Sam Cutler

It’s been a heck of a two weeks ! It started out driving to Byron Bay from Sydney (for the Blues Fest) and ended up in Seattle in the United States. That’s a total of about three thousand miles of driving, and fifteen thousand miles of flying and a whole slew of wonderful music en route ! It’s a fortunate life that I lead and I enjoy sharing it, so  I guess I had better start this description at the beginning of my latest adventures, (the place from where all good writing is supposed to depart) and invite you all along for my ‘remembered ride’.

I headed for the Blues Festival (in Australia) in my bus with the dog and my girl friend aboard on the  Thursday afternoon before Good Friday - probably one of the worst departure times one could ever chose to make when leaving Sydney. The long Easter weekend holiday was under way and at five p.m. on the Thursday the swarming vehicles headed north would  have seemed like a million lemmings headed for self-destruction except that they were moving at the speed of snails rather than Lemmings. It would have been quicker to have walked to the Blues Festival, and for the first three hours of our journey we crawled at a pace that would have suited a three legged horse, or maybe even a rocking horse ! At times the pace would have suited a dead horse, but as the old (cruel) saying goes - you can’t flog a dead horse. So we reluctantly put on our ‘noble long-suffering and patient’ expressions and sat there with a million other muppetts waiting for the highway north to come into view - three hours later we were rewarded with the highway mercifully bereft of traffic and as I plunged the bus into third gear (it hadn’t been out of second for over an hour!) the old girl gave a sigh of relief and attacked the open road with gusto. We were on our way yet still less than twenty miles from the center of Sydney - it was time to make up time, and I detirmined to drive all night.

My girl friend soon tired of the dark highway and the monotony of the deisel engine’s vibrations lulled her into a welcoming torpor. In the rear of the bus a large double-bed beckoned, and muttering about having had a long week at the office she stumbled to the bed and within a few minutes was fast asleep. I could see her nose  poking out from under the blankets in the rear-view mirror and Pablo the dog mimicking her serenity with his nose on her feet and his eyes closed fast. I was alone at the wheel and settled down for my driving-meditation with little but the headlights of a few cars and trucks for company. I had a thousand kilometers to go.

I love driving at night - to be alone with one’s thoughts is a great privilege. Time to think, to breathe in the endless space of the imagination. As I drove I wondered about the wisdom of releasing my book on both the i-phone app and as a regular book, simultaneously. Would the two distinctive forms co-exist in the world in comfortable simbiosys or would they struggle with one another, and the lesser manifestation be crushed by the stronger of the two ? As I drove through the night, I thought of America. Of that vast and exciting land where I had roamed with bands so many years ago. Where I had experienced the intense “love-affair” of the relationship a tour manager has with his artists - where he ‘cares for his charges’ in a way like an anglican minister cares for his flock - with that certain detached compassion that comes from years of experience of dealing with human beings and their little foibles. The road stretched before me, the endless road, through the black night of Australia and across the pacific to the land of dreams - America.

A land that was born of the white man’s dreams of equality, fraternity, and liberte which (of course) extended to neither the Native Amerian Indians nor the black slaves the white man brought in his stead. The poor old Native American got it from all sides just like the aborigines in  Australia, and it is sometimes conveniently forgotten that black soldiers (the “Buffalo Soldiers” of Bob Marley’s song) hunted down the Indians with the same deadly efficiency as whites. These thoughts brewed in my brain as I drove down the midnight road in Australia to the Blues festival with my friend asleep in the bus and the dog asleep at her feet.

I have lived and dreamed on both sides of the Pacific. I have lived and dreamed on both sides of the Atlantic. In a bus in Australia driving at night I have dreamt of Seattle, and here I am in Seattle listening in the middle of the night to the high ol’ lonesome sound of the freight trains in the marshalling yards as they sound their calls out into the night, a sound that was made to accompany men’s dreams. I have dreamed in London of New York City, and in New York I have sighed and dreamed of the love I left in London. Wandering the world I have dreamed and still I dream.

Last year I read my book in a recording studio. The whole book from beginning to end. It took over two weeks and was like an extended dream. Four days ago the book was released as an i-phone/i-pad/i-tunes application and Reuters wrote a story about it which went out to their subscribing news organisations. The following day it had been picked up by over 100,000 sites - yesterday the figure stood at 600,000 ! A story about the story of my life, read by me, was being read by virtually millions of people ! It was all a dream ! And in a hotel room in Seattle I remembered a poem I had written long ago just after I parted ways with the Grateful Dead -

“Every day we murder our dreams then pick them up dust them down and adjust their silly hats upon their heads and tell them how glad we are that they are still alive”.

The dream lives ! Life continues ! Slowly I am driving down the West Coast of America towards San Francisco where long ago the Rolling Stones did the disastrous concert at Altamont, and there in that beautiful city I will re-unite with friends from long ago. Friends from the family of the Grateful Dead with whom I shared many dreams. On the way to the family re-union I am stopping in book shops and signing copies of my book. It all has an ethereal quality to it, this life of mine, and after sixty seven years I make no more sense of it today than I managed to achieve as a child. I’m not sure if this is a sad admission or a glad realisation ! What is one supposed to DO with a life I sometimes ask myself? And as I drive down the highway in the dark I amuse myself by replying to my own question - I’m buggered if I exactly know but I’m working on it !

© sam cutler 2010

Sometimes it is necessary for a “decent interval” to have elapsed before one can write meaningfully about historic events, especially if those events have intersected with one’s own life in a dramatic fashion. In my case this “decent interval” has extended to some forty years. That period of time has seen the period of which I write (the Sixties and its counter culture) enter into the mainstream of  academic and literary discourse. University and college undergraduates now study the Sixties and there is a growing consensus that the period is of significance and worthy of attention. The Sixties are now being re-assessed. People of my age are looking back at their lives and  they are asking themselves, “what did I do with my youth?”

For many years I had been told, you should write a book, and for many years my instincts told me the time was not ripe for my contribution to the history of the two most popular music groups of that era - the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. By a weird co-incidence I had been the Tour Manager for both of them and the change from the one group to the other had been bifurcated by the dreadful events at Altamont - a free concert in California where a man had been killed right in front of the stage as the music played. Finally I felt that the time was right for me to make my contribution to the literature of the sixties and I steeled myself for the task ahead.

Where was I physically to write my book became the first order of my attention. I could not like the author JK Rowling sit in a cafe and scribble away, and I could not be in a cosy house with my lover -  I needed to be completely focussed, and most importantly; alone. A dear  friend (Anette Harris) came to my rescue and offered me a “cabin in the woods” on her property outside Bellingen in New South Wales, Australia. Full of a “sense of purpose” I isolated myself in the cabin and began the task of ‘remembering what I had forgotten’ and writing my auto-biography.

‘Remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ are words that signify a strange and (sometimes) revealing process ! They force one to consider the whole business of HOW one re-creates what happened to one’s life. It helps (I think) to take the position that NOTHING is actually forgotten ! Like undiscovered gold it’s ‘in there somewhere’ and it’s only a matter of time and luck and application before the mother-load is somehow discovered. So one begins upon a coherent and logical course of self-exploration, carefully proceeding from one memory to the next and slowly ‘chipping away’. The process unravels some startling insights, some memories long since buried beneath the daily grind of existence. With patience and care most of what has ever happened to us can be revealed to the meditative and enquiring mind. NOTHING is actually forgotten - though often it is obscured from view !!

I started with my ‘earliest’ memory - one that had been ‘unearthed’ in a series of hypno-therapy session long ago in Northern California, where under skilled guidance I was ‘re-gressed’ back to my earliest childhood memories. The ‘earliest’ the therapist could get me to was just prior to my third birthday when I had been carried down the steps of a bombed out railway station and been given to my adoptive parents. The therapist couldn’t get me ‘back’ any further and to all intents and purposes that was where my ‘memory life’ began. So I started on the long road to remembering things from right THERE. And I spent three months alone in that cabin writing/remembering/writing about my childhood years. This preceeded my writing abour rock and roll, which happened to me in my young adulthood.

At the end of writing about my childood an irrational desire to re-locate myself and write  somewhere else, took hold of me. It was interesting that this desire in my sixties should have exactly mirrored what I felt as a teenager when I was anxious to ‘discard’ my youth and become an adult ! So I was faced, again, with the question; where should I write. Once again, I was ‘saved’ by a friend. David Siler, an American from San Francisco who had lived in Australia for many years, offered to let me write on the deck of his beautiful house in a suburb of Brisbane, and I shifted myself to the new locale. An added bonus was that David was a chef and he kindly cooked and froze a whole range of wonderful one-man meals - it took him longer to teach me how to use the micro-wave than it did for him to cook one of the meals !

And so I undertook the next part of the ‘journey’ facing a green and verdant valley seated at a large table on a magnificent deck. The words flowed like the beer David consumed in prodigous quantities and a futher dilema presented itself. David had never much cared for the Grateful Dead (even though he was from San Francisco) so I had no-one to talk to about that period of my life, to check what I had written and to generally ‘be involved’ in the magic of recalling those wonderful times. Up stepped Nick Veltre, a Dead Head with a love of the band that bordered on the demented and a series of laughing and joking sessions went on for several weeks, whilst Nick checked what I had written and generally helped to inspire. Being from New jersey proved useful and Nick also did some ‘research’ on the more unsavoury elements of American life for which I am eternally grateful - and not dead ! Yet !

Other people were also involved. NO book is written solely alone. Even Ian Fleming (James Bond) who could write a book in three weeks (!!) had his cook and his gardener and his houseboy to support his efforts - if only by staying out of the way ! Some understood my efforts - some didn’t. At the end of the writing those who had helped have to be thanked in the acknowledgements - those that THOUGHT they had  helped (but who in fact had hindered the process, albeit unconsciously) had to be studiously ignored. The publishers had wanted a manuscript of around 90,000 words and I had written 160,000. There now came the editing process, and there in the trenches where words are dissected and often destroyed and cast aside, I finally learnt about books - as opposed to writing ! Throughout that (sometimes) painful process I was guided by a wonderful woman called Elizabeth Cowell who walked into the wild garden of my creative imagination and pruned the trees, cut back the overgrowing shrubs, and re-planted the lawn. To my editor I owe everything ! This is not to forget my kids, my ex, my lover, and everyone else who was prepared to support and nurture my ambitions.

The first book was released in Australia almost two years ago and did moderately well. It is now about to be released in America. It’s a bit like giving birth to a child, I imagine. Once one has had the first one then the thought of additions doesn’t seem so daunting ! I shall go to America and promote the book and we’ll see whether the Gods have favoured our endeavours. Then I’ll find the right place to write the next one ! Meanwhile the rather daunting prospect of reading reviews becomes a reality. Get ready for a slap I tell myself and I’m prepared ! Not every reviewer is going to like a book (impossible!) and some are going to be wildly off-base in their comments. You put a book out into the world about your own life it’s going to be judged ! Warmly, harshly, kindly, bitterly - all things are possible. If autobiography is to be REAL then it has to be BRAVE - the world seeks (and needs) authenticity. One can satisfy oneself in this regard and give it one’s ‘best shot’ but in then end other people will decide whether they’re going to embrace what you’ve written  - or not ! Better a false hope than an unendurable reality ? As the Rolling Stones sing : “you can’t always get what you want” -  I decided that was a perfect title for the book !

© sam cutler 2010

Yesterday I was sixty seven. One of those strange ages  lost somewhere between the polarities of sixty five and seventy - “neither fish nor good fried herring” as my  long departed grandmother would have mordantly observed  had she been around to witness the event. It was appropriate that my sixty seventh should have occurred on a Wednesday - a day I have always felt to be marooned between weekends  and lodged between two equally strange days; Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Tuesday one remembers the previous weekend, on Thursday one looks forward to the coming weekend - on Wednesdays ? One floats without direction and simply gets on with it ! It’s a non descript day a Wednesday, characterless and without charm, one that simply gets consumed in order to get to the main course of the rest of the week.

Sixty seven ? A numerologist would no doubt make a meal of it and give me endless encouragement to see the numbers as of great and lasting significance, but such matters leave me cold. Perhaps I should have had my palm read and I would have done so had there been a Romany within hailing distance of me in Sydney Australia. The last time I had my palm read was way back in the seventies in Kerala India. After a faily conventional reading squatting in the dust beside the road the palmist asked if I had any questions for him and was disappointed when I bluntly told him no. Surely you must have a question ! Everybody has a question. I decided to tease him a little, and bluntly told him no, I am NOT having question baba. The palmist became more and more agitated, so to put the poor man out of his misery I relented and asked a question. How old will I be when I die ? Without hesitation the man replied, eighty one.

I paid him his few rupees and the day went on as before, hot and dusty and with very little happening in that languid torpor which is the way of India. A man with glasses came and squatted beside me. He began a long series of questions, and was in effect interrogating me in that charmingly offensive and direct manner at which Indian men are masters. I answered his questions with little enthusiasm and the conversation, such as it was, ground to a halt with our words forced into a hot and dusty contemplative silence. He then asked if I would like to know what had happened to the poor unfortunate who only five minutes previously had read my palm. Nothing stirred and the heat was decidedly oppressive so I agreed to listen.

The palm reader had apparently been a man of some significance, for he had read the palm of Mrs. Gandhi, the autocratic daughter of Nehru. She was the Prime minister of India.  Not only had he read her palm, he had told her that her life was in danger. He was dismissed from her regal presence and sent back from whence he came and no-one thought anything more about it. Unfortunately, three weeks later, Mrs.Gandhi was to die in a hail of machine-gun fire from her Sikh  body-guards - she had made the unfortunate decision to attack the Sikh’s Golden  Temple in Amritsar which had enraged the Sikhs. An investigation into this unfortunate event occurred and the security people looked back at who had met Mrs. Gandhi before her assassination. The palm reader, and his dire prediction  (which had been spot on!) was immediately swept up by the security services  and he spent a very uncomfortable month as a guest of theirs in a secret prison in New Delhi. Upon his release he scuttled back to his village in Kerala hoping to lead a quiet and uneventful life and determined to never read a Prime Minister’s palm again. In the village was where I had met him. This was the man who told me that I should die at eighty one. As they say in the lower circles of London - I must admit the man had a bit of form !

So there I was, neither fish nor good fried herring, on my sixty seventh birthday, and l spent some time thinking about my life in the light of what the palm reading baba in Indian had told me long ago. Fourteen years to go !  That seemed about right to me, and the age of eighty one seemed a perfect number at which to ‘depart the mortal coil’. I have seen many people die of old age and it is really quite sad and tragic to watch the ‘natural’ decline of someone who has reached their late eighties. I’d rather die ‘compis mentis’ than completely batty ! I want my brain to still be around when I die, because to me dying is as important as living and both should be done with a modicum of style. So sixty seven was put into perspective - a small and unremarkable milestone along the path. I sat in my friends garden and wondered what I should do with the day. Having made up my mind I had done enough already I went on to decide that I would do as little as possible. A glorious way (once in a while) to spend a day !

The hours passed delightfully with me contemplating my navel and not caring a jot about anything of significance, least of all my own birthday. I was returned to the chronological ‘here and now’ of the calendar by a phone call from a friend inviting me to dinner and La Traviata at the Sydney Opera House ! Within an hour I was all dressed up and ready to go - lapis lazuli cuff-links, black velvet jacket, polished shoes - looking good. I dined with a friend at the Opera house with the bill being sufficient to have fed a family in India for a year and the food was excellent. Jorn Utson, the architect, had built not only a fine Opera House, but a magnificent restaurant with views across Sydney Harbour which made the food melt upon the palette and effortlessly sink into the stomach  like the ripples of the many passing ferry boats as they came and went to Circular Quay.

La Traviata was ‘chocolate box’ opera - a beautiful spectacle of lushly crinolined ladies in nineteenth century Italian decadent settings. The heroine was dying of consumption (what we know as tuberculosis) and was a ‘grande-madame-horizontal’ loved  and admired by all. Especially the rich Baron, her protector, and Alfredo who seemed so besotted that he insisted on wasting his inheritance on the whore. Alfredo’s father begs the lady to release his son …… I shall not go on, these stories after all are SO unconvincing ! It is a requirement of Opera, like poetry, that one should bring to the feast a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and so it was that I passively enjoyed the sad and improbable tale which ends with the woman’s death and her lover being granted permission to marry whomever he might be fortunate enough to find, and to live happily ever after. Albeit, without the woman of his dreams who has just expired in his arms !

Walking down the entry steps of the Opera House my mind returned from supra to mundane reality. I had parked the bus in a loading zone being unable to find anywhere legal to park such a large vehicle, and more or less abandoned myself to getting a very expensive parking ticket. This had been six hours ago ! When I arrived at my bus, lo and behold, no ticket !! A wonderful birthday present and I gave thanks for the inefficient parking inspectors. Then I remembered, it’s Wednesday ! It was also now officially winter in Australia. The wind had been blowing; for Sydney it was quite cold. The inspectors would have been parked up somewhere themselves, drinking coffee smoking cigarettes and having a good old argument about football or whether the Australian cricket vice-captain should have left an overseas tour to come back to Australia to support his girlfriend who was in a spot of bother. She is conventionally referred to as “an underwear model” and is something of a contemporary equivalent to Violetta in La Traviata except she doesn’t have tuberculosis. I could go on, but the antics of modern day sportsmen and their ladies are as labarythine and assinine as those depicted upon the Opera stage. Who cares !  I’m pleased to say that parking meter attendants do ! With that happy circularity in mind I jumped in the bus and drove away - and sixty seven floated towards midnight and being over - ‘neither fish nor good friend herring’ as my old grandmother used to say but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

© sam cutler 2010

Writing is a solitary craft. The life of a writer is a solitary life. It doesn’t have to be so, but I write here of myself and my own experience. My own  privileged and self-centred life has landed me just prior to my sixty-seventh birthday in a position which could (perhaps) be described as “in the world but not OF the world”. I imagine that it is a position somewhat analogous to that enjoyed by monks and nuns - except that their work is an ‘interior dialogue shared privately with the Gods and of little concern to anyone but the participants” - whereas my work is “an interior dialogue shared with the world and of little concern to anyone but myself and those who chose to be my readers”. The work of writers (like monks and nuns) is done in the private chapels of the interior of the mind, where none but deities  may enter, and where the resultant work becomes one’s ‘prayer’ sent out to the world.

I write creative non-fiction. I write about myself, that strange and unique collection of aggregates which is a person. I write about myself, for in truth I am endeavouring  to understand what a person IS. The one model I have as an examplar is myself,  though I have children and ex wives and lovers as companions on the path, essentially I am a man who in solitary contemplation moves along at a strange and mysterious pace dictated by random fortune. Like all human being I have to make sense of the world, and thus far, I have spectacularly failed to do so. The struggle continues and this is what I write about. How to BE. It is a strange and compelling conundrum this business of living and I can hear my own interior voice sneering at my indecisiveness, telling me that life is simple and explicable, but there’s a right little ding dong of a battle going on ! The question (for a writer) is what to DO when one is not writing !! The writing part is, in a sense easy - it’s the living part that’s difficult ! Perhaps that’s why so many great writers take to the bottle !

I live in a bus. I don’t want to live in ONE place for I already live in one place and that is my own interior landscape. I don’t want to live in an idyllic rural setting with chickens and horses though I am happy to visit. I don’t want to live in New York, London, Marin County, Ibiza Paris or Amsterdam (done all of that) and I don’t want to live on a desert island. I live in a bus specifically so that I don’t have to live in any one place - I can live wherever I chose ! I am fortunate in that (at the moment) I live in Australia and have before me a trillion magic options when it comes to ‘parking my butt’. The external landscape is mine to explore or to chose to ignore. I can wander, if I will, wherever my fancy takes me. This theoretically idyllic existence has it own problems and they all revolve around other people. It is interesting that so many problems that writers seem to have are related to their relationships with other people - mainly those whom they love.

A writer is a slippery soul and cannot be captured by conventional means ! When he tells a  woman that he loves her she needs to be able to understand (and accept) that he is already in love !  That he came to her already promised to another! That other lover is his constant companion and pre-occupation - she is his work. No writer can feel comfortable writing with the vulture of conflicted love perched beside him in malevolent jealousy which is why so many writers have multiple failed relationships. The partners of writers seem to feel excluded by the very process of writing, feel neglected and unloved, and a battle begins for the attention of the writer. It is all so utterly predictable and the writer for his own protection (and in order to continue unmolested what he has chosen) begins to find it ever more necessary to guard his pitch, to make sure that his boat is safely moored in a sheltering harbour. This harbour, the writer begins to think, is yet another figment of his imagination. It simply doesn’t exist !

The problem is very much related to a misunderstanding of what a writer does. How it IS to be a writer. The conventional understanding has the writer sitting at his lap-top (or type-writer) slaving away writing the great work which will see him become immortalised ! At the lap-top is where the work is done. In my own experience nothing could be further from the truth. The coal-face of writing, where the writer hacks away at his pre-occupations, is NOT at the lap-top at all - it resides in the day to day minutae of his life. THERE in the viccisitudes of existence the writer patiently watches the grapes of his own ideas either flourish or wither on the vine. Dylan asks his lover in one of his songs “are you so blind you cannot see I must have solitude, when I am in the darkness, why must you intrude?”. He also plaintively titled one of his songs “No Time to Think”. And there’s the rub when it comes to writers and love. His lover sees him patently not writing ( he’s not sitting at the lap-top so how CAN he be writing?)  whilst not realising that most of the work is done away from the machine, the guitar, the piano. Writing is a contemplative art - it is an art that needs ‘time to think’.

I do not write novels for I have always felt since I was a little boy that I was trapped in the novel which is my life. The endless pre-occupation with one’s own life is of course a narcissistic perversion of all that is ‘normal and healthy’ and is certainly not conducive to harmonious relationships. It has nonetheless historically produced some wonderful writing though at terible emotional cost to the writers !  The book gets written the woman leaves him, or the book gets fought over and in exasperation the writer leaves the woman.Or the woman destroys the man ! It’s an old story, as old as writing itself!  Elias Cannetti’s Auto Da Fe springs to mind, that perfect exposition of the writer’s problem which earned him the Nobel Prize for literature.

A woman quite rightly wants her partner to be interested in her and to live a happy and contented life with the man who is her lover. It’s not much to ask ! But how is one to live with a self-centered man who walks around with his ‘mind’ somewhere else other than in the ‘here and now’ ? A man who has a constant interior dialogue going on to which he pays close attention ?  I honestly don’t know the answer to this question ! The ladies I have been fortunate enough to love, and who have loved me, could probably answer it better than I. But I will try to answer the question as honestly as I can, to do honour to those whom I have been fortunate enough to love. One cannot ‘own’ a person nor can one limit the imagination - they encompass the whole universe ! One might as well wish to posses the moon and stars ! To chose to live with a writer is something of a thankless task, for as I have said, he is already ‘promised to another’. The best that can be said, given that one cannot own the ship, is that one can only be the very best friend of the captain ! In that way the voyages can continue  and the elusive dawn of happiness may yet appear far on those eliptical horizons which are our lives.

© sam cutler 2010

UPDATE: “The Lynx Effect” on youtube, click here to watch!

I arrived back from Bali full of the joys of Spring even though I had just experienced the wet season. Two weeks in Paradise had lifted my heart, made me look at the world with fresh eyes, and equipped me for the journey of the next few weeks. I was really looking forward to getting together with the bus - my home - which had been parked outside my friend’s house in a quiet inner-city suburb of Sydney Australia. It was time to get back on the road “Down Under”.

I was shocked when I saw my bus. Some thoughtless and arrogant twerp had “tagged it” by which I mean someone had scribbled graffiti on the bus - left their “signature” in bright red and black paint on the side. It looked hideous ! Australia is covered with these “tags” and most of them are simply crude reproductions of what the young people concerned seem to think is “hip”. It’s as if the young people of Australia, or at least a small minority of them, want to change this beautiful place into a facsimile of downtown Detroit and cover all available surfaces with their illegible signatures ! Ugly ugly ugly !

I thought about calling the police to report the damage and then thought better of it, for (after all) it is the job of the police to catch criminals not misguided youths with spray cans. Then I thought I should make an appeal to “Banksy” the famous underground graffiti artist in England whose work is now highly collectible. Maybe he should come to Australia and I could offer my bus to HIM, so that what was a scribbled mess could be turned into a work of art ? Maybe he could show our local louts a thing or two and “upgrade the medium” so that at least it became a thing of beauty ? With these thoughts in mind I got in the bus and drove my friend to work, pondering on how I was going to remove the offending signature which disfigured the side of the bus.

I stopped outside a chemist’s shop and thought it would be a good idea to ask the chemist if there was any product which could be used to remove graffiti. The young chemist had no idea but was in the midst of dealing with a sales person from a pharmacological distributor - those “legal” drug dealers who make such astounding profits. The lady sales person answered my question for me, and I was astounded by her advice. “You should use Lynx deodorant” she told me. Deodorant to remove graffiti I asked myself ??? A long discussion re-assured me that this was no practical joke and I willingly forked out five bucks for a can of Lynx. This was a first for me as I have never purchased a can of deodorant in my life, preferring as I do to smell “natural” and to bath once a day. If deodorant can remove graffiti then what one earth, I asked myself, must it do to the human body ? What’s in the stuff to make it so powerful that it actually dissolves paint ? I laid these concerns aside and thought no more about it as I had various errands to run, and place the deodorant in a drawer in the bus for later use.

Several days later I was at a friend’s house. Jeremy had recently emigrated to Australia and was one of England’s finest photographers. When I told Jeremy about the woman’s claim that Lynx deodorant would remove graffiti we chuckled merrily at the absurdity of it all and decided that we had to establish whether such an improbable claim was true. We also decided that we should film the event in order that our sceptical friends could be left in no doubt as to whether the claim actually worked. The film, we decided, we would post on You Tube, with a link from my blog and a reference to it on Facebook.

Jeremy set up the camera to record my efforts, and I prepared myself for a starring role in “Lynx does Graffiti”. Firstly (on camera) I used the product for what it was (presumably) designed for - namely to stop gentlemen smelling. I liberally sprayed it under each of my arm pits and wondered about the health implications of such a move. Never mind, I assured myself, this is in the name of art. Or more accurately in the name of removing a mess which some dick head THINKS is art. With the camera rolling and a handful of tissues and the can of deodorant in-hand, I sprayed the side of the bus and there before my astonished eyes the offending graffiti literally melted and began rolling in blue and black and pink down towards the ground. I was flabbergasted and it took me a second to galvanize my thoughts and begin wiping off the paint. Deodorant works on removing graffiti ! I had “discovered” one of the great secrets of the universe !

The film will eventually be on YouTube (when Jeremy gets it together) and I am thinking of trying to ask Lynx for a fat fee for demonstrating to them a whole new market for their product. God only knows what it does to people ! I KNOW what it does to graffiti and graffiti is a massive problem in our cities - far more than smelly men ! So come on Lynx let’s go for it - the girls wont mind, and let’s face it, all they need to do is encourage the men to bathe once a day and all will be well ! In the meantime we could (all of us) buy a can of said product, and get off our butts and start cleaning up the mess the young people have made of where we live !

I am writing this in a suburban garden in Sydney Australia. The bus is sitting outside the house in a quiet leafy street. I haven’t seen it this morning, but if that little bastard has tagged it again I’m not going to wait up all night for him with a baseball bat - I’ll simply go out and buy another can of Lynx. So now you my beloved readers KNOW - and I am forced to admit that in a perverse and mysterious way “advertising makes it happen”.  When Jeremy finally gets it together there will be photos of the event to accompany this blog. At the moment he’s fast asleep along with the rest of the good Australian citizenry, it is after all only five thirty in the morning and the dawm has hardly begun. This is the time of day when somewhere out there is a little bastard who’s got a paint spray can in his hand - well let me tell you sunshine, LYNX has got your number !!! And if you’re living in America the same applies - except there Lynx is called “Axe” - and the product can be used to chop this problem down to size. Come on people - reclaim the streets ! We don’t have to live in visual squalor ! Death to graffiti, life to art !

UPDATE: “The Lynx Effect” on youtube, click here to watch!

I am in Bali - the island of the Gods. A short break before I go to America and Canada and Europe on a promotional tour for my book. I have come to Bali to re-charge my batteries - to re-connect with the ‘spiritual center’ and to get a tattoo ! Here there is a man (Leon) who is a Master artist - one whom I trust to put marks on my body that will be there until the day I die. On my chest, beside my heart, Leon will create for me a beautiful Buddha - whenever I look into a mirror the Buddha will be looking at me and will serve to remind me of the ‘refuge’ which is his sublime teaching.

On my second evening on the island I am invited to a dinner party by a charming woman with whom I became friends on Facebook ! I try to buy a bottle of wine but the wine is of poor quality and wildly over-priced, so instead I buy my host a bottle of Stolychnya Vodka. I arrive at a beautiful Balinese house and meet an eclectic and interesting group of people. It is amazing how we are all strangers and yet we all have mutual friends and acquaintances that stretch down the years and cover virtually every corner of the planet !

One of the guests is a lovely German woman, a follower of Bhagwhan Shree Rajneesh, (my Guru in the seventies!) and we have a splendid conversation about old times in Poona. The years roll away and I am transported to those sometimes manic Tantric groups in the basement of the Ashram where we laughed and cried together and connected our sexualities in ways which re-affirmed our humanity and our essential connectedness with our fellow human beings. She makes my heart sparkle and my eyes brim with happy tears this woman, like so many have done over the years.

Another guest lives in Costa Rica and is here on holiday, and invites me to go to a bar where he wants me to meet some of his friends. He loves the Grateful Dead and wants me to meet other people who carry the band’s music in their hearts. We exchange telephone numbers.  A man is telling amazing tales of tunnels beneath the earth which stretch from Antartica to Europe and which are known (he tells us) to the top brass in the Pentagon ! A stunningly attractive woman tells me emotional tales of when she and Mick were lovers so many years ago, when Jagger would come to the island and no-one would give a toss who he was. Here (for a short period of time) he was able to take his holidays and get away from the full time job which is being Mick Jagger. She speaks of her lover from long ago with the slightest hint of a tear but without rancor or malice and in a voice soft enough to delight the most reluctant lothario. Her words of love lost long ago make me feel sad and I remember those whom I too have loved who are no more.

My gracious hostess and I talk of old times. Of her friend Chris Stamp who managed The Who, a man that partly shared the journey with me and experienced the rocky trail which was the music business in the sixties. We talk of his brother who (like so many of us) made the ‘pilgrimage to Poona’ and of lives devoted to both the spiritual path and the necessity of somehow making our way through the trials and vicissitudes of the world. As the evening grows late I make my excuses and wander away and walk down the edge of the rice paddy with the frogs croaking and strange noises emanating from the darkness in an enchanting chorus. The Balinese night is heavy with clouds, the Gods are busy which is their wont, and I feel wonderfully receptive to the lush fecundity of my surroundings. Here is a locale where the soul can be serenely nurtured should it so desire.

The following evening I am at dinner with another group of people. Some of them are friends and some are new to me. A woman is at the dinner party with her young and strikingly handsome son. His father is Javanese, she is English. The children of such unions have the most beautiful features and wonderful skins. We strike up a conversation and the son tells me that he is studying Sanskrit at university in Australia. As we talk I discover to my amusement and delight that his Professor is an acquaintance from many years ago when he was a post graduate student in England. We speak of Kharoshti manuscripts that were found in Afghanistan - the oldest birch-bark manuscripts ever discovered, and how his professor is working on their decipherment.

The circularity of acquaintances never ceases to amaze - those six degrees of separation with which we are all connected. I love meeting new people, hearing their stories, and am amused and delighted that I should have had a conversation with a young man whose Professor I knew back in the eighties. The young student is stunned that an old rock and roller like me should know of his eminent professor and is reduced to silence - that he could sit at a table in a Balinese restaurant and hear a man dressed in black and covered in tattoos talk about indo-sanskritic language roots and the manuscripts recently uncovered in the caves of the Silk Road leaves him happily bemused. I must admit to a certain mischievous delight in not conforming to conventional stereo-type when it comes to those who enjoyed getting wasted through years of sex and drugs and rock and roll ! The student will never take “old rockers” for granted again ! We’re not all Ozzie Osborne !!!

I make my way to a small bar (Warang Sanje) which advertises “authentic Indonesian food” and as I walk up the steps the sound system is playing Grateful Dead music ! In Ubud in the center of Bali, they are playing the Grateful Dead ! Several ex-pats are sitting around drinking beer and soon I am immersed in conversation about arcane questions to do with The Dead’s music. Was I in Hartford Connecticut in 1974 ? (yes) was I at the first Portchester gig? (yes)” why did Jerry change the lyrics to Wharf Rat?” and so on. I am bombarded with question of encyclopedic intensity and lo and behold (sure enough) some of us had been at the same concerts long ago - concerts which I had organized ! Such happy coincidences leave us bemused and delighted and chuckling merrily at the connectedness of everything.

I wander, once again, off into the night to make my way home to bed. Most of the island is fast asleep but in the fields and rice paddies everything is as busy as a Wall Street broker’s office. Frogs are croaking orders to one another and yelling “I’m over here, you want it, come and get it!” and the sound of running water is punctuated with the distinctive plop of a frog making his move to ferociously procreate. A Balinese rice paddy at night is a veritable orgy of frog lust ! I stand beneath the clouds enjoying the silken caress of the finest Balinese mist. What a glorious ‘safety zone’ in which to find oneself. How fortunate I am to be alive ! How grateful I am to have been involved in sharing the music of the Grateful Dead ! And my mind wanders to long ago, and a small shabby house which served as the band’s office in San Rafael California. Alan Trist and I were talking about the liner-notes for a Grateful Dead album and all the fans of the Grateful Dead who called themselves Dead Heads. We wanted to let them have a place with which they could communicate with the band - this was in the days before the internet became a commonality. In a sarcastic dig at the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto (“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”) I wrote the words which were to appear on the album. “Dead Heads of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains!” The rest (as they say) is history.

And here in Bali, all those disparate and seemingly unconnected strands of my life intersect and re-emerge in a wonderful synthesis of community and communication. The people of the island ensure in their daily lives that the Gods are given their due - peace and harmony are constantly re-enforced through devotion and prayer. Strangers come into their midst and the Balinese smile, and slowly but surely the secret magics of existence come to inform the lives of their guests. Life, which had hitherto somehow appeared disconnected and separate, becomes re-integrated with experience and something to be shared with one and all. I am reminded of how stunningly beautiful it all can seem for those with the soul to see and hear and the good fortune to have been blessed by the Gods.  With the ‘gift’ of Bali in my heart I am infinitely enriched by the experience of being in this place. That is why I give thanks and constantly remind myself that this world IS a beautiful hotel.

© sam cutler 2010

Each morning at five o’clock I get up and make my way to the garden. I am in Petersham, an inner-west suburb of Sydney Australia, looking after my dear friend who has a broken leg. At six the first of a thousand planes will be landing at Sydney airport and flying low over the house on their landing-approach - there is this opportunity for one blissful hour of peace and tranquility before the polluting arrows of ‘civilization’ roar once more into my life. The dog sits at my feet, the cat sits on the table beside me.

I make of my mind a temple for one hour each day and remind myself that inner peace is a pleasant and prescient antidote to the stresses and tribulations of a daily life. Stendhal said that “each day the reasonable man starts out on the search for happiness” and though I am sure this insight has its merits, it is not one that applies to me. I do not search for happiness, I do not “search” for a purpose - search seems far too active a word to describe what I am doing here.  I am not searching (as such) for anything.

Rather, I am remembering that beneath the vast panoply of the atmosphere, that comforting arch above the conundrums of this earth, we sit (mere mortals) with our trials and tribulations, our joys and sorrows, and there is precious little that is subject to our controls, other than ourselves. What are we to do, with this “thing” called me ? As my friend was fond of saying “we should get out of our own way”. That is what I do. For a blissful hour I step out of my own pre-occupations and simply become part of a suburban garden.

The plants are growing. The birds sing. There is nothing to do, for I have done more than enough already ! Simply sit. Be here now. On the lemon tree the fruit is green and I am reminded of the lemon tree in my garden in Spain - the thought arises, the memory is momentarily enjoyed, and away it goes without a care in the world. Thoughts manifest and they pass in their own inimitable way, I neither encourage them nor do I follow them with relentless attention. I allow them to frolic within my mind with paternal affection, rather like an indulgent father watches over his children playing in a park. Children know instinctively how to play, thoughts know instinctively how to come and go ! They arise, they manifest, they ‘do their bit’ and then they depart. From whence they come, to where they depart - who is to say ? The first of the planes roars overhead. Life intrudes.

In a week I shall go to Bali, to the land of temples and prayer. I shall go to look at a small piece of land high in the mountains that is for sale. If my book does well in America and Europe perhaps I will have enough money to purchase the land which by Western standards is ridiculously cheap. Perhaps I will even have enough to build a small wooden house ! Who knows ? The future is uncertain, eat dessert first, as Kinky Friedman used to say. It is all in the lap of the Gods ! I like the uncertainty. My whole life has been uncertain. Nothing is certain but death and once this is merrily accepted (for I can never bring myself to feel sad about the inevitable) then life can be joyously embraced. I am a sensual soul - I love life with an epicurean passion. It has been such a long strange trip but the dishes I have consumed along the path have nurtured me with such an amazing palette of sensations. What to do ? I have done enough already !

Still, the airplane reminds me. There is a book to be worked on, the animals to be fed, the washing up to be attended to - there is plenty to do ! But for one hour a day there is nothing to do but sit and enjoy the peace and quiet of this garden. To allow the thoughts to come and go and to pay them no particular attention. To be at peace with the world and all that is in it. I wouldn’t change my hour for all the tea in China, for all the money in the world. It seems to silly me, the perfect start to a day. Then, I tell myself, but what do you know ! Only this - this world is a beautiful hotel .

© sam cutler 2010

With “other fish to fry” the poor old blog got side-lined for a while there. No puny excuses no “exit stage lines” no explanations just the simply reality. It refused to appear and I didn’t force it to. But like a comatose body with the apparent characteristics of a corpse one day as I considered its sad and immobile bulk it twitched, it sighed and farted, and then it opened its eyes and smiled. The blog returned to life, and here it is, fresh as a daisy.

There have been many adventures. Every day has begun with the search for happiness (as Stendhal said) and that always relates to a key. The key (not to life) but the bus ! Without the engine she no go, so starting up the lady becomes a vital morning ritual. I put a kettle on the stove to boil water for morning tea, then I go to the driver’s seat and stick the key in the ignition and see if she sparks into life. If the bus starts, I starts - she no go I no go. Simple ! Thus far my wonderful companion (A 1989 toyota coaster) has never let me down, except the one time I left the head-lights on and flattened the batteries. A reliable vehicle is the key to transportation ! The lady fires up, the kettle boils, tea is made and all is well with the world. I pull the awning out, set up my table, sit down and write on my lap-top. This has been my daily pattern of activity.

Here in Australia we have many festivals, and one of my favorites is the Woodford Folk Festival which is held in rolling grasslands about two hours north of Brisbane in the state of Queensland. I arrived with the bus and one of my sons and we set up camp. A lady friend joined us three days later and had been there for two hours. It had been raining steadily for days. My friend went to the toilet and fell over in the mud and broke her ankle. I spent the whole festival looking after her and didn’t see one of the several hundred bands that were on the week’s bill. What appeared to be a bad sprain got slowly worse with bruising and swelling and finally we made the long trek to the hospital. The leg was encased in plaster and the lady had to go to her parent’s house - all of this on New Years Eve ! It was not an auspicious start to the coming year and the celebrations were decidedly muted. I sat sheltering from the rain with my son Bodhi and his friend Tynan, said a desultory happy new year, and retired to bed in the bus. The following day I drove to Sydney.

I am now in Sydney being a full-time nurse until the end of January. As Lennon said, “life is what’s happening whilst you’re busy making plans for something else”. The lady has a month of severely reduced mobility and I have my work cut out carrying and fetching. When the going gets tough the tough get going ! What to do ? One cannot simply abandon one’s friends when they need help - it’s not a good look ! So I am here, trying to be gracious and not resentful, and back to my writing.

I have actually been working on the outline of a novel. I always swore I would never write a novel as my life had been the functional equivalent of being trapped in a novel, but the form has slowly and effectively insinuated itself into my consciousness. A twenty first century tale is beginning to gestate in my head and there’s little I can do about it. It’s been busy being born for quite a while, hence the lack of a blog. I know, I said I wouldn’t explain the blog’s absence but somehow the reason for my dilatory productivity needs to be talked about. I haven’t been idle, I’ve just been on the “blog missing list” and paying attention to my own imagination.

The blog has returned. The writing is going well. My friend is finally taking the arnica I’ve been going on about for the last two weeks. I have a spring in the steps of my neurons ! The old grey matter is firing away. Who knows, sometime before I die I might complete the great novel which lurks within .

I’m working on it ! Happy two thousand and pen to one and all !

Having returned to Australia from a wonderful month in Bali, I have begun that process which occurs after a holiday of assimilating the experience, analyzing the pleasures, and generally thinking about what happened. My month in Bali got me thinking about another island which I know and love, Ibiza; and I was struck by some of the similarities between the two places, between their experiences as island cultures, and in particular between their sometimes unhappy experiences with mass tourism. Having lived in Ibiza and had a magic month in Bali, I began to feel like I was in love with two women for both islands are decidedly feminine-energy places.

My Balinese holiday also got me wondering whether the experiences of Ibiza in dealing with the masses of tourists whose annual inundations virtually swamp their island, may have some relevance and some lessons for the Balinese. There’s no question that the people of the Balearic Islands (namely Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza, and Formentera) have made some serious mistakes when it comes to tourism and its impact, and it would be  so encouraging if the major mistakes were NOT replicated in Bali. Could the Balinese, I wonder, use Ibiza to LEARN how NOT to develop their island ? How NOT to make basic errors when it comes to improving their standards of living ?

The first major ‘error’ that one observes in both Bali and Ibiza is in the way that both islands have dealt with ‘development’. If there IS, or HAS BEEN, a plan in either place then that plan is so obscure as to be virtually invisible. In Bali one is not allowed to build higher than a palm tree - how HIGH is a palm tree ?? No-one has a definitive answer ! In Ibiza for years there were few if any restrictions upon building, and on my last visit it struck me that the whole island had been infected with a rash of pox-like square boxes (they call them ‘villas’) of the ugliest kind. If there WERE building controls and planning schemes they were obviously ineffective and outdated on BOTH islands. In Bali I was told all the time, “you should have seen this village five years ago, none of this was here” and I could never quite work out whether the person was bragging or apologizing ! Unrestricted building is going on apace, and in Bali the town of Kuta looks just as ugly as the town of San Antonio in Ibiza. Both places are a blight upon their local cultures, an insult to the peaceable inhabitant of the islands upon which they are located, and both places are a festering sore of drunken louts parading their tattoos and generally being obnoxious.

Both Kuta and San Antonio have been built to attract ‘low end mass-market  tourism’ and whilst they were initially successful are now suffering from a perception that they are unsafe because of drunken behavior in the streets, and undesirable because they were designed only for  those who have very little disposable income and are looking for the lowest common-denominator holiday experience. If one wishes for examples of how NOT to build holiday destinations then Kuta in Bali and San  Antonio in Ibiza are outstanding examples. Unfortunately one can see the San Antonio-ization of Ibiza and  the Kuta-ization of Bali proceeding apace ! This is nothing less than a tragedy.

Are we to end up with both islands covered in shops selling fake designer goods with well known labels to no-one ? Both islands have hundreds of stores which remain uneconomic or barely viable selling shoddy goods which not even the poorest tourist wishes to buy. How long can such a ‘false economy’ continue to survive ? Both islands already have hundreds of bars and restaurants which are barely scraping a living, and in both islands the presence of noticeably drunken tourists is a common sight on the streets of the major towns. Prostitution and drugs are readily available, with the excesses of western hedonism particularly entrenched in Ibiza and now beginning to appear in Bali. Is this what the Balinese people actually want ?

Apart from the issue of the type of tourist each of the islands wishes to attract, there is the MAJOR concern of the environmental imprint of unrestricted development. One of the easiest ways of measuring the impact of unrestricted development is in the effect it has on the water supply and in particular the water table. On both islands the water table (the depth at which water exists when one drills into the ground) has dropped alarmingly and is continuing to do so. When porous rocks (which hold the water) are deprived of the water as the table drops, those rocks lose their porosity and they eventually silt up and can no longer hold water. The water table when it is reduced and lowers does NOT re-establish itself. Once it is significantly lowered that is IT ! As a direct consequence of the lowering of the water table through unrestricted demand there is less water available for both development and agriculture. Bali needs to look to the experience of Ibiza and do so urgently.

Prior to the death of the dictator General Franco, Ibiza was a poor and largely self-sufficient island. By and large Ibiza could feed itself and indeed what it ate, it grew. Development funds were directed to the other Balearic islands because Ibiza supported the opponents of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and as a result Ibiza experienced no mass tourism until the mid 1960’s. In a spurt of development funded in large part by German money fleeing a restrictive tax regime in Germany, Ibiza then leapt into action and a rash of low-budget hotels sprang up on the island. A huge casino was built, and San Antonio flourished as a cheap package-holiday destination. The results for the environment have been simply dreadful. The result for the people of the island, similarly so. I lived in a house which I rented which had been owned for hundreds of years by the one family. It was lost at gambling with the family put out into the street. I subsequently rented the place from the man who had won it at cards. Gambling is a MAJOR problem in Ibiza for the people of the island. The casino was built, we are told, for the tourists !

Sewage from the hotels HAS to go somewhere ! Where did it go, and where does it go to this day ? It is conveniently pumped out to sea in pipelines which place the fecal matter some half a kilometer out to sea ! The hotels and guest houses HAD to have water. Where did it come from ? They bored wells and pumped it from the water-table which is now so low that many of the wells which had hitherto been in existence for hundreds of years are now dry. The experience of the small island of Ibiza is there for all to see, available in research by Spanish Greenpeace and various agencies of the European Union and Common Market. Bali would do well to wake up and take heed for it is undoubtedly the case that their are worrying similarities between the two islands experiences. The water table in Bali is dropping, NOW. Bali is importing rice !

When I first went to Ibiza in the sixties it was a relatively unspoiled place. The Ibicencos had a vibrant culture and a method of farming that was ancient and had withstood the test of time. Their fields were lined by wonderful dry-stone walls, they grew olives and almonds and fruit, grapes were in abundance, and their neatly white-washed houses were of a design and a simplicity that harked back over a thousand years to the era of the Phoenicians. At the local fiestas the Ibicencos would appear in their best traditional clothes, proudly wearing the red cap of the Catalan people of which they are a part. All of the families proudly spoke their native tongue even though it had been suppressed by a fascist dictatorship for almost forty years. They played their traditional music which they had secretly kept alive. Most of this, other than the language, is eoither gone or fast disappearing in the space of less than a generation. The Balinese would do well to take note of what has happened !

No young person in Ibiza wishes to be a farmer. Most of the fields lay fallow with the walls collapsing because no-one wants to do the hard manual labor that’s involved in the maintenance of dry-stone walls. Within a matter of years there will be few people left who possess the skills or the knowledge to farm in the traditional manner.  Ibiza long ago ceased to be self-sufficient and all its food needs are met through importing food from the Spanish mainland. There is talk of a water pipe-line from the mainland, and already the power needs of the island (electricity and fuel) have to be imported. No-one but the very elderly wears national dress, where only thirty years  ago it was quite common to see it upon people of all ages. The olive presses on the island which for centuries pressed olive oil no longer work and are now installed in people’s houses as designer objects. Where once people all over the island could make baskets, I doubt one could find anyone under sixty years of age with the skill today. The experiences of Ibiza will, I fear, be replicated (if only in part) in Bali because they are the experiences of a culture that has embraced tourism. What should the Balinese do ?

If I could wave a ‘magic wand’ I would arrange for a delegation from Bali to go to Ibiza to make connections with the Ibicenco tourism and culture people. With Spanish and Catalan government departments which deal with the environment. With universities and places of higher learning which deal with the impact of tourism on society. I would set in motion a continuing ‘dialogue’ between the two cultures that existed for the benefit of the peoples of the two places. In this way, I believe, some of the worst excesses of the Ibiza experience could be spared the people of Bali. AND, some of the BETTER experiences could be shared. For all is not doom and gloom, though the overall picture is pretty depressing. The Catalan people have a rich and vibrant culture that goes back many hundreds of years, and they would love the Balinese culture for its richness and historicity - the cross-cultural benefits of the two islands being in ‘harmonic communication’ would be wonderful.

With my ‘magic wand’ I call upon the cultural and business elites of BOTH islands to respond to this call - you both have so much to benefit by becoming friends and being in meaningful communication. BUT, alas, I am only a writer and a dreamer. A poet who has enjoyed both magical places, a man whose heart has been moved by the soulful generosity of both peoples. Ibiza and Bali, the two most beautiful islands of my dreams. In Ibiza I became a writer, in Bali I hope to live as an old man. I remain deeply in love with both places in a marriage made in heaven. “Om swasti astu”, as my Balinese friends would say when they met the people of Ibiza; who would reply in friendship and good cheer,  “benvingut” !

© sam cutler 2009

Of course, just because one falls asleep in ‘paradise’ there is no automatic guarantee that one will awake in the same place, and so it was that on my first night in Bali I had some rather strange nocturnal experiences. The bed was hard and firm as an athletes muscles and draped in crisp white mosquito netting so that I felt as if I were in the tent of some desert potentate. I lay down and remember feeling ostentatiously luxurious before falling asleep with my head on a pillow softer than my lady’s breasts and without a care in the world.  I was awakened to the sound of a baby being strangled.

The most pitiable cries seemed to be coming from immediately outside my room. I woke instantaneously, charged and attentive, mind clear and focused, and ready to do battle with every monster that the world could summon to test me. It was two minutes past three in the morning and within less than five seconds of my re-entering consciousness I was standing at the door in my bare feet listening to the strange sounds. It was a noise like no noise I had ever heard before, a hideous noise, strangely moving and ineffably sad,a  noise that I couldn’t quite place, yet one which (though distant) seemed somehow familiar. It was the sound of a baby being strangled but that was plainly ridiculous I told myself, unless that is, I had gone to sleep in heaven and woken up in hell.

Armed with nothing more than an absurd sense of purpose I threw open the door to my room and stepped out onto the porch. The rain poured down in those monsoon sheets which one can only find in Asia. There was a soft and gentle rhythm as the rice shivered in appreciation beneath the downpour - in the distance across the fields a  lone light bulb pierced the gloom. I stepped to the edge of the porch and stood just behind a sheet of water which sprayed down from the edge of the roof and peered into the darkness. The baby sounds became intermittent, less insistent now, but I could see nothing and eventually they ceased all together. There was nothing but the steady sound of the rain, and I began to feel foolish standing naked on my porch and went back to the room.

Asleep again, I dreamed of when I was a child. I had been very ill and almost died from a condition known as Pyloric Stenosis. The pyloric valve sits at the lower end of the esophagus and regulates the flow of food from the tube which goes from the mouth to the stomach. If the baby suffers from this condition, the valve will not open, thus food cannot enter the stomach proper. The baby regurgitates its food with projectile force and without an operation will almost certainly not survive. BUT, some with the condition DO survive, and for those that make it through early childhood the ailment returns in their teens when it requires major surgery. I was one of these and was to spend almost a year of my life in hospital when I was seventeen. Anyway, I was asleep now in Bali, but it was a fitful sleep, disturbed and without restorative value. I would wake feeling as if I were choking and turn this way and that as I struggled for breathe, just like I must have done when I was a baby in my mother’s arms beneath the bombs that rained down on London in the Second World War. Finally I could stand it no more, and as the sky lightened I decided to get up and write.

As I stepped onto the floor, the terrible baby cries began again. I was shocked and listened attentively. The noises were coming from outside the room and this time I decided to get dressed before I investigated. Fully clothed and armed with an umbrella I stepped onto the porch and looked out at the fields as the dawn reformed the night sky. The noise was coming from just beyond the porch and I opened the umbrella and stepped out into the rain. A meter away from me in my peripheral vision I noticed something moving and the awful sounds were loud and insistent. There, almost at my feet, was a snake about a meter long doing its level best to swallow a massive frog. The green and red and black snake held the frog in its reticulated jaws, with the frogs eyes bulging manically and the most hideous cries coming from its throat. The snakes eyes were glazed and it would thrash its tail and with each spasm the frog would enter just a few millimeters more into the snake’s mouth. Two nasty fangs held the top of the frog’s head and there was no chance of its escaping. It was a hideous sight and one that made me want to wretch as I stumbled back in horror to the safety of the porch. I slumped into a chair and waited for the ghastly business to be over and finally the snake slithered into the rice paddy with its distended belly and its malevolent eyes and the sounds of death were no more.

The day had begun. The world had merely been going about its business with snakes eating frogs, and my memories of children dying, bombs falling, mothers abandoning their babies, rain falling, and my lover a million miles away. I felt horribly alone. At the end of the garden the Balinese had the house temple and I walked there in the rain. Beneath the benevolent eyes of the Gods I cried and mournfully realized that all was as it ever was. Rain and tears, rain and tears, same same baba, same same.  At night in the fields sometimes even the stones must cry.

©  sam cutler 2009