Remember, remember

We are landed with fallible, frailty, imperfect memories. Nonetheless, confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: it allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to contribute to the common mind. Memories are… unlike Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled with every act of recollection; they are dialogic. Hence perhaps our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine.

In Lewes, the town where the country’s biggest annual bonfire festival commemorating the Guy Fawkes night is said to take place, the local societies’ banners read “we burn to remember”.

(Photos taken in Lewes, East Sussex, UK, 2013)

Zeal

There is no way to explain an edge, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others — the living — are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between the 'now' and the 'later'.

(Photos taken in Mt. Merbabu, Central Java, 2013)

Arrive

We have to live with the certainty that we will get old, our bodies decline, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. There will come a time when we ought to be making the most of joy in the final hours in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. That, and tell ourselves that it is now that matters, to construct and deconstruct, to surpass ourselves everyday, to make everyday undying, and to do them in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. 

That is what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

(Photos taken in Huangyao, China, 2012)

Continuum

Only a fanatical will to make a vanished world endure despite the passing of time can explain this belief in the existence of an 'always within never' -- an entire world that had disappeared, a mixture of flavors, smells, scattered fragrances that has left its sediment in ancestral rites and local dishes, crucibles of illusory memories that seek to make gold from sand, eternity from time.

(Photos taken in Sapa, Vietnam, 2012)

Instinctive Living

We see that the intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward at the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument that is not designed for such use. The intellect is characterized by the natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life. While the intellectual treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were to wound up into knowledge rather than being wound up into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give us the most intimate secrets of life, for it only carries out further the work by which life organizes matter--so that we cannot say, as has often been shown, where instinct begins and where organization ends.

All in all, the most essential of the primary instincts are really vital processes. The potential consciousness that accompanies them is generally actualized only at the outset of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by itself. It would only have to expand more widely, and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one of the generative force of life. That which is instinctive in instinct cannot be expressed in terms of intelligence nor, consequently, can it be analyzed.

(Photos taken in Hanoi, Vietnam, September 2012)

Systematic Wonder

We march through the world armed with intuition and rationality to conquer the unknown, the two in near-constant friction in a culture that frames them as opposing forces. Then we turn to science and scientific method as the ultimate bastion of rationality in our quest for truth. But science, is not merely reason; science should also be culture. It is a poetic and practical sensemaking mechanism for the universe and our place therein, the totality whose machinery is greater than the sum of its logical parts, an inherent contradiction--systematic wonder--applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of dried leaves or fabrics, advances the perimeters of knowledge, step by laborious step.

(Photos taken at the weekly cultural Bac Ha Market, Vietnam, 2012)

The Stolen Time

Aku ingat saat waktu yang tercuri berarti rasa tenang yang menggebu, terpesona oleh ruang yang akan terus ada. Di Ta Prohm, tepatnya. Di kompleks itu, tahun-tahun terlepas dari masa. Diam, beku, kegagahan yang mencemooh para turis yang hanya berkeliling 30 menit saja karena harus mengejar matahari terbenam di Phnom Bakheng. Pokoknya yang rasanya alami untuk dilakukan di situ adalah berusaha lupa dan alpa, menikmati yang jadi. Jangan berlari-lari, apalagi menggali-gali.

Nikmat adalah menyaksikan waktu yang menyelinap pergi. Sayang dalam keseharian yang banal, justru aku yang ingin sembunyi dari detik yang tidak berhenti.

(Photo taken in Siem Reap, Kingdom of Cambodia, January 2010)

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!

is the glass half empty or half full?

It is completely full. But it is empty of a lot of things; it is completely empty of everything but water and air molecules.

(Photo taken in Brisbane, July 2009)

Archaetypal Waves

In searching of the Divinity, some would rather be lining up amongst a certain degree of festivity: music, colors, scents, and fellowships. We might not find the tranquility as seeked, but surely similarities are ascertained, manifest within the kinds. We might not be wholly aware, or in any way associated, with what we believe in, but together with the throng we feel to have conducted the act of worshipping, commited the part of acknowledging, even if it is being carried out collectively.

After all, isn't it, for some, a mere searching for the feeling of security? To steer clear of seclusion?

(Photo taken in between the Royal Palace and the Tonle Sap, Sisowath Quay, Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, January 2010)

On Proceeding into the Storm

Perhaps strength in itself does not become morality, especially if what we seek is not the kind where we win or lose, neither some kind of surrounding protective wall that will repel the outside forces. Perhaps we are after the strength to be able to absorb the floating powers, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure what life has in the store - unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.


(Photo taken in Yenwaupnor Island, West Papua, December 2009)

The Motionless Movement

Watching the sea and faraway lands right after the morning prayer was truly enlightening and profound. I was (and always have been) on motion, and watched the motionless passing by. It made me dwell in the memory of the people and the world I had passed by during my movements, either enforced by the fangs of time or due to the dream of constructing and deconstructing.

When we move, we are in a way destructured by our movement towards a certain direction; we are both here and at the same time not here as we are already in the process of going elsewhere. To stop destructuring ourselves, we have to stop moving altogether. Either we move and we are no longer whole, or we are whole and we cannot move.

Consequently we journey to the different corners and pause, seeking the motionless movements in the world. If such exist.

(Photo taken on board KM Labobar, while crossing the Banda Sea, December 2009)

you are not alone

I will hold my longing tightly

before the leaves become quiet

(Photo taken in Klaten, October 2008)

subtlety

The most memorable scene in Anna Karenina is set at Prokovskoye. Levin, dark and melancholy, is trying to forget Kitty. It is springtime, he goes off with the peasants to mow the fields. In the beginning the task seems too arduous for him. He is about to give up when the old peasant leading the row calls for rest. Then they begin again with their scythes. Rest, and the row moves forward again, forty hands scything swathes and moving steadily towards the river as the sun rises. Hotter, arms and shoulders are soaked in sweat, but with each successive pause and start, the awkward painful gestures become more fluid. A welcome breeze suddenly caresses their backs: a summer rain. Gradually, Levin's movements are freed from the shackles of his will, and he goes off into a light trance which gives his gestures the perfection of conscious, automatic motion, without thought or calculation, and the scythe seems to move of its own accord. Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvellously foreign to the striving of the will.

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from demands of decisions and intention, adrift on some inner sea, or a "city of subtlety and brown-colored life", we observe our various moments as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.

(Photo taken in Yogyakarta, October 2008)

ceritakan padaku tentang kebersatuan

(Photo taken in Tanjung Tinggi, Belitung, August 2009)

savannah

When we gaze at still life, even though we did not pursue it, we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile configuration of things, we find pleasures in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. So this still life, because it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but was given birth by none, because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own plans, because it is offered to us without requiring the effort of desiring on our part: it incarnates the quintessence of art, the certainty of timelessness. In the scene before our eyes, silent, without life or motion, a time exempt of plans for the future is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed. Existence without duration, beauty without will.

For it is an emotion without desire.

(Photo taken in Mt. Lawu, at Cokro Srengenge post, 3025 m above sea level, August 2009)

Zurück zu dan Sachen selbst

Dunia bukanlah sejumlah benda karena setiap benda dapat menawarkan dirinya dalam ketertentuan yang penuh hanya jika benda-benda lain mengundurkan diri ke latar belakang yang kabur. Waktu pun bukanlah arus kekinian yang mengalir karena tiap-tiap kekinian mengisi kenyatannya hanya dengan meniadakan kekinian yang lebih awal dan kekinian yang lebih kemudian.

(Photo taken at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, July 2009)

rhytmic pattern

I think people would be much happier in a regulated society that had a definite pattern and a unified form - like a folk dance, beautiful and rhytmic. What makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much. Having to decide, always to decide, torn every which way all of the time. Now in a society of pattern, a man could feel safe.

(After a conversation with B.T.H., in The Valley area, Brisbane)
(Photo taken in Solo, September 2008)

work is good

it takes the mind off the pain
or even if it does not, it prevents me from hugging the pain

(Photo taken in Bekasi, November 2007)

dirt and humbug

Our only guide is home-sickness.

(Photo taken in Mt. Bromo, January 2009)