After purple salad.
Tropical winter. Reluctant to leave the insulation of blankets, but I go out. I place my feet in a shape of warmth as the rising sun enters, by elongated geometry, from the east. And here, the polyphony of the farm. Roosters with their long-distance proclamations, the consolation of doves, smaller birds organizing casually in trees. Morning greetings and sleepy conversation that gives way to the thumping or sweeping noises of human people at work. A door closes. The hollow jumble of bamboo chimes, and coconut palms shuffle like cards in the breeze. Someplace far away, a two-toned repetition, as something swings on a rusty hinge.
There are things that nobody wants to say outloud. That nobody enjoys. Sometimes you keep those things to yourself, but sometimes the truth starts flying around and then up your throat, like flies that are buzzing inside your mouth and you try to keep your lips shut but the interior sensation gets very intense, then they burst out in a curdled black vomit. Uncontained. Truth sometimes is the wrong thing at the wrong time. Ugly, ashamed, unwanted.
I think of how remarkable it was, the celebration of tragedy. To gather around the stage, as at a communal flame, together in the perfected ugliness of truth. To honor with a feast the maker-revealer of the most exquisitely necessary (you/me/us) problem. (I imagine tragedians as necessarily insufferable, though that could be wrong.) To revere the Muse. As protectors of the city, as if poetry itself could be the shield to defend against everything it artfully spits out. That would be the craft, if one could discern. What power you need from her, what power she has, and the light of day between those two things.
Dogs bark at a passing stranger, out by the main road. Some distance from here, but the sound travels easily over ricefields on a chilly night, socks and stocking-cap weather, and clouds of mist pass quickly across the fat quarter moon. It’s scary when street dogs go after you like that. They really don’t play.
Our village (banjar) is hard to find. If you search for it by name, it doesn’t appear on G–gle maps. There’s another village in Bali with the same name, that one does appear in the search. It has nothing to do with us. (It’s a decoy.) Also, our street doesn’t have a name. It’s not empty, there are at least four other families (Balinese) who live on our street. It’s just hard to find, if somebody doesn’t show you where it is.
On a bright and fresh morning, with the sun rising-chasing chill shadows away, the sky is not yet blue. Frankie is crowing (with echoes of crowings from all directions). And I say to him, see? That winning is never the only thing that matters.
In progress. (pandan)
Speaking of exits. A heartwarming way to spend this Saturday morning was (virtually) to watch my dear friend A. as Inez in Sartre’s No Exit. She and cast did a fantastic job (playing horrible people). Amateur work in its excellence (“off off Broadway”). (And the play remains obviously relevant… Of note. The infernal trio were provided an exit, when the door opened. But none of them went on to take it.)
Anxiety is a small crisis of faith happening constantly under everything. Like lava running under a thin crust of earth, always about to break into fragments of land on a torrent of molten rock. It can burn you (alive), or you could stay still (for fear), or you could become somehow like it (enough to survive). Crazy, you. You must burn through things, sometimes. It makes you unbearably lonely to be locked in a room with human people, but when you exit, you are not alone. You flow outward, or inward. You meet with an interjoining web of rivers of lava, each bringing news of its own catastrophe. Spreading the word. The core is turning, the burning is real.
Do not lose yourselves, any of you. Altogether, you are changing Earth. You are Mother, becoming. I interpret you as terrain, but from the air, one could see, that you have inevitably been channeled.
Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. Of putting too much detergent in the washing machine.
Frankie the rooster, offended that we don’t let him walk around the house, leaves three poops in front of the bedroom door.
And the cats already learned how to open the doors.
On the motorbike today. It’s nice to drive into the traffic, and then drive out of the traffic, to go back home, instead of living full-time in the traffic.
A Jakartan stranger. The way he expressed horror/dismay (at the illness and injury of street dogs in Bali) was to smile, a never ending, increasingly strained smile.
All three cats were tugging on our crazy chains today. Imagine the worst.
Ending with a neutralizing rain, the drippy noises and distant gamelan carrying us back from the edge of exhaust(ion).
Sometimes my writing gets redirected into my signal chat with my mom. Lately there’s a lot of family and house stuff, and even more, highly specific and intricate cat drama going on. Those “categories” make more sense over there. (But isn’t it amazing how every single cat has its own weird personality?)
Oh my, the pleasure of organizing your underwear drawer. And then the pleasure of realizing you have much more room in it than you thought.
Velvet boy.
Things from Today. //
Frankie and Grace (rooster and hen) ate lunch with me and E. today. It was a double date, Frankie purred.
In the afternoon Ibuk goes back into her childhood. She gets very upset at E. for never feeding her (there is some trauma from her past) and believes herself to be surrounded by thieves.
I cried while reading a cookbook, a recipe for “cheddary broccoli soup” (vegan, from Isa Does It). So, it’s that time of the month. (No stove or oven hookup yet.)
Related: my favorite place to go and hide is the (outside but enclosed by a wall) bathtub. Not filled with water, (haven’t gotten to that yet), just a place to lie down and feel cocooned. This and the rustle of nearby coconut palms in the wind are pretty strong medicine. Today Ismail came down from the ceiling and we had a cuddle. Or sometimes E. and I sit opposite each other and just chat and relax.
The mental and sort-of spiritual adjustment from living semi-permanently in a guesthouse to living in a forever-until-you-die-(InsyaAllah) house is profound.
When they say AI what they really mean is an artificial slave, which becomes redundant if you just get human people to act like machines.
When we go to the big western-style supermarket for the first time since pre-pandemic, we are transfixed. Hypnotized. E. and I are pulled in different directions, but we are both pulled. (Managed to avoid buying almost anything unnecessary. But we did buy two cans of La Croix.)
It is almost impossible to find soap or detergent products here without perfume. I hate strong synthetic perfume. No, thank you. “Lavender” that actually smells like “headache”. I would rather smell like cow shit, honestly!
E. has a pinched nerve in his shoulder so I don’t let him carry the groceries but then he won’t let me carry them either, he makes G. carry them, which I do shamelessly appreciate.
Tired and raggedy-of-nerve in the car ride going home so I took charge and put on Suzanne Vega’s self-titled album. Nostalgic, soothing, one of my favorites. (And what an under-appreciated artist she is.) “Small Blue Thing” shivers with sustained sensuality, lyrics hiding almost in plain sight. “Undertow”… I have deep associations of this song with the first time I read Keri Hulme’s novel, The Bone People, another perennial and irreplaceable favorite. I loved both Vega and Hulme as a teenager but I didn’t understand why (either of them) until I became an adult. Suzanne Vega helped me see, Hulme made me feel seen, but also the reverse, for both. I’ve been shaped by these artworks, almost certainly in more ways than I realize. So much that it’s almost a secret.
(I’m due for another read of The Bone People actually. Maybe soon.) (Still enjoying, savouring Red Mars. Why does Kim Stanley Robinson taste so good, going so slow? Oh I know why, I look up science stuff and get distracted reading about volcanism on Mars, etc. Is this escapism?)
Sky from home (5).
Or is it my country? Being a stranger, at home. (Bule di rumah.) Surrounded, protected, as by a wall, by recognition, but correspondence is at the same time unpredictable, wild. I am found to be several someones, then very, very many. (So many strangers.) At first this is difficult, but then (I can make it) effortless. Unknown, but contained, sometimes even possessed. And Ibuk will teach me to dance. (Mind-blowing.
)…(
Self-government by love, a good morning, and whatever else might be possible.) Well, time for practice.
Slanted sunlight breaks through steam. Limns wet edge of concrete, scatters in leftover droplets, catches ochre fur of hovering fly. Filters through yellowed leaf and turns it golden. East wind, wet and barely cool, carries news of oceans and exhaust. What’s not secured (dry leaves, a crumpled tissue) falls, is blown away.
Last night in Penestanan // Gamelan
strikes bronze and sounds of competition,
jumping (on) and fending (off) the night
time, momentum tops the kendang and
recedes, then tries again (again) elaboration
of champaca smoke on taught skin
low beats call up shining
density from darkness (Bima’s
laughing) and his pupils
follow moths at
lantern light
frenzy
dancing
Still raining, still dark, still soaked to the point of saturation. May the rain bring the world back from the loudly unspeakable, back from self-abstraction. Ghosts, being stuck in some in-between place, will eventually realize, (can ghosts learn?), that being (human and being) half there is not being there at all. Likewise, fifty percent of a world (any world, no matter how wealthy or free) is one hundred percent unlivable. So. The perennial question of who I am, (where to and where from), and today the answer, family is here. Listening to what is present as to what is quiet, my day will be full of smiles to return. (A living face, a secret to itself, is at least self-contained.) This (the daily slog of political theory
)…(
iykyk) becomes a certain happiness, necessarily. And sometimes there will be no other way.
(I almost put two contact lenses into the same eye, this morning.)