The Axis

 

Nobody tells you about the whispers that follow you down that imaginary line from Mount Merapi to the Southern Sea. Oh, they’ll tell you about the fancy UNESCO designation and the philosophical mumbo-jumbo, but they won’t tell you how the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you stand at that crossroads where the worlds of the living and the dead intersect. I know, because I’ve been there. And once you’ve been there, you can’t un-know what you’ve felt.

The locals call it the Philosophical Axis, but that’s just a pretty name for something old and powerful and not entirely friendly to human concerns. Something that was there long before Prince Mangkubumi—later calling himself Sultan Hamengkubuwono I—decided to build his kingdom between the mountain and the sea.

You see, the mountain to the north—that’s Mount Merapi, and it ain’t just any mountain. It’s the kind that breathes fire when it gets angry. The locals call it the “father figure,” all strength and masculinity, but I call it what it is: a sleeping giant that could wake up and burn everything to cinders if the mood strikes it.

And then there’s the Southern Sea—Segoro Kidul—where they say the mystical Ratu Kidul holds court in her underwater palace. “The mother figure,” they call her, all compassion and femininity. But don’t you believe it. Any mother who demands annual sacrifices isn’t the kind you’d want tucking you in at night.

(And don’t even get me started on the “compassionate” sea. I’ve seen what the ocean can do when it gets riled up. It swallows cities whole and doesn’t even burp.)

The Sultan knew what he was doing, though. Oh yes. In 1755, when he laid the foundation for his palace—the Keraton—he positioned it dead center between these two forces. He understood something primal about power, something the modern city planners with their traffic regulations and conservation efforts don’t fully grasp.

He called it Hamemayu Hayuning Bawono—to preserve and sustain the beauty of nature. But what he really meant was to harness that beauty, to tap into its power, to position himself at the nexus of those ancient forces.

The axis isn’t just a line on a map. It’s a lifeline, a deathline, a cosmological umbilical cord stretching from birth to that final reckoning we all face. Sangkan paraning dumadi—the origin and ultimate destination of existence. That’s what they call it in the old books, the ones kept under lock and key in the palace archives.

When I stood at Plengkung Gading—that ancient ivory-colored arch they closed to traffic last week—I felt it. The weight of centuries pressing down, the whispers of all those who had passed through before me. The living and the dead. Especially the dead.

They say no living Sultan can pass through Plengkung Gading—it’s the gateway for royal corpses on their way to the cemetery. There’s a reason for that. Some thresholds aren’t meant to be crossed until it’s your time.

The plengkung has wings carved into its sides—lar, they call them—symbols of nobility. But they looked more like the wings of something waiting to take flight, something ancient and hungry that’s been biding its time. And at the top, a jasmine flower carving that locals pronounce as “malati”—a warning, a taboo.

(I’ve seen what happens to folks who ignore warnings in places old as time. It ain’t pretty.)

The fortifications around the palace used to stand four meters high and stretch for over a kilometer in each direction. Most of it’s gone now, destroyed during the British invasion they call Geger Sepoy. But pieces remain, like the five plengkung gates that once controlled access to the palace grounds.

Of those five, only two remain in their original form. Like forgotten sentinels, they stand watch over a kingdom that’s fading into history, being paved over by progress and one-way traffic systems.

The sirens at Plengkung Gading only sound twice a year now—on Independence Day and during Ramadan. But I wonder what other sounds those old stones could make if they wanted to. What voices they could channel from the mountain to the sea, what ancient bargains they could remind us of.

Because that’s the thing about axes, philosophical or otherwise. They cut both ways. They connect, but they also divide. They create, but they also destroy.

And as I watched them close off Plengkung Gading completely last Saturday—"for conservation,” they said—I couldn’t help but wonder what was really being conserved. And what was being awakened.

Because in Yogyakarta, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

It’s just waiting, patient as mountains, relentless as the sea.