THALHANMMATHI @veboo - Tumblr Blog

hallo

a prayer for the future

Susan Sontag Illustrated, The Atlantic

barely open

sometimes things open up inside in a way they hadn’t because those possibilities were locked tight, a bud so closed and so layered it is hard like a conker, one that hurts maybe, within the softness, as it moves around, making itself known.

and then something sudden strikes (or the fingers of possibility stroke) it into another state, one of the opposite. unfurling and with each slow curl outwards, there is a rush that comes with possibility and meaning. and outwards, it is felt, it it seen, it sees the narrative suddenly altered, another ending possible. really, is it, though.

but then there is stupid stupid fear, or perhaps it is the biggest love ever felt, it is impossible to know at this juncture, but rationalisation still comes from the same place it always did, and there is the limits of time and circumstance that tells you you can only work from this compression, and yearning for another state would be impossible.

and so the bud gets abandoned, barely open, again, but now it is altered, and it cannot go back to what it was before - the hardness is now gone, softness has given way, and the inside of it is still hidden, perhaps forever. yes, abandoned, for now, with a prayer for the future.

it is very painful.

for between two people, one must strive to hold most dear, truth. those unloving moments of fear and control and lies, each by each they chip away at the purity and vastness of the space in between, until you look at whom you once loved, and there is little to find, than what has been thrown at you, with little mercy or care for what had once been real, unbroken. and finally, when you look at them, you see yourself in a small room with a broken mirror. what a lie we live in, if love cannot make itself seen?

beauty/truth

when in the depths too long, there perhaps is some unconscious need for a kind of flippancy

(i don’t know now why or how, now)

but interacting flippantly with the world gets tedious when prolonged, much as it may have been needed at first.

every act of flippancy in itself, contains little harm...

...but sustained flippancy by the fact of its repetition becomes a kind of obscene rejection of connection and vulnerability...

... a disrespect, a refusal...

...eventually becoming a habit of unloving...

... a different kind of superficiality, perhaps initially needed to overcome certain inner things - perhaps necessary then, but now a kind of cruelty...

...love needs time for it to be love itself. the love like a child that looks eagerly through a door that opens and shuts quickly, with you inside, then waits again, for the door to open...

is the solution then perhaps, consciously cultivating depth? for the sake of those you love and those who love you.

or perhaps it is that nothing should be allowed to become habit. except perhaps a habit of mindfulness, as much as humanely possible

hukuru vaguthu

There are swimshorts hanging on the line outside, and the borrowed red Mt Everest tshirt, sun-drying not tomatoes. The yellowing palm leaves framing the yellow wall move imperceptibly, listlessly, guided by their thin needly ends.

The door opens with a squeak and belches out this entirely hairless man, about fifty, whose reddened face is breathing out the sun. He paddles to the fridge on the verandah and picks out a coconut and leaves the same way, almost soundlessly but a sight that feels completely incongruous, almost laughable, though I shouldn’t. I didn’t.

Everything is quiet for now. A mendhuru hush stretching out like a placid lake, each little sound a faint ripple that breaks its surface, then ebbs into the heat. People are doing their own little silent things in their silent places. This is perhaps when we feel the breath of the atoll the most. It reminds me of the old island heat, the wake of the bee buzz around the velanbuli trail, and how instinctively the body reacts to known, but forgotten things. The taste of gerikiru on hunilee roshi under a banyan tree. A tongue bites itself. Stop.

In the heat, the body behaves just like it does in the cold but for opposite reasons. It finds some cold comfort and settles. Everything absorbs the world around it. The table into the wall, the dust onto the books, and the body into it all. Perhaps the senses heighten in sunlight, its sharpness demanding unsentimental scrutiny. But then, if we search for a narrative, it is inevitable perhaps, that it acquires a patina of romance. The human filter of love and trauma.

The glasses on the table are smudged with fingerprints of a forgotten breakfast. The fan turns, hot air forced to move. Two fire extinguishers with their mouths open, two laughing storks. The tiny plastic babydoll has wrapped itself up in a tissue for naptime.

#thulusdhoo

is this jumble in the light bereft of sensibility and thought? perfectly comfortable to stoke along the edge of blackness and feel into the textures of the unseen

lonaa, leyaa, dheno

I don’t know the the sequence of it. Was it the fenfoah ruh? I am not sure. What seems evident now is that Yameen is out to change Male’ into something else that it wasn’t. Not with a vision for what it could be. But a vision for what it shouldn’t be: as it was before, evolving more or less with time and what it entails. This is an overhaul. Perhaps in the name of tharaggee. Getting rid of Lonuziyaaraiy kolhu is the last vestige of Old Male’ that remains.

The trees are gone. The trees that took years to grow, for strength to build, inside, the trees that slowly and steadily became a part of our mental geography of home, are gone. The mosques are going to be taken away. The mosques that decades of prayer and routine, belief and soul, are taken away. Yameen is shifting Maumoon’s structures around, from here to there, neither that relevant. The park is a joke. The park that was closed off for royalty for so long, then opened up, almost a metaphor for democracy now being replaced with these awful, plastic lights, these nausea of a place, I don’t know what to say

Yameen seems willing to be branded a madman to carry this out. I don’t know if he believes in sihuru or worse, but it seems like we’ve sat by and let him make an authoritarian nightmare out of Male’, while calling him a madman. A place bereft of memory or joy, just us now existing and walking and talking within a creation of baaghee envisioned tharaggee. A loveless boy who grew up in a mutant world now erasing all love for everyone else. Petty almost, perhaps. Or evil, the spread of lovelessness.

My friend says he feels sorry for Yameen. He says Yameen was neglected and bullied by Maumoon and his father before that. Yes. i feel almost sorry for him also. but then I don't have enough understanding in my repertoire of meaning - of being bullied or neglected - to reach that level of empathy. so i have to try to imagine that is how he has been made. But he is a sentient human being capable of intelligent thought and ability to be self-conscious and understand the meaning of his actions. And if god is love, Yameen lacks both.

My other friend says Yameenakee bodu vageh. Dhen thibeeves hus vagun. Male’ vagah nagaifi. Aharun mithibee gellifa. Viber ga kanneynge.

Another friend says he is a psychopath. And that is that.

In the late eighties and early nineties, we walked on the seawalls around Male’ that lead to Lonuziyaaraiykolhu. My young cousin Nibu, who died when he was four, I remember walking with him a few months before he died. It was a strange, festive occasion because our entire family went. It began to rain while we were at raalhugandu, and we ran home.

It was usually just our grandfather, and all the grandchildren. It would be still dark when we set out, and then it would become light. Lonuziyaaraiykolhu was part of the routine. It was where we stopped to “get our feet wet” which would lead to other parts of the body, of course. My grandfather in his mundu, will stand with his arms crossed, while we ran around. We didn’t question his patience. It was just how things were. It is scraps and fragments of defined memory, but the inner things, feelings, associated with these scraps, they remain. Male’ is a part of the identity of all who have grown up here. It has its pull and it’s comfort of memory and familiarity.

Sure you can laugh at sentimentalism, because it is ‘randu’ or useless. but it is perhaps the heart-things that make people care and love. Sure you can be embarassed at emotion but it is this embarrassment that is making you stifle feelings that could lead to some kind of semi-constructive anger or sadness. Narratives of functionalism are a joke if there if it doesn’t account for the drive for function. In my mental geography, the image for Maldives machismo is a bunch of men sitting around in a circle around a table wanking each other off, or perhaps even trying to generate an erection at this point, with a cup of lavazza cooling in front of them. Theethi salhiey kiyan. Balaaehnnu.

That unigas that lends the particular smell at the corner of Lily Magu and Dharumavantha Magu is still there. Dharumavaane.

When allowed to flow freely, thought still tends to fit itself into those grooves of known thought (read: memory), and then inevitably reach into darker corners, those potholes under the softer mud and silt, and seek out those compressed pieces of hard thought. Those memories of times better forgotten, perhaps for their sweetness or trauma. When free-flow happens then, these compressions get wedged out, then unfurl themselves in the unsuspecting current, letting out their forgotten bits; their reasons for being hid. It is especially difficult because free flow happens in an unguarded state, where the inner mechanisms of protection are at ease, asleep, perhaps smoking and reclining on a joali somewhere with no phone signal. And then pow. Ok. Less dramatic than POW but pow nonetheless.

the smallest square in the world, and there she is, inside. her fatigued skin and bones have been shed, an askew skeleton and its canvas hide, like a broken umbrella. on the grass that seems to rise every time you look away, these green spikes, a whooshing sound, at the periphery of your vision and sight.

she has been distilled into the purest essence of herself. the residual granules, rising in wind and the sparkling vapour, of her seventh tooth or the frailness of her elbow, the feeling of fragility in the first blow into a flute or the settling of a child in her arm's cradle. the flakes of thread of the tearing muslin on the nail of the boat she had left her island.

we once had body fur but they disappeared and now some of us have dark skin

hello modern contemporaries, perfectly evolved proud monsters

we only get thick hair on our heads, and then on our pubis.

we groom our head hairs, these biological wayfarers. smooth it down, pull it back, a slice of it falling rakishly across our brows, saying eat me

and our pubic hair, we trim it, we squat undignified on a plastic sheeted bed and allow a Philippine woman to matter of factly stick her face into our arses and cause us an insane about of pain as they rip off hot wax with cotton

and the skin is hot too, from the wax and from the pain and there is blood sometimes, little round balls of blood that pool were the follicle gets pulled out (the follicle is called the bulb when you pull it out, that little white, solidness at the end of the hair where it meets the skin).

what is left behind within the skin (a nicer word is dermis) are the stem cells that remind the hair to exist again, what a nice thing

The teacher called out Fidgety’s name and no one raise their hand.

Fidgety realised that being absent in class was an easy way to unexist except nothing ceases to exist at the point where the reason for the absence lay.

It was still full of things, let’s liken them to pieces of paper protruding from an already-full wastepaperbasket, except it is not paper or waste inside but feelings - both this metaphor and what it seeks to explore gives rises in Fidgety certain hard and existential questions about the existence of existence, tangibility, observability and reality.

But the fact that the metaphor existed meant that where the Fidgety thought, and so, where the Fidgety was, still existed. Fidgeting was merely absent in all those other places where it was usually present, and so there is a sense of relief from not being in those places where Fidgety usually was (or did what he was meant to, i.e. to Fidget). It was easy to unexist in a space where the natural balance of his life didn’t happen, far beyond the usual points of reference (like zooming out on a google map and then zooming in to a different place).

It was easy because outside of the usual, things take place in a space without compulsion or expectation or the sudden expectance of action dictated by the topographical contours of the reference points known to Fidgety - the rivers the bluffs and highlowlands.

And so, those triggers of Fidgeting - here the metaphors get mixed but please see them like points in a map, manmade or natural - a capital city, the winding trough of a levee, the slow bluff : the first hum of a forgotten mobile phone inside trouser pockets, or the familiar move and sound of undoing of buckles, the familiar turn of a doorknob inside a palm that had been in that space so many times -

in a space absent of these (the absent space), this space is barely anything, the known information being so limited made it so unpopulated by mental connection - that in this absent space, the everyday things, the untraumatic things - needs like urinating and tying of shoelaces, or the act of putting food inside a mouth, and even smaller things, like the way Fidgety moved his elbows about a house without a neighbourhood around it - all of this took place in a moment of peace, in a patch of sun perhaps, on an unsupervised childhood morning, where Fidgety was free to play with the shadow and the dustmotes - things that could only be appreciated by Fidgety being free from all expectation, obligation and compulsion, those little earthquakes, do you see where this is going

What happens then is that without connection, the mental ties that bound Fidgety to what it cared about gets untied, because in the absence, it has nothing to cling on to, and with those ribbons of expectation now gone what remained was Feeling itself which could care for what it once cared, now care for it freely, unfettered in the winds of daily rhythms which makes it beautiful, but to whom and what does it benefit? Caring without action meant the Fidgety itself lost its identity of itself - but even these pondering take place on the hammock of idle, and the words dissipate in a sunlit world where there is no one else but the once-Fidgety.

But the ego absent of identity craves to be known again, for the ego to exist requires definition of itself perhaps via its relationship other people or things not necessarily unplatonic - which meant the first point of action requires it to make itself present, raise your hand when your name is called, present miss.

I forgot about the hunger for a while. The deep, probing hollowness of it. The insistence for action upon its state, the yearning to devour things, the imagined grab peel bite succession, what else, all remained unexplored, unvisited, inside me... For a while.

Instead there were other things. The comfort of brightlight stimuli. The affected grace of an evening sultan park visit. The embarrassment of slipsliding into reefside window. The comfort in the slap of fenfaivaan past a doorway crossed so many times. All of them layered across the hunger likes haalu folhi. Each of them their own web, easily tearable, and when folded, a mere tissue of thing, and yet somehow hefty in their collective form. Thick bendable and acquiring elasticity.

So I forgot about the hunger for a while.

carvalhais

McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense “sensuous involvement” with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a “considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.”31 But intellectually, our ancestors’ oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own. The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation. It opened to the mind broad new frontiers of thought and expression. “The achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are testimony to the tremendous values of literacy,” McLuhan wrote.

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. London: Atlantic Books, 2010. (via carvalhais)

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