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Window Shopping

The phrase "the desert of the real" conveys that ‘the real’ is the destroyed world, gloomy, fantastical, inexplicable through language, especially when viewed from the ordered world. In Indonesia, we are actually in that ‘desert’: with incessant floods, landslides and earthquakes.

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Mortality

Death is always with us in the same carriage. Death does not cut the journey. Death is part of the journey.

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Data

With the technology of the Hubble telescope, we see that we inhabit merely one tiny planet in a galaxy, while there are two trillion galaxies sprinkled in space. Humans are not the center.

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Ondel-ondel

The ondel-ondel, which people say used to be part of high-class ceremony in old Jayakarta, is nowadays part of the life of the impoverished, who know they are not in the limelight.

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The Crown

Power succeeds not through oppression with guns and bribery with money, but because it is effective in performing illusion.

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Fragile

Viruses are wars without borders. There is no space or time that can be completely ordered and stabilized in indices and maps. Contagion and healing go on within traces of differing attitudes towards life, sickness, and death.

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Vision

The eye – unlike the ear – does indeed absorb things field by field, not all at once. Sight becomes king. Humans no longer know objects by hearing, tasting and feeling them.

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Nazareno

The Bible prohibits the faithful from making pictures of humans and from worshipping idols, as do the other two Abrahamic religions. The history of the Christian world has witnessed a few episodes of ‘iconoclasm’, movements to destroy statues: in the 8th and 9th centuries in Byzantium, and at the beginning of the 16th century in Europe, when the Protestants burnt statues and paintings in churches.

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Astonishing

Maybe Marion does not view his relationship with the divine as a matter of belief in God. That relationship is more an acknowledgment of love–and love, even ‘love in a simple way’, is more astonishing than faith.

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A Story

Goenawan Mohamad

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Familocracy

Democracy begins as scandal.

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Mishima

HALF a century ago, Yukio Mishima plunged a short blade into his stomach and disemboweled himself.

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Advertising

These days, truth—which makes an appearance every now and then—seems unable to touch ground. It leaves no trace.

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Das

DAS is a labor union activist, the bearer of progressive ideas, a perfect hero.

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Billie

In anticipation of The United States vs Billie Holiday, a docu-drama directed by Lee Daniels…

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Woce

Goenawan Mohamad

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Amir

When the poet Amir Hamzah left his native village and sailed for Batavia on the Plancus, he wrote a rather mediocre poem:

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The Workers

GOENAWAN MOHAMAD

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Ruslan

Goenawan Mohamad

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Towards

Goenawan Mohamad