On rice and terraces and limbic things

or, an embrace of travel

Disclaimer: everything in this post is true. Because, you know, sometimes I write things that aren’t.

I write this staring at an orchid, its yellow-cream flowers blooming from a lone, curved stem. Behind it, the sun crests the horizon above lush jungle.

I’m in Bali, on the outskirts of Ubud in a paradisiacal villa with my wife.

The end.

No, no, not the end, not yet. There’s a few more words, things that might spill out as I ponder on what to write this week. I was, originally, considering having a week off writing, seeing as I'm away on holiday. But then I came to the realisation that there is no off—this isn’t like work, from which I desire and require periodic breaks; this act of fingers and keys and the emergence of words is, fundamentally, a part of me. So although I’m not treading the usual path of fiction this week, I’m just going to, well, wing it. Or something.

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A few weeks ago I read Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. If you’re not familiar, it’s about an amateur entomologist, Jumpei Niki, who, after going off in search of insects near a coastal village, somehow finds himself stranded at the bottom of a large dune. There, he’s forced to live with a strange woman who spends her days shovelling away the ever-encroaching threat of sand from her flimsy house. The book is surrealist and strange, touching on themes of existentialism, isolation, and the struggles of the human condition. It’s lauded as one of Abe’s best. Although I did enjoy the story and the themes it explored, I found the prose too minimalist, too barren, to become totally embraced. Which, maybe is the point.

Yet, in leaving for Bali last weekend, one phrase and idea from the book kept returning to me. There’s a moment where, stuck at the bottom of the dune, Niki is pondering the notion of being a one-way ticket man or a round-trip ticket man¹. There’s a lot to this, I think. My interpretation may be woefully loose and wrong, but I found myself considering that the latter kind of person desires a constant return to normalcy and therefore maintains a longing in the past and a constant safeguarding of the future, whereas the former is confronted to live in the present, despite any hardships that may entail.

As I’ve gotten older, an incremental resistance to travel has etched its way into my brain. Not the actual travel. Sitting here right now and staring at the deep lush greens, hearing the noises of strange birds and insects, watching swift-like things² dart for their breakfast and pondering the slow existence of the large gecko that watches us from the wooden rafters of our bedroom—these are all an immediate reminder of the beauty of travelling the world. No, not the travel. I mean the lead-up.

I know the origin of this … come now, I won’t call a spade a spoon … anxiety, but where my youth brushed it off my adulthood has only seen it fester. The endless what-ifs. What if our flight gets cancelled or we miss it due to a miscalculated home departure? What if we get sick? What if the accommodation is terrible, that we’re trapped, that our belongings are stolen, that an earthquake strikes? Even the mundane what-if-the-normally-stunning-weather-turns-to-rain-each-day? Of course, I know the stupidity of these thoughts and their wasteful nature; a modicum of preparedness is a welcome, helpful thing to keep you alert and in control; but when it becomes an affliction it very much isn’t.

And this all seems so absurd to fret about, even more so in a world seemingly hell-bent on destruction and suffering, evident perhaps no more so than in the dark horrors of the last few weeks. Viewed in comparison, writing of such minor internal battles nearly has me dunking my laptop in the pool. I haven't done that, though. Some introspection and acknowledgement of internal quirks—as minimal as they might be—is, I hope, OK.

Back to Abe. Where was going with this? As simple as it was, that phrase from the dune-struck Niki kept returning. To what extent have I always been clutching a round-trip ticket? I know it’s an ever-present item in my wallet. I can see it there now as I push aside the inflated rupiah. But at the weekend when packing, I turned to Abe's words. A simple thought process, the reframing of a crutch, even if temporary, was enough³ to snuff out those stupid what-ifs and lead me to tear that stub in half—a stub that will, I know, in time regrow and reissue itself—and embrace the part upon which is instead printed ONE WAY.

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Oh, and the rice and terraces in the title. Yes, I very much want to live on a rice terrace. They … are … beautiful.

Ceking rice terrace, Tagalalang, Bali. Photo by me. I’m most likely still there, swimming through the rice with my mouth wide open.

OK, so now this time

The End.

1. You’ll have to forgive me if those words aren’t entirely correct.

2. Possibly swifts.

3. I will add that I am lucky to also have a constant antidote in the form of my wife. Her strong necessity for travel and exploration and an ability to simply go with things in a 100% at-ease, you-only-live-once-so-live-well mindset—including, I must note, throwing us both off of a Swiss mountain with nothing but a magical gravity-defying and physics-capitalising strip of material to keep us aloft—is a most admirable of traits.