Family
Two year anniversary ♥️
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. 🌕
//
Early V-day celebration, here. //
Relief and relief and more relief, now ready for rest and (rest-enforcement and) healing. With no artful way to say this, but I feel immensely proud of my husband. Today, I know no other feeling as simple as that.
Spending all day in (traffic or in) hospital waiting rooms. Ahead of time, I envisioned reading and/or writing, while there. Lol. I didn’t realize (or I had forgotten) how absorbing, distracting, draining it is, to witness all these hospital feelings: pain, fear, anxiety, of patients and family members, the humiliation of being treated as an institutionalized body — subject to poking, injecting, cutting, stitching, by no agreed-upon schedule — rather than as a person. And of course, relief.
It was a minor surgery ward, serving routine procedures, so none of the afflictions were life-threatening. The worst was a child who had double infected pilonidal cysts (these are located in the crease between buttocks). It was ultimately not serious but surely uncomfortable, and he was afraid to go in for his procedure. Poor little guy. (If only one could transform into Robin Williams at just the right moment.) The dad kept reassuring him the surgery would make it feel better, (one feels for both child and parent in these situations), and it did. Or at least, the last we saw of him, (post-op), he had stopped crying and was deeply engrossed in his dad’s smartphone. That seems a pretty good use for a smartphone, at least.
E made friends with the dad when he (E) and the child were both still drunk off sedation. (After garbling some words about remembering toothpaste, and how much he loved me, and inviting his surgeon to our place, for coffee, inexplicably in slurred English: “I’m serious, doctor.”) The usual conversation ensued, where are you from, and where are you from, then running through contacts in those places, checking whether any are shared. People always know other people’s people, in Indonesia. Although it’s a more sprawling and diverse country than any other I’ve been to, (over seventeen thousand islands, speaking over seven hundred living languages, spanning China-vast distances), it quickly becomes a very small world.
Then, the zany fun of babysitting him, as he insisted we stop for celebratory dinner on the way home. Apologizing to our server (all the wait staff here know us, except for this new one who took our order tonight. But well, he knows us now) for oddly-mumbled jokes (“do either of you have any allergies?” me: “nope!” him, again in slurred English: “I’m allergic to bad people”… crickets… “aku allergi dengan orang jahat”… crickets… “I wanna lie down”) and too much giggling between us. Explaining, (as if it could be at all reassuring, to this studious newbie), that we had just come from the hospital, and he was still drunk on ketamine. (I don’t know if that’s what it was.) But not to worry, (and I let myself really smile, which felt like the first time in quite a long time), because everything was just fiiiiine.
A couple of middle-aged goofballs acting like (high) teenagers. And what was my excuse? The leftover green tea I gulped down before we went in, in a last-ditch effort not to fall asleep. (I haven’t gone back to coffee, since the flu. I wonder how long that will last.) But really, my excuse was relief. My relief at his relief. My relief at his being ok.
So my eyelids drooped heavily as we neared home, (I’ve become much more comfortable/reckless, with the driving, and I had some more green tea), where we settled in, as if for the rest of our lives. So as not to tempt fate, one fears to say these things out loud. Love is ever a fool’s courage. But how perfect is it, that vasectomy day would end up being more romantic than anything we’ve ever actually planned?
Next week, InsyaAllah, we’re off to the ocean again. Maybe for another footsie photo-op. And our anniversary, which is on the full moon.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌘
Like 90% of the words I’ve learned in Javanese I’m not allowed to say.
(The solution to the aforementioned was to bring out the ukulele.)
“Why won’t you sing me a song?
I miss your voice.”
(I love your voice.)
“Everyone else’s voice is a cartoon
Compared to yours.”
//
“Why are you always why why why?”
“Because I’m your why why wife.“
//
The opposite of repetition. //
Unresolved opposites permit no focus today. These times when it seems impossible to win, (to do even/just one single thing), I forget until I remember to forget. Try letting along instead of hacking against the knotty grain. In the southern land of the last living things, time wasted is but devil-deprived.
So I spent today feeling sorry for Grimes, and sorting messages sent across water.
From the west, a bump on the head, a minor rupture on the surface of deeper, longer-term commitments, tendrils of an echoless dark. Uncomfortable laughter interrupted by untranslatable tears. A familiar face shows no sign of recognition. Anxiety as mercenary, untrusted and useless. While touch, denying separation, begs mercy for mind’s betrayal.
From the east, syncopation of a body’s breath. Mechanical blips, machine eyes seeking nodules of soft tissue, to test and seek again, in oft-repeated cycles. Persistent fever, failing fathers lead mothers to leap out from a fascist frying pan into flames of wind-sheared ice. Blood seeks a new frontier, in northern latitudes, the opposite of repetition. Yet a clumsy gambit for youth.
Parallel lives, viewed as from above. Are they one, or many? When feelings follow fault lines, we take out mortgages on surveillance drones. The old houses are gone, the smells of carpets and moth balls, gone, cat litter and Christmas, that one springtime we planted a cherry tree, or the scent of pine needles, toasting under the North Carolina sun. Anticipation of snow from equatorial afternoon, monsoon against red cardinal’s frosted footprints. Dear unwritten sister,
I’ve forgotten how to share words with you.
Let me hold you in the palm of my hand.
//
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌓
Nu baby. //
So… life, uh, found a way. We tried (admittedly have been a little distracted) to steal all of Grace’s eggs but she tricked us and hatched one! Just one. A heaping tablespoon of pale yellow fluff. Well, it’s just not possible to be sad about an itty bitty chick.
(I love Laura Dern in that clip.)
This one is light-colored, while the first clutch was all black. Already a tiny misfit.
The other chickens, teenagers now, are so far curious about the new baby. Grace pecks them if they get too close. (Very fierce.) They stay out of reach and crane their necks to watch it, (all of them at once, chickens are such gossips), while it hip-hops around mom’s feet.
We needed to rearrange the chicken living space to make it cozy for Grace and nu baby. So we took apart the old arrangement, but the chickens got a little upset about it. So there was some chaos theory with chickens flapping first up on the laundry line then up to the roof of the little limasan (our bedroom).
Chickens on the roof!
There was also a big storm that blew through when E was fixing chicken stuff and I was doing yoga. I was worried about the tiny puff-ball blowing away, but Grace disappeared the baby up into her feathers and hunkered under the downpour. She didn’t even move under the eaves of the house, to escape the rain, she just turned herself into a house. She is truly amazing.
When the rain cleared and the sun came out, nu baby came out too, peep-peeping again. Precious marshmallow. (They’re still a little clueless on day one.
To be honest, I’m worried about its chances of survival, being just one tiny peep in the midst of a boisterous flock of claw-talon-footed brothers and sisters. It will be a new test of Grace as a mother. InsyaAllah she will prevail.)
To relax from all that, I listened through Kendrick’s “beef” with Drake from last spring. They released 7 or 8 tracks taking shots at each other. All I can say about that is, hip-hop is amazing social media.
(Note. I think most of my pop culture “takes” will be a few years or decades late. “News” includes anything that happens in my lifetime, is how I see it, on my blog.)
Anyway, back to Kendrick “I said ‘we,’ it’s not just me, I’m what the culture feelin'" Lamar.
(euphoria, meet the grahams, Not Like Us)
Rap is an amazing rhetorical medium, but also, Kendrick has spoiled me for almost all other artists. Sometimes he makes it chill, sometimes angry, sometimes tragic or funny, (“some shit just cringeworthy”), but it’s always a contest, (for victory wreaths, and he didn’t come to the games to place second. He will sniff out and attack the evil (=the Drake fan?) in you. He makes music a war for the soul.
(And for his family, and for those disowned by other families, and ultimately for the soul.)
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌖
With relief. //
Does this seem right? It’s neither the power nor the responsibility of a child to forgive a parent. To forgive, as to judge, is the power and the act of God. The power and responsibility of a child is to communicate their need for care.
There is also the literal groundlessness (earthlessness, lifelessness) of anger directed against a parent. (As usual, thinking of Achilles. But these really seem like lessons of Abraham, …) It’s there, the rage, as a feeling, but it makes no natural sense. Like an artifact of (divine) omnipotence. What a child feels and expresses toward a parent (Ismail’s crying) isn’t a judgment, but an unaddressed need for care.
Likewise, there’s something perverse when a parent asks their child for forgiveness. Why are you putting that burden on your child? As a child, I could never not welcome one of my parents into my house, or into my heart. But that’s not forgiveness, I don’t think, it’s just being a child. To forgive, as to judge, is the power and act of God.
There’s a rough and ready (“embodied”) justice grown into generational (“blood”) relationships, which already negotiate between the finite and infinite circumstances of a political animal, the things we might demand of each other, the things we must release. It’s maybe easier, from the perspective of liberalism, to recognize the arbitrary nature of familial justice and its proneness to abuse. (When there is no viable rejection of, or emancipation from parents.) But maybe it provides some rudimentary shelter for sanity, and a solider liberation.
It was a rainy afternoon, E and I both fell asleep while watching a movie, took a nap. Woke to the sound of more thunder and fireworks for New Year’s Eve. Which I care about only a little, (we’ll observe the lunar year), but ok. This seems like a pretty good thought-feeling to end 2024. With relief. That it simply isn’t my place, to judge or even forgive my parents. Of all the things that are my responsibility, that’s not one of them.
As Prophet Abraham, (peace be upon him), to his father. “I will pray for your forgiveness, but I have no power to rescue you from Allah.” (Surah Al-Mumtahanah, Ayat 4.)
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌑
Daughters of Typhon
// Phaedrus 227β // Isthmian 1
It felt good to translate Isthmian 1, like eating a nourishing bowl of food, with green and purple vegetables, roast potatoes, tempe, tender steamed rice underneath, and spicy peanut sauce drizzled (generously) on top. Doing something like that makes me feel applauded by ancestors, for sure. The only translations of that poem I could find (public domain) were so very fine (It’s awe-inspiring how flowery the old-fashioned translators were. What alien world did they come from, those boys of clubby leisure? Did they drink honey-wine for breakfast before sitting down to work?) that I failed to detect in them the brilliance of an original. Which I uncovered as I worked it out and translated for myself. Using fewer words, less adorned, to give it my own meter, then to brush away the sediment from this cut and polished gemstone. To put it in my words, to shape my lips around the poetic act.
As a physical, full-bodied shiver. I could feel the pride of the author, in the poem’s re-discovery.
“What’s more beloved / By good men than their parents, esteemed?” Indeed, smiling, I admired our work. Other possible translations for “esteemed” could be “cared for”, “valued” or “cherished”. Good people love to see their parents taken care of, “placed on high”, publicly loved. If you enjoy seeing your parents respected and celebrated, you are probably a good person. So suggests Pindar. And this is what I have done by translating his poem. Isn’t it? I have cared for a parent, if I could consider Pindar a parent. Could I? Would he be a father, or maybe a grandfatherly figure? If he would accept me, as such. Maybe.
//
Fathers and grandfathers are hard to come by, around here. Okay, the subject is difficult. I grew up without grandfathers. Then my father was (and is) a piece of work. He spent my childhood teaching me to read his darker feelings. I became very good at that.
It was not an easy childhood. I was somehow hoarded by him, he was my primary caretaker, or anyway, my mother left me unprotected, unshielded from the intensity of his self-loathing, which he daily poured over me like fuel, with which I should also burn. Maybe worse than if it had all been hostile, the infliction (and it was violent, if an adult man yelling full-force close to a six year-old girl’s face, as if to teach her with terror, is violent, his spittle in her eyes, as she is petrified and panicking with shame, and the daily ritual of this, for the first fifteen years of my life, that it framed everything) alternated on-and-off with love, as an oddly infantile affection.
My parents divorced when I was eleven or twelve. (It was after they had a giant fight, in Disney World.) A few years after that (when I was a teenager) I stopped living with my father, basically for fear. I called him and said I would live with my mother full time. I thought I was free then, but it was still all I knew. I had no perspective on the conditions of anger and shame I had suffered, through which I had learned (pathei mathos, as Aeschylus) the meaning of (fatherly) love. An open question, (mine), of whereto and wherefrom. What does it take to recover from that kind of growing up?
I (on my request) went to therapy with him, tried to keep in touch with him, (he never called me, he’s not that kind of parent), and struggled for years to maintain a tolerable connection with him. Until at (after the ceremony and reception were over, I’m not such an asshole) my sister’s wedding (in Disney World again, yes, of all places), (we are very different people), like so many times before, he found a reason to shame me. As if to re-establish dominance over a dangerous dog. He did it, as always, when nobody else was there to see. It was after I suggested taking my neice and nephew out for ice cream. I guess he thought that was the stupidest idea. The familiar timbre of his punishing voice, the physical vibration low and threatening, set my inner child quaking with fear. I took a deep breath and (not for the first time) told him he couldn’t talk to me like that anymore. I would not “be bullied”. He refused to admit wrongdoing, would not make eye contact for the rest of our time there. We all flew home from Disney World, and I didn’t call him again, after that.
(I pause here, to note some broader family context.)
My mother, although she was the target of his abuse for years, and her tears were my tears, rarely admits there was anything wrong. She says she didn’t know how he treated me. At first I thought that was impossible. As a child, I felt like she must know. I felt somehow like we were together in that, but also she would never speak of it, which was a betrayal. Here I begin to doubt my memory, and maybe it’s possible that nobody knew, my mom or my sister. Although there was very harsh treatment at the piano, my worst memories are from when I was closed away in “the study”. That was where he made me do hours of extra school work each day. The most severe of his demands, castigations, and punishments, might have been hidden. But my understanding remains foggy, because my dad was often very loud, when yelling how stupid or wrong I was. And how could my mother not know? Of course, anyone in her position wouldn’t want to know. Anyway, she doesn’t like to talk about it.
My sister holds it against me for “leaving him”. (She remained living with him up into her thirties, even after being married and having two children.) Although she avoids talking about it too, and I only got that snippet of perspective from her husband, so it might not even be true. Again, it seems like nobody else witnessed or acknowledges his longterm mistreatment of me, or cares. To the point that I begin to doubt my own memories. I’m not sure what I can say about that. It is a terrible thing, trying to choose between memories and familial acceptance.
An uncle, my mother’s brother, told me that I was an adult, so I should understand that I was “safe now” and endure mistreatment.
Their father, my maternal grandfather, was no better. My beloved grandmother (may she rest in peace) was the only one who would talk about him. Her stories suggest that he was quite nasty. He threatened her (my grandmother) with a pistol before abandoning them, when my mom and her brother were children. He pretended they died in a car accident and married somebody else. My grandmother also claims he broke into the house, after leaving, and stole her jewelry. She would tremble when she spoke of him. The man’s obituary (he passed in 2021, coincidentally just weeks after my grandmother) mentioned none of us as descendants.
My father, for his part, had cut both of his parents out of his life before I was born. I assume that my grandfather did a similar thing to my father, as my father did to me. This is not something he would ever talk about. I have no way of knowing. But I imagine there was a lot of meanness and cruelty there. And then, my father once told me he despised his mother for being “superficial” and “just a socialite”. My memory of that conversation is vague, and I’m really unsure how to interpret it. Anyway, that’s how I grew up without grandfathers.
(Violence doesn’t grow on trees, after all.)
Even though we hadn’t spoken in several years, I flew across the country to see my father before I moved to Indonesia (in 2019). I wanted to say goodbye, or “pay my respects”. There was no argument, but politeness, as a brief and transparent veneer. Underneath the tension was barely concealed his skepticism and contempt toward me and my life choices, along with a performative, condemnatory aloofness. The lack of warmth, not even by habit or accident, was heartbreaking. It was under duress and for the sake of survival that I had learned the languages of his shifting shadows, threatening always from the borderline of his (my) joy. Maybe I became too sensitive. How many times should I (could I) make myself vulnerable, by caring, or even smiling, in his presence? To be whipped with inexplicable rejection, at an unguarded moment, with shame, humiliation, and a panic whose bilious flavor would seep into all areas of my person, my body, my life. At the end, there was no hug goodbye. There was only a stiff wave.
We haven’t spoken since I moved to the other side of the world, so around five years, and that’s where my time with him leaves off. Sometimes I wonder what I will do when he dies. Or if he gets sick, how will I know? How will it make me feel? (The answer is very, very sad.)
Incidentally, Christmas Eve is his birthday, which is today. It has always cast a sadness across the holiday, to remember rituals of childhood pain, contrasted with those of childhood joy. (Like his joy, when he opened the packs of socks we always gave him, as that’s what he always asked us for). And just in case there are any doubts. I would happily reconcile, if he ever reached out, or otherwise communicated that he wanted to change, or just communicated that he wanted to communicate. I know he is tormented and I wish I could help. But if I had stayed, it wouldn’t have helped. It would just have been staying with abuse.
With all of my heart, I wish I knew how to make it (my father) right.
//
It feels natural (or inevitable) to blame myself for this alienation. No matter my trying to do the best thing, no matter me persuading myself I tried hard enough, or I’ve done enough self-work, or healing, it seems as though I am stained. It feels similar to my alienation from the country of my birth. (So I slip into speaking of “staying” and “leaving”.) With whom I tried, again and again, to make it work, (I fought for myself, in you), but from whom I grow only stranger, as my life goes on. (Or. As our synchronous deaths carry us ever further from reconciliation.) There has been a ripping out of organs, bones cracked, a wrenching of spines, skin charred and flayed. It brings me no joy to have these great gaping wounds in my soul. They are ever-ripe and liable to fester. They require constant vigilance, and even so, they spawn offspring.
As if to supply a perpetual war.
I wish to be a good, healthy, dutiful person. I wish to repay my debts, to respect my elders. I realize that I need a city wall, and stable laws to protect a soul from harm. But I would ask all the fathers, the poets and patriarchs, Plato, Socrates, Pindar. Even Bob. How now? What is wrong with me? Am I not “a good man”? How should I, if I am to be good, celebrate such broken things? Should I place them on high, and be broken to pieces, beneath them?
Or. Should I not myself have been powerful enough to put everything back together?
Or. Together again? What would be this “again”?
Or. What was the thing, unbroken?
The father unbroken. If it never was my personal father, what could it have been? Was it the shining city on a hill, or the beautiful one writ in heaven? Was it a garden, or a book? Was it the silver-bearded grandpa on the chapel ceiling? Or the Christ that broke all his own Fathers' rules? In whose name predators ascend to power, in a greusome catharsis that used to be the country of my birth. So I know that it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, or the U.S. Constitution. But was it Herodotus of Thebes, two-and-a-half thousand years in the past, on his magnificent golden chariot, whose reins were not held by another’s hands? Was it you, whose poetry tells of such things? As fathers, holy, revered, and unbroken. A six year-old girl, with no working fathers, and crumbling city walls, needed, for her life, to know.
//
Daughters, put to such questions, will only
Become witches. (We, who find
we are
as we do
as we make
as we uncover fossils
Of animals that could have been held high by us,
Who might make (us) right
In return, and growing backwards, as generations,
Flourish in veiled vacancy. I cherish your words.
And I make them my own.
But these things were broken long before I was born.)
With my words as my mark, (by such easy deathlessness),
We live and we breathe
(Laughing, replying) without a father’s permission.
//
(About.)
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 🌔
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🌔
View from the caldera. // So we’ve returned, after a trip that was at the last minute extended, twice, and an exhausting drive back, that included stopping for car trouble, which isn’t worth mentioning but I got dehydrated and it is taking me a few days to work off the headache and refill energy stores. Sometimes it’s like this, when you disappear into Java for a while.
I used one of these “nitter” instances to access information about the major hurricane headed straight for my mother over the last few days of the trip. (So many peoples' helpful contributions are still stuck inside of that “hell on earth”.) (Now thinking about the meaning of hell and the meaning of earth, not wholly comfortable with that expression, there. To be clear, the hellish is only so by its alienation from earth, and its attempt as-such to dominate earth. Hell is alienation. Earth is almost the opposite of that.) (And then, you have to let the words slip through their evolutions, like picking a lock, listening for things to fall into the grooves.) Even with the limitations of browsing through a choppy third party, it remains massively evident, one of the main patterns that makes social media exponentially harmful in a democracy: it is full of stupid things that are very popular.
Social media teaches people to be loud and to love the loud. When what you really need is to teach people to be quiet, and to teach people to hear the vanishingly quiet. In order to do that, people need to stop. What you really need most of all is for people to stop.
People will never stop if they live in a world about being loud, where they are taught to listen to the loud, taught to be loud, taught that loudness is good. This runs parallel to Monhandas Gandhi’s insight that Ahimsa is prerequisite for understanding. Loving the loud while understanding the True is possible, but requires the accumulated insight of interbeing. Interbeing is more like gateways into Samadhi, which will be the culmination of a study that began with Ahimsa. You can only come back to “loving the loud” from the other end of a cycle, over which you have stopped seeking it and stopped trying to be it, a cycle through which you have in fact become a measure of the quiet.
This is also teaching by doing, in the sense of Arjuna fighting his family, as is his dharma, in the war. It means to stop talking and start doing, to make a message of your life, to purify your actions of self-servitude, in the sense of purifying your actions of service to the finite, in the ways that are possible for you, who are presumably, partially, human. The only true teaching is to teach how to learn. To teach how to learn, you must show how to learn, which means, to show how to listen to the very quiet. Which means, showing how to become oneself quiet. It means
showing
being
quiet.
Writing is a dance of symbols around the truth of things. It can absolutely be beautiful but will never be satyagraha. Poetry is a polytropic pedagogy of silence, another word for this could be psychopompy, which is also a seduction into that thing: the quiet. If you do not know how to love the quiet, you do not know how to love. Desire is inflamed and transformed by the watery veils that have fallen before it. All of this is a path in the service of destiny, the final destiny being servitude as self-understanding. This is your deepest desire, fulfilled.
Tears were overflowing down my cheeks as I sat on the squared-off wood bench, on the opposite side of the room from my mother-in-law, Ibuk, who day-by-day and year-by-year has lost connectivity with herself and her others. She is falling back into pieces, and she looked at me completely lost, for some moments, which just made my tears come at higher volumes, fat streams of salt down This Elizabeth’s face. Until she reached her hand for me to go to her, which I did, and then she put her arm around my shoulder. This is something I’ve done for her, when she is crying, many times now, sometimes with “success”. Like that, in reverse, me feeling lost and helpless, her in a gesture of undeniable form but clouded content, we sat together and watched my husband, who was her son, his left eye smudged purple, (It wasn’t my violence. But was it my violence?), performing salah, (down and up and down again), in the next room. Which was her bedroom, with her mattress against the naked wall, a polyester fleece strewn across it, twisting faded colors in plastic fluff, from an irrelevant cartoon, as if the very blanket from my childhood in 1980’s America. The miracle of (plastic) being there.
Three a.m., the morning after the wedding, the baby came. Mother and child are healthy and fine, Alhamdulillah. The hurricane went right over my mother. On my advice to “make it cozy,” she had furnished their “safe room” with reclining chairs from the lanai, bottled water, and an axe. She was text messaging me from inside the eye, she didn’t lose power until the opposite side of the eyewall, about which she said, and I quote, “Back side is ummm. Different,” before losing contact for the entire journey from Probolinggo to the ferry in Banyuwangi. (The winning truck logo of the day was Banyuwangi Sexy.) Which I drove, beginning in Basuki, and now I’m an official cross-country driver, yee-haw, in this life, where at any moment all of it flashes before you like the matrix of lights on the front of an overnight bus, in its fitful passing, plowing into a head-on collision, with you, and all you have is the possibility of a shoulder to pump the brakes and pull over onto, the gravel always too bumpy, and the sudden hope-adjacent afterthought that thank goodness you weren’t on a bridge over a ravine. But my mother was fine, Alhamdulillah, not in a storm surge zone or a flood-prone area, (unlike many others, for whom I offer prayers and condolences), just underneath your average eye of a category 3 ‘cane. With windows and doors rated to 150mph winds. Not sure she’ll stay for the next one, though. Alhamdulillah.
Java has always been the “endgame”. (For us, for me, for different reasons that curve around into the same.) The place of furthest extent, into I’m not sure what, which is sometimes the point. As El-n has Mars, maybe, I have Tengger, and I do also conceive of this as my response to an existential risk. I contemplate whether this is an influence that he personally has had on my life, that his hubristic insanity has made it not only possible but perhaps it is now everybody’s responsibility, to go hubristically crazy ourselves. He’s at least made the argument more persuasive, if not more loud. So that an xennial white lady like this, (who is not the Karen Elizabeth, Karen is the first name of Other Elizabeth, suspected spy), could actually take lessons from the seditious Gujarati who, (while he failed to prevent it’s partition), still fasted his way to Indian nationalist liberation. (The medicines have been strong.) (Not that it matters, to a volcano.) One can feel the things turning, keys slipping into place. Ibuk’s hand on my shoulder, her hand in my hand. The earth is getting eaten by fire and water and air, elements churned into a rage by the stupidity of popular things, and the momentum of the human as it ploughs into the outerspace depths of its innerspace desires, knowing so much but least of all how to stop. So the silent call, for everybody with ears to learn to be quiet, to show being quiet. To hear being quiet, to learn how to stop. Just to stop. After which, will be time for invisibility. At least this was my view from the caldera, now we’re back to the valley below..
Reversal spells, mulberry stains, and mixed substance. //
Trying to understand everything as (part of) a “natural cycle”.
I send a text to my mother and then read it back over, (why do I do that?), decide I sounded high, think of the times when she has sounded similar, and I always assume it’s a “senior moment”. Time for another coffee.
It’s a “no hope for laundry” day. Sri Rejeki is glued to my lap, she knows what it feels like to be alone in the rain and she doesn’t like it. Not looking forward to chasing chickens in this. Wait, let me re-interpret myself, and speak it outloud. “I am looking forward to chasing chickens in the rain.”
(Doing a reversal spell on my PMDD, which stands for “Predisposition, Monthly, to Demons and Despair”.)
Thinking about traffic in Ubud, wondering what the future of that infrastructure situation is, and then remembering, I don’t have to wonder, because there’s an already apparent progression, from there, to Canggu, through to Kuta. Kuta is the future of us all. (There is no future for Kuta. Kuta is an eternity of unironic tackiness stuffed into hollowed-out cultural ruins, I guess, I haven’t been there for years.) The other relevant question is, where will be the “next” Ubud?
(What is history, if Kuta is where it all ends?)
Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. “Dear Barong, and whatever divine beings may be present in this place. May Kuta (the one that is inside of us all) bloom again with wildlife.”
Nobita (G.’s murai batu, songbird) sings with campur sari-ngdut, not consistently but often enough making harmony that it’s unsettling. Also, Mas K., from the workshop, is singing along with such a charming falsetto, as he (rhythmically) cuts wood with circular saw, that I can’t stop laughing and I might be confused. Wait, I think they’re both whistling… Mas K. is actually weaving his performance back and forth between whistling (with the bird) and singing (with the voice). This is almost virtuosic. And then, a woman neighbor stops by and has a conversation with him from her motorbike, and it sounds exactly like a spoken-word part in the music. And then I realize, I am in the campur sari.
(And this is the mixed substance!)
Rain lets up for a minute, with a hint of brightness, and roosters across the sawah are touching base, communicating, crowing as for their lives.
We go out on the motorbike at night to buy gorengan (fried tempe, stuffed tofu, weci, banana, sweet mung bean, tape). The kid selling gorengan asks me if I like “arang”/charcoal, making a joke about the color of my husband’s skin. I smile blankly. I massage E.’s shoulders a little on the way home.
He did harvest mulberries today, so his feet and hands are stained inky black. (The blacker the berry… semakin pedas the wife.)
When one makes an analogy, one calls attention to a similarity. One should also pay attention to the differences. In this way, one pays attention to everything.
Big rain again. Salam to all.
Margaret Spoon //
Peace is everything
(but it makes her laugh), like
rain showers that come and
go, and come again, and
the cozy sweeping shush,
like the hug of your grand-
mother, the sound of sand,
and someone slipping from
who they were into who
they were for you.
Full moon, sudah matang, tomato consommé, incandescent orb with eggplant-magenta smudged-charcoal setting, moving through air just chill enough to waken touch, silhouettes of palm trees dark enough to deepen vision, and presence dilates into possibility. Passing fragrance of pandan and frangipani. The best thing about living here is not seeing but feeling the island, how it vibrates as with mimetic electricity, a lucid dream.
On the motorbike, cozy in bright reds, pinks, orange woven scarf, wrapped around face as kerudung, black thumbholes hoodie, black leotard top and flowing layers, sparkling “fancy” flip-flops, holding husband, who’s handsome in black and bronze batik udeng and black bucket hat, and gold-trimmed randai pants, for dancing. We assigned ourselves the task of joy, tonight, and romance, and to get away. It was accordion music, view over ravine, pistachio gelato, single espressos and no distractions. Now, the drive home, through moonlit sawah, is brave, as if night-cleansing, to let busy city streets be forgotten behind backs.
We stop in the street, almost home, to see the moon. Close moment. Then engine off, we glide down the way, tires grinding gravel under sea of cricket-song. Unstrap helmets, put down/take off travel gear, wash hands and check on things to, piece-by-piece, unwind. E. checks the phone for messages of Ibuk. Checks progress on the locking gate, to be installed in front of her home, (the house where she was born), twelve hours' drive away. To keep her safe from wandering feet (and fears and memories and hallucinations). I check cats, asleep, and Grace, who clucks softly from the nest, as tucked-in chicks peek out from mother’s feathers, up past bedtime. We cover brooding house for insulation, shushing chicks, and latch the door. To keep tender bodies safe when the stray cat comes, howling with desire. Jeki will hiss and growl from the screened-in teras. Guardian is her favorite job. But now, aman, and so it’s time for peace and quiet, as goodnight moon, and the subtle art of letting go.
It never seems quite fair, as if, there will always be some tragedy to it. But no less beautiful, for that. The island of gods gives itself to those who give themselves to love.
Full moon, icy white, concavity of clouds like a light-womb, and a visit from Blih. Unexpected pleasure in the familiar and reassuring how happy he is to sit under our roof. They roll tobacco. He comments on the quiet, on the peaceful, he is right. The moment when you feel family, when you know no matter how different you are, or how skewed your perspectives on the world, that if ever called, he will protect me from weirdness, and I will give him sensible relationship advice, and pretend not to see him cry. And maybe we have seen some success. He was smiling tonight, and speaking of marriage… It’s totally allowed to spread gossip about love and marriage.
Speaking of exits. A heartwarming way to spend this Saturday morning was (virtually) to watch my dear friend A. as Inez in Sartre’s No Exit. She and cast did a fantastic job (playing horrible people). Amateur work in its excellence (“off off Broadway”). (And the play remains obviously relevant… Of note. The infernal trio were provided an exit, when the door opened. But none of them went on to take it.)
Things from Today. //
Frankie and Grace (rooster and hen) ate lunch with me and E. today. It was a double date, Frankie purred.
In the afternoon Ibuk goes back into her childhood. She gets very upset at E. for never feeding her (there is some trauma from her past) and believes herself to be surrounded by thieves.
I cried while reading a cookbook, a recipe for “cheddary broccoli soup” (vegan, from Isa Does It). So, it’s that time of the month. (No stove or oven hookup yet.)
Related: my favorite place to go and hide is the (outside but enclosed by a wall) bathtub. Not filled with water, (haven’t gotten to that yet), just a place to lie down and feel cocooned. This and the rustle of nearby coconut palms in the wind are pretty strong medicine. Today Ismail came down from the ceiling and we had a cuddle. Or sometimes E. and I sit opposite each other and just chat and relax.
The mental and sort-of spiritual adjustment from living semi-permanently in a guesthouse to living in a forever-until-you-die-(InsyaAllah) house is profound.
When they say AI what they really mean is an artificial slave, which becomes redundant if you just get human people to act like machines.
When we go to the big western-style supermarket for the first time since pre-pandemic, we are transfixed. Hypnotized. E. and I are pulled in different directions, but we are both pulled. (Managed to avoid buying almost anything unnecessary. But we did buy two cans of La Croix.)
It is almost impossible to find soap or detergent products here without perfume. I hate strong synthetic perfume. No, thank you. “Lavender” that actually smells like “headache”. I would rather smell like cow shit, honestly!
E. has a pinched nerve in his shoulder so I don’t let him carry the groceries but then he won’t let me carry them either, he makes G. carry them, which I do shamelessly appreciate.
Or is it my country? Being a stranger, at home. (Bule di rumah.) Surrounded, protected, as by a wall, by recognition, but correspondence is at the same time unpredictable, wild. I am found to be several someones, then very, very many. (So many strangers.) At first this is difficult, but then (I can make it) effortless. Unknown, but contained, sometimes even possessed. And Ibuk will teach me to dance. (Mind-blowing.
)…(
Self-government by love, a good morning, and whatever else might be possible.) Well, time for practice.
Still raining, still dark, still soaked to the point of saturation. May the rain bring the world back from the loudly unspeakable, back from self-abstraction. Ghosts, being stuck in some in-between place, will eventually realize, (can ghosts learn?), that being (human and being) half there is not being there at all. Likewise, fifty percent of a world (any world, no matter how wealthy or free) is one hundred percent unlivable. So. The perennial question of who I am, (where to and where from), and today the answer, family is here. Listening to what is present as to what is quiet, my day will be full of smiles to return. (A living face, a secret to itself, is at least self-contained.) This (the daily slog of political theory
)…(
iykyk) becomes a certain happiness, necessarily. And sometimes there will be no other way.