Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World [Paperback]

The first two pieces in the book deal with Sri Lanka (known in the fifties when this book was written as Ceylon). Bowles lived in Weligma, South Ceylon from 1952 to 1959. A black-and-white photo (all the pictures acompanying the text or B&W) depicts the incredibly lush vista he enjoyed from his veranda. The beauty of the place is largely counterbalanced by Bowles' descriptions of the intolerable heat and humidity of the region, which combined with the incessant swarms of mosquitoes, made a good night's sleep about impossible. This would be a recurring motif throughout the reports. Finding lodging and adequate sleeping arrangements were constant aggravations in the out-of-the way environs Bowles visits.

When Bowles writes of out-of-the way destinations, they really are remote in the strictest sense of the word. He takes the reader to regions that were (and are, for the most part) seldom visited by western travellers, and there are good reasons these are not popular tourist spots. Most of the towns don't possess what any western traveller would think of as a hotel. In practically every town (and that is a loose description as well) the only place a traveller can find quarters is at some hovel, where electricity, much less plumbing, is a rarity.

The reader may ask, why did Bowles choose to visit such remote habitats? The answer to that lies in his section on the Sahara, in which he talks about the "Baptism of Solitude," a motif that is of great significance in his major novel, The Sheltering Sky. Bowles describes it here: "You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out into the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call "le bapteme de la solitude." It is a unique sensation and has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaing the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for awhile is quite the same as when he came."

This quote, which is central to this book, both literally and figuratively, is also at the core of Bowles' entire ouvre. He writes repeatedly of the individual in isolation, but always redefining and reconfiguring the terms and meaning of "isolation."

I don't know how much T. H. Lawrence Bowles read, but there are some definite parallels in the lives of the two men. Both are expatriates (Lawrence from Britain, Bowles from America) who were committed to and seduced by the desert, and by the predominately Moslem cultures they interacted with. They were also equally seduced by hardship and discomfort, actually revelling in extremely unpleasant conditions, which would repulse and defer most of their countrymen. I am sure that Lawrence had his initial Baptism of Solitude shortly after his arrival in the Sahara himself. He even describes a similar transformation in his description of the desert in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Bowles is an author with whom every serious reader should become familiar. His prose is uniformly excellent. He has great descriptive power and captures the nuances of foreign customs and cultures more than adroitly. This may prove to be a good starting point for those unfamiliar with his novels or his other works. He was an accomplished composer as well. He was an Eastern beacon to the Beat Generation. Every important Beat writer made a sojourn to Tangiers, where Bowles held court for many years. He also lived a fascinating life in other respects and his wife, Jane, also wrote an intriguing novel of her own that I would likewise recommend.

Flutes are scarcer these days
And flutists are unskilled.
The white lilies were by walls.

The music does still exist though. An excellent CD was released in 1992, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, "Apocalypse Across the Sky"(Axiom). If they ever stop playing, legend holds, the world will end.