Round and Round It Goes

“We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round” Joni Mitchell, “Circle Game”

Blogging encourages lazy writing which suits me fine. My writing could not be anything but sloppy-lazy.

There was a time when circumstances forced the writing to be rather serious and purposive. Being part of a political organization in college provided discipline and impetus to write manifestos and burador under time-pressure. For the uninitiated, a burador is a working draft on specific topics calendared for discussions. There was colossal pressure to craft substantive, coherent, and comprehensible arguments because as a leftist organization, attacks came from all quarters. At the very least, we had to be sensible.

First, there was a perception that we were trouble-rousers. Teachers warned their students not to join. A fraternity which shall be unnamed dissuaded its recruits to even go near our “tambayan.” Students whom we wished to recruit were either apathetic or wary, can’t blame them. We were not exactly exemplars for academic excellence, a big deal for most students, but we strived to be riveting in our discourse. Most students didn’t want to cavort with us but at least, we pushed them away from their safe zones.

When I became a teacher myself, I could tell them apart – the activist and the regular student. Exercising prudent objectivity, let me just say that students who were politically involved may not have been the most academically-gifted but their sublime intelligence radiated and was more pronounced inside the classroom – they were surer of themselves, selfless and engaging in discourse, less morally enthusiastic, unafraid of discordant voices. They enlivened the class and kept me on my toes and to a certain extent, vivified their classmates.

I don’t know, maybe those students mirrored a younger, cockier version of myself. Maybe you have to be a college instructor to appreciate the value of such minds. There is nothing more that could drive instructors to contemplate suicide than to be confined in a quasi-deaf-and-mute class because the students are too timid or docile or indifferent.

In college, fresh from the boondocks of HIC and dogged by naivety, fascinating people were a throng in the activist circle – females who blew smoke heavier than a chimney who I might have described when I was still sugar-and-shit as “girls with unbridled passion who threw away their chastity belts in bold defiance” but now that I’m all-shit (minus the sugar), let me reconstruct it this way: women whose spirit was not of this world. Yet I never felt alien in their company.

The guys, some of them, have to be constantly reminded of hygiene but their journals had heartfelt scrawling of bittersweet poetry. Their articulations of an alternate universe could make a giddy girl’s panty wet, ooppps! How come I never got fatally attracted to any of them? Tsk….

It was a great time to get your bearings. I mean, the general idea of college is to enter adulthood and whether you are involved in any form of activism or not is not for me to pass judgment. The savagely romantic idea of being persecuted, pigeonholed, and misunderstood made the whole college experience enriching for me, I guess.

Those were starving days, oh boy. But no one can accuse us of being malnourished in philosophy. We mentored one another – a lot of book-swapping, exchange of musical heroes, sharing of writing concepts, criticizing one another’s works-in-progress, endorsements of Buddhism and existentialism.

The friendship I cultivated from that wellspring is quite special. Time and space set us apart. Some pursued their revolutionary calling. Some became boringly conservative like myself. Some joined the Establishment and defend the status quo.

At the end of the day, the cause never leaves you, truth be told. You may turn your back from it but like some ensnaring pain or stubborn virus, it never goes away.