Love in Chains

Earlier I checked the writer's almanac - Jean Jacques Rousseau was born yesterday 3 centuries ago. Rousseau ushered in the Age of Romanticism and the irony was not lost on me - my friend L whom I could not prod to take the leap of faith for one reason or another, crushing her romantic efferverscence and R's Social Contract declaration of "man being born free but everywhere, is in chains" and realizing in this situation, I was part of the chain-gang. Touche.

No chants of Liberte for a friend but over in Iran, some liberties are being compromised, some chants muted. Four national football players wearing green badges during an international match were allegedly booted out, the fate of 2 others, undetermined.

One cannot take a pulse of Iran's political climate without a full grasp of its history and culture so I will not sink my crooked teeth into it. It just occured to me that the first foreigner I met was Nabee, an Iranian student who temporarily lived obliquely across our residencia in Santan St. My father was chummy with him but I never understood their conversations.

An early riser as a kid, I would go to Mano Titing's as a pre-breakfast ritual. Mano Titing, bless him, stood as a surrogate grandfather as my biological ones were in Bohol, was convincing me forever to study archery with him as a teacher but his household stock of Tagalog comics kept me glued to the sofa.

Once I was done with the morning's chitchat, I would go next door to watch Nabee perform his routine in a pole vault he installed in his backyard, back on those pre-gated days when it was easy to trespass on other people's property. A silent spectator, my presence didn't make him self-conscious at all. We would exchange pleasantries after he's through with his regimen as I struggled with my English.

I wonder where he is now or if he is still alive. Could he be joining the demos? In honor of this childhood memory, I am posting some favorite verses of "The Sound of Water's Footsteps," one of the longest poems I ever encountered by Sohrab Sepehri, whose birthday falls a day after mine, as if the connection matters. He is a notable Persian painter and poet whose work is considered 'New Poetry.'

I joined the party of the World:
I visited the field of grief,
The garden of mysticism,
The lighted veranda of knowledge.
I climbed up the stairs of religion.
To the end of the alleyway of doubt,
To the cool air of independence,
To the wet night of compassion.
I went to meet someone on the other end of love.
I walked, I walked toward a woman,
Toward the light of pleasure,
Toward the silence of desire,
Toward the sound of the wing of loneliness.

I saw people. I saw cities.
I saw fields, mountains.
I saw water, I saw earth.
I saw Light and Darkness.
And I saw the foliage in Light,
and I saw the foliage in Darkness.
And I saw humanity in Light,
and I saw humanity in Darkness.

No matter where I am,
Sky is mine.
The window, thought, air, love, earth is mine.

Let us go to the seashore,
Spread the net on the water,
Catch freshness out of the water.
Pick up a pebble from the ground
And feel the weight of being.

(doodles from www.xkcd.com)

Insanity, It Seemed

“Do you have the time
To listen to me whine?” - Green Day, “Basketcase”

2008 was rather a bastard of a year – cancer made a splashing comeback to my otherwise sprightly existence and more likely, this dabbed napalm on my mother’s heart that pronounced her dead one regular day in October.

For a while, the world screeched to a halt – there’s a panic of the senses, terror at a dreary future, paranoia about being the crux to the dimming of spark of everyone in your magic circle. The mountain of guilt perched on my shoulder is what Ben Okri calls “unfinished weeping,” my own Calvary of sadness that seeks but never finds settlement, a home to rest - forces me to be tough beyond my wildest imagination.

I kicked my mother to her grave, depriving my siblings the comfort of her presence. It’s a bitter pill and no matter how I rebuff myself that I am not God, that I am just a slave to this Supreme Being, this guilt-trip won’t reach its shore for a while.

No one needs to understand my point, I just had to let it out. Finally, I had the guts to revisit what I call my “insanity journal,” recorded at a time my morale needed babysitting. Being sick and physically weak alters one’s sense of self and my scribbling a good part of last year was astonishingly dark and lonely, gibberish at most times. I could hardly decipher my handwriting as I was too weak to even write.

I leafed through my older journals. The writing was gibberish still as if feverishly drunk but those notebooks were adorned with comic strips, lyrics, poems, cut-outs of horoscope and war pictures, cards, snapshots of my favorite musicians and players, drawings done by cousins and friends, concert tickets, what-have-you. Colors screamed from the pages.

The “insanity journal” however is a sad documentation. I cringed just reading the entries on the anniversary of my long confinement. Here’s what I am talking about:

Entry 1: Sleep is a commodity I cannot buy. How could it be elusive?

Entry 2: A symphony of dog barks from several blocks away provides me company.

Entry 3: I am staring at nothing in particular. I just want to close my eyes. My thoughts stray but not too far.

Entry 4: Plan for the day: fold dried clothes.

Entry 5: It’s about to rain. I hear the roaring thunder. I love the sound of raindrops.

Entry 6: A week without mishap, just the general feeling of harmony, of being in harmony with the world. I wish for a kinder world – less cruel and brutal for our chidren. It’s still raining.

Entry 7: Georgelablab is terrified of thunder, hides under the sofa and only comes out when it’s all quite.

Entry 8: I feel weak today, not been eating very well. Terrible taste buds.

Entry 9: Two days wedded to the bed – nagging cough. Just spend the hours coughing, terrible.

Entry 10: Today’s a Friday. It means we’ll be complete for lunch tomorrow.

Reading these entries again tempts me to pick a match and set the “insanity journal” on fire. If only I could disavow ever writing this crap and drink some liquid-poison.

Bastard of a writing, sonofabitch.

The Boy with a Thorn on his Side

"I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does" The Smiths, "How Soon is Now?"

In college, straight from the boisterous loose-ends of a PolSci class, Literature hour beckoned. Two buzzwords I learned: “stream of consciousness” and “tragic flaw.”

Traipsing between the two fields enabled me to experience a slight paradigm shift in character-treatment. In PolSci, no political actor is sui generis. There is a remarkable absence of personal autonomy and the focal point is how events and outcomes are swayed by a much-looming political synergy. In other words, the individual is rendered insignificant.

In fact, in the big picture, there is no individual as a unit, as an entity, as a reality. Super-villains are not persons but institutions, a prevailing belief and value system, a powerful economic minority. The theoretical language of the Left harps on collective action and class struggle – always persons in the plural.

In Lit, the individual is an imposing figure, not a product of myth. The individual is so much alive, charting his own path, building his own legend, conquering history. It was such a breath of fresh air.

Peeking into “stream of consciousness,” my limited grasp of dialectics proved to be a reliable guidepost. KM provides one of the plausible explanations of consciousness-formation: “It’s not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, rather, it’s their social existence that determines their consciousness.” It was quite a smooth ride.

However, when the professor started discussing “tragic flaw,” I plummeted into the pits of ignorance. Before that, I considered flaws endearing, even cute, but never tragic. The people I think the world of are highly flawed human beings and without anyone sermoning me on this valuable point, I have always embraced flaws more than semblances of perfection.

I go to a house with no clutter, nothing is out of place, not a speck of dust is evident, so Lysol-clean and I get dizzy. I enter a house stinking of cat-shit and dog-urine and I find it cozy and welcoming. (It’s our house I’m describing, actually).

So upon encountering the concept of “tragic flaw” for the first time, I was dumbfounded. For one, my familiarization with Greek tragedy was/is limited, my knowledge of Shakespeare was/is anemic. You hazard a guess – too much greed? Loving too much? Loving too little? Being born poor? Being impotent? The prof would vigorously nod his head in feigned annoyance. Who was exasperating who?

The elusive answers? The prof volunteered that the tragic flaw of Oedipus Rex was his obsession of the truth, his wanting to know everything. Hamlet’s was his failure to forget, his belief that everything fits and means something.

Ho-hum. What about falling in love with their mothers? I just don’t get the whole concept. What was Samson’s tragic flaw if not Delilah? What was John the Baptist if not Salome? What was Judas’? Christ’s?

At 17, “tragic flaw” was a canonical idea I wished to repudiate because my answers would always fall short and the mighty prof always had the last word. Why were we not simply told that “tragic flaw” is attendant to our mortality, our powerlessness, that it’s because we are not God?

Obviously, “tragic flaw” is a normative, not a descriptive concept. Wanting to know everything is a tragic flaw? Unable to forget is a tragic flaw? Sounds like a recipe concocted by the Washington consensus.

Normative rules are determined by power relations, here we go again (ho-hum) but convince me otherwise. Those with power dictate what is right and legal, are you blind? Those with power besiege the weak with fanciful ideas that “knowing and not forgetting” is a tragic flaw, God forbid. That’s exactly the fear of oppressive and evil imperialists – the political awakening of the powerless.

Ignorance and amnesia, that’s what exploiters and oppressors would want to inflict on the oppressed using all legal means, the educational system, in this instance. Make no mistake about this: education is empowering and subversive in itself, for as long as it encourages critical thinking and dialogue.

Going back to “tragic flaw,” I reflect on my own. Wishing happiness on everyone, that’s one among a thousand. First, it’s just not possible. Second, it’s just not fair. People who cause so much distress and misery shouldn’t have any right to be happy for a duration, if I were to decree.

No, we’re not talking about imperialists this time. I mean, the adorable boy who promised you the moon, the lovable boy who promised to buy the stars for you, Petra.

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.