ellipsis Press |
 |
|---|
In Java during the reign of King Senapati, a master of the shadow-puppet theater heard, by chance from a Portuguese sailor, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The rods were awkward in Guntur’s hands, and the puppets faltered behind the screen. No longer supple, his hands had forgotten how to divine the presence of the unseen. His voice also faltered. It would advance haltingly, as if words were stones above the surface of a river to be crossed with deliberation. During his exile, Guntur had lost the habit of speech. But an uncommon — even unnatural — sympathy for the wayang had not lessened during the years he had kept himself apart from people and puppets, both. If anything, it had increased while he taught himself to enter the minds of his puppets, especially that of Arjuna with whom he most identified.
To say that Arjuna or any other of Guntur’s puppets had minds is only to suggest the inordinate degree to which Guntur had concentrated his attention on them. Dwelling exclusively on some few objects, the mind may sometimes overcome the distance between itself and them. It will imagine that it is regarding other intelligences when these are, in actuality, only itself. Guntur had held his puppets in mind with so much fervor and fixity that he believed he could possess them where they lay shut up in their boxes. (Unless invisible powers had, in truth, materialized in Guntur’s shadow puppets — in which case, they might be said to have minds and with them to have subjugated Guntur’s own.)
Guntur would tell stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — for months and years he would tell them until they were enacted in the room without need of shadow puppets. Possibly no other dalang had ever made a theater of his thoughts alone. When Guntur did finally take the puppets in his hands and once more had mastered them, he was no longer an ordinary dalang. His power over the wayang kulit, over the stories’ gods and demons, princes and warriors—over the time and distances of myth—had no equal. Supernatural powers were now his and sufficient to the journeys he undertook to find Candra. Night after night, Guntur (in the form of Arjuna) and Arjuna (in the person of Guntur) traveled through all the heavens and hells known to the devout and to the damned. Guntur sat crosslegged behind the story-screen, sounding in his mind the music of the rebab and gamelan; and in his mind (which was also Arjuna’s), he searched the darkness. As Rama had pursued Sinta to Rahwana’s castle, so did they now—Guntur and Arjuna—pursue Candra across rivers, over white deserts, and through bleak forests. They went on foot, in boats, and on the backs of elephants. They flew with Gatotkaca, the Flying Knight, above the Sudirman Mountains. Each night they advanced farther, stopping at dawn in exhaustion under a tree, in a cave or a tent erected in the desert against the desert’s heat. And when the light was gone once more from the sky, Guntur sat on the floor behind the story-screen and began his journey anew — Arjuna’s journey and his own.
The ways leading to the Land of the Dead are not straight. They move, they go forward and double back on themselves. They writhe hypnotically like white snakes of snow before the wind; like certain snakes, they devour themselves. The ways are like carpets taken up at the beginning of summer and laid down in the wrong rooms at summer’s end. Demons harry the wayfarers with snares, with fog and confusion. One can arrive in the afterlife by dark or lighted paths, but one cannot always be certain which of the two he has taken or if the path on which he set out is the same as he now finds himself. The ways leading to the Land of the Dead are strange and forbidding, and there is more than one fatal land.
Guntur came to understand that the ways are, in actuality, sentences composing — in his case — the story of his rescue of Candra, which was more difficult than Rama’s of Sinta, who had not been ravished by death but by a monster. Prince Rahwana had become enamored of Sinta, the beautiful wife of Prince Rama. Disguising himself as an old man, Rahwana erased with his own magic the magic circle Rama’s brother had drawn round Sinta to protect her in her husband’s absence. Rahwana took her by force to Alangkadiraja — his kingdom — and locked her in Alengka, his castle. Aided by the Monkey King, Prince Rama followed the monster and slew him with a magic arrow.
Guntur invoked Sinta’s story, hoping to repeat its happy outcome. But he failed. For a hundred nights, he and Arjuna traced her path from the Dandaka Forest, where Sinta and Rama lived out their exile, across the desert and into the mountains of Alangkadiraja. A hundred times they besieged Rahwana’s castle, a hundred times broke down Alengka’s great door, and a hundred times slew the monstrous prince with magic arrows. But Candra was never there. Candra’s story was not Sinta’s, and Guntur would not find the young woman in the brown sarong in Alangkadiraja.
At last, Guntur understood that it was his own rising and falling voice, which paved with words the ways to the afterlife. And he remembered the old dalang’s admonition against invention for its presumption against the ancient forms of storytelling. But Guntur knew that he had reached the end of all known forms and, like a navigator on the brink of the world, must enter the unknown with neither map nor history to guide him. Like wayang that the clothmakers purchase as readymade patterns for the decoration of batik, the immemorial patterns of stories, too, can lose their usefulness and serve merely to reproduce an empty form.
While it was not uncommon for a dalang to improvise (Guntur’s and his mentor’s condemnation of the practice notwithstanding), the result was limited to a comic or satiric confirmation of reality. Never before this had a dalang improvised in order to extend his story — and himself—beyond what was previously known.
Guntur now embarked on other, more formidable journeys from behind the story-screen — to Vaikunth, the heaven of Vishnu; to Kailash, the heaven of Shiva; and to Brahmalok, the heaven of Brahman. With his voice paving the way and with an almost unearthly skill in the manipulation of the wayang, he traveled as far as Indralok, where the blessed sit beneath red parijata trees. With his radiant shadow puppet, Arjuna, Guntur went also to Yamalok — Lord Yama’s infernal palace where Chitragupta pronounces irrevocable judgment on all human souls.
But nowhere among all that dead did Guntur find Candra.
* * *
One night Guntur did not go in search of Candra in his theater’s limitless shadowland, which might also have been the equally limitless space of his mind. He did not take up Arjuna, did not sit crosslegged on the floor behind the story-screen, did not sound in his mind the music of the rebab and the gamelan. He lay down on his mat and slept.
And for the first time, he dreamed of the sea.
In his dream, a girl walked into the sea and climbed into a boat just beyond the rolling waves. Having let out the sail, she sat by the tiller and steered toward the place where the sun would soon rise. Guntur knew, in his dreaming, that it was the Java Sea and the girl was Candra as he had often imagined her. He was dreaming the story she had told him ten years earlier, while she sat on her side of the white cotton screen, so that she might take to the clothmaker a puppet.
The boat flew over the water, accompanied by flying fish which sang a nonsense song to wake the sun. The girl’s long hair loosed itself darkly in a morning wind fragrant with cinnamon. And the boat sped toward the horizon even as the sun began to pull itself up from sleep and so, once more, light the world. The black sea lightened, turned gray, then blue. The horizon trembled, and the sea round the boat now resembled a vast indigo cloth, which a wind’s rough handling has creased.
The horizon trembled as if in nervous expectation, for the girl was steering a course for it that no power on earth could deflect. Implacably, she was making for the horizon; and contrary to all mortal experience, it did not recede. The horizon line to which she steered remained as if fixed to the spot on the earth’s watery bulge where first her eyes had detected it — black against the night’s lesser black, with here and there a lingering star. The horizon did not fall back in order to keep between it and the approaching boat a constant distance. Instead, the boat closed on it. And as it did so, the flying fish trilled all the louder, the sky rolled shining and silken overhead, and the sun vanished. Or rather the sun was no longer a flaming disk above the water but an unfolding rose — coral and cinnamon and singing in concert with the fish.
Guntur dreamed that the sea at last stopped its ceaseless motion; the waves lay down and the wind, which had been blowing from every corner at once, uncreased the indigo cloth before returning to its caves at the ends of the earth. Not caves — nautilus and amphora shells.
The boat crossed the blue horizon and entered the sea’s far side — the first boat built by human hands to do so. And on it, Candra entered that impossible sea.
Guntur did not dream what happened next; if he did, he forgot it. Or if it was not a figment forgotten upon waking, it was one that the dreaming mind could find neither words, sounds, images, nor fragrances with which to speak of it to the mind’s waking half. The girl had entered a place where sensations were perceived only by gods and by the dead—a passageway leading from the visible to the invisible world.
He dreamed further; and what he dreamed, he remembered. Candra at the tiller, the boat drawn up on an island’s pink and yellow sand, a coral reef through which the boat had passed and — beyond it — a green jasper sea from which came the odor of cinnamon. Guntur watched her step lightly from the boat and lightly walk across the sand toward countless pavilions in whose radiant shadows the dead were sleeping. Their faces seemed to him like yellow diamonds heaped in the sun, though here there was no sun — only light and music, which were the same. Their faces seemed like lanterns carried at night by the fishing boats, whose lights appear and disappear in the rolling sea’s deep troughs. But here, light and dark were indistinguishable — or say, instead, that these and other familiar categories of existence had no meaning.
The pavilions were red, blue, gold, and green silk. The music danced like motes of sunlight on the water.
Guntur woke and recalled on the instant of waking the story of Orpheus and Eurydice told to him long before by a Portuguese sailor. And with the harrowing certainty of one who has endured a revelation, Guntur knew that the island sought by the Portuguese was the same as in Candra’s story. Guntur knew where he would find Candra and that he could bring her back, provided he did not turn round to see if she were following him.
* * *
