Ceremony
- Peace.
- Justice.
- Health (global ecological health, including human health, including individual health, embodied and psycheic).
- Vaccination against fascism.
- That “AI” would be far more resource-intensive than it would be profitable.
- It wouldn’t produce reliable or universally-agreeable results, because while these are the most important human pursuits, they pose difficult (perennial) problems. The fantasy of a facile, universalizable, standardized answer is propaganda for fascism.
- Good results would lead to less reliance on the technology, less engagement, and therefore less profit.
- Therefore it will not be attempted, let alone made.
Lessons from the puputan
cw: (historical) political violence and suicide.
Another passage from Revolusi (David van Reybrouck), on the Balinese puputan of the early 1900s:
“More horrifying still were the scenes in Bali, where in 1906 and 1908 the complete courts of a number of principalities chose to commit collective suicide (puputan). Hundreds of men, women and even children walked straight towards the Dutch rifles and artillery. They were dressed in traditional white garments and carried only staffs, spears and the finely wrought traditional daggers called krises. ‘The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire went on, the fighting grew fiercer, people fell on top of each other and more and more blood flowed.’ A pregnant Balinese woman was one of the few who lived to tell the tale. ‘Persisting in passionate fury, men and women advanced, standing up for the truth without fear, to protect their country of birth, willing to lay down their lives.’ The KNIL [Dutch] soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes: women hurled their jewellery at them mockingly, courtiers stabbed themselves with their daggers and died, men were mown down by cannons. The wounded were put out of their misery by their relatives, who were killed in turn by the Dutch bullets. Then the colonial army plundered the corpses. In the puputan of 1906, an estimated 3,000 people died. ‘The battlefield was completely silent, aside from the rasp of dying breath and the cries for help heard from among the bodies.’
“And this event, too, has left traces. In December 2017 I travelled around a near-deserted Bali. Mount Agung’s volcanic rumblings had put a stop to tourism for the time being, and in the ancient capital of Klungkung, I found the desolate ruin of the royal palace. It had been destroyed after the puputan of 1908. ‘My grandpa, Dewa Agung Oka Geg, was there that day,’ said Tjokorda Gde Agung Samara Wicaksana, the crown prince of Klungkung. We were sitting in the new palace, opposite the ruin, and drinking tea. It was Saturday and his servants had gone home; he had made the tea himself. ‘The puputan of Klungkung was the very last one. After that, Bali was entirely subject to Dutch authority. My grandfather was only thirteen years old and nephew to the king.’ Almost the entire royal family died; the king and the first prince in the line of succession were killed, the king’s six wives stabbed themselves to death with krises, and 200 courtiers followed their example or were murdered. ‘But my grandpa survived.'”
This isn’t emphasized, to say the least, for tourists—the hedonistic hordes landing on Bali every day, who come for sprawling villas, endless traffic jams, cheap labor, and the monetization and destruction of the island’s natural and cultural resources. But the Balinese valiantly, fiercely resisted Dutch colonial control. They did so, notably, by puputan.
I’m not sure it would make any difference, if tourists were universally informed about the puputan. The days even of pretense seem to be gone. Ubud has transformed into an urban shopping complex, bloated by money, overrun by beach bodies. We rarely go there anymore, the traffic makes it nearly inaccessible. Locals have converted family homes to expensive boutiques, restaurants, and villas. Foreign-catering establishments occupy an upper echelon of public space, not unlike colonial resorts in the Dutch East Indies. These fantasy realms are inaccessible and undesirable to most working-class Indonesians, whose labor builds them, whose work is to wait on and serve the foreigners. Ubud, like Canggu and Kuta before it, has been smothered by gentrification.
But my fantasy is that everyone is always remembering the puputan. These acts of solidarity are still alive—I know it—deep in the meaning of this island. We, following the Balinese, make offerings to the ancestors, in a sangga at our house, to show that we remember. And the mountain holds the memory.
The puputan are a testament to a people and a place.
//
Now, Love—An abrupt change of topic? So be it—Love is difficult. I’m not sure it’s possible to love, outside of a context such as this.
In my life, I have found it difficult to feel contentment in love. As soon as I feel a moment of contentment, I watch it happen—I’m gripped with terror at the thought that my beloved will die and be lost to me forever. I’m inundated by images of death—mine, his, that unthinkable loss. Love is terrifying because loss is terrifying.
My husband (E) has always stated, plainly, his conviction that he will be there waiting for me, in the next life, and that we will live, in the afterlife, together forever. This is the deal, the very basis of our marriage—our marriage is truer than death. This lends courage to love.
I say to myself, sharp as a blade—“You needed to find someone who believed in monsters, to find someone who could believe in you.” Well, E was that person. He believes. Drunk off his imaginative capacity, I myself stopped disbelieving. This may be easier to accomplish if you’ve fallen from the respected ranks of career and society, and are walking around barefoot. But as a result, at our house, we believe in Wewe Gombel, Kuntilanak, Tuyul, and countless others. There are more monsters and ghouls and djin and demons and mer-folk than I ever expected. It’s amazing. I believe in all of them!
And if I ever feel a moment of cleverness, superiority, or doubt, concerning the reality of a ghost or spirit, I remember—I myself am the most dubious of all. I am, very truly, the dubious one! It’s a miraculous kind of bargain. I suspend disbelief in Wewe Gombel, and I suspend disbelief in myself. I couldn’t do it without E, I’d never heard of Wewe Gombel before him.
That’s the grim overtone to a deeper harmony. What I also needed, was not just someone who believed in monsters, but someone who believed in mercy. I had booksmarts, but I didn’t know anything about that, until I met my husband. Mercy, itself a kind of monstrous irrationality, had also been unbelievable to me.
//
Cut to the dialogue, Plato’s Phaedrus. A relevant passage comes later in the text than where I am now. And yet the text is simultaneous with itself, unlike this blog. Here, it pierces into the beating heart. To paraphrase, from memory—I’ll stop vouching for accuracy here, because why should I?—Socrates says he has no time for a certain skeptical inquisition against mythical beings, as being true or false, fact or fiction. His Wewe Gombel is Boreas, the North Wind, storied to have abducted Oreithyia, a maiden princess. He has no time, because he doesn’t yet know, of himself, whether he is full of rage, like a Typhon, or capable of mercy, partaking in the divine.
The imperative, more urgent than doubt, is of divine provenance—Know thyself—and credited to the oracle at Delphi.
The dialogue, having arrived at its poetically designated place—in the shade of a platanos tree—hints that Socrates is, in his living truth, a mythical being; Socrates is a character in a poem, of dubious reality; Socrates is a monster. If Socrates doesn’t know, then how would we? Did, or does, the poet know? If I fail to know Socrates, shall I forget myself?
If I am so unsure of myself, then by what desire and on what grounds shall I interrogate the truth of anything else? Am I only a monster, for monsters, reading a monstrous poem, written by a monster, about monsters?
Is it monsters at war, this very poem, or is it a creature of mercy?
These become inevitable and appropriate questions in this dramatic context, as Socrates and Phaedrus have left Athens. They have exited the city walls, in a poem that was written, historically, not long after Athens was defeated by Sparta and overtaken by the thirty tyrants; also not long after Athens put Socrates on trial and killed him. That death also was a kind of suicide. History bleeds into the poem.
But now, we find ourselves in a lovely fantasy—is it the poet’s? Socrates and Phaedrus, for the purpose of the poem, are leisurely wanderers, or a serious lover following his flighty beloved, beyond an unstable and oppressive political reality.
The questions out here are different than the ones in there.
If the city served as a container for self-knowledge, in the form of Justice, Virtue, or even the Good, what happens when you leave that container? How does anybody leave behind their city, without becoming utterly lost? And what when the city crumbles, and a person survives? What basis is there for self-knowledge, if a human being is, in this paradisical afterlife of the poem, always on the way?
This question of human nature reflects the personal identity of the poet—exiled, abroad, otherwise absent—from a failing democracy. When there is no city to support or to limit you; when the laws have lost their definitive hold, by unlikely accident, a miracle, an error in your favor; or when they have destroyed the very foundation of their claim to Justice—who or what might you become? What is left for you to be?
And why would you carry this poem in your pocket?
//
My husband and I have a pair of matched krises, these sacred daggers. They were passed down to E through his grandfather. Each has a wood sheath carved around it. They feel heavier in the hand, from the iron inside. His is smooth and broad, with a face like an inquisitive fish. Mine (witch-made, I am told, specifically for a woman) is shaped like a bodkin, with a slender, split hoof at the end of a handle. E gave it to me after we married. I had a general idea of their meaning, after all, the athame is a descendant of the Javanese kris. But I had never made the connection with puputan.
Our histories are alive with mythical animals. Always on the way, in wildernesses, we catch glimpses of clearer selves—ours, theirs; past, present—lightning flashes as responsibility in the dark. We follow the shining. We are seized by the wind, over edges of cliffs, bearing witness to the impossible. As unable to save others, as we are ourselves, we become unknown, are dead and gone, or living among immortals.
So the pen takes lessons from the puputan. A kris is an instrument of truth as freedom, life as exit, wholeness through cutting. The blade makes a container for the uncontained. Clad in white, tossing the last of its jewelry at tyrants, bleeding itself into self-possession—
Poetry is the puputan of logos.
//
coy loon, calico
coy loon, calico
cat snatched cake from the canang
cinder coils cunning
//
Assalamualaikum + selamat purnama 🌕
our exercise as exorcism of time —
the oddly-staggered rhyme leaves bruises
on buds stringently-steeped, the undisclosed
grays of grass groped in dark of morning that
took hold as roots in midnight, not knowing color
not knowing how seemly to be in sun —
steps right into the rhythm of blinding fire
this prism of shadows is highways home, revealed
in daylight’s reconciliation with desire
//
Selamat Idulfitri, Eid mubarak, blessed Eid to those who observe.
Alhamdulillahirabbil’alameen. 🌙
//
The result of all this “intelligence” // (A rant)
In these final days of the holy month of Ramadan, I am publishing this “rant” on “AI” and technology. It is a long rant, cobbled together, rambling, error-prone, and possibly shouty at times, but with the enthusiasm of madness, rather than anger, I believe. I imagine it as tribute to the darkening moon, as well as Ogoh-ogoh, which is today in Bali. Ogoh-ogoh is when the demons (called ogoh-ogoh) go howling and yowling in the streets, causing violence and uproar, to be brought out, burned up and chased away for the next year. I didn’t get any photos today as we moved around our neighborhoods, but (oops, these probably are NSFW) here is the fabulous vibe.
//
I am not anti-tech. I am not anti-AI. But writing something like this feels like writing against a deluge of history, imagining the words scattered and lost in a roaring flood. (Relatable?) Sometimes purgation itself is a good thing, the locals seem to believe. There are demons in the street, I can hear them this moment, their words and their hyper-active laughter, their growls and groans and spat curses, the frantic drumbeats of their chaotic mission, accompanied by frequent pyrotechnics. So.
Tech serves only the one in posession of tech.
(Who is that one?)
For the one in possession of tech, it makes things possible on different scales then pre-tech. Colonial and then industrial-scale genocide are examples of this, as are vaccination and virality.
Communication tech (from carved writing in stone, all the way up to algorithmic social media and/or “AI”) doesn’t just convey power over bodies, but over hearts + minds, in ways that are not well-understood. (And at tech-enabled massive scales.) It grants someone (the one in possession of the communication tech) the power to sway populations.
I am not anti-tech; I blog. (Even written language, as I wrote, I consider to be tech.) I have an iphone and an induction cooktop, I use tech all the time. I am even a tech lover. (Again, I blog.) But the use of technology (especially tech that creates new needs, i.e. luxury tech) builds a kind of ethical scaffolding (ἕξις or hexis, an active condition, disposition, or habit) for a narcissistic comportment in the world. Implicit in the building of tools, even the simplest ones, is the thought that the material exists only to serve the user. Technology progressively (re)defines the world as “material”. It serves the appetites of those who can pay for it (or invest in it). Every tech is an example of this, but it’s especially poignant when the “material” is alive, as with “factory-farmed” animals. Whether a chicken is mere material, or something in itself, has become irrelevant in the (modern western, but increasingly global) day-to-day world, built by human technology.
Of course, it’s already happening: techno-fascism is the not-long leap of turning humans into “material” too.
I am also not anti-artificial intelligence. I just have a different idea of what artificial intelligence means, than the people who are setting (and selling) the terms of the conversation.
To discuss “what is artificial intelligence” would first require a discussioin of intelligence. I’ve seen no evidence or argument that what is being sold as “AI” even resembles intelligence. What paradigmatic “intelligence” are the “AI"s being tested against? What are the “benchmarks”? We are left to gauge the purpose of it by observing what it does. (This idea, “The purpose of a system is what it does”, is straight out of Aristotle too.) As far as I can tell, the benchmark of a language model is, to convince users that it’s reliable. That it doesn’t (often because it has been specifically censored) spit out a disturbing or offensive response. That when a user feels like double-checking, it matches extant data, until a user is convinced not to double-check anymore. It doesn’t matter whether the response is “true” or not, there is no available parameter for that, because “the true” is not present in the extant data. “The true” is not present in the sum total of the internet, or ten thousand internets. “The true” is not a statistical regurgitation of ten million all-over-the-place opinions.
For “AI”-generated content, the “benchmark” (as far as I, an observer, can discern) is to convince people to keep watching, to keep scrolling, to keep using. The more people it convinces, the more money it makes, the more successful it is. And bonus, the proprietary “AI” has become an indispensable source (a medium through which to interpret the world) for an entire population.
This is not knowledge, it has nothing to do with knowledge. My prediction is (to predict this seems trivial) that the holistic result of all this “intelligence” will be insanity. And then, war. Well, more war, and worse. Anyway, it strikes me as a contradiction.
Intelligence doesn’t cause or profit off of war. Intelligence doesn’t cause or promulgate insanity. Intelligence doesn’t harm the weak. Intelligence without empathy isn’t intelligence. Intelligence isn’t complacent in the face of suffering. Intelligence doesn’t perpetrate or propel people toward self-harm, genocide, or extinction. When there is a cultural consensus on intelligence, according to which intelligence does these things, that is a sign of immanent catastrophe. So even if I am all alone in doing so, I reject that definition.
Here are some “benchmarks” for artificial intelligence I would (conditionally) accept.
Where is the “AI” that prioritizes these? Not just in its words, but its actions?
So artificial intelligence, according to me, is not present in this “discourse”. Except inasmuch as any number of artists and writers and poets have always provided artwork-based interpretations of intelligence, of what it looks like or what it is, going all the way back to the (pre-human?) invention of artifice. Religious texts offer interpretations of intelligence, and state constitutions and laws, and music, and mathematics. They are all artificial intelligences. The intelligence of a dancer. Ptolemy discerning the intelligence of stars. Intelligence understands and makes room for itself as plural – it is neither an absolute, nor a scattered infinite of particulars, but worlds within worlds. Like a jungle, or an animal, or a coral reef. Or even, something like Ocean.
Technology does not and never has had a monopoly on intelligence, no matter the propaganda they’re injecting into our feeds. Tech’s monopoly is on control.
Just so, peace remains ever beyond the reach of technology, because peace is not imposed as control. That is the violent fantasy of fascism.
The easiest and therefore the only path to (techno-)fascism is through insanity. This appears to be the “benchmark” and the purpose of what is currently called “AI”, because this is by-in-large what “AI” (in a mutually-servicing arrangement with algorithmic social media) does. It turns people into users, turns users into the used, and turns the Earth into a ball of flaming garbage. A junkies’ den. This is our new politics, or lack thereof. Other “use-cases” – (e.g., if it can practice and propagate anti-fascism as hexis, as an active condition) – will be rare, if not merely accidental.
Because technology is essentially narcissistic and only accidentally good.
It requires education as a precursor, with subsequent active intention and effort, for a human person to be healthy and good. Education if successful puts us on a path toward (empathy, as David said) sensing the depth of the full breadth of the world, as well as our own depths, and sensitizing us to our limits and boundaries in these contexts, rather than imagining ourselves to be little kings. So education was needed to temper technology. American education, including its incentive structures, has done almost the reverse. Not just by emphasizing STEM and pumping money into innovation, but also using standardized testing to measure children’s worth. By design, even our education has been in service to tech.
As I’ve mentioned before, my only political view is (public, obviously) education. Education is the living soul of (human, obviously?) politics. All else in any political constitution should be organized to protect and serve education. While the end (telos) of education is active inquiry into the discovery, expression, and interpretation of justice, as the end (telos) of politics, of what it means to be just.
That is the secret teaching of “philosopher kings”, by the way – that education alone must rule.
(Here I offer yet another on-the-fly-interp of Plato’s Republic. I say it to acknowledge the hubris of it, but also to express gratitude for the ancient technology that has somehow educated me, though any errors are my own. And I might change the word order tomorrow. Wink emoji.)
(Here I note further, as my “rant” fizzles out, that I never intended to write on the Republic for my blog, not even in oblique terms. This blog is a constant meditation on the Phaedrus, I stubbornly maintain, where we find ourselves in a quasi-mystical meta-political realm. However, here as in the Phaedrus, politics is fully capable of accompanying us outside city walls, presented and represented by its – ugliest and most beautiful – faces.
For me at least, a reference to the Republic is a reference to the past. Lol, that’s also hubris. I hope very soon to get back to more direct engagement with the textual object of my adoration, beginning with some remarks on “the chariot”. However, I’m very bad at promises. The best way for me NOT to do something has always been for me to promise to do it. I would be a very bad employee of myself. Deadlines are unnecessary, we are worlds-building, after all. So no promises, just surprises.)
This flashed across my incredulous and hungry eyes today. Okay. Islamaphobia, they say. But in another way (from another perspective of Islam) this is the truest tattoo you could ever get. It’s like getting a giant tattoo of “asshole” across your chest.
We were laughing about it, because things suddenly seemed very funny. “Oke Jeki, go hunt it like a cicak (gecko),” my husband said. And we just couldn’t stop laughing, it was just so funny. These are the useful idiots of the basilisk.
All it has are its useful idiots.
Mask firmly engaged: these long posts always strike me as narcissistic. For example, imagining all the time it would take someone to read these words, and still posting them. So I guess one thing I’m wandering-around-about-on-here is the possibility of whether you can fight narcissism with a narcissistic act. This is what poetry is, and anyone who has ever experienced a glimmer of the joy of writing knows this, even if they won’t admit it, that poetry is engagement of a deep (and hopefully redeemable, if somehow self-defeating) narcissism.
I control every little blip that’s on here, almost.
//
Tomorrow is Nyepi, Bali’s silent day, so the demons fly away. For twenty-four hours we’re not supposed to make noise or use electricity, and internet and celular are often down. Even though I guess nowhere else celebrates Nyepi, I can still say Selamat Nyepi, have a nice Nyepi. Even from a distance, to imagine an island (a party island) that is totally peaceful, no cars or motorbikes or airplanes, with birdsong taking over the entire sky, as if everybody has suddenly disappeared, an empty day that darkens down quickly to unlit night, so that it disappears from the satellite photos, is also an effect. So just imagine the sound of Bali without humans. That’s where we will be, when the purification rites are over, and I’m not posting on my blog.
Thanks for reading, if you got this far. Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🔥🌑✨
//
Ramadan vibes. // Cozy, calibrating, sedating. Feelings of sahoor. Being awake and only half-alert during the darkest, the quietest, the coldest hours of the day. Wearing ankle-socks, drinking a small cup of coffee in bed. Gaining clarity, then working (reading, writing, occasional chores) as the sun comes, light born as from quietude, and the day grows, the beams angling upward into bright hot activity. The hour is earlier than it seems.
The best time I’ve tested for yoga practice is around noon, mid-day. It’s hot and my practice is three hours of sweating. I drink enough water to rehydrate.
Later, the hypnotic hunger-doze of afternoon. Indecisive napping. A flurry of preparation before sunset, and about thirty minutes of hangry vibes, (grouchy and efficient are incompatible modes), before it’s time to eat.
Maybe takjil (Indonesian snacks especially for breaking the fast at iftar) are sweet and cool to soothe the nerves of the final hour. Today we shared a big protein shake, frozen banana - vanilla protein powder - coconut water - chia seed. Thick and superfoody. This is bougie takjil. High in electrolytes, to help with hydration, and protein, which I am really craving by then. Chia seeds are one of the few “superfoods” I kind of believe in. They feel nourishing, filling but not bloating, easy on the digestive tract, excellent for stamina. The jelly-seed texture is inherently comforting.
Some days (especially non-yoga days) we’ll drive to the nearby Muslim kampung and hunt down real (sugary) takjil. The pre-iftar neighborhood “cruising”, everyone aimless and out-of-it toward the end of the fast, (the soporific Ramadan vibes), is another casual but recurring ritual of the holy month. There is a sense that the Muslim community draws closer, contracts, and even I am a part of it.
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌘
Temple clearing.
A festival of purgation. //
“Being sick” is also a negotiation between myself and the world, I was thinking yesterday. As we kept progressing through this illness, as if it were an argument, the subsequent days offering different perspectives on it, beginning with aches, shakes, and nausea, that climax in a night of vomiting, (un-willing efforts to empty an already hollowed stomach), disease passing as through a spectrum of these bodily systems, modes. The last few days it turned into the upper part of the body, head and chest, which are now swollen with mobilization, inundative rescue efforts, wracked by sneezes and coughs. So chapped lips and nose, morning voices cut with sludge, and sinus headache. My trifling desire to shut out all light and sound.
This is not me falling prey, I (comedienne) assure my husband, who tends to view illness as weakness in surrender. This is a battle, this phlegmy mess is our mounted defense and a glorious victory in progress… And then (feeling very American) meekly apologizing for being a burden while thusly underway.
My mind has been so sluggish, especially after that weird mania of day three. The last thing I want now is to focus on the specific task of writing. Which requires razor edges and piercing sight, building by division and seeking subtler senses of coherence, not to mention, setting out the beggar’s bowl for inspiration. (And caffeine, now seven days without. Who even am I?) You never know what gift you’ll get. Reading, ok, I’ve done a lot of that, in a hazy stupor absorbing many terrible things. What else is new.
The whole Neil Gaiman situation is gross and fascinating, (the archived link, at six days old, is already obsolete?), with offshoots to and from nearly everything relevant, to me and my humble epic, an irresistible exemplar of subterfuge poetic manipulation. Or as (poor, dear) Tori put it, last year, a wolf disguised as sheep. How blessed we are to have our own contemporary Lysias. Good thing we’ve got horses, as those armies really kept perfectly still. It is not mine but my other favorite response so far is this one. (Is this guy an asshole? or just ornery? I don’t know these people, their whisper networks, and yet,) It brings a shiver to read such incisive commentary, or perhaps that’s just leftover fever.
I have some digesting to do, and further healing, before offering my thoughts on all that. Other than, to celebrate its coming out. A festival of purgation.
Then yesterday I was thinking, while coughing until the gag reflex came, (apologies but I guess I will add Montaigne to the inevitable list of influences around here, who really put no limits on the observations he would share), and why not? These sensations and this experience are no less expressions of something true than, well, a tree growing, or an approaching storm. The red rose blooming. Baudelaire’s “take” (“take” = “make”) on a rotting corpse. (The ever-unheeded warning that “anyone can do it”.) This too is experience and introspection is in theory possible, here as everywhere, in war as in peace, in decay as in life.
Perhaps it is a reliable cornerstone of interpretation for these modern horrors, as purgation. (Or as Americans call it these days, inauguration.) We have ceremonies too for calling out the demons, for coughing them up and spitting them out, the upending of bodily-function as vomit, (I despise and resist this feeling, to no avail), as banishment of the enemy one made of oneself. (Must we deal with it now, the nightmare of involuntary anal penetration? Dear God, what would Jesus do? With Christ’s remains interred in this necessary question.) Or what else is a virus? Embrace your closest intimate, the toilet bowl. Disease as ecstatic dance, revelling in the expulsive revelation of noxious bodily fluids!
I’d been thinking lately also, here is another possible referent of Morychos. A cthonic deity, local and obscure, the kind whose worship seems to have been ubiquitous in Ancient Greek “civilization”, as folk practice. These things rarely if ever made it into the written record. Modern historians had (imagine it) interpreted a whole society based only on its polite conversation. Ye noble Greeks. Here’s yet another way of cultivating a partial truth, by limiting your resources to official, state-sanctioned documents. Well history, which is human, will always be more akin to “the state”, than to “the true”. Disregard images on vases, atypical animals represented on temple reliefs, a coiling snake on the throne of Zeus. Which figure was the interloper? To which one did we sacrifice our children? This is not modern, not at all. It has ever been difficult for us to see through the deception of our ongoing efforts, “to groom”.
So I started reading (pre-flu) Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison, (a fascinating historical figure in her own right), the seminal academic text on stratification of divinity in the ancient world. Written word versus unrecorded ritual, text versus ceremonial relief, the one kind of god you like to talk about, the other that doesn’t bear mentioning. Indispensable reading for students of invisibility, (in whatever dialectical direction), a constant reminder that we are secrets kept from ourselves,
Of mystery as the shroud.
You will never understand anything unless you assume the unmentionable, subterranean. Dead bodies. That said, I’m not convinced I contain multitudes at all. This skin is too fragile, this spirit bloated, and this willing, quite broken. It seems more to me that they (or we, the multitudes) come spilling out, un-contained, as yellow bile. Seemingly seamless stories vibrate with fever of the undisclosed. We, who remain unread, unwritten will be known as forgotten prisoners of his, awaiting our climactic liberation.
This is the radical steadfastness of faith, as Furies. We do not look at the time.
The air is heavy with rain that didn’t come. //
Galungan today. Canang on the bedside table, one also on the floor. A brown egg, small scoops of rice, sprinkled coconut, a few cakes and crispy sweets. Pisang susu, a mango, shredded pandan and frangipani. Scented like the sweetest dream. Lit incense stick and holy water. Cleansing the atmosphere of bad spirits so ancestors can come. (The veil is thin for the next ten days.)
One week til travel, soon enough to feel too soon. Sluggish thoughts on what to wear to a wedding. No traditional kebaya and sarung, but covered up. Mentally locating long sleeves and pants to go under other things. The priority is respect.
(Then again, a reminder to self. Let go of getting it right. Be yourself even if it means making mistakes.)
Argument advances. Poetry waits, and/or is carried.
Thinking about walls. Walls around the property (gateways with extra offerings, today), walls of houses, walls and doorways of rooms, and the need for them. Natural or artificial obstacles between self and world or self and God. Clothes to be seen, and to hide behind. Expressed appearance as a veil behind which one might… just be. The quietude of invisibility. Poetry as protection.
On the other hand, as prayer. Or the instability of opening channels without the (what?) to close them back up again. When and how to draw a portal closed and not lose yourself in it. Grounding.
One chick wanders away from others. He’s independent and interested in his own things. Sometimes he gets left behind. He’s fine, just a little different from the rest.
Sun is falling. Animals of day have gone inside. Insects' shimmering drone in dense humidity, gripping hands of mind are melting, letting go of time.
and then I knew. All of creation is
so many veils and such suffering as
would spell defeat for all but purest Love.
Salam to all.
Beat on the kul-kul summons people to the pura this morning and gamelan starts for the ceremony. Incense smoking, offerings aloft, village is alert, decisive. Brass shivers and syncopated heartbeat and (bodies marching and) the bell of the Mangku, high and bright. All attention put on the spirit. Barong moves through the streets today, transportation by music, in full regalia. (The battle for balance. Stops traffic, stops everything. Alhamdulillah. And what are you being called to do?)
Moving house starts today, according to the island gods. Ceremony this morning, awake before dawn to comb through the details, mentally then materially preparing everything. Not least, (my body), sarung, kebaya, symbolic trimmings. Painted on face, twisted up hair. Becoming a symbol, in person and gesture. Ceding control to complex performances, letting it be whatever it is. Stretching outward the various senses, as one does when (humbly, although today, quite publicly) summoning cosmic significance.
Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim. Blessed Eid to all who observe. // Today (here) Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha, a holiday in memory of Ibrahim’s (Abraham) readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail (Ishmael) to Allah (God). There isn’t the same popular mudik/migration in most of Indonesia around Eid al-Adha as there is around Eid al-Fitr. Many people go to the mosque and pray, and some who can afford it purchase a (non-human) animal to kill, or to have killed, as a ritual of sacrifice.
I have complicated thoughts and feelings regarding ritual (non-human) animal sacrifice, and I will not personally participate in it. (It’s optional, for a Muslim, so I don’t break any rules there.) But the story of Ibrahim, and especially his readiness to sacrifice, as well as the thing, (the child), and the promised lineage, (the historical, embodied, coming-to-be and passing-away, of the future), that he is ready to sacrifice, I find that to be an extraordinary lightpost. (Relating to what I wrote yesterday, about Īśvarapraṇidhāna.)
Ibrahim is brave, he does not fit with his community, (who worship idols), and he fights to establish his own relationship with the divine. He does not hide. He listens to dreams. He barely hesitates. His devotion can be interpreted, (or rather, felt), as cruel unresponsiveness to his human relationships and blindness to his own limitations. We are rightly terrified.
(Of Ibrahim, and his daemonic readiness.)
So Allah provides Ibrahim with a substitute, the ram. This serves a double purpose, both to reward his readiness, and to contain the terrifying nature of it. Ibrahim, “in the end”, does not need to kill his child, and all of humanity can breathe a sigh of relief. (Although later, he will send him, and his mother, into the desert. It seems a never-ending trial.) In Islamic tradition, the memory of it (Ibrahim’s readiness) has been further contained by this day, every year, Eid al-Adha.
As I understand it, this is something of the purpose of religion. To contain the terrifying (and otherwise problematic) in human being, to build laws and customs around it, to codify prayer in relation to it, thereby to tame it, and to make possible the establishment of political communities of trust and moderate prosperity. Not to forget the terrible readiness of Ibrahim, but somehow to live beside it, as we play out our animal lives, on earth.
By containing Ibrahim’s terrible readiness inside the symbolic act of killing the ram, the tradition builds a barrier around this moment in Ibrahim’s heart. It is a veil through which one may never see, a hijab in the relationship between finite and infinite. My interpretation of scripture is that this barrier, while accepted gladly by the community, is ultimately provisional. The entire thing that differentiates Ibrahim from the idolators is his stubborn insistence on direct relationship with Allah. This makes him receptive to infinite demand. Indeed, what makes the sacrifice holy, and not idolatrous, is the awareness that, at any moment, the ram might not be enough. No. The ram is already nowhere near enough.
(And the veil is already lifted.)
Ibrahim’s heart is the human heart. And his readiness is what is demanded of human beings, who bridge an otherwise inconceivable gap, between creature and creator. An animal responsible both to finite and infinite. The very nature of our in-between nature is terrible. Terror at Ibrahim is terror at what we ourselves are called upon to do, every day of our human lives.
I myself love the story of Ibrahim, but I have never been supplied with a ram. (Or a human child.) I have been given certain gifts in my life. I work to pay back my finite debts, and I struggle to share whatever I have, that is good or might be helpful, with family, and friends, and community. But not once has it seemed to me that this speaks to the story of Ibrahim’s readiness. In view of which, I find myself quite poor. Poorly supplied with sacrificial substitutes for myself. For myself, and the whole extent of my meaning, in this historical (embodied, coming-to-be and passing-away) world. I am not a patriarch. I am not a king. I myself am all that I have. Myself, and whatever work I can do. Whatever (broken, imperfect) things I can make, things that say “me”, that I might put into a fire.
(To show that none of “me” belongs to me. Is to say that I am… something else.)
It is a personal practice. To have spent one’s life preparing, not really knowing what for, not yet understanding that preparing has always been the work itself. Not having any idea it would lead to where one is now, doing work that one still does not fully comprehend. It has sometimes resembled madness. (And still does.) When it doesn’t resemble hubris. (Which it does fairly often, I guess.) One can neither recommend it nor require it of others (unless one is feeling very grouchy that day, which, patriarchs also had grouchy days). In fact, the lesson (for Ibrahim, for others) might be one of compromise, if not compassion. To let people have their sacrificial ram, for as long as they find themselves supplied.
I myself have never been supplied with a ram. But I have, in my life, been given (metaphorical, and also, metaphorical) cats. For better or worse, a steady supply. (Our boy cat is even named Ismail, in another coincidence, strange even for here.) I have also been given certain other gifts. One of which is the ability to step back and see that this story shows two things: the veil (the sacrificial ram), and the thing behind the veil (the sacrificial child). What it shows is different from what it seems to recommend. So that the story itself is also a veil, and the tradition of sacrifice, another veil. That there is a multi-layered (un)veiling of (un)veiling going on, related to self and sacrifice, responsibility and creation, human demands and human limitations. That the sacrifice, as a container, has a fascinating shape, and one takes care not to miss the point.
(So, “in the end”. I click “publish post”. And draw a veil closed, behind me.)
Offering for fish.