Sky from home (4).
Moving house starts today, according to the island gods. Ceremony this morning, awake before dawn to comb through the details, mentally then materially preparing everything. Not least, (my body), sarung, kebaya, symbolic trimmings. Painted on face, twisted up hair. Becoming a symbol, in person and gesture. Ceding control to complex performances, letting it be whatever it is. Stretching outward the various senses, as one does when (humbly, although today, quite publicly) summoning cosmic significance.
Thoughts fallen into all the wrong places, as if settled into gutters, now stuck there glaring back with soapy sachets of synthetic perfume, no solutions, and a lot of bitter complaints. Taking shelter in small wrongs, lost perspective, petty despair. Needing reasons to laugh, get turned on one’s head, reset. (Monkeys? Maybe. And just literally standing on my head. Being literally upside-down is being upside-down!)
Battlegrounds at borders, clashing signs, // have me wondering this morning, are we artworks or alive? And the conflicts between us, what they say. That living (bodies) fight as bodies, over territory and resource, and cannot overlap. While artworks are hypothesis, from their inception, and somewhat placeless. So artworks violate embodied borders. Like airborne virus, impossible to contain.
Community of action, community of speech. The latter demands unison, sameness, in what is said. While the former works from difference. Different parts do different things, for the sake of accomplishing some one thing, impossible alone. One cooks, one cleans, one repairs the house, one goes to market. One economizes, one prioritizes. Actions for the sake of all, though each might have something (very) different to say.
Is it person? Or is it hypothesis? Here, behind these signs. Hypothesis is lawless. Bodies have no immunity against it. (Contrary to the myth of liberal arts, this was the function of education. Not “freedom”. But immunity, protection, fortification, against this.) That there could have been a body, a citizen, a living human being, subject to certain laws and customs. But poetry renounced that limit. Escaped sidedness. So poets make (if at all) mediocre (at best) neighbors. And,
A life of beauty is (almost always) a life of crime.
And everything remains equally important.
Coconut tree near concrete.
Blustery when I enter the bale today, trees tossed and swaying arhythmically down through their trunks. Some sprung tension in the spoken words, plans for travel changing around plans for ceremonies that changed plans for someone’s birthday. (A different present, is all that means.) Plans suspended and cast around like leaves in the fire of mid-day sun. Taking Sweet Orange to the heat island today, for ceiling fans, to make our own air. As we batten down the nearest future, temper possibility with the need to live in it, with shape and stability of steady wood. BUT how it whips through locks of hair, skims past cloth to know by touch the skin, which raises spirit into chills of fresh sensation, altogether un-imagined, is the wind-kissed exhilaration of promised days beyond ground, beyond even gravity, when we (or whatever we have become) will live in aerial dimensions, as shapes unbodied, unbuilt, and fleeing toward an ungovernable unknown.
Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim. Blessed Eid to all who observe. // Today (here) Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha, a holiday in memory of Ibrahim’s (Abraham) readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail (Ishmael) to Allah (God). There isn’t the same popular mudik/migration in most of Indonesia around Eid al-Adha as there is around Eid al-Fitr. Many people go to the mosque and pray, and some who can afford it purchase a (non-human) animal to kill, or to have killed, as a ritual of sacrifice.
I have complicated thoughts and feelings regarding ritual (non-human) animal sacrifice, and I will not personally participate in it. (It’s optional, for a Muslim, so I don’t break any rules there.) But the story of Ibrahim, and especially his readiness to sacrifice, as well as the thing, (the child), and the promised lineage, (the historical, embodied, coming-to-be and passing-away, of the future), that he is ready to sacrifice, I find that to be an extraordinary lightpost. (Relating to what I wrote yesterday, about Īśvarapraṇidhāna.)
Ibrahim is brave, he does not fit with his community, (who worship idols), and he fights to establish his own relationship with the divine. He does not hide. He listens to dreams. He barely hesitates. His devotion can be interpreted, (or rather, felt), as cruel unresponsiveness to his human relationships and blindness to his own limitations. We are rightly terrified.
(Of Ibrahim, and his daemonic readiness.)
So Allah provides Ibrahim with a substitute, the ram. This serves a double purpose, both to reward his readiness, and to contain the terrifying nature of it. Ibrahim, “in the end”, does not need to kill his child, and all of humanity can breathe a sigh of relief. (Although later, he will send him, and his mother, into the desert. It seems a never-ending trial.) In Islamic tradition, the memory of it (Ibrahim’s readiness) has been further contained by this day, every year, Eid al-Adha.
As I understand it, this is something of the purpose of religion. To contain the terrifying (and otherwise problematic) in human being, to build laws and customs around it, to codify prayer in relation to it, thereby to tame it, and to make possible the establishment of political communities of trust and moderate prosperity. Not to forget the terrible readiness of Ibrahim, but somehow to live beside it, as we play out our animal lives, on earth.
By containing Ibrahim’s terrible readiness inside the symbolic act of killing the ram, the tradition builds a barrier around this moment in Ibrahim’s heart. It is a veil through which one may never see, a hijab in the relationship between finite and infinite. My interpretation of scripture is that this barrier, while accepted gladly by the community, is ultimately provisional. The entire thing that differentiates Ibrahim from the idolators is his stubborn insistence on direct relationship with Allah. This makes him receptive to infinite demand. Indeed, what makes the sacrifice holy, and not idolatrous, is the awareness that, at any moment, the ram might not be enough. No. The ram is already nowhere near enough.
(And the veil is already lifted.)
Ibrahim’s heart is the human heart. And his readiness is what is demanded of human beings, who bridge an otherwise inconceivable gap, between creature and creator. An animal responsible both to finite and infinite. The very nature of our in-between nature is terrible. Terror at Ibrahim is terror at what we ourselves are called upon to do, every day of our human lives.
I myself love the story of Ibrahim, but I have never been supplied with a ram. (Or a human child.) I have been given certain gifts in my life. I work to pay back my finite debts, and I struggle to share whatever I have, that is good or might be helpful, with family, and friends, and community. But not once has it seemed to me that this speaks to the story of Ibrahim’s readiness. In view of which, I find myself quite poor. Poorly supplied with sacrificial substitutes for myself. For myself, and the whole extent of my meaning, in this historical (embodied, coming-to-be and passing-away) world. I am not a patriarch. I am not a king. I myself am all that I have. Myself, and whatever work I can do. Whatever (broken, imperfect) things I can make, things that say “me”, that I might put into a fire.
(To show that none of “me” belongs to me. Is to say that I am… something else.)
It is a personal practice. To have spent one’s life preparing, not really knowing what for, not yet understanding that preparing has always been the work itself. Not having any idea it would lead to where one is now, doing work that one still does not fully comprehend. It has sometimes resembled madness. (And still does.) When it doesn’t resemble hubris. (Which it does fairly often, I guess.) One can neither recommend it nor require it of others (unless one is feeling very grouchy that day, which, patriarchs also had grouchy days). In fact, the lesson (for Ibrahim, for others) might be one of compromise, if not compassion. To let people have their sacrificial ram, for as long as they find themselves supplied.
I myself have never been supplied with a ram. But I have, in my life, been given (metaphorical, and also, metaphorical) cats. For better or worse, a steady supply. (Our boy cat is even named Ismail, in another coincidence, strange even for here.) I have also been given certain other gifts. One of which is the ability to step back and see that this story shows two things: the veil (the sacrificial ram), and the thing behind the veil (the sacrificial child). What it shows is different from what it seems to recommend. So that the story itself is also a veil, and the tradition of sacrifice, another veil. That there is a multi-layered (un)veiling of (un)veiling going on, related to self and sacrifice, responsibility and creation, human demands and human limitations. That the sacrifice, as a container, has a fascinating shape, and one takes care not to miss the point.
(So, “in the end”. I click “publish post”. And draw a veil closed, behind me.)
Less traffic and an overall hush in the neighborhood today. A thick ceiling of clouds holds the light down and keeps sound muffled. Doves curr-curr as always and a rooster crows from far away. Solid clinking together of dishes, loud thwack to ignite the gas stove, scrape of wire across glass opens the coffee jar. Small sandals slapping concrete, fast passage through the back alley, but no voices. Feeling somewhat bruised and reluctant to move. Not wishing to be carried up the mountain.
Ismail, ready-Ish.
Awake, not yet twilight, cats causing chaos. I cover eyes, determined to go back. (Wow, it worked.) Hours later, waking as digging out from under concrete. It seems more likely I never woke up.
(The invention of prayer. Begin with sleep and the way it/you works. Body is not machine. Simple acts are a negotiation, while the deepest consist of letting go. Make yourself an offering and the infinite becomes kind. Practice savasana, learn how to fly. Īśvarapraṇidhāna.)
As if death were the missing half of wonder.
Blood on the Tracks is the sun of my Bob Dylan universe. Desire is the moon. (Welcome to Bob Dylan astrology, by me.) I consider myself to be Earth. “Tangled Up in Blue” is where I am, right now, (and sometimes “Idiot Wind” album version, other times Bootleg Series version, you should listen to them one after the other for best effect. Obviously,) “One More Cup of Coffee” is right previous to where my blog is. (Listening to crickets tonight. Softly, like a crystalline froth of sound, from all around the rice paddies, in which there is no time, no history, only countless grains and some one infinite self, dissolving.)
Given the Anthropocene, a weather report in its accuracy becomes a poem. Instead of saying “It will rain,” or “It will not rain,” the weatherman, (witnessing subject as substance), says, “We will rain,” or, “We will not rain.” And if he speaks winged words, “It is raining in my heart.”
Lalah easily wins the pretty prize but/and as a model she is very tummy-forward.
Lalah, ready to go.
Indeterminate clear, nice day for a Saturday morning, a modest tower, safe, from which to see. Last night. A past-hyped art piece (ha) that turned familiar in disturbing ways. That a certain world, once inhabited without question, was already perverse, designed by greased-up power-clowns, and world-historical problems, if not made clear, at least had some ugly guts spilled out, glorious tacky, and evil, almost innocent with shamelessness. A devil’s garden (Manhattan, Berlin, Jerusalem?). What things were born that still bear fruit, etc.
Weekend questions, am I fruit? As I breakfast (fried plantains with drizzle of palm sugar) leisurely on the bale with Glagahdowo and Pacitan (husband and G. and A.). Nongkrong. Temperature the same as skin. Sweetness on teeth, obscure (to me) vernaculars bouncing out time, bitter coffee biting down. The joy of being included, with eye-contact, in laughter, at a harmless joke, (about the pisang goreng, and who accidentally picked the over-burned piece). How I covet such rudimentary signs of trust. (Re-making a life on their foundation.) While contemplating a different city, and whether it could ever be, that certain things that happened, never happened.
It’s like this: being of your body, and sensing (with) the ghost of past body, and sensing (with) the ghost of possible body, there is a constant negotiation between these (differing perspectives), each “one” claiming to be “the one”. Then, the analogy (between ghost bodies) is (what we call) time.
Woken by earthquake. Between clean sheets, a brief interval of (probably insufficient) alertness. Light rattle of windowpane. Being moved. Doesn’t stop so much as fade into a wobbly hallucination. Pathos, a (mercifully) gentle reminder. That ground is also made of shifting-in-relationship pieces.
Now is the time of the lunar month when I start having (noticing) the darker feelings. (Also. Random waking, trouble sleeping, heightened sensitivity to smell.) I never know how much of that (“the darkness”) I want to put into the blog, or how much choice I have in the matter, or even whether this is any different than my normal (purple and pink) word salad. (It’s a blog about my salad days.) And it makes me feel a universal guilt. So I would like to say I’m sorry to everyone (including those not in my life).
(Every poem is an apology, broken in one way or another.)
Sky from home (3).