Wherefrom
Where-from? Chickens’ Edition
I’m celebrating, because after two days living on coconut water and white bread, I graduated today to whole wheat bread. You see, I have the flu. Or, “a” flu? Just basic old-fashioned flu, not one of the trendy new viruses (you know the ones). I’m already feeling better, enough to be fantasizing about a fully-loaded veggie burger, (sauerkraut is mandatory), however, I remain shaky-feeling and weak, so my realistic plan for tonight is noodle soup. And maybe a fruit smoothie. (InsyaAllah there will be a burger on Friday.)
Grace is feeling better too, I think. She stopped pining around the brooding nest and started hanging out with Frankie again. So Frankie is more of a paranoid asshole with everybody else, (including his own children), but it’s because he’s protective of Grace. So we can’t fault him. He’s back to finding her morsels of food and making cozy nests for her. (Is he actually an ideal partner?) If they haven’t already, they’ll probably start mating again soon. (That decision is up to Grace.) Those two are inseparable.
Doing a little “research”, I realized that our chickens are probably different from the domestic chicken breeds popular in North America and Europe. Frankie is similar in appearance to the red junglefowl. This is the wild bird, native to Southeast Asia including Indonesia, from which chickens were domesticated thousands of years ago (~8,000). Red junglefowl cocks are strikingly handsome birds, as is Frankie. The wikipedia article notes that they are sometimes used in cock fighting, which remains popular around here (in Bali). When wikipedia says “sometimes” about Indonesia, I have learned to interpret that as “often”. So I would imagine Frankie’s genetics are pretty close to that source, and it’s not surprising that he would come across as somewhat feral.
We “acquired” Frankie before we moved into our house, when he wandered onto our property and didn’t feel like leaving. So he has lived here longer than we have. He was still a chick back then, but apparently old enough for independence. We later learned that he had been chased away from our neighbor Pak T’s house, by their cat. (Pak T said we could keep him.) Then we “acquired” Grace when Pak S brought her over, also before we moved in, and left her in a small bamboo cage in the yard. This was either a gift or an instance of Pak S not wanting to deal with her, possibly because she had five chicks at the time. (Or it was, for Pak S, an entertaining test of what we would do with a mating pair of chickens? I really don’t know, he just laughed about it when we asked him! All I know is, we weren’t consulted about whether we “wanted” any of them.) Because we didn’t live here yet, our carpenters kind of took care of the chickens. I assumed everything would be ok. But over several nights, those five chicks that came with Grace disappeared. They were probably hunted and eaten by the same cat that had chased Frankie.
When I learned about it, I felt guilty about that, Grace losing all her chicks while she was stuck in the cage. This is one reason I really wanted Grace to experience motherhood, fully, at least once. (My sense of justice!) And that’s what got us into the situation where we have a flock of eleven chickens. Or at least, one flock of nine chickens, and another flock of two chickens. It remains unclear whether Frankie and Grace want to integrate with their children’s flock at all. On second thought, maybe it’s totally clear. The parents and the children simply consider themselves separate flocks.
(Imagine that. I actually said to one of them today… “It’s ok, I have a mean dad too.” …)
For her part, Grace doesn’t look like a red junglefowl hen. She looks very much like this other breed of chicken from Indonesia, also used for cock fighting, the Ayam Cemani. She’s a lovely bird, with a soft and thoughtful look, although my photos haven’t yet captured it. I doubt she’s any kind of pure breed, but she is completely black, with only the faintest blush on her “caruncles”. (There’s a lot of chicken vocabulary to learn.) Another reason I doubt she’s purebred is because wikipedia says Ayam Cemani aren’t good “setters”, whereas Grace is a very broody chicken. When that time comes, she is utterly devoted to sitting on her eggs.
My thinking is this. Most domestic chickens have been bred for egg and/or meat production, and possibly for docility, whereas our chickens have been bred, (and/or taken from the jungle?), for fighting, and/or allowed to breed free-range. As a result, I don’t expect them to be very cuddly birds. But I do expect them to be smart in their own ways, as wild or feral animals are. And they are thoroughly social, with each other and with us. It’s apparent that they consider us (humans) company, they always come “check out” what we’re doing, or sit nearby us (under the awning) when it’s raining and they’re bored, or ask for treats (boiled peanuts). They (warily) eat from our hands. They look at us accusingly when we don’t have peanuts for them. And if I speak to Grace in sweet coos (like Cucurrucucu), Frankie gets testy.
(Although I always think of it as Frankie’s, that song isn’t about a rooster, but a lovesick coo-ing dove. Please click the link if you’ve never heard Caetano Veloso’s rendition. You won’t regret it, it’s heart-achingly lovely. We need more Caetano Veloso and Almodovar in all our lives, don’t we? And then for another version, this one sung by Juan Diego Florés at La Scala is sublime. Watching that reminds me of that one time I was there. Also, watch for the look he gives the loggionisti—it’s so direct!)
Anyway, that’s more-or-less the origin story of our chickens. They showed up in our lives, like our three cats, and we weren’t ever given a real option to say no. And they (unlike the cats, who are now imprisoned in our safe, loving, and amply medicated home) are technically free to leave. Although once a few of Grace’s chicks escaped outside the wall and we spent a rainy afternoon traipsing through overgrown jungle and rice paddies to retrieve them, with Grace frantically waiting back home. She was very upest about it. That was when they were still babies. Now they’re almost grown, the girls will probably start laying soon (if they haven’t already, in secret), and one of the cockerels has, as signaled by his crowing, decided he’s the leader of the flock. The chicks have their own governance structure now. They could fly over the wall if they wanted, but they seem pretty content to hang around here. Even if we are delinquent chicken keepers and have yet to figure out their permanent coop situation. They may not be cuddly, but it’s pretty obvious that they will love when we give them a permanent and roomy chicken house, dry and warm, with brooding boxes, etc. They would live with us in the human house, if we let them. But that’s too much even for me.
By the way, we did eventually screen off the hallway, so the human house is totally off-limits now. Thank goodness, because the poop grew up as they did… the quantity makes it gross, but excellent fertilizer for the gardens. And oh, please pray for us that we never experience an outbreak of avian influenza. (My own symptoms do NOT match those of A H5N1.)
(I still haven’t told you what we do with all the eggs. That can wait for another day.)
Because look at me, I’m still in bed with this flu and I had planned to give myself a solid 3-4 days off of “serious blogging”. But then I accidentally wrote this long post and spent the afternoon reading some of these older posts and listening to music that makes me tear up and/or shout bravissimo and wave my hands around like I’m in The Godfather. And yesterday I read the whole book about learning to speak chicken! Apparently I’m ok at resting the body, but not great at resting the mind. I can’t believe I haven’t had coffee in three days. That’s truly wild.
Maybe it’s because of the full moon? Selamat purnama, everybody. Stay healthy and safe.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌕
Nu baby. //
So… life, uh, found a way. We tried (admittedly have been a little distracted) to steal all of Grace’s eggs but she tricked us and hatched one! Just one. A heaping tablespoon of pale yellow fluff. Well, it’s just not possible to be sad about an itty bitty chick.
(I love Laura Dern in that clip.)
This one is light-colored, while the first clutch was all black. Already a tiny misfit.
The other chickens, teenagers now, are so far curious about the new baby. Grace pecks them if they get too close. (Very fierce.) They stay out of reach and crane their necks to watch it, (all of them at once, chickens are such gossips), while it hip-hops around mom’s feet.
We needed to rearrange the chicken living space to make it cozy for Grace and nu baby. So we took apart the old arrangement, but the chickens got a little upset about it. So there was some chaos theory with chickens flapping first up on the laundry line then up to the roof of the little limasan (our bedroom).
Chickens on the roof!
There was also a big storm that blew through when E was fixing chicken stuff and I was doing yoga. I was worried about the tiny puff-ball blowing away, but Grace disappeared the baby up into her feathers and hunkered under the downpour. She didn’t even move under the eaves of the house, to escape the rain, she just turned herself into a house. She is truly amazing.
When the rain cleared and the sun came out, nu baby came out too, peep-peeping again. Precious marshmallow. (They’re still a little clueless on day one.
To be honest, I’m worried about its chances of survival, being just one tiny peep in the midst of a boisterous flock of claw-talon-footed brothers and sisters. It will be a new test of Grace as a mother. InsyaAllah she will prevail.)
To relax from all that, I listened through Kendrick’s “beef” with Drake from last spring. They released 7 or 8 tracks taking shots at each other. All I can say about that is, hip-hop is amazing social media.
(Note. I think most of my pop culture “takes” will be a few years or decades late. “News” includes anything that happens in my lifetime, is how I see it, on my blog.)
Anyway, back to Kendrick “I said ‘we,’ it’s not just me, I’m what the culture feelin'" Lamar.
(euphoria, meet the grahams, Not Like Us)
Rap is an amazing rhetorical medium, but also, Kendrick has spoiled me for almost all other artists. Sometimes he makes it chill, sometimes angry, sometimes tragic or funny, (“some shit just cringeworthy”), but it’s always a contest, (for victory wreaths, and he didn’t come to the games to place second. He will sniff out and attack the evil (=the Drake fan?) in you. He makes music a war for the soul.
(And for his family, and for those disowned by other families, and ultimately for the soul.)
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌖
I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars // maybe a week ago. I really liked it but I think it took me the whole year to finish.
(Spoilers follow.)
It was relaxing. Not facile, but easy to read when stressed out about other things. Good for falling asleep too. The pages are full of lush descriptions of Martian geology, seen from gliders and rovers and windows and walkers, and also, of humans being very human. I think the viewpoint is… near-future, mild tech optimism made palatable by human realism, where humans routinely do callous and violent stuff, like sending out a Mars expedition while trashing planet Earth. They are a destructive force, ever-changing and -surviving, and some who have good ideas are also gifted with good luck and timing. The 90’s vintage works (published 1992, I think). It wouldn’t work nearly as well, if written today, with all of the darkness of these days. Perhaps this is an example of escapism from history, while still being canny to human nature. It’s much nicer to think about the future from a pre-9/11 perspective, isn’t it?
Robinson’s characters are like avatars, but not (to me) in an overbearing way. I especially like his women characters. Maybe these are his favorite too. I like Ann, the geologist, who is a staunch defender of virgin, untouched, original Mars. The plot of the book, which follows the beginning of humans colonizing Mars, as terraforming is begun, and the landscape is ripped apart by industry and eventual rebellion and war, is an extended grief, for Ann. She loves Mars with unspeakable devotion and hates the terraforming with every cell in her body. Her perspective is difficult and severe, but beautiful.
And I like Hiroko, who completely subverts all the official directives of their initial mission. She is the designated biosphere designer, and it seems like she has some amazing ideas for how to create life. Then she and her followers ditch the main group and spend most of the book shrouded in mystery. Well, she is busy making babies using all the men’s sperm samples, taken from her lab, (without anybody’s consent), and creating an underground cult movement called Areophany that worships viriditas, or life-force. She is disciplined and insane, also very difficult, impossible to contain or to fully know. She answers to nobody and recognizes herself as a force of nature. Like a Mars-mother goddess. As you may know by now, I love this kind of thing.
(Can’t forget to mention, there’s a scene in this book, with a character named John Boone, a goofy lovable American, a charismatic and nice guy, who has an ecstatic experience with a group of travelling Sufi Muslims. They are dancing and whirling around in the vortex of a crimson dust storm, flying through the air and spinning in the low gravity of Mars, chanting all the different names of Mars, with all the names of Allah. The image is one of flying-spinning through a great blood-red alien heart. This scene is wonderful, not to be missed!)
There are other women characters less extreme in their commitments, and many other things to love about the book. These are just my favorites. Happily, Ann and Hiroko are both still around in the next book, Green Mars. I started it a few days ago. Maybe this one will take me another year to finish?
With relief. //
Does this seem right? It’s neither the power nor the responsibility of a child to forgive a parent. To forgive, as to judge, is the power and the act of God. The power and responsibility of a child is to communicate their need for care.
There is also the literal groundlessness (earthlessness, lifelessness) of anger directed against a parent. (As usual, thinking of Achilles. But these really seem like lessons of Abraham, …) It’s there, the rage, as a feeling, but it makes no natural sense. Like an artifact of (divine) omnipotence. What a child feels and expresses toward a parent (Ismail’s crying) isn’t a judgment, but an unaddressed need for care.
Likewise, there’s something perverse when a parent asks their child for forgiveness. Why are you putting that burden on your child? As a child, I could never not welcome one of my parents into my house, or into my heart. But that’s not forgiveness, I don’t think, it’s just being a child. To forgive, as to judge, is the power and act of God.
There’s a rough and ready (“embodied”) justice grown into generational (“blood”) relationships, which already negotiate between the finite and infinite circumstances of a political animal, the things we might demand of each other, the things we must release. It’s maybe easier, from the perspective of liberalism, to recognize the arbitrary nature of familial justice and its proneness to abuse. (When there is no viable rejection of, or emancipation from parents.) But maybe it provides some rudimentary shelter for sanity, and a solider liberation.
It was a rainy afternoon, E and I both fell asleep while watching a movie, took a nap. Woke to the sound of more thunder and fireworks for New Year’s Eve. Which I care about only a little, (we’ll observe the lunar year), but ok. This seems like a pretty good thought-feeling to end 2024. With relief. That it simply isn’t my place, to judge or even forgive my parents. Of all the things that are my responsibility, that’s not one of them.
As Prophet Abraham, (peace be upon him), to his father. “I will pray for your forgiveness, but I have no power to rescue you from Allah.” (Surah Al-Mumtahanah, Ayat 4.)
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌑
Chanced upon Bob’s 2017 Nobel lecture, which made me realize a few things. 1. Being a folk singer isn’t too different from blogging. 2. I should read All’s Quiet on the Western Front, which I never read. And 3. Does the blog maybe need some audio voice recording? Just something to think about.
The lecture is a pretty amazing “where from”. Even though I catch flashes or hints of them in the songs, I never heard him talk so explicitly about books before. “I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’” Nobody misquotes translates Homer like Bob.
(What strikes me is his piety.)
This is also what I call translation, which is both poros and poiesis.
Daughters of Typhon
// Phaedrus 227β // Isthmian 1
It felt good to translate Isthmian 1, like eating a nourishing bowl of food, with green and purple vegetables, roast potatoes, tempe, tender steamed rice underneath, and spicy peanut sauce drizzled (generously) on top. Doing something like that makes me feel applauded by ancestors, for sure. The only translations of that poem I could find (public domain) were so very fine (It’s awe-inspiring how flowery the old-fashioned translators were. What alien world did they come from, those boys of clubby leisure? Did they drink honey-wine for breakfast before sitting down to work?) that I failed to detect in them the brilliance of an original. Which I uncovered as I worked it out and translated for myself. Using fewer words, less adorned, to give it my own meter, then to brush away the sediment from this cut and polished gemstone. To put it in my words, to shape my lips around the poetic act.
As a physical, full-bodied shiver. I could feel the pride of the author, in the poem’s re-discovery.
“What’s more beloved / By good men than their parents, esteemed?” Indeed, smiling, I admired our work. Other possible translations for “esteemed” could be “cared for”, “valued” or “cherished”. Good people love to see their parents taken care of, “placed on high”, publicly loved. If you enjoy seeing your parents respected and celebrated, you are probably a good person. So suggests Pindar. And this is what I have done by translating his poem. Isn’t it? I have cared for a parent, if I could consider Pindar a parent. Could I? Would he be a father, or maybe a grandfatherly figure? If he would accept me, as such. Maybe.
//
Fathers and grandfathers are hard to come by, around here. Okay, the subject is difficult. I grew up without grandfathers. Then my father was (and is) a piece of work. He spent my childhood teaching me to read his darker feelings. I became very good at that.
It was not an easy childhood. I was somehow hoarded by him, he was my primary caretaker, or anyway, my mother left me unprotected, unshielded from the intensity of his self-loathing, which he daily poured over me like fuel, with which I should also burn. Maybe worse than if it had all been hostile, the infliction (and it was violent, if an adult man yelling full-force close to a six year-old girl’s face, as if to teach her with terror, is violent, his spittle in her eyes, as she is petrified and panicking with shame, and the daily ritual of this, for the first fifteen years of my life, that it framed everything) alternated on-and-off with love, as an oddly infantile affection.
My parents divorced when I was eleven or twelve. (It was after they had a giant fight, in Disney World.) A few years after that (when I was a teenager) I stopped living with my father, basically for fear. I called him and said I would live with my mother full time. I thought I was free then, but it was still all I knew. I had no perspective on the conditions of anger and shame I had suffered, through which I had learned (pathei mathos, as Aeschylus) the meaning of (fatherly) love. An open question, (mine), of whereto and wherefrom. What does it take to recover from that kind of growing up?
I (on my request) went to therapy with him, tried to keep in touch with him, (he never called me, he’s not that kind of parent), and struggled for years to maintain a tolerable connection with him. Until at (after the ceremony and reception were over, I’m not such an asshole) my sister’s wedding (in Disney World again, yes, of all places), (we are very different people), like so many times before, he found a reason to shame me. As if to re-establish dominance over a dangerous dog. He did it, as always, when nobody else was there to see. It was after I suggested taking my neice and nephew out for ice cream. I guess he thought that was the stupidest idea. The familiar timbre of his punishing voice, the physical vibration low and threatening, set my inner child quaking with fear. I took a deep breath and (not for the first time) told him he couldn’t talk to me like that anymore. I would not “be bullied”. He refused to admit wrongdoing, would not make eye contact for the rest of our time there. We all flew home from Disney World, and I didn’t call him again, after that.
(I pause here, to note some broader family context.)
My mother, although she was the target of his abuse for years, and her tears were my tears, rarely admits there was anything wrong. She says she didn’t know how he treated me. At first I thought that was impossible. As a child, I felt like she must know. I felt somehow like we were together in that, but also she would never speak of it, which was a betrayal. Here I begin to doubt my memory, and maybe it’s possible that nobody knew, my mom or my sister. Although there was very harsh treatment at the piano, my worst memories are from when I was closed away in “the study”. That was where he made me do hours of extra school work each day. The most severe of his demands, castigations, and punishments, might have been hidden. But my understanding remains foggy, because my dad was often very loud, when yelling how stupid or wrong I was. And how could my mother not know? Of course, anyone in her position wouldn’t want to know. Anyway, she doesn’t like to talk about it.
My sister holds it against me for “leaving him”. (She remained living with him up into her thirties, even after being married and having two children.) Although she avoids talking about it too, and I only got that snippet of perspective from her husband, so it might not even be true. Again, it seems like nobody else witnessed or acknowledges his longterm mistreatment of me, or cares. To the point that I begin to doubt my own memories. I’m not sure what I can say about that. It is a terrible thing, trying to choose between memories and familial acceptance.
An uncle, my mother’s brother, told me that I was an adult, so I should understand that I was “safe now” and endure mistreatment.
Their father, my maternal grandfather, was no better. My beloved grandmother (may she rest in peace) was the only one who would talk about him. Her stories suggest that he was quite nasty. He threatened her (my grandmother) with a pistol before abandoning them, when my mom and her brother were children. He pretended they died in a car accident and married somebody else. My grandmother also claims he broke into the house, after leaving, and stole her jewelry. She would tremble when she spoke of him. The man’s obituary (he passed in 2021, coincidentally just weeks after my grandmother) mentioned none of us as descendants.
My father, for his part, had cut both of his parents out of his life before I was born. I assume that my grandfather did a similar thing to my father, as my father did to me. This is not something he would ever talk about. I have no way of knowing. But I imagine there was a lot of meanness and cruelty there. And then, my father once told me he despised his mother for being “superficial” and “just a socialite”. My memory of that conversation is vague, and I’m really unsure how to interpret it. Anyway, that’s how I grew up without grandfathers.
(Violence doesn’t grow on trees, after all.)
Even though we hadn’t spoken in several years, I flew across the country to see my father before I moved to Indonesia (in 2019). I wanted to say goodbye, or “pay my respects”. There was no argument, but politeness, as a brief and transparent veneer. Underneath the tension was barely concealed his skepticism and contempt toward me and my life choices, along with a performative, condemnatory aloofness. The lack of warmth, not even by habit or accident, was heartbreaking. It was under duress and for the sake of survival that I had learned the languages of his shifting shadows, threatening always from the borderline of his (my) joy. Maybe I became too sensitive. How many times should I (could I) make myself vulnerable, by caring, or even smiling, in his presence? To be whipped with inexplicable rejection, at an unguarded moment, with shame, humiliation, and a panic whose bilious flavor would seep into all areas of my person, my body, my life. At the end, there was no hug goodbye. There was only a stiff wave.
We haven’t spoken since I moved to the other side of the world, so around five years, and that’s where my time with him leaves off. Sometimes I wonder what I will do when he dies. Or if he gets sick, how will I know? How will it make me feel? (The answer is very, very sad.)
Incidentally, Christmas Eve is his birthday, which is today. It has always cast a sadness across the holiday, to remember rituals of childhood pain, contrasted with those of childhood joy. (Like his joy, when he opened the packs of socks we always gave him, as that’s what he always asked us for). And just in case there are any doubts. I would happily reconcile, if he ever reached out, or otherwise communicated that he wanted to change, or just communicated that he wanted to communicate. I know he is tormented and I wish I could help. But if I had stayed, it wouldn’t have helped. It would just have been staying with abuse.
With all of my heart, I wish I knew how to make it (my father) right.
//
It feels natural (or inevitable) to blame myself for this alienation. No matter my trying to do the best thing, no matter me persuading myself I tried hard enough, or I’ve done enough self-work, or healing, it seems as though I am stained. It feels similar to my alienation from the country of my birth. (So I slip into speaking of “staying” and “leaving”.) With whom I tried, again and again, to make it work, (I fought for myself, in you), but from whom I grow only stranger, as my life goes on. (Or. As our synchronous deaths carry us ever further from reconciliation.) There has been a ripping out of organs, bones cracked, a wrenching of spines, skin charred and flayed. It brings me no joy to have these great gaping wounds in my soul. They are ever-ripe and liable to fester. They require constant vigilance, and even so, they spawn offspring.
As if to supply a perpetual war.
I wish to be a good, healthy, dutiful person. I wish to repay my debts, to respect my elders. I realize that I need a city wall, and stable laws to protect a soul from harm. But I would ask all the fathers, the poets and patriarchs, Plato, Socrates, Pindar. Even Bob. How now? What is wrong with me? Am I not “a good man”? How should I, if I am to be good, celebrate such broken things? Should I place them on high, and be broken to pieces, beneath them?
Or. Should I not myself have been powerful enough to put everything back together?
Or. Together again? What would be this “again”?
Or. What was the thing, unbroken?
The father unbroken. If it never was my personal father, what could it have been? Was it the shining city on a hill, or the beautiful one writ in heaven? Was it a garden, or a book? Was it the silver-bearded grandpa on the chapel ceiling? Or the Christ that broke all his own Fathers' rules? In whose name predators ascend to power, in a greusome catharsis that used to be the country of my birth. So I know that it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, or the U.S. Constitution. But was it Herodotus of Thebes, two-and-a-half thousand years in the past, on his magnificent golden chariot, whose reins were not held by another’s hands? Was it you, whose poetry tells of such things? As fathers, holy, revered, and unbroken. A six year-old girl, with no working fathers, and crumbling city walls, needed, for her life, to know.
//
Daughters, put to such questions, will only
Become witches. (We, who find
we are
as we do
as we make
as we uncover fossils
Of animals that could have been held high by us,
Who might make (us) right
In return, and growing backwards, as generations,
Flourish in veiled vacancy. I cherish your words.
And I make them my own.
But these things were broken long before I was born.)
With my words as my mark, (by such easy deathlessness),
We live and we breathe
(Laughing, replying) without a father’s permission.
//
(About.)
Just playin', again. // Although we can’t actually listen to this album, because when we do, we just cry,
As one who is broken.
I am primarily an emotional listener to Bob Dylan, . .. Because that is what he has taught me to be.
Evil is gifted a new aspect, with “Black Rider”.
The grandfather’s follow-up to the suckling child’s “Idiot Wind”.
(The end-of-days bard, the weariness of Zeus, the predicament of Lot..)
There’s obviously a lot of (that old time) (Ancient Greek) religion in here.
Bob always writes my exact kind of briar patch. I guess I’m crying, I realized, because I’ve been needing the kind of comfort only he could give. I can’t say how grateful I am to hear the specific and living sound of his voice, right here in my ears. On my pirate radio station. A perfect antidote to… farthiness. The awareness of being too far away.
Evil got theirs, now “Key West” is givin the old “written on my soul, from me to you”.
“Hibiscus flowers,
They grow everywhere here.
If you wear one,
put it behind your ear.“
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin (Mother of Muses) for blessing this world, (this one here, that I live in, my world), with Bob Dylan.
Just playin’ some Bob
Σωκράτης: ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν;
Socrates: Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
(…)
Φαῖδρος: πεύσῃ, εἴ σοι σχολὴ προϊόντι ἀκούειν.
Phaedrus: You will learn, if there is leisure for you, as you go, to hear.
Σωκράτης: τί δέ; οὐκ ἂν οἴει με κατὰ Πίνδαρον “καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον πρᾶγμα” ποιήσασθαι τὸ τεήν τε καὶ Λυσίου διατριβὴν ἀκοῦσαι;
Socrates: What? Don’t you think, as Pindar, I would make it “a matter higher even than non-leisure (business)”, to hear about your and Lysias' spending?
//
Behold, the destiny of human (political) being in its interior conflict: between the erotic-philosophic (desirous and r/evolutionary) soul and the material body’s need for (protective and conservative) law; with its resolution in the dialectic of (political/poetic) education; the infinite freedom of the human soul, as philosophy, is yoked (by logos/music), in service as conservation, to the body (politic/imaginary).
(Here is my Plato-feeling, “tree-reading” I should call it, or a tentative shorthand, The Republic in a nutshell, but with all of these other things, %gestures at blog%, in mind, and always, of course, through the lens of Phaedrus.
Translating you is mothering multitudes.)
//
I got caught up (through these next few lines of Phaedrus, which revolve poetically around leisure, and get sling-shotted around by Socrates' inversionary or may I call it tropical conservatism) thinking about leisure and responsibility, duty to parents and country, what one owes, how one serves. So I got caught up thinking about mothers and fathers. You can’t talk about “where from” without leisure, says Phaedrus. But you really can’t talk about it without mothers and fathers, and their celebration (in poetry), which is right where Socrates puts us, with Pindar, in Isthmian 1.
Then it happened that writing about fathers found me in a dark place, and I didn’t feel good about posting what I wrote. I will post it, but I needed to write this first.
To whom do I owe pleasure?
To whom do I owe life?
(Fertile Phthia is like the valley below, but for Achilles.
The valley below is like Key West, but for me.)
//
Listening to Bob Dylan’s more recent Rough and Rowdy Ways. Playing it for the chickens, it’s a great sound for them, they love it. For me, I’m always trying to be ready for this album, ever since I wasn’t several years ago, (the first year of the pandemic), when it was released. (That whole first year, I could only listen to two albums, but that’s another story for another time.) One of the boys practices crowing for “Black Rider”. As if to say, “these kids”, Frankie starts in with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”. He sounds so eloquent and sleekly up-tempo with Bob’s Tennessee whisky-soaked blues.
And then Bob takes us to church with “Mother of Muses”. Something about this reminds me of Little Drummer Boy, (from my favorite Christmas album, I admit, every year I weep for this song), it is a hymn sung with the same dutiful reverence, Bob’s most lovely and humble offering for Her. There is an Illiad and an Odyssey in his storyful prayer. Key West is a place to get away, (the one we need), the permission to go, the road and the highway sign to get there. (Honestly surprised at how many holes these fathers have left, written into the city walls. If only I trust myself to find them.)
Sunset and the bending-of-light through its longing shades of exit, and plentiful tears falling again for “Murder Most Foul”. I am learning from Bob how to remember someone who was already dead before I was born. Bob sings a shining, shimmering like-a-mirage, place of hope, dream on a hill.
The hardest thing about the death of a parent, from what I have seen, or what I have heard, is a leftover feeling of guilt, as of a duty unfulfilled. I wonder what kinds of things Bob feels responsible for, I mean to speak of history. He was there as the centerpiece of revolutionary American culture, although he constantly resisted being there, in his perverse way, until that worked and he wasn’t there, anymore. But he was at the heart of it, so if anybody could feel the pulsating heartbeat, I believe it would be Bob. He tells of the leaning over and falling of the body, into her lap, he tells me there was something alive, and then it was not, and (whispering, by now) it did not die a natural death. It was, he repeats, “a murder most foul”, and as I am alive, I believe him.
He gives us the funeral we need (at least, we who are left to listen).
It is a slow procession, full of myriad moments bitter and painful, a retrospective drawn by sorrowful progress toward the inevitable end. American destiny. Every dreamlike revolution is new tears flowing, emptying out in grandiose repetition, as an over-abundance of scattered light. It is a song of anger that would be too deep to feel, were it not already healing itself, like a laundering in the sea. The taste of frothy sand in Key West, washing away the beach, washing away the stain of the crime. Like Jackie washing the blood off her clothes, America washing the death off her clothes, after all the years. Our bard fulfills his final duty, delivering the eulogy, that’s what it feels like. After more than fifty years spent trying to understand who it was, what it was that died. Seeing the shining, past the anger, through the grief, of love.
Can’t talk about elders without talking about Bob Dylan. He tore it apart, turned it upside-down, and re-made it whole, again and again. A parent for poets and pirates, and probably philosophers too. (Remember that time when he gave us a recipe for figgy pudding on TTRH?) Love you forever, Bob.
//
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.)
To the alien, from another side. // Earth used to be the most beautiful place.
You could go running, under-leaf, through waist-deep tangled-grass jungle, wondering about snakes but not stopping because you had lost something in there, your heart breaking along fault lines in egg shells of worry and the impossibility of searching this dense pocket of hiding. The sharp limits of eyes. (It could start to rain and the drops, clear pinpoints and gashes on your naked arms, would feel body-temperature, not quite cool.) You would give birth to yourself, clambering out from staggered layers of green into a rice field, shifting pale to yellow, (footsteps uneven in cracking, caked mud, swaying in) needle-soft fibers cascading with grain. A sea of it. (It could start pouring, but the heavy, like wind-whipped-metal, grey holds.) Do you go left, right, forward into the field, or back to the jungle? (Ok, good choice. Turn to page 56.)
Words come from behind you, you don’t understand those, but fearful fluttering heartbeats, you do. From underneath places, trembling invisibles look back, lines of sight never meeting, from too many directions. You never held what happened, there. Life was snuffed out in missed-crossings, disappeared, or worse, waited past the faltering light, as if to be found again, hoping but knowing, skin and memory growing thin and colder, until heart stopped. It gave up, it was over, but then, you were found. A strange struggle, distracting but home again, having made plans that seem irrelevant, at this point. Washed a sink full of dishes. Sat on the floor, scratching stray sentences in dust. It would be dark, but not raining, and anyway, you would be under the solid wood floor of another world, with footsteps relying heavily on the grammar of your (earthy) answer.
Somebody who loved you might bring you food that was soft and crunchy and salty and sweet. And a lit stick of honeyed incense. Parts of you would fall back in right places. You could remove clothes, find yourself misshapen, and step into a hot shower under pitch-navy sky. Becoming twin bodies, ocean and sorrow in a breathy coccoon against deep space. I would work my fingers into your scalp, and medicinal smells of sudsy substances would rinse off in slippery streams to either side of your (kissed) face. Scrub around ears. You could be clean. (And the miracle of that.) You could put on clean clothes. You could slip between clean sheets underneath a comforter blanket that was the perfect thickness for this night’s chill, with just enough weight to let you feel, well, enough. Plus a cat, on your legs. Yes, cats were amazing. You could cover your eyes, and drift off, as a warm hand slipped softly into yours. Everything that was lost, would be home, would be dreamt or forgotten, singing or held, would be tucked under feathers, bed scattered with blossoms, and the waning crescent would disappear into the better side of night.
One felt gratitude, and mistook it for fear. That is how beautiful Earth was. We couldn’t contain the joy it put into us, so we turned it upside-down, into fear.
How Not to Break
Σωκράτης: καλῶς γάρ, ὦ ἑταῖρε, λέγει.
Socrates: Beautifully said, fellow.
//
People forget the absolute confusion it would throw us into. Our poor hearts. To be flirted with by Socrates!
Everyone reacted in his own way. There were puppies, pitbulls and poodles among us, Siamese cats, golden retrievers, kosher beef hotdogs, poisonous spiders and slithering snakes, all electrified, burning cheeks, clammy hands, contemptuous coughs, eyes rolling exaggeratedly behind backs, tea-drinking, name-calling, note-taking, knowing looks, mistaken engagements, pregnant pauses, drunken outbursts, drunken confessions, drunken makeouts, sneaking sweets into pursed lips, so many petty jealousies you wouldn’t believe.
Backstabbing, frontstabbing, it got ugly, abusive. Nobody wanted to see himself like that. Some went abstract, algebraic, symbolic, tried to ignore it, tied their hands as they slept. It exhausted us all. Some dismissed her for it, pretended cute compliments were sarcastic slights, secret glances a lie, the multi-entendres a meaningless flourish, intellectual metaphor, performative bullshit, while sneaking behind bushes. Some named it irony, her beloveds and her beautifully saids, a great number of grown men turned theatrically, cartoonishly evil, sending pornography to professional inboxes, these are historical facts, they just broke.
From her simple, sweet flirtation: they broke.
The question was always, how not to break.
(Hold it together?) What does he want. (Does he want it from me?) What do I want. (Why do I want it?) Do I want to give. (Do I have what he wants?) Do I believe him. (Is it about sex?) The stimulation of bodies to pleasure, more pleasure, until lost in the pleasure. (Reforged in pleasure?) Is it empty or is it full. (It or me?) Am I safe or am I in danger. (Which is the one that holds me together?)
The heart becomes a gaping question.
After all, this is a rite of passage. Few of us pass. (Pass into what?) The beautiful is what we call it when someone just does.
//