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. 🌓
Peace, love, and a blessed darkest and lightest to all including the swingier parts of the globe. Our longest day is around 12.5 hours, tempered by clouds, intermittent rain, and a strong breeze, with a high temperature of 28c/82f. The equanimity makes it feel closer to the center of a certain world, but out on the fringes of another one.
(A good reminder to befriend the genius loci.)
Just under two days without rain, bright and blustery days, enough to wash and dry two loads of sheets, towels and blankets plus a full load of clothes. Hot sun=quick drying. I didn’t buy laundry clips so underwear sometimes flies away, then we go chasing after errant negligees in the rice fields.
Just playin', again. // Although we can’t actually listen to this album, because when we do, we just cry,
As one who is broken.
I am primarily an emotional listener to Bob Dylan, . .. Because that is what he has taught me to be.
Evil is gifted a new aspect, with “Black Rider”.
The grandfather’s follow-up to the suckling child’s “Idiot Wind”.
(The end-of-days bard, the weariness of Zeus, the predicament of Lot..)
There’s obviously a lot of (that old time) (Ancient Greek) religion in here.
Bob always writes my exact kind of briar patch. I guess I’m crying, I realized, because I’ve been needing the kind of comfort only he could give. I can’t say how grateful I am to hear the specific and living sound of his voice, right here in my ears. On my pirate radio station. A perfect antidote to… farthiness. The awareness of being too far away.
Evil got theirs, now “Key West” is givin the old “written on my soul, from me to you”.
“Hibiscus flowers,
They grow everywhere here.
If you wear one,
put it behind your ear.“
Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin (Mother of Muses) for blessing this world, (this one here, that I live in, my world), with Bob Dylan.
Pure sensation.
Just playin’ some Bob
Σωκράτης: ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν;
Socrates: Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
(…)
Φαῖδρος: πεύσῃ, εἴ σοι σχολὴ προϊόντι ἀκούειν.
Phaedrus: You will learn, if there is leisure for you, as you go, to hear.
Σωκράτης: τί δέ; οὐκ ἂν οἴει με κατὰ Πίνδαρον “καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον πρᾶγμα” ποιήσασθαι τὸ τεήν τε καὶ Λυσίου διατριβὴν ἀκοῦσαι;
Socrates: What? Don’t you think, as Pindar, I would make it “a matter higher even than non-leisure (business)”, to hear about your and Lysias' spending?
//
Behold, the destiny of human (political) being in its interior conflict: between the erotic-philosophic (desirous and r/evolutionary) soul and the material body’s need for (protective and conservative) law; with its resolution in the dialectic of (political/poetic) education; the infinite freedom of the human soul, as philosophy, is yoked (by logos/music), in service as conservation, to the body (politic/imaginary).
(Here is my Plato-feeling, “tree-reading” I should call it, or a tentative shorthand, The Republic in a nutshell, but with all of these other things, %gestures at blog%, in mind, and always, of course, through the lens of Phaedrus.
Translating you is mothering multitudes.)
//
I got caught up (through these next few lines of Phaedrus, which revolve poetically around leisure, and get sling-shotted around by Socrates' inversionary or may I call it tropical conservatism) thinking about leisure and responsibility, duty to parents and country, what one owes, how one serves. So I got caught up thinking about mothers and fathers. You can’t talk about “where from” without leisure, says Phaedrus. But you really can’t talk about it without mothers and fathers, and their celebration (in poetry), which is right where Socrates puts us, with Pindar, in Isthmian 1.
Then it happened that writing about fathers found me in a dark place, and I didn’t feel good about posting what I wrote. I will post it, but I needed to write this first.
To whom do I owe pleasure?
To whom do I owe life?
(Fertile Phthia is like the valley below, but for Achilles.
The valley below is like Key West, but for me.)
//
Listening to Bob Dylan’s more recent Rough and Rowdy Ways. Playing it for the chickens, it’s a great sound for them, they love it. For me, I’m always trying to be ready for this album, ever since I wasn’t several years ago, (the first year of the pandemic), when it was released. (That whole first year, I could only listen to two albums, but that’s another story for another time.) One of the boys practices crowing for “Black Rider”. As if to say, “these kids”, Frankie starts in with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”. He sounds so eloquent and sleekly up-tempo with Bob’s Tennessee whisky-soaked blues.
And then Bob takes us to church with “Mother of Muses”. Something about this reminds me of Little Drummer Boy, (from my favorite Christmas album, I admit, every year I weep for this song), it is a hymn sung with the same dutiful reverence, Bob’s most lovely and humble offering for Her. There is an Illiad and an Odyssey in his storyful prayer. Key West is a place to get away, (the one we need), the permission to go, the road and the highway sign to get there. (Honestly surprised at how many holes these fathers have left, written into the city walls. If only I trust myself to find them.)
Sunset and the bending-of-light through its longing shades of exit, and plentiful tears falling again for “Murder Most Foul”. I am learning from Bob how to remember someone who was already dead before I was born. Bob sings a shining, shimmering like-a-mirage, place of hope, dream on a hill.
The hardest thing about the death of a parent, from what I have seen, or what I have heard, is a leftover feeling of guilt, as of a duty unfulfilled. I wonder what kinds of things Bob feels responsible for, I mean to speak of history. He was there as the centerpiece of revolutionary American culture, although he constantly resisted being there, in his perverse way, until that worked and he wasn’t there, anymore. But he was at the heart of it, so if anybody could feel the pulsating heartbeat, I believe it would be Bob. He tells of the leaning over and falling of the body, into her lap, he tells me there was something alive, and then it was not, and (whispering, by now) it did not die a natural death. It was, he repeats, “a murder most foul”, and as I am alive, I believe him.
He gives us the funeral we need (at least, we who are left to listen).
It is a slow procession, full of myriad moments bitter and painful, a retrospective drawn by sorrowful progress toward the inevitable end. American destiny. Every dreamlike revolution is new tears flowing, emptying out in grandiose repetition, as an over-abundance of scattered light. It is a song of anger that would be too deep to feel, were it not already healing itself, like a laundering in the sea. The taste of frothy sand in Key West, washing away the beach, washing away the stain of the crime. Like Jackie washing the blood off her clothes, America washing the death off her clothes, after all the years. Our bard fulfills his final duty, delivering the eulogy, that’s what it feels like. After more than fifty years spent trying to understand who it was, what it was that died. Seeing the shining, past the anger, through the grief, of love.
Can’t talk about elders without talking about Bob Dylan. He tore it apart, turned it upside-down, and re-made it whole, again and again. A parent for poets and pirates, and probably philosophers too. (Remember that time when he gave us a recipe for figgy pudding on TTRH?) Love you forever, Bob.
//
To fertile Phthia. //
There’s a Plato dialogue for every mood when you’re living through the dying days of a democracy. I revisited the Crito, which I blame on every person who has posted anything about “conservatism” on the internet since election results. It is a strange dialogue, it feels more surreal each time, after being away (and changing). Socrates' tone is jarring, like a dull thud that measures our powerlessness, and this stupid, intrusive thought that Crito hardly even tries, in a suspended, too-brief moment of waiting. For a ceremonial ship to arrive, between the sentencing and the carrying out of the execution. During which the prophetic dream hangs in the air,
“Socrates, on the third day you would come to fertile Phthia."
(Fertile Phthia is like the valley below, but for Achilles.)
I sometimes wonder if the oddness of Socrates' voice is because this is the closest the poet ever made it to the “original” flavor of Socrates. There is a historical heaviness, but this could also be the result, I imagine, of the poet’s grief. (Maybe written at about the right time.) And a mercilessness with which Socrates invokes for himself this knotted nest of aporia. He doesn’t come across as pure, so much as impatient, correct, resigned. Tired. He treats it like a summary of repetitions. He draws a very hard line, but at the same time, a weird mix of lines, that don’t gracefully fit together. He leaves for himself no other choice, while he leaves for us quite a few holes.
The laws are our parents and we owe them everything.
Or,
We shouldn’t do wrong to anybody, (or at all), no matter what wrong they do to us.
(Selamat purnama🌕)
People who write about “Western civilization” as if it is one thing boggle my mind. Don’t trust anybody who writes about “the Greeks”, much less the (unraveling backwards-and-forwards in time) Typhonic-Scyllaian-Minotaur of “Western civilization”, without strong caveat, as if they were one thing. This wild ride eats its own tail, Tweedle-Dee. More times than Euclid can count.
(“I am not a pedant, but” // should be a repeat series on my blog.)
Play-dreaming.
Hujan angin. // (Windy rain.)
I’m inventing a new word, psycheic. From psyche + -ic, three syllables pronounced sai-kay-ik. An English-language adjective for the Ancient Greek psyche, soul, life, spirit.
(“Psychic” has so much baggage, why not make a new word?
Why does it feel like a forbidden power, to make new words? Or like a slippery slope into… indecipherable crone. It gets exhausting placing restrictions on myself that I rarely expect other people to follow. This is what it feels like, I guess, the unravelling of responsibility.
But one is seeking a different connection.)
There’s nothing wrong with self-actualizing. Although I prefer to say it, “being at work, staying myself”. There’s nothing wrong with work, either.
Work is the best kind of leisure.
(Related, I will not hold myself back from continuing to praise: stretchy tube tops, they are my new favorite, all-purpose clothes. They are amazing bra substitutes. Plus shoulders are beautiful? It is very sensual and freeing. And just imagine, a no-straps lifestyle. I can add it to my no-shoes lifestyle. I can never be allowed to leave Bali, lol)
We’ve had a few hours every afternoon of very windy thunderstorms. It’s bracingly good weather for translating. But Sri Rejeki sticks to my lap like glue. She gets cuddle-grouchy when it rains.
When it’s hard to let go of all the rabbit holes, at the end of the day, it helps to have a cup of peppermint tea. Then to go looking for sleep.
(Sleep is also a being-at-work.)
(And dreaming is another sailing?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌖
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).