《美食祈禱和戀愛》Chapter 107 (259):度假美儂島
The place we end up going on vacation is a tiny island called Gili Meno, located off the coast of Lombok, which is the next stop east of Bali in the great, sprawling Indonesian archipelago. I'd been to Gili Meno before, and I wanted to show it to Felipe, who had never been there.
The island of Gili Meno is one of the most important places in the world to me. I came here by myself two years ago when I was in Bali for the first time. I was on that magazine as-signment, writing about Yoga vacations, and I'd just finished two weeks of mightily restorative Yoga classes. But I had decided to extend my stay in Indonesia after the assignment was up, since I was already all the way over here in Asia. What I wanted to do, actually, was to find someplace very remote and give myself a ten-day retreat of absolute solitude and absolute si-lence.
When I look back at the four years that elapsed between my marriage starting to fall apart and the day I was finally divorced and free, I see a detailed chronicle of total pain. And the moment when I came to this tiny island all by myself was the very worst of that entire dark journey. The bottom of the pain and the middle of it. My unhappy mind was a battlefield of conflicted demons. As I made my decision to spend ten days alone and in silence in the middle of exactly nowhere, I told all my warring and confused parts the same thing: "We're all here together now, guys, all alone. And we're going to have to work out some kind of deal for how to get along, or else everybody is going to die together, sooner or later."
Which may sound firm and confident, but I must admit this, as well—that sailing over to that quiet island all alone, I was never more terrified in my life. I hadn't even brought any books to read, nothing to distract me. Just me and my mind, about to face each other on an empty field. I remember that my legs were visibly shaking with fear. Then I quoted to myself one of my favorite lines ever from my Guru: "Fear—who cares?" and I disembarked alone.
I rented myself a little cabin on the beach for a few dollars a day and I shut my mouth and vowed not to open it again until something inside me had changed. Gili Meno Island was my ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing. I had chosen the right place to do this—that much was clear. The island itself is tiny, pristine, sandy, blue water, palm trees. It's a perfect circle with a single path that goes around it, and you can walk the whole circumference in about an hour. It's located almost exactly on the equator, and so there's a changelessness about its daily cycles. The sun comes up on one side of the island at about 6:30 in the morning and goes down on the other side at around 6:30 PM, every day of the year. The place is inhabited by a small handful of Muslim fishermen and their families. There is no spot on this island from which you cannot hear the ocean. There are no motorized vehicles here. Electricity comes from a generator, and for only a few hours in the evenings. It's the quietest place I've ever been.
Every morning I walked the circumference of the island at sunrise, and walked it again at sunset. The rest of the time, I just sat and watched. Watched my thoughts, watched my emo-tions, watched the fishermen. The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure . . . I'm lonely . . . I'm a failure . . . I'm lonely . . .) and we become monu-ments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating man-tras.
It took me a while to drop into true silence. Even after I'd stopped talking, I found that I was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech—brain, throat, chest, back of the neck—vibrated with the residual effects of talking long after I'd stopped making sounds. My head shimmied in a reverb of words, the way an indoor swimming pool seems to echo interminably with sounds and shouts, even after the kindergartners have left for the day. It took a surprisingly long time for all this pulsation of speech to fall away, for the whirling noises to settle. Maybe it took about three days.
我們度假的地方是名叫美儂島（GiliMeno）的小島，位於龍目（Lombok）沿海；在大片延展的印尼羣島當中，龍目是巴厘島以東的下一站。我從前去過美儂島，我想讓斐利貝看看，他未曾去過那裏。
美儂島對我而言是世界上最重要的地方之一。兩年前首次造訪巴厘島時，我獨自前來此地。當時我受雜誌社邀稿，撰寫瑜伽之行，纔剛結束兩個禮拜有助於恢復活力的瑜伽課程。但在完成了雜誌社指派的工作後，我決定延長在印尼的居留，既然我已大老遠跑來亞洲。我想做的，事實上是找個偏遠之地，隱居十天，給自己絕對的隔絕和絕對的平靜。
當我回顧從婚姻開始瓦解到終於離婚而獲得自由的四年時光，我看見一部詳盡的痛苦史。我獨自一人來到這座小島之時，是那整趟黑暗之旅的最低潮期，最底層當中的痛苦。我憂愁的心，是一座戰場，彼此爭鬥的惡魔在其中作戰。當我決定在前不着村、後不着店的地方安靜獨處十天，我告訴內心所有混亂交戰的想法同一件事："你們這些傢伙聽好，咱們現在單獨待在一起了。我們得想辦法相處，否則遲早大家都將葬身此地。"
語氣聽起來堅定而自信，但我也必須承認——獨自搭船前來這座安靜的小島時，我感到有生以來未曾有過的恐懼。我甚至未帶任何書來讀，沒有任何事可以讓我分心。只有我和自己的心共處，即將在荒原上面對彼此。我記得看見自己的腿因恐懼而發抖，而後我給自己引用一句我的導師曾說過的深得我心的話："恐懼——誰在乎？"於是我獨自下了船。
我在海邊租下一間茅舍，每日的租金只要幾塊錢。然後我閉上嘴，發誓直到內心發生變化前，不再開口。美儂島是我的絕對真理與和解審訊。我挑選了合適的地點，這再清楚不過。島非常小，很原始，有沙灘、碧海、棕櫚樹。正圓形的島只有一條環島步道，一個小時內即可走完整個圓周。小島幾乎位於赤道上，因此日日循環不變。太陽清晨六點半在島的一邊升起，午後六點半在島的另一邊下山，一年到頭皆如此。一小羣穆斯林漁夫及其家人居住在此地。島上沒有一處聽不見海聲。這兒沒有任何機動車輛。電力來自發電機，僅在晚間提供幾個小時。這裏是我到過的最安靜的地方。
每天清晨，我在日出時分繞着島周行走，日落時分再走一次。其餘的時間，我只是坐着觀看。觀看自己的思考，觀看自己的感情，觀看漁夫。瑜伽聖者說，人生所有的痛苦皆起因於言語，如同所有的喜悅。我們創造言語，藉以闡明自身經驗，而諸種情緒伴隨這些言語而來，牽動着我們，猶如被皮帶拴住的狗。我們被自身的咒語引誘（我一事無成……我很寂寞……我一事無成……我很寂寞……），成爲咒語的紀念碑。因此，一段時間不講話，等於是嘗試除去言語的力量，不再讓自己被言語壓得透不過氣，讓自己擺脫令人窒息的咒語。
我花了一陣子才真正沉默下來。即使停止說話，我發現自己仍低聲響着語言。我的五臟六腑和語言肌肉——腦袋、喉嚨、胸膛、頸後——在我停止出聲之後，餘音殘留。言語在我腦中迴響，就像幼稚園的幼兒們白天離開室內游泳池後，游泳池似乎仍迴盪着無止境的聲音與喊叫。這些語言脈動花了好一段時間才消失而去，迴旋的聲音才得以平息，大約花了三天工夫。
