Just last night, I was watching the fireworks from my window and that’s how I said it. But my hands were stabbing the air to barter with Their interest because Their eyebrows, from what little I could see, were creasing together to figure out…
The triumph of good over evil; their meanings separated by region into Northern, Southern, Western, Sikhs, and Jains. What a shame, I don’t actually remember much of any of it without searching again. But did you know the demon king was named Bali? How about that, I say to Them. Howboutthat. Balinese Hinduism vs Indian Hinduism.
Hmm I tell Them, do you think Balinese Hindus celebrate Diwali? They don’t! Did you know?
They tries to practice a kind of anti-historical punk: to live in the moment so as to remain convinced that They are smarter than those who came before. Anyway, I continue telling Them, I think there’s a power in connecting an individual’s idiosyncrasies to a shared memory… like a midwife of truth. I don’t actually remember much of any of it without searching, I tell Them, again. But it reminded me of this thing from Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents. Their eyes roll, I fumble with my phone to find the phrase in my notes app: “Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity…” he was trying to evoke the archeology of Rome and its ruins as a metaphor for the mind I think, that memory traces remain in the unconscious and are not destroyed. But, he gave up after a few pages of deliberation so maybe that’s a metaphor itself… They isn’t really replying but I continue.
I tell Them I read an article in Mula last night, before or after the fireworks, I’m not so sure. Shre Maha wrote ‘the rot runs deep.’ The rot runs deep, the rot runs deep. An unreconciled version of Rome which has all of its past superimposed onto the present. I sit up to face Them. LOOK. If you view me from the front, I could be beautiful, my features align. Now I’ll turn, you glance at me from the slight right, you see my chin sags weak from mouth-breathing through my sleep right? Don’t you agree? I tell Them, I guess what I’m saying is that you only have to change the direction of your view to call into view something else.
Helloooo, I’m wagging my index finger in front of their face. Hellooooo! I keep saying but They remain unphased by my plagued passion for not actually knowing much about what I keep talking about. So Diwali, I don’t know. There was this line that followed it, the line about being overlooked and the rot running deep. As I was reading it, I felt this sort of guilt? For being unphased I guess. I guess I’m the metaphor of Freud giving up deliberation. Shre wrote she feels like a ‘scratchy record, regurgitating the reality of systemic exclusion over and over again’– she called repeating it, the bane of her existence. I tried to think of how I feel. I feel anxious, I always feel anxious recently overall just being here, in KL, Malaysia, A ‘city’… There’s like this disconnect between everything happening and everything happening in me! Like I’m a permanent trespasser of experience…
I’ve never really celebrated Diwali in the real sense. My family, were not really a ‘family’ I slump into my seat. Diwali makes me sort of sad. I wonder if what I feel is moral, good, dharma-tic! Haha dharmatic! Drahhhhmatic? Get it? They doesn’t laugh.
I tell Them, it just feels like everything is always being settled at this very moment; like a simmering that will never boil over. I find myself wishing that it would finally boil over.
They says, Balinese people celebrate Galungan instead, Google says it marks the victory of dharma (Good) over adharma (Evil).
HA! What’s the difference?
Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation.
Images sourced from Kevin Standage’s Photography Blog
Main Page image sourced from a “City of Benares,” an aquatint by Thomas Sutherland after Charles Rammus Forrest, from “A Picturesque Tour along the River Ganges and Jumna”, 1824
Article Cover image sourced from “Bathing Ghats and Temples in Benares (Varanasi)” – cica 1880