A feather against the scales

Whatever I want to write is locked up in the summer heat like the fabled Helcaraxë. Unlike the grinding ice that Fëanor could not pass, though, my own sense of warring bars set against my face ebbs and flows with the days. When I wrote this (in long-hand, red fountain pen by Lamy) the sense of stoppage was very real. Now in the liquid summer sunlight of a Sunday afternoon, things are flowing again.

Come and go. Liquid and forward. Stop and back. It waxes and wains like a moon on a blue kind of bender. All this is a kind of grief, I think. This attempt to be precise, to be crystalline when writing in a necessarily smeared medium (wet ink).

I confess myself unable to meet the burden, the exigency of the moment in prose. My children have been taken from me in a choice I initiated. Told another way, I have freed myself from the burden of living with a person who has honed intimacy as a weapon, and who accuses me of the same. Told a third way: divorce. If I told you my feet were wounded and covered in salt this would also be the story of my heart. My pen is fine. It is not modest. In Laos (the story goes) there lives a community who prefers to cover their feet than their breasts. I have no idea if this is a lecherous colonizer tale or not (it appeared in an English book so your mileage may vary), but the suggestion of modesty forbidding the feet is instructive to me.

I want to run, you see. I want to move. I want to get on a plane and go to the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Every day. (Not every day there, but every day Burundi, every day Senegal, every day the Faroe Islands. I am trapped writing a travel blog during a pandemic when travel is forbidden the wary. A Helcaraxë indeed.)

This blog post was originally about counting corpses. I do that a lot. The half million of 1965, of course. Or so. A million maybe. I mused originally on the combination of these deaths I feel obligated to remember with the half million (600,000 and counting) we have accumulated in pandemic death in this country in 19 months. And again, refracted a third time, with the forgotten half million who died in this country as a suspected result of our willingness to conduct atmospheric nuclear weapons tests on our own soil during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Deaths that trickled invisibly along for a long time after the last US atmospheric test was completed on November 4th, 1962. I asked myself if I could challenge the one country (Indonesia) for forgetting the dead when another country (America) does the same, now and during the very time of the Indonesian genocide.

I asked myself if all this was a way of avoiding my own grief. The silent house. Not silent today (the children have been stomping during playtime), but silent on Monday. Silent Tuesday. Silent Friday and Saturday and Sunday. Silent half the time, in other words. A half million for half the time: in my mind these things were indeed connected, though it seems grievously pretentious to suggest so in print.

I am a human being and I confess my own story, my own tragedy—this is the thing that’s felt most deeply. The art of literature is to transform such tragedies, I hear, into something relatable. I hug my children while I wait for such inspiration. I watch them run to the woman who (as I believe and see and live) has turned intimacy into a Morgul blade. Who would swear in court I have done the same with her trust, though I do not believe this is so.

And the children walk the blade between us with the surety of the faithful walking to Paradise. The feather may fall against the scales, but not for them. Not for them.

As I read my hand-written notes, I closed my look into the desert of my memories— the corpses in stacks in stinking ditches and little rivers in Java, the refrigerated containers of bodies in America in 2020—I closed these reflections by revisiting the idea of a reforested memory. Of a memory not decimated by either those who log the truth to steal our memories nor by those (I count myself among them) who can sit so primly and comfortably in the burning sun of a tragedized landscape that they have difficulty imagining regrowth.

Regrowth happens always. My oldest ran to a stranger yesterday to tell her she has two families. She is growing again, sprouting in all directions (it’s hard to keep her in food). Indonesia has largely grown over the mass graves with vines, with silence from the elderly. The generation who witnessed these deeds is rapidly passing away now.

1965, which has been formative for me in ways I don’t understand, is passing rapidly out of living memory. Chernobyl is next in the dread queue. Then 9/11. Then…now? Then this present pandemic with all its death will also slip away as the youngest ones now (including my children) give up their memories and their breaths at the other end of their brief ellipsis.

I told you I could not regrow memories. The sprouting happens around me, but my particular talent seems to be remembering the dead. And now that a form of death or grief has come to visit me, I feel bound up observing this grief, and it is even more difficult than usual to write of efflorescence, of hope, of the hibiscus flowers outside the hotel in Biak when I was a child, which were always so red and alive in the sun, their stamens dappled with the shade of coconut trees, and stirred by the cool breeze.

I am tired of giving up. Whether the ice thaws or no, I will cross it. I am set upon a flowering and new memories.

There is a new Indonesia. An Indonesia with new tragedies to remember, and new hopes, and new dreams. And an old one I remember, too. Both are, just as the victims of the atmospheric tests of the 50’s haunt this land with 500 years’ of First Nations genocide victims and my own happy redheads.

All life and death flourishes together, and it is past my skill to float the feather that balances the accounts.

I’ll just keep writing.