Element
Our watery roots.
The apps forecasted silence, now tonight
The sky brings thunder. Hurricane or drought,
Sheer element’s beyond us, but not quite:
To make it rain, just leave the laundry out.
Sky from home (11).
Video is everywhere of Los Angeles burning, still visible when we close our eyes. My heart is with everyone suffering unimaginable loss and uncertainty right now. Struggling to imagine an America where these images could spark an extinction rebellion. Then struggling to quiet the imagination, seeking neutral ground, the soil for sleep. Focusing on these economies of the imagination, attempts at self-maintenance. Orienting by the presence of a partner. Self-maintenance as other-care.
We can hear the shush of rain for a few minutes before it comes.
How to sweep the floor on a windy day?
Just under two days without rain, bright and blustery days, enough to wash and dry two loads of sheets, towels and blankets plus a full load of clothes. Hot sun=quick drying. I didn’t buy laundry clips so underwear sometimes flies away, then we go chasing after errant negligees in the rice fields.
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.)
(Morning was enough.) //
As abrupt muffling shadow,
It slightly thrills me, when
The sky grows dark around 1 pm.
A daily eclipse, the rain is
Welcome relief from
The sun’s blazing
Hot bulb, dampening down.
Wind-driven shush becomes droning
Comforter of water, the sound
And the element of a nap. Dream of
Starfish faces, jellyfish eyes, and
Whiskers of shrimp, seeing softly
Touched lace, skin or feather.
Rest,
But try not to sleep
Through dinner.
Experiments in self-compost.
Groundworks, bare.
“Guide of the perplexed sea witch”. //
Certain ancestors were about to be angry if she didn’t make that joke.
Circe polypharmakos at home on her island. Making her magic. Laughing at images she conjures of herself.
The herbs will not teach, but they carry a message.
We run an orchid roadside rescue service. If you know of an orchid in need of rescue, please contact us at the email in the footer.
Howard Ashman was the shape of my 8yo heart, what about yours? (A youtube link. Please listen to the end.)
The connectivity of interior structures and sensations, made possible by breath. Stretching my right psoas and unwringing the “deep front line”, I can feel the pull and release through different channels in my neck. That is not surprising. But sometimes, I feel it pulling back from my inner ear. That is surprising. Or pulling at the back of my tongue. At the same time, I can feel a deep release under the arch of my right foot. Like serpents inside, listening, dancing, trying to speak.
Given, that we can never be friends. Let us be alien-dream twin sisters.
We shall meet here at midnight. Under the stars. Attended by tame animals we have made out of men who knew only violence. Don’t worry, they all presently agree that things are much better this way.
Who, out of all of them, gets the prize for having told the most beautiful lie?
This body is full of secret sounds. Waiting in here to be found. Aeaea!
Even less could the sparkling sapphire of Truth be removed from Her setting.
She was the gender of fire.
She was the gender of water.
She was as you like it.
Salam to all.
Sky from home (9). // Selamat purnama🖤
Something about orchids. //
A mistake on a small road is easier to fix than a mistake on a big road.
If I only knew how and could do absolutely everything in the world, then I wouldn’t need anybody else, at all, ever. The fantasy of anti-politics. (A grouchy thought I had that made even me laugh.)
I guess this post on loudness is in a way a follow-up to this one, which is on, ok, I forgot what it was on. Something political that I don’t want to re-read.
The entirety of my political views can adequately be summed up as: education is the sine qua non of politics.
Woke up from a dream about the blog, where I looked at the photos and the last five or six photos were all of cloudy grey skies, and they started blurring into each other and expanding. It’s a vibe I like but try to avoid on the blog.
I remember knowing only grocery store orchids. You know what those are. Or any orchid that you buy from a shelf, in a pot or mounted in media, that you take home and put in your house, or your garden. These are lovely, predictable, clean and tame things. But then I came here, and began to meet wild orchids. Orchids that live in the trees, in the jungle, on the mountain or in the ravine. There’s something about an orchid, how it sits in its place, how it inhabits, infuses itself into and out of the surrounding life, clinging to tree branches, nestled in deep sponges of green and brownish-black, respirating and perspirating the bodies of mist that roll in at night. Leaves being sniffed and scampered across by a passing reptile or rodent, the ants and tiny wasps that visit for nectar or moths that flutter past the floral apparition. The grizzled reaches of its roots, aerial and earthen, as the spirit taps into and from everything. Some of the most enchanting orchids I’ve seen are the tiny ones, with delicate foliar structures and thread-thin blooms, indescrible furry textures, feeling everything out, and it’s their thorough presence. They radiate with the truth of this, that
You can’t take an orchid out of the jungle. It doesn’t remain the same thing, when you do that. A person would have to live in the jungle, to know the orchid. This person wouldn’t remain the same thing, either.
An orchid isn’t the fantasy of anti-politics, but the religion of a cosmic polity. An orchid is the true revolution.
“Fire blue as glass” is Dylan Thomas' “Fern Hill” but sung from a mermaid perspective.
(The “mer-spective”.)
Salam to all🌖
Fire blue as glass.
Living with water. // Distant thunder, constant but low, and the atmospheric awareness of a storm. Not here yet, the rain, and it may not come, but shadows gather on the northwest horizon, toward the higher altitudes, near Pupuan.
Taking a (hot) shower outdoors under (cool) sprinkles of rain. The contrast is reviving. With bits of fern and mossy surface surroundings, I feel like a sea nymph. (The soap “includes sea salt, seaweed, and argan oil”.) Like a Nereid, like Achilles' mother, Thetis, and as soon as she enters my mind, I am overpowered by her perspective, her native tenderness toward, sometimes ownership over, Achilles. There’s one story that she dipped him into the Styx, holding him by the ankle. The other story is that she took him in secret every night, when he was a baby, to burn away his mortality. With flame, and the desire for her child to live forever.
The fish love the dry season that never was, the rainy season come early. One day there were splinters of light in the canal, magnetic slivers of translucent peach and orange shooting like stars through the murky green, sun-dappled water. The next day there were more. (We feed them table scraps and leftover cat food, they basically wash dishes.) Now, through their private (unwitnessed by us) reproductive routines, they have filled the canal with their glittering babies, from tiny newborns to about thumb-sized, which scatter at every hint of motion. Meanwhile, the adults watch me do yoga. Their eyes do not blink. Their mouths open and close, attentive expressions. They really do watch. Some are spiny and the color of mud. Some are bright orange, spattered with black, the mouths of these ones like to gape wide open. Some are pale, almost white, with long, diaphanous fins. They linger underneath tangled and raggedy roots. They float past, with their streamers of chiffon, these otherworldly angels. Fish energy is quiet and serene, arhythmic nibbles at nothing, until it is lightning fast, or surprisingly strong, the peck and pull at seeds of grass, a torpedo aimed at the next shadow down. A heavy splash, ker-plunk, in the dark of the night, and no other symbol than that.
The canal (so far) runs around two sides of the house, catching the rain that cascades from the roof. To us, it’s a strategy for living with water. But rain is their element, their power, and nothing makes them more at home. We are surrounded, in sleep, by the dreaming of fish. And when it rains, we sleep in a different dimension, of warmth and light, ensconced beneath their waterfall.
Waterways.
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.
Mask/flame earth.
Body/passage earth.
Earthquakes, atonalities, and rice porridge. // We (here) had a pretty big earthquake just now, the ceiling and frame of the house rattled and shook. The sound, like something big grabbing and shaking, from the roof. (Later, to add: the place where the concrete wall of the bathroom meets the wood construction, is where all the noise is. Gempa bumi reported as magnitude 4.8, which is not too high, but less than 10 km away, which is close.) I grabbed Sri Rejeki (she had been sitting on my lap, as she does when it rains) and ran out the door. Everything shook for a while. During that time, I remember the vague sense of surprise, that it was happening, that it wasn’t over yet, and then, that Jeki hadn’t clawed away. Looked for that pain. Soon after that, I started shaking, as one shakes after a car accident. When the noise stopped, I put Jeki back inside, went back inside myself and found Ismail and Lalah, safe, looking up at the ceiling. As though there was a serious ghost or a monster, up there. Still waiting to reach E., who hasn’t answered his phone. I’m sure he’s ok, they were driving in Sweet Orange, the truck. Is it possible they didn’t feel it?
The other measurement is that it was 36 km deep, so the total distance from here, of the source of motion, (what exactly does that mean?), was around 37 km. From me, the earth moved. At least, that is much further away than my husband is.
Something odd is hearing them before feeling them. The rattling of joints in the house, divisions between separate parts of a whole, in conflict. Sound is such an earthy sensation. Light is fiery, touch is watery, smell is airy, not sure to what extent I’m making these up. Also: making up a list of seeds to buy, chamomile, okra, interesting greens, like tatsoi.
Husband was fine, he felt it, he just forgot his phone at home. As happens. I’d rather he forget it, than spend too much time on it. As I probably do with mine.
(Always looking for the moment of proportion between two extremes, moderation, balance, but when certain things swing too far, maybe it’s hard or impossible to find a note of ease. Atonality isn’t an abstract thing, but earthy, embodied, off-balance, bad music. Trying to find good music inside of bad music, to hear past the bad music, to listen for atonality’s resolution, to shape one’s ear in that way, as analogies for being a person on their way through these various worlds.
How far can you stretch, to make it whole?)
Turning around, realized I’ve been in a dark place these past few days. Reading got tangled up in a Catherine Wheel (don’t look it up). Writing got tangled up in time, a bad rhythm, “off”. Days are hot when they’re not dark. Assuming this is hormonal, waiting for it to pass. Playing Enya’s Shepherd Moons, and then, Dark Sky Island. It’s the bubur sayur (rice porridge, with vegetables and peanuts) of music.
Saw the moon two nights ago, the thinest scythe of light against violet-pink satin, when Bu and Pak S. brought our offerings for Kajeng Kliwon. Bu S., (wearing pink marimekko flowers), gave me a jepun flower to put in my hair. I said “suksma Bu”, and she smiled and called me “pinter”, and I smiled and said “sedikit saja Bu”. I put two small offerings in the bedroom, with dupa/incense. Then I followed Bu S. as she prayed over the offering in the kitchen, one in the driveway, two on either side of the exterior of the gate, and one large offering in a basket on the ground in the middle of the gate, at the house’s entry. She poured wine in a circle around the final offering, then she prayed, and then it was finished. (She hugged me and patted my butt, which could be part of the ceremony, too.)
Salam to all.