Cats
Sitting for a passport photo // trying to figure out who I’m looking at. I’ve never been good at smiling (or not smiling, or what) for a camera. I feel like I have way too many faces and I don’t know which one to pull out, and then it feels like an “I-can’t-work-the-body” moment, virtual system failure. Who am I even looking at?
Is this how it is for everyone? I assume not.
Maybe I believe too heavily in the medium. (Smiling cat emoji.)
I always think of the lyrics that start off “Black Diamond Bay”, by Bob Dylan:
Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat.
Her passport shows a face
From another time and place
She looks nothin' like that.
Oh, Bob.
I looked nothin’ like that, for a while. Now, for a while at least, I will look pretty much like that. (They don’t let you wear a wood mask in your photo.
It was strange to see my face so naked.)
One of Lalah’s favorite things is to use the litter box when I’m taking a shower. So when I am finished, all fresh and clean, I am greeted first thing by a stinking poop to clean.
Fruits, flowers, and one active choice. //
I watched my husband turn the spray-bottle (for “cat discipline”) on Frankie, which was utterly ineffective, mildly confusing for Frankie, and funny for us. (Chickens have no problem with water.) It’s not very effective on Ismail, either. We might have to add vinegar, then Ish will hate it, in his casual way.
He and I are capable of self-discipline. But when it comes to others, we are terrible disciplinarians. It brings us joy to see (and let) others break rules. A luxury of being child-free, I guess, or a vice that we “permit ourselves”.
Frankie and Grace have a collaborative romance. Frankie builds nests for her and catches bugs and grubs and gives them to Grace. Grace did the same for their children, until she emancipated them. They share their peanuts. They sleep together, Grace and Frankie perched on top of the coop with the children safe (if not silent, sometimes a little rowdy) inside. The chickens have a family.
The sufficiency of apricot-scented roses. Trigger warning: America.
What is called politics (or democracy) in U.S. America is a highly-formalized, performative/participatory ritual of nostalgia for the sacrificed/human act of choice. Not unlike Attic tragedy.
Imagine attending (or abstaining from) that yearly Dionysian hoedown.
…and recognizing it as your (now) destiny.
There must eventually be a satyr play. Traditionally, after three of these. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, it just seems, rhythmically, a necessary thing. Which might be the lure of the uglier alternative. The aestheticization of politics is (Walter Benjamin’s term for what I describe as) enthusiasm without education.
(Was subsequently referred, through a rabbit hole, to this talk given by Robert Frost, where he compares an education by poetry to “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor”. … While, and this seems important, he also emphasizes poetry as that from which we learn the limits of metaphor.)
“The election” in 2016 seems like U.S. America lost a kind of virginity. Thinking about the myth of virginity, and its loss, as a suffered trauma that cannot be repeated because it substantially changes things, who you are, your character, what can be said or is true about you. Through one Passion, or act of suffering, the landscape of possibilities changes, completely. (The protagonist doesn’t have to be “the anti-christ”, or an actual rapist, but calling him that makes it feel more real.)
Not pathei mathos (learning by suffering), pace Aeschylus, but pathei genesis (by suffering, being born).
Watching someone fall prey to their own mythologized monsters, using predation as an excuse for predation. This is also (sadly) a “feminist take”.
By no coherent logic do one-hundred and sixty-million individual choices add up to one active choice. Allah is ever, over all things, an Accountant (al-Haseeb, Qur’an 4:86).
Lemon is one of my favorite fruits, flowers, and flora. Also, vanilla (which, if you didn’t know, is an orchid). Imagine growing both in the same garden. Pollinators would love it and so would we.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
(Lalah is known in the family for being “a little bitchy”. It’s just the way she is. But she’s also sweet and lovely. And none of us wants to put “bitchy vibes” into the world, especially on a Saturday. Salam to all.💖)
Lalah makes you jealous.
To the alien, from another side. // Earth used to be the most beautiful place.
You could go running, under-leaf, through waist-deep tangled-grass jungle, wondering about snakes but not stopping because you had lost something in there, your heart breaking along fault lines in egg shells of worry and the impossibility of searching this dense pocket of hiding. The sharp limits of eyes. (It could start to rain and the drops, clear pinpoints and gashes on your naked arms, would feel body-temperature, not quite cool.) You would give birth to yourself, clambering out from staggered layers of green into a rice field, shifting pale to yellow, (footsteps uneven in cracking, caked mud, swaying in) needle-soft fibers cascading with grain. A sea of it. (It could start pouring, but the heavy, like wind-whipped-metal, grey holds.) Do you go left, right, forward into the field, or back to the jungle? (Ok, good choice. Turn to page 56.)
Words come from behind you, you don’t understand those, but fearful fluttering heartbeats, you do. From underneath places, trembling invisibles look back, lines of sight never meeting, from too many directions. You never held what happened, there. Life was snuffed out in missed-crossings, disappeared, or worse, waited past the faltering light, as if to be found again, hoping but knowing, skin and memory growing thin and colder, until heart stopped. It gave up, it was over, but then, you were found. A strange struggle, distracting but home again, having made plans that seem irrelevant, at this point. Washed a sink full of dishes. Sat on the floor, scratching stray sentences in dust. It would be dark, but not raining, and anyway, you would be under the solid wood floor of another world, with footsteps relying heavily on the grammar of your (earthy) answer.
Somebody who loved you might bring you food that was soft and crunchy and salty and sweet. And a lit stick of honeyed incense. Parts of you would fall back in right places. You could remove clothes, find yourself misshapen, and step into a hot shower under pitch-navy sky. Becoming twin bodies, ocean and sorrow in a breathy coccoon against deep space. I would work my fingers into your scalp, and medicinal smells of sudsy substances would rinse off in slippery streams to either side of your (kissed) face. Scrub around ears. You could be clean. (And the miracle of that.) You could put on clean clothes. You could slip between clean sheets underneath a comforter blanket that was the perfect thickness for this night’s chill, with just enough weight to let you feel, well, enough. Plus a cat, on your legs. Yes, cats were amazing. You could cover your eyes, and drift off, as a warm hand slipped softly into yours. Everything that was lost, would be home, would be dreamt or forgotten, singing or held, would be tucked under feathers, bed scattered with blossoms, and the waning crescent would disappear into the better side of night.
One felt gratitude, and mistook it for fear. That is how beautiful Earth was. We couldn’t contain the joy it put into us, so we turned it upside-down, into fear.
Verses of chickens, cats, crones. // We get her to the vet’s clinic and I swear Lalah jumps out of the carrier, nose glowing pink, and exclaims, “All better!” Maybe it has something to do with the trauma of the drive here, as she carries on like she’s suffering endless sorrows in the style of Italian opera. Or the memory of having to stay overnight, a few weeks ago, due to ear infection, when she learned about how cats live, “in the Real World”. On the drive back home, she is the sweetest, slow-blinking angel.
“Do you know Enya?” (A better test for whether a tribe is uncontacted by “civilization”.)
In the Indonesian language, “un-contacted” (tidak terkontak) is said differently than “not-yet-contacted” (belum terkontak). I find this characteristic of the language already influences the way I think about the world, getting into the habit of considering temporality with every negation. (Even when writing/thinking in English. Do I mean “not”, simply? Or rather, “not yet”?)
Future (“InsyaAllah”) is (just) another kind of presence.
Prayer is a practice of humbleness, humility. Then also, any practice of humility, including serving, giving, offering, supplication, cooking or baking for someone, taking care of someone, including yourself, in body and/or soul, translating, loving, you could say these all fit together under the broad (outward-leafing) umbrella of “prayer”.
Every new/different person that you meet is an opportunity to express yourself in a new and possibly beautiful way. To become a new verse/version of yourself. But what this means is, it’s a new opportunity to learn from someone else, which requires a certain flexible but deep listening. Re-sponding, re-plying, re-versing. Well, that isn’t trivial. (And “self”-ish is the opposite of “selfish”?) We “keep” Grace and Frankie because we are interested in learning something from them, about their selves, about ourselves. And we “keep” them, and take care of them, as guests. We follow, if we can, certain rules regarding guests, and strangers, or anyone we don’t know who “shows up”, ancient rules of hospitality, that you could really, in “the old stories”, be punished for violating. We don’t know who that is, the homeless beggar that shows up at our door. But we treat them as an honored guest.
(I also am a guest. And in many circumstances, I also find myself “speechless”.)
As an aside, in a present and experiential way, it does seem to me like, if I eat other animals, it becomes hard (even just for my body) to hold onto the idea, that I can learn from other animals, too. The scales-falling-from-my-eyes moment, which I felt first in 2008, (when I stopped eating animals and “animal products”), was very moving. One of the most deeply-felt moments of my educational life. I will always be (humbly) grateful for it, and toward everyone involved.
(There are so many ways to say this same thing, and every time I say it, I feel the need to choose words anew. But/and again, “Alhamdulillah.")
Looking up the etymology of “version” (through French version for “a translation”, from Medieval Latin versio, “a turning, a translation”, from Latin vertere, “to turn, turn back, be turned; convert, transform, translate; be changed”), which led me to another really wonderful Proto-Indo-European root, wer- (2), meaning “to turn, bend”. Odds are, if you are reading this… Well, I was going to write, “if you are reading this, you probably use many words that are descended from wer-.” But I stopped, because it blows my mind into diagonals-of-squares to contemplate readership, whatsoever. Any readership, between zero and one hundred (percent, of what?), and further, who can say what and how (your, my, their, our, the) logos will evolve? Or numbers, for that matter, or time itself? Some people believe that t=0 is a constant, or the speed of light. But stability remains mere hypothesis, without which certain favored things (people, worlds, blogs) fall apart. Life requires shelter, not the direct blast of a sun. I know not even a fraction of what a shelter could look like, (for example, of an “uncontacted tribe”), but I know that I can’t survive without it.
And yet, she considers herself a translator. So she rests in the shape of wer-.
(“Are you there Heraclitus? It’s me, Elizabeth.”)
The beggar could be Odysseus, interminable, come home like a wanderer, red with the blood of innocents slaughtered in Ilium. Or it could be Pallas Athene, eyes grey with motherless calculation. Nice to have some non-human kinfolk around, whose opinion you can trust, chickens, etc. Or the crone, the devoted, elderly woman, who remembers the baby who suckled from her breast, however many years have passed. So, she knows the master of the house before almost anyone else. She too rests in the shape of wer-.
(Wer- is also, excellently, the source of weird.)
By the way, the first thing Grace did, when I let her out this morning, was to circumnavigate her entire territory, with chicks, including through the hallway. My husband woke to the riotous sounds of their passage. Which is just the weirdness of a bule di rumah.
Peace on earth and salam to all.
Reversal spells, mulberry stains, and mixed substance. //
Trying to understand everything as (part of) a “natural cycle”.
I send a text to my mother and then read it back over, (why do I do that?), decide I sounded high, think of the times when she has sounded similar, and I always assume it’s a “senior moment”. Time for another coffee.
It’s a “no hope for laundry” day. Sri Rejeki is glued to my lap, she knows what it feels like to be alone in the rain and she doesn’t like it. Not looking forward to chasing chickens in this. Wait, let me re-interpret myself, and speak it outloud. “I am looking forward to chasing chickens in the rain.”
(Doing a reversal spell on my PMDD, which stands for “Predisposition, Monthly, to Demons and Despair”.)
Thinking about traffic in Ubud, wondering what the future of that infrastructure situation is, and then remembering, I don’t have to wonder, because there’s an already apparent progression, from there, to Canggu, through to Kuta. Kuta is the future of us all. (There is no future for Kuta. Kuta is an eternity of unironic tackiness stuffed into hollowed-out cultural ruins, I guess, I haven’t been there for years.) The other relevant question is, where will be the “next” Ubud?
(What is history, if Kuta is where it all ends?)
Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. “Dear Barong, and whatever divine beings may be present in this place. May Kuta (the one that is inside of us all) bloom again with wildlife.”
Nobita (G.’s murai batu, songbird) sings with campur sari-ngdut, not consistently but often enough making harmony that it’s unsettling. Also, Mas K., from the workshop, is singing along with such a charming falsetto, as he (rhythmically) cuts wood with circular saw, that I can’t stop laughing and I might be confused. Wait, I think they’re both whistling… Mas K. is actually weaving his performance back and forth between whistling (with the bird) and singing (with the voice). This is almost virtuosic. And then, a woman neighbor stops by and has a conversation with him from her motorbike, and it sounds exactly like a spoken-word part in the music. And then I realize, I am in the campur sari.
(And this is the mixed substance!)
Rain lets up for a minute, with a hint of brightness, and roosters across the sawah are touching base, communicating, crowing as for their lives.
We go out on the motorbike at night to buy gorengan (fried tempe, stuffed tofu, weci, banana, sweet mung bean, tape). The kid selling gorengan asks me if I like “arang”/charcoal, making a joke about the color of my husband’s skin. I smile blankly. I massage E.’s shoulders a little on the way home.
He did harvest mulberries today, so his feet and hands are stained inky black. (The blacker the berry… semakin pedas the wife.)
When one makes an analogy, one calls attention to a similarity. One should also pay attention to the differences. In this way, one pays attention to everything.
Big rain again. Salam to all.
Light, whiskers, wood.
Full moon, sudah matang, tomato consommé, incandescent orb with eggplant-magenta smudged-charcoal setting, moving through air just chill enough to waken touch, silhouettes of palm trees dark enough to deepen vision, and presence dilates into possibility. Passing fragrance of pandan and frangipani. The best thing about living here is not seeing but feeling the island, how it vibrates as with mimetic electricity, a lucid dream.
On the motorbike, cozy in bright reds, pinks, orange woven scarf, wrapped around face as kerudung, black thumbholes hoodie, black leotard top and flowing layers, sparkling “fancy” flip-flops, holding husband, who’s handsome in black and bronze batik udeng and black bucket hat, and gold-trimmed randai pants, for dancing. We assigned ourselves the task of joy, tonight, and romance, and to get away. It was accordion music, view over ravine, pistachio gelato, single espressos and no distractions. Now, the drive home, through moonlit sawah, is brave, as if night-cleansing, to let busy city streets be forgotten behind backs.
We stop in the street, almost home, to see the moon. Close moment. Then engine off, we glide down the way, tires grinding gravel under sea of cricket-song. Unstrap helmets, put down/take off travel gear, wash hands and check on things to, piece-by-piece, unwind. E. checks the phone for messages of Ibuk. Checks progress on the locking gate, to be installed in front of her home, (the house where she was born), twelve hours' drive away. To keep her safe from wandering feet (and fears and memories and hallucinations). I check cats, asleep, and Grace, who clucks softly from the nest, as tucked-in chicks peek out from mother’s feathers, up past bedtime. We cover brooding house for insulation, shushing chicks, and latch the door. To keep tender bodies safe when the stray cat comes, howling with desire. Jeki will hiss and growl from the screened-in teras. Guardian is her favorite job. But now, aman, and so it’s time for peace and quiet, as goodnight moon, and the subtle art of letting go.
It never seems quite fair, as if, there will always be some tragedy to it. But no less beautiful, for that. The island of gods gives itself to those who give themselves to love.
Sri Rejeki in silhouette.
Lalah glamour.
Grace laid eggs.
Tenang Sri Rejeki.
(But not like this.) // Every choice feels hard, these days. None of it is easy. Even thinking is heavy. I wish I could put more levity on my blog, but then I reflect on “everything happening in the world”, and lightness itself seems to lack compassion. (No sun today, just one big featureless cloud.)
So I wonder at (and then question) the detachment, the surreality of cat pictures and typewriters, the psycho-spiritual health of it. After all, these are presentations of leisure and privilege. (Blogging, by nature, is a presentation of leisure and privilege. As is writing, in general.) At what point does it become, (let alone beneficial or good), not even innocuous, but cruel?
(At the point that one “gains” one’s first reader?)
Writing, as leisure, preserves its own necessary and peculiar ignorance. This, alongside its irresponsibility. And writing, as an art form, must address it somehow. The whole, “What I do here comes at a price.”
Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. Of putting too much detergent in the washing machine.
Frankie the rooster, offended that we don’t let him walk around the house, leaves three poops in front of the bedroom door.
And the cats already learned how to open the doors.
On the motorbike today. It’s nice to drive into the traffic, and then drive out of the traffic, to go back home, instead of living full-time in the traffic.
A Jakartan stranger. The way he expressed horror/dismay (at the illness and injury of street dogs in Bali) was to smile, a never ending, increasingly strained smile.
All three cats were tugging on our crazy chains today. Imagine the worst.
Ending with a neutralizing rain, the drippy noises and distant gamelan carrying us back from the edge of exhaust(ion).
Sometimes my writing gets redirected into my signal chat with my mom. Lately there’s a lot of family and house stuff, and even more, highly specific and intricate cat drama going on. Those “categories” make more sense over there. (But isn’t it amazing how every single cat has its own weird personality?)
Velvet boy.