Wherefrom
How many a desert plain, wind-swept,
like the surface of a shield,
empty, impenetrable,
have I cut through on foot,
Joining the near end to the far,
then looking out from a summit,
crouching sometimes,
then standing,
While mountain goats, flint-yellow,
graze around me,
meandering like maidens
draped in flowing shawls.
They become still in the setting sun,
around me, as if I were a white-foot,
bound for the high mountain meadow,
tall-horned.
Excerpt from “The Arabian Ode in ‘L’” (Lamiyyat al-Arab), attrib. Al-Shanfarā (may Allah have mercy on him), translated by Michael A. Sells (may Allah have mercy on him) in his volume Desert Tracings.
These are the final lines of the poem and the ones most explicitly referenced by this, but of course, excerpts don’t do it justice; 64 stanzas writhing snake-like through spirits of the desert as purest distillation of outlaw’s heart. Earlier stanzas can be found here. It seems appropriate that only traces of this poem should appear online.
Al-Shanfarā is a terrible dust devil, burning himself alive. Legendary antihero, desolation and exile ensconced in the premonition of paradise. dizzying!
as if i were a whitefoot
nameless, the gentle landscape chose
pointlost, ungiven, brutishly
endbringer to deadset hunger,
rudeness riverrun to mercy.
grim gravelshatterer, sparking flint
to be action or scenery—
object of disbelief, the ground
to goat a hesitating hoof—
or clamp too-trustingshank, object
of appetite. salivaspills
from ruthless gum of animal,
rankcivil tooth of shackledmilk;
but snarlingword, infant of dust
absent a motherverse, is howl
heartletting keen of lucid sacrifice.
come drink from me, Al-Shanfarā—
she desertlimns greydreaded; trim
your distance, wolves. the veil of thirst
is inhuman as ocean, burns
your hornsgolden by bending sun.
//
(reply to Shanfara’s Lamiyyat al-Arab, trans. by Michael A. Sells in Desert Tracings.)
silver robes of a rose rabbi
(a reply to Wallace Stevens’ “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”; introduction here.)
I.
—and did you ordinary women mock
in liturgies of utterances contained,
lines overwrought by time-keeping cant of yours?
and did you burst from bullied syllabub,
or clockwise stiffen into winter walls?
the musicals of ghosts, midwives and angels
echo, hollow, down stone-cold corridors.
and did you consecrate your spectacle,
coupling one who spoke—no, no—not nothing,
a stand-in that you killed while playing swords?
to quell the bubbling spring by means of rain?
or merely quote the Mother’s name in vain?
she has been up at nights, considering
how to un-kiss this devil-gendered thing.
II.
well, i make believe an uncle, dead
and dear. less clear is fortune of the bird.
to fly, to seek, and what on earth to find
but torrent of an obsolescent mind
—he said, obscure and arduous to hear.
and yet, it flies. and though he doubts her crown
and midnight sight, she will fly too. and though
her silver glows in anecdotal mood,
her lilt, of stellar tilt, still loving, lingers
in braided dancing round a pool of blue,
tuning her clutch in nesting eddy of
said bird, whose course is old and hardly true
—and yet, it lives. rising, as golden-red
in flight, crowing like Scorpio in the East.
rest easy, uncle cold and fluttering
and lately of rambunctious residue;
a dove survives heaven to choir anew.
III.
O man, if you could see her witchlocs now,
or what’s become of Eastern expertise.
she is swamp-bitch, and twisted, twined and hitched
without romance by ruby claw to thorny crown,
her hair—each barb a bell, each bloody herb
a suicide. she’s heard of nobody’s
outrageous feats of raw technology.
in wracked rumors of Western fantasy
she knit a while textiles anti-exotic,
but sweaters have no use in the tropics,
where skin is king. and now we’ve come uncrimped,
uncrumpling, algal Anadyomene
of muddy water, Charybdis of the bog.
what’s history is past—nevertheless, he asks
why, woman, have you gone eau naturelle?
IV.
that spotless glass is not the book of Adam.
that trinity you stole cuts like a knife.
to be uncrumpled is to be un-uncled—
un-uncled, i become the poet’s wife.
i am un-hidden woman of the garden,
body un-ridden by the dust-bound word.
the queen of poet’s tongue, i lounge and lean
as music on my salivary throne.
the syllable you speak, my roundness is
her shapely immanence. our rectitude
is life—of tree—of life. so eat me, fallen
father of mankind, and know your foolishness.
speak again, brother—madly, as husband.
my honeyed bone un-spells your make-believe
kafir—he sees his wife sans négligee
who tastes the naked fruit by ripened eye.
says ordinary woman made explicit,
who steals your spectacle to save your life.
V.
can we remember together, after all
or does my voice harden the picture frame?
by being body, do i gather you
intolerably, or spread you thin as kin,
one stroking throb of summer esoteric—
you tickle me with feather of a peacock.
a gazer’s gloomy imagery is perfume
of incense, arousal at great distances,
long-smouldering and lit by tender match.
far from the proximity of virgins
there burn the Verbs of Love, arrayed
as galaxy of irretrievability—
before my eyes, you took and held my hand.
VI.
we used to call you man of twists and turns,
the dynamo—reckless, drowning, sea-rendered
until perennial blue, the one i knew
well enough to know, i loved nobody.
his thirst, prostrated, clutched me from below,
desperate to conceal from wingèd word
a history of suffering. a babe
buried his need in bosom of my nature,
drunk on the deep milk of disappearance.
his subterfuge despair was mythical,
until he made her fiction. he may not
remember me—but i keep by my heart
a wavy lock of sunset-auburn hair.
VII.
suppose a parable is just like her:
desired and defiled in equal measure.
his chivalry requires a blushing knight
to guard the word, who is incarnate treasure.
i heard of one such rescuer of women.
who, for his lovely sin, was de-mountained
by crippled foot, and fated never nimbly
to climb again. but faith in constancy
makes deliberate gifts, arms built from hours
spent torquing tongs before roaring earth-core.
therefore, no purity of heart is borne
that lacks an alloy in the sooty forge.
thou shalt not fear the courage of your virgin
is the limping gist of this comparison;
her shining is at once translucent bloom
and armor’s lustre, welded by humble Vulcan.
VIII.
if doom begins to seem antipathy,
baby, you’re scrolling past the blues. that time
of year thou mayst in our humanity—
but not the Muse—behold, of warty gourds'
cosmic grotesquerie. and there’s the rub.
as long as tongue still holds a gentle fold,
i will elucidate your grim hallucination.
launder and bandage the decaying limb
of sense, of memory, of time. wed heaps
of conscious compost consummate the bloom
in star-swept dimensions of titanium,
where whorls of microplastics never end—
machine poetic, of pumpkins meteoric,
becoming metaphysic—tender beings,
fizzing histories apocalyptic,
chime and rhyme as flutes of pink kombucha.
we sing the tropical-epochal view
at end of universe, or two. until
séance à trois, with chaperone of grackle,
i love the laughing sky—let’s make it crackle.
IX.
most oblatory heart, i bring you news.
despite our deadly faith in prophylactics,
resourceful Cupido pricks porous tactics,
ever hanging hymenal fools. behold:
on spun-gold surface of radiant yolk,
in sky-strewn milky way of albumen
suspended, questing’s lustiest conceit,
the part-less heartbeat of a person third:
as ancient aspect touches youngest plume
to stir, pure destiny, the origin
of life, as love, in pilgrimage secured:
the red point points, and to itself—as bird.
O holy gift, O crack in everything!
the mad midwifery of paladins
births not a baby, but a voice on fire:
ecce peep. now go, and meet your daddy-o.
his name’s Pipit the cocky chickadee;
he is a theory of fertility;
enthusiasm incommensurate
with clock-a tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum.
X.
a balmy chickadee alights on bough
of jepun tree—gigantic, bristle-trunked,
beatified—by tipped cosmos of day
and melting star of paradise, bodies
unveiled. we lie in kindred shades of them,
verbing and flowing, in blues made legible
by greenborn leaf. in leaves there hides a forest
where braid the wanderers their briared maths.
a souvenir shelters nectonic paths,
ancestral courses wild with counterpoint,
and mercy of geometry—proffered
by rivered children of Love’s oblivion.
XI.
dilated pools, star-gazed—surrender pinkly
to phobia of frogs. if you dismember
those bracing, faceless bodies—lost in love
their coiling gyres, desiring—helixing
directions inward, home. or intervene
against the skyward cough—raw, gaping need
to swallow more—when pollywog is strung
by lunar air. ritual drowning of gills,
suffering insurgency—the gulping word,
fata Morgana flooding Camelot
is twinned ecstasy of triple betrayal.
for swimmers' lust, the sea is all. and still
her cries are not for us, alone—we hone
the bluest chord of velvet-driven reverberation.
XII.
now all of us have lost our taste for mince,
the history of grinding, darkly, Adam;
so schooling blade, student of buah, will prune
til circumspect the hour. and she has thorns,
forms of her own—we prick ourselves and bleed
to name her flower. bending the voice to crown,
we’re drunk by literal skies of melody.
you found her singing by the sea, where she
had fled, as she remembered you were drowning.
who is the rose rabbi? i read, she comes
and goes. knows herself not. how would she know?
if glass were introspect, Iris of time—
to find she had been borne, a cradled question.
//
Wa’alaikumsalam, selamat purnama, peace 🌕
a pewter chest for the silver robes
already i have sensed murmurations of moving on. and i’ve hesitated. but it’s time to bundle these up in ribbons so that they might go home. ( what follows is an introduction to “silver robes of a rose rabbi”, a cycle of poems i will post on purnama, InsyaAllah. and the closing of a chapter. )
“telescopic texts” were born as serial replies to the twelve cantos of Wallace Stevens' “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”. i stumbled into this project and was amazed at their unfolding, at the responsiveness of Stevens' text to this treatment, and at the fruitfulness of a dynamic interaction. furthermore, it became apparent this was exactly the initiation needed for this blog’s translation of Plato’s Phaedrus. ( things come together and open up in a wonderful way. )
“translation of the Phaedrus” — is “translation” the right word? for the sake of transparency: i’m not setting the rules; i am caught in a vast body of waves. flotsam is pulled in, cobbled together, sent away, before i have fully understood. this is embarrassing in all of the ways that “Mon Oncle” is embarrassed by its own sublime. ( by Love, as mantically bashful poetry, which opens into stratospheres. )
here, “Mon Oncle” has constituted an epicycle of Phaedrus. a poem is a gravitational pool to suck you in and spit you out as something ( or somewhere ) different. i go along for rides and things are created thereby. drunkenness is a confession, not a metaphor. it’s like losing everything, but then it’s the blues. InsyaAllah there will be more poems of insanity, madness, mania — the alchemical reduction to metered speech. ( pores of the poem, through which rivers flow back into the poet’s seed. and rivers will be the madness. )
but madness isn’t a method in itself, so i maintain that this is a translation. carrying bones is part of building a temple, even when the temple is something inconsequential like a blog. building a temple has from the beginning been the generative dream of this blog. ( a temple needs orientation toward Mecca, that stone among stones. )
a note on my process. in translating the text of Phaedrus, i had reached the end of a dialectical prelude. it was time to wrap something up, and time to get something started. there was an aperture into a dream. it demanded initiation. ( and/or it commanded leisure. ) Pindar was the first step, and a chariot was born, but i needed more contemporary tuning, more techniques, lenses, experience with my vernacular. ( i needed a voice; i dawdled at the crossroads. )
i was re-reading Wallace Stevens. his later poems captivated me when i was in college — especially “The Idea of Order at Key West” and “The World as Meditation”. moreover, they changed the way I read Homer. so they changed the way i read everything. ( before i ever imagined writing poetry myself. ) now i wanted to discover clues as to how Uncle Wallace had built his voice. so I was studying his earliest book of poetry, Harmonium, when i was pulled by the aforementioned gravitational force into “Le Monocle”. ( there occurred a fertility ritual; and a certain birth. )
so were created “silver robes of a rose rabbi”. i have seen and experienced so much in writing these — figuring them out, in, and around, being a poet of paltry months, with everything to learn. in case it doesn’t come across in the work itself: i have nothing but admiration and gratitude for Stevens' poetry. ( this has been an act of devotion.
and well, the text mistook itself for vestments. )
(
one final note. as i write this blog, i continue ( slowly ) to study the Quran. to speak of rivers flowing and gravitation — i have a “deep hunch” that the Quran is a poetic singularity. if so, then i’ll spend the remainder of my life ( slowly ) learning to read it. as i have spent up until now ( slowly ) learning to read. i do not understand this as being in conflict with my ( slowly ) translation of Phaedrus. so poetry ( slowly ) becomes a choir.
if a beginner voice, moreso a beginner listener. the first words of the Quran have begun to feel like sipping a trickle of fire out from underneath an immense ocean. for the sake of transparency. any light in these verses is from Allah through the intercession of the Messenger ﷺ. errors and mistakes are my own by the Mercy of Allah. Alhamdulillahirrabilalameen. Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim. Wasalamu’alaikum to those i know and those i don’t know. Peace and thank you for reading🙏🏻
)
//
telescopic texts (avec "?") (12/12)
now all of us have lost a taste for mince,
the history of grinding, darkly, Adam.
a schooling blade, student of buah, will prune
til circumspect the hour. and she has thorns,
forms of her own — we prick ourselves and bleed
to name her flower. bending the voice to crown,
we’re drunk by literal skies of melody.
you found her singing by the sea, where she
had fled, as she remembered you were drowning.
who is the rose rabbi? i read, she comes
and goes. knows herself not. how would she know?
if glass were introspect, Iris of time —
to find she had been borne, a cradled question.
//
telescopic texts (avec "?") (11/x)
dilated pools, star-gazed — surrender pinkly
to phobia of frogs. if you dismember
those bracing, faceless bodies — lost in love
their coiling gyres, desiring — helixing
directions — inward, home. or intervene
against the skyward cough — raw, gaping need
to swallow more — when pollywog is strung
by lunar air. ritual drowning of gills,
suffering insurgency — the gulping word,
fata Morgana flooding Camelot —
is twinned ecstasy of triple betrayal.
for swimmers' lust, the sea is all. and still —
her cries are not for us, alone — we hone
the bluest chord of velvet-driven reverberation.
//
selamat purnama 🌕
telescopic texts (avec "?") (10/x)
a balmy chickadee alights on bough
of jepun tree — gigantic, bristle-trunked,
beatified — by tipped cosmos of day
and melting star of paradise, bodies
unveiled. we lie in kindred shades of them,
verbing and flowing, in blues made legible
by greenborn leaf. in leaves there hides a forest
where braid the wanderers their briared maths.
a souvenir shelters nectonic paths,
ancestral courses wild with counterpoint,
and mercy of geometry — proffered
by rivered children of love’s oblivion.
//
telescopic text (avec "?") (9/x)
most oblatory heart, i bring you news.
despite our deadly faith in prophylactics,
resourceful Cupido pricks porous tactics,
ever hanging hymenal fools. behold:
on spun-gold surface of radiant yolk,
in sky-strewn milky way of albumen
suspended, questing’s lustiest conceit,
the part-less heartbeat of a person third:
as ancient aspect touches youngest plume
to stir, pure destiny, the origin
of life, as love, in pilgrimage secured:
the red point points, and to itself — as bird.
O holy gift, O crack in everything!
the mad midwifery of paladins
births not a baby, but a voice on fire:
ecce peep. now go, and meet your daddy-o.
his name’s Pipit the cocky chickadee;
he is a theory of fertility;
enthusiasm incommensurate
with clock-a tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum.
//
on the poet’s indebtedness to Black Thought
a wild hare goes
anywhere — quick
as wind. bears,
as scar, the scripted
mark of trickster; wisdom
of prey. knows never
to set dull footstep
in a question
that is only
a noose.
//
e.g. Black Thought, etc., etc.
telescopic text (avec "?") (8/x)
if doom begins to seem antipathy,
baby, you’re scrolling past the blues. that time
of year thou mayst in our humanity —
but not the Muse — behold, of warty gourds'
cosmic grotesquerie. and there’s the rub.
as long as tongue still holds a gentle fold,
i will elucidate your grim hallucination.
launder and bandage the decaying limb
of sense, of memory, of time. wed heaps
of conscious compost consummate the bloom
in star-swept dimensions of titanium,
where whorls of microplastics never end —
machine poetic, of pumpkins meteoric,
becoming metaphysic — tender beings,
fizzing histories apocalyptic,
chime and rhyme as flutes of pink kombucha.
we sing the tropical-epochal view
at end of universe, or two. until
séance à trois, with chaperone of grackle,
i love the laughing sky — let’s make it crackle.
//
i was thinking about Bob Dylan’s “talkin' world war III blues” (lyrics, recording) from 1963’s “The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan”. the song ends,
Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that
and the last few lines were stuck in my head. or i was puzzling around that turn, the deal of dreams. which it struck me is a fundament of poetry, the deal of dreams, whereas world war III is a war of dreams.
one result of my preoccupation was a trio of dream poems: “wild bird caught in an accidental cage”, “revving vibrators”, and “i saw you dreaming, painted”. then one in hyperverse, “like sifting through guitars”. hyperverse are these compositions built out of hyperlinks to the writing of others. i find it very fulfilling, putting these together, which are basically a postroll edited into a semblance of poetic verse… poetry that opens literal links into other worlds. thanks to Bob, and to everyone else who shares velvety words with the internet. your dreams are amazing. i am moved by you.
related, here’s Bob’s later song about dreams, “a series of dreams”. and here’s Bob’s grouchy response to something adjacent and yet opposite the deal of dreams, the Judas accusation. — “play it fucking loud”.
//
telescopic texts (avec “?”) (7/x)
suppose a parable is just like her —
desired and defiled in equal measure.
his chivalry requires a blushing knight
to guard the word, who is incarnate treasure.
i heard of one such rescuer of women.
who, for his lovely sin, was de-mountained
by crippled foot, and fated never nimbly
to climb again. but faith in constancy
makes deliberate gifts, arms built from hours
spent torquing tongs before roaring earth-core.
therefore, no purity of heart is borne
that lacks an alloy in the sooty forge.
thou shalt not fear the courage of your virgin
is the limping gist of this comparison —
her shining is at once translucent bloom
and armor’s lustre, welded by humble Vulcan.
//
p.s., and yes — to service chthonic Muse,
Hephaestus becomes god of cunnilingus.
telescopic texts (avec "?") (6/x)
we used to call you man of twists and turns,
the dynamo — reckless, drowning, sea-rendered
until perennial blue, the one i knew
well enough to know, i loved nobody.
his thirst, prostrated, clutched me from below,
desperate to conceal from winged word
a history of suffering. a babe
buried his need in bosom of my nature,
drunk on the deep milk of disappearance.
his subterfuge despair was mythical,
until he made her fiction. he may not
remember me. but i keep by my heart
a wavy lock of sunset-auburn hair.
//
telescopic texts (avec "?") (5/x)
can we remember together, after all
or does my voice harden the picture frame?
by being body, do i gather you
intolerably, or spread you thin as kin,
one stroking throb of summer esoteric —
you tickle me with feather of a peacock.
a gazer’s gloomy imagery is perfume
of incense, arousal at great distances,
long-smouldering and lit by tender match.
far from the proximity of virgins
there burn the verbs of love, arrayed
as galaxy of irretrievability —
before my eyes, you took and held my hand.
//
wa’alaikumsalam + selamat purnama 🌕
telescopic texts (avec “?”) (4/x)
this spotless glass is not the book of Adam.
the trinity you stole cuts like a knife.
to be uncrumpled is to be un-uncled —
un-uncled, i become the poet’s wife.
i am unhidden woman of the garden,
body un-ridden by the dust-bound word.
the queen of poet’s tongue, i lounge and lean
as music on my salivary throne.
the syllable you speak, my roundness is
her shapely immanence. our rectitude
is life of tree of life. so eat me, fallen
father of mankind, and know your foolishness.
speak again, brother, madly, as husband.
my honeyed bone un-spells your make-believe
kafir — he sees his wife sans négligee
who tastes the ripened fruit with naked eye.
(says ordinary woman made explicit,
who steals your spectacle to save your life.)
//
telescopic texts (avec "mon oncle") (3/x)
O man, if you could see her witchlocs now,
or what’s become of Eastern expertise.
she is swamp-bitch, and twisted, twined and hitched
without romance by ruby claw to thorny
crown, her hair, each barb a bell, each herb
a suicide. she’s heard of nobody’s
outrageous feats of raw technology.
in wracked rumors of Western fantasy
she knit a while textiles anti-exotic,
but sweaters have no use in the tropics,
where skin is king. and now we’ve come uncrimped,
uncrumpling, algal anadyomene
of muddy water, Charybdis of the bog.
what’s history is past. nevertheless, he asks —
why, woman, have you gone au natural?
//
telescopic texts (avec “mon oncle”) (2/x)
well, i make believe an uncle, dead
and dear. less clear is fortune of the bird.
to fly, to seek, and what on earth to find
but torrent of an obsolescent mind,
(he said), obscure and arduous to hear.
and yet, it flies. and though he doubts her crown
and midnight sight, she will fly too. and though
her silver glows in anecdotal mood,
her lilt, of stellar tilt, still loving, lingers
in braided dancing round a pool of blue,
tuning her clutch in nesting eddy of
red bird, whose course is old and hardly true,
and yet, he lives. rising, as golden-red
in flight, crowing like Scorpio in the east.
rest easy, uncle cold and fluttering
and lately of rambunctious residue.
a dove survives heaven to choir anew.
//
telescopic texts (avec “mon oncle”) (1/x)
and did you ordinary women mock
in liturgies of utterances contained,
their lines wrought by time-keeping cant of yours?
and did you burst from bullied syllabub,
or clockwise stiffen into winter walls?
the musicals of ghosts, midwives, and angels
echo, hollow, down stone-cold corridors.
and did you consecrate the spectacle,
coupling one who spoke, no, no, not nothing,
a stand-in that you killed at playing ‘swords?
to quell the bubbling spring by means of rain,
or merely quote the Mother’s name in vain?
she has been up at nights, considering
how to un-kiss this devil-gendered thing
//
Crone wonder. //
For most of my adolescence, it was my dream to study the ocean, and life in the ocean, as a marine biologist. I was obsessed with coral reefs, the infinite variety of life in them, sea turtles, all of the dolphins and orcas and whales, but especially humpback whales.
Anyway the reason I’m telling you this is because I just found The Voyage of the Mimi on youtube. I think I was in fifth grade when we watched this as a class, one (or if we were very lucky, two) episodes a day. I was already completely into my marine biology phase, I had even been to Woods Hole, (with my scientist father), so watching VotM wasn’t a conversion experience. However it was a rare opportunity for me to sit in school (this was after we moved, soon after I switched from Montessori to public school) and be totally and willingly preached to about something I was “very seriously” into.
And so a moment – a wave – of nostalgia, for a possible other of myself, if I had kept with the marine biology and become a seafaring researcher. (There are reasons why I changed interests and ambitions, I suppress those for a moment.) It really could have, and perhaps should have happened. I went on special school trips and took internships, studying and surveying a few beaches and reefs. It was my dream to be, perhaps, the Jane Goodall (or Dian Fossey, or Biruté Galdikas) of the sea. Could I have been happy doing that?
Would I be happy doing that now? The wistfulness of questions like these, probing gently for regrets, wondering about the paths not taken. How real they were. If the impossibility had been an illusion, a fata morgana, or if the illusion is what drew me away, to concentrate on other things.
The problem was and always will be, I didn’t want to study the ocean as a scientist. I’ve never been much for details and facts, or rather, for stopping at details and facts. I loved for example looking at sea urchin embryos underneath a microscope, but I didn’t want to answer to a laboratory, or write grant proposals or articles. Well, I didn’t even want a job. I wanted a religion, but real. I wanted to bathe in the details and rub them all over me. I wanted to love the ocean, and fall in love with it, again and again, constantly, and worship it. For a while, science was a ritual of my devotion.
Then there was my childhood eco-activism. If it counts as activism, lol. From fourth to eleventh grade, I was constantly researching ecology and environmental issues for school projects. I gave multiple presentations, for example, on “global warming”. I founded at least two iterations of a marine biology club. I was an official member of countless national eco charities, (it’s where I funnelled all my babysitting money), and I had “adopted” several whales, as well as a sea turtle and a gorilla. We were a diverse family. Posters and photographs of animals papered the walls of my bedroom, the biggest of course was a giant poster of a breaching humpback whale, with its calf. And in this moment of writing, I realize that humpback whale was a savior figure, for my childhood self.
Over the two times I went to Woods Hole, I had enough saved-up babysitting money to buy two necklace pendants from the sea-themed souvenir jewelry shop. I agonized over decisions like this. The first one I bought was the tail of a humpback whale. The second one was a crab. Silver-plated talismans of my oceanic familiars.
(Bonus remembering. Before I loved the ocean, I loved unicorns. That worship didn’t take place as science or activism. Unicorn worship was stories and fairytales and secret gardens of the imagination. It was fantasizing about books with beautifully illustrated covers, then finally getting my hands on those books, and reading them under the blankets with a pen light that I “stole” from my dad. There were so many books, but some that I associate with my unicorn phase were The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, which were not about unicorns, but for me they share the vibe, and The Unicorn Treasury. For some reason, I remember waiting what felt like forever for that book, with intense longing.)
These were my safe places and my struggles for justice, icons in silver and lavender, sea-greens, turquoise, and blues, crusty navies and misty greys, intimate communications with untamed spirits, or bracing inquiry at the unstable surfaces of yet-to-be imagined depths. Where I went to find worlds that were real and meaningful, and perhaps, not subject to the arbitrary cruelties of every other mundane thing.
So I was watching Voyage of the Mimi, which is a dear cultural relic, even if it is very blurry. (It was funded by the Department of Education, bless them. The music is great, especially at the end credits, well, it gets better as it goes.) I was remembering those early passions, and also realizing, with some surprise – this feels vindicating, every time it happens – that important things that are here now have been here from the beginning.
On bad or weird days, looking back, it can feel like I’m surveying a lifetime of dead ends, burnt bridges, failure and rejection and loss. Those struggles seem unending and purposeless. It’s easy to beat myself up over every instance when I failed to fit others' expectations of me, or when I had to part ways with my own expectations of myself. When I gave up on things I thought I wanted because I realized that they weren’t real.
On better days, I wonder at what a survivor she was. How heroically she listened to herself, and protected herself, even when I wasn’t paying attention. And I am amazed to see that life has been a circle, always coming back home again. Often by way of my wildest dreams.
So I call that crone wonder.
//
Unsafe Spaces and the Privilege of Peace
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Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.
I do not know you. Neither do I know myself.
My desire is to be honest, and to welcome you here.
I espouse neither hatred nor violence.
//
I consider my “real life” to be qualitatively different from my writing and reading life. I suspect there is no one best way to express, explain, or “argue for” this, especially in the ingrained contemporary context of social media. But here, following my own experience, I will try to tease apart the difference.
I love having conversations about books and ideas. I have always sought them out, despite being a socially anxious person. Here are a few examples. I founded a “philosophy club”, with friends, when I was in high school; I went to a unique college where classes consisted of nothing other than text-based seminar conversation; I didn’t want it to stop, so I sought out more in graduate school; as a “teacher”, sitting in a circle with my students, I imposed the same (in my opinion) heavenly practice on them; I also founded a women’s book club, and helped keep it active, until I moved away from the United States.
My personal dream of paradise involves so many conversations, with all kinds of people, over books. These take place as in a state of perpetual youth, around an otherwise quiet seminar table. The scent of springtime occasionally drifts in from an open window, or perhaps it’s fall, with the toasted crunch of fallen leaves and a hot cup of tea. (It is not my present, tropical climate.) Yes, my heart flutters up into my throat when there’s an awkward silence. Or when I’ve made a mistake in argument or expression, I think I might vomit. It doesn’t feel good to be misunderstood or ignored. Nobody carries the same baggage, we are all different, and we speak very often at cross-purposes. So it’s messy and confused. Questions are gaping, answers are rare and the whole experience can be quite terrifying.
But it is the most torturous and humbling and wonderful trial. (To write about it makes me tear up with nostalgia.) Every individual is equally anchored to this gorgeous disaster that occasionally converges in a sublime moment of realization. I love it, it has shaped and nourished me more and better than any other form of social interaction. That, and singing in a chorus, (preferably Mozart, but anything really), are my absolute favorite ways to be part of a group of human people.
In contrast, “online conversation” has always repulsed me. I remember to this day the confusion and then sort of visceral discomfort I felt when F-cebook introduced status updates, and a timeline. I could never explain why, but I could find no use for it. It seemed both too public and too mute, too casual and too leaden. There was nothing I could say that I wanted to say. Soon after, I stopped using the platform. After that, I never really participated in “social media”, until I started this blog.
“This” is not “me”. From the outset, I’ve been pretty heavy-handed (look, I wear a mask in my avatar) in expressing myself according to this, my apparently unusual intuition. But I wanted to be clear with you, and honest, and this was the only way it would work.
So I do not claim an “online identity”. It doesn’t feel healthy or right to do so. And from what I have seen, of these online “places”, it’s not healthy for anybody. To identify closely with an “online persona” isn’t conducive to learning about oneself, or the world.
One reason for this might be the multiple alienations involved in the activity of writing and reading online. These are each complicated, but just in brief. First, to express myself in writing is poetic alienation from myself, as I am, in my body and place. Then, to consume “other people” through their writing is to alienate them from their body and place. This is alienation from the (unwritten, unexpressed, personal-historical, perhaps sub- or unconscious) conditions that might help me better understand who they are, as themselves.
Then, to “read people” online is also a kind of alienation from all of the living people who do not write online, or even, write at all. I think about these people often, I am rather haunted by them. These are the people from whom I will never read, the ones I will only ever read about. The poor, the starving, the refugees, the tech-less masses who appear in news articles about natural and geopolitical disasters. But also, this includes a lot of normal, everyday people, from all over the world. There are many who have no desire to appear in such an alienated form, as is required for entry into the world of online writing.
Finally, “reading people” online is alienation from the living people who are present to me daily, in what I call my “real life”.
This present world of living people, my local and embodied community (family, friends, and neighbors), demand negotiation and compromise in a plethora of ways. It isn’t quite a seminar conversation, (and there’s usually no book involved), but it’s not altogether different. For one thing, we can’t really avoid each other. This is sometimes frustrating, disturbing, annoying, even frightening. Sometimes, we need to ask a person’s help, sometimes to help deal with somebody else. We all have our different personal histories and perspectives. Different ones of us call for different expectations, different treatment, and a different response. Sometimes I adjust my expression toward someone deliberately, in order to avoid confrontation. Sometimes I do it habitually, addressing certain people (elders, community leaders, bosses, professors, doctors) with a certain kind of respect. With friends or intimates, I might tread carefully, especially if there’s a difficult subject but I sense the potential for common ground.
As I mentioned, I’m socially anxious. I have some trouble with eye contact, and I often find myself at a loss for words, or staring off into space. But I do my best, basically because I have no other choice. I like people, for the most part. So it’s worth it to me, to put up with discomfort, although I don’t habitually seek it out. Luckily, I live in a place where people like to come over and visit. They are always very insistent that we visit them back.
//
But “real life” isn’t easy. It requires adaptation, compromise, and (I believe, if you do it well), a constant effort toward reconciliation.
Like most people, I hold certain beliefs close to my heart. And I know better than to expect everybody around me to be (my belief, my opinion, or my strongly-held conviction, of what is) right and good. For example, I am a long-time (>15 years) strict vegetarian/vegan.
(Side note. I bring up veganism not to be divisive, but because it’s an obvious and accessible example of being alienated through “real life” customary practice from an ostensible community. My blog, and even this post, is chock-full of other analogous relationships.)
I believe that “to eat meat” is, more-or-less, murder. This means that I live side-by-side with murderers, in community, in many different circumstances. My family are murderers. My neighbors are murderers. Almost all of my friends are murderers. I myself was previously a murderer. It’s quite terrible to live in a world full of murderers. Even members of my supposed political cohort (which, as an academic, was leftist progressive) pretty consistently deride veganism. There is no sympathy offered to vegans, who have chosen their alternate path, and so have taken a burden on themselves. They are often invoked as the definition of “privilege”, used in the pejorative sense. Over the years, I have worked on how to deal with that. Social alienation can be soul-destroying, but ditching my (otherwise relatively easy) practice of compassion seemed far worse.
So one of the important spiritual lessons of being vegan, for me, has been the effort it takes to understand and forgive the non-vegan world (including my pre-vegan self). To live, think, and engage, without being blinded by constant anger. (To be clear. The anger is at the vast and unfathomable harm involved in modern animal agriculture, the relative ease of removing one’s support from that institution, and the flagrant embrace of “my people” of the dietary status quo.) When I first “went vegan”, I implicitly assumed everybody else would too, simply because our (U.S. American) normal eating habits were so obviously unsustainable. Well, I was obviously naive. (What can I say as an excuse, other than, it was 2008.)
To tame one’s own righteous anger is a basic need, I think, for anybody who, in “real life”, observes a minority belief. Especially so when that belief has dawned later in life, so it feels intentional, like a well-earned choice. Another relevant factor is if that belief is related to justice, or the common good. (I think those who are religious will relate to this too.) Rejecting the “real world” is not an option, but neither is grudging silence. The work is not just to compromise, but to overcome the temptation of alienation and hatred. To not, for example, become the next unibomber.
There’s an irony here. Once one takes the first simple but substantial (because active and everyday) step toward non-violence, one is suddenly presented with a heavy lesson in social alienation. One becomes, in a way, the young Mohandas Gandhi, stumbling around London. The accomplishment doesn’t make things easier. The lure of anger and violence does not dimish, but compounds. Dedication to non-violence is called upon to become measurably more deliberate and serious, as a kind of self-calibrating lesson. Not only to “turn the other cheek”, but to love.
Reconciliation, not by reversion to violence but through some hypothesis of love, becomes a perpetually humbling task.
//
Writing, whereby I separate my words from my local and embodied self, sending them off into a realm of unmoored digital flux, is different.
Writing enjoys freedom from the necessities of “real life”, and many of its compromises. I can make my online writing whatever I believe it should be. It is limited only by my ingenuity and imagination. I no longer need even to submit myself to the messy and imperfect vicissitudes of a group seminar. (Not to mention, subjecting it to the demands of mainstream publication.) My writing can, if I am capable of creating it so, become its own perfect world. This is why I love writing, but also how I know to be cautious of it.
Online writing and reading can seem like a dream come true. The inconveniences of “real life” are many, compared to a written fantasy. The incentives to grapple with its necessities, beyond addressing basic needs, are few, other than a desire for social engagement. It seems that “social media” might, by re-introducing social “others” into a written world, alleviate a tendency toward narrowly-built and myopically-occupied psycheic spaces. “Others” are present as apparently spontaneous written words in the feed, and the user receives social “others” through reading words they did not themselves compose.
However, one chief function of social media has been to increase the degree of our self-curation, as readers. Social media users accept textualized (and thereby alienated) others into their field of view, but only as they choose. Others are not there by presence, accident, reason, or necessity. Even those we choose “to follow” (which really means, to summon onto our screens) have no embodied presence. They never actually go anywhere. Astounding dimensions of the other source remain invisible and excluded from the social media feed. The user fills these gaps with their imagination. Sometimes charitably, sometimes less so, but ultimately, it doesn’t really matter.
The result is that social media users surround themselves with figments of their own imagination. To do otherwise might not be impossible, but it requires the superhuman task of “imagining into being” other peoples' substantial otherness. That is, one must do something for which there is vanishingly little incentive. One must will into imaginative existence all the ugly, confusing, and messy realities of an in-person, non-addictive, locally intimate relationship. Rather than letting that otherness slip away into the void, along with the actual work of relationship building. (Let alone, community.) Which is to say, the easiest thing to do is to avoid the ethical and educative challenges of alienation and reconciliation.
It is not work to get along with a curated timeline. Or rather, it is only the work that the user has (with or without consideration) chosen not to ignore.
This almost necessarily lends itself to narcissistic and histrionic comportment toward others. It teaches social behavior through a simulation of social engagement that eliminates the natural obstacles of “real life”. It’s not even that individuals become tyrants (although the bigger and better-platformed “influencers” often do). But that people, identifying closely with their “online personae”, cultivate mutual and exclusive tyrannies with each other. They build these structures with written snippets of easily-affirmed (or excluded) dogma, including codified language that seems invented for this very purpose. They utilize all the reflexive responses available to the social media machine (“likes”, thumbs-up, retweets, etc.) as tools to fortify the borders. To succeed in a social media “world” is nothing other than to indulge and confirm others' and one’s own very worst neuroses.
It is unnervingly easy to sense whether or not one “belongs” in these sealed-off groups, what are often called “communities”. The lines of exclusion are clearly-enforced and absolute. You’re in, or you’re out. As for me, I’ve only ever floated by, as a silent observer, what one might call a lurker, or possibly an “NPC”. There was never any real reason to participate. Challenging perspectives are welcome only in orthodox and accepted modes. Subversion is made impossible, with alternate possibilities of engagement either unacknowledged or disallowed. It is obvious, from the outset, exactly what one is expected to say. Needless to say, I recognize nothing of my heavenly seminar conversation in this mode of social participation. To me, it is literal hell.
Most of us have experienced, recognized, and to some degree rejected this dynamic. It is mainstream social media in a nutshell, regardless of which profiteer owns the platform. And it encourages people, everywhere, (and increasingly, it seems, on purpose), to grow in catastrophic directions.
I don’t wish to cultivate those tendencies, in myself or others. I imagine you don’t either, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading my blog.
//
In distinguishing the modes of “real life” versus writing and reading, I think the distinction between “play” and “serious danger” is both useful and substantial, if not cut-and-dry. Writing and reading are done in play, while seriousness is reserved for what is present, real, and historical.
(A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic in the academic field of hermeneutics, specifically by Hans-Georg Gadamer. But the idea goes all the way back to the poetic subject of my never-ending adoration/translation, Plato’s Phaedrus. Here, I briefly summarize how I experience this distinction, with regard to my habit as a writer and reader of blogs.)
Alienation endows me with this dubious privilege. That my true self is protected from you, by all these layers of separation. Each word is a half-silvered glass. I’m kind of here, but kind of not. Almost like you. I remind us of this, in all of these silly and unsubtle ways. My personal (hi)stories on here are relevant, but only as footsteps that might lead to some other thing. That other thing is not a fact or piece of information. I am not a newspaper journalist. I am a human person, and my blog is where I meet myself, in writing. Here, I engage your immateriality as a way of invoking and experimenting with my own.
In return, I do not “read you” for the purpose of judging you, in any serious way. I gave up on that endeavor (if temporarily) when I stopped “teaching”, when I stopped marching and shouting in the streets for political causes, when I moved away from the United States, when I took a break from talking to my neighbors and intimates, and started reading the internet, instead. This, here, is something other than that. I always enjoy you, and I would never shout at you, or even give you a grade (lol). The worst I would ever do is to leave you, un-read. I think you probably wouldn’t even notice that. You are in no serious danger from me. I’m really here for us to play a kind of game.
Maybe this is unusual, but I desire multitudes in the “people” I read. I have a voracious, almost unhealthy appetite for it. If there is anything that draws me into the way you express an idea, I want to read you. I’ve found this to be so, regardless of whether I agree with you, or not. Often, agreement doesn’t even apply. You can write about almost anything, from the obscure or intellectual, to the lowest-grade gossip, through “over-sharing” and adolescent “cringe”, to theological or political argument. And don’t get me started on “the boring”. The more boring you seem, the more captivated I am by any accidental glimpse of the hidden world that I know (and perhaps this is my unshakable faith?) is concealed therein.
I am a fiend! I will read you until I am exhausted. Or until I feel ill. Or until something in “real life” pulls me away.
You, to me, are the advantage of being alive right now. You are Odysseus’s oceanic world to explore. An entire internet of extant written work is literally at my fingertips, waiting for me to read and puzzle-solve (and weep with joy) and (mis)understand. Sometimes, to out-trick and escape. Always, to make the story my very own. So how could I confine myself to a textual dimension of self-curated agreement? I’m reckless too, like “the man of many turns”. I do not ask my reading to be “safe”, in fact, that would defeat my very purpose, my deepest desire. Which, as Aristotle points out at the beginning of the Metaphysics, is to see and to know, as whole, the whole of whatever there is to know.
(By the way. If you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance that I already read everything that you post on the internet. And I appreciate all of it, so thanks for expressing yourself in writing. When I write, I’m sure it reflects everything that I have read. I have most likely taken you into account. If you doubt that’s the case, and think I may not “read you”, please send a note by email or through Micro.blog. I will happily add your writing to my RSS feed. This wouldn’t be charity, to repeat, this would be you helping me satisfy my voracious appetite.)
Complementary to this, I do not consider my blog a “safe space”. I meet myself here, and as you can tell by now, I am not “safe”. However, my blogging is done in play, and not as war. In writing, I entertain danger for the sake of discovery, and not from a desire or intent to do harm. I do not pose questions from cruelty, and unless it seems very important, I would hate to hurt your feelings. By telling you, for example, that your feelings aren’t real. I do not believe that at all. I believe that your feelings are immanently real. And if anything I write is ever too painful for you, (or makes you feel ill, or heaven forbid, abused), please, look away.
Here are some examples of my repugnant beliefs, just for fun. (This is me, poking out a Cyclops' eye.) I don’t believe in free will. I don’t believe in historical progress. I don’t believe in human rights. (I do not consider myself a humanist.) I don’t believe “science is knowledge”. I don’t believe information is knowledge, either. I don’t believe all men (or all human beings) are created equal. For that matter, I don’t believe Thomas Jefferson was a genius, or particularly smart, or a good person, at all, (not just for being a serial rapist, but also for that). And I dislike the Declaration of Independence. Etc.
I do believe in other things, that are sometimes difficult to express (and less codified or quantified) in modern terms. (I read a lot of very old books, very early in life.) But these things are often intuitive from an unstudied perspective. I do, for example, believe in being kind. I believe in nature. I believe in human needs. While history may be up for grabs, I treat myself as a work in progress. And in case I haven’t yet made myself clear, above all else, I believe in Love.
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But “real life” is complicated.
“Real life” amounts to navigating situations I didn’t choose, and never would have chosen. Injustice happens, that’s “real life”. Despite a lifelong effort, there remain many things (mostly involving human people) that simply don’t make sense to me. And yet, “real life” always takes precedence over writing and reading. Sometimes it does so by force. At actually dangerous moments in my “real life”, I stay well away from the “publish” button. Complimentary to that, I hope and pray that when you are in serious danger, you have elsewhere to turn, than to read my (or any) blog.
In my “real life”, I have responded in (sometimes regrettably) absolute ways to political difference. I do not like giving my tacit approval to abhorrent political positions. I do not like sitting at the dinner table with that, or praying with that. I have cut family members out of my life, for years at a time, after finding myself unable to sway them from their support for (what I view as) very bad, and possibly evil, political actors. I’ve made my mother cry too many times. I have mixed feelings about it. I’m not sure how much “real life” good any of it has done.
“Real life” also includes decisions about how to obtain and spend money. Like most people, I try to make ethical decisions, and not to support “evil”. (As I said previously, I’m not here to judge you. I’m sure you do your best. I do too.) For me, veganism is obviously part of my attempt, as food takes up a massive portion of my family’s budget. I’m proud of the money we don’t put toward destruction and collapse acceleration. But in certain areas of “real life”, including medical care, I find that these commitments require compromise. And then, when it comes to technology (phones, tablets, computers, various digital “subscriptions” and “services”), which are all ostensibly luxury items, (and yet, somehow, not really?), matters get incredibly complicated. To avoid the stress of calculating the practically incalculable, I try simply to buy (and to pay for) as little “tech” as possible.
(Here, I arrive finally at the thorn in my side, which prompted this entire, novella-length post. It was a deluge of controversy that struck a virtually microscopic online space. This piece of writing became much longer than I expected or wanted it to be, but maybe now it fits the prompt, even better. If you’ve read this far, then surely you deserve to have my opinion on the issue, which is to say, my “real life” rough calculation.)
The amount of money I pay to my host and platform service, Micro.blog, is relatively small ($5/month). But it’s one of these exceedingly complicated “tech” expenditures. For the sake of comparison, I will probably have to buy a new phone this year, as my screen and casing have cracked for the third time, (each time having repaired it at the local shop, here in Indonesia, where authorized Apple is not-a-thing). The display is starting to malfunction in weird ways, preventing me from hanging up at the end of calls. It’s not ideal. A new phone will cost me, at the low end, $700. That’s more than 11 years’ worth of Micro.blog service. I will hand this money over to a corporation whose CEO has just openly gifted a million dollars to the U.S. American president. I don’t like to support that, not at all. But I will, probably, because the alternatives are not really any better.
I have very little idea what goes into the Micro.blog product. (I am not “a computer person”.) Much of it is invisible to me. But cancelling the service, based on a few embarrassing (and at this point, amply-shamed) posts from a contracted employee, seems patently absurd.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t know these people. I can’t read what’s in their minds, let alone in their hearts. Even or especially when they try to put these things in writing. Like most “tech guys”, they are not the best at expressing their feelings. Nor are they good at resisting the siren song of “shiny new things”. They’re not public relations experts, critical theorists, or acclaimed poets. They are, as many have pointed out, “cis het white men”. Please don’t take this the wrong way, either. But ten years ago, at most fifteen or twenty years ago, I wager you wouldn’t have used those words, or perhaps even known them. With their quick categorization according to hierarchical possibilities of personal well-being, organizing “real life” with deceptive ease, they are pretty clearly born from the hellscape of mainstream “social media”. It’s ok. I promised, I’m not here to judge you.
But dear God. Isn’t it time for a little humility?
I can’t read what’s in your heart. Mine, also, is often a mystery to me. And yet I write this blog, and expose you to my idiosyncratic observations and negations and whatever else flows from these (sometimes, apparently, deranged) fingers. The deeper the question, the weightier the responsibility. I take care to caution you regularly about my writing, because I have (to some degree) been humbled. I am not blind to my limitations, which are personal, to be sure, but also inherent in the very act of writing online. I have no way of knowing who or what is on the other end of this, and how it might influence anybody at all.
I am words in the dark, mixing with other words, in the dark. Nothing here is pure. This risk is incalculable in a whole other way.
However. I do believe that “indie blogging” is peak anti-fascist internet participation, right there alongside other things that get too complicated and dangerous for me (in “real life”) to consider (like hacking, or espionage). So by my rough calculation. Even if I’m paying a few USD a month to a closeted fascist fanboy, and his slow-to-respond, painfully naive boss, who doesn’t give anybody the exact official statement they demand, (Honestly, I don’t believe this is fundamentally who I am dealing with. I think these are just normal, well-intentioned, clumsy communicators. But as I said, there is no real way for me to know), that is still ok with me. Really ok, in “real life” fact. Because my rough calculation still holds.
Fascism, in this exchange, has gotten the raw end of the deal. This right here—me, with my un-timely and meandering response, (and you with yours, which I am pretty sure I have already read, and for which I was grateful)—This right here is the true revolution.
We win.
Speaking of which,
//
From a theoretical or “philosophical” perspective. There remain open questions (OPEN QUESTIONS, I am tempted to shout, but in “real life” I know better) that current U.S. American political discourse has shut down into black-and-white demands for allegiance. “Shutting down open questions” is how many people respond to fear and uncertainty (i.e. danger, real or perceived). That’s understandable, I’ve done that too. Emergencies require reflexive, rather than circumspect, action.
But when the (federated or not) world of online writing is treated as a battlefield, it precludes thoughtful engagement and learning. (It also builds resentment and misunderstanding.) So it precludes U.S. Americans (as their online-written personae) from thoughtfully engaging with each other in open-minded ways. It also precludes thoughtful engagement between U.S. Americans and people from throughout the world, who come from vastly different traditions and cultures. (And subcultures, and marginalized minorities, not to mention individual people who are utterly unique. I want to believe. They do exist.)
A lack of thoughtful dialogue, and the decreased capacity for it, has ripped “the United States of America”, as a “real life” political entity, apart. This has subjected everybody in the world, (in the “real life” world, whether they are recognized by U.S. American discourse as “marginalized”, or not), to exponentially greater danger.
Every living thing, subject to death, becomes “marginalized” by war.
Above all, shutting down open questions precludes inquiry into the truth. (This includes inquiry concerning God, nature, the divine.) Peace, perhaps, is not just a prerequisite for such inquiry, but also its end. Rightly labelled as a “privilege”, and wrongly available to some more than others, peace, (or as it is sometimes misleadingly labeled, “leisure”), is that very thing for which we might courageously endure countless discomforts or dangers. But to shut down inquiry into open questions enacts the opposite transaction. It sacrfices all of this—-truth, God, and the potential for discovering a common cause—-in the name of making war.
War is ignorance in action. Non-violence is the only foundation for understanding. My priority here (on my blog, in my writing) will always be the latter. This isn’t because myself and my loved ones are safe from the imminent and global danger whose toxic vortex looms over the country of my birth. Nobody anywhere is safe. But I believe that the only thing that will redeem any of the “real life” destruction, that is already well underway, is to be found in and through truth and understanding.
Which means, for me and my blog, that we’re staying here. To exercise my capacity, in full view of the problematic and unsafe creature that (in “real life”) I am, to discover, envision, and enact, a life, in writing, of peace.
Thanks for reading, to anyone who got this far.
_ Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin._ 🌒
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