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of the Rising Son Samurai in the picture: Kenshin Himura character from Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan manga © 1994 Nobuhiro Watsuki, publisher Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo, Japan Grave of the Fireflies is good. I have to say that first. Even though the character drawing isn't the kind that I clap aloud for (like, for instance, those which populate Rurouni Kenshin or Sol Bianca), it nevertheless is good. It speaks. The storyline itself is, considering the shovelwares anime-producers keep littering the whole planet (or my living room) with, almost flawless. It flows. But I have a huge chunk of "but" at the tail of the previous lines. The story breathes, and as the producer keeps reminding us, Ebert didn't; he was busy fighting tears -- or so he said on the trailer. Americans tend to get too easily impressionable, hence my un-surprise upon the thunderous landing of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and the like, in Hollywood, several boy bands before today; it's almost irresistible the thought that maybe it always happens because they never suspected Asians to be able to switch a camera on without the help of a fire brigade. It explains the unnaturally short time it took the Chinese artists to go international these past few years after the domestication of Hong Kong.
Anyway, Grave of the Fireflies didn't make me cry. Since people said it takes a World War to make me cry, this might be a useless fact, but it also didn't make my little sister cry -- the same sister who got herself into oceans of tears upon watching practically any movie, human or animal or anime, starring Death. Over the fireflies' grave, she, however, did not cry a single tear. I asked her why, and she said "It's Japan in 1945." Right. The fireflies and the grave are of that time and space. If my sister, who's never even remembered her own racial and ethnic and national identities unless some authoritative-looking guys who hold her passport are present, reacted like that, it is bound to be heavier so in my head. I can name a barrack-full of Japanese, factual and fictional, that I love. So I'm not an Anti-Nippon League member. I have no personal enmity spurted towards that direction. But in 1942 the Japanese troops landed here in Indonesia. In 1945 they went out, home or elsewhere, leaving us virtually nothing, plus a trail of blood and tears. Grave of the Fireflies is of the Japanese history; this is Indonesian history. Grave of the Fireflies is about two kids, whose dad was away in the Japanese Navy, whose mom was killed in an air-bombing, who were abused by their only aunt, and who, eventually, starved and minimally clothed and were besieged by diarrhea and skin rash and so forth unmedicated, who in the end died. A familiar story this is, to me. Of Indonesians under the Japanese occupation before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing. Of course human suffering is oblivious of national boundaries. I never say the story didn't move me in this. But without being an ultra-fascist I still cannot really feel sorry for the time-bound Japanese in the movie; those who bombed them, the American air squadrons of WW II, have been, I believe, much sorrier, though I'm uncertain when it comes to the United States. All these does not have anything to do with the assessment of the merit of Grave of the Fireflies. I told you it's a good film. As a work of art it surely is. As a historical piece it serves its purpose. But my tears are reserved for those my Grandmother knew who starved to death before the boy Seita and his kid sister met the same fate in Japan; as far as I'm concerned their father was among the ones firing at us back then here in Java. At the time, dying of severe malnutrition was almost 'normal' for the Javanese under the Japanese imperial banners. Children kept falling apart preceding their parents -- which was already a case of the 'lucky', because many such kids never saw their fathers again, who were sent to forced-labor camps, nor their mothers, who were rounded up for institutionalised rape. It's all over now, the World War II -- both you and I were born years and years away from 1942. But history, that obese thing, is no matter what with us and the generations that today only exist in science-fiction. We've been doing better than dreaming imperial dreams. The sons that rise in the future Japan are, I believe, to know even much better if they learn. But those who forget what it's like to see wars are in a perennial danger of starting some anew. Grave of the Fireflies just reminded us about it. And we're not that lucky anyway, being the kids of the relative peace; the things our parents inhaled in the end of the sixties are probably even deadlier as an inheritance than warfare -- I suspect much of our generation were born with some mental-concussion -- and we got to witness peace-time calamities such as Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. Footnotes:
Beyond
Antares Silent
Partners
songs: You have no idea what you have done to me. The postman demanded extra stamps, but just one song among the dozens you sent is worth everything DeBeers could boast of having - I'm always repulsively passionate about things, but really even when I sober up later this opinion will not change. Beyond Antares is one goddamned bliss. I can't say anything original at this sort of time. It must be the thing that made Confucius forgot what it was that he was eating. Let Leo Tolstoi speaks:
As an inland tropical creature, I have never understood summer. But today you out of the blue painted the thing inside my head. I will forever pray for you the very best.
The
Bolt Reminds Me I Was There There is a good deal of everything that remains hidden behind the foggy existence of the known, out there in the infinite universe and in here beneath what we are conscious of. Living a Javanese life, it is impossible to dismiss the Unknown as unreal. Living a human, it is improbable that we can claim all the unknown as inexistent. Though generally sounds silly, the notion of the "unknown forces", the "invisible hands", the "other world", is not wholly a lair of the lesser kind of primates, land of the lost souls in the eye of the religious, resort for the weird and hideout for crackpots. Things couldn't evaporate into Nothing simply by being doubted, disbelieved, aimed at by cynicism, laughed out loud. The first thing I tend to do whenever somebody drags in such tales of ghosts and oracles and doomsaying and the like is hitting my forehead hard, unless the person gets mad because of that, in which case I will hit his forehead hard. I just can't stand an all-out belief in anything -- it's your very own business as long as you keep it under your very own bed, but social ethics should keep you refrain from taking it for a visit. But the human mind isn't that simple -- it's never a matter of location: if you say such things are characteristic of "the Easterners", you need a surgical procedure to broaden your horizon so you can see your own immediate environment. It's not a matter of education either -- there is no sane connection or instant impact of getting a Ph.D and the discarding of the bedtime anxiety of getting the sandman creeping in to rob your soul from God. To me, this subject is and should stay personal; the tendency to flock is human but it is what makes the Unknown shrinks into some pseudo-knowledge comprised in a set of mumbo-jumbo that drags the believers further from the scientific race and into asylums. I know some people who dabble in the so-called "supernatural" to their necks. I also know some guys who don't buy a single crumb of it. And I know many who display hatred towards such a thing because they fear it, doubt it, unsure of what they believe themselves, reluctant to shift the object of worship because of the uncertain rewards. This last group is the most unbearable. The first thing a dummy does when confronting something alien is to hate it because it doesn't look like anything he has been taught to know before. The only people is his people. The only God is his God. The only way to cook eggs is his mother's. The only way to be for him is, then, his ancestors' -- and I mean Darwinism here. Observing foreigners stumbling on abroad, claiming their own cultures as the culprit whenever they commit blunders in some foreign land ("That's not how we do it in Germany. How could I know your people do it differently?"), is like paying income taxes when you are already dead -- utterly unfair and ridiculous. It is only sensible to expect people to learn beforehand. That is why schools teach currently useless stuff -- it's the basic of the later life's business. You should, with some gray cells called brain you automatically try to, know enough about the people, the culture, the norms and ethics and rules of the foreign shore you plan to land on. "But this is not the way in London" is unpardonable when you mess up in my house. Beliefs like in the "supernatural" is somebody's house too. It is your fault, your own mistake, and nothing but your own stupid decision to marry a practicing astrology-addict without realizing the fact before you said "I do" -- getting mad and disgusted later when the sex ceased to be exciting should get you to the gallows. I take your spouse's side. It is she that has the right to complain of your stupid old fat butts. Especially because you use them to think with, when the sane use their heads. I don't defend her or anybody else's "supernatural" stuff -- I do raise arms against you for the sake of believing itself, or the contrary. A true believer is sure of what he believes; it is pity that springs out whenever he sees his kind of heathen, not insecurity that leads to war. A world of true believers equals to the universe of practiced tolerance -- it is a different thing, but the result is everybody stays calm. If your god is the God, when others don't buy the idea you could shake your head and are pacified by the notion that you, at least, have tried. But their souls are theirs. Whatever they decide to do with them is their business. Whatever they think of your belief is their business. The same applies to you as far as theirs are concerned. In the world I'm living in, genies and ghosts and such are daily stuff, as readily at hand as forks and spoons and the neighbor's snore at nights. It is un-kosher to bash them here -- those who believe are still infants and democracy is nowhere in sight yet -- but nobody would send you back in a bodybag as long as you let it be their own business and mind your own instead. No belief is smarter, no disbelief is, either. Once this gets into your skull nothing is harmful out there. I know that the urge to pull others into our own stuff is the phantom lurking in everybody's mind -- grouping is submitting to the human nature. But knowing when, where, who and how is essential. Otherwise just try to get more sleep and forget your idea of mass convertion. Because if it is all up to me then I would want everybody to plunge into Peter White fan club, having Santana daily and cats are never far in their lives, no one should be allowed to read science fiction, hip-hop is illegal and a good many of you will never get licenses to marry anyone, and if you dare to do so and even worse dare to procreate there, you're dead. Showing people what you are for is absolutely okay -- force-feeding them with it is a sin. I can search for a group that shares all the things I believe in just to better the head count. But I simply sit here and shake my head -- that you are disbelieving any of the above is your own mistake, if your God can save you then let it be since I won't try, I'm too busy downloading the pic of Metallica. The treshold is clear: we cannot know everything. Either our antennaes tune in to some different airwaves, won't respond to certain calls, or we are simply too stupid. Knowing this, it is only sensible to let the window open and see what could get in by itself. The "supernatural" can be; we don't know if it positively cannot. The "wrong ideas" can be true; we don't know if they are undoubtedly trashy. Your man can be a con on the lam from Mars; we don't know if he isn't, judging from his therapist's nervous breakdown after treating him for a week. Astrologers are a pain in the unmentionable part (for instance, the mind), for some. Personally I think they are sort of amusing and are definitely useful when you are waiting for a delayed flight at a boring airport somewhere. But I know a typical someone who gets really ashamed of himself after leaving through an astrology journal, citing "I'm a good Christian" as the cause; or "I don't believe in this kind of thing". Why the guilty feeling? Because he's human after all. But this doesn't mean it can be used as the excuse anytime one gets queasy about what one does wittingly. So do I believe in the "supernatural"? No, I don't burn incense under a tree in the graveyard and I don't bathe naked in a certain lake every third full moon. But it may exist, as we are the users of languages and free to name anything including the Unknown. Do I believe in astrology and the like? No, I don't launch missiles to another country if my zodiac of the day says it is now or never, I don't cancel a dinner if it says I will get choked on salmon and die. But those who believe in it are free to roam out there -- it will only be my business when they demand a war based on the same prediction of the stars or raid my house so the dinner is undone. My High School building was, people said, full of restless ghosts -- it's a colonial building, the only reason that made me oblivious of their existence was, they said, the fact that the ghosts spoke Dutch. Even the university's new structure was said to be some supernatural power's playground, they said the faculty members neglected making sacrifices before it was erected on the ground. Some said to be confronted by apparitions of bodies who asked them stuff in Chinese. One of the dormitories I stayed in has seen unexplainable attacks on its tenants; the bathrooms were ghost-infected and when I was there in fact they did some ghost-busting effort once. The last house I lived in before this one was supernaturally crowded too, they said. Why we were saved from them was, so I was told, because I had fourteen cats that stood guard. A Chinese medic read me once, around my school days, and said that I would die at 40, have troubles with the family and fights against everybody, there would be no man in my life, and no kids, absolutely. A Javanese shaman did the same a long way back when I still didn't have the tool to distinguish letters in the alphabet, and Grandma told me that he predicted a good life though I would have to work hard to achieve it, I would marry a blond with blue eyes, I would get two kids, my correct line of work is being a school teacher, and when I die I would leave 2 cars in the garage, being around 70. In a trip to West Java in my first year in the university an old shaman re-read me and came out with the prediction of a long life, a long list of kids, I would have to get a divorce at least once, he said, and my last husband would be the soulmate intended from the beginning, being a writer would be the right way already for me, and the chronic problem that would plague my life after 20 was said to be gastritis. Then in 1994 another shaman browsed my soul and shook his head and said nothing whatsoever; in 1996 still another one read my palm and broke into laughter -- the last two, I think, are the most believable readings so far of my fate. The devil -- and the deity -- in predictions is in the fact that you wouldn't know until it is over -- and this is how we live Life without evoking such "supernatural" authorities anyway, so I think that believing in them is not my thing. The best people that read the future share the same quality: painting the landscape in the broadest canvas available. No one went into details and nobody named years; no name is clearly indicated when it comes to people. "You're going to live a long life," for instance -- in the arid African regions reaching 45 is a feat, in other places 60, 70, 80, 90 -- it could be any age. "You will be a teacher" would be said as true when you are a priest, or a writer, or a cop, or a driving instructor, or work in a gym, already. Even a seemingly detailed prediction like "a blond with blue eyes" means a lot of things with the existence of hair-dyes and fashionable contact lenses. Yet I concede that there is the Unexplainable in our lives. Just the other day some guys tried to convince me that my de já vu has been supernatural clues each time -- you know, the usual thing of feeling like you've been some place before -- lacking any other theory, this could be the case. And there were a few occurences I couldn't make sense of, like in my previous backyard when my cats hissed at Nothing all night, barring the backdoor to the house, and I was sure I was scared to death while nothing visible caused it -- I went everywhere looking for dogs, snakes, people or anything that could have angered the cats and couldn't find any, it simply was creepy. So it might be there, the Unknown, and the Unexplainables surely do happen, like Bill Clinton, the state of Brunei Darussalam, and boy bands. But I can't attribute what I could dub "the somehow Known" in my own life as parts of this. Since I was a little kid, I got the feeling, of which I was sure, that I would grow older and mess things up in certain ways and do what is kind of "good" in other certain ways and so on. I "knew" I would be sitting somewhere and write instead of going into glass blocks and do what is called "work" all day for someone known as "Boss". I "knew" I would piss many heads off in the course of time. I "knew" I would have migraines and other stuff all my life. I "knew" I wouldn't have weddings. I "knew" I would never get rich. No matter how far I strayed from the "Known", somehow it has always been the way. Things could look like proceeding into another direction at a time, but in the end it has always been the "Known" that concluded the matter. So I have no choice but to take it as something that I "know". It is not a string of "supernatural" revelations because it could easily get explained as being logical deductions of what I should, and which I can say I do, know about: my very own Self. I have never been living "normal", since the first day of my life. My parents were unmarried, Mom got to fake it every single day for years, I have never had a father, the sort of "artistic" environment I was brought up in left me unimpressed by other, more "normal" fields and lifestyles, a weird kind of poverty left me devoid of monetary ambitions rather than the contrary, the odd way of teaching me about life that was done by my immediate habitats planted the seeds of the "abnormal" ideas in my head. What would later on have taken me to be pro-choice, believing in individuality, being for equality, for diversity, disgusted by Britney Spears, disliking chocolates, and so on -- all these little things can be easily searched the roots of. I am very short-tempered in some subjects and unshakenly patient in some others, capable of getting over-enthusiastic, passionate to the point of giving others a creep, automatically skeptical about anything, and so the list goes, including that I am, in somebody's remark, "sexually July the 4th" -- my temperament and character, either naturally inborn or socially nurtured, explain stuff that I deal with in life, too. I might look like subscribing to the fatalistic worldview -- maybe to some degree I do. What one thinks of oneself is often the indicator of his or her fate. It might look like some self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe to some point it is. Some sort of fatalism had sustained the old Javanese people's life -- it helped them getting real, it left no regret, bad things weren't so upsetting. Maybe a dash of the cultural hue is in my mental makeup too. But fatalism is never my telescope in reviewing a person's life. We are what we have been, things that we have done is the starting-point to do what we do now. Everyone has come a long way. But the most idiotic way to live is by using it as an excuse. If you were abusing drugs, was that because of Fate? If you were madly in love with a serial killer and in slack season he cut your head, was that Fate? If you robbed a bank and got a lethal injection as its cost, was that Fate? If you were stupid and headstrong and nothing anyone did at the time could open your eyes and you only realized it after 8 years, was that Fate? Never, to me. Only dummies regret a lot. You might have made a very twisted decision in your life, and it took you to the dungeon -- but if you gave your all into it at the time, if you have thought it over and it yielded nothing better, if you were sure of it and you really knew what you were doing, you wouldn't have anything to look behind your shoulder to and weep bitterly about. If you are not as stupid as you would like to think, it would have been one of the lessons you learned from. If you are not dumber than I think, you would know that NOT every bad experience is a lesson. The same mistake over and over again is NOT a string of lessons -- since you weren't taught the first time around and still are not learning. The blunder you committed 8 years ago and about which you have never tried to make right even though you have seen it as such -- it isn't a lesson of anything but of how abnormally lethargic, cowardly and idiotic your so-called Soul has been -- and of course you refuse to learn about this. Dummies always blame somebody else whenever they act stupid and Life hands in the bill to pay. Personally I have never found anyone to blame for my bad experiences but Life itself -- this is my fatalism -- that Life be, tyranically so, needing none of our votes to be, and there is nothing we can do but living Life once we were born. The mighty "supernatural" doesn't tell me why Life. The sun and moon and stars don't even seem to regard it as a legitimate question. So I don't believe. [Sigh.] If only you dig.
Of
Synchretism SEE
ALSO: There are countries like Cambodia which share this trait, or so some said. King Norodom Sihanouk is a self-confessed Francophile*, he is also an upholder of the ancient kingship and rights derived from gods, he loves caviar and the People's Republic of China. There is communism, Buddhism, democratic socialism, Christianity, a Prime Minister, a Royal Family, everything there along the Avenue Charles de Gaulle. Now Indonesia - We were (are) open to virtually everything, and after some time (during which stuff like deaths might have occured) the newcomer is stashed neatly somewhere among the existing archives, side by side and in some cases overlapping with each other. So here was animism, the original system of belief which put spirits in natural landmarks like banyan trees, springs, etcetera. Then came Hinduism with Indian gods -- Brahma, Wishnu, Shiva, and so on; they didn't delete the indigenous spirits. Buddhism came afterwards, without really erasing any of the previous tenants of this realm. Islam next, it did the same. Catholicism followed. Lastly came Protestantism. All existed by major or minor, of substraction or addition, modification, but all existed together nonetheless. That gave us the 'Indonesian Islam'. The Nine Leaders (Wali Songo) who spread this religion all over Java took the already available media to do the job. Our famous mosques are different in architecture and philosophy from, for instance, the Middle Eastern. The Hindu literature was rewritten in the Islamic spirit, and new ones were born putting together all that was known earlier. Just a simple principle of survival and to lay safely, peacefully, unstartlingly, the foundation of anything. But synchretism, even if we aren't puritans of any belief, looks weird or incongruent or 'wrong' often. Even casual observers wouldn't miss it. You'd see people who dutifully pray five times a day like good Muslims do, and putting some offerings of rose petals, jasmine, and cananga under the majestic banyan tree of the neighborhood. There are devout churchgoers who routinely keep the priest busy with confessions, and don't consider giving some food to the recently deceased family members a sin of infidelity. Reverend X and Y and Z themselves bless nuptials which are conducted in some traditional ceremony that uphold and give tributes to ancient spirits and the goddess of fertility. The Balinese Hindu pray to their ancestors' spirit after the bodies were cremated. And so forth. Those are lived as something normal and not seen as against religions by most of the practitioners. People still come to mountains to seek some remedy of everything from pre-menstrual syndrome to post-power syndrome. Politicians hunt 'wisemen' to give them supernatural powers to reap as many votes as possible and hinder rivals from having so. Businesspersons obtain talismans to enhance sales. Drivers get some for safety. Athletes for victory. Actors for fame. Wives for sex appeal. Blades, gems, nondescript pieces of wood, all are on sale for the power of the unseen in them. Shamans never lack patients; the cops always get to arrest 'fake shamans' whom, after deflowering fifty virgins, then couldn't grant their wishes (which are to get a husband, to be Miss Indonesia, to pass the test to enter a university, to succeed the boss at work, to drive the boyfriend away from another woman, etcetera). Mobs execute their neighbor who is believed as an expert of black magic. Suharto* is strongly believed as one such believer of the Javanese supernatural. They always say he employed shamans to secure the regime, that evil spirits had inhabited his palaces and took blood sacrifices, that his wife's death was a sign to end his reign, that they both were pagans (or pagan gods, alternately), and many such tales (easy to get, just ask anybody). We use all calendars at once -- the Javanese (i.e. Hindu) that tells all of the good and bad days for anything; the Islamic (Hijriyyah lunar calendar), the Christian that tells what year of the Lord this is. Indonesian calendar is usually printed three-in-one. That's why it's so crowded. 'Good days' and 'bad days' are sought upon determining when to get married, what to name a baby, when to erect permanent tombstone for the deceased, when to sow and to harvest, when to clean up the inherited family blades, and everything else, alongside the religious beliefs. Herbal remedies are taken along with sophisticated therapies. Tabooes derived from the elders are observed as well as those which come from doctors' orders. Vaccination is gotten together with mantras to evade diseases. Upon building a state-of-the-tech bridge, a skyscrapper, a monument, or other such things, workers gather to give offerings to the site's guardian spirits - to gain their blessing, so they wouldn't interfere with the job. A buffalo's head is buried under the building's foundation to please the spirit of the soil. There are stories about human sacrifices in major architectural projects - believed by many, not because they were true or have been sustained by evidence, but because it made sense. A long, elaborate ceremony preliminates the work on certain grounds like ex-cemeteries, and it goes on even when the building has been finished and inhabited. Reports of sightings and people being possessed by evil spirits are abundant in such sites. I can go on but this example-giving won't be finished tomorrow if I do. Hence what you have noticed: the Indonesian attachment to symbolicism. In West Sumatera, for instance, tigers were never called tigers; doing so would mean irreverence and so the same as inviting them to break necks. "Don't get the water today," they said; "'Grandmother' was prowling near the well." My neighbors almost never call snakes snakes. They say "I killed a worm yesterday" lest the dead reptile's spouse would listen and thus able to identify the one it must take revenge against. If circumstances necessitated the reference, the things we are afraid of are referred to by other words. Simple changing of terms, then, is taken as changing the things they represent. To avoid maladies, these substitutes are said sparingly, if never is impossible. The stuff we are wishing for are referred to as they are, but as often as possible. By the thousandth time or so we would have succeeded in convincing ourselves they had happened and are still happening. Sukarnoist slogans grew along this line; he simply had to utter 'revolution' and voila it happened. Suharto did the same with 'development'. Now we have Reform to continue this inheritance.* Footnotes:
But
Can You Hang The Cheshire Cat? I plea guilty. It has been bothering me for some time now. I am not just guilty for the cheap tricks you suspect me of pulling ('the appropriation of slapstick'), not only for idiotic puns (all puns are), but also for something that you, God knows how, have overlooked (!!!): hyperbole. Communists would have loved me in the fifties. I was born for one purpose: to be so excellently quick to self-criticize. I am extravagant in speech. I can't remember how long I have been so, but it must have been born almost simultaneously with my start in writing, because I have forgotten all about the start. I can't think of why you haven't mentioned it. It is so obvious, although I only got someone asking me about it once, about eleven or twelve years ago in a formal discussion, and afterwards there has been no sound. To say 'blunder' I use 'mistake'. Instead of 'mistake' I say 'sin'. Someone stupid is 'idiotic', a folly means 'insane'. Hyperbolic statements are, you can say, my habit to make. It is automatic. In any language. It could be funny at times, and (or) it could destroy the whole moral value in the piece. More than that, it could be, as I have been knowing all these years, downright dangerous. Hyperbole in this sense doesn't care a fig about the correct ascending order of adjectives. For instance, the next step higher than ugly is not 'disgusting'; they don't even come from the same species. I know what I mean; some people who read my words do, too, but I know and they know that some just don't like such incorrect stuff and some other don't even grasp it right. I have been writing that way without any intention to get extravagant, with the result going to the opposite direction. About Britney Spears, for one - she is a sin, I always said. I also always said she sins. And I said she is Sin, too. This chaos of values can get really maddening. There is a correct order, like, from 'good' you get 'better' and then 'best' and common hyperbole will give you 'bestest'. I seldom if ever followed this line. So I completely made a somersaulting mess out of the everpresence of the words such as 'weird', 'nuts', 'insane'. I see very plainly how that area can get me into a ditch. Bear me a while for a flashback in real life. Once, I knew a man who used to read my essays, and of course like everyone else he continually met with 'weirdo', 'lunatic' and so on. Then he was diagnosed by psychiatrists as having an internal disorder that goes about by a difficult name (I forgot what it was). He was locked up in a mental hospital. Upon getting released, he as the law had ruled got the "P.S.: This Mr. X is insane" in his CV; a social decision made by the court. That thing closed the door to 'respectable' employment, as a matter of course, and even hindered any step towards getting a socially nice woman. He horrified me (really - not a hyperbole) one day when he said he wasn't bothered by the stigma of insanity, he wasn't even thinking that lunacy is socially unholy, because of me. "You are a lunatic too, and so I'm okay," he said. Imagine how I felt. It was like the whole U.S. Army marched on my grave when I was buried alive. I was guilty. I had given a great discount; the entire bulk of perversion, hazard to society, etcetera, were virtually eradicated from my meaning of the word 'lunatic', that the man certified so by a legal body undermined its real meaning (I don't say true sense - this can be anything). This man, doc, used to call himself 'a nutcase', 'crazy', 'mad', and the like, following my use of those words. He took the court's verdict just as lightly meant as those. Result: unemployed, distressed, couldn't understand why, endangering other people out of frustration, and there he went, into lunatic asylums again. If I can get close to a traumatization then this is it. I will never be able to forget the real life enactment of numbskulled reasoning. Another flashback: Once, when I was young, I wrote a personal ad that said "I want men who long for the impossible"* . And lo and behold, the next day I woke up to find my digital mailbox getting a flood of members of the Ultra Neo Fascist Union (or whatever the correct name is), subscribers of the Weight Watchers, Star Trek addicts, The X-Files believers and a hodgepodge of misoriented primates on their way to suicide. No kidding - those men apparently thought that they were my soulmates because nobody else talked to them. (If this isn't so saddening, I would have gotten on medication because of the shock). Still another nostalgic piece of truth: In a conversation with several people, I said "My gods are guitar players." One of them was a man who, unsmilingly, with the unmistakable tone of rebuke, promptly snapped "I thought you are a Christian." More specimens: To the only man I love in this galaxy I wrote tons of letters that said approximately the same thing over and over, with the noxious signature "your slave, Sire". Judging from his (mis)behavior, it is safe to assume that he lived up to the royal title. Either that or his namesake; which unfortunately denotes something even higher than kings - which more unfortunately is an angel's - which most unfortunately is something I kept on reminding him of by worshipping. Oh, well. Yet, from another point of view, I am not guilty. Not a bit, sir. I have every right to use words as I see fit, and literary prerogative is the law we all uphold. In my world - of artists, writers, assorted crackpots - 'crazy', 'insane', and the likes have the same weight: none whatever. It is not my business if some people don't get what I meant to say. I am not responsible for any stagnant lair that reads it literally. So - I have no remedy; what has happened be bygone. But like I have admitted, I think I am guilty - from the social perspective. No matter which way I look at it from, the habitual messing up with adjectives can't be deleted like horrendous files; it is, however, my personal style. Yet I admit my (aha.....) sins:
And for all my life I am always conscious of the trio of dangerous inclinations - sarcasm, wordplay, hyperbole. Pray for me so God would probably accept the notion that when I wrote "God hates me so much" I actually meant "I don't care if he does or doesn't, I don't know if he does or doesn't, it's just a cheap expression of incredible unexplainable series of bad luck". Whew, too long, the sentence, if I am to be so correct. Footnotes: "Man who longs for the impossible...": Borrowed phrase from Goethe's statement. Betsy Clark, Melinda Shaw, Veronica Baran, Cookie Williams and I posted the exact same ad (I and Betsy wrote it). Initially this was just for fun. See 'my' men -- a mess of photographs and rap.
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