Crone
the inky
i dream of an intruder in the house and i wake up screaming when they turn their face to me. but if awake and i imagine an intruder in the house, my fear goes silent and still. heart pounding in darkness i listen for my life
the same idea
but what felt
differences
complete sentences
drag heavy lately like
costumed excesses
shed
the inky
extra
//
assalamu’alaikum 🌒
Æ.2
ok computer whereto and from
dragging chains against the sun
the name of both is Æ
(orthœpy in play) and
ælizabeth is setting honey traps
for dragons
//
broken machine of tentacles and teeth
war is what monsters are and what they do
monsters are monsters at war with monsters
useless becomes another name for peace
//
Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh 🌖
Ironically(?), when I write about fascism, my voice goes into führer mode.
Take a deep breath, I say to my heart. Peace is every l — e — t — t — e — r.
Crone wonder. //
For most of my adolescence, it was my dream to study the ocean, and life in the ocean, as a marine biologist. I was obsessed with coral reefs, the infinite variety of life in them, sea turtles, all of the dolphins and orcas and whales, but especially humpback whales.
Anyway the reason I’m telling you this is because I just found The Voyage of the Mimi on youtube. I think I was in fifth grade when we watched this as a class, one (or if we were very lucky, two) episodes a day. I was already completely into my marine biology phase, I had even been to Woods Hole, (with my scientist father), so watching VotM wasn’t a conversion experience. However it was a rare opportunity for me to sit in school (this was after we moved, soon after I switched from Montessori to public school) and be totally and willingly preached to about something I was “very seriously” into.
And so a moment – a wave – of nostalgia, for a possible other of myself, if I had kept with the marine biology and become a seafaring researcher. (There are reasons why I changed interests and ambitions, I suppress those for a moment.) It really could have, and perhaps should have happened. I went on special school trips and took internships, studying and surveying a few beaches and reefs. It was my dream to be, perhaps, the Jane Goodall (or Dian Fossey, or Biruté Galdikas) of the sea. Could I have been happy doing that?
Would I be happy doing that now? The wistfulness of questions like these, probing gently for regrets, wondering about the paths not taken. How real they were. If the impossibility had been an illusion, a fata morgana, or if the illusion is what drew me away, to concentrate on other things.
The problem was and always will be, I didn’t want to study the ocean as a scientist. I’ve never been much for details and facts, or rather, for stopping at details and facts. I loved for example looking at sea urchin embryos underneath a microscope, but I didn’t want to answer to a laboratory, or write grant proposals or articles. Well, I didn’t even want a job. I wanted a religion, but real. I wanted to bathe in the details and rub them all over me. I wanted to love the ocean, and fall in love with it, again and again, constantly, and worship it. For a while, science was a ritual of my devotion.
Then there was my childhood eco-activism. If it counts as activism, lol. From fourth to eleventh grade, I was constantly researching ecology and environmental issues for school projects. I gave multiple presentations, for example, on “global warming”. I founded at least two iterations of a marine biology club. I was an official member of countless national eco charities, (it’s where I funnelled all my babysitting money), and I had “adopted” several whales, as well as a sea turtle and a gorilla. We were a diverse family. Posters and photographs of animals papered the walls of my bedroom, the biggest of course was a giant poster of a breaching humpback whale, with its calf. And in this moment of writing, I realize that humpback whale was a savior figure, for my childhood self.
Over the two times I went to Woods Hole, I had enough saved-up babysitting money to buy two necklace pendants from the sea-themed souvenir jewelry shop. I agonized over decisions like this. The first one I bought was the tail of a humpback whale. The second one was a crab. Silver-plated talismans of my oceanic familiars.
(Bonus remembering. Before I loved the ocean, I loved unicorns. That worship didn’t take place as science or activism. Unicorn worship was stories and fairytales and secret gardens of the imagination. It was fantasizing about books with beautifully illustrated covers, then finally getting my hands on those books, and reading them under the blankets with a pen light that I “stole” from my dad. There were so many books, but some that I associate with my unicorn phase were The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, which were not about unicorns, but for me they share the vibe, and The Unicorn Treasury. For some reason, I remember waiting what felt like forever for that book, with intense longing.)
These were my safe places and my struggles for justice, icons in silver and lavender, sea-greens, turquoise, and blues, crusty navies and misty greys, intimate communications with untamed spirits, or bracing inquiry at the unstable surfaces of yet-to-be imagined depths. Where I went to find worlds that were real and meaningful, and perhaps, not subject to the arbitrary cruelties of every other mundane thing.
So I was watching Voyage of the Mimi, which is a dear cultural relic, even if it is very blurry. (It was funded by the Department of Education, bless them. The music is great, especially at the end credits, well, it gets better as it goes.) I was remembering those early passions, and also realizing, with some surprise – this feels vindicating, every time it happens – that important things that are here now have been here from the beginning.
On bad or weird days, looking back, it can feel like I’m surveying a lifetime of dead ends, burnt bridges, failure and rejection and loss. Those struggles seem unending and purposeless. It’s easy to beat myself up over every instance when I failed to fit others' expectations of me, or when I had to part ways with my own expectations of myself. When I gave up on things I thought I wanted because I realized that they weren’t real.
On better days, I wonder at what a survivor she was. How heroically she listened to herself, and protected herself, even when I wasn’t paying attention. And I am amazed to see that life has been a circle, always coming back home again. Often by way of my wildest dreams.
So I call that crone wonder.
//
I am not full of outrage.
Tonight, as begins a new lunar year.
I see there is beauty (also) in your invisibility.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌘🌑🌒
People who write about “Western civilization” as if it is one thing boggle my mind. Don’t trust anybody who writes about “the Greeks”, much less the (unraveling backwards-and-forwards in time) Typhonic-Scyllaian-Minotaur of “Western civilization”, without strong caveat, as if they were one thing. This wild ride eats its own tail, Tweedle-Dee. More times than Euclid can count.
(“I am not a pedant, but” // should be a repeat series on my blog.)
On Vulnerability as a Key to Everything
This post was inspired by the #weblogpomoama challenge, from Annie, which prompted another Annie’s question and response, which prompted the first Annie’s re-response, which inspired me to reply, so a heartfelt thank you to both (all) of them. As the first (?) Annie wrote, my answer is not an argument with previous replies, it is my personal perspective, or what the question has brought up, for me. If you wish, please “ask me anything”, my email is in the footer, although I don’t promise satisfying answers.
What makes you vulnerable?
Being alive makes me vulnerable. I am vulnerable by nature. If I have been made, then my maker has made me vulnurable. Therefore most of what I have to do, in order to be vulnerable, is “just to let go”, although (as most are aware) that’s easier said than done. In my experience, “just letting go” involves (paradoxically) study and effort. It is a blessing (of God) to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is a prerequisite for anything worthwhile. (Isn’t it?) Love, learning (and therefore, intelligence, wisdom), pleasure. At least, worthwhile from a human (mortal) perspective.
I am vulnerable primarily through my embodiment and my attachments to other bodies, including ecological, political/legal, “marketplace”, and local community interdependence, all of the people (living or dead) whom I love, or embodied children of various modalities (including animal companions and, in a weird way, writing, more on that below). My embodied presence makes me especially vulnerable. The mere fact of my body, (my heart could just stop), its vulnerability to injury by another body, (I could get long covid, etc.), its vulnerability to social or political conditions, and/or punishments, my vulnerabilities as an immigrant, (I am helpless in so many ways), my vulnerability if I were to “run out into the jungle”, etc. My body is constituted almost as pure vulnerability, every part of it is subject to violence or failure. (One is aware of this especially if one lives with “physical disability”, or suffers even an unanticipated moment of it.) But perhaps (InsyaAllah) no vulnerability surpasses the vulnerability of my body in pleasure. I am most vulnerable in love-making or sex, to be blunt about that. For me, the vulnerability of erotic love is vulnerability before God, in the person of my husband/partner. We become witnesses for each other (in love). It requires that we let ourselves be seen (in our utter incapacitation).
“Letting oneself be seen” (whatever that entails) sounds plausibly like the ultimate in vulnerability. But another candidate is “letting oneself be had”.
One can of course “let oneself be seen” in different ways and layers of the self, not requiring orgasm or literal nudity or physical presence or eyesight. I believe in the healing powers of a good cry, with girlfriend, mom or sister, an intimate correspondence in letters, what we here call ngaji, which is patient conversation about spiritual things, etc. But there is something about orgasm, in its special relationship with vulnerability, which it takes and transforms, that the specific experience of pleasure flays the soul wide open, and will fill however much of yourself you can bear to unlock. Tantric meditative practice is a real thing, or the carnal mysticism of Rumi’s poetry, or Plato’s erotic storytelling, for that matter. These describe vividly embodied experiences of vulnerability as access to insight and/or the divine, as God. I would describe Ashtanga yoga practice in these terms, too (lacking the sex, and there’s a whole other topic). Spirituality as a self-studying practice of vulnerability.
In “the valley below”, which is my blog, I may seek the same register of vulnerability, but the embodiment is different, therefore so is the work. Written communications have different dis/abilities than present bodies, different vulnerabilities and strengths, including that, as a writer, one doesn’t know who may be reading. One cannot see the face, smell the breath or the sweat, or grasp the hand of the person to whom one “speaks”. The reader is, possibly or it seems, completely invisible and therefore invulnerable—So I tell you, “you are safe”. This could be one of the principle jobs of a writer, to give a reader the gratification of vulnerability, with none of the risk (a divine sort of privilege). But as most writers know, that’s a lie. Readers are eminently vulnerable. A reader’s vulnerability may not be through the body, but it is there, through the soul, by way of the imagination. By reading, especially with a certain pleasurable naiveté, we open ourselves to wild worlds of deep psychic alter(c)ation. As a writer, I try to be mindful of that vulnerability, while communicating (or, insinuating myself into a “bedroom”) the best that I can.
In writing the blog, I am unsure of my level of vulnerability. The invulnerability of writing would be another divine-seeming and yet dubious privilege. It helps me feel safe that I live “very far away” from almost anybody who would stumble on my blog, and geographic distance plus an ocean around me gives an obvious appearance (or illusion) of safety. It also helps that I wear a mask, that my blog is more-or-less anonymous, that I no longer rely on employment income (or even, strictly speaking, an open-armed welcome) from the country of my birth, my assumption that not many people read the blog, that “helps”, and a calculated guess that even fewer from my local communities, here where I live, will ever read it. Although I am mindful of that possibility (and incidentally, a few interested folks here are, this minute, passing around this piece, translated into Indonesian). I am also mindful of the fact that I live among vulnerable communities, and I care about them dearly. I wish to protect these people and places, whereas exposure (being seen) is enough to destroy many embodied and vulnerable things. So there are certain protections built into my writing, because of this and related (political, legal, privacy) vulnerabilities. “Freedom of speech” is, here, not even a dubious privilege, but an idiomatic slogan that doesn’t apply.
My writing is always trying to describe or share something possibly true, in a vulnerable medium, with a potential reader who is vulnerable, in a vulnerable world, as a vulnerable person, while doing as little harm as I can manage, with unceasing respect for the ever-glimmering unlikelihood of doing (or being) something somewhat good. So the writing is layers of transparent protection, down to the smallest punctuation mark (the liminal crescent of each parenthetical). The work is composed out of metaphorical veils.
One important thing is, I can control every word on this page, in theory. So I have a great deal of control, in the writing, which can make me feel invulnerable (like a magician, or creator god). But every invulnerability of the author becomes a vulnerability of the communication. For example, the fact that I (in my body) am absent from my written words makes them vulnerable to misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or misuse. The meaning of a message (for example, of truth) may not be vulnerable, but the messenger is. I am at constant risk of being taken out of context, (also, server failure), (which is also a euphemism), while at the same time, I find it genuinely difficult to explain my context, in an abbreviated or explicit way (on the blog). And isn’t this difficult, impossible even, for everybody? How can I describe, in a few simple and customary sentences, what I have failed to comprehend fully myself? When it is my life’s work and responsibility not only to understand, but to communicate what is true. To write a few sentences presents context as cut, dry, and known. Like a fact. Whereas, when you know me in my place, you will naturally understand that my context is… infinite. (Reflecting this, I would guess that I’m more vulnerable, as a reader, than I am as a writer. As a reader, I default to generosity.) It is inherently and notoriously difficult to communicate (about) infinite things, in a straightforward way. Anything infinite, as a message, (selves, worlds, justice, beauty, etc., anything divine), becomes vulnerable to the limitations of the messenger.
Another vulnerability of a written communication is its inherent silence.
One might imagine all kinds of monsters, in that silence. And I do feel vulnerable, or afraid of being dismissed or ignored, or of readers who might think I’m (stupid, “cringe”, arrogant, fake, I don’t know, please fill in the blank), or I’m crazy, (which I am, sometimes, and I’ve decided, that’s ok). This is a natural fear for any artist, not just me (or you). I believe that because I read it in The Artist’s Way, which I think is a lovely and therapeutic book, (although I don’t stand behind everything it says, or anything like that), touching on themes of vulnerability in creation, and I recommend it to anyone struggling with “imposter’s syndrome”, or whatever other names for it there are. An artist is chronically vulnerable to those fears, and they can be entirely crippling.
As for my own fear of rejection, I consider that a sort of sacrificial feeling, so I take a knife to it. (Doubtless it’s to my advantage, that I live in a community where ritual offering is public and commonplace, and is always notably at the expense of “business”.) Part of the sacrifice is letting go of the pride that would make me feel humiliated by rejection, or failure, letting the blood drain out of that part of myself (on the hypothesis it’s not an essential part). It helps that I sacrifice it (fear/pride) for something that I experience and acknolwedge as sacred. Whether the sacrifice is delivered in a (or the) name of God, in gratitude as a translator of my teachers, in gratitude as a translator of earth, or whatever the poetry is that day, if there was to be any real or important message in my writing, I wouldn’t consider it my own.
Somewhere in here is the paradoxical in/vulnerability of the fool, who carries the world bundled on their shoulder as they step off a cliff. After decades of writing in a context of fear, to protect my (embodied) professional, social, and political vulnerabilities, I removed my body, (or at least my face), and invited a fool’s energy (back) into my life. And as it turns out, I am altogether happy having nothing to sell. Blogging brings me joy only if I empty it as much as I can of vanity, or an attachment to reward or response, which devolves (for me?) very easily into fear. Most of us (embodied souls) harbor some trauma, here, and I do, too. The feeling of fear or pain can be an indicator of vulnerability, but a reflexive response also stifles access to vulnerability, and all of its fruits. (That’s a yoga lesson, for me, but easy to witness in “everyday life”, including in sex.) Here, there is work to be done, the aforementioned study and effort, and also the sacrifice. Below the pain, I sing to myself, there will be the deepest and easiest pleasure. There will be selflessness, humility, and also liberation in singing for a possibility more remote than the most distant star, which is also a silence, born into the heart of things. That is the kind of vulnerability that I seek, in writing, the in/vulnerability of a (“god-damned”/“blessed”) fool.
Which I understand also as submission to God, and as jihad, in the context of Islam. To me, in my “old life”, this would have sounded like a very strange thing to say, but Islam keeps encouraging the development and practice of my voice. For which my gratitude is… as yet, by me, uncounted. I haven’t reached the end of it. My belief (or my experimental hypothesis, which I also gratefully engage as part of a living lineage, the vastness of which I am still discerning, which is to say, I’m still learning, from the written and living people in my life, as well as from “the trees”) is that tapping the soul’s deepest vulnerability translates its silence into strength.
All the while, a fool has simpler and more superficial incarnations. I enjoy also the nostalgia of being a teenager, pouring her feelings out into a journal, blogging about ruched tube tops, chickens, sexual feelings, or the rain. (“Silly things”.) But this one, here, is no longer a girl. She is rather an emergent crone, and a savvy (if sappy) old bitch, recreating and rediscovering that joy and that sufficiency, in a historical context that will remind her, constantly, just how vulnerable she is. Especially to fear. I guess the joy (if there’s joy) of the blog is also a certain armor. And nobody’s really going to pierce through that. (Are they?)
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🌔
Me, on me. // Feelings are like the wind and you have to adjust the sails to catch them in the right way. And maybe you have to adjust the boat sometimes into these impossibly steep-seeming angles (heel). The boat is built to handle this. (One assumes.)
So (caveat lector, seek your own help, this is me, on me) these are some of my therapies for coping with depression.
When you can’t stop being down on yourself. Make it a game to see which voice in your head can fling the most sublime sh-t. Because games are theoretically fun if you look for the beauty.
Listen to Enya and/or Tori Amos with earbuds, depending on the “complexity” (ugliness) of your needs in that moment. (I save BfP for special occasions. I shouldn’t.)
Accidentally stumble upon something that awakens your compassion. Do a kindness before your depression knows what hit it.
Quit demanding any form of recreation from yourself.
Write a lot, even though you “know it’s sh-t", just remove the expectation to publish.
Take advantage of the situation and let anxieties go, if possible. I was surprised how the depression made it possible. Be your version of an unresponsive, mopey, adolescent asshole. Or a saggy old crone. (Stop wearing a bra, stop trying to people-please.)
Spend time obsessing over the side-of-the-coin that you can’t currently see. Assume there’s a rainbow, over there. Depression is just another perspective. Perspectives are dialectical. You are expressing relations, albeit warped ones, relations. You remain related. Being upside-down-from is also a relation.
(Sorry, Satan.
You have to learn to enjoy the smell of your own armpits.)