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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🌑
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.