Strangers
Æ.3
i’m only here because of you, you said
i said, you are your secrets too
Æ is built and born anew
from hiding
Phaedrus loves
to hide so grow
from hiding
//
the inky
i dream of an intruder in the house and i wake up screaming when they turn their face to me. but if awake and i imagine an intruder in the house, my fear goes silent and still. heart pounding in darkness i listen for my life
the same idea
but what felt
differences
complete sentences
drag heavy lately like
costumed excesses
shed
the inky
extra
//
assalamu’alaikum 🌒
dog asleep
dog asleep
in the middle
of the street
i slow the car
unsure who i
feel sorry for
homeless
undisturbed
territorial
tired
thinking
will demand
no less than
loving
//
Contextualizing TESCREAL (a sketch)
//
in phenomenology as dialectical dismemberment:
(A) –> post-logos –> post-politics –> post-nature –> (X)
//
(A) is the logos fully realized.
Logos is the end (telos) of natural being.
Humans are (by nature) political animals.
Tyranny is the fantasy of anti-nature.
The end (telos) of politics is justice.
Democracy was a remnant of justice.
(American democracy has been the forgetting of ends.)
Fascism is the (technology-enabled) fantasy of the post-political.
Techno-fascism is the usurpation of justice by technology (“AI”).
TESCREAL is the (“AI”-enabled) fantasy of the post-natural.
The end of the post-natural is endlessness.
The post-natural fully realized is (X).
//
Human beings by history catapult toward (X).
Human beings by nature stretch back toward (A).
//
Going ‘down’ is post-physics, going ‘up’ is meta-physics.
//
(Physics comes from Aristotle’s ta phusika, “those on nature” or “the natural things”, from Ancient Greek φύσις / phusis, origin, birth, nature, the natural. Coming to be (and passing away). Metaphysics comes from Aristotle’s ta meta ta phusika, lit. the ones (books) after the ones (books) on physics. The Latin interpretation of ta meta ta phusika as “what is beyond nature” isn’t accurate, as the original Greek referred to the customary ordering of the texts in archives. Aristotle calls it, in passing, “first philosophy”.)
//
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts”
Shakespeare, As You Like It.
//
Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un
to Allah we belong and to Allah we shall return 🌙
//
As if (walking along the beach) to pick up something alive and then letting it be alive in me.
We see now // the tools of tyranny falling happily, giddily into the laps of tyrants. These it turns out were not just our toys, but the dark materials of American fascism.
(Whose?)
Well, I had an accumulation of dark thoughts gathering for a dark moon post, on technology and colonialism and the other usuals around here, but I lost my heart for it. So instead I’ll tell you, my beloved blog, about my guilty pleasure or “secret single behavior” (who remembers this reference?) when my husband is away, which is to watch a certain tv show. I won’t name it but it’s Korean and it involves “singles”.
The “singles” always do this thing where they compare their faces to non-human animals' faces. Saying, like, “you look like a puppy dog” or get specific with breeds like “you look like a maltese” or “you look like a cat” or “like a donkey”. Awkward smile. “Oh, I do?” “Yes. In a good way.” Followed by modest, embarassed laughing. The women cover their mouths with their hands when they smile or laugh. They all have perfect manicures and pedicures. I try to catch looks at the peoples’ faces but I never catch the resemblance to the given animal.
I notice my husband’s face today, when I video call with him and Ibuk, my mother-in-law. I see anew how handsome he is, with chiseled, sad but wonderful features, high cheekbones and kind eyes. He has the most dazzling smile of anybody I’ve ever met. He is part fae. Ibuk smiles when she sees my face in the phone. I wave and smile back, one of those smiles that feels involuntary, with a rush of warmth, maybe gratitude at being recognized. It’s hit-or-miss these days, with Ibuk. I’m happy to see her in a good mood.
E knows I watch this tv show, and now you do too. Why do I watch it? I admit, it’s because I get drawn into the romantic entanglements. The silly hosts crack me up, they also get drawn in. We hope to see clever relationships develop, we fall for every hand-holding moment, (in Korea, I guess, hand-holding is still a big deal), we despair when the perfect couple can’t make it work. Or when someone cheats on us, by holding the wrong person’s hand! Sometimes we cry together (me and the show hosts). So the moral of this dark moon story is, even when it’s garbage tv, I am a fool for
rage, I was thinking, is like-drawing-like. Rage of the inside draws rage of the outside.
Given: a triangle, between external rage, internal rage, and X.
Never ask, who is X?
is who X is.
You were the mother, you programmed the song.
The name you gave it was
(click to subscribe
)…(
is who you are
playing the long game of bow and lyre, aiming for the victory wreath, while (the uncanny child stumbles like a thick and heavy smoke toward the capital)
blind
)
//
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌑
//
Of course we come by different paths. Just because we’re all recognizable doesn’t mean we’re all the same.
Threads woven between pretenses. //
A test I give myself, as I consider interacting with anything at all, but especially on the internet. I ask myself, is this my business? Is it really my business? What really is my business? I originally borrowed the question from Plato’s Republic, where there’s an otw definition (a repeat Socratic suggestion) of justice as “minding one’s own business”. Perhaps better rendered as, to be just is to take care of the matters that are (truly) one’s own.
It’s easy to overlook because it sounds too simple or glib to be the answer to the big question. (“What is justice?” “Mind your own business, knucklehead.") It has a colloquial meaning of not sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, not interfering with things that don’t involve you, that you don’t or couldn’t understand. And its simplicity is fecund, being the kind of definition that leads to further questions. There is the question most readily implied by its context. What is my role, what part do I play in a “just city”? Who am I as part of a political whole? And then, there are the introspections. What work truly belongs to me? What is my work? Ultimately, who (and/or what) am I?
This all became topical as a friend of ours (we recently learned) might be in a dangerous situation abroad (in a country in the Balkans). He might be, it’s hard to tell. For at least a month, the texts that are supposed to be from him, received by various members of his friend group, are not from him. (He normally would text pithily, in un-g–gle-translatable slang. Whereas his texts have been in too-formal g–gle-translated Indonesian.) The situation could be a dysfunctional relationship playing out over international borders, (i.e., his jealous partner has taken possession of his phone), or something more sinister. Sensitive to these possibilities, we are gathering information to figure out what’s happening (if we can) and what we can do to help (if there’s anything).
So we’ve had the opportunity to ask a few times. Is it my business? Is it our business?
Crucially, there is a lot of work to do, to understand whether it’s our business. (Or whether it’s their own private business, or the business of the embassy, etc.) We work to try to understand what’s going on, as well as we can. At the same time, we realize, there may be no such thing as perfect information. We are worried he might just disappear.
It’s a substantial project, worth undertaking and worth the various risks involved, I think, because this is a longtime friend in a vulnerable situation, the danger is real, and we are in certain ways equipped to help him out. There are things we could do. We are so powerful. And yet, everything still depends on having a clear and trustworthy line of communication. We need to hear him say certain things, for example whether he’s ok. Even then, things might still seem “off”. We will have to judge, on our end, whether he really seems “ok”.
We don’t want to be knuckleheads.
“Mind your own business” is an anti-democratic mantra. Well, it’s an anti-political mantra. The whole premise of politics is that minding one’s own business was insufficient for our pre-political selves. So politics is the business of democracy, after all of the business became everyone’s business. (There’s no politics in autocracy, politics requires embodied plurality.) We all vote on everything, are all responsible for everything. Even the things we have no business being responsible for. Of course, this makes functional organization impossible. No living being could survive in such a way, (with the hand judging the work of the ear, the liver meddling in the work of the pituitary), and neither can a political entity.
The genius of the Republic is (lol to start a setence with those words) that Socrates presents human politics with all of its dubious structural requirements on full display. The “beautiful lie”, the calculated-and-controlled sexuality and reproduction, the removal of infants from their parents' care. How everything relies on the counter-cultural initiation-education (it’s literally psychedelic) of a government of seers (“philosopher kings”). Not least, the inevitable decay into tyranny. These are not idiosyncratic features of Socrates' preferred utopia. (If only they were.) They are fixtures in any political composition, doing its best to imitate and thereby transcend nature. What Socrates' city-in-speech shows is that not even the most beautiful lies, in partnership with the most advanced technology, in the light of Truth Itself, can fix politics.
So it’s a warning for political animals.
“Mind your own business”, in context, was a non sequitur. Some other principle had already been supplied and was primary. This isn’t difficult to see, but it may be difficult to stomach. “Mind your own business, but always in service to the whole.” Always, always, always, in service to the whole. Even the thing that you held precious, your very identity (be it gold, silver, or bronze), was never yours alone. Yours alone is not a thing. It was just a story, (and not even a likely one), used as a tool to keep you in place. Privacy is an illusion, in politics.
Privacy is not (in truth) an illusion. It is something we’ve got and are stuck with. Does this make it a blessing? The most memorable image from the Republic is not the divided line, for me at least, but will always be this one (from Book VI). In the city in disarray, (as are all extant cities, according to Socrates), there is no reason to try to bear witness to justice, as such an effort could only lead to destruction and defeat. So one who loves wisdom acts prudently, as would a human being who has fallen in (oops) with wild beasts. They keep quiet and mind their own business. They take shelter as behind a wall, from the ravages of a storm. They strive to live a life pure of injustice and unholy action. Privacy becomes their saving grace.
Now that is difficult to stomach, coming from the famous meddler of Athens. Who always knew the gossip or was busy becoming the subject of it, concocting alternative political regimes with the young, making aristocrats squirm and getting himself executed on stupid charges. Who also happens to be the only one, if ever there was such a one, worthy of the name philosopher. He didn’t accept his own premise. He insisted on his own day-by-day empirical examination and diagnosis of Athens. “Are you wild beast, or what?” That was his life. His business was neither quiet nor private and it spoke to a different measure than the pure.
Socrates (in this context and elsewhere) considers himself an exception, and often excuses others from following in his footsteps (arguments in the Crito are full of deliberate holes). It was his daimon who made him do it, and his daimon belongs to him alone. Voices in dreams. Idio-socrates. Nonetheless, there is a constant temptation for any reader to consider Socrates as a standalone measure of the human. This is understandable. He gave birth to Western Civilization, and has been executed by it, again and again, ever since. His life story prophesies the whereto and the wherefrom, remaining somehow at the center of it all. At the center of us all. Anyone can more-or-less have a daimon. Well,
Have you been sentenced to death by your city? If not, you’re falling short.
In exasperation, I return to the question of “minding my own business”. Today, I used pointy scissors to dig a hornet’s stinger out of my husband’s big toe. It had gotten lodged in there, underneath a thick callus. Maybe six months ago. And it had been causing increased pain, or at least, increased complaining. In a way, it wasn’t my business, because I’m not a doctor. But it was my husband’s toe. He wouldn’t go to a doctor. It was like he might dig it out himself, but then he couldn’t reach it. I could tell he wanted me to do it. I put alcohol and then a flame on the scissors, not sure they were even made of steel. It felt like a lot of digging for such a tiny thing.
After I finally excised the black chit from his thickened toe, at the brink of where the callus started bleeding, seeming to cause a lot of discomfort (and I apologized a lot, causing pain is hard), apparently the worst of the pain quickly stopped. We were amazed at the relief. It’s wild to think that, again, such a tiny thing could cause such severe long-term reaction. I assumed that the body’s immune system would, you know, clean up a mess like that. I guess there was still some undigested venom, causing irritation.
Now back to hiding behind a wall. When the city seems made up of wild beasts, and you feel like a human, when you estimate yourself to be basically a different species of animal than they are, or if indeed there is unbroachable estrangement between you, this is the condition for privacy as grace. This is the requirement and the active presupposition of taking shelter from politics. They are wild beasts, inhuman. Socrates says it casually and imagines it being concluded, with cheerful optimism.
That’s not a little monstrous. It has been amply demonstrated that to live in such estrangement becomes its own trial. Not everybody is Socrates, that’s for sure. For example, I imagine Achilles withdrawn in his tent. Embracing alienation as he embraces the lyre. This is minding one’s own business as grief. Perpetual grief makes for uneasy grace, and occasionally, murderous fits of rage.
Knowing ourselves not quite as alien, we send exploratory feelers out from the grim sanctuary of our post-political, apo-calyptical selves. We dig out stingers and seek intel from abroad. Minding, making, or discovering our own business as we go. Yearning for reliable facts when we can never quite trust the voices on the other end of the line or the dismantling of a more-or-less abstract empire. Paying our taxes, more-or-less on-time. It helps to understand that it’s been going on since the beginning, this wobbly exercise of unfounded privacy. Protective alienation against a bestial world, savior of impotence, surrender as weapon against empire. But then, feeling along as by touch the limits of this work, which belongs to someone, and where it meets the limits of unreliable information. The limits of what one might (regardless of all that) understand.
(Or care for. Or love.) What really is my proper work?
There are people who consider the whole as their business. Others consider none of it (theirs) at all. The fools, the busybodies, knuckleheads all. Then there are days of being a balloon, floating over illegible landscapes. There are voices of saving and of being saved. There are the trees in the forest, books written about trees, on trees, and there are lumberjacks. The lumberjack’s daughter, up in the branches. The eagle whose nest she stumbled into, as if by accident. There are me and you. We are threads woven between pretenses of praeter-nature and of the praeter-political, as after amateur surgery. Unsteady in grace, as in laws and definitions.
There are some people who judge further questions to be a waste of time; at least we can be certain we’re not one of those.
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌔
//
Xenia on the Internet
Another way to think about this is as being a good guest.
For example. I am a stranger and a guest in Indonesia, the country where I live, so I am obliged to respect the boundaries of a guest. It is not (it can’t be) my business to go shouting in streets, making trouble, about Indonesian governance. I’m not a citizen, I cannot (expect the right to) vote. It’s not my work here to castigate people or their customs. (I would be an asshole if I did. And end up in prison.) If I really don’t like it, what I can do is leave.
Consider. The internet would be a much better “place” if everybody treated it as not-their-own-house. If we acted like guests. (Many “here” already sense this, I think, and follow the custom.) The fact of the matter is that nobody knows whose house they are in, in a literal way. The written words you type into your keyboard, in your own house, will appear in unknown countries and unknown houses. Maintaining awareness of that is the basic etiquette of a guest.
However. This is not about “being genteel” or saying “tut-tut”. This is not about avoiding politics. Far from it, this is itself a political stance, and reflects a serious political need. It’s the basis of diplomacy. As a sacred observance, it guarantees sanctuary in a temple or church. To be a good guest is to acknowledge the limits of one’s own knowledge and reputation. It is careful comportment with respect to the unknown. Practically speaking, it’s the basis for traveling and meeting people outside city walls (or national borders). For visiting foreign countries, and hosting foreigners at home. These are the ancient rules of ξενία (xenia), or guest-friendship.
I propose. A hospitable social media platform shouldn’t be governed, in the sense of a neighborhood jurisdiction, as an attempt at community. It should model itself on a guesthouse, at an internet crossroads. Like an inn or a caravanserai. To be sure, the atmosphere can be friendly and welcoming. It will have its longterm or familiar denizens. It may be a convivial place to share news, political views, feelings, artworks, or other ideas, to catch up on gossip, or just to say hi, and yet it remains as a hub of the ungovernable. Not all guests share the same creed or commitments. They may convene in clubs or cliques, or keep to themselves in the shadows. Some things are confined to more “private quarters”, like private notes, emails, or the blog.
Of course, not everything is permitted. When “the law of the land” and the etiquette (or inhibitions) of guests aren’t enough to enable sanctuary, a guesthouse needs to enforce its own rules, in violation of which users may be blocked or kicked out. Even so, unlike those of a political jurisdiction, the rules of a guesthouse are not written to exclude the unknown, the stranger, or the refugee. They cannot demand political allegiance without defeating their purpose. This is so especially in times of civil conflict, when misinformation is rife, and all are on paranoid lookout for mere signs (which are inherently fallible, and not the substance) of enmity.
The purpose of guesthouse rules is to preserve a limited and special kind of peace. Peace maintains the viability of the guesthouse, as a business, the provision of its guests, and the very possibility of (the “open web” as) travel.
Travel is essential to Xenia, who takes on spiritual countenance as host of the politically homeless. She is the honesty of outlaws, the unspoken agreement of (quality) pirates and thieves, and the pious duty of every anarchist. (She also transgresses the limits of deified gender, appearing both as Zeus and Athena.) Then, there is her enemy. The outlawing of travel, in all of its psycheic (intellectual, political, and poetic) senses, (including translation), is the essence of illiberality. It is the attempt to expunge Life. This is fascism, at its very core.
Xenia, therefore, is an organizing element of antifascism. It would be valuable as a principle of the “open web”. It can be a business model, a public good, or a piety, depending on perspective and motivation. No matter the political commitments of its keeper or guests, longterm or transient, the internet guesthouse has a higher duty to guest-friendship. It can host neither fascism, nor the war.
//
Hormonal IUD side effects
Something a little different, today. I wondered for about thirty seconds whether this was “too much information” for my blog but well, it’s relevant, (everything is relevant?), so here’s your warning.
Today, I finally (actually) realized I have to remove my hormonal IUD. I knew I was developing worse mental side effects soon after a new one was placed, in August. (I got a Kyleena in fall 2019, and then with the Mirena hormonal IUD, in fall 2024. The Mirena brought intensification of everything, which helped me identify the previous effects of the Kyleena.) Influenced by my doctor, I hoped things would “even out” after a few months, and I was desperate to maintain protection from pregnancy. My hope was delusional and self-destructive. Today I searched youtube and then reddit for other women’s experiences and learned I’m not alone. (Cue crying.) It was the catalyst for my realization.
Mood has been by far the worst cluster of side-effects. I feel like I’ve had no ability to deal with stress/stressors and like I’ve been going periodically crazy. Being stuck in bed sobbing for days with no idea why or how to get out of what feels like a deep hole. Followed by days of feeling empty, anhedonia, fatigue. This has accompanied actual stressful events (in personal life and in the world) since I was first fitted with the Kyleena. Soon after that I moved to Indonesia, which began a period of instability and uncertainty in living sitations (housing, immigration status, a new relationship and then marriage in a foreign country), as well as the pandemic and acceleration of apparent civilization collapse. It’s difficult to distinguish between normal stress and side effects, but I assume now that my responses to these things were impacted negatively by the Kyleena IUD. I don’t know how much the IUD is related to the asymmetrical psoas syndrome that rapidly intensified and has physically disabled me during that same time period. But I believe that the stress of those months, from October 2019 through the summer of 2020, was a significant contributing factor. So if the hormonal IUD reduced my ability to deal with stress (and there are peer-reviewed studies showing that hormonal birth control raises cortisol and lowers GABA levels), it likely played a significant role in my physical impairment over the last 5 years.
Here are all the side-effects I experienced.
mood effects included anxiety, depression, panic, feelings of dread, intrusive thoughts, paranoia, irritability (meanness, rudeness, lashing out, way more than usual), feeling out of control, crying fits, despair and hopelessness, frequent overwhelm, including from small things, episodes that felt like depressive paralysis or catatonia, inability to focus, fatigue, suicidal thoughts, depersonalization.
nausea, shakyness, dizziness/vertigo, especially in the morning (like “morning sickness”)
excessive sweating, night sweats, excessive and strange body odor, “feeling gross” even right after bathing
insomnia
migraine/tension headaches
increased body hair (minor but noticed)
melasma on my face (minor but annoying, impactful)
feeling of puffiness, bloating and cramps, breast soreness (minor, could have lived with it, except for.. all of the above)
Politics around reproductive health is already shit, and it’s only getting worse, so a lot of women are probably considering this option (hormonal IUD). For many, it works fine. But potential consumers (that’s what we are) should be aware that they can cause severe psychological side effects, including suicidal ideation. Hormone imbalance is no game. It’s typical that contemporary medicine treats (women’s) health with such disregard, that a medicine like this would be promoted by doctors (and would profit pharmaceutical corporations like Bayer, which makes these) without communication or (sufficient research? or) open acknowledgement of how severe the side-effects can be. I am not alone in feeling like it has “made me crazy”. My doctors said the IUD was low-impact and “localized”, in its effects, (all doctors seem to use this term, I assume it’s from the drug’s promotional material), but mentally it was far more intense for me than oral BC. I am the child of healthcare professionals, I generally trust modern medicine, but I believe this kind of minimization (and profit-seeking) harms women and erodes trust in the whole institution.
I’m f- -king lucky my husband is understanding, supportive, tolerant, patient, long-suffering, didn’t take anything personally, through some very tough times. Otherwise it might have been relationship-ending. Also I learned that in a situation like this, when there aren’t other options, a good partner will (despite his own fear of doctors and hospitals) insist on vasectomy.
I guess the lesson here is to feel your feelings. Listen to your body, don’t take its natural balance for granted, and try not to be gaslit by healthcare professionals. Not sure how long it will take to get back to normal, or what normal will be like. But it feels better to write all this down. Now (actually) to get the damned thing yanked out.
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.
School Days in Athens
Φαῖδρος: ναί, παρ᾽ Ἐπικράτει, ἐν τῇδε τῇ πλησίον τοῦ Ὀλυμπίου οἰκίᾳ τῇ Μορυχίᾳ.
Phaedrus: Yes, at Epicrates', in the house of Morychos, here, near the Olympiad.
//
Take words to it,
he said, and words were fire. And yet, you lacked
conviction. Crowded by black memories
of unseen hands and uninvited touch,
as old men’s trembling clammy kindnesses,
their groping behind doors, our voices as
stray syllables, or whimpering with fright,
the muffled passage of another, coaxed
with promises, down enforced aisles, bound by
vocabulary’s sight. Terrible child,
no light escaped the house of Morychos.
So how did you?
At nights, with flashlights,
we stayed up, mapping tangled vacations.
It wasn’t always hellish as it sounds.
We were kept kids, padlocked in battery
cages, our own best teachers, of tossed-off
certainties, known neighborhoods, and always
chasing some kind of slang. To spell the word
backwards, chop up and repurpose pieces,
or make the meaning opposite from what
it was. We traded jabs of pleasure in
the mottled darkness of his maze, tongues of
soft flesh. We rearranged worlds to make our
places.
What would your mother give to you
of time? Faded photos, hand-me-down jeans,
a crayon-drawn map of paradise, you were
a metaphor too well-worn for what you
became, true as, it feels ugly to be
ugly and the resolution offers
no resolution, just this hissing in
my ears, this chaos. Lay down in the dog
bog. Keep trying. Keep gashing out the lines,
edit twisting serpents from the narrative,
and trace the tattered logic left behind,
monster observing monster, overwrought
and double-blind.
History is the final
solution for you, so go, dissolve your words
in time. Let their bleached remains fortify
the temple, your descendants living down
the stupid crime. That’s what
religion was, at home, submission to
the uncomprehended solidarity of
teenage desire, or something like, romance.
On echinacea lawns, she dons glitter
bodysuits, writes parochial poetry
on freedom. We were such creators, in
our nascent phases, molding plastic limbs
to tether our volcanic bases.
I do
not want to go, I beg, don’t take me back.
In wept oceans let me clear the bitter
savor from my eyes. Picnics in real
places, manicures on brand, she painted party
faces, praising God for such justice
as could be found and leveraged there, in
shared maps of iron laces, corset-bound,
hound-hunted hallways exhumed from ancient
flavors of local reason, a child’s small
hand ghostly waving from the window like
a metronome. She swallowed blood and sand
to earn their graces.
Take words to it, I said,
and words were airplanes, it was time, and she
was ready. She heard rumors on the wind
of its disintegration, climbed a hill,
and saw it for herself: the metaphor had died.
The whole, wide world was failing beauty, spread
beneath her like a poem in multitudes,
legs-open bride. And still, she cried. She longed
for absolute intelligence of who
he was, of home, of houses on the street
and what they hide, of where the figure’s corpse
was buried, and what appetites for youth were
still fed and worshipped there.
Take care of it,
he said, and words were memories, to which
she had no scholarly reply. No house,
nor street belonged to her, no shoes or gowns
to pack in chests, but ashes and fresh-breath
mints lost in linings, crumpled tissues, all
forgotten reasons why. Because you were
unseen, you could escape the conflagration?
Not so, although, not too far off. Because
she took my parchment seeded in her and
bad wisdom gained, as blasphemy of sight,
enlightened predation.
If words be fire,
then seek us in my gold and burning bower:
a clown is a bad child with adult power.
//
(About.)
Me, on me. // Feelings are like the wind and you have to adjust the sails to catch them in the right way. And maybe you have to adjust the boat sometimes into these impossibly steep-seeming angles (heel). The boat is built to handle this. (One assumes.)
So (caveat lector, seek your own help, this is me, on me) these are some of my therapies for coping with depression.
When you can’t stop being down on yourself. Make it a game to see which voice in your head can fling the most sublime sh-t. Because games are theoretically fun if you look for the beauty.
Listen to Enya and/or Tori Amos with earbuds, depending on the “complexity” (ugliness) of your needs in that moment. (I save BfP for special occasions. I shouldn’t.)
Accidentally stumble upon something that awakens your compassion. Do a kindness before your depression knows what hit it.
Quit demanding any form of recreation from yourself.
Write a lot, even though you “know it’s sh-t", just remove the expectation to publish.
Take advantage of the situation and let anxieties go, if possible. I was surprised how the depression made it possible. Be your version of an unresponsive, mopey, adolescent asshole. Or a saggy old crone. (Stop wearing a bra, stop trying to people-please.)
Spend time obsessing over the side-of-the-coin that you can’t currently see. Assume there’s a rainbow, over there. Depression is just another perspective. Perspectives are dialectical. You are expressing relations, albeit warped ones, relations. You remain related. Being upside-down-from is also a relation.
(Sorry, Satan.
You have to learn to enjoy the smell of your own armpits.)
Cold damp dark of night ascends, is parted, penetrated by light like swords of angels stabbing through the atmosphere. The remainder is patched parts of gray. Saturday morning is going on, tiny chip-chatterings in coconut trees, sounding roosters-out the four directions, cats glut themselves on breakfast then seek pools of fire to glory-bathe. Grace and chicks burst across the yard in their boisterous reply to dawn.
Sitting, puzzling, how far into (this) the sun can go, is the waiting question. Sorting through some past impressions and interpretations, shifts in orientation, momentous or errant conclusions drawn. Awareness of other entities, not oneself, inside a self, creeping through cracks and chiselling away in stealthy corners, strangers. Emerging from logic-fogs in desolate confusion, at baffled love, not knowing how one got there or where one left oneself, uncovered. Feeling for order among untrusted elements, a haunted shipwreck and the old debate over the weather, over whether any of this is salvageable, after rain. Leaning on others.
Strength of sun settles as clouds knit back together. There are periods of shadow, periods of heat, hammers sounding from the outer rooms, and weary resignation to the unborn symbols whose beauty-queen machinations dictate progress over the liabilities of (tear-stained, tangled, raw) labile perception. Letting go, carrying on.
But, Lysias
Σωκράτης: καλῶς γάρ, ὦ ἑταῖρε, λέγει. ἀτὰρ Λυσίας ἦν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐν ἄστει.
Socrates: Beautifully said, fellow. But Lysias was, as it seems, in town.
//
(“What even is Athens?” asked the blind, somewhat frustrated, woman.)
When I was twelve, I got thrown off a pony. Bocara, reddish-velvety-brown, with black mane and tail and an opinion of her own. Or something less accessible than opinion. So we were out for a ride one day, and she spooked when she noticed something “off” in the other field, man or machine, she didn’t like it. The instructor said, go. The third time around was the third time she bucked, and I was thrown, landing dirt-hard on back, face-full of sky, chest spasm for air. (Damn.)
That day. Writing this other post, which was about (what we do with) time, made me late for what was next (on our schedule). Now as I was on the way in Sweet Orange, who also is an incubator, a protectrix of time, at present of Duckworth time, (listening to DAMN., by Kendrick Lamar, to summon this artist from the other side, of the earth,) we stopped to pick up bricks, (exchanged looks with Sundanese brick-makers, but the bricks were “belum matang”), then re-entered the churning sprawl of I-cannot-tell-you-how-many pale riders on motorbikes. (Sweet Orange drives slow behind a couple, two probably fine fellows, and total nerds, out on holiday, who, having not made it, push theirs up the steep slope of a ravine. Frustration metamorphs into sympathy, inside Sweet Orange, for how many of us, one, has been caught under such circumstances, but without the solid-pack of traffic to witness. To whiteness. Laughing sympathy, but sympathy, nonetheless.)
There is a body, and there is a virus. No, back up. There is an island, and there is a world. There is an interaction between these two things, the city and the jungle, (a person and a blog), and I interpret it as, There is a body, and there is a virus, and there is a coordinated response, of the body, to the entry of the virus, and I call it, an immune response. The virus multiplies. The immune system, to defend the body’s living soul, which is mine, which is sacred, targets viral particles for elimination and expulsion. The immune response is the xenophobia.
(I am a stranger. Xenophobia is relevant to me.)
An immune response, whatever that is, and all of its analogues, would be one way to know or understand a moving thing, something coming and going, or something that’s born, and dies, as well as something that has a wall, with people going in and out, no matter how porous, and oh, yes, laws, written, unwritten, and weird, an immune response. Athens also might have an immune response, with, well, a soldier’s DNA., who would target the foreign element, (disguised-stranger emoji), they would be a sort of philosophical guard dog, barking at everything they don’t already know. (The hounds of hate? Or of jealousy?) But in addition, Socrates, who might as well be on a leash today, has been led outside the wall. (Is it you, ghost-of-Snowden-flake?) Whereas the virus is at another professor’s total party house, seducing of-age students with unlicensed garfield merchandise, and the lines of the battle, here, are somewhat unclear.
Who is the aggressor? What needs a defense? (I thought we’d grown tired of the city?) (Everyone agrees, by the way, that this is the most boring part of the dialogue. Like a plane, delayed on the runway, it must be endured, and quickly, to make the connection in Singapore.) But whichever direction is inward, and which outward, we are being steered into Lysias, like a T-cell with confirmed coordinates. Except for one thing, which is, the coordinates are… algebraic. (It’s a Boeing-built plane.) The virus isn’t here. Or, what was the virus, again? Man, or machine. A gadfly, round the bud that forks the corner of a dark-lashed eye.
I woud never blame her, beautiful, spirited Bocara. She is a genius and a horse is never wrong. The instructor was a jerk, “instructors” nearly always are, but let’s be honest, the instructor wasn’t wrong. (And I held the crop.) I was a fool, and a child, and I won’t blame myself. But sometimes, on a horse, you must be direct, and you must welcome judgment day with open arms. I did not. Like I said, I am messy. Wrong was done and a lesson had to be learned. It was one of those moments around which everything changes, or breaks, and I carried Bocara with me, after that.
Fun fact. “No feelings involved” is impossible with horses. You can’t remove yourself, it’s impossible. She follows you, she sticks with you, you carry her, you might hide her, or become her without knowing it, or you love her, and her things that she sees, her ghosts and her witness, her trumpets and her fire, and she appears before you, at night, in your secret life (crying, confused). Something was beautiful, then everything went wrong. She/he/they haunt you. Hidden in your heart, in your tunic, or in the iPhone that you carry in your pocket, until it’s m.A.A.d. as Compton to tell what is the virus, and where is home. Silly Phaedrus, with his concealed scroll, and his leopard-skin pill-box hat, thinks it’s not-a-thing to step outside a wall. But, look,
there’s a war going on. Of all against one, or one against all, or all against all, (based on gender pronouns and deity preference), or it’s one against one, and it follows you, the war, tapping its pocket. Like blood, or a bloodhound, it will track you down, and you will be there, again. Landing dirt-hard on back, sky-full of face, chest spasm for air, (like I can’t breathe. Look,) a caught body, again. Until you win the war. Which you cannot win, because you are a single soul, brave, clever, damned Duckworth, fleeing from, pursuing, (whereto and wherefrom), human nature itself. You are so many terrible, body-caught things. You are Socrates, in America, you are Phaedrus, out of (what even is) Athens(?). On an island all-but-destroyed by pale riders, (no feelings involved), you are red horse, and pale rider. You are, the war, so it rules you, the war. Unless
(I) just love (you) and (learn
how to put down the weapon.)
//
(About.)
Must be a snake nest in the garden because the cats have caught three babies so far. Small, brown, narrow heads, E says not dangerous but how they rear their heads and face you off… Then I had a dream some deity, reflected shimmering gold and black, commanded I build it a temple. It was terrifying.