The Poem
ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν;
Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
//
Holding (with love, and so
gently) dear Phaedrus
(my day, light-ephemera)
my first and undying
metaphor, for
holding (with love, and so
longing) as asking
(as humbled-home-making)
the perfected question
to keep you. Pan,
beloved, as the drawing-
together (from the inside)
of meaning, and lover
as embrace (from the
outside) of horizon, sun-
set to sunrise, as all-time,
is the heavy becoming light-
as-boundary at the edge
of a world. We are there,
together:
the hand
and the what-would-be-
held.
( As nature
I am birthing and dying
unquestionable irresponsive
a fleeing, hiding and
by-many-wanted thing. )
( As human
I am messy, interminable
a political and personal
history of hysteria, making
and remembering, desiring
and deceiving, a restlessly
in-between
word.
A fool and a monster,
my pillaged possessions
are images and accounts
of war, and music
is how I play failure
as comedy, as a
question for a problem
with a deadly and un-
summarizable sound. )
( As god,
I am end (of motion),
I am source (of motion),
I am being (of motion),
I am (hungry
for motion),
I am
may-we-be
love. )
Morningtime, in a garden. And what is
this, that was laid in my lap? That is si-
lent but asking, that seems sent, but scatters
leafing-out patterns of my un-formed self,
harmonic. I need to know. Is it male
or female, flesh-fire of creature, salad
scrumptious and/or ambrosial bane? Shall I
eat it, be eaten by it, become it
or come into dust, be taken, wind-swept
and tearful, or reborn as clean, unseen
green, after all? I must know. I cannot
not know its reflecting, it blooms when I
touch it, it shivers, it is water-light,
earth-dispersing, kaleidoscope versing,
tongue-teasing shadow of radiant tree.
//
(About.)
Tenang Sri Rejeki.
Pan //
(Is it)
the shiver
that
passes through your body
(to endings from beginning)
when
you make the connection
(from ending to beginnings)
and then realize
it isn’t you
who made it
(?)
News of the cold and the iridescent. //
At night, Frankie sleeps in a jepun tree in front of our family room. Tonight (for the first time) I looked over and saw him there, in the dark, an iridescent-, black- and elaborately-feathered figure, crouched on a curved branch. (Very impressive, Frankie.)
Protein shake and krupuk is not a nutritious dinner solution but it is what we call “really Indo-bule”.
What would happen if Thomas Jefferson had invented emojis, and written them into the founding documents? (I know TJ would have been into this idea, heavily. He was in many ways the El-n of his time, which is accidentally too serious to laugh about.)
My 90’s timeline is: 1994, Kurt Cobaun dies; 1997, the release of “Boys for Pele” by Tori Amos; between those I watched My So-Called Life (several times, I think, whenever it came on the tv and my parents weren’t around).
I want to (find and then) buy a wall thermometer. The weather app says it’s 22c/71f, but I don’t believe it. I feel cold. I’m wearing socks and double sweatshirts. Maybe a fire pit is a good idea.
Sometimes, to get back on the right path, you have to circumnavigate the globe.
As time persists in circularity, I wonder (again) what makes this morning different from the last. There are two spider bites on my leg. (Each one two dots of red, making four dots total, with pink smudges of irritation around them.) There is dirty laundry I left soaking, for putting in the wash today. This morning, there is no specific sun, just bright cloud we seem to be a part of. Being-in-cloud is not the best for drying clothes. But the sky changes quickly here, so I, perhaps recklessly, forge ahead, and start the load in the machine.
Sometimes the cloud comes down and eats us, from above, from its permanence, further up the island’s altitude. It can be days or a week with no direction to the light. Cloud also soaks up sound. I’m accompanied now mostly by the shushing, rolling rhythms of the washing machine, nearby. It occurs to me, this is one of the less problematic (almost comforting?) of the machines. Yes, it works. So I can focus on this thing here. I like it and I almost trust the washing machine. (The sun is another matter, here’s hoping happily to be surprised.)
Sky from home (6).
Full moon, icy white, concavity of clouds like a light-womb, and a visit from Blih. Unexpected pleasure in the familiar and reassuring how happy he is to sit under our roof. They roll tobacco. He comments on the quiet, on the peaceful, he is right. The moment when you feel family, when you know no matter how different you are, or how skewed your perspectives on the world, that if ever called, he will protect me from weirdness, and I will give him sensible relationship advice, and pretend not to see him cry. And maybe we have seen some success. He was smiling tonight, and speaking of marriage… It’s totally allowed to spread gossip about love and marriage.
Birthday poem. //
(A fool, having no knowledge of debt,
does not choose their sacrifice.
Nonetheless it is chosen, discovered
by time and un-made into wisdom. With
balanced account,
)…(
the learned-by-suffering, seeing-
but-feelingly goes, as, making-as-
offering heart-over-spilling down into
the wordy-deep well of justice. And,
the humbled source speaks
)…(
of w-i-l-d responsibility
as animals apparent play wicked
transubstantiation. Each crea-
tor’s device is to make failure
thus. So,
)…(
the crab shells were empty. They
skittered crossways on silken sand, brief,
funny little things. With crescent claws,
and ivory carapace cradling
the sacred syllable,
)…(
Om.)
(But not like this.) // Every choice feels hard, these days. None of it is easy. Even thinking is heavy. I wish I could put more levity on my blog, but then I reflect on “everything happening in the world”, and lightness itself seems to lack compassion. (No sun today, just one big featureless cloud.)
So I wonder at (and then question) the detachment, the surreality of cat pictures and typewriters, the psycho-spiritual health of it. After all, these are presentations of leisure and privilege. (Blogging, by nature, is a presentation of leisure and privilege. As is writing, in general.) At what point does it become, (let alone beneficial or good), not even innocuous, but cruel?
(At the point that one “gains” one’s first reader?)
Writing, as leisure, preserves its own necessary and peculiar ignorance. This, alongside its irresponsibility. And writing, as an art form, must address it somehow. The whole, “What I do here comes at a price.”
Light-caught.
Notes at the limit of politics.
Winning is never the most important thing. In a political context, the most important thing is justice. Justice is the only source of political legitimacy.
There is nothing inherently just about democracy. A democracy is only as just as the demos. (A demos is a group of people, “a people”, understood as a political body. Democracy is the self-governing of a demos.) Therefore, if one wishes to use democracy as an approximation of justice, or as a political hypothesis on the way to justice, (which remains, despite everything, a very good idea), one must first of all consider education.
Education (on justice), as the “sine qua non”, is therefore the first responsibility of democratic governance. Education (on justice) would be the heart and the soul of a legitimate democracy. What this looks like (education) is an open question. But it must look like something. There must be some idea (even hypothetical) of justice, cultivated through education, (obviously, public), in order to preserve (even the hypothesis of) the legitimacy of democratic governance.
(What is justice? The government would not have to know, or even claim to know, but it would have to ask. Without justice, it is nothing. So the demos might pose hypotheses, and learn or decide ways to judge between them. If the demos discovers a good hypothesis of justice, then this, and the practice of keeping it alive—which is what political education is—would be a foundation for the stability, function, and health of the demos, and therefore of the democracy. This, and nothing else, is what would make possible a healthy and legitimate democracy.)
But without education, there is neither justice, nor a people. If a government claims to be a democracy, and it does not hold sacred the work of education, then it will function only so long as the demos preserves a rigid and un-adaptable idea of itself. (A conservative political identity falls back on arbitrary characteristics, racial genetics, cultural superiority, personal wealth, or other dysfunctional place-holders for justice.) But moreover, if a government claims to be a democracy, and it does not hold sacred the work of education, then it surrenders (even the hypothesis of) its legitimacy.
To repeat. Without education, (One would do a lot of work at this point, for the sake of responsibility, to complete the demonstration, which is something of an argument-by-adventure. But few have the training or stamina, these days. And we are all very tired. Maybe this is a lapse.
)…(
Study, e.g., the entire Platonic “corpus”, but especially the Republic, from which all of this, although the author artfully renounces authority. An orphan argument, but nonetheless), democracy surrenders its legitimacy.
As a “democracy” (lacking education) fails, (which it does from its inception, because it is nothing), the fragmentation of the demos becomes more apparent. (And feels awful.) Lacking a relevant or coherent education, individuals respond in different (haphazard) ways to the dawning recognition that they are participants in an ongoing (historical, natural, perhaps cosmic) in-justice. (Against themselves as against outsiders, through imbalance external and internal, with rapid exacerbation of symptoms. The problem appears to be everywhere.) Without a demos, individuals need, seek, and find their own private (idios) educations. Many gather shouting under the ugly banners of partial ideas. It is complicated and contentious. But recognizing the basic problem, diagnosis is trivial. That is not a democracy. That is an illegitimate regime, a people without a soul, at a loss (aporia) to heal (the hearts, minds, bodies of) its broken (political) self.
That is not self-government, but a multitude of tyrannies. And a multitude of tyrannies inevitably approaches war.
Winning is still not the most important thing. (Winning is never the most important thing. Not even in war.) (Consider Achilles, or Odysseus in his next life.) But it may be that losing—beautifully—becomes the new (oldest) measure. Which, like a divine gift, opens up whole other worlds of action.
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.