the spiral light of venus
rising first
and shining best

Bengaii, it is one of the 19,000 islands currently contained within the ludicrous artificial construct known as the "nation" of Indonesia. The island, it is located at the far eastern edge of that watery province monikered Sulawesi. It has not, yet, been wholly ruined, by the rapacious ravenoids of Eastasia, Oceania, Eurasia.

On March 9, a solar eclipse engulfed the island of Bengaii. The people of Bengaii, they, rightly, believe such a phenomenon, to be a time of real magic. Very special things, they can, and do, then, happen.

And so, it was natural, then, that, but a few days later, on March 12, a Bengaii fisherman, walking along the beach, he encountered there a bidadari. Stranded. Crying.

Bidadari, they are female spirits of the clouds and waters. Beautiful, ethereal, supranatural. Sensual. Sexy. Good dancers. Better flyers. Western white people, they might think of the bidadari, as a form of angel. Or, maybe, as Venus. Forming, there. In the foam.

The fisherman, he recognized the bidadari, for what she was. And brought her to the home of his parents. Who cared for her. Changing her clothes, daily. They also fitted her with a special hijab. Because the animists of Indonesia—the majority of the population—they are not legally permitted to be animist. They must instead "pass," under some state-recognized religion. And the people of Bengaii, they, mostly, pass as Muslim.

The people of Bengaii, they felt blessed. To be visited by a bidadari. Come to them, from the spirit world. Word spread. Eventually it spread to the local police chief. Who came to see the bidadari. And pronounced her a sex doll.

"It was checked by our team," said this chief, one Heru Pramukarno. "It was a sex toy."

The police, they confiscated the bidadari, and they took her away.

Of the Bengaii people, Pramukarno said: "They have no internet. They don't know what a sex toy is."

A while back here I wrote about how the humans, they used to think the wind, it was generated by blustery beings like Boreas, Njord, Fujin, or Stribog . . . or by a restless young god, sleeping in a cave, dreaming of a girl; and he sighs; and then, in the night, there is the wind, stirring, with his breath.

But, today, the humans, they are told, by the Science Men, and they thereby so Believe, that the wind, it is a "meteorological phenomenon." The flow of gases on a large scale. Movement of air in bulk. Generated by pressure differentials. Deflected by the Coriolis effect. Etc. Etc.

And, I wondered, then: why can't the wind, it be both? What is it, with all this dern either/or? And all the dern time?

Same with this bidadari. Who says she's a sex doll? Just because some police chief, he has looked in some tubes, and seen there some sex dolls, and so, he thinks, he knows one, when he sees one? The people of Bengaii—who, after all, are the people to whom the bidadari appeared—they say she's a bidadari. So who's to say they're wrong? And what, as ever, anyway, gives any Johnny Law, the right, to take her away?

People, they should let other people, regard things, as they wish. I learned this from my daughter.

She liked to walk on the beach. When still very wee. And gather in her bucket, some of the many treasures, she found there. Pebbles. Shells. Driftwood. Seaweed. The like.

Once, she picked up some sort of flotsam or jetsam, that some human somewhere had excreted into the ocean, and that had subsequently washed up on this beach, right here.

"You don't want that," I told her. "That's garbage."

"But daddy," she demurred. "It's pretty."

And then I shut right up. And stayed that way. Because she was absolutely right. I had, long before, been, robotically, conditioned, to regard any human effluvia, found washed up out of any ocean, onto any beach, as Bad and Wrong—even, a harbinger, of Imminent Planetary Doom.

But, my daughter, she was not constrained, by any such blinders. She was able to, clearly, regard: the thing itself. And so, she saw it, for what it was. Pretty.

These cats, they recurrently reintroduce this lesson. I rhythmically bring into their lair, here, various store-bought cat-toys. And sometimes these are appreciated. But, mostly, these cats, they prefer to develop their own toys. And these, they are not always anything, I might predict.

The one cat, for instance, his current favorite toy, it is Q-tips. Which he paws out of the waste-can in the bathroom. After I have used them to apply the Weldbond. To the glasses that I broke. In the winter. When I set them on the floor, while I was making a fire. And then stepped on them, when I got up, to turn off a lamp. I was going to buy a new pair, of glasses, like a Normal person, but, then, when I priced what They are charging for glasses these days, my aorta, it nearly blew, in Outrage. And so, I have decided, that, until the Socialism comes, and we all have universal health care, I will stick with the Weldbond. Thank you very much.

Anyway. These glue-used Q-tips. They, to the cat, are not trash. They are, instead, totally fun toys. As a waste can: it is not even a waste can. It is, instead, a receptacle of fun. Where might be found, all sorts of wonders. Like used filter-cartridges for the fish tank. These, the same cat, he pulls out of the little waste-can, in the bedroom. Then rolls around on them, in great pleasure, while we have the fish feed. Every morning. And every night.

Who am I, to say, that he is wrong?

Nobody.

I am also constantly finding, on the floor, transformed into cat toys, the little representations of the totem animals of here, that I purchase from the feed-people across the way, and then place in this charming little tri-level recessed shrine built right into the wall, there in the front room. Totem animals like cats. Birds. Deer. Raccoons. Roosters. Warthogs. That sort of thing.

The Q-tip cat, he must needs pass by this little zoo, frequently, as he walks atop the dragon tank, in order to travel over, to check on his frogs. Q-tip cat, he needs to stand atop their tank, the tank of the frogs, in order to Look at them. These, they are the famous fucking frogs, of which we have here spoke.

To pass by the light-contraption atop the dragon tank, in order to get to the frogs, the cat, he must brush against the little wind chimes, that hang above the first level of the shrine. This brushing, it makes a really lovely, little, ringing sound. And, since in the true-life documentary film It's A Wonderful Life, it is said, truly, that every time a bell rings, an angel gets her wings, this cat, he is making a lot of angels. Here, in this house.

This is why I feel proprietary about that bidadari, who appeared on the beach in Bengaii. This cat, here, he manifested that bidadari, there. And no sex-doll-on-the-brain law jockey, had the right, to take her away.

In the true-life documentary film Bells From The Deep, the extraterrestrial anthropologist Werner Herzog, he treats mysticism in Russia. Where it is all and everywhere. As it is, all and everywhere, all and everywhere, on this planet.

The film's title references the legend of the lost city of Kitezh. Of which Herzog has said this:

Bells From The Deep is one of the most pronounced examples of what I mean when I say that through invention, fabrication, and staging, you can reach a more intense level of truth. I took a fact—that for many people this lake was the final resting place of this lost city—and explored the truth of the situation to reach a more poetic understanding. I heard about the myth while I was out there; it's a very real belief of these people. As recounted to me, the legend is that the city was systematically ransacked and demolished by hundreds of years of Tartar and Hun invasions. The inhabitants called on god to redeem them, and he sent an archangel who tossed the city into a bottomless lake, where the people live in bliss, chanting their hymns and tolling the bells. During the summer, pilgrims crawl around the lake on all fours, saying their prayers. I was also there at the beginning of winter, because I wanted shots of them looking through the ice, trying to catch a glimpse of the lost city. Unfortunately there was no one around, so I hired two drunks from the nearby town and asked them to play pilgrims. One of them has his face on the ice and looks as if he's deep in meditation. The accountant's truth: he was fast asleep.

Who am I, to say, that these drunks, they were not, actually, pilgrims?

Nobody.

As it is not for me to say, whether, or not, the lost city of Kitezh, it is Real.

The humans, they are increasingly abandoning the pianos. Throwing them away. Treating them as trash.

This is unfortunate, on a number of levels. Not least of which is that there are gravitational waves, there in the pianos. As we discussed here, gravitational waves bend space-time. And you can reproduce the sound of those waves—and, indeed, the waves themselves—"by running your fingernails across the keys of a piano from the low end to middle C."

Roman Robroek, he is a man from the Netherlands, who is roaming around Europe, photographing abandoned pianos. There is a story about him here.

At story's end, there is a video of a refuse worker, one Glenn, playing an abandoned piano, at a Newcastle recycling center. Before the piano, it would receive the big chop.

I went over to the YouTube, to see if I could find the video, there, so that I could embed it, here. I could. And, so, here, it is.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N74IScLwOo]

I also found, there, on the YouTube, that, this, it had, well, struck a chord. For instance, somebody in Vietnam, s/he had felt moved, to affix different-one piano music, to images of this man. And the abandoned piano. And, here, is that.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMSL97-Mtfw]

The title, translated from the Vietnamese, reads:

hear his melancholy piano
spirit workers at the landfill
think twice, before throwing one item