SALON

Pico Iyer

Saturday, Jun 19, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

My sacred place

For an introspective wanderer, a two-room flat in a generic Japanese suburb offers all the possibilities of a traditional shrine.

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My sacred place is a makeshift, modern, entirely generic suburb in the
middle of Japan, which looks, alas, like a (badly translated) version of a
sitcom set from the San Fernando Valley. There are no temples in the
vicinity, no priests; there is almost nothing in sight that would remind a
typical visitor of Japan. A new McDonald’s sits just down the road from me,
and a line of convenience stores stands across the street. A four-story
department store called Life has just replaced some empty fields, and a
health club nearby offers aerobics classes behind an entrance guarded
inscrutably by some Easter Island statues.

Yet what the place affords me is almost everything I associate with
sacredness: the chance to be still, and perfectly alone; people all around who
are always going places and doing something, but with an air of quiet self-
containment; and complete freedom from the TV or newspapers that would only
bring me down. A lifetime of traveling has brought home to me, perhaps, that
it makes little sense to go all the way to Jerusalem or Cuzco if you’re still
carrying Sherman Oaks inside you; take an angry person to Nepal, and he’ll
only find new things to be angry about.

Yet conversely, I think, you can go anywhere and find a shrine of sorts if
you can leave Sherman Oaks (or modern Japan, or anywhere) behind; a sacred
place for me is a place where you can find a silent clearing within, an open
space that the best part of you respects. And though this is something any of
us can (and must) do anywhere, it’s easiest, I find, in a very foreign place
where I can’t speak the language or import any of the trappings of my usual
self. The reason we go to Varanasi or Isfahan, after all, is to step outside a
dailiness that gets in the way of eternity.

I practice my own forms of sacredness, then, in a two-room flat in the
Memphis apartment building: For grace I can read Emerson or Thoreau; for daily
communion, I can take walks through the rectilinear streets, to where the maples (in autumn, as I write this)
are turning in the park; for hymns, I have Van Morrison. And if I
really crave actual temples, I can activate the memories of Tibet or Big Sur
that I keep inside my head. Some people go to the woods for this, some go to
Antarctica to flee Monica Lewinsky and TNT; I just come to a place which
baffles me on the surface, and so offers me the chance to find a shrine
within.

My “sacred place,” I recognize, is not necessarily sacred for the Japanese
all around me, especially because for them it is familiarity, and not
the opposite; and it’s probably not very sacred for a foreigner who speaks
Japanese, or finds his sense of anchor in community. But for me it offers a
solitude that is where my sense of sacredness is rooted, and a chance to make
a life at some level deeper even than the Hindu rites of my grandparents, the
Christian hymns I learned at school or the Buddhist-Shinto practices all
around. Sacredness, which is the beauty of the soul, is — as much as any
beauty — in the eye of the beholder.

On those occasions when I hanker after a more formal kind of worship, I can
travel to Kyoto, 90 minutes away by train, and visit 2,000 shrines and
temples, often lit on autumn nights with lanterns leading up into the
hills; or I can take my daily walk a little farther, down a slope and up
another hill, to where a small traditional farmer’s shrine sits among the
condominia. I can go to Osaka nearby, and listen to Eric Clapton’s riffs, or
visit full-moon rites commemorating long-gone empresses. I can even just savor
the everyday rites — the softball games in the park, the post office
chatter — of a culture that finds its religion in its social harmonies. But I
can also not do so. I can see no monks or prayers, read no books or
catechisms, and feel no pulse of history or romance; and still — in the light
on my desk — find everything transformed.

The great danger of going around the world in search of Paradise, for me, is
that, too often, we forget that Eden is the place where the serpent haunts the
garden; and anywhere with many angels in evidence (I’ve found in Lhasa, in
Bali and Cambodia) is likely to have some demons too. So I make my sacred
place in the middle of the fallen (though sheltered from distraction), and
take a sacred place, at heart, to be the place where one can trust oneself
(and rise, perhaps, towards a higher sense of self). Others, I know, find this
in the mountains or a lover’s arms, in yoga class or church; I find it here,
in an unremarkable room near the KFC parlor, where the full moon shines and
the leaves fall and fall.

Saturday, Apr 17, 1999 7:04 PM UTC

Bewitched on Bali

All love affairs are like journeys, deep into a foreign country, where you can't read the signs.

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It was dark when first I set foot on the island, and the jungle all around
was chattering. I heard gamelan music through the trees, saw oil-lamps
flickering along the narrow lanes. The last parties were breaking up along
the back streets of Kuta, and when the taxi dropped me off at an unknown
hotel, I was alone in a confounding darkness.

That first night in Bali, still jangled and discombobulated from two days
and nights in the air, from New York, through Tokyo, to Jakarta and then
here, I wandered out onto the beach at dead of night, and a figure
appeared, smiling, and asked if I’d like “jig-jig” or some carnal services
I couldn’t follow. I woke up often in the dark, fitful and scratchy,
mosquitoes whining all around, and when I went out again at dawn, I found I
had landed up on a pockmarked lane, with psychedelic paintings hanging
from storefronts, and demon masks fringed with human hair, and a few
long-hairs slumped among the bushes, deadened by the magic they’d eaten or
smoked.

I sat on the beach, that first day at sunset, and watched bare-chested boys
frolicking among the reddening waves, and snake-armed masseuses packing
away their charms, as in some Gauguin fantasy. A girl came over and sat
down beside me. “I saw two flowers in my dream last night, and one of them
was you,” she said. “I put that flower in my hair.” She wasn’t beautiful,
and I could hardly see her face for the sarongs she was carrying on her
head, and the night that was falling around us. But I followed her, and
followed her down the beach, and into the dark, till I could see nothing
but the whites of her eyes and her teeth.

We walked along the buzzing lanes, dogs howling on every side. She took me
to a night-market, a movie and then, again, into the whirring
back streets, where, in memory, I can see her eyes burning. I remember her
sobbing, I remember her panting, and laughing when least I expected it.

In the nights that ensued, we went deep into the interior, through magic
forests and small towns, into candlelit guesthouses at midnight. We
walked on a beach where couples walk under a huge full moon.
She laughed as I unbuttoned my shirt, and dug her nails into my arm.

All the best journeys, I have always felt, are like love affairs, not least
because they turn you inside out and leave you within a darkness where you
can’t tell right from left or good from bad. And all love affairs are like
journeys, deep into a foreign country, where you can’t read the signs, and
you don’t know the language and you are drawn into a wilderness alive with
mystery and possibility, and the knowledge — certain knowledge — that who you
were is irretrievable.

But in Bali, the whole spell is heightened and intensified, as in some
charged re-creation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where queens fall in love
with asses, and young men lose their heads. In Bali, lovers sit all night
with the image of their devotion in a coconut-lamp, or catch unwilling
souls with moon coins and magic potions made from a serpent’s saliva mixed
with an infant’s tears.

I remember how I would walk through the night — always night — with Wayan,
and she would tell me of the pills she had swallowed once, and of the first
boy who’d ever loved her, who died soon after in an industrial accident.
She took me into the humming darkness of her culture, its dream-messages
and leyak witches, its singing cremations and unwanted ghosts. Her mind,
her being, seldom touched the ground.

Bali is at the best of times a kind of vibrating altered state — a different
zone of consciousness, in which dancers are often in trances, and spirits
appear at the foot of your bed, and always, at the edge of your mind, you
can hear howling dogs and the tinkling gamelan; it is also a province of
romance, like some Arcadian forest where bodies fall into couplings, by the
light of a hundred temples. But I was entering both states at once, with a
spirit that didn’t seem earthly. Anyone who points out, quite rightly,
that Bali is a paradise of angels and Edenic pleasures has to acknowledge
that there must be demons there, too, and serpents in the garden.

When Wayan took me to the airport my last day there, she said, “Last night
I dreamed I died. I dress all in white and go away.” I tried to brush it
off, but she was insistent, her gaze intense. I wouldn’t see her again,
she said; she would be in the realm of her ancestors.

I kept in touch with Wayan from afar, and sent her presents for her
birthday; I often thought of her trembling form, shaking in the back lanes
of Kuta. Yet I realized, too, that it wasn’t wise to toy with what I
couldn’t fathom. The undertow in Bali carries several foreigners to their
deaths each year.

The next year, when I returned to Kuta, I didn’t tell Wayan when I crept
into her village. But she found me, that first night back, in the same
lane where she’d held onto me so fiercely I thought she’d draw blood. I
heard the sound of her laughter again, saw her rolling eyes.

We went back to the full-moon beach, at noon, and walked along its
unmagicked sands. I told her I had stumbled into a forest I had not sought
and did not trust. She said almost nothing, her dress not flaming scarlet
as before, but the blue of daytime skies.

She said almost nothing, and I
went back to my hut. For three days after that farewell, I could not move.
I lay, feverish and awake, in a room full of insects and crawling bodies.
I heard cats yelping outside, and the gamelan incessantly. Dogs, more
dogs, howled in the dark, and lizards stood on my walls till I could no
longer tell them from the light switches. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t
sleep, I couldn’t think — could only hear whispers and rustlings from next
door, where a soft-limbed local sprite danced in and out of an Australian’s
arms.

When finally I could move, I went up into the hills, far away, to a village
where I’d been with Wayan a year before. But something in me was lost; I
was waterlogged and sluggish, a sleepwalker in a phantom state. It felt as
if some guardian spirit had stolen away from me, leaving all the lights
turned out.

I finally picked up enough strength to leave the island, and I never heard
from Wayan again. But when I returned to New York, I put up on my wall an
owl mask I’d bought in her village — and instantly the Manhattan night was
so full of chatterings and hauntings that I had to tear the mask down from
the wall and stash it away, in a closet, behind a stack of boxes, where I’d
never have to lay eyes on it again.

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Wednesday, Jan 13, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

New York serenade

Pico Iyer returns to the Big Apple for five days -- and finds that attitude has its charms.

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D A Y__O N E

A cold winter’s day: I fly into La Guardia. You need a ticket, I find, just to enter the baggage claim area. A large sign on every carousel warns, “Keep an Eye on Your Bags.” Another sign on the wall advises, “For Your Safety — Don’t Accept Unsolicited Ride Offers.” Next to it, a poster showing some friendly, welcoming faces says, “Don’t Ride With Them. They’re Breaking the Law.” The messages go oddly with the bright framed prints saying, “New York Is Art,” “New York Is Dance,” “New York Is Heritage.”

Outside, in the chill, a Trinidadian helps me into his cab, and, taking instant note of my complexion, jams some Hindi film music into his tape system. What brought him to New York?

“Greener pastures,” he says, catching my eye with an ironic glint in the rearview mirror.

“Do you still think the pastures are greener here ?”

“Now I don’t know, man. You know how it is. My ex-wife’s here with my kids, and I don’t want to be too far from them.”

Being a New Yorker (and of Indian origin, to boot), he proceeds to discourse on the difference between Hindus and Muslims, on the work of V.S. Naipaul, and on the joys of being held up at gunpoint twice in his cab and finding caches of abandoned drugs in the back seat. As we pass through Guyanatown, FDR Drive, the area around the United Nations, he discourses on cricket, the joys of aloo roti, the ghazals he plays on his harmonium. He quizzes me about my books, delivers a sociological lecture on Surinam, informs me that the Indian population of his native island is 42 percent. By the time we arrive at my hotel — and it’s not a long drive — he’s cranking out “chutney” — Trinidad-flavored Indian music — from his car, and I’m catching, above the crash of Indian instruments, an island voice singing, liltingly, prettily, “Everybody dancin’ — windin’ up de place!”

A couple of hours later, I make my way to Brooklyn, in the dusk, to see snow drifting across deserted streets. One could almost be in some tattered sepia version of Henry James’ New York, I think, in this muffled light, with not a trace of cars or noise, and no buildings higher than two stories. Not even a shadow stirs in the gently falling snow. The signs around me, as so often here, recite words I’ve never heard before: “Paczki: Maskie-Lotnicze. Katalogwe.”

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D A Y__T W O

“I’ll be 85 May 5th,” says an old guy in a Nathan’s Hot Dog restaurant near Times Square, holding court before two other codgers and signing autographs for a trio of polite, standing Guardian Angels. “You know, I wrote that song for Elvis?” he asks them. “‘I Wish I Knew it Was Christmas.’ Now I wish I’d written, ‘I Wish I’d Made a Million Dollars.’”

The Angels go off, and he resumes. “You see this picture of me and Giuliani,” he says, naming the mayor in his creaky, Damon Runyon Broadway whisper, and pulling a worn snapshot out from his pocket. “That’s me. You see those guys? They’re bodyguards. That’s me. Me saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, meet the next president of the United States.’

“You see that? That’s me. That’s the bodyguards. See, I’m saying …” As he talks, a tired black man slouches past, the red apron covering his body advertising the “Bare Elegance” topless lounge. “There is a 20-minute limit at each table,” say the signs along the walls and, elsewhere, “Customers only will be buzzed into the rest-rooms.” Inside these forbidden sanctuaries, rolls of toilet paper are suspended in creaking black slings made of garbage bags. Undeterred by the 20-minute limit, the former king of comedy keeps talking about the 1,150 hours of the videos of himself he has at home and all the TV shows he once graced.

At a fancy bookstore on Fifth Avenue, a middle-aged man in a suit pushes aside an old woman in a hat. “You know, there’s a line back there,” he barks at her. She steps to the side, stunned, not sure how to respond. “Hey, don’t touch me,” he shouts at her as she gently taps at his arm.

Outside the bookstore’s doors, a woman in a mink lectures her tiny children. “If one of you guys loses a foot” — they’ve been misbehaving in a revolving door — “I want you to pay me a million dollars.” Behind them, an absurdly cheese-shaped, wedge-thin truck cruises down the street, blasting out James Taylor songs to get people’s attention. On its side, in block capitals, a sign says, “DO NOT PATRONIZE CITIBANK.” Patronizing us instead, I think.

I walk past an ambulance in the Diamond District, surrounded by black-hatted Hassidim, that says, “Hatzolah.” I pass the Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery. I see Angry Monk Tibetan restaurant, Polish Kilbasy, “Buddy Booths” advertised on what is called, with touching hopefulness, the “New 42nd Street.”

Outside a bank, two tough white blonds (with a dog) are facing off four black guys (whom the dog has apparently harassed), screaming profanities at each other.

“Everything’s black,” spits one woman in disgust.

“I ain’t gonna be no gigolo,” counters the man she’s harassing.

In your face, as they say round here; out of my expletive way.

D A Y__T H R E E

In my chic, post-modern hotel, the Paramount, 20-cent stamps cost 30 cents, and trendy postcards go for $1.50. People sit over pear ginger muffins reading scripts, and every other word I hear is “show.” Everyone here looks like a cable star from the Continent, or someone auditioning for a sitcom.

Yet even the hotel observes the New York creed of making sure you don’t mistake it for anything, or anywhere, else. At the tiny concession stand in the lobby, among copies of the Guardian and the Financial Times, they sell massage oils, candles, peach-scented lotions and other luxurious appurtenances of romance. The main books on sale behind the counter are “Erotica Universalis,” “The Nude,” a collection of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, and a large volume titled “Erotic Art.” Every room comes equipped with a reproduction of a Vermeer and a video machine on which you can watch such classics (from the hotel’s video library) as “Dyke,” “Studio of Lust” and “Steele Butt.”

The Paramount has its own Playroom (“styled by renowned artist Gary Porter”) on the mezzanine, and its own Fitness Center. To use the latter, however, you have to sign a form absolving the hotel of all legal responsibility for your body, and to learn a five-digit code to open the door. In the deliberately penumbral anti-light of the lobby, crew-cut girls and earringed boys float around like art designers and designed.

Yet the place also contains, in New York’s wonderfully unedited fashion, five or six aged residents from another era who refused to move out when the hotel bought up their apartment block. You see them often, with canes and shabby coats, hobbling past Miyake models and Berlin cinéastes, and throwing into question which is art and which is life.

I go to the nearest branch of the library and find an “installation” (great New York word, like “loft” or “sublet”) called “Entre Chien et Loup,” a fine name for the city (though a sign explains that “Between Dog and Wolf” is the French term for “twilight”). The people gathered outside the restrooms here (both of them festooned with huge signs saying “OUT OF ORDER”) are carrying books called “The Job-Getter’s Bible,” “The Psychology of Hope” and “Slam Dunk Resumes.”

I make pilgrimages to the places I’ve always loved here: the Gotham Book Mart, the Tibetan Kitchen restaurant, the streets around Gramercy Park. At a Buddhist magazine I visit (barricaded behind two locked doors in a warehouse), I am greeted by a yapping dachshund. “The thing about the Village,” a filmmaker told me the previous night, “is, they don’t freak out when you take your dog into the store.”

At a lavish, mock-colonial restaurant, a friend tells me about her 4-year-old’s interviews for kindergarten. A teacher at the city’s most prestigious school tells her, “This is a girl’s school — not a girlie’s school. We don’t believe in teaching manners, or how to dress like a woman.” There are 40 places for 800 candidates.

Back in my hotel I stop to buy a paper. “Piercing, schmiercing,” says one of the buttons on sale. “I’m holding out for amputation.”
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D A Y__F O U R

After only a few days in Manhattan, I find I’m wired, as they say, energized, speaking in the rapid-fire, swallowed, Cantonese-in-simultaneous-translation lingo of the true New Yorker, ready to take on (if not in) the whole swaggering metropolis. I’m waking up at 5:30 every morning, not from jet lag or insomnia, but just because I’ve picked up New York’s forward-tilting strut, its impatience to be mixing it up with the world outside. After a while, I find, I’m negotiating my way through conversations like the kamikaze bicycle messengers who weave their way in and out of honking taxis and the turbanned cabbies who’ve learned all their skills from P.J. O’Rourke’s “Third World Driving Hints and Tips.” After a while, in fact, I start to think everything is sarcastic, and to take every compliment as an insult with a kicker.

New York is a great downsizing mechanism, bringing you down to earth, and size, and refusing to put anyone on a pedestal, not even itself. This is one city that sells postcards, in stark black-and-white, of policemen performing arrests and homeless souls holding up heart-rending placards.

I go into a photo store to have a passport picture taken.

“Thank you,” I say when the man stops clicking.

“Don’t thank me,” he replies. “You haven’t seen how they turned out.” The accent is American, though the tone is common to every quick-witted operator from Bombay to Beirut.

A pretty, leopard-skin-clad girl puts two rolls of film on the counter. “This one I just found on the street,” she says. “I don’t know what’s in it.”

“Uh-huh,” says the man after she leaves. “She just found it on the street!”

“And it just happened to show her in full police gear,” says his partner.

“And her boyfriend in the altogether.”

“Just happened to find it on the street.”

The sign on the shop I enter says, “Egress” on its back, and the posters advertise open-mike poetry readings at KGB and Limbo. The ad on the subway says, “The official souvenir of the city that never sleeps,” and features a photo of a condom. In the East Village, burly men are burning sticks of incense and selling Hindu gods along the sidewalk, as if they were priests in a cathedral of doubt, a Durbar Square of the Ungodly.

Nearby there are bars with sofas where you can recline, and pasta restaurants with candles that seem designed to conjure ghoulish spirits from the dark. Back in my black-light lobby, where lamps wear rainbow-colored hats, a large man with a ponytail is engrossed in a book called “A Dog’s Mind.”
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D A Y__F I V E

New York is just attitude in block capitals, I think, as I get ready to fly back to bleary California; a city with a sense of humor, too, and enough irreverence to undercut (and validate) its strut. New York is a city on speed, a whole metropolis with a kind of gay — or at least Madonna-tinged — sensibility: quick, witty, sardonic, always on the brink of shouting, “So what’s your problem?” “Give me a break” or “I don’t have time for this” are its mantras. The “Have a Great Day” I see on a license plate feels nearly confrontational.

New York is a comedy routine, a place of nonstop chatter, a city with its feet decidedly on the ground. “There’s something democratic about it,” says a thoughtful editor who’s fled here from Toronto. “Everyone yelling at everyone else all the time.” New York is egalitarian in the sense of everyone being in the same sinking ship, survivors of some Boschian inferno, exchanging friendly cracks with an edge.

When I lived here, many years ago, I found it was too harsh to separate myself from the city, to live apart from its diminishing values. New York is a crash course in humility, and a noisy refutation of the very notion of a meditative life. To me it was all too easy to recall what Lorca wrote more than 60 years ago, when he called it “Senegal with machines.” In New York, he wrote, they “believe that man is the most important thing in the world,” and on Wall Street there is “a total absence of the spirit … And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, and that it is their duty to keep that huge world running, day and night, forever.”

In New York, I felt, I could not be myself.

But now, after a few years in California, I see something bracing and tonic in New York’s violence, its closeness to reality, its acceptance of everything human and its embrace of the same truths known in all the difficult ancient cities of the world. New York is the Human Comedy writ large, and it does not give you the space to live inside your head. Where California waters you down, New York sharpens you up, a hip-hop, abrasive refresher course in truth. New York is a celebration, after all, of “smarts” — the quick-on-its-feet, worldly wisdom that fuels Hong Kong and Calcutta.

And as I drive back out of the city, noting the Trump Luxury Hotel and Towers in Columbus Circle, calling itself — of course — “THE MOST IMPORTANT NEW ADDRESS IN THE WORLD,” and passing strikers everywhere we turn, huddled up in layers and babbling in Spanish outside the Marriott, around Washington Square, in Midtown, and taking in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School for International Careers and the names of airlines I’ve never heard before (Ryan Int’l, Rich Int’l, Air Ukraine and Servivensa), I realize that nothing energizes and stimulates me like New York, and nothing gives me such a blast of vital, raw intelligence.

My life takes me often these days to London, Los Angeles and Tokyo, but New York is the only regular stop that leaves me hungry, awake and full of every sign of human life.

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