Swarm

 

As a child, I heard whisperings, faint at first, that grew; murmurs of an island, like a grainy shadow, which had to be tenderly kept afloat as fiction. A friend who is a medium said to me one night, “Your grandfather wants to speak to you.” And I replied, “No.” Not because I didn’t want to hear from you, but because I couldn’t bear to hear you channelled into words.

 

Hadn’t I followed your rattle, tuned into your buzzing? Can’t that be enough? So I said no, and the tapping stopped. But you became a swarm, which picked up your bule-pupa and carried her home, and I opened dizzy in your courtyard, where the buzzing became insistent.

 

A few weeks later, my friend texted, “I think it might have been the grandfather on your mother’s side.” I texted back, “that makes more sense.” My maternal uncle hears voices, my mother speaks in tongues, and I feel, at times, your susurration, some days like a scourge of mosquitoes, other days like an eclipse of moths. A murmuration that is an accumulation of energy at odds with filial linearity, a vibration not a bloodline: a gyromancy, where felled by dizziness, at the point of falling, I see no successions, only shimmering diversions branching out in all directions like lightning in the rainy season.

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And the Creeper Keeps on Reaching for the Flame Tree animates the insects found in the last painting by my grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu. Painted in the traditional Kamasan style, uncommon for him, it depicts a battle scene from the Bhomantaka: The Death of Bhoma, a twelfth-century Javanese epic by an unknown author. These insects can be found in the white spaces between the warring figures, where, mosquito like, they function like the small motifs called aun-aun or “haze” found in nearly all the traditional schools, which represent dust particles in the air.  The art historian Adrian Vickers, in his book Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali 1800–2010, writes:

 

This filling accords with Balinese ideas that there is no such thing as empty space, but rather concepts of areas that are ‘busy’ and ‘quiet’ …  that operate on a spectrum of fullness and emptiness. In Balinese ideas of landscape, certain areas, such as deserted shorelines or conjunctions of rivers or mountains, are more potent, more charged with energy than others. … So, too, areas of painting are more or less charged, and figures are arranged in relation to these areas, since they are connected to the characters’ actions. The unity of humanity and nature, of micro- and macrocosmos, is expressed through this sense of space, particularly how areas of painting can be charged with potentiality.

 

 

In I Gusti Made Rundu’s painting, it appears that he has transformed the traditional aun-aun motif into insects. And the Creeper Keeps on Reaching for the Flame Tree animates these insects, producing a swarm that follows my voice as I recite a circular, looping text, formed from a section of the Bhomāntaka that describes a hermitage left in ruins after a battle. As one of the lines laments: “The circle has been broken and destroyed.” Dust animates my grandfather’s insects as a swarm in the dawn light of an empty and arid landscape. This swarm images ancestry not as linear succession but as an accumulation of energy, as a vibration full of shimmering diversions “charged with potentiality.”