Cosmos
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.
Students in submission. //
A difficult conversation, a revelation. So much (of reading this book) depends on acknowledging, wrestling, reconciling, releasing—-the impotence of outward-turning.
Inspired by the treatment of Sufism in KSR’s Red Mars series, (sci-fi and Islam: who knew?) I finally went looking. I found Allah’s servant, Ahmed Hulusi. Alhamdulillah, I believe he is much that I have needed as a guide to the Quran.
Always humbling, in a moment of seeking, to discover just the voice that connects your outer pieces and draws you deeper in.
“It’s a Farsi poem by Jalaluddin Rumi, the master of the whirling dervishes. I never learned the English version very well—
’I died from a mineral and plant became,
Died from the plant, took a sentient frame;
Died from the beast, donned a human dress—
When by my dying did I ever grow less . . .’“Ah, I can’t remember the rest. But some of those Sufis were very good engineers.”
(A Rumi reference, from Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson.)
Of course they are well-prepared for Mars. Mars is ever-singing in the Sufi heart.
After eighteen days on a convalescent diet, I finally got my veggie burger tonight. Beet-lentil burger with purple sauerkraut and charcoal mayo, roasted sweet potato wedges, and a creamy durian smoothie. I am full of flavor-colors.
From a fruitful exchange. I propose “a seed” as a self-incarnating teacher of divine mystery.
(Then to follow the seed back into its sleep, as to dream.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
Tonight, as begins a new lunar year.
I see there is beauty (also) in your invisibility.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌘🌑🌒
One beautiful day.🌈
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.
Tropical Christmas //
wonderful news, everything is less empty than advertised,
triple-checking our double-Christ by the crossroads, the unborn child
that Love is Real, however disturbingly ugly and poor. get ready
to suspect of “parasocial” relationships that they aren’t actually one-way (being at work in only one way). And “normal” social relationships aren’t two-way, well, not relationships of love. These are (“paranormally”) three-way, it’s called mediation
to invite another being-at-work to emerge than those presently spoken, or instead, that our voices have been momentarily invited
to escape I thought I must flee into falsehood. Beauty was only there, in circuses of impossibility, until my very shape was chosen by the eyes of this gently created face. In whose curves and creases it would be possible to cease flight and surrender. A shifting of ivory feathers, a self of un-defacing light. (A song!) Lo and behold (the beautiful self) it was (us, reading) you
(we had lost all reason, we had lost restraint)
a being built not to survive but to thrive, bellyfat shaking under half-lit moon, she is the gift of procreation. With dripping excess of bodies joined, masses of the partial and angry, legs, breasts, hands, flayed faces smeared with mud, and as she mounts the horizon, a star on her forehead through which is visible their heavenward mandala
their shapes were monster with mandala or Athena with gorgoneion
(each solstice a moment of peace,
and submission of lust to curvilinear motion)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌓
Peace, love, and a blessed darkest and lightest to all including the swingier parts of the globe. Our longest day is around 12.5 hours, tempered by clouds, intermittent rain, and a strong breeze, with a high temperature of 28c/82f. The equanimity makes it feel closer to the center of a certain world, but out on the fringes of another one.
(A good reminder to befriend the genius loci.)
Trying to focus on leisure, // to put it as a question. What exactly is it, where does it begin and end in my life?
Why are its edges so blurry?
Also, the idea of spending time. What happens to time if it’s wasted? Does something turn into nothing? Or was it nothing already, so nothing wasted, afterall?
We took a wrong turn in Denpasar today. I did the whole thing where a bule (following my husband, who was following the app) drives into a tiny, urban street that is also a crowded fruit market, and barely squeezes the car through the parked motorbikes and fruit shopping traffic. It was the first time that happened. We did ok. Balinese are so relaxed about stuff like this. People are just glad to see your smiling face.
As I drive, I point out a child hanging on the back of a motorbike, wearing a red and white school uniform, but no shoes. He tells me stories about being hungry, growing up in East Java. How neighbors would invite him in for dinner, to feed him. He always had flip-flops to wear to school, but his mom would get furious if he got his clothes dirty too fast. Kids would do their laundry at school, hand-washing and hanging outside the classroom to dry, so their moms didn’t get angry. (Even the bad kids were afraid of “the moms”.) He had friends that didn’t have flip-flops, because they were poor, so they went to school barefoot. (They didn’t have electricity yet in the village.)
I ask him which is worse, being rich or poor? He says, being rich.
(I’ve heard many of his stories before. We revisit them together, a few at a time. I collect them in an inner archive.)
Living here, I often feel a mixture of awe and loss, at being surrounded by so many stories that aren’t mine to tell, that otherwise slip away. This should probably be felt everywhere, and with everyone. But it isn’t.
Garbage has special metaphorical significance, here. In its apparent self-infliction, its mindless accumulation. (There is a widespread assumption that plastic dissolves back into the earth, like leaves.)
(Wouldn’t that be nice?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌔
A metaphor for the parts and a different metaphor for the whole, is a human being. // That old triple goddess, the zoon logon echon.
Or like Prometheus holding desperately onto his chains, while his insides are being picked at, so he doesn’t fall into a void. (Permitting a small symbolic alteration..)
I sometimes think about the central mediations of the major Abrahamic religions (as far as I understand them) and how those must be key to the logic of their respective theologies. For Judaism, the covenant. For Christianity, a mother and a father becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child, and/or the passion. For Islam, the messenger.
It gives me some confidence that, even though it seems like a geographical accident, I (we) found my way to the messenger, (the messenger found a way to me?), when a messenger has already accomplished the most important mediations in my life, over and over again, clothed in different bodies and texts and appearances. My life’s passion and work has been the search for and interpretation of messages. Now, I am offered a message of Islam, which is a message of Peace (as-Salam, as in, assalamualaikum). As a world composed of messages, the messaging world has been very kind, to me. It has cradled me, (I always think of Thich Nhat Han, counseling me to cradle my anger), to make the anger inside of me feel loved and cared for, that has been the love and care of the messenger, patiently sending messages. Waiting for me to find them, and listen to them, and discover their sense, and follow them. Until, at last, a message of peace.
A messenger is very close to the Logos. A messenger is an apt prophet for writers and above all translators. A messenger is a teacher who doesn’t teach, a (musical) counterpoint to learning, especially from afar. A messenger carries a message and it’s not, strictly speaking, her own. A messenger might bring the news, or she might bring a message of peace.
The “seeming” shifts. It stops seeming like a geographical accident, and begins to seem like (reveal itself as) destiny. As it does, other things fall into places, that were already falling, as a planetary whole. Like a webbing of streams and rivers flowing into lakes and then oceans.
(I have a tradition.)
A message can come (and go) in many forms. Its essence is in its (departure and) arrival (and in the differences between these things). A message is manifold and fitting.
What I feel, when I feel my feelings, is resonance, and then humility, and then gratitude. (Resonance is with study, which is measured, but all three are somewhat infinite feelings.) That a message might reach me from across the entire world, in a way that feels “right on time”, (a message delivered is always on time), and these are the messages that have.
(I am a jihadi.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
One might feel alone, or imagine oneself joining a chorus of the unheard. Every song about war is longing in its heart to be a song about peace. (The flow and the solidarity of Music.)
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🌓
Sky from home (9). // Selamat purnama🖤
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.
Cold damp dark of night ascends, is parted, penetrated by light like swords of angels stabbing through the atmosphere. The remainder is patched parts of gray. Saturday morning is going on, tiny chip-chatterings in coconut trees, sounding roosters-out the four directions, cats glut themselves on breakfast then seek pools of fire to glory-bathe. Grace and chicks burst across the yard in their boisterous reply to dawn.
Sitting, puzzling, how far into (this) the sun can go, is the waiting question. Sorting through some past impressions and interpretations, shifts in orientation, momentous or errant conclusions drawn. Awareness of other entities, not oneself, inside a self, creeping through cracks and chiselling away in stealthy corners, strangers. Emerging from logic-fogs in desolate confusion, at baffled love, not knowing how one got there or where one left oneself, uncovered. Feeling for order among untrusted elements, a haunted shipwreck and the old debate over the weather, over whether any of this is salvageable, after rain. Leaning on others.
Strength of sun settles as clouds knit back together. There are periods of shadow, periods of heat, hammers sounding from the outer rooms, and weary resignation to the unborn symbols whose beauty-queen machinations dictate progress over the liabilities of (tear-stained, tangled, raw) labile perception. Letting go, carrying on.