This means of expression makes any attempt to summarize those ideas a dubios business. As with poetry, which in the broad, poiesis (making) sense is what is involved, the message here is so deeply sunk in the medium that characteristic crimes of exegesis: seeing more in things than is really there, and reducing a richness of particular meaning to a drab parade of generalities
But whatever the difficulties and dangers, the exegetical task must be undertaken if one wants to be left with more than the mere fascinated wonderment like a cow looking at a gamelan orchestra, as the Baliness put it-that Helms, for all his responsiveness and powers of description, displays. Balineses ritual,and most especially Balinese state ritual, does embody doctrine in the literal sens of "teaching", however concretely they are symbolized, however unreflectively they are apprehended. Digging them out for presentation in explicit form is not a task in which the Balinese, aside from a few modernist nowadays,have ever had any interest. Nor would they feel, any more than a translated poet ever feels, that any such presentation really gets to the heart of the matter, get it really right. Glosses on experience, and most especially they are paths, twisted enough; toward understanding it