News
On American Thanksgiving
//
War on (the outside, war on) the inside,
And (choose) from the flavors of (Babylon),
To (be the change), to (bring good news), or (not).
//
I’m thankful for any moment (of peace).
I’m thankful that cat diarrhea isn’t (forever, like) plastic.
I’m thankful for the love (of my husband).
//
And when I need to feel a resolution,
I can just skip (may I reverently
Hold that power) to the end (of your poem).
//
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌒
There is VERY IMPORTANT chicken news // that I’ve been trying to squeeze in “here” for a few days.
(Sometimes one lets the horses run.)
We were shocked to learn, Grace’s nine offspring aren’t nine roosters. They are four juvenile roosters and five juvenile hens. This feels something like a miracle! It’s a shift in household energy and a change in the meaning of things.
There will no longer be ten roosters crowing, at our house. (I am honestly relieved. However,
There still will be ten roosters crowing in beta.)
So it seems that we trusted some fake news a false prophecy. A family member had worked in a chicken factory, claimed expertise in identifying their sex, as chicks, and we believed him. It turns out, he was wrong. Pak and Bu S. came over for purnama and we gave them a tour of the “orchid hallway”, that is my husband’s work-in-progress, they played with the cats through the trellis, and commented how nice it was to have a family of chickens. Pak S. wrinkled his nose and said, “Mas, those aren’t all roosters”.
(A few had started growing horns and cockscombs, a few hadn’t yet. It turns out, they never will.)
We were all amazed. Us at the mistaken chicken sex, them at us being goofy. We all laughed. Me, at the serendipity. It was a comedy of errors, perhaps even a gender-(perception-/deception-/substance-)switching/sacrificing “As You Like It” moment. This is one of my favorite genres!
As a couple, we make these mostly harmless, and yet significant, mistakes, like the old tv land “Beverly Hillbillies”, or dreamy airheads, floating through farm life. Even my husband, who grew up in a village, and his parents kept chickens, never paid much attention to their lives, their parts and their wholes, how they work as families or breeding partners or rivals. (Side note. He does have chicken stories, however, one of which involves him, as a child, persuading younger children to eat chicken poop. To this day, he maintains that eating chicken poop was, at the time, a good thing to do.) (We live in such suspended realities.) So we did not know, what now we know. Because we are watching and learning, as they do their things, and watching and waiting to watch them some more.
This is not business. This is the school yard proper.
Things “here” are like that.
Sometimes a game and sometimes a miracle, not in the sense of divine intervention, but of the hanged man. We are fools who suffer the foolish reversal of folly, we receive reconciliation, we say, Alhamdulillah. (Allah is ever, over all things, an accountant. And rizq, there shall be many more eggs than we planned. Where shall they go?) Every error, forgiven, is a re-marriage, no less joyful for its lack of positivity.
We are (but) wholesome entertainment, after all.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌓
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 🌔
Sitting for a passport photo // trying to figure out who I’m looking at. I’ve never been good at smiling (or not smiling, or what) for a camera. I feel like I have way too many faces and I don’t know which one to pull out, and then it feels like an “I-can’t-work-the-body” moment, virtual system failure. Who am I even looking at?
Is this how it is for everyone? I assume not.
Maybe I believe too heavily in the medium. (Smiling cat emoji.)
I always think of the lyrics that start off “Black Diamond Bay”, by Bob Dylan:
Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat.
Her passport shows a face
From another time and place
She looks nothin' like that.
Oh, Bob.
I looked nothin’ like that, for a while. Now, for a while at least, I will look pretty much like that. (They don’t let you wear a wood mask in your photo.
It was strange to see my face so naked.)
On Introspection and Ideology // One Year on “Micro.blog”
As prologue. I’ve been thinking about what Denny wrote here the last few days, and I wanted to thank him for putting it in such stark terms. I think this is an important conversation to have, but not an easy one, especially to address in a public way. This is not intended as an argument against Denny’s initial post. This is my perspective, which I believe overlaps with his in a significant way, but from some different angles. I share here for the sake of supporting, by responding to, his statement, while reflecting our plurality of voices.
“This is who we are.”
Given that I agree with Denny’s assessment of the country’s genocidal history, as a supplement to its present and future likelihood of violence and (self- and other-) harm, that this is its basic definition or essence. On what grounds is there any “we”? If the “we” is defined, tied together and made one, only by those lies and that violence, then how can it be owed any allegiance?
So quickly, for me, the statement, “this is who we are”, becomes the question, “Is this who I am?”
I think that’s more challenging to address, but also, more welcoming. It’s a question, it requires introspection, which is intrinsically uncomfortable, and it will indicate responsibility, which is doubly so. It’s not easy to tease apart national identity (including ideology, lifestyle, family, etc.) from a sense of who you are. It’s grown into all of us in different ways, in ways not at all easy to see or know about ourselves. I would repeat that, we have been brought up in violence. Introspection is bound to dig up the deepest traumas. And I guess there would be as many ways of answering (“Is this who I am?") as there are individual people “around here”.
Speaking of “around here”. A lot of online people talk about seeking community, and they seem to mean by that, affirmation, support, a feeling of safety, agreement, optimism, positive vibes. This makes complete sense, to me. It’s hard for people to feel empowered, without an initial feeling of safety, or rest, or support. I sympathize and I believe that the moral support of online communities for sharing (as people search for a surrogate “we”) is real, valuable, and important.
But I also share Denny’s frustration, that more people in the global north (generally) aren’t incorporating real lifestyle changes (i.e. major simplifying, quitting air travel, eating plants, or other fasting, broadly conceived) in solidarity with those (in and out of the geographic U.S.A.) on the receiving end of a malignant culture of violence and exploitation. (Or if they are, “around here”, they are not posting about it regularly. But also, and this is important to acknowledge, it would never be regularly enough.) Lifestyle changes, incidentally, seem to me more sustainable, more personally empowering, less scary, and probably more effective than organizing for direct confrontation. (Especially for “online types” of people, if I may compassionately akcnowledge that.) I realize also that people resist lifestyle change, for real reasons. It is stressful. When someone is already feeling vulnerable, or exhausted, the last thing they want to do is voluntarily increase their discomfort, which lifestyle change entails. And also, of course, there is supernaturally intense pressure, in dominantly global northern online “places”, to maintain a high-powered lifestyle, to keep up with everyone else’s consumption of new and more stuff. And the ubiquitous implied promise that more stuff will make you happy, or at least, less afraid.
These are things I know that Denny knows, because of the way he lives, and the way he writes about the value of a bag of beans. He writes about it like it’s precious. Which, in truth, it is.
Here is another sliver of irony, which has again to do with the people “around here”. The very act of “moving” onto the independent web, and saying “no” to the loud and abusive “places” of mainstream social media, is an anti-fascist lifestyle change, it seems to me. It is a kind of fasting. It represents sobriety from that extreme form of psychic addiction, (and anybody reading this will know exactly the feeling of sickness), which is mainstream social media. That means, everybody “around here” has taken one real and concrete step, at the very least, demonstrating who they are not. Concrete steps, when they are shared, build a sense of solidarity. And then, “we” are and remain, together, addicts in recovery. As they say, recovery is an everyday effort, which you (InsyaAllah) undertake, every day for the rest of your life.
Is it enough? (Being on the “indie web”.) No. And then, nothing will ever be enough. Not to undo history and the catastrophic effects of American (and other colonial) empire, plus its bottomless appetite for increasingly, stupidly powerful technology, with which it is choking the world. What’s done is done, tipping points were in-all-likelihood conclusively demolished, on Nov. 5, and the future has become ugly indeed. But plenty of paths remain for introspection, and self-possession, by self-sacrifice, by helping others, by standing up for others, by doing work you believe in, work that you stand for, (which includes writing or making art), which (InsyaAllah) become the artifacts that plant seeds of support or inspiration for nobody knows what, but everybody (“around here”) wants to believe.
Here is what I believe, anyway. That introspection is and will always be everything, in the work of anti-fascism, and introspection requires seeking out, actively and intentionally, the quiet voices that pose difficult questions. By which I mean not just the brown peoples' voices who live on the other side of the world, or in the other part of the state, which (apparently) remain abstract figures, for the majority of U.S. Americans. But also, and I mean this in seriousness, the quiet voices of the heart. This is not abstract, this is the opposite of abstract. People may well have different capacities for it, and it will mean different things for every person, to answer the question, in their heart of hearts, (and thereupon reflecting it in their actions), “Is this who I am?” The individual nature of the question means that asking it, in a genuine way, will take time and (what I would call spiritual) work, it will be awkward and ugly, and it will often feel like alienation, or rejection, like the opposite of community. It is notoriously difficult to keep the same group of friends, before and after you release an addiction.
At the same time, I think all of us, always, can use regular reminders of how empowering it is, and how empowering it feels, simply to withhold support from, or investment in, a terrible cause. This is intrinsically difficult to “share”, while it is easy to “share” a new purchase or service or accessory. This is in evidence, for example, all over micro.blog’s discover feed (last time I checked, which was probably a long time ago, because it is peak gaslit Hobbiton, over there). Perhaps people have carried over this habit from mainstream, monetized social media. Because even in the “indie” context of micro.blog, there remains ample expressed support, (which could easily and freely be withheld), of a violent regime enabled not just by fear, and hate, but also by our blind addictions to its poisonous products, in exchange for which many have delivered (or have lost, or are in the process of losing) their very souls. The amplified sharing of products consumed is in no way, at this point, politically neutral.
I guess this also fits as my “one-year anniversary” review, of micro.blog as a service. It works perfectly adequately for me, as a host. Please, no more “A.I.”. Please, keep it simple. The “social” aspect is something else. I’m not going anywhere, probably, as long as @manton can keep it running. But I’m curious to see how the platform and the people deal with what’s coming, with the ongoing human crisis, in all of its aspects, but especially with political deterioration in the U.S.A. Not because U.S. American suffering is worse, than the rest of the world’s suffering, but because U.S. American voices are almost always the loudest, “around here”. And I wonder how “we” will absorb, process, accommodate, and/or respond to the increasing expressions, not only of suffering, but also of violence, explicit and implicit, that make it through, into the blogs. Will what “we” see be a reflection of reality? And whose? Responsible governance also requires introspective effort.
While who this is, the surrogate “we” of “around here”, remains to be seen, I turn this question also back on myself. “How will I do this?”, I keep on asking, over here, in my head, in my in-person life, (which is extremely different in social and cultural character than anything “around here”), and in my blog writing. I’m a stubborn person but I have some experience sacrificing what I believe is good and right for the sake of getting along with a(n in-person, neighborhood, or family) community. I’ve written some about this, but I don’t focus on it, for obvious reasons. I can keep my head down, not make trouble, and I don’t need explicit approval or applause to carry on my own work. I am surely unskilled, awkward, and inexperienced, navigating the whole “social media” scene. For the most part, I avoid confrontation, and also what is called, around here, “conversation”, (which is, for what it’s worth, nothing like the conversations on which I was raised).
But I know this about myself, I have a line. There are things I don’t abide, in the way of abuse, and I’ve been known to pick up and leave, institutional situations, in pretty abrupt ways. (e.g., “I renounce my credentials.") What I’m saying is, if I speak or write about “running off into the jungle”, it’s not an abstract possibility.
My (anxiety and) prediction is this, that the yearning for community is about to get much more desperate, and much more concrete, for all those in the U.S., and perhaps “the West” more broadly. I don’t have solutions for building online relationships, (other than the obvious one, which is, use email), much less for governing online communities, much less anything “on the ground” in the U.S. I have scattered family and friends, and that’s all, in the country of my birth and ongoing citizenship. I will not be travelling there, during a Tr-mp regime. (Even if I wanted or needed to go, it would be too dangerous for my husband, and he wouldn’t let me go alone.) So in this way too, I feel like a mis-fitted part of the U.S. American “we”, gone but not gone, a part of it, but in an estranged and displaced position. This mostly serves as a reminder, to me, that everybody’s situation is unique, and most people, at this point, also have specific ways in which they have become vulnerable. That’s how “creeping fascism” works. But here’s something I have to say that is basically the same for everybody.
I earnestly hope, and pray, in the name of God, (Bismillah hir rahman nir raheem), that people all over the world are seeking out not only the easy but the difficult questions, and discussing them, substantially, with their loved ones, with whatever neighbors and family they hold close, and in their own hearts. I hope people are preparing, with their actions, by practicing, by making and living with the manageable and right sacrifices, now. I’m doing the best I can with this, too, and I pray and work daily, for my own stamina and resolve, to be hard-headed and absolute at the right moments, while retaining a capacity for softness and understanding. To answer the challenge of introspection, and follow until it leads to a deeper source of belonging, one that might overturn, or at least cease the perpetuation of, the violence from which I, as a political animal, was born.
And then, if I’ve learned anything about spiritual community, in its place, by living where I do, (adjacent to indigenous communities that to this day resist the genocidal oppression of colonial past and present), it’s this: side-by-side practice (i.e. of sacrifice) builds solidarity, while solidarity builds confidence and the sense of personal power required for gracefully courageous action. It’s pretty basic, and not meant to be easy. All of us, at some point, will be tested. We will face a sacrifice that seems un-manageable, that seems impossible. We will, each of us, feel very alone. And it will be extremely important, in that moment, not to f-ck it up.
Thanks for reading. May peace, and the blessings, and the mercy of God, be upon you. And have a beautiful full moon.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu and selamat purnama 🌕
My head is buzzing with village gossip, // or the tone and cadence of it, understanding a fraction of the words, still overwhelmed by the density of meaning. (After a night out with family, visiting from Java.)
And I exchange their news, for mine. I bring news of the outside world, and my news is dark. (I am always, it seems, the bearer of bad news.) I am the one who explains climate change, to these kids. (The most basic explanations feel nearly impossible, here.) I have explained the dangers of manipulative messaging in their social media feeds. (That those “places” have owners, who cannot be trusted.) Now I am the one who explains the Western world in its political evolution, that the colonizing powers are turning their culture of violence (this alone is easily explained, as here, they live with its legacy) against their own populations, in increasingly explicit ways. And of course, I have to explain the result of the election. (After all, it’s my country of birth.)
The responsibility feels heavy, like too much to bear, and there are times at the dinner table when the task overwhelms me. I feel myself sinking into my smallness, my powerlessness, my unfitness for this task. But there’s nobody else who will do it. If I didn’t try to explain, then they just wouldn’t know. And that still seems much worse.
There’s an interpretation of my life story whereby I deserve this discomfort. So I pray, and I do my best, acutely aware of the messages that don’t make it. We laugh as we pass around slices of pizza, a taste of salad. As they take selfies, images of surface glitz and status, on phones with jewelry dangling off pastel or metallic cases. My husband holds my hand as we walk to the car. Then I drive us back home, in the dark.
(Does this mean we’re all antifa now?) //
There are two words for we/us in Indonesian, one that includes you (as in, we live on earth) and the other that does not include you (as in, we live in Indonesia). It’s a useful distinction that English doesn’t have.
My husband reports that yes, I do write like I talk. F.Y.I., bitches.
Everybody has a special talent, their thing(s) they can do especially well. Most skills or talents can be put to use, subversively. We can be open-minded and creative about it. For example, I could be a really good messenger. Of, like, encoded messages.
This most recent translation (poem) I wrote went through really different and weird iterations. It was (uncomfortable, difficult, tricky) to write on the little line of dialogue. So heaps of in-progress verse were there waiting when the election happened. The election result was… key to re-working and finishing.
(This is a message (paraphrased) from my friend, A: When you lose a poem it gives birth to another poem about a lost poem. A poem she wrote was just published and I love it.)
I don’t really want write more poetry (or prose) that is so dark. But, well. It’s a fascinating time in history to be focusing on this specific passage from the Phaedrus. There is unfortunately more sexual violence to come. The intended purpose is therapeutic, … cathartic and transformative. My experience studying the dialogue now is so sharply different from when I was 18. When I first read it, I didn’t get it. I thought it was absurdist nonsense, a rhetorical game, reading the manipulative Lysias speech on sexual manipulation. My young mind could not wrap itself around the fact: the absurdity of (sexual, or other exploitative) violence, being educated into us, marketed, sold to us as love, is real, essential, and absolutely serious.
It breaks us. (?)
Either “The Memory of Trees” is better than I remembered or I’m just desperate for more Enya these days. It has some pretty mystical/elvish-sounding tracks but then I find myself humming the upbeat ones in the shower, this is embarrassing (fun).
Daily thunderstorms bring relief from heat with unpredictably cool gusts of wind, heavy with water. The bath garden is magical after it rains, a hot shower in the cool, drippy, cloudy-dark world. Some wood-ear fungus is growing on a nearby log, it enjoys the steam of my shower, this feels intimate. And we’re still very buggy here, more mosquitoes lately, lots of swarming ants and termites, all different sizes of those, moths, praying mantis, sweet, stingless trigona bees, mud-daubers and “murder hornets”, grasshoppers and crickets, katydids and cicadas, spiders, other spindle-legged bodies, tiny lightning bugs, all shapes and sizes of wriggling worms in the dirt, or coiling centipedes, slippery earwigs, shiny black beetles that are tiny or large, or very large and pincered, like scarabs.
Before, people wanted to protect democracy. After, people need to protect themselves from democracy. Democracy is in itself nothing (more precisely, anything). Education is the something-making.
It’s hard to say “fix your boat” to people who don’t realize they’re in a boat. Sometimes in an inflatable tube in a swimming pool on a gigantic (leviathan) cruise liner. Then I look around and wonder, what’s my boat that I don’t realize? This makes me feel very “Bill and Ted”. (Does it need fixing? Constantly, yes.)
Nature also floats, but it wasn’t built by humans.
(Yes. Yes, it does.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌗
School Days in Athens
Φαῖδρος: ναί, παρ᾽ Ἐπικράτει, ἐν τῇδε τῇ πλησίον τοῦ Ὀλυμπίου οἰκίᾳ τῇ Μορυχίᾳ.
Phaedrus: Yes, at Epicrates', in the house of Morychos, here, near the Olympiad.
//
Take words to it,
he said, and words were fire. And yet, you lacked
conviction. Crowded by black memories
of unseen hands and uninvited touch,
as old men’s trembling clammy kindnesses,
their groping behind doors, our voices as
stray syllables, or whimpering with fright,
the muffled passage of another, coaxed
with promises, down enforced aisles, bound by
vocabulary’s sight. Terrible child,
no light escaped the house of Morychos.
So how did you?
At nights, with flashlights,
we stayed up, mapping tangled vacations.
It wasn’t always hellish as it sounds.
We were kept kids, padlocked in battery
cages, our own best teachers, of tossed-off
certainties, known neighborhoods, and always
chasing some kind of slang. To spell the word
backwards, chop up and repurpose pieces,
or make the meaning opposite from what
it was. We traded jabs of pleasure in
the mottled darkness of his maze, tongues of
soft flesh. We rearranged worlds to make our
places.
What would your mother give to you
of time? Faded photos, hand-me-down jeans,
a crayon-drawn map of paradise, you were
a metaphor too well-worn for what you
became, true as, it feels ugly to be
ugly and the resolution offers
no resolution, just this hissing in
my ears, this chaos. Lay down in the dog
bog. Keep trying. Keep gashing out the lines,
edit twisting serpents from the narrative,
and trace the tattered logic left behind,
monster observing monster, overwrought
and double-blind.
History is the final
solution for you, so go, dissolve your words
in time. Let their bleached remains fortify
the temple, your descendants living down
the stupid crime. That’s what
religion was, at home, submission to
the uncomprehended solidarity of
teenage desire, or something like, romance.
On echinacea lawns, she dons glitter
bodysuits, writes parochial poetry
on freedom. We were such creators, in
our nascent phases, molding plastic limbs
to tether our volcanic bases.
I do
not want to go, I beg, don’t take me back.
In wept oceans let me clear the bitter
savor from my eyes. Picnics in real
places, manicures on brand, she painted party
faces, praising God for such justice
as could be found and leveraged there, in
shared maps of iron laces, corset-bound,
hound-hunted hallways exhumed from ancient
flavors of local reason, a child’s small
hand ghostly waving from the window like
a metronome. She swallowed blood and sand
to earn their graces.
Take words to it, I said,
and words were airplanes, it was time, and she
was ready. She heard rumors on the wind
of its disintegration, climbed a hill,
and saw it for herself: the metaphor had died.
The whole, wide world was failing beauty, spread
beneath her like a poem in multitudes,
legs-open bride. And still, she cried. She longed
for absolute intelligence of who
he was, of home, of houses on the street
and what they hide, of where the figure’s corpse
was buried, and what appetites for youth were
still fed and worshipped there.
Take care of it,
he said, and words were memories, to which
she had no scholarly reply. No house,
nor street belonged to her, no shoes or gowns
to pack in chests, but ashes and fresh-breath
mints lost in linings, crumpled tissues, all
forgotten reasons why. Because you were
unseen, you could escape the conflagration?
Not so, although, not too far off. Because
she took my parchment seeded in her and
bad wisdom gained, as blasphemy of sight,
enlightened predation.
If words be fire,
then seek us in my gold and burning bower:
a clown is a bad child with adult power.
//
(About.)
A metaphor for the parts and a different metaphor for the whole, is a human being. // That old triple goddess, the zoon logon echon.
Or like Prometheus holding desperately onto his chains, while his insides are being picked at, so he doesn’t fall into a void. (Permitting a small symbolic alteration..)
I sometimes think about the central mediations of the major Abrahamic religions (as far as I understand them) and how those must be key to the logic of their respective theologies. For Judaism, the covenant. For Christianity, a mother and a father becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child, and/or the passion. For Islam, the messenger.
It gives me some confidence that, even though it seems like a geographical accident, I (we) found my way to the messenger, (the messenger found a way to me?), when a messenger has already accomplished the most important mediations in my life, over and over again, clothed in different bodies and texts and appearances. My life’s passion and work has been the search for and interpretation of messages. Now, I am offered a message of Islam, which is a message of Peace (as-Salam, as in, assalamualaikum). As a world composed of messages, the messaging world has been very kind, to me. It has cradled me, (I always think of Thich Nhat Han, counseling me to cradle my anger), to make the anger inside of me feel loved and cared for, that has been the love and care of the messenger, patiently sending messages. Waiting for me to find them, and listen to them, and discover their sense, and follow them. Until, at last, a message of peace.
A messenger is very close to the Logos. A messenger is an apt prophet for writers and above all translators. A messenger is a teacher who doesn’t teach, a (musical) counterpoint to learning, especially from afar. A messenger carries a message and it’s not, strictly speaking, her own. A messenger might bring the news, or she might bring a message of peace.
The “seeming” shifts. It stops seeming like a geographical accident, and begins to seem like (reveal itself as) destiny. As it does, other things fall into places, that were already falling, as a planetary whole. Like a webbing of streams and rivers flowing into lakes and then oceans.
(I have a tradition.)
A message can come (and go) in many forms. Its essence is in its (departure and) arrival (and in the differences between these things). A message is manifold and fitting.
What I feel, when I feel my feelings, is resonance, and then humility, and then gratitude. (Resonance is with study, which is measured, but all three are somewhat infinite feelings.) That a message might reach me from across the entire world, in a way that feels “right on time”, (a message delivered is always on time), and these are the messages that have.
(I am a jihadi.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
I’m wearing a ruched tie-dye tube top, I’m self-actualizing✨
(There were certain things that you kept from me.) //
Rainy days lately, and buggy, with small flying termites swarming frosted lightbulbs, at nights, and particulate rivers of ants spanning surfaces in exploratory veins, locating and removing insect bodies, leaving translucent brown confetti, so many spent wings, scattered across the floor.
A breath, and they disperse.
A moth alit on the soap dispenser, a velvety shield of black and cream stripes against a liquid surface of stainless steel reflection.
A tiny, brightly-humming wasp building mud cradle-tubes on the bedroom door. To be woken in the morning by its sunny song.
Homestyle curry cooked on a rainy afternoon. Onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, chilis. Potatoes, carrots, broccoli, tofu. Remembering how to improvise. It always tastes better on the second day.
A few of the baby roosters peck food from our hands now. The same few linger nearby and make eye contact, inquisitive, observant. One already has a little cockscomb, although it’s still black. (Frankie’s is a blazing red, like the chilis, with a full scarlet mask and cheek lobes.) Another has pinkish-red patches showing around his face and neck, and stunning glimpses of iridescent copper and blue, green, and purple nestled in his otherwise black feathers. One is a little smaller, with black and white marks like a tuxedo. Each child rooster looks a little different. We won’t know their “final forms” until they go through a full adult molt. That’s several months away, at least.
Frankie arrived here as a plain-looking juvenile, but then he had a dramatic transformation. Now, he is deep coppers and rich burnt caramel creams, chocolate browns blended with black, a frothy cappuccino ruff, teal patches on his sides, a forest green fountaining cascade of tail feathers, and the aforementioned bright red mask and comb. In my opinion, he is a rooster of flamboyant elegance and circumspect stature, a proudly beautiful bird, tempestuous and refined. Almost always with a faint goofy undertone.
I want to take a picture of him, but he is paradoxically hard to get a good picture of. He doesn’t appreciate having a camera (phone) put in his face.
(Some things I don’t need to know. But some things, I can’t help it, I just wish I did, about you.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.🌑
Fruits, flowers, and one active choice. //
I watched my husband turn the spray-bottle (for “cat discipline”) on Frankie, which was utterly ineffective, mildly confusing for Frankie, and funny for us. (Chickens have no problem with water.) It’s not very effective on Ismail, either. We might have to add vinegar, then Ish will hate it, in his casual way.
He and I are capable of self-discipline. But when it comes to others, we are terrible disciplinarians. It brings us joy to see (and let) others break rules. A luxury of being child-free, I guess, or a vice that we “permit ourselves”.
Frankie and Grace have a collaborative romance. Frankie builds nests for her and catches bugs and grubs and gives them to Grace. Grace did the same for their children, until she emancipated them. They share their peanuts. They sleep together, Grace and Frankie perched on top of the coop with the children safe (if not silent, sometimes a little rowdy) inside. The chickens have a family.
The sufficiency of apricot-scented roses. Trigger warning: America.
What is called politics (or democracy) in U.S. America is a highly-formalized, performative/participatory ritual of nostalgia for the sacrificed/human act of choice. Not unlike Attic tragedy.
Imagine attending (or abstaining from) that yearly Dionysian hoedown.
…and recognizing it as your (now) destiny.
There must eventually be a satyr play. Traditionally, after three of these. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, it just seems, rhythmically, a necessary thing. Which might be the lure of the uglier alternative. The aestheticization of politics is (Walter Benjamin’s term for what I describe as) enthusiasm without education.
(Was subsequently referred, through a rabbit hole, to this talk given by Robert Frost, where he compares an education by poetry to “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor”. … While, and this seems important, he also emphasizes poetry as that from which we learn the limits of metaphor.)
“The election” in 2016 seems like U.S. America lost a kind of virginity. Thinking about the myth of virginity, and its loss, as a suffered trauma that cannot be repeated because it substantially changes things, who you are, your character, what can be said or is true about you. Through one Passion, or act of suffering, the landscape of possibilities changes, completely. (The protagonist doesn’t have to be “the anti-christ”, or an actual rapist, but calling him that makes it feel more real.)
Not pathei mathos (learning by suffering), pace Aeschylus, but pathei genesis (by suffering, being born).
Watching someone fall prey to their own mythologized monsters, using predation as an excuse for predation. This is also (sadly) a “feminist take”.
By no coherent logic do one-hundred and sixty-million individual choices add up to one active choice. Allah is ever, over all things, an Accountant (al-Haseeb, Qur’an 4:86).
Lemon is one of my favorite fruits, flowers, and flora. Also, vanilla (which, if you didn’t know, is an orchid). Imagine growing both in the same garden. Pollinators would love it and so would we.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
This may be obvious, // but as everybody knows, obviousness is relative.
When the thing that would make you happy has been planned out of your civilization, this can mean something different for everybody.
For no reader do I recommend fascism or joining cults or eating an animal.
(Some things can be written in stone. Others should be written only in wax, or on the wind, etc.)
Ten roosters crowing is not just a metaphor, it is also real. Hence, the “news” category. There will be ten roosters crowing, at my house.
(We will have to name them, I guess. The nine juveniles. The dad is already named Frankie. Grace is the Hen. “Fun fact”, Grace and Frankie is a tv show starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Frankie is the name of Lily Tomlin’s character.)
When I don’t use an emoji, the mood that I am communicating is, “I am not in the mood to express myself with a cartoon right now.”
(I added that to my emoji dictionary.) (For a minute, I got confused between roosters and emojis. There are a lot of both!)
To communicate in writing requires synthesis between writing as yourself and writing for “the reader”.
“The reader” is only ever inside your head. It is almost absolutely plural. Hmm.
(Inside your head, “the reader” can feel nearly synonymous with “the writer”… also, in a blogging neighborhood.)
To every one of you, I have something different to say.
To every one of you, thank you🙏🏻 for showing me ways to break out of my civilization.
(That’s what I look for, in blogs.)
…“almost absolutely plural”…
Salam to all🌓
Three yolks, two pulsas, no home. // Last night we ran out of two kinds of pulsa at once, it was just bad luck, but our reward was to spend a night without internet or cellular. That is still an odd kind of quiet, unsettling to notice how compulsively I check internet things. I surrendered to connectionless-ness by (of all things) reading a book.
I feel cleansed now; saintly.
Infrastructure concerns. My mother who went through a hurricane two weeks ago is (fine, but) still experiencing power outages and spotty internet service (from the storm). I don’t know where I would move anymore. Maybe the last safe place in Florida will be the last safe place… and the multitude of homeowners who are desperation-betting on that same thing. No time like the present… to liquidate assets. Dollar-face emoji, tsunami emoji, filed under “texts not to send”.
Stories about Mars are stories.
Stories about the Moon are stories.
Stories about Earth are stories.
(Staunching an open wound with stories.)
What is placeless has no home.
The vibe around here shifted because Grace decided it was time to ditch being a mom and take a lover again. (The lover is Frankie.) So while the juveniles have become a roving band of nine goofy pre-teens, Grace is an expressive queen, squawking to the heavens before each egg laid. Hen labor is painful and intense. Grace is also a demanding queen, so they copulate with abandon, and Frankie is her designated guardian. I carry a broom, in case Frankie decides I’m a credible threat. (He is bred for fighting and I am “a chicken”.) Grace leaves eggs tucked all over the place, I never realized egg hunting was a real-life thing, until now. (Practical chicken birth control.) Looking for them makes me feel like a child on Easter morning. Each one found is perfectly rounded and smooth, in clouded ivory, texture of water-shaped stone, the inside heavy with liquid potential. The shell feels thinner than it should be, protecting infinitude. I cradle it in my thieving hands, gaze at it with my thieving eyes.
I love questions.
I am questions, too, excavated insides of who-knows-what. Being the question, opening up, the beggar’s bowl of ecstatic reunion. Even (especially) a crone conceals an egg-shaped interior, triple of yolk, with strange constellations unfolding across their inky, jelly-fat surfaces. The placeless-ness inside.
I am a thief. Of infinite potential!
(Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. All eggs are offered to al-Haqq, the True.)
Salam to all🌔
“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.
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🌖
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..
The air is heavy with rain that didn’t come. //
Galungan today. Canang on the bedside table, one also on the floor. A brown egg, small scoops of rice, sprinkled coconut, a few cakes and crispy sweets. Pisang susu, a mango, shredded pandan and frangipani. Scented like the sweetest dream. Lit incense stick and holy water. Cleansing the atmosphere of bad spirits so ancestors can come. (The veil is thin for the next ten days.)
One week til travel, soon enough to feel too soon. Sluggish thoughts on what to wear to a wedding. No traditional kebaya and sarung, but covered up. Mentally locating long sleeves and pants to go under other things. The priority is respect.
(Then again, a reminder to self. Let go of getting it right. Be yourself even if it means making mistakes.)
Argument advances. Poetry waits, and/or is carried.
Thinking about walls. Walls around the property (gateways with extra offerings, today), walls of houses, walls and doorways of rooms, and the need for them. Natural or artificial obstacles between self and world or self and God. Clothes to be seen, and to hide behind. Expressed appearance as a veil behind which one might… just be. The quietude of invisibility. Poetry as protection.
On the other hand, as prayer. Or the instability of opening channels without the (what?) to close them back up again. When and how to draw a portal closed and not lose yourself in it. Grounding.
One chick wanders away from others. He’s independent and interested in his own things. Sometimes he gets left behind. He’s fine, just a little different from the rest.
Sun is falling. Animals of day have gone inside. Insects' shimmering drone in dense humidity, gripping hands of mind are melting, letting go of time.
and then I knew. All of creation is
so many veils and such suffering as
would spell defeat for all but purest Love.
Salam to all.
(omg what did you just read?) //
or,
(omg what did you just write?)
Every blog is a re-invention of blogging, or at least it could be.
If one had to choose, one should rather be “jester” to the nerds than “queen” of them.
I don’t blog about snack foods lightly but here in Indo we have these keripik tempeh, like tempeh chips, that are so good and also complete protein…?
Bi-/multilateral causality, equiprimordiality, mimesis. Organism, energeia, wholeness. Natural analogues for artificial system, or whether there’s a real dividing line between those.
One could choose worse audiences (or readers) than (e.g. Milton’s) Satan. But the hardest ones to reach are often the “useful idiots” of God.
(File that one under “Vladimir Putin would smirk.")
Gus Dur, former president and Islamic leader in Indonesia, had a remarkable sense of theological humor. He was also disabled, and a fascinating proponent of religious pluralism.
I don’t consider myself a very religious person but I love to write about God.
(Sometimes I capitalize and sometimes not, depending on context and mood, and sometimes it’s not God but Allah. In addition, Allah has at least ninety-nine names. That complicates or simplifies things, depending on perspective.)
You have to deal with your anger because it’s God’s anger. You have to deal with your fear because it’s God’s fear.
Plastic was an important working component of the overall machine, which was fueled by fear. The machine was incredibly terrifying, which is how they had discovered perpetual motion.
Grace and the chicks demand peanuts every evening, earlier each day. It’s hard to say no because they get really loud. With that, and their hallway parades, we could film a Hitchcock spoof.
Sitting (lying) down to read Rumi and feeling like the sand as it slips through the funnel of the hourglass, and the glass bulb on the other end is Rumi.
Wishing the whole world a restful night of sleep.
Salam to all🙏🏻
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.