News
Verses of chickens, cats, crones. // We get her to the vet’s clinic and I swear Lalah jumps out of the carrier, nose glowing pink, and exclaims, “All better!” Maybe it has something to do with the trauma of the drive here, as she carries on like she’s suffering endless sorrows in the style of Italian opera. Or the memory of having to stay overnight, a few weeks ago, due to ear infection, when she learned about how cats live, “in the Real World”. On the drive back home, she is the sweetest, slow-blinking angel.
“Do you know Enya?” (A better test for whether a tribe is uncontacted by “civilization”.)
In the Indonesian language, “un-contacted” (tidak terkontak) is said differently than “not-yet-contacted” (belum terkontak). I find this characteristic of the language already influences the way I think about the world, getting into the habit of considering temporality with every negation. (Even when writing/thinking in English. Do I mean “not”, simply? Or rather, “not yet”?)
Future (“InsyaAllah”) is (just) another kind of presence.
Prayer is a practice of humbleness, humility. Then also, any practice of humility, including serving, giving, offering, supplication, cooking or baking for someone, taking care of someone, including yourself, in body and/or soul, translating, loving, you could say these all fit together under the broad (outward-leafing) umbrella of “prayer”.
Every new/different person that you meet is an opportunity to express yourself in a new and possibly beautiful way. To become a new verse/version of yourself. But what this means is, it’s a new opportunity to learn from someone else, which requires a certain flexible but deep listening. Re-sponding, re-plying, re-versing. Well, that isn’t trivial. (And “self”-ish is the opposite of “selfish”?) We “keep” Grace and Frankie because we are interested in learning something from them, about their selves, about ourselves. And we “keep” them, and take care of them, as guests. We follow, if we can, certain rules regarding guests, and strangers, or anyone we don’t know who “shows up”, ancient rules of hospitality, that you could really, in “the old stories”, be punished for violating. We don’t know who that is, the homeless beggar that shows up at our door. But we treat them as an honored guest.
(I also am a guest. And in many circumstances, I also find myself “speechless”.)
As an aside, in a present and experiential way, it does seem to me like, if I eat other animals, it becomes hard (even just for my body) to hold onto the idea, that I can learn from other animals, too. The scales-falling-from-my-eyes moment, which I felt first in 2008, (when I stopped eating animals and “animal products”), was very moving. One of the most deeply-felt moments of my educational life. I will always be (humbly) grateful for it, and toward everyone involved.
(There are so many ways to say this same thing, and every time I say it, I feel the need to choose words anew. But/and again, “Alhamdulillah.")
Looking up the etymology of “version” (through French version for “a translation”, from Medieval Latin versio, “a turning, a translation”, from Latin vertere, “to turn, turn back, be turned; convert, transform, translate; be changed”), which led me to another really wonderful Proto-Indo-European root, wer- (2), meaning “to turn, bend”. Odds are, if you are reading this… Well, I was going to write, “if you are reading this, you probably use many words that are descended from wer-.” But I stopped, because it blows my mind into diagonals-of-squares to contemplate readership, whatsoever. Any readership, between zero and one hundred (percent, of what?), and further, who can say what and how (your, my, their, our, the) logos will evolve? Or numbers, for that matter, or time itself? Some people believe that t=0 is a constant, or the speed of light. But stability remains mere hypothesis, without which certain favored things (people, worlds, blogs) fall apart. Life requires shelter, not the direct blast of a sun. I know not even a fraction of what a shelter could look like, (for example, of an “uncontacted tribe”), but I know that I can’t survive without it.
And yet, she considers herself a translator. So she rests in the shape of wer-.
(“Are you there Heraclitus? It’s me, Elizabeth.”)
The beggar could be Odysseus, interminable, come home like a wanderer, red with the blood of innocents slaughtered in Ilium. Or it could be Pallas Athene, eyes grey with motherless calculation. Nice to have some non-human kinfolk around, whose opinion you can trust, chickens, etc. Or the crone, the devoted, elderly woman, who remembers the baby who suckled from her breast, however many years have passed. So, she knows the master of the house before almost anyone else. She too rests in the shape of wer-.
(Wer- is also, excellently, the source of weird.)
By the way, the first thing Grace did, when I let her out this morning, was to circumnavigate her entire territory, with chicks, including through the hallway. My husband woke to the riotous sounds of their passage. Which is just the weirdness of a bule di rumah.
Peace on earth and salam to all.
Reversal spells, mulberry stains, and mixed substance. //
Trying to understand everything as (part of) a “natural cycle”.
I send a text to my mother and then read it back over, (why do I do that?), decide I sounded high, think of the times when she has sounded similar, and I always assume it’s a “senior moment”. Time for another coffee.
It’s a “no hope for laundry” day. Sri Rejeki is glued to my lap, she knows what it feels like to be alone in the rain and she doesn’t like it. Not looking forward to chasing chickens in this. Wait, let me re-interpret myself, and speak it outloud. “I am looking forward to chasing chickens in the rain.”
(Doing a reversal spell on my PMDD, which stands for “Predisposition, Monthly, to Demons and Despair”.)
Thinking about traffic in Ubud, wondering what the future of that infrastructure situation is, and then remembering, I don’t have to wonder, because there’s an already apparent progression, from there, to Canggu, through to Kuta. Kuta is the future of us all. (There is no future for Kuta. Kuta is an eternity of unironic tackiness stuffed into hollowed-out cultural ruins, I guess, I haven’t been there for years.) The other relevant question is, where will be the “next” Ubud?
(What is history, if Kuta is where it all ends?)
Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. “Dear Barong, and whatever divine beings may be present in this place. May Kuta (the one that is inside of us all) bloom again with wildlife.”
Nobita (G.’s murai batu, songbird) sings with campur sari-ngdut, not consistently but often enough making harmony that it’s unsettling. Also, Mas K., from the workshop, is singing along with such a charming falsetto, as he (rhythmically) cuts wood with circular saw, that I can’t stop laughing and I might be confused. Wait, I think they’re both whistling… Mas K. is actually weaving his performance back and forth between whistling (with the bird) and singing (with the voice). This is almost virtuosic. And then, a woman neighbor stops by and has a conversation with him from her motorbike, and it sounds exactly like a spoken-word part in the music. And then I realize, I am in the campur sari.
(And this is the mixed substance!)
Rain lets up for a minute, with a hint of brightness, and roosters across the sawah are touching base, communicating, crowing as for their lives.
We go out on the motorbike at night to buy gorengan (fried tempe, stuffed tofu, weci, banana, sweet mung bean, tape). The kid selling gorengan asks me if I like “arang”/charcoal, making a joke about the color of my husband’s skin. I smile blankly. I massage E.’s shoulders a little on the way home.
He did harvest mulberries today, so his feet and hands are stained inky black. (The blacker the berry… semakin pedas the wife.)
When one makes an analogy, one calls attention to a similarity. One should also pay attention to the differences. In this way, one pays attention to everything.
Big rain again. Salam to all.
Witch’s mane and chaos truffles. //
I don’t look at the sky today. It’s too bright.
A discussion about zucchini, which isn’t commonly grown or eaten here, whether, where, and how we can grow it, in the wilder garden, outside the wall. Easy to grow, but the danger of curcubits is that the plants are favorite hiding places for pit vipers (the small green ones) and cobras (the “kings”). One also avoids walking in jungle areas, or anywhere really, without a wide-brimmed hat. Snakes will attack your head and face, from above, which, if you’re very lucky, doesn’t kill you.
Discovering periods of my life I seem to have stashed into dark, cobwebbed corners, so they’ve been barely, rarely remembered. Now, when I think of them, they strike me as odd, alienating, inappropriate. What to do with these memories?
Related: some things you can’t learn until you separate yourself. Dysfunctional situations prevent growth. Situations, institutions, environments, are not surface problems, but deep.
We stop at a small bridge, over a ravine, to collect aren palm fibers, (duk), from a fallen tree. It looks like a witch’s black hair, (it’s used as this, in ceremonial representation, also as mane of Barong), a matted tangle that we tug apart. Afterwards my skin is dry and tight, and sinuses are on edge from the dust.
Fragments of conversation with school children, walking by, two boys and a girl, puzzled to see us. Until we explain, “ini untuk tempat tidur ayam”. They smile, hands on hips, like adults. O iya, of course, it’s for chickens.
Back home. Grace leads chicks to the lowest garden, jumping down a one-meter (or so) drop. They need “assistance” getting back to the chicken house, so E grabs Grace and I grab the cilik-cilik, but it turns complicated as they scatter into a chaotic (cuteness) matrix. Soon I’m Lucille Balling again, chocolate chicks like quick-moving truffles, stuffing in bra, like an expert.
Separating oneself is like separating duk, tangled and tough. It decides whether and where it comes apart, and what comes with it, that you didn’t expect.
Now time for practice. Salam to all.
More chicken news. //
Grace got up to stretch her legs, today, and I counted nine eggs.
I bring Frankie fresh water. He drinks it. I talk to him. He makes soft noises at me. I think we’re becoming friends.
Maybe. Older siblings are like the first trees, they grow tall and big, and younger siblings are like the next trees, they have to spread out, twist around, or find other ways to get light. It’s hard to be either one of these things.
Noticing the swastikas on neighbors' front gates. Here, it’s a symbol of balance. In the West, (its reverse is) a symbol of evil. Again here, a symbol of the instability of symbol.
(Evil remains evil, and, context is everything.)
Moments around which everything changes, or breaks, and I carried her with me, after that. (Writing about Bocara, the pony.)
Admire the optimism here.
I feel changes in my toes, (big toes mostly), the soles of my feet, my knees (twisty jelly), my shoulderblades, my triceps and elbows (little pops), my wrists, the pinky mound of my palms (crampy), my neck (cracking up and down spine), and even in my jaw (unpleasant tension). As the psoas (un)twist, the entire body follows. A crazy tour of the deep front line (myofascial meridian).
Cozy outfit: Soft grey sweater dress over brown-grey tank top, white pajama shorts, light grey ankle socks, charcoal grey buff worn like a beanie, old blue-grey tie-died shawl. Orange chocolate sachertorte and oat milk. Love fake winter.
Salam and goodnight to all.
We found your footprints in the snow.
We brushed them all away. //
Chilly night here, the forecast says low of 63f/17c. My fingers and nose definitely forgot what cold feels like. So I have on socks. Trying to figure out what I think about claims of blood descent from a prophet, or mid-20th century Indonesian politics, shivering. Realizing it’s not important and I was just confused. I try to be better at being confused, or the feeling when you suddenly stop being confused, and realize how confused you’ve been, fingers fumbling with keys, perhaps for a long time, even in a sort of rhythmic way. Cozy pajamas help. The moon was an icy white chunk in a starry black sky but I can’t see it now because it’s too cold to get out of bed. I’m under the covers writing this with a flashlight, and I’m about to put on “50 Words for Snow”, (by Kate Bush), which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. Probably the warmest thing ever written about the cold. This album will take care of you in a dark moment. It’s such a midwinter meditation.
Salam and a peaceful night to all.
Living light captures, listening to “Soldier of Love” (by Sade), sight. From the corner of my eye, a flame, on wood panel near bed. Scent of Taiyo Byakudan, dreamy sandalwood, lofty amber, honeyed clean. Not flame, but the sun setting, hot and steeply-sliced through northern window, shimmers by wind-rustling coconut palm, presently as perpetual motion. Shifting moods of ever-late afternoon, captured there, sinks heavenly warmth toward evening, fades to cool, and fevered comfort wraps thoughts in blankets, whether to let go or pull it closer. Either way waits dewfall so it’s time to bring the laundry in.
Little earthquakes can be reassuring. If it doesn’t little-earthquake for a while, there’s a chance the next earthquake will be really big.
(If you haven’t recently, ask a loved one whether they’ve experienced any little earthquakes, lately. This really works!) (And of course, the album too❤️)
Unexpected summons to a banjar celebration (part of Odalan) this morning, brief if frantic search through storage boxes for the traditional regalia, batik sarungs and embroidered lace kebaya, shades of purple, lavender, olive, background of antique cream, accents of black and gold and possibly pink. (Pak S., mischievous, likes to catch us off-guard?) Making time to make-up the face, the layered steps of that in-between sips of accidentally too-strong coffee. Jitters on an empty stomach, ignore it, will be supplied jaje at the banjar. Preparing outward-self for salims, looks of studious listening, dutiful nods, and prayerful hands, accompanied by my few but respectful (as I can manage) words, having more sweets and coffee pressed upon me than I can possibly eat, and broadcasting gratitude fused with admiration by sunny (as possible, though muscles in the face grow tired, and questions sometimes peek through) smiles. And oh, there will be all our farmer friends playing gamelan, always a wonderful treat to see and hear.
Om Swastiastu🙏🏻
Grace laid eggs.
Peacock blue of eyeshadow on the painted face of a legong dancer in an advertisement on the grimy side of a bus, turning at exhaust-choked crossroads, engines sputtering, growling, purring, vehicles nudging in or tapping brakes to decide who goes first, who next, and who will barely squeeze between them, this (dis-)order is the mystery of a universe and I am on the way (in Sweet Orange) toward Immigration, to answer the call of the government. I shall submit my (not smiling, that’s not allowed) face for photograph, press my fingers one-by-one, as instructed, to red-tinted print-readers, render answers to the yearly questions on relations and activities, and reassure them that no, I do not, in any way, make money. (I should give them a link to my blog, yes?) (No. Just kidding. Everything that happens here is irrelevant to there. Not related at all, in fact, a reductio of interbeing to absurdum. So sacrifice an analogical cock, but not Frankie, maybe the blue eyeshadow?, to the square root of two, for I speak today with the unspeakable and InsyaAllah it will go perfectly to plan.)
(Update: it went fine, I even got a friendly officer, almost impossibly nice.)
Deeply-stacked blanket of grey on the horizon and a prodigal son for coffee. Lunchtime leisure, (this is nongkrong), slow discussion of organization and mobilization, elsewhere, interpretation of natural signs, anywhere, and closer to home, planning lamp configurations, as the boys laugh and assure me with barefooted confidence that motherly love knows nothing of high places. (They may be right about that.) Preparations in the village, celebratory or instructional announcements on a distant speaker, (just beyond the jungled ravine, for Odalan), and occasional mantra. So much competition for Frankie, who doesn’t like the look of the sky. He takes advantage of distraction to explore the workshop, with its precarious planks and mounds of dusty woodchips, scratching to unearth bugs, eyeing us warily from across the yard. As we all wait for the (ever unseasonal) rain.
Laundry day and questionable behavior. //
Midnight, distant crowing, and the helicopter sound from the living room of wings beating before Frankie replies with a hoarse cry (a “doodle”?). He claims supremacy over all. Cocks through the sawah commence with a back-and-forth, in the dark, that teeters out around 00:07. (Some bird woke from a dream, got everyone else involved.)
(Shortly thereafter, I fell asleep, a while after that, woke again, and started laundry in the machine.)
A small adventure yesterday, we all (six of us) drove into the city in Sweet Orange to receive a gift from my visa agent, (of all people), three beautiful, fragrant (and old) jepun trees. My husband doesn’t do business without making friends. (We have two gardens full of jepun trees, all of them gifts.) And the magic of watching relationships evolve from friendships of utility into deeper things.
(But I think all music sounds bad in Sweet Orange. Sweet Orange might have only a subwoofer.)
Something extraordinary about Bali is just how fast things change. We’ve been gone from Ubud for maybe one month and it already feels different. Development, almost all related to tourism, appeasing the bottomless (foreign) appetite for servitude, pampering, the extraordinary…
So urbanized Bali is a scene from the end of the world. Being beautiful and not costing much money, foreigners come here to live out their fantasies. (I don’t exclude myself from this group.) They are visible on the streets in a patchwork of the improbable, (sometimes deeply disrespectful), alongside the ubiquitous ravages of colonial exploitation. This becomes visibility of the same thing that is wrong with everything, everywhere. So Bali’s beauty besmirched is a visible indictment of human being. Not anyone in particular, (the irresponsive anonymity of grouped humans), but the imbalance of the whole (of us).
(Letting anger wane, and) just taking in (again) our utter disarray. (Disco-trance-yoga, anyone?)
Back home. Pak and Bu S. stopped by to help us do a house ceremony, because it was a holiday here. (We were not prepared, I was napping, oops.) They’re an elder couple from the village, like adoptive parents, taking the place of our adoptive parents from Ubud.
(In case you’re not familiar.) Balinese Hindus keep a demanding schedule of ceremonies throughout the year. We don’t do all of them, (religious ceremony is genuinely exhausting), but we do some, including for purnama and tilem (full and new moon) at our house altars, assisted by Pak and Bu S. We observe Balinese customs at our house because the land is Balinese, because these align with ancient customs of Java people, (from the time of Majapahit), and not least, because it keeps us connected with the people of our banjar (village).
(And we don’t do business without making friends. I am still bad at this, I feel like that goes without saying. Sometimes it seems every institution in my “old life” was designed to prevent “making friends”.)
Mostly everyone in E.’s family (and currently staying at our house) is Muslim, although not all have received upbringing in the “old ways”. Interesting conversations happen around this, our seeming plurality of cultural practices, all the time. (Hypothesis, secret: there is only one practice.)
E. said yesterday, (in a bathtub conversation), I don’t care about the music as much as I care about the sound. Sometimes you need to “put the music” in order to make people hear the sound. When he was young he would drop objects into the village well to experiment with sound. Then he got in trouble because too many spoons disappeared.
In the same conversation, me discovering/declaring, (not for the first time), (and he looks at his wife with a serious silence), that writing is a kind of necromancy.
Salam to all.
News of the cold and the iridescent. //
At night, Frankie sleeps in a jepun tree in front of our family room. Tonight (for the first time) I looked over and saw him there, in the dark, an iridescent-, black- and elaborately-feathered figure, crouched on a curved branch. (Very impressive, Frankie.)
Protein shake and krupuk is not a nutritious dinner solution but it is what we call “really Indo-bule”.
What would happen if Thomas Jefferson had invented emojis, and written them into the founding documents? (I know TJ would have been into this idea, heavily. He was in many ways the El-n of his time, which is accidentally too serious to laugh about.)
My 90’s timeline is: 1994, Kurt Cobaun dies; 1997, the release of “Boys for Pele” by Tori Amos; between those I watched My So-Called Life (several times, I think, whenever it came on the tv and my parents weren’t around).
I want to (find and then) buy a wall thermometer. The weather app says it’s 22c/71f, but I don’t believe it. I feel cold. I’m wearing socks and double sweatshirts. Maybe a fire pit is a good idea.
As time persists in circularity, I wonder (again) what makes this morning different from the last. There are two spider bites on my leg. (Each one two dots of red, making four dots total, with pink smudges of irritation around them.) There is dirty laundry I left soaking, for putting in the wash today. This morning, there is no specific sun, just bright cloud we seem to be a part of. Being-in-cloud is not the best for drying clothes. But the sky changes quickly here, so I, perhaps recklessly, forge ahead, and start the load in the machine.
Sometimes the cloud comes down and eats us, from above, from its permanence, further up the island’s altitude. It can be days or a week with no direction to the light. Cloud also soaks up sound. I’m accompanied now mostly by the shushing, rolling rhythms of the washing machine, nearby. It occurs to me, this is one of the less problematic (almost comforting?) of the machines. Yes, it works. So I can focus on this thing here. I like it and I almost trust the washing machine. (The sun is another matter, here’s hoping happily to be surprised.)
Full moon, icy white, concavity of clouds like a light-womb, and a visit from Blih. Unexpected pleasure in the familiar and reassuring how happy he is to sit under our roof. They roll tobacco. He comments on the quiet, on the peaceful, he is right. The moment when you feel family, when you know no matter how different you are, or how skewed your perspectives on the world, that if ever called, he will protect me from weirdness, and I will give him sensible relationship advice, and pretend not to see him cry. And maybe we have seen some success. He was smiling tonight, and speaking of marriage… It’s totally allowed to spread gossip about love and marriage.
(But not like this.) // Every choice feels hard, these days. None of it is easy. Even thinking is heavy. I wish I could put more levity on my blog, but then I reflect on “everything happening in the world”, and lightness itself seems to lack compassion. (No sun today, just one big featureless cloud.)
So I wonder at (and then question) the detachment, the surreality of cat pictures and typewriters, the psycho-spiritual health of it. After all, these are presentations of leisure and privilege. (Blogging, by nature, is a presentation of leisure and privilege. As is writing, in general.) At what point does it become, (let alone beneficial or good), not even innocuous, but cruel?
(At the point that one “gains” one’s first reader?)
Writing, as leisure, preserves its own necessary and peculiar ignorance. This, alongside its irresponsibility. And writing, as an art form, must address it somehow. The whole, “What I do here comes at a price.”
Notes at the limit of politics.
Winning is never the most important thing. In a political context, the most important thing is justice. Justice is the only source of political legitimacy.
There is nothing inherently just about democracy. A democracy is only as just as the demos. (A demos is a group of people, “a people”, understood as a political body. Democracy is the self-governing of a demos.) Therefore, if one wishes to use democracy as an approximation of justice, or as a political hypothesis on the way to justice, (which remains, despite everything, a very good idea), one must first of all consider education.
Education (on justice), as the “sine qua non”, is therefore the first responsibility of democratic governance. Education (on justice) would be the heart and the soul of a legitimate democracy. What this looks like (education) is an open question. But it must look like something. There must be some idea (even hypothetical) of justice, cultivated through education, (obviously, public), in order to preserve (even the hypothesis of) the legitimacy of democratic governance.
(What is justice? The government would not have to know, or even claim to know, but it would have to ask. Without justice, it is nothing. So the demos might pose hypotheses, and learn or decide ways to judge between them. If the demos discovers a good hypothesis of justice, then this, and the practice of keeping it alive—which is what political education is—would be a foundation for the stability, function, and health of the demos, and therefore of the democracy. This, and nothing else, is what would make possible a healthy and legitimate democracy.)
But without education, there is neither justice, nor a people. If a government claims to be a democracy, and it does not hold sacred the work of education, then it will function only so long as the demos preserves a rigid and un-adaptable idea of itself. (A conservative political identity falls back on arbitrary characteristics, racial genetics, cultural superiority, personal wealth, or other dysfunctional place-holders for justice.) But moreover, if a government claims to be a democracy, and it does not hold sacred the work of education, then it surrenders (even the hypothesis of) its legitimacy.
To repeat. Without education, (One would do a lot of work at this point, for the sake of responsibility, to complete the demonstration, which is something of an argument-by-adventure. But few have the training or stamina, these days. And we are all very tired. Maybe this is a lapse.
)…(
Study, e.g., the entire Platonic “corpus”, but especially the Republic, from which all of this, although the author artfully renounces authority. An orphan argument, but nonetheless), democracy surrenders its legitimacy.
As a “democracy” (lacking education) fails, (which it does from its inception, because it is nothing), the fragmentation of the demos becomes more apparent. (And feels awful.) Lacking a relevant or coherent education, individuals respond in different (haphazard) ways to the dawning recognition that they are participants in an ongoing (historical, natural, perhaps cosmic) in-justice. (Against themselves as against outsiders, through imbalance external and internal, with rapid exacerbation of symptoms. The problem appears to be everywhere.) Without a demos, individuals need, seek, and find their own private (idios) educations. Many gather shouting under the ugly banners of partial ideas. It is complicated and contentious. But recognizing the basic problem, diagnosis is trivial. That is not a democracy. That is an illegitimate regime, a people without a soul, at a loss (aporia) to heal (the hearts, minds, bodies of) its broken (political) self.
That is not self-government, but a multitude of tyrannies. And a multitude of tyrannies inevitably approaches war.
Winning is still not the most important thing. (Winning is never the most important thing. Not even in war.) (Consider Achilles, or Odysseus in his next life.) But it may be that losing—beautifully—becomes the new (oldest) measure. Which, like a divine gift, opens up whole other worlds of action.
Tropical winter. Reluctant to leave the insulation of blankets, but I go out. I place my feet in a shape of warmth as the rising sun enters, by elongated geometry, from the east. And here, the polyphony of the farm. Roosters with their long-distance proclamations, the consolation of doves, smaller birds organizing casually in trees. Morning greetings and sleepy conversation that gives way to the thumping or sweeping noises of human people at work. A door closes. The hollow jumble of bamboo chimes, and coconut palms shuffle like cards in the breeze. Someplace far away, a two-toned repetition, as something swings on a rusty hinge.
There are things that nobody wants to say outloud. That nobody enjoys. Sometimes you keep those things to yourself, but sometimes the truth starts flying around and then up your throat, like flies that are buzzing inside your mouth and you try to keep your lips shut but the interior sensation gets very intense, then they burst out in a curdled black vomit. Uncontained. Truth sometimes is the wrong thing at the wrong time. Ugly, ashamed, unwanted.
I think of how remarkable it was, the celebration of tragedy. To gather around the stage, as at a communal flame, together in the perfected ugliness of truth. To honor with a feast the maker-revealer of the most exquisitely necessary (you/me/us) problem. (I imagine tragedians as necessarily insufferable, though that could be wrong.) To revere the Muse. As protectors of the city, as if poetry itself could be the shield to defend against everything it artfully spits out. That would be the craft, if one could discern. What power you need from her, what power she has, and the light of day between those two things.
On a bright and fresh morning, with the sun rising-chasing chill shadows away, the sky is not yet blue. Frankie is crowing (with echoes of crowings from all directions). And I say to him, see? That winning is never the only thing that matters.
Speaking of exits. A heartwarming way to spend this Saturday morning was (virtually) to watch my dear friend A. as Inez in Sartre’s No Exit. She and cast did a fantastic job (playing horrible people). Amateur work in its excellence (“off off Broadway”). (And the play remains obviously relevant… Of note. The infernal trio were provided an exit, when the door opened. But none of them went on to take it.)