True news is rigorously neither bad nor good, but always on the edge of your ability.
Do not smile at things that would otherwise make you gag.
It appears as a dysfunction of leadership, but tyranny is the malady of a people (person).
The roosters are learning to crow.
The young is transparent and cute, the old is cute and obscure. A cuteness metric.
A principle of psychedelic science. //
Am I crazy or does Kendrick Lamar’s latest album share moments with Isthmian 1?
(“Manifest excellence boldly radiated”)
(I have more posts planned on Isthmian 1, what a fascinating poem it is. Basking a little in the wonder.)
If I was a track from gnx, I would be “reincarnated”, which is breathtaking and a quick favorite. It actually feels (and is this crazy?) similar in theme to that post I wrote about Kendrick, a few months ago. (ok, to a point)
I want to write a post/page where I list “influences”, or “heroes”, (mostly makers of things out of words, but maybe it should be more than that), the ones I’m aware of at least, but there’s a certain way I want to do it (as ever, eyeroll-at-self), so the blog has to wait. Not everything can come out at once, and that is something like a natural law, or maybe, a principle of psychedelic science. Just so, with blogging. It has a temporal quality, it takes shape over time, which means it must have rhythms. How it develops and settles into patterns, or shifts, how things come out, expressed into it, when they do, or when they don’t. The stutters and the repetitions. There is also the kind of reality things achieve, when they go from these sort of gritty swirls of melting sherbet all around us, to being set down in monochrome. Very many things in life (naturally) resist that. And then, the voices (are they daimonic?) say no until they don’t.
Kendrick Lamar is among those “influences” towards whom I feel something that feels a lot like love, I think it might be love.
(Another of these is Cardi B,..)
Idea. For the month of January, instead of reading any global news at all, maybe I’ll read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I’m not saying I will do that, but maybe it would be better for my overall health, if I could.
The thought of “shutting out” everything not on this island. (The last thing anybody I know wants to talk about is news.)
Hm, I do think it’s a good idea to begin planning real strategies for psychic protection, for the coming months. The way these clowns talk about women is going to feel like constant rape culture down your throat, and they will be sadistic about it. For me, it helps to spend time absorbed in Greek poems. It’s obviously different for everybody. Please anticipate ways to keep yourself safe.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌘
Sky from home (10).
Isthmian 1
By Pindar.
(This is an original translation of Pindar’s Isthmian I, part of ongoing work on Plato’s Phaedrus. It was undertaken with that dialogue in mind, specifically on the topos of leisure. The full Greek text was accessed here. Public domain translations may be found here, here, and here.
The original has an irregular line and meter. I prioritized keeping the “literal” meanings intact, with the goal of preserving the analogical work of the poem.)
FOR HERODOTOS OF THEBES, CHARIOT.
My mother, Thebes of the golden shield,
I shall place your matter above non-leisure.
May rugged Delos, to whom I have myself
Supplied, not take offense: What’s more beloved
By good men than their parents, esteemed?
Yield,
Apollo’s land: That, by the gods, dancing
For Phoibos of the unshorn hair, in flow-
Encircled Keos with her salt-born men,
And for the wave-splitting ridge of Isthmos:
Both graces I shall yoke to this one end.
Six garlands from her games did Isthmos send,
With Kadmos' team, and fame for glorious
Victory, to my fathers’ land. It was there
Alkmene bore her fearless son, before
Whom bristled once the bold hounds of Geruon.
But, making for Herodotos a gift
For his four-horsed chariot, its reins
Held not by another’s hands, to the hymn
I would fit him, either of Kastor or
Iolaos. For the mightiest among
Heroes of charioteers were born
To Lakedaimon and Thebes: and at
The games, of contests, they always sought out
The greatest count, and with tripods they filled
Their houses, and caldrons, and gold vessels,
Tasting the wreaths of victory:
And their
Manifest excellence boldly radiated
In races run nude, or wearing forged armor
And clattering shields, likewise when hurling with
Taut hands the javelin or pointed spear,
And whenever they threw the quoit of stone.
(For in that time, there being no pentathlon,
Each deed was given a separate end.) Often,
Their rippling hair bound round by wreathed bundles,
They would appear beside the ever-flowing
River Dirke, or on the banks of Eurotas,
The mighty son of Iphikles, being
One people with the Spartan race, and he of
Tundareas, presiding with Achaians
In their highland seat of Therapne.
Rejoice.
But I, attending to Poseidon with song,
The sacred Isthmos and the banks of the
Onchestos, will sing in honor of this man,
The famous dispensation of his father,
Asopodoros, and of Orchomenos,
His ancestral land, which received him when,
In desolate misfortune, he was driven
Ashore, shipwrecked, disposed by briny sea
Unmeasured:
But these days, the good old times
Hath native destiny restored.
Hard work
Brings foresight to the mind: And if he submits
Every impulse to excellence, both in
Expenditures and labors, then for him
Who obtains clamorous praise for valor,
One must bear no grudging thoughts.
It is an easy gift for a wise man
To speak a beautiful word, against
A multitude of hardships, and set straight
The common good.
Different wages for different works
Are sweet to men, to the shepherd, the farmer,
The bird-catcher, the one raised by the sea:
Each and every one struggles to keep hunger
Perpetual from the belly. But who takes
Splendid glory in contests, the making
Of war, receives praise as their highest gain,
In citizens' and strangers' finest tongues.
For us, it will be seemly, by making,
To celebrate son of Kronos, earth-shaking,
Mere bystanders of horse races into
Benefactors of gleaming chariots,
And to invoke your sons, Amphituon,
From deepmost hollow of the Minyan,
The famous grove of Demeter, Eleusis
And Euboia, at these curving courses.
For Protesilaos, I also include
The sacred precinct of Achaian men,
In Phulake.
To tell all that Hermes,
Lord of games, would bestow, by horses, upon
Herodotus, the brief measure of the hymn
Prevents. And very often, to be silent
Garners greater cheer.
So may he be raised up
On splendid wings of Pieridean Muses'
Sweet voices. Beyond that, may all the choicest
Wreaths from Pythia, the Olympiads,
And from Alpheos fortify his hand:
Building honor for seven-gated Thebes.
But if anyone hoards hidden wealth within,
While marking others' trials in derision,
Their failure is to see: The soul, bereft
Of reputation, achieves its end—in Hades.
//
I missed the obvious, it could (will) be a pharmakon.
…It’s heavy mushroom season here, these days.
How many honored fathers can the motherland bear? //
“When your guru sends you to study with another guru for a while, and you don’t know them, and you don’t know why you’re sent, but you go,” I said to my husband. “It’s like that.” He understood, and agreed, having been in that very situation, (and told me about it), unlike me, who was recognizing it (in my own experience) for the first time.
It could be for context, or a prerequisite for whatever’s next. It could be you need to learn something specific, and the other guru has a special skill. It could be that you’re being tested, it could be this is a barrier to entry, or a container (or mantra) for safekeeping, like a gate (or a city wall). It could be a trick or a trap. It could be they want to impart a certain feeling or awareness, to make present a specific idea or situation. It could be this is a useful or healthy distraction. It could be you need to be babysat. This could be a different version of the same lesson. It could be a supplement to the main lesson. It could be the main lesson, in a nutshell.
(It could be no lesson at all.)
Translating a Pindar ode because Socrates quotes it,
and the whole island shifts from unadulterated gravitas. (Transmission may be spotty.) Pindar’s mode is arch conservatism, a dream where even the lightness tastes like metal. The aroma of olive leaves and salty air, parched lips touching wine, human sweat and horses, woodsmoke and sizzle of burnt flesh offering, of making multitudes of hardships right.
(Previously, I would not have with enthusiasm and joy sat down to analyze an entire 70-line Isthmian ode, just because my author uses four words of it. This has become a pleasure to which I happily submit.)
If the “old school” version of hypertext was poetic reference, then using hypertext to build a poetic world, including passageways to other worlds, is making it with passageways to things one didn’t make. To worlds with other structures and capacities, shaped analogues walking through containers… as possible, or at least momentary, conclusions, places to wreck your ship on, places to be received, be left exposed, or be forgotten.
Nobody reads Pindar anymore, it seems, and maybe that’s because his poetic world is so strictly of a time and people. Celebration as funereal business, as dust to dust, and the sacred perpetuity of that. To pick up his scroll is to pick up the poet’s earth-bound mortality. The faint whiff of one’s own (archaic) decay. That he would say, rejoice. We shall build an un-begrudging song so we might crumble together, over ages.
Beloved Pindaros, (ὦ φίλε Πίνδαρος), how many (Greek) words are there, for how the sea flows around an island?
(In what sense is a blog “a whole”?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🪐
Sri Rejeki with laron. // Selamat tilem🌑
With (sensitive) obscurity of allusion, the poet makes a reading go wild.
Nothing useful to say, but my sympathies go out to all those who had a sh-t Thanksgiving. Here’s a poem that might help. (Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse”.)
On American Thanksgiving
//
War on (the outside, war on) the inside,
And (choose) from the flavors of (Babylon),
To (be the change), to (bring good news), or (not).
//
I’m thankful for any moment (of peace).
I’m thankful that cat diarrhea isn’t (forever, like) plastic.
I’m thankful for the love (of my husband).
//
And when I need to feel a resolution,
I can just skip (may I reverently
Hold that power) to the end (of your poem).
//
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌒
(Can Phaedrus tell the difference between those two things?)
The worship of beauty (Love) begins on the outside a book of monster.
(Translation as tantra.)
Diatripse
Φαῖδρος: (…) συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ. (…)
Phaedrus: (…) For I spent a long time there, sitting since early morning. (…)
Σωκράτης: τίς οὖν δὴ ἦν ἡ διατριβή; ἢ δῆλον ὅτι τῶν λόγων ὑμᾶς Λυσίας εἱστία;
Socrates: So then, what was the spending? Or is it clear that Lysias was feasting you with speeches?
//
The spending was διατριβή, diatribe, a word built from dia (through) + tribo (to rub, to rub hard, to grind, thresh, pound, waste, bruise, ravage, wear away, wear out). And so, the meaning of diatribe starts with, to rub hard, wear away, consume, and Phaedrus has been at it with time (χρόνον or chronos) so it means to spend or waste or pass the time, and then sometimes the word comes to mean, to busy oneself (for example, with school work), with an implicit flavor, of rubbing and grinding it out.
So then, what was the spending?
Phaedrus describes a rubbing away of time, sitting, and growing weary enough that he wanted the refreshment of a walk. As if being there was physically exhausting and spiritually cramped, causing a feeling of claustrophobia, compelling him, following a doctor’s advice, to escape the city walls.
Socrates suggests the context for this was Lysias, (a sophist, or teacher-for-pay, a guru from abroad), feasting him with speeches, τῶν λόγων εἱστία, ton logon heistia. Ton logon is logos, it means a lot (here, accounts, speeches, arguments, words..). And heistia (as in Hestia, goddess of the hearth) means to receive at one’s house, to host or entertain, often as a celebration. Here, we note the back and forth. For what Phaedrus has given (being coy, it will soon be revealed) as a wasteful exhaustion, Socrates offers an alternative account, as a celebration or reward. That it was offered by Lysias for the benefit of Phaedrus, in worshipful adoration (as Socrates flirtatiously suggests) of his youthful beauty.
So then, what was the spending?
Phaedrus and Socrates speak circles around the house of Morychos, (nearby the Olympian temple), and what happened there. Each describes something like the opposite of his perspective, or as the other might like to hear. As lovers would in a fresh encounter, tiptoeing toward pleasure, with promiscuous words and excusable touch, they dance around the truth of things. While we here (being a chorus of gossips, or readers) are hungry for truth. Was Phaedrus given a blessed feast, while entertained by Lysias? Or did he endure a hard rubbing out, a grinding, a pounding, a bruising, a ravaging away, a wearing out?
Let us, for a moment, not be coy. Let us not flirt. Let us speak not in circles, as of the unspeakable, (holy and/or profane), but pierce straight into the heart of things. (The facts of life, without breaking the mood, and how can you break what was already broken?) Let us be shameless and use the words available to us, as we are, and the ones into which we were born. So then, what was the spending?
Was it a sacred celebration of beauty incarnate?
Or a (violent and degrading) fuck?
//
Interiors (3) feat. Lalah.
There is VERY IMPORTANT chicken news // that I’ve been trying to squeeze in “here” for a few days.
(Sometimes one lets the horses run.)
We were shocked to learn, Grace’s nine offspring aren’t nine roosters. They are four juvenile roosters and five juvenile hens. This feels something like a miracle! It’s a shift in household energy and a change in the meaning of things.
There will no longer be ten roosters crowing, at our house. (I am honestly relieved. However,
There still will be ten roosters crowing in beta.)
So it seems that we trusted some fake news a false prophecy. A family member had worked in a chicken factory, claimed expertise in identifying their sex, as chicks, and we believed him. It turns out, he was wrong. Pak and Bu S. came over for purnama and we gave them a tour of the “orchid hallway”, that is my husband’s work-in-progress, they played with the cats through the trellis, and commented how nice it was to have a family of chickens. Pak S. wrinkled his nose and said, “Mas, those aren’t all roosters”.
(A few had started growing horns and cockscombs, a few hadn’t yet. It turns out, they never will.)
We were all amazed. Us at the mistaken chicken sex, them at us being goofy. We all laughed. Me, at the serendipity. It was a comedy of errors, perhaps even a gender-(perception-/deception-/substance-)switching/sacrificing “As You Like It” moment. This is one of my favorite genres!
As a couple, we make these mostly harmless, and yet significant, mistakes, like the old tv land “Beverly Hillbillies”, or dreamy airheads, floating through farm life. Even my husband, who grew up in a village, and his parents kept chickens, never paid much attention to their lives, their parts and their wholes, how they work as families or breeding partners or rivals. (Side note. He does have chicken stories, however, one of which involves him, as a child, persuading younger children to eat chicken poop. To this day, he maintains that eating chicken poop was, at the time, a good thing to do.) (We live in such suspended realities.) So we did not know, what now we know. Because we are watching and learning, as they do their things, and watching and waiting to watch them some more.
This is not business. This is the school yard proper.
Things “here” are like that.
Sometimes a game and sometimes a miracle, not in the sense of divine intervention, but of the hanged man. We are fools who suffer the foolish reversal of folly, we receive reconciliation, we say, Alhamdulillah. (Allah is ever, over all things, an accountant. And rizq, there shall be many more eggs than we planned. Where shall they go?) Every error, forgiven, is a re-marriage, no less joyful for its lack of positivity.
We are (but) wholesome entertainment, after all.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌓
Modern science may be better understood as an extension of modern politics, than as a descendant of (ancient natural) philosophy.
One is born from wonder and matures into the work of love.
The other is (desire as) conquest, disguised as codifiable law.
(Just because you can light a fire doesn’t mean you’ve understood the flame.)
(Morning was enough.) //
As abrupt muffling shadow,
It slightly thrills me, when
The sky grows dark around 1 pm.
A daily eclipse, the rain is
Welcome relief from
The sun’s blazing
Hot bulb, dampening down.
Wind-driven shush becomes droning
Comforter of water, the sound
And the element of a nap. Dream of
Starfish faces, jellyfish eyes, and
Whiskers of shrimp, seeing softly
Touched lace, skin or feather.
Rest,
But try not to sleep
Through dinner.
Trying to focus on leisure, // to put it as a question. What exactly is it, where does it begin and end in my life?
Why are its edges so blurry?
Also, the idea of spending time. What happens to time if it’s wasted? Does something turn into nothing? Or was it nothing already, so nothing wasted, afterall?
We took a wrong turn in Denpasar today. I did the whole thing where a bule (following my husband, who was following the app) drives into a tiny, urban street that is also a crowded fruit market, and barely squeezes the car through the parked motorbikes and fruit shopping traffic. It was the first time that happened. We did ok. Balinese are so relaxed about stuff like this. People are just glad to see your smiling face.
As I drive, I point out a child hanging on the back of a motorbike, wearing a red and white school uniform, but no shoes. He tells me stories about being hungry, growing up in East Java. How neighbors would invite him in for dinner, to feed him. He always had flip-flops to wear to school, but his mom would get furious if he got his clothes dirty too fast. Kids would do their laundry at school, hand-washing and hanging outside the classroom to dry, so their moms didn’t get angry. (Even the bad kids were afraid of “the moms”.) He had friends that didn’t have flip-flops, because they were poor, so they went to school barefoot. (They didn’t have electricity yet in the village.)
I ask him which is worse, being rich or poor? He says, being rich.
(I’ve heard many of his stories before. We revisit them together, a few at a time. I collect them in an inner archive.)
Living here, I often feel a mixture of awe and loss, at being surrounded by so many stories that aren’t mine to tell, that otherwise slip away. This should probably be felt everywhere, and with everyone. But it isn’t.
Garbage has special metaphorical significance, here. In its apparent self-infliction, its mindless accumulation. (There is a widespread assumption that plastic dissolves back into the earth, like leaves.)
(Wouldn’t that be nice?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu 🌔
Sitting for a passport photo // trying to figure out who I’m looking at. I’ve never been good at smiling (or not smiling, or what) for a camera. I feel like I have way too many faces and I don’t know which one to pull out, and then it feels like an “I-can’t-work-the-body” moment, virtual system failure. Who am I even looking at?
Is this how it is for everyone? I assume not.
Maybe I believe too heavily in the medium. (Smiling cat emoji.)
I always think of the lyrics that start off “Black Diamond Bay”, by Bob Dylan:
Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat.
Her passport shows a face
From another time and place
She looks nothin' like that.
Oh, Bob.
I looked nothin’ like that, for a while. Now, for a while at least, I will look pretty much like that. (They don’t let you wear a wood mask in your photo.
It was strange to see my face so naked.)
Romantic view (2).