About the writing

All week long, I’ve been waiting for this moment, uncertain about when it will arrive. I’ve been sick and still have lingering coughing fits; and while I was down, my to-do (for others) pile steadily accumulated. I still haven’t touched the hill of documents sitting accusingly to the left of my laptop as I type, or the dishes languishing in the sink. They can wait. This moment and the next few hours—as long as it takes—is mine, for the writing.

Right: Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf called this essential mental space “a room of one’s own.” I’ve had it all my life, but it’s only now that I am truly beginning to appreciate it. Perhaps it’s because I’m in a place where I can “indulge” my fascination for the craft of writing, throw time and energy and money behind a vision whose raw parts are just coalescing. For example, I’ve never had so many ideas, not even while I was a graduate student in philosophy. I realize now that I’ve been looking for the medium that would help me think and see best.

I like to think that, finally, I am face-to-face with the love that had eluded me forever. And it came to me in an unexpected form: Not as that capable and intelligent guy with the blade of a nose, who will compensate for my lack of a discernible nose bridge to pass on to the inquisitive daughter we are going to have. It came to me in the form of a darkness, a heaviness—a non-form, really—whose incredible weight I started feeling last year, as I was nearing my 28^th birthday, the age Mom was when she married my dad and then had me less than a year later. The age when the most important thing in your life is supposed to start happening. But all I could see then was a small life and a small self.

I don’t know exactly how things turned around. Perhaps it was all the traveling last year, a season of defamiliarity, which forced me to see the big picture in the mind’s eye, as in an inverted telescope. I guess when the Self is growing, the shifting of boundaries exceeds the shutter speed of memory. Many of my close friends have new babies whom they photograph almost daily, trying to capture all that will be lost forever. I hope one day to feel that too, a kind of long-distance running of the soul, before the presence of a precious Other. But one can also have a kind of baby inside oneself, something that is not you either, the unknown factor that makes life worth living, gestating while you are gathering the words. Some have unwritten novels waiting to be born. While rocking her mewling infant, who was fresh from a crying fit, my best friend asked me rhetorically, “Oh no, Les, how will you ever find the time to write once you get one of these?” In retrospect, I could’ve answered, I already have one. And I can only deal with one big thing at a time.

This is my privilege, often taken for granted—the room of my own. Now I wonder why I had stayed out of it for too long.

—oOo—

Earlier this week, I went to Mall of Asia to pick up a few things. Several evenings later, I’d be back in the same place and in a more relational mood, with my two other best friends, interrupting our dinner and chatter to watch the fireworks through the glass window. I love the ocean—and the requisite sunset—in many ways: by myself, with another, or with a group. This week I realized just how much I can enjoy it the first way.

I remember that fading afternoon, sitting at a table with a view of the bay, before a two-mile stretch of restaurants near the breakfront. The breeze was making passionate love to my hair, loose and much too long now, in a dance they choreograph anew whenever I’m out in the open. I watched as the last brave brightness of sun shattered in the waters, the thousand and one pieces of a broken mirror. Why does it always hurt to look? To look inside oneself and endure the silent movie that is this sunset, whose flames of orange and bruises of indigo are best appreciated without commentary, a down-going you cannot speak of to another, until there is suddenly only a gentle evening.

On the way home, I remained in a philosophical mood. I drove through the cramped streets of Manila and paused at an intersection, watching the motorists ahead of me run the red light for a good five seconds. After awhile I noticed the grimy man sitting along the meridian and leaning against a lamppost, staring at me—accusingly, I imagined. He must’ve seen me tap away the beggar boy who’d leaned against my newly-washed car window, leaving behind imprints of his breath and cupped palms. The world is full of people who have nowhere to stay and nowhere to go. I suddenly recalled the previous night’s news report about another squatters’ area being demolished nearby.

The light changed and I proceeded through the smog-filled bowels of the city. Each pile of uncollected garbage, each sewage hole missing a lid told the story of corruption, as old as the betrayal of the people’s revolution more than a century ago. I thought of the multitudes, many of them from the educated class, who have already left. I realized then why it hits me so forcefully sometimes—more frequently nowadays—how I want to leave as well. But it’s a decision I always postpone, waiting for events to will me to it, in the classic manner of Sartrean bad faith. I can’t seem to find my true place. Maybe all Filipinos are lost the moment they were born, carrying around the out-of-placeness in their hearts, like shanties you dismantle today but are rebuilt the very next day. Squatters at heart, are we?

An essay about flight and finding one’s place first drew me to the work of Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas, who wrote the essay “Flying over Kansas.” As she was growing up, her family shuttled back and forth between Southern Philippines and different places in the American Midwest, wherever the work of her parents—the famous Filipino writing couple Edith and Edilberto Tiempo—took them. Kansas is the “heartland” itself, being at the literal dead center of the US. Below: Kansas by Dusty Davis.

I was actually there twice last year, to see a friend who had left the Philippines and never looked back. During those visits, I realized I would die if I had to live so far from the ocean, an irrational thought as I don’t even know how to swim. Paradoxically, my fear of being landlocked is my mild claustrophobia writ large on Kansas’ endless plains. Even my skin protested violently; I had rashes on my cheeks the whole time I was in Topeka. I much prefer the east coast, even though it’s colder there, probably because I need a teeming city of family and friends. It’s home for everyone else I know in North America, and the closest I can get to the bustle of Manila. We leave places only to look for them elsewhere, which makes me wonder if it’s not so much a country we are looking for as a lost language of our being.

The place I’ve learned to be at home in is the zone of no-country, the airspace of no-time. Rowena put it into words, this quiet epiphany borne of my fifteen plane rides last year. In her collection of essays, she talks about so many things that resonate with my own experiences. All these magical places in her writing, I’ve marked with Post-It flags, as I do with beautiful books I actually talk to—Yes. That’s it. Thank you! But the part that told me she is my kind of writer is were she talks about her “afternoon graynesses,” symbolized by the metaphorical handkerchief into which her godfather has put the young Rowena’s bad mood. Then he promised her he would drop the handkerchief out of his window as he flew over Kansas.

.... As I grew older I learned that the bad feeling, the one that hurt inside, that was in my head but not a headache, had its own healing; it was nothingness and all things, it was a stranger with my face who turned away... and was also a cold and shining instrument that I had to learn to use rightly, that I could hurt with or hurt myself using. It was I that sought out the afternoon graynesses, and gave them a sort of a name.

Flying over Kansas, on my way to take up a writing fellowship at the University of Iowa, where my parents had their own first start in writing, I know that the handkerchief’s still there, blowing in that stratum between the earth and the sky that is finally the mind’s own territory. Gray wonder of words caught up in its four corners, that part of what I am that is most breakable and also most indestructible, flattening in the sharp air, disappearing behind the dreaded cloudbanks, lifting and being lifted, always there.

Rowena asked me, in an email, “Did you catch hold of that handkerchief Ninong Garcia dropped into the air over Kansas, that contains the melancholic mystery of the origins of my urge to write?” And I told her that I just loved that metaphor, that it was wonderful to realize that I wasn’t alone in experiencing this fundamental aloneness.

Earlier this week I had written her and introduced myself as an admirer of her work. I asked if I could write a short biographical sketch of her, for my Creative Non-Fiction class with Dr. Marj—but really, mostly for me. I never would have thought I’d find the courage to do it, until Dr. Marj surprised me by introducing me (in writing) to Rowena! By doing so, she gave me the chance to work on my dream assignment. So we’ve been emailing, and I already know that this writing project will change me.

Even though I’ve been in the Creative Writing program for five terms now, during the first year the words would hardly come. I realize now that I was waiting for the fitting end to a story that began around the end of 2006, a season of looking for myself in another. I mentioned this observation to Dr. Marj, over coffee some days ago. Now I realize I could only have recounted that story because it was complete. The main characters have entered the realm of fiction, which is to say the narrative of memory: the self that is no longer me now, the storyteller; and the other whom I had smiled and waved at just this week, because it felt like nothing, and it is. Now. Finally, I can leave this unwritten story behind. As on clear nights we can see the false history of dead stars, so too can we tell the tale of one who no longer exists: the ex-self.

I can hardly contain it, the urge for flight—the flight of words, over “the mind’s own territory.”

—oOo—

Some pictures taken at Mall of Asia: (1) Sunset, 1 Feb. 2007, (2-5) Maricar and me, (6) Mitch and Maricar.