Last night, beneath a sky full of stars. Crickets and tongaret and frogs of a hundred voices, night bird from the jungle with a wistful lilt. Full chorus. From within, Pacitan and Glagahdowo chat tentatively as they wire a fixture, poke fun at R., the youngest, for an accident with the motorbike. (He’s ok.) How did so much time pass without seeing stars? (One of rainy season’s more subtle effects, no stars for months.) The sound and the visible meet in expansive absorption. One doesn’t want to leave the moment for anything.
(One must, and so, one does.)
This morning. Wake in the different, the old, the becoming emptier place, where our presence thins. Wijaya kusuma, orchids, instruments, gone. Cats observant, unsure of change. To abandon all of these heavy, unfixable things.
But our footsteps are lightness. We orchestrate movement, flowing now as if downhill. We tell Blih that he absolutely must come visit (arguing against his inner voices). And we prepare, part by part, to disappear.
(To the place where one listens to stars.)
Aspiring to harmlessness.
Wijaya kusuma (3).
Amber citrine on midnight velvet smiling surprised me above the tree line as we left to see what the house (electric installation) looks like by night. Giving shapes and lines an implied trickery or deception, warmly but also cruelly comedic, elegant. The moon with two horns. Reasons to be happy and reasons to be very very sad, these past few days. Rediscovering the deep well dug down through the bedrock of the soul called grief.
Repetitive, slow single bangs from a place behind, across the small concrete waterway, that delivers rain and runoff down land. As chopping wood? The refrain of roosters seamlessly fused with the pastel light. Memory of a word, perhaps useless here, equiprimordial. I still shape it into a whisper.
Sometimes the scent of a pale peach rose is the cool feeling on your cheek of the breeze blowing from the west through the rice fields in central Bali that might bring more rain tomorrow but has cleared away the rain from yesterday.
Offering for fish.
Intensification and a crushing-in by sound that triggers claustrophobia. Awake in dark. Loudness outside everywhere pressing in on our small room. An image comes, half-speculation, of rushing rising from below, lifting up this piece of earth. Anxiety of infinitude. How (could it not be empty yet)? Where (is it all coming) from? The sheer scale of element overwhelms the primate calculation. Ocean, immense. A spare fraction of her being is enough to wash us (and drowned dreaming) all away.
(Stop thinking about anything else, stop writing, cover eyes, and become fish.)
Finally, all are home. Precipitation never stopped. Heavy mood of endless rain, (which oddly doesn’t appear on any radar map), shadowless medium fades to thickened black. Cloaked under cloud, enshrouded by water, all but forgotten by the outside world. The relief of becoming profoundly inaccessible.
Morning of puddles, drips, gurgles, the persistent lap and blur of water on glass, glossy leaves nodding under plonks of rain, tucking in noses and toes to keep warm and dry. Homecomings expected, green shadows, grey shining, detached from specifics of time, but waiting. Sunlight without direction.
Bat at sunset.
Sound of rain, to look up, and admit that morning’s reverie is over. The incense of an offering, long since out. The fact of having eaten, (or an empty plate, sitting there), without clear memory of it. A heavy sigh as day changes position, rolling over into evening, and shifting atmosphere blows trees into an ocean, cooling. Jeki appears, we choose an herb responsive to the coming dark. Feed her and strike a flame. Turn it into smoke, inhale a little nighttime air, and go to bed, quite early.
Blue is the moon in her transparency,
And dark the sky, when she looks to the star
Without whom we would all be rock. We would
Be third person, un-personed remainder
After love, with unbound freedom, to scream
Anything and go unheard, unspoken.
So, blue becomes the face of unrequited
Silence. Earth, displaced from selfhood, touches
That, the final leaving off, so that it
Might grow conceivable. And that being
It, empty of form, pure as blue, still as
Clear water, shows her, heavenly, a home.
Indifference remains unwed, yet breaks
Open in the absolute reflection.
Sky from home (2).
(To be clear, the witch does not advocate cooking kittens. She means cats, metaphorically.)
Stirring the cauldron. // Today is the last day of the waning crescent and it seems I am borrowing her shape, words keep surfacing these last few days that just aren’t ripe enough to make fruit. So instead of putting out, I add them back into the whorl of thoughts, wondering, (about unruly kittens), if they can break down and remix into a shape more suitable for survival.
The Darwinist, with his recommendation of adapting, not for the present, but for the future, thereby advises that she who wishes to survive, become versatile. (“And do the right thing, as quietly as possible.”) We work on this project. What is more versatile, human life or the written word? What will prove itself thus? What words could survive us? Questions for history and technology.
Of course, the first (woman’s) question was (and always has been) what, if anything, is worth anything at all? What of this life is worth living, whether I am (always) anger or (possibly) grace, and whatever could it be that I am trying to save from the burning city. Because it isn’t my visible self, in the sense contained in these dying words. The heart of someone I have never reached, whose emanation I am sensing with every cell, for whom I attempt transparency, self-finding through self-erasure.
(Perhaps, one works to save fire.)
Tomorrow is dark moon, rest day. So the work of today is preparing for sleep, negating the slim shape, and mothering oneself with a soothing song. That there is nothing more versatile than the churning depth of a dream.
Spider practice. // Not just the weaving of her web, a trap and a home and a cosmos and a sort of destiny. But also, the way it (daily) breaks, and how she does it again, and again, and again. This is her work and her expression. Loss, and the spirit of starting over from (seeming) nothing. Discovering new anchors, and then, half-measuring, half-making relationships between them. Living on strands of silk is not dissimilar to living on hypothesis. (Her spider soul suspended somewhere between dia-noia and noesis.)
Wijaya kusuma (2).
That was a little witchy, wasn’t it.
But cats are only ever half-tame and you’re never sure which half is in play, which one aflame. Familiar look, at any moment liable to anger (or just disappear). Stranger-purpose, brought intimate. Cuddly soft, leisurely cruel. Wild cherished messenger. Children to be kissed, cradled, and obeyed.