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✨
Interiors (1).
(There were certain things that you kept from me.) //
Rainy days lately, and buggy, with small flying termites swarming frosted lightbulbs, at nights, and particulate rivers of ants spanning surfaces in exploratory veins, locating and removing insect bodies, leaving translucent brown confetti, so many spent wings, scattered across the floor.
A breath, and they disperse.
A moth alit on the soap dispenser, a velvety shield of black and cream stripes against a liquid surface of stainless steel reflection.
A tiny, brightly-humming wasp building mud cradle-tubes on the bedroom door. To be woken in the morning by its sunny song.
Homestyle curry cooked on a rainy afternoon. Onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, chilis. Potatoes, carrots, broccoli, tofu. Remembering how to improvise. It always tastes better on the second day.
A few of the baby roosters peck food from our hands now. The same few linger nearby and make eye contact, inquisitive, observant. One already has a little cockscomb, although it’s still black. (Frankie’s is a blazing red, like the chilis, with a full scarlet mask and cheek lobes.) Another has pinkish-red patches showing around his face and neck, and stunning glimpses of iridescent copper and blue, green, and purple nestled in his otherwise black feathers. One is a little smaller, with black and white marks like a tuxedo. Each child rooster looks a little different. We won’t know their “final forms” until they go through a full adult molt. That’s several months away, at least.
Frankie arrived here as a plain-looking juvenile, but then he had a dramatic transformation. Now, he is deep coppers and rich burnt caramel creams, chocolate browns blended with black, a frothy cappuccino ruff, teal patches on his sides, a forest green fountaining cascade of tail feathers, and the aforementioned bright red mask and comb. In my opinion, he is a rooster of flamboyant elegance and circumspect stature, a proudly beautiful bird, tempestuous and refined. Almost always with a faint goofy undertone.
I want to take a picture of him, but he is paradoxically hard to get a good picture of. He doesn’t appreciate having a camera (phone) put in his face.
(Some things I don’t need to know. But some things, I can’t help it, I just wish I did, about you.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.🌑
One might feel alone, or imagine oneself joining a chorus of the unheard. Every song about war is longing in its heart to be a song about peace. (The flow and the solidarity of Music.)
Experiments in self-compost.
Fruits, flowers, and one active choice. //
I watched my husband turn the spray-bottle (for “cat discipline”) on Frankie, which was utterly ineffective, mildly confusing for Frankie, and funny for us. (Chickens have no problem with water.) It’s not very effective on Ismail, either. We might have to add vinegar, then Ish will hate it, in his casual way.
He and I are capable of self-discipline. But when it comes to others, we are terrible disciplinarians. It brings us joy to see (and let) others break rules. A luxury of being child-free, I guess, or a vice that we “permit ourselves”.
Frankie and Grace have a collaborative romance. Frankie builds nests for her and catches bugs and grubs and gives them to Grace. Grace did the same for their children, until she emancipated them. They share their peanuts. They sleep together, Grace and Frankie perched on top of the coop with the children safe (if not silent, sometimes a little rowdy) inside. The chickens have a family.
The sufficiency of apricot-scented roses. Trigger warning: America.
What is called politics (or democracy) in U.S. America is a highly-formalized, performative/participatory ritual of nostalgia for the sacrificed/human act of choice. Not unlike Attic tragedy.
Imagine attending (or abstaining from) that yearly Dionysian hoedown.
…and recognizing it as your (now) destiny.
There must eventually be a satyr play. Traditionally, after three of these. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, it just seems, rhythmically, a necessary thing. Which might be the lure of the uglier alternative. The aestheticization of politics is (Walter Benjamin’s term for what I describe as) enthusiasm without education.
(Was subsequently referred, through a rabbit hole, to this talk given by Robert Frost, where he compares an education by poetry to “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor”. … While, and this seems important, he also emphasizes poetry as that from which we learn the limits of metaphor.)
“The election” in 2016 seems like U.S. America lost a kind of virginity. Thinking about the myth of virginity, and its loss, as a suffered trauma that cannot be repeated because it substantially changes things, who you are, your character, what can be said or is true about you. Through one Passion, or act of suffering, the landscape of possibilities changes, completely. (The protagonist doesn’t have to be “the anti-christ”, or an actual rapist, but calling him that makes it feel more real.)
Not pathei mathos (learning by suffering), pace Aeschylus, but pathei genesis (by suffering, being born).
Watching someone fall prey to their own mythologized monsters, using predation as an excuse for predation. This is also (sadly) a “feminist take”.
By no coherent logic do one-hundred and sixty-million individual choices add up to one active choice. Allah is ever, over all things, an Accountant (al-Haseeb, Qur’an 4:86).
Lemon is one of my favorite fruits, flowers, and flora. Also, vanilla (which, if you didn’t know, is an orchid). Imagine growing both in the same garden. Pollinators would love it and so would we.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
Groundworks, bare.
Beautiful flowers // grow out of chicken shit. Sometimes the work is to see chicken shit and imagine flowers, sometimes to see flowers and imagine chicken shit.
Of all known technologies, the best and most reliable way to preserve something is (still) to keep it alive. And, failing that, to make it alive.
An inherent problem of place-based politics is its need for oppression as government. Which can come in the form of punishment, in the form of “education”, or in the form of education.
Politics without place happens through literature and on the internet, by extra-judicial combinations of algorithm, chance, history, and psychic powers (“spirit”, human ambiance, Pan, etc). This is barely politics at all. People become shapeless and unpredictable (wild) without a shared place to anchor them, or if not a shared place, then a strong narrative of that.
Beware the “strong narrative”, which is back in the realm of “education”… often it’s been brought along, unawares.
If you yell at a child, they become an adult who yells, or an adult who is silent.
The work of a writer is, by the written work, to show somebody how to read, not just the work, but the world.
This may be obvious, // but as everybody knows, obviousness is relative.
When the thing that would make you happy has been planned out of your civilization, this can mean something different for everybody.
For no reader do I recommend fascism or joining cults or eating an animal.
(Some things can be written in stone. Others should be written only in wax, or on the wind, etc.)
Ten roosters crowing is not just a metaphor, it is also real. Hence, the “news” category. There will be ten roosters crowing, at my house.
(We will have to name them, I guess. The nine juveniles. The dad is already named Frankie. Grace is the Hen. “Fun fact”, Grace and Frankie is a tv show starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Frankie is the name of Lily Tomlin’s character.)
When I don’t use an emoji, the mood that I am communicating is, “I am not in the mood to express myself with a cartoon right now.”
(I added that to my emoji dictionary.) (For a minute, I got confused between roosters and emojis. There are a lot of both!)
To communicate in writing requires synthesis between writing as yourself and writing for “the reader”.
“The reader” is only ever inside your head. It is almost absolutely plural. Hmm.
(Inside your head, “the reader” can feel nearly synonymous with “the writer”… also, in a blogging neighborhood.)
To every one of you, I have something different to say.
To every one of you, thank you🙏🏻 for showing me ways to break out of my civilization.
(That’s what I look for, in blogs.)
…“almost absolutely plural”…
Salam to all🌓
Romantic view.
Three yolks, two pulsas, no home. // Last night we ran out of two kinds of pulsa at once, it was just bad luck, but our reward was to spend a night without internet or cellular. That is still an odd kind of quiet, unsettling to notice how compulsively I check internet things. I surrendered to connectionless-ness by (of all things) reading a book.
I feel cleansed now; saintly.
Infrastructure concerns. My mother who went through a hurricane two weeks ago is (fine, but) still experiencing power outages and spotty internet service (from the storm). I don’t know where I would move anymore. Maybe the last safe place in Florida will be the last safe place… and the multitude of homeowners who are desperation-betting on that same thing. No time like the present… to liquidate assets. Dollar-face emoji, tsunami emoji, filed under “texts not to send”.
Stories about Mars are stories.
Stories about the Moon are stories.
Stories about Earth are stories.
(Staunching an open wound with stories.)
What is placeless has no home.
The vibe around here shifted because Grace decided it was time to ditch being a mom and take a lover again. (The lover is Frankie.) So while the juveniles have become a roving band of nine goofy pre-teens, Grace is an expressive queen, squawking to the heavens before each egg laid. Hen labor is painful and intense. Grace is also a demanding queen, so they copulate with abandon, and Frankie is her designated guardian. I carry a broom, in case Frankie decides I’m a credible threat. (He is bred for fighting and I am “a chicken”.) Grace leaves eggs tucked all over the place, I never realized egg hunting was a real-life thing, until now. (Practical chicken birth control.) Looking for them makes me feel like a child on Easter morning. Each one found is perfectly rounded and smooth, in clouded ivory, texture of water-shaped stone, the inside heavy with liquid potential. The shell feels thinner than it should be, protecting infinitude. I cradle it in my thieving hands, gaze at it with my thieving eyes.
I love questions.
I am questions, too, excavated insides of who-knows-what. Being the question, opening up, the beggar’s bowl of ecstatic reunion. Even (especially) a crone conceals an egg-shaped interior, triple of yolk, with strange constellations unfolding across their inky, jelly-fat surfaces. The placeless-ness inside.
I am a thief. Of infinite potential!
(Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. All eggs are offered to al-Haqq, the True.)
Salam to all🌔
Most people who believe or feel like they’ve disavowed God have more accurately disavowed an idol, which I believe is a perfectly fine and healthy thing to do. The more serious and terminal problem is the array of idols that people continue to serve, to which many will without hesitation sacrifice e.g. their own children.
Today I realized that gangs of wild street dogs know the spatial boundaries of my vehicle better than I do.
The (only) answers are in mirrors.
“Guide of the perplexed sea witch”. //
Certain ancestors were about to be angry if she didn’t make that joke.
Circe polypharmakos at home on her island. Making her magic. Laughing at images she conjures of herself.
The herbs will not teach, but they carry a message.
We run an orchid roadside rescue service. If you know of an orchid in need of rescue, please contact us at the email in the footer.
Howard Ashman was the shape of my 8yo heart, what about yours? (A youtube link. Please listen to the end.)
The connectivity of interior structures and sensations, made possible by breath. Stretching my right psoas and unwringing the “deep front line”, I can feel the pull and release through different channels in my neck. That is not surprising. But sometimes, I feel it pulling back from my inner ear. That is surprising. Or pulling at the back of my tongue. At the same time, I can feel a deep release under the arch of my right foot. Like serpents inside, listening, dancing, trying to speak.
Given, that we can never be friends. Let us be alien-dream twin sisters.
We shall meet here at midnight. Under the stars. Attended by tame animals we have made out of men who knew only violence. Don’t worry, they all presently agree that things are much better this way.
Who, out of all of them, gets the prize for having told the most beautiful lie?
This body is full of secret sounds. Waiting in here to be found. Aeaea!
Even less could the sparkling sapphire of Truth be removed from Her setting.
She was the gender of fire.
She was the gender of water.
She was as you like it.
Salam to all.
Sky from home (9). // Selamat purnama🖤
I said to a friend that she doesn’t have to read my blog, at all, because she has a better version of it, which is me.
Now stuck in this thought wondering which one is better or whether the comparison makes any sense. (So typical!)
Something about orchids. //
A mistake on a small road is easier to fix than a mistake on a big road.
If I only knew how and could do absolutely everything in the world, then I wouldn’t need anybody else, at all, ever. The fantasy of anti-politics. (A grouchy thought I had that made even me laugh.)
I guess this post on loudness is in a way a follow-up to this one, which is on, ok, I forgot what it was on. Something political that I don’t want to re-read.
The entirety of my political views can adequately be summed up as: education is the sine qua non of politics.
Woke up from a dream about the blog, where I looked at the photos and the last five or six photos were all of cloudy grey skies, and they started blurring into each other and expanding. It’s a vibe I like but try to avoid on the blog.
I remember knowing only grocery store orchids. You know what those are. Or any orchid that you buy from a shelf, in a pot or mounted in media, that you take home and put in your house, or your garden. These are lovely, predictable, clean and tame things. But then I came here, and began to meet wild orchids. Orchids that live in the trees, in the jungle, on the mountain or in the ravine. There’s something about an orchid, how it sits in its place, how it inhabits, infuses itself into and out of the surrounding life, clinging to tree branches, nestled in deep sponges of green and brownish-black, respirating and perspirating the bodies of mist that roll in at night. Leaves being sniffed and scampered across by a passing reptile or rodent, the ants and tiny wasps that visit for nectar or moths that flutter past the floral apparition. The grizzled reaches of its roots, aerial and earthen, as the spirit taps into and from everything. Some of the most enchanting orchids I’ve seen are the tiny ones, with delicate foliar structures and thread-thin blooms, indescrible furry textures, feeling everything out, and it’s their thorough presence. They radiate with the truth of this, that
You can’t take an orchid out of the jungle. It doesn’t remain the same thing, when you do that. A person would have to live in the jungle, to know the orchid. This person wouldn’t remain the same thing, either.
An orchid isn’t the fantasy of anti-politics, but the religion of a cosmic polity. An orchid is the true revolution.
“Fire blue as glass” is Dylan Thomas' “Fern Hill” but sung from a mermaid perspective.
(The “mer-spective”.)
Salam to all🌖
Fire blue as glass.
View from the caldera. // So we’ve returned, after a trip that was at the last minute extended, twice, and an exhausting drive back, that included stopping for car trouble, which isn’t worth mentioning but I got dehydrated and it is taking me a few days to work off the headache and refill energy stores. Sometimes it’s like this, when you disappear into Java for a while.
I used one of these “nitter” instances to access information about the major hurricane headed straight for my mother over the last few days of the trip. (So many peoples' helpful contributions are still stuck inside of that “hell on earth”.) (Now thinking about the meaning of hell and the meaning of earth, not wholly comfortable with that expression, there. To be clear, the hellish is only so by its alienation from earth, and its attempt as-such to dominate earth. Hell is alienation. Earth is almost the opposite of that.) (And then, you have to let the words slip through their evolutions, like picking a lock, listening for things to fall into the grooves.) Even with the limitations of browsing through a choppy third party, it remains massively evident, one of the main patterns that makes social media exponentially harmful in a democracy: it is full of stupid things that are very popular.
Social media teaches people to be loud and to love the loud. When what you really need is to teach people to be quiet, and to teach people to hear the vanishingly quiet. In order to do that, people need to stop. What you really need most of all is for people to stop.
People will never stop if they live in a world about being loud, where they are taught to listen to the loud, taught to be loud, taught that loudness is good. This runs parallel to Monhandas Gandhi’s insight that Ahimsa is prerequisite for understanding. Loving the loud while understanding the True is possible, but requires the accumulated insight of interbeing. Interbeing is more like gateways into Samadhi, which will be the culmination of a study that began with Ahimsa. You can only come back to “loving the loud” from the other end of a cycle, over which you have stopped seeking it and stopped trying to be it, a cycle through which you have in fact become a measure of the quiet.
This is also teaching by doing, in the sense of Arjuna fighting his family, as is his dharma, in the war. It means to stop talking and start doing, to make a message of your life, to purify your actions of self-servitude, in the sense of purifying your actions of service to the finite, in the ways that are possible for you, who are presumably, partially, human. The only true teaching is to teach how to learn. To teach how to learn, you must show how to learn, which means, to show how to listen to the very quiet. Which means, showing how to become oneself quiet. It means
showing
being
quiet.
Writing is a dance of symbols around the truth of things. It can absolutely be beautiful but will never be satyagraha. Poetry is a polytropic pedagogy of silence, another word for this could be psychopompy, which is also a seduction into that thing: the quiet. If you do not know how to love the quiet, you do not know how to love. Desire is inflamed and transformed by the watery veils that have fallen before it. All of this is a path in the service of destiny, the final destiny being servitude as self-understanding. This is your deepest desire, fulfilled.
Tears were overflowing down my cheeks as I sat on the squared-off wood bench, on the opposite side of the room from my mother-in-law, Ibuk, who day-by-day and year-by-year has lost connectivity with herself and her others. She is falling back into pieces, and she looked at me completely lost, for some moments, which just made my tears come at higher volumes, fat streams of salt down This Elizabeth’s face. Until she reached her hand for me to go to her, which I did, and then she put her arm around my shoulder. This is something I’ve done for her, when she is crying, many times now, sometimes with “success”. Like that, in reverse, me feeling lost and helpless, her in a gesture of undeniable form but clouded content, we sat together and watched my husband, who was her son, his left eye smudged purple, (It wasn’t my violence. But was it my violence?), performing salah, (down and up and down again), in the next room. Which was her bedroom, with her mattress against the naked wall, a polyester fleece strewn across it, twisting faded colors in plastic fluff, from an irrelevant cartoon, as if the very blanket from my childhood in 1980’s America. The miracle of (plastic) being there.
Three a.m., the morning after the wedding, the baby came. Mother and child are healthy and fine, Alhamdulillah. The hurricane went right over my mother. On my advice to “make it cozy,” she had furnished their “safe room” with reclining chairs from the lanai, bottled water, and an axe. She was text messaging me from inside the eye, she didn’t lose power until the opposite side of the eyewall, about which she said, and I quote, “Back side is ummm. Different,” before losing contact for the entire journey from Probolinggo to the ferry in Banyuwangi. (The winning truck logo of the day was Banyuwangi Sexy.) Which I drove, beginning in Basuki, and now I’m an official cross-country driver, yee-haw, in this life, where at any moment all of it flashes before you like the matrix of lights on the front of an overnight bus, in its fitful passing, plowing into a head-on collision, with you, and all you have is the possibility of a shoulder to pump the brakes and pull over onto, the gravel always too bumpy, and the sudden hope-adjacent afterthought that thank goodness you weren’t on a bridge over a ravine. But my mother was fine, Alhamdulillah, not in a storm surge zone or a flood-prone area, (unlike many others, for whom I offer prayers and condolences), just underneath your average eye of a category 3 ‘cane. With windows and doors rated to 150mph winds. Not sure she’ll stay for the next one, though. Alhamdulillah.
Java has always been the “endgame”. (For us, for me, for different reasons that curve around into the same.) The place of furthest extent, into I’m not sure what, which is sometimes the point. As El-n has Mars, maybe, I have Tengger, and I do also conceive of this as my response to an existential risk. I contemplate whether this is an influence that he personally has had on my life, that his hubristic insanity has made it not only possible but perhaps it is now everybody’s responsibility, to go hubristically crazy ourselves. He’s at least made the argument more persuasive, if not more loud. So that an xennial white lady like this, (who is not the Karen Elizabeth, Karen is the first name of Other Elizabeth, suspected spy), could actually take lessons from the seditious Gujarati who, (while he failed to prevent it’s partition), still fasted his way to Indian nationalist liberation. (The medicines have been strong.) (Not that it matters, to a volcano.) One can feel the things turning, keys slipping into place. Ibuk’s hand on my shoulder, her hand in my hand. The earth is getting eaten by fire and water and air, elements churned into a rage by the stupidity of popular things, and the momentum of the human as it ploughs into the outerspace depths of its innerspace desires, knowing so much but least of all how to stop. So the silent call, for everybody with ears to learn to be quiet, to show being quiet. To hear being quiet, to learn how to stop. Just to stop. After which, will be time for invisibility. At least this was my view from the caldera, now we’re back to the valley below..