A Million Miles From Here - Tales from the Cultural Frontier Part III – Kylie...
The Other Side of Paradise…
En-route to London, sitting on the plane, reflecting…
Leaving recent tragic events aside, Bali is a challenging place to live. Far from being a simple island idyll – on a higher vibration than most places, the effects of one’s actions, karma, are reflected back much more quickly and strongly here (and often in glorious technicolour – groan!) So it’s possible to grow quickly yet changing can be stressful/painful (especially if you resist it). ‘Bali is a workshop!’ said my friend Sandy, on being made to wear a string bracelet denoting payment at an Ubud shadow puppet fundraiser. And he’s right.
For this reason, people who live in Bali turn up their eyes at the thought of guests – my friend Lois recently exclaimed ‘God! – It’s exhausting - trying to keep the ‘paradise’ myth going for someone’s hard-won two weeks of holiday! How can I tell them what it’s really like?” We all nod sagely, smiling, know just what she means.
As an aside, I’m a bit ‘anti holiday’. Well, anti the usual ‘two weeks of bliss’ style holiday that is supposed to be an antidote to - what, a ‘year of hell’? Personally, I think it’s better to try to bring more of the ‘holiday’ energy into everyday life. Better to find ways of doing what you really want to do, every day, not just for two weeks.
Anyway, the reality of living in Bali is that it’s frenetic, hard work, frustrating, incredibly annoying, more annoying, delightful, impossible to communicate, easy to communicate, funny to communicate, a delightful community of truly caring people, deep deep deep local culture with ever deepening fascinating layers to unpeel, horrendous bureaucracy, easy to get things done, difficult to get things done, no rules, lots of corruption and bribes, beautiful greenest scenery in the world, loads of grey breezeblock walls being thrown up and destroying beautiful scenery, incredible place for creativity – lots of different media and skills to explore and help you create your dream, terrible food, wonderful food, contrast, contrast, contrast!
We’re arriving at Kuala Lumpur airport. Black and white cloth banner ‘Pardon Us As We Create An Exciting New Retail Concept’. So says the Mont Blanc partitioned area. ‘An Exciting Retail Concept By Enrico Travel Retail’. Well, Pardon Me While I Find The Transit Desk, Grab A Coffee And Get The Hell Out Of Here!
Actually, I like KL airport. Clean, glass aviary of a shopping emporium, extravaganza on stilts, it’s a relatively comfy place to hang around for two hours.
Dodging a couple of black-clad sales girls intent on squiffing me with some odious sweet smelling spray, I come to the ‘Pertukanan’ – Transfers desk. Happily I am blessed with the gift of communication here in Malaysia, as Bahasa Indonesia seems to work just as well as Malay. What joy!
Conversing easily, I buy three books in my favourite bookstore. One is: ‘Building Brands And Believers - How to connect with Consumers using Archetypes’. Right up my street! Back by Exit Gate Four, I crouch by the auto walkway in the cavernous glass and brushed chrome hall, poring over it. This is great – I’ve always been ‘Mrs. Archetype’ – fascinated by the universal characters that appear in myth, fairy tale, legend, Hollywood, books, TV and are known to us all on a deep level.
This book adds something to the usual ‘Jungian’ soup. (Carl Jung was a pioneer in psychiatry. The first to fully describe archetypes – universal characters that we all relate to, he also coined ‘the collective unconscious’ – a kind of dreamworld in which we are all connected. Kind of like a ‘shared archetype store’ that we can all tap in to.)
Describing the archetypes and what they represent, this book has a section on ‘how to connect with consumers using archetypes’– ie how to motivate people to buy into a product, project or image as the result of deeply held feelings and identification with the character represented, at a core level (my words, not his). Wow! Now this is interesting. I have long been fascinated by what motivates us. Why do we choose certain things to have near us? I have noticed, actually, that often the things I buy represent my own ‘inner characters’ (or archetypes). For example, at a Sydney art fair, I was attracted to three little hand-made tiles with faces painted on them. I realised later I had chosen one which looked like my father, one which reminded me of Putu, and one which looked rather like my ex!
Archetypes are, in my view, extremely important. They offer a key for us to explore and express the many and various parts of ourselves, rather than sticking with one, basic ‘mode of being’. They therefore offer a kind of ‘means of escape’ from habitual styles of thinking, experiencing, behaving, and expressing ourselves. They are useful models that we can experiment with – they give examples that we can follow, try out, or try on.
To explain a bit more about archetypes, in this book, there are twelve. They are:
Ultimate Strength (Warrior) – Samson, Mohammed Ali
Siren (Goddess), Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Kylie Minogue
Hero – Suu Kyi of Thailand, Nelson Mandela, Tom Cruise, Jane Fonda in Silkwood
Anti-hero – Woody Allen, Harry Angel in Angel Heart
Creator (Artist or Inventor), Van Gogh, Stephen Hawkin, Walt Disney
Change-Master (Transformer, Change Guru) Madonna, Anthony Robbins
Powerbroker - Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, Donald Trump
Wise Old Man – Dalai Lama, Yoda, Confucius
Loyalist (Friend) – Lucille Ball, all of ‘Friends’
Mother of Goodness (Earth Mother) – Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, Snow White
Trickster – Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson
Enigma (Mystery, Magician) – David Copperfield, The X-Files, SpiderMan
You might recognise some of these archetypes from, say, Tarot cards, which are another rich source of them. Sometimes they have different names. My names for them are given above in brackets. The names don’t really matter though – the basic ideas are the same. Interesting ommissions from this list are ‘Father’, and ‘Witch’, by the way.
Let’s take ‘Mother’ for example (Mother and Father being two of the most fundamental archetypes that we observe from birth, in our parents’ relationship with each other, and with ourselves). The ‘inner mother’ archetype exists within all of us. We all have a model of the nurturing, loving, child-caring woman. Each person has their own individual image of ‘mother’ resulting from their life experience – but the archetypal ‘mother’ is universal. This cuts across cultural boundaries, which is interesting for anyone trying to build a global brand – the archetypes work for everyone, the world over, regardless of culture, language, or creed.
Kylie
Talking of global archetypes (in this case – ‘The Siren’), I’ve just been watching An Audience With Kylie Minogue’ on the mini video screen on the plane. Slightly spaced out oriental woman dozing on one side of me, slightly more together one snoozing on the other. Me in the middle, avid screen queen, watching TV in the dark as they huddle under their blankets.
Kylie Minogue (pron. ‘Min-og-you’) is not exactly one of my faves, nor is the ‘an audience with’ format (where personal friends of the star plus other celebrities are invited to a special show), but let’s have a bit more of a look first, before we get too critical (criticising being one of the easiest things on the planet to do, appreciating requiring slightly more application).
She kicks off with ‘pe-r-obing questions’ from the audience. The first one turns out to be from her mum. A nice touch, silver fox of a glamourous older lady, tanned, black dress, rather black inverted teeth. Asks her daughter if her behaviour has improved any, which gets a laugh. And says how proud of her she is. Seems honest.
The show goes on with the prevalent ‘Michael Jackson’ style dance routine (he has had such an influence on his millieu!) – Kylie, spiv style sequinned trilby slanted low, lots of black clothes, active rather masculine movements also à la Janet Jackson (though thankfullly, sans tie). Ho hum. Flip around channels a bit – shots of the squat domes of Santa Sophia, Istanbul. Turkish football team travelling in Europe to get experience. Jennifer Lopez
contemplating dropping the ‘J.Lo’ moniker for her next album. Ho hum. Kids ‘message in a bottle’ travelling seventy-eight thousand miles to reach North Wales – getting a reply from an eight year old British girl.
Back to Kylie and it’s the rather camp Julian Clary, one of my faves, sitting in the audience. He’s brought along a blow-up pic of her. ‘What’s this?’ he enquires slyly, pointing. She peers at the photo. ‘Well, it’s er a little ‘scrunch-dry’, a little ‘blouson’…’ she says hesitantly. ‘What were you thinking of, Kylie?’ Asks Clary archly, smirking. A great wit and sarcastic as hell in the dryest English ‘Oscar Wilde’ tradition, he always amuses me with his utter irreverence. He’s got the ‘trickster’ energy in spades.
I love the trickster! Well, love and hate – the essence of the trickster is brutal honesty. Often cutting, often with humour, and always with a nugget of truth. It’s great, because often the trickster will say what no-one else dares to, cutting through society and politeness to get straight to the heart of the matter. The unacceptable gets an airing and the difficult can be addressed. The humour is the sugar on the lemon (though it’s often not quite enough to take the tang off – ouch!). I have never forgotten a trickster I know who arched a quizzical eyebrow when I was telling him about my new, though out of work, boyfriend. ‘Yes, but can you afford him?’ he asked. I have never forgotten it to this day!
Nonplussed for a moment, Kylie takes the photos and says, crestfallen, ‘I’ll dispose of these’. Then, gathering herself, she turns with poise and suddenly yells ‘It’s taken me fourteen years to accept this is where I came from – and this is why I’m here with you To-NITE!’ Cleverly, she’s said just the right thing, and really brought the audience with her.
To rapturous applause, she flounces confidently back onto the stage, then launches into a medley of her greatest hits that has everyone jumping up and down, dancing, and joining in. Good for her! She’s put the effort in, hasn’t she? Actually, she has had a lot of surprisingly good songs, and she has an outstanding voice. And she’s a good dancer too.
For some reason, a bare-breasted woman is glimpsed jiggling in the audience a moment, but nobody seems to mind. Is it real, or maybe my air dried contact lenses have finally clouded over? The stage is filled with tumblers, dancers, dry ice, rope climbing girls inexplicably wearing suspenders and tights, smoke and mirrors. The energy takes off and it looks like fun to be there. I wish I was there instead of sitting hunched over this tiny little time and light window on a darkened plane in the middle of the night.
Anyway, Julian’s a fine one to talk! He looks plain enough today in tweedy suit and short hair, but usually he is done up to the nines in dangly earrings, diamante, and sequinned dresses (another reason I like him – he’s got guts and he does what he likes).
I adore slapstick humour and now there’s one of those great programmes where they play tricks on people and capture them on camera. I’m trying to control myself – laughing like a drain into this tiny screen, surrounded by darkness, huddled passengers sleeping.
Passers by are handed a large water-filled glass containing a goldfish. They can’t put it down as the bottom is spherical. So they have to find a way of offloading this sudden unwanted responsibility (the ‘owner’ rushes off hastily, clutching car keys, never to return…) Most people end up wedging the glass slantily between kerb and car. One lady triumphantly plants it gracefully atop a litter bin, with an ‘aha! – it fits!’ She hurries off, glancing back over her shoulder guiltily, hoping she’s got away with it. It’s very funny indeed.
I suppose I like the improbable – watching people struggling in the hinter zone of experiences where they really don’t know quite what to do! Also the very British fear of looking stupid is a great aid to humour as people try to pretend that nothing crazy is going on, which makes it even funnier. Trying to paper over the cracks, when the cracks are getting wider, and wider…
After this nearly two years of struggling to complete all my ‘money stuff’ and UK affairs, I need a bit of a rest and some fun. Maybe we could have a ‘custard pie week’ in Ubud. We need to muck about and be silly sometimes, don’t you think?
I hope you can give space to exploring your contrasts, and find ways of expressing them, too!
NEXT ISSUE: Fat is a spiritual issue -
How to get slim by giving your body exactly what it wants
Jeli Lala created the ‘Ashram of Spiritual Jewellery and Art’ at no. 1, Sukma St., Tebesaya, Ubud, with her husband, Putu S. She has studied yoga and many other spiritual practices for more than ten years. She writes “As a life-long artist, I’ve been exploring my inner world since I was a child. In this column, I will share some of my personal experiences and spiritual methods – hopefully, you’ll find this interesting, and maybe it will give some ideas for your own journey”.
Jeli welcomes comments and may be contacted on
E-mail: enquiries@baliashram.com
