Showering. A spider came dangling down from the ceiling, right in front of my face. A smooth spiderwoman drop, front legs raised in fearless poise. How graceful she was, descending into the steamy waterfall! The subsequent dance. (I imagine myself played by Kim Cattrall.) Me, nude, startled bonkers. She, versatile, evading my careful attempts, trying again with more elaborate gestures, to catch her by her thread. I failed. She lifted herself up and escaped into obscurity (the thatched bamboo ceiling).
The bathroom is where we keep a seminar of spiders. They are good at catching bugs and generating ideas.
Music is artificial intelligence. (Anyone who says differently is selling something.) (Or are themselves being sold.)
Beat on the kul-kul summons people to the pura this morning and gamelan starts for the ceremony. Incense smoking, offerings aloft, village is alert, decisive. Brass shivers and syncopated heartbeat and (bodies marching and) the bell of the Mangku, high and bright. All attention put on the spirit. Barong moves through the streets today, transportation by music, in full regalia. (The battle for balance. Stops traffic, stops everything. Alhamdulillah. And what are you being called to do?)
Beginning again with a tentative rhythm. Afternoon sun, slanted, partial, and hot, with persimmons on the kitchen counter. Irregular spheres, some squat or approaching rounded-square, pale orange or chartreuse waxy skin speckled and clouded with powdery must. I choose three. Stemleaf (calyx) thickly coated, looking ancient. Paring knife separates (as a broken spiral, drops) skin from clean flesh inside, cut open, with octagonally-spoked slivers for (not there) seeds. Firm between teeth, shifts to pulpy softness, floral honey sweet, young and complicated with something nostalgic. A fragrance from childhood candy. Games of pure pleasure being just out of reach.
Wijaya kusuma (6). // Indecision.
I found the Margaret spoon when I was packing the wardrobe, I mentioned it to my mother and she was reminiscing about her grandmother (Margaret). How she would play the piano and sing, and her grandfather would sing too, and their “beautiful voices”. She (my mom) remembered that from when she was six years old. (In my imagination, she plays lieder by Franz Schubert, I listen to it now.) Margaret was also an amateur astronomer, which has me thinking about studying constellations. It’s often too cloudy here for stars.
Cloudy again tonight, and raining, and the sky is an inky thickness. They sit around a cross-section of tree, cigarette packs out, kripik passed. Low conversation. Light bullying. A start, a decision, not quite unanimous, to go on the roof. Bare feet up homemade ladders, disembodied voices, and the night tips over that always close-by edge into surreality.
Under rain again. Big grey above, sucking sponge beneath, birdcall from all corners. Everyone wants to speak. (Good morning, Frankie.) Knowledge and being known across distance, sound as comprehension. (And what is it you say?) Crowing. A sometime slow sheen, passing in and out of soaking pour, dry under roofs, (mostly), we let the weather check for leaks. You will not know a house until it rains ten-thousand times. (Numbers become abstract, here.) House logic, according to which, demonstration is a demonstration. (And everything is fixable, including you.) Solid structure carries watery indeterminate around the sweet space of human habitation. (A house being clear and present negation.) Emptiness is also comprehension. Toes cold, eyes blinking open, coffee is fire.
Emptying the wardrobe. // (Finally.) Piece by piece sorting clothes (and other things) into (commandeered from cats) cardboard boxes. Items that disappeared, (underclothes, mostly), constantly needed and vaguely missed, one by one reappear, having been crumpled into rear corners, crevices, hiding between darker and heavier things. One could have sworn one had checked there, again and again. Some coated in dusty grey mold, some apparently eaten by it, elastics and polyester blends stiffened or dissolved or having become oddly, unpleasantly sticky in the dank incubator, black box, organizer’s nemesis, which has in certain ways ruled over us these past years, determining what we were allowed to have, and what not. You see, the tropical climate is unsuited to long-term storage (or possession) of anything at all (subject to disintegration).
(Avoiding questions, whether we could have been happier here, if we had done this all a little bit differently.) (We came to the guesthouse in February 2020. Having no idea what was about to happen, of course we stayed much longer than planned.)
The satisfaction of shining light on the interior of a more-or-less orthogonal container. Hollow. An empty possibility, belonging soon to somebody else. Sketching boundaries between ourselves and whatever will become of that.
Wijaya kusuma (5). // Not yet.
Paranormal. // Beady black ants, small and matte and anonymous-looking, crowd around some coconut water spilled on the kitchen counter, dropped crumbs on the floor, bits of sugar in a saucer, anything oily, and a small river of them courses around the perimeter of the kitchen, spilling out as a black swarm on the catfood dish. Flowing. It rained for a minute, night releasing a sigh. Now the air cools from evaporation off leaves wet and shiny in the dark. Walking outside to refill a glass, I see movement in the corner of my eye. A shadow that defies looking. Might be a ghost.
Different ants have different signals to make them go away. “Earthquake”, we tap or shake a plate, they file away, we can wash the dish. Or “typhoon”, we blow on the plate, they scatter and go, we can wash the dish. Beady black ants don’t have a signal. We tap the dish, blow on it, they spread, but they don’t leave or even disperse very much. They run around in panic circles. E. blows tobacco smoke, “forest fire”, as last resort. They don’t clear away. Can’t wash a dish or clean the counter without wiping multitudes up or putting them down the drain. They stick to dishes, even under running water. And they crawl onto anything, when upset, hands, tissues, bare feet, cats. Not aggressive, but fast, and when you accidentally squish one, the bite is a pink welt that itches and hurts for three or four days. We find them crawling on us, biting us, in our clothes, in our bed at night, in our food dishes. Pinch it off, toss on the ground. A moving blur on a glasses lense. Ant.
(The rain these past days isn’t normal, for this time of year. The ants, displaced by the rain, are not normal. A ghost that I saw in the kitchen is… more normal than the ants.)
An interesting thing, about (poetry, and) prayer, is how it can’t be reverse engineered. (Pretty sure, and as always, Aristotle points out something similar in the Poetics, using terms almost im/possible to translate.)
Waking up back in the old, time-wise upside-down, and a sense that all observations will be observations of discomfort. In the midst of transition there are moments of feeling somewhat brutally nowhere. Like a baby, on its birthday, new-born, (being sensitive to babies, for they know something true), crying because all is lost. Then, as an adult, healing knowledge with mantra. All is indeed lost. (This is something, but not it.) And there is a home. (And you already know it.) So repeat it until you believe it. (Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.
)…(
Repetition until morning’s end.)
Wijaya kusuma (4).
Through it all, he promises to wait.
The storm has passed. He opens,
and she puts her face against the
fragile thing. Knowledge is there,
of the falling (apart), and the
passing away of something loved.
Skin palm sugar brown, limb narrow,
face is wonder-young, the scars
and creases deepening into
pools of brave obsidian,
and nothing else is worth a thought.
Hair, like mermaid horses riding,
silver-black and torn by wind
and wild waves, is soft. She cannot
breathe for hiding in it, wishing
most of all to go with it,
dissolving, holding, as to life,
to leaving. Every wanting cell
rehearses promise breaking.
Every metaphor about the moon
(is)
also a metaphor about the sun.
And a metaphor about a star.
(And about ocean, and about
)…(
the crab who lives there.)
)…(
Night in cloud. With sounds of water surrounding, an evolution from gerimis (drizzle) to soft patter to steady downfall, with drips following waterworks around the house, (in which, fish respirate) small splashing pours, shifting flows through ducts, now slowing into more percussive plonks and plinks and poinks, tinkles and trickles, like this jungle is designed by frogs. A nestled-in rainforest of fractal-shaped puddles arrayed through heartleafs and stems reverberating. This is a very rich ambient sound, and I wonder about sleep, or disturbed dreams, lost connectivity, (unexpected, of course), and mental compulsions related to that. How this was probably written late last night relative to when it will be sent. Just so, a blog inelegantly measures motion. As trial and failure at learning nothing. So imagine this, but yesterday, and we found ourselves watching old videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing the Nutcracker. My mother used to speak somewhat breathlessly of him, his body, (in translucent stocking), and its parts, so visibly distinct. Me, then, in tight-pulled bun, (tears), and pale pink tutu. Today, a grainy image of a man leaping (if we could be parts of that, composed) into a momentary stillness.
Sun Salutation. // Grey morning with here and there spots of rain, where shaded distances contour the horizon, making clear certain things that need doing. Hating. (Be not afraid. Let me neutralize this word, my self.) Rough or reflective edges, surfaces, too much or too little sound or light or tactile or calculative
friction.
With neither apology nor anger, (heartless), the actor’s genius of making it her own, (editing), (object murder), as it’s fraught enough to be born, (a dream incarnate), (a serpent without a shell), let me not be such a stranger to my own re-armored skin. (Warm welcome to you, this cancer season. And a reminder that, from every end of creation, all is just beginning.)
Star-crushed velvet of night song. A dog barking, distant concern. Chilly, under blanket, eardrums dilated. Everything slows. And an airplane, holding space open like a dream. (.)
Sky from home (4).