Today I find myself googling ‘#invasive caterpillars in Indonesia’, a core memory from my time in Solo, Surakarta. Actually I am trying to find the name of the trees that they are feeding on but instead, I find myself reading about a species of caterpillar that will eventually grow into an insect known as a ‘gypsy moth1'.
Coincidentally, the archetype of the ‘gypsy’ has also surfaced in my favourite anime of all time, ‘Cowboy Bebop2’ which I have been watching nonstop ever since I got back to Singapore from Indonesia. Faye (Valentine) tells Spike and Jet that she comes from a family of Romani (gypsies) who roam the earth looking for love and while deriding them as Gadjo (people who have no pride in their lives). I love the idea of the Romani as I find that I often in romani fashion, tend to drift into places, consuming everything in my path, then I turn into a gypsy moth and fly away.
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I can’t stop watching Cowboy Bebop after I come back from Solo. I often watch this anime to savor the feel of loneliness.
The reason why I am in Solo is actually for a small but powerful butoh festival under the invite of Melati Suryadomo, a performance artist whose work I have admired for a long time. We gather to take butoh workshops and host informal group sharings underneath a sheltered but open area beneath her studio. The dance floor is teeming with furry caterpillars whose bodies coil in malformed ways. I am told that they make your skin itch when you touch them.
The caterpillars emit a sticky secretion of thin filament and shrivel up into dried-up husks when exposed to the sun. They seek shade in our dance area in order to escape sudden death by incineration. I understand that it is their instinct for self-preservation that brings them to us, but I have no love for them. The caterpillars leave a nervous feeling in my body and I have to expend a big effort to move in a way where I do not touch any of them. In their presence, I find it difficult to concentrate on anything or maintain my composure. My workshop partner who senses my discomfort, helpfully tries to remove them one by one with his bare hands but more keep crawling back into our space no matter how many we toss away.
On a different day, some people are coming to clean the house that my good friend art naming 奇能 and I are staying at for the duration of the festival. The area where we usually hang out and smoke cigarettes is spotless for a day before it reverts back to being covered in excrement. I realize that living in or close to nature is a lot of work … which disrupts my dream of living in the countryside. I need to stop fantasising about nature in the abstract. I don’t know if I can live near the outdoors if there are this many caterpillars, especially if they defecate everywhere. The caterpillars dangle from silk strands from the ceiling, wriggling frantically in mid air. I fight the urge to shudder violently every time I walk out to smoke a cigarette.
The story of the caterpillars takes a poetic turn when my new butoh friend Chi Hao tells me that I should go stand under the big trees below the studio, for the sound of the caterpillars eating the leaves really resembles the sound of rain.
On my last day at Studio Plesungan, the sun is scorching hot. I stand uncomfortably beneath the barren canopy of broken yellow gossamer listening out for rain, praying that no caterpillars fall on my head. I eventually realize that there probably aren’t any caterpillars around because of the intense sunlight, which means I won’t be getting my caterpillar rainfall experience.
Instead, I gaze upwards at the thinning foliage and marvel at the fragile webs of disintegrating fibers swaying softly in the wind, suspended by the finest of threads. In those moments, time appears to be at a standstill. There is something poignant about how the shape of the leaves still hold even though all the green is gone. I realize it is almost time for me to go home, yet I want so badly to remain in this cocoon of frozen time amongst the floating leaves.
One afternoon, Razan murmurs quietly to me that upon waking, he thought he was still dreaming, because the trees, usually ripe with large green leaves had been completely ravaged by the caterpillars and now looked completely different. I resonate with this feeling of disorientation. On some afternoons, I have often looked at those naked trees myself and felt a keen sense of someplace else … taking me back to a time I once spent in the Adirondack mountains with a group of friends in the fall, kayaking across a quiet and skeletal lake.
On Christmas, Razan shares a video of himself dancing amongst the fallen leaves and that’s how the name of the trees come to me. He reveals that in Javanese these trees, ‘jati diri’ have a symbolic meaning, which means ‘true self’, I google the meaning and it translates simply as ‘identity’ but I like Razan’s definition better. I appreciate when he explains things to me in his own way, even things that are difficult and metaphorical, for his translations often convey something deeper and far beyond language.
jati diri, our true self.
jati guru, teacher inside ourselves.
I tell him it is difficult to trust ‘jati guru’, and he says yes because it is the harshest teacher and knows you better than anyone. Actually, from dancing butoh I already know this to be true, as no one understands my dance like the teacher that lives within me.
These hungry caterpillars usually feed around mid-April to mid-June. Melati tells me this phenomena is unusual for this time of year.
A lot of things have been unusual for me (this time of year).
A European species of moth, not actually the ones that are feeding on the trees