PLASTIC IMAGE OF HOME [Journal entry and email -- reply to Leif Kjensli -- 2003] Windy October morning still drags in its usual melancholy; but this Hallowe'en month with its pumpkin-faced days seems to get shorter and shorter -- and around the much-avoided corner, a shadowy glimpse of the Grim Reaper. It is, I agree, unappropriate to read your account of the Hallowe'en wingding you so much love with this tint of surrealist sorrow -- but there is little that I can do in the department of shooing away socially unpleasant feelings. My mind is a thing perenially claims independence -- it might sneak out to get its own passport if I'm not looking. We are not, as someone I know brokenheartedly reminded me yesterday, getting younger. And you wished you were 20. You still did even as your head tick-tocked loudly with the knowledge that being 20 means getting devoid of the last 10 years of better epistemological files of life, too little dose of immunization against grossly committed blunders, too much unnatural attachment to the glittering and fleeting, and probable commonsensically-challenged passion towards Avril Lavigne. Nonetheless I, like you and maybe everybody else in our hippie-produced generation, draw a sigh long enough to cross the Atlantic on, upon the realization that we got, by now, a lot more people who call us 'auntie' and 'uncle' and 'ma'am' and 'sir'. Another man I know -- 2 years older than I -- just reminded me of the same thing via a comment on Mick Hucknall (Simply Red's singer -- click here for footnote and pictures) -- "The new album [Home, Universal Music, 2003] sucks, and I saw the band on TV and Mick is, gosh, old --". He is. He was born when real encounter with a washing-machine was exclusive. He was born in an era that suspected nothing of the splash somehow made by the likes of Britney Spears. He was born when no one in England ever used the word 'Iraq' in normal conversation. When I began to be these poptuners' fan in 1986 [via the album Picture Book, Warner Music, 1985], he was already much older than us, by then a collective of prom-obsessed irrationality and pimple-related existential angst. Mick Hucknall is getting old -- so is the world -- and we are, too, although this subsequent thought gives us the cold. And your Grim Reaper costume has been undergoing how many times again? of re-tailoring for the past 13 years -- so you said, not without some glee -- it testifies about changes, and coupled with years they form a league named decay, and the olfactory clue the duo emits is of some unmistakable nearer-to-completeness of life-circle. It makes me sad that at least a few of the people dearest to my resemblance of a heart are getting saddened and growing more desperate this month of my birthday -- due to their birthdays. All of them complain of being chased by Time that seems to get too close at their heels day by day. All of them wailed upon the fact that Wednesday has just passed but it felt like a whole year did. All of them fear the increasingly limited span on which to grow. All of them get busy addressing protests to the likes of gods about the yearn for reversal of what has been. It makes me sadder to know that none of them -- you included -- take my "Jeeez, man, you're not 80 for Christ's sake!" as anything but a meaningless attempt to enliven their humidified spirit -- a tired cliche destined to parachutelessly jump into the bottomless gorge of personal anxiety. It makes me sadder to know that I might have been so helplessly alone in this universe -- having no immediate knowledge of anybody who shares my belief in a frontierless space. I believe that growth is a neverending process over infinity; it never makes a difference whether you got 2 minutes or years of 20. To start a life anew, to refresh a course, to shift trek and to redirect destination there is always time. How I wish you all to do your Math! How much less of time is left after you use it up to complain about the lack of time? At 20, time was on Sale -- so cheap you could hardly resist not to waste more than sanely advised. At 25 an in-built alarm went shrieking in your head, telling the time of day and what it signified according to your socialized standard, and you hurried on marrying someone nearest, raced on to DNA-reproduction, fattening your National Bank account and so on. At 30 you more or less got at rest, looking over your shoulder in either contempt or being content, only a wee bit of new goals were set in some distance ahead. After 30 you more or less have given up. And I ask why. Biological facts surely can't be denied -- there is, advanced technology and theology aside, virtually no sight of female reproduction after 40, so it is kind of healthy to refrain from aspiration to by that day on generate a progeny. But 'impossible' is, even here, impossible; we are old enough to regard anything as fixed and immovable -- or the opposite. You might have gotten 100 lbs larger at 35, which renders certain things easily done at 20 now useless to attempt, not to mention daily battle against elevator doors -- yet, even here, a whole lot of other things you've never known 10 years ago are open wide. Realism is a natural thing that usually -- though not in every case -- get into your possession only by the grace of more and more passing years. And realism says your fear is utterly baseless -- whichever number is said to denote your locally, nationally or regionally expectable life-span, you still have enough time to do whatever it is unresolved in your mind. You have known more, lived more, learned and got rid of more, now, to do in 10 days what took you 10 years when you were 20. You could, for instance, mow your front yard with eyes closed today in perfect amicability while you continuously fought against the mower and consequently nothing was to get done 10 years ago. Though you still face the exact same feeling and thought and unprintable utterance whenever the tax forms come, today or in 1990, generally what is routine is done fusslessly these days, unlike years and years back. And this means cutting a lot of unnecessary burst of wrath. This means you have more time to mind everything else. Notice how your dad goes fishing after retirement -- he never got the chance to taste any such personally enjoyable bliss not just when he was 20 but also 30 and 40 and 49 and realistically speaking any time before your mother's death. You are, as you get older, more at home in this temporary world that you know of. And that is what is good with the thing you so loudly lament about; the roots of the angst that gave you insomnia when you were 20 was actually the absence of this feeling. Your adrenaline was ready to commit pogroms just to have the feeling of being at home, back then -- remember? Most of the Self at 20, 25, even 30, is a fake plastic image of what you want to be. After 30 you are nothing but you, no matter how indigestible this truth is to most people I know. What's
worth nothing else but love? What's
worth nothing else but love? So
fake cool image should be over I'm a woman, to start with. Your mom never let anyone know her age in any occasion since 1979 -- it is almost every culture's stereotype that my gender is scared of getting older much more than yours. Of course like all stereotypes this one smacks of fabrication, but if you believe it then you should have asked why I'm a non-member of the league. The answer is this entire body of text, to the last dot from the beginning. Footnote:
THE OBJECTIVE CASE OF I [Email. Reply to Rowan P., 2004.]
A woman I've never heard from for the last 18 years suddenly mailed me the other day. She is filed by my swirling mind as 'olden days relic', one among approximately 3 hundred, namely people I knew way back in time when Madonna still could justifiably call herself a material girl. My entire system always automatically get itself on alert whenever phenomenons like this (and solar eclipse and political campaigns) happen. Too many times over the years, since I took my official departure from puberty, people from the past have been popping up out of the blue and straight to my banknotes. I believe that God gave us Junior and High School mates solely for the purpose of later-day extortion. They always ended up trying to sell me dubious household gadgets made in China, or (even 'and') tickets priced exorbitantly to reunions. But this time I got a different kind of Jill in the Box; she was only interested in reminiscence about the worst moments of her life -- the whole span of our first year in High School. "I remember what a freak I was," she wrote. "Not just because I spilled the drink all over my dress at dancing night of our class, but the entire year was so bad I often thought of killing myself. I always felt everybody ridiculed me behind my back, and for a good reason. I really was a freak among you guys." As a matter of historically correct fact, she was. We were 16. It is a difficult business, being 16. It's an awkward age when we couldn't decide whether we would take courses in drug-dealing or piano or French. We knew everything, and we knew absolutely nothing. We thought grown-ups were idiots, and we felt we were even worse than that. We spent night after night devising plans of either suicide, homicide, or both at once. It was a painful stage for anyone. And she was visibly in pain every morning anew. She used to look like an Indonesian governmental agency's web site: totally out of tune, undeniably out of date, conspicuously forbidding, obviously unplanned, unsystematically constructed and absolutely uninteractive. Actually we almost never exchanged words at all, as far as I can recall -- for one thing, I was rarely in school those days (see the page referred to above). Secondly, she might or might not be present, because it wouldn't have made any difference. She was invisible except when she made mistakes or blundered around, like in the party she still remembers today. She wasn't pretty enough and wasn't a sight gag either, so if she did nothing at all then she would have escaped attention. I used to think that she intentionally did stuff that loudly spell clumsiness to get people's eyes on her. It's my 16 year-old head that thought like that; I knew so much back then than I do now after 18 years of gap -- if you ask me today, I would say she was probably just nervous. Her tone when recalling those days saddens me. True that some of the scars we got in school days would never ever heal; I have my archaic demons from those years too. A guy I keep in touch with, who went to the same High School, still get a sudden cloudy expression today if he remembers how back then people made fun of his skin (he was too fair-skinned for a boy, so others said at the time!). A woman who used to be nicknamed simply 'Pimple' by her classmates, who is now a TV personality, told me that she still gets sad thinking of how it was in Junior High when nobody forgot to mention her problem. Physical appearance mattered so much in the 16th year of our existence. Curly hair, big nose, skin that was too dark (for a girl) or too light (for a boy), etcetera, all were made fun of in broad daylight and invariably exactly in front of the boy or girl you had a terribly hopeless crush on. But (and I told her so) by now we should, if we haven't yet, know that we were just a speck of hormonal agony in an ocean of woe-ridden population in puberty. Even the almost physically perfect boy and girl that age never failed to apply the harshest and undeserved self-criticism. It's only natural. It's the age that spoke. 16 was a lonely age to be; not everybody got a friend or thought of him/herself as being anyone's friend. Gangs and groups, with or without a definite aim except to flock, existed every other meter square; easier to hide the plaguing low self-esteem in them. But the same self-loathing entered the gang alongside your entrance; it never made a difference whether you were alone or seemingly a member of something communal. The woman, my High School mate, was so wrong in assessing the situation of the year she dreads now as she deaded back then. She said I was lucky because I never knew what it's like to be a 'freak' like her. But I was no exception. The feeling that I was alone came slapping my little brain back then even as I had more than one group that was supposedly extending some sense of belonging. My maddeningly diverse interests didn't help. I think I was, in truth, when being seen with all those clubs and gangs and groups and bands, nothing of them; I was only me. In the dance group I was a drama player -- in the band I was a writer. Something like that. I never got the sense of belonging to any of the flocks, except for practical purposes such as scheming excuses to skip classes. I spent 2 weeks in a sort of a bunker with poets from all over the country once, in a convention; I felt like a misplaced kilobyte of the wrong data in the seemingly integrated system of operation everyone else looked like being fine with. I wandered far and wide with rock bands for a few bucks in a row of concerts; the entire time I felt like a Martian being deserted by Mothership in the middle of Times Square on New Year's eve. And from other people's bouts of melancholic confessional mood I dug the same thing; at least those around my age were fidgeting with their inner restlessness and dissatisfaction. Most of my 'friends' (more proper term is actually 'colleague' since my grouping was mostly for money-making) ran to drugs and booze and sex to numb the painful emptiness inside. Some went to the so-called opposite direction, into religions. But the options were yucky to me -- and worse, they also meant additional groups to join -- drunken teenagers couldn't even face the bottom of any bottle alone. While the truth was I'm never made for grouping, period, to begin with; I was doing it for everything but companionship; they were some mere special-interest groups. The pang of loneliness that I felt came mainly from the fact that none of the groups represented the total I; none was an extended version of the entire self that I was. It is actually impossible to attain, but of course at 16 I was still eager enough to trust that the world could somehow be a little bit better than it always is. Another grouping-session wouldn't do for me, so I could only run to me. That was another way to say I was lonely. Growing away from 16 and closer to 60, I found similar things in every stage of (so they say) maturity; crossroads and disorientedness knocked at your door at certain points of your calendrical existence. I might have gotten, as the woman said, 'lucky' by taking up what I do now early on (click here for elaboration). But artists and poets and authors and such, too, and even more complicatedly so because of the swelling egos, cannot get a permanent, sure, safe, sense of belonging by inserting themselves into a congregational list. This very day, for instance, among the ones of 'my kind', I am a freak -- ask anyone in the vicinity. X is a freak. Y is a freak. Z is a freak. No one can conform much being here; less than what you got to yield to be a member of some saner society. I and X and Y and Z are therefore in a sense lonely. But look at the whole picture then. So many freaks are around when you are 33; so many were around when you were 16. I think 99,9% of the schoolmates that you had believed they were freaks. If everyone was a freak, who's a freak? It is predestined that our race cannot be but in this or that gregarious assertion. But I want to tell you this: you do not, you never did, need a large body of entities of your species to snatch the remedy for your inner pain, loneliness, yearning for friendship, and/or whatever else of the similar fibers. Who needs crowds to be 'friends'? You are not running for the Parliament. In this life, one friend (and I differ it sharply from 'acquaintance' and 'lover' and 'relative' and such unless it happens to be overlapping with one of those) is enough; you have known how hard it is just to find that one -- but once you do then all is worth it. "One man in a thousand," Solomon said, "would walk to the gallows with you" or something -- you never need the 999 persons out there, and it is a waste of nightly tears and tons of self-pity and hordes of nightmares to wish for more. I said I was, at the age you were, lonely. But that wasn't the whole story. I got a truce with myself quite earlier -- I and myself were company. If I ever got lucky as my long-lost High School friend suspected, it was in this only; my angst-ridden teenage soul back then was never at war with itself. That meant one enemy less to face out of bed. You, too, could see the stuff from this point of view, because so far you have never wailed about self-loathing and such. Why can't you take yourself into some friendship? That's the start to anywhere else; no fervent self-loather could get a friend outside. The thing leaks like a Russian nuclear plant -- it drives other people further away from your realm. And there is, I believe, someone who has been spending his or her entire life searching for you now -- he or she doesn't need any other person either, so stop the crying because your tears would render you practically blind -- and in that case you would miss him or her when she or he passes by, or you would inflict a lifelong myopia upon yourself that you wouldn't be able to see that he or she has been standing there at your side all along. I am still a freak now. But I am a comfortable freak. I'm at home. All I need is one other member of my league; once I have gotten that one everything is fine with me. I had made sure that he would never ever try to sell me unworkable vacuum cleaners or tickets to Las Ketchups concerts. Footnotes:
[Email. Reply to Michael Beck & Rhonda Reed, 1999.]
In
love you find the oddest combinations: I don't believe in the complementarian principle. Even such things based on obvious mutual benefit and reciprocal gain, like an alliance between a masochist and a sadist, always fail. And I surely don't think a sane person's soulmate must be the lunatic. But I don't subscribe to the other belief that love will prevail on the fact that you and him/her are practically twins. Such an excess of narcisism is, to me, noxious. It is very much like a marital tie between a pair of diabetics. Theoretically speaking, I believe in something else unnamed; which is probably in practice nonetheless everywhere by most for the past 1999 years. This thing says that when it is love then none of the previous principles matters. Practically speaking, if life really is so much a choice among evils, then I'd take the second. It is better to get virtually egomaniacal by extension; this other person projecting yourself would be loved rather earnestly. It nauseates me to imagine an egomaniac loving someone because of this other person's lack of whatever he or she thinks is best in his or herself. This very indecently often happens. I've seen idiots telling me they were loved, by people who were smart sinners cherishing the chance to exercise their power upon their lovers' nonexistent minds.
AGAINST HOMO FABER [Email. Reply to Ryan Kane, 1999. Homo faber = 'Man (human) who works'.]
It's not that I don't bear any grudges towards capitalism. But so far I've never got attracted by the prospect to write it down. The topic is not my favorite, and it is I think enough that I have asserted the fact that I prefer it as a lesser evil than socialism. I understand that, as you have pointed out, I seem to criticize the New Left constantly, socialism and communism incessantly, while leaving liberalism and capitalism alone. Well, why not? The danger for my Indonesia is not towards getting too far to the North; it is always to the opposite direction. That's my alibi. Capitalism sucks to me deep down in its core: the myth of productivity. Above all else humans are seen there as Homo faber - this means it has re-written the entire description of 'being human' as 'being productive'. 'Being productive' means being working, and this in turns come to acquire every sense that represents the idea of conquering and changing the world. Indonesian technocrats that Suharto had brought in the seventies are this sort of thinkers. [See Indonesian History] The philosophy of the national 'development' was (is) based on productivity. That's how our fields were flooded by artificial growth. It is rather funny that the notion of Homo faber came from the likes of Auguste Comte and the so-called 'Christian ethics' and also Karl Marx at once - marxism deifies 'work' so disgustingly. But back to the subject - where does capitalism differ from socialism then, in this matter? Good question. Just a superficial conclusion: maybe they don't. Both wants people to work and produce. They only disagree about how and what to do with the output. To separate North from South, this basic notion of work originated in your sphere. Even if your pedigree isn't Anglo-Saxon (BTW is it?), the Industrial Revolution in England was the starting-point to get this out into the whole world. Americans have made it irreversible. Of the Southern hemisphere, in a simplistic account we can say that the philosophy of Homo faber isn't indigenous and originally they don't agree with this brand of materialism. But I don't make such a distinction in my private sphere. What I know is, I don't subscribe to the notion of work. If only we can have 'work' as das ding an sich, as an end in itself rather than as a means to get some money or to buy tickets or to be able to eat, I'd say it's Paradise. "But you have to work!" sucks, capitalist or not - it is the mentality of the masses. No one has to work except slaves.
TO UNDERSTAND AND TO DO NOT [Email to Art Thomson, 1999.] I can imagine a good many different lives - the fact that most of us are so goddamned narrow and have no place to store anything from the outside has made such a thing a capability, while it is just an automatic response you cannot avoid because your system already has the reference within upon any new encounter with the outer world. So there is nothing to brag about if all the aid you have gotten - books, films, people's lives, the work of your own brain - logs you into understanding. But from time to time, while specimens gather themselves up and choke your storage, and the blue line present in a lot of them has shown itself bare to perception, still you ask yourself, "Really?" - because the pattern isn't what you want to see. I mean not you - I mean me. I mean whatever I have known so far, from whichever source, forces me to see that most people, most lives, are so darn shallow and myopic, no matter what age, no matter what era, doesn't matter the race or way of life. My own life is, too. I'm not even ten miles close to being my own example of anything good. Exactly because of that, I always keep a little hope that I would find people who belong to a higher degree of being human - people who are never confined by their own lives, people who are capable to see far away and beyond the horizon of today, people who are used to grand dreams and gigantic ideas, people who won't take anything unknown as strange. But this age I live in is itself lightyears away from such an Eden. Nothing great can be invented, said or done, now - nothing is left. Only technological advancement goes on. I can't marvel at that sort of development - I have never taken the majority's automatic (though this, unknown by them, was taught) assumption that everything is in progress, everything goes forward, onward, climbing up - into.....what? No one answers this question only infidels would have raised to their ears. The USA and its breathtaking pace of everything - this imported stuff will reign everywhere in time, soon. While what they call 'progress' is absolutely nothing..... Because it is just a small step onto a very limited spot each and every single time. Forward, perhaps; up, maybe; but still, every time it is definite and no grander than tuna's progress into a can. Only about how to go faster, how to sell better, how to enlarge things - how shallow success is seen from this sort of eye. Ordinary lives - not inventors', not geniuses', not thinkers', not decision-makers', not leaders' - happen in the same mode, a mimic of the whole society. While of course they have no valid reason to think big. Only because 'everyone does', they do force the pace and everything into the tiny inconsequential lives they have. The result is so heartbreaking..... Floaters who are only worth a few dollars a week keep changing jobs, almost without knowing why - just couldn't stand the state of standing still somewhere. Small town mothers keep urging their grandkids to do this or that in order to be something else - almost oblivious of how worthless the aim is. Suburban boys with no skill in anything at all spend their days wishing on big cities' lights - not even a dim awareness is there. I'm afraid I can't really explain how come nausea attacks me so vehemently whenever I see such a life. Only this; their wishes are so pathetic, so narrow, so small, so meaningless, yet they pursue them in an imitation of pursuits of real grand things..... And they call their way 'getting real'. They make 'getting real' a god. They worship it by running as fast as they could upon any errand or even none, they give tributes in the form of hurried announcement "I AM BUSY!" I feel sorry for them for not even knowing how empty their lives are, how ridiculous their rat-race for nothing is. I feel sorry for myself because I can't even find a soul at which I can marvel at.
OBSESSIONS? [Email. Reply to Steve Davidson, 1999.]
I'm not that quickly despising stuff you dub 'weird' - including yours! Even though I know this will break you down to tears, still it is the truth: weird, sir, is reserved for.....me! (So sorry you can't claim it) Browsing your list, I shook my head all the while. Your oddities, your real wacky characteristics, your truly kooky attachments, were not there! Not a crumb, not a morsel! Why? To me, if your buddies do have anything to complain of, it must be the 100% perverted tendency of yours to adopt such an indecent obession towards, like, baseball! Ice cream! Chocolates! Non-smoking! Coke! Oh, well. No one on this planet agrees with me about what is weird and what isn't, anyway; so I won't bother enlightening you. And so, since 'weird' is just an opinion, assigned to what deviates from the common, then I, rather than you, am more entitled to have the word. Weird is definitely a cultural thing, though. So many people have never even been aware of the fact that it is so. Until, of course, they win a lottery and are able to 'go around the world'. They will be the wackos anywhere they go - according to the people natives of the touristic places, their destinations. Strolling the beach in bikinis is weird here in every island of Indonesia except Bali. You'd even get arrested, I presume, if you do so in any Javanese shoreline. While in places like Maluku it isn't weird to go shopping wearing the full attire commonly used in scuba-diving. Geography! If only people learn. Here are my lists. I don't
like: I like: Lighthouses wouldn't be if not for the sea, pictures of ships wouldn't exist without ships, morning is because of the sun, and that one and only beachgoer I like devours Baywatch - see, weird. And like
your auntie Jane, I also collect coffee mugs.
[Email. Reply to Marie Lansburry, 1999.]
Indonesians got the knowledge about America the wrongest way - via imported pop cultural artefacts. In the package are of course 'bad Indians' and 'brave cowboys' and 'great sheriffs' and nobody thought of the African-Americans, or that the Chinese immigrants were third-rate citizens, spending their lives laundring the dirty clothes of those people who only once a year took a bath. It was my Mom who gave me Ingalls' books - she loved the TV series and searched for the original stories later, as - so she thought - means to teach the kids 'to be frontierspersons'. [Click here for pictures] Unfortunately we, the kids, were not so dumb. We didn't believe that the Native Americans fought just because they were 'bad'. A lot of kids didn't buy this, either - all over Indonesia today you'd see people who were born around 1960's and 1970's adoring Chief Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, and so on - a friend of mine, born in 1967, have been a mad collector of 'anything Injun' since he was in primary school. We, basically, are for the Native Americans, in every cowboy movie we've ever seen. This is what is bound to happen because of history. We can identify with Sitting Bull's people. We can't symphatize with the caucasian enemies. The biggest and most popular radio station in Yogya is Geronimo FM. The discotheque I used to go to in High School was Crazy Horse. A record store in my town is named Little Big Horn. Examples like this is abundant. And all along the Malioboro Street, people have been selling statues, headgears, bracelets, jackets, boots, etc., under the sign that reads 'Indian souvenirs'. [Click here for pictures] Laura Ingalls never talked about robbing the land off the natives; of course. She only was impressed by a native baby and once a few warriors came into her house asking for something to eat - which terrified the whole family. It's not that I find the frontierspersons and early settlers devoid of virtue - they were, certainly, showing courage very few could match, and perseverance so great, and determination a lot of people can never have for life. I love Ingalls' stories. But I am, like others here in my homeland, loving Native Americans for the guts and the trail of tears they were forced to go through; while seemingly paradoxical we don't feel nor think the same of African-Americans - you know why? Because they are, anyhow, prominent citizens of your land - seen from today's eyes it is absurd to extend compassion to Puff Daddy, Death Row rappers and Colin Powell and Michael Jackson. While the baby that Ingalls saw on the mother's back in 19th century might have belonged to a vanishing race - once lords of the land.
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