The Soul Is a Bird

Now, as press, this didn’t really seem like a great way to advertise concerts,
but it sounded like fun anyway
And I stayed at the palace in one of the former king’s harem houses.
Each of the king’s wives had had her own house guarded by a pair of animals.
A bear and a fox, for example. By the time I got there, years later,
the menagerie had dwindled a bit: my house was guarded by two tropical fish
Bali was extremely hot in the afternoons, and the conversations with the prince
drifted along randomly from topic to topic. The prince was a bon vivant,
trained in Paris, and he spoke excellent English. And when he wasn’t in the
palace he was out on the bumpy back roads racing cars. So we talked about cars,
a subject I know absolutely nothing about, And I felt that as far as
representing the Western world was going, I was failing pretty dismally
Then, on the second night, the prince served an elaborate feast of Balinese
dishes. At the end of the meal, the conversation slowed to a halt,
and after a few minutes of silence he asked:
«Would you like to see the cremation tapes of my father?»
The tapes were several hours long, and were a record of the elaborate
three-month ceremony shot by the BBC
When the king died the whole country went to work building an enormous funeral
pyre for him. After months of preparation, during which time the corpse
continues to reside in the living room, they hoisted the body to the top of
this rickety, extremely flammable structure, and lit a match. The delicate
tower crumbled almost immediately, and the king’s body fell to the ground with
a sickening thud. Suddenly, everyone began to cheer
Later, I learned that the Balinese believe that the soul is a bird,
and that when the body falls, it shakes the bird loose and gives it a head
start on its way to heaven