Red Cloud Nine

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Red Cloud Nine

Journal entry,
September 6, 2000

My constant problem, communication, despite (or actually because of) being schooled in this subject once. Just when I have finished todays' slavery-time and been resolute to hang up on MS if he calls to remind me for the millionth time of the deadline, I find myself thinking about how few people I know, all my life, who speak my language at all.

And I can't even define what language is it that I mean. It's just something you feel, when exchanging words, but you can't grab its head or tail to show it to the guests after dinner.

Unfortunately this is the very problem with me and Z -- I can never use, nor relate to, his sometimes too much down-to-earth vocabulary. The dictionary of bucks and cents and percents and lunch breaks -- his sillier but most valuable side always naps during daytime, like vampires up there in Transylvania.

I can say I and Z don't speak the same sort of English or so -- just the same if we were, say, speaking Spanish or Zulu to each other. And I can say this because there's one or two people whose languages are just like mine; with them I can really talk. Not that they use my sort of English or anything; how am I to explain this -- it's just, like, when H told me (verbatim quote) "It's so cold here. I feel the woods in my bed.", I knew what he was talking about. Or when MG said (about a concert) "I was sliced open and sewn together again," I knew what he meant. But Z's "It's so bad. I got my wisdom tooth pulled for 30 bucks" didn't get into any of my folders as something recognizable. It needed re-deciphering as if written in some World War II military codes. So I knew how vast the terra incognita has been, between his 'love' and mine and every other thing. Too bad. And I have no idea of a remedy for such a malady.

Anyway, there's something weird with K. All of a sudden I faintly got the impression that either he had absorbed and used my language or he just got his other self out or what; he started to speak like H, MG and me.

He called an hour ago when I was at work. "Can you hear the colors?" he asked. "All colors, the greenish sea, the purplish sky, the reddish sun, the snowy clouds...."

And I just told ST that this man is as poetic as an ATM and the Microsoft Corp. and several other wonders of the world, for instance heilhitler dot de. Looks like there's another K, or this is a mere freaky minute of his long prosaic life. Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, "Listen to this wind," he said. "You would hear it flies to sunset -- the road is empty there, it travels fast...."

Anybody who could talk like that on a cellphone while driving on a two-way street is the salt of the earth and a headache to the cops and a danger to others and a hazard to himself. If he keeps this on I might marry him.

Once & For All Parenthood

Email. Reply to Miftah Fauzi, 2001

Footnotes:

For the quotation of Sawamura's memoir, I thank Watanabe Tomoe who translated it from Japanese.

Suharto: Indonesian President since I wasn't even born until ousted in 1998, head of what was generously dubbed 'a benevolent dictatorial regime' where the military was predominant. His kids and grandkids had been owning the largest and/ or most lucrative businesses in Indonesia.

See History of Indonesia

Malin Kundang: Sumateranese folktale. Tells of a man who disowns his mother when he has grown up, so the mother curses him into stone.

"This amulet keeps away evils," said the fruit vendor's wife.
" What evils?" asked Toyo.
Quoting an ancient maxim, the vendor's wife replied:
"An earthquake, a thunder, a fire, a father, and the like."
(Sawamura Sadako, Watashi no Asakusa, 1976)

My definition is simple. A father is a man who's always been there for the kids, probably not as something they could decently look up to, but he's never cheated them, never robbed them, of a kind of a healthy childhood. The ejaculator of some liquid that could have happened entirely unplanned and cursed mightily -- that's about your kind of fatherhood -- the biological father -- half of the oftentimes careless producers - is not a father to me, not for granted. Whether he is a father or not, that depends on what he does - free entirely from the socially ascribed status.

"Father" and "mother" are social constructions -- nothing biological in this sense. My notion about fatherhood and motherhood is that they are some achieved status. It isn't given gratis upon reproduction. When it is about parenthood, I don't base my definition upon pedigree, DNA or gender.

The persons responsible for my knowing this life's ABC's and 123's are parents to me. Whoever was there when I needed him or her most is my parent. Of course what more often happens is the handing in of bad examples, role models for what we shouldn't be -- that's not on my list of parenthood, or else we all would be Suharto's kids .

Say, you got some female pregnant, she gave birth, you called the kid your son, and promptly sent him to your parents, while you went thirty thousand kilometers away from there to chase some shadows - to be a well-known writer, to secure a tenure, to snatch jazz stardom, to be the one who's known as 'The Reaper' in the WWF Smack Down - and the woman, your partner in this crime, saw the kid once every twelve months in New Year.

You call yourselves 'parents' for all that?

Do if you please, but I wouldn't. Not that I don't want to, but because I simply can't. It is against every streak of my conscience, it is against my entire logic.

Your kid's parents are your parents; the ones who were always be there, taking him to school, helping him with homework, asking him to swim in weekend. It doesn't need a parent to send him a New Year gift. I'd do that if your kid isn't the type of a cat-teaser. I don't claim parenthood over your kid just because I sent him some chocolates, took him on vacation, or even paid for his tuition fees -- so what reason do you have for yours?

You have made it perfectly clear to me that my life is not your business. Yet you have embarked upon this normally dubbed intrusion of a private life because you believe that I must be saved from being Malin Kundang -- your driving idea was, if I'm not mistaken, that I must be grateful to be inheriting some talent to write, and therefore I must fatherize the man whom you believe to have had contributed 50% of the creation of me. God had granted the poor Malin's mother's wish to punish her son, you said - God doesn't like kids who don't subscribe to your idea of being ones.

Now -- are you sure you really want to call talents 'given by parents'? Where the heck did the parents get it in the first place? Their parents? Where is God in your picture, if you claim to believe in the Being?

Funny that one holds on to such mortal genesis and wipes God out. That's not my argument, but it's one of the possible viewpoints. Talent in some criminal deeds surely are enough to dispute the Merciful Origin. Mine is this: it is, once again, an accident. Ten kids the master of the piano has had -- only one be a musician, and even then he goes for flutes. Is this too complicated to digest, or do I have to put in some more spice?

You said I must be thankful at least for that man's virtue in bringing me into this world.

Come on now. Are you sure you're going to say that it is a virtue that I was born? You've got to be kidding. Because even I disagree. And you apparently do, too.

Why do parents do anything for their kids? There's the mammalian instinct. Then there is another thing; i.e. because it's socially obligatory, and because at the core of it they have to pay for what they have done -- i.e. their "bringing into this world" thing when no one asked to be born.

Now -- talents mean -- what, exactly?

Nothing, nil, zero.

It's a dormant virus. It will only come to life by something social -- nurturing. Zillions have died without ever activating whatever talent they might have had. Yet, even with socialization, with a lot of teaching and navigating and kicking, if the kid doesn't want to pick up the brush, is he going to be anywhere in fine art? There comes the crucial part of this maddening process -- the will. And from there it's all up to the kid.

Supports do matter, and good parents know it is simply their obligation as homo sapiens.

"Well, I didn't kick your butts when you said you're gonna be an artist, right? So you owe me!" is a fine line -- if you are with some satanic cult.

Not cutting a growing tree is not a virtue. Cutting it, though, is a crime. Letting it grow and pick its own course is only something natural. Like, not being a corrupted public servant is not virtuous. Corruption dubs you a criminal. Being a 'Mr. Clean' at the public office is merely what the job means, no more, no less. Am I comprehensible enough?

Parenthood is nothing that you can handle by putting it on pedestal and dust it once a day - it is entirely devoid of mythical notions in real life - parenthood is a serious business and it has to, according to me, be taken as such.

"Love" is not enough. It is just something you say to calm down your social guilt that you don't take care of the kid yourself and burden your mom with extended parental responsibilities.

To me the whole thing around the concepts of 'foster parents', 'adopted child', 'stepfather', 'stepmother', etcetera is ridiculous and meaningless beyond repair. You're either a parent or you're not. What's the use of differentiating the state of being adopted and the situation of being born out of someone else's womb?

You might really love your kid, but facts are, you're nowhere near him in daily life - at your best you're just a 'holiday parent'.

Ties between a kid and his old man (and mother, especially) are not, as myths say, descending from Heaven. They are built by interaction.

Otherwise to the kid you're nothing but a basically indifferent, although outwardly nice and might even be inwardly well-meaning, stranger.

My Oh, Yeah Racism

Email.
Reply to Thomas Erskine, 2001

Check out:

Land of the Rising Son

I, Too, Maybe
Sing America

Dreams Ain't Made of
What Is

Blitz

History of Indonesia

First of all, I have nothing to do with fashion. It's easy to see just by asking my Mom to show you old pictures. When everyone wore Whitney Houston, I did Madonna. Everyone was hooked up to colorful plastic earrings, I got at least ten (sic.) metal necklaces around my neck at once. They were plagued by super-mini skirts, I put on fake leather pants. They were bejewelled in gold, I had twenty-five (exact number) of black rubber bracelets anywhere I went, including the bathroom. Everybody cut their hair short and/or dye it blond or carrot, I have mine longer than waist-length and don't do anything about the dull blacky color it was released from the factory in.

So my abstractions are either out of date or (and?) wholly against the tide. Among which is nationalism, or to get precise an acute consciousness of being related to Indonesia.

I'm only 25 years younger than Indonesia, you know. It's a parent or uncle or aunt; it's not yet a grandpa to me. I can't respect it beyond what I can to people of its age. If grandparents suck we don't instantly say so; we let them be in peace; we can afford to do so because they are beyond our circle of life and we share too little with them; but we defend them with only a very small bit of emotion if needs be - we do only because they're so old. If I were you, my mentality would make me do that; England is so horribly old; it doesn't need anyone to fuss for its sake since probably the end of the Roman occupation. But this Republic of Indonesia is young enough to disgust citizens in real life. It hasn't even finished building its foundation yet. So when it makes a mistake it is still it that commits it (Margaret Thatcher's blunders were Margaret Thatcher's, or at most the eighties' Tories', for comparison), I can't detach myself from some sort of patronizing attitude towards it. I hope you know what I mean.

My old-fashion eye still sees the successive occupations by the Netherlands, Japan, Portugal and so on as colonialism, imperialism, brutalism, whatever name that suggests steps to this direction of criminal actions. The colonists are of different races, not our own. So in this a dash of resentment could have been colored. Reading historical documents pertaining to the way the Dutch VOC saw us back then, I still get angered. If only you were American - perhaps then you could imagine me as one of you who is a bit insane; that I still see England of pre-1776 as somewhat 'enemies'.

So it is the Dutch before 1949 and the Japanese before 1945, etc., that I take as such - not just 'the Dutch', an sich, 'Japan', period; this racism is time-bound.

Am I What I Am
Or What

Email. Reply to Tristan Weiss, 2002

Check out:
Plastic Image of Home

I will be 32 this year no matter what. Too old to listen to Jiminy Cricket. Oh, even older than that! A 25 year-old woman I know just said yesterday, about her brother, "He still dreams of Hollywood. It won't be so funny if he isn't so old!" - the man is one year older than I am. She had unwittingly (or even worse, purposefully) made me sad and I swear I almost could hear my bones slushing away calcium and the soul inside wrinkling and my mind started to get age spots (that's what getting senile is all about) and there is cellulite growing in my heart.

This depressing talk is (are you still reading by now?) a preliminary to my answer to your question about what kind of person I am.

That was a fine, legitimate question, but frankly I have had it for eternity and the answer never changed. Plus in fact I have answered the question before it was asked, through anything I have written at any given moment.

On the other hand, you were right in the unspoken assumption that nothing stays but changes. 'Never changed' in the previous paragraph only meant basically the answer has always been the same. But circumstances made the details varied. And age makes it sound different.

My ageless belief is that a person is made (built) by daily acceptance and rejection of things - ideas, plans, portraits, actions, etc. Individuals' identities are determined by what they think as normal, by what they believe as important.

When I was 31 sharp, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25 - I didn't know anything about a few things that I do now at 32. This natural development makes the answer to "What are you?" different from year to year, in its details - for instance, in 2000 I would have said the cat I loved was the most beautiful but idiotic feline in the whole wide world; today the answer is the most loving cat on this planet that isn't so handsome; but the point of both answers is cat, none of the adjectives, so it never changed.

Other things in me are even bolder in being unchanged. The name of the man I love, for example, has been the same for years, though it is a pseudonym. Anyway, you got the outline of what I was trying to say, I hope? I'm sorry that I'm incapable of giving you any other sort of reply.

I laughed even though it was outrageously saddening. My neighbor Mrs. CS told us she just went to her cousin - a super-long story comprising of everything, which ended itself two hours later or so by a teenager's, Mrs. CS' nephew's, attempted suicide.

That young male kid of 14 did not do it out of a broken heart, but of utter fear: he was convinced that to get a girl, his schoolfriend, to consent going to see a movie with him he simply must steal his dad's wallet and all therein. I was, I admit, sort of amused - of course I didn't show it to Mrs. CS and all the congregation of neighborhood housewives. They might force me to endure exorcism.

Looks like "Nothing's changing at all", like Mike's song that I still hear at night especially when I got too much dirty laundry for tomorrow.

The way of the world hasn't changed since I was 14 myself. Kids still steal some money literally for stuff their parents would never bless. I guess Mrs. CS' cousin is a bit well-off, she once told us they all got the same amount of inheritance from their grandparents. So a couple of tickets to the cinema couldn't have been beyond their reach. That was what the kid himself thought of the business. But everything went against him.

His older brother, a university student, refused to lend him the bike - kids under 17 are not eligible for obtaining Driver's License in Indonesia. Without a motorbike you're not man enough yet. Then the next blow came; the mother sniffed what was going on and positively identified the girl, and forbade the kid to see her outside school hours - according to Mrs. CS, the woman employed the kids' friends to spy on him and, alas, they did tell. This might be the only 'change' from what I knew in my days - peers back then would never snitch. Anyway, the kid's father was of course in due time informed of the matter, and he unleashed his wrath. The whole family believe that dating at 14 is a crime (all Indonesian families do); upon the news that their very own little boy has had a crush automatically they imagined condoms. (Not that they might not work, but exactly that they might be at all). Love = sex = dropout = doom - this is parents' fixed notion for ages here.

So, the kid got the money and risked his mental health, took to the girl's house on Saturday night on a borrowed motorbike (a neighbor's), and - got a road accident.

I already began to laugh there when the tale reached that part. Inhumane, but - well, so ridiculous the whole thing was!

The kid was okay, and could get home promptly, but the bike was not. The cops detained it because there was no Driver's License. And it was quite damaged.

Conclusion: the kid bought a bottle of insecticide for a midnight drink.

Now he is fine in the hands of good nurses, but Mrs. CS and all her sisters and brothers and cousins are only starting the bumpy ride to (the kid's) adolescence.

I'm still laughing; maybe I'm getting hysterical thinking of how we don't learn from events experienced over and over and over again through the two thousand and two years of human history.

People who stole things still managed to get bewildered by a revelation of someone else stealing. People who have gotten off the final hook of misery by somehow finding a way through little daily maladies ended up marrying Pandora boxes. You ain't 14 for good; unless you are 14 and take insecticide there and then.

Gosh, seems like I've also been thinking about other stuff while I was convinced I minded Mrs. CS' nephew -- I hate the way human brains function sometimes.

Anyway, the last thing released from the Pandora box was Hope.

Ancient Greek people visualized Hope as some unsubstantial, transparent object with wings.

But humans like you and I and Mrs. CS and all her nephews still get disheartened whenever we find that Hope, being itself, always tend to fly -- and it's even lighter and smaller than a butterfly so we'd never find it again to mummify.

Stand Alone Complex

Journal entry, May 17, 2002

Footnotes:

The phrase 'Stand Alone Complex" is borrowed from the title of the anime (Ghost In The Shell) based on the manga created by Oshii Mamoru, released by Production I.G., Japan, October 2002. But there is no relation whatsoever between the content of this entry and what the anime is all about. (Or is there? Oshii's story is populated by cyborgs.)

Joy Adamson: The caucasian 'lion woman' whose work in Africa got her fame in the seventies. She and her husband studied, lived with and looked after lions. Her favorite was named Elsa. She continued the work after being attacked and wounded once by her four-legged companion. Eventually she died, her corpse showed fatal wounds that looked like some lion's deed, but there was also some doubts - like all such expatriates, it was possible that Mrs. Adamson got enemies among African poachers and illegal hunters.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD), Roman philosopher, author, politician, and, alas, the emperor Nero's tutor and adviser. Accused of treason, he got the death sentence but Nero was 'kind' enough to let him execute it himself. I tell it the way I always do, but the person and the story are non-fiction.

Freeport: American mining company, operating in West Papua, Indonesia.

Isma Savitri: Indonesian journalist.

Paul Theroux: American travel and fiction writer.

Linkin Park: American rock band, early 21st century.

To assist the obese flock of people with anorexia (it is the flock which is obese, and the people that is anorexic), one day I would write an un-scientific detailed report of what I only stopped to feel a few minutes ago - what it is like to be ill, and, to make it even more effective for the Weight Watchers, what it is like to speak ill, to ill-advise, to get ill-bred, ill-defined, ill-fated, ill-fitted, ill-founded, ill-gotten, ill-starred, ill-suited, ill-tempered, ill-timed, ill-treated, and so on down to ill-willing and ill wind.

Like chicken soup, a story of illness is unpalatable, even though my English wouldn't allow me to get specific. Just hearing the word 'ill' I can instantly lose my appetite; this is the cheapest way to ill-treat yourself with a diet.

I've been thinking of writing this down since several months ago in a starlit night when everything was serene and happy and pretty and healthy and smart - except me. I really don't understand how Seneca could have cut his veins and gulped the poison and dictated the book to his secretary at once; when something went wrong with my darned physical cage, the last thing my mind could do was to keep itself. Thank God I weren't some B.C. Roman.

Anyway, nothing has ever been right with me, medically speaking; it amazed me once in a while that I could be all physically wrong so wretchedly without ever getting the fanfare worthy of a major disgust; such as shown by the medical record of F, a 34 year-old man that I happened to be so unfortunate to have known once. This true story might serve to help the healthy to stop eating at once and to help easing the ungratefulness the sick are so keen to maintain.

F was born with problems pertaining to his bones and therefore wheel-chaired by his grandma each week to the rehab center since 1968. He nose-bled every time someone said nasty things about his wife, for instance that she had already been the only one in the prom night who wasn't asked for a dance during the Eisenhower administration - which was almost true - and he got vertigo upon hearing the rumor that his wife was ticketed by the highway patrol for riding a broom on Hallowe'en. He used to be submitted to yearly x-rays and CT-scans and God knows whatever else by his father, because the father was convinced that F got the lung, brain, skin and pancreas cancers - plus hernia every Veteran Day. Meanwhile, his mother had never recovered from the shock of giving birth to F because the baby handed to her by the nurse back then was full of mole-like birthmarks of every size, which made her phobic of dalmatians for the rest of her Alcolholic Anonymous life. F's sister had poured every Druidian herbal remedy down the brother's throat to cure his snoring that had bordered on criminal as it created public disturbance all around the 17th Street. Finally F got confined in a mental hospital by a court order issued upon his wife's petition, for suicidal fantasies and for faking erection (sic.) - while all those were only a little chunk of the whole unmentionables this man has been plagued with. He is now probably in one or all of the aforementioned conditions if he's still alive. Now this is an interesting case of illness; with him it might be a culture.

The last time I heard about him, he was commuting among the quartet of a Hamburg prison, a place locals call 'lunatic asylum', a general hospital, and a district court. They said the shrinks were facing incarceration themselves, accused of falsifying reports of competence so this total wreckage could still appear in the legal battles. The Freudian psychiatrists (locals call them 'psychopaths') threatened to sue the cops in turn, suspecting them to be practicing the Pontius Pilate policy of laundring social maladies by sending F to them when he should, they said, have been put into the death row with maximum security, since he cried ten galons a day and almost killed the staffers by nauseating them so. F's wife also sued the cops, the shrinks, and the lawyers because they have, so she claimed, deprived her of a futuristically decent alimony and half of the couple's worldly wealth, which was a totality of a few packs of condoms and six bottles of beer. The hospital sued F, Mrs. F, F Senior, Mrs. F Senior, the cops, the shrinks and the City Hall because nobody paid for the services it had given over the rheumatism, the imaginary cancers, the much too real hernia, the even more obvious birthmarks, broken ribs and brain concussion. Ribs broken when he tried to sell the scooter that he won in a quiz show, by demonstrating how high it could jump over a fence, in full speed, in front of an elderly citizen who was severely uninterested. Whatever is dubbed 'brain' got the condition when it hit a Volkswagen peacefully parked in somebody's garage - this was the incident that made him the business of the precinct. The man, meanwhile, kept nose-bleeding all through the hearings. The whole Hamburg suffered an alarming deficit of tissue paper in particular and sanity in general because of this man.

So Y was right, the only thing subtle about me is the gang of illness I've had. He must be right; he's a doctor for God's sake, even though M believes that the Afghan refugees would rather die unattended than trusting the Medecins sans Frontieres, regardless (or because?) of the fact that the frontierless doctors could have starred in Baywatch. Y is, M said, leaving Pakistan for Angola now. I hope he gets enough malnutrition to satiate his soul.

I usually remembered the glory days of motorbike accidents when I got sick. Those were something else; those were trophies. Having troubled by gall-bladder is nauseating, having bled like a dynamited dam in the street is a blessing. It's a substitute for battle-scars. It's an honor to give yourself some badge of courage. That's why, as far as I can recall, the boys whose limbs were smashed to pieces were always looking like they'd just won the World Cup, while the ones bedridden by appendicitis distinguishedly looked like faking to be in a coma whenever visited.

My greatest achievement was nauseatingly mediocre - nothing was broken, not even my heart; just torn flesh here and there and my left arm was numb for a week, being the thing I landed on when falling. But I had to do with whatever tiny scrap of glory I could get, so I remember how it felt years and years ahead. Laying down there when everybody else was tortured by Geometry and the like, or (which was my sort of kids) on their way to whichever misdemeanor. Focusing on the pain and gradually self-tranquilized. Forgetting that the cigarette on the bed was lit. And so on.

The utter depravity of getting ill by a disease instead of a truck has always distressed me. 'Disease' here includes everything that kept you in the mercy of physicians and apothecaries and nurses and grandmas and such without involving the traffic or firearms or a surplus of adrenaline. Cancer and AIDS are excluded because those scare the ordinary mortals still. But the sort of sickness and physical maladies which only succeed to elicit dismay or irritation or sneer or laughter is automatically to be find herein. For instance a bad flu, diarrhea and all the wrongdoings of your digestive system that completely lack prestige, and miscarriages.

I don't mean to make light of anything undeservedly; I believe if you are ill and you want to get helped to regain your previous days you shall have it. The Africans besieged by acute perspiratory problems surely ought to get doctor Y's touch if they wish so, and darn this world if they couldn't.

A friend's sister, K, has been working in the deep inland of Kalimantan for years now, bravely beholding the mosquito rampage - if she didn't have what took her there, the isolated tribe would perhaps have lost more souls than was sensible.

I saw the U.S. Marine medics erecting a tent in the outskirt of the center of Jakarta a few months ago, on TV; it kicked my nationalism hard to know that the urban poor did come to the super-healthy doctors and got themselves cured of this or that trouble which should have been taken care of by our own - where had all those local MD's gone, out of the medical schools' gates? I thought there were thousands of them newly released every semester - did they then become their daddies' deputies in washing-soap companies?

Healing people is always a good reason to live, and if physicians like Y and K and Lieutenant Doe found the job thankless they would, so I hope, get their reward in heaven around the year 2090. Meanwhile, they have been giving people back their dammed zest by exorcizing the illness.

But not everyone is that lucky, you know. A lot got to face illnesses alone - some even so literally. Reasons for this are various from a simple inexistent of money and free medical care, or sheer physical distance in miles and kilometers to the nearest medical establishment, to heavy loads of phobia and superstitions.

A long long while ago I read an article about a West Papuan woman who lived by herself in a jute hut where devils and Freeport didn't even tread, neither did their opposite. This woman had a little kid at first, but he died of something (cholera?), she couldn't take care of him better because she was also ill. She buried him and kept on being ill; she ate grass (sic. No Colombian.) around the hut and drank rain water and that was all that she did. Somehow she recovered and still told the reporter that she didn't intend to hitchhike to the city; for some reasons she couldn't get back to her village either, so she'd stay where she was. I can't be sure if it was Isma Savitri or Paul Theroux who wrote it, but the point is an extreme case like that could happen.

I have absolutely no idea how it feels to get treated by the U.S. Mariner, no matter how wild my fantasies are. But I know what it's like to have nothing whatever but the physical trouble itself, although I also had Linkin Park. One day I plan to share this enviable knowledge with those who are concerned - plus the initial target, the anorexic bunch.

For now I can say this much: If you can't get help when you need some, there would be no choice but to get amiable to your unspeakable problem. Like some good sex, at one point you two would be undistinguishable, merging into a single existence; no longer you, no longer the pain, just something else.

Of course you might never recover again. But by the time you are able to leave the bed and sit in front of the computer and pour your head out you'd know that you have known what people in your mailing list do not.

In the meantime I hope they wouldn't send Lieutenant Doe to Afghanistan. With such a Tom Cruisian face he'd better stay around the Jakartanese slum; a heavenly sight in the TV prime-time jammed by infernal lexicon and artless commercials and political junk.

I almost believed that there is some good in the world when I saw him smiling and talking to the reluctant kid with burnt skin whose mother literally pushed to the doctor; she couldn't understand a word but she did smile back and at last let him examine the wound.

On Shelf-Improvement

Emails. Reply to Max Blöhm (part 1 & 3) and reply to Maezawa Tetsuko (part 2), 2003

Footnotes:

Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965): usually cited as one of the best 'modern Japanese authors' by Northerners' reviews. They also use adjectives such as 'cosmopolitan', 'sensual', 'witty', 'satirical', and the like to describe both the man and his works. They said Tanizaki the young man willingly fell under the spell of the Northern ways (albeit knowing how shallow and superficial the crumbs of Northern civilization he encountered there in his own homeland), and Tanizaki the older man later abandoned all that to re-enter the ancient Japanese stuff with the same degree of interest. Not really self-taught, Tanizaki studied at the Tokyo Imperial University, majoring in Japanese Literature. His works comprise of, among others, The Makioka Sisters (1943-48), Some Prefer Nettles (1929), The Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). Usual theme he took was sort of sexual.
[His picture is at another page]

Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927): one of the must-read among Japanese classics. Of him people said good things involving words such as 'brilliant'. Among his best-known works are Kappa, a social satire, and a score of really splendid short-stories like Rashomon -- known to the rest of the planet later as being adapted to silver screen by the great director Kurosawa Akira. His dark side includes things like winding melancholy, a serious case of neurosis, and schizophrenia -- he took a large dose of kaliumcyanid at last, ending his own life out of the constant fear that he would go insane and being dragged into an asylum.

Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912): only lived a short 26 years, but those years were full of stuff enough for you to suffer a long lifetime. The tanka (traditional poetry) writer was always poor and sickly; he neglected his wife, kids and mother in the kind of poverty that bordered on the impossible degree anyone could endure; he squandered every farthing he had (gotten as salaries, borrowed from friends, and stolen from them) on a wide collection of prostitutes. Died of TB at last, and the following year his wife -- of course she was infected -- followed.

1

I can't for the life of me remember how many pieces of verbal junk I have smeared nominally innocent passersby with. You, too, would find it abnormal and inhuman to recall what you have littered this civilization with if you have been writing stuff for public perusal since 1977 -- I was a mere wide-eyed clueless girl when I started out that year, as so were you if you were I. It simply must be taken for granted that I have written quite a chunk in the last 26 years.

So, I can't be sure if your observation was bulletproof. And it is impossible for me to be certain that it was wrong. But with a dim recollection of my recent sins I could say you were right. I really never wrote about the experience of reading; it seems like my mind was preoccupied by writing and football and rock music and gory animation movies.

But what's with reading?

I'm never close to being good in descriptive narration. I can't describe what it is like, to read. It's something so unspeakable to me, as private as the taste of cigarettes and more than the act of making love; the experience and its reward or impoverishment are admittedly beyond my power to retell.

But much of what you described about it clicked. The feeling when you found the book you want, how you took it home with you and dirtied its flyleaf with cryptic rendering of the name your dad trickily punished you with in 1970, what chemical substance ran through your veins when you got to its inner layer and pried its introductory ingredients open, how page per page came rustling by until the final dot -- but reading, while is an experience and not some mere action, in this respect is like everything else in the same league: writing, sculpting, painting, etching, even cooking.

I disagree much with the pervasive word 'interactive', spread after the toddler digital realm started to walk by itself; 'interactive', taken to mean nothing but the sort of what happens when you use Playstation, is what happens when you read, too. No reader is a passive dumbo -- unless he or she is, reading or no reading. From the beginning I always have faith in this impersonal thing you call 'audience' -- I always take it as Mr. X + Mrs. Y + Ms. Z + indefinitely. It's only a convenient term for language-users, 'audience'. The actual thing is nowhere on earth. The actual thing is a sea of diversity comprised of persons.

So, you read -- an audience does not. It cannot.

How you read is fated to be different from everybody else's way; this is my alibi for virtually every mass-media-related perversion I have been accused of having. That's what makes it in the end impossible for me to tell of the experience. Even if I somehow manage to, it would be an invalid since birth; you would find no way to relate to it.

About why I never did book reviews -- well, this is another story. I actually did, once, when I was young. I couldn't go on because the periodical which ran my first and only two reviews threatened to crucify me itself. I have zero talent in this area. My choice of books, films, pictures, maybe even everything, never goes with the tide; refusing to review such and such books or so and so's movies surely wouldn't let me earn my daily pizza. And when I really sat down to write the reviews, I already lost interest in the subjects; took some superhuman effort to kick the keyboard on. Finally when it's done everybody said I had ridiculed the entire tome to pieces. Book and movie and CD reviews, at least as far as know, aim at sale of the reviewed. Having me around means manic-depression for the Ad Dept, while in most Indonesian companies health insurance is alien.

2

I re-read several old books last Tuesday, bitten by the worst specimen of flu -- I secretly hoped for the said 'mysterious pneumonia' that scared the wits out of the European Union these days -- but looks like I wasn't worthy of it. Raging war is out there now in Basra and the like; reminding me again of the 'Wartime Books' of the WW II -- this might come to be the III, mind you -- yet there I was, reading yellowing pages of ancient yearning and cranks and lust, as if the plastic clock on my shelf had stopped the time.

I wondered why I still kept Niwa Fumio's The Buddha Tree while I was convinced I had cleansed the library off such elements. If my opinion after the second or more reading stays the same, I judge the book for good, that's how I function; Niwa's was as bad on Tuesday as it was seven or eight years ago when I got it. Japanese 'classical' prose tends to run to the opposite direction of where its poetry takes its joyous leap -- long and winding and nothing going -- everything is in slow-mo and a lot is said without telling anything. It exasperated me, Niwa's style, faithful to that whitewashing impression of the whole genre; if he were a plumber he would have driven me to suicide since he would have taken three presidential terms to fix one little kitchen sink. All I could think of is somebody should have condensed this overweight novel into a slim pornographic tome, taking only the priest Soshu's affair with his mother in-law and leaving everything else to oblivion. If a novel can be squeezed into just one sentence without losing anything, like Niwa's book is fully capable of, it, then, is an outrageous waste of time and calories to ever get it written at all. Everything there is too predictable, thoughts and events are all too common yet aren't realistic. It's not so fair, given the grip of time and space, to apply today's standard to Niwa and his characters -- so don't suspect me of such a thing. But, even without the loud "women are the source of carnal sins" in which generosity it is already when a spineless man sees it as also his sin, The Buddha Tree is beyond redemption for its unbearability. I seldom find a novel so colossally boring.

Tanizaki Junichiro's Naomi is another matter. Nevermind the bias (it's never my fault that the English version is titled like that), it's still a good reading for waiting for your plane to take off again, or so; closer to the usual style of what Tanizaki would have called 'Western novels'. The Naomi character is typical, no matter how shocking and novel she was when Tanizaki released the piecemealy slabs of this verbal architecture; Dorothy Parker's heyday around New York was just like that. Asada Kanae, an artist I know, said she liked this book for its succint report of what a Japanese life was like, in the twenties; but Tanizaki wasn't the only or best person who jolt down that phase of human history down in print. Countless accounts exist of stuff like that against the Yokohama panorama. But maybe because Naomi wasn't put in that city, Tanizaki's story differs a bit. What I think is good in this book isn't the social pictures; it is the inner workings of the mind of the fool (Kawai Joji) in what is commonly dubbed 'love'. The devastated mind is described very well by Tanizaki there. I have no idea whether it was designed to be a 'funny book', social satire, or what; exaggerations work well in there and probably its Japanese-ness lays in the fact that Tanizaki's Kawai faced it differently than, say, Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's stupid that reviewers compared Naomi with the established 'Western' seductresses; she's lightyears away from being sexually subtle and too slutty to be mythical. Yet, for the way Kawai deals with his intoxication, he's a somehow lovable idiot, or an unspeakably despicable vermin. Reader's choice.

Ishikawa Takuboku's Romaji Diary is something; maybe the English has made it rougher than the original, nonetheless it is impossible to translate what is never there. As a man, he'd have been in my hit list for everything he had done in his mercifully short life -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau is, by the way. But like Rousseau's, too, his writings I still see as good. Just the other day MB asked you why "the Japanese notions of sex is so disgusting", right -- a good number among the planet's populace think the same. I mean no offense. It's just so, as far as superficial glances at the subject is concerned. Lurking at the corner of Ishikawa's diary is that very same phantom. The book I have also got Sad Toys. It's not so good, to me, though I love traditional poems of your country's. Writing hundreds of tanka in a sitting; well, "wow", surely, but embalming every passing moment in life that way is scary.

As for Akutagawa Ryunosuke's collection of super-short stories, I was really horrified to dig the book out of the dusty heap that day -- what on earth had possessed the Tuttle Publishing's crew, to release it in that utterly horrible jackets? It really looked like the cheapest stinky S&M pulp! Jeez, what a blasphemy. I loved Akutagawa most, among others; he and Kawabata Yasunari. If he's not insane the best of his works wouldn't see the light of day -- I have a personal unresolved ambiguity towards the subject. I can hardly avoid getting repulsed to learn that a creator of something or other is a certified nutcase. But even as this keeps bugging me, Akutagawa is usually above this personal standard; he's too good. I really have a titanic chunk of bad words to say about the supremely un-good cover of the book. My complaint of the content itself didn't change from what I said years ago: it is too short!

I arranged a transport for Endo Shusaku's books to someone else's library 120 kilometers away from my town, right upon seeing them last Tuesday; this is my review of them.

3

Your mail came in right at the best of times -- I just got off the phone talking with T, who was much too excited to have found an (in his words) absolutely amazing travelogue, concerning none other than his beloved Schleswig-Holstein, published in Singapore, written by a Chinese whose name completely eluded my receptors, and whose work's greatest achievement lays in God knows what -- if only you know how my Mom always wanted to fix T's English with a hammer.

The Pidgin English abundant praises of the Schleswig book might, I got to rely on hunches to get to this, be lavished by T upon nothing in the book but only for what is on it: the publisher's address and the author's race.

If, say, T was to find that sort of book whose details were exactly like those, but the writer's name is for instance Wölfgang von Narrenschiff, he would have still been unnaturally elated just the similar way. If Herr von Narrenschiff wrote it and the tome was published by Trottel & Son of Hamburg, yet it was found in a sleek disinfected corner of Singapore, the fact would have discounted his joy a chunk, yet he would still get kind of happy. But imagine the very same book written by von Narrenschiff published by Trottel and turned up in Bonn. T would have never even glanced at it, not even by accident.

In not so many words, T's momentary relapse into a temporary abyss of joy came from a feeling we commonly dub getting flattered. A Chinese wrote about my homeland, thought T; wow.

But that's judging the book by its covers only. I expect another international call some time soon when T had discovered, if the Webster's really lends him some good aid, what the Chinese author had to say about his Schleswig.

By temperament I am even more susceptible to getting hysterically happy about even more trivial findings than T. I think you have correctly guessed so. But not about such books as you have mentioned (travel books about Indonesia, Bali, Yogyakarta, etc.)

Feeling like getting flattered, I am capable of being dragged into. Yet another side of my temper and the force of habit are always stronger; I gather that you haven't wasted your time browsing a little of my (not on these pages) writings, or you would have known how far your patience could stretch before you send me some hate-mail. Not that it is true, but some people believe I am either a fascist, racist, or simply generally insane.

They said so just because I never say anything good about travel-writing.

Travel writing, sir. Words of one who travels. Traveling means leaving home. The one who leaves home is a stranger elsewhere. And in this realm of reasoning home is never your address; it is your genetic codes.

I acknowledge the upside of having books written about my country or my province or my town by foreigners; they serve a good purpose of imparting info we need to tell to their people. The only way to speak to foreigners is never just by speaking their tongues, but their hearts -- no matter how many times I heard the comment exaggerating my fluency in this language, I never have any illusion about how impossible it is to speak to the people who soiled their first diapers in English. Speaking it their way, I meant; speaking it with all the long trail of history behind the words, in the collective spirit their forepersons had handed down over centuries, in the beat of their hearts -- I, native of a non-English-speaking country, could never do that. Not in a zillion years.

And that is why if I am to write something about, for example, New York, it would only be a view of a visitor whose mind is unavoidably confined in two thousand years of ancestral memories, of tropical monsoon, of the languor of dry season afternoon; damned if I were to claim it as even 'my' New York -- I would have been just a guest strolling around with both hands behind my back, examining the host's interior design, together with and within the entire Javanese-Indonesian worldview.

I hope this, being a tired old pretext I have always said to whoever cared to hear, could soften the negative tone I never intended that you might, as many others before, find here.

With all due respect, no one, being raised in somewhere like Boston or Liverpool or Helsinki or Berlin, would ever be able to say anything about us that we would regard him or her as our spokesperson. He or she, no matter how great a writer, in essence is just a passersby, regardless of how many years he or she has spent on our soil.

I found it almost outrageous that the Preface of Lafcadio Hearn's book on Japan Kokoro said that the author was (is -- authors never really die) "almost as Japanese as haiku". So Lawrence of Arabia is almost as Arabian as the Mecca? The studied use of 'almost' doesn't lessen the thing. Marrying a local, breeding there, dying there and buried there don't change the color of your hair, let alone alter your roots.

I know I have to be careful here; but it is sheer bull if I say what I never have in mind about it. To drag my opinion to encompass "Go the heck home Yankees!" or so is stretching it beyond limits. My point was just this: as a foreigner, the peak of cultural immigration is to be regarded as 'almost native' -- but never forget the 'almost'. You can change everything down to your ideals and beliefs, but there must be something amiss, unexplainable by any other argument but the (only smells of, but not really) 'supernatural' thing related to your origins. Hearn has a term for this: 'race-feeling'. To it, even the most seasoned immigrant is an outsider.

I extend this even to anthropological studies. Name anyone in the business -- Ruth Benedict, Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson, whoever. I never doubt the truth that we need someone to tell us about all cultures on earth, but even so, even as nobody but researchers would do this for us, it is off limit to say that living with a certain tribe for two months could give you all there is to know about it. And a gross idiocy to suppose that anthropologists are somewhat colorless superhumans whose mental skin is peeled off and renewed upon every project. The bias is there, no matter how small, no matter how refined. Social studies are not pure Math. What we get is interpretations. Also guesses, even if learned; and more guesses.

If you, being born and raised and spending the subsequent years in Rendsburg, won't take seriously whatever a Japanese says about the city and its populace, why would you hold on accounts of Kamakura written by a German as true to the bones? Apart from the fact that you otherwise were, at the time of encounter with the accounts, totally clueless; and possessed not a speck of prior knowledge of the subject, it is also more importantly because you share his inner system -- and this is a rather dangerous inclination that can only be harmless if disarmed by a realization that it is not about Kamakura, Japan, an sich; it is some parts of Kamakura according to a certain German -- not even by all means the embodiment of every German at that.

So Asia isn't what Paul Theroux said it was, not even at the very second he jumped onto the wretched iron rooster on the railway. Even so much shallower a view from the eye of the travel writer, as piling up years never really made Hearn Japanese. The accounts travel writers and anthropologists scribbled are of some use, to their people to know what it's like to see other places and other cultures with their eyes; and to the objects of the tales to have someone else outside the cultural boundaries hear about them.

That would be all. Living up to that level of expectation is the farthest travelogues can aspire to. Read them if you like, but never forget that the essence of a people, the very thing that made them a people, is somewhere else, bound to be unwritten. Even the people themselves wouldn't be able to point out to you just what it is; it's tucked away beyond scrutiny, in their veins.