Walking Through Walls (2/3) // Phaedrus 227α-β
It isn’t trivial, from a human perspective, to translate words that are two-thousand years old. To carry meaning from past to present, (where to, where from?), of words, then, and now. Poros in practice. Requires naïveté, ambition, and the shameless exploitation of available tools.
Ποίησις (Poiesis)
ποιέω (Again, in middle/passive voice.) (Phaedrus is a middle/passive kind of fellow.) - to make, to do; to make, produce, create, bring into existence, to compose, to write (e.g. poetry), to invent. From which ποίησις - poetry, poem; creation, fabrication, production. From which English language words like poetry, poet, poem, etc.
Everybody knows what poetry is,
And anyone can do it.
To give shape, form, body. A finite instantiation of some (finite or infinite? Known or unknown?) purpose. Appearance (as alienated from being), surface (as alienated from depth), artwork (as alienated from the life of an artist). Inherently irresponsible, a letting go of responsibility, a thing for which responsibility has been denied. An ontological orphan. A “bastard”. (The inverted windegg? A fetus aborting its mother.) An amputation of self into indeterminate pieces (which the city, which the poem, which the self?). Nature gone weird. Frankenstein. Horcrux. Monster-being. Can hypothetically be tamed, but always at risk of making its own laws. A law unto itself. Sinister stuff, and not to be trusted. The action of I. The Mage, the apparent (non)being, (existence, ex + sistere), of the deck of cards.
(An attempt at coherence when history fails. A desperate measure. A talisman of) deathlessness. (A love letter. A good alternative to insanity or self-harm. A test at the limits of nature, a gamble for truth, a shot in the dark.) A prayer. (Example, it is poiesis for me to write and press “publish”.)
If you exit the city, you (have to, you can, you get to, it’s refreshing, to) make your own way, (the leisure of monsters), through un- (or other-) civilized spaces, “wilderness”, the (exterior? hostile? unknowable?) unknown. How reckless you are, how precariously tethered to pyramids in ice, ends and beginnings severed from sight.
Phaedrus passes through the wall to make, create, compose his walk, as a poet, writing a poem.
//
Mid-day crossing.
Amateur comes from French and Latin words that mean “one who loves”, “lover”, and I wish everybody used amateur in that way, not as a pejorative. Being an amateur doesn’t mean you’re not very good at something, it means you do it out of love, which is beautiful and attracts beneficial pollinators.
Walking Through Walls (1/3)
Φαῖδρος: παρὰ Λυσίου, ὦ Σώκρατες, τοῦ Κεφάλου, πορεύομαι δὲ πρὸς περίπατον ἔξω τείχους: συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ. τῷ δὲ σῷ καὶ ἐμῷ ἑταίρῳ πειθόμενος Ἀκουμενῷ κατὰ τὰς ὁδοὺς ποιοῦμαι τοὺς περιπάτους: φησὶ γὰρ ἀκοπωτέρους εἶναι τῶν ἐν τοῖς δρόμοις.
Phaedrus: From Lysias, Socrates, son of Cephalus, and I am going (πορεύομαι) for a walk outside the wall. For I spent a long time there, sitting since early morning. Persuaded by your fellow and mine, Acumenus, I take (ποιοῦμαι) my walk down the paths, for he says they remedy weariness better than the racetracks.
//
Two verbs get Phaedrus outside the wall, with Socrates following behind: πορεύομαι, from πόρος; and ποιοῦμαι, related to ποίησις.
Πόρος/Poros
πορεύω (Phaedrus uses the verb in middle/passive voice.) - to be driven or carried, to go, to walk, to go over, cross, pass over, traverse. From the noun πόρος - a means of passing a river, a ford, a ferry (e.g. Πλούτωνος πόρος, the Stygian ferry); the paths of the sea, a pathway, way, a passage through the skin (i.e., pores); a way or means of achieving, accomplishing; contrivance, device, resource. From πείρω - to pierce, to run through.
Phaedrus passes through the wall by poros. As through a pore in the skin, as a spear through your shoulder, as ferried across the river to Hades, as a way through an impossible problem.
Poros, who is a person, is mentioned at a symposium.
(A summary of Symposium, 203b-204a:)
Plato writes about Apollodorus,
(who is obsessed with Socrates),
who tells the story of Aristodemus,
(who is in love with Socrates),
who tells the story of Socrates,
(who is an expert at love),
who tells the story of Diotima✨,
(who has taught Socrates about love),
who tells the story of Poros (Πόρος),
who gets drunk at Aphrodite’s birthday,
and how Penia, (Πενία, Poverty),
who is a-poros and stuck at the doorstep,
schemes to lie beside Poros and conceive a child,
who becomes daimonic Eros, (Ἔρως, Love).
(A daimon, says Diotima✨, is what passes between human and divine, between not-having and having, and she spins the tale of a drunken hookup to show it.)
So. According to her story, (within a story), (x3 or 4), Poros is:
- A drunk.
- Easy to trick into sex.
- The father of at least one daimon.
- The subject of a lot of gossip.
Other examples of poros include: Leaving a country, entering a country, im/migration in general and laws concerning these, imports and exports. The penetrability of political states, invasion, colonization, occupation, tourism, expatriation, migrant workers, the welcoming in of guests or strangers. Breaking or “bending” the law. Tax havens, other leakage. Doorways and windows into a house, out of a house. Small boats taken to big boats, ferries across rivers or between islands, cruise ships, other maritime vessels, airplanes, rocket ships, trains, other vehicles of ground transportation. Pores in the skin. Through which pimples, cysts, rashes, perspiration, body odor, hairs growing, wings growing from shoulders, a sprout breaking through the wall of a seed, a bud breaking through the wall of a stem. Other holes in the body, mucus membranes, organs of sensation, consumption, excretion, the mouth, the ears, the nose, the eyes, urethra, anus, vaginal canal. Sexual intercourse, sexual reproduction, birth canal, giving birth, producing a child or menses or a windegg. Eating, drinking, vomiting, passing gas, sneezing, burping, hiccuping, pissing, shitting, ejaculation, etc. Piercings and tattoos. Catching a virus or bacterial infection. Breathing in, breathing out, respiration, inhaling smoke or pollution or perfume. Taking medicine or a drug orally or intravenously or topically or as an inhalant. Seeing, listening, tasting, smelling, digestion, persuasion, education, miseducation. Conversation, dialogue, correspondence, gossip, rumor, media, news media, social media, “the internet”, blogging. Translation, metaphore, semaphore, analogy. Odysseus. Achilles is aporos, until he isn’t. The permeability of boundaries, membranes, definitions. Beliefs or opinions shattered, catharsis, to be wonder-struck, laughter, crying, compassion. Psychedelics. Scents, including the aromas of certain plants or plant parts (animal parts also?). Passageways between stages of life, changes in form, metamorphoses. Fantasies, dreams. The penetration or removal of any obstacle. Hermes, Hekate, Thoth, Ganesha, Hanuman, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, prophets and messengers and psychopomps, the Muse, Eros and other daimons (including Socrates' daemon), (who, almost always, says only “no”), angels, etc. The crack in every thing, the finitude of finitude, double negation, dialectic. To find a way through. That a person can change. Coming to be, passing away. A passage or transformation between life and death, death and life. Divine becoming human becoming divine, etc.
Human ingenuity, perseverance, desire, are drivers of poros. As are foolishness, recklessness, hamartia (missing-the-mark). Inherently ambiguous (vis-à-vis justice or injustice, good or bad, healthy or sick), always a risk, a vulnerability, in relation to the unknown. Poros is the empty eye of 0. The Fool, and the passage of each trump into the next. (Example, it is poros for me to write and press “publish”.)
//
(More here.)
Fish pond.
My younger sister’s birthday was several days ago (same day I got stitches). She and I are okay, we don’t fight, but we also don’t communicate much. (I went to her wedding, in Walt Disney World, she didn’t come to mine, in Bali.) I usually send a note for birthdays and holidays but I had sort of… let this one go by. I admitted that to E.
He asked when is my sister’s husband’s birthday, a random question, I said I have no clue, it was only Greta, (my grandmother), who kept track of those things. I could go search emails from Greta, and probably find one she had sent to the family list, for my sister’s husband’s birthday. She always included our significant others in her correspondence.
I opened my phone to find that my mom had sent a bunch of old photographs of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, Greta’s mother and father. Beautiful old photographs. I showed them to E. We peered into those for a while, trying to see me in their faces, seeing Greta there, or my mom. They look handsome and serene in sepia tone. She has penetrating eyes and a subtly sculpted brow, square jawbone, soft and solid expression, with sloping shoulders and precise (pianist) hands. She wears an offwhite blouse with extra bibs of fabric down the front, (not fluffy, just draped), pinned with a brooch at the v-neck, under a boxy cardigan with matching skirt, a pearl necklace and an elegant, plain bonnet. He has blonde hair, blonde brows, and deepset, translucent eyes, a seafarer’s gaze, clean expression. He wears his uniform, undecorated. He sailed on a sloop in the navy, patrolling for underwater mines during World War I.
It’s disarmingly easy to see myself in my great-grandfather’s face. That’s me, as a brave young man, in the year 1930. E. goes silent when he sees it. Greta had those eyes too, although her hair was tawny brown, her face more square. She had her mother’s mouth and chin.
My grandmother was a prolific in-writing communicator. She sent emails often to the family list, (she practically was the family list), about backyard (or frontyard) animal sightings, health-related events, astronomical occasions, and light neighborhood gossip. In addition to emails, she sent paper greeting cards for every birthday and major holiday. (She also left voicemail messages long after everyone else stopped doing that. We all have archives of these, brief documentaries of her Durham, North Carolina life.)
I am different from my grandmother in this respect, I am terrible at keeping in touch. In my American family, (what’s left of it), holiday greetings feel artificial and pointless. A few words exchanged a few times a year. There’s not enough shared experience to give them life. Then I procrastinate writing replies, which makes me feel self-conscious, so I harbor secret resentments. (Ultimately, bad feelings toward my own self.)
I admire my grandmother for her ethic of communication. It took stubbornness, an iron will sometimes, to maintain family connections. She did it even through awkwardness, divorces, other circumstances of alienation. She crossed lines, crossed church aisles, defeated angry silences with routine but nonetheless heartfelt greetings. (This seems impossible?) I don’t know if she used etiquette as a weapon (good manners are a martial art in the American South), but she did use it as armor. In this respect, she was unimpeachable.
I felt sad for a minute that I would never be like Greta in this way. I am not a connector of people. I didn’t have the heart to send my sister a message for her birthday. Why not? I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in my character. (She never sends me messages…) Then I asked myself why I couldn’t just do it. Then I decided to send my sister a birthday message, and then I just did. Like swallowing medicine. Really not that bad. Fine!
Then I sent a message to brag to my mom that I did it. (And I wrote this…) It made my mom happy, for a minute.
I have a small amount of ashes from Greta’s cremation. My mom brought them when she visited Bali last year, whispering, “I have her.” Me, mystefied. Who? “Greta.” I told her, “That’s not Greta, Mom. That’s just ashes.” They made it all the way to Indonesia, from a woman who never left the east coast of the United States. We still don’t know where we’ll put them. We’ve considered a few places, scattering them at Bedugul, or in the garden at our house that we’re building, or in Tengger caldera. “If it’s Greta’s destiny,” said E. Still watching and waiting for that decision to come down, from the sky plan. (Greta herself had called them, her future ashes, “my leftovers.” Impishly, defiantly morbid. Her favorite section of the newspaper to read was obituaries. Then, the sports pages.)
After we got married, E. gave Greta’s name and birthplace to the little mosque in his neighborhood. Every year now, her name is called out for community prayers in Galgahdowo, in East Java, with the rest of his family ancestors.
I visited her before I left for Indonesia, in 2019, when it was probably the last time. I helped her clean out a few kitchen cabinets, old boxes. She didn’t like to let go of things, we bickered, she was mischievous. She gave me a silver spoon with her mother’s first name etched in it, (the lady from the photo, in delicate cursive). Which was also her first name, and my mom’s first name, and my first name. Later, after she gave me the spoon, she tried to take it back. She didn’t like the idea of it “lost at some cafe.” (You know, because I’m flaneur-esque.) I scolded her, told her she can’t do that, give something and then take it back. It’s rude. Besides, I had already packed it. (E. overheard the conversation, from the phone in my pocket. He reminds me how I made her laugh.) She said, I suppose you’re right, let it go.
I still have the spoon, of course. I call it the Margaret spoon.
These past few days, I’ve been on hiatus from yoga practice (twas a minor medical procedure requiring stitches). After three days of rest, (as usual), I’ve shifted from feelings of indulgence and relaxation, to feelings of blech, self-blame, and despair. I am sluggish, restless, out of tune.
Sometimes I joke (with myself) that I have the yoga practice of a crazy person, the truth is, it keeps me right. It orders my days, gives them a before, during, and after. It generates a modest purpose. Even if I do nothing else, I’ve done that. It makes me feel physically exercised, alive and expanding. Ready in motion, receptive to senses. In a living situation that’s somewhat cramped, my practice is where I can find freedom. It creates a place for interior things, thoughts, daydreams, connections, ruminations, to follow their logics through to a surface. To demand from myself, observe myself, accept myself, not least in my reactions to pain, fear, disappointment. To listen and follow. To establish and re-establish trust. To practice good self-relation.
In a few days I’ll start again, unroll my mat and take an inquiring breath. Are you still there? It waits for me. Maybe on Sunday. Watch it heal itself, the practice, and these off days will fade into a broader motion, (a promise I believe), (a promise in which I build belief).
Sri Rejeki, 3/2021. (unputdownable)
An unpleasant thing just happened. I put on some socks. I started having intense itching around my shins. It got worse, waves of intense itchiness that didn’t go away. I took off my socks. Put aloe on my itching skin, it just got itchier. It got worse and worse, I started to itch in other places, and it was also triggering a spike of anxiety? Or made it feel hard to breathe? I did what I should have done first, washed my lower legs off with soap. The itchiness was still there, but then it slowly went down. Now it’s mostly gone and I feel like I can breathe. I am so glad to stop itching. And afraid to trigger it again. I guess there’s something on my socks, like from laundry detergent. But no other clothes have caused it? (E. said it could also be from an itchy bug.)
This hasn’t happened to me before. It’s a little scary. I don’t want to touch the itchy socks again. Or maybe any socks, ever!
I learned the other night that my husband never took a selfie before he took one for me. (There was a time, early on, we were stuck across oceans.) I have thoughts: this is rather romantic? Also, it makes sense, of him. It makes me feel special, but also like I brought on a world of weird shadows, and am I to blame? It occurs to me that taking a selfie could be like losing a kind of virginity. Too many people (children, now) do it without thinking what is lost, what they are giving away.
Again, the word as propaganda, this time: selfie. No, my dear. That is not your self. These are not “selves” that appear in the “meta”, organized by “intelligence”.
I thought somebody might take a picture of “AI” and caption it “bubble”. Then I started thinking of all the things in the world getting bigger, higher stakes, and waiting to pop. A world of bubbles, a bubble world.
E. suggested we could take pictures of the volcano bubbling magma. Oh yes, I said, I didn’t realize we could do that. There are ropes keeping you far enough away, they used to wear gas masks to get that close.
Because the mountain might decide to burp, I said. A little bubble, and you would be dead.
This is why we have mantras to say before we go to the mountain, he reminds me, for example, hong ulun basuki langgeng. (Salam dari Tengger.) He wishes to make that one famous.
H.’s wife gave birth to a healthy baby last night. I woke up to that news, and the tears in my eyes, and the rain persisting from overnight. A new baby is also a mantra.
(Important to note that the community of the dead shares its place with a community of trees.)
Bubble(s).
At first I thought it wouldn’t bother me, but increasingly it does, that whenever I encounter the word (or prefix) “meta”, (including in an Ancient Greek context), the company with that name intrudes on my thoughts. Isn’t it upsetting that they have the power to infiltrate language like that? Then I remember, many words' meanings have been twisted over the last few hundred, or thousands of years, butchered, scraped off the slaughterhouse floor, stuffed into sausage, etc. Like holding onto body, holding onto meaning takes constant regenerative work. (Not just linguistic…) Sometimes I wonder whether current or future generations will be able to think, at all, whether ours is the last generation of thoughtful people.
Sometimes I feel like one reason I started my blog is, in case that’s true. When weaving in loose threads from the past becomes a witness statement to an alien future. It makes me think of judgment day. Something everybody should realize about themselves is that comedy is local, to time and place, while marriage is forever.
Art is an expression of relationship with the world, and therefore, (because god is the relationship of the world with itself), with god. I think often about how weird (wonderful?) it is, how poets got away with it, providing alternate ontologies. Or providing any ontology at all. Raising people up in ontologies, without them even knowing it. Something so powerful, disguised as optional, elective, irrelevant, a matter of personal taste. A war, disguised as sweet nothing.
The titanic is sinking. Here we are, keeping each other afloat with bare reminders of beauty.
Yes, and I agree, everything is very monstrous on here.
The cats are smothering me and literally making it impossible to type. They look at me like it’s my fault for bothering them!
Ayu’s strength. (Hometown)
E. says “I am from Pesantren” the way Mystique Summers said “I am from Chicago.” Declaring victory and throwing down a gauntlet.
Half the people from his hometown say half of their words backwards, this is Arema slang, gleeful insider speak, encoded against outsiders. (Not least, law enforcement, which, never forget, is rotten to the core.) Aremaisme, Easternoil, is a spirit, unassailable.
I never met anyone more hometown than my husband. I told him that and I got a whole lecture on the meaning (spiritual, mythical, historical, etymological) of Tumpang. I can only smile.
The only place in America that I miss is a lake. I used to walk around it almost every day and take pictures of it. I took so many. Different seasons, different times of day, different perspectives. Sometimes I look at those pictures and weep. That’s it, all I loved of that place, was the lake. And I do miss it, so much, the only place I long to visit. If I ever went back, to America.
(There are people, that’s different. Possibly a school… But certainly not a town.)
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about America (“The United States” of it). But the country where I was born has been, for me, something to understand, and if possible, to overcome. I am a political animal. We are political animals. But we are more than that. Love is the cause and the demonstration.
So. If I have a hometown, it isn’t quite mine.
Drift.
On the road, memories of Java. Baluran a looming shadow on the left, Ijen somewhere to the right, cloaked in a grey day that fades to black, as grimy trucks metamorphose to arrays of rippling lights, inscrutable expressions ever gnawing at the pass.
And Ibuk, the eroding centerpiece of every Java trip. No longer as individuals but as genres of people, we enter her life. E. as son, husband, father. I as myself or Other Elizabeth, both of whom Ibuk trusts and likes, to whom she whispers untranslated secrets. An intimate unknown. Until she loses the thread. Then she trusts nobody, wants nothing but to grab a nearby bag (of what?) and flee on foot. She fights to do it, tooth and nail and shouts and cries. The family contains her as best they can. I try to comfort my husband. Alzheimer’s may be the cruelest disease.
(Other Elizabeth is, in a twist of circumstance strange even for here, an American woman who came to the village some twenty-five years before me, also blonde, rumor suggests an intelligence agent? She married a local artist and studied dance and voice with Ibuk. Then left Indonesia, taking with her a large collection of E.’s fathers masks. Present status unknown.)
My feelings for Java remain so ambivalent, it demands so much, of both of us. Nothing here is convenient or comfortable or predictable. I can’t say if I could ever live here. After Ibuk passes, I’m not sure how alive that question will be anymore.
The possibility of our entry depends on a community coherence that remains presently intact, but seems unsustainable. How the younger generation is being sucked into the same smartphone world as everywhere else. They abandon village life in pursuit of urban status, commodfied glamour, the parasitic myth. They will go back to the village someday, look for it again, find it has disappeared. The same story, so many times over. At what point does one give up the ghost?
Presently, in Bali. Jeki on my lap, sulit girl, karmic helper, I am home. Angry-happy to see us, now cuddly and precocious, soon she will be off again. I must reweave loose threads so things don’t fall apart. Memories of last night (this morning) are a dark dream.
Over water, from the ferry. The waves were too big and E. was afraid. (I was afraid to squeeze between trucks. We contain complimentary visions of annihilation.) We went to the upper deck, at the muster point, near the lifeboats, and distracted ourselves deciphering deployment instructions. Heaving swells of black ocean tossed us and all that heavy machinery, sometimes in circles, it seemed. The force of water crashing against steel, the thunk- and vibration of the rudder, resisting, the engine pushing to maintain a direction. (Water does weird things as it switches between seas.)
I had two photos ready for “community”. One, of a tiny mosque we passed the other day, it’s carved decorations painted turquoise blue, golden ochre, like icing on a sweet dessert, neat little gate, (doors closed), blue sky with white clouds, a happy, trim little image. The laws, rituals, and words that bind people together, a place with a pretty shape, clearly defined.
The other, of a graveyard we visited before leaving. The quiet of their interwoven voices, the sound of ghosts in ancient communion. Holding back judgment, as a drawn breath in unison, noticing my presence. Countless gravestones in an old jepun forest.
They keep jepun (frangipani) in the graveyards, in Java. I think I understand why, (a little), the trees leafing out, flowering, or bare, in their staggered cycles. Always saying everything at once, these trees. And in silence. Just like the dead. The image was wild, gnarled, messy edges, poorly captured. Hard to tell what it was, if it was anything, an undergrowth concealing the broken stone markers, grass untended. Disorderly. I waited for fear, but instead it felt calm, soothing. Everyone here has seen too much. They don’t shout. They are not afraid.
I felt expected there, to be honest. It was some kind of welcome. Difficult to admit, but I am difficult to admit. A slow, almost flat exhalation. Without pain. Savasana.
It was on the ferry, waves heaving underneath us, (another graveyard below, don’t forget the ferry that was sucked down, in this very crossing, just a few years past), that I, fingers stumbling to touch the right buttons, posted that photo. Unsure of everything, in that moment. The meaning, the memory, what it would be. Probably we would be fine, I said to E., and we were. Someone threw up their dinner over the side, was all that was lost. Everything else, aman.
Now, Jeki stretches out on my lap. Special when she shows this much affection, comfort, trust, her paws and whiskers twitch, she is in her own dream. I think about why it is, that I love best the most difficult things, and I get back to life here, in Bali. Where I sweep my own floors, we brew our own coffee, and make the day as familiar as the medium allows.
Community.
Substance, subject, surprise.
They were there for hours. Taking turns, back and forth, one posing while the other took a picture. I wandered off, looked for other images. Wandered back again, they were still there. Wandered off, and back again, they had not left. They seemed oblivious to the queue that had formed, other people who wanted selfies with the rocks. Everyone was shifting, impatient. Sometimes giggles, rolling eyes. A vague sense of injustice. How many pictures could two guys need? How many different poses? Nobody knew what to do.
Standing there, looking through my viewfinder, puzzling out the situation. I felt a momentary sense of responsibility. As the only foreigner on the beach, I commanded a certain celebrity. (Three different people had asked to take photos with me. I was almost as popular as the rocks!) Was the onus on me to approach the greedy guys, to suggest they give other people a chance?
Of course not. What an absurd thought. But it did occur to me, in passing.
I almost wandered off again. But then, I stopped, and took the picture. With them in it. I guess, to see what the camera would see.
Later on, as I was editing that photo, assuming I wouldn’t use it for anything, I realized, oh. My editor has a tool that can erase them. With a swipe of my finger, I tried it, I cleansed the image of the weird intrusion, the bothersome presence. There, I thought, empty landscape. Relief. Just the rocks, no posing guys. More like how it should be… more like how it is.
But, no… it was wrong. The image was off. Could it be? I missed them. I can’t say why. I put them back. These silly guys, these human figurines, with their matching shirts, and distressed jeans, I zoomed in to see up close, their idea of how they wanted to be seen. It was their performance. I could change a lot of things, the highlights, the shadows, the vibrance, whatever. But they changed the world. I couldn’t stop it, they made it what it was.