So cloudy this morning that the air gets darker as the sun rises. Everything outside is dripping wet, water-heavy, steamy muffle. Good for frogs, orchids, snails, mushrooms, mold… sleepy farmers. A touch cool, perfect flannel shirt weather, the monsoon holds, the atmosphere keeps wringing out rain.
I imagine extra-terrestrial aliens wouldn’t really get a lot of Earth-based humor, but I do think they would enjoy Charlie Chaplin, at least his earlier work.
Seedling rice.
Blood on my hands at the start of the day, nothing to worry, just small cat drama, but the flood of sensation (in the webbing of the left thumb) wakes everything up, puts it on edge. I have to write sometime about my relationship with pain.
I wonder if in retrospect this time in my life, this period in my practice, I will understand not as being about muscles or even fascia transformation, but about me and my “nervous system”, re-organizing my entire relationship with pain. There seems to have been a lot of it stored inside here (inside this body?) without me realizing it, or it improvised its own realization, and all this was the result, a nest of pain. As I was ignorant of myself. (I do not enjoy this, but it seems one of those burdens in life, you have no option but to accept. This is your suffering. This is you.) Daily excavation, disentangling the threads of—what is it, once freed?
What does pain become when it has been brought to the light of day, felt fully, and released, does it dissolve? Will it become nothing? A memory? Will it be forgotten as part of the overall motion, absorbed into a new organization? It really hurts. I cry on the mat, I want to remember, I don’t want to forget.
But the thing I study has to be the absolute wonder, an empty-like feeling, at the very possibility of study. I have no right to the intelligibility of this. And yet. I touch it, I feel it, I am felt. And in incommensurate increments, it happens, is let go, and something is becoming. I (willfully) imagine it as, a new kind of self-sense, but I can’t see it yet. The eyes are too new, an infant’s eyes. Looking, without sight, and wanting (hush, hush) to see.
Considering alternate forms of “community”. Community of the silent, of the invisible, of the unknowing. Community of grief. Secret community, hypothetical community, community of dreams. Community of written words. Community of people who write only to themselves. Community of the very, very quiet.
Wayang kulit/shadow puppet.
Wanted: a good-faith, non-circular definition for “artificial intelligence”.
A fantastical term commandeered by propaganda (marketing) campaigns, as divisive as they are ubiquitous, with real and harmful political consequences. When consensus on the definition is taken for granted, non-dogmatic (non-polarized) communication becomes impossible. Everyone becomes a tool of the (undisclosed, unaccounted-for) author(s) of their (unidentified, unclarified) presuppositions.
Another such term: “community”.
I went shopping today. // Complex decisions involving many moving parts, external limiting factors, (or “budgets”), changing possibilities and demands, hypothetical landing-places wherefrom to re-evaluate the terrain, I am good at problem solving with a “flow”, but I am not good at finalizing a concrete answer, which leaves me bad at packing (I procrastinate and overpack), online shopping (I procrastinate and overshop), and “writing a book” (Iol). But I don’t want to talk about ontology, not today, because my nerves are fried after completing two giant shopping tasks, one of which was, making “the” IKEA purchase for moving into our house.
I’ll not bore you with details, just know that this single purchase was for everything “absolutely necessary to move in”, with a set budget, and a set (according to Javanese astrological caluculations, 4 Juli) moving day. I’ve been planning this IKEA purchase for… an embarassingly long time, based partly on an ongoing evaluation of what is locally available/locally made/good quality, plus not stupidly expensive or wasteful. (Bali has a rather insane price-range, catering to some of the world’s “poorest” and some of the worlds stupidly richest people.) (Okay, rules. We aim to make “everything we can” ourselves, to keep purchased items “high quality”, with no unnecessary plastic, as basic and practical and long-lasting “as possible”, and not least, pleasurable to live with.) (There is a whole other blog post about which “luxuries” we’ve chosen to include in our house, and why.) (Examples of “luxuries” include a bathtub, an oven, a french press, etc.) The point is, it was my responsibility to press “purchase”, which I finally did, and that is a big weight off my mind.
So I thought I might photo edit, to soothe frazzled nerves, and there may be a little scattered photo mix over the next days, some from Java, some from Bali, some of a wijaya kusuma bloom that happened a few nights ago. (A joy to behold wijaya kusuma, when she blooms, the sovereign queen of the night. Growing since last year’s Lebaran, every successive bloom is more dramatic, an anticipated performance under cover of darkness, with hushed whispers from the banana trees, a stage-lit dream or an opera unfolding over the course of hours, the rich pleasure of her slow-opening, light-gathering into radiance, expression… then by sunrise, she is spent.)
My hair looks really fantastic today. Sometimes in sunlight it appears almost pink. Cornhusk and rose, golden waves, softly shining. Unwashed and undone, perfection!
Therefore, the weight of Ish on my legs. (Still full belly from the night before?) The gentle snore of somebody I love. The chatter of Blih, passing by, on his phone. The coffee, that made it down, bitter savior of morning. The what-to-do, ten thousand tasks on a throwaway list, bricks out of which a day might be built. That structures over unmarked graves still provide shelter from rain. To wait (for the moon) out the stages of grief. Soft, you. Sometimes, all that’s visible are the ironclad logics behind our great diversity of angers.
Awake before wanting to be awake, noticing the untenable. Eyes dry, in the dark, fingers sore from a bite. Blankets and sheets that don’t fit, at all. Chill in the bones, heat at skin surface. The groan of vehicles, unceasing respiration of machines, and somewhere, the unaddressable discomfort of a womb. Everything dragging a heavy weight. (Growing deficit of fuel.) History, its epicycles, (each one a genocide), and words, from which I ask too much. Even body cannot do that, says Luna, inverting. Shifting between, the falling apart, the holding together, or the manic inference that there ever could have been a beginning. One would first have to have died, says the cock, crowing. (Or at the very least, fallen asleep.)
Parable of the Cage // G. brought a songbird over from Java, (a murai batu/white-rumped shama), named Nobita, to keep at the house. Nobita is at our guesthouse today, just temporarily, hung under the awning outside the door. His cage is covered completely by a yellow, zipped-shut fabric. (The cats are mystified.)
All during my practice, Nobita was singing and whistling sweet trills and dynamic little melodies. Happy sing-songy sounds. It had me thinking. After practice, I said, Oh, sweet little bird. (I am Snow White.) Maybe you would like to peek out from under your cover. Have a nice view of the garden. Get fresh air and sunlight. So, I unzipped one of the zippers, just a little. As soon as he saw me, Nobita started squawking and scolding. He said, “no! No! what are you doing! What are you doing!” Not in words, but in angry little squawks and tch tch sounds. I felt so bad, I quickly apologized and zipped it back up.
There are no computers in Sweet Orange, G.’s truck, I noticed as I climbed in today. It could be 1975 in here. This will be useful in case of “AI apocalypse”, or whatever it’s called when our tools stop working because they’ve all become subscription-based.
Sweet Orange is a Mitsubishi L300 pickup truck, custom painted in mint bluish-green, with bright orange and yellow accents. A photo of Sweet Orange might break the blog. Prayers, slogans and mottos, in Indonesian, Javanese, English, and Japanese, in different sizes and street-art fonts, (with letters whose edges appear lightning-blazed or ripped into metal), are airbrushed or stuck on with decals. The most prominent is “berkah 77”, a prayer of dedication to G.’s mother, born in 1977. (A reminder that in Indonesia, E. and I are grandparent-aged.) There are two anime ladies’ faces on one side, and a third on the other. A decal on the driver’s-side window warns, “18+”. Sweet Orange is tricked out with an array of string lights that ripple across her dashboard in rainbow colors, at night, for safety, or on command, for fun. It is mesmerizing. She is part of a truck driver community. Her decorations and adornments are a language she shares with other trucks (of a similar orientation).
(All of this is G.’s world, of course. He gets shy if we ask too much, but it’s pretty obvious he loves his truck.)
She’s called Sweet Orange because (announcing her purpose) she mainly transports oranges across Java and Bali. That is, when she’s not transporting us. I get a lot of weird looks, a princess-looking bule riding around in such a vehicular statement, but this kind of attention, somehow, I don’t mind. It sets a good example, there’s nothing wrong with a working-class truck, and of course, we’re proud of Sweet Orange too.
Clouds from home (1).
Sun falling, light lengthens, sounds of tongaret (cicada) sawing away in hedgerows. The big sky in painterly patterns of grey and peach and pale, on blue, swallows crossing. Sighting of layang-layang (kites) confirms a hint of dry season, despite big rain last night. All of this feels like change.
…this, to the extent that when colonizers came to the island and saw someone speaking with a mountain, they called it animism. By which they meant, since you don’t pray to Mickey Mouse, you must believe that the mountain is beefcake grandpa. A mountain person told me how offensive and idiotic this was, (they brought it up, told me their side of the story), I said you only know the half of it, and told them the meaning of anima. (Soul, air, breath.) The mountain person said, “I guess we do kind of believe in that,” and I said, “They don’t know the meaning of their own words.” The mountain person said, “Our god cannot be described in words.” (Anthropologists call it, “primitive.") (To speak with a mouse, or to disbelieve in a cartoon?) In retrospect it’s no surprise, colonizers go around with so little understanding of where they themselves come from, that even the mountain person, after uncounted crimes that are (then and now) being committed, against the mountain people and the mountain, had to laugh and feel sorry for them, to be turned so upside-down…
…many I’ve spoken with over the years (students, family, colleagues, friends) have this very cartoony notion of god. Either god is this magical fellow making decisions in the sky, or “He doesn’t exist.” Sometimes I wonder if Michelangelo is to blame, (my little mind, always wanting somebody to blame. How about,) the beefcake grandpa on the ceiling, with voluminous silver hair and clingy pink peejays, (nipples erect, yes and, godly buttocks), pointing theatrically at the things he creates. (Zoom! Bada-boom!, is what I hear.) It’s more than a little… over the top. (Stop looking up Glaucon, you’ll pull a muscle.) Doesn’t leave much to the imagination? (Let alone ta meta ta physica.) (Italian Renaissance is the Las Vegas of European cultural history?) (Pretty crazy what passes for monotheism, then and now.) So that when Mickey Mouse came along I think it confused people, they were like, wait a minute, this is really compelling…
I was floating in emptiness, no light, only the sound of heavy rain. Body weightless, cocooned. It all almost fit inside itself. Then, the thought that I should remember the moment. Record it to retrieve at a later time. It was already sealing itself off again, the interior reflection, and I lost myself back to sleep.
Related, from what I can observe, pesantren provide really good husband training. There’s a folk song about a boy who pretends to be a santri, (a student in pesantren), to get a girl to be interested in him. The song is funny and cute and I totally get it.
Oh, there was a little anger left. I had a chat with A., who is one of my oldest friends, through no achievement of my own. I’ve been a jerk sometimes and/or bad at keeping in touch. We have mysteriously parallel life patterns that we react to in symmetrically opposite ways, we are non-Euclidean soul sisters. She’s a prolific playwright and painter, her plays are clever and touching. We’re like sisters, (except that) it feels very easy to talk.
I also talked to E. about the pesantren community, which is close to his heart, where abuse scandals come out every so often. The dangers inherent in providing a good education, which relies on trust in a trustworthy institution, the imperative for the institution and community to protect their students. How complicated it is to watch them change, whether they can maintain trust. E. told me how one time his kyai made him walk all the way back to Glagahdowo, from Ngawi, which took several days. (He ate and slept in mosques on the road. This is why my husband never complains about anything.)