Tips to keep this place free of ugliness and other sorts of disgrace

Day 165 - Jakarta

Jakarta could do with following those tips so helpfully displayed on a roadside sign. Indonesia's capital is a city of 11 million people. Of endless houses broken by mosques, then urban sprawl, then fields and trees. Or if you're flying into it then fields and trees > urban sprawl > houses > mosque> houses > mosque > hou... you get the idea. It is not Paris. It is not Labuan Bajo. Whatever the limitations of the latter it was, to quote, "a home away from home". The grit of Jakarta was a shock to my system but that was exceeded by the shock of being alone again. I was out of the peculiar terrarium of holiday romance and I hated it. A bar seemed the right place for me right now and the Jaya pub would do. It was basically empty with just me and a pair of friends to prop it up. They would occasionally exchange a few words but mostly sat in silence in that way that men do in bars and women don't. The place slowly fills up and a live band appears. they play 'Beyond the sea' and the whole thing takes on a vaguely colonial-oriental feel and I find my mood slightly lifted. Somehow a night's sleep in my windowless concrete box of a room has been restorative. Everything seems more balanced, less intense. The worst seems manageable. I walk the streets of Jakarta until I hurt. It's not actually the worst city I concede. My mind, when tired or stressed or both, is the playground of grotesque monsters. I think back to my early-morning commutes to work through London's congested centre. Every person that stepped into my path and delayed my progress towards somewhere I didn't want to be going was some oxygen-thieving avatar of the decayed state of the world. The devil's work for idle minds. It was a feeling as reliable as death and taxes (and not dissimilar). It was Orwell's daily hate. And Jakarta no longer seemed the dystopian hellscape of the previous day. Big, dirty and noisy are not exactly rare characteristics of places around here. There's interesting stuff if you look hard enough. Colonial remains of the Dutch, street art, vascular plants, that sort of thing. The night ends in another bar and I, somewhat involuntarily, get talking to a young English guy who clearly had some mental health issues. He couldn't seem to hold a thought in his head for more than 30 seconds which made for energetic conversation and exciting plans. I briefly considered joining him for a booze-fuelled rampage across the city before something a wiser man would call 'wisdom' told me it would be a hollow and regrettable pleasure. And so, like a brutalist vampire, I retired to my concrete coffin.

I wake with excitement. Of the emotional kind I should say. It's a wonderful feeling to truly look forward to seeing someone. Jessie was going to be in Jakarta for one night and one night only before flying out to meet her parents in Malaysia. The only thing that tempered my joy at the reunion is the knowledge of how brief it will be. A reprise and then it is over, probably forever. I am thankful that I have much tidying of the room to do as it makes the time pass more quickly. And then she is there with some wonderful teutonic hairstyle and the slightly off-centre smile. We go for nasi padang which is a meal in which your table is covered with small plates of food. You only pay for the ones you eat. I guess the ones you don't are recycled for the next customers. We go to a rooftop bar and then back to my live music place, it is all as it was. After some early-morning yoga the next day we roam the streets of Jakarta and I watch the seconds tick by. Over some bitterballen (Dutch bar snacks) at the grand Café Batavia conversation slows as the words we choose take on more significance. Trivialities seem pointless in the dying light. And then she is gone. Maybe I'll see her back in the UK, I've always wanted to spend more time in Leytonstone. Probably I won't. My travels are nearly over and hers are just beginning and I rage at the misalignment. The misfortune! But don't be sad it's over, be glad it happened they say. Yeah I can live with that.

The only justification, the only mitigation for higher intelligence is love and love of beauty. For all that a godless life is ultimately meaningless we create something meaningful when we love and when we experience beauty. In a cold, limitless universe we each create a warmth when we love, when we pine, when we need, when we experience the unrequited desire and so much the latter. The intense burning of love that won't be neatly packaged into a happy story of domesticity or conventional conjoining. That is purer and uncorrupted by reality. That love lives forever in its original state of perfection. It's the most intense kind of pain and the perfect kind of pleasure to imagine the wonder of requitement. Oscar Wilde's cigarette burning with emotion. The most beautiful art is drawn from it. Animals of flesh and blood and mortality yet we have the most infinite capacity for feeling. Joy and despair light the world, they give every moment purpose. Maybe it is pointless to conceive of a world in which everybody is happy because of the relative, temporal nature of that feeling. A world where they *can* feel happy is a more realistic ambition. The people we could have loved, had they let us, can make for more compelling memories than the people we have shared love with. Though that is romanticism and that is me. That is what breaks unbreakable relationships because it believes in the unbreakable. The romance, the fairytale, the one. It neglects the practicalities of love and takes liberties with reality. It is sold on the origin story. It lives in the small gap between people's lips as they lean in for that first kiss, knowing that it is about to happen, knowing that it can't be undone, knowing that life may not be the same afterwards. Romanticism yes but what is the point of a kiss that leaves all unchanged? Even in the most superficial kiss I see beauty. A moment of intimacy whether it is repeated or not. Moreso even than sex which has a practical, biological urging. To kiss someone is to be in a timeless moment of useless, intimate desire. A prelude perhaps but an indulgent moment for love and beauty before the evolutionary necessity of intercourse. The middle bit is known to be The Best Thing Ever® but the before and after hold the meaning for me. The look, The kiss, the expression of desire by pressing your lips to someone else's, putting your arms around them and pulling them as close to you as anyone can ever physically be. The sleep, the lying next to someone and passing into the unconscious where you have no control, are utterly vulnerable and trusting that person next to you to feel the same when you wake up. Those are intimacy. Those make life worth living. Romanticism is a weakness when it rules in the real world but to lose it entirely is to lose what makes our consciousness special. To dismiss a feeling for a person as inconvenient, to work the apps for practicality and compatible metrics undermines the beauty of unpredictable, uncontrollable desire. Why we want someone and why we feel that way should never be rationalised to bare efficiencies. And if it works with that person then we shouldn't let the force of practicality overcome the force of nature. Of that swirling mix of chemicals in our heads that create the most unintended feeling. Our feelings are all we have to give meaning to our lives and love is the greatest of them. This wasn't intended as a manifesto, only, to go back to the beginning, as a justification of impractical, unrequited, unrestrained, indulgent love.