News
A festival of purgation. //
“Being sick” is also a negotiation between myself and the world, I was thinking yesterday. As we kept progressing through this illness, as if it were an argument, the subsequent days offering different perspectives on it, beginning with aches, shakes, and nausea, that climax in a night of vomiting, (un-willing efforts to empty an already hollowed stomach), disease passing as through a spectrum of these bodily systems, modes. The last few days it turned into the upper part of the body, head and chest, which are now swollen with mobilization, inundative rescue efforts, wracked by sneezes and coughs. So chapped lips and nose, morning voices cut with sludge, and sinus headache. My trifling desire to shut out all light and sound.
This is not me falling prey, I (comedienne) assure my husband, who tends to view illness as weakness in surrender. This is a battle, this phlegmy mess is our mounted defense and a glorious victory in progress… And then (feeling very American) meekly apologizing for being a burden while thusly underway.
My mind has been so sluggish, especially after that weird mania of day three. The last thing I want now is to focus on the specific task of writing. Which requires razor edges and piercing sight, building by division and seeking subtler senses of coherence, not to mention, setting out the beggar’s bowl for inspiration. (And caffeine, now seven days without. Who even am I?) You never know what gift you’ll get. Reading, ok, I’ve done a lot of that, in a hazy stupor absorbing many terrible things. What else is new.
The whole Neil Gaiman situation is gross and fascinating, (the archived link, at six days old, is already obsolete?), with offshoots to and from nearly everything relevant, to me and my humble epic, an irresistible exemplar of subterfuge poetic manipulation. Or as (poor, dear) Tori put it, last year, a wolf disguised as sheep. How blessed we are to have our own contemporary Lysias. Good thing we’ve got horses, as those armies really kept perfectly still. It is not mine but my other favorite response so far is this one. (Is this guy an asshole? or just ornery? I don’t know these people, their whisper networks, and yet,) It brings a shiver to read such incisive commentary, or perhaps that’s just leftover fever.
I have some digesting to do, and further healing, before offering my thoughts on all that. Other than, to celebrate its coming out. A festival of purgation.
Then yesterday I was thinking, while coughing until the gag reflex came, (apologies but I guess I will add Montaigne to the inevitable list of influences around here, who really put no limits on the observations he would share), and why not? These sensations and this experience are no less expressions of something true than, well, a tree growing, or an approaching storm. The red rose blooming. Baudelaire’s “take” (“take” = “make”) on a rotting corpse. (The ever-unheeded warning that “anyone can do it”.) This too is experience and introspection is in theory possible, here as everywhere, in war as in peace, in decay as in life.
Perhaps it is a reliable cornerstone of interpretation for these modern horrors, as purgation. (Or as Americans call it these days, inauguration.) We have ceremonies too for calling out the demons, for coughing them up and spitting them out, the upending of bodily-function as vomit, (I despise and resist this feeling, to no avail), as banishment of the enemy one made of oneself. (Must we deal with it now, the nightmare of involuntary anal penetration? Dear God, what would Jesus do? With Christ’s remains interred in this necessary question.) Or what else is a virus? Embrace your closest intimate, the toilet bowl. Disease as ecstatic dance, revelling in the expulsive revelation of noxious bodily fluids!
I’d been thinking lately also, here is another possible referent of Morychos. A cthonic deity, local and obscure, the kind whose worship seems to have been ubiquitous in Ancient Greek “civilization”, as folk practice. These things rarely if ever made it into the written record. Modern historians had (imagine it) interpreted a whole society based only on its polite conversation. Ye noble Greeks. Here’s yet another way of cultivating a partial truth, by limiting your resources to official, state-sanctioned documents. Well history, which is human, will always be more akin to “the state”, than to “the true”. Disregard images on vases, atypical animals represented on temple reliefs, a coiling snake on the throne of Zeus. Which figure was the interloper? To which one did we sacrifice our children? This is not modern, not at all. It has ever been difficult for us to see through the deception of our ongoing efforts, “to groom”.
So I started reading (pre-flu) Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison, (a fascinating historical figure in her own right), the seminal academic text on stratification of divinity in the ancient world. Written word versus unrecorded ritual, text versus ceremonial relief, the one kind of god you like to talk about, the other that doesn’t bear mentioning. Indispensable reading for students of invisibility, (in whatever dialectical direction), a constant reminder that we are secrets kept from ourselves,
Of mystery as the shroud.
You will never understand anything unless you assume the unmentionable, subterranean. Dead bodies. That said, I’m not convinced I contain multitudes at all. This skin is too fragile, this spirit bloated, and this willing, quite broken. It seems more to me that they (or we, the multitudes) come spilling out, un-contained, as yellow bile. Seemingly seamless stories vibrate with fever of the undisclosed. We, who remain unread, unwritten will be known as forgotten prisoners of his, awaiting our climactic liberation.
This is the radical steadfastness of faith, as Furies. We do not look at the time.
Where-from? Chickens’ Edition
I’m celebrating, because after two days living on coconut water and white bread, I graduated today to whole wheat bread. You see, I have the flu. Or, “a” flu? Just basic old-fashioned flu, not one of the trendy new viruses (you know the ones). I’m already feeling better, enough to be fantasizing about a fully-loaded veggie burger, (sauerkraut is mandatory), however, I remain shaky-feeling and weak, so my realistic plan for tonight is noodle soup. And maybe a fruit smoothie. (InsyaAllah there will be a burger on Friday.)
Grace is feeling better too, I think. She stopped pining around the brooding nest and started hanging out with Frankie again. So Frankie is more of a paranoid asshole with everybody else, (including his own children), but it’s because he’s protective of Grace. So we can’t fault him. He’s back to finding her morsels of food and making cozy nests for her. (Is he actually an ideal partner?) If they haven’t already, they’ll probably start mating again soon. (That decision is up to Grace.) Those two are inseparable.
Doing a little “research”, I realized that our chickens are probably different from the domestic chicken breeds popular in North America and Europe. Frankie is similar in appearance to the red junglefowl. This is the wild bird, native to Southeast Asia including Indonesia, from which chickens were domesticated thousands of years ago (~8,000). Red junglefowl cocks are strikingly handsome birds, as is Frankie. The wikipedia article notes that they are sometimes used in cock fighting, which remains popular around here (in Bali). When wikipedia says “sometimes” about Indonesia, I have learned to interpret that as “often”. So I would imagine Frankie’s genetics are pretty close to that source, and it’s not surprising that he would come across as somewhat feral.
We “acquired” Frankie before we moved into our house, when he wandered onto our property and didn’t feel like leaving. So he has lived here longer than we have. He was still a chick back then, but apparently old enough for independence. We later learned that he had been chased away from our neighbor Pak T’s house, by their cat. (Pak T said we could keep him.) Then we “acquired” Grace when Pak S brought her over, also before we moved in, and left her in a small bamboo cage in the yard. This was either a gift or an instance of Pak S not wanting to deal with her, possibly because she had five chicks at the time. (Or it was, for Pak S, an entertaining test of what we would do with a mating pair of chickens? I really don’t know, he just laughed about it when we asked him! All I know is, we weren’t consulted about whether we “wanted” any of them.) Because we didn’t live here yet, our carpenters kind of took care of the chickens. I assumed everything would be ok. But over several nights, those five chicks that came with Grace disappeared. They were probably hunted and eaten by the same cat that had chased Frankie.
When I learned about it, I felt guilty about that, Grace losing all her chicks while she was stuck in the cage. This is one reason I really wanted Grace to experience motherhood, fully, at least once. (My sense of justice!) And that’s what got us into the situation where we have a flock of eleven chickens. Or at least, one flock of nine chickens, and another flock of two chickens. It remains unclear whether Frankie and Grace want to integrate with their children’s flock at all. On second thought, maybe it’s totally clear. The parents and the children simply consider themselves separate flocks.
(Imagine that. I actually said to one of them today… “It’s ok, I have a mean dad too.” …)
For her part, Grace doesn’t look like a red junglefowl hen. She looks very much like this other breed of chicken from Indonesia, also used for cock fighting, the Ayam Cemani. She’s a lovely bird, with a soft and thoughtful look, although my photos haven’t yet captured it. I doubt she’s any kind of pure breed, but she is completely black, with only the faintest blush on her “caruncles”. (There’s a lot of chicken vocabulary to learn.) Another reason I doubt she’s purebred is because wikipedia says Ayam Cemani aren’t good “setters”, whereas Grace is a very broody chicken. When that time comes, she is utterly devoted to sitting on her eggs.
My thinking is this. Most domestic chickens have been bred for egg and/or meat production, and possibly for docility, whereas our chickens have been bred, (and/or taken from the jungle?), for fighting, and/or allowed to breed free-range. As a result, I don’t expect them to be very cuddly birds. But I do expect them to be smart in their own ways, as wild or feral animals are. And they are thoroughly social, with each other and with us. It’s apparent that they consider us (humans) company, they always come “check out” what we’re doing, or sit nearby us (under the awning) when it’s raining and they’re bored, or ask for treats (boiled peanuts). They (warily) eat from our hands. They look at us accusingly when we don’t have peanuts for them. And if I speak to Grace in sweet coos (like Cucurrucucu), Frankie gets testy.
(Although I always think of it as Frankie’s, that song isn’t about a rooster, but a lovesick coo-ing dove. Please click the link if you’ve never heard Caetano Veloso’s rendition. You won’t regret it, it’s heart-achingly lovely. We need more Caetano Veloso and Almodovar in all our lives, don’t we? And then for another version, this one sung by Juan Diego Florés at La Scala is sublime. Watching that reminds me of that one time I was there. Also, watch for the look he gives the loggionisti—it’s so direct!)
Anyway, that’s more-or-less the origin story of our chickens. They showed up in our lives, like our three cats, and we weren’t ever given a real option to say no. And they (unlike the cats, who are now imprisoned in our safe, loving, and amply medicated home) are technically free to leave. Although once a few of Grace’s chicks escaped outside the wall and we spent a rainy afternoon traipsing through overgrown jungle and rice paddies to retrieve them, with Grace frantically waiting back home. She was very upest about it. That was when they were still babies. Now they’re almost grown, the girls will probably start laying soon (if they haven’t already, in secret), and one of the cockerels has, as signaled by his crowing, decided he’s the leader of the flock. The chicks have their own governance structure now. They could fly over the wall if they wanted, but they seem pretty content to hang around here. Even if we are delinquent chicken keepers and have yet to figure out their permanent coop situation. They may not be cuddly, but it’s pretty obvious that they will love when we give them a permanent and roomy chicken house, dry and warm, with brooding boxes, etc. They would live with us in the human house, if we let them. But that’s too much even for me.
By the way, we did eventually screen off the hallway, so the human house is totally off-limits now. Thank goodness, because the poop grew up as they did… the quantity makes it gross, but excellent fertilizer for the gardens. And oh, please pray for us that we never experience an outbreak of avian influenza. (My own symptoms do NOT match those of A H5N1.)
(I still haven’t told you what we do with all the eggs. That can wait for another day.)
Because look at me, I’m still in bed with this flu and I had planned to give myself a solid 3-4 days off of “serious blogging”. But then I accidentally wrote this long post and spent the afternoon reading some of these older posts and listening to music that makes me tear up and/or shout bravissimo and wave my hands around like I’m in The Godfather. And yesterday I read the whole book about learning to speak chicken! Apparently I’m ok at resting the body, but not great at resting the mind. I can’t believe I haven’t had coffee in three days. That’s truly wild.
Maybe it’s because of the full moon? Selamat purnama, everybody. Stay healthy and safe.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌕
Funeral for a Chicken
It became obvious that Grace was grieving the loss of her chick.
She remained close to the nest, puttering, looking here and there or inside the nest again. She was uncharacteristically quiet. She chased away other chickens. She was aimless but unwilling to leave. I spent time sitting with her. I took moments to slow down, to meet her “where she is”, and tell her how sorry we are for her loss. Now she sits near me as I read and write. (I sit on the porch, still not far from the nest.) The most touching thing is how she maintains eye contact.
It prompted me to search for written-down experiences of (communication, community) living with chickens, and I found this book called How to Speak Chicken by Melissa Caughey. She means literally speaking their language, deciphering and returning their clucks and bokks, as well as gaining entry to their flock. I do already speak to the chickens in words and sounds. I’ve been surprised how closely they listen and the things they seem to understand. But Melissa takes it to another level and clearly knows more than we do about her chickens, about what they want, about their feelings, their fears and joys, their quirky (individual) personalities, and all their ways of self-expression.
At first, I felt shy that I would mourn with Grace, for a chick who knew only one beautiful day. When chickens are not just eaten by them, but treated worse than garbage, by humans, by the thousands and millions. (And, well, Los Angeles is burning.) But I shouldn’t be shy. Community with the non-human is a gateway to deeper understanding.
Too many instances of it (community with the non-human) are treated as un-serious, dismissed as “merely subjective”, reduced by dualist (Cartesian) dogma (in partnership with certain religious traditions, especially Christianity in its understanding of human will, i.e. Augustine and Aquinas) to machine-like instinct, safely compartmentalized into the category of “pets”, explained away as the primitive behavior of pre-scientific minds, (children or women or the brown-skinned), or the flaky spirituality of new-age nonsense. This is part of the same modern and enlightenment-era thinking that provides justification for rapacious colonial expansion and empire, as well as chattel slavery, and all else that is generally called “white supremacy”. The culturally assumed solution to this (“white supremacy”) has largely been to gather non-white humans up into the exclusive flock of intellect- and/or “free will”-endowed beings, while partitioning away the rest of the natural world (non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, rivers, oceans, mountains, canyons, stars, moons, etc.) in a separate category of the stupid and/or dumb, unworthy of ethical or moral consideration. Except inasmuch as they are useful, to the human.
Humanism, when seen from this vantage, is the cultural effort to replace white supremacy with (a dubiously racially neutral) human supremacy. But the violence (ignorance, self-abuse) of supremacy remains. The in-practice meaning of “free will” retains nothing holy, becomes the freedom to exploit, abuse, and generally disregard the suffering or wellbeing of those without it (without “free will”). All of us (humans) have suffered from this humanism. And because humanism assumes the human to be dual, human and animal, (as opposed to human animals), humanism divides us against our own embodied selves.
The violence of human separatism can be observed through a cultural Scylla of embodiment issues, from the body’s hijacking by commodification, (“the beauty industry”, including online “influencers”), to abuse by for-profit pharmaceutical corporations (in the name of health), to cultural conflicts over sexuality, (including over manifestations of gender), to the marginalization or cultural “turning away” from the elderly and the disabled, to addiction and other crises of habit (i.e. obesity, heart disease, diabetes, social media, “AI”), to crises of mental health and suicide, etc. (Here I include “AI” as an embodiment problem, as a mis-relation of human thinking to human bodies. Although I don’t think this is the only way to interpret it.)
Non-human does not mean stupid. Only the most rarefied facets of our experience (if any) are uniquely human. Most of the time, humans interrelate like any other animals. But look, there is plenty of love in this. It’s true that our chicken family will never read and discuss a Plato dialogue with me. Neither will most humans (including you). Neither would your own child, especially if it passed away only a day after it was born. We are almost wholly joined by bonds of affect and imagination. Whatever it is that is uniquely human, we can’t even be sure that it lends itself to community. Humans stand out from other living animals not by their social or political coherence, but in their (uniquely) dysfunctional or unstable relationships with each other, and with the world. The most destructive become historically notable mostly because of an idiotic pretense of supremacy. It works until it fails.
Does it count as trying to understand the world, if you assume at the outset its stupidity? To assume its stupidity is expedient. It may get you to Mars, it may get you a big mac, or a house in the suburbs with enough cashflow to supply (frequently replaced) digital devices for a family of four. To assume its stupidity makes it seem okay to do unfathomly terrible things to the non-human. There isn’t such a sharp divide between concentration camps and factory farms, the fossil fuel industry and violence against women. To the extent that, as metaphors, they read as obvious, clichéd or tedious, if not offensive. And yet, these are its routine, its daily complicities.
What is it? It is a living thing, saying “never again” with each exhalation, and with each inhalation, “always already”.
My husband buried his father as well as his sister, according to Muslim tradition, so he knows how to wrap a corpse in preparation for burial. Once the chick died, having lost its voice, its movement, its warmth, and its self, Grace no longer interpreted it as the body of her child. (A reminder that we are but interpretations of each others’ bodies.) We removed it from the nest without her objection. We lit some small incense sticks, E set it on a small wood-block table, wrapped it in several pieces of white cloth. He dug a hole under a rose bush, about the size of my hand. I placed it in the hole, he covered it with dirt. He placed a stone to mark the location. I put small white and purple melati flowers.
Grace sees what we do. She sees me crying. I tell her it wasn’t her fault, and she’s a really good mom.
The other chickens, her grown babies, come by and check in. She snaps at them, still defensive of the nest. Frankie is never far away but gives her space. Grace moves a little farther from the nest, day by day. With reluctance, she releases the feelings and memories of her baby. Today, we gave them their favorite treat, boiled peanuts. Frankie, as usual, made sure that Grace got more than the rest.
Natural divisions are temporary, like rivers between us that are never the same, or hypothetical, like bridges that dissolve as we pass beyond them, or revelation, like eggshells cracked open with tiny horns on our hatchling beaks. We grow into other lives. Nature in motion is constant incompletion, otherwise we would all stop dead in our tracks. History is the ontological mismanagement of time. There is no cause for despair, but hope is only from the cracks, and the light that gets through them. What this means is that the future is not the measure, and to stop expecting victorious outcomes. Build to rebuild, and to rebuild again. Live in the truth of one beautiful day. Sacrifice your heart at the altar of its creation.
(One way or another.) Community with the non-human is the gateway to self-understanding.
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.
I’m sad to share that nu baby was lethargic and weak today, didn’t come out of the nest, rarely cheeping. E held out hope while I braced for loss. Noticing the smallness of passing life and its clarity, like a glass marble in time.
Grace sits close, mouth open, and blinks at us. She knows her baby and its heartbeat. Her energy for care is concentrated patience, balanced sorrow and waiting, being neither here nor there, but present. Watching Grace I tell myself, this is part of being a mother too.
We left her a wijaya kusuma flower.
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. 🌖
I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars // maybe a week ago. I really liked it but I think it took me the whole year to finish.
(Spoilers follow.)
It was relaxing. Not facile, but easy to read when stressed out about other things. Good for falling asleep too. The pages are full of lush descriptions of Martian geology, seen from gliders and rovers and windows and walkers, and also, of humans being very human. I think the viewpoint is… near-future, mild tech optimism made palatable by human realism, where humans routinely do callous and violent stuff, like sending out a Mars expedition while trashing planet Earth. They are a destructive force, ever-changing and -surviving, and some who have good ideas are also gifted with good luck and timing. The 90’s vintage works (published 1992, I think). It wouldn’t work nearly as well, if written today, with all of the darkness of these days. Perhaps this is an example of escapism from history, while still being canny to human nature. It’s much nicer to think about the future from a pre-9/11 perspective, isn’t it?
Robinson’s characters are like avatars, but not (to me) in an overbearing way. I especially like his women characters. Maybe these are his favorite too. I like Ann, the geologist, who is a staunch defender of virgin, untouched, original Mars. The plot of the book, which follows the beginning of humans colonizing Mars, as terraforming is begun, and the landscape is ripped apart by industry and eventual rebellion and war, is an extended grief, for Ann. She loves Mars with unspeakable devotion and hates the terraforming with every cell in her body. Her perspective is difficult and severe, but beautiful.
And I like Hiroko, who completely subverts all the official directives of their initial mission. She is the designated biosphere designer, and it seems like she has some amazing ideas for how to create life. Then she and her followers ditch the main group and spend most of the book shrouded in mystery. Well, she is busy making babies using all the men’s sperm samples, taken from her lab, (without anybody’s consent), and creating an underground cult movement called Areophany that worships viriditas, or life-force. She is disciplined and insane, also very difficult, impossible to contain or to fully know. She answers to nobody and recognizes herself as a force of nature. Like a Mars-mother goddess. As you may know by now, I love this kind of thing.
(Can’t forget to mention, there’s a scene in this book, with a character named John Boone, a goofy lovable American, a charismatic and nice guy, who has an ecstatic experience with a group of travelling Sufi Muslims. They are dancing and whirling around in the vortex of a crimson dust storm, flying through the air and spinning in the low gravity of Mars, chanting all the different names of Mars, with all the names of Allah. The image is one of flying-spinning through a great blood-red alien heart. This scene is wonderful, not to be missed!)
There are other women characters less extreme in their commitments, and many other things to love about the book. These are just my favorites. Happily, Ann and Hiroko are both still around in the next book, Green Mars. I started it a few days ago. Maybe this one will take me another year to finish?
Goodnight, chickens. //
I spend a lot of energy worrying about waste.
I dislike waste. Unambiguous waste strikes me as unambiguously bad. Sometimes waste is obviously egregious, sometimes it’s outside of my control. It can be hard to know what is (or will be) wasteful, without learning that from experience. Often one gets it wrong, before getting it right. Experiment is being-at-work for the sake of learning, which often involves waste. What seems truly needful is the waste (scattered like flower petals, ribbons, feathers, teeth…, we are free to improvise) along a possible way to wisdom.
(What is the opposite of experimental? Naive, traditional, conservative, established, authoritative, authoritarian, conjectural, anecdotal,…
Wow, an uncontained multitude.)
“I dislike wasted words. I think humans really are un-governable. While causality is alive and poetry is worship.” Anybody who would actually say this is so full of themselves. But written words can follow opposite rules, from spoken ones, which is how poetry slips into necromancy. Written words are like statues. Once you let them be poses, and self-organize as unique figures, they become experiments in the containment and unleashing of multitudes.
It is not entirely safe, it can be extremely dangerous. Is it worth it? Is it waste on the way to wisdom?
(If not, then to where?)
The chickens grew big enough that they didn’t fit in their house. They were fighting about it, mostly at night. They don’t need walls for warmth anymore, with the tropical temperatures, but they’re much happier with enclosed shelter from the rain. So E made a covered loft in their pen to expand the roosting space. Tonight they look cozy and relieved, snuggled up off the ground, on a cushy grass bed. They are more quiet, too.
I’m glad that my husband believes in ghosts, monsters, miracles. If he didn’t, how could he believe in me?
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌒
Mawar Natal.
Tropical Christmas //
wonderful news, everything is less empty than advertised,
triple-checking our double-Christ by the crossroads, the unborn child
that Love is Real, however disturbingly ugly and poor. get ready
to suspect of “parasocial” relationships that they aren’t actually one-way (being at work in only one way). And “normal” social relationships aren’t two-way, well, not relationships of love. These are (“paranormally”) three-way, it’s called mediation
to invite another being-at-work to emerge than those presently spoken, or instead, that our voices have been momentarily invited
to escape I thought I must flee into falsehood. Beauty was only there, in circuses of impossibility, until my very shape was chosen by the eyes of this gently created face. In whose curves and creases it would be possible to cease flight and surrender. A shifting of ivory feathers, a self of un-defacing light. (A song!) Lo and behold (the beautiful self) it was (us, reading) you
(we had lost all reason, we had lost restraint)
a being built not to survive but to thrive, bellyfat shaking under half-lit moon, she is the gift of procreation. With dripping excess of bodies joined, masses of the partial and angry, legs, breasts, hands, flayed faces smeared with mud, and as she mounts the horizon, a star on her forehead through which is visible their heavenward mandala
their shapes were monster with mandala or Athena with gorgoneion
(each solstice a moment of peace,
and submission of lust to curvilinear motion)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌓
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.
Just playin', again. // Although we can’t actually listen to this album, because when we do, we just cry,
As one who is broken.
I am primarily an emotional listener to Bob Dylan, . .. Because that is what he has taught me to be.
Evil is gifted a new aspect, with “Black Rider”.
The grandfather’s follow-up to the suckling child’s “Idiot Wind”.
(The end-of-days bard, the weariness of Zeus, the predicament of Lot..)
There’s obviously a lot of (that old time) (Ancient Greek) religion in here.
Bob always writes my exact kind of briar patch. I guess I’m crying, I realized, because I’ve been needing the kind of comfort only he could give. I can’t say how grateful I am to hear the specific and living sound of his voice, right here in my ears. On my pirate radio station. A perfect antidote to… farthiness. The awareness of being too far away.
Evil got theirs, now “Key West” is givin the old “written on my soul, from me to you”.
“Hibiscus flowers,
They grow everywhere here.
If you wear one,
put it behind your ear.“
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin (Mother of Muses) for blessing this world, (this one here, that I live in, my world), with Bob Dylan.
To fertile Phthia. //
There’s a Plato dialogue for every mood when you’re living through the dying days of a democracy. I revisited the Crito, which I blame on every person who has posted anything about “conservatism” on the internet since election results. It is a strange dialogue, it feels more surreal each time, after being away (and changing). Socrates' tone is jarring, like a dull thud that measures our powerlessness, and this stupid, intrusive thought that Crito hardly even tries, in a suspended, too-brief moment of waiting. For a ceremonial ship to arrive, between the sentencing and the carrying out of the execution. During which the prophetic dream hangs in the air,
“Socrates, on the third day you would come to fertile Phthia."
(Fertile Phthia is like the valley below, but for Achilles.)
I sometimes wonder if the oddness of Socrates' voice is because this is the closest the poet ever made it to the “original” flavor of Socrates. There is a historical heaviness, but this could also be the result, I imagine, of the poet’s grief. (Maybe written at about the right time.) And a mercilessness with which Socrates invokes for himself this knotted nest of aporia. He doesn’t come across as pure, so much as impatient, correct, resigned. Tired. He treats it like a summary of repetitions. He draws a very hard line, but at the same time, a weird mix of lines, that don’t gracefully fit together. He leaves for himself no other choice, while he leaves for us quite a few holes.
The laws are our parents and we owe them everything.
Or,
We shouldn’t do wrong to anybody, (or at all), no matter what wrong they do to us.
(Selamat purnama🌕)
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.)
Hujan angin. // (Windy rain.)
I’m inventing a new word, psycheic. From psyche + -ic, three syllables pronounced sai-kay-ik. An English-language adjective for the Ancient Greek psyche, soul, life, spirit.
(“Psychic” has so much baggage, why not make a new word?
Why does it feel like a forbidden power, to make new words? Or like a slippery slope into… indecipherable crone. It gets exhausting placing restrictions on myself that I rarely expect other people to follow. This is what it feels like, I guess, the unravelling of responsibility.
But one is seeking a different connection.)
There’s nothing wrong with self-actualizing. Although I prefer to say it, “being at work, staying myself”. There’s nothing wrong with work, either.
Work is the best kind of leisure.
(Related, I will not hold myself back from continuing to praise: stretchy tube tops, they are my new favorite, all-purpose clothes. They are amazing bra substitutes. Plus shoulders are beautiful? It is very sensual and freeing. And just imagine, a no-straps lifestyle. I can add it to my no-shoes lifestyle. I can never be allowed to leave Bali, lol)
We’ve had a few hours every afternoon of very windy thunderstorms. It’s bracingly good weather for translating. But Sri Rejeki sticks to my lap like glue. She gets cuddle-grouchy when it rains.
When it’s hard to let go of all the rabbit holes, at the end of the day, it helps to have a cup of peppermint tea. Then to go looking for sleep.
(Sleep is also a being-at-work.)
(And dreaming is another sailing?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌖
True news is rigorously neither bad nor good, but always on the edge of your ability.
Do not smile at things that would otherwise make you gag.
It appears as a dysfunction of leadership, but tyranny is the malady of a people (person).
The roosters are learning to crow.
A principle of psychedelic science. //
Am I crazy or does Kendrick Lamar’s latest album share moments with Isthmian 1?
(“Manifest excellence boldly radiated”)
(I have more posts planned on Isthmian 1, what a fascinating poem it is. Basking a little in the wonder.)
If I was a track from gnx, I would be “reincarnated”, which is breathtaking and a quick favorite. It actually feels (and is this crazy?) similar in theme to that post I wrote about Kendrick, a few months ago. (ok, to a point)
I want to write a post/page where I list “influences”, or “heroes”, (mostly makers of things out of words, but maybe it should be more than that), the ones I’m aware of at least, but there’s a certain way I want to do it (as ever, eyeroll-at-self), so the blog has to wait. Not everything can come out at once, and that is something like a natural law, or maybe, a principle of psychedelic science. Just so, with blogging. It has a temporal quality, it takes shape over time, which means it must have rhythms. How it develops and settles into patterns, or shifts, how things come out, expressed into it, when they do, or when they don’t. The stutters and the repetitions. There is also the kind of reality things achieve, when they go from these sort of gritty swirls of melting sherbet all around us, to being set down in monochrome. Very many things in life (naturally) resist that. And then, the voices (are they daimonic?) say no until they don’t.
Kendrick Lamar is among those “influences” towards whom I feel something that feels a lot like love, I think it might be love.
(Another of these is Cardi B,..)
Idea. For the month of January, instead of reading any global news at all, maybe I’ll read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I’m not saying I will do that, but maybe it would be better for my overall health, if I could.
The thought of “shutting out” everything not on this island. (The last thing anybody I know wants to talk about is news.)
Hm, I do think it’s a good idea to begin planning real strategies for psychic protection, for the coming months. The way these clowns talk about women is going to feel like constant rape culture down your throat, and they will be sadistic about it. For me, it helps to spend time absorbed in Greek poems. It’s obviously different for everybody. Please anticipate ways to keep yourself safe.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌘
How many honored fathers can the motherland bear? //
“When your guru sends you to study with another guru for a while, and you don’t know them, and you don’t know why you’re sent, but you go,” I said to my husband. “It’s like that.” He understood, and agreed, having been in that very situation, (and told me about it), unlike me, who was recognizing it (in my own experience) for the first time.
It could be for context, or a prerequisite for whatever’s next. It could be you need to learn something specific, and the other guru has a special skill. It could be that you’re being tested, it could be this is a barrier to entry, or a container (or mantra) for safekeeping, like a gate (or a city wall). It could be a trick or a trap. It could be they want to impart a certain feeling or awareness, to make present a specific idea or situation. It could be this is a useful or healthy distraction. It could be you need to be babysat. This could be a different version of the same lesson. It could be a supplement to the main lesson. It could be the main lesson, in a nutshell.
(It could be no lesson at all.)
Translating a Pindar ode because Socrates quotes it,
and the whole island shifts from unadulterated gravitas. (Transmission may be spotty.) Pindar’s mode is arch conservatism, a dream where even the lightness tastes like metal. The aroma of olive leaves and salty air, parched lips touching wine, human sweat and horses, woodsmoke and sizzle of burnt flesh offering, of making multitudes of hardships right.
(Previously, I would not have with enthusiasm and joy sat down to analyze an entire 70-line Isthmian ode, just because my author uses four words of it. This has become a pleasure to which I happily submit.)
If the “old school” version of hypertext was poetic reference, then using hypertext to build a poetic world, including passageways to other worlds, is making it with passageways to things one didn’t make. To worlds with other structures and capacities, shaped analogues walking through containers… as possible, or at least momentary, conclusions, places to wreck your ship on, places to be received, be left exposed, or be forgotten.
Nobody reads Pindar anymore, it seems, and maybe that’s because his poetic world is so strictly of a time and people. Celebration as funereal business, as dust to dust, and the sacred perpetuity of that. To pick up his scroll is to pick up the poet’s earth-bound mortality. The faint whiff of one’s own (archaic) decay. That he would say, rejoice. We shall build an un-begrudging song so we might crumble together, over ages.
Beloved Pindaros, (ὦ φίλε Πίνδαρος), how many (Greek) words are there, for how the sea flows around an island?
(In what sense is a blog “a whole”?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🪐
Sri Rejeki with laron. // Selamat tilem🌑