Riding on the back of Beasts

What's wrong with this photo? A friend emailed this earlier and her theory is that this military officer might just had his toenails pedicured. Or athlete's foot? Hernia?

This is not an issue of feudal relations but bothersome, all the same.

Jesus walked on the water and turned water into wine.

This officer enjoyed a piggie ride on the back of a working man.

No Mystery (Part 2)

A postscript to the importance or non-significance of mystery in a relationship from Jonathan Carroll's latest book. If I'm not mistaken, the title is "Ghost in Love":

The first great real intimacy between two people begins when secrets are told. The time you stole the money from the candy drive when you were a boy scout. The time you slept with your brother-in-law after their marriage dissolved. The lie you told your boss that changed everything and burned every bridge you had at the time. The secret about your parents you thought you would never, ever tell anyone.

But suddenly you do—to your new partner. No matter what happens to you two after that, they know these things now. You can never take them back. They have the goods on you and you on them. At that point your life together shifts on its axis permanently. You have begun to let them into your soul and often we don't even know ourselves what the result of *that* will be."

(Illustration from www.explodingdog.com)

Cannavaro still can

Canna! Casa Lippi scored a crucial victory against Bulgaria. 3 goals, tigol. Forza Azzurri!

After that heartbreaking loss from Ireland and the brutal punch of Brazil, people easily dismissed Italy's chances to defend the World Cup.

I am still not thinking of victory. One match at a time. What is more important is that Canna is playing and slowly getting back to form. Never mind his stint with Real Madrid. Playing for the national flag is different.

Cannavaro, one of heaven's factory's best walking this earth.

Catalano!!!

"I know a dirty word - hello, hello"....Jared Leto is walking on sunshine. White out. Jared is beautifully strutting on a sunshiny morning. What a sweet distraction to the dull ache on my left leg.

And I was imploring - is my near end, O Lord? This pain is nothing to what you suffered for our redemption but let it go away, give me some relief, and some cussing.

I will take emotional pain any day. With emotional pain, you can rationalize your way around it. Even argue with it. Box it in its proper perspective. Shelve it and do things to keep your mind off it but with physical pain, there is no escape. You cannot focus, sleep is a hard commodity to bargain, and you are pratically rendered unproductive and useless....just feeling rotten in one miserable corner, in my own corner of the sky where cats don't fit on the window sill.

No pain, no gain, some quarters say. Well, you can have them all. Just let me be a happy loser.

WeeeeeeeD

Ganja in a funkier package, yay! Leaves a bad taste, these corporate jocks who prefer designer drugs actually conceptualizing, glued to their story boards, hatching up plans to market this sacred herb. Dread and trepidation.

But if this is a necessary step to make it more accessible and acceptable, who am I to disapprove? An alternative painkiller, it should be available in our suking tindahan soon. Make it faster than soon.

Mar Shifts Gears

"Fruits of a good tree," that's how Jovito Salonga, the best president this country never had, described Mar Roxas and Noynoy Aquino.

Mar Roxas is being lauded for the supreme sacrifice of withdrawing from the presidential race and giving way to Noynoy, the reluctant Noynoy, to become the Liberal party's standard-bearer. An act of statemanship, everybody seems to be in accord.

I truly believe there's no spin here, no gimmickry at all. It is but pragmatic to ride on the coattails of the Cory magic while it lasts. But to overstate Mar Roxas' supposed sacrifice is a bit off. I mean, sure it must be painful to give up something you have worked and spent millions for but one can also look at it in a different angle.

His numbers were not going up despite the barrage of infomercials. "Ramdam ko kayo," he assures but the case is "Di niya tayo nararamdaman." Not in very encouraging figures so we can also say, Mar is in fact cutting his losses this early. Early on, talks of an Escudero team-up was rife, Escudero being quite popular in some surveys but that seemed to fizzle out. Noynoy is a more viable tandem, let's see how this plays out after Noynoy's spiritual retreat.

Rafacious

A new haircut. The arms, still to kill for. Rafa!!! He is futbol's loss and tennis' gain - the ruggedness, the tenacity, the boyish imperfections. Charming.

The Fed and Rafa represent two schools of thought. People who root for them are profiled and said to belong to a different spectrum. Since Rios left, I lost interest so I am not in the thick of things.

Maybe it's like Barcelona and Real Madrid. Barca is perceived to be progressive and run a more scientific game geared towards victory while Real Madrid, despite its stable of talent is pereived to rely more on divine providence to win.

Whatever it is, I look at these athletes as fascinating machines.

George and Vicky

Milan Kundera: "Dogs are links to paradise. They don't know evil or jealous or discontent. To sit on a hillside with a dog on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where nothing was not boring, it was peace."

Our Georgelablab, no one makes me worry more when he's not eating well or have some sort of fever. With him, all defenses are down Sometimes, I think I am unfair by not sparing him my own kitchen sink drama but he seems to get it. He revels when he's told that he's God's gift to us and that Jesus loves him. He actually smiles at the declaration. Of late, his favorite song to sleep to is "Con te Partiro." When I stop playing the song after 6 repetitions, he would stand up and silently beg. What's in this song?

Speaking of dogs, I couldn't help but admire Vicky Morales several notches higher, with the dogged persistence she demonstrated covering the Liberal Party press conference at Club Filipino last night. Mar Roxas was admonishing "Vicky, masasagasaan ka" quite a number of times but relentless to get the soundbites, Vicky showed everyone that passion still rules a seasoned journalist like her. No let up. It was very humbling - an awarded broadcaster of her stature who has certainly paid her dues showing us how willing she was to lose her poise to get the news.

Nabokov's Old Soundbites Still Bite

For some chinwag, nobody does it with aplomb than Nabokov. In a 1965 Playboy interview, his charitable comments on fellow Russian Dostoevsky and novelists Hemingway and Conrad is one for summit negotiations.

Q: Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. "Why?

Nabokov: Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

A slapdash comedian? Several chapters of Crime and Punishment and I do believe that the punishment in the title is more of a caveat. Sorry.

Q: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad"writers of books for boys"?

Nabokov: That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story,"The Killers." And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile,and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as-- but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.

Souvenir-shop style? Pets of the common room? I cannot smirk at such snobbery.

Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," from relative academic obscurity was embraced by the academic brigade when the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe blasted Conrad as a "bloody racist." Then came the discourses and the dissertations.

I wonder who the other "beloved authors" are and the dead ones not yet buried Nabokov is alluding to. Oh, writers and their catfights, so delectable on a humid day.

(Caricature from The New Yorker)

Hanging with a jerk

In a perfect example of synchronicity, my favorite musicians and novelists usually espouse the same socio-political views that I cherish, fanning delusions that you are what you read or listen to and that to a certain degree, belief in the remote possibility that these cultural heroes of our youth could be our drinking buddies. After all, the recipe of friendship is almost complete - same-mindedness, shared trepidations of a world gone awry, harboring the same misgivings...

As I grew older, I became less and less convinced that an artist ought to be evaluated primarily for his political views. I've mentioned before I've been poked for reading works of known anti-Communists but would you throw out Dostoevsky, for instance, for being a defender of the patriarchal authority of the Tsar? How many writers have conjured images of women that are despicable, shall we boycott them? If we choose to read writers substantially for their politics, we will be shortchanging ourselves.

My first hard lesson was nothing short of traumatic. This musician was a favorite since college, I wrote a paper heralding his contribution to music. In short, he was in my altar of unabashed adoration. Later, I found out that he was a wife-beater. A wife-beater? How could someone capable of writing such profound thoughts be a monster? It was difficult to reconcile but reality bites. What was I to do? Throw away his CDs and declare him as a bad artist?

The artist does have a covenant to preserve the integrity of his work, continue to sharpen his craft either by reworking his themes, push boundaries, and discover new frontiers. How he treats his dogs is of secondary importance, but God forbid, no to animal cruelty. I mean, what do I care if my cultural heroes are misogynist, miserable bastards? Their body of work speak for themselves, never mind how they behave in private.

Rilke whose poems have been my prayers is another example. In a biography written by Ralph Freedman, he was described as: an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive, a delicate blossom easily punished by a passing breeze or sudden frost.

Clearly, Rilke was not a nice man. He was a con artist. And this jerk wrote this:

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willingto be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything... And I do.

Some non-jerks could not illuminate such as this. So I will take Rilke, jerk and all, any day of the week. Now, jerk off.

Running on Empty

Run, baby, run" - Sheryl Crow

Do men sprint faster than women? Anatomically, they have 2 yoyos swinging loosely and a distended rod to boot, a heavier package to carry around, if you ask me, so why do women breaking speed records subjected to gender speculations? As if it were improbable for females to race in Flash Gordon quickness.

There was Nancy Navalta of recent years. And the latest woman on the stake is South African athlete Caster Semenya. Or is it her family name, evoking masculine visceral representation? Semen, indeed, is a male thing.

Here we go again, back in the first paragraph, being pulled by the inanity of medieval ideas as if Madonna did not make us dance to "I made it through the wildnerness." It's been more than 7 hours and 15 days and yet it feels we have not actually move forward. Kabudlay, oi.

Women are already in the literature on positive politics of peace and being evaluated as a workable ethical model for corrective citizenship and yet, road blocks continue to delay the journey. I remember being asked in either a class report or was it a forum, how the experience of motherhood as distinctively female experience dictate how women engage themselves as political beings.

First of all, I don't subscribe to the notion that as mothers, women care for the world and the future more passionately than men. I don't believe that women crave for peace more than men. Perhaps, there is in our socialization a different perspective being molded but as a whole, I don't see civic participation as a function of gender.

Citizenship, as a masculinized concept, is intimately linked with patriotism. Sadly, patriotism in most cultures, is measured in military defense terms - how one gallantly takes a bullet for one's tribe/community/country and in the enduring age of imperialism, being in the forefront of expansionist projects camouflaged as pursuits of national interest. In short, citizenship is defined along the lines of glorifying the male warrior.

While men are born to run down enemies of the state and run political affairs, women are considered unpatriotic because they burn their bras or run naked protesting against wars of aggression, inadvertently getting in the way of men's preoccupation.Where do women camp out? Mostly they are at the forefront of peace and environmental movements, microfinance, solidarity-building endeavors. Some explain than since women are less exposed to violence or are not instruments of violence, they tend to have a different worldview from men. I beg to differ. Women across socio-economic cleavages get slaps, lashes, and whips for breakfast, and mind you, this is not of the kinky variety. How people readily assume women are less exposed to violence should get married and experience for themselves how it is to cohabit with males and their sharp instruments.

It is false to assume that women are remotely located in the radius of violence simply because they are not in combat gear and raining down bombs on some strange land and annihilating culture. Come on, women are collateral damges in any form of militarization, whether as a source of comfort to soldiers or are the ones massacred and raped. Perhaps, because of these experiences of war and violence that women tend to develop aversion to them and yearn for peace or are more open to dialogues of peace.

But as I said earlier, gender can be a booby trap. To accept the idea that nurturing is a woman's turf is to fall prey to the same socially-constructed binary categories of males vs. females, animus-anima, yin-yang. The machines of war march forward not because boys will be boys. Gender is not in the equation, not by a far shot. That's silly, as if war were some esoteric idea that is hard to explain. It's that simple:war is real, not metaphorical; war is physical, not metaphysical. To some, war is a neccesity to survive as an economy. War has become both a means and an end.

Meanwhile, there's a continuous revolutionizing of the means of production, the pressure of profit, the development of the production forces amidst repressive relations of power - gelling up to fuel more wars.

Yes, we are running, racing, speeding.....towards destruction.

No Mystery

"Cause you're working, building a mystery" Sarah Maclachlan

Mystery. Once the veil of mystery is stripped off, trust me, a relationship is on the doldrums. Next stop, splitsville. That's a friend speaking her mind, not me.

How in God's country can one sustain "mystery" in, say, a 3-year relationship, I silently wonder. Replicating a chameleon isn't exactly an enchanting prospect for me. What in the hell for? It's like being in a relationship with a schizo, no thanks.

Maybe I don't get it. Most of the time, I don't get it anyway. But here's my take: from the get-go, I want no mask. Layers to be peeled off, yes. No holding back, all cards on the table. Warts, zits, and all.

Mystery is so contrived, pa-epek and overrated. What possible mystery can one preserve - that you're an alien from Mars? That one grows fangs every time the moon is in full bloom?

Understanding and acceptance - how can they hold a candle in a relationship cloathed in mystery? I agree with Lucretius. The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love. Isn't it the case of celebrities we like, we prepare a dossier of them, in our intent to know them in a deeper sense? Of course, it does not follow that just because you live with a person or spend time with him that you can already read the palm of his hand or that he can no longer spring a surprise. But the second-guessing is not deliberate.

I want boring and predictable, a comfortable knowledge that I can even predict the shirt my partner is going to wear on a particuar ocassion, the part of a film which he finds funny, a quotation that will rock his boat, what he's going to say in a repartee, what he is not saying, finish his sentences.

Even with friends, I would like to think I can order food for them or choose songs at videoke and there's no mystery involved anymore. Precisely you can do this because you somehow know them. Just recently, a dear friend dropped by and played some Dave Matthews in his guitar. I told him that if Baan were around, she would surely request for "Crash". True enough, when Baan got home and caught us jamming, she asked R, "can you play Crash?" R and I looked at each other and shared a secret smile, in unspoken agreement that I somehow know my sister. Maupay it feeling.

Polluting Politics

The medley of cover-ups that exposes more non-truths rather than conceal them, infuriates even more. It's not so much the callousness of the present leadership to munch and nibble to their gastronomic excesses but the deliberate manueverings to mislead. If this government cannot even be honest and transparent on its frivolous 'trivialities', what honesty can we expect from its other squanderings?


This administration slaps politics a bad name, a very bad name. Politics as conceived by Aristotle, is the "highest art," the "rarest of human activities". At the core of politics is the fundamental preoccupation as to what is the best way for people to live, both as an individual and as a collective. The "highest good," that is, the full potential of man for happiness and the best quality of life, can only be achieved outside the household. In effect, Aristotle paid homage to the polis as the vehicle and venue for the fruition of the highest good. Consequently, the marriage of politics and ethics is virtually solidified as the organization of society was paralleled with summoning what values, rules, and ideas must each person embody.

The Renaissance broke this bond with the ascendancy of Machiavelli's political realism of conquest and power and more importantly, the perpetuation of that power - 'the end justifies the means'. The Prince, to wield power, must be amoral, cunning, possessing astuteness to discern when to behave like a fox or a lion.

Today, several generations from Aristotle, politics is practiced in its crudest, most crass form, thanks to politicians like GMA.

Proust Way

We'll say there are two kinds of novelists: the snail and the swallow. The
swallow is quick, agile, and able to speed across long, tireless stretches.
Nothing a swallow does goes wrong; mistaken turns are instantly corrected, bad
weather is put to good use, and poor judgment can be tweaked just enough to look
like a flash of genius. In the implacable assembly line of prose, nothing is
ever wasted or thrown away. By contrast, the snail is slow, deliberate, fussy,
cramped. Swallows travel and seek out the world; the snail burrows into itself.
The swallow acts; the snail retracts, guesses, speculates. A swallow chugs life
down the way whales take in water, plankton and all, while the snail ingests
choice bits down a multichambered spiral, where its appetite, like its vision,
is eternally whorled. Balzac, Dickens, and Fielding are swallows, even
Tolstoy. (Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way")

I'm not too sure I get Proust's drift but I like his typology, simplistic maybe, but clearly makes the distinctive comparison. Some writers choose the trendier nihilistic outlook of the world and at a certain age, these are the writers we gravitate to, mirroring our own mugging despair and disenchantment. At the end of the day, we feel more dazed and confused, emptyhanded in our little excursions.

sense overload

A room of one's own. The room in my mind. A room I would like to have, given the chance. Small, private, with everything of great value within an arm's reach - CDs, DVDs, books, whew! This is so-called life.

Behind this door is another universe, an encounter with the incalculable, a world where disenchantments are regulated and conditioned.

The present world, the world outside can be shut out. In a contrived environment, the world left behind can be recaptured by imitations and repetitive recollections, not born out of despair but of convenient necessity.

Nothing is worthless. Everything has value, even silence. Specially silence, sublime silence. Words and speech, they take a backseat. They have a different destiny.

And Emily Dickinson's ghost hovers. And it's my mother's birthday today. She would have been 64.

Poems for "Bigo" (not Big O, if you get my drift)

I came across Anne Carson’s “The Beauty of the Husband” weeks ago – And so why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age/And the divorce decree came in the mail?/Beauty, no great secret/ Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty/As I would again if he came near/Beauty convinces/You know beauty makes sex possible/Beauty makes sex, sex/

This made me reflect on damage, er, marriage, what’s the spelling? Or how is it spelled? – these were the running jokes in college. My friend Godo even had a wisecrack “Marriage? You must be tired of living.”

I can count by my left hand the number of times I’ve attended a wedding in the last 5 years. I guess my friends prefer to live in sin or are mostly gay and can’t get married or are mostly dry-eyed spinsters like me. Oftentimes, I jest that the prime benefit of marriage is the sex becoming legal but not necessarily better.

As the poem suggests, will love transcend the loss of beauty? Will sex and sex alone keep the marital bed burning? Carole King sang “Will you still love me tomorrow?” which is a far realistic love song than say, “I love you more today than yesterday but not as much as tomorrow” which is a bit spaced-out talking about the future on certain terms – pure baloney.

All the jadedness aside, it sure takes a lot of balls to decide to get married and remain married. I used to say that I could not imagine myself organizing my life around a single person but Georgelablab, this abandoned pup looking so lost and earnest outside the dorm, wormed his doggie charm into my heart and I found my life literally revolving around a dog and I was not even raised to be a dog-lover. This is not to compare a dog to a husband but in terms of affections and commitment involved, it’s almost on the same plane.

What makes marriages tick? There are formulas and there are formulae. Most people are convinced it’s having a dynamic communication. From where I sit, it’s more of self-sacrifice – staying faithful, forgiving shortcomings, putting yourself in the shoes of the other, agreeing to disagree, humbling oneself, all these demand sacrifice. Not unless one is prepared to go the distance should the idea of marriage be even entertained.

Fidelity-this will spawn volumes and volumes of treatise and I remember a bittersweet poem I read in college – I went downtown tonight/to the capital under the clear moon/I came home: what did I see?/Four legs under my quilt/Used to be two of them were mine/but what about the other two?/ Tonight, I’m sure of this/the other two are not mine. (“Song,” Cho Yong)

Poetry isn’t exactly the most popular artform but its power isn’t exactly diminished. I’ve started posting poems I like at FS and the reactions I receive are unexpectedly tremendous. Poetry has an audience contrary to some notions that it has no effect on people, specially the younger set. This poem was well-received so I am reposting it here.

My Husband Discovers Poetry (Diane Lockward, from Eve's Red Dress,Wind Publications)

Because my husband would not read my poems,

I wrote one about how I did not love him.

In lines of strict iambic pentameter,

I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.

It felt good to do this.
Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.

Towards the end, struck by inspiration,

I wrote about my old boyfriend,

a boy I had not loved enough to marry

but who could make me laugh and laugh.

I wrote about a night years after we parted

when my husband's coldness drove me from the house

and back to my old boyfriend.

I even included the name of a seedy motel

well-known for hosting quickies.

I have a talent for verisimilitude.
In sensuous images, I described

how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,

got into bed, and kissed and kissed,

then spent half the night telling jokes,

many of them about my husband.

I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,

then hid the poem awayin an old trunk in the basement.
You know how this story ends,

how my husband one day loses something,

goes into the basement,

and rummages through the old trunk,

how he uncovers the hidden poemand sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds

that floated up the stairs that day,

the sounds of an animal, its paw caught

in one of those traps with teeth of steel?

Do you see the wounded creature

at the bottom of the stairs,

his shoulders hunched over and shaking,

fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?

It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

(graphics by www.slowpokecomics.com)

Binukbok Questionnaire

1. What author do you own the most books by? Salinger, Anita Brookner and May Sarton, I almost have all their novels, I think.

2. What book do you own the most copies of? Art of War and Bhaggavad-gita, got two of both.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? Not really. My prepositions are weak and uncertain. Prepositions still confuse me sometimes.

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? My love is no secret. I think I fall a bit in love with particular characters to be truly engaged, then I totally forget about them. My heart is fickle and promiscuous.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life? Something on spirituality.

6. Favorite book as a ten year old? The Hardy Boys series.

7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year? There’s always redemption at the end no matter how weak a book is. This is more of a self-indulgence for me so I don’t get upset or have self-loathing, I try to find crumbs I can cart away before I close a book forever.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year? I have not actually read for almost a year because of an illness. Maybe, the essays on fishing, I forgot the title.

9. If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be? The Jungle so they would also have bouts of rage and depression as I had. It's a punishing novel, I have to say.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? None that I can think of at the moment.

11. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read? Those authored by French post-modernists, damn.

12. What is your favorite devotional book? The Psalms and Rilke

13. What is your favorite play? Brecht’s Mother Courage

14. Poem? Epitaph for the Western Intelligentsia, mostly because of the last line "We bark like dogs and learn to wag our tails"

15. Essay? Anything about literary criticism and critical theory usually interest me.

16. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? No Comment. Ask the critics.

17. What is your desert island book? A book on humor and poetry. Maybe, some Woody Allen's.

18. And...what are you reading right now? Finishing “Tale of Two,” a book about Lucille, an adorable dog.

Defrosting in Proust

Several years ago, VF ran this Proust Questionnaire, not at all credited to Marcel Proust but believed to be character-revealing. Hmm...I'm trying my hand on it. See how it works.

What is your current state of mind?
Brimming with hope. A little nostalgic and sentimental

What is your greatest fear?
When I was young and full of shit, the prospect of becoming irrelevant. But that was pure humbug. Later, the thought of outliving my loved ones and sure enough, God’s warped sense of humor made sure I dealt with it gallantly. I am fully orphaned and dealing with cancer. Now, it’s losing my memory, my humanity, my resolve to sanctify life and love.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Romantic optimism about people and life in general, oftentimes neglectful that it has its limits.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lack of compassion; absence of integrity; not having a mind of their own; too much self-importance.

Which living person do you most admire?
Is Jesus dead? This is tough. Abbas Kiarostami whose films are amalgams of poetry and philosophy .

Which living person do you most despise?
My wrath is reserved for oppressors and exploiters, people wrapped in hate and greed and only love themselves.

On what occasion do you lie?
Every occasion. I’m a lousy liar, I need years of practice before I can lie with a straight face and credible conviction.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Life itself and its attendant trappings. Life has not been exactly easy but I strive to celebrate it. I am grateful, despite and inspite of its imperfections and intricacies.

When and where were you happiest?
Inhaling the rarefied air, in the company of family and friends whom I consider family.

Which talent would you most like to have?
Music - crafting it, playing it or understanding the human condition in the context by which it has to be interpreted.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I wish I had more ambition and focus.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would it be?
I’ve blogged about this quite recently. I wish to be a polygot, a physicist and a superb dancer, I wrote. In addition, I wish to swim and drink like a fish in the next life. Have a fat bank account, perhaps? And Good Lord, not to have cancer. If I were to choose one disease, it would be nymphomania.

What is your favorite occupation?
Not to have one? Be in development work, work at the grassroots. Maybe teach again. I don’t know.

Who are your favorite writers?
I am a fan of my friends’ writings. Some Continental authors, a few Anglo-Saxon.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Would Logan of “Veronica Mars” or Tony Soprano qualify? Phoebe in “Catcher in the Rye”; Atticus Finch

Who are your heroes in real life?
People who are governed by compassion, moral courage, and integrity.

What are your favorite names?
I like the name Rodrigo.

What is your greatest regret?
That I have been more self-absorbed at times.

How would you like to die?
By the ocean with the whisper of the waves beckoning me home or by the forest and birds are singing.

What is your motto?
Love is the strongest drug? It’s got to be from Goethe – “What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.”

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Preserving my humor and sanity or at least, a semblance of it. Let me bring to the dinner-table Ralph W. Emerson “to laugh often and much/to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children/to earn the appreciation of honest critics/and endure the betrayal of false friends/to appreciate beauty/to find the best in others/to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition/to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived/this is to have succeeded.

Woke up Again this Morning

Posted a poem I liked in college (Damn, I forgot the poet's name) and became some sort of a morning prayer for a while in FB but my senses may have not yet been fully awake, I realized I skipped some of the parts and there's no way of editing so I'm reposting it here.

Here's how you get out of bed:

You get out of bed like this - one foot at a time, one leg at a time, one life at a time, then you're up. But that's only the beginning.

Then you have to drag your whole godforsaken body out from the dead of the living into the light of the world.

Fuck it! I think I'll crawl under the covers and stay where I am.

Which does't mean I don't know how to get out of bed.

It's just like what I said - one foot at a time, one leg at a time, one life at a time. Then you're up. But that's only the beginning.

(doodle from www.stereotypist.livejournal.com)

The President's Choice

"The President's prerogative, " a haughty defense for the uproar and indignation caused by the latest list of persons to be conferred the prestigious title of National Artist. This chilled my frail bone and brought back hazy memories of "Dean's prerogative" everytime administrative decisions were met with outrage in UPTC where I was employed years ago.

This so-called prerogative of the highest authority, I can understand the how of it - how it's often used, in more brazen ways than one, and how gratifying it must be but the why of it, I should be enlightened. Is this part of the Social Contract where we entrust the "common good" to the sovereign? Is the sovereign capable of deciding for the common good, all the time? Is the Leviathan infallible and who is to police his thoughts and actions?

If the president chooses to use this power of having the prerogative, what is the point in installing a democratic exercise or a semblance of democratic process through a selection committee when in the end, the recommendations of the committee carry no substantive weight? It's a waste of resources. Might as well go by gut-feel.

The GMA administration is particularly notorious for bypassing the Committe on Apointments in some of its controversial appointees in the past so this is not particularly shocking - GMA soiling her hands, yet once again, in the area of culture and the arts. Naglilinamiri na gud la, nga kagwang.

I force myself to look at GMA on TV and not puke and I see a woman who is not only so at home with power but is so smug about it. She has flabbergasted me several times by her propensity to give tongue-lashings to government officials deemed inefficient with the cameras panning on her infuriated expression. Some landlords treat their slaves better. People with lesser virtue would curb their tongue and try to act properly even on pretense, but this woman who has been raised in wealth, had a president for a father, and a crook for a husband? shows no qualms parading to the world what her power provides and how she intends using it.

Some smartass texted GMA's fitting epitaph: Here lies.....and I find myself not disagreeing.

(photo courtesy of www.weheartit.com)

"The Book is Binukbok" (Emman Lacaba)

While I am about to embark on a McEwan exploration, a long time coming really, here's the Booker Prize contenders this year. Not a single book in the list made it to my reading achievements, so far. (woe to me!)

1. The Children's Book, AS Byatt (Chatto and Windus)

2. Summertime, JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker)

3. The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)

4. How to paint a dead man, Sarah Hall (Faber)

5. The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)

6. Me Cheeta, James Lever (Fourth Estate)

7. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)

8. The Glass Room, Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)

9. Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Ed O'Loughlin (Penguin - Ireland)

10.Heliopolis, James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)

11. Brooklyn, Colm Toibin (Viking)

12. Love and Summer, William Trevor (Viking)

13. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Virago)

Will Coetzee get his third? It's too much but that would be a treasured feather on the prized cap of a novelist who writes in studied restraint and whose sparse prose is devoid of sentimentality. Well, at least, the Coetzee of old. The numerical trend suggests something - his first came in 1983, then 14 years later in 1997, he scored his second with 'Disgrace'. Well, it's only 12 years from winning his last but it's 2009, he seems to be darn lucky on odd numbers.

Speaking of novels, how many have I started and not finished? Quite a few, just quite a few. One of the things I loathe about myself is the inability to let go, such a pussy. By page 8, one more less, gets a sense that this is a lousy novel - yawn, yawn and the best idea is to throw it and find something worthwhile. But since I am rather committed to it and harbor notions that who knows, by page 72, there will be an epiphany of sorts. Or a beautifully crafted sentence you wished you had written, an unexpected twist, a funny line that reminds you of someone, a phrase evoking memories, an anecdote so close to home. I end up feeling empty and detesting myself more for being kiss-ass to throw a novel away. It's a huge character flaw I have had major battles with - knowing and deciding to give up.

I wish I could wean myself from fiction a little bit. I have friends who I see happier chewing on the fat, so to speak, nourishing their souls with the fattier tissues of political economy, biographies, history, philosophy and I envy them. While here I am, still in fictionland. Some have even become condescending or maybe this is just paranoia on my part but you feel a prejudice-vibe. Somebody asked "what pleasure do you derive from fiction?" I could recite a litany but that would sound defensive.

Yes, I agree that after being familiar with a particular genre, the genre somehow loses its suspense. You can somehow predict the nuances or read into them but as a reader, there's comfort in the thought that you are actually capable of entrusting your imagination to a writer you hardly know. It's the masterful stroke of a writer to let you experience the agony of action until the last page, regardless if you know from the very start how stories usually end.

Fiction to me, feeds that archetypal vulnerability of monkeys swinging from tree to tree, demonstrating faith in their peers to catch them, no matter what. Story plots are trite, contrived, tired, rehashed but so is life. Life finds comfort in patterns and rituals, it's not really an exciting rollercoaster ride but even rollercoasters for the sake of debate, also follow certain patterns, don't they?

Fiction may not offer something new, in the strictest sense of the term. What is more important is having that attitude that you may have heard this already, done this, read about this, knew about this and yet there is something that you can cart away that either sustains or reaffirms your spirit.

And this is not me being defensive, guffaws. To that friend who asked what pleasure I derive from fiction, allow me to drag an ally in John Gardner whose books on crafting fiction are considered major references. He competenly defends "to write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that 1 out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or have some loved one dying....to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs.....to write as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged, to live on."

Thank you, Mr. Gardner. And to those who have lost their stomach for fiction, maybe you're reading the bad ones.

Farewell, President!

Somber - the national mood, a deluge of nostalgia for the gilded time in history when we felt as a people, we were more formidable than the sum of our parts; that with a clear vision, we could rise above ourselves. The aftermath - the tide swayed, giving room for man-made catastrophe to impose its way. But that’s not my story.

Tears found freedom to leak and flow as I watched the tributes for Pres. Aquino over the weekend. Most affecting was witnessing Teddy Boy Locsin’s uncontrollable display of grief. Used to have this huge crush on him and hearing him say that just by being in Pres. Cory’s presence made him feel noble made my heart constrict to a 30th degree.

Memory rush - my mother discussing national politics at the dinner table. Sophomore year, I wrote my first political manifesto supporting Cory’s call for civil disobedience which my mother typed in her office's rustic typewriter. If not for Cory, the political bug wouldn't have sucked my blood. Yes, she taught me the value of affirmative action. She opened my eyes to what extent political activism could achieve. Before I encountered Bell Hook, I already felt how to be changed by ideas was pure pleasure.

My bouts of crying I try to rationalize. Maybe I was crying for that highschool sophomore draped in youthful optimism and harboring romantic ideas of liberty. Where has she gone? Maybe, the crying was more a feeling of yearning for a generation that shed blood for freedom and stood proud, that era where political actions bore positive fruits. I remember feeling weary, drained, fatigued, following the national headlines but nevertheless hopeful and celebratory of the general tempo of those times. Now, national politics just make me nauseous. The leadership, plagued by questions of legitimacy and charges of corruption does not inspire pride.

For Pres. Cory, this poem by Goethe, one of my life-coaches:

SILENCE
Over all the hilltops
Silence,
Among all the treetops
You feel hardly
A breath moving.
The birds fall silent in the woods.
Simply wait! Soon
You too will be silent.

Good Morning, Sunshine

Woke up this morning and realized I need to find new geometries of desire, refreshing cartographies of fantasies. The ache in my back is miraculously gone, as if it never tormented me for a day or two, to begin with. What a normal, healthy body can alter the sky's hue, tweak worlds of possibilities, cajole the mind to take flight, unfettered by physical limits and man-made rules.

Thought about a novel I have been wanting to read to compliment this gem of a book about dogs that Ver gifted me (thanks, Ver!), engrossed me while staying horizontal to give my archaic back a rest. I realized I have not actually finished A. Huxley's "Brave New World" and I can't find my copy. Figured it might be a good dessert after Orwell's "1984." I vaguely remember the blurb about people indulging in sex and drugs but never falling in love - so decadent and attractive. So anti-intellectual. So me. Got to find the book.

A few weeks ago, had this conversation about labels and identities and stereotypes. A friend talked about his various advocacies - I am pro-this, pro-that. Told him, I wanted to preserve my mildly militant spirit and would stick to the 'anti' prefix rather than 'pro', just for the heck of it. So I declared, I am anti-intellectual/ism.

Facing the world isn't exactly my strongest suit, getting out of bed hurriedly, not my favorite occupation. But I get my stride after a quick reflection/prayer/whatever. Today, this poem spoke to me. Entitled "Being Boring" by Wendy Cope. Here's the last verse:

I don't go to parties.

Well, what are they for,

If you don't need to find a new lover?

You drink and you listen and drink a bit more

And you take the next day to recover.

Someone to stay home with was all my desire

And, now that I've found a safe mooring,

I've just one ambition in life: I aspire

To go on and on being boring.

Dancing to the Music

"This is fact not fiction/for the first time/in years" - DCFC, "Lack of Color"

I am not quite sure if it's my bulging eyes complaining or my tummy. Yes, I threw in the towel after months of tenacious stonewalling the more tenacious badgering of friends to join FB. This isn't exactly news - me and conformity.

Because I am a wimp, my fisherman's cap is in the ring of this Info-era's "word-community" where everybody tries to be Socratic in their dialogue and Sarte in their meta-philosopy. Even the 'inside jokes' I observed, are meta-jokes. Nostalgia galore. Buckets of inanity - me, gamely joining the pack. Typical, so typical.

Barely a week into it, it's like going to a circus, a grotesque one, and I bump into friendly creatures who in their best intentions, try to elevate the literary degradation of this social network to at least, Grade 6.

Truth to tell, I prefer the laidback spirit of FS, my original social network, where most of my transactions are still performed. With FB, it's more intense - the pressure to throw in your bits of prose. I tell myself, no one is poking a gun and forcing you to respond to revelatory testaments and outrageous pronunciamentos. Yeah, I shall not be engulfed into this time-sucking endeavor. There's Kafka, Proust, Mann, beckoning to be read in the luxury of a daytime bed than being strapped into the PC reading what so and so ate for breakfast or know their emotional hoo-ha.

Is the world becoming friendly - people loosening up, more open to declare what used to be guarded as private? Is this public display of emotions sincere or artificial, just like those detritus of reality TV jammed on us or Dr. Phil or Oprah, Lord have merci?

This onslaught of private sentiments finding their forum in social networks - is this the new face of fascism? The horrors, the horrors. And sadly, I am one of its eager participants. Shame, shame, shame.

(doodles from www.nougart.net)

Tenure Fight

Politics within academic institutions is usually fierce, savage, and parochial. Tenure of a faculty is hotly contested, political lines are drawn. One has to contend with the so-called administrative mindset - authority figures of simple intelligence who think and behave operationally, self-bound by the parameters of their power, shackled by the fascism of tribal animosities.

Details of Prof. Raymundo's case versus UP's Thought Police can be accessed from http://www.bulatlat.com/, among other websites. It is insinuated that her left-leaning politics does not score rapturously with some of her colleagues. Why, the logic escapes me.

I don't know Prof. Raymundo personally but I have seen her interview on TV once. Her plight is not removed from my own experiental context. To be a woman. To stand up for something.

I remember being questioned "what does it mean to be a woman?" Well, Marxist-feminists would be quick to posit that to be a woman is to be oppressed. And in a globablized capitalist system, to be a woman is to be twice oppressed. Personally, I am of the fervent belief that gender, per se, cannot be relied on as a basic unit of analysis since it is embedded in a broader power relations.

Make no mistake about this:I am not stereotyping women as hapless victims. That's not what I am saying. Grrrlll Power, yeah! Commodified by the mainstream media, rightly or wrongly, this drumbeating to celebrate women power has made concrete headways. What I am actually saying is that women have a rich revolutionary heritage - in the struggles for national independence and anti-imperialism, their participation cannot be discounted.

Prof. Raymundo is a magnificent testament to that. Unfortunately, UP's Thought Police, basking in the archaic glory of being the center of intellectual ferment, decrees her ilk has no room. So unfortunate.

(photo taken from www.bulatlat.com)

The Sea rises

"Miss Arruba," my monicker as a kid - sea-shampooed hair, sunbaked arms and scalp, the playing ground of a battallion of kuto.

On weekends, our landlords who were way into their 60s tagged us along with their grandchildren to their resthouse in White Beach. Social barrier was an alien concept.

The sea was a get-away, an unjealous friend you visited on weekends who embraced you with a spirited welcome, a worthy destination that always revived your spirit.

A while back, I went to the beach and found myself alone. It was midweek, is everyone employed except me? There was noise around the swimming pool area. I counted a few people taking dips.

The ocean is out there, just a few footsteps away. Some people take long roadtrips to get to the nearest beach and here you are, in the swimming pool. I don't get it. I am surely feeling my age. I don't understand young people sometimes.

You go to a beach resort and prefer the artificiality of a pool, chlorined water and all to the natural beauty of the ocean. Someone is missing the point and darn hell, it sure isn't me.

Game 7 splash

Victory, success, these are dangerous things to get heady about but I will savor this championship more than all the blood-diamonds in the world and will predictably regret ever writing this line tomorrow.

Throughout the championship series, SMB did not display its full champ-mettle until Game 7. I thought they played a bit shaken and stirred. Who wouldn't be? You have to give it to the Ginebra constituency, they certainly know how to express their partisanship. The roar of the crowd had a way of erasing SMB's competitive advantage and it was kind of infuriating at times to watch SMB getting sloppy and rattled. You sort of wanted to sponsor a ganja-fest just to be able to say "Relax. Here, puff some magic."

SMB's worst enemy is itself. Over the years, its game-culture has always been typified by class and finesse. I have no quibbles with that. But it has to harness its 'killer instinct' too. This is where SMB is weak. It cannot sniff blood and thrive on the aroma.

Tonight was different - tons of emotions and pride. SMB, most of the time, was able to seal spaces and forced Ginebra to take poor-percentage shots and baited to over-commit on Washington. Tough luck.

So, put this victory on my tab. I only resumed watching the PBA this conference. For SMB fans who were in a drought for 4 years, cheers!

Money Can't buy me Love

Today marks the anniversary of my resignation from work, which concretely translates to a year without earning a penny, becoming a bona fide lumpenproletariat in anyone's book.

This is not to parade my "suffering." I mean, woe to me! This is suffering? Tell that to the Palestininans. Try telling that to those in refugee camps.

There is dignity in destitution, I pep-talk. Money cannot buy happiness, I heard a rich kid's confession. Well, try giving part of your wealth to me and I shall show you delirium. Delirium, my friend. Not just plain, simple happiness.

A recent study conducted in Israel postulated that money can actually buy happiness and rarely will I agree to what Israel proclaims but to a certain degree, I agree. Money will afford me some of my guilty pleasures - body massage, CDs, DVDs, books, concert tickets, that dream farmhouse, an in-house chef, somebody on the payroll to read me bedtime stories, among other things. These are more than enough to make me deliriously happy.

In celebration of a failed economic system that glorifies money, let me post a stanza of John Updike's poem entitled, you guess it right, "Money":

It is freedom in action:
when you give a twenty-buck bill to the cabbie,
you don't tell him how to spend it.
He can blow it on coke, for all you care.
All you care about is your change.
No wonder the ex-Communists are dizzy.
In the old Soviet Union there was nothing to buy, nothing to spend.
It was freedom of a kind, but not our kind.
We need money, the dull electric thrill
when the automatic teller spits out the disposable receipt.
("Money" by John Updike, from Americana and Other Poems. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.)

(illustrations from www.exploding dog.com)

Writing in PigstyLE

It's not your fashionable moleskine but the self-adorned journal serves as a repository of idiotic rants and raves, some aimless ramblings, what-not. Scribblings not suitable for blogging. In his lunacy, the French dramatist A. Artaud is immortalized by this brilliant brush-off which I swallow with more than just a grain of salt: "All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes in their minds are pigs."

Ouch! Guilty as charged. Born in the Year of the Pig, I am a pig in Artaud's view. A pig twice over. Oink, oink.

Good thing Artaud didn't live in the era of writers and their piggy banks. What could he have said about writers and their fat writing contracts, sequels, tie-in movies, reading tours, etc.?

Could this be the real cause of the swine flu - horrendous writing, lousy bloging, and the whole shebang? Hence, I shall go back to my notebook of old.

Or I could start making money as a talkbacker for Israel, heaven defend! Israel's Foreign Ministry has earmarked roughly $150T to organize its internet warfare squad and shall privilege those with background in Political Science, Communications, and Law to post pro-Israel responses on various websites. The demise of dignity - how pathetic for Israel and those who will be joining this evil project. You cannot shroud the truth with your logistics. Most of all, you cannot buy respect.

It's easy to say Israel is a pig, ala Artaud but in respect to this lovable animal, I will not. There is no animal comparable to Israel, such an uncalled for insult to God's creatures, big and small. Israel is just, well, being Israel.

Neruda's Birthday

To strangers asking about my age, I sometimes share this trivia: 2 sublime events marked the year 1971 - my birth and Pablo Neruda being rewarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Seriously, Neruda made me understand that being a poet is not about wordcraft or making poems but a way to live - something started in my soul/fever or forgotten wings/and I made my own way/deciphering that fire. (Poetry) He armed me with the strongest excuse why I cannot write one decent poem despite my purest intention. With foolish pride, I declared to anyone who cared to listen that I may not be a poet in the literal sense of the term but I strive to be a poet by the way I interact with life. Can you hear this, Pablo?

In the beginning, I took him quite literally. I saw poetry everywhere - of cable wires hanging next to telephone wires I can glimpse from the front-window, of my mother's duster hanging beside my old shorts in the clothesline, of snobbish cats sitting repose in our backyard. Yes, there is poetry and there is poetry. And anyone who is nourished by poetry will surely relate to this joyous invitation Neruda extends generously because - I, infinitesimal being/drunk with the great starry void/likeness, image of mystery/felt myself a pure partof the abyss/I wheeled with the stars /my heart broke loose on the wind. Oh what freedom, what joy!

Today, in 1904, this beautiful human being to whom I owe a part of my freedom and joy was born. Picking a favorite among his obra is more difficult than an Algebra equation but in his honor, let me post "I Like for you to be Still." I am not sure I understand this poem in the context by which it has to be understood but I like the word "melancholy". So there.

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not touch you
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
And it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth
As all things are filled with my soul
You emerge from the things
Filled with my soul
You are like my soul
A butterfly of dream
And you are like the word: Melancholy

I like for you to be still
And you seem far away
It sounds as though you are lamenting
A butterfly cooing like a dove
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not reach you
Let me come to be still in your silence
And let me talk to you with your silence
That is bright as a lamp
Simple, as a ring
You are like the night
With its stillness and constellations
Your silence is that of a star
As remote and candid

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
Distant and full of sorrow
So you would’ve died
One word then,
One smile is enough
And I’m happy;
Happy that it’s not true

Alone Again, Naturally

"Take a sad song and make it better"
- Beatles, "Hey Jude"

A movie's final sequence convincingly portrays the protagonist conquering all odds and you leave the theater feeling triumphant over the victory of good versus evil. But you won't pay to watch the same movie again. Same with novels. Once you put them down, you don't find yourself reopening the pages. But with songs, the experience is intense to the point of being spiritual - soul, heart, and senses in one swoop and you find yourself repeatedly consuming the same songs whose representation have not diminished by time.

Two years ago, in the month of July, a 'debasement tape' of sorts to honor a friend's bleeding heart was carelessly prepared. 7 songs consisted that list:

1. Circle (Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians) - Being alone is the best way to be/When I'm by myself/ it's the best way to be/Everything is temporary anyways.

2. Fortress around your heart (Sting) - If I built this fortress/around your heart/encircled you in trenches/and barbed wire.

3. Fact and Fiction (Kristen Hall) – I’m weighing the fact and fiction/Diluting the truth with diction/and empty promises.

4. Fake Plastic Trees (Radiohead) – If I could be/who you wanted/all the time.

5. God Only Knows (The Beachboys) – If you should ever leave me/life would still go on/believe me/the world would show nothing to me/so what good/would living do me.

6. World Before Columbus (Suzanne Vega) – If your love/were taken from me/all the trees freeze/in the cold ground

7. Half A World Away (REM) – This could be the saddest dusk/I’ve ever seen…My hands are tied/my heart aches/I’m half a world away.

An updated list is in order, I decree. Senti.

1. I Eat Dinner (Rufus Wainwright) - No more candlelight/no more romance

2. Hand on your Heart (Jose Gonzales) - It's one thing to fall in love/but another to make it last/You know it's one thing to say you love me/but another to mean it from the heart.

3. To The End (Blur) - You and I collapsed in love/And it looks like/we might have made it.

4. Shattered Like (Rivermaya) - Have you been drinking/have you been messing up your life/as you did mine/not long ago

5. Clever as You (Sheila and the Insects) - I could have loved you more/but my heart/is not as clever as you.

6. Disarm (Smashing Pumpkins) - The bitterness of one who's left alone

7. The District Sleeps Alone Tonight (Postal Service) - And I am finally seeing/why I was the one/worth leaving.

8. One More try (Kuh Ledesma) -It really is quite tough/when love is not enough

9. Fragments of Forever (Nonoy Zuniga) - Now we're left with nothing more/thank God, there's still worth living for/than fragments of forever/we saved along the way

10. Country Feedback (REM) - You wear me out, you wear me out.

I'm tired of this. Get a life - memo to self.

Notes on Insanity

"When I find my peace of mind,
I"m gonna give you some of my good time"
- Red Hot Chilli Peppers, "Soul to Squeeze"

The infamous insanity journal, sheltering dark, furious thoughts, reflecting a frail fettle. Before I burn it or use as a tissue-substitute.

Writing some of those thoughts seemed fairly innocuous, most of the time. At times, you felt unsafe but at the end of the day, it was more perilous not writing them. Like the case of someone hitting the roof and wanting to punch walls. It's not helping your case or doing you any good but it was more harmful not to vent it out.

Writing is a form of prayer. I think Kafka beat me to this proclamation but I am no Kafka. No one is. No one will ever be. I used to maintain a notebook of personal prayers. Obviously, the presumption is that God is literate and does not only read in Arabic.

That notebook of prayers is just hiding somewhere in my mother's house. I am not too keen on revisiting, with the apprehension that I may no longer recognize the "I".

My struggle is not so much a question of faith as it is a debate with the Catholic Church and its pronunciamentos. The Ignatian Spirituality practiced by Jesuits is pretty clear on critical awareness, not blind faith. I take comfort from it.

Organized prayer is a struggle. As I shared in an earlier blog, my prayer life is characterized by departures and returns and with an adorable dog as a prayer-partner, we owe it to the good Lord to demonstrate variety somehow - a hymn today, a poem the next day, a clap exercise the day after next, till we run out of ideas. It's like giving a birthday card to a dear friend - shall I give a personalized one or should I just trust Hallmark to get my message across?

So I talk to my personal Jesus - You may not be pleased with what I am doing, substituting organized prayer with reading or writing or affectionate talks with Georgelablab or whatever it is I'm appropriating as expressions of workship. This is me reaching out with the purest intentions because yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

The mother of Baan's classmate whose older sister happens to be a classmate too at HIC, was recently diagnosed with cancer. Hear this: the medication costs 20 grand/day and will run for a year. Jesus of Nazareth, good Lord! My math falters.

In T. Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," a national tragedy befalls on Lima, Peru in 1714 when the said bridge collapsed, claiming the lives of 5 individuals. A Franciscan from northern Italy by the name of Brother Juniper, in a state of beleaguered grace, set out to make sense of this woeful event. Was it a sheer act of God? What was the common denominator among the 5 victims? Why were they chosen? Was it some sort of natural selection?

The bridge was built by the Incas in the 1600s at the time when brazen bidding practices were still unheard of. It was not of inferior quality and was in fact, a national landmark. Was the accident orchestrated by God? And why on that fateful day in July?

Every person who wanted me to imbibe their optimistic thoughts regarding my own battle with cancer were unanimous in declaring God's deliberate hand in my situation. They all enthused, "it's God's blessing." I try to carry this with me as I give formal and informal testimonials of this blessing disguised in tragedy.

Wilder employs a more accusatory tone, evoking agnostic insight, "to the gods, we are like flies boys kill on a summer day...that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed by the finger of God.'" (p.7)

This goes beyond simple faith, a faith demanding total submission, an absolute surrender of the value of human action, even free will. Who in his right mind would choose to be stricken with cancer? What God in His right frame of mind would brush His finger on ugly cancer cells and give them to His children?

When I was at the hospital, the Wise One shared V. Woolf's insightful description of illness -"how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed." Indeed. You travel without roadmaps, for long stretches with no end in sight. Your senses are twice alive - life, all of a sudden, becomes more urgent and yet time, becomes irrelevant. The tic-tac changes, an hour is a day, a week is a month and no one except you, keeps pace - the reckoning of one's mortality renders both freedom and repression.

There is solitude amidst the neighbor's loud radio, loudly thinking that this may be your last chance to hear that overplayed pop song but silently wishing you can endure all of these just to stay a litle longer on this planet. There are legitimate reasons to die but there are more excuses to live.

Yes, Virginia. You gain perspective. You find reaons to be grateful. You learn humility and grace of Hemingway's definition. You sanctify love and love what isn't beautiful and safe.

This is what I pray for my classmate's mother - sanctify love. Wilder's final sentence grips it firmly, "there is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." (p117)

Ai, gugma. So ancient but never out of fashion.

Beat It

Obviously, a CSI fan emailed me this. For all the money media reportage squeezed from the dignity of a dead celebrity, tongues will not cease wagging. Bring CSI to settle the matter and put all speculations to rest.

As the illustration suggests, MJ's heart could no longer take a beating one day more. When the heart gives up, in real life and in movies, a sense of dread and emptiness and an absence of purpose prevails.

Rest easy, all our dead brothers.

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Another message, this time an SMS from Fordy pricked a funny bone. I wasn't able to save it, so from memory, let me reconstruct it in Waray. The original text was incidentally in Tagalog.

Nanay: Upay-upaya gad it im katre.
Anak: Para ano? Magugubot man la gihap iton. Baga ka la hin nahigugma, tapos, masasakitan la.
Nanay: Char! Nag-emote an hubya.

Allusions. Hints and allegations. The state of our shared bed is a constant issue between my sister and I. My side gives an impression that it could have been slept in by an elephant and a cow and novels are my bedfellows so you can just imagine the chaos.

Lastly, my being "hubya". In my defense, I say that I was just born tired. As if I had a choice in the matter. As I said, I was born tired. So beat it.

May Saysay ang Buhay

In V. Frankl’s “Man and His Search for Meaning,” there’s an account of a father encouraging his 6-year old daughter to thank the Lord for curing her of measles. The daughter responded, “but wasn’t it God who gave me measles in the first place?”

At various points in my life, Frankl, proponent of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, silvered a few disconsolate nights and pulled me from the gulch of desolation. In psychology, there are 3 major conceptions of man’s primary motivational force: Freudian’s psychoanalysis centers on pleasure: Adlerian psychology emphasizes power; and Frankl’s logotherapy focuses on man’s groping for life’s meaning.

Informed by Nietzche’s existentialist thought, “he who has a WHY to live can bear with any HOW,” VF’s patented couch session style was to floor patients with the standard question: Why do you not commit suicide?

Why indeed, if we feel life is forbidding, stifling, why do we insist on surviving anyway? Variations of this trick question have helped me deal with self-doubts and self-hurt as well as counsel a few friends to slay their own demons, enthusing that the more devils we kill, the more we form angels.

Existentialists argue that surely, if there is a purpose for life, there ought to be a meaning for everything trapped with it – suffering, dying, etc. but is there truly a meaning, an ordered sense to the randomness of this world?

Existentialism is quite simple. The challenge it tosses for each of us is to seek that purpose and life will be superfine in a non-metaphorical sense - contentedly inhaling all the shit on this earth and calmly enduring all indignities.

A quasi-bible, I keep revisiting the pages highlighted in green marks (a folly of youth) whenever I need a rope to hang on to, staving off despair with philosophical oomph. After losing my mother rather unexpectedly, Frankl gave me a different perspective on my suffering mode that makes me less unsettled. There is meaning to our suffering, he reassures.

A week ago, I hinted parting with the book, thinking it has already served its purpose and another friend might be needing it more. Baan expressed her mild protestations. Only then did I discover – she too, leans on Frankl for enlightenment and drinks from his cup. Tough luck.

Our taste in literature differs. She, of the no-nonsense type buries her nose on medical journals, books on spirituality and psychology while my bedtime leisure is usually spent in fiction-land. Henceforth, the stuff we commonly savor are celebrated: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea,” the Anais Nin diaries, “Tuesdays with Morrie,” and YES magazine, to mention a few.

YES magazine may not lead us towards our purpose in life which could be quite an elusive pursuit to most of us really, but Jean Paul Sartre sways us to invent our own essence. Frankl, however, argues that our essence is not invented by us but by a Higher Being. Our only sweat is to unravel that essence.

As a whole, I cannot claim to fully internalize my 'essence' but parts of my anatomy, I know what they are for. For instance, my hands – they were made to make one man happy, ahoi!; my tongue for some gastro-carnal delight and moody lashings, my clavicle for that blatant body cue for mating and so on and so forth. Ole!

Frankl’s faith in humanity is nothing short of colossal. I think eminent writers/thinkers are those that bare the madness of the world, swerve our attention to the “unbearable lightness of being,” conceal their skepticism poorly and yet in the end, feed our soul with hope and pull us inches closer to this Supreme Being, this Central Force most of us conformingly label God.

Like that 6-year old finding irony in a God that allows unspeakable suffering yet at the same time, heals and comforts, I, too, quibble with His impotence, His indifference, His contradiction but relieved I am not in His shoes. Because according to G. Bataille “being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evil is unimaginable unless God willed them,” an obvious paraphrase of Epicurus lambasting that if this God cannot control evil because He cannot, He is impotent but if He can actually prevent evil and is just unwilling, He is malevolent.

Oh, to be culpable for everything – our misfortunes, our sorrow, our grief, our turmoil. To be ignored most of the time when everything is peachy. But I am exercising free will here, a gift some people consider overrated. I choose to be buddies with this God, maybe not the Abrahamic God or Job’s, but my God still, and share some occasional banters and healthy tirades.