Eggs
The young is transparent and cute, the old is cute and obscure. A cuteness metric.
There is VERY IMPORTANT chicken news // that I’ve been trying to squeeze in “here” for a few days.
(Sometimes one lets the horses run.)
We were shocked to learn, Grace’s nine offspring aren’t nine roosters. They are four juvenile roosters and five juvenile hens. This feels something like a miracle! It’s a shift in household energy and a change in the meaning of things.
There will no longer be ten roosters crowing, at our house. (I am honestly relieved. However,
There still will be ten roosters crowing in beta.)
So it seems that we trusted some fake news a false prophecy. A family member had worked in a chicken factory, claimed expertise in identifying their sex, as chicks, and we believed him. It turns out, he was wrong. Pak and Bu S. came over for purnama and we gave them a tour of the “orchid hallway”, that is my husband’s work-in-progress, they played with the cats through the trellis, and commented how nice it was to have a family of chickens. Pak S. wrinkled his nose and said, “Mas, those aren’t all roosters”.
(A few had started growing horns and cockscombs, a few hadn’t yet. It turns out, they never will.)
We were all amazed. Us at the mistaken chicken sex, them at us being goofy. We all laughed. Me, at the serendipity. It was a comedy of errors, perhaps even a gender-(perception-/deception-/substance-)switching/sacrificing “As You Like It” moment. This is one of my favorite genres!
As a couple, we make these mostly harmless, and yet significant, mistakes, like the old tv land “Beverly Hillbillies”, or dreamy airheads, floating through farm life. Even my husband, who grew up in a village, and his parents kept chickens, never paid much attention to their lives, their parts and their wholes, how they work as families or breeding partners or rivals. (Side note. He does have chicken stories, however, one of which involves him, as a child, persuading younger children to eat chicken poop. To this day, he maintains that eating chicken poop was, at the time, a good thing to do.) (We live in such suspended realities.) So we did not know, what now we know. Because we are watching and learning, as they do their things, and watching and waiting to watch them some more.
This is not business. This is the school yard proper.
Things “here” are like that.
Sometimes a game and sometimes a miracle, not in the sense of divine intervention, but of the hanged man. We are fools who suffer the foolish reversal of folly, we receive reconciliation, we say, Alhamdulillah. (Allah is ever, over all things, an accountant. And rizq, there shall be many more eggs than we planned. Where shall they go?) Every error, forgiven, is a re-marriage, no less joyful for its lack of positivity.
We are (but) wholesome entertainment, after all.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌓
Modern science may be better understood as an extension of modern politics, than as a descendant of (ancient natural) philosophy.
One is born from wonder and matures into the work of love.
The other is (desire as) conquest, disguised as codifiable law.
(Just because you can light a fire doesn’t mean you’ve understood the flame.)
Good luck, U.S.A.
Experiments in self-compost.
Fruits, flowers, and one active choice. //
I watched my husband turn the spray-bottle (for “cat discipline”) on Frankie, which was utterly ineffective, mildly confusing for Frankie, and funny for us. (Chickens have no problem with water.) It’s not very effective on Ismail, either. We might have to add vinegar, then Ish will hate it, in his casual way.
He and I are capable of self-discipline. But when it comes to others, we are terrible disciplinarians. It brings us joy to see (and let) others break rules. A luxury of being child-free, I guess, or a vice that we “permit ourselves”.
Frankie and Grace have a collaborative romance. Frankie builds nests for her and catches bugs and grubs and gives them to Grace. Grace did the same for their children, until she emancipated them. They share their peanuts. They sleep together, Grace and Frankie perched on top of the coop with the children safe (if not silent, sometimes a little rowdy) inside. The chickens have a family.
The sufficiency of apricot-scented roses. Trigger warning: America.
What is called politics (or democracy) in U.S. America is a highly-formalized, performative/participatory ritual of nostalgia for the sacrificed/human act of choice. Not unlike Attic tragedy.
Imagine attending (or abstaining from) that yearly Dionysian hoedown.
…and recognizing it as your (now) destiny.
There must eventually be a satyr play. Traditionally, after three of these. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, it just seems, rhythmically, a necessary thing. Which might be the lure of the uglier alternative. The aestheticization of politics is (Walter Benjamin’s term for what I describe as) enthusiasm without education.
(Was subsequently referred, through a rabbit hole, to this talk given by Robert Frost, where he compares an education by poetry to “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor”. … While, and this seems important, he also emphasizes poetry as that from which we learn the limits of metaphor.)
“The election” in 2016 seems like U.S. America lost a kind of virginity. Thinking about the myth of virginity, and its loss, as a suffered trauma that cannot be repeated because it substantially changes things, who you are, your character, what can be said or is true about you. Through one Passion, or act of suffering, the landscape of possibilities changes, completely. (The protagonist doesn’t have to be “the anti-christ”, or an actual rapist, but calling him that makes it feel more real.)
Not pathei mathos (learning by suffering), pace Aeschylus, but pathei genesis (by suffering, being born).
Watching someone fall prey to their own mythologized monsters, using predation as an excuse for predation. This is also (sadly) a “feminist take”.
By no coherent logic do one-hundred and sixty-million individual choices add up to one active choice. Allah is ever, over all things, an Accountant (al-Haseeb, Qur’an 4:86).
Lemon is one of my favorite fruits, flowers, and flora. Also, vanilla (which, if you didn’t know, is an orchid). Imagine growing both in the same garden. Pollinators would love it and so would we.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
This may be obvious, // but as everybody knows, obviousness is relative.
When the thing that would make you happy has been planned out of your civilization, this can mean something different for everybody.
For no reader do I recommend fascism or joining cults or eating an animal.
(Some things can be written in stone. Others should be written only in wax, or on the wind, etc.)
Ten roosters crowing is not just a metaphor, it is also real. Hence, the “news” category. There will be ten roosters crowing, at my house.
(We will have to name them, I guess. The nine juveniles. The dad is already named Frankie. Grace is the Hen. “Fun fact”, Grace and Frankie is a tv show starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Frankie is the name of Lily Tomlin’s character.)
When I don’t use an emoji, the mood that I am communicating is, “I am not in the mood to express myself with a cartoon right now.”
(I added that to my emoji dictionary.) (For a minute, I got confused between roosters and emojis. There are a lot of both!)
To communicate in writing requires synthesis between writing as yourself and writing for “the reader”.
“The reader” is only ever inside your head. It is almost absolutely plural. Hmm.
(Inside your head, “the reader” can feel nearly synonymous with “the writer”… also, in a blogging neighborhood.)
To every one of you, I have something different to say.
To every one of you, thank you🙏🏻 for showing me ways to break out of my civilization.
(That’s what I look for, in blogs.)
…“almost absolutely plural”…
Salam to all🌓
Three yolks, two pulsas, no home. // Last night we ran out of two kinds of pulsa at once, it was just bad luck, but our reward was to spend a night without internet or cellular. That is still an odd kind of quiet, unsettling to notice how compulsively I check internet things. I surrendered to connectionless-ness by (of all things) reading a book.
I feel cleansed now; saintly.
Infrastructure concerns. My mother who went through a hurricane two weeks ago is (fine, but) still experiencing power outages and spotty internet service (from the storm). I don’t know where I would move anymore. Maybe the last safe place in Florida will be the last safe place… and the multitude of homeowners who are desperation-betting on that same thing. No time like the present… to liquidate assets. Dollar-face emoji, tsunami emoji, filed under “texts not to send”.
Stories about Mars are stories.
Stories about the Moon are stories.
Stories about Earth are stories.
(Staunching an open wound with stories.)
What is placeless has no home.
The vibe around here shifted because Grace decided it was time to ditch being a mom and take a lover again. (The lover is Frankie.) So while the juveniles have become a roving band of nine goofy pre-teens, Grace is an expressive queen, squawking to the heavens before each egg laid. Hen labor is painful and intense. Grace is also a demanding queen, so they copulate with abandon, and Frankie is her designated guardian. I carry a broom, in case Frankie decides I’m a credible threat. (He is bred for fighting and I am “a chicken”.) Grace leaves eggs tucked all over the place, I never realized egg hunting was a real-life thing, until now. (Practical chicken birth control.) Looking for them makes me feel like a child on Easter morning. Each one found is perfectly rounded and smooth, in clouded ivory, texture of water-shaped stone, the inside heavy with liquid potential. The shell feels thinner than it should be, protecting infinitude. I cradle it in my thieving hands, gaze at it with my thieving eyes.
I love questions.
I am questions, too, excavated insides of who-knows-what. Being the question, opening up, the beggar’s bowl of ecstatic reunion. Even (especially) a crone conceals an egg-shaped interior, triple of yolk, with strange constellations unfolding across their inky, jelly-fat surfaces. The placeless-ness inside.
I am a thief. Of infinite potential!
(Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. All eggs are offered to al-Haqq, the True.)
Salam to all🌔
The (only) answers are in mirrors.
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.
So that peace shall be our constant and only purpose.
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.
Honeyed wafer set lightly into smoked amethyst sky. Grace’s nine eggs hatched into nine tiny black puffballs. Nine infant roosters, cheeping-cheeping… and she loves them with an intensity. Selamat purnama✨🌕✨
Grace, sitting.
Waking, as thinking, what we do with time. // Spending or wasting, as of fixed amount, and therefore an imperative, to put to good use. (Better wake up now, then.) Using it. As time is material. Filling it, or, as time is container. A schedule, with slots of, empty blocks on a page. Empty ones to the right, can be filled; empty ones to the left, empty time-passed, and nothing.
A fantasy of time: if only one could have all of that empty time. And then fill it up, past overflowing.
Go to see Grace. How is it she is filling (her) time? What is the action? (I called it sitting.) The eggs (under there) are her contemplations. Or perhaps, she is bodies, these days. Night passes, cold passes, sun comes and light warms. She is still, in the green, gives me nothing at all. (Am I empty?) My time is not hers, or her time is not here. She becomes barrier, wall of the garden, as stillness. A being of no-time, mother-protector of inner-other(s). It is paradise, in there. (And ten tiny, red-blinking heartbeats. InsyaAllah.) I am the against-witch, (against-which), I am the hunger. I am the waiting and the wanting-to-know.
There’s only so much one can do, in the morning. Coffee-making, cat breakfast, floor-sweeping, some laundry. Nongkrong with Frankie, putting shapes on a page. Skip around the old playground, as if forever, then, sent, posted, past. Hang out the laundry, as shadows shorten. Seek shade and retire. Dust returns to floors. As daytime becomes, all at once, too much heat, too much light, too much everything.
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…)
An interesting thing, about (poetry, and) prayer, is how it can’t be reverse engineered. (Pretty sure, and as always, Aristotle points out something similar in the Poetics, using terms almost im/possible to translate.)
And everything remains equally important.
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.
Aspiring to harmlessness.