Trash

So we're having a bit of a trash situation here in Bali these days. Or I should say these many days. Apparently the government has decided that there will be no more trash on the island. Or no trash collection anyway. They say that there is nowhere to take the trash. 

Well that's a bit of a kerfuffle, isn't it? 

So here is this mountain of trash just in front of my house. Gunung sampah, in the language. It is growing with each day and more putrid with each day, and with each night the dogs drag various portions of it into the street and into my driveway. 

It seems also bound to attract various creatures such as rats and snakes and cockroaches and God knows what else. Alligators? 

This morning when I came home from having coffee I opened the door and found a rather large snake in the middle of my floor. 

Of course as soon as I approached, the snake slithered under the nearest obstruction, attempting to hide himself. Otis the dog came in and immediately sensed the presence of this snake. He began to hunt it beneath one of my shoe racks. He flushed the snake out of that hiding place only to have it slither back behind my tall, heavy bookcase. I had to wrestle this thing out from the wall so that Otis could get behind it. The snake then made his way around the dog and back to the shoe rack, as Otis decided he was not about to be careless around the thing. Pretty smart dog, as it turns out that the snake is of a poisonous type. This I learned after sending a picture of the snake to the neighborhood group. It is a picung snake. It can spray a fluid at its enemies which causes blood clotting and poisoning.

Anyway, by continually moving things and using a broom to direct its movements, along with Otis's rearguard attacks on its tail, we managed to get it outside onto the front patio, which is where the photo above was taken. Oma (Gramma) from down the street was alarmed by the barking of the dogs, Otis having now been joined by Jagger, and came up to help with her own broom and a metal dustpan. 

The snake is no more. RIP. 

But what of his brothers still out there? 

Oma advices that I keep my door closed. But that's something I plan to be doing anyway, not so much to prohibit the snakes, which may or may not come, but to block out the stench as far as possible. 

Not a very good advertisement for Paradise island, is it.

Sparks

That night I saw the world in a completely different way than I had ever seen it before, illuminated by a pale gray sun, small, miserable, and crippled. Darkness was emerging out of every nook and cranny. Wars and plagues were raging the whole world over, Rivers overflowing their banks as the earth quaked. Each and every human seemed like such a brittle being, like the merest eyelash or speck of pollen. I understood then that human life is made of suffering, that suffering is the true substance of the world. Every single thing was screaming in pain. 

--------

"Don't be fooled by all that gilding. Scratch it with your fingernail, and you will see what's underneath," said Reb Mordke, and he dragged me into filthy courtyards, where he began to show me a completely different world. Ulcerous, ill women begging outside the bazaar, male prostitutes dressed as women, ruined by hashish and sick and poor, crumbling mud huts on the city's edges, packs of mangy dogs scrounging through the trash, in between the bodies of their companions, starved to death. It was a world of unthinkable cruelty and evil, in which everything raced towards its own destruction, toward death and decay.

--The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk

Pretty bleak stuff, right. Ah, but now I remember, or I begin to remember. Jacob Frank, acolyte of Sabbatai Zevi before him, a 17th century Jewish Messiah figure ultimately captured by Muslims and given the choice of death or conversion to Islam. Zevi chose conversion (so much for his term as Messiah). Frank, like Zevi, believed that only descent into the realms of utter degradation could ultimately save those trapped therein (the trapped 'sparks'), lead them back out again, and thereby bring about the Tikkun, the repair, the restoration of the world. Or some such nonsense. 

The strange thing about all of these strange philosophies is that the deeper you go, the more confused you become. It's like falling into one wormhole after another. Maybe. I've never actually fallen into a wormhole, but I imagine it might be something like this. My son, Holden, seemed to have things more or less straight in his own mind, but then again his mind was not so much straight as it was labyrinthine. For me, the gospel was always both a simpler and a more elegant path to follow. 

Nonetheless, it seemed good entertainment at the time, and an avenue by which I might keep a handle on my son's journey, to somehow know something about what was going on, just trying to keep my head above water, and hoping that he could too, or at least that I might be there to rescue him when his arms grew weary.

 

Mostly Concerning Literary Matters.

Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by two or three peculiar features therein. One was an intermittent rumbling from the back premises of the inn halfway up; this meant a skittle alley. Another was the extensive prevalence of whistling in the various domiciles - - a piped note of some kind coming from nearly every open door. Another was the frequency of white aprons over dingy gowns among the women around the doorways. A white apron is a suspicious vesture in situations where spotlessness is difficult; moreover, the industry and cleanliness which the white apron expressed were belied by the postures and gaits of the women who wore it - - their knuckles being mostly on their hips (an attitude which lent them the aspect of two-handled mugs), and their shoulders against door posts; while there was a curious alacrity in the turn of each honest woman's head upon her neck and in the twirl of her honest eyes, at any noise resembling a masculine football along the lane.

Here's a nice little piece of artful insinuation from Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which might be generally described as a novel of betrayal and revenge, blind anger and painful regret. It is in my mind somewhat inferior to Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure as it seems uncharacteristically melodramatic, as far as my estimation of Hardy's work has developed (this being my third Hardy novel). It reminds me a bit of Hawthorne's novels, though minus the fantastical/supernatural elements. That's not to cast any aspersions on Hawthorne, who for me is unequaled in his specific genre. 

In the meantime, I have begun my reading of a ponderous 900 page tome by Olga Tokarczuk and entitled The Books of Jacob. I happened to hear about this novel in some way, I have forgotten how, and the subject drew me strongly because it reminded me of my son's passing obsession with a Messianic figure by the name of Sabbatai Zevi--a 17th century Rabbi and Kabbalist who briefly led people as a sort of Messiah. I don't remember the details now with any clarity of Zevi's philosophies and adventures, but I do remember having many a long discussion with Holden, or rather sitting for many a long lecture on the rabbi's views. Tokarczuk's novel follows a similar historical figure from the 18th century, and I just wanted to kind of reacquaint myself with something that used to engage me with my son. But I have only gotten to about page 100 thus far and so I cannot say much about the novel. I'm actually surprised that I was able to find it at all. I could have found it of course if I still had a functioning Kindle reader, but I don't. Or rather, the reader functions but I have no US visa to connect it with. However, I thought one fine day that I would just take a look on the internet marketplace here in Indonesia, called Shopee, and lo and behold there it was. So this must be a providential sign, as Holden surely would have thought. If only I had him here still to interpret for me. 

In matters not touching on the literature, I was surprised to hear today from my stepdaughter, Jamila, whom I have not seen for some 16 years and more. She is traveling here to Yogyakarta and then to Bali, and I am very much looking forward to seeing her again, as I have very much missed her during this long period of time.

Blue Shoes

Henchard gave Elizabeth Jane a box of delicately tinted gloves one spring day. She wanted to wear them to show her appreciation of his kindness, but she had no bonnet that would harmonize. As an artistic indulgence she thought she would have such a bonnet. When she had a bonnet that would go with the gloves she had no dress that would go with the bonnet. It was now absolutely necessary to finish; she ordered the requisite article, and found that she had no sunshade to go with the dress. In for a penny in for a pound; she bought the sun shade, and the whole structure was at last complete. 

The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy 

 

Just a humorous bit from this novel, which, 1/3 the way through, has offered a a quiet handful of such tongue in cheek incidents. And I can identify. Any of you other husbands or ex-husbands out there with me? 

The dress doesn't fit right. I have no blouse to go with this skirt. I have no skirt to go with this blouse. Oh my God, I have no shoes! No shoes at all! 🤭

I can vividly remember my ex-wife standing outside her closet, staring at the two shoe racks therein, and exclaiming that she had no shoes.

"No shoes? But my dear, what are these?" 

"Blue!" she said. "I need blue shoes! I can't wear this dress without blue shoes!" 

It occurred to me at the time that I did have a pair of blue shoes that I might offer, but on second thought I decided against mentioning the idea.

A Last Word Followed by a First Word

The landlord of the lodging, who had heard that they were a queer couple, had doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial; and he was about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms, and ultimately flinging a shoe at his head, he recognized the note of genuine wedlock; and concluding that they must be respectable, said no more. 

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy 

One suspects, if he has read enough of Hardy, that the author was less than enthusiastic about the joys of marriage. And that is an understatement. The quote above in any case represents a very rare bit of humor in this otherwise breathlessly tragic tale. 

Throughout the novel, Hardy's theme has been one of true, simple love juxtaposed against properly adjudicated unions bearing the stamp of religious and societal approval. The killing influence of the letter in opposition to the natural outpouring of the heart. As the novel was written near the close of the 19th century, you can probably guess which power prevailed--although, in truth, a dynamic is set wherein all things fail. 

So I leave Jude now to his grave and his great love for Sue to her passionless marriage and move on to the Mayor of Casterbridge, by the same author, where we find this very early on indeed: 

That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down the road.

Lol. So here we go again with stale marriages. The man seems to have carried the issue from book to book like Marley from place to place with his ponderous chains.

Jude the Acherontic

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? 🤭

Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. 

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy 

Learned a new word today. Rhadamanthine. To show stern and inflexible judgment. 

And another. Acherontic. An adjective describing something as dark, dismal, gloomy, or Infernal, often evoking a sense of death or the underworld. It is derived from the Greek mythological river Acheron and signifies a profound, hopeless sorrow or a pitch black atmosphere. 

And there you have the whole atmospheric canvas of Jude the Obscure; for, my goodness, this novel is grim and gloomy indeed, and rather shockingly so, in my mind anyway, for a novel published in 1894. 

And it is all rather wonderfully, astoundingly done. 

I wonder if anyone has ever counted the occurrences of the word obscure or its various forms through the pages of the novel. Surely someone has, I think. And then there are the many synonyms as well. Hardy has planted these throughout the text, and quite artfully so, I thought; gradually, though ceaselessly, adding darkness and dimness and gloom and fog and storm in ever heavier shades.

Only 50 pages or so remaining now. What else could go wrong? Much, I suspect, if the preceding 300 are any clue.

Tragic Comedy

'But it seems such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world--so presumptuous--that I question my right to do it sometimes!'

--Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy 

My girlfriend has often expressed the same general thought--that the world now is such a terrible, tragic place that it calls into question whether she should have ever agreed to bear children. Why has God made such a world, she wonders, wherein tragedy and disaster thrive? 

Well, if it is any comfort, we can see from the Hardy quote that the world now is not any worse than the world of the mid 19th century; and one may safely assume that it never has been much good. Especially if one is acquainted with history and literature. So if misery loves company, this has been a long, long affair.

By extension then, we can appreciate the soundness of scripture when it says: God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Always terribly tragic, I guess 😉😅

Of course the key to the issue, theologically anyway, is that the good world that God created ended with original sin and the fall from grace. Since that time, it has been pretty much of a dumpster fire. Our eyes and our minds are therefore rightly set upon things above, things beyond, even as we struggle through things as they are. 

She doesn't believe that last part. She wants God to fix things now. This crappy world was his fault to begin with, she figures, and he should have done it right in the first place, or not at all! 😅