Cosmos
telescopic texts (avec "?") (5/x)
can we remember together, after all
or does my voice harden the picture frame?
by being body, do i gather you
intolerably, or spread you thin as kin,
one stroking throb of summer esoteric —
you tickle me with feather of a peacock.
a gazer’s gloomy imagery is perfume
of incense, arousal at great distances,
long-smouldering and lit by tender match.
far from the proximity of virgins
there burn the verbs of love, arrayed
as galaxy of irretrievability —
before my eyes, you took and held my hand.
//
wa’alaikumsalam + selamat purnama 🌕
stellar veil //
Æ.5 (butane lighter)
are you ungovernable,
and getting hot — like me? we’ll be
tempestuous, together.
ours, of cosmic squabs,
result in smoke-stained sheets
and purple bruises. of Mars,
don’t worry, baby
your revolver is magnetic.
let’s go collapse.
//
telescopic texts (avec "mon oncle") (3/x)
O man, if you could see her witchlocs now,
or what’s become of Eastern expertise.
she is swamp-bitch, and twisted, twined and hitched
without romance by ruby claw to thorny
crown, her hair, each barb a bell, each herb
a suicide. she’s heard of nobody’s
outrageous feats of raw technology.
in wracked rumors of Western fantasy
she knit a while textiles anti-exotic,
but sweaters have no use in the tropics,
where skin is king. and now we’ve come uncrimped,
uncrumpling, algal anadyomene
of muddy water, Charybdis of the bog.
what’s history is past. nevertheless, he asks —
why, woman, have you gone au natural?
//
the way of buah potong
discreetly,
the membrane
he seeks
where earlier skin
defines still-
vibrant
pupal pulp
some flesh
surrenders simply
to cutting
releases seeds
like fish eggs
to a spoon
some arms itself
with stinks and spines
( the risqué
are forbidden
in public places
but true buah
is nowhere
vulgar )
or squeezes
open, slurpy
pearls of furry
mollusk
some section
selectively, not
as you like it
whining pith or
dogged rind
crumbling shards
of jewels,
broken
but
felt gently,
their presence
is luminous
crescents
sliced
stars
skinless egg
of snake
tumbled boulders
of Mars
he speaks
with knife
submits
in pieces, re-
composed
honeyed
and binding
as Yusuf
suffering
many
( and blade- )
kissed
fingertips
//
idea for the public-facing garden
three fates
with gigantic anime
boobies
Clotho
Lachesis
Atropos
dewi
of some
stranger land,
bodies carved
painstakingly
in wood
are set
to rule a while
from garden,
rambling
flowers bracelet
round their
skinny limbs
bending over
facing up
as if to see
the water aspect
of they and their
bosoms reflected
pornographic
sanded and grainy
thread-makers,
rippling
serene cut
in glassy pond
of koi
//
telescopic texts (avec “mon oncle”) (2/x)
well, i make believe an uncle, dead
and dear. less clear is fortune of the bird.
to fly, to seek, and what on earth to find
but torrent of an obsolescent mind,
(he said), obscure and arduous to hear.
and yet, it flies. and though he doubts her crown
and midnight sight, she will fly too. and though
her silver glows in anecdotal mood,
her lilt, of stellar tilt, still loving, lingers
in braided dancing round a pool of blue,
tuning her clutch in nesting eddy of
red bird, whose course is old and hardly true,
and yet, he lives. rising, as golden-red
in flight, crowing like Scorpio in the east.
rest easy, uncle cold and fluttering
and lately of rambunctious residue.
a dove survives heaven to choir anew.
//
snow white turning
has the twinkle ever
been for nothing
more than
to leave
a loving
artifact
to make
a deathless
hen,
whose faith outpaced
her season’s augury
this fruit is sticky
stretchy,
furious
its nectar possessed
of Lethean ambience
my arms are glittering
swans, my pillows
pur de lait, my eyes
are royal-blooded
blue navé, my dreams
are dialogues
of dolphins
how can she
believe the verbs
you writ, when all
you tender-left
were winterscape, or
sidereal tongue-
traps, of snowmen
that psychedelic night,
she sapped the wine
and stole the spade
howl-lit, she went
digging
in mud of your
decaying spring
for word-eaten
bodies
to meet
the gristled
marrow
to touch and leave
fingerprints
melting
on tongue
rose red grows
from a hollow bone
while moon-
shot belladonna
is kissing cousins
with bull-horned
hemlock, reckless
and honest
//
animal entertainment
they were watching us
as we ate our dinner
the grazers and
the gazing, directly
we felt
disconcerted,
on display
after some symposium
the resolution was
to recompose our stars
and watch them back
//
dreamcatching
is your weaving procrastination or
bare art to chart the tempest of my heart
make me be making you become our all
is it wisdom when you step away from wood
the holding firm of it, its firmament
but temperamentally gossips with birds
is it deception that you tangle, home
of spider-silk as wordy work, anchored
by glittering images that come to know me
no pristine landscape catches stellar wings
earth shakes the boughs of quaking sun
scattering us as gibbering bats from ashes
airborne we’re hunting fireflies between
a melting Luna’s effulgent ice cream
dodging light-threaded night and Venus rising
i am assemblage channeled to be none
you are motion, savior of fitful sleep
the rhythmic tide unravelling its mooring
draw deeply down where one is one is one
fly home again wherefrom wind-woven sea
embroiders iridescent migrations
//
Wasalamu’alaikum 🌖✨
how to watch the Eta Aquariids meteor shower
behold
pendulous drape
of cosmic cat
uncoil
the breath
where bodhisattva
sat
orangutan
persuaded
chimpanzee
let’s be
moving targets
together
baby
//
thanks for the heads up @Miraz💫
the letter B
a small stone stopped
me on the way
having forgotten &
being renamed
tear
in
the glass
//
insp. by “Three things, together”
Contextualizing TESCREAL (a sketch)
//
in phenomenology as dialectical dismemberment:
(A) –> post-logos –> post-politics –> post-nature –> (X)
//
(A) is the logos fully realized.
Logos is the end (telos) of natural being.
Humans are (by nature) political animals.
Tyranny is the fantasy of anti-nature.
The end (telos) of politics is justice.
Democracy was a remnant of justice.
(American democracy has been the forgetting of ends.)
Fascism is the (technology-enabled) fantasy of the post-political.
Techno-fascism is the usurpation of justice by technology (“AI”).
TESCREAL is the (“AI”-enabled) fantasy of the post-natural.
The end of the post-natural is endlessness.
The post-natural fully realized is (X).
//
Human beings by history catapult toward (X).
Human beings by nature stretch back toward (A).
//
Going ‘down’ is post-physics, going ‘up’ is meta-physics.
//
(Physics comes from Aristotle’s ta phusika, “those on nature” or “the natural things”, from Ancient Greek φύσις / phusis, origin, birth, nature, the natural. Coming to be (and passing away). Metaphysics comes from Aristotle’s ta meta ta phusika, lit. the ones (books) after the ones (books) on physics. The Latin interpretation of ta meta ta phusika as “what is beyond nature” isn’t accurate, as the original Greek referred to the customary ordering of the texts in archives. Aristotle calls it, in passing, “first philosophy”.)
//
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts”
Shakespeare, As You Like It.
//
Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un
to Allah we belong and to Allah we shall return 🌙
//
her ecosystem
the things you took are empty, cast-off and
abandoned spells, porcelain and wooden shells,
remnants of oceans past and absent wonder —
tombs wherein she gave birth, by way of earth
to visions that unfold, un-helled, in dark
of pockets, moon-mothered, saturn-supressed
and mars-propelled past deeper houses that
she’ll build, nightmares of sword-swallowing flesh
without a bone, without a government,
letters of constitutions burned, laundered
in surf, your teeth, your plastic handicaps,
your non-fungible bird, your poems unheard
through algorithmic feats of isolation —
when all she ever wanted was (your heart, stirred)
for one watery moment to be the law
in her place, her body, her ecosystem
//
(“Sub-tweeting” Babylon.) //
“There’s no education here. There’s no geometry, no music, no reading or translation of any kind.”
Reminding myself, I was full of outrage for a long time. It will probably be back. It seems to be cyclic, like the moon: a threaded crescent now, disappearing. Eva-nascent.
I believe rage is a deeply revealing human experience of self.
(Does it count as self-study, to use the “search” function on my blog? Incidentally, I love the “search” function on my blog. I use it all the time. It is my favorite special feature. And this is technology that, I just know, certain ancient authors would have been tickled by.)
Of course I do. One of my favorite cosmic-conceptual or noetic perspectives is based on a (dialectically-productive) partnered-duality between Achilles and Odysseus. Each one of whom is a poetic expression (or alchemical transformation) of rage.
Given: a triangle, between Achilles, Odysseus, and the Poet.
It’s like Nimrod has ordered his subjects (including you) to build the tower and you’re optimistic about the embellishments you can make in the brickwork.
I didn’t quite state the obvious, here: the best way to “mind your own business” is to work on (that means, to dedicate active focus to figuring out through embodied and active understanding, or a hypothetical/experimental method) what your business really is.
Coming up on Ramadan and trying to get our thoughts in order. The holy month is always something I know is coming and yet it turns out impossible to prepare for. This will be my sixth one. So far it always hits with the same inexplicable, mind-deafening force.
Maybe fasting brings out my rage. My difficulty fasting isn’t the not-eating. I can go without food. (In some ways, being vegan is a continual fast.) My difficulty in fasting is the starting-to-eat-again. The fast-breaking. It’s the ugliest feeling, like my body gets angry and rebels by not wanting to eat again. Like the body wants to punish me (for fasting, for refusing to serve its appetites) by subsequently refusing food, going numb. It feels like anorexia as revenge. Sometimes it feels like demon possession. This feeling scares me. I can’t tell whether I need to avoid it or approach it.
I never know how these things will affect the blog. Often I keep on writing, and a lot of words, but don’t feel good posting them.
Oh. I realized I forgot to include one of the most obvious idols, maybe in a class of its own, which is “my technology”.
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌒
I am not full of outrage.
On conservation as (eva)nascence. // Comment on the first part of the shahada. // Prelude to the incoherence. //
The error of so-called conservatism is that it always comes down to idolatry. Which means, it comes down to nothing at all.
I include among “conservatives” anyone who grieves at the dismantling of present empire. (The time is past for quibbling between Christians and progressives, technologists and institutionalists. Y’all are the same, just drowning in -isms. You are hereby invited to give up your ghosts and make amends.)
As it is idolatry, conservatism is dualism. The idol (whether that’s “the wisdom of forefathers” / “universal human rights” / “liberal democracy” / “all these old books” / “my civilization” / “my job” / “my planet” / “my foreskin” / “my infant child” / or even, for a lucky few, “my esoteric tradition") is worshipped at the expense of the remainder. Well, this is blasphemy against the remainder, and as such, blasphemy against the idol too. Idolatry is an equally absolute error no matter what form it takes. It is immanently forgivable, but absolute.
The era of Tr-mp is obviously (for the privileged) a time of endings. Every news article, here as elsewhere, reflects this and loudly. But the era is one of beginnings too. Beginnings that are well on their way, already visible to themselves. As a seed is visible to itself before human eyes perceive anything green, so truth, as life, has been ignored until now, kept veritably invisible by the dualism of empire’s desperate holding on. Well, we must learn to be blind before we can learn how to see.
The first thing Muslims say in the shahada, or testimony, is La ilaha illallah. There is no god but the god. There is no god but Allah. This is not a statement of faith, as of holding on. The first mistake was to believe that Allah could be held. So the first statement is one of letting go, of letting go of the god. You see, we had been holding them (the god). As if it was by holding them that they (the god) would not be lost to us. We were acting as if they (the god) were the baby, and we were doing the holding. Rather than the other way around.
Letting go (of what I have been holding) opens me for relationship with truth, definition and witness as one. Only the whole is Allah.
The work of being human is to be a part of a living whole. (Here’s a theology of minding one’s own business, broadly conceived.) I myself am only a part. However many flicks of infinite life are reflected through these meager facets, it remains less false to say they are not mine. And I (as human) admit that the only thing worthy of conservation is, whatever the cause, beyond mine to conserve. (In the next breath of the shahada, we are reminded of Allah’s self-conservation.) So we come to submission:
To seek (out of love) from a temporary place (albeit a temple) the ever-ageless in the ever-new.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌒
//
I am the difficult daughter; // I am also a grateful wife.
Not just moving to the other side of the world, (and converting to Islam, from a Presbyterian family), but my mother has to learn a whole other calendar if she wants to wish us a happy anniversary. I explain it again this year. “It’s the first full moon after lunar new year, Mom.” “Okay. So next year it will be on…” She looks up the date. It’s also the last full moon before the holy month of Ramadan. But I don’t tell her that because it wouldn’t be helpful.
If I were a character in a novel, these would be external analogues for internal structures, helpful signs for a reader, to give a good idea. Of all the boundaries I’ve traversed, all the rivers crossed without knowing a way back, (well, literally oceans). Growing always farther away from whatever it was we could never call home.
They are that, for us, but they’re also insistently concrete obstacles. Distances not easily traversed, even by plane. Family with brown skin and kinky hair. (“What do people in Indonesia look like?” my grandmother asked. We both knew what she meant. There was no simple answer to her loaded question.) Laws and customs that repel. (“Muslims are required by their religion to commit acts of terrorist violence,” my father stubbornly held. The immovable rock face of a cliff. In what must have been one of our last conversations.) Altogether different measurements of time.
When I do think about it (I usually don’t), I like to think I’m inviting my mother on an adventure she was never quite daring enough to undertake, by herself (for herself). And all of these things become rites of passage for almost anyone who would ever know or love me. Everyone except for one person. And tonight is our night.
We sit in beach chairs and the frothy tide swirls beneath us, bypassing the sand-inundated sea wall. Then we secure our flip-flops (at some distance) and walk in up to our knees. Sometimes feeling like this rough surf, the bulging swell of a stormy spring tide, pressing always further in than before. (We had submerged ourselves this morning. It had still been pretty rough, we had gone just far enough in for melukat.) Fighting to keep steady. Watching her approach. Wondering when it would be that a person becomes too difficult to go in. Too tumultuous, even for melukat. (What would be the measure?) Wondering if there is such a thing, as “too difficult”.
(We doubt there will be such a thing. Perhaps this doubt is our unshakable faith.)
The waves are taller than we are now, billowing walls of ravenous white under the bright moon. They gobble away the sand. It’s become a steep incline. They come further than you expect, every once in a while making great splashing displays against the sea wall, behind you now. But don’t look away. For they pull back and cling to the earth as they go, drawing everything under and in, sucking at your calves, catching you off-guard. One balances, expands to receive it. A constant calling to be re-absorbed.
The moon has illuminated the sky in dappled ivory edges against misty midnight black. In the pattern of a wild celestial animal. Arcing over us, the body of Nut. Our eyes widen; we are syncretic by nature. We seek the correspondence between Luna and Ocean, learning by as many senses as can be roused. This one here, together with that. This endless appetite, for all the Earth, planets and stars. We stretch out toward the end of a temporal chain. We will be there too; we also correspond.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin.
Selamat purnama. 🌕
//
And then we were darkness comprised of crickets,
Resident textures of stars, witness to
Unbound interiors, and delivered by
The same face-dispersing name as ever.