Beginnings

About some new things, change, and The Sandman

"What’s the name of the word for things not being the same always. You know. I’m sure there is one. Isn’t there? There must be a word for it… The thing that lets you know time is happening. Is there a word?"
–Delirium to her brother Dream, Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman

I had promised myself that this weekend I’m finally going to update this blog. It was impossible over the past couple of weeks, given my new full-time teaching load (twelve units, or four classes). I go to school everyday now. But this morning I woke up with the delighted, single-minded thought that It’s a Saturday!, and moreover, that It’s MY Saturday! Right: The ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for life and its endless cycle of endings and beginnings.

For the first time in years, I remember how to appreciate weekends. I used to have a dreary Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five office job back when I used to live in New Jersey. I had lived for weekends then. But when I returned to Manila and worked in the academe on a part-time basis, weekends sort of lost their specialness. I usually had Tuesdays and Thursdays off in addition to weekends. I taught six hours of philosophy in a week, and the rest of the time was mine. Of course, the downside was I only earned enough money to cover my expenses. And then I could only usually hang out with some friends on Saturdays, since they were busy the rest of the time.

Now, here I am, on my fourth year as a professor of philosophy at my old alma mater, with a new appointment to full-time status and its concomitant 40-hour workweek. It feels like a clean, comfortable place to start anew, like the good, "normal" adult I am going to be.

It’s refreshing, especially because over the past year, there seem to have been more endings than beginnings. Below: Death of The Endless, from Neil Gaiman's graphic novel series The Sandman. The ankh is her signature accessory, worn in a chain around her neck. This image first appears in the historic issue no. 8 entitled "The Sound of Her Wings."


* * * *

This term I’m handling a class of engineering majors, whom I meet three times a week at the fifth floor of the elevator-less Velasco Hall. Now, I’m the sort who’d take the lift up to the second floor if I can help it. But since the engineers haven’t built an elevator yet in their building, I’m forced to take the stairs.

By the time I get to class, I’d be scrambling for remnants of poise in between ragged breaths, typically while apologizing for my lateness. It’s the high heels. I mean, how fast can you walk in two-inch stilts? And these are my short high heels. I guess I can forget about wearing my high high heels. Maybe I ought to declare Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays as jeans-and-rubber-shoes days.

Except I have to buy a pair of rubber shoes. They just don’t go with anything I own. That’s it! Owing to my new Velasco room assignment, I will overhaul my entire wardrobe. I will be the grungy, backpack-carrying, slippers-wearing, be-jeaned professor. Maybe I’ll even throw in a cap just to complete the look.

Yeah right. ;-)

* * * *

What else is new? Well, there's Bro. Andrew Hall, whose construction was recently completed in time for the influx of this year’s freshmen. It’s supposed to be the freshman building, a sort of high-rise (with more than twenty floors), with its own canteen, viewing and conference rooms, and library. It fronts the Sports Complex, which houses parking lots, gyms, and an Olympic-size pool. Both buildings are on the edge of campus, farther away even than “Planet Gokongwei,” said to be the self-contained world of computer science students.

My friend Bebs, who teaches classes at Andrew Hall, wondered if the building were earthquake-proof–especially in light of what has happened in Indonesia. And Natty remarked that campuses are supposed to have a sprawling layout, not edifices that shoot skyward. It’s not like we’re in Singapore, which is so tiny all their buildings have to be really tall. Then again, DLSU-Manila is also so small, I probably bump into the same person three or four times a day. A high-rise would indeed conserve limited campus space. But what if there was a fire, for example, and your classroom was all the way up on the 18th floor? You’d be rushing to the stairs along with five thousand other freshmen. Not a sanguine scenario.

Right: The main entrance of the new building opens out into Taft Avenue.









Left: The hotel-like lobby. If you walk through the hall toward the back entrance, just across the street you will see the Sports Complex, the building where I usually park.




Right: Sideview of Bro. Andrew Hall, the building on the right, across the street from the Sports Complex and the Science and Technology Research Center. Just a few blocks away (out of camera range) is the Gokongwei Building.

There's also the matter of overcrowding at the bank of elevators. There are five elevators in all, one reserved for faculty use. But given the sheer number of classes held at Andrew Hall, my fellow teachers report that it takes a minimum of 30 minutes to get to your destination, whether you’re going up or down. You’re lucky if you're only headed to the second or third floor; then you could take stairs. But most of the classrooms are in the tenth floor or higher. Below: A typical scene.

I guess I’m lucky I wasn’t given a freshman class this term. But eventually I expect I’d be assigned a room in this new building. I should be only too happy with Velasco.

* * * *

Another thing that’s new these days is my group of lunchmates in philosophy. Bebs, James, and Dennis were my classmates in graduate school who recently got their M.A,’s, or are working on their Ph.D.’s. They’re my peer group. It’s a nice change being with them; I can be as wide-eyed and foolish as I want. With my older friends—whom I love dearly and who don’t need to be told this—sometimes I’m the proverbial butt of jokes. From their perspective, even secretly twisted old me can be thought of as, shall we say, relatively innocent. I like hanging out with the thirty- or forty- or even fifty-somethings, all of whom were my professors, some of whom have become my close friends. Conversations with them are just… different, like peeking out at life through a larger window, which I wouldn’t have reached if they hadn’t hoisted me on their shoulders. Below: The junior faculty of the Philosophy Department. L-R: Bebs, Dennis, me, and James.

For most of my first few years of teaching, I was the youngest at the department, and have had friends who always seemed to be several steps ahead of me. If we were The Endless, I’d have been Delirium, the perpetual child. Now I’m no longer the youngest, and there are other “kids” to play with. It’s great.

* * * *

Speaking of Delirium, I recently finished volume 7 (Brief Lives) of the collected issues of The Sandman, as part of an ongoing reread for a philosophical paper. In an interview with Hy Bender, author of The Sandman Companion, Neil Gaiman remarked, “I like the fact that these days I’m getting fan mail from people who read Sandman when they were seventeen, and now they’re going back and rereading it in their late twenties and discovering it’s a completely different story, and getting all the stuff they didn’t get out of it the first time.” This description perfectly applies to me. I first came across The Sandman through my friend G., who is The. Ultimate. Sandman. Fan. If we were still hanging out as often as we used to, he’d probably laugh uproariously at the irony of this; how I used to say, for example, that I couldn’t get Delirium because she was such a dizzy character (and those tattered fishnet stockings, eeew). How I used to raise my eyebrows nonchalantly at the comics he raved about. He’d pick out stories for me to read, show me pages and panels he found remarkable. I’d go, Oh. Okay. Uh-huh. That’s nice. (In retrospect, thanks, G.!)

I’m pretty sure I appreciated these things, on some level, back then. Certainly I read everything he foisted on me.

Left: Delirium of The Endless, my Shadow—or everything that's the opposite of me. Surprisingly, I now find her very endearing. Does this mean I am moving toward greater integration?

Now I’m rereading the series, and so many philosophical things jump out at me that I missed the first time. I wonder what this says about me. Was I so empty in college, and have simply changed so much? Whatever the reason, I’m into everything Sandman these days, incorporating some aspects of the series in my lectures and getting my students to read Preludes & Nocturnes (the first volume). It’s my latest project. I’ve been meaning to write about some of my “findings” here, but I’m still in the midst of reading and researching. I’m thinking C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, a little Parmenides and Heraclitus, some Buddhism, and lots and lots of metaphysics and epistemology. Some of it’s been done before; it’s not a new research topic, really. Other academics have gone and ruined The Sandman for everyone. But I have to have an outlet for this new mania, somehow.

Anyway, I quoted Brief Lives at the start of this entry about “beginnings.” As you may have already anticipated, Dream’s answer to Delirium’s question is “change.” Change is the painful and often unwelcome precondition to any new beginning. The story arc of volume 7 encompasses Dream and Delirium’s search for their missing brother, Destruction. The latter is the embodiment of change or upheaval, and he has decided to abandon his realm. We follow Dream and Delirium’s journey through some seven or eight issues, as they look all over the mortal world for clues about Destruction’s whereabouts. The collection is entitled Brief Lives because we learn that any being that has a beginning has an ending—even, strangely enough, so-called “immortals,” or members of The Endless themselves!

Interestingly, in Buddhism, change or impermanence is the first of the Three Dharma Seals (or three main teachings), the other two being the non-self and nirvana. Meanwhile, an ancient Greek philosopher named Heraclitus declared that flux or change is the essence of reality. Hence for Heraclitus, the fundamental stuff of the universe is fire, the ultimate metaphor for change. I love Brief Lives—my favorite volume so far, more than Season of Mists, the crowd favorite—because it’s about the truth of change.

I’d even go as far as to say that nothing is truer.

These days anyway.

But that could change. ;-)

This ends this week’s epistle. On to new beginnings.

Below: With my friend Mike, after our "photo shoot" at Bro. Andrew Hall.