Ere we go, ere we go !

By Bunga Pakma

Only with the utmost effort of the imagination can a person who has never spent at least one year-cycle in the higher latitudes of the globe, north or south, understand the visceral pull of the seasons.  We on the equator experience little change from January to January.  Some months are wetter, some drier, some smokier.  Daylight lasts twelve hours, and night twelve, always.

Holidays on the equator are timed by the moon, not the sun, and the Islamic calendar ignores the solar calendar altogether. Our holidays are entirely religious.  The appointed day comes and it’s time to fast, or feast, to make offerings, to perform some rite or pious deed.  These days serve to remind the faithful of some commandment or signal episode or saint in the history of their religion.

“Temperate” is commonly taken to mean “mild.” Temperate climates are anything but mild.  In New England the thermometer shows a range of 60°C, the landscape is at one time a wasteland of marble-hard ice, another heat more than tropical.  The seasons succeed on another in a titanic, and often violent, drama.  Spring causes plant and animal life to surge in a continuous orgasm, racing to grow, stock food, and reproduce in the short summer.  Nature matures and “dies” in a glorious massacre of leaves the colour of blood.  The days grow short and winter and darkness spread over the world like death.  This cosmic spectacle bears a much too intimate connection with Life to be called a metaphor. When people liken the year to our mortal span, they feel that in their bones.

This inner feeling remains the original religion—if it can be called that—of the non-tropical world.  To this day, though holidays such as Christmas and Easter carry a Christian gloss (the Church fathers arranged it that way), what they really celebrate is the recurring cycle of life: the spring equinox and rebirth; the summer solstice and fruition; the autumnal equinox and plenty; the winter solstice as time’s resting-place and new beginning.

Today is Hallowe’en.  Up north the days are short, and when Standard Time is restored on Sunday, dark will fall at 4:30 p.m.  The leaves are gone from the trees, the air is frosty.  Summer warmth is a memory, life is already sunk into the earth for its long sleep.  It’s no coincidence at all that peoples of the northern hemisphere chose this season to observe the Day of the Dead. In Europe this sombre eve can be traced to well before Christianity or the Romans.  One would like to know how they celebrated it at Stonehenge. The Mexican Day Día de los Muertos is an entirely indigenous, native festival in essence unchanged from pre-Aztec times.  The catholic Christian cast over it now is a mere puff of icing-sugar.

I had thought to use this day to tell some spooky tales of the uncanny in Sarawak.  I don’t have an atom of religion in me, but I am skeptical enough to be skeptical about skepticism…

“There are more things in heav’n and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy…”

and I have soberly witnessed things I cannot explain.

Strange entities may well have roamed the forests of Sarawak.  I once hoped that the Antu Gerasi and Antu Kamba, in just indignation of the destruction of their homeland, would have banded together and cracked bulldozers and loggers like peanuts.  A tree did indeed try to brain James Wong, but missed, as he reports in a memoir.  But logging belongs to a sinister devilry whose aim is the cancelling of creation, a blind goal that must strike terror even into giants.

Nor do the Dead have anything to make my hair stand up. I am personally acquainted with dozens of dead people, people who loved me when they were alive, and whom I love—in vain—still after they have joined the Greater Number.

Christianity has nearly erased all traces of the old, noble Dayak spirituality.  Only a few very old Dayaks, who keep silent, and a few sensitive scholars are left to understand the deep and thoughtful Native response to Life and Death. The ancient Austronesians viewed the afterlife as a state in which personality mattered little.  The soul over aeons faded away to return to earth as pure life-force.  In the meantime the departed had joined the Ancestors and looked kindly on living and guided them in the established ways of life that they themselves lived in the spirit-realm.

As your Hallowe’en “treat”  I end with a poem by an 18^th century American poet, Philip Freneau, entitled “The Indian Burial Ground.” I have been to Native American burial sites, and have come away feeling the poignance of human mortality after seeing the small mounds marked by jagged stones.  I wonder if now, or in the future when the forest has recovered, as forests will, and native life has vanished into oblivion, for culture never recovers, someone straying in the evening in Sarawak forest might stumble unawares upon a pagan Dayak pendam and be favoured with a similar sight.

In spite of all the learn’d have said;
I still my old opinion keep,

The posture, that we give the dead, (i.e. lying down)
Points out the soul’s eternal sleep.

Not so the ancients of these lands –
The Indian, when from life releas’d

Again is seated with his friends,
And shares again the joyous feast.

His imag’d birds, and painted bowl,
And venison, for a journey dress’d, (dress’d: prepared)

Bespeak the nature of the soul,  (bespeak: declare)
Activity, that knows no rest.

His bow, for action ready bent,
And arrows, with a head of stone,

Can only mean that life is spent,
And not the finer essence gone.

Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way.
No fraud upon the dead commit –

Observe the swelling turf, and say
They do not lie, but here they sit.

Here still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace,

(Now wasted, half, by wearing rains)
The fancies of a older race.

Here still an agèd elm aspires,
Beneath whose far-projecting shade

(And which the shepherd still admires)
The children of the forest play’d!

There oft a restless Indian queen
(Pale Shebah, with her braided hair)

And many a barbarous form is seen
To chide the man that lingers there.

By midnight moons, o’er moistening dews,
In habit for the chase array’d, (habit:clothing, chase: hunting)

The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer, a shade!  (shade: ghost)

And long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,

And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.

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