There is VERY IMPORTANT chicken news // that I’ve been trying to squeeze in “here” for a few days.
(Sometimes one lets the horses run.)
We were shocked to learn, Grace’s nine offspring aren’t nine roosters. They are four juvenile roosters and five juvenile hens. This feels something like a miracle! It’s a shift in household energy and a change in the meaning of things.
There will no longer be ten roosters crowing, at our house. (I am honestly relieved. However,
There still will be ten roosters crowing in beta.)
So it seems that we trusted some fake news a false prophecy. A family member had worked in a chicken factory, claimed expertise in identifying their sex, as chicks, and we believed him. It turns out, he was wrong. Pak and Bu S. came over for purnama and we gave them a tour of the “orchid hallway”, that is my husband’s work-in-progress, they played with the cats through the trellis, and commented how nice it was to have a family of chickens. Pak S. wrinkled his nose and said, “Mas, those aren’t all roosters”.
(A few had started growing horns and cockscombs, a few hadn’t yet. It turns out, they never will.)
We were all amazed. Us at the mistaken chicken sex, them at us being goofy. We all laughed. Me, at the serendipity. It was a comedy of errors, perhaps even a gender-(perception-/deception-/substance-)switching/sacrificing “As You Like It” moment. This is one of my favorite genres!
As a couple, we make these mostly harmless, and yet significant, mistakes, like the old tv land “Beverly Hillbillies”, or dreamy airheads, floating through farm life. Even my husband, who grew up in a village, and his parents kept chickens, never paid much attention to their lives, their parts and their wholes, how they work as families or breeding partners or rivals. (Side note. He does have chicken stories, however, one of which involves him, as a child, persuading younger children to eat chicken poop. To this day, he maintains that eating chicken poop was, at the time, a good thing to do.) (We live in such suspended realities.) So we did not know, what now we know. Because we are watching and learning, as they do their things, and watching and waiting to watch them some more.
This is not business. This is the school yard proper.
Things “here” are like that.
Sometimes a game and sometimes a miracle, not in the sense of divine intervention, but of the hanged man. We are fools who suffer the foolish reversal of folly, we receive reconciliation, we say, Alhamdulillah. (Allah is ever, over all things, an accountant. And rizq, there shall be many more eggs than we planned. Where shall they go?) Every error, forgiven, is a re-marriage, no less joyful for its lack of positivity.
We are (but) wholesome entertainment, after all.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌓
Modern science may be better understood as an extension of modern politics, than as a descendant of (ancient natural) philosophy.
One is born from wonder and matures into the work of love.
The other is (desire as) conquest, disguised as codifiable law.
(Just because you can light a fire doesn’t mean you’ve understood the flame.)
(Morning was enough.) //
As abrupt muffling shadow,
It slightly thrills me, when
The sky grows dark around 1 pm.
A daily eclipse, the rain is
Welcome relief from
The sun’s blazing
Hot bulb, dampening down.
Wind-driven shush becomes droning
Comforter of water, the sound
And the element of a nap. Dream of
Starfish faces, jellyfish eyes, and
Whiskers of shrimp, seeing softly
Touched lace, skin or feather.
Rest,
But try not to sleep
Through dinner.
Trying to focus on leisure, // to put it as a question. What exactly is it, where does it begin and end in my life?
Why are its edges so blurry?
Also, the idea of spending time. What happens to time if it’s wasted? Does something turn into nothing? Or was it nothing already, so nothing wasted, afterall?
We took a wrong turn in Denpasar today. I did the whole thing where a bule (following my husband, who was following the app) drives into a tiny, urban street that is also a crowded fruit market, and barely squeezes the car through the parked motorbikes and fruit shopping traffic. It was the first time that happened. We did ok. Balinese are so relaxed about stuff like this. People are just glad to see your smiling face.
As I drive, I point out a child hanging on the back of a motorbike, wearing a red and white school uniform, but no shoes. He tells me stories about being hungry, growing up in East Java. How neighbors would invite him in for dinner, to feed him. He always had flip-flops to wear to school, but his mom would get furious if he got his clothes dirty too fast. Kids would do their laundry at school, hand-washing and hanging outside the classroom to dry, so their moms didn’t get angry. (Even the bad kids were afraid of “the moms”.) He had friends that didn’t have flip-flops, because they were poor, so they went to school barefoot. (They didn’t have electricity yet in the village.)
I ask him which is worse, being rich or poor? He says, being rich.
(I’ve heard many of his stories before. We revisit them together, a few at a time. I collect them in an inner archive.)
Living here, I often feel a mixture of awe and loss, at being surrounded by so many stories that aren’t mine to tell, that otherwise slip away. This should probably be felt everywhere, and with everyone. But it isn’t.
Garbage has special metaphorical significance, here. In its apparent self-infliction, its mindless accumulation. (There is a widespread assumption that plastic dissolves back into the earth, like leaves.)
(Wouldn’t that be nice?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌔
Sitting for a passport photo // trying to figure out who I’m looking at. I’ve never been good at smiling (or not smiling, or what) for a camera. I feel like I have way too many faces and I don’t know which one to pull out, and then it feels like an “I-can’t-work-the-body” moment, virtual system failure. Who am I even looking at?
Is this how it is for everyone? I assume not.
Maybe I believe too heavily in the medium. (Smiling cat emoji.)
I always think of the lyrics that start off “Black Diamond Bay”, by Bob Dylan:
Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat.
Her passport shows a face
From another time and place
She looks nothin' like that.
Oh, Bob.
I looked nothin’ like that, for a while. Now, for a while at least, I will look pretty much like that. (They don’t let you wear a wood mask in your photo.
It was strange to see my face so naked.)
Romantic view (2).
On Introspection and Ideology // One Year on “Micro.blog”
As prologue. I’ve been thinking about what Denny wrote here the last few days, and I wanted to thank him for putting it in such stark terms. I think this is an important conversation to have, but not an easy one, especially to address in a public way. This is not intended as an argument against Denny’s initial post. This is my perspective, which I believe overlaps with his in a significant way, but from some different angles. I share here for the sake of supporting, by responding to, his statement, while reflecting our plurality of voices.
“This is who we are.”
Given that I agree with Denny’s assessment of the country’s genocidal history, as a supplement to its present and future likelihood of violence and (self- and other-) harm, that this is its basic definition or essence. On what grounds is there any “we”? If the “we” is defined, tied together and made one, only by those lies and that violence, then how can it be owed any allegiance?
So quickly, for me, the statement, “this is who we are”, becomes the question, “Is this who I am?”
I think that’s more challenging to address, but also, more welcoming. It’s a question, it requires introspection, which is intrinsically uncomfortable, and it will indicate responsibility, which is doubly so. It’s not easy to tease apart national identity (including ideology, lifestyle, family, etc.) from a sense of who you are. It’s grown into all of us in different ways, in ways not at all easy to see or know about ourselves. I would repeat that, we have been brought up in violence. Introspection is bound to dig up the deepest traumas. And I guess there would be as many ways of answering (“Is this who I am?") as there are individual people “around here”.
Speaking of “around here”. A lot of online people talk about seeking community, and they seem to mean by that, affirmation, support, a feeling of safety, agreement, optimism, positive vibes. This makes complete sense, to me. It’s hard for people to feel empowered, without an initial feeling of safety, or rest, or support. I sympathize and I believe that the moral support of online communities for sharing (as people search for a surrogate “we”) is real, valuable, and important.
But I also share Denny’s frustration, that more people in the global north (generally) aren’t incorporating real lifestyle changes (i.e. major simplifying, quitting air travel, eating plants, or other fasting, broadly conceived) in solidarity with those (in and out of the geographic U.S.A.) on the receiving end of a malignant culture of violence and exploitation. (Or if they are, “around here”, they are not posting about it regularly. But also, and this is important to acknowledge, it would never be regularly enough.) Lifestyle changes, incidentally, seem to me more sustainable, more personally empowering, less scary, and probably more effective than organizing for direct confrontation. (Especially for “online types” of people, if I may compassionately akcnowledge that.) I realize also that people resist lifestyle change, for real reasons. It is stressful. When someone is already feeling vulnerable, or exhausted, the last thing they want to do is voluntarily increase their discomfort, which lifestyle change entails. And also, of course, there is supernaturally intense pressure, in dominantly global northern online “places”, to maintain a high-powered lifestyle, to keep up with everyone else’s consumption of new and more stuff. And the ubiquitous implied promise that more stuff will make you happy, or at least, less afraid.
These are things I know that Denny knows, because of the way he lives, and the way he writes about the value of a bag of beans. He writes about it like it’s precious. Which, in truth, it is.
Here is another sliver of irony, which has again to do with the people “around here”. The very act of “moving” onto the independent web, and saying “no” to the loud and abusive “places” of mainstream social media, is an anti-fascist lifestyle change, it seems to me. It is a kind of fasting. It represents sobriety from that extreme form of psychic addiction, (and anybody reading this will know exactly the feeling of sickness), which is mainstream social media. That means, everybody “around here” has taken one real and concrete step, at the very least, demonstrating who they are not. Concrete steps, when they are shared, build a sense of solidarity. And then, “we” are and remain, together, addicts in recovery. As they say, recovery is an everyday effort, which you (InsyaAllah) undertake, every day for the rest of your life.
Is it enough? (Being on the “indie web”.) No. And then, nothing will ever be enough. Not to undo history and the catastrophic effects of American (and other colonial) empire, plus its bottomless appetite for increasingly, stupidly powerful technology, with which it is choking the world. What’s done is done, tipping points were in-all-likelihood conclusively demolished, on Nov. 5, and the future has become ugly indeed. But plenty of paths remain for introspection, and self-possession, by self-sacrifice, by helping others, by standing up for others, by doing work you believe in, work that you stand for, (which includes writing or making art), which (InsyaAllah) become the artifacts that plant seeds of support or inspiration for nobody knows what, but everybody (“around here”) wants to believe.
Here is what I believe, anyway. That introspection is and will always be everything, in the work of anti-fascism, and introspection requires seeking out, actively and intentionally, the quiet voices that pose difficult questions. By which I mean not just the brown peoples' voices who live on the other side of the world, or in the other part of the state, which (apparently) remain abstract figures, for the majority of U.S. Americans. But also, and I mean this in seriousness, the quiet voices of the heart. This is not abstract, this is the opposite of abstract. People may well have different capacities for it, and it will mean different things for every person, to answer the question, in their heart of hearts, (and thereupon reflecting it in their actions), “Is this who I am?” The individual nature of the question means that asking it, in a genuine way, will take time and (what I would call spiritual) work, it will be awkward and ugly, and it will often feel like alienation, or rejection, like the opposite of community. It is notoriously difficult to keep the same group of friends, before and after you release an addiction.
At the same time, I think all of us, always, can use regular reminders of how empowering it is, and how empowering it feels, simply to withhold support from, or investment in, a terrible cause. This is intrinsically difficult to “share”, while it is easy to “share” a new purchase or service or accessory. This is in evidence, for example, all over micro.blog’s discover feed (last time I checked, which was probably a long time ago, because it is peak gaslit Hobbiton, over there). Perhaps people have carried over this habit from mainstream, monetized social media. Because even in the “indie” context of micro.blog, there remains ample expressed support, (which could easily and freely be withheld), of a violent regime enabled not just by fear, and hate, but also by our blind addictions to its poisonous products, in exchange for which many have delivered (or have lost, or are in the process of losing) their very souls. The amplified sharing of products consumed is in no way, at this point, politically neutral.
I guess this also fits as my “one-year anniversary” review, of micro.blog as a service. It works perfectly adequately for me, as a host. Please, no more “A.I.”. Please, keep it simple. The “social” aspect is something else. I’m not going anywhere, probably, as long as @manton can keep it running. But I’m curious to see how the platform and the people deal with what’s coming, with the ongoing human crisis, in all of its aspects, but especially with political deterioration in the U.S.A. Not because U.S. American suffering is worse, than the rest of the world’s suffering, but because U.S. American voices are almost always the loudest, “around here”. And I wonder how “we” will absorb, process, accommodate, and/or respond to the increasing expressions, not only of suffering, but also of violence, explicit and implicit, that make it through, into the blogs. Will what “we” see be a reflection of reality? And whose? Responsible governance also requires introspective effort.
While who this is, the surrogate “we” of “around here”, remains to be seen, I turn this question also back on myself. “How will I do this?”, I keep on asking, over here, in my head, in my in-person life, (which is extremely different in social and cultural character than anything “around here”), and in my blog writing. I’m a stubborn person but I have some experience sacrificing what I believe is good and right for the sake of getting along with a(n in-person, neighborhood, or family) community. I’ve written some about this, but I don’t focus on it, for obvious reasons. I can keep my head down, not make trouble, and I don’t need explicit approval or applause to carry on my own work. I am surely unskilled, awkward, and inexperienced, navigating the whole “social media” scene. For the most part, I avoid confrontation, and also what is called, around here, “conversation”, (which is, for what it’s worth, nothing like the conversations on which I was raised).
But I know this about myself, I have a line. There are things I don’t abide, in the way of abuse, and I’ve been known to pick up and leave, institutional situations, in pretty abrupt ways. (e.g., “I renounce my credentials.") What I’m saying is, if I speak or write about “running off into the jungle”, it’s not an abstract possibility.
My (anxiety and) prediction is this, that the yearning for community is about to get much more desperate, and much more concrete, for all those in the U.S., and perhaps “the West” more broadly. I don’t have solutions for building online relationships, (other than the obvious one, which is, use email), much less for governing online communities, much less anything “on the ground” in the U.S. I have scattered family and friends, and that’s all, in the country of my birth and ongoing citizenship. I will not be travelling there, during a Tr-mp regime. (Even if I wanted or needed to go, it would be too dangerous for my husband, and he wouldn’t let me go alone.) So in this way too, I feel like a mis-fitted part of the U.S. American “we”, gone but not gone, a part of it, but in an estranged and displaced position. This mostly serves as a reminder, to me, that everybody’s situation is unique, and most people, at this point, also have specific ways in which they have become vulnerable. That’s how “creeping fascism” works. But here’s something I have to say that is basically the same for everybody.
I earnestly hope, and pray, in the name of God, (Bismillah hir rahman nir raheem), that people all over the world are seeking out not only the easy but the difficult questions, and discussing them, substantially, with their loved ones, with whatever neighbors and family they hold close, and in their own hearts. I hope people are preparing, with their actions, by practicing, by making and living with the manageable and right sacrifices, now. I’m doing the best I can with this, too, and I pray and work daily, for my own stamina and resolve, to be hard-headed and absolute at the right moments, while retaining a capacity for softness and understanding. To answer the challenge of introspection, and follow until it leads to a deeper source of belonging, one that might overturn, or at least cease the perpetuation of, the violence from which I, as a political animal, was born.
And then, if I’ve learned anything about spiritual community, in its place, by living where I do, (adjacent to indigenous communities that to this day resist the genocidal oppression of colonial past and present), it’s this: side-by-side practice (i.e. of sacrifice) builds solidarity, while solidarity builds confidence and the sense of personal power required for gracefully courageous action. It’s pretty basic, and not meant to be easy. All of us, at some point, will be tested. We will face a sacrifice that seems un-manageable, that seems impossible. We will, each of us, feel very alone. And it will be extremely important, in that moment, not to f-ck it up.
Thanks for reading. May peace, and the blessings, and the mercy of God, be upon you. And have a beautiful full moon.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu and selamat purnama 🌕
Veganism is the “indie web” of food.
Water spinach/kangkung.
My head is buzzing with village gossip, // or the tone and cadence of it, understanding a fraction of the words, still overwhelmed by the density of meaning. (After a night out with family, visiting from Java.)
And I exchange their news, for mine. I bring news of the outside world, and my news is dark. (I am always, it seems, the bearer of bad news.) I am the one who explains climate change, to these kids. (The most basic explanations feel nearly impossible, here.) I have explained the dangers of manipulative messaging in their social media feeds. (That those “places” have owners, who cannot be trusted.) Now I am the one who explains the Western world in its political evolution, that the colonizing powers are turning their culture of violence (this alone is easily explained, as here, they live with its legacy) against their own populations, in increasingly explicit ways. And of course, I have to explain the result of the election. (After all, it’s my country of birth.)
The responsibility feels heavy, like too much to bear, and there are times at the dinner table when the task overwhelms me. I feel myself sinking into my smallness, my powerlessness, my unfitness for this task. But there’s nobody else who will do it. If I didn’t try to explain, then they just wouldn’t know. And that still seems much worse.
There’s an interpretation of my life story whereby I deserve this discomfort. So I pray, and I do my best, acutely aware of the messages that don’t make it. We laugh as we pass around slices of pizza, a taste of salad. As they take selfies, images of surface glitz and status, on phones with jewelry dangling off pastel or metallic cases. My husband holds my hand as we walk to the car. Then I drive us back home, in the dark.
One of Lalah’s favorite things is to use the litter box when I’m taking a shower. So when I am finished, all fresh and clean, I am greeted first thing by a stinking poop to clean.
(Does this mean we’re all antifa now?) //
There are two words for we/us in Indonesian, one that includes you (as in, we live on earth) and the other that does not include you (as in, we live in Indonesia). It’s a useful distinction that English doesn’t have.
My husband reports that yes, I do write like I talk. F.Y.I., bitches.
Everybody has a special talent, their thing(s) they can do especially well. Most skills or talents can be put to use, subversively. We can be open-minded and creative about it. For example, I could be a really good messenger. Of, like, encoded messages.
This most recent translation (poem) I wrote went through really different and weird iterations. It was (uncomfortable, difficult, tricky) to write on the little line of dialogue. So heaps of in-progress verse were there waiting when the election happened. The election result was… key to re-working and finishing.
(This is a message (paraphrased) from my friend, A: When you lose a poem it gives birth to another poem about a lost poem. A poem she wrote was just published and I love it.)
I don’t really want write more poetry (or prose) that is so dark. But, well. It’s a fascinating time in history to be focusing on this specific passage from the Phaedrus. There is unfortunately more sexual violence to come. The intended purpose is therapeutic, … cathartic and transformative. My experience studying the dialogue now is so sharply different from when I was 18. When I first read it, I didn’t get it. I thought it was absurdist nonsense, a rhetorical game, reading the manipulative Lysias speech on sexual manipulation. My young mind could not wrap itself around the fact: the absurdity of (sexual, or other exploitative) violence, being educated into us, marketed, sold to us as love, is real, essential, and absolutely serious.
It breaks us. (?)
Either “The Memory of Trees” is better than I remembered or I’m just desperate for more Enya these days. It has some pretty mystical/elvish-sounding tracks but then I find myself humming the upbeat ones in the shower, this is embarrassing (fun).
Daily thunderstorms bring relief from heat with unpredictably cool gusts of wind, heavy with water. The bath garden is magical after it rains, a hot shower in the cool, drippy, cloudy-dark world. Some wood-ear fungus is growing on a nearby log, it enjoys the steam of my shower, this feels intimate. And we’re still very buggy here, more mosquitoes lately, lots of swarming ants and termites, all different sizes of those, moths, praying mantis, sweet, stingless trigona bees, mud-daubers and “murder hornets”, grasshoppers and crickets, katydids and cicadas, spiders, other spindle-legged bodies, tiny lightning bugs, all shapes and sizes of wriggling worms in the dirt, or coiling centipedes, slippery earwigs, shiny black beetles that are tiny or large, or very large and pincered, like scarabs.
Before, people wanted to protect democracy. After, people need to protect themselves from democracy. Democracy is in itself nothing (more precisely, anything). Education is the something-making.
It’s hard to say “fix your boat” to people who don’t realize they’re in a boat. Sometimes in an inflatable tube in a swimming pool on a gigantic (leviathan) cruise liner. Then I look around and wonder, what’s my boat that I don’t realize? This makes me feel very “Bill and Ted”. (Does it need fixing? Constantly, yes.)
Nature also floats, but it wasn’t built by humans.
(Yes. Yes, it does.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌗
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.)
Condolences 🕊️
Interiors (2).
Good luck, U.S.A.
On Vulnerability as a Key to Everything
This post was inspired by the #weblogpomoama challenge, from Annie, which prompted another Annie’s question and response, which prompted the first Annie’s re-response, which inspired me to reply, so a heartfelt thank you to both (all) of them. As the first (?) Annie wrote, my answer is not an argument with previous replies, it is my personal perspective, or what the question has brought up, for me. If you wish, please “ask me anything”, my email is in the footer, although I don’t promise satisfying answers.
What makes you vulnerable?
Being alive makes me vulnerable. I am vulnerable by nature. If I have been made, then my maker has made me vulnurable. Therefore most of what I have to do, in order to be vulnerable, is “just to let go”, although (as most are aware) that’s easier said than done. In my experience, “just letting go” involves (paradoxically) study and effort. It is a blessing (of God) to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is a prerequisite for anything worthwhile. (Isn’t it?) Love, learning (and therefore, intelligence, wisdom), pleasure. At least, worthwhile from a human (mortal) perspective.
I am vulnerable primarily through my embodiment and my attachments to other bodies, including ecological, political/legal, “marketplace”, and local community interdependence, all of the people (living or dead) whom I love, or embodied children of various modalities (including animal companions and, in a weird way, writing, more on that below). My embodied presence makes me especially vulnerable. The mere fact of my body, (my heart could just stop), its vulnerability to injury by another body, (I could get long covid, etc.), its vulnerability to social or political conditions, and/or punishments, my vulnerabilities as an immigrant, (I am helpless in so many ways), my vulnerability if I were to “run out into the jungle”, etc. My body is constituted almost as pure vulnerability, every part of it is subject to violence or failure. (One is aware of this especially if one lives with “physical disability”, or suffers even an unanticipated moment of it.) But perhaps (InsyaAllah) no vulnerability surpasses the vulnerability of my body in pleasure. I am most vulnerable in love-making or sex, to be blunt about that. For me, the vulnerability of erotic love is vulnerability before God, in the person of my husband/partner. We become witnesses for each other (in love). It requires that we let ourselves be seen (in our utter incapacitation).
“Letting oneself be seen” (whatever that entails) sounds plausibly like the ultimate in vulnerability. But another candidate is “letting oneself be had”.
One can of course “let oneself be seen” in different ways and layers of the self, not requiring orgasm or literal nudity or physical presence or eyesight. I believe in the healing powers of a good cry, with girlfriend, mom or sister, an intimate correspondence in letters, what we here call ngaji, which is patient conversation about spiritual things, etc. But there is something about orgasm, in its special relationship with vulnerability, which it takes and transforms, that the specific experience of pleasure flays the soul wide open, and will fill however much of yourself you can bear to unlock. Tantric meditative practice is a real thing, or the carnal mysticism of Rumi’s poetry, or Plato’s erotic storytelling, for that matter. These describe vividly embodied experiences of vulnerability as access to insight and/or the divine, as God. I would describe Ashtanga yoga practice in these terms, too (lacking the sex, and there’s a whole other topic). Spirituality as a self-studying practice of vulnerability.
In “the valley below”, which is my blog, I may seek the same register of vulnerability, but the embodiment is different, therefore so is the work. Written communications have different dis/abilities than present bodies, different vulnerabilities and strengths, including that, as a writer, one doesn’t know who may be reading. One cannot see the face, smell the breath or the sweat, or grasp the hand of the person to whom one “speaks”. The reader is, possibly or it seems, completely invisible and therefore invulnerable—So I tell you, “you are safe”. This could be one of the principle jobs of a writer, to give a reader the gratification of vulnerability, with none of the risk (a divine sort of privilege). But as most writers know, that’s a lie. Readers are eminently vulnerable. A reader’s vulnerability may not be through the body, but it is there, through the soul, by way of the imagination. By reading, especially with a certain pleasurable naiveté, we open ourselves to wild worlds of deep psychic alter(c)ation. As a writer, I try to be mindful of that vulnerability, while communicating (or, insinuating myself into a “bedroom”) the best that I can.
In writing the blog, I am unsure of my level of vulnerability. The invulnerability of writing would be another divine-seeming and yet dubious privilege. It helps me feel safe that I live “very far away” from almost anybody who would stumble on my blog, and geographic distance plus an ocean around me gives an obvious appearance (or illusion) of safety. It also helps that I wear a mask, that my blog is more-or-less anonymous, that I no longer rely on employment income (or even, strictly speaking, an open-armed welcome) from the country of my birth, my assumption that not many people read the blog, that “helps”, and a calculated guess that even fewer from my local communities, here where I live, will ever read it. Although I am mindful of that possibility (and incidentally, a few interested folks here are, this minute, passing around this piece, translated into Indonesian). I am also mindful of the fact that I live among vulnerable communities, and I care about them dearly. I wish to protect these people and places, whereas exposure (being seen) is enough to destroy many embodied and vulnerable things. So there are certain protections built into my writing, because of this and related (political, legal, privacy) vulnerabilities. “Freedom of speech” is, here, not even a dubious privilege, but an idiomatic slogan that doesn’t apply.
My writing is always trying to describe or share something possibly true, in a vulnerable medium, with a potential reader who is vulnerable, in a vulnerable world, as a vulnerable person, while doing as little harm as I can manage, with unceasing respect for the ever-glimmering unlikelihood of doing (or being) something somewhat good. So the writing is layers of transparent protection, down to the smallest punctuation mark (the liminal crescent of each parenthetical). The work is composed out of metaphorical veils.
One important thing is, I can control every word on this page, in theory. So I have a great deal of control, in the writing, which can make me feel invulnerable (like a magician, or creator god). But every invulnerability of the author becomes a vulnerability of the communication. For example, the fact that I (in my body) am absent from my written words makes them vulnerable to misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or misuse. The meaning of a message (for example, of truth) may not be vulnerable, but the messenger is. I am at constant risk of being taken out of context, (also, server failure), (which is also a euphemism), while at the same time, I find it genuinely difficult to explain my context, in an abbreviated or explicit way (on the blog). And isn’t this difficult, impossible even, for everybody? How can I describe, in a few simple and customary sentences, what I have failed to comprehend fully myself? When it is my life’s work and responsibility not only to understand, but to communicate what is true. To write a few sentences presents context as cut, dry, and known. Like a fact. Whereas, when you know me in my place, you will naturally understand that my context is… infinite. (Reflecting this, I would guess that I’m more vulnerable, as a reader, than I am as a writer. As a reader, I default to generosity.) It is inherently and notoriously difficult to communicate (about) infinite things, in a straightforward way. Anything infinite, as a message, (selves, worlds, justice, beauty, etc., anything divine), becomes vulnerable to the limitations of the messenger.
Another vulnerability of a written communication is its inherent silence.
One might imagine all kinds of monsters, in that silence. And I do feel vulnerable, or afraid of being dismissed or ignored, or of readers who might think I’m (stupid, “cringe”, arrogant, fake, I don’t know, please fill in the blank), or I’m crazy, (which I am, sometimes, and I’ve decided, that’s ok). This is a natural fear for any artist, not just me (or you). I believe that because I read it in The Artist’s Way, which I think is a lovely and therapeutic book, (although I don’t stand behind everything it says, or anything like that), touching on themes of vulnerability in creation, and I recommend it to anyone struggling with “imposter’s syndrome”, or whatever other names for it there are. An artist is chronically vulnerable to those fears, and they can be entirely crippling.
As for my own fear of rejection, I consider that a sort of sacrificial feeling, so I take a knife to it. (Doubtless it’s to my advantage, that I live in a community where ritual offering is public and commonplace, and is always notably at the expense of “business”.) Part of the sacrifice is letting go of the pride that would make me feel humiliated by rejection, or failure, letting the blood drain out of that part of myself (on the hypothesis it’s not an essential part). It helps that I sacrifice it (fear/pride) for something that I experience and acknolwedge as sacred. Whether the sacrifice is delivered in a (or the) name of God, in gratitude as a translator of my teachers, in gratitude as a translator of earth, or whatever the poetry is that day, if there was to be any real or important message in my writing, I wouldn’t consider it my own.
Somewhere in here is the paradoxical in/vulnerability of the fool, who carries the world bundled on their shoulder as they step off a cliff. After decades of writing in a context of fear, to protect my (embodied) professional, social, and political vulnerabilities, I removed my body, (or at least my face), and invited a fool’s energy (back) into my life. And as it turns out, I am altogether happy having nothing to sell. Blogging brings me joy only if I empty it as much as I can of vanity, or an attachment to reward or response, which devolves (for me?) very easily into fear. Most of us (embodied souls) harbor some trauma, here, and I do, too. The feeling of fear or pain can be an indicator of vulnerability, but a reflexive response also stifles access to vulnerability, and all of its fruits. (That’s a yoga lesson, for me, but easy to witness in “everyday life”, including in sex.) Here, there is work to be done, the aforementioned study and effort, and also the sacrifice. Below the pain, I sing to myself, there will be the deepest and easiest pleasure. There will be selflessness, humility, and also liberation in singing for a possibility more remote than the most distant star, which is also a silence, born into the heart of things. That is the kind of vulnerability that I seek, in writing, the in/vulnerability of a (“god-damned”/“blessed”) fool.
Which I understand also as submission to God, and as jihad, in the context of Islam. To me, in my “old life”, this would have sounded like a very strange thing to say, but Islam keeps encouraging the development and practice of my voice. For which my gratitude is… as yet, by me, uncounted. I haven’t reached the end of it. My belief (or my experimental hypothesis, which I also gratefully engage as part of a living lineage, the vastness of which I am still discerning, which is to say, I’m still learning, from the written and living people in my life, as well as from “the trees”) is that tapping the soul’s deepest vulnerability translates its silence into strength.
All the while, a fool has simpler and more superficial incarnations. I enjoy also the nostalgia of being a teenager, pouring her feelings out into a journal, blogging about ruched tube tops, chickens, sexual feelings, or the rain. (“Silly things”.) But this one, here, is no longer a girl. She is rather an emergent crone, and a savvy (if sappy) old bitch, recreating and rediscovering that joy and that sufficiency, in a historical context that will remind her, constantly, just how vulnerable she is. Especially to fear. I guess the joy (if there’s joy) of the blog is also a certain armor. And nobody’s really going to pierce through that. (Are they?)
A metaphor for the parts and a different metaphor for the whole, is a human being. // That old triple goddess, the zoon logon echon.
Or like Prometheus holding desperately onto his chains, while his insides are being picked at, so he doesn’t fall into a void. (Permitting a small symbolic alteration..)
I sometimes think about the central mediations of the major Abrahamic religions (as far as I understand them) and how those must be key to the logic of their respective theologies. For Judaism, the covenant. For Christianity, a mother and a father becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child, and/or the passion. For Islam, the messenger.
It gives me some confidence that, even though it seems like a geographical accident, I (we) found my way to the messenger, (the messenger found a way to me?), when a messenger has already accomplished the most important mediations in my life, over and over again, clothed in different bodies and texts and appearances. My life’s passion and work has been the search for and interpretation of messages. Now, I am offered a message of Islam, which is a message of Peace (as-Salam, as in, assalamualaikum). As a world composed of messages, the messaging world has been very kind, to me. It has cradled me, (I always think of Thich Nhat Han, counseling me to cradle my anger), to make the anger inside of me feel loved and cared for, that has been the love and care of the messenger, patiently sending messages. Waiting for me to find them, and listen to them, and discover their sense, and follow them. Until, at last, a message of peace.
A messenger is very close to the Logos. A messenger is an apt prophet for writers and above all translators. A messenger is a teacher who doesn’t teach, a (musical) counterpoint to learning, especially from afar. A messenger carries a message and it’s not, strictly speaking, her own. A messenger might bring the news, or she might bring a message of peace.
The “seeming” shifts. It stops seeming like a geographical accident, and begins to seem like (reveal itself as) destiny. As it does, other things fall into places, that were already falling, as a planetary whole. Like a webbing of streams and rivers flowing into lakes and then oceans.
(I have a tradition.)
A message can come (and go) in many forms. Its essence is in its (departure and) arrival (and in the differences between these things). A message is manifold and fitting.
What I feel, when I feel my feelings, is resonance, and then humility, and then gratitude. (Resonance is with study, which is measured, but all three are somewhat infinite feelings.) That a message might reach me from across the entire world, in a way that feels “right on time”, (a message delivered is always on time), and these are the messages that have.
(I am a jihadi.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
I’m wearing a ruched tie-dye tube top, I’m self-actualizing✨