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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.)
Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. Of putting too much detergent in the washing machine.
Frankie the rooster, offended that we don’t let him walk around the house, leaves three poops in front of the bedroom door.
And the cats already learned how to open the doors.
On the motorbike today. It’s nice to drive into the traffic, and then drive out of the traffic, to go back home, instead of living full-time in the traffic.
A Jakartan stranger. The way he expressed horror/dismay (at the illness and injury of street dogs in Bali) was to smile, a never ending, increasingly strained smile.
All three cats were tugging on our crazy chains today. Imagine the worst.
Ending with a neutralizing rain, the drippy noises and distant gamelan carrying us back from the edge of exhaust(ion).
Sometimes my writing gets redirected into my signal chat with my mom. Lately there’s a lot of family and house stuff, and even more, highly specific and intricate cat drama going on. Those “categories” make more sense over there. (But isn’t it amazing how every single cat has its own weird personality?)
Oh my, the pleasure of organizing your underwear drawer. And then the pleasure of realizing you have much more room in it than you thought.
Things from Today. //
Frankie and Grace (rooster and hen) ate lunch with me and E. today. It was a double date, Frankie purred.
In the afternoon Ibuk goes back into her childhood. She gets very upset at E. for never feeding her (there is some trauma from her past) and believes herself to be surrounded by thieves.
I cried while reading a cookbook, a recipe for “cheddary broccoli soup” (vegan, from Isa Does It). So, it’s that time of the month. (No stove or oven hookup yet.)
Related: my favorite place to go and hide is the (outside but enclosed by a wall) bathtub. Not filled with water, (haven’t gotten to that yet), just a place to lie down and feel cocooned. This and the rustle of nearby coconut palms in the wind are pretty strong medicine. Today Ismail came down from the ceiling and we had a cuddle. Or sometimes E. and I sit opposite each other and just chat and relax.
The mental and sort-of spiritual adjustment from living semi-permanently in a guesthouse to living in a forever-until-you-die-(InsyaAllah) house is profound.
When they say AI what they really mean is an artificial slave, which becomes redundant if you just get human people to act like machines.
When we go to the big western-style supermarket for the first time since pre-pandemic, we are transfixed. Hypnotized. E. and I are pulled in different directions, but we are both pulled. (Managed to avoid buying almost anything unnecessary. But we did buy two cans of La Croix.)
It is almost impossible to find soap or detergent products here without perfume. I hate strong synthetic perfume. No, thank you. “Lavender” that actually smells like “headache”. I would rather smell like cow shit, honestly!
E. has a pinched nerve in his shoulder so I don’t let him carry the groceries but then he won’t let me carry them either, he makes G. carry them, which I do shamelessly appreciate.
Tired and raggedy-of-nerve in the car ride going home so I took charge and put on Suzanne Vega’s self-titled album. Nostalgic, soothing, one of my favorites. (And what an under-appreciated artist she is.) “Small Blue Thing” shivers with sustained sensuality, lyrics hiding almost in plain sight. “Undertow”… I have deep associations of this song with the first time I read Keri Hulme’s novel, The Bone People, another perennial and irreplaceable favorite. I loved both Vega and Hulme as a teenager but I didn’t understand why (either of them) until I became an adult. Suzanne Vega helped me see, Hulme made me feel seen, but also the reverse, for both. I’ve been shaped by these artworks, almost certainly in more ways than I realize. So much that it’s almost a secret.
(I’m due for another read of The Bone People actually. Maybe soon.) (Still enjoying, savouring Red Mars. Why does Kim Stanley Robinson taste so good, going so slow? Oh I know why, I look up science stuff and get distracted reading about volcanism on Mars, etc. Is this escapism?)
Or is it my country? Being a stranger, at home. (Bule di rumah.) Surrounded, protected, as by a wall, by recognition, but correspondence is at the same time unpredictable, wild. I am found to be several someones, then very, very many. (So many strangers.) At first this is difficult, but then (I can make it) effortless. Unknown, but contained, sometimes even possessed. And Ibuk will teach me to dance. (Mind-blowing.
)…(
Self-government by love, a good morning, and whatever else might be possible.) Well, time for practice.
Slanted sunlight breaks through steam. Limns wet edge of concrete, scatters in leftover droplets, catches ochre fur of hovering fly. Filters through yellowed leaf and turns it golden. East wind, wet and barely cool, carries news of oceans and exhaust. What’s not secured (dry leaves, a crumpled tissue) falls, is blown away.
Still raining, still dark, still soaked to the point of saturation. May the rain bring the world back from the loudly unspeakable, back from self-abstraction. Ghosts, being stuck in some in-between place, will eventually realize, (can ghosts learn?), that being (human and being) half there is not being there at all. Likewise, fifty percent of a world (any world, no matter how wealthy or free) is one hundred percent unlivable. So. The perennial question of who I am, (where to and where from), and today the answer, family is here. Listening to what is present as to what is quiet, my day will be full of smiles to return. (A living face, a secret to itself, is at least self-contained.) This (the daily slog of political theory
)…(
iykyk) becomes a certain happiness, necessarily. And sometimes there will be no other way.
(I almost put two contact lenses into the same eye, this morning.)
Chaotic maneuvers this morning after certain equipment, which had been broken for a long time, finally became unusable last night, ok I will tell you, the water kettle fell apart. The glue holding the plastic levered stopper to the aluminum body melted off or dissolved, and left a smear of melted black plastic on the pouring spout. (Yum.) I try not to be precious about the flimsy equipment standard in household shops here, people make do, and so have I. (I read that the risk of aluminum poisoning from cookware is largely exaggerated? And I trusted that information? Was that the right thing to do?) But I did think briefly, wistfully of the (stainless steel, sturdy, chic) ikea kettle that sits already in the new house, on an induction cooktop, (a luxury, no more running out of gas, or wrestling gas tanks and their beat-up valves, risking limbs for fuel for heat), and its dulcet whistle, a treasure to be used.
(I’ve become famous in the family for using kitchen tools hard and breaking them fast, blenders or stick-blenders especially. I demand performance! Not sure this is a good or bad thing, E. thinks it’s hilarious, is laughing this very minute, he says he gossips about it with other husbands. Possibly a point of pride, for him, I admit, it does reveal something enduring about my personality…)
Waking up and taking stock, this is about where we are. So ready to be gone from the guesthouse that inanimate things are kicking us out, refusing to function, telling us (me?) to leave. Family from Java (including Ibuk/mother-in-law) arrives tomorrow for yet another new house ceremony (Javanese) on Thursday, when we will move the cats and start living there for good. None of it is in my control. It feels similar to when we got married. Pulled up into a tidal wave of big-family customs and engagements, trying to hold my own (personal, petty) rhythms, hoping/assuming (cheerfully) I will be back on solid, more predictable ground soon, I just have to (go limp and) survive the next few days.
Rainy still, wet everywhere, and dark. I guess dry season got cancelled. Santai saja. (Let’s just be relaxed.)
For us. // A dark day, cold and rainy and the atmosphere got funereal for a minute, which it does here, now and again. My mother-in-law is passing away from dementia and my country sort of is also. There are parallels between the grieving processes, all of which I experience almost second-handedly, at unstable removes.
One of the things that makes it truly difficult is learning, through trial and (regrettable, yet forgivable) error, how softly you have to tread when it isn’t yet clear (to everyone, to anyone, at any given moment) that she is dying. How feelings of guilt, anger, fear, or sadness intermittently (and unpredictably) penetrate the (relief and) forgetfulness of daily activity. How one believes, (because belief is everything), (belief is her), until the moment it becomes impossible to believe, that she is not yet lost. And how that moment disarms us, completely, leaves us feeling motherless, without a home, (or seeming impossible to ourselves.
)…(
So I have a prayer, for us.) Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem. May you never be alone in this. May you be surrounded by love and care. And may the people you have loved always be there to remind you that you are absolutely possible, solid, and real.
Showering. A spider came dangling down from the ceiling, right in front of my face. A smooth spiderwoman drop, front legs raised in fearless poise. How graceful she was, descending into the steamy waterfall! The subsequent dance. (I imagine myself played by Kim Cattrall.) Me, nude, startled bonkers. She, versatile, evading my careful attempts, trying again with more elaborate gestures, to catch her by her thread. I failed. She lifted herself up and escaped into obscurity (the thatched bamboo ceiling).
The bathroom is where we keep a seminar of spiders. They are good at catching bugs and generating ideas.
Beat on the kul-kul summons people to the pura this morning and gamelan starts for the ceremony. Incense smoking, offerings aloft, village is alert, decisive. Brass shivers and syncopated heartbeat and (bodies marching and) the bell of the Mangku, high and bright. All attention put on the spirit. Barong moves through the streets today, transportation by music, in full regalia. (The battle for balance. Stops traffic, stops everything. Alhamdulillah. And what are you being called to do?)
Beginning again with a tentative rhythm. Afternoon sun, slanted, partial, and hot, with persimmons on the kitchen counter. Irregular spheres, some squat or approaching rounded-square, pale orange or chartreuse waxy skin speckled and clouded with powdery must. I choose three. Stemleaf (calyx) thickly coated, looking ancient. Paring knife separates (as a broken spiral, drops) skin from clean flesh inside, cut open, with octagonally-spoked slivers for (not there) seeds. Firm between teeth, shifts to pulpy softness, floral honey sweet, young and complicated with something nostalgic. A fragrance from childhood candy. Games of pure pleasure being just out of reach.
I found the Margaret spoon when I was packing the wardrobe, I mentioned it to my mother and she was reminiscing about her grandmother (Margaret). How she would play the piano and sing, and her grandfather would sing too, and their “beautiful voices”. She (my mom) remembered that from when she was six years old. (In my imagination, she plays lieder by Franz Schubert, I listen to it now.) Margaret was also an amateur astronomer, which has me thinking about studying constellations. It’s often too cloudy here for stars.
Cloudy again tonight, and raining, and the sky is an inky thickness. They sit around a cross-section of tree, cigarette packs out, kripik passed. Low conversation. Light bullying. A start, a decision, not quite unanimous, to go on the roof. Bare feet up homemade ladders, disembodied voices, and the night tips over that always close-by edge into surreality.
Emptying the wardrobe. // (Finally.) Piece by piece sorting clothes (and other things) into (commandeered from cats) cardboard boxes. Items that disappeared, (underclothes, mostly), constantly needed and vaguely missed, one by one reappear, having been crumpled into rear corners, crevices, hiding between darker and heavier things. One could have sworn one had checked there, again and again. Some coated in dusty grey mold, some apparently eaten by it, elastics and polyester blends stiffened or dissolved or having become oddly, unpleasantly sticky in the dank incubator, black box, organizer’s nemesis, which has in certain ways ruled over us these past years, determining what we were allowed to have, and what not. You see, the tropical climate is unsuited to long-term storage (or possession) of anything at all (subject to disintegration).
(Avoiding questions, whether we could have been happier here, if we had done this all a little bit differently.) (We came to the guesthouse in February 2020. Having no idea what was about to happen, of course we stayed much longer than planned.)
The satisfaction of shining light on the interior of a more-or-less orthogonal container. Hollow. An empty possibility, belonging soon to somebody else. Sketching boundaries between ourselves and whatever will become of that.
Waking up back in the old, time-wise upside-down, and a sense that all observations will be observations of discomfort. In the midst of transition there are moments of feeling somewhat brutally nowhere. Like a baby, on its birthday, new-born, (being sensitive to babies, for they know something true), crying because all is lost. Then, as an adult, healing knowledge with mantra. All is indeed lost. (This is something, but not it.) And there is a home. (And you already know it.) So repeat it until you believe it. (Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.
)…(
Repetition until morning’s end.)
Night in cloud. With sounds of water surrounding, an evolution from gerimis (drizzle) to soft patter to steady downfall, with drips following waterworks around the house, (in which, fish respirate) small splashing pours, shifting flows through ducts, now slowing into more percussive plonks and plinks and poinks, tinkles and trickles, like this jungle is designed by frogs. A nestled-in rainforest of fractal-shaped puddles arrayed through heartleafs and stems reverberating. This is a very rich ambient sound, and I wonder about sleep, or disturbed dreams, lost connectivity, (unexpected, of course), and mental compulsions related to that. How this was probably written late last night relative to when it will be sent. Just so, a blog inelegantly measures motion. As trial and failure at learning nothing. So imagine this, but yesterday, and we found ourselves watching old videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing the Nutcracker. My mother used to speak somewhat breathlessly of him, his body, (in translucent stocking), and its parts, so visibly distinct. Me, then, in tight-pulled bun, (tears), and pale pink tutu. Today, a grainy image of a man leaping (if we could be parts of that, composed) into a momentary stillness.