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)

Kampanye

Ketika dalam politik ada potensi atau klaim filosofis mengenai pengetahuan tentang realitas politik yang secara ontologis superior terhadap – atau secara epistemologis lebih pasti ketimbang – penampakkan (appearance), maka dalam politik ada klaim metafisika.

Padahal politik ada di dalam era pengakhiran metafisika (the closure of metaphysics), ketika tidak ada lagi klaim-klaim terhadap realitas yang superior dan melampaui penampakkan, sehingga konsep manusia sebagai zoon politicon dapat ditafsir ulang secara tanpa batas oleh manusia itu sendiri, sesuai dengan konteks keberadaannya secara fisik di dunia harian, namun melampaui ruang-waktu dan asal-usul historisnya.

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)

for the close of our study

All interpretations, psychology, attempts to make things comprehensible require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies; none should omit, at the close of an exposition, to dissipate lies so far as may be in his power. 'Above' or 'below' is already a statement needing explanation, since an above and a below exist only in thought as abstraction. The world itself knows nothing of above or below.

diminutive

“Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naïve of all superstitions. That, at least, has been generally conceded in our age. You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction.”
“A contradiction of what?”
“Of itself.”
“How … how’s that?”
“The duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained. The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man.”
“But when we prove it, what’s going to be left?”

“Instinct.”

- Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged

(Photo taken in Madakaripura, January 2009)

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

We’ll collect the moments one by one; I guess that’s how the future is done.

I’m not geared up, or probably will never be, to have any fraction of my past being simply perceived by others. It’s not one of the features in the times of yore that got deeply incised, or that huge giant strong pillar, or anything. But along the way, I realize more and more that it is the petite details that build me. The meaningless pieces. But in this case, not for me.

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware of the degree that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and radio music. And whoever wants more and has got it in him – the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints – is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.