I guess I live now in a world of rain. Always about to rain, and sometimes does, and if I wash dishes, my face beads with moisture, from me or from the damp air, pores open, passable, sensitive, vulnurable, and everything must be said in a whisper, as at a funeral. Borderless, spherical. Thoughts too cutting for snails and frogs, who would breathe them in like blades, must be shared without syllables. With touch, immediate, tears tasted by skin, and that this world could dissolve in compassion.
From one perspective, by falling back asleep this morning, after feeding the cats, I wasted half the day; but from another, death is what we see when awake, and why would I waste a perfectly good Sunday morning like that; then again, I take from this fragment (21) that Heraclitus didn’t have cats.
Wijaya kusuma (1).
It started with the ants. The ants are being pesky today, (small beady black ones), doing this thing they sometimes do when it rains: they come out of the ground, running in circles with nowhere to go, so they find (my) food more quickly than usual. Then a pink and purple salad with inky black elements (no, not the ants!) next to pumpkin electrifies the day. Something I love is the always-everywhere freshness of vegetables, here. Still full of midnight air. Strings of raw, grated cabbage and beet are juicy and sweet-bitter, like the best Saturday ever, (or, as Sappho says, like love). I immediately want to share, with E., who is in Java today. So I add it to a list of things that need sharing. The list will solve problems of place, and time. Whereas love solves the problem of
Easy gloom, gentle periods of rain, and barely a transition from sleep. Or at all. Water, earth, air, at an even temperature. The wet doesn’t dry, the dry doesn’t wash away. Coffee blends into a universal container, as the dream becomes lucid, and atmosphere moderates a few simple questions.
A funny thing is when a meow turns into a yawn.
As I was a girl in school, and a lover of astronomy, I did a library research project on black holes, and the method of their making. Supernova. A “would be” thing. What a momentous spectacle (it “would be”)! To witness what (would already have) precluded (what I am). A celebrated freedom of imagination, or. Divine law, twisting, turning, and now. As monsters happen to be real, her bindings tremble. Her eyes won’t shut. (“Just don’t let me go,” she says to him. “When I beg you to let me go.”)
Learning to discern between hunger that’s sick and hunger that’s healthy. (Patho-logical and… logical? auto-logical? dia-logical?) In cat care, self-care, care in general. Observing, treating for, recovering from, parasites. (Overshoot, and the ana-logical.) Swallowing bitter herbs.
Unusual calm this morning, absence of demand. (Explained later by the fact, which I missed, I was sleeping, that somebody else took care of jobs that are usually mine.) A shadow of floating, displaced fear, and a choice, to let the intimacy of sensation remind me that we are (here, and not un)real.
A day spent adjusting between conflicted places and moods. Driving through Denpasar in Sweet Orange, windows down, concrete heat. Hair stuck to my cheeks, impossible to clear. Music from a younger country, (pie), dobro and whiskey, as the sun goes down and the city takes shape, interiors lit, full of smartphone advertisements, food stalls, diesel fumes, cartoon boba shops. A moment of lightness (under bright lights) in a foreign space. Dealing out as needed, the inside occupied by questions of boundaries and the effort it takes to let something go. Nothing quite settles until we get home, (it’s not home yet), wash feet, splash face, new toothpaste the scent of orange and cloves. Head on pillow. Ish, asleep. Lalah, playing, on top of the armoire. Waiting for E., and the closeness of warm skin, and for all of these things to slow to a stop.
Anger in writing becomes virulent. It never tires and lacks feeling for when to stop. Rage without responsibility does damage unmeasured, unintended, uncontrolled. You (we) know better than these written words. Friends, take care. Turning untempered anger into writing is making the material of war.
There’s something I have to write about but it’s giving me a hard time. It feels like this writhing thing inside of me that wants to get out, (you know, the usual feeling), but if I try to write about it, the words trail off, my fingers stop moving. It’s not that I’m scared of sharing this with you, (I love you but/and you’re really nobody, to me), I have a block just putting it down in written sentences. The words aren’t there to summarize.
Writing down is an alchemical treatment that some things resist. For different reasons, maybe, that I have yet to understand. The frustrating thing is, (why this of all things?), how simple it should be to put down. And at the same time, how alien the words will be from the experience, because the experience is (was) confusing and, well, terrifying in ways I maybe don’t want to share, or “externalize”, (it strikes me, what dubious complexity is hidden inside that word), or let go of.
Something precious (to me) that I don’t want to let go of.
(Working on it.)
So cloudy this morning that the air gets darker as the sun rises. Everything outside is dripping wet, water-heavy, steamy muffle. Good for frogs, orchids, snails, mushrooms, mold… sleepy farmers. A touch cool, perfect flannel shirt weather, the monsoon holds, the atmosphere keeps wringing out rain.
I imagine extra-terrestrial aliens wouldn’t really get a lot of Earth-based humor, but I do think they would enjoy Charlie Chaplin, at least his earlier work.
Seedling rice.
Blood on my hands at the start of the day, nothing to worry, just small cat drama, but the flood of sensation (in the webbing of the left thumb) wakes everything up, puts it on edge. I have to write sometime about my relationship with pain.
I wonder if in retrospect this time in my life, this period in my practice, I will understand not as being about muscles or even fascia transformation, but about me and my “nervous system”, re-organizing my entire relationship with pain. There seems to have been a lot of it stored inside here (inside this body?) without me realizing it, or it improvised its own realization, and all this was the result, a nest of pain. As I was ignorant of myself. (I do not enjoy this, but it seems one of those burdens in life, you have no option but to accept. This is your suffering. This is you.) Daily excavation, disentangling the threads of—what is it, once freed?
What does pain become when it has been brought to the light of day, felt fully, and released, does it dissolve? Will it become nothing? A memory? Will it be forgotten as part of the overall motion, absorbed into a new organization? It really hurts. I cry on the mat, I want to remember, I don’t want to forget.
But the thing I study has to be the absolute wonder, an empty-like feeling, at the very possibility of study. I have no right to the intelligibility of this. And yet. I touch it, I feel it, I am felt. And in incommensurate increments, it happens, is let go, and something is becoming. I (willfully) imagine it as, a new kind of self-sense, but I can’t see it yet. The eyes are too new, an infant’s eyes. Looking, without sight, and wanting (hush, hush) to see.
Considering alternate forms of “community”. Community of the silent, of the invisible, of the unknowing. Community of grief. Secret community, hypothetical community, community of dreams. Community of written words. Community of people who write only to themselves. Community of the very, very quiet.
Wayang kulit/shadow puppet.
Wanted: a good-faith, non-circular definition for “artificial intelligence”.
A fantastical term commandeered by propaganda (marketing) campaigns, as divisive as they are ubiquitous, with real and harmful political consequences. When consensus on the definition is taken for granted, non-dogmatic (non-polarized) communication becomes impossible. Everyone becomes a tool of the (undisclosed, unaccounted-for) author(s) of their (unidentified, unclarified) presuppositions.
Another such term: “community”.
I went shopping today. // Complex decisions involving many moving parts, external limiting factors, (or “budgets”), changing possibilities and demands, hypothetical landing-places wherefrom to re-evaluate the terrain, I am good at problem solving with a “flow”, but I am not good at finalizing a concrete answer, which leaves me bad at packing (I procrastinate and overpack), online shopping (I procrastinate and overshop), and “writing a book” (Iol). But I don’t want to talk about ontology, not today, because my nerves are fried after completing two giant shopping tasks, one of which was, making “the” IKEA purchase for moving into our house.
I’ll not bore you with details, just know that this single purchase was for everything “absolutely necessary to move in”, with a set budget, and a set (according to Javanese astrological caluculations, 4 Juli) moving day. I’ve been planning this IKEA purchase for… an embarassingly long time, based partly on an ongoing evaluation of what is locally available/locally made/good quality, plus not stupidly expensive or wasteful. (Bali has a rather insane price-range, catering to some of the world’s “poorest” and some of the worlds stupidly richest people.) (Okay, rules. We aim to make “everything we can” ourselves, to keep purchased items “high quality”, with no unnecessary plastic, as basic and practical and long-lasting “as possible”, and not least, pleasurable to live with.) (There is a whole other blog post about which “luxuries” we’ve chosen to include in our house, and why.) (Examples of “luxuries” include a bathtub, an oven, a french press, etc.) The point is, it was my responsibility to press “purchase”, which I finally did, and that is a big weight off my mind.
So I thought I might photo edit, to soothe frazzled nerves, and there may be a little scattered photo mix over the next days, some from Java, some from Bali, some of a wijaya kusuma bloom that happened a few nights ago. (A joy to behold wijaya kusuma, when she blooms, the sovereign queen of the night. Growing since last year’s Lebaran, every successive bloom is more dramatic, an anticipated performance under cover of darkness, with hushed whispers from the banana trees, a stage-lit dream or an opera unfolding over the course of hours, the rich pleasure of her slow-opening, light-gathering into radiance, expression… then by sunrise, she is spent.)