Ceremony
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.