Places
Beautiful flowers // grow out of chicken shit. Sometimes the work is to see chicken shit and imagine flowers, sometimes to see flowers and imagine chicken shit.
Of all known technologies, the best and most reliable way to preserve something is (still) to keep it alive. And, failing that, to make it alive.
An inherent problem of place-based politics is its need for oppression as government. Which can come in the form of punishment, in the form of “education”, or in the form of education.
Politics without place happens through literature and on the internet, by extra-judicial combinations of algorithm, chance, history, and psychic powers (“spirit”, human ambiance, Pan, etc). This is barely politics at all. People become shapeless and unpredictable (wild) without a shared place to anchor them, or if not a shared place, then a strong narrative of that.
Beware the “strong narrative”, which is back in the realm of “education”… often it’s been brought along, unawares.
If you yell at a child, they become an adult who yells, or an adult who is silent.
The work of a writer is, by the written work, to show somebody how to read, not just the work, but the world.
Romantic view.
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..
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.
Full moon, sudah matang, tomato consommé, incandescent orb with eggplant-magenta smudged-charcoal setting, moving through air just chill enough to waken touch, silhouettes of palm trees dark enough to deepen vision, and presence dilates into possibility. Passing fragrance of pandan and frangipani. The best thing about living here is not seeing but feeling the island, how it vibrates as with mimetic electricity, a lucid dream.
On the motorbike, cozy in bright reds, pinks, orange woven scarf, wrapped around face as kerudung, black thumbholes hoodie, black leotard top and flowing layers, sparkling “fancy” flip-flops, holding husband, who’s handsome in black and bronze batik udeng and black bucket hat, and gold-trimmed randai pants, for dancing. We assigned ourselves the task of joy, tonight, and romance, and to get away. It was accordion music, view over ravine, pistachio gelato, single espressos and no distractions. Now, the drive home, through moonlit sawah, is brave, as if night-cleansing, to let busy city streets be forgotten behind backs.
We stop in the street, almost home, to see the moon. Close moment. Then engine off, we glide down the way, tires grinding gravel under sea of cricket-song. Unstrap helmets, put down/take off travel gear, wash hands and check on things to, piece-by-piece, unwind. E. checks the phone for messages of Ibuk. Checks progress on the locking gate, to be installed in front of her home, (the house where she was born), twelve hours' drive away. To keep her safe from wandering feet (and fears and memories and hallucinations). I check cats, asleep, and Grace, who clucks softly from the nest, as tucked-in chicks peek out from mother’s feathers, up past bedtime. We cover brooding house for insulation, shushing chicks, and latch the door. To keep tender bodies safe when the stray cat comes, howling with desire. Jeki will hiss and growl from the screened-in teras. Guardian is her favorite job. But now, aman, and so it’s time for peace and quiet, as goodnight moon, and the subtle art of letting go.
It never seems quite fair, as if, there will always be some tragedy to it. But no less beautiful, for that. The island of gods gives itself to those who give themselves to love.
“Being Balinese //
is
so
much
upacara.
From being born,
until
you
die,
Mas!"
is what he said.
With a surprised grin on his wrinkled, spotted face, when he said it, light-hearted, calm, and satisfied to be heard, or not heard. He was sitting in the bale, at the sangga on top of the banjar building, leaning on a post. In front of him was a box-shaped table with offerings, flowers in woven grass dishes, sticky rice jaje, and a spiral-bound notebook, slightly weathered, on the pages of which were words, in the Balinese language, to a song or prayer. He had just been singing into a microphone without looking at that notebook. He had finished the song, switched off the microphone, and set it carefully on the table-box. His face glowed as it dawned on him.
“Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born, until you die, Mas!”
(“Upacara” is ceremony. “Mas” is a polite form of address for my Javanese husband. He looked back and forth between us, when he said it.) We laughed, and my interpretation was that we laughed because the look on his face was so joyous, it must be a joke. E. agreed, making sure I understood, that this great-great-grandfather had just shared with us a really good joke.
I had been thinking about what I wanted to be writing. Sometimes I dissociate at upacara, especially when there’s something unsettling. This one had begun with a nice conversation, while sitting on a mat next to a young Balinese girl with the roundest, deepest eyes, in matching pink sarung and kebaya, who touched her toes with mine, wiggling. As if by accident. But the conversation was with a man from the next village over. He articulately was exchanging acquaintance with E., in a way I could mostly understand, which always comes across as extra considerate. The man was holding a slender white goose. As he listened to my husband, he examined the goose. With two touching fingers, he smoothed a stray feather on its head. He stroked the length of the goose’s body, to calm it, as it shifted with fear.
The goose would momentarily be sacrificed.
I never know what to do with my face, in these situations. What I deeply wish I could do is look into the goose’s eyes and talk to it. To tell it, I see you. I don’t care how that sounds, it’s what I really want to do. But I am a guest. It wouldn’t be right, to my hosts. It wouldn’t be fair, to my husband. So in fact, I am hiding. I don’t want anyone to notice how hard it is, for me, to look anywhere but at the goose. (The discipline of eyes is an essential part of dancing, here.) So I shut off my face. The little girl’s toes are still casually touching my own. But the goose is wrapped in a piece of fabric, around its middle, and the friendly man is re-wrapping it, securing it, as if with care. The wrapped piece of fabric is the sarung of the goose, it is dressed respectfully in sarung, just like me.
Just like all of us.
I bring it up with my husband later, the goose, I cry a little, and we talk about the words of the great-great-grandfather. He is the oldest man in our village, he is ninety-eight, we have sat with him before and nongkrong(ed) as he was holding and caring for his newborn great-great-granddaughter, a very cute and fat baby with diamond studs in her milk caramel ears. E. is impressed that the old man told the joke, and we were the only ones who laughed, not the Balinese people sitting nearby. Me, too. But the spritely old man had addressed it to us, and other people nearby had been distracted, eating. So it didn’t really seem spoken for them.
I keep thinking about the old man’s words, and bringing them up with E., to hear him tell me again. “Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born… until you die, Mas!” E. says, with the right expression. And we laugh. It reminds me of the look on his face, the suspense and the gesture. How, when he said it, he referred to all this, and he referred also to himself. “Upacara, from birth, until death.”
Eveningtime in the sawah, the last night of Odalan, and a sliver of almond light hangs in the east, against periwinkle into deep lavender haze. Chill air floods from the highlands and mist spills out from ravines. The voices of elders carry, again from the banjar, across cloudswept rice fields, and coconut palms are sighing, tidal, in the shifting breeze. They’ve been singing every night, for more than a week. That’s his voice, I know it now.
Sweet smoke-smudged, broken flowers in hair, rice pressed on third eye and throat, sacred water splashed, with mark of goddess on your arm. So many words for how it hurts to let go. The same way it hurts to watch a goose be soothed by a man who’s about to slit its breast and spill its blood, in service to powers that will chase away bad spirits. Compassion is the key to sacrifice, this is what you say, and you hate it. And you are supposed to hate it. And you will wonder at that, but you will do it anyway, you will let yourself be given. Because your life doesn’t belong to you, at all, in the way you believe. Not in a way that will ever make you happy, or good. Not the part of you that hurts like that. And it was a joke, spoken by a man with only a few teeth left. And in his smile, it was an explanation. For both of you, but especially, the stranger.
Tiresias, back and forth between man and woman, gains inner sight through the cruel magic of mutilation. Again and again, verse after verse, the great-great-grandfather sings. There’s something I was, and something I am becoming, he is singing with a grandmother, her voice, trembling, his voice, alive. A steady, alternating song, words weaving between hidden constellations. Nobody who can hear him is as old as he is. I have seen him now, on the roof of the banjar, and I imagine him there, both hands holding the microphone, his eyes half-closed, not needing the book. I say to E., we will go to his funeral. E. says, yes, of course we will.
What I actually want, is that we go to his one-hundredth birthday party. I believe that we will make it there, first. But I don’t know at all, what to bring, that will be an appropriate gift.
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🙏🏻
Sounds of campur sari (a genre of music, translates to “mixed substance”, combining a core of keyboard-synthesized gamelan, the rhythm of Sundanese kendang drums played for jaipong dancing, and folk-style, song-based storytelling) and power tools, this morning. Overgrown boys climb again to high places, up walls and up coconut trees, flaunt silly moves to make me start. Frankie gets a bath, then put into caged confinement, (still he crows), so he doesn’t disturb (he just can’t help himself) the sitting Grace.
Grace, who sits, and her sitting is her work, as meditation, as keeping the pale, rounded shapes beneath her, such fragile contained cosmoi, safe and warm and hidden, as stirring primary material into life. I have come to see her. She doesn’t move at my approach, nestled in an overgrown patch of green, the closest place to quiet. Her stare is intent, concentrated, full of something like determination. The knowledge of her mission. No doubt or question, no blinking, just full touching, with her heart-holding, feather-breasted body, still. Does she even see me, and if she does, as what? Black eyes on black-scaled face, black with spots of iridescence. Something in her is as when Buddha touches the earth, as Bhumisparsha. I am so impressed, my heart too is touched, to see Grace in her moment.
I say salam, to Grace. I leave her (sitting) there. And I go back to my (wordy) day.
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.)
Gift-bearing.
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.
Sometimes, to get back on the right path, you have to circumnavigate the globe.
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.
Dogs bark at a passing stranger, out by the main road. Some distance from here, but the sound travels easily over ricefields on a chilly night, socks and stocking-cap weather, and clouds of mist pass quickly across the fat quarter moon. It’s scary when street dogs go after you like that. They really don’t play.
Our village (banjar) is hard to find. If you search for it by name, it doesn’t appear on G–gle maps. There’s another village in Bali with the same name, that one does appear in the search. It has nothing to do with us. (It’s a decoy.) Also, our street doesn’t have a name. It’s not empty, there are at least four other families (Balinese) who live on our street. It’s just hard to find, if somebody doesn’t show you where it is.
Last night in Penestanan // Gamelan
strikes bronze and sounds of competition,
jumping (on) and fending (off) the night
time, momentum tops the kendang and
recedes, then tries again (again) elaboration
of champaca smoke on taught skin
low beats call up shining
density from darkness (Bima’s
laughing) and his pupils
follow moths at
lantern light
frenzy
dancing
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.