Frieze

By Cecile Pineda

This poetic narrative discusses the creative life of a 9th century Indian stonecarver who is drafted at an early age to spend his entire life working on the thousands of statues that fill the niches of an Indonesian temple. Exploring the museartist relationship as few works of fiction have done, this novel is an intensely political worka parable that pits the blind cruelty of a feudal ruler against the creative expression of a single slave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781609401863

Cecile Pineda

CECILE PINEDA was the founder, director, and producer of the Theatre of Man, 1969-1981. She is the author works of fiction and nonfiction, including Face, Frieze, The Love Queen of Amazon, and Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World, among others. Her novels have won numerous awards, including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, a Neustadt Prize for International Fiction nomination, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. She is professor emerita of creative writing at San Diego State University.

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THE CRITICS ON CECILE PINEDA

Cecile Pineda is a writer of the utmost artistic integrity.

- J. M. Coetzee

An author of powerful imagination and intellect, Cecile Pineda has already been compared to Cortazar, Borges, Marquez, Camus, Lagerquvist and Kafka. She has become one of the most discussed up-and-coming American novelists around.

- San Antonio Light

Critical Praise for Face:

The author reveals the immense power of human will and obsession . . . an original, complex portrait of survival.

- New York Times Book Review

A poetic, hallucinatory work, finely and sparely written, the debut of a very talented writer indeed. May we see more?

- Newsday

Written with sparse prose, stark drama and pointed symbolism, the novel is an intensely moving tale of catastrophe and redemption, of the fall and unyielding will of the human spirit. The prose of this novel cuts like a surgeon’s scalpel; not a word is wasted or out of place.

- Nashville Banner

There is an immediacy to her narrative, combined with images that startle our senses, that leave us haunted.

- San Francisco Chronicle

Speaks in the spare voice of man’s spirit at its final reach.

- The Tribune (San Diego)

Pineda’s haunted story, with its bold symbolism, will remind readers of Camus and Kafka.

- People

Critical praise for Frieze:

Elegant form and vigorous detail give Frieze its mesmerizing power.

- Josephine Humphreys in The Nation

A Singular, absorbing book.

- The New Yorker

As delicately phrased as a prose poem . . . . A parable that opposes the pride and power of the state to the slow resistance of human life.

- Richard Eder in The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Critical Praise for The Love Queen of the Amazon:

The passionate backdrop of South America has produced some of modern literature’s most remarkable female characters . . . . In her third novel, The Love Queen of the Amazon, Cecile Pineda enhances this roster with a brilliantly drawn portrait of a Peruvian bawd, Ana Magdalena Figueroa. She is one of the few great Latin heroines not created by the male imagination, and Ana Magdalena’s amorous history provides a unique vehicle for the U.S.-born Pineda to look with a satirically feminine eye at the manners, mores, and literature of all the Americas, to which Love Queen is a noteworthy addition.

- Richard Martins in The Chicago Tribune

Ana Magdalena Arzate de Figueroa stars in Cecile Pineda’s terrific new novel, The Love Queen of the Amazon. . . . Her story has a soft, erotic feel, with a cast of characters who persist in making theatrical fools of themselves and others throughout. . . .

- Tom Miller in The New York Times Book Review

Critical Praise for Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood:

Fishlight is a gentle, beautiful book, a rare and poetic song from an exquisitely melancholy childhood, written with heartbreaking innocence and a great love of life. It is original, poignant, profoundly simple and unforgettable. Cecile Pineda creates wonderful magic.

- John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

Fishlight is a long-awaited treat . . . full of pulsing, beautiful language from a gifted storyteller . . . writing at the peak of her craft.

- Virgil Suarez, editor of Iguana Dreams

Other works by Cecile Pineda

Face

Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood

The Love Queen of the Amazon

Bardo99:

A Mononovel

Redoubt:

A Mononovel

Frieze © 1986, 2007 by Cecile Pineda

Originally published in 1986 by Viking Penguin.

Cover image © 2006 by Kathy Vargas. The cover image is based on an original photograph

of a bas relief at Borobudur, taken by Cecile Pineda.

Author photo by Maria DeGuzmán. Used by permission.

First Wings Press Edition

ISBN: 0-930324-91-9 or 978-0-930324-91-9

paperback original

First E-book (eBook) Editions © 2011

ePub: 978-1-60940-186-3

Kindle: 978-1-60940-187-0

Library PDF: 978-1-60940-188-7

Wings Press

627 E. Guenther

San Antonio, Texas 78210

Phone/fax: [phone]

On-line catalogue and retail ordering:

www.wingspress.com

All Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by

Independent Publishers Group • www.ipgbook.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pineda, Cecile.

Frieze / Cecile Pineda. -- 1st Wings Press ed.

     p. cm.

Including an interview with the author

Originally published: Viking Penguin, 1986.

ISBN-13: 978-0-930324-91-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-930324-91-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Stone carvers--Fiction. 2. Borobudur (Temple : Magelang,

Indonesia)--History--Fiction. 3. Indonesia--History--

To 1478--Fiction. I. Title.

   PS3566.I5214F75 2007

   813’.54--dc22

2007001500

Except for fair use in reviews and/or scholarly considerations, no portion of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the author.

In memory of my mother, Jane

Contents

Drawing: Cross-section of Borobudur

Preface

India

Drawing: Aerial view of Borobudur

Java

An Interview with Cecile Pineda

About the Cover Artist

About the Author

The great pagoda is raised.

The country lies ruined.

—Burmese Saying

For the fifth consecutive year, in the face of the highest child-poverty rate in eighteen years, our national leaders have targeted poor children and families again for billions in new budget cuts. . . . [Meanwhile] an escalating arms race and nuclear proliferation not only hold hostage the future we hold in trust for our children, but also steal the present from millions of the world’s children whose principal daily enemy is relentless poverty and the hunger and disease it breeds.

—Marion Wright Edelman,

quoted in The Barnard Reporter (1986)

Preface

BOROBUDUR first invaded my consciousness in 1984 when I spent a solitary hour scampering over the vast pyramid / stupa / shrine which lies on the Indonesian island of Java, in the near vicinity of Jogyakarta. What initially struck me was the vast scale of the monument, its ingenious conception, and the remarkable vitality of the stone relief work which, for depth of feeling and subtlety of execution, rivals anything known to the West.

Then, too, I was moved by what, even on first blush, seemed to be an argument between, on the one hand, the highly elegant iconography of those panels in all four galleries devoted to the lives of the Buddhas, and the astonishing vigor that animates depictions of the more vernacular Buddhist legends and animal fables.

My first impression was borne out by a visit to another, this time, Hindu, shrine in the same vicinity. Known as Prambanan (damaged in the earthquake of 2004), and completed some eighty years or so after Borobudur, it consists not of one, but of a cluster of shrine/pagodas, their exteriors decorated with stone reliefs, but whose subjects originate principally in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Again, I marveled at the extraordinary exuberance of the depictions, some of which show life much as it was lived over one thousand years ago, and is still lived among countryfolk throughout Asia, with patient honoring of time and season, with reverence for the animal and vegetal worlds paralleling the human and divine.

Frieze was first conceived as a rivalry between a master carver, traded to Java by an Indian dynast, and a native carver, recruited from a local village. But long before the first draft was completed four months later, quite another story was demanding to be told. I had discovered that Borobudur was raised with forced labor. The great number of Borobudur’s builders were recruited from the rice fields.

Statistics pale against the actual vastness of Borobudur’s scale. It required some one million carved stones, mostly of volcanic rock, to build. It measures one hundred thirteen meters corner to corner, and thirty-one meters high. For a temple of its size and period (the completion date hovers around 800 A.D.), Sanskrit sources relating to other monuments suggest that it may have required nearly ten thousand workmen to be on the site at any given time during the more than eighty years it took to build. For a feudal ninth-century agricultural society, the logistics of feeding and sheltering such a vast number, let alone organizing them into effective work gangs, rivals the complex organization and technology of a modern-day space launch.

Not long after Borobudur’s completion, Central Java collapsed economically and politically. It is known that the Sailendra dynasts, to whose glory Borobudur was built, were forced to abdicate, and that the new dynasty that replaced them, the Sanjaya, chose to set their capital far to the east, so depleted had become the heartland. Were the Sailendra bankrupted by their own extravagant monument building? The pattern of history seems to suggest such a course of events, but no one knows for sure.

The ancient world of ninth-century Asia saw a vigorous and extensive mercantile and tourist activity, although the latter was probably motivated more by religious fervor than sensation seeking. Economic organization, such as that found in India, where craftsmen were already grouped into guilds, could be highly sophisticated, contrasted, say, with Java, where the economic base was entirely agricultural. The custom of exchanging carvers, sculptors, painters, and decorators was frequently practiced by feudal monarchs who used such mutual favors to bolster their sometimes shaky political and economic alliances.

Apart from these generalities, there is little in Frieze that is not directly suggested by the monument itself: the hidden base, the pillaged great stupa, the one hundred twenty panels in the first gallery, meant to depict the life of Gautama Buddha from before his birth to the preaching of the First Sermon, and to provide the pilgrim who circled the gallery with a formal framework for his meditation. The growing of rice is never depicted on any of the panels that adorn Borobudur. Rice figures only on richly laden tables, or as part of elaborate temple offerings. Forced abortion figures not only on one of Borobudur’s hidden panels, but is to be seen at Prambanan as well. For these monuments, like the great European cathedrals, which they predate by nearly four hundred years, are the books of vernacular history, depicting myth and custom as they continue to be celebrated by people who still live by the sweat of their brow.

The reader may perceive a nagging parallel between that ancient world and his own, with one exception: it will be the rare curiosity seeker who one thousand years hence makes a tourist pilgrimage to a line of missile silos, guidebook in hand.

The study of Borobudur is a fascinating one, and, despite the recent UNESCO-sponsored restoration project, much about its construction remains a mystery, unexplained by anything more substantial than conjecture. For the reader who, like myself, cannot put the subject out of mind, Ageless Borobudur by Augustus Bernet-Kempers is recommended reading.

— Cecile Pineda

San Francisco, 2006

India

1

Slant the chisel just so, so that the hammer, tapping lightly on the shaft, lifts up the layers, flakes them off like skin. The workings are simple: everything depends on the angle, and the strike of the hammer blow; there are as many kinds as colors. Not so the stone. For in truth no matter what the angle and type of instrument, or the skill of the hammer blow, whether soft or hard, whether light or dark, the stone decides. For all depends how daylight first strikes and moves with the passing hours over the surface of the face, and neither the finishing plaster, nor the colors applied by the painters afterward can redeem a bad design.

Brahma, Siva, Vishnu

are three;

so chisel, hammer, and stone

are three.

I had forgotten this song, forgotten we sang it over and over until the words lost all meaning, in the shed of the master where we were given our first backgrounds to carve. Already the designs had been incised in the surface of the stone. To us fell the backgrounds, mine, the fig tree, heavy with fruit. Older apprentices would work the figures later.

Still now it is second nature: this ring of metal on stone, the clink, clink, the scatter of dust. Even now it tells me of the precision of the angle, how trued to the design.

There are limits. I have resigned myself to them: the great processions, the parallel forms of armies, hunters, suppliants, parasols, palm-leaf fans, royal standards, of fronds, of flowers, iridescent feathers, elephants propelled by