Crisis 22
The Dark Which Has No End
Strata Casting: Akasha & Accumulation - From Lamp to Lamp
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Strata Casting
In the previous section States of Mind I looked at ways we might engage in the Ukraine crisis yet also maintain a psychological distance. Among the strategies I examined in ☯️ Both In and Out of the Game is that of Walt Whitman, who suggests that we can be both in and out of life, both engaged and disengaged simultaneously. Applied to the present conflict, Whitman’s mental strategy suggests that we can be engaged in a detailed understanding of the war yet also disengaged, outside the war in a more serene psychological zone that might be called peace. Koch’s Year gives an excellent and widely applicable instance of such a strategy: Koch suggests that we expand our awareness, from the nightmarish, mythologized topography of the national crisis of 1965 to include the ‘mystical topography’ of the borderless infinity of outer space.
On top of the layers of characters — from the slum-dwellers and betjak drivers to the foreign journalists and embassy staff to the palace and army elite — and on top of the global geopolitical situation of 1965 Indonesia, Koch lays a stratum or zone of peace and escape that is subtle, surprising, and rather difficult to understand. This narrative strategy works cumulatively, leading from the arcade theatre of the Hotel Indonesia to the hissing of the puppet-master’s voice, to the sound of the radio, to the sound of the universe.
Koch sets up many layers of narrative, in some cases to show how some characters (Hamilton and Billy) get too caught up in politics while others are able to keep a critical and emotional distance. In this latter category we find Jill, who imagines that Hamilton might love her enough not to turn the information she gives him into a headline (she gives him information about a Chinese arm shipment, to save his life, not to land him the story of his life). There’s also Wally, the oversize man on the bar stool who philosophizes detachedly, and with a great deal of wit, about the meaning of politics. And then there’s Cookie, the narrator who’s haunted by everything he’s seen and heard, yet manages to find a way of thinking beyond the Indonesian sky, past the horror of the slaughter in the dark fields and the goddess with her necklace of skulls.
Back in Australia, Cookie writes his narrative, perhaps finding in its recitation a sort of catharsis. He also prefaces and punctuates the grim late chapters with references to the universe beyond the problems of the world, taking from Hinduism not just the notion of a scourging Hindu goddesses, who incarnate the horrible slaughter of communists and Chinese, but also the Hindu concept of akasha, which might be understood as ether or infinite space. This akasha isn’t necessarily meant in a religious sense of hoping the reader will believe in it, but rather in a philosophical sense as an infinity that might connect and lie beyond the troubled world we live in.
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Before I go into detail about the way Koch sets up this accumulation of layers, I should explain briefly 1. what this final extended layer of akasha means, and 2. how the accumulation works in general.
1. Akasha
Akasha is usually defined as space or ether, which in non-dual Hindu thought is considered to be the subtlest form of existence, and closely connected to sound. In his commentary on Brahma Sutra I.i.22, Shankara identifies akasha with Brahman, the Essence that (or who) subsumes all gods as well as all the fullness and all the emptiness in the universe. As such, akasha is a sort of secular or mystical version of what others might call God. T.M.P Mahadevan writes,
akasha means ‘ether.’ But in a text where it is stated that all things come out of akasha and get resolved into it, the expression akasha obviously means Brahman, which is the ground of the universe.
2. Accumulation
In the early parts of the novel the connection of events to akasha is hard to discern. Numerous connections are made to the Wayang theatre, with its lamp projecting mythic characters onto a screen and with its gamelan music: the theatre of the hotel arcade is a bright light in the surrounding dark; the hotel bar called The Wayang is dark and shadowy and has Wayang characters on the walls; Hamilton and Billy journey into the dark Indonesians streets where they see lamps, smell spiced cigarettes, and hear gamelan music; and Hamilton travels to the outskirts of Bandung, where a friendly man tries to explain the meaning of a village performance of the Wayang.
In the third part of the novel, aptly subtitled Amok, Koch starts several chapters with the notion of akasha. In the final chapters he links the hissing sound of the dalang’s lamp with the hissing sound of Hamilton’s radio broadcasts and with the static of the radio Cookie listens to when he’s back in Australia. Koch highlights the notion of akasha right before his most apocalyptic description of the massacre of the Communists. He punctuates the darkness of Part III (chapters 19-25) with references to akasha as a thin light, a hissing sound that pervades everything and makes us see our particular situation or perspective as transient and small. He likens the sound to the lamp of the dalang, who explains the meanings behind the darting shadows of the stick-figures of the Wayang.
It’s as if Koch is bringing to his brother’s country home in Australia (where he writes his account) the old man who was about to explain to Hamilton the meaning of the Wayang in the village on the outskirts of Bandung — just before Hamilton is seduced by the beauty and mystery of the Russian spy Vera. It’s as if this man were there, somewhere in the infinite space that appears lost and yet allows those who believe in infinity to find themselves. That is, those who find meaning in not being able to see where meaning starts or where it ends. I’d argue that this is both scientific, in an astronomical dimension, and mystical, in that the extension of dimensions and the multiplication of dimensions (and our understanding of dimensionality) open up into a notion of God-like Infinity. This infinity then serves as a religious or mystical balance to the dark and violent visions of Durga and Kali, goddesses who are are increasingly connected to the massacre of communists and Chinese at the end of the novel.
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