Chickens
(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.
I love being an animal. // As I sit down to write, in the bedroom, there begins an intensifying chip-chip, bok-bok from outside the front door… getting closer… going past. Oh! I do a little inward cheer.
Our house is partly open to gardens, which surround it on three sides, and these are terraced into different segments, to match the terracing of the farmland. Grace usually begins every morning in the “romance garden”, at one top corner, then works her way down to the lowest level, and increasingly, around to the other side of the house. But to go down, the chicks have to flap down a 1-1.5m drop, and while flapping-falling baby chickens are superheroes, they can’t flap-fall back up again.
So typically, as it gets dark, we catch them and bring them back to the brooding house at night, in the “romance garden”. And although they love their house, (Grace cannonballs into the nest and starts primping in the most self-determined, self-righteous way), the catching process isn’t really enjoyable. It involves E. grabbing Grace first, and as soon as he gets her she screams with the rage of Achilles, and he takes her to the hen house. Then I run everywhere chasing fluffy handfulls of zooming, mind-piercing cheeps, to jumble together in a box, count to make sure there are nine, and carry the box up the walls, grass staining hands and knees, back up to their house, for safety and calm and eventually quiet, which takes me a minute. Okay, so it sounds fun. But they self-express in ways that make it obvious, they hate nothing more than to be separated from each other.
Grace is smart. Mother knows that the humans do not like chickens in the hallway. Chickens in the hallway were a big “no”, in the days of B.H.C.E (before-hatched-chicks era). (Because poop.) But we have perhaps, in an undisclosed manner, changed our minds about this. Speaking seriously, as chicken servants, it’s important to us that they can “put themselves to bed”. And to traverse the human-house hallway is almost the only way for Grace to circumnavigate with her chicks through the gardens and levels, and get them back “home”, on their own. (There is another way, but it is slightly more advanced, somewhat under construction, and not nearly as fun for the chickens, probably, yet. It will “become fun” before there are ten roosters using our main hallway as their favorite place to nongkrong. Believe.)
So again, now. I leap up (!) to watch their transgression from the teras. Grace, who has finally built the courage, leads her chicks through the hallway of the house, past me, “that meddlesome woman”. And mom surely feels like a criminal as she does it, from her extreme expression. No, I will re-interpret. She looks at me like I’m the one getting away with a very embarassing murder. Ok, namaste, Grace.
The final obstacle is a quick leap over the goldfish canal. Bloop, bloop, bloop. And finally, after a grand tour of the premises, the hen and chicks emerge from the hallway out into the “romance garden”, which is their home garden, with the brooding house, where they sleep at night. Safe and sound. It is so familiar to all of them. They burst in nine directions, running and celebrating, peeping about it from all around the little piles of rocks, chukk-chukking with success. It’s a party. Grace is feeling extremely proud right now. I give her a lot of verbal praise and celebration. The first time, going all the way around, to bring yourself and your babies back home. Animals really feel these moments. (And “Alhamdulillah.” I love being an animal.)
Revelation. Every day, she takes them all the way around, shooting for home in the late afternoon. As cool shadow overtakes the green. Grace is following the sun.
(… Salam to all.)
Grace and chicks.
Reversal spells, mulberry stains, and mixed substance. //
Trying to understand everything as (part of) a “natural cycle”.
I send a text to my mother and then read it back over, (why do I do that?), decide I sounded high, think of the times when she has sounded similar, and I always assume it’s a “senior moment”. Time for another coffee.
It’s a “no hope for laundry” day. Sri Rejeki is glued to my lap, she knows what it feels like to be alone in the rain and she doesn’t like it. Not looking forward to chasing chickens in this. Wait, let me re-interpret myself, and speak it outloud. “I am looking forward to chasing chickens in the rain.”
(Doing a reversal spell on my PMDD, which stands for “Predisposition, Monthly, to Demons and Despair”.)
Thinking about traffic in Ubud, wondering what the future of that infrastructure situation is, and then remembering, I don’t have to wonder, because there’s an already apparent progression, from there, to Canggu, through to Kuta. Kuta is the future of us all. (There is no future for Kuta. Kuta is an eternity of unironic tackiness stuffed into hollowed-out cultural ruins, I guess, I haven’t been there for years.) The other relevant question is, where will be the “next” Ubud?
(What is history, if Kuta is where it all ends?)
Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. “Dear Barong, and whatever divine beings may be present in this place. May Kuta (the one that is inside of us all) bloom again with wildlife.”
Nobita (G.’s murai batu, songbird) sings with campur sari-ngdut, not consistently but often enough making harmony that it’s unsettling. Also, Mas K., from the workshop, is singing along with such a charming falsetto, as he (rhythmically) cuts wood with circular saw, that I can’t stop laughing and I might be confused. Wait, I think they’re both whistling… Mas K. is actually weaving his performance back and forth between whistling (with the bird) and singing (with the voice). This is almost virtuosic. And then, a woman neighbor stops by and has a conversation with him from her motorbike, and it sounds exactly like a spoken-word part in the music. And then I realize, I am in the campur sari.
(And this is the mixed substance!)
Rain lets up for a minute, with a hint of brightness, and roosters across the sawah are touching base, communicating, crowing as for their lives.
We go out on the motorbike at night to buy gorengan (fried tempe, stuffed tofu, weci, banana, sweet mung bean, tape). The kid selling gorengan asks me if I like “arang”/charcoal, making a joke about the color of my husband’s skin. I smile blankly. I massage E.’s shoulders a little on the way home.
He did harvest mulberries today, so his feet and hands are stained inky black. (The blacker the berry… semakin pedas the wife.)
When one makes an analogy, one calls attention to a similarity. One should also pay attention to the differences. In this way, one pays attention to everything.
Big rain again. Salam to all.
Witch’s mane and chaos truffles. //
I don’t look at the sky today. It’s too bright.
A discussion about zucchini, which isn’t commonly grown or eaten here, whether, where, and how we can grow it, in the wilder garden, outside the wall. Easy to grow, but the danger of curcubits is that the plants are favorite hiding places for pit vipers (the small green ones) and cobras (the “kings”). One also avoids walking in jungle areas, or anywhere really, without a wide-brimmed hat. Snakes will attack your head and face, from above, which, if you’re very lucky, doesn’t kill you.
Discovering periods of my life I seem to have stashed into dark, cobwebbed corners, so they’ve been barely, rarely remembered. Now, when I think of them, they strike me as odd, alienating, inappropriate. What to do with these memories?
Related: some things you can’t learn until you separate yourself. Dysfunctional situations prevent growth. Situations, institutions, environments, are not surface problems, but deep.
We stop at a small bridge, over a ravine, to collect aren palm fibers, (duk), from a fallen tree. It looks like a witch’s black hair, (it’s used as this, in ceremonial representation, also as mane of Barong), a matted tangle that we tug apart. Afterwards my skin is dry and tight, and sinuses are on edge from the dust.
Fragments of conversation with school children, walking by, two boys and a girl, puzzled to see us. Until we explain, “ini untuk tempat tidur ayam”. They smile, hands on hips, like adults. O iya, of course, it’s for chickens.
Back home. Grace leads chicks to the lowest garden, jumping down a one-meter (or so) drop. They need “assistance” getting back to the chicken house, so E grabs Grace and I grab the cilik-cilik, but it turns complicated as they scatter into a chaotic (cuteness) matrix. Soon I’m Lucille Balling again, chocolate chicks like quick-moving truffles, stuffing in bra, like an expert.
Separating oneself is like separating duk, tangled and tough. It decides whether and where it comes apart, and what comes with it, that you didn’t expect.
Now time for practice. Salam to all.
Full moon, sudah matang, tomato consommé, incandescent orb with eggplant-magenta smudged-charcoal setting, moving through air just chill enough to waken touch, silhouettes of palm trees dark enough to deepen vision, and presence dilates into possibility. Passing fragrance of pandan and frangipani. The best thing about living here is not seeing but feeling the island, how it vibrates as with mimetic electricity, a lucid dream.
On the motorbike, cozy in bright reds, pinks, orange woven scarf, wrapped around face as kerudung, black thumbholes hoodie, black leotard top and flowing layers, sparkling “fancy” flip-flops, holding husband, who’s handsome in black and bronze batik udeng and black bucket hat, and gold-trimmed randai pants, for dancing. We assigned ourselves the task of joy, tonight, and romance, and to get away. It was accordion music, view over ravine, pistachio gelato, single espressos and no distractions. Now, the drive home, through moonlit sawah, is brave, as if night-cleansing, to let busy city streets be forgotten behind backs.
We stop in the street, almost home, to see the moon. Close moment. Then engine off, we glide down the way, tires grinding gravel under sea of cricket-song. Unstrap helmets, put down/take off travel gear, wash hands and check on things to, piece-by-piece, unwind. E. checks the phone for messages of Ibuk. Checks progress on the locking gate, to be installed in front of her home, (the house where she was born), twelve hours' drive away. To keep her safe from wandering feet (and fears and memories and hallucinations). I check cats, asleep, and Grace, who clucks softly from the nest, as tucked-in chicks peek out from mother’s feathers, up past bedtime. We cover brooding house for insulation, shushing chicks, and latch the door. To keep tender bodies safe when the stray cat comes, howling with desire. Jeki will hiss and growl from the screened-in teras. Guardian is her favorite job. But now, aman, and so it’s time for peace and quiet, as goodnight moon, and the subtle art of letting go.
It never seems quite fair, as if, there will always be some tragedy to it. But no less beautiful, for that. The island of gods gives itself to those who give themselves to love.
Honeyed wafer set lightly into smoked amethyst sky. Grace’s nine eggs hatched into nine tiny black puffballs. Nine infant roosters, cheeping-cheeping… and she loves them with an intensity. Selamat purnama✨🌕✨
Grace, sitting.
More chicken news. //
Grace got up to stretch her legs, today, and I counted nine eggs.
I bring Frankie fresh water. He drinks it. I talk to him. He makes soft noises at me. I think we’re becoming friends.
Maybe. Older siblings are like the first trees, they grow tall and big, and younger siblings are like the next trees, they have to spread out, twist around, or find other ways to get light. It’s hard to be either one of these things.
Noticing the swastikas on neighbors' front gates. Here, it’s a symbol of balance. In the West, (its reverse is) a symbol of evil. Again here, a symbol of the instability of symbol.
(Evil remains evil, and, context is everything.)
Moments around which everything changes, or breaks, and I carried her with me, after that. (Writing about Bocara, the pony.)
Admire the optimism here.
I feel changes in my toes, (big toes mostly), the soles of my feet, my knees (twisty jelly), my shoulderblades, my triceps and elbows (little pops), my wrists, the pinky mound of my palms (crampy), my neck (cracking up and down spine), and even in my jaw (unpleasant tension). As the psoas (un)twist, the entire body follows. A crazy tour of the deep front line (myofascial meridian).
Cozy outfit: Soft grey sweater dress over brown-grey tank top, white pajama shorts, light grey ankle socks, charcoal grey buff worn like a beanie, old blue-grey tie-died shawl. Orange chocolate sachertorte and oat milk. Love fake winter.
Salam and goodnight to all.
Waking, as thinking, what we do with time. // Spending or wasting, as of fixed amount, and therefore an imperative, to put to good use. (Better wake up now, then.) Using it. As time is material. Filling it, or, as time is container. A schedule, with slots of, empty blocks on a page. Empty ones to the right, can be filled; empty ones to the left, empty time-passed, and nothing.
A fantasy of time: if only one could have all of that empty time. And then fill it up, past overflowing.
Go to see Grace. How is it she is filling (her) time? What is the action? (I called it sitting.) The eggs (under there) are her contemplations. Or perhaps, she is bodies, these days. Night passes, cold passes, sun comes and light warms. She is still, in the green, gives me nothing at all. (Am I empty?) My time is not hers, or her time is not here. She becomes barrier, wall of the garden, as stillness. A being of no-time, mother-protector of inner-other(s). It is paradise, in there. (And ten tiny, red-blinking heartbeats. InsyaAllah.) I am the against-witch, (against-which), I am the hunger. I am the waiting and the wanting-to-know.
There’s only so much one can do, in the morning. Coffee-making, cat breakfast, floor-sweeping, some laundry. Nongkrong with Frankie, putting shapes on a page. Skip around the old playground, as if forever, then, sent, posted, past. Hang out the laundry, as shadows shorten. Seek shade and retire. Dust returns to floors. As daytime becomes, all at once, too much heat, too much light, too much everything.
Sounds of campur sari (a genre of music, translates to “mixed substance”, combining a core of keyboard-synthesized gamelan, the rhythm of Sundanese kendang drums played for jaipong dancing, and folk-style, song-based storytelling) and power tools, this morning. Overgrown boys climb again to high places, up walls and up coconut trees, flaunt silly moves to make me start. Frankie gets a bath, then put into caged confinement, (still he crows), so he doesn’t disturb (he just can’t help himself) the sitting Grace.
Grace, who sits, and her sitting is her work, as meditation, as keeping the pale, rounded shapes beneath her, such fragile contained cosmoi, safe and warm and hidden, as stirring primary material into life. I have come to see her. She doesn’t move at my approach, nestled in an overgrown patch of green, the closest place to quiet. Her stare is intent, concentrated, full of something like determination. The knowledge of her mission. No doubt or question, no blinking, just full touching, with her heart-holding, feather-breasted body, still. Does she even see me, and if she does, as what? Black eyes on black-scaled face, black with spots of iridescence. Something in her is as when Buddha touches the earth, as Bhumisparsha. I am so impressed, my heart too is touched, to see Grace in her moment.
I say salam, to Grace. I leave her (sitting) there. And I go back to my (wordy) day.
Grace laid eggs.