My husband’s grandfather said domestic cats are the ancestors of wild cats.
The Opening Question
Σωκράτης: ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν;
Socrates: Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
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Sometimes I long to go back. To when I first read these words, when I heard them from your lips and they were sweet words, these sweet and bitter words. I was young then, and beautiful I guess, and I was the one who you caught on the way. I was the one who you loved.
Now you are gone. These words are here, shapes on a page, but things have changed. I have changed. Meanings have changed. Has your love changed?
Did you ever love me at all?
Sometimes I wonder. Even in my salad days, we were never alone. It was never just you and me. It was always you, and me, and somebody else. You, and me, and the whole god-dammed city. I am not jealous. I am not angry. That is what made you who you were.
Who you are.
If there is one thing in this world I will never forget, it is this. Socrates came from Athens. Socrates died in Athens. Socrates, my Socrates, wouldn’t leave Athens any other way.
I too am gone from Athens, now.
//
Handsome Ismail.
ΦΑΙΔΡΟΣ / Phaedrus.
And I thought, if I imagine myself as an angel in heaven, what would I be doing? And I knew, I would be translating Plato’s Phaedrus.
Tomorrow, as begins a new lunar year.
Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim.
May our homes and our passages between homes be blessed. 🌘🌑🌒
Everybody knows it’s fun to eat in bed a few times (especially ice cream, chocolate) but if you do it too many times it will make you depressed and ants etc. will get in your bed.
It’s not really a climate crisis but a human crisis, a crisis of human civilization. It’s not the climate that is destroying itself, it’s not the climate that needs terribly to learn, the cause of the problem is not the climate, climate isn’t even a symptom, but an external effect of human hamartia.
Your body is an expression of ancient intelligence to which you have literally psychic access!
The first day back after convalescence is like Mercurial sunrise, the inner landscape a chiaroscuro of white-on-black sensation. Limits touching, resolutions in release, the lost body regains shape in a polyphony of pain. The clarity is mesmerizing but cruel. It’s easier to injure unpracticed flesh.
Let go of what? The frozen-shut psoas and illiacus, the clenched-fist side of my diaphragm, which hold everything else hostage, being unable to exhale for possibly forty years has been an adventure, yes and, I’m glad its almost over. Let go of what? The need to name the thing that must be let go of.
Didn’t practice yoga for almost a week because I got sick after our return from Java, again, a body rebells against exposure and exertion. Now my nerves and tissues feel foreign inside me, insolent and funky-twisted. Preparing mentally to resume tomorrow. The hardest thing (as always) is to let go.
The opening passage about sunrise on Mercury is very good: “The spill to left and right keeps spreading, farther than seems possible, until it is very obvious one stands on a pebble next to a star… The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head.” (Reading 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.)
We’re losing Ibuk (my mother-in-law) to Alzheimer’s disease. Sometimes she whispers to me in basa Jawa and I just can’t understand. Sometimes the memories come skipping, tripping, flooding out of her, and my husband translates. Sometimes she wants to cry and be held, so I hold her, which doesn’t require words.
I feel very smug sitting in Mak Sun’s kitchen, eating krawu and trancam and mendol and tempe goreng, knowing that the best vegan food in Indonesia is to be found in kampung kitchens, cooked by mothers and grandmothers and offered freely to family. (Not in the trendy restos of Bali.)
Investing in artificial intelligence without believing in natural intelligence is modernity in a nutshell.
Writing (is) for strangers.
Java makes me feel foreign again, cozy and completely uncatered to.
Sounds of Java: growling engines, whining brakes; azan from the speakers of every masjid; dangdut on blast from a roadside warung; sawing and chirping of insects in the brush.
Never let anybody tell you where your breath should go. It doesn’t matter what famous gurus say. Yoga yamas, niyamas, asana are preparation for the revolutionary lesson of pranayama. There is no outside authority for the breath.