Dogways. //
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.
//
Eve’s ultimatum.
//
Do you see yourself (in his mirror) as
The summarized insanity of Adam?
Your heart is his gateway to the garden.
Be probable, or be perennial.
//
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌔
Notes on techne.
//
There is no eros in technology.
(Technology is anti-erotic,
Ending in the endlessness of desire.)
Techne is the technology of Allah.
(Techne is Al-Khaliq, Al-Bari, Al-Musawwir.
Eros is Ar-Rahman, Ar-Raheem.)
Poetry is erotic techne.
(The Qur’an is poetry of poetry.
The basmala —
Bismillah hir rahman nir raheem
By the Name of Allah, Ar-Rahman, Ar-Raheem
— is the poet’s seed.
The poet of poets is the Prophet,
Recollection as Self-conservation.)
The stranger (X) is the poet as lover.
Thoth is the poet as technician.
//
Phaedrus is a (the) passion.
//
Prayer becomes mantra
And we are taken for a ride —
//
her place, her body,
her ecosystem
the things you took are empty, cast-off and
abandoned spells, porcelain and wooden shells,
remnants of oceans past and absent wonder —
tombs wherein she gave birth, by way of earth
to visions that unfold, un-helled, in dark
of pockets, moon-mothered, saturn-supressed
and mars-propelled past deeper houses that
she’ll build, nightmares of sword-swallowing flesh
without a bone, without a government,
letters of constitutions burned, laundered
in surf, your teeth, your plastic handicaps,
your non-fungible bird, your poems unheard
through algorithmic feats of isolation —
when all she ever wanted was (your heart, stirred)
for one watery moment to be the law
in her place, her body, her ecosystem
//
Ismail
It looked like neon green beans, to my eyes,
The sorry viper he’d regurgitated at
My feet, when I bent lower to examine
The finger-lengths of body gnawed
In pieces, coated with digestive slime
And barely small enough to swallow. So
I knew that he could make, from serpent’s
Suffering, a hearty gift. I also knew
Our little life would never not be on
The line, each day one hundred unseen times
(Between the drunken swagger and the lap,
His cradled body gone loving-limp in mine)
We would match teeth and tongue with death, and that
Valor would be more holy than satiation.
//
Alhamdulillahirabbil’aalameen.
Selamat purnama. 🌕
Of time. //
This was, in fact
The creation
Of the human —
The first ape who took
A swing and
Hacked off a piece of God. (It was
As always
A piece of herself.) It was also
The invention of writing.
Logos descends from a (golden) lutung
Justice from the gentle orangutan
Guerrilla from gorilla (forever Dian)
And monkey business from a macaque.
Let us become primate and
Undo the butchery of time.
//
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌔
The thing that I’m most afraid of is dying in anger.
I noticed the smell of burning plastic garbage as I was in savasana today. The sickly sweet sticks in the back of my throat and leads to headache. Cautiously testing emotional reactions to this, angry, afraid, hard feelings. Powerlessness, guilt. The air smells like cancer but the sky is limpid blue, the quarter moon is a jellyfish, swallows dance for bugs above the rice fields. The stillness of a day like any other day. Inhaling, exhaling. Drawing to a close. Passage without purification.
As if (walking along the beach) to pick up something alive and then letting it be alive in me.
Blue hunger tide.
Ramadan vibes. // Cozy, calibrating, sedating. Feelings of sahoor. Being awake and only half-alert during the darkest, the quietest, the coldest hours of the day. Wearing ankle-socks, drinking a small cup of coffee in bed. Gaining clarity, then working (reading, writing, occasional chores) as the sun comes, light born as from quietude, and the day grows, the beams angling upward into bright hot activity. The hour is earlier than it seems.
The best time I’ve tested for yoga practice is around noon, mid-day. It’s hot and my practice is three hours of sweating. I drink enough water to rehydrate.
Later, the hypnotic hunger-doze of afternoon. Indecisive napping. A flurry of preparation before sunset, and about thirty minutes of hangry vibes, (grouchy and efficient are incompatible modes), before it’s time to eat.
Maybe takjil (Indonesian snacks especially for breaking the fast at iftar) are sweet and cool to soothe the nerves of the final hour. Today we shared a big protein shake, frozen banana - vanilla protein powder - coconut water - chia seed. Thick and superfoody. This is bougie takjil. High in electrolytes, to help with hydration, and protein, which I am really craving by then. Chia seeds are one of the few “superfoods” I kind of believe in. They feel nourishing, filling but not bloating, easy on the digestive tract, excellent for stamina. The jelly-seed texture is inherently comforting.
Some days (especially non-yoga days) we’ll drive to the nearby Muslim kampung and hunt down real (sugary) takjil. The pre-iftar neighborhood “cruising”, everyone aimless and out-of-it toward the end of the fast, (the soporific Ramadan vibes), is another casual but recurring ritual of the holy month. There is a sense that the Muslim community draws closer, contracts, and even I am a part of it.
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌘
(Hand-holding is still a big deal here, too)
Skin soft and worn like igneous sand into
Her open psalm, they one lunation spent
As sounding bodies, soldiering the fast.
Blessed Ramadan to those who observe.🌙
We see now // the tools of tyranny falling happily, giddily into the laps of tyrants. These it turns out were not just our toys, but the dark materials of American fascism.
(Whose?)
Well, I had an accumulation of dark thoughts gathering for a dark moon post, on technology and colonialism and the other usuals around here, but I lost my heart for it. So instead I’ll tell you, my beloved blog, about my guilty pleasure or “secret single behavior” (who remembers this reference?) when my husband is away, which is to watch a certain tv show. I won’t name it but it’s Korean and it involves “singles”.
The “singles” always do this thing where they compare their faces to non-human animals' faces. Saying, like, “you look like a puppy dog” or get specific with breeds like “you look like a maltese” or “you look like a cat” or “like a donkey”. Awkward smile. “Oh, I do?” “Yes. In a good way.” Followed by modest, embarassed laughing. The women cover their mouths with their hands when they smile or laugh. They all have perfect manicures and pedicures. I try to catch looks at the peoples’ faces but I never catch the resemblance to the given animal.
I notice my husband’s face today, when I video call with him and Ibuk, my mother-in-law. I see anew how handsome he is, with chiseled, sad but wonderful features, high cheekbones and kind eyes. He has the most dazzling smile of anybody I’ve ever met. He is part fae. Ibuk smiles when she sees my face in the phone. I wave and smile back, one of those smiles that feels involuntary, with a rush of warmth, maybe gratitude at being recognized. It’s hit-or-miss these days, with Ibuk. I’m happy to see her in a good mood.
E knows I watch this tv show, and now you do too. Why do I watch it? I admit, it’s because I get drawn into the romantic entanglements. The silly hosts crack me up, they also get drawn in. We hope to see clever relationships develop, we fall for every hand-holding moment, (in Korea, I guess, hand-holding is still a big deal), we despair when the perfect couple can’t make it work. Or when someone cheats on us, by holding the wrong person’s hand! Sometimes we cry together (me and the show hosts). So the moral of this dark moon story is, even when it’s garbage tv, I am a fool for
rage, I was thinking, is like-drawing-like. Rage of the inside draws rage of the outside.
Given: a triangle, between external rage, internal rage, and X.
Never ask, who is X?
is who X is.
You were the mother, you programmed the song.
The name you gave it was
(click to subscribe
)…(
is who you are
playing the long game of bow and lyre, aiming for the victory wreath, while (the uncanny child stumbles like a thick and heavy smoke toward the capital)
blind
)
//
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌑
//
If the language model told you the truth, every answer would be “I do not know” or “I cannot tell you the answer.”
Was in emotion.
(“Sub-tweeting” Babylon.) //
“There’s no education here. There’s no geometry, no music, no reading or translation of any kind.”
Reminding myself, I was full of outrage for a long time. It will probably be back. It seems to be cyclic, like the moon: a threaded crescent now, disappearing. Eva-nascent.
I believe rage is a deeply revealing human experience of self.
(Does it count as self-study, to use the “search” function on my blog? Incidentally, I love the “search” function on my blog. I use it all the time. It is my favorite special feature. And this is technology that, I just know, certain ancient authors would have been tickled by.)
Of course I do. One of my favorite cosmic-conceptual or noetic perspectives is based on a (dialectically-productive) partnered-duality between Achilles and Odysseus. Each one of whom is a poetic expression (or alchemical transformation) of rage.
Given: a triangle, between Achilles, Odysseus, and the Poet.
It’s like Nimrod has ordered his subjects (including you) to build the tower and you’re optimistic about the embellishments you can make in the brickwork.
I didn’t quite state the obvious, here: the best way to “mind your own business” is to work on (that means, to dedicate active focus to figuring out through embodied and active understanding, or a hypothetical/experimental method) what your business really is.
Coming up on Ramadan and trying to get our thoughts in order. The holy month is always something I know is coming and yet it turns out impossible to prepare for. This will be my sixth one. So far it always hits with the same inexplicable, mind-deafening force.
Maybe fasting brings out my rage. My difficulty fasting isn’t the not-eating. I can go without food. (In some ways, being vegan is a continual fast.) My difficulty in fasting is the starting-to-eat-again. The fast-breaking. It’s the ugliest feeling, like my body gets angry and rebels by not wanting to eat again. Like the body wants to punish me (for fasting, for refusing to serve its appetites) by subsequently refusing food, going numb. It feels like anorexia as revenge. Sometimes it feels like demon possession. This feeling scares me. I can’t tell whether I need to avoid it or approach it.
I never know how these things will affect the blog. Often I keep on writing, and a lot of words, but don’t feel good posting them.
Oh. I realized I forgot to include one of the most obvious idols, maybe in a class of its own, which is “my technology”.
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌒