Upward Counter-Gravitational Pull
When You Cut Me, You Cut Me Like a Knife. When You Touch Me, I Feel Butterflies*
The music is by:
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, an Australian rock band,
Laya Project’s musicians of coastal and surrounding communities of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar and India. Laya Project is a personal and collective tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, and is dedicated to the survivors of the 26 December 2004 Asian tsunami.
Tom Odell, an English singer, songwriter and pianist, with Aurora Aksnes, a Norwegian singer, songwriter and record producer.
Today’s post continues from last week’s:
It’s 2.34 p.m., and it sounds as though hordes of hawkers from Pulau Karimunbesar’s waterfront have hauled their merchandise down to the cattle class deck here. With my usual knack for sleeping through pivotal moments, I crack open an eye in response to this unusual commotion around my bunk bed, no.4343A. What on earth is up?
I initially estimate that as a result of an unfortunate combination of adverse circumstances, I’ve somehow woken up in the very heart of a Syrian refugee camp. There are parcels and bundles everywhere around, meticulously jute-twined cardboard boxes and cheap plastic jute XXL bags. Aren’t these classic paraphernalia of well-organised refugees? On the bunk next to mine, probably 4342A, somebody’s guitar is gently weeping some very nostalgic notes. Jesus,
❈
are these words or tears?
Is weeping speech?**
❈
Opposite the disoriented me and the grief-stricken guitarist, a family in purple headscarves are treating themselves to something hot in paper cups. A loud, shrill, throaty, uninhibited gulugulugulugulu—a gobbling turkey call—echoes through our cattle pen. When the sound nears my bed, I politely ask the gobbling gulugulugulugulu turkey what he is advertising, but he just hurls a flurry of Bahasa at me and waddles off. ‘What am I doing here?’, I mutter, leaping to my feet—only to bump into the Gobbling Turkey again.
It’s 2.43 p.m., and our Kapten seems to have lost his morning composure during his afternoon verbal communication over the PA system, ... “And will you stop your gobbling, Mr Turkey, 'cos I can’t understand our Kapten, can I?” This afternoon, our Kapten’s favourite stylistic device seems to be the inconspicuous hyphen, so he’s on about things like merik-merik, piti-piti, tiket-tiket, and the such-such.
I rush out of our detention pen, eager to uncover the source of our Kapten’s sudden irritation. He hadn’t stuttered a word during his morning pearls of wisdom, had he? Once I reach the upper deck, I‘m struck by the eerie emptiness. There isn’t a single soul in sight, where there was a bustling crowd before my nap. What in Allah’s name is up?
First, I register a vague shape of the island on the horizon and then my pulse quickens, because they’ve now separated the stern from the bow with a firmly locked iron double door! As I race back down to my bed, two facts snap into place: they had stamped my skin red on the companionway, hadn’t they? And there’s a strong, unmistakable stench of steamed meat wafting from behind that locked iron double door, isn’t there?
Reminiscent of all the gruesome pig-slaughtering rituals in the basement of my family home, I imagine that they’ve scalded the carcass and are now dehairing the poor porker. But no!, they wouldn’t do pigs on Allah’s vessel, would they? Maybe a calf or something? But then, why the red stamp on my pale wrist? I saw lots of those at the butcher’s where my mum would leave me holding the fort in those scandalously long morning queues, while she went hunting for whatever scraps had been kindly deployed by the shortage economy of those difficult times.
My frantic mum, the boiling water, the purple methylated spirit, the red-stamped body parts hooked to the white-tiled wall, and now the dead-bolted corridors … In such shaky discomposure, I stumble straight into a pre-battle assembly on Deck 5. Blue uniforms salute to white ones. There is stomping, humming, shouting—the full, unsettling choreography of a quasi-Nazi ritual.
“There’s bound to be a bloodbath”, I gulp, goosebumps crawling over my skin as I scan area for an escape route. “They'll start with merik-merik, apply some hati-hati, and will finish us off with heaps of piti-piti or something equally dreadful! And piti-piti I will feel no doubt,” I whisper, drenched in sweat and with lots of involuntary muscle movements around my knees.
Well, didn’t I ask for it? Didn’t I gawk at the promiscuous karaoke stars in Kafeteria Karia Karaoke on Deck 6? Didn’t I defile their national dish with a rainbow of condiments and didn’t I pigheadedly refuse to surrender to coffeed sugar in place of sugared coffee? My dear sons of Allah in blue and white uniforms, I really should’ve kept a slightly lower profile, shouldn’t I?
At that moment, one of the saluting seafarers spins on his heel, grinds his perfectly even, white teeth, and barks a hyphenated command straight into the anxious azure of my panic-stricken eyes: tiket-tiket! Her Majesty Kelud leaves plenty of water behind her roaring propellers before I establish the whereabouts of my tiket-tiket, but I do find it, hand it over and retreat to our underwater cowshed, resolutely vowing never again to be led astray by hyphens.
It’s 3.08 p.m. Perhaps in an effort to restore some balance, they’ve now started singing from the church!
“It’s the Asr prayer***” I hear from bunk no. 4344A. All 14,665 tonnes of Kelud have now spoken in a loud, holy voice of Allah:
يا الله يا الله يا الله
الله
Ya Allah
يا الله
Ya Allah
الله****
Surprisingly, no one but me has dashed up onto the upper deck to listen. No one else seems to care! Are they hard of hearing, deaf to this divine call or perhaps they simply don’t know how to
❈
drink from the presence of saints,
not from those other jars?*****
❈
I look around and sense that Lady Kelud has shed some of her weight, gravity, and density—all at once. She feels lighter, more transparent, her sharp contours now traced with an alabaster feather rather than chiseled in iron. “What marvel has the Almighty Allah just performed before the eyes of an infidel beholder?” I whisper disbelief.
The Asr prayer seems to have created vast spaces between Lady Kelud’s once tightly packed molecules. Is it that your atoms, like those of hydrogen, are 99.9999999999996% empty space and 0.0000000000004% solid matter******, my dear Kelud? How solid or elastic is your quantum field of potentiality? I gaze in awe, eyes brimming with lacrimal fluid, as Kelud’s white-painted rust is lifted by a kaleidoscopic swarm of translucent butterflies.
* Cf.:“Butterflies” by Tom Odell,
** ” I Have Five Things To Say” cf. Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, HarperOne, 2004,
*** The Asr prayer (صلاة العصر "afternoon prayer") is one of the five mandatory salah (Islamic prayers). The period of Asr prayer begins approximately when the sun is halfway down from noon to sunset.
**** Ya Allah by Laya Project.
***** ” The Many Wines” cf. Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, HarperOne, 2004.
****** https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmsutter/2020/02/26/you-are-mostly-empty-space/
There will be much more from Lady Kelud in the coming weeks. And remember my dear subscriber that whatever’s been published before, can be found in the archives. Also, if you can’t find my post on Monday next week, well… it will mean that I have gone to do the next thing that is making me tick at that moment I time….