The full moon ceremony on the beach in Lombok is not in the guidebook. Not because it is secret, which it is not: the community that gathers for it is the community that lives above the beach and that has been gathering here at the full moon for as long as the community has been here, which in some of the older Lombok coastal communities predates the written record of the region.
It is not in the guidebook because the guidebook documents what the visitor can access on a convenient schedule, and the full moon ceremony happens on the full moon, which happens on the full moon’s schedule rather than the visitor’s schedule, and which the boat at anchor in the bay can attend because the boat’s schedule is the full moon’s schedule for the duration of the stay.
The ceremony begins before the sun is fully down. The community arrives at the beach in the way that communities arrive at things that belong to them: not on time in the punctual sense but at the right time in the cultural sense, the gathering complete when it is complete rather than when the programme says it should be.
The gamelan instruments arrive with the men who play them: the bronze percussion ensemble whose specific tuning is the tuning of this community’s instruments, which differs from the tuning of the instruments in the village above the next bay in ways that the untrained Western ear cannot distinguish and that the trained Lombok ear hears immediately as this specific place rather than the general tradition.
The Music Before the Fire
The gamelan begins before the fire is lit. The bronze keys struck by the padded mallets produce the specific resonance of the Lombok gamelan tradition: not the Balinese gamelan, which the tourist circuit has made the representative Gamelan of the region, but the Sasak tradition of Lombok’s indigenous Muslim population, whose musical tradition has absorbed the Hindu-Buddhist-Islamic layering of the island’s history into a sound that belongs to none of those traditions exclusively and to all of them simultaneously.
The music is not in any scale that the Western ear has a name for. It is in the scale that this place has produced, and it is the most specific sound that the Naora route produces in the Indonesian chapter: the sound that exists only here, only at this ceremony, only when the full moon is rising over the water and the community that has been here for centuries is on the beach because the full moon requires it.
Being Present Without Being a Tourist
Our boat will be in the bay for four days by the time the full moon ceremony happens. This matters. The community above the beach has seen the boat arrive, has seen the dinghy go back and forth to the market and the village, has observed the specific pattern of the boat’s relationship with the bay that distinguishes the boat that is here from the boat that is passing through. The ceremony is not closed to visitors. But the quality of the visitor’s presence is different when the visitor has been here long enough to be recognised as someone who chose this specific place rather than arrived here on a tour itinerary.
The Naora member at the edge of the ceremony is present in the way that a guest is present rather than in the way that a tourist is present: without the camera raised to document, without the movement through the gathering that the documentation impulse produces, without the social noise of the group visiting in the organised sense.
Simply there, in the dark at the edge of the firelight, with the gamelan producing its specific sound and the moon rising over the water that the boat is anchored in and the community gathered on the beach because it is the full moon and this is what the full moon has always required of this community. To be present for this is to have been in a place rather than to have visited it.
