Lifestyle tip. The best hairstyle (for long hair) for being sick in bed is braids. The extra effort is worth it. Easier to keep out of the way, in general, and the last thing a recovering body needs is the arduous task of detangling a rat’s nest of hair.
One beautiful day.🌈
Where-from? Chickens’ Edition
I’m celebrating, because after two days living on coconut water and white bread, I graduated today to whole wheat bread. You see, I have the flu. Or, “a” flu? Just basic old-fashioned flu, not one of the trendy new viruses (you know the ones). I’m already feeling better, enough to be fantasizing about a fully-loaded veggie burger, (sauerkraut is mandatory), however, I remain shaky-feeling and weak, so my realistic plan for tonight is noodle soup. And maybe a fruit smoothie. (InsyaAllah there will be a burger on Friday.)
Grace is feeling better too, I think. She stopped pining around the brooding nest and started hanging out with Frankie again. So Frankie is more of a paranoid asshole with everybody else, (including his own children), but it’s because he’s protective of Grace. So we can’t fault him. He’s back to finding her morsels of food and making cozy nests for her. (Is he actually an ideal partner?) If they haven’t already, they’ll probably start mating again soon. (That decision is up to Grace.) Those two are inseparable.
Doing a little “research”, I realized that our chickens are probably different from the domestic chicken breeds popular in North America and Europe. Frankie is similar in appearance to the red junglefowl. This is the wild bird, native to Southeast Asia including Indonesia, from which chickens were domesticated thousands of years ago (~8,000). Red junglefowl cocks are strikingly handsome birds, as is Frankie. The wikipedia article notes that they are sometimes used in cock fighting, which remains popular around here (in Bali). When wikipedia says “sometimes” about Indonesia, I have learned to interpret that as “often”. So I would imagine Frankie’s genetics are pretty close to that source, and it’s not surprising that he would come across as somewhat feral.
We “acquired” Frankie before we moved into our house, when he wandered onto our property and didn’t feel like leaving. So he has lived here longer than we have. He was still a chick back then, but apparently old enough for independence. We later learned that he had been chased away from our neighbor Pak T’s house, by their cat. (Pak T said we could keep him.) Then we “acquired” Grace when Pak S brought her over, also before we moved in, and left her in a small bamboo cage in the yard. This was either a gift or an instance of Pak S not wanting to deal with her, possibly because she had five chicks at the time. (Or it was, for Pak S, an entertaining test of what we would do with a mating pair of chickens? I really don’t know, he just laughed about it when we asked him! All I know is, we weren’t consulted about whether we “wanted” any of them.) Because we didn’t live here yet, our carpenters kind of took care of the chickens. I assumed everything would be ok. But over several nights, those five chicks that came with Grace disappeared. They were probably hunted and eaten by the same cat that had chased Frankie.
When I learned about it, I felt guilty about that, Grace losing all her chicks while she was stuck in the cage. This is one reason I really wanted Grace to experience motherhood, fully, at least once. (My sense of justice!) And that’s what got us into the situation where we have a flock of eleven chickens. Or at least, one flock of nine chickens, and another flock of two chickens. It remains unclear whether Frankie and Grace want to integrate with their children’s flock at all. On second thought, maybe it’s totally clear. The parents and the children simply consider themselves separate flocks.
(Imagine that. I actually said to one of them today… “It’s ok, I have a mean dad too.” …)
For her part, Grace doesn’t look like a red junglefowl hen. She looks very much like this other breed of chicken from Indonesia, also used for cock fighting, the Ayam Cemani. She’s a lovely bird, with a soft and thoughtful look, although my photos haven’t yet captured it. I doubt she’s any kind of pure breed, but she is completely black, with only the faintest blush on her “caruncles”. (There’s a lot of chicken vocabulary to learn.) Another reason I doubt she’s purebred is because wikipedia says Ayam Cemani aren’t good “setters”, whereas Grace is a very broody chicken. When that time comes, she is utterly devoted to sitting on her eggs.
My thinking is this. Most domestic chickens have been bred for egg and/or meat production, and possibly for docility, whereas our chickens have been bred, (and/or taken from the jungle?), for fighting, and/or allowed to breed free-range. As a result, I don’t expect them to be very cuddly birds. But I do expect them to be smart in their own ways, as wild or feral animals are. And they are thoroughly social, with each other and with us. It’s apparent that they consider us (humans) company, they always come “check out” what we’re doing, or sit nearby us (under the awning) when it’s raining and they’re bored, or ask for treats (boiled peanuts). They (warily) eat from our hands. They look at us accusingly when we don’t have peanuts for them. And if I speak to Grace in sweet coos (like Cucurrucucu), Frankie gets testy.
(Although I always think of it as Frankie’s, that song isn’t about a rooster, but a lovesick coo-ing dove. Please click the link if you’ve never heard Caetano Veloso’s rendition. You won’t regret it, it’s heart-achingly lovely. We need more Caetano Veloso and Almodovar in all our lives, don’t we? And then for another version, this one sung by Juan Diego Florés at La Scala is sublime. Watching that reminds me of that one time I was there. Also, watch for the look he gives the loggionisti—it’s so direct!)
Anyway, that’s more-or-less the origin story of our chickens. They showed up in our lives, like our three cats, and we weren’t ever given a real option to say no. And they (unlike the cats, who are now imprisoned in our safe, loving, and amply medicated home) are technically free to leave. Although once a few of Grace’s chicks escaped outside the wall and we spent a rainy afternoon traipsing through overgrown jungle and rice paddies to retrieve them, with Grace frantically waiting back home. She was very upest about it. That was when they were still babies. Now they’re almost grown, the girls will probably start laying soon (if they haven’t already, in secret), and one of the cockerels has, as signaled by his crowing, decided he’s the leader of the flock. The chicks have their own governance structure now. They could fly over the wall if they wanted, but they seem pretty content to hang around here. Even if we are delinquent chicken keepers and have yet to figure out their permanent coop situation. They may not be cuddly, but it’s pretty obvious that they will love when we give them a permanent and roomy chicken house, dry and warm, with brooding boxes, etc. They would live with us in the human house, if we let them. But that’s too much even for me.
By the way, we did eventually screen off the hallway, so the human house is totally off-limits now. Thank goodness, because the poop grew up as they did… the quantity makes it gross, but excellent fertilizer for the gardens. And oh, please pray for us that we never experience an outbreak of avian influenza. (My own symptoms do NOT match those of A H5N1.)
(I still haven’t told you what we do with all the eggs. That can wait for another day.)
Because look at me, I’m still in bed with this flu and I had planned to give myself a solid 3-4 days off of “serious blogging”. But then I accidentally wrote this long post and spent the afternoon reading some of these older posts and listening to music that makes me tear up and/or shout bravissimo and wave my hands around like I’m in The Godfather. And yesterday I read the whole book about learning to speak chicken! Apparently I’m ok at resting the body, but not great at resting the mind. I can’t believe I haven’t had coffee in three days. That’s truly wild.
Maybe it’s because of the full moon? Selamat purnama, everybody. Stay healthy and safe.
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌕
Funeral for a Chicken
It became obvious that Grace was grieving the loss of her chick.
She remained close to the nest, puttering, looking here and there or inside the nest again. She was uncharacteristically quiet. She chased away other chickens. She was aimless but unwilling to leave. I spent time sitting with her. I took moments to slow down, to meet her “where she is”, and tell her how sorry we are for her loss. Now she sits near me as I read and write. (I sit on the porch, still not far from the nest.) The most touching thing is how she maintains eye contact.
It prompted me to search for written-down experiences of (communication, community) living with chickens, and I found this book called How to Speak Chicken by Melissa Caughey. She means literally speaking their language, deciphering and returning their clucks and bokks, as well as gaining entry to their flock. I do already speak to the chickens in words and sounds. I’ve been surprised how closely they listen and the things they seem to understand. But Melissa takes it to another level and clearly knows more than we do about her chickens, about what they want, about their feelings, their fears and joys, their quirky (individual) personalities, and all their ways of self-expression.
At first, I felt shy that I would mourn with Grace, for a chick who knew only one beautiful day. When chickens are not just eaten by them, but treated worse than garbage, by humans, by the thousands and millions. (And, well, Los Angeles is burning.) But I shouldn’t be shy. Community with the non-human is a gateway to deeper understanding.
Too many instances of it (community with the non-human) are treated as un-serious, dismissed as “merely subjective”, reduced by dualist (Cartesian) dogma (in partnership with certain religious traditions, especially Christianity in its understanding of human will, i.e. Augustine and Aquinas) to machine-like instinct, safely compartmentalized into the category of “pets”, explained away as the primitive behavior of pre-scientific minds, (children or women or the brown-skinned), or the flaky spirituality of new-age nonsense. This is part of the same modern and enlightenment-era thinking that provides justification for rapacious colonial expansion and empire, as well as chattel slavery, and all else that is generally called “white supremacy”. The culturally assumed solution to this (“white supremacy”) has largely been to gather non-white humans up into the exclusive flock of intellect- and/or “free will”-endowed beings, while partitioning away the rest of the natural world (non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, rivers, oceans, mountains, canyons, stars, moons, etc.) in a separate category of the stupid and/or dumb, unworthy of ethical or moral consideration. Except inasmuch as they are useful, to the human.
Humanism, when seen from this vantage, is the cultural effort to replace white supremacy with (a dubiously racially neutral) human supremacy. But the violence (ignorance, self-abuse) of supremacy remains. The in-practice meaning of “free will” retains nothing holy, becomes the freedom to exploit, abuse, and generally disregard the suffering or wellbeing of those without it (without “free will”). All of us (humans) have suffered from this humanism. And because humanism assumes the human to be dual, human and animal, (as opposed to human animals), humanism divides us against our own embodied selves.
The violence of human separatism can be observed through a cultural Scylla of embodiment issues, from the body’s hijacking by commodification, (“the beauty industry”, including online “influencers”), to abuse by for-profit pharmaceutical corporations (in the name of health), to cultural conflicts over sexuality, (including over manifestations of gender), to the marginalization or cultural “turning away” from the elderly and the disabled, to addiction and other crises of habit (i.e. obesity, heart disease, diabetes, social media, “AI”), to crises of mental health and suicide, etc. (Here I include “AI” as an embodiment problem, as a mis-relation of human thinking to human bodies. Although I don’t think this is the only way to interpret it.)
Non-human does not mean stupid. Only the most rarefied facets of our experience (if any) are uniquely human. Most of the time, humans interrelate like any other animals. But look, there is plenty of love in this. It’s true that our chicken family will never read and discuss a Plato dialogue with me. Neither will most humans (including you). Neither would your own child, especially if it passed away only a day after it was born. We are almost wholly joined by bonds of affect and imagination. Whatever it is that is uniquely human, we can’t even be sure that it lends itself to community. Humans stand out from other living animals not by their social or political coherence, but in their (uniquely) dysfunctional or unstable relationships with each other, and with the world. The most destructive become historically notable mostly because of an idiotic pretense of supremacy. It works until it fails.
Does it count as trying to understand the world, if you assume at the outset its stupidity? To assume its stupidity is expedient. It may get you to Mars, it may get you a big mac, or a house in the suburbs with enough cashflow to supply (frequently replaced) digital devices for a family of four. To assume its stupidity makes it seem okay to do unfathomly terrible things to the non-human. There isn’t such a sharp divide between concentration camps and factory farms, the fossil fuel industry and violence against women. To the extent that, as metaphors, they read as obvious, clichéd or tedious, if not offensive. And yet, these are its routine, its daily complicities.
What is it? It is a living thing, saying “never again” with each exhalation, and with each inhalation, “always already”.
My husband buried his father as well as his sister, according to Muslim tradition, so he knows how to wrap a corpse in preparation for burial. Once the chick died, having lost its voice, its movement, its warmth, and its self, Grace no longer interpreted it as the body of her child. (A reminder that we are but interpretations of each others’ bodies.) We removed it from the nest without her objection. We lit some small incense sticks, E set it on a small wood-block table, wrapped it in several pieces of white cloth. He dug a hole under a rose bush, about the size of my hand. I placed it in the hole, he covered it with dirt. He placed a stone to mark the location. I put small white and purple melati flowers.
Grace sees what we do. She sees me crying. I tell her it wasn’t her fault, and she’s a really good mom.
The other chickens, her grown babies, come by and check in. She snaps at them, still defensive of the nest. Frankie is never far away but gives her space. Grace moves a little farther from the nest, day by day. With reluctance, she releases the feelings and memories of her baby. Today, we gave them their favorite treat, boiled peanuts. Frankie, as usual, made sure that Grace got more than the rest.
Natural divisions are temporary, like rivers between us that are never the same, or hypothetical, like bridges that dissolve as we pass beyond them, or revelation, like eggshells cracked open with tiny horns on our hatchling beaks. We grow into other lives. Nature in motion is constant incompletion, otherwise we would all stop dead in our tracks. History is the ontological mismanagement of time. There is no cause for despair, but hope is only from the cracks, and the light that gets through them. What this means is that the future is not the measure, and to stop expecting victorious outcomes. Build to rebuild, and to rebuild again. Live in the truth of one beautiful day. Sacrifice your heart at the altar of its creation.
(One way or another.) Community with the non-human is the gateway to self-understanding.
Video is everywhere of Los Angeles burning, still visible when we close our eyes. My heart is with everyone suffering unimaginable loss and uncertainty right now. Struggling to imagine an America where these images could spark an extinction rebellion. Then struggling to quiet the imagination, seeking neutral ground, the soil for sleep. Focusing on these economies of the imagination, attempts at self-maintenance. Orienting by the presence of a partner. Self-maintenance as other-care.
We can hear the shush of rain for a few minutes before it comes.
I’m sad to share that nu baby was lethargic and weak today, didn’t come out of the nest, rarely cheeping. E held out hope while I braced for loss. Noticing the smallness of passing life and its clarity, like a glass marble in time.
Grace sits close, mouth open, and blinks at us. She knows her baby and its heartbeat. Her energy for care is concentrated patience, balanced sorrow and waiting, being neither here nor there, but present. Watching Grace I tell myself, this is part of being a mother too.
We left her a wijaya kusuma flower.
Nu baby. //
So… life, uh, found a way. We tried (admittedly have been a little distracted) to steal all of Grace’s eggs but she tricked us and hatched one! Just one. A heaping tablespoon of pale yellow fluff. Well, it’s just not possible to be sad about an itty bitty chick.
(I love Laura Dern in that clip.)
This one is light-colored, while the first clutch was all black. Already a tiny misfit.
The other chickens, teenagers now, are so far curious about the new baby. Grace pecks them if they get too close. (Very fierce.) They stay out of reach and crane their necks to watch it, (all of them at once, chickens are such gossips), while it hip-hops around mom’s feet.
We needed to rearrange the chicken living space to make it cozy for Grace and nu baby. So we took apart the old arrangement, but the chickens got a little upset about it. So there was some chaos theory with chickens flapping first up on the laundry line then up to the roof of the little limasan (our bedroom).
Chickens on the roof!
There was also a big storm that blew through when E was fixing chicken stuff and I was doing yoga. I was worried about the tiny puff-ball blowing away, but Grace disappeared the baby up into her feathers and hunkered under the downpour. She didn’t even move under the eaves of the house, to escape the rain, she just turned herself into a house. She is truly amazing.
When the rain cleared and the sun came out, nu baby came out too, peep-peeping again. Precious marshmallow. (They’re still a little clueless on day one.
To be honest, I’m worried about its chances of survival, being just one tiny peep in the midst of a boisterous flock of claw-talon-footed brothers and sisters. It will be a new test of Grace as a mother. InsyaAllah she will prevail.)
To relax from all that, I listened through Kendrick’s “beef” with Drake from last spring. They released 7 or 8 tracks taking shots at each other. All I can say about that is, hip-hop is amazing social media.
(Note. I think most of my pop culture “takes” will be a few years or decades late. “News” includes anything that happens in my lifetime, is how I see it, on my blog.)
Anyway, back to Kendrick “I said ‘we,’ it’s not just me, I’m what the culture feelin'" Lamar.
(euphoria, meet the grahams, Not Like Us)
Rap is an amazing rhetorical medium, but also, Kendrick has spoiled me for almost all other artists. Sometimes he makes it chill, sometimes angry, sometimes tragic or funny, (“some shit just cringeworthy”), but it’s always a contest, (for victory wreaths, and he didn’t come to the games to place second. He will sniff out and attack the evil (=the Drake fan?) in you. He makes music a war for the soul.
(And for his family, and for those disowned by other families, and ultimately for the soul.)
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌖
I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars // maybe a week ago. I really liked it but I think it took me the whole year to finish.
(Spoilers follow.)
It was relaxing. Not facile, but easy to read when stressed out about other things. Good for falling asleep too. The pages are full of lush descriptions of Martian geology, seen from gliders and rovers and windows and walkers, and also, of humans being very human. I think the viewpoint is… near-future, mild tech optimism made palatable by human realism, where humans routinely do callous and violent stuff, like sending out a Mars expedition while trashing planet Earth. They are a destructive force, ever-changing and -surviving, and some who have good ideas are also gifted with good luck and timing. The 90’s vintage works (published 1992, I think). It wouldn’t work nearly as well, if written today, with all of the darkness of these days. Perhaps this is an example of escapism from history, while still being canny to human nature. It’s much nicer to think about the future from a pre-9/11 perspective, isn’t it?
Robinson’s characters are like avatars, but not (to me) in an overbearing way. I especially like his women characters. Maybe these are his favorite too. I like Ann, the geologist, who is a staunch defender of virgin, untouched, original Mars. The plot of the book, which follows the beginning of humans colonizing Mars, as terraforming is begun, and the landscape is ripped apart by industry and eventual rebellion and war, is an extended grief, for Ann. She loves Mars with unspeakable devotion and hates the terraforming with every cell in her body. Her perspective is difficult and severe, but beautiful.
And I like Hiroko, who completely subverts all the official directives of their initial mission. She is the designated biosphere designer, and it seems like she has some amazing ideas for how to create life. Then she and her followers ditch the main group and spend most of the book shrouded in mystery. Well, she is busy making babies using all the men’s sperm samples, taken from her lab, (without anybody’s consent), and creating an underground cult movement called Areophany that worships viriditas, or life-force. She is disciplined and insane, also very difficult, impossible to contain or to fully know. She answers to nobody and recognizes herself as a force of nature. Like a Mars-mother goddess. As you may know by now, I love this kind of thing.
(Can’t forget to mention, there’s a scene in this book, with a character named John Boone, a goofy lovable American, a charismatic and nice guy, who has an ecstatic experience with a group of travelling Sufi Muslims. They are dancing and whirling around in the vortex of a crimson dust storm, flying through the air and spinning in the low gravity of Mars, chanting all the different names of Mars, with all the names of Allah. The image is one of flying-spinning through a great blood-red alien heart. This scene is wonderful, not to be missed!)
There are other women characters less extreme in their commitments, and many other things to love about the book. These are just my favorites. Happily, Ann and Hiroko are both still around in the next book, Green Mars. I started it a few days ago. Maybe this one will take me another year to finish?
Chillin’.
Hormonal IUD side effects
Something a little different, today. I wondered for about thirty seconds whether this was “too much information” for my blog but well, it’s relevant, (everything is relevant?), so here’s your warning.
Today, I finally (actually) realized I have to remove my hormonal IUD. I knew I was developing worse mental side effects soon after a new one was placed, in August. (I got a Kyleena in fall 2019, and then with the Mirena hormonal IUD, in fall 2024. The Mirena brought intensification of everything, which helped me identify the previous effects of the Kyleena.) Influenced by my doctor, I hoped things would “even out” after a few months, and I was desperate to maintain protection from pregnancy. My hope was delusional and self-destructive. Today I searched youtube and then reddit for other women’s experiences and learned I’m not alone. (Cue crying.) It was the catalyst for my realization.
Mood has been by far the worst cluster of side-effects. I feel like I’ve had no ability to deal with stress/stressors and like I’ve been going periodically crazy. Being stuck in bed sobbing for days with no idea why or how to get out of what feels like a deep hole. Followed by days of feeling empty, anhedonia, fatigue. This has accompanied actual stressful events (in personal life and in the world) since I was first fitted with the Kyleena. Soon after that I moved to Indonesia, which began a period of instability and uncertainty in living sitations (housing, immigration status, a new relationship and then marriage in a foreign country), as well as the pandemic and acceleration of apparent civilization collapse. It’s difficult to distinguish between normal stress and side effects, but I assume now that my responses to these things were impacted negatively by the Kyleena IUD. I don’t know how much the IUD is related to the asymmetrical psoas syndrome that rapidly intensified and has physically disabled me during that same time period. But I believe that the stress of those months, from October 2019 through the summer of 2020, was a significant contributing factor. So if the hormonal IUD reduced my ability to deal with stress (and there are peer-reviewed studies showing that hormonal birth control raises cortisol and lowers GABA levels), it likely played a significant role in my physical impairment over the last 5 years.
Here are all the side-effects I experienced.
mood effects included anxiety, depression, panic, feelings of dread, intrusive thoughts, paranoia, irritability (meanness, rudeness, lashing out, way more than usual), feeling out of control, crying fits, despair and hopelessness, frequent overwhelm, including from small things, episodes that felt like depressive paralysis or catatonia, inability to focus, fatigue, suicidal thoughts, depersonalization.
nausea, shakyness, dizziness/vertigo, especially in the morning (like “morning sickness”)
excessive sweating, night sweats, excessive and strange body odor, “feeling gross” even right after bathing
insomnia
migraine/tension headaches
increased body hair (minor but noticed)
melasma on my face (minor but annoying, impactful)
feeling of puffiness, bloating and cramps, breast soreness (minor, could have lived with it, except for.. all of the above)
Politics around reproductive health is already shit, and it’s only getting worse, so a lot of women are probably considering this option (hormonal IUD). For many, it works fine. But potential consumers (that’s what we are) should be aware that they can cause severe psychological side effects, including suicidal ideation. Hormone imbalance is no game. It’s typical that contemporary medicine treats (women’s) health with such disregard, that a medicine like this would be promoted by doctors (and would profit pharmaceutical corporations like Bayer, which makes these) without communication or (sufficient research? or) open acknowledgement of how severe the side-effects can be. I am not alone in feeling like it has “made me crazy”. My doctors said the IUD was low-impact and “localized”, in its effects, (all doctors seem to use this term, I assume it’s from the drug’s promotional material), but mentally it was far more intense for me than oral BC. I am the child of healthcare professionals, I generally trust modern medicine, but I believe this kind of minimization (and profit-seeking) harms women and erodes trust in the whole institution.
I’m f- -king lucky my husband is understanding, supportive, tolerant, patient, long-suffering, didn’t take anything personally, through some very tough times. Otherwise it might have been relationship-ending. Also I learned that in a situation like this, when there aren’t other options, a good partner will (despite his own fear of doctors and hospitals) insist on vasectomy.
I guess the lesson here is to feel your feelings. Listen to your body, don’t take its natural balance for granted, and try not to be gaslit by healthcare professionals. Not sure how long it will take to get back to normal, or what normal will be like. But it feels better to write all this down. Now (actually) to get the damned thing yanked out.
Product misplacement. // Happy new year!
With relief. //
Does this seem right? It’s neither the power nor the responsibility of a child to forgive a parent. To forgive, as to judge, is the power and the act of God. The power and responsibility of a child is to communicate their need for care.
There is also the literal groundlessness (earthlessness, lifelessness) of anger directed against a parent. (As usual, thinking of Achilles. But these really seem like lessons of Abraham, …) It’s there, the rage, as a feeling, but it makes no natural sense. Like an artifact of (divine) omnipotence. What a child feels and expresses toward a parent (Ismail’s crying) isn’t a judgment, but an unaddressed need for care.
Likewise, there’s something perverse when a parent asks their child for forgiveness. Why are you putting that burden on your child? As a child, I could never not welcome one of my parents into my house, or into my heart. But that’s not forgiveness, I don’t think, it’s just being a child. To forgive, as to judge, is the power and act of God.
There’s a rough and ready (“embodied”) justice grown into generational (“blood”) relationships, which already negotiate between the finite and infinite circumstances of a political animal, the things we might demand of each other, the things we must release. It’s maybe easier, from the perspective of liberalism, to recognize the arbitrary nature of familial justice and its proneness to abuse. (When there is no viable rejection of, or emancipation from parents.) But maybe it provides some rudimentary shelter for sanity, and a solider liberation.
It was a rainy afternoon, E and I both fell asleep while watching a movie, took a nap. Woke to the sound of more thunder and fireworks for New Year’s Eve. Which I care about only a little, (we’ll observe the lunar year), but ok. This seems like a pretty good thought-feeling to end 2024. With relief. That it simply isn’t my place, to judge or even forgive my parents. Of all the things that are my responsibility, that’s not one of them.
As Prophet Abraham, (peace be upon him), to his father. “I will pray for your forgiveness, but I have no power to rescue you from Allah.” (Surah Al-Mumtahanah, Ayat 4.)
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌑
Chanced upon Bob’s 2017 Nobel lecture, which made me realize a few things. 1. Being a folk singer isn’t too different from blogging. 2. I should read All’s Quiet on the Western Front, which I never read. And 3. Does the blog maybe need some audio voice recording? Just something to think about.
The lecture is a pretty amazing “where from”. Even though I catch flashes or hints of them in the songs, I never heard him talk so explicitly about books before. “I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’” Nobody misquotes translates Homer like Bob.
(What strikes me is his piety.)
This is also what I call translation, which is both poros and poiesis.
The first lesson of the chariot is maybe not to put the chariot in front of the horses.
Goodnight, chickens. //
I spend a lot of energy worrying about waste.
I dislike waste. Unambiguous waste strikes me as unambiguously bad. Sometimes waste is obviously egregious, sometimes it’s outside of my control. It can be hard to know what is (or will be) wasteful, without learning that from experience. Often one gets it wrong, before getting it right. Experiment is being-at-work for the sake of learning, which often involves waste. What seems truly needful is the waste (scattered like flower petals, ribbons, feathers, teeth…, we are free to improvise) along a possible way to wisdom.
(What is the opposite of experimental? Naive, traditional, conservative, established, authoritative, authoritarian, conjectural, anecdotal,…
Wow, an uncontained multitude.)
“I dislike wasted words. I think humans really are un-governable. While causality is alive and poetry is worship.” Anybody who would actually say this is so full of themselves. But written words can follow opposite rules, from spoken ones, which is how poetry slips into necromancy. Written words are like statues. Once you let them be poses, and self-organize as unique figures, they become experiments in the containment and unleashing of multitudes.
It is not entirely safe, it can be extremely dangerous. Is it worth it? Is it waste on the way to wisdom?
(If not, then to where?)
The chickens grew big enough that they didn’t fit in their house. They were fighting about it, mostly at night. They don’t need walls for warmth anymore, with the tropical temperatures, but they’re much happier with enclosed shelter from the rain. So E made a covered loft in their pen to expand the roosting space. Tonight they look cozy and relieved, snuggled up off the ground, on a cushy grass bed. They are more quiet, too.
I’m glad that my husband believes in ghosts, monsters, miracles. If he didn’t, how could he believe in me?
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌒
Mawar Natal.
Daughters of Typhon
// Phaedrus 227β // Isthmian 1
It felt good to translate Isthmian 1, like eating a nourishing bowl of food, with green and purple vegetables, roast potatoes, tempe, tender steamed rice underneath, and spicy peanut sauce drizzled (generously) on top. Doing something like that makes me feel applauded by ancestors, for sure. The only translations of that poem I could find (public domain) were so very fine (It’s awe-inspiring how flowery the old-fashioned translators were. What alien world did they come from, those boys of clubby leisure? Did they drink honey-wine for breakfast before sitting down to work?) that I failed to detect in them the brilliance of an original. Which I uncovered as I worked it out and translated for myself. Using fewer words, less adorned, to give it my own meter, then to brush away the sediment from this cut and polished gemstone. To put it in my words, to shape my lips around the poetic act.
As a physical, full-bodied shiver. I could feel the pride of the author, in the poem’s re-discovery.
“What’s more beloved / By good men than their parents, esteemed?” Indeed, smiling, I admired our work. Other possible translations for “esteemed” could be “cared for”, “valued” or “cherished”. Good people love to see their parents taken care of, “placed on high”, publicly loved. If you enjoy seeing your parents respected and celebrated, you are probably a good person. So suggests Pindar. And this is what I have done by translating his poem. Isn’t it? I have cared for a parent, if I could consider Pindar a parent. Could I? Would he be a father, or maybe a grandfatherly figure? If he would accept me, as such. Maybe.
//
Fathers and grandfathers are hard to come by, around here. Okay, the subject is difficult. I grew up without grandfathers. Then my father was (and is) a piece of work. He spent my childhood teaching me to read his darker feelings. I became very good at that.
It was not an easy childhood. I was somehow hoarded by him, he was my primary caretaker, or anyway, my mother left me unprotected, unshielded from the intensity of his self-loathing, which he daily poured over me like fuel, with which I should also burn. Maybe worse than if it had all been hostile, the infliction (and it was violent, if an adult man yelling full-force close to a six year-old girl’s face, as if to teach her with terror, is violent, his spittle in her eyes, as she is petrified and panicking with shame, and the daily ritual of this, for the first fifteen years of my life, that it framed everything) alternated on-and-off with love, as an oddly infantile affection.
My parents divorced when I was eleven or twelve. (It was after they had a giant fight, in Disney World.) A few years after that (when I was a teenager) I stopped living with my father, basically for fear. I called him and said I would live with my mother full time. I thought I was free then, but it was still all I knew. I had no perspective on the conditions of anger and shame I had suffered, through which I had learned (pathei mathos, as Aeschylus) the meaning of (fatherly) love. An open question, (mine), of whereto and wherefrom. What does it take to recover from that kind of growing up?
I (on my request) went to therapy with him, tried to keep in touch with him, (he never called me, he’s not that kind of parent), and struggled for years to maintain a tolerable connection with him. Until at (after the ceremony and reception were over, I’m not such an asshole) my sister’s wedding (in Disney World again, yes, of all places), (we are very different people), like so many times before, he found a reason to shame me. As if to re-establish dominance over a dangerous dog. He did it, as always, when nobody else was there to see. It was after I suggested taking my neice and nephew out for ice cream. I guess he thought that was the stupidest idea. The familiar timbre of his punishing voice, the physical vibration low and threatening, set my inner child quaking with fear. I took a deep breath and (not for the first time) told him he couldn’t talk to me like that anymore. I would not “be bullied”. He refused to admit wrongdoing, would not make eye contact for the rest of our time there. We all flew home from Disney World, and I didn’t call him again, after that.
(I pause here, to note some broader family context.)
My mother, although she was the target of his abuse for years, and her tears were my tears, rarely admits there was anything wrong. She says she didn’t know how he treated me. At first I thought that was impossible. As a child, I felt like she must know. I felt somehow like we were together in that, but also she would never speak of it, which was a betrayal. Here I begin to doubt my memory, and maybe it’s possible that nobody knew, my mom or my sister. Although there was very harsh treatment at the piano, my worst memories are from when I was closed away in “the study”. That was where he made me do hours of extra school work each day. The most severe of his demands, castigations, and punishments, might have been hidden. But my understanding remains foggy, because my dad was often very loud, when yelling how stupid or wrong I was. And how could my mother not know? Of course, anyone in her position wouldn’t want to know. Anyway, she doesn’t like to talk about it.
My sister holds it against me for “leaving him”. (She remained living with him up into her thirties, even after being married and having two children.) Although she avoids talking about it too, and I only got that snippet of perspective from her husband, so it might not even be true. Again, it seems like nobody else witnessed or acknowledges his longterm mistreatment of me, or cares. To the point that I begin to doubt my own memories. I’m not sure what I can say about that. It is a terrible thing, trying to choose between memories and familial acceptance.
An uncle, my mother’s brother, told me that I was an adult, so I should understand that I was “safe now” and endure mistreatment.
Their father, my maternal grandfather, was no better. My beloved grandmother (may she rest in peace) was the only one who would talk about him. Her stories suggest that he was quite nasty. He threatened her (my grandmother) with a pistol before abandoning them, when my mom and her brother were children. He pretended they died in a car accident and married somebody else. My grandmother also claims he broke into the house, after leaving, and stole her jewelry. She would tremble when she spoke of him. The man’s obituary (he passed in 2021, coincidentally just weeks after my grandmother) mentioned none of us as descendants.
My father, for his part, had cut both of his parents out of his life before I was born. I assume that my grandfather did a similar thing to my father, as my father did to me. This is not something he would ever talk about. I have no way of knowing. But I imagine there was a lot of meanness and cruelty there. And then, my father once told me he despised his mother for being “superficial” and “just a socialite”. My memory of that conversation is vague, and I’m really unsure how to interpret it. Anyway, that’s how I grew up without grandfathers.
(Violence doesn’t grow on trees, after all.)
Even though we hadn’t spoken in several years, I flew across the country to see my father before I moved to Indonesia (in 2019). I wanted to say goodbye, or “pay my respects”. There was no argument, but politeness, as a brief and transparent veneer. Underneath the tension was barely concealed his skepticism and contempt toward me and my life choices, along with a performative, condemnatory aloofness. The lack of warmth, not even by habit or accident, was heartbreaking. It was under duress and for the sake of survival that I had learned the languages of his shifting shadows, threatening always from the borderline of his (my) joy. Maybe I became too sensitive. How many times should I (could I) make myself vulnerable, by caring, or even smiling, in his presence? To be whipped with inexplicable rejection, at an unguarded moment, with shame, humiliation, and a panic whose bilious flavor would seep into all areas of my person, my body, my life. At the end, there was no hug goodbye. There was only a stiff wave.
We haven’t spoken since I moved to the other side of the world, so around five years, and that’s where my time with him leaves off. Sometimes I wonder what I will do when he dies. Or if he gets sick, how will I know? How will it make me feel? (The answer is very, very sad.)
Incidentally, Christmas Eve is his birthday, which is today. It has always cast a sadness across the holiday, to remember rituals of childhood pain, contrasted with those of childhood joy. (Like his joy, when he opened the packs of socks we always gave him, as that’s what he always asked us for). And just in case there are any doubts. I would happily reconcile, if he ever reached out, or otherwise communicated that he wanted to change, or just communicated that he wanted to communicate. I know he is tormented and I wish I could help. But if I had stayed, it wouldn’t have helped. It would just have been staying with abuse.
With all of my heart, I wish I knew how to make it (my father) right.
//
It feels natural (or inevitable) to blame myself for this alienation. No matter my trying to do the best thing, no matter me persuading myself I tried hard enough, or I’ve done enough self-work, or healing, it seems as though I am stained. It feels similar to my alienation from the country of my birth. (So I slip into speaking of “staying” and “leaving”.) With whom I tried, again and again, to make it work, (I fought for myself, in you), but from whom I grow only stranger, as my life goes on. (Or. As our synchronous deaths carry us ever further from reconciliation.) There has been a ripping out of organs, bones cracked, a wrenching of spines, skin charred and flayed. It brings me no joy to have these great gaping wounds in my soul. They are ever-ripe and liable to fester. They require constant vigilance, and even so, they spawn offspring.
As if to supply a perpetual war.
I wish to be a good, healthy, dutiful person. I wish to repay my debts, to respect my elders. I realize that I need a city wall, and stable laws to protect a soul from harm. But I would ask all the fathers, the poets and patriarchs, Plato, Socrates, Pindar. Even Bob. How now? What is wrong with me? Am I not “a good man”? How should I, if I am to be good, celebrate such broken things? Should I place them on high, and be broken to pieces, beneath them?
Or. Should I not myself have been powerful enough to put everything back together?
Or. Together again? What would be this “again”?
Or. What was the thing, unbroken?
The father unbroken. If it never was my personal father, what could it have been? Was it the shining city on a hill, or the beautiful one writ in heaven? Was it a garden, or a book? Was it the silver-bearded grandpa on the chapel ceiling? Or the Christ that broke all his own Fathers' rules? In whose name predators ascend to power, in a greusome catharsis that used to be the country of my birth. So I know that it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, or the U.S. Constitution. But was it Herodotus of Thebes, two-and-a-half thousand years in the past, on his magnificent golden chariot, whose reins were not held by another’s hands? Was it you, whose poetry tells of such things? As fathers, holy, revered, and unbroken. A six year-old girl, with no working fathers, and crumbling city walls, needed, for her life, to know.
//
Daughters, put to such questions, will only
Become witches. (We, who find
we are
as we do
as we make
as we uncover fossils
Of animals that could have been held high by us,
Who might make (us) right
In return, and growing backwards, as generations,
Flourish in veiled vacancy. I cherish your words.
And I make them my own.
But these things were broken long before I was born.)
With my words as my mark, (by such easy deathlessness),
We live and we breathe
(Laughing, replying) without a father’s permission.
//
(About.)
How to sweep the floor on a windy day?
Tropical Christmas //
wonderful news, everything is less empty than advertised,
triple-checking our double-Christ by the crossroads, the unborn child
that Love is Real, however disturbingly ugly and poor. get ready
to suspect of “parasocial” relationships that they aren’t actually one-way (being at work in only one way). And “normal” social relationships aren’t two-way, well, not relationships of love. These are (“paranormally”) three-way, it’s called mediation
to invite another being-at-work to emerge than those presently spoken, or instead, that our voices have been momentarily invited
to escape I thought I must flee into falsehood. Beauty was only there, in circuses of impossibility, until my very shape was chosen by the eyes of this gently created face. In whose curves and creases it would be possible to cease flight and surrender. A shifting of ivory feathers, a self of un-defacing light. (A song!) Lo and behold (the beautiful self) it was (us, reading) you
(we had lost all reason, we had lost restraint)
a being built not to survive but to thrive, bellyfat shaking under half-lit moon, she is the gift of procreation. With dripping excess of bodies joined, masses of the partial and angry, legs, breasts, hands, flayed faces smeared with mud, and as she mounts the horizon, a star on her forehead through which is visible their heavenward mandala
their shapes were monster with mandala or Athena with gorgoneion
(each solstice a moment of peace,
and submission of lust to curvilinear motion)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌓