Pandu

Kenaifan barangkali bukan terletak pada kecenderungan optimisme relatif, karena kecenderungan tersebut bukan ditujukan pada kebathilan di dunia dari mana segalanya berawal.

Kenaifan, meminjam Camus, barangkali berada pada titik moral keterlibatan yang ditekankan, bahwa "lebih banyak yang bisa dikagumi dalam diri manusia", untuk terus melibati berbagai kebathilan tanpa ambisi mencari sebab, untuk terus bergerak dan mengejawantahkan solidaritas. Yang harus diingat adalah bahwa moral keterlibatan dimulai justru dari kesadaran akan kebathilan yang absolut, yang dimulai dari penerimaan akan medan dan penghidupan pemberontakan melawan absurditas, "kematian yang memotong", dan "kejahatan" (ataupun kebaikan yang meleset).

Maka tersebutlah segelintir yang memberontak dengan melibatkan diri dalam absurditas yang hidup, yang dihidupkan.

Kenaifan adalah pilihan atas jalan yang altruistik dalam memandang, menghadapi, melibati kebathilan, yang memang lebih menenangkan jika disebut absurditas, dalam bentuk dan skala apapun. Kenaifan adalah penolakan untuk takluk pada absolutisme kebathilan. Kenaifan adalah usaha untuk mempertahankan greget untuk melawan, hasrat untuk bertahan.

(Photo taken above South Sulawesi, December 2010)

- Happy International Volunteers Day!

Terjun

Kau membuatku mencuri, di rumahku sendiri. Entah sejak kapan gaung kerut tawamu terselip di setiap reklamasi. Berselimutkan embun dan peluh tak habis kita menalar mimpi, meretas sunyi. Lalu di keheningan kita menepi...

membiarkan fana
menaklukkan yang baka

mengasapi asa
atau mengasinkan luka

192 Jam

Dua hari ini adalah tentang gelisah yang mengendap. Kau bergelut di tengah sebab-sebab yang mungkin, dan menemukan bahwa jarak yang ingin kau depa mengada di cerukan yang bukan milikmu.

Di luar sana, ketika peperangan adalah selalu satu-satunya hal yang menyambutmu, kau resah ketika harapan dan manifestasinya tak bermotifkan loyalitas, apalagi nasionalisme gamang. Lalu apa yang akan kau pertahankan di menit-menit todongan laras api? Bahwa kau melacur demi keberbedaan yang wajib meraga?

Kau begitu yakin. Kau tak ingin berhenti. Kau tak kunjung mengerti. Dan kau pun bergantung pada moralitas-moralitas tua: tindakan paling mulia di tengah peperangan bukanlah berjuang menyerang musuhmu hingga titik darah penghabisan, bukan pula berlari, apalagi bersembunyi, melainkan menyelamatkan segala yang kau bisa selamatkan, siapapun itu.


- Tentang surat, bantuan bermuatan, dan dislokasi budaya. Terima kasih kepada G.S.M. dan ingatannya atas Purbo Carito.

it is the spectators that art really mirrors

"Optis Jiwa: Kesaksian adalah perihal melihat, karenanya dia visual. ... Karya kemudian menjadi adagium dari dialektika melihat."

- Oscar Motuloh, for the Djakarta Artmosphere program book

I am often mistaken as a hopeless romantic. I maintain plenty of reveries about genius scheme beyond the line of a simply too amazing show, indulge myself in own conviction upon the greatness of minds, regardless how predictable mankind really is. I believe in the power of the middlemen, not due to the number of those bearing such identity badge, but rather to the fact that they lack the aspiration to rule. They just do, and by so doing they project the superior brilliance. They consistently converse, and by so doing they dispense with the small number of floating mass actually really listen and move (their bodies to the music, their minds to the ideas). Trying, moving, as opposed to the self-acclaimed motors who set themselves above the forgiving God. Battling, against the reality always freshly presented.

I suppose I am a hopeful audience.


(To the delight of an all night almost-Leviathan debate with A.A.L., for no matter how you confuted the romantic thesis, we are wearing the Guy Fawkes masks distributed throughout the show.)

the barricades

When all of a sudden you need to justify who you have been for the past year, you realize you no longer have a place to stay. Subsequently you have two choices, walk your lonely road, or impose your reality within the possible limitations.

implore the fate to truly meet someone

(thanks to A.R. and A.E.F., whom I dearly met at a friend's wedding)

We never look beyond our assumptions, and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others, we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy.

the ordinary life as we perceive it

Half-sheltered, catch the wink that ignites
the confirming corner, open arms, and an ear
The pebbles contain sounds, torrent of lights
This pattern in silence is crystal clear

With scattering thoughts in the midst of the crowd
the joker within the deck seeks for plain float
The humm of the timely space cannot be heard
as the laughter corresponds, the riddle gets old

Between reason and purpose there stretches a line,
though we don't always traverse it
Basketball shoes, flip-flops, barefeet are fine
it's over here with the coffee we sit

* All the best luck to Ray and Dachung!


(Photos taken in Bogor, August 2008)

to look is to listen to insights on the mind's eye

For more or less a week, the conception of time was being thrown away. The only way to measure the signified chain of seconds is how far messages got accross, or how entangled relations have been built, or how wide smiles spread when two eye sights met, or of course how drops of growing-up lessons filled our bowls little by little. But still, most of the time it is not measurable.
Same place, different obstacles. This year,surprisingly I pity the people who already maintained unyielding definition upon own selves, who managed to choose paths self-enlightened, or shortly to people to whom I would have had my jaw fell in awe. I pity them for one stupid reason, namely how unlucky they would be to never indulge in the minty solitude deep within just by undergoing hours of trashtalk without sugarcoats with some friends in the middle of nowhere, looking around and sideways, far from walking fast in certainty to an oasis or nirvanas or however ways they're named. Most of the time, life is series of waiting rooms, and thus the likely question is how one can go past through that, with both solid dignity and the feeling of a company.
Accordingly, the past week was also my chance to gaze around my dessert. The smiles, the globules of tears, the laughs, the advance understandings, the streams of ideas, the complex minds poured into one simple language, the instant foods for both the stomaches and the thoughts, THE DETAILS.



"And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life - that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its crucible pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic if passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect - to observe where they met, where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at the discord - there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation." -Oscar Wilde

alex

wet cement

granting recognition to certain close ones surrounding by being her own true self. the acknowledgement is the realization, of the genuine honesty projected.
she admires the beauty of the wilds without having to understand, moreover, without having to compromise. she'll just let the streams fluttering the way they really do.
beside, would compromising be the best way? who decides and provides the clauses anyway?
she is a believer, that the universe is not a fabrication of some freaking tall buildings erected in such consencus of analogous similarities.

crustaceae

Dikenakannya awan – awan kumulus
berkas insekuritas yang menjangkiti rongga – rongga uap
Sinar matahari yang memendar
dan Tyndall tersenyum…
Lembaran seng dilumuri lem kanji
toh manusia hanyalah makhluk yang terjebak
dalam kebebasannya
memandang sembari mengepakkan sayapnya, katanya
Ia terpekur
melewati bebatuan yang sama berkali – kali
tapak kakinya meninggalkan jejak terdalam
pada aspal panas

returned home

engaged to every bit of it:



the long-line waitings


the KLM talks with way too much caffeine (oh that shitty coffee made the earth gravity just vanished)



the napping spot we found a year back



the kisses


the never-ending walks


the first batch of YES baby!



an almost-20-hours flight tells one thing, that the world is indeed round, that the place which may seem like an end may also be just the beginning..




and we had a very happy 4th of July. who are you kidding?

turning 18

and i'll be off through SFO in 3 hours, leaving California.
leaving you dear family.

leaving the life i created with my own paints.

leaving with a realization?

well that would be such a gift on the 18th 'celebration' of a birthday.

oh and i'm not finished packing. how could you pack memories of 11 months into two giant suitcases anyway?