Fire blue as glass.
View from the caldera. // So we’ve returned, after a trip that was at the last minute extended, twice, and an exhausting drive back, that included stopping for car trouble, which isn’t worth mentioning but I got dehydrated and it is taking me a few days to work off the headache and refill energy stores. Sometimes it’s like this, when you disappear into Java for a while.
I used one of these “nitter” instances to access information about the major hurricane headed straight for my mother over the last few days of the trip. (So many peoples' helpful contributions are still stuck inside of that “hell on earth”.) (Now thinking about the meaning of hell and the meaning of earth, not wholly comfortable with that expression, there. To be clear, the hellish is only so by its alienation from earth, and its attempt as-such to dominate earth. Hell is alienation. Earth is almost the opposite of that.) (And then, you have to let the words slip through their evolutions, like picking a lock, listening for things to fall into the grooves.) Even with the limitations of browsing through a choppy third party, it remains massively evident, one of the main patterns that makes social media exponentially harmful in a democracy: it is full of stupid things that are very popular.
Social media teaches people to be loud and to love the loud. When what you really need is to teach people to be quiet, and to teach people to hear the vanishingly quiet. In order to do that, people need to stop. What you really need most of all is for people to stop.
People will never stop if they live in a world about being loud, where they are taught to listen to the loud, taught to be loud, taught that loudness is good. This runs parallel to Monhandas Gandhi’s insight that Ahimsa is prerequisite for understanding. Loving the loud while understanding the True is possible, but requires the accumulated insight of interbeing. Interbeing is more like gateways into Samadhi, which will be the culmination of a study that began with Ahimsa. You can only come back to “loving the loud” from the other end of a cycle, over which you have stopped seeking it and stopped trying to be it, a cycle through which you have in fact become a measure of the quiet.
This is also teaching by doing, in the sense of Arjuna fighting his family, as is his dharma, in the war. It means to stop talking and start doing, to make a message of your life, to purify your actions of self-servitude, in the sense of purifying your actions of service to the finite, in the ways that are possible for you, who are presumably, partially, human. The only true teaching is to teach how to learn. To teach how to learn, you must show how to learn, which means, to show how to listen to the very quiet. Which means, showing how to become oneself quiet. It means
showing
being
quiet.
Writing is a dance of symbols around the truth of things. It can absolutely be beautiful but will never be satyagraha. Poetry is a polytropic pedagogy of silence, another word for this could be psychopompy, which is also a seduction into that thing: the quiet. If you do not know how to love the quiet, you do not know how to love. Desire is inflamed and transformed by the watery veils that have fallen before it. All of this is a path in the service of destiny, the final destiny being servitude as self-understanding. This is your deepest desire, fulfilled.
Tears were overflowing down my cheeks as I sat on the squared-off wood bench, on the opposite side of the room from my mother-in-law, Ibuk, who day-by-day and year-by-year has lost connectivity with herself and her others. She is falling back into pieces, and she looked at me completely lost, for some moments, which just made my tears come at higher volumes, fat streams of salt down This Elizabeth’s face. Until she reached her hand for me to go to her, which I did, and then she put her arm around my shoulder. This is something I’ve done for her, when she is crying, many times now, sometimes with “success”. Like that, in reverse, me feeling lost and helpless, her in a gesture of undeniable form but clouded content, we sat together and watched my husband, who was her son, his left eye smudged purple, (It wasn’t my violence. But was it my violence?), performing salah, (down and up and down again), in the next room. Which was her bedroom, with her mattress against the naked wall, a polyester fleece strewn across it, twisting faded colors in plastic fluff, from an irrelevant cartoon, as if the very blanket from my childhood in 1980’s America. The miracle of (plastic) being there.
Three a.m., the morning after the wedding, the baby came. Mother and child are healthy and fine, Alhamdulillah. The hurricane went right over my mother. On my advice to “make it cozy,” she had furnished their “safe room” with reclining chairs from the lanai, bottled water, and an axe. She was text messaging me from inside the eye, she didn’t lose power until the opposite side of the eyewall, about which she said, and I quote, “Back side is ummm. Different,” before losing contact for the entire journey from Probolinggo to the ferry in Banyuwangi. (The winning truck logo of the day was Banyuwangi Sexy.) Which I drove, beginning in Basuki, and now I’m an official cross-country driver, yee-haw, in this life, where at any moment all of it flashes before you like the matrix of lights on the front of an overnight bus, in its fitful passing, plowing into a head-on collision, with you, and all you have is the possibility of a shoulder to pump the brakes and pull over onto, the gravel always too bumpy, and the sudden hope-adjacent afterthought that thank goodness you weren’t on a bridge over a ravine. But my mother was fine, Alhamdulillah, not in a storm surge zone or a flood-prone area, (unlike many others, for whom I offer prayers and condolences), just underneath your average eye of a category 3 ‘cane. With windows and doors rated to 150mph winds. Not sure she’ll stay for the next one, though. Alhamdulillah.
Java has always been the “endgame”. (For us, for me, for different reasons that curve around into the same.) The place of furthest extent, into I’m not sure what, which is sometimes the point. As El-n has Mars, maybe, I have Tengger, and I do also conceive of this as my response to an existential risk. I contemplate whether this is an influence that he personally has had on my life, that his hubristic insanity has made it not only possible but perhaps it is now everybody’s responsibility, to go hubristically crazy ourselves. He’s at least made the argument more persuasive, if not more loud. So that an xennial white lady like this, (who is not the Karen Elizabeth, Karen is the first name of Other Elizabeth, suspected spy), could actually take lessons from the seditious Gujarati who, (while he failed to prevent it’s partition), still fasted his way to Indian nationalist liberation. (The medicines have been strong.) (Not that it matters, to a volcano.) One can feel the things turning, keys slipping into place. Ibuk’s hand on my shoulder, her hand in my hand. The earth is getting eaten by fire and water and air, elements churned into a rage by the stupidity of popular things, and the momentum of the human as it ploughs into the outerspace depths of its innerspace desires, knowing so much but least of all how to stop. So the silent call, for everybody with ears to learn to be quiet, to show being quiet. To hear being quiet, to learn how to stop. Just to stop. After which, will be time for invisibility. At least this was my view from the caldera, now we’re back to the valley below..
Poetry is… the solidarity of the unseen with the vanishingly quiet. //
Salam to all.🌒
(Lalah is known in the family for being “a little bitchy”. It’s just the way she is. But she’s also sweet and lovely. And none of us wants to put “bitchy vibes” into the world, especially on a Saturday. Salam to all.💖)
Lalah makes you jealous.
On grass. // One “touches grass” to better understand Homer. One reads Homer to better understand grass, and to meet its myriad sensations.
(Grass is one of my favorite things to think about, as an example of thinking about nature. I had a revelatory moment with grass, decades ago, when I read Aristotle’s Physics for the first time. I was taking a break from writing a paper, the night before it was due. It was well past midnight. I smoked a Du Maurier cigarette on the back porch of my sketchy apartment, sitting in a plastic chair, looking at the grass. The lawn in front of me was… rather like I was, struggling. In human landscapes, grass is so often kept constantly chopped, to be treated like a manufactured rug, a servant to human use. To the point where you might never have noticed it, but
grass
really
is
its
own
thing.)
Living with water. // Distant thunder, constant but low, and the atmospheric awareness of a storm. Not here yet, the rain, and it may not come, but shadows gather on the northwest horizon, toward the higher altitudes, near Pupuan.
Taking a (hot) shower outdoors under (cool) sprinkles of rain. The contrast is reviving. With bits of fern and mossy surface surroundings, I feel like a sea nymph. (The soap “includes sea salt, seaweed, and argan oil”.) Like a Nereid, like Achilles' mother, Thetis, and as soon as she enters my mind, I am overpowered by her perspective, her native tenderness toward, sometimes ownership over, Achilles. There’s one story that she dipped him into the Styx, holding him by the ankle. The other story is that she took him in secret every night, when he was a baby, to burn away his mortality. With flame, and the desire for her child to live forever.
The fish love the dry season that never was, the rainy season come early. One day there were splinters of light in the canal, magnetic slivers of translucent peach and orange shooting like stars through the murky green, sun-dappled water. The next day there were more. (We feed them table scraps and leftover cat food, they basically wash dishes.) Now, through their private (unwitnessed by us) reproductive routines, they have filled the canal with their glittering babies, from tiny newborns to about thumb-sized, which scatter at every hint of motion. Meanwhile, the adults watch me do yoga. Their eyes do not blink. Their mouths open and close, attentive expressions. They really do watch. Some are spiny and the color of mud. Some are bright orange, spattered with black, the mouths of these ones like to gape wide open. Some are pale, almost white, with long, diaphanous fins. They linger underneath tangled and raggedy roots. They float past, with their streamers of chiffon, these otherworldly angels. Fish energy is quiet and serene, arhythmic nibbles at nothing, until it is lightning fast, or surprisingly strong, the peck and pull at seeds of grass, a torpedo aimed at the next shadow down. A heavy splash, ker-plunk, in the dark of the night, and no other symbol than that.
The canal (so far) runs around two sides of the house, catching the rain that cascades from the roof. To us, it’s a strategy for living with water. But rain is their element, their power, and nothing makes them more at home. We are surrounded, in sleep, by the dreaming of fish. And when it rains, we sleep in a different dimension, of warmth and light, ensconced beneath their waterfall.
The air is heavy with rain that didn’t come. //
Galungan today. Canang on the bedside table, one also on the floor. A brown egg, small scoops of rice, sprinkled coconut, a few cakes and crispy sweets. Pisang susu, a mango, shredded pandan and frangipani. Scented like the sweetest dream. Lit incense stick and holy water. Cleansing the atmosphere of bad spirits so ancestors can come. (The veil is thin for the next ten days.)
One week til travel, soon enough to feel too soon. Sluggish thoughts on what to wear to a wedding. No traditional kebaya and sarung, but covered up. Mentally locating long sleeves and pants to go under other things. The priority is respect.
(Then again, a reminder to self. Let go of getting it right. Be yourself even if it means making mistakes.)
Argument advances. Poetry waits, and/or is carried.
Thinking about walls. Walls around the property (gateways with extra offerings, today), walls of houses, walls and doorways of rooms, and the need for them. Natural or artificial obstacles between self and world or self and God. Clothes to be seen, and to hide behind. Expressed appearance as a veil behind which one might… just be. The quietude of invisibility. Poetry as protection.
On the other hand, as prayer. Or the instability of opening channels without the (what?) to close them back up again. When and how to draw a portal closed and not lose yourself in it. Grounding.
One chick wanders away from others. He’s independent and interested in his own things. Sometimes he gets left behind. He’s fine, just a little different from the rest.
Sun is falling. Animals of day have gone inside. Insects' shimmering drone in dense humidity, gripping hands of mind are melting, letting go of time.
and then I knew. All of creation is
so many veils and such suffering as
would spell defeat for all but purest Love.
Salam to all.
Waterways.
This is a blog.
blog (n.) “online journal,” 1998, short for weblog (attested from 1993, in the sense “file containing a detailed record of each request received by a web server”), from (World Wide) Web (n.) + logos (n.), Ancient Greek for “word, speech, discourse, account, ratio, reason, understanding”.*
//
The Logos is alive, a garden too.
A blog is not alive. It is, at times,
unfinished artifact.
InsyaAllah,
a blog is a corpse
with connectivity.
The time and place
of a blog is
(A timestamp is
no measure,
but a mark
of irony.)
element undefined.
The time and place
of a blog is
(not) in
a cloud.
The time and place
of a blog is,
as if,
not here,
not now.
Then where? Chicks hunger. As a family
of elsewhere-dwellers, scavenged absence is
the flavor of their nutriment. They keep
their bodies close to Grace, and Grace makes place
of wayward-turning, gathering to breast:
(What we desire,
the shape of Adam.
What we fear,
the shape of Adam.
What we would share,
the shape of Adam.
What we would be,
ecstatic automatic.)
Deep earth listens through thrum of Polaris,
impregnable flame seals at southern crux.
Burgundy rivers into sunset cup
cascade, return as easterly promise
of flight, and summon orphans back,
(—not yet. In blip of night,
we are testing,
turning,
always
in beta.
We will be
ten roosters
crowing
in beta.
Our logic is
loud and in-
fallible,
in beta,
pieced from the
scraps of our
falling,
feathered,
rapturous
fight.
We are roosters,
inventing eggs.
We are eggs, re-
surrecting hens.
What we share
is dabbling
in death.
A blog is,
aerial interred,
a corpse
with connectivity,
insyaAllah,)
from rosy graves, whence armies form, of light.
//
*The “real”/recorded etymology, which this is not, is interesting, and if you don’t already know, you might like to read about it. The word comes by way of a ship’s log, so-called based on a nautical technique of using a floating piece of wood to measure the speed of a ship.
(omg what did you just read?) //
or,
(omg what did you just write?)
Every blog is a re-invention of blogging, or at least it could be.
If one had to choose, one should rather be “jester” to the nerds than “queen” of them.
I don’t blog about snack foods lightly but here in Indo we have these keripik tempeh, like tempeh chips, that are so good and also complete protein…?
Bi-/multilateral causality, equiprimordiality, mimesis. Organism, energeia, wholeness. Natural analogues for artificial system, or whether there’s a real dividing line between those.
One could choose worse audiences (or readers) than (e.g. Milton’s) Satan. But the hardest ones to reach are often the “useful idiots” of God.
(File that one under “Vladimir Putin would smirk.")
Gus Dur, former president and Islamic leader in Indonesia, had a remarkable sense of theological humor. He was also disabled, and a fascinating proponent of religious pluralism.
I don’t consider myself a very religious person but I love to write about God.
(Sometimes I capitalize and sometimes not, depending on context and mood, and sometimes it’s not God but Allah. In addition, Allah has at least ninety-nine names. That complicates or simplifies things, depending on perspective.)
You have to deal with your anger because it’s God’s anger. You have to deal with your fear because it’s God’s fear.
Plastic was an important working component of the overall machine, which was fueled by fear. The machine was incredibly terrifying, which is how they had discovered perpetual motion.
Grace and the chicks demand peanuts every evening, earlier each day. It’s hard to say no because they get really loud. With that, and their hallway parades, we could film a Hitchcock spoof.
Sitting (lying) down to read Rumi and feeling like the sand as it slips through the funnel of the hourglass, and the glass bulb on the other end is Rumi.
Wishing the whole world a restful night of sleep.
Salam to all🙏🏻
Saw too much, today.
Soaking a washcloth to place on eyes.
Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh.
Mulberry harvest.
It’s like being a teenager again but this time learning to drive on the other side of the road.
Uncertainty Principle. // Always a new example, of me, discovering (through self-depletion) how resource-intensive my old life was, and the immensity of resource-debt hidden behind veneers of lifestyle and infrastructure, image and interface. It was invisible to me, or I was used to it, and I grew deeply attached to the luxuries it supports. From roots to vines to vanilla flowers. Guessing whether any luxury at all is the result of imbalance and intrinsically unsustainable. She seems increasingly apparent, these days, the swollen moon, and the owl of Minerva in her silent flight.
Salam to all✨🌕✨
Me, on me. // Feelings are like the wind and you have to adjust the sails to catch them in the right way. And maybe you have to adjust the boat sometimes into these impossibly steep-seeming angles (heel). The boat is built to handle this. (One assumes.)
So (caveat lector, seek your own help, this is me, on me) these are some of my therapies for coping with depression.
When you can’t stop being down on yourself. Make it a game to see which voice in your head can fling the most sublime sh-t. Because games are theoretically fun if you look for the beauty.
Listen to Enya and/or Tori Amos with earbuds, depending on the “complexity” (ugliness) of your needs in that moment. (I save BfP for special occasions. I shouldn’t.)
Accidentally stumble upon something that awakens your compassion. Do a kindness before your depression knows what hit it.
Quit demanding any form of recreation from yourself.
Write a lot, even though you “know it’s sh-t", just remove the expectation to publish.
Take advantage of the situation and let anxieties go, if possible. I was surprised how the depression made it possible. Be your version of an unresponsive, mopey, adolescent asshole. Or a saggy old crone. (Stop wearing a bra, stop trying to people-please.)
Spend time obsessing over the side-of-the-coin that you can’t currently see. Assume there’s a rainbow, over there. Depression is just another perspective. Perspectives are dialectical. You are expressing relations, albeit warped ones, relations. You remain related. Being upside-down-from is also a relation.
(Sorry, Satan.
You have to learn to enjoy the smell of your own armpits.)
Mask/flame earth.
Cold damp dark of night ascends, is parted, penetrated by light like swords of angels stabbing through the atmosphere. The remainder is patched parts of gray. Saturday morning is going on, tiny chip-chatterings in coconut trees, sounding roosters-out the four directions, cats glut themselves on breakfast then seek pools of fire to glory-bathe. Grace and chicks burst across the yard in their boisterous reply to dawn.
Sitting, puzzling, how far into (this) the sun can go, is the waiting question. Sorting through some past impressions and interpretations, shifts in orientation, momentous or errant conclusions drawn. Awareness of other entities, not oneself, inside a self, creeping through cracks and chiselling away in stealthy corners, strangers. Emerging from logic-fogs in desolate confusion, at baffled love, not knowing how one got there or where one left oneself, uncovered. Feeling for order among untrusted elements, a haunted shipwreck and the old debate over the weather, over whether any of this is salvageable, after rain. Leaning on others.
Strength of sun settles as clouds knit back together. There are periods of shadow, periods of heat, hammers sounding from the outer rooms, and weary resignation to the unborn symbols whose beauty-queen machinations dictate progress over the liabilities of (tear-stained, tangled, raw) labile perception. Letting go, carrying on.
Meditation on plastic. // Morning sun brightens bare arms, damp grass touches feet, my body aches as I stoop to the ground. No need to move, so much of it is here. I pick it up piece by piece and pin it together between fingers of one hand. I pry fragments of discard from the dirt, from a multifarious mosaic of the formerly-purposed. I find they have become embedded, as finding rest in, as being eaten by organic matter. It breaks into smaller pieces, as by accident, by the pull of my fingers, or the same sacred falling apart as us all. Trying, as nature, to lose itself, disintegrating into soil. The closer one looks, the dirtier one’s fingernails, the more scattered becomes the plastic. One fills bags and it doesn’t disappear. Vegetation grows over it in carpets and thickets. The baby chickens are digging through it, strings of blue grass and black cord, eating it, styrofoam pecked into tiny crumbles like bread, swallowed into newborn bodies. It disappears into living things with unknown effect. The compost feeds the children. The junk food, the barbie dreamhouse food that it wrapped, the beverage it carried, an unending supply of single servings, in reflective colors and flavors of distraction, the defunct dreams play before my inner eye as I untangle it from grass and root, the tarpaulin or the twine that fell apart, the filters on countless cigarettes. This one was held between someone’s lips. It was dropped, tossed, thrown, flung, strung out, put, left, dumped, piled up, ground in, tamped down. Without intention, again and again, as if by second nature, and the being of plastic is to be shaped into anything and never decay, to be infinite and undying, impervious to rot. (I fill a plastic bag with the plastic, and put it in a plastic garbage bin, for going to “the dump”.)
Plastic is hope. Plastic is death. Plastic is certain. I refill my glass at the plastic dispenser. My fingers tap the plastic-coated keys. A piece of plastic releases drugs into my body. I am the destiny of plastic, sorting through its own ephemera. As time slips into plastic time. (As destiny does. Which probably seems like a lot, to you, but) to us, we last less than a day.