Memang Selalu Demikian,(Kata Taufiq Ismail 1966)

Ada sebuah sajak Taufiq Ismail yang sangat populer, ditulis Taufiq Ismail, di tengah kekisruhan politik 1966 yang memunculkan Tritura dan melahirkan Orde Baru. Judulnya, "Seorang Tukang Rambutan Pada Isterinya."

"…Ya. Mahasiswa-mahasiswa itu. Anak-anak sekolah / Yang dulu berteriak: dua ratus, dua ratus! / Sampai bensin juga turun harganya / Sampai kita bisa naik bis pasar yang murah pula / Mereka kehausan karena panas bukan main / Terbakar mukanya di atas truk terbuka / Saya lemparkan sepuluh ikat rambutan kita, bu / Biarlah sepuluh ikat juga / Memang sudah rejeki mereka / Mereka berteriak kegirangan dan berebutan / …/ Dan ada yang turun dari truk, bu / Mengejar dan menyalami saya / "Hidup rakyat!", teriaknya / Saya dipanggul dan diarak-arak sebentar/ …/ "Hidup Pak Rambutan, hidup rakyat!" / Saya tersedu, bu. Belum pernah seumur hidup / Orang berterima-kasih begitu jujurnya / Pada orang kecil seperti kita".

Sajak itu menginspirasikan banyak hal pada kita. Bahwa ada saatnya, pada suatu masa, semua orang bergerak dalam kebersamaan. Semua orang mengambil perannya sendiri-sendiri, memberikan kontribusinya sendiri-sendiri, dengan caranya sendiri-sendiri. Untuk sesuatu yang diyakini bersama, untuk tujuan yang hendak dicapai bersama.
Tidak pernah lagi lahir sajak seperti itu. Karena tidak pernah lagi lahir kejadian yang sejenis. Berapa banyak gerakan advokasi dan demonstrasi mahasiswa sejak 1966. Tapi tak ada yang mengabarkan pada kita bagaimana interaksinya dengan Pak Rambutan-Pak Rambutan yang disaksikan Taufiq Ismail.

Barangkali karena situasinya memang berbeda. Di masa itu, mahasiswa tahu betul bahwa mereka bergerak dengan dukungan Angkatan Darat. Dan di masa itu, militer punya kepedulian terhadap masalah yang dihadapi rakyat: tidak tercatat adanya tentara yang diturunkan untuk menggusur tanah orang, misalnya.

Tapi barangkali juga, karena di masa itu mahasiswa memang memiliki sensitifitas untuk menangkap hati nurani rakyat. Juga 1966 itu barangkali suatu masa, di mana terdengar suara dari seorang ibu seperti yang bisa terbaca di sajak Taufiq Ismail yang lain, "Dari Ibu Seorang Demonstran" (1966) : Ibu telah merelakan kalian / Untuk berangkat demonstrasi / Karena kalian pergi menyempurnakan / Kemerdekaan negeri ini / Ya, ibu tahu, mereka tidak menggunakan gada / Atau gas air mata / Tapi peluru tajam…

Di zaman ini ada sajak Wiji Thukul: "Hanya ada satu kata: lawan!" yang jadi kalimat semua aktivis mahasiswa. Tapi berapakah "semua" itu? Lima puluh, seratus, dua ratus, atau paling banyak lima ratus orang saja terlibat, jika ada demonstrasi mahasiswa. Dua puluh ribu mahasiswa bisa memang turun berjuang, tapi hanya jika isyunya agama: kasus Monitor dan kasus SDSB. Entah apa yang membuat mahasiswa bisa demikian sensitifitas mengendus isyu SARA, tapi tidak terhadap isyu yang menyangkut penderitaan nyata umat manusia Indonesia.

Yang jelas di semua zaman, di 28, di 45, di 66, di masa ini, di masa depan, selalu terjadi apa yang dituliskan Taufiq Ismail, dalam satu lagi sajaknya, "Memang Selalu Demikian, Hadi":

Setiap perjuangan selalu melahirkan
Sejumlah pengkhianat dan para penjilat
Jangan kau gusar, Hadi

Setiap perjuang selalu menghadapkan kita
Pada kaum yang bimbang menghadapi gelombang
Jangan kau kecewa, Hadi

Setiap perjuangan yang akan menang
Selalu mendatangkan pahlawan jadi-jadian
Dan para jagoan kesiangan

Memang demikianlah halnya, Hadi

FORCI Development (Center for Forestry Organization Capacity and Institution Development-Pusat Pengembangan Kapasitas Organisasi dan Kelembagaan Kehutanan) adalah sebuah unit kerja otonom di lingkungan Fakultas Kehutanan IPB yang bergerak dalam penguatan kapasitas sumberdaya manusia, organisasi, dan kelembagaan kehutanan, yang didukung oleh kompetensi keilmuan dan pengalaman yang memadai dalam bidang kehutanan dan yang terkait, mulai tataran kebijakan (policy) sampai teknis (technical), dengan jejaring kerja dari pemerintah (government) hingga non pemerintah (civil society). Selain itu, FORCI Development juga bergerak dalam upaya-upaya transfer knowledge.

Posted under real circumstance, source will be published and will not claimed as its own writing

Guy De Maupassant "Henri René Albert" (1850-1893)

Of the French writers of romance of the latter part of the nineteenth century no one made a reputation as quickly as did Guy de Maupassant. Not one has preserved that reputation with more ease, not only during life, but in death. None so completely hides his personality in his glory. In an epoch of the utmost publicity, in which the most insignificant deeds of a celebrated man are spied, recorded, and commented on, the author of "Boule de Suif," of "Pierre et Jean," of "Notre Coeur," found a way of
effacing his personality in his work.

Of De Maupassant we know that he was born in Normandy about 1850; that he was the favorite pupil, if one may so express it, the literary protege, of Gustave Flaubert; that he made his debut late in 1880, with a novel inserted in a small collection,
published by Emile Zola and his young friends, under the title: "The Soirees of Medan"; that subsequently he did not fail to publish stories and romances every year up to 1891, when a disease of the brain struck him down in the fullness of production; and that he died, finally, in 1893, without having recovered his reason.

We know, too, that he passionately loved a strenuous physical life and long journeys, particularly long journeys upon the sea. He owned a little sailing yacht, named after one of his books, "Bel-Ami," in which he used to sojourn for weeks and months. These meager details are almost the only ones that have been gathered as food for the curiosity of the public.

I leave the legendary side, which is always in evidence in the case of a celebrated man,--that gossip, for example, which avers that Maupassant was a high liver and a worldling. The very number of his volumes is a protest to the contrary. One could not write so large a number of pages in so small a number of years without the virtue of industry, a virtue incompatible with habits of dissipation. This does not mean that the writer of these great romances had no love for pleasure and had not tasted the world, but that for him these were secondary things. The psychology of his work ought, then, to find an interpretation other than that afforded by wholly false or exaggerated anecdotes. I wish to indicate here how this work, illumined by the three or four positive data which I have given, appears to me to demand it.

And first, what does that anxiety to conceal his personality prove, carried as it was to such an extreme degree? The answer rises spontaneously in the minds of those who have studied closely the history of literature. The absolute silence about himself, preserved by one whose position among us was that of a Tourgenief, or of a Merimee, and of a Moliere or a Shakespeare among the classic great, reveals, to a person of instinct, a nervous sensibility of extreme depth. There are many chances for an artist of his kind, however timid, or for one who has some grief, to show the depth of his emotion. To take up again only two of the names just cited, this was the case with the author of "Terres Vierges," and with the writer of "Colomba."

A somewhat minute analysis of the novels and romances of Maupassant would suffice to demonstrate, even if we did not know the nature of the incidents which prompted them, that he also suffered from an excess of nervous emotionalism. Nine times out of ten, what is the subject of these stories to which freedom of style gives the appearance of health? A tragic episode. I cite, at random, "Mademoiselle Fifi," "La Petite Roque," "Inutile Beaute," "Le Masque," "Le Horla," "L'Epreuve," "Le Champ d'Oliviers," among the novels, and among the romances, "Une Vie," "Pierre et Jean," "Fort comme la Mort," "Notre Coeur." His imagination aims to represent the human being as imprisoned in a situation at once insupportable and inevitable. The spell of this grief and trouble exerts such a power upon the writer that he ends stories commenced in pleasantry with some sinister drama.

Let me instance "Saint-Antonin," "A Midnight Revel," "The Little Cask," and "Old Amable." You close the book at the end of these vigorous sketches, and feel how surely they point to constant suffering on the part of him who executed them.

This is the leading trait in the literary physiognomy of Maupassant, as it is the leading and most profound trait in the psychology of his work, viz, that human life is a snare laid by nature, where joy is always changed to misery, where noble words
and the highest professions of faith serve the lowest plans and the most cruel egoism, where chagrin, crime, and folly are forever on hand to pursue implacably our hopes, nullify our virtues, and annihilate our wisdom. But this is not the whole.

Maupassant has been called a literary nihilist--but (and this is the second trait of his singular genius) in him nihilism finds itself coexistent with an animal energy so fresh and so intense that for a long time it deceives the closest observer. In an
eloquent discourse, pronounced over his premature grave, Emile Zola well defined this illusion: "We congratulated him," said he, "upon that health which seemed unbreakable, and justly credited him with the soundest constitution of our band, as well as with the clearest mind and the sanest reason. It was then that this frightful thunderbolt destroyed him."

It is not exact to say that the lofty genius of De Maupassant was that of an absolutely sane man. We comprehend it to-day, and, on re-reading him, we find traces everywhere of his final malady. But it is exact to say that this wounded genius was, by a singular circumstance, the genius of a robust man. A physiologist would without doubt explain this anomaly by the coexistence of a nervous lesion, light at first, with a muscular, athletic temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable. The skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was accompanied by a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are in turn those of a hunter and of a sailor, who have, as the old French saying expressively puts it, "swift foot, eagle eye," and who are attuned to all the whisperings of nature.

The only confidences that he has ever permitted his pen to tell of the intoxication of a free, animal existence are in the opening pages of the story entitled "Mouche," where he recalls, among the sweetest memories of his youth, his rollicking canoe
parties upon the Seine, and in the description in "La Vie Errante" of a night spent on the sea,--"to be alone upon the water under the sky, through a warm night,"--in which he speaks of the happiness of those "who receive sensations through the
whole surface of their flesh, as they do through their eyes, their mouth, their ears, and sense of smell."

His unique and too scanty collection of verses, written in early youth, contains the two most fearless, I was going to say the most ingenuous, paeans, perhaps, that have been written since the Renaissance: "At the Water's Edge" (Au Bord de l'Eau) and the
"Rustic Venus" (La Venus Rustique). But here is a paganism whose ardor, by a contrast which brings up the ever present duality of his nature, ends in an inexpressible shiver of scorn:

"We look at each other, astonished, immovable,
And both are so pale that it makes us fear."
* * * * * * *

"Alas! through all our senses slips life itself away."

compiled by nino(pic from wikipedia and e-text from gutenberg)