So that peace shall be our constant and only purpose.
artifact //
(this jagged)
wish
(edge of words)
lonely, and a craving for being alone
(came out)
why am I even
(somewhat involuntarily)
finished, here
(during a moment of)
cracking, needs to stop
walls
(up)
walls
broken
Sky from home (8).
Anger, which is of love and loss, is a dragon (dangerous and dialectical) that you tame, and then ride, through cloud tops scattering rainbows in fizzy, kaleidoscopic patterns at your passing. Its yolk is what heats you from the inside, tears melting as rain into rivulets down clefts of leaf-patterned veins toward the womb of the earth, crying (of servant or master, at sound of own voice), in no color but all color, as metal, water, woodwind, swansong of phoenix, cradled in crescent. You rested there, to watch. From a distance, you beheld charcoal and ashes scattering through atmospheres, burnt snow falling, lining the sponge-tunnels of lungs and gills with glass splinters all colors of black, laying it down until pelvic bones overflow as beggars' bowls, abundantly silent, a prelude to epochal winter. Landscapes, exhausted by element, ripple below you as satin sheets of mineral reflection, and smooth, sonic transitions from error into the opposite of whatever it was you believed, rounding into sustainable orbits, or perfect planetary poems. It’s a chorus of angels, just being themselves, being holy. Those who were decent and kind, who believed with their undine hearts that fishwives were wealthy, and who buried in bosom only what or whom all could be borne by the cosmic queen of moderation, with her gardener’s tools and her grey eyes fading, at staggered horizons, to gold.
(// Fire-egg.)
To the alien, from another side. // Earth used to be the most beautiful place.
You could go running, under-leaf, through waist-deep tangled-grass jungle, wondering about snakes but not stopping because you had lost something in there, your heart breaking along fault lines in egg shells of worry and the impossibility of searching this dense pocket of hiding. The sharp limits of eyes. (It could start to rain and the drops, clear pinpoints and gashes on your naked arms, would feel body-temperature, not quite cool.) You would give birth to yourself, clambering out from staggered layers of green into a rice field, shifting pale to yellow, (footsteps uneven in cracking, caked mud, swaying in) needle-soft fibers cascading with grain. A sea of it. (It could start pouring, but the heavy, like wind-whipped-metal, grey holds.) Do you go left, right, forward into the field, or back to the jungle? (Ok, good choice. Turn to page 56.)
Words come from behind you, you don’t understand those, but fearful fluttering heartbeats, you do. From underneath places, trembling invisibles look back, lines of sight never meeting, from too many directions. You never held what happened, there. Life was snuffed out in missed-crossings, disappeared, or worse, waited past the faltering light, as if to be found again, hoping but knowing, skin and memory growing thin and colder, until heart stopped. It gave up, it was over, but then, you were found. A strange struggle, distracting but home again, having made plans that seem irrelevant, at this point. Washed a sink full of dishes. Sat on the floor, scratching stray sentences in dust. It would be dark, but not raining, and anyway, you would be under the solid wood floor of another world, with footsteps relying heavily on the grammar of your (earthy) answer.
Somebody who loved you might bring you food that was soft and crunchy and salty and sweet. And a lit stick of honeyed incense. Parts of you would fall back in right places. You could remove clothes, find yourself misshapen, and step into a hot shower under pitch-navy sky. Becoming twin bodies, ocean and sorrow in a breathy coccoon against deep space. I would work my fingers into your scalp, and medicinal smells of sudsy substances would rinse off in slippery streams to either side of your (kissed) face. Scrub around ears. You could be clean. (And the miracle of that.) You could put on clean clothes. You could slip between clean sheets underneath a comforter blanket that was the perfect thickness for this night’s chill, with just enough weight to let you feel, well, enough. Plus a cat, on your legs. Yes, cats were amazing. You could cover your eyes, and drift off, as a warm hand slipped softly into yours. Everything that was lost, would be home, would be dreamt or forgotten, singing or held, would be tucked under feathers, bed scattered with blossoms, and the waning crescent would disappear into the better side of night.
One felt gratitude, and mistook it for fear. That is how beautiful Earth was. We couldn’t contain the joy it put into us, so we turned it upside-down, into fear.
The cloud is not a cloud. Apple is not an apple. AI is not intelligence. (Examples of using nature to build trust and sell technology.)
Shadow/surface earth.
Verses of chickens, cats, crones. // We get her to the vet’s clinic and I swear Lalah jumps out of the carrier, nose glowing pink, and exclaims, “All better!” Maybe it has something to do with the trauma of the drive here, as she carries on like she’s suffering endless sorrows in the style of Italian opera. Or the memory of having to stay overnight, a few weeks ago, due to ear infection, when she learned about how cats live, “in the Real World”. On the drive back home, she is the sweetest, slow-blinking angel.
“Do you know Enya?” (A better test for whether a tribe is uncontacted by “civilization”.)
In the Indonesian language, “un-contacted” (tidak terkontak) is said differently than “not-yet-contacted” (belum terkontak). I find this characteristic of the language already influences the way I think about the world, getting into the habit of considering temporality with every negation. (Even when writing/thinking in English. Do I mean “not”, simply? Or rather, “not yet”?)
Future (“InsyaAllah”) is (just) another kind of presence.
Prayer is a practice of humbleness, humility. Then also, any practice of humility, including serving, giving, offering, supplication, cooking or baking for someone, taking care of someone, including yourself, in body and/or soul, translating, loving, you could say these all fit together under the broad (outward-leafing) umbrella of “prayer”.
Every new/different person that you meet is an opportunity to express yourself in a new and possibly beautiful way. To become a new verse/version of yourself. But what this means is, it’s a new opportunity to learn from someone else, which requires a certain flexible but deep listening. Re-sponding, re-plying, re-versing. Well, that isn’t trivial. (And “self”-ish is the opposite of “selfish”?) We “keep” Grace and Frankie because we are interested in learning something from them, about their selves, about ourselves. And we “keep” them, and take care of them, as guests. We follow, if we can, certain rules regarding guests, and strangers, or anyone we don’t know who “shows up”, ancient rules of hospitality, that you could really, in “the old stories”, be punished for violating. We don’t know who that is, the homeless beggar that shows up at our door. But we treat them as an honored guest.
(I also am a guest. And in many circumstances, I also find myself “speechless”.)
As an aside, in a present and experiential way, it does seem to me like, if I eat other animals, it becomes hard (even just for my body) to hold onto the idea, that I can learn from other animals, too. The scales-falling-from-my-eyes moment, which I felt first in 2008, (when I stopped eating animals and “animal products”), was very moving. One of the most deeply-felt moments of my educational life. I will always be (humbly) grateful for it, and toward everyone involved.
(There are so many ways to say this same thing, and every time I say it, I feel the need to choose words anew. But/and again, “Alhamdulillah.")
Looking up the etymology of “version” (through French version for “a translation”, from Medieval Latin versio, “a turning, a translation”, from Latin vertere, “to turn, turn back, be turned; convert, transform, translate; be changed”), which led me to another really wonderful Proto-Indo-European root, wer- (2), meaning “to turn, bend”. Odds are, if you are reading this… Well, I was going to write, “if you are reading this, you probably use many words that are descended from wer-.” But I stopped, because it blows my mind into diagonals-of-squares to contemplate readership, whatsoever. Any readership, between zero and one hundred (percent, of what?), and further, who can say what and how (your, my, their, our, the) logos will evolve? Or numbers, for that matter, or time itself? Some people believe that t=0 is a constant, or the speed of light. But stability remains mere hypothesis, without which certain favored things (people, worlds, blogs) fall apart. Life requires shelter, not the direct blast of a sun. I know not even a fraction of what a shelter could look like, (for example, of an “uncontacted tribe”), but I know that I can’t survive without it.
And yet, she considers herself a translator. So she rests in the shape of wer-.
(“Are you there Heraclitus? It’s me, Elizabeth.”)
The beggar could be Odysseus, interminable, come home like a wanderer, red with the blood of innocents slaughtered in Ilium. Or it could be Pallas Athene, eyes grey with motherless calculation. Nice to have some non-human kinfolk around, whose opinion you can trust, chickens, etc. Or the crone, the devoted, elderly woman, who remembers the baby who suckled from her breast, however many years have passed. So, she knows the master of the house before almost anyone else. She too rests in the shape of wer-.
(Wer- is also, excellently, the source of weird.)
By the way, the first thing Grace did, when I let her out this morning, was to circumnavigate her entire territory, with chicks, including through the hallway. My husband woke to the riotous sounds of their passage. Which is just the weirdness of a bule di rumah.
Peace on earth and salam to all.
I love being an animal. // As I sit down to write, in the bedroom, there begins an intensifying chip-chip, bok-bok from outside the front door… getting closer… going past. Oh! I do a little inward cheer.
Our house is partly open to gardens, which surround it on three sides, and these are terraced into different segments, to match the terracing of the farmland. Grace usually begins every morning in the “romance garden”, at one top corner, then works her way down to the lowest level, and increasingly, around to the other side of the house. But to go down, the chicks have to flap down a 1-1.5m drop, and while flapping-falling baby chickens are superheroes, they can’t flap-fall back up again.
So typically, as it gets dark, we catch them and bring them back to the brooding house at night, in the “romance garden”. And although they love their house, (Grace cannonballs into the nest and starts primping in the most self-determined, self-righteous way), the catching process isn’t really enjoyable. It involves E. grabbing Grace first, and as soon as he gets her she screams with the rage of Achilles, and he takes her to the hen house. Then I run everywhere chasing fluffy handfulls of zooming, mind-piercing cheeps, to jumble together in a box, count to make sure there are nine, and carry the box up the walls, grass staining hands and knees, back up to their house, for safety and calm and eventually quiet, which takes me a minute. Okay, so it sounds fun. But they self-express in ways that make it obvious, they hate nothing more than to be separated from each other.
Grace is smart. Mother knows that the humans do not like chickens in the hallway. Chickens in the hallway were a big “no”, in the days of B.H.C.E (before-hatched-chicks era). (Because poop.) But we have perhaps, in an undisclosed manner, changed our minds about this. Speaking seriously, as chicken servants, it’s important to us that they can “put themselves to bed”. And to traverse the human-house hallway is almost the only way for Grace to circumnavigate with her chicks through the gardens and levels, and get them back “home”, on their own. (There is another way, but it is slightly more advanced, somewhat under construction, and not nearly as fun for the chickens, probably, yet. It will “become fun” before there are ten roosters using our main hallway as their favorite place to nongkrong. Believe.)
So again, now. I leap up (!) to watch their transgression from the teras. Grace, who has finally built the courage, leads her chicks through the hallway of the house, past me, “that meddlesome woman”. And mom surely feels like a criminal as she does it, from her extreme expression. No, I will re-interpret. She looks at me like I’m the one getting away with a very embarassing murder. Ok, namaste, Grace.
The final obstacle is a quick leap over the goldfish canal. Bloop, bloop, bloop. And finally, after a grand tour of the premises, the hen and chicks emerge from the hallway out into the “romance garden”, which is their home garden, with the brooding house, where they sleep at night. Safe and sound. It is so familiar to all of them. They burst in nine directions, running and celebrating, peeping about it from all around the little piles of rocks, chukk-chukking with success. It’s a party. Grace is feeling extremely proud right now. I give her a lot of verbal praise and celebration. The first time, going all the way around, to bring yourself and your babies back home. Animals really feel these moments. (And “Alhamdulillah.” I love being an animal.)
Revelation. Every day, she takes them all the way around, shooting for home in the late afternoon. As cool shadow overtakes the green. Grace is following the sun.
(… Salam to all.)
Grace and chicks.
Reversal spells, mulberry stains, and mixed substance. //
Trying to understand everything as (part of) a “natural cycle”.
I send a text to my mother and then read it back over, (why do I do that?), decide I sounded high, think of the times when she has sounded similar, and I always assume it’s a “senior moment”. Time for another coffee.
It’s a “no hope for laundry” day. Sri Rejeki is glued to my lap, she knows what it feels like to be alone in the rain and she doesn’t like it. Not looking forward to chasing chickens in this. Wait, let me re-interpret myself, and speak it outloud. “I am looking forward to chasing chickens in the rain.”
(Doing a reversal spell on my PMDD, which stands for “Predisposition, Monthly, to Demons and Despair”.)
Thinking about traffic in Ubud, wondering what the future of that infrastructure situation is, and then remembering, I don’t have to wonder, because there’s an already apparent progression, from there, to Canggu, through to Kuta. Kuta is the future of us all. (There is no future for Kuta. Kuta is an eternity of unironic tackiness stuffed into hollowed-out cultural ruins, I guess, I haven’t been there for years.) The other relevant question is, where will be the “next” Ubud?
(What is history, if Kuta is where it all ends?)
Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. “Dear Barong, and whatever divine beings may be present in this place. May Kuta (the one that is inside of us all) bloom again with wildlife.”
Nobita (G.’s murai batu, songbird) sings with campur sari-ngdut, not consistently but often enough making harmony that it’s unsettling. Also, Mas K., from the workshop, is singing along with such a charming falsetto, as he (rhythmically) cuts wood with circular saw, that I can’t stop laughing and I might be confused. Wait, I think they’re both whistling… Mas K. is actually weaving his performance back and forth between whistling (with the bird) and singing (with the voice). This is almost virtuosic. And then, a woman neighbor stops by and has a conversation with him from her motorbike, and it sounds exactly like a spoken-word part in the music. And then I realize, I am in the campur sari.
(And this is the mixed substance!)
Rain lets up for a minute, with a hint of brightness, and roosters across the sawah are touching base, communicating, crowing as for their lives.
We go out on the motorbike at night to buy gorengan (fried tempe, stuffed tofu, weci, banana, sweet mung bean, tape). The kid selling gorengan asks me if I like “arang”/charcoal, making a joke about the color of my husband’s skin. I smile blankly. I massage E.’s shoulders a little on the way home.
He did harvest mulberries today, so his feet and hands are stained inky black. (The blacker the berry… semakin pedas the wife.)
When one makes an analogy, one calls attention to a similarity. One should also pay attention to the differences. In this way, one pays attention to everything.
Big rain again. Salam to all.
Margaret Spoon //
Peace is everything
(but it makes her laugh), like
rain showers that come and
go, and come again, and
the cozy sweeping shush,
like the hug of your grand-
mother, the sound of sand,
and someone slipping from
who they were into who
they were for you.
Light, whiskers, wood.
E. says I look like a baby dinosaur when I sleep. I don’t know what that means. I used to have recurring nightmares about a t-rex, though.
Witch’s mane and chaos truffles. //
I don’t look at the sky today. It’s too bright.
A discussion about zucchini, which isn’t commonly grown or eaten here, whether, where, and how we can grow it, in the wilder garden, outside the wall. Easy to grow, but the danger of curcubits is that the plants are favorite hiding places for pit vipers (the small green ones) and cobras (the “kings”). One also avoids walking in jungle areas, or anywhere really, without a wide-brimmed hat. Snakes will attack your head and face, from above, which, if you’re very lucky, doesn’t kill you.
Discovering periods of my life I seem to have stashed into dark, cobwebbed corners, so they’ve been barely, rarely remembered. Now, when I think of them, they strike me as odd, alienating, inappropriate. What to do with these memories?
Related: some things you can’t learn until you separate yourself. Dysfunctional situations prevent growth. Situations, institutions, environments, are not surface problems, but deep.
We stop at a small bridge, over a ravine, to collect aren palm fibers, (duk), from a fallen tree. It looks like a witch’s black hair, (it’s used as this, in ceremonial representation, also as mane of Barong), a matted tangle that we tug apart. Afterwards my skin is dry and tight, and sinuses are on edge from the dust.
Fragments of conversation with school children, walking by, two boys and a girl, puzzled to see us. Until we explain, “ini untuk tempat tidur ayam”. They smile, hands on hips, like adults. O iya, of course, it’s for chickens.
Back home. Grace leads chicks to the lowest garden, jumping down a one-meter (or so) drop. They need “assistance” getting back to the chicken house, so E grabs Grace and I grab the cilik-cilik, but it turns complicated as they scatter into a chaotic (cuteness) matrix. Soon I’m Lucille Balling again, chocolate chicks like quick-moving truffles, stuffing in bra, like an expert.
Separating oneself is like separating duk, tangled and tough. It decides whether and where it comes apart, and what comes with it, that you didn’t expect.
Now time for practice. Salam to all.
Full moon, sudah matang, tomato consommé, incandescent orb with eggplant-magenta smudged-charcoal setting, moving through air just chill enough to waken touch, silhouettes of palm trees dark enough to deepen vision, and presence dilates into possibility. Passing fragrance of pandan and frangipani. The best thing about living here is not seeing but feeling the island, how it vibrates as with mimetic electricity, a lucid dream.
On the motorbike, cozy in bright reds, pinks, orange woven scarf, wrapped around face as kerudung, black thumbholes hoodie, black leotard top and flowing layers, sparkling “fancy” flip-flops, holding husband, who’s handsome in black and bronze batik udeng and black bucket hat, and gold-trimmed randai pants, for dancing. We assigned ourselves the task of joy, tonight, and romance, and to get away. It was accordion music, view over ravine, pistachio gelato, single espressos and no distractions. Now, the drive home, through moonlit sawah, is brave, as if night-cleansing, to let busy city streets be forgotten behind backs.
We stop in the street, almost home, to see the moon. Close moment. Then engine off, we glide down the way, tires grinding gravel under sea of cricket-song. Unstrap helmets, put down/take off travel gear, wash hands and check on things to, piece-by-piece, unwind. E. checks the phone for messages of Ibuk. Checks progress on the locking gate, to be installed in front of her home, (the house where she was born), twelve hours' drive away. To keep her safe from wandering feet (and fears and memories and hallucinations). I check cats, asleep, and Grace, who clucks softly from the nest, as tucked-in chicks peek out from mother’s feathers, up past bedtime. We cover brooding house for insulation, shushing chicks, and latch the door. To keep tender bodies safe when the stray cat comes, howling with desire. Jeki will hiss and growl from the screened-in teras. Guardian is her favorite job. But now, aman, and so it’s time for peace and quiet, as goodnight moon, and the subtle art of letting go.
It never seems quite fair, as if, there will always be some tragedy to it. But no less beautiful, for that. The island of gods gives itself to those who give themselves to love.
Honeyed wafer set lightly into smoked amethyst sky. Grace’s nine eggs hatched into nine tiny black puffballs. Nine infant roosters, cheeping-cheeping… and she loves them with an intensity. Selamat purnama✨🌕✨
Grace, sitting.
But, Lysias
Σωκράτης: καλῶς γάρ, ὦ ἑταῖρε, λέγει. ἀτὰρ Λυσίας ἦν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐν ἄστει.
Socrates: Beautifully said, fellow. But Lysias was, as it seems, in town.
//
(“What even is Athens?” asked the blind, somewhat frustrated, woman.)
When I was twelve, I got thrown off a pony. Bocara, reddish-velvety-brown, with black mane and tail and an opinion of her own. Or something less accessible than opinion. So we were out for a ride one day, and she spooked when she noticed something “off” in the other field, man or machine, she didn’t like it. The instructor said, go. The third time around was the third time she bucked, and I was thrown, landing dirt-hard on back, face-full of sky, chest spasm for air. (Damn.)
That day. Writing this other post, which was about (what we do with) time, made me late for what was next (on our schedule). Now as I was on the way in Sweet Orange, who also is an incubator, a protectrix of time, at present of Duckworth time, (listening to DAMN., by Kendrick Lamar, to summon this artist from the other side, of the earth,) we stopped to pick up bricks, (exchanged looks with Sundanese brick-makers, but the bricks were “belum matang”), then re-entered the churning sprawl of I-cannot-tell-you-how-many pale riders on motorbikes. (Sweet Orange drives slow behind a couple, two probably fine fellows, and total nerds, out on holiday, who, having not made it, push theirs up the steep slope of a ravine. Frustration metamorphs into sympathy, inside Sweet Orange, for how many of us, one, has been caught under such circumstances, but without the solid-pack of traffic to witness. To whiteness. Laughing sympathy, but sympathy, nonetheless.)
There is a body, and there is a virus. No, back up. There is an island, and there is a world. There is an interaction between these two things, the city and the jungle, (a person and a blog), and I interpret it as, There is a body, and there is a virus, and there is a coordinated response, of the body, to the entry of the virus, and I call it, an immune response. The virus multiplies. The immune system, to defend the body’s living soul, which is mine, which is sacred, targets viral particles for elimination and expulsion. The immune response is the xenophobia.
(I am a stranger. Xenophobia is relevant to me.)
An immune response, whatever that is, and all of its analogues, would be one way to know or understand a moving thing, something coming and going, or something that’s born, and dies, as well as something that has a wall, with people going in and out, no matter how porous, and oh, yes, laws, written, unwritten, and weird, an immune response. Athens also might have an immune response, with, well, a soldier’s DNA., who would target the foreign element, (disguised-stranger emoji), they would be a sort of philosophical guard dog, barking at everything they don’t already know. (The hounds of hate? Or of jealousy?) But in addition, Socrates, who might as well be on a leash today, has been led outside the wall. (Is it you, ghost-of-Snowden-flake?) Whereas the virus is at another professor’s total party house, seducing of-age students with unlicensed garfield merchandise, and the lines of the battle, here, are somewhat unclear.
Who is the aggressor? What needs a defense? (I thought we’d grown tired of the city?) (Everyone agrees, by the way, that this is the most boring part of the dialogue. Like a plane, delayed on the runway, it must be endured, and quickly, to make the connection in Singapore.) But whichever direction is inward, and which outward, we are being steered into Lysias, like a T-cell with confirmed coordinates. Except for one thing, which is, the coordinates are… algebraic. (It’s a Boeing-built plane.) The virus isn’t here. Or, what was the virus, again? Man, or machine. A gadfly, round the bud that forks the corner of a dark-lashed eye.
I woud never blame her, beautiful, spirited Bocara. She is a genius and a horse is never wrong. The instructor was a jerk, “instructors” nearly always are, but let’s be honest, the instructor wasn’t wrong. (And I held the crop.) I was a fool, and a child, and I won’t blame myself. But sometimes, on a horse, you must be direct, and you must welcome judgment day with open arms. I did not. Like I said, I am messy. Wrong was done and a lesson had to be learned. It was one of those moments around which everything changes, or breaks, and I carried Bocara with me, after that.
Fun fact. “No feelings involved” is impossible with horses. You can’t remove yourself, it’s impossible. She follows you, she sticks with you, you carry her, you might hide her, or become her without knowing it, or you love her, and her things that she sees, her ghosts and her witness, her trumpets and her fire, and she appears before you, at night, in your secret life (crying, confused). Something was beautiful, then everything went wrong. She/he/they haunt you. Hidden in your heart, in your tunic, or in the iPhone that you carry in your pocket, until it’s m.A.A.d. as Compton to tell what is the virus, and where is home. Silly Phaedrus, with his concealed scroll, and his leopard-skin pill-box hat, thinks it’s not-a-thing to step outside a wall. But, look,
there’s a war going on. Of all against one, or one against all, or all against all, (based on gender pronouns and deity preference), or it’s one against one, and it follows you, the war, tapping its pocket. Like blood, or a bloodhound, it will track you down, and you will be there, again. Landing dirt-hard on back, sky-full of face, chest spasm for air, (like I can’t breathe. Look,) a caught body, again. Until you win the war. Which you cannot win, because you are a single soul, brave, clever, damned Duckworth, fleeing from, pursuing, (whereto and wherefrom), human nature itself. You are so many terrible, body-caught things. You are Socrates, in America, you are Phaedrus, out of (what even is) Athens(?). On an island all-but-destroyed by pale riders, (no feelings involved), you are red horse, and pale rider. You are, the war, so it rules you, the war. Unless
(I) just love (you) and (learn
how to put down the weapon.)
//
(About.)
Sri Rejeki in silhouette.