کمبالي ک اصل 2

-Besok, tanggal 1 haribulan 3, aku berangkat ke Kuala Lumpur. Kali ini aku akan berada di Malaysia selama 3 minggu lebih. 3 minggu lebih! Bukan satu tempoh yang lama bagiku yang telah meningkat tua; namun apakah jiwaku lebih dewasa dan matang? Itu aku tidak tahu.

-Barangkali nanti di Malaysia, suasana kempen pilihan raya akan hangat menantikanku, untuk menyambutku dengan salam mesra dari panji-panji parti politik Malaysia, yang ingin memancing undi dengan sebanyak mungkin. Maaf, kali ini aku tidak mengundi; Aku belum berdaftar. Dan kalaupun aku berdaftar, aku tak nampak di mana letaknya sebab untukku mengundi kali ini. Sudah terlalu lama aku di luar negara. Aku tak nampak lagi ke arah manakah lagi aliran siasah Malaysia mengalir; ke Laut Cina Selatan? Itu Sungai Rajang, bukan ideologi kerajaan.

-Kuala Lumpur; tempat paling jijik yang pernah aku lihat seumur hidupku! Dengan kesesatan identitinya, kekotoran sampahnya, pembangunan tidak terancangnya, aku tak melihat di mana letaknya nilai estetik dan keindahan yang boleh aku nikmati di sana, melainkan kesepian menginap semalam di hotel seorang diri, memikirkan tentang nasib diriku yang sudah tak tahu ke mana harus ku membawa diriku ini, ke mana harus ku mengejar mimpi yang takku pasti kewujudannya. Barangkali asap rokok akan membantuku melenyapkan jiwaku dalam kala malam butaku meliar, membawa syaitan dalam bentuk kenangan lalu dan harapan yang palsu. Asap rokok menjadi bentengku menentang syaitan yang bertopengkan mukaku.

-Kembali ke asal; itu kata-kata omongan kosong dari harapan yang durjana! Takkan pernah wujud kembali saat ketika aku belum pernah berdosa, taubat takkan melenyapkan masa silam yang duka, penyesalan atas apa yang telah dan takkan terjadi. Aku yang lenyap ditelan waktu dan aliran dunia; apa yang harus kusedihkan? Aku takkan pernah bersedih di atas pemergian waktu silam, walaupun air mataku bercucuran di pipi. Air mataku hanyalah lambang. Aku takkan bersedih atas apapun jua. Tidak berguna kesedihan itu.

-Kuala Lumpur; bandar raya kutukan Tuhan! Tuhan; siapa Dia? Wujudkah Dia? Pentingkah Dia? Peduli apa aku dengan Tuhan. Kehendak Tuhan tiada siapa yang boleh mengerti; jadi buat apa aku kisah dengan apa segala perkhabaran yang diungkapkan manusia dengan istilah 'wahyu,' itu semua adalah angan-angan belaka bagiku. Namun di balik tiap-tiap anganan manusia itu tersimpan, tersirat satu benda yang dinamakan 'erti', dan tiap-tiap erti mengandungi secebis hakikat; Angan-angan manusia itu adalah cebisan dari hakikat yang mengungkapkan selayar citra yang dinamakan dunia; Tuhan adalah Benar kalaupun Dia hanya Khayalan, kerana Khayalan adalah Benar.

-Sudah-sudah sahaja aku mencarut di sini. Aku belum berkemas lagi. Dengan kucupan mesra dari batinku aku akan memeluk engkau, wahai nusantaraku Malaysia. Bi iznillah, Insya-Allah.

-Amen.

Letters Left Unwritten

-Sometimes, there are words I want to say, but they never came out from my mind to the outer world. Honesty and appropriateness sometimes go against each other. Love for a friend and a desire to love the same person as a lover makes it hard to say things, and later I regret not saying it for the world might have been a different story had I said the words in the first place.

-"I should have kissed you in the elevator that night, it was two o'clock, and God is the only witness, all the more reason to kiss you, for it would be true, and alas I didn't, for that I curse myself, and my cowardice, and also the religion that prohibits me from kissing you..."

February Love

-No, this post has nothing to do with that formerly pagan cultural festival otherwise known as the Valentine's Day. It is not even remotely related to the general feelings of love.

-I'm just surprised to hear that the Pope wants to resign.

-So what?

Freedom Demands Sacrifice

-Jose Rizal, the famous Filipino revolutionary writer, once described death as a rest; to quote his poem, Mi Ultimo Adios, he said that death is a place where 'faith doesn't kill'. As he was a critic of the Catholic Spanish occupation of Philippines, it is clear that he criticized the Church, and he paid the price with his blood.

Satu Hari

-Hari ini anak buah aku lahir ke dunia. Sekarang aku masih tak tahu siapa nama dia; itu tak penting buat ketika ini. Apa yang penting, hari ini hari yang mulia.

-Apa yang aku buat di sini?

Membakar Kitab

-Semenjak kebelakangan ini, ada sahaja isu yang melanda negara Malaysia. Sekarang ini, timbul satu cerita konon-kononnya Ibrahim Ali dari PERKASA nak membakar kitab Injil Melayu yang ada tertulis kalimah Allah. Hee hee hee.

-Aku kadang-kadang seronok juga tengok perangai politikus-politikus Malaysia ini, terutamanya politikus Melayu. Mereka selalu cakap bukan main besar, atas isu yang tak penting sama-sekali. Siapa peduli kalau Injil Melayu letak kalimah Allah? Melayu saja yang peduli. Walhal mereka bukannya baca kitab itu. Buat apa bising-bising tentang satu kitab yang kau cakap penipuan belaka? Kalau letak kalimah Allah pun, Injil tetap Injil: dia takkan tiba-tiba menjadi buku sihir yang memurtadkan ribuan umat Melayu (bukan umat Islam; Melayu saja yang boleh kena sihir macam itu).

-Melayu cakap yang kalimah Allah itu milik umat Islam sahaja. Kita mencuri akidah orang Yahudi boleh pulak! Senang hati suka rasa saja pergi cakap Tuhan Bani Israel itu tuhan kita sekali. Konon itu Tuhan bercakap dengan kita, cakap dia sudah putus asa sama Bani Israel; pasal itu cari kaum lain; Tuhan yang macam ini, Tuhan yang berputus asa ini, kamu ambil sebagai Tuhan?

Open Mind

-What the fuck does that phrase mean? No one has ever had their minds literally opened, you can only open your brain out-which doesn't help open your mind, it just exposes your brain and may result in death, or at least some gruesome injury. No, mind and brain are two different things that, despite the fact that they are essentially intertwined with each other, is still different; forget the common utterances of common people who say of idiots as having no brain; they're actually referring to the state of mind, but saying that one has got no mind is also untrue in a literal understanding, since having no mind means you're dead-but as some religions hold that your soul preserves your mind, which means that your mind is as immortal as your soul, so your death might not necessarily mean the disappearance of your mind, and it is more appropriate to say that mind is only absent when the soul is also absent, that is the state of neither living or dying, or might I say an inorganic state.

-But of course we are not entering a discussion in which people try to define what soul refers to-Leibnitz has done that in his treatises concerning monadology-, but rather I would rather talk about the openness of mind in a conventional sense; that is, a state where one is willing and able to input any information into his mind without having a preset reaction set for any information that his mind receives; or rather more simply, not having a prejudiced state of mind. Open-mindedness is a hard state of mind to perpetuate in any given setting; All of us have some mechanism that prevents us from dangerous things, be it objects, individuals or ideas; and this mechanism works as a kind of censor board, the 'self censor' that prevents us from having a totally open mind, regardless of our best conscious efforts. This mechanism is created in an early formative age, at a time when it is essential for us as children to input things into our mind, and in order to make sure we don't go against the community, for our own safety, our subconscious works to suppress our ego, and this self-censorship is one of the mechanisms involved in the process.

-Thus, by the time you're a teenager, most of the time, people are already having prejudices. That is normal, nobody will question too much; for it is safe and comfortable to be having prejudices, as you know who to love and who to fear-and hate. As we are by nature a predatory, resource-gathering species, these feelings-love and hate-are very important, as they define our behavior in a lot of ways; They make us humans. Open-mindedness is not something that comes directly out of nature ready-made; it is something that develops out of this prejudice, as we input more information into our minds naturally, to discover the world (and the discovery of the world, or the Other, lead to us discovering and defining our Selves), and it can be said that prejudice comes before open-mindedness-prejudice has to come first.

-But prejudice doesn't come as something that is a priori  either; what is first there is plain emptiness, an emptiness where even the Self is not properly developed; the Self has to acquire the essence of being Self from obtaining information from the Other (moms teaching their kids language is a fine way of demonstrating this concretely), and in this state the mind, being of a dark, formless nature (quoting from the Torah, as in the beginning of Genesis) is open and willing to receive any command from the Other (in a Quranic fashion, 'Kun fayakun', or Biblical fashion, 'Yehi Or Vayehi Or')-and thus this emptiness, being the default state, can be said of as the real open-mindedness. But nobody in their adulthood has this open-mindedness anymore, and attempts at reaching it can be disastrous, although for some enlightened minds who are able to reach it, the results are an extreme, unspeakable joy, being Heaven or Nirvana itself.