the valley below

Rainy season means bugs, so many bugs. Colonies produce frenzied night swarms that last mere hours before dropping, energy spent, masses of bodies wriggling helpless until snatched by gecko jaws, frog tongues, translucent wings carried off by ants, countless born and died and disappeared by morning.

Jeki mood.

And who among us doesn’t have a secret name?

One reason we resonate is that we also are hybrid beings. Always one foot in and one foot out the door of each world we occupy, it makes us more versatile but also wildly uncomfortable in our daily lives. Ontological instability is human.

Reading Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells. 📚

Jepun bali (frangipani) leaves after rain.

The bathroom had cream colored wallpaper with gold birdcages on it, peeling at corners. Rose glycerin soap, threadbare bathmat, old calendar with photos of wild birds hung on the wall. Different days of the week taped over the old, numbers switched to turn past into present, strategies against time.

Lalah with coconuts.

Jeki was fine, evening’s dose of eardrops was easier. Rain this afternoon. The minty smell of new dental floss reminded me of Greta’s (grandmother) house. She passed away two years ago in October. She used to write the best and plainest emails, including animals in her yard and moon updates.

They cut into the banyan tree. (In the early hours of the morning, under the waning crescent moon, before the rainy season came.) Now they hammer the roof of the banjar building and we live beneath a wounded giant.

Sri Rejeki with new bonsai.

Coffee with complicated reflections.

There’s a limit to the quality of fiction someone can write who has only state-sanctioned dogma. Without geometry, without a basic understanding of the way nature or human beings work.

One of the propogandas of the American/Western world, which is to say, one of the lies that people believe in order to maintain the government of it (colonialist, exploitative, expansionist, techno-appetitive, attention-captured, etc.), is that all of that—all of this—is inevitable. Fiction published in the English language increasingly rests in this weird belief: that human beings cannot possibly be any other way.

When there is a vast literary tradition presenting other human possibilities. (Much of it is pre-modern and has been labelled, by state-sanctioned intellectual authorities, as obsolete.)

When there remain territories of humankind yet unconquered by that authority, who to this day display a resilient invulnerability to it. (Much of which falls under the umbrella of a “developing country” or “emerging economy” and is labelled, by state-sanctioned authorities, as primitive.)

When it’s really just what happens when bad human habits are allowed to run rampant. (So is no more inevitable than tyranny, albeit one the English-speaking imagination increasingly cannot see beyond).

It is a cultural ignorance that results in dissatisfying fiction. History may be written by the victors, but fiction is beholden to no such law.

Coffee with orchid shadow.

Tales leaf (mbote, taro) after rain.

Bulb at base of stem (corm) can be steamed/boiled/roasted/fried. Can eat leaves and stem but must be processed (soaked in cold water or cooked enough) to remove toxins. Easy to forage, popular ornamental in Bali/Java and elsewhere (‘elephant ear’).

(Reposting a few photos so they appear on my photos page.)

Reading The Future by Naomi Alderman.📚 Can’t resist a rec from Cory Doctorow. Morbidly interested in future-obsessed billionaires with bunkers, eager to read a novel about it, maybe some billionaires will learn a lesson?

Peppermint tea (infusion). For two.