Jeki mood 2.
Delayed departures and I notice Bali before leaving, or rather Balis, there being so many. The cocks crow from before sunrise and a pack of dogs barks at a passing presence, feral guardians of night. The scent of cooking rice mixed with floral incense smoke, women’s work, through sunrise. Mourning doves and frogs and tiny finches chirp their ambient language. Traffic heaves a periodic sigh, as on every workday, hordes of red-burnt tourists, the punctuated exchange of horns, brakes squealing, and fragments of conversation picked up from hidden alleyways. Giggling, crying. Colors run more saturated under heavy skies, overwhelming sight, and people walk uncovered, as if open to the sun. Plastics mixed with faded floral offerings crowd the gutters below their feet.
So open you might be fooled into believing she’s honest, a reputation ardently if sloppily maintained. Her government is tangled and obscure, embroidered with extra-judicial bureaucracies, her pathways impossible to navigate by compass, unmapped, and obstacles send you looping back in wild directions. You are the ant and someone toys with you. The more you try to cross, the farther from the source you go. So cloven is the island into slivers and pieces by rivers, ravines, and lava flows.
A silent goodbye to something here, pale jepun blossoms wreathed in green, or barren branches in their ever-staggered cycles, and black grass-roofed temples that house Barong. An extra moment granted to a stranger, the balance of the otherwise unknown.
The camera and the scarf are talismans, same as the polished carnelian I carry in my bag, the one that helped bring Jeki home. Talisman, from Greek telesma “completion”, from telein “perform (religious rites), pay (tax), fulfill,” from telos “end, purpose, completion”.
The scarf is for resourcefulness and protection on the road. The camera is for clear sight and perspective. The carnelian is for listening to my heart. Expressions and reminders of deepest purpose, things that help me get there.
Early morning boys (3/3). (transcendence)
There’s something wonderful even about terrible art projects!
Waking up to a day of preparation, packing, for a week of unpredictable travel and socializing… opportunities, obligations, the whole spectrum between those. Travel through Java is a constant cultural puzzle that hits all my anxiety pressure points. I will always stand out, the tall foreign woman with blazing blonde hair. What to wear, how much skin to cover, when to make eye contact, whether it’s ok to smile. If I look weird. (I always look weird!) Words that abandon me as soon as I need them.
Language is a survival skill. I rely on my words, more even than I know. Words are my resource and letting go of language is a profound surrender. Being in the woods at night, how your ears pick up every sound, my ears pick out words from the Java language. A complex language with multiple levels of formality, even simple things have multiple words, are socially complex. I piece together situations, relationships, themes. I test out learned words on closest family. Where failure results only in minor embarassment! They are affectionate, they cheer me on. Ah, I am a babe again.
There is something challenging and healthy about all this, I firmly believe, it’s also enjoyable. I just have to awaken my appetite for adventure. A new trick this trip, we have gotten out “the good camera”. Getting behind a lens is like the first dip into a cold pool, but once in, it can be a very nice place. The world as image, not as constant, living demand. The camera speaks and says, I am not here for words. (To be determined, how successful this is here, where social demand is forceful, loud, strong. Doesn’t always take “no” for an answer.)
It also helps to wear a scarf. I discovered this last trip. Not as hijab, (at least not in the usual sense), and usually not covering my hair, but as a protective presence. Something that can be adjusted to fit different situations. Again, like a babe, with a blanket. But a blanket can be very good armor! Portable psychic cozy.
Flaneur-esque. (Ubud, 2019)
How I keep dipping my feet into rivers when I should be focusing on the name of Zeus.
I have never been a flaneur but a peripatetic, yes.
Reading, and remembering the claustrophobia I would feel reading, Benjamin, under the eyes of professional readers of Benjamin. I guess it’s the Marxism, more specifically, the strict adherence to history, (or to what they call history, history always being what somebody calls history), which imposes an ontological opacity, a dull thud in my intellectual imagination, the thinking-sensation of too many walls.
(Never a problem with Baudelaire, though I fought many battles with him too. <3)
A trauma response to World War 2, maybe. And then the fetish they made out of 19th and 20th century Europe. An arbitrary designation of “our historical situatedness” that, once viewed from outside academic halls, appears naive, classist, colonialist, absurd, the humorless inability to see one’s own irony. Snapshots of the arcades are exhausted, a nostalgia that’s barely worth the effort anymore, the amour-propre of an empire on the brink of fully embracing its decline. (Instagram.)
Or maybe it’s just me who escaped. Is obsolete now, unseen, uninterpreted, having gathered enough manufactured scraps to contentedly erase myself from history. (Cheers.) Or maybe I am the revolution Benjamin was waiting for, (is a self-deprecating joke), who knows. …I am hardly alone.
You can be a ragpicker, but I think you can’t see the city from inside the walls. There needs to be some glimpse of sky mixed in. Or ocean, or fire, or (in Baudelaire’s terms), fils sacré du Soleil.
So back to you, Héraclite.
Small.
A long day. Supporting E. through pukesmas visit (a minor but unexpectedly painful procedure) and then a grueling day 2 of yoga, like there were weights on my hands and feet, my pain tolerance was low, my nerves already exhausted. The upside of a stiff day (like day 2) is that muscles are harder to injure. I pretended to be a boulder and rolled… through it. (The hot shower after, some comfort.)
There is a constant conversation between us about going to the doctor. I get scared thinking, about growing old here, in a rural area, the healthcare that will or won’t be available. I remind myself, it’s ok to be afraid. (But you don’t make life decisions based on fear.)
So, always looking for home remedies that work, rudimentary first aid, more advanced first aid, or herblore, also for witchcraft, which is good backup, and sometimes the only thing that works. Believe it or not, one of my most valuable (to my community) skills is that I can find ok health information on the internet. Enough to double-check doctors in most situations, to help people understand why they’ve been given different drugs, or help them figure out what they can or should eat. I’m the daughter of a nurse, I also communicate advice from my mom. (Nothing is, or ever feels like, enough.)
Here is reality, we have these chocolate waffles with extra “raw-tella” for dessert, so in the day’s economy of pain, we can possibly come out even. (If there is such a thing as an economy of pain.)
A trip to the local pukesmas (health center) reminds me what a privilege it is to have access e.g. to anaesthetic when somebody is cutting into you.
Cozy cactus.
Thought I might clarify, the reason I dislike filing taxes isn’t because I have a problem with paying taxes, but because the app I use to do it is literally a psychic vampire.
From the inside, from the outside. // Caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror during yoga today. (The mirror is usually covered for yoga, this was another dis-ordering from the cats' wild night.) After years of not seeing, a small shock (what is that, my leg?) to see from the outside what I have lived, or studied, or gotten comfortable with, for a long time, from the inside.
Related. The other day I stumbled on wikipedia entries for Kejawen and Kapitayan, Javanese folk spiritual lineages (I wouldn’t call them religions) that have syncretized with Islam (and Buddhism and Hinduism, etc.). Not exactly what I live with, and our community just calls it Islam, but this gives an outside perspective on… whatever I write about when I write about Islam in Java (or among Javanese people elsewhere, like in Bali).
Again, from an outside perspective. What I “do” is another syncretization, with my own weird and twisted roots in ancient Greek, Abrahamic, European pagan, American, (etc.), mythologies, ontologies, theologies. There is a vast (and global) landscape to explore beyond the cultural limits of Enlightenment European thought, which believes itself to have a monopoly on the logos. But this kind of “exploring” is… not possible “from the outside”. (And neither is “the logos”.)
Anyway. I fixed the curtain on the mirror, so it shouldn’t happen again. But you never know with cats,
A little Baudelaire in the morning to get you clean and contrary and ready for the day.
I wake. That small spirits of chaos have somewhat dis-ordered the room. Dirty clothes strewn, a painting collapsed, ant dirt sticks to the soles of my feet. I wonder how we could sleep through it, straighten a towel, take poop from a box, in between dreams, there having been a sound from the world.
Halaman/page.
Saturday morning “rest day” but what is the right music for filing taxes, not-quite-numbness to abuse with aftertaste of anxiety? Does the completion even register as accomplishment? Worse than the dentist!
Next. Lucky I washed my hair last night because coffee and croissants (vegan) come with a video call from Java. Everyone’s faces look so good and smiling and W. with sleepy teenager hair a-fluff. Ibuk takes a moment to connect but, smile of recognition on her face and I feel a warm glow, like sunshine from inside. All conversation hints at family melodrama but those topics remain background for now.
Next. Again by motorbike to Carangsari, we pick up yesterday’s coffee order, change into “casual traditional” (pakai sarung. I wear lipstick now, and face powder) to visit a bereaved family in the village. A man who was part of the rafting community, a nephew of Pak S., we sit, drink coffee, E. chats with a cousin smoking clove cigarettes. I smile and nod along.
A certain barrier. With local people (mostly men) who have worked in the tourism trade, spent time with foreigners, they are bold with me and expect me to be bold back. Interested in business. I don’t like to disappoint but I’m not that kind of bule. It takes time to build back trust. To demonstrate I’m neither opportunity nor opportunist. My quiet works well enough for that. Maybe they think I’m simple minded, it’s ok to be benignly misunderstood.
This also is my work. Mothers and grandmothers hug me, pat my butt, tell me I’m cantik. I tell them back, of course. Bu S., always making offerings, doesn’t stop smiling. She holds my hands as if my very presence is a blessing. They make me eat and drink, I don’t resist. My body belongs to them for a while.
At last. A quiet moment in the loteng. Warm woodlight. Leafing through inherited notebooks.
On the way back, day fades. Piles of burnt chaff smoulder in the fields, plumes disperse as a pink haze. In the east, Gunung Agung appears in lavender-grey silhouette, silent and immense. Inhalation, exhalation. Then slips back under covers as waxing crescent follows crimson sun, sinking in the west.
(To be clear, we don’t live there yet, but hopefully in a month or two, and maybe the photo is a little spell to help us along✨)