Cosmos
Orchid and Traveller //
Lost selves-of-sand resolve as empty time.
As moon that disappeared, or star that failed
to be itself, forging light like iron
chains, and dragging dredged-up planetary
prisoners into debtor’s knowledge. Some
girls worship diamonds, some spilt blood. Of gods,
gravity hallowed flings them, winged, past
the fixed orbit of that rotten town, where
sanctity is suicide, reconceived
as end, turned upside-down. Which ones
are wholesome hunger, scarlet stain, or junk
jetsam, are judged by what rags come undone
in passing. I come close, closer to you.
Here quivers the pink rabbit’s nose, to taste
on solar breezes dying destinies
of sight. Soft lips on eye. And the breathing
body of a ram, inside her, twin horns
repenting tearfully the pious act
of girls, as woman, lost for ‘swords, that shot
their bleak comet close-as-chiasmus to
the split-fruit sundae, cool and creamy core
of chocolate-drizzled, measure-melting Love.
//
(Submitted to September’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Matthew Graybosch a.k.a. Starbreaker. The topic is “Power Underneath Despair”.)
Anger, which is of love and loss, is a dragon (dangerous and dialectical) that you tame, and then ride, through cloud tops scattering rainbows in fizzy, kaleidoscopic patterns at your passing. Its yolk is what heats you from the inside, tears melting as rain into rivulets down clefts of leaf-patterned veins toward the womb of the earth, crying (of servant or master, at sound of own voice), in no color but all color, as metal, water, woodwind, swansong of phoenix, cradled in crescent. You rested there, to watch. From a distance, you beheld charcoal and ashes scattering through atmospheres, burnt snow falling, lining the sponge-tunnels of lungs and gills with glass splinters all colors of black, laying it down until pelvic bones overflow as beggars' bowls, abundantly silent, a prelude to epochal winter. Landscapes, exhausted by element, ripple below you as satin sheets of mineral reflection, and smooth, sonic transitions from error into the opposite of whatever it was you believed, rounding into sustainable orbits, or perfect planetary poems. It’s a chorus of angels, just being themselves, being holy. Those who were decent and kind, who believed with their undine hearts that fishwives were wealthy, and who buried in bosom only what or whom all could be borne by the cosmic queen of moderation, with her gardener’s tools and her grey eyes fading, at staggered horizons, to gold.
(// Fire-egg.)
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.
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.)
“Being Balinese //
is
so
much
upacara.
From being born,
until
you
die,
Mas!"
is what he said.
With a surprised grin on his wrinkled, spotted face, when he said it, light-hearted, calm, and satisfied to be heard, or not heard. He was sitting in the bale, at the sangga on top of the banjar building, leaning on a post. In front of him was a box-shaped table with offerings, flowers in woven grass dishes, sticky rice jaje, and a spiral-bound notebook, slightly weathered, on the pages of which were words, in the Balinese language, to a song or prayer. He had just been singing into a microphone without looking at that notebook. He had finished the song, switched off the microphone, and set it carefully on the table-box. His face glowed as it dawned on him.
“Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born, until you die, Mas!”
(“Upacara” is ceremony. “Mas” is a polite form of address for my Javanese husband. He looked back and forth between us, when he said it.) We laughed, and my interpretation was that we laughed because the look on his face was so joyous, it must be a joke. E. agreed, making sure I understood, that this great-great-grandfather had just shared with us a really good joke.
I had been thinking about what I wanted to be writing. Sometimes I dissociate at upacara, especially when there’s something unsettling. This one had begun with a nice conversation, while sitting on a mat next to a young Balinese girl with the roundest, deepest eyes, in matching pink sarung and kebaya, who touched her toes with mine, wiggling. As if by accident. But the conversation was with a man from the next village over. He articulately was exchanging acquaintance with E., in a way I could mostly understand, which always comes across as extra considerate. The man was holding a slender white goose. As he listened to my husband, he examined the goose. With two touching fingers, he smoothed a stray feather on its head. He stroked the length of the goose’s body, to calm it, as it shifted with fear.
The goose would momentarily be sacrificed.
I never know what to do with my face, in these situations. What I deeply wish I could do is look into the goose’s eyes and talk to it. To tell it, I see you. I don’t care how that sounds, it’s what I really want to do. But I am a guest. It wouldn’t be right, to my hosts. It wouldn’t be fair, to my husband. So in fact, I am hiding. I don’t want anyone to notice how hard it is, for me, to look anywhere but at the goose. (The discipline of eyes is an essential part of dancing, here.) So I shut off my face. The little girl’s toes are still casually touching my own. But the goose is wrapped in a piece of fabric, around its middle, and the friendly man is re-wrapping it, securing it, as if with care. The wrapped piece of fabric is the sarung of the goose, it is dressed respectfully in sarung, just like me.
Just like all of us.
I bring it up with my husband later, the goose, I cry a little, and we talk about the words of the great-great-grandfather. He is the oldest man in our village, he is ninety-eight, we have sat with him before and nongkrong(ed) as he was holding and caring for his newborn great-great-granddaughter, a very cute and fat baby with diamond studs in her milk caramel ears. E. is impressed that the old man told the joke, and we were the only ones who laughed, not the Balinese people sitting nearby. Me, too. But the spritely old man had addressed it to us, and other people nearby had been distracted, eating. So it didn’t really seem spoken for them.
I keep thinking about the old man’s words, and bringing them up with E., to hear him tell me again. “Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born… until you die, Mas!” E. says, with the right expression. And we laugh. It reminds me of the look on his face, the suspense and the gesture. How, when he said it, he referred to all this, and he referred also to himself. “Upacara, from birth, until death.”
Eveningtime in the sawah, the last night of Odalan, and a sliver of almond light hangs in the east, against periwinkle into deep lavender haze. Chill air floods from the highlands and mist spills out from ravines. The voices of elders carry, again from the banjar, across cloudswept rice fields, and coconut palms are sighing, tidal, in the shifting breeze. They’ve been singing every night, for more than a week. That’s his voice, I know it now.
Sweet smoke-smudged, broken flowers in hair, rice pressed on third eye and throat, sacred water splashed, with mark of goddess on your arm. So many words for how it hurts to let go. The same way it hurts to watch a goose be soothed by a man who’s about to slit its breast and spill its blood, in service to powers that will chase away bad spirits. Compassion is the key to sacrifice, this is what you say, and you hate it. And you are supposed to hate it. And you will wonder at that, but you will do it anyway, you will let yourself be given. Because your life doesn’t belong to you, at all, in the way you believe. Not in a way that will ever make you happy, or good. Not the part of you that hurts like that. And it was a joke, spoken by a man with only a few teeth left. And in his smile, it was an explanation. For both of you, but especially, the stranger.
Tiresias, back and forth between man and woman, gains inner sight through the cruel magic of mutilation. Again and again, verse after verse, the great-great-grandfather sings. There’s something I was, and something I am becoming, he is singing with a grandmother, her voice, trembling, his voice, alive. A steady, alternating song, words weaving between hidden constellations. Nobody who can hear him is as old as he is. I have seen him now, on the roof of the banjar, and I imagine him there, both hands holding the microphone, his eyes half-closed, not needing the book. I say to E., we will go to his funeral. E. says, yes, of course we will.
What I actually want, is that we go to his one-hundredth birthday party. I believe that we will make it there, first. But I don’t know at all, what to bring, that will be an appropriate gift.
There is nothing in this world that is actually straight.
(Isn’t that right?)
(One still loves the geometry of Euclid,
which manages somehow to have nothing,
and everything, to do with all that.)
μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου. // Mousiken poiei kai ergazou. // Make music and work at it.
(This message comes to Socrates repeatedly in his dreams, as Plato describes in the Phaedo, (at 60e6), which takes place on the day of Socrates' death by hemlock. Socrates also describes himself as experimenting with his interpretation of the message.
This is an example of a daimonic message, in Diotima’s✨ sense of daimon, which is something that goes in between the human and the divine. One might keep it as a mantra, or reminder, subject to interpretation…)
The Poem
ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν;
Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
//
Holding (with love, and so
gently) dear Phaedrus
(my day, light-ephemera)
my first and undying
metaphor, for
holding (with love, and so
longing) as asking
(as humbled-home-making)
the perfected question
to keep you. Pan,
beloved, as the drawing-
together (from the inside)
of meaning, and lover
as embrace (from the
outside) of horizon, sun-
set to sunrise, as all-time,
is the heavy becoming light-
as-boundary at the edge
of a world. We are there,
together:
the hand
and the what-would-be-
held.
( As nature
I am birthing and dying
unquestionable irresponsive
a fleeing, hiding and
by-many-wanted thing. )
( As human
I am messy, interminable
a political and personal
history of hysteria, making
and remembering, desiring
and deceiving, a restlessly
in-between
word.
A fool and a monster,
my pillaged possessions
are images and accounts
of war, and music
is how I play failure
as comedy, as a
question for a problem
with a deadly and un-
summarizable sound. )
( As god,
I am end (of motion),
I am source (of motion),
I am being (of motion),
I am (hungry
for motion),
I am
may-we-be
love. )
Morningtime, in a garden. And what is
this, that was laid in my lap? That is si-
lent but asking, that seems sent, but scatters
leafing-out patterns of my un-formed self,
harmonic. I need to know. Is it male
or female, flesh-fire of creature, salad
scrumptious and/or ambrosial bane? Shall I
eat it, be eaten by it, become it
or come into dust, be taken, wind-swept
and tearful, or reborn as clean, unseen
green, after all? I must know. I cannot
not know its reflecting, it blooms when I
touch it, it shivers, it is water-light,
earth-dispersing, kaleidoscope versing,
tongue-teasing shadow of radiant tree.
//
(About.)
Pan //
(Is it)
the shiver
that
passes through your body
(to endings from beginning)
when
you make the connection
(from ending to beginnings)
and then realize
it isn’t you
who made it
(?)
Sometimes, to get back on the right path, you have to circumnavigate the globe.
As time persists in circularity, I wonder (again) what makes this morning different from the last. There are two spider bites on my leg. (Each one two dots of red, making four dots total, with pink smudges of irritation around them.) There is dirty laundry I left soaking, for putting in the wash today. This morning, there is no specific sun, just bright cloud we seem to be a part of. Being-in-cloud is not the best for drying clothes. But the sky changes quickly here, so I, perhaps recklessly, forge ahead, and start the load in the machine.
Sometimes the cloud comes down and eats us, from above, from its permanence, further up the island’s altitude. It can be days or a week with no direction to the light. Cloud also soaks up sound. I’m accompanied now mostly by the shushing, rolling rhythms of the washing machine, nearby. It occurs to me, this is one of the less problematic (almost comforting?) of the machines. Yes, it works. So I can focus on this thing here. I like it and I almost trust the washing machine. (The sun is another matter, here’s hoping happily to be surprised.)
After purple salad.
In progress. (pandan)
Anxiety is a small crisis of faith happening constantly under everything. Like lava running under a thin crust of earth, always about to break into fragments of land on a torrent of molten rock. It can burn you (alive), or you could stay still (for fear), or you could become somehow like it (enough to survive). Crazy, you. You must burn through things, sometimes. It makes you unbearably lonely to be locked in a room with human people, but when you exit, you are not alone. You flow outward, or inward. You meet with an interjoining web of rivers of lava, each bringing news of its own catastrophe. Spreading the word. The core is turning, the burning is real.
Do not lose yourselves, any of you. Altogether, you are changing Earth. You are Mother, becoming. I interpret you as terrain, but from the air, one could see, that you have inevitably been channeled.
Music is artificial intelligence. (Anyone who says differently is selling something.) (Or are themselves being sold.)
Under rain again. Big grey above, sucking sponge beneath, birdcall from all corners. Everyone wants to speak. (Good morning, Frankie.) Knowledge and being known across distance, sound as comprehension. (And what is it you say?) Crowing. A sometime slow sheen, passing in and out of soaking pour, dry under roofs, (mostly), we let the weather check for leaks. You will not know a house until it rains ten-thousand times. (Numbers become abstract, here.) House logic, according to which, demonstration is a demonstration. (And everything is fixable, including you.) Solid structure carries watery indeterminate around the sweet space of human habitation. (A house being clear and present negation.) Emptiness is also comprehension. Toes cold, eyes blinking open, coffee is fire.
Battlegrounds at borders, clashing signs, // have me wondering this morning, are we artworks or alive? And the conflicts between us, what they say. That living (bodies) fight as bodies, over territory and resource, and cannot overlap. While artworks are hypothesis, from their inception, and somewhat placeless. So artworks violate embodied borders. Like airborne virus, impossible to contain.
Community of action, community of speech. The latter demands unison, sameness, in what is said. While the former works from difference. Different parts do different things, for the sake of accomplishing some one thing, impossible alone. One cooks, one cleans, one repairs the house, one goes to market. One economizes, one prioritizes. Actions for the sake of all, though each might have something (very) different to say.
Is it person? Or is it hypothesis? Here, behind these signs. Hypothesis is lawless. Bodies have no immunity against it. (Contrary to the myth of liberal arts, this was the function of education. Not “freedom”. But immunity, protection, fortification, against this.) That there could have been a body, a citizen, a living human being, subject to certain laws and customs. But poetry renounced that limit. Escaped sidedness. So poets make (if at all) mediocre (at best) neighbors. And,
A life of beauty is (almost always) a life of crime.
Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim. Blessed Eid to all who observe. // Today (here) Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha, a holiday in memory of Ibrahim’s (Abraham) readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail (Ishmael) to Allah (God). There isn’t the same popular mudik/migration in most of Indonesia around Eid al-Adha as there is around Eid al-Fitr. Many people go to the mosque and pray, and some who can afford it purchase a (non-human) animal to kill, or to have killed, as a ritual of sacrifice.
I have complicated thoughts and feelings regarding ritual (non-human) animal sacrifice, and I will not personally participate in it. (It’s optional, for a Muslim, so I don’t break any rules there.) But the story of Ibrahim, and especially his readiness to sacrifice, as well as the thing, (the child), and the promised lineage, (the historical, embodied, coming-to-be and passing-away, of the future), that he is ready to sacrifice, I find that to be an extraordinary lightpost. (Relating to what I wrote yesterday, about Īśvarapraṇidhāna.)
Ibrahim is brave, he does not fit with his community, (who worship idols), and he fights to establish his own relationship with the divine. He does not hide. He listens to dreams. He barely hesitates. His devotion can be interpreted, (or rather, felt), as cruel unresponsiveness to his human relationships and blindness to his own limitations. We are rightly terrified.
(Of Ibrahim, and his daemonic readiness.)
So Allah provides Ibrahim with a substitute, the ram. This serves a double purpose, both to reward his readiness, and to contain the terrifying nature of it. Ibrahim, “in the end”, does not need to kill his child, and all of humanity can breathe a sigh of relief. (Although later, he will send him, and his mother, into the desert. It seems a never-ending trial.) In Islamic tradition, the memory of it (Ibrahim’s readiness) has been further contained by this day, every year, Eid al-Adha.
As I understand it, this is something of the purpose of religion. To contain the terrifying (and otherwise problematic) in human being, to build laws and customs around it, to codify prayer in relation to it, thereby to tame it, and to make possible the establishment of political communities of trust and moderate prosperity. Not to forget the terrible readiness of Ibrahim, but somehow to live beside it, as we play out our animal lives, on earth.
By containing Ibrahim’s terrible readiness inside the symbolic act of killing the ram, the tradition builds a barrier around this moment in Ibrahim’s heart. It is a veil through which one may never see, a hijab in the relationship between finite and infinite. My interpretation of scripture is that this barrier, while accepted gladly by the community, is ultimately provisional. The entire thing that differentiates Ibrahim from the idolators is his stubborn insistence on direct relationship with Allah. This makes him receptive to infinite demand. Indeed, what makes the sacrifice holy, and not idolatrous, is the awareness that, at any moment, the ram might not be enough. No. The ram is already nowhere near enough.
(And the veil is already lifted.)
Ibrahim’s heart is the human heart. And his readiness is what is demanded of human beings, who bridge an otherwise inconceivable gap, between creature and creator. An animal responsible both to finite and infinite. The very nature of our in-between nature is terrible. Terror at Ibrahim is terror at what we ourselves are called upon to do, every day of our human lives.
I myself love the story of Ibrahim, but I have never been supplied with a ram. (Or a human child.) I have been given certain gifts in my life. I work to pay back my finite debts, and I struggle to share whatever I have, that is good or might be helpful, with family, and friends, and community. But not once has it seemed to me that this speaks to the story of Ibrahim’s readiness. In view of which, I find myself quite poor. Poorly supplied with sacrificial substitutes for myself. For myself, and the whole extent of my meaning, in this historical (embodied, coming-to-be and passing-away) world. I am not a patriarch. I am not a king. I myself am all that I have. Myself, and whatever work I can do. Whatever (broken, imperfect) things I can make, things that say “me”, that I might put into a fire.
(To show that none of “me” belongs to me. Is to say that I am… something else.)
It is a personal practice. To have spent one’s life preparing, not really knowing what for, not yet understanding that preparing has always been the work itself. Not having any idea it would lead to where one is now, doing work that one still does not fully comprehend. It has sometimes resembled madness. (And still does.) When it doesn’t resemble hubris. (Which it does fairly often, I guess.) One can neither recommend it nor require it of others (unless one is feeling very grouchy that day, which, patriarchs also had grouchy days). In fact, the lesson (for Ibrahim, for others) might be one of compromise, if not compassion. To let people have their sacrificial ram, for as long as they find themselves supplied.
I myself have never been supplied with a ram. But I have, in my life, been given (metaphorical, and also, metaphorical) cats. For better or worse, a steady supply. (Our boy cat is even named Ismail, in another coincidence, strange even for here.) I have also been given certain other gifts. One of which is the ability to step back and see that this story shows two things: the veil (the sacrificial ram), and the thing behind the veil (the sacrificial child). What it shows is different from what it seems to recommend. So that the story itself is also a veil, and the tradition of sacrifice, another veil. That there is a multi-layered (un)veiling of (un)veiling going on, related to self and sacrifice, responsibility and creation, human demands and human limitations. That the sacrifice, as a container, has a fascinating shape, and one takes care not to miss the point.
(So, “in the end”. I click “publish post”. And draw a veil closed, behind me.)
Awake, not yet twilight, cats causing chaos. I cover eyes, determined to go back. (Wow, it worked.) Hours later, waking as digging out from under concrete. It seems more likely I never woke up.
(The invention of prayer. Begin with sleep and the way it/you works. Body is not machine. Simple acts are a negotiation, while the deepest consist of letting go. Make yourself an offering and the infinite becomes kind. Practice savasana, learn how to fly. Īśvarapraṇidhāna.)
As if death were the missing half of wonder.
Blood on the Tracks is the sun of my Bob Dylan universe. Desire is the moon. (Welcome to Bob Dylan astrology, by me.) I consider myself to be Earth. “Tangled Up in Blue” is where I am, right now, (and sometimes “Idiot Wind” album version, other times Bootleg Series version, you should listen to them one after the other for best effect. Obviously,) “One More Cup of Coffee” is right previous to where my blog is. (Listening to crickets tonight. Softly, like a crystalline froth of sound, from all around the rice paddies, in which there is no time, no history, only countless grains and some one infinite self, dissolving.)