Writing – Adventures in Design

Sarong Story Number 5: Sometimes no one knows what to do or how to understand what is happening and that is when someone who thinks she is a woman gets dressed as a man.

It was early in my fieldwork. I had been in Bali a few months only and was staying in Denpasar, the capital city of Bali in the central south of the island. My project involved dance, my hypothesis being that teachers’ physical manipulations of children’s bodies when they were learning to dance was an active gendering process as girls learned the female dance-form (igel luh), boys the male dance-form (igel muani), and both boys and girls strayed into the interstitial form that combined male and female styles of movement, the androgynous dance-form (igel banci). Nyoman, who had been proffered to me as an academic guide by the head of the Anthropology Department at Udayana University, the main higher education institution on the island, was helping me to find someone willing to talk to me about dance.

I wanted a master dancer who had not been part of the arts institutions on the island, but rather someone who had an indigenous experience, unmediated by imported educational models. And I wanted someone who was teaching Balinese children to dance, not tourists from Japan or Germany. Nyoman took me to Karangasem – the eastern-most part of Bali – following a lead from someone he knew. It took us hours to get there because the roads are narrow with multiple areas of switch backs to get around the peaks and troughs of the landscape. Once we arrived in Karangsem we meandered, going first to one village to talk to someone who told us to go somewhere else. These quiet, self-conscious conversations were held in Balinese and were tinged with the sense of status-anxiety and language-awareness that comes from being a commoner speaking to Brahmins in their own houses in an unaccustomed register, asking them for their help.

We finally ended up in the village of Abang, at the house of the man who would become one of my teachers – Ida Made Basma, a Brahmin and a dancer and ritual specialist after he retired from being a public school teacher. When we got to his house, Ida Made’s eldest daughter told us he had gone to dance in a village on the coast. So we went to search for him and finally found him; the little temple where he danced was at the end of a dusty track between fields, almost at the edge of the ocean. It was very hot.

I don’t remember exactly how the initial approach and introduction happened. Balinese was still mostly sounds to me as I was not yet able to discern where the words began and ended. Nyoman would have explained our objective in coming to that village and described our search for Ida Made Basma. That is how it happened. I was with a man who wanted to talk to a man, so I ended up in a room amongst men grappling with the problem that Nyoman and I wanted to enter the temple to watch Ida Made Basma dance and we didn’t have sarongs. It was proposed that we watch from outside the temple wall. Perhaps we should have done that. Probably it was me who wanted to be inside rather than outside the temple wall, standing on a cinder block in a dry field and no shade. And of course I would not have this story to tell you if we had done that.

Temple attire is both specific and non-specific: the lower half of the body must be covered with kain (the 2 meters of fabric we are calling a sarong even though, in Bali, the term sarong refers to a tube of fabric rather than a length of cloth); a sash must be worn to separate the upper half of the body from the lower; a chest covering must be worn[1]. Within these non-specific parameters, ritual dress differs according to gender and varies by status, wealth, personal taste, and current trends (a Western notion of tradition suggests fashion should not operate but it does).

I was with a man who wanted to talk to a man so I ended up in a room amongst men now tasked with lending me a sarong so I could watch the dance performance from inside the temple. Sometimes I wish I had a photographic memory, or even better, a cinematic memory from the perspective of an Emmersonian, all-seeing Eye, that could record precisely the event from multiple perspectives with internal monologue voice-overs so that I could watch it all, hear (and understand) the thoughts of all of the actors. But I only have my own cobbled together blurry recollection and this event has been coming back to me in vague impressions as I have been thinking about it, pulling details into focus in pieces. The risk is that I have made things up in the interim, filled in gaps with things that never happened. Maybe there would be no harm in that. Maybe I am the only one who remembers this event. Or maybe many people in that village remember that day and what happened because it is the only time a white woman ever showed up out of nowhere to watch a short, unremarkable dance performance by Ida Made Basma from Abang.

I remember Ida Made vomited. I remember Nyoman commented that there was something going on “ada sesuatu,” which I didn’t fully understand at the time but now think probably indicated that Nyoman saw Ida Made’s queasiness in spiritual terms though it can also be argued that it had to do with the heat and his having previously ridden in the back of a truck down to the coast on the switchbacks that snake through the most spectacular and magnificently steep rice terraces on the northeast flank of the volcano Agung.

I was a white woman with a Balinese man who wanted to talk to another Balinese man so I ended up in a room amongst Balinese men now tasked with lending me a sarong so I could watch the dance performance from inside the temple. Nyoman was handed a sarong and he put it on, rolling up his pants legs so they didn’t show below the kain. I followed Nyoman and started to roll my pants up. I was so confused. One of the men got out a length of kain for me, and a sash, and started to dress me in it. He held the sarong in one hand, reached his arms behind me, and started the sarong at the back with volume on either side in both hands. He adjusted how much fabric was on my left and my right.

Men wear the right side of the sarong long in the front in a kind of phallic drape.
Women never wear their kain draped in the front like this.

He placed the left-side fabric first so that it covered me to my right hip bone. Then he placed the left-side fabric so it was overlapping in front, letting a length of it hang down, then rolling the waist down. The man wrapped my borrowed sarong like a man’s.

Putting on a Saput (the green fabric) over the sarong (blue fabric). Only men wear Saput.

Nyoman just stood there not saying anything. The other men stood and watched. I don’t know if they conversed or not. I didn’t understand it if they did so I would have nothing to remember except a murmur and I can make that up in my brain but I can’t say whether it happened like that.

Dressed with sarong wrapped like a man. On the day I was dressed as a man by the men in that tiny village, I was wearing a loose-fitting short jacket not so different from this one.

As our host awkwardly dressed me I felt more and more agitated until I couldn’t stand it anymore and took the whole thing apart and re-wrapped myself as a woman.

Re-dressed as a woman with sarong wrapped from left to right instead of right to left (man-wise). I wish I had images from that day. This was long before the ease of cellphone selfies and I didn’t have Bruce to document anything the way I did on the day these images were taken – a series of studio shots designed to show the difference – between dressing like a woman and dressing like a man – that resides in wrapping your sarong one way versus another. What I didn’t do was show the difference between wrapping the same piece of fabric as a woman and then as a man with the same jacket I wore in the first three images above. That would have conveyed more what things looked like on that day. And hair up in a knot of course.

My confusion and agitation at being in a room full of men and dressed by a man as a man is what I remember about that day. There are times when no one knows what to do, when categories have been violated and everyone tries in some way to make the world adhere to a cosmo-logic that has already broken down. Maybe there is a more compelling way to think about this. Perhaps it’s not that categories were violated, which sounds so passive, as though such things just happen without anyone’s agency. Perhaps, instead, we were all actively engaged in constructing my (gender) identity (is that the right word? I’m not coming up with a better one at the moment; at least it begins to capture elements beyond gender, which can’t have been the only classification operating at the time) in different ways depending on how we understood me and the way I fit into available (combinations of) categories.

I didn’t/don’t know if the man dressing me thought I was a man or if he was purposely making me into one using the sarong or if he thought I was a woman and so didn’t understand why I was in the room with the men, so there must be something he didn’t know that made it make sense to dress me like that. Hadn’t I just rolled my pants legs up just like Nyoman? Didn’t I let him dress me, thereby showing I didn’t know what to do or how to do it, demonstrating I needed construction? So was it that the man who dressed me felt like it was what he had to do? I know he was hesitating. Am I making that hesitation up? It was a long time ago.

In Bali, social life, most definitely village life, is sex-segregated. The shadow of sex-segregated patterns of interaction and work continue to operate even in contemporary contexts where people have migrated away from their ancestral villages and communities and young men and women mix socially in non-traditional ways in culturally and religiously non-homogeneous, semi-urban environments. But in general, men associate with men. Women associate with women. Work is gendered. And yet there is also a flexibility to these complementary symbolic categories. The in-between, combinatory subject position has a name I’ve talked about before– banci – and represents a legible social location, not just a dance form as I mentioned previously. I thought I understood banci, but I realize, as I write this, that I don’t think I do. I understand it in the abstract. It is performative. But how does banci work when a person has chosen to occupy that position (role? Is it a role?) not just for the length of a dance, but for the duration a life? Where and how does a banci person dress to enter a temple to watch a dance performance?

At a point when I was well into my field research, I asked a man (I’ll call him Pak T) I knew in the village where I ended up living if he ever knew of a banci person there. I had heard from the man who lived next door that there was a banci person in the village in the past but no one else seemed to know anything about it so I was not sure. Pak T said that when he was a boy, there was a banci person who dressed as a woman and did women’s work alongside women but bathed in the river with the men and had a penis the size of a bean. As Pak T explained this, he showed me the tip of his little finger to help me visualize the size of the bean, his thumb nail pressed into the first joint. This fact of the bean-sized penis was presented as the defining detail that explained everything; the social followed the physical.

This is the hand gesture my interlocutor used to indicate – a penis the size of a bean.

Upon re-reading the previous paragraph I suddenly doubt my final sentence. Maybe showing me his little finger to visualize the size of the bean was not at all intended as an assertion that the banci person was banci because s(h)e had a bean for a penis, and thus would never be able to inhabit fully the social role of a man by marrying and having children. Maybe, behind the gesture coupled with the observation that s(h)e bathed with the men, Pak T’s point was simply that having a penis and not a vagina, even if the penis was only the size of a bean, is what determined whether s(h)e bathed with men versus women but didn’t necessarily determine anything else. It was bathing with men and at the same time living and working as a woman that determined the categorization banci. Otherwise s(h)e would simply have been a man with a penis the size of a bean who would have never married as a result.

Either I didn’t talk to anyone else about it after that or nobody else knew when I asked as I don’t recall any other accounts. If I were to go back and ask now, would anyone still be alive who would remember? That was over two decades ago. (The last time I went home to Karangasem three years ago, I searched out the new house of my friend Dayu Padmi after I found my old village deserted; I guessed that everyone had gone to a cremation, as it was the (dry) ritual season, but it almost felt like everyone had died. Dayu greeted me warmly, brought a mat for me to sit with her on the veranda, served me coffee (coffee is considered a male drink but she knows I don’t like sweet tea), and began to tell me about everyone who had died since my last visit. She is not the only one who starts with the dead instead of the living. The list of the dead always feels too long and the dead too young when they died.) Elders often don’t tell their stories to their children and children don’t ask. I have frequently been the only one who has ever asked. How long, then, does a lone banci in the recent history of a village stay alive in the collective memory?

I was a woman who had been brought by a man into a male space. Did simply being in a male space position me as male, making it imperative that my sarong was wrapped as a man? Is that what happened?[2]

Had I been a Balinese woman, I would have been led into female space and been given a sarong to wrap myself as a woman. I can theorize that I was a novel being so, as an unintended result, was granted an opportunity to slip into an interstitial space and occupy a liminal position. But that theory only works from my perspective. Maybe I missed a cue and stayed with Nyoman when I should have accepted an invitation I missed to go with the women. Perhaps the men in that room didn’t understand what I was even though I thought they should as it was obvious to me that I was a woman. Did the very fact I entered the room at all, an action taken because I didn’t know where I was going or what was happening, categorize me as male?

Maybe I wasn’t a woman. I walked in dressed in pants (male) and a loose jacket (male) with a big bag (male) having travelled from far away (male) to do research on religion (male). I was very skinny at the time so my body didn’t telegraph femaleness. I wore my hair long, pulled back in a knot; I viewed my hair as female but artistic men and men who have become ritual specialists don’t cut their hair and wear it long, pulled back in a knot. How can we know how others see us, even in familiar environments, let alone contexts where we aren’t yet able to discern the array of categories available, and so can’t intentionally choose to occupy one over others? We think we are legible. But maybe we are not.

The men in that room couldn’t have known (maybe they wondered?) whether I was a person with a penis (the size of a bean?) who dressed as a woman, did women’s work, but bathed with men and so dressed with the men to enter the temple even though s(h)e wore a sarong like a woman, which is exactly what I did when I found myself in a room amongst men because I was with a man who wanted to talk to a man and we had to borrow sarongs so I could watch a dance performance without standing on a cinder block, in that heat outside the wall of the temple.

[1] Unrelated to attire, a woman must not be menstruating; if a woman just finished menstruating – menstruating considered to take three days – she must have washed her hair before she can enter a temple.

[2] In Bali, I studied esoteric topics and old palm-leaf manuscripts, both of which were gendered male. When I did learn to dance, Ida Made Basma insisted on teaching me the male dance-form (igel muani). I was sometimes described as keras, hard, or tegang, intense, relatively male characteristics, though they didn’t completely exclude women. Nyoman once said to me – you are really just a man.

A Quick Guide to Dressing Like a Man in Bali

Sarong Series Number 3: Some thoughts on gender, the body, and the universe (and sarongs).

Dressing like a man feels like winging it every time; I am not a man. I don’t have a detailed physical routine around wearing a sarong like a man. I have no reliable physical habits that direct my hands this way and then that, hold here with the left, turn at the waist slightly, pull with the right, wrap, fold, hold, accordion, roll; I have not wrapped my sarong like a man enough times for it to feel natural. My understanding is visual, conceptual, not tactile and physical.

In this series of photographs I am demonstrating how to wrap a sarong like a man. The photographs do not have the same finely detailed, step-by-step character as my Anatomy of Ceremony Clothes description. Maybe this is partly because I don’t have the same granular sensitivity to operations. There are things I’m missing – exactly how much overlap over the belly, how precisely to engineer the folds in the center front. What are all those subtle hand movements that make it work just right so it looks right and feels right and stays together even while doing men’s work all day, every day.

Hands on hips: angry stance in a Balinese grammar of body-language.

We did the men’s sarong images after the women’s sarong-wrapping instruction (see previous post for more description of the photoshoot). Chris was still directing and he asked me to put my hands on my hips. I did and mentioned that arms akimbo means anger in a Balinese grammar of body language. That surprised him and he commented. He asked me to take another attitude. I corrected again, saying no, I can’t do that. It’s not male. He asked what is male? So I described the gender of attitude and demonstrated dance positions – male, female, banci (androgyne) as a quick shortcut to the difference in how a woman stands versus a man. I took a strong, male dance position – opened my eyes wide until the whites showed (fierce), did a deep sort of plie with my legs wide, arms spread, fingers spread. Then I stopped dancing and just squatted in the relaxed position of a man, knees wide, arms outstretched, elbows on my knees. This is the position of men resting, or waiting by the side of a road or path for nothing in particular, or watching other men harass their roosters to prepare them for a mock cock fight.

Igel muani keras – Strong male dance position.

Bengong – staring into space in a resting (men’s) squat.

Men’s sarongs wrap in the opposite direction from women’s. Women’s sarongs wrap from right to left, the sarong finishing with the left covering the right; men’s sarongs wrap from left to right, the sarong finishing with the right covering the left. This simple oppositional organization of fabric is part of a gendered logic that pervades Balinese cosmology, starting with the human body, which is conceptualized as a small homologue to the universe.

In a Balinese worldview (epistemology), gender is a way of describing just about everything and the relationships between types of things or processes. This is how symbolism works – certain categories of things or people are granted a value or an identity that is meaningful within a universe of other values. To begin to map this out, imagine the body oriented in space, standing facing north. The sun rises on the right hand and sets on the left. The east where the sun rises is male, as is the sun; the right hand, the sweet hand, is male. The west where the sun sets is female, as is the moon; the left hand, the dirty hand, is female. North and east are male (and one should always orient the head of a bed so it faces north or east according to a Balinese version of feng shui), the south and west are female. Magic is right-handed (benevolent and male) and left-handed (malevolent and female). The right hand is social. To rest the right hand in the left is to make a polite request. Babies are taught to ask for things in this way before they can speak. The left hand is intimate and private. To give someone something with your left hand, especially food, doesn’t just demonstrate intimacy; it creates intimacy. If the relationship is not an intimate one, then giving something with your left hand, especially food, creates hierarchy and would be an insult between status equals.

Humorally speaking, heat is male where coolness is female. Sky is male. Earth is female. Every plant, situation, object, activity and relationship can be broken down into gendered complementarities. Gender is a nuanced language for talking about relationships, interdependencies, the order of things. Nothing is complete without the combination, in some way however subtle, of these gendered aspects. Gender is generative.

Back to sarongs. I intend this document as a baseline, an instruction and also a kind of visual glossary of gendered categories that are embedded in the way people wear their clothes, and which repeat, like reverberations, like sound waves or the concentric circles of disruption that reveal the submergence of a stone. This water-reference is a cliché but it visualizes something that helps me to convey the expansive, encompassing aspect of the ideas that are relevant to sarong-wrapping (and everything else). With this in mind, I’m going to relate to you a folk story. The teller recorded, transcribed, and translated it from Balinese into Indonesian. I haven’t re-read it. I’m relying on my memory of the tale as that is how oral tradition works. It was told to me. I am telling it to you. You may ask yourself what this story, and the way I contextualize it, has to do with sarongs. The answer is – it has nothing to do with sarongs and it has everything to do with sarongs. I am going to say to you what authors sometimes say to their readers – just listen. Come with me.

In the story of Chandra[1], a commoner has abducted his high-born love-object in an attempt at marriage by capture (malagandang) but he doesn’t violate her. He wants her to give herself to him. She tells him she will marry him, but only if he will climb a magnolia tree to get her the flower she points out in the tree’s crown. The Cempaka magnolia (Magnolia Champaka) is the most beautiful, with the most exquisite perfume, of the seven white, scented flowers used to infuse holy water. It is a small blossom – the petals roughly two inches long – for such a massive tree, that can grow to 160 feet tall with a trunk up to six feet in diameter. The tree in the story, of course, is one of such magnificent proportions.

Cempaka flowers are picked by men[2] who climb the trees in the early morning before the dawn coaxes the buds to open fully; in the dark, the Cempaka’s petals remain soft and straight, modestly concealing the flower’s sexual center instead of arcing back to reveal the stamens and pistil. The hopeful lover climbs the tree in the dark and calls down to Candra when he reaches one of the buds – this one? She says no, the one farther up. Can’t you see it through the branches? He climbs higher, again reaching a flower, again calling out – is it this one you want? No. It’s the one above that. Can’t you see it glowing white amidst the leaves? He climbs higher, every time calling out, every time told that the bloom Chandra wants is still above him. When he gets to the top of the tree without obtaining the particular flower his beloved wants, he looks up at the sky from the Cempaka tree’s topmost branches and suddenly realizes the glowing white, unopened bud he has been searching for is the moon he sees glowing out of the morning-dark. He understands, then, that she is utterly unobtainable; her very name – Chandra – means moon. In despair and shame, he throws himself from the top of the tree and dies. His body, then, begins to change and each part of it becomes a botanical element that sounds improvised in the words of an excellent story teller – his cheeks become the white flesh of the Durian fruit; his eyebrows transformed to become the perfect arc of the leaf of the Intaran tree (Azadirachta indica, also Neem); his fingernails now cloves of garlic; his teeth the seeds of the white pomegranate (delima); the whites of his eyes now tiny cakes of yeast; jasmine blossoms where his nostrils were; sweet spices – nutmeg, cinnamon, clove – replace pubic hair; Salak fruits for testicles; a long eggplant for a penis; Pepper vine for sinews; the blue water lily for the glance of his eyes; a coconut for a skull, the leaves of the water lily wrapped around it are where the membrane covering his brain used to be, the music of a palm frond left in place of the sound of his breath.

The botanical equivalents for the body – each body part proxied by a fruit, a flower, a seed, a leaf, a stalk, a root, fungus, mold, vine– are established in this story in a seeming improvisation. Yet, these same botanical equivalents for the body are discoverable in the contents of two huge mortuary offerings in which every part of the small world (buana alit) of the human body is represented by its counterpart in the big world (buana agung) of the universe: from this we know there is a logic. These proxies are used to adorn a corpse when it is bathed and wrapped in meters of white fabric, doused repeatedly with holy water containing the seven scented blossoms, including the Cempaka.

So you see, the metamorphosis of the despair-inspired lover’s corpse is not only a story told late at night to entertain. It’s an inculcation that describes and teaches a critical act of transformation and un-making that must be performed for the dead, part of which involves assembling the offerings about which I am telling you, and which are later burned with the corpse during cremation.[3] After the burning, the body’s botanical proxies are used to adorn another proxy made of Chinese coins strung together to form a stick figure with all the fingers and toes articulated. The coins are laid on top of a reiteration of the body made of its vestiges. The bone fragments of the deceased are retrieved from the ash of cremation by hand, through sifting and searching for every discernible piece, placed in three shallow dishes made of leaves. In each dish are collected the bone-shards of the head, upper body, and lower body. The ash-proxy’s head is made from head shards; the proxy upper body and arms from upper-body shards, the proxy lower body, legs, and feet from the lower-body shards.[4]

I did an interview once with a neighbor. It was a structured conversational interview – I had a set of questions I asked all of my interviewees, but the questions in between those questions were determined by the specifics of each conversation. Part of the interview asked the interviewee to draw a picture of the human body. My neighbor, whose name escapes me, was then in her forties. She was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, her legs straight out in front of her. I gave her the piece of paper and a pencil and asked her to draw the body. She held the pencil awkwardly and stared at the paper for what seemed to me like a long time. I think about it now and there were so many assumptions embedded in my request. I had a notion of an abstract body that could be separated from the specificity of particular bodies. I had a notion that this abstract body could be represented in a drawing. I started with an assumption that asking my interlocutors for such drawings would be a comprehensible request. I was starting with pictures from anatomies in my mind. I actually had no idea what my interlocutors were starting with. Of course I wanted to find out. The fact I handed my neighbor a piece of paper and a pencil suggests the body could be described in that way, with those tools. But why should it be? (I asked her later to draw the contents inside the body and again she paused before saying (roughly, in Indonesian of course) – well, I’ve never seen the inside of the body but I’ve cut pigs and I’m guessing what’s in pigs might be similar to what is in humans . . . Humbled again. Of course I have never seen the inside of the human body either.)

Then she looked up at me and she began to pat her body – her chest, her lap, her legs, back to her chest – with both hands as she asked me – you mean this? You mean me? So (going with whatever she was thinking) I said yes. And she began to draw. She pressed hard on the paper with the pencil to make her lines thick and dark and drew a stick figure with intense focus I didn’t understand at the time. To me it seemed strange she would work so hard on such a simple figure. She narrated as she drew – this is me after I have died, after I have burned. A man from my family will make this for me . . . then if it has been done correctly, some time later, one of my sons will dream I have come to the gate of the compound, then entered the yard and asked for food (minta nasi, literally request rice, the word rice being a gloss for food generally). If/when this happens, they will know that the next child born in the house will be me; I will have returned.

At the time I didn’t understand what my neighbor was telling me. I was trying to make sense of it on the hoof – watching, listening – but it didn’t make sense. It was only later, I don’t remember how much later, that I realized she was talking about her own cremation and the final reiteration of her body after her corpse was finished burning, using her bones and ash arranged on a white cloth, then overlain with the coin proxy and adorned with the botanical proxies, doused in holy water, bundled up with a small inscribed shroud, placed in a miniature replica of a cremation tower, something like a sedan chair for bones and ash, and taken on its last physical journey to the ocean for the final dis-integration – water to water. My neighbor’s rhetorical move is fascinating to me. The abstract, generalizable human body I asked her about becomes her specific body. She drew a self-portrait, but not of her living self. She drew a self-portrait in ash.

I only know a small percentage of the botanical elements that correspond to the body; probably only the eldest and most skilled ritual offering specialists have memorized the contents of the most complex mortuary offerings and know what all of the possible proxies are. Sometimes a particular ingredient isn’t available so she has to know what else can stand for the veins or whatever. I watched an offering specialist call for the frond of a particular species of palm that proxies the ribs and no one could find one quickly so she instructed her assistant to go to the nearest metalsmith (there were many in that village) and request a tiny proxy in metal of the ribs curving out from the spinal column.

I couldn’t see the landscape the same again after that. Intaran leaves on the ground around the tree are perfect eyebrows. That particular palm that makes a quiet tuned percussion with its leaves is the ribs and their flexing with breath. The blue water lily is the glance of the eyes. That is how the anatomies called Tatwa Wit – Root Teaching – begin: the blue water lily is the glance of lovers’ eyes.

I first worked on a series of Tatwa Wit with two, later three, teachers, all high-caste men in their 60s who read, translated, and wrote palm leaf manuscripts in Old Javanese, which can perhaps be compared to reading, translating, and writing in Latin. The Tatwa Wit’s Western correlative texts are anatomies, with their meticulous visual deliberation on the particularities of the body and their representation. Considering Tatwa Wit alongside Western anatomies I was (and am still) struck by the disembodied, unlocated nature of Western anatomic representations of the body. The flayed and splayed bodies in our anatomies are chronicles of dissection. These disembodied bodies are particular but not specific, an additive model that begins with an armature, the skeleton, and builds the body layer by layer. The (Western) anatomy I have adds these systems, roughly, in the reverse order of the dissection that was the mode by which Western men came to understand the body and its ‘systems’ and then, perhaps, by order of perceived importance: the muscular system, nervous system, limbic system, parasympathetic system, orthosympathetic system, digestive system, respiratory system, circulatory system, lymphatic system, excretory system, and, finally, at the very end, the reproductive system. In the particular anatomy I am consulting, there are two headings below “Reproduction” – Man and Woman and The Male Reproductive System. “The female reproductive system” is a sub-heading under “the male reproductive system.” The very last discussion in the book is “Insemination, pregnancy and nursing.” Anatomies are maps of power. The conceit is that authoritative texts are simply true. Embedded dynamics of power, gender, and race are effaced and implicitly these documents purport there is no culture; there is only nature. I don’t accept that. You probably know that about me already.

Tatwa Wit anatomies start with the desire of lovers.

Sex is the foundational productive act/relationship that launches the continual, transformative process of making and unmaking that is the body over the course of a life and into death.

This is a tough part to write because what I am writing seems so obvious. Sex makes new bodies. But I’m writing about anatomies. And there is a contrast between indigenous Balinese anatomies (Tatwa Wit) and the Western anatomies I grew up looking at, which depicted White, adult, male bodies as the exemplary representations of human contents and characteristics. The body was a fully-formed (male) body in stasis, perpetually flayed, taken apart, every functional aspect already disarticulated from every other – what the Balinese do through mortuary at the end of life. Western anatomies, within this framework, are snapshots of corpses. not representations of living bodies in flux. And, indeed, we know it’s true that they are snapshots of corpses.

The originary combinatory impulse is initiated by the glance of would-be lovers. Their first insubstantial exchange of emotion, legible in a look, leads to a feeling. Their hearts beat faster, their breaths become shallow, their ears ring, the world constricts. They have sex. In the terms of the Tatwa Wit, their souls meet, their bodies meet and then their procreative fluids (kama putih and kama bang, literally white desire and red desire) meet to form an embryo the word for which (ajur mula) means molten metal, the creation of an alloy of white (male) and red (female) to form the body of a child. The fetal body develops out of an ongoing combination of gendered fluids mixing in a woman’s body over the months of a pregnancy. Old people admonish young couples to have regular sex during a woman’s pregnancy so the child will develop fully with no deficits; they clarify that sex is the work of marriage. In this way, new bodies are made through sex, made of sex. Sex is the responsible creative act that brings bodies into being through their complementary contributions.

It’s gendered turtles all the way down.[5] Every productive process or relationship references sex, viewed most simply as the combination of male and female (androgynes are not the absence of gendered relationships but their combination in one body instead of two).

Sarongs are no different; sarongs are located in this symbolic scape. The way they wrap is not coincidence or random. It is determined by this cosmo-logic.

For men, the sarong is wrapped like this:

Image 1. You start the fabric at the center front or just to the right of the center front so it covers the genitals.

I’m not sure if the left hand position is correct or not. I did not watch adult men wrap their sarongs but my guess is that the left hand would start over the genitals.

Image 2. Wrap around the back, to the front again and accordion the remaining fabric to form a phallic drape down the center.

Arranging the phallic drape in the front.

Image 3. Over the sarong goes a shorter – in both width and depth – piece of fabric called a saput.

Trying to organize the saput. I think you can tell I’m not used to this.

Images 4-6. A sash or leather belt secures the folds of the sarong and saput, which are then rolled down over the belt to hold all the layers in place at the waist.

Rolling the sarong and saput down over the belt.

Image 6 (above) In contemporary Balinese ceremony dress, men wear a kemeja, a simple button-down shirt with long or short sleeves. In these photos I wore a jacket rather than a kemeja. Historically, men wore no chest covering except in the temple or other context in which the most polite or reverent attitude was required, and then they wore the saput pulled up under the armpits and secured with a sash around the ribs (actually, I’m not sure if that’s correct. I don’t know if the fabric pulled up to cover the chest was also called a saput).

Image 7, I stand like a man.

I am not really standing like a man here, more like a dancer about to dance a male character. My toes are up in a dance move. My hands are tense with fingers spread in a dance move. This posture looks like I’m about to raise my arms into the stance of a strong character, like I’m gathering the energy to become a powerful figure. My teacher taught me to start the development of a male character at my feet, gather energy there first, then pull that energy up my body and fill the stance with power and intensity.

About the textile:

Before I left for the photoshoot I sewed the two pieces of a Songket Alam sarong together. Balinese Songket are hand-woven in two lengths the width of the loom and less than the 2 meters you would typically get with a batik sarong; because Songket are fine, you don’t get excess length the way you do in other fabrics that are less precious. Prior to the photoshoot, I had never worn any of my Songket Alam textiles as a sarong. Songket Alam (alam means natural) are a modern style of hand-woven, supplementary-weft textile in which the motifs are created by colored cotton or silk instead of the gold or silver threads of traditional Songket, which were luxurious fabrics reserved for nobles and royalty. In supplementary-weft textiles, generally, the threads that make up the design are described as ‘floating’ on top of the base fabric; they are ornamental, integral to the visual design, but not structural. If you cut all of them off you would still have a length of cloth. I was told that what makes Songket Alam ‘natural’ is a combination of natural and commercial dyes so that once the cloth is woven and washed, the natural dyes run and combine while the commercial dye stays bright. The result is often a muted palette with splashes of color that can be extremely beautiful. For awhile, this style of weaving was the latest trend in luxury sarongs. It has been supplanted since but it’s still my favorite.

[1] The “C” is always pronounced like a “ch” in English. Candra is pronounced Chandra. Cempaka is pronounced Chempaka, and so on. I use the Indonesian spelling throughout.

[2] Sky is male. Anything that involves climbing trees or scaling heights is men’s work because of this association. Women do not climb trees.

[3] The main tasks of Balinese mortuary are to return the body and soul to its original forms and locations. The two souls must be separated from the physical body. The eternal soul – atma – is returned to the undifferentiated divine from which it was borrowed. The personal soul – jiwa – is coaxed out of the body so that it may be prepared for return; a Balinese understanding of reincarnation entails the personal soul returning within the family rather than returning in some other higher or lower form of living creature unrelated to the deceased. The persuasion and shepherding of these souls to their proper places is performed by a Pedanda Siwa. At the same time, another priest, a Pedanda Buda, works to take the body apart through mantras and mudras while the family and community of the deceased do this work physically, taking the corpse through a series of rituals that return the elements of the body to their origins – earth to earth through interment, fire to fire and air to air through cremation. Ether I’m not sure about. And water to water through taking the body to the ocean in the form of ash and submerging it there. If the family can’t take the ash to the ocean, they take it to the river. Around each of these tasks are elaborate and beautiful preparation that are more or less elaborate depending on status and wealth: special offerings of meat and botanical elements; gorgeous textiles; proxy bodies made in various materials – sandalwood plaques, Chinese coins, botanical elements; inscribed shrouds; gold ornaments; gamelan music; cremation towers, sarcophagi in different animal shapes depending on caste and clan; and more I’m forgetting or don’t know about.

[4] I have done this – sifted through the ash to find the bones of the deceased – for the wife of the priest who was a relative to one of my teachers. I had been at the bathing of her corpse, observed her adorned with botanicals and bound in white cloth, her body stored under an inscribed shroud (tumpeng salu) while the complex offerings for her cremation (pengawak and tetukon) were assembled. I walked to the river with her grandchildren and her sister in law (who was a female priest) who carried a clay pot in which the liquid of the decaying body was collected, turned ritually into holy water and used to mark the third eye of each of us before it was emptied into the river. There was hardly anything there; corpses are now semi-preserved with formalin to spare the family the stench of death while they wait to purify the body with fire and the house with the smoke of incense and holy water. I have done this intimate work alongside the deceased’s adult children. This is work we must do for our parents; they brought our bodies here, our tangible materiality borrowed from the world around and our intangible essence lent by the divine. In turn, we shepherd their bodies and souls back to their origins. We return the immortal soul to the undifferentiated god stuff from which it comes, release the individual soul from the specific body (making it available to return), and restore the five elements of which the body is made: fire returns to fire; water returns to water; earth returns to earth; air returns to air; space returns to space.

I have done this for someone else’s parents and I will not be able to do it for mine.

[5] Turtles all the way down is a reference to an indigenous concept of the world resting atop a turtle. Sometimes this turtle foundation is not just one turtle, but layers upon layers of turtles. Turtles all the way down, then, is a way of talking about a fundamental reality; there is no end to it.

Mousetrails, a Shattered Blouse & Naked

I bought it more than twenty-five years ago. It’s black georgette with a looping and gestural floral chainstitch embroidery, made with thread that’s a little glossy, making it either silk or a synthetic. The blouse came from a little boutique that sold things mostly from India, embroidered and sequined dresses made from velvet and rayon, and scarves and blouses in sheer fabrics like this one. I used to wear the blouse over a black bra and under a fitted jacket (which upon reflection did not fit me as the torso was too long, so the bottom of the waist hit at about my hips, causing a wrinkle at the base of my back and obscuring my shape). I stopped wearing it regularly many years back but kept it because it’s romantic and the sleeves are too long, which means they extend to my fingertips and drape at the wrist in a way I like.

I went to look for the black embroidered blouse the other day to wear it for some photographs with Bruce. We had no photographs of us together as he is always the one behind the camera and I wanted to document the time before the cancer treatment that will change him in ways we can’t anticipate. But when I went to my clothes rack to get it, I found the right sleeve in tatters, which confused me and made me sad. The rest of the blouse was not damaged. The last time I had gotten it out, also for some photographs with Bruce, the sleeve had been intact. I inspected the sleeve in relation to the rest of the garment to figure out if the fabric had finally begun to break from the stress of time.

It wasn’t time, unless the right sleeve aged while the fabric that made up the body and the left sleeve did not. Here is my theory. One night, after I returned from some weeks of travel this summer, I was awakened by a rustling sound. I didn’t know if it was in the room or in a dream at first but it recurred after I was fully conscious and it was in the direction of my clothes rack and sounded quite high up. I listened for long enough to decide that whatever it was it was not a threat to me. I got out of bed and turned on the light. On my clothes and on the floor was a confetti of shredded paper that I realized must be the work of a mouse harvesting the paper in the hangars from the drycleaner. When I went to inspect, I found that several of the hangars were already stripped except for a fringe of paper around the wire. The one the mouse had just been working on was only partly gone; what remained was scalloped around the edges by the mouse’s teeth or claws. I don’t know how mice shred paper. It was making a nest. Which meant the nest was close by. I pulled out the leather satchel I had gotten in Florence and in which I had stored two pairs of long leather boots. I pushed the toe of one around inside the case and heard a tiny mewing. While I was trying to decide what to do, the momma jumped out and ran down the stairs. There were pinkies. I won’t tell you the rest of that story. It’s not the point of this post. It creates the context for my theory that the right sleeve of my black georgette blouse was the momma mouse’s road to the paper in the hangars.

When my mother was newly married to my father, and before my sister and I ‘came along’ (as my father would say), she was working on a Master’s degree research project in Small Mammal Ecology. She identified four distinct micro-ecosystems on the land of the cabin they had purchased in New Hampshire. In each quadrant she set live traps, baited with peanut butter, every evening. Every morning she checked her traps and recorded the species of rodents she caught in which ecosystem. She told me how she caught the same critters in the same traps over and over and that after she recorded the data and let them go, they always followed the same tracks away from the traps. She described how the critter (maybe she was imagining a particular one) would run along the same log, jump to the same rock, scrabble up the same tree trunk, every time. Since then I have taken to calling my routines ‘mouse trails,’ and to describe adventures away from the routine as ‘getting off the mousetrails.’ Habitual and new ways of thinking, too, have been affected by this metaphor and have become old or new ‘mental mousetrails.’

The reality of these roads of routine became visible to me one spring. We had a heavy snow late in the winter that had frozen and persisted with a thick crust for a long time. It had finally started to melt and I had ventured out with S to take a walk around some historic battlegrounds and up onto the rocks at their perimeter. At the edge of the road we took I saw a tracery of impressions in the grass where the snow had gone and realized they were mousetrails beneath the snow, a maze of grass-lined tunnels with a roof of ice. I imagined the entire field could be mapped like this with the imprint of habitual routes.

I think my sleeve became such a route, a delicate ladder to the top of the rack. I think she tested the suitability of fabric as nesting material at first and rejected it in favor of the paper There was a large, uneven hole at the wrist that didn’t fit together. There was fabric missing. The rest of the holes were tears running in the direction of the weft, like tiny rungs for a mouse’s feet.

When I discovered the damage I had a convergence of thoughts –What else can I wear for the photographs? I have no other blouses. I love this blouse. Should I repair the blouse? I’ll wear it anyway. It’s tatters became beautiful in a way to me then, a serendipitous lace. And then I thought – I am naked. I have no blouses at all.

Photographs of me and Bruce before his cancer treatment started.
He is controlling the camera with his phone, held in his left hand. I am covering the tumor on the right side of his face with my face.

A few details about my brilliant and dear friend and collaborator:

Bruce’s studio is located in Frederick, MD; you can follow him and find examples of his work on Instagram at @bruce_falkinburg

Bruce is also currently teaching photography classes at Photoworks at Glen Echo Park in Glen Echo, MD:
Intro to Black/White Darkroom Photography
Advanced Black and White Photography

You can follow Photoworks on Instagram at @glenechophotoworks

See the online schedule for Bruce’s changing roster of workshops.

In his own words:
Bruce enjoys both black and white fine art and modern commercial photography. He has a lot of cameras.

And I would add to that:
He also has a lot of lights.

First Knitting

I was seven when my mother taught me how to knit. She learned from her aunt Elma. I don’t know exactly what the kinship arc was that connected my mother to Elma and made Elma my mother’s aunt and for this story it doesn’t matter.

I don’t remember the learning-to-knit part. I remember the first project once it was done. It was white wool, a short scarf, and very uneven and badly shaped in the way first knitting projects can be – wide at the start and loose, narrowing to the center and way too tight, then widening again as I tried to rectify the tightness in the center. Some stitches were too big, others too small. It didn’t look like my mother’s even knitting.

I gave it to my father as a gift. It was soft and I guess I must have been proud enough to have made it that I could give it to my dad even though, when compared to fine knitting, it was clearly no good.

My father wore it. That amazed me. That he wore that no-good first-knitting little white neck warmer totally amazed me. He would fold one side over the other to cover his neck. The narrow part fit at the back of his neck. The two wide ends came down to the top of his chest. Then he’d put on his coat. As I remember it, he wore it alot. And even if that is a bit of hyperbole my amazement wrought, I’ll take it.

I decided to re-create that first scarf. My motivation was simple enough. I thought about how, if it is sufficiently inept, a first project can alienate one from trying again. When we face real difficulty in achieving a goal of mastery, we may decide we are no good at it, are lacking in some fundamental talent that other people clearly have but which to us is inaccessible or elusive. We hold our first-starting-out selves up against those with years of experience and find ourselves so lacking that we lose hope and lost interest. The thing is no good. It’s no use. It’s unwearable.

The fact that my father wore that badly-knit scarf his little daughter made gave me the confidence to execute the next project, which was better. Even if the scarf was unwearable to me, it was not unwearable to my father.

But I contend that an unwearable scarf -from the perspective of even tension and a consistent number of stitches – can become wearable if it is styled well. The unintentional can be wrestled into submission to intention with the right approach and good tools. The first scarf can take us from ambivalent about the issue of our first efforts to more than proud: stylish.

This transformation is what I work for. It’s my job. I design and produce accessories. The justification for my work, my company, is my need, your need, for tools to turn handmade fabrics (knitted, crocheted, handwoven) and purchased garments into beautiful wearables that show the fabric off and make the wearer feel beautiful in addition to looking stylish.

My closures should make your life in fiber-wear easier. I want the same things you want. I want to look good without thinking about it too much. I want to go about my days undistracted by difficulties with my clothes. I don’t want my scarves falling off and catching in drawers when I bend over. I don’t want my shawl to slide off one shoulder and require re-arranging many times a day.

I felt sure that I could take a first scarf, of the kind I made when I was 7 years old, from wonky to wonderful with a few screw-in closures. So I cast on.

It’s hard to return to a pre-control moment when you can’t achieve an even tension, have trouble discerning where a stitch begins and ends, and haven’t yet learned to purl. I got better at inconsistency and wonky as time went on. Well, that’s not quite true. Because I was working toward inconsistency, in a sense I became more consistent in my achievement of inconsistency. Even naive execution contains the possibility of mastery.

So I finished it. The end with the cast-on yarn trailing, is where I started. The increase of stitches to make the scarf slightly wider was fairly subtle. I wanted it to be more extreme. My inconsistency in tension was not enough. I pushed it harder. By the time I finished, I felt I had begun to master the first scarf. If I make another, I’ll do even better at bad knitting.

Now comes the interesting experiment – adorning the first scarf so it becomes an enviable style piece, a fabulous example of hand-knit art you might expect in a high-end chic boutique. This is my goal.

What is your first-knitting story? I would love to hear it. You are welcome to tell me about it in a comment.

If you want to start growing your style toolkit, go to juldesigns.com

Check out my instagram @jul_designs to see how I have styled this Simulation and get 15% Off the Pedestal Buttons and screw-in closures in the Cordoba Series when you use coupon code FIRSTSCARF.