Chickens
Y’all were louder than the chickens today —
But no hard feelings. Just measured words, and patient
Preening to wax away the feathered nerve.
Soft clucks will mend, with flock tucked-in, the hearts
Of beleaguered and yet good-natured birds.
Black hen, her shining
Shadow, sleeps in tangled grass.
At home in hiding.
One beautiful day.🌈
Where-from? Chickens’ Edition
I’m celebrating, because after two days living on coconut water and white bread, I graduated today to whole wheat bread. You see, I have the flu. Or, “a” flu? Just basic old-fashioned flu, not one of the trendy new viruses (you know the ones). I’m already feeling better, enough to be fantasizing about a fully-loaded veggie burger, (sauerkraut is mandatory), however, I remain shaky-feeling and weak, so my realistic plan for tonight is noodle soup. And maybe a fruit smoothie. (InsyaAllah there will be a burger on Friday.)
Grace is feeling better too, I think. She stopped pining around the brooding nest and started hanging out with Frankie again. So Frankie is more of a paranoid asshole with everybody else, (including his own children), but it’s because he’s protective of Grace. So we can’t fault him. He’s back to finding her morsels of food and making cozy nests for her. (Is he actually an ideal partner?) If they haven’t already, they’ll probably start mating again soon. (That decision is up to Grace.) Those two are inseparable.
Doing a little “research”, I realized that our chickens are probably different from the domestic chicken breeds popular in North America and Europe. Frankie is similar in appearance to the red junglefowl. This is the wild bird, native to Southeast Asia including Indonesia, from which chickens were domesticated thousands of years ago (~8,000). Red junglefowl cocks are strikingly handsome birds, as is Frankie. The wikipedia article notes that they are sometimes used in cock fighting, which remains popular around here (in Bali). When wikipedia says “sometimes” about Indonesia, I have learned to interpret that as “often”. So I would imagine Frankie’s genetics are pretty close to that source, and it’s not surprising that he would come across as somewhat feral.
We “acquired” Frankie before we moved into our house, when he wandered onto our property and didn’t feel like leaving. So he has lived here longer than we have. He was still a chick back then, but apparently old enough for independence. We later learned that he had been chased away from our neighbor Pak T’s house, by their cat. (Pak T said we could keep him.) Then we “acquired” Grace when Pak S brought her over, also before we moved in, and left her in a small bamboo cage in the yard. This was either a gift or an instance of Pak S not wanting to deal with her, possibly because she had five chicks at the time. (Or it was, for Pak S, an entertaining test of what we would do with a mating pair of chickens? I really don’t know, he just laughed about it when we asked him! All I know is, we weren’t consulted about whether we “wanted” any of them.) Because we didn’t live here yet, our carpenters kind of took care of the chickens. I assumed everything would be ok. But over several nights, those five chicks that came with Grace disappeared. They were probably hunted and eaten by the same cat that had chased Frankie.
When I learned about it, I felt guilty about that, Grace losing all her chicks while she was stuck in the cage. This is one reason I really wanted Grace to experience motherhood, fully, at least once. (My sense of justice!) And that’s what got us into the situation where we have a flock of eleven chickens. Or at least, one flock of nine chickens, and another flock of two chickens. It remains unclear whether Frankie and Grace want to integrate with their children’s flock at all. On second thought, maybe it’s totally clear. The parents and the children simply consider themselves separate flocks.
(Imagine that. I actually said to one of them today… “It’s ok, I have a mean dad too.” …)
For her part, Grace doesn’t look like a red junglefowl hen. She looks very much like this other breed of chicken from Indonesia, also used for cock fighting, the Ayam Cemani. She’s a lovely bird, with a soft and thoughtful look, although my photos haven’t yet captured it. I doubt she’s any kind of pure breed, but she is completely black, with only the faintest blush on her “caruncles”. (There’s a lot of chicken vocabulary to learn.) Another reason I doubt she’s purebred is because wikipedia says Ayam Cemani aren’t good “setters”, whereas Grace is a very broody chicken. When that time comes, she is utterly devoted to sitting on her eggs.
My thinking is this. Most domestic chickens have been bred for egg and/or meat production, and possibly for docility, whereas our chickens have been bred, (and/or taken from the jungle?), for fighting, and/or allowed to breed free-range. As a result, I don’t expect them to be very cuddly birds. But I do expect them to be smart in their own ways, as wild or feral animals are. And they are thoroughly social, with each other and with us. It’s apparent that they consider us (humans) company, they always come “check out” what we’re doing, or sit nearby us (under the awning) when it’s raining and they’re bored, or ask for treats (boiled peanuts). They (warily) eat from our hands. They look at us accusingly when we don’t have peanuts for them. And if I speak to Grace in sweet coos (like Cucurrucucu), Frankie gets testy.
(Although I always think of it as Frankie’s, that song isn’t about a rooster, but a lovesick coo-ing dove. Please click the link if you’ve never heard Caetano Veloso’s rendition. You won’t regret it, it’s heart-achingly lovely. We need more Caetano Veloso and Almodovar in all our lives, don’t we? And then for another version, this one sung by Juan Diego Florés at La Scala is sublime. Watching that reminds me of that one time I was there. Also, watch for the look he gives the loggionisti—it’s so direct!)
Anyway, that’s more-or-less the origin story of our chickens. They showed up in our lives, like our three cats, and we weren’t ever given a real option to say no. And they (unlike the cats, who are now imprisoned in our safe, loving, and amply medicated home) are technically free to leave. Although once a few of Grace’s chicks escaped outside the wall and we spent a rainy afternoon traipsing through overgrown jungle and rice paddies to retrieve them, with Grace frantically waiting back home. She was very upest about it. That was when they were still babies. Now they’re almost grown, the girls will probably start laying soon (if they haven’t already, in secret), and one of the cockerels has, as signaled by his crowing, decided he’s the leader of the flock. The chicks have their own governance structure now. They could fly over the wall if they wanted, but they seem pretty content to hang around here. Even if we are delinquent chicken keepers and have yet to figure out their permanent coop situation. They may not be cuddly, but it’s pretty obvious that they will love when we give them a permanent and roomy chicken house, dry and warm, with brooding boxes, etc. They would live with us in the human house, if we let them. But that’s too much even for me.
By the way, we did eventually screen off the hallway, so the human house is totally off-limits now. Thank goodness, because the poop grew up as they did… the quantity makes it gross, but excellent fertilizer for the gardens. And oh, please pray for us that we never experience an outbreak of avian influenza. (My own symptoms do NOT match those of A H5N1.)
(I still haven’t told you what we do with all the eggs. That can wait for another day.)
Because look at me, I’m still in bed with this flu and I had planned to give myself a solid 3-4 days off of “serious blogging”. But then I accidentally wrote this long post and spent the afternoon reading some of these older posts and listening to music that makes me tear up and/or shout bravissimo and wave my hands around like I’m in The Godfather. And yesterday I read the whole book about learning to speak chicken! Apparently I’m ok at resting the body, but not great at resting the mind. I can’t believe I haven’t had coffee in three days. That’s truly wild.
Maybe it’s because of the full moon? Selamat purnama, everybody. Stay healthy and safe.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌕
Funeral for a Chicken
It became obvious that Grace was grieving the loss of her chick.
She remained close to the nest, puttering, looking here and there or inside the nest again. She was uncharacteristically quiet. She chased away other chickens. She was aimless but unwilling to leave. I spent time sitting with her. I took moments to slow down, to meet her “where she is”, and tell her how sorry we are for her loss. Now she sits near me as I read and write. (I sit on the porch, still not far from the nest.) The most touching thing is how she maintains eye contact.
It prompted me to search for written-down experiences of (communication, community) living with chickens, and I found this book called How to Speak Chicken by Melissa Caughey. She means literally speaking their language, deciphering and returning their clucks and bokks, as well as gaining entry to their flock. I do already speak to the chickens in words and sounds. I’ve been surprised how closely they listen and the things they seem to understand. But Melissa takes it to another level and clearly knows more than we do about her chickens, about what they want, about their feelings, their fears and joys, their quirky (individual) personalities, and all their ways of self-expression.
At first, I felt shy that I would mourn with Grace, for a chick who knew only one beautiful day. When chickens are not just eaten by them, but treated worse than garbage, by humans, by the thousands and millions. (And, well, Los Angeles is burning.) But I shouldn’t be shy. Community with the non-human is a gateway to deeper understanding.
Too many instances of it (community with the non-human) are treated as un-serious, dismissed as “merely subjective”, reduced by dualist (Cartesian) dogma (in partnership with certain religious traditions, especially Christianity in its understanding of human will, i.e. Augustine and Aquinas) to machine-like instinct, safely compartmentalized into the category of “pets”, explained away as the primitive behavior of pre-scientific minds, (children or women or the brown-skinned), or the flaky spirituality of new-age nonsense. This is part of the same modern and enlightenment-era thinking that provides justification for rapacious colonial expansion and empire, as well as chattel slavery, and all else that is generally called “white supremacy”. The culturally assumed solution to this (“white supremacy”) has largely been to gather non-white humans up into the exclusive flock of intellect- and/or “free will”-endowed beings, while partitioning away the rest of the natural world (non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, rivers, oceans, mountains, canyons, stars, moons, etc.) in a separate category of the stupid and/or dumb, unworthy of ethical or moral consideration. Except inasmuch as they are useful, to the human.
Humanism, when seen from this vantage, is the cultural effort to replace white supremacy with (a dubiously racially neutral) human supremacy. But the violence (ignorance, self-abuse) of supremacy remains. The in-practice meaning of “free will” retains nothing holy, becomes the freedom to exploit, abuse, and generally disregard the suffering or wellbeing of those without it (without “free will”). All of us (humans) have suffered from this humanism. And because humanism assumes the human to be dual, human and animal, (as opposed to human animals), humanism divides us against our own embodied selves.
The violence of human separatism can be observed through a cultural Scylla of embodiment issues, from the body’s hijacking by commodification, (“the beauty industry”, including online “influencers”), to abuse by for-profit pharmaceutical corporations (in the name of health), to cultural conflicts over sexuality, (including over manifestations of gender), to the marginalization or cultural “turning away” from the elderly and the disabled, to addiction and other crises of habit (i.e. obesity, heart disease, diabetes, social media, “AI”), to crises of mental health and suicide, etc. (Here I include “AI” as an embodiment problem, as a mis-relation of human thinking to human bodies. Although I don’t think this is the only way to interpret it.)
Non-human does not mean stupid. Only the most rarefied facets of our experience (if any) are uniquely human. Most of the time, humans interrelate like any other animals. But look, there is plenty of love in this. It’s true that our chicken family will never read and discuss a Plato dialogue with me. Neither will most humans (including you). Neither would your own child, especially if it passed away only a day after it was born. We are almost wholly joined by bonds of affect and imagination. Whatever it is that is uniquely human, we can’t even be sure that it lends itself to community. Humans stand out from other living animals not by their social or political coherence, but in their (uniquely) dysfunctional or unstable relationships with each other, and with the world. The most destructive become historically notable mostly because of an idiotic pretense of supremacy. It works until it fails.
Does it count as trying to understand the world, if you assume at the outset its stupidity? To assume its stupidity is expedient. It may get you to Mars, it may get you a big mac, or a house in the suburbs with enough cashflow to supply (frequently replaced) digital devices for a family of four. To assume its stupidity makes it seem okay to do unfathomly terrible things to the non-human. There isn’t such a sharp divide between concentration camps and factory farms, the fossil fuel industry and violence against women. To the extent that, as metaphors, they read as obvious, clichéd or tedious, if not offensive. And yet, these are its routine, its daily complicities.
What is it? It is a living thing, saying “never again” with each exhalation, and with each inhalation, “always already”.
My husband buried his father as well as his sister, according to Muslim tradition, so he knows how to wrap a corpse in preparation for burial. Once the chick died, having lost its voice, its movement, its warmth, and its self, Grace no longer interpreted it as the body of her child. (A reminder that we are but interpretations of each others’ bodies.) We removed it from the nest without her objection. We lit some small incense sticks, E set it on a small wood-block table, wrapped it in several pieces of white cloth. He dug a hole under a rose bush, about the size of my hand. I placed it in the hole, he covered it with dirt. He placed a stone to mark the location. I put small white and purple melati flowers.
Grace sees what we do. She sees me crying. I tell her it wasn’t her fault, and she’s a really good mom.
The other chickens, her grown babies, come by and check in. She snaps at them, still defensive of the nest. Frankie is never far away but gives her space. Grace moves a little farther from the nest, day by day. With reluctance, she releases the feelings and memories of her baby. Today, we gave them their favorite treat, boiled peanuts. Frankie, as usual, made sure that Grace got more than the rest.
Natural divisions are temporary, like rivers between us that are never the same, or hypothetical, like bridges that dissolve as we pass beyond them, or revelation, like eggshells cracked open with tiny horns on our hatchling beaks. We grow into other lives. Nature in motion is constant incompletion, otherwise we would all stop dead in our tracks. History is the ontological mismanagement of time. There is no cause for despair, but hope is only from the cracks, and the light that gets through them. What this means is that the future is not the measure, and to stop expecting victorious outcomes. Build to rebuild, and to rebuild again. Live in the truth of one beautiful day. Sacrifice your heart at the altar of its creation.
(One way or another.) Community with the non-human is the gateway to self-understanding.
I’m sad to share that nu baby was lethargic and weak today, didn’t come out of the nest, rarely cheeping. E held out hope while I braced for loss. Noticing the smallness of passing life and its clarity, like a glass marble in time.
Grace sits close, mouth open, and blinks at us. She knows her baby and its heartbeat. Her energy for care is concentrated patience, balanced sorrow and waiting, being neither here nor there, but present. Watching Grace I tell myself, this is part of being a mother too.
We left her a wijaya kusuma flower.
Nu baby. //
So… life, uh, found a way. We tried (admittedly have been a little distracted) to steal all of Grace’s eggs but she tricked us and hatched one! Just one. A heaping tablespoon of pale yellow fluff. Well, it’s just not possible to be sad about an itty bitty chick.
(I love Laura Dern in that clip.)
This one is light-colored, while the first clutch was all black. Already a tiny misfit.
The other chickens, teenagers now, are so far curious about the new baby. Grace pecks them if they get too close. (Very fierce.) They stay out of reach and crane their necks to watch it, (all of them at once, chickens are such gossips), while it hip-hops around mom’s feet.
We needed to rearrange the chicken living space to make it cozy for Grace and nu baby. So we took apart the old arrangement, but the chickens got a little upset about it. So there was some chaos theory with chickens flapping first up on the laundry line then up to the roof of the little limasan (our bedroom).
Chickens on the roof!
There was also a big storm that blew through when E was fixing chicken stuff and I was doing yoga. I was worried about the tiny puff-ball blowing away, but Grace disappeared the baby up into her feathers and hunkered under the downpour. She didn’t even move under the eaves of the house, to escape the rain, she just turned herself into a house. She is truly amazing.
When the rain cleared and the sun came out, nu baby came out too, peep-peeping again. Precious marshmallow. (They’re still a little clueless on day one.
To be honest, I’m worried about its chances of survival, being just one tiny peep in the midst of a boisterous flock of claw-talon-footed brothers and sisters. It will be a new test of Grace as a mother. InsyaAllah she will prevail.)
To relax from all that, I listened through Kendrick’s “beef” with Drake from last spring. They released 7 or 8 tracks taking shots at each other. All I can say about that is, hip-hop is amazing social media.
(Note. I think most of my pop culture “takes” will be a few years or decades late. “News” includes anything that happens in my lifetime, is how I see it, on my blog.)
Anyway, back to Kendrick “I said ‘we,’ it’s not just me, I’m what the culture feelin'" Lamar.
(euphoria, meet the grahams, Not Like Us)
Rap is an amazing rhetorical medium, but also, Kendrick has spoiled me for almost all other artists. Sometimes he makes it chill, sometimes angry, sometimes tragic or funny, (“some shit just cringeworthy”), but it’s always a contest, (for victory wreaths, and he didn’t come to the games to place second. He will sniff out and attack the evil (=the Drake fan?) in you. He makes music a war for the soul.
(And for his family, and for those disowned by other families, and ultimately for the soul.)
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌖
Chillin’.
Goodnight, chickens. //
I spend a lot of energy worrying about waste.
I dislike waste. Unambiguous waste strikes me as unambiguously bad. Sometimes waste is obviously egregious, sometimes it’s outside of my control. It can be hard to know what is (or will be) wasteful, without learning that from experience. Often one gets it wrong, before getting it right. Experiment is being-at-work for the sake of learning, which often involves waste. What seems truly needful is the waste (scattered like flower petals, ribbons, feathers, teeth…, we are free to improvise) along a possible way to wisdom.
(What is the opposite of experimental? Naive, traditional, conservative, established, authoritative, authoritarian, conjectural, anecdotal,…
Wow, an uncontained multitude.)
“I dislike wasted words. I think humans really are un-governable. While causality is alive and poetry is worship.” Anybody who would actually say this is so full of themselves. But written words can follow opposite rules, from spoken ones, which is how poetry slips into necromancy. Written words are like statues. Once you let them be poses, and self-organize as unique figures, they become experiments in the containment and unleashing of multitudes.
It is not entirely safe, it can be extremely dangerous. Is it worth it? Is it waste on the way to wisdom?
(If not, then to where?)
The chickens grew big enough that they didn’t fit in their house. They were fighting about it, mostly at night. They don’t need walls for warmth anymore, with the tropical temperatures, but they’re much happier with enclosed shelter from the rain. So E made a covered loft in their pen to expand the roosting space. Tonight they look cozy and relieved, snuggled up off the ground, on a cushy grass bed. They are more quiet, too.
I’m glad that my husband believes in ghosts, monsters, miracles. If he didn’t, how could he believe in me?
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌒
True news is rigorously neither bad nor good, but always on the edge of your ability.
Do not smile at things that would otherwise make you gag.
It appears as a dysfunction of leadership, but tyranny is the malady of a people (person).
The roosters are learning to crow.
There is VERY IMPORTANT chicken news // that I’ve been trying to squeeze in “here” for a few days.
(Sometimes one lets the horses run.)
We were shocked to learn, Grace’s nine offspring aren’t nine roosters. They are four juvenile roosters and five juvenile hens. This feels something like a miracle! It’s a shift in household energy and a change in the meaning of things.
There will no longer be ten roosters crowing, at our house. (I am honestly relieved. However,
There still will be ten roosters crowing in beta.)
So it seems that we trusted some fake news a false prophecy. A family member had worked in a chicken factory, claimed expertise in identifying their sex, as chicks, and we believed him. It turns out, he was wrong. Pak and Bu S. came over for purnama and we gave them a tour of the “orchid hallway”, that is my husband’s work-in-progress, they played with the cats through the trellis, and commented how nice it was to have a family of chickens. Pak S. wrinkled his nose and said, “Mas, those aren’t all roosters”.
(A few had started growing horns and cockscombs, a few hadn’t yet. It turns out, they never will.)
We were all amazed. Us at the mistaken chicken sex, them at us being goofy. We all laughed. Me, at the serendipity. It was a comedy of errors, perhaps even a gender-(perception-/deception-/substance-)switching/sacrificing “As You Like It” moment. This is one of my favorite genres!
As a couple, we make these mostly harmless, and yet significant, mistakes, like the old tv land “Beverly Hillbillies”, or dreamy airheads, floating through farm life. Even my husband, who grew up in a village, and his parents kept chickens, never paid much attention to their lives, their parts and their wholes, how they work as families or breeding partners or rivals. (Side note. He does have chicken stories, however, one of which involves him, as a child, persuading younger children to eat chicken poop. To this day, he maintains that eating chicken poop was, at the time, a good thing to do.) (We live in such suspended realities.) So we did not know, what now we know. Because we are watching and learning, as they do their things, and watching and waiting to watch them some more.
This is not business. This is the school yard proper.
Things “here” are like that.
Sometimes a game and sometimes a miracle, not in the sense of divine intervention, but of the hanged man. We are fools who suffer the foolish reversal of folly, we receive reconciliation, we say, Alhamdulillah. (Allah is ever, over all things, an accountant. And rizq, there shall be many more eggs than we planned. Where shall they go?) Every error, forgiven, is a re-marriage, no less joyful for its lack of positivity.
We are (but) wholesome entertainment, after all.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌓
(There were certain things that you kept from me.) //
Rainy days lately, and buggy, with small flying termites swarming frosted lightbulbs, at nights, and particulate rivers of ants spanning surfaces in exploratory veins, locating and removing insect bodies, leaving translucent brown confetti, so many spent wings, scattered across the floor.
A breath, and they disperse.
A moth alit on the soap dispenser, a velvety shield of black and cream stripes against a liquid surface of stainless steel reflection.
A tiny, brightly-humming wasp building mud cradle-tubes on the bedroom door. To be woken in the morning by its sunny song.
Homestyle curry cooked on a rainy afternoon. Onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, chilis. Potatoes, carrots, broccoli, tofu. Remembering how to improvise. It always tastes better on the second day.
A few of the baby roosters peck food from our hands now. The same few linger nearby and make eye contact, inquisitive, observant. One already has a little cockscomb, although it’s still black. (Frankie’s is a blazing red, like the chilis, with a full scarlet mask and cheek lobes.) Another has pinkish-red patches showing around his face and neck, and stunning glimpses of iridescent copper and blue, green, and purple nestled in his otherwise black feathers. One is a little smaller, with black and white marks like a tuxedo. Each child rooster looks a little different. We won’t know their “final forms” until they go through a full adult molt. That’s several months away, at least.
Frankie arrived here as a plain-looking juvenile, but then he had a dramatic transformation. Now, he is deep coppers and rich burnt caramel creams, chocolate browns blended with black, a frothy cappuccino ruff, teal patches on his sides, a forest green fountaining cascade of tail feathers, and the aforementioned bright red mask and comb. In my opinion, he is a rooster of flamboyant elegance and circumspect stature, a proudly beautiful bird, tempestuous and refined. Almost always with a faint goofy undertone.
I want to take a picture of him, but he is paradoxically hard to get a good picture of. He doesn’t appreciate having a camera (phone) put in his face.
(Some things I don’t need to know. But some things, I can’t help it, I just wish I did, about you.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.🌑
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.
Beautiful flowers // grow out of chicken shit. Sometimes the work is to see chicken shit and imagine flowers, sometimes to see flowers and imagine chicken shit.
Of all known technologies, the best and most reliable way to preserve something is (still) to keep it alive. And, failing that, to make it alive.
An inherent problem of place-based politics is its need for oppression as government. Which can come in the form of punishment, in the form of “education”, or in the form of education.
Politics without place happens through literature and on the internet, by extra-judicial combinations of algorithm, chance, history, and psychic powers (“spirit”, human ambiance, Pan, etc). This is barely politics at all. People become shapeless and unpredictable (wild) without a shared place to anchor them, or if not a shared place, then a strong narrative of that.
Beware the “strong narrative”, which is back in the realm of “education”… often it’s been brought along, unawares.
If you yell at a child, they become an adult who yells, or an adult who is silent.
The work of a writer is, by the written work, to show somebody how to read, not just the work, but the world.
This may be obvious, // but as everybody knows, obviousness is relative.
When the thing that would make you happy has been planned out of your civilization, this can mean something different for everybody.
For no reader do I recommend fascism or joining cults or eating an animal.
(Some things can be written in stone. Others should be written only in wax, or on the wind, etc.)
Ten roosters crowing is not just a metaphor, it is also real. Hence, the “news” category. There will be ten roosters crowing, at my house.
(We will have to name them, I guess. The nine juveniles. The dad is already named Frankie. Grace is the Hen. “Fun fact”, Grace and Frankie is a tv show starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Frankie is the name of Lily Tomlin’s character.)
When I don’t use an emoji, the mood that I am communicating is, “I am not in the mood to express myself with a cartoon right now.”
(I added that to my emoji dictionary.) (For a minute, I got confused between roosters and emojis. There are a lot of both!)
To communicate in writing requires synthesis between writing as yourself and writing for “the reader”.
“The reader” is only ever inside your head. It is almost absolutely plural. Hmm.
(Inside your head, “the reader” can feel nearly synonymous with “the writer”… also, in a blogging neighborhood.)
To every one of you, I have something different to say.
To every one of you, thank you🙏🏻 for showing me ways to break out of my civilization.
(That’s what I look for, in blogs.)
…“almost absolutely plural”…
Salam to all🌓
Three yolks, two pulsas, no home. // Last night we ran out of two kinds of pulsa at once, it was just bad luck, but our reward was to spend a night without internet or cellular. That is still an odd kind of quiet, unsettling to notice how compulsively I check internet things. I surrendered to connectionless-ness by (of all things) reading a book.
I feel cleansed now; saintly.
Infrastructure concerns. My mother who went through a hurricane two weeks ago is (fine, but) still experiencing power outages and spotty internet service (from the storm). I don’t know where I would move anymore. Maybe the last safe place in Florida will be the last safe place… and the multitude of homeowners who are desperation-betting on that same thing. No time like the present… to liquidate assets. Dollar-face emoji, tsunami emoji, filed under “texts not to send”.
Stories about Mars are stories.
Stories about the Moon are stories.
Stories about Earth are stories.
(Staunching an open wound with stories.)
What is placeless has no home.
The vibe around here shifted because Grace decided it was time to ditch being a mom and take a lover again. (The lover is Frankie.) So while the juveniles have become a roving band of nine goofy pre-teens, Grace is an expressive queen, squawking to the heavens before each egg laid. Hen labor is painful and intense. Grace is also a demanding queen, so they copulate with abandon, and Frankie is her designated guardian. I carry a broom, in case Frankie decides I’m a credible threat. (He is bred for fighting and I am “a chicken”.) Grace leaves eggs tucked all over the place, I never realized egg hunting was a real-life thing, until now. (Practical chicken birth control.) Looking for them makes me feel like a child on Easter morning. Each one found is perfectly rounded and smooth, in clouded ivory, texture of water-shaped stone, the inside heavy with liquid potential. The shell feels thinner than it should be, protecting infinitude. I cradle it in my thieving hands, gaze at it with my thieving eyes.
I love questions.
I am questions, too, excavated insides of who-knows-what. Being the question, opening up, the beggar’s bowl of ecstatic reunion. Even (especially) a crone conceals an egg-shaped interior, triple of yolk, with strange constellations unfolding across their inky, jelly-fat surfaces. The placeless-ness inside.
I am a thief. Of infinite potential!
(Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. All eggs are offered to al-Haqq, the True.)
Salam to all🌔
This is a blog.
blog (n.) “online journal,” 1998, short for weblog (attested from 1993, in the sense “file containing a detailed record of each request received by a web server”), from (World Wide) Web (n.) + logos (n.), Ancient Greek for “word, speech, discourse, account, ratio, reason, understanding”.*
//
The Logos is alive, a garden too.
A blog is not alive. It is, at times,
unfinished artifact.
InsyaAllah,
a blog is a corpse
with connectivity.
The time and place
of a blog is
(A timestamp is
no measure,
but a mark
of irony.)
element undefined.
The time and place
of a blog is
(not) in
a cloud.
The time and place
of a blog is,
as if,
not here,
not now.
Then where? Chicks hunger. As a family
of elsewhere-dwellers, scavenged absence is
the flavor of their nutriment. They keep
their bodies close to Grace, and Grace makes place
of wayward-turning, gathering to breast:
(What we desire,
the shape of Adam.
What we fear,
the shape of Adam.
What we would share,
the shape of Adam.
What we would be,
ecstatic automatic.)
Deep earth listens through thrum of Polaris,
impregnable flame seals at southern crux.
Burgundy rivers into sunset cup
cascade, return as easterly promise
of flight, and summon orphans back,
(—not yet. In blip of night,
we are testing,
turning,
always
in beta.
We will be
ten roosters
crowing
in beta.
Our logic is
loud and in-
fallible,
in beta,
pieced from the
scraps of our
falling,
feathered,
rapturous
fight.
We are roosters,
inventing eggs.
We are eggs, re-
surrecting hens.
What we share
is dabbling
in death.
A blog is,
aerial interred,
a corpse
with connectivity,
insyaAllah,)
from rosy graves, whence armies form, of light.
//
*The “real”/recorded etymology, which this is not, is interesting, and if you don’t already know, you might like to read about it. The word comes by way of a ship’s log, so-called based on a nautical technique of using a floating piece of wood to measure the speed of a ship.
(omg what did you just read?) //
or,
(omg what did you just write?)
Every blog is a re-invention of blogging, or at least it could be.
If one had to choose, one should rather be “jester” to the nerds than “queen” of them.
I don’t blog about snack foods lightly but here in Indo we have these keripik tempeh, like tempeh chips, that are so good and also complete protein…?
Bi-/multilateral causality, equiprimordiality, mimesis. Organism, energeia, wholeness. Natural analogues for artificial system, or whether there’s a real dividing line between those.
One could choose worse audiences (or readers) than (e.g. Milton’s) Satan. But the hardest ones to reach are often the “useful idiots” of God.
(File that one under “Vladimir Putin would smirk.")
Gus Dur, former president and Islamic leader in Indonesia, had a remarkable sense of theological humor. He was also disabled, and a fascinating proponent of religious pluralism.
I don’t consider myself a very religious person but I love to write about God.
(Sometimes I capitalize and sometimes not, depending on context and mood, and sometimes it’s not God but Allah. In addition, Allah has at least ninety-nine names. That complicates or simplifies things, depending on perspective.)
You have to deal with your anger because it’s God’s anger. You have to deal with your fear because it’s God’s fear.
Plastic was an important working component of the overall machine, which was fueled by fear. The machine was incredibly terrifying, which is how they had discovered perpetual motion.
Grace and the chicks demand peanuts every evening, earlier each day. It’s hard to say no because they get really loud. With that, and their hallway parades, we could film a Hitchcock spoof.
Sitting (lying) down to read Rumi and feeling like the sand as it slips through the funnel of the hourglass, and the glass bulb on the other end is Rumi.
Wishing the whole world a restful night of sleep.
Salam to all🙏🏻
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.