Dragonfly in Amber

Moving to Wordpress

2010-01-27T12:56:00.001+08:00

Hi friends! For the nth time, I'm relocating: http://bluemoonhuntress.wordpress.com/. Thanks. :)

Remembering The Smurfs

2009-11-27T17:51:00.000+08:00

A random memory, of watching all those Smurfs episodes when I was very young. I was in kindergarten, I think, and my mom would tape the show while we were watching it on TV. Afterward, she'd send me off to bed--bedtime then was 7 pm. The following day, after school, I'd head straight to the TV and watch the tape of the previous evening's episode. That was how much I loved it.

The smurfs are little blue men (and one woman, Smurfette--of the diminutive suffix that feminists don't like) who live in a village of mushroom houses. They live under the tutelage of a wise old man, Papa Smurf. I don't know what's become of Mama Smurf. Their oppressor is a shabby, balding sorcerer named Gargamel, who owns a cat named Azreal. Gargamel keeps fantasizing about eating the smurfs, but never actually succeeds in holding onto them long enough to cook them. There's always a rescue even when some blue bodies are already immersed in a pot of water, sprinkled with herbs and all. The smurfs are named after their unique traits or abilities: E.g. Brainy Smurf, Greedy Smurf, Clumsy Smurf, Handy Smurf, and so on.

Eventually, I was introduced to the cartoons aimed at older kids: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Captain Planet, X-Men. Then of course, every Sunday, before my family and I would hear mass at Don Bosco Church in Makati, my dad would take me to the video rental store beside the church. There I would select a Betamax tape to watch for the week, a Disney movie, usually. I think I kept borrowing 101 Dalmatians. And The Labyrinth, an '80s film with David Bowie in it as the malevolent wizard who abducts the heroine's baby brother.

But The Smurfs will forever be the definitive show of my childhood. The backdrop appealed to me: The lush green village, the woods. The magic. Each story is a moral tale, teaching us about the pleasures and pains of co-existing with others, the risks and rewards of adventure, the reality of evil, the accomplishments of love. Each Smurf represented a facet of the childlike/childish person, which I think is why the series appealed so much to me then. Like these vulnerable yet intrepid little creatures, I wanted what I wanted, and would test the limits of what the world would yield to my will.

I don't know why I suddenly remembered The Smurfs tonight. I love it when I retrieve a cherished childhood memory. It reminds me of those old delights, back when my world was so different, and I was a completely different person with different concerns. My mom was an all-powerful being. My sister didn't exist yet. And my dad would come home in the evenings, in time for dinner, after spending his time at the office. I remember how I loved stories then; my parents--Dad, usually--would tell me tales each night. He included sound effects (of thunder, that is) in his rendition of the tale of Pinya, the girl who turned into a pineapple because she was too lazy to look for her mother's lost needle. Eventually, my hunger for stories gave my parents the idea to tape their voices. Soon, I was listening to Dad's or Mom's narration of "The Three Little Pigs" and "Little Red Riding Hood" in my walkman. I remember I even recorded the story of Goldilocks myself. I wish I knew where we kept those old cassette tapes, so I could hear my child's voice describing Goldilocks' wild curiosity inside the bears' house.

This reminds me of one of the things people debate about in philosophy, which is the enduring self. Philosophers love puzzles, and what could be more puzzling than my sense of me? The farther back in time I remember--perhaps adding things that weren't there, in the original experience--the less I think of these things as having happened to me. Who was that very young girl who so loved cartoons and fairy tales, who had an almost omnipotent sense of self, who walked around calling other kids "bata" and who'd (literally) look up to adults, who towered over me? She's lost, and now I'm the one who's telling her story.

I'm one of those grown-ups now. The Smurf-sized me would be surprised that being a big person doesn't mean that you're all-powerful after all.

So much for Facebook

2009-10-18T10:40:00.000+08:00

Thought I'd completely abandon my Multiply site in favor of Facebook, but lately FB begins to feel overwhelming for me again. It seems more like a social networking and news site than a place for posting long content. I need space for some of the things I write, which would seem to be drowned out by the dynamic, almost harried, atmosphere of FB.

So. I refurbished my Multiply site and may keep this around until a better idea occurs to me. I do hate my stuff being all over the place, but what can one do?

Don't get me wrong, though: FB is amazing. The problem is I never seem to get anything done when I log on there, and I haven't even started on the applications. Something about the entire thing calls to my compulsive nature. Also, I feel confined to snippets there: Snippets of opinions, insights, images, feelings. Colorful facets of a crystallized moment, bleeding into Internet space, only to fade almost as fast as they appeared. Nothing wrong with that, if you don't feel a longing for the unplumbed depths. (Pa-deep effect daw! Whatever. You know what I mean.)

So much for Facebook. I'm probably still an addict, but the initial "obsession" has started to taper off. Typical me, I think: ningas kugon. Heheh. * Shrugs *

A very long update

2009-03-08T12:10:00.001+08:00

What a week it’s been: I was actually productive. I’ve only lately realized how poorly I managed my energies last year. This time I’ve started to develop some useful habits—like waking up around 5:30 am and leaving early to beat the traffic, and attacking my backlog with the determination of a worker ant.

My life’s theme these days seems to have something to do with ticking off items in to-do lists. I don’t know what explains this frantic energy. Perhaps it’s the constant awareness of what this year means for me, a kind of age-consciousness. But I think the bigger factor is having overcome a desolate period in my life, which had stretched over several years. I was just so closed, and the mood swings were truly frightening. Each time I was happy, I’d actually be afraid, knowing that the next black wave was already gathering in the horizon. (In the ninth elegy of the Duino Elegies, Rilke refers to happiness as “that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.”) Yes, I was a sad creature. I can only shake my head at all that was lost, especially over the past year.

Now that it seems I’ve found me again, I feel like the tempted one in the poem Ordeal by Romanian writer Nina Cassian, in which the Fallen Angel tantalizes you with the loveliness of existence. This line is particularly apt: “... your shoulder blades will hurt from the imperative of wings.” Ah, to say yes to this angel! In the silence of my heart, I can already hear phantom wings beating overhead. As I go about my day, I hear this constant refrain: When? When will my time come?

* * * *

Writing is one of those things that give me unadulterated bliss. I guess this is one of my many “blessings,” which must be honored as such. I need to give it a central place, this art.

In line with this resolve, some weeks ago I sent my poems to Philippines Free Press. Then last week, my friends from the 47^th Dumaguete National Writers Workshop congratulated me in our e-group. That was how I found out that three of my poems—“Metamorphosis: A Vigil,” “Discourse,” and “28” were published in the February 28 issue of the said magazine, page 39 to be exact. I was so elated, I went to National Bookstore across Taft the next day, and bought three copies (one to keep, one to give to my dad in the States, and one to give to my mentor, Ma’am Marj—who by the way, had a hand in “Discourse” and “28”). I still can’t quite believe I’d been published in a national magazine, one with a prestigious literary section. I feel both humbled and proud, but above all, thoroughly, ecstatically, and orgasmically satisfied.

“Discourse” is the one people seem to like the most. I like to think it says so many things about not being able to say things. It’s not only about the perceived failure of some of our relations, but also about the failure of any medium, be it logic or art. We feel and know so much more than what we can communicate, or are “allowed” to communicate, by the conditions of our world and by the limitations of language itself. And yet, that we can meet at all, even blindly, is already miraculous. I love this poem (and I want to think of it as not really “my” poem, but that of the persona), because it’s about her sweet frustration. Thanks to everyone who loved it too!

But while I find poetry sublime, and am so grateful that I was able to learn this craft at all, what I really want to master is the art of fiction. I think the energies of poetry are introverted. It takes an altogether different sensibility to be a storyteller. An important change has occurred this year, which is propelling me toward what I ultimately want to do, a dream whose realization is neither poetry nor philosophy. I am still gathering my material from life. While there has been no writing yet, there is a new way of seeing. It’s like there’s this little person who leans back comfortably in some couch (which is red, somehow) in my brain, her fingers steepled, speculating about why certain things happen, what could’ve happened, and what will happen next. It would’ve been funny if it weren’t my life she’s speculating about, my relationships, my triumphs, my car crashes. But to be fair, there’s a new bravery that seems to come from her, a sardonic outlook, one that blesses the villain as much as the protagonist, the tragedy as much as the happy ending. I love this new girl.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t looked through her eyes until now. Perhaps a new organ has developed from the forge of something like pain, though that word fits the experience like a grain of sand represents the Sahara.

* * * *

For a long time, I’ve struggled with what I thought was my lack of fit in certain aspects of philosophy, that discourse I’ve chosen as a career. I know I’m a philosophy teacher, but am I a philosopher? Do I want to be? But lately, I’ve been taming my shadow, namely logic and argumentation. As a result, when I teach my philosophy classes now, there is a new subtlety in my reasoning, a new facility of expression, even a deeper reading of the texts, though I hope that doesn’t sound too presumptuous. Verbal sparring used to stress me out, but now I seem to enjoy it. Philosophy need not be a bloody battle so much as a pleasurable game. There’s an art to it, even though it may be highly cognitive. I guess the trick for me is to balance this aspect of my life with more aesthetic and physical pursuits, so I wouldn’t feel so “trapped” in philosophy. (Speaking of physical pursuits, there’s a class I’ve been taking daily now which will go on till March 20, and which has been incredibly enjoyable for me. What it is will be a surprise. All will be revealed in April, when the skills learned shall be appropriately demonstrated at certain, uhm, events. Walang manghuhula kahit alam ninyo na!)

In any case, going back to my philosophical renaissance, last Friday I was invited to the Rogationist Seminary College in Merville Park, Parañaque (see picture above), where I sat as a panelist during some seminarians’ defense of their thesis papers, eight of which were presented. For the first time in a long while, I came to an appreciation of what it is that we philosophers do. Perhaps the setting had a lot to do with it; and the energies of the people involved, in particular the students. That was exactly how thesis defenses ought to proceed. We’re a community of philosophers who recognize that the search for wisdom is a cooperative endeavor, and that the getting there is already pleasurable in itself. It was lovely, the playful exchange of ideas, whose speed was awesome but whose elegance lingered in the mind, like the pleasant aftertaste of good food. Some papers that stood out for me include the one about Donald Davidson’s philosophy of action, which considers the role of motivational dispositions (e.g. beliefs, emotional states, etc.) in our moral choices; the one about the animal rights movement and the treatment of animals in the Philippines; and finally, the one that valiantly defended Immanuel Kant’s highly abstract and virtually impracticable duty ethics.

Having been invited as a guest lecturer at the San Carlos Seminary in Makati last year, I’ve come to love such enclaves of the spirit. The students tend to be quite appreciative, dedicated, and respectful, so open to philosophy. It was a welcome change, as I’m so sick of the spoiled brats and self-proclaimed rebels I often encounter in my milieu. These seminarians should remind them of Socrates’ message, that humility is truly the beginning of wisdom.

* * * *

Today is International Women’s Day. While there are crucial privileges that come with being male, given the current setup of human society, I’m glad I’m female, and I’m thankful for the strong bonds I have with other women in my family and network of friends. While I was at the Rogationist College, I couldn’t help thinking that if I were male, I definitely would’ve considered going into the priesthood. Being a nun doesn’t seem to be an equivalent endeavor. Perhaps, if I had lived in pre-Christian Britain during the era of the Mother Goddess, I’d have been one of the priestesses of Avalon. I guess we must never forget that at least, She has survived in our myths, and in that in our own ways, we can keep Her alive in our rituals and narratives. In relation to this, Dr. Marj has sent me this quote from Marge Piercy’s poem, The Sabbath of Mutual Respect: “Habondia, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Au Set, Hecate, Themis, Lilith, Thea, Gaia, Bridgit, The Great Grandmother of Us All, Yemanja, Cerridwen, Freya, Corn Maiden, Mawu, Amaterasu, Maires, Nut, Spider-Woman, Neith, Au Zit, Hathor, Inanna, Shin Moo, Diti, Arinna, Anath, Tiamat, Astoreth: the names flesh out our histories, our choices, our passions....”

Lately, I draw courage and integrity from Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. For a long time, due to my “inner Cartesian” (a phrase that tickles my friend Mike), I had always identified with Athena, and during long periods of forgetful passion, Aphrodite. But I think Artemis, of the full moon, of the wild creatures, of the defiant virginity, represents the best part of me.

Left: Apollo and Daphne by John William Waterhouse. Fittingly, a wood nymph under the auspices of Artemis, Daphne, also embodies my myth these days. Daphne escapes her pursuer Apollo by turning into a laurel tree. Similarly, what I need now is self-preservation. So many things are unfolding inside me, which I must permit no one to distract me from. In any case, I believe that any heterosexual woman must always nurture her inner Daphne, whether or not she’s in a relationship. Because we are socially conditioned to be the caregivers, we often forget to care about ourselves and our own pursuits. This doesn’t necessarily mean you must forsake romantic love, only that—even if there is much love in your life—it should never be the raison d’être of your existence.

Revolutionary

2009-02-15T12:39:00.000+08:00

So many synchronistic events—or meaningful coincidences—seem to be happening lately. (I’d have said “blessings,” but the religious connotation might raise some eyebrows, hehe.) Maybe one way of explaining synchronicity, to use C.G. Jung’s term, is that the self-consciously rational ego is beginning to listen to the higher Self. And so there is a new way of seeing, into the unfolding of a larger story, where you’re a main character and not a detached observer. Does that make any sense?

In any case, I am glad about this precious new perspective. Perhaps now I can follow the bread crumbs out of the woods of hesitation and vague melancholy, emerging in a clearing where the stories are waiting—to be lived, imagined, worded. For the first time, I think I can see it, the possibility of writing fiction. (There, it’s out!) I’ve been putting certain things in place for this end. There’s a writers’ workshop that I’ve applied to, and if my short story gets accepted, I’d be going to another city in southern Philippines this May. (Knock on wood!) I also plan to enroll in next term’s fiction class in the MFA program. I had let things go over the last six months—ironically, right after the Dumaguete workshop—dropping my lit classes and focusing almost exclusively on philosophy.

There’s a partial explanation, which I’ll try to tell here.

I want(ed) to be a serious philosopher. There are so many projects you can do, in a place where you are given the means and resources to do it, among really smart and interesting people who also happen to be your good friends. I had made philosophy at La Salle my life. I still love it. But there is a greater passion in me that clashes with what appears to be an important premise of this discourse—i.e. abstraction—so that sometimes I would wonder if there were only two choices: (1) Change the terms of the discourse, or (2) Get out of it. As I don’t plan on leaving it, I guess I just have to do philosophy differently—or at least, differently from an imagined “mainstream.”

The Argument, I’ve learned to appreciate. Critical thinking, I’ve learned to balance with critical feeling. But I want nothing to do with abstraction. I want what is concrete: I want the poetry of Heidegger (post-Being and Time), of Nietzsche, of the literary existentialists. Abstraction is just one stream in philosophy, headed toward the murky lagoon of obfuscation and triviality. Follow instead a numinous, raging river toward the ocean, where the mind and the heart can be one.

Last year, while a part of me did enjoy it, another part felt trapped in the discourse of philosophy, where I’ve been in for more than a decade now. It’s only recently that I finally realized how I can change my direction. There were many signposts, but let me name six, in chronological order.

1. Last year, I discovered Alessandro Baricco. Ma’am Marj once suggested that I read his novel, Ocean Sea, after I had submitted to her an essay making use of that most infinite of metaphors—the sea. (Ah yes, me and the sea.) I was riveted to Baricco's novel. It said everything (and more) that I would have wanted to write about the sea and life and relationships and good and evil and love and hate and adventure and art and spirit and healing and God. I bought all his books, devoured them and realized: He is my kind of writer! I want to write like him! His craft embodies the sensibility I was so far only just trying to imagine. So I did some research on Baricco, and found that he was mentored by the Italian philosopher and existentialist, Gianni Vattimo—a philosopher of art and of time, and a scholar of Friedrich Nietzsche. Now, there are many philosophical novelists, but Baricco is it for me. He. Is. It.

2. On a particularly long and dark night, a comet streaked across the sky—beautiful, short-lived, and sad. But it illumined the dark path ahead of me, so that I now know now where I need to go. While its beauty had ravished me, its real power was in its tragic and necessary disappearance. Its absence became me.

3. Then the Book Angel brought me another gem: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, her memoir of her spiritual journey. I hadn’t realized that it was an international bestseller, or that its author was listed by Time as one of 2008’s 100 most influential people. Having ripped through the book, I can see why. She tells the story of her harrowing divorce, the tumultuous affair that followed, and her travels across three countries—Italy, India, and Indonesia—in order to find herself again. Her writing style is so accessible, and her attitude so positive and inspiring. There were so many quotable passages for me, about overcoming depression, learning to be alone, finding the courage to go for what you really want, showing true compassion for others, and above all, listening to God. This is what I loved best about the book: Its imperturbable spiritual center. Everything spoke to me, as though she were a doppelganger who was recounting—from the perspective of a survivor—the things that I myself am only just going through. Of course, I’m not going through a divorce or anything like that, but like Liz Gilbert, I’ve made so many wrong turns in the karmic labyrinth of love. Far too many.

Left: Elizabeth Gilbert. In any case, as I told my good friend M.R., the author so inspired me that I finally realized what I want and need to do for the rest of my life. For some reason, since I turned 28, I’ve been propelled into a crisis, feeling the weight not just of my literal age but the burden of my own expectations of myself. Many of my peers were moving on to The Next Stage. Commit to something, make a commitment, be committed (to an institution?!). So many things had needed to happen, and fast, which I think is what 2008 was all about. I learned so many things, but mostly how not to do things, how not to be careless with your own heart.

I am still in crisis (of the Saturn Return, Ma’am Marj had once said to me, “You do know that it runs for seven years, right?”). But for the first time, I can see what’s ahead of me. Three words: Travel, writing, and love, but love in the most general sense. While I’ve done a lot of traveling just last year, I’m not sure if I had truly appreciated the places I had seen. I carried so much baggage with me. Now I’ve been unloading it, as quickly as I can manage, which is still a gradual process. All I know is that I need to go out there, literally, and actually be there, figuratively, so that I can have something to write about and so that I can expand the boundaries of my love.

4. Some relationships with important women in my life were rejuvenated. M.R., for example, has listened to me articulate and process my crisis over the course of many dinners at Mall of Asia, and many moments of looking out at Manila Bay. We've been best friends since high school, but have grown even closer now. I've been quoting Gilbert's book to her via SMS, and two weeks ago I finally got her her own copy. (So far she says she's enjoying the book.)

Meanwhile, I found an old college friend, Jolina Mallari, in Facebook. She was my classmate before I changed majors from Political Science to Philosophy (and before she shifted from Economics to Psychology). We used to hang out all the time, attending debut parties and going on out-of-town trips with our friends from the DLSU Aikido Club. (Yes, I used to practice aikido!) Eventually, we gravitated to a larger world out of that barkada when I became the Editor in Chief of The LaSallian and she became the Student Council president. We had such a memorable conversation over dinner at Greenbelt some weeks back. Being an intensely religious person, she talked about her relationship with God and the man He has chosen for her. I told her I was very happy for her. We also talked about our respective careers and money and Moving Forward in One's Life, etc. I think she's a few steps ahead of me, but then again, each one of us has a different journey. Way to go, Jols! Below: With Jolina.

Finally and most importantly, I opened up to my mom. The story of our relationship is too personal to reveal here. Suffice it to say that last year, I've been a prodigal daughter of sorts. But I'm back, and I hope that some of the things I've been doing now can make up for how much I hurt her last year. I love you, Mom.

5. I also realized who my life guru was. It’s a sacred story that is still unfolding, and I am praying for a favorable outcome. But I am very certain about it, because, after all, it is something I’ve always known. It’s not a huge secret, either, as her name appears many times throughout my writings. Sometimes I fancifully think that she is the Viviane to my Morgaine, though I still have so much to do to even be remotely worthy of Avalon. (Who knows? Maybe ultimately, I’m really more of a Gwenwyfar, distracted by Lancelet, then eaten up by depression, exiling herself in a cloister. Then again, the lost girl may be one part of me, but she’s not the leading role anymore. Or at least, I hope so.)

6. Finally, I recently saw a film that two great ladies recommended to me. It’s up for the Oscars, but I don’t think it’s been released in the Philippines yet. Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (as Frank Wheeler) and Kate Winslet (as April Wheeler), is based on the novel by Richard Yates. It’s about a couple living in 1950s American suburbia, who married before they figured out what they really wanted. Now, they have the trappings of what society defines as the good life: A big house, children, and a high-paying job for Frank. But Frank detests his dreary office job and April feels stifled and restless at home. Emotionally disconnected, they go through the motions of marriage and family life. Things turn around when April gets the idea of moving to the family to Paris, where she could support them by getting a secretarial job and Frank could finally figure out what he really wants to do. They are ecstatic for awhile because of this plan, until Frank changes his mind when he gets promoted at work and April accidentally gets pregnant with their third baby. Below: DiCaprio and Winslet in Revolutionary Road.

I loved the way the story dramatized the dilemma between staying in your comfort zone and going after what you really want. When what’s at stake is Your Whole Life, it’s not so easy to take risks. But you have to. The alternative is misery and death—for what is a meaningless, empty life but death itself?

One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when April tries to convince her husband to follow their dream, by appealing to the truth they had known all along: “Tell me the truth, Frank. Remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what’s so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they’ve lived without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank. They just get better at lying.”

I guess we really know what we want. The ego may not always be aware of it, but the higher Self knows. Fighting the destiny you have freely made for yourself will only cause so much suffering. I have gone through so much suffering just to get here. At last, I think I have finally decided to break with the past and go forward.

And that is truly revolutionary.

Elasticity

2009-02-09T17:37:00.001+08:00

Today, I realized that the old contours of my life have snapped back into place, with the almost-comforting elasticity of a rubber band, after all the stretching of last year. With a dazed recognition, I pushed open the door to the aloneness in my consciousness. Carefully, I swept away the dust of nostalgia, pushed out the ghost of another presence. It’s important to organize things, to cleanse even the memory of the body.

Back to me.

Then I realized, as I began to relearn the old ways of aloneness, how limiting it feels sometimes. With my mild claustrophobia, I need always to be at the edge—on the aisle seat, for example, or beside the sea. When I used to live in a condominium by myself, I wouldn’t even close the bathroom door while I was in the shower. After trooping up and down Taft Avenue looking for the perfect place to rent last year, I had finally settled on a condo unit for its huge glass windows and view of Manila Bay. That’s how I want to live my life: With an eye toward sky or sea, that which is infinitely beyond me.

But the rubber band has been released, has snapped back into a tight, inscrutable circle. It feels... anti-climactic, like a wrong turn in the plot. I shall have to rewrite the story then, commence the outward movement, but in another direction this time.

* * * *

A catalog of things to care for or care about, which I noticed today:

At the office, Koala and Tarsier were preoccupied with their virtual dogs at Facebook. They invited me to try it, and I said, worried about a phantom pet that hasn’t yet experienced my abandonment, “Oh, I don’t know. What if I end up not having enough time for him? Then he’d be sad.” I was genuinely concerned about this.

Driving back to Pasay after a ludicrously expensive dental procedure, I passed by a middle-aged woman weaving around the cars during a red light, trying to sell ropes of sampaguita. She had a noticeable limp. She’d earn in 50 years, maybe not even then, the amount that was extorted from me today while I was on the dental chair.

On the flyover from Edsa to Tramo Street, I passed by a woman of indeterminate age, dancing in place, nude, soot all over her body. I said a quick prayer for this person.

And over dinner tonight, Mom and I heard the new mother next door singing no recognizable song (as she does nightly) to her baby. Every so often, from the assorted domestic noises coming from that house, including the marital quarrels that were more riveting than a radio show, a thin cry would emerge, as it did tonight. “Hear that?” Mom said. “The baby is learning to respond to her!”

So much needs to be loved.

But because so much needs to love.

Let life stretch me then, as far as my elastic heart can take.

Au revoir, Tristesse

2009-02-08T13:21:00.000+08:00

“They [Zen Buddhists] say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well—the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Lately, I’ve been going to Mall of Asia just to gaze at Manila Bay, or the portion of it visible from the seawall at the back of the mall. Of course, I’ve been a fan of this place since it first opened two years ago. I’ve always loved standing before a body of water, especially the sea. When I was a kid, our parents would take me and my sister to the tabing-dagat near the Cultural Center in Manila. When I would get lung infections, which was often, my mother the doctor would prescribe a trip to the tabing-dagat where the breeze could cure me. In retrospect, I think the culprit may have been all the dust in Pasay City and especially in our tiny house. Thus, I’ve come to think of the edge of the sea—where sand or rock meets the lashing foam—as my great outdoors, or at least, the closest I could get to it in my smoke-choked urban life.

Right: Woman at the Window by Salvador Dalí. This image is on the bookmark Ma'am Marj had given me, along with this note, "For those days of looking out to sea!" Now as an adult, I’d been sick lately, and have been making a pilgrimage to my trusty place of peace almost everyday over the past several weeks. During the worst of my illness, which is emotional and psychic rather than physical, I would think that as long as I could see the water, I shall be all right. I’d sit in a café beside the bay, my journal open before me, awash in the terrifying orange sunset. Or sometimes I’d just sit on the ledge among lovers or groups of friends, just inhaling the breeze and watching people, curious about these strangers’ stories. On one occasion while I was waiting for a friend, she suddenly appeared by my side and interrupted my reverie with a warm hug. “Kitang-kita kita agad!”, she exclaimed. “Yeah, kasi ako lang siguro ang nag-iisa dito,” I replied, rolling my eyes.

But mine was a solitude in the wake of an angel’s visit, not the dreaded one from a demon, which used to assail me frequently at around this time last year. It’s a time that can just as well be called “The Great Before,” a time of unconsciousness about the extent of my depression. Then something happened that shook me out of that dead time. It seems that sometimes, the heart would seek the rain obsessively: Better the life-threatening typhoon than the life-threatening drought. Of love, Kahlil Gibran wrote, “And when he speaks to you believe in him,/ Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.”

Now the storm is over, and everything is different.

For one thing, I can write again. For a time, I had let it all go; perhaps I needed to—not just my words, but everything that had anchored me to this earth. I had wanted to be one with the storm, and I was. Now that it is spent, and I have dealt with the worst of the wreckage, I am sensing the force of what needs to exist, what wants to shoot out from the damp soil and bloom.

* * * *

One evening, a decision finally coalesced, and I drove to the tabing-dagat intending to perform a ritual. It was night then, and drizzling a bit. I stood before the sea, the greasy light of the street lamps illumining the concrete strip of restaurants. Scattered laughter and distracting music wafted to me, but did not puncture my bubble of peace—not even when a group of teenagers approached my space and hoisted themselves on the ledge. I walked away, until I came to a spot where I could reasonably talk to God.

Left: The amazing book by Elizabeth Gilbert, where I got the idea for this ritual. More than a decade ago, I used to be very religious. I think maybe I’ve always been a spiritual person, even though my religious beliefs have evolved and vanished at some point, at the height of my attraction to (atheistic) existentialism. I don’t think one can be in philosophy and remain uncritical or unreflective about the religion one is born into, choiceless. But this doesn’t mean that matters of the spirit will not haunt you. (Like the word “God,” I think of “spirit” as a manner of speaking that doesn’t refer to a substance.) This longing for spirit haunts the writings of the existentialist writers, for example when Jean-Paul Sartre describes the intensely human experience of abandonment, or when Friedrich Nietzsche refers to the cyclical mystery of the eternal recurrence. In us resides the Godly, not necessarily inside churches or through priests, those these may or may not enhance the experience of the divine, depending on where the individual is on his or her journey.

One of the consequences of my soul’s storm was a recuperation of certain vital relationships—with God, whom I hadn’t prayed to in a very long time; with my mother; with some old friends; with some mentors. And yes, with my Self. I had distanced myself from them last year, choosing to live in what Martin Buber would call the manufactured heart beside the other heart. These places inside me were equally real; it’s just that the other space would have died in the harsh sun of the world’s truth. Nonetheless, it was no less true, because I made it so, but now its time is over. I am whole again: that compartment has merged with the other chambers. Evidence of this mending is I can write again. Oh, how I can write again!

So, I was back in the arms of God, enveloped by the infinite sea-space of his heart, which could absorb everything that was weighing me down. I started praying:

God, please take from me my immense sadness. I don’t want it anymore. I’ve lived with it for as long as I can remember. Please take from me all the hurt and anger and disappointment, frustration, jealously, attachment. Most of all, please take the paralyzing nostalgia. I offer up my sadness to you, for safe-keeping, because I cannot take it with me where I need to go. And I want to go, God. I am sick of this place of heartbreak. I have had enough. I no longer want to be here! I am ready to move on! I want to move on. So please take what used to be my world, what I wouldn’t let go of, everything that is preventing me from becoming what I need to become. I trust that in Your infinite power, You can do all the worrying and regretting and longing and mourning for me. I cannot do any of it anymore. I am leaving all of this now, with Your blessing, in Your keeping. Thank You. Amen.

A synchronistic poem that says everything

2009-01-26T08:58:00.000+08:00

Risk
By Anaïs Nin

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

Rilke, again

2009-01-24T19:30:00.000+08:00

I immensely enjoyed my graduate class in Phenomenology and Existentialism today. This term I'm trying a new "structure." In previous courses, I'd lecture now and then, and assign a topic for each student to present. This term, however, due to the nature of the subject matter--nothing less than (human) existence--I thought we could just sit in a big circle and discuss the philosophical texts in a quasi-literary way. So far, our discussions have been great! We just exchange insights and observations based on the readings for the week.

This week, we read some forerunners of existentialism in literature, i.e. Fyodor Dostoevsky ("The Grand Inquisitor"), Franz Kafka ("The Imperial Message"), and Rainer Maria Rilke (the second and ninth elegies of "The Duino Elegies"). I especially liked going back to Rilke. It's been a couple of years since I was first enamored by his poetry and his message about the fleetingness of everything, what we called the "onceness" of things. Here's an excerpt from the second elegy, translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell:

But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we
breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment
our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us:
"Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime
is filled with you..."--what does it matter? he can't contain us,
we vanish inside him and around him. And those who are beautiful,
oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises
in their face, and is gone....

And from the ninth elegy (on the question of "why then have to be human," when we could just as well have been a laurel):

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Our class talked about the sadness that seems to accompany our sense of time passing. I drew their attention to the fact that this cycle of poems is an elegy, which addresses a profound loss. A laurel would not be conscious of its impending death, and so, even though it is temporal, would not be tragic. But for us, when we are reflective enough, we feel the poignant onceness of each thing: A kiss, a heartbreak, a birth, a poem. These will never come again, because each event represents a unique configuration of self, other, place, and time. We are evanescent, like air freshener: "... from moment to moment/ our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume...."

Why this nostalgia over a fact of life? Why do we seem to desire permanence, love's grand dream? Why can't we let go without the knee-jerk sadness?

So I've been resurrecting some of my old writings...

2009-01-20T18:58:00.000+08:00

... and just realized how bulky everything is, from my previous blogs. Maybe four years' worth of writing, I imported from blogger. Now I don't know why I even bothered! :-p

I wanted to write again after a dry spell of several months. Writing-wise, it's like somebody had stuffed cotton into my mouth: even in my head, the thoughts were muffled. But lately, I've been hearing the call of ideas again, even though I'm so out of practice in wording them. So I guess I may post some new stuff here, even though this whole thing feels so clunky right now.

* * * *

I feel I am almost hopeless with regard to my creative output. After having attended a (i.e. the) national writers' workshop last year, I was only able to produce two or three poems. I didn't even have the courage to show them to Ma'am M.

I do know that the art of writing requires so much discipline. What I've realized recently is that--for me anyway--good writing comes from disciplined living as well. That means living toward the soul's direction. I'm sorry to say that I was lost in the woods. Now, when I think about starting again, I get this image of me with my head down, perhaps standing before the mists of another Avalon, a place in my mind where I used to write from. A centered place; a place of belonging. My home. Can a prodigal daughter still part the mists, and go back home?

(Below: Morgaine prepares to part the mists, with Viviane behind her, in Mists of Avalon)

What will she do if she can't? Where will she go?

* * * *

On a lighter note, I recently saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at Greenbelt, with the bears. I had heard good stuff about it, and wasn’t disappointed. It’s based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a man who is born old and then progresses through his life steadily growing younger. He is almost the same age as his “soul mate” in the movie. They finally become lovers in their late 30s, when their physical ages coincide—after that point, she grows older and he grows younger.

(Below: Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)

Time passing is an intensely human experience. The ultimate enemy of love is not people, but time. Would that I could keep my love within a bubble that melted those relentless timepieces. But I myself am in time, and the only place where love can be preserved is memory.

Do watch this movie. It teaches you that it takes the perspective of a lifetime to appreciate the preciousness of everything.

Epiphany

2008-07-18T05:42:00.002+08:00

"And by the time I reach 80
I would have fallen in love with
An entire city.
All the people on the streets
Would follow me down with
A knowing. All hate gone. All sorrow.
The word absence would not make sense."
--Nerisa Guevara, 27

How morning comes over your eyelids sometimes, snatching you from behind the skirts of sleep. And out the window, the bay lies placid, gray, as the city opens its many eyes. A thought glints like the sharp reflected light from a car's side mirror, plying the 8 am traffic. Impossible to guess where they had come from, which homes they locked to go to work, which avenues they'll stream through like salmon, swimming against the current of last night's dream. Suddenly the city looms with the velocity of focus. And then it makes sense: that poet's ode to some future wisdom, from thousands of days coming at you like lightning cracks through your neurons. To fall in love with life's violence; to let the sadnesses disperse like street dust. To let the morning in.

"Imbricate"

2008-07-16T19:55:00.000+08:00

Now that's a word I didn't know!

Was doing some drone work for Dr. Grips (read: editing articles for Filosophia) when I came across this sentence: "... self-creation which is an expediency of self-interpretation can only take place through critical appropriation of imbricate relations."

So I went to dictionary.com which told me that "imbricate" [adj.] means "overlapping in sequence, as tiles or shingles on a roof."

Wala lang, naaliw lang ako.

Use "imbricate" in a sentence!

It's difficult to keep track of his imbricate romantic liaisons.

My neglected tasks have imbricated beyond my control.

Your imbricate lies are outrageous!

And the list goes on...

Success!

2008-07-06T15:10:00.003+08:00

The move to Multiply has been made: http://noelleleslie.multiply.com/. Please update your links and add me to your contacts. I won't be updating my blogger site anymore.

So proud :)

2008-07-01T22:19:00.003+08:00

Above: Group picture during the Fellows' Night. More pictures to follow, when I next find the time to update this blog... or make the long-delayed move to Multiply. Soon!

Susan Lara, one of our panelists in the 47th National Writers' Workshop, wrote an article about us for The Philippine Star. It came out the other day. Here's a link to the online version. And here's an excerpt, where one of my poems was mentioned:

Everyone agreed that the 47th Batch is a great bunch. There is a good deal of fine writing. Most of the fellows’ works already hold the evidence of other writers’ workshops attended, and the promise that they are in it for the long haul. We were hard-pressed to think of ways to improve “Cross,” Margie de Leon’s metafiction, or “In His Own Image,” Lambert’s science fiction. We delighted in Igor dela Peñas ekphrastic poem “Whitewash” and Leslie dela Cruz’s poignant “Terminal.”

Sigh. Thank you, Ma'am Sue. :'-)

I had initially pulled down the link to my poem "Terminal," thinking that it wasn't any good, that it was just another love poem with metaphors that had come easy. I didn't expect the panelists to like it that much. I even became teary-eyed at Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas' reading of it, especially because she had also been through the experience of protracted airport goodbyes.

Here's the text of the poem. I still consider it a draft, since I haven't incorporated the suggestions mentioned during the workshop.

Terminal

At the terminal, sitting by myself
with a pen and paper, I wondered idly
why duty-free perfumes preserve only
the scentless vanishing present,
why we are never without baggage
and why the heaviest moment is always
right before takeoff, as when a bird
centers its weight and digs in its feet:
The mind prepares for flight
against the gravity of memory.

During that last plane ride earlier this year,
I carried your palm’s warm impression.
Certain things are impossible to leave
unlike the place I grew up in,
the way the sultry wind had felt
against my neck, or how the tongue
excites itself within the nuances
of a language. Now, flying 30,000 feet
above the earth feels like
the shredding of a chrysalis,
scattered all over the Pacific.

This is the death that my sojourns
aspire to, why I hate airports
as some people hate hospitals.
I cannot stand such a violent goodbye—
not the one we never exchanged,
but the one I have to keep saying
to the warm impression of your palm.

Sometimes I feel as though my entire life were a lugubrious airport scene. While it's true that we are always in transit--literally and figuratively--I can't seem to get used to the sadness of letting anything or anyone go. I had written this piece for someone who had meant so much to me at one point. Now, over a year later, he doesn't anymore, which seems to prove the whole point of the poem. Despite the emotional violence of my separations, in particular the romantic kind, I inevitably realize--after enough time passes--that even a Great Love can die.

At the end of our discussion ("Terminal" was the last poem taken up in the entire workshop), I said something to the effect that No one is essential to us. Not a lover, not a spouse, not a parent, not a child, and in the end, not even the self.

I want to find the one who will be essential to me.

But that's the question: Is anyone essential to us?

Perhaps we must first find wholeness within ourselves. Then, we can love another: we can love them, even knowing that they are not essential.

Belated happy Dads' Day! :)

2008-06-16T18:55:00.004+08:00

I've been meaning to post these pictures here for the longest time. This is a bathroom that my dad designed and built himself. It's one of the reasons why I admire him so much. When the telecommunications companies that he used to work for folded one after the other, he always found a way to keep making a living. First he put up a fax paper delivery business with my mom. When that didn't bring in enough, he went to the States and practiced his profession there. But after some mass lay-offs in his industry, he fell back on his other skills: Designing, building, and fixing houses. Now he's his own boss, doing what he truly loves.

I like to think that when you're where you are supposed to be, success will follow you. It may take some time, but as long as you have courage and love, I believe you will achieve your dreams. So for all the dads I know--especially mine--thank you, and I hope you know that you are very much appreciated!

2008-05-18T13:39:00.008+08:00

A Mermaid Learns to Swim
by Noelle Leslie dela Cruz

And the ocean closes over her head:
-----seaweed, brine, a hollow
hush like the inside of
-----a marine mind, -----language-less

comes the impulse to lift
-----her feet, let them rise, meld
into fins, silver scales----------undulating
with love's velocity,
-----trailing froth on water’s surface

now suddenly calm again.
----------She has vanished
-----in pursuit of his song
---------------echoing from the deep.

Happy Mother's Day!

2008-05-11T19:27:00.001+08:00

To my Mom, who's in New Jersey—I miss you!

Like fish to water

2008-05-11T16:52:00.057+08:00

Above: Sunrise at the boulevard, 8 May 2008. A week has passed since I arrived in this city, whose name, Dumaguete—as I learned from a co-fellow in the 47^th National Writer’s Workshop—comes from the Visayan word dumaguit, meaning “to hold captive” or “to catch” (especially a fish). I’ve certainly caught so many things in the seven days I’ve been here. Ideas, which satisfies the philosopher in me. Experiences: of other minds, of a place, of a way of life. A cold. And just before I switched hostels this morning, a female spirit that inhabited my room. I caught her sense of being so lost, as though she were a foreigner, alone, not just in the place where she was but more importantly, inside her own consciousness. Maybe I sensed her because she could’ve been my doppelganger, in another world when she lived and we were both frustrated writers. I couldn’t sleep well for several nights, and yesterday morning I finally realized that I’d had it; I was moving. Her gray mood had osmosed into my being, so much so that I felt as though I were between worlds—neither here nor there. Neither in Avalon nor in Camelot, but exiled in the mists.

Right: In my old room, where the mumu is. After I told him the story, a friend teased me about “imputing an ontological basis” to my experiences. Actually, I never thought I would speak this kind of language, which some people use to refer to their experience of the supernatural. I remember Ma’am Marj once saying that in a certain retreat house, spirits had knocked on her door at night, begging her to write their poems. And Josh, one of my co-fellows, matter-of-factly shared that he once saw a white lady cross the aisle in an auditorium. The activities of the psyche are too rich, too communal, that we need a word like mumu (courtesy of my friends from the Philosophy Department) to refer to them. But I know that my words had made my ghost more real, and also that in a way, she has always been a part of me. Below: My current lodgings. My room is in the top row, center.

Thankfully though, this weekend feels ghost-less. I may have acclimated to the place. I make SMS announcements to the effect that I have become an island person, that I already want to live here. It’s so different from Manila, where my career is, supposedly. I walk around in just a shirt and jogging pants or shorts, hair loose, a fine sheen of sweat on my makeup-less face. I often get up early to try to catch the sunrise at the boulevard, though I always miss it. I end up just appreciating the morning, soaked in sea breeze and a mild light filtering from the gray sky. I love that I can walk around this place—across the Silliman campus, around the cafés and bars, along the boulevard—feeling safe, feeling... found. What should I have expected? After all, Dumaguete is the literary home of Filipino writers, the southern ones especially. People are laidback here, respectful, genuinely kind. There are no leers even when I walk around in shorts. No raising of eyebrows even when I’m in the throes of my ingrained kaartehan: just indulgent smiles. No tense rushing to get to wherever, no jostling at the local mall. This is a place where time slows down, and even perhaps, aging. A friend who had grown up here told me to look out for the dolphins, for they would remind me of what it’s like to be a child again. Here, I’m steeped in a certain outlook where creativity inevitably gestates, finally blooming in conversation among like minds. Oh, the people I have met! Below: Photos taken while I was walking around the city. (1) The boulevard at night; (2) at a bar, listening to a lovely rendition of Tom Petty's "Free Falling"; (3) the boulevard at noon; (4) early morning, low tide; (5) man collecting algae; (6) youths on a boat; (7) et in Arcadia ego.

As a teacher and pilosopo, I live for stimulating discussions. Last year though, my energy started flagging in the classroom, not so much because of the dearth of good students to work with—I had many of them—as because of the dearth of something as basic as inspiration. I’m happy to say that over the past few months, I’ve found my love for the love of wisdom again; love is bringing me back to philosophy. In my head, just underneath the level of words, is a so-far unwritten poem about the velocity of this love. It is teaching me to venture outward, after years of going inward. Previously, I was stuck in a place where solitude, for so long my friend, had become annoying. Even my joining the workshop, I think, is part of this outward movement. In a sense, I am doing this not so much for the writing per se, but for love—in its amorphous permutations, but always springing from the particular experience of an Other, that which is not the self. And I think of this meeting between poet and muse in terms of soul mate love, for it is essentially a matter of the soul. Below: At Silliman University. (1) The entrance to the campus; (2) campus map; (3) on the campus grounds, with a view of the port; (4) Katipunan Hall, where most of our sessions are held; (5) the SU library; (6) the SU church.

In any case, though I rarely lack for thoughtful conversations at La Salle, I was astounded by the high level of discourse that we regularly achieve in the workshop. I’ve never been in a discussion with this many scintillating people, never had such powerful mental orgasms. Also, the young fictionists and poets in my batch are amazing. Two of them are from La Salle: one a philosophy major and my former student; the other a Palanca-winning playwright. They’re only in their early twenties, and they’re already producing cutting-edge work. I can’t help but think of our workshop literally as history in the making, for in a way, we can say that this annual convocation of writers in Dumaguete is historic. The late Edilberto Tiempo and his wife, National Artist for Literature Edith Tiempo, had founded it in 1962. Having received their Ph.D.’s from Iowa University under the tutelage of Paul Engle, they brought to Silliman the writer’s workshop culture. Since then, many Filipino writers have learned their craft in Dumaguete, including César Ruiz Aquino, Wilfrido Nolledo, Merlie Alunan, Marjorie Evasco, Alfred Yuson, Ernesto Superal Yee, Susan Lara, Dinah Roma, and Maningning Miclat, among others. I get the sense that I am making friends with writers who will become famous one day. Below: (1) My ID; (2) session at the President's veranda; (3) at the alumni office with Jordan, Igor, and Marge; (4-5) session at the Spanish Heritage building; (6) kainan; (7) poets Igor, Lawrence, and Jordan outside Cafe Antonio; (8) me in my dress on the night of the Governor's Dinner; (9) the fellows with Mom Edith; (10) kainan ulit; (11 & 12) group shots.

Over the past week, we’ve listened to Edith Tiempo herself; her daughter, the Iowa-based Rowena Torrevillas; and poets Myrna Peña-Reyes, César Ruiz Aquino, and Butch Macansantos. They begin with their respective readings of somebody’s creative piece, drawing out associations that may have eluded even the writer himself or herself. Then the other fellows offer their own opinions, and finally the author reacts to everything that has been said. We usually take an hour to discuss a poem, a short story, or an essay. So far, two of my own poems had already been workshopped, the first one being “The House of Logic.” It was actually the piece that opened the discussion on our very first day, with “Mom Edith” presiding.

She began by saying that the poem had a very sound concept, but that I had to avoid simply stating the idea, so that the poem would earn its ending. Indeed, it seems to be a more or less universal opinion that I am coming from the country of prose. I had the concept; my mistake was to begin from it, at the expense of the language. Perhaps it’s due to my academic training. Sometimes I fear that I’ve developed a hopelessly hybrid mind, one that is neither wholly philosophical nor wholly poetic. When I need to think in images, I resort to arguments, and vice versa! Anyway, I’m glad to hear this critique of my craft, so I can work on it. I do want to learn to think imaginatively without sacrificing the precision of logic. I think there is a way to do that, but one must begin by finding a rare and tenuous completion within the self—so that the outside world will be whole as well.

Speaking of wholeness, I loved Rowena’s reading of my poem. She said that it was the story of a relationship between the emotive and the rational aspects of the self. The two characters—the “I” and the “you”—were in search of each other. Though they are actually two people, her interpretation of them as aspects of the same person wouldn’t be entirely incorrect. In a relationship, a new self may emerge from a kind of dialectic between two forever separate identities. The project of love then becomes the annihilation of dichotomies, such as self/other, feminine/masculine, emotion/reason, intuition/logic, etc.

Incidentally, I’ve been a fan of Rowena since I came across her writings in my Creative Nonfiction class last term. It was amazing to have met her in person, and to listen to her erudite reading of our works. As my co-fellow Igor observed, when she speaks, it’s as though she were already writing literary criticism—her words are that precise. Below: (1) With Rowena after a session; (2) Rowena signing her books, which belong to the DLSU library (until now... just kidding!); (3) with Rowena during the Governor’s Dinner; (4-6) some photos from the 1970’s that my co-fellows and I came across at the library archives at Silliman, showing Rowena as a beauty queen and as a young woman, with her then-campus sweetheart and now husband, Lemuel Torrevillas.

I remember Ma’am Marj once saying that the writer has to be wiser than the one who had lived through the experience. So when we write, we have to be one step ahead of ourselves. Writing then becomes an invitation for reflection. It demands the same courage that moves the philosopher to (re-)construct, endlessly, the world we are living in. Discussions about our works show us how to improve our craft, but also—on an existential level—how to be braver, more empathetic, more patient with and appreciative of life’s paradoxes. In short, how to be wiser. For ultimately, we are what we write.

Why my poems are not actually about me

2008-03-06T23:29:00.008+08:00

Nothing is coming out this week. Because I’d been ill, I had the chance to stay home and sit down in front of my laptop, determined to write an essay or two for my CNF class. But all I got from two days of missing school were an empty Word file and unproductive coughing fits. Inside is a huge wreckage I can’t even begin to sort out. I know that when I get like this, nothing gets done.

I realized something recently though, about my creative process. My friend Mark, who attended my poetry recital last Friday, observed that my poems are based on feeling. I guess that’s an apt characterization. The poems that work for me, the ones I can be proud of, are those that are based on an emotion I had lived, and which I could think through afterwards. So my better pieces embody the thought structure of an emotion, or my feelings about my feelings. If I had not or could not live through the emotional experience, then I couldn’t write it. For example, I had so many problems with the ekphrastic piece on Magritte’s Les Amants, a painting that certainly caught my attention the first time I saw it in a museum. But despite my fascination with it, I couldn’t write a good poem... until last month when my frustration over a (non-)relation finally seeped into the forge, and the thoughtful wordsmith in my heart hammered it out into “Discourse.”

I was very happy when it came out, more so when I received what I consider high praise from my teacher, who said, “Maganda na siya... Publishable na siya!” The writing of it was good for my spirit too, which is too often battered by my disappointments—that is the measure of how hard I am all the time wishing for certain things. In my blackest moments, it’s some comfort to know that—on my good days, anyway—I have it in me to articulate my little deaths within the horizon of the aesthetic. But art, while it can bring us face-to-face with the sublime, does not always save us. It didn’t save Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Reflecting on his late son’s guitar, whose strings were broken from disuse after the young man’s suicide, poet Ricky de Ungria writes, “In a crack of grace I now know music/ can push to the edge but will not save.” Nonetheless, I am glad for the times I can write, even though that in itself is not the solution to the sadness. Ultimately, life is worth living, even if it’s only because one can write about it.

I also realized that after I finish a poem, which includes the work of revision, the one who is speaking in the piece is no longer me. In our writing classes, we call the author the persona, because when we write, we take on the voices of everyone/no one. We begin from our individual experience, but that experience is at the same time universal, and in that way each personal narrative has the capacity for the mythic. Some of my poems are consciously addressed to or are about particular people, but in another sense, they are no longer simply about them, or me. For example, when de Ungria writes about his desolation over his son’s death in the following poem, it also speaks of our most fundamental experience of loss, even though we might be unfamiliar with the details of the author’s life.

Pain, you unhappy Pig
By Ricky de Ungria

Pain you unhappy pig
knowing no other sty
to wallow in but mine.
I’ve smashed you with steel pipes,
broken your trough in two,
cut you up, led you out
to lose yourself
in foreign lands

__________but you

keep coming back

and I
keep giving you
wet soul
_____for slop.

If only because of the mythic element—all our literature coagulates from the churning of the Collective Unconscious—a poem does not apologize for itself. So even if the narrative is based on a situation that the author had incorrectly read, or in which he or she had acted unwisely, the emotion articulated in the piece stands alone, apart from the author’s personal context. As a poet who thinks of her poems as her feelings, and often gifted/burdened with hindsight after they had been written, I think of my writing in this way: I may have been, or can be, wrong, but the feelings are true. And they will be so, as long as the poem survives in other people’s consciousness.

"The Jeber" by Auguste Rodent

2008-03-03T19:14:00.009+08:00

Boom, a.k.a. The Pooh Pooh Bear

Soul-searching on a sick spell

2008-03-03T13:30:00.019+08:00

This might be the third or fourth week of an on-and-off illness. I can’t complain because everyone seems to be sick as well, so the virus just goes around and nobody gets well. But I can use this down time to sort out all the details I let go of in the first half of the term (it’s March already, agh!). I began the year with so many plans: Focus on the writing, stop procrastinating in my job so I can focus on the writing, work on years-old research obligations so I can focus on the writing, and—almost as an afterthought—gain weight. I think I was tackling my list of priorities well enough, until things fell apart last month. I received some ten scholarly articles to look over, from my former professor and mentor who’s editing an international journal of philosophy. Then I got sick and lost an incredibly hard-earned five pounds. Now I only have four weeks left in the term to complete the rest of my assignments for my course on Creative Nonfiction.

Perhaps I’d be more productive if my (a) physical and (b) emotional health were cooperating. As a trivia, I found out over the years that my “default” weight is a stingy 90 lbs, which means I have to work hard to maintain the extra 10 lbs I try to keep over that. The heaviest I ever achieved is 105 lbs. For some months back in 2003, I had this seriously round face and people actually started telling me to stop eating so much. In any case, for some bizarre reason, my natural tendency is lose weight rather than to gain it. People are all the time assuming that I am trying to reduce it rather than the other way around. I never bother to correct that assumption because, who would believe me anyway? Everyone wants to be thin. I want to be fat. End of rant.

On the hindrances to my productivity, I think it’s mostly (b) that’s the bigger problem. But I had worse years; my mood fluctuations are supposed to be less wild now that I’m doing What I Really Want to Do. In fact, last night—when it took me hours to fall asleep because of my cold and sore throat—I reread my journal from 2006. I revisited the first painful months of transition from my academic training to what I’m doing now, and I realized why I have so many things to be glad about now.

It was the third term of the school year, and I was finishing my dissertation on Sartre and Beauvoir. I looked into their ideas about the self-other relation, as expressed through their fictional and autobiographical narratives. Existentialism was the first philosophy in post-World War II Europe, which was in the thick of an ideological battle between capitalism and communism. Sartre and Beauvoir were angst-filled celebrity fence-sitters whose stories mirrored their actual lives. Their love affairs were consistently tortured and highly publicized, mostly through Beauvoir’s bestselling four-volume memoirs.

A friend once expressed his surprise that I was attracted to the ideas of the existentialists, concerning romantic love, anyway—with their famous distinction between “contingent” and “essential” loves—because, he said, I was not like that. In a way, that’s true. I want the essential love and only that, forever and ever amen. And yet, perhaps as a way of justifying my attraction to people who were inevitably already attached, I’d whip out the existentialists: See, this can work. But now I know that’s just philosophy, and I can’t do that, nor would I want to. Which is not a judgment of others, just a realization about myself. I’m more the Romantic, really, like Caspar David Friedrich, the old bachelor whose heart was broken by the one woman he married. There can be only one, as the Highlander would say. ;) And in the Romantic sensibility, that doesn’t even mean just one at a time, but one and only one great love in a lifetime.

In any case, what I liked best about existentialism is that it’s a philosophy of subjectivity. It’s also practically literature, because the existentialists expressed their ideas mostly through novels, short stories, plays, and memoirs. Despite my personal attachment to my subject matter, though, the whole process of dissertation writing was somehow soul-killing. I’m proud enough of the output, and I like to think I made an important contribution to the field, at least among people who want to talk about that. But I don’t want to do something like it again. In short, despite all nerdy appearances, I don’t think I’m for the academe, and I don’t intend to be here for a long time. Here’s the evidence from my journal:

6 March 2006

As usual this week, I can’t sleep. :-( Keep worrying about my dissertation, my work at the department, my teaching....

16 March 2006

The dissertation torture ain’t over yet. Still have a couple of chapters to write over the weekend. :-( I want this to be over. So I could move on with my so-called life. My cousins Jeff and Jhan are here, with their family, from Canada, and I haven’t even seen them. My uncle’s coming next week and things are going to be very hectic.

I haven’t answered Les’s email.

I haven’t updated my blog.

I’m so tired. :-(

27 March 2006

I can’t believe it. But I did it; I finished my dissertation! :-) What a relief. I really thought it would never end. Of course I still have the defense to go through, but most of the work is done, and I’m just... God, so unburdened. In fact, I was pretty productive today minding all the things I’d neglected. At least now I have a bit more time to spare for our relatives who are visiting from the US. In fact, last night we went to Enchanted Kingdom!

....

I won’t bore you with the details of how I had toiled this term to be able to submit that dissertation tomorrow. I’ve even practically repressed the memories. I don’t want to have to go through that again. I didn’t have fun at all. :-/ Gah. At least now it’s (almost) over....

Earlier, reading an undergraduate thesis about Heidegger and the poetry of Rumi, I couldn’t help thinking about my own boring areas of expertise. I’ve always wanted to delve into literature and creative writing, I just always seem to get sidetracked. First it was the law school plan and then this totally unforeseen Ph.D. in philosophy....
(Undated scribble)

Noelle Leslie dela Cruz, Ph.D.

Dr. Noelle Leslie dela Cruz, Ph.D.

2 April 2006

Can you believe it ? I actually defended my dissertation last Friday. I’ve been (mentally) laughing like a maniac ever since. Am I happy? A bit. Touched by all the congratulations from friends and family. They’re really sweet.

8 April 2006

Still ruminating about getting that Ph.D.... Last night I told Mitch, it’s like getting a new house. On one hand, you’ve got something you’ve worked so hard for. On the other hand, you’re no longer free—or are less free—to live anywhere else. I thought I’d be “free” once the dissertation’s done. Who am I kidding?! I’ve practically sentenced myself to life in academic philosophy: A life of research writing, lectures, and paper-grading. It’s not such a bad life, but... I’m not sure if it’s what I’m looking for.

I had lived in a mental freezer when I was focusing solely on graduate work in philosophy, and I was off-center emotionally. I was looking for something I knew I couldn’t find in graduate school. But I plowed on till I got the degree, a.k.a. the amulet, the magic pass, the pill that will make you One of Us, so you won’t be such a part-timing troglodyte. I got it at the cost of five years of stifling the unarticulated, unwritten poems and stories. Now I’m “free,” and rereading that journal, I realize that based on my skewed standards for happiness back then, I must say that now I’m incredibly happy. However, when I’m in the mood to nitpick, I bemoan that I hadn’t taken that Ph.D. in literature instead. ;)

Now I also seem to have more discernment for the depths, though I still have a long way to go. There is a journey I have to make, but I don’t know how to start. Nowhere feels right. I’m not talking about the writing, but the living. I have to get over something, perhaps the snootiness that my friends are always making fun of, they’re that fond of me. Otherwise, I’d have burned a long time ago for all the tactless or thoughtless opinions I’ve dared voice. I know I’m a weirdo who lives on this one-woman island, which very few know where it’s located so they can visit. I think I have it in me to venture away from this island, keeping in my heart the things I need not leave behind: the quality of the air, the color of the sky, the texture of the sand. Everyone won’t forget that I’m the island person, yet maybe that’s okay. The rowboat that will take me to the main land is still under construction, but the work is steady....

Delirium of the Endless

Ekphrasis—encore!

2008-02-21T17:30:00.017+08:00

Les Amants by Rene Magritte (1928)

Discourse
By Noelle Leslie dela Cruz

After we had said so many things,
pursued the vanishing thread
out of this labyrinth, stepped over
the corpses of slain propositions
along the path of valid argument,
we fell silent at the sunlit exit
and it came to me, an image
of our hidden darkness

In a portrait of Magritte's lovers
a man and a woman's questing lips
suck the cloth into the void
of each other's hunger.
We don't see their faces
under the mask where the eyes
are hinted at by hollows,
the heads fused at the damp
counterpoint of orifices
trying to inhale the other in

What if we are just mouths
limning the edges of words
as they whirl down the drain of talk,
or otherwise pressed tight
like the seam of an unopened letter
suffocating under the weight
of unsaid things

Our conversations map the matrix
of a burlap sack, a last rough contact
before the garrote of logic
twists tragedy into philosophy,
and we can only speak of ideas,
never of stories. If only
I could see your face.

—oOo—

“Ekphrasis, alternately spelled ecphrasis, is a term used to denote poetry or poetic writing concerning itself with the visual arts, artistic objects, and/or highly visual scenes.” —Tracy Clark, “Ekphrasis: An extended definition”

This week, I finally got around to revising an ekphrastic poem I wrote last year. Its subject is René Magritte’s 1928 painting, Les Amants, which I first came across at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I had posted the original draft here, but deleted it after a workshop brought out its serious problems. It took me awhile to figure out how to fix the clichéd and illogical parts, ending up with a completely rewritten poem. Later I’ll discuss the specifics of how I did it, since it also shows how my foray into literature and creative writing has overhauled my thinking process. (In short, I think I have a more naturally literary than philosophical mind. Maybe, as a friend had suggested, I was the caged bird in one of my earlier poems. Now the lock has broken and I am soaring in what feels like a limitless sky.)

I finally revived/revised the Les Amants poem—which had languished in my drawer for six months—for another poetry reading with Marjorie Evasco and two other women. It will be held on February 29, the second and last day of the Arts Congress on campus. Each of us will be reading three of our own ekphrastic poems, prefaced by a description of the creative process behind each one. A synthesis and panel discussion will cap the event. Here are the complete details. Admission is free, by the way:

Ut Pictura Poiesis: Four Poets on The Sister Arts
Poets/panelists: Marjorie Evasco, Dinah Roma, Noelle Leslie dela Cruz, and Ida del Mundo
Time: 1-2 pm
Venue: Teresa Yuchengco Auditorium, De La Salle University (Manila)

In his definitive book on this form, Museum of Words, James A.W. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of a visual representation.” It comes from the Greek words ek (out) and phrazein (to tell, declare, or pronounce), and had originally meant “to tell in full.” In the literary tradition, it has come to designate written works, especially poems, that address artworks, usually paintings. A classic example is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is a haunting meditation on our indifference toward others’ suffering. It narrates different scenes depicted by the Old Masters, as one would encounter them on a tour of the museum. In particular it focuses on Pieter Bruegel’s 16^th-century painting, Landscape with The Fall of Icarus. The latter portrays a typical scene at a busy port; it takes awhile for the eye to notice a boy’s thrashing limbs in the water. “In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster,” Auden writes. “.... and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

Dr. Marj has written a lyrical paper entitled “Restoration and Creation: The Work of the Ekphrastic Imagination,” published in Issue no. 4 (January-June 2005) of High Chair. Here she explains a crucial element of ekphrasis: the enlargement of the artistic canvas, or the frame of the story, to incorporate the writer’s own imaginative input. She also provides the text of several such poems she herself had written. My personal favorite is “La Condition Humaine,” after René Magritte’s painting of a painting whose frame appears to be contiguous with an open window. She introduces two characters—a man and a woman, momentarily lovers—and refers to two rooms. The literal room contains them, and is the one that is depicted in the painting; the figurative room is inside the woman, as in the room of her reverie, or the room of a relationship. It is a lovely elegy about the intrinsic fleetingness of love and our continual attempt to capture it, as an artist would try to petrify reality onto a canvas. This doomed attempt of both love and art is described in the third stanza, through the unforgettable image of dust motes:

... she understood how inside
And outside the rooms of love
The landscape was not always seamless;
How, every time she turned her heart
Into words to invent the true form
Of being, dustmotes were already trapped
In the light of images, like this morning
Vanished fast into another day.

* * * *

And that is why Dr. Marj is magic.

Last September, I delivered a lecture on ekphrasis that she had liked enough to ask me to present it again in her graduate class in literature. The paper is entitled “The Philosopher as Romantic Wanderer: An Ekphrastic Engagement with Caspar David Friedrich’s Paintings.” Dr. Marj also liked the creative piece that came with it, i.e. my pair of ekphrastic poems entitled “Two Letters to the Romantic.” These addressed the following works by Friedrich, a German landscape painter of the sublime: The Wanderer above The Sea of Mists (1817) and The Sailing Boat (1818). As I mentioned in a previous entry, my teacher observed that these poems refer to two opposite centers of gravity: that of the self (as in freedom or independence), and that of the other (as in a relationship). As all Romantics know, both of these constitute an abyss, i.e. the dangerous and even fatal depths of the heart. These were the first poems I had ever read in a truly public setting, at Mag:Net café in Katipunan, Quezon City, before an audience that included some of the foremost poets in the Philippines—previously mere names to me.

As I write poems now, after two terms of intensive work on this particular craft, I notice that I’ve learned to think differently. It’s my fifth term overall in the MFA program, and aside from poetry, I’ve studied or am studying fiction, non-fiction, various literature cognates, and—agh!—professional editing (thank God I’m past that one). My teacher once told me that thinking in terms of images is easier than thinking in terms of abstract ideas. I was very new into the program back then, so I didn’t really know what she was talking about. I understood it cognitively, but not really intuitively, until I started trying my hand at the different belletristic forms. It’s been an amazing year for me, in the sense of discovering new ways of seeing the world, processing my own emotions, even thinking about “God.” What makes writing a fine art (i.e. belles-lettres) is a particular way of sifting the aesthetic element from any existential experience—of transcending the personal devastation, for example, to imagine yourself writing about it even as you are going through it. For the first time, pain actually feels exquisite. I’ve never enjoyed more the journey that the mind takes over the contours of ideas. Maybe I have found my form(s), or they found me.

The first poem I attempted on Magritte’s Les Amants comprised two six-line stanzas with end rhymes, and included an epigraph from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The quote was about how the lover desires to possess freedom as a freedom, a doomed project because of its paradoxical nature. You cannot possess what is free; you can only possess a thing, not another consciousness. Thus, I read the painting as a portrayal of love’s illusory intimacies, which can never penetrate the other’s unknowability—hence the allegory of the head cloths.

However, during a workshop I realized that my first draft didn’t have a single original line, even containing such cringe-inducing phrases as “the night of love” and “the magic moment of recognition.” Thank goodness for other discerning minds, especially Dr. Marj who pointed out these facile associations. I abandoned the poem and didn’t touch it for at least half a year.

Now that I’ve come back to the image of Magritte’s lovers against the backdrop of a different situation, the revised poem is no longer about Sartrean freedom. In fact, it’s not even a revised version; it’s a new poem altogether—this time about how words can be a hindrance and a burden. This actually builds upon a theme that recurs in my poetry, and in a way, I am repeating myself in this piece. But it’s what had come out—suggesting perhaps that the situation hasn’t changed or I haven’t changed, and I am full of the same festering ideas.

In any case, this is how I imagine a literary critic would close-read “Discourse,” assuming her omniscience about and preference for the author’s intentions. (However, the nice thing about readers who are not you is how they bring out what you never realized about yourself through your work. This is another high that workshops give me.)

Magritte’s painting is called The Lovers, while the title of the poem is “Discourse.” Their juxtaposition may bring to mind Roland Barthes’A Lover’s Discourse, an erudite literary meditation on eros. As a discourse, love has its own grammar, like the grammar of the polarity between attraction and antagonism. To survive or succeed in love, you have to know its rules.

The first stanza gives us a situation. The persona is addressing someone with whom she presumably has had many discussions: “After we had said so many things....” The nature of their conversations is labyrinthine. This is suggested by the allusion to the minotaur’s maze, which Theseus escapes by following Ariadne’s thread. In terms of the associations in the poem, this myth may represent the intellectual work that philosophers or logicians engage in. After all, they are ones who step over “the corpses of slain propositions/ along the path of valid argument.” However, what should have been a triumphant journey out of the labyrinth is belied by the persona’s thoughts. The stanza ends with a contrast between surface clarity (“sunlit exit”) and deep obfuscation (“our hidden darkness”). It seems that they are not yet outside the real maze. And as the next verses suggest, it is not the logical or rational maze, but the emotional or relational one.

The next stanza is the part that talks about the painting. There is no description of the otherwise bare background or the colors; the focus is on the enshrouded heads fused in a passionate kiss, one a man and the other a woman. The subsequent lines immediately relate the image to the predicament described by the persona in the first part of the poem, by means of a synecdoche: “What if we are just mouths....” The mouth is used both to kiss and to speak, actions that cannot be performed at the same time. It is the lovers in Magritte’s painting who are kissing, and the characters in the poem—who may or may not be lovers—who are speaking. Both activities, whose typical objective is to achieve a connection, fail in some crucial way in both stories. The kissing lovers are hindered by their masks, while the persona and her addressee are hindered by words.

This interpretation of words as futility and as hindrance is developed in the last two stanzas. Words “whirl down the drain of talk.” The idiom about something “going down the drain” means that something important is lost or wasted. Another waste is an unopened letter whose contents will not be read. These two metaphors suggest something about the nature of the characters’ conversations. When they talk, it is of useless things; what is important remains unsaid: “... we can only speak of ideas, never of stories.” The final stanza equates the obscuring cloth to the words of discourse. The reference to a medieval instrument of execution—the garrote—expresses what the persona feels, which is akin to strangulation (however, the poem is ultimately silent about the other’s state of mind). Incidentally, a person who is condemned to die by garrote usually dons a head cloth. The poem ends with the persona’s wish—“If only/ I could see your face”—which may be read as futile in light of the all obstacles described.

My two houses

2008-02-16T15:40:00.017+08:00

“The professor had two houses, one inside the other.”—Ursula Le Guin, “The Professor’s Houses,” in Unlocking The Air: Stories (1996)

When I think about my attitude toward spaces, I am reminded of the careful life of the hermit crab. Crawling across sand, soil, or asphalt, it conquers its surroundings one millimeter at a time. But this brave exploration is belied by what the creature carries around on its back—its cache of certainties. Unlike other animals in their naked peregrinations, the hermit crab never goes anywhere without its house. It only truly ventures outside once it has sighted another viable shell, waiting to be lived in.

We seem to have an instinctive attachment to the known, perhaps as insurance against our nomadic ambitions and imaginations. Are we looking for something to anchor us, like a portable shell? We sometimes speak of our attachment to someone as though he or she were a beloved dwelling. We “feel at home” with a friend, or “come home” to a lover or spouse. Alternatively, a place can also assume the status of a person. It can take on a character and a sense of humor; it can be missed, when you are elsewhere long enough; and it can help you find a lost center, the way a childhood room is like an old friend who listens well.

Certain places form part of the geography of memory. For example, there is that small complex of cottages in Baguio City where my first out-of-town writing workshop was held, back in college when I was part of the newspaper staff. The terrace had an expansive view of the city—the colorful roofs of houses dotting a sea of trees; slender roads carved out of the mountain face snaking along the slope; cars and buses crawling on them like ants. At night, the sight of it all would make me think of “Christmas lights strewn around the mountain range,” as I fancifully wrote in an essay about my workshop experience. Around that time about a decade ago, I first made the writer’s connection between physical travel and the travel of the imagination. Below: (1) Baguio City by JMom, (2) Manila Bay seen from the entertainment hall of Mall of Asia.

I’ve also grown fond of the view of Manila Bay from the breakfront at the back of a local mall, in Pasay City where I live. I grew up very near this body of water, which flows into the South China Sea and therefore separates us from the rest of the Asian continent. Sometimes, looking at where the sky curves into the water—countless miles into the finish line of the horizon, the limit of our visual space—I fancy that I am looking at my father’s half of the planet. This is somewhat illogical because he lives in New Jersey, which is on the other side of the other ocean, on the farther end of America. In other words, he’s on the exact opposite of my time zone, so that we are separated not just by half the world but by half a day as well. It takes me twice as long as that to get to him by plane, an interminable journey I make annually now to see him, flying in the same direction as the world spins (but faster), in a sense going back in time. During the part of the year that I live with him and my mother under the same roof, I become a child again.

—oOo—

Dad builds houses for a living. Or rather, he buys old ones and spruces them up to sell again. He was actually an engineer by training and profession, when he was still in the Philippines and before the telecommunications company he worked for had gone out of business. When I was younger, he took care of every leak in the roof, broken door hinge, or malfunctioning light. Many of our furniture, he also made himself, such as cabinets, beds, and tables. He built me a desk and a couple of bookshelves. Now he does entire houses in America: basements, sinks, bathrooms, walls, ceilings. The people who know him there—mostly Filipino Americans who’ve become his good friends and business associates—tell me how amazed they are that he has never formally studied what he does. By contrast, some licensed architects in the States mostly assume supervisory roles but can barely hammer a nail into a wall. Once, Dad showed me a basement he’d redone, which used to be just a storage space or tambakan. He’d re-floored and re-walled it with gleaming wood panels, as well as installed a small kitchen and bathroom, and now it looks so much more livable than our own house! For on the second floor of that 35-year-old structure in Pasay, there is a fist-sized hole, first gnawed out by termites and then gouged by an unsuspecting foot. You can still see it if you look up from the living room, though we’ve covered it up with a makeshift plank cut out of a carton and taped on the upper side. And during the rainy season, water stains would bloom on the plywood of the ceiling, our signal for when to bring out the pails. Below: Dad and me in front of his latest project in Union, New Jersey.

So many things have dilapidated during the years of his absence. But I understand why the best people leave our country, with its rotten political system and collapsing economy. Very few bother to build it up, much less have the skill to do so. For decades, the Philippines has mirrored the poor man’s hovel so ubiquitous in its cities, out of place among Asia’s tiger nations.

Nonetheless, my younger sister and I had grown up in a sturdy house, the best possible one that my parents could make out of the raw materials of their lives. But like many other educated children of the Filipino diaspora, I eventually graduated to a consciousness of cramped space. I lived with the sense that the center was elsewhere, and so had learned to want to leave.

But something about our place in Pasay holds me there. This is surprising because over the past decade, the neighborhood has steadily deteriorated. The children of the earlier generation came to have families of their own, whom they could barely provide for, and crowded the area. Driving home at the end of the day, I can barely squeeze my car into our narrow street, with the vehicles parked on both sides and grubby kids littering the way with their small but energetic bodies. I wonder if they would grow up to become the drug addicts and thieves that their older siblings are—who, we suspect, routinely steal each new fluorescent light we install in front of our gate. Throughout the day, the noises from the closely packed houses would spill over into each other, so it’s not unusual to hear the sounds of someone else’s TV or radio show. Sometimes, when there is a party nearby, the men’s drunken conversation or the karaoke music would keep us awake all night.

Left: A poor neighborhood in Pasay. Last year, the house across the street burned to the ground in less than 30 minutes. It happened two days before we were to leave for the States for a month-long visit. Because a shanty town had sprung up about a mile from our place, along the polluted estuary, we live with the constant threat of fire. It is said that fires originating there were deliberately set, to drive away the illegal residents. Every year, there is an average of about two fires, each one always uncomfortably close to our house. During such times, my task is to drive our car—loaded with our valuables—to another part of the city, parking it in front of a friend’s house on the other side of the highway. I have to make the getaway before the streets—in places only about ten feet wide—became impassable with piled-up furniture, hysterical crowds, and the fire trucks. In ten minutes, I have to select and save the fifteen most important physical things from our lives. (I realize now that I often bypass old photographs and letters and other mementos, prioritizing replaceables like computers and cameras and the TV. The TV, which I never watch. I suppose haste forces us into materialistic decisions.)

In any case, the most recent fire was the closest one, and actually damaged my aunt’s living quarters. Rumors blamed the boy who lived in the house across the street. Having got hold of a lighter, he was supposed to have ignited the air-conditioning system in his bedroom. Something is wrong with his mind; I’ve heard that his mother had once tried to abort him. He’s about six now, and can barely form a coherent word. Sometimes I think of him, uncharitably, as the quintessential product of a “bad” house—the spawn of a mistake, which spawns another mistake and so on ad infinitum. A bad house nobody bothers to either fix or leave condemns its inhabitants to a life of misery.

Our nerves were still frazzled by the time we arrived in New Jersey several days after the fire, having left our compound in a virtual state of disarray, for my aunt and the live-in help to manage. My mother had decided not to cancel the trip. I remember what a relief it was to be reunited with my dad and also my uncle; to let the men handle the details of living, such as driving and bill-paying and house-fixing. Back in the Philippines, it was just my mom and my aunt and my sister, and we felt helpless in certain situations.

The difference between New Jersey, USA and Pasay City, Philippines is the difference between a clear forest lake and a mud puddle, a thirteen-lane super highway and a potholed street, or a sprawling ranch and a rickety shack. Despite being in our 20s now, my sister and I revived the “Shotgun!” tradition, each wanting to hog the passenger’s seat of my dad’s van. It was the best place to appreciate the passing scenery of emerald lawns, majestic trees, and big, pretty houses. In the upscale town where my uncle lives, there is a neighborhood we would go out of our way to drive around—just for the sights. There, perched in the center of their large lots, like royal castles surrounded by moats of manicured grass, are some of the loveliest residences I’ve ever seen. Their tiled roofs, shiny brick walls, pristine colonnades, and neat square windows gleamed under the sun. We thought of taking pictures, but decided against it lest we be accused of terroristic activities. Below: My sister and I in our uncle’s backyard, during spring.

In any case, for all the beauty of that place, we hardly saw a single soul—human or animal—walking the grounds. Another jarring difference I’ve noticed between the American and Filipino lifestyles is how the former puts so much importance on privacy. Perhaps it’s the necessary consequence of most everyone having (paid) work to do, and then coming home at the end of the day with only enough energy to relax in a cozy room, in the soft yellow light. Driving by suburban houses at night, I look curiously into their windows, at chandeliers, bookshelves, sofas, and the occasional man or woman walking across the room. This is the quiet night of carpeted comfort they’ve worked all their lives for, and will do so until the mortgage is paid. I like to think they’re happy, having perhaps known no other kind of life to make comparisons. Yet it’s difficult to gauge this from the outside looking in, and in any case I realize the falsity of this dichotomy: being poor but generally happy versus being rich but vaguely sad. In my years of shuttling between America and the Philippines, I’ve learned that happiness is not a quality of place but of state. It is not to be found in the outer house but in the inner one, for we live in two places, two structures we must maintain and which we bridge through the work of our mind and hands.

—oOo—

When I returned to the Philippines after my last trip abroad, I discovered that the key to our house in New Jersey followed me here, hiding in one of the pockets of my purse. As I write, it sits on my desk a few inches from my laptop, beside the two quarters I had unwittingly tried to spend here but were returned by a sales clerk. I think of it as a kind of talisman; it will fit into no lock here, and hence will open no door. And yet it is the key to something—a physical house somewhere on the other side of the world, but also and more symbolically, a lifestyle of transience. For the house it opens will not stay ours for long; Dad is just prettifying it for some other family to live in. He himself will probably buy another one to repeat this cycle. In the meantime we shall stay in the house he has left, which is falling apart and which, for some reason, I am still living in.

Why can’t I leave the Philippines? For surely, there are places out there that I can love as much as evening lights on the mountain range, seen from a terrace in Baguio; or my ritual of sunsets in Manila Bay, along the strip of cafés at the back of Mall of Asia. For example, I think I can grow very fond of New York City, of the suspension bridge across the Hudson, of the museums and libraries where I could take my future children, of the bustling streets of Manhattan—a bigger, richer, and only slightly cleaner version of Manila. Below: My sister gazes at the New York City harbor from the New Jersey side.

Perhaps leaving your parents’ house is one of the most decisive rites of adulthood. In the Philippines, we seem to postpone that; many Filipinos continue to stay with their folks even if (or because) they have families of their own to support. Another word for “innocent,” which also connotes immaturity, is sheltered. Its literal origin has to do with the inability to give up the comfort and security of home, in particular the one where you grew up in. I picture the hermit crab who, for its own survival, needs to carry its house on its back. For some, it takes so much courage to crawl naked into the open, to realize that what matters is not the ephemeral building that encloses us, but the truer harbor of the heart.

I keep postponing my journey because for a long time, I have feared the unknown. But increasingly these days, I feel like Alice in wonderland. I have just drunk a potion that is making me grow so much bigger than my house can contain. Soon, my head will pop out of the roof and my giant limbs will crash through the windows and doors....

somewhere i have never travelled....

2008-02-14T23:37:00.028+08:00

Here is my poem for the day. For some reason, lately I’ve had e.e. cummings (1894-1962) in mind, in particular one of his romantic pieces—very Valentinish. ;) The e.e. stands for Edward Estlin, and he was fond of writing his name all in lower-case letters. He was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright who was noted for his unconventional syntax.

This untitled poem, known by its first line—“somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond”—first came out in 1931. It was subsequently excerpted in Lisa Angelle’s version of “The First Time I Loved Forever,” which was the theme song of the ’80s TV series Beauty and The Beast.

It is a poem of subtlety, which is striking if we consider how romantic love is popularly perceived as a grand, heart-palpitating thing. By contrast, cummings portrays it as a quiet opening and closing, as of a flower. To perceive this delicate movement requires the quiet of the soul; it demands great patience on the part of the lover. When we are getting to know another, and letting ourselves be known as well, there is an inevitable blooming that tracks the ephemeral seasons of a relationship. The image of a rose in winter underscores the fragility of this entire process.

At first glance, it may read like a man’s poem for a woman, since the addressee is described as having an “intense fragility” and “such small hands.” However, I think that in love, we are all fragile. And the beauty of our romantic fascinations is precisely this challenge of breakage, tempered by an all-consuming tenderness. It is the moment of protectiveness—over the source of our own blossoming—that cummings captures in this poem. (My favorite parts are the second and third stanzas, which, by the way, had come most naturally to me as I was committing the entire thing to memory.)

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
and which I cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

—oOo—

My friends and I had an impromptu merienda this afternoon, following a tradition we started on Valentine’s Day last year. (1) Group shot somewhere at EGI Tower, L-R: Mike, Den, Bebs, me, and Boom; (2) with the (Pretend) Boyfriend, not-so-recently back from China; and (3) at my cubicle with Mike’s panda.*

*A toy he gave me because of my inordinate amusement over the following joke: “Q: What did the panda say to the photographer? A: Ayoko ng black and white ha!” Since then, people have sometimes called me “Panda,” which led to ursine names for everyone else—Tarsier, Koala, Carebear, Yogi Bear, Bear Kachina, Bear Kachina’s cub, and, to round off the group, Goldilocks! This, in a nutshell, is the story of the Bear Clan. Most everyone is a happy bear these days... even perhaps, with some very subtle qualifications, the Panda. ;)

About the writing

2008-02-03T00:21:00.002+08:00

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.

2008-01-26T21:40:00.000+08:00

Just got home after an evening of scouring, futilely, four different bookstores for these titles: Flying Over Kansas: Personal Views by Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas, Voice from the Underworld by Maningning Miclat, and Six Women Poets by Edna Manlapaz and Marjorie Evasco. Two of these books are for my Creative Nonfiction class with Dr. Marj, and I’ve read portions of them already from the pile that she keeps at the library reserve section. But I want my own copies! :'( I’m especially bent on finding Tiempo-Torrevillas’s book, as her essay that bears the title of her collection is just so beautiful. I even took a passage from it and put it in the quotes section in my blog sidebar. I'll place it here as well, since some of the sidebar materials won’t stay up for long:

Time is unmarked in an airplane; time does not hold: you are whatever time it is, but only whatever it is on the ground far underneath you, territory already abandoned even as you cross it, wherever you depart and arrive. The time on your wristwatch is arbitrary when you are in the sky, a designation you carry like luggage from wherever you come.

I really want to write my end-of-the-term biography assignment on this writer—who, incidentally, is the only daughter of Edith and Edilberto Tiempo, two pioneers of Philippine literature in English. They founded the National Writers’ Workshop in Dumaguete, an important rite of passage for contemporary young writers. Unfortunately, Dr. Tiempo-Torrevillas lives in the US, where she is connected with the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Unless she consents to an email or phone (!) interview by someone who’s a complete stranger to her, amidst everything else that she is doing, I don’t think I can write about her life. Sigh. I have to pick another writer/musician/artist living or dead for this assignment.

It’s just that she really inspires me. I’ve been reading up on her, and I’m in the stage where I want to buy everything she’s ever written. Unfortunately, our bookstores are so badly stocked! Or perhaps the best books I’ve been discovering lately are by Filipino writers whose works are not well-distributed. They’re brilliant and multi-awarded, and well known in certain circles, but not by the general public. I have the same problem with my own teacher. Try going to the Filipiniana section of any major bookstore, and you probably won’t find any of her poetry collections or even her latest nonfiction works.

I guess this goes to show that genius does not always translate to bestseller status. Think of the many trees killed to print Dan Brown, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, JK Rowling (sorry, but I think only the first three Harry Potter books count as remotely literary), and countless others. Most of those who take writing seriously, making it their life’s purpose, probably won’t become very rich. Producing at least one truly great work will have to be enough, even though only a few people (relative to the world’s or even just the country’s population) will end up appreciating it. This is what I’m learning now: Ultimately, we are not really writing for the hoi polloi, but for our intellectual peers. That sounds elitist somehow, but—as Dr. Marj once pointed out in class—there really is an intellectual aristocracy. It’s silly to deny it and say that anything can pass as literature, or even that anything less than a well-ordered, well-disciplined mind can appreciate literature.

—oOo—

I actually began this post wanting to rave about how I am truly enjoying my extracurricular (read: outside of philosophy) activities. It’s so rare that I get over my long periods of funk; there’s always one thing or another to angst about. Not so these days, since the middle of the month, in fact. I don’t know how long the optimism and general allrightness with the universe is going to last, so I’m trying to get as many projects done as I can, before I let it all go again.

One of the things that I want to prioritize at last is creative writing. There’s a whole story—partly told here and here—about why I’m not into professional writing right now, but rather into professional philosophizing ;). In any case, this time I want to focus on what I really want to do, and where I’m probably better at. They say there are those who want to write, and those who just want to be writers. I like to think that I’m among the former, that I want to do this not because of the fame associated with getting published or winning your requisite Palancas, though of course all these things are nice. I’m addicted to the craft because of the rare completion I feel every time I finish a piece, or when people read it and I can see that it touched them or made them think, or I expressed a similar feeling they’ve always had but had never quite put into words. The discussions that your work inspires—especially among minds you admire—will give you a different high. Speaking of quoting the writers I like, consider the following passage by poet Ricardo de Ungria, from his essay “Tongues of Fire and Silence,” in Luna Caledonia: Five Filipino Writers in Hawthornden Castle. Here he attempts to describe what it is “to word.” It's rather prolix as he himself admits, but how else can one even begin to talk about this monumental task?

It came to me that to word is always to desire, to test the limits of the human and the materials of the mind. That to word is to open a crevice between worlds so the heart which is the source of all can find room to breathe, take root and grow. That to word is to clear a ground where life can defend its lightness against the difficulties and where pain can contend with the composure and serenity it seeks and grapples with in the dark. That to word is to seduce infinitely the unpossessable, to be ravished by it and survive the permutations by which the moment's available perfection walks the tightrope between fullness and emptiness, desire and deliberation, who to love and the absence of reasons to love.

In the end, though, the writing comes from the living, and I don’t think you can be a good writer unless you live an interesting existence. What’s great about these days is that I get to hang out with really amazing people, and I get to know myself even more in the process. Maybe it’s just a side effect of the auto/biographical writing course I’m taking, but I’m starting to realize that maybe I’m not as “boring” as I’d always feared I was. Or rather, a life of solitude and introspection, philosophy and a few deep friendships—and lots and lots of obscure vocabulary words that your friends always call you on—need not be so bad.

Two names for the cold

2008-01-25T21:27:00.000+08:00

My names snag me in their branches, riotous with meaning, reminding me of Christmas and the cold and Celtic warriors and the strange hold on my imagination that England has always had. I rarely think of how even the “I” is built out of the naming power of words, as opposed to being its source. That’s a frightening thought for writers, whose first and last resort is words. But even we ourselves are made up of words, or the names that consciousness likes to call itself.

Left: Christmas lights at Mall of Asia, photo by Terri.

My mother originally had meant for people to call me “Noelle,” the feminine form of the French word for Christmas, which is celebrated ten days after my birthday. Literally, it is the coldest of all the Christian holidays, but figuratively the warmest; even St. Valentine can’t match the incarnation of God’s love. I wonder if this association with the festivities is what makes me, paradoxically enough, unusually sad around the end of the year. The expected optimism and rote merriment are so hard to live up to, especially for a philosophy teacher. My father once wondered aloud, “How do atheists celebrate Christmas?” I could’ve said, but didn’t, that I for one would rather take the religion out of the celebration, and party as the Romans had, or even the ancient Celts who knew how to fire up their spirits during the winter solstice. But my pagan heart breaks at the sight of Christmas lights twinkling determinedly along the winding, dingy streets of our neighborhood, over the heads of the children and teenagers from the nearby squatters’ hovels, singing carols before closed gates. I learned to un-celebrate Christmas when I was old enough to understand these social realities, and when I got even older I actually learned to hate it. It reminds me of how my whole family is rarely together even during the holidays. Annually, it brings me the same coldness, and the inescapable realization that I am yet another year older.

Shortly after I was born though, my mother tells me, people started mispronouncing my name, starting with the nurses at the hospital who, despite her protestations that I was No-wel, kept calling me No-wel-ee. My kindergarten teacher called me Noy-lee. As for the rest, they thought I was a boy, especially my teachers on the first day of school reading the class list aloud. Mom eventually insisted that I be called “Leslie” instead.

She probably didn’t realize it at the time, but my second name is from the Gaelic, meaning “the gray fortress.” I picture medieval Britain and the castles built by the feudal lords as protection against the ferocious Celtic natives and Scandinavian invaders. In the end many of these citadels held, though they are no more than crumbling ruins now, as names ultimately are. I wonder if this connection to my name is what draws me to England, a place I’ve never actually been to. Fancifully, I think I have unfinished business there, or a soul mate I had abandoned in another lifetime (or who abandoned me). Or perhaps, if I were a much older soul, I was a daughter of Queen Boudicca, and with my sword I cut a swath through the defending soldiers around some prized stronghold.

Or perhaps the fortress has always been myself, impregnable, as I keep struggling with the inner passions I somehow cannot adequately express, unborn as the children I still cannot see myself having. I imagine others looking up the towering façade of my academic degrees, momentarily absorbed, then moving on to the next, infinitely more accessible ruin. I am difficult to get to know, and even my closest friends I sometimes push away. I like my alone time too much, and am incapable of sustained perkiness.

When I peer too closely at the nuances conjured by my names, I start at how completely they capture me, like a net flung over the butterfly just emerging from within. Archetypally speaking, there is always a beleaguered psyche whom love tantalizingly eludes. Inside me is a coldness that my words belie, or so said someone who used to be a close friend. Certainly the meanings behind my names remind me of my antiseptic existence; how, in order to write, I often play the role of the remote observer. I begin to think that perhaps my names are my invisible prison.

But sometimes, when I’m in an optimistic mood, I appreciate the cold: For somewhere in the cavernous rooms inside me, there is a place I can always come into for the seasonal thawing. There I contemplate a constellation of meanings with each shivering exhalation, glad to see my mortal breath condensing in the chill air, so tangibly that I can dream I know.

2008-01-11T06:50:00.000+08:00

Today we saw Terri off at the airport. My sister will be working in Japan for about a year at least, though her contract might also be extended. Her wonderful boyfriend drove us there. On the way back, we were all (surreptitiously) crying in the car. The scene was so familiar. I forget how many times this happened on the way to and from whichever airports. Sometimes I’m the one who gets to go somewhere. Perhaps that’s easier? Then again, not really.

Yet I want to stop feeling so sad at the fact of leaving. After all, we are always in transit. Even in our inner lives, the self doesn’t stay in one place. Last year was hard because of the onset of my Saturnine year—which is still ongoing! Now I see where it’s bringing me, to the realization that the soul needs these separations.

At some point later this year, the members of our family will be at different places (though my parents will be together, as they’re supposed to be). So whenever I feel so sad, like I have since I returned from my trip last week, I tell myself that this is the turning point I’ve been anticipating for so long. I’ve been looking for something which I can’t find here. But thanks to the changes this year, I have fewer reasons to stay and more reasons to go.

My white Christmas

2008-01-06T14:46:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, I got back to the Philippines after a two-week stay with my family in New Jersey. Today is going to be my last opportunity to sit down and blog, since tomorrow is the first day of classes for the third term. (I’m teaching feminist philosophy for the second time this school year, but in the undergrad level, because the majors need an elective. Can’t say I’m excited, since it’s a much-maligned discourse and very few really get it. Anyway, I promise myself this is the last term I’m teaching it for a long, long, long time.)

Incredibly, I actually went to the States twice in 2007. It took my best friend’s wedding for me to finally apply for a visa, after my last one expired in 2001. Every time I go there and see my Dad, and our whole family gets together again, it becomes harder and harder to leave, and I wonder why we—especially me—keep shuttling back and forth. The last visit gave me a lot to think about. I will need a lot of courage to set certain things in place this year.

Over the past month, I’ve been on a couple of mini-vacations: the poetry workshop in Tagaytay that I mentioned in a previous post, and then the too-brief trip to the US over the Christmas break. I realized how travel is so good for one’s intuition. Going to a new place helps me generate so many ideas, and it gives me an amazing perspective on my life. I often forget how lucky I am to have these opportunities. It’s the bright spot I finally noticed during the new year, since last year ended with me feeling the force of a quarter-life crisis. I can’t say the internal melodrama is over yet, and all the self-pity and tendency to compare myself with others, especially my close friends who are always in a magical “there” where I am not. But I’m learning to appreciate my life now.

I want to get over my vague sense of alienation, the idea that I’m so different from others, the notion that only very few could understand me, the grim identification with Kafkaesque characters. It’s not that I want to be “perkier”; after all, my sister is the only naturally perky person I’m willing to put up with, heheh. I don’t want to be more extraverted either, since I don’t think I can ever be that. I guess I just want to appreciate myself more, nerdiness and all!

Here are some pictures from my trip: (1) With my sister Terri at the airport in Manila, (2) Dad's living room in Union, New Jersey, (3) me, Dad, Mom, and Terri, (4 and 5) at Dad's back porch.

Our cousins Jeff and Jhan (in the blue and gray sweaters, respectively) came over from Canada and spent the New Year with us. They stayed at Tito Jun's house in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where my family and I used to stay before Dad got a house. ;) Some pictures of us and our cousins at the New Year's Eve party at "TJ"'s place (the one in the yellow sweater is our other cousin Mark):

Here are other pictures from the party:

Mark and his girlfriend Nelly took us out to dinner at Chili's. Here are Jeff and Jhan posing with Nelly's rootbeer bottles.

Afterwards, we rented The Ring (which the boys hadn't seen yet) and scared ourselves silly. See Jhan hugging a pillow here while watching the movie. ;)

One of the highlights of my trip was the visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (or The Met) in New York City, which I wasn't able to include in my itinerary during the last time I was there. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading up on Impressionism, and most of the books I've been buying these days are about Monet and the 19th-century movement started by him and his contemporaries (i.e. Renoir, Degas, Pissaro, Cezanne, etc.). I didn't realize there were so many Impressionist paintings at the Met, not to mention an entire gallery of Monet's works! What a memorable pilgrimage this had been.

Here are some pictures of Monet's masterpieces from my predictably crappy camera: (1) At the Monet gallery, (2) Haystack, Snow Effect, (3) Garden at Sainte Addresse, (4) Rouen Cathedral: The Portal in the Sun, (4) La Grenouillere, (5) Sunflowers, and (6) Nympheas.

I also chanced upon (1) Renoir's large Madame Charpentier and Her Children, (2) the post-Impressionist George Seurat's famous A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and (3) the Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon.

Speaking of my crappy camera, here are some artistic shots taken by my sister, using her own infinitely better digicam. She really has a knack for this: (1) The ceiling fan in our bedroom, (2) cheese cake, (3) a wintry road at dusk, and (4 and 5) view of the sunrise from the plane on the flight back to Manila.

Another highlight of my trip was dinner in New York City, with Terri and the immensely talented Mark Muñoz. He took us to Chinatown where we had a sumptuous dinner and dessert. I so enjoyed my milk tea with tapioca! I never laughed so much in a long time.

I also went to visit my friend Les and her family in Kansas, just for a couple of days. I met her new baby Sehana. Last April I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. It was great to be with my best friend again after a long time. Well, not such a long time, after all! ;) Her brother-in-law, Kuya Chabs, also took us to a tour of Kansas State University, where he works with the Physics Education department. Their facilities are so impressive. It's the first university I toured here.

Unfortunately, I missed my 6:45 am flight back to New Jersey. Fortunately, the new tickets they gave me let me experience the first class cabin and take a detour to Houston. First class is the only way to fly! ;) Here are some pictures of Terri and our cousins meeting me at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New York, where I finally landed.

But of course, the best part of my trip was seeing my Dad again. He did everything for us: Cook, do the laundry, take out the garbage, wash the dishes, drive us to places, pack and unpack our boxes, and pay for everything, including all our plane tickets. I miss him already. I love my Dad! :) Can't wait for my family to be together again soon.

Somewhere in Union, New Jersey

2008-01-03T11:37:00.000+08:00

Bye-bye, 2007

2007-12-15T19:59:00.000+08:00

Another year is ending. Why does time seem to speed up as you accumulate more years? Now I have such birthday well wishes as "Sana magka-lovelife ka na" (A.), "Wish ko sana magka-baby ka na by 30" (L.), and the simple "I hope you're happy!" (M.). Well, at least the last one is true. Thanks, you guys, and everyone who greeted me today. Thank you most of all to my wonderful Mom and Dad, to whom I owe my life.

Except for some sad news that I will blog about at another time, the last month of the year has been happily eventful. First, there was our three-day out-of-town poetry workshop at Tagaytay, which put me in touch with those soulful matters that city life tends to drown out. After that ineffable experience, I had a nice hangover. I must have walked around for days wearing a beatific smile, which pre-finals week quickly effaced. In any case, I gained a lot of insights from the workshop and was able to revise my stockpile of poems, some of which I had posted here as early drafts. Some pictures from the workshop: (1) the view from the terrace, (2) me and Dr. Marj, (3) during a session, (4) me and my creative writing classmates, and (5) one last group shot before leaving for Manila.

Incidentally, I was asked to do a presentation on behalf of the Philosophy Department during our college's Christmas party. Since I neither sing nor dance, they asked me to read some of my poems. Thankfully, I didn't have to perform alone, as J.J. kindly provided the background music from his guitar.

I began with the slightly revised "The House of Logic," an exposition of our method of argumentation in philosophy and how, in the end, it leaves you cold. Meanwhile, the crowd favorite seemed to be the second of the three pieces that I recited, entitled "The Infinitely Disappearing Stopping Distance." J.J. and I had this idea to use an old Beatles tune, "Blackbird," as a background for it. It has a wistful melody, which is often how we feel when something happens that is unexpected, unstoppable, and life-changing. In the Power Point presentation that accompanied the reading, I used Mark Rothko's abstract painting Yellow and Gold (1956) to illustrate the poem, since it is also about how we tend to miss life's warning signs. I ended with what for me is the most important of the set, "28," my crisis poem, and which I prefaced with the caveat that the titular number has absolutely no meaning whatsoever! ;p

Here are the poems in their final revised form:

The House of Logic

Impressive, how you stacked the bricks so neatly,
The main columns ponderous and confident
And on your roof, not a shingle out of place.
I can scarcely imagine the inner intricacy
What doors would open to which chambers
Or how to navigate the secret hallways.
You spent a lifetime building this mansion,
Plotting the hidden cellars and trapdoors
And a panic room in case of an invasion.

But the door was open, and I entered
Was almost lost in the labyrinth of corridors
Feeling my way through the intractable darkness,
Believing I was alone in the fortress—
Till I wandered into the farthest wing
And found you huddled in a corner, shivering.

The Infinitely Disappearing Stopping Distance

Yellow is the traffic light
when I’m far enough
to slow down to a full stop
with some elegance

I mean the grace
of wheels’ revolution
winding down
at the foreseen moment
of total stillness.

Yellow, a color hard to love
for its manic energy,
like mid-morning sun
peeking through the blinds

The first spark
before a house flares up

Cat’s eyes
seen from the ground
before a bird can fly

Your cell phone screen
lit by a new message
before it slid
into your pocket.

Yellow, a color I couldn’t love
but wish I’d heeded
two seconds before

I crashed.

28*

The weight of Saturn anchors me sleepless
on the bed. I’ve come to dread the descent
of night, a time of running through the calendar
in my head, pursued by the burden of days.
For instance, chalk dust feels unexpectedly heavy
all over my fingers at the end of the hour
talking about philosophers, or perhaps
their profundity is simply difficult to bear.
I imagine the ringed planet inching its way
to a complete revolution, back to its place
on the day I was born, making a bulge
in time’s weft where everything flows now.

It is like swerving into a new lane
as can only happen before the unprecedented:
piled-up cars ahead or a phantom street
from an old map, nowhere to be seen. It is like
the lights going out in the early hours before dawn,
navigating against the resistance of things
implacable in their wrong positions in the dark.
Heaviest of all is the weight of unknowing,
of stumbling forward and imagining
the freefall into the abyss, terrified
but not daring to stand still.

* Many thanks to my friend Hazel who told me about the Saturn return, and Dr. Marj who—having brought up the Saturnine years over dinner once—inspired me to write this.

—oOo—

I also recently went out with my friends at Mall of Asia, which by the way seems to be shrinking by the day. Or maybe I'm hanging around there too much especially after the Glorietta blast. Everyone's there these days. Anyway, we had so much fun, and I got teased again for my "one little beer." I didn't know Mitch was bringing her new Pajero (naks!) or I'd have left my own car so I could get really drunk.... hahaha, as if. Here are some pictures from that night: (1) me and my best friends Maricar and Michie, (2) Dennis and Bebs, (3) I. and Justin who, despite all evidence, are not gay ;), and (4) and (5) a couple of slightly blurred group shots.

2007-11-27T18:03:00.000+08:00

This year I've decided to forgo the Starbucks planner tradition. It costs too much (if you add up the prices of the individual drinks), everyone else will get it, and this year's planner looks rather flimsy. But the real reason is, I am getting... the Monet diary!

The love affair with impressionism began when I first saw Monet's Impression, Sunrise in The Illustrated History of Art by David Piper. This famous painting is where the movement got its name. Many biographical, fictional, and art books later, I became belatedly enthusiastic about the essential premise of impressionist art: the attempt to capture the fleeting moment. I admired these artists for going against the establishment, i.e. the Academy of Arts in Paris, which recognized only the works with classical themes and finished brush strokes. Instead, the impressionists held their own independent exhibitions, in which they were jeered at for their unusual subject matter and unfamiliar technique. They depicted ordinary Parisians going about their typical routines in the day, "in plain air," in a way that called attention to the paintings' manner of execution. The thick and obvious brush strokes invited you to recognize the dynamic nature of the everyday—and the corresponding preciousness of each passing second.

In his essay "The Eyes of Claude Monet," John Berger, one of my favorite writers, describes an impression as

more or less fleeting; it is what is left behind because the scene has disappeared or changed. Knowledge can coexist with the known; and impression, by contrast, survives alone. However intensely and empirically observed at the moment, an impression later becomes, like a memory, impossible to verify.

And this is why one cannot enter an impressionist painting:

What an Impressionist painting shows is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there. It is here and here only that Impressionism is close to photography. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you—the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.

Here are some of my favorite paintings by Claude Monet:

Impression, Sunrise, 1872

Poppy Field at Argenteuil, 1873

Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875

Gare Saint Lazare, 1877

Boulevard des Capucines, 1873

Haystack, Snow Effect, 1891

Water Lilies, 1916

2007-11-26T19:09:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, my sister and I went to the Fully Booked main branch at Fort Bonifacio to see Neil Gaiman, who was scheduled to appear before his fans around 3 pm. Unfortunately, we were informed that he was no longer signing anything; but we could buy autographed works of his starting at P1,000. Which we did, having become interested in a couple of anthologies of graphic and prose fiction. These were compilations of the winning works in last year’s fantasy writing competition that the bookstore and Mr. Gaiman sponsored. (Incidentally, I just found out that a couple of my friends, former colleagues in The LaSallian, were in the comics anthology—Paulo Ferrer and Chester Ocampo, for their story “Defiant: The Battle of Mactan.” Congratulations, you guys!) But while my sister bought the set for the comics, I was more intrigued by the prose fiction, having come across the names of the two first-prize winners who are also former Palanca awardees. This is just amazing; I wish someday I’d have the follow-through to write my own stories and actually enter them in contests.

In any case, we just saw Mr. Gaiman very briefly somewhere inside the store. For some reason, we were made to wait too long for his official appearance before the crowd outside the building. Which, by the way, we didn’t get to see anymore, since more than an hour of standing in the light rain—forced to watch a lame magic show—was just too much. I couldn’t help comparing how Fully Booked had handled this program with how they do author appearances in the States. For example, I once attended a book signing by Nora Roberts in a Barnes and Noble branch in New Jersey. They provided seats for the audience inside the store premises and she signed everything we brought (with our requested dedication), even though none were purchased from the store. We even posed for a picture with her.

Anyway. That was just so disappointing. Perhaps, despite some starry-eyed pieces I’d written about The Sandman here, here, and here, I just wasn’t rabid enough of a fan to endure the endless waiting for him. No doubt he’s worth all the inconvenience anyway. I was the one who was in my diva mode then, heheheh.

I guess, increasingly these days, I can’t stand having to waste any of my time—you know, waiting for anything. For the traffic to move. For friends and students to keep their appointments. For the “Right Person,” whatever that means, to decide to be the Right Person and meet you even a teeny tiny fraction of the way. I think this intense impatience is part of the Saturn Return I’d written about in a previous post. You feel as though there were so many important, unwritten things in your head but your energy is consumed by meaningless things—bureaucracy, unmindfulness, malice, mediocrity.

I promise myself not waste any more time.

My first (public) poetry reading

2007-11-23T23:52:00.000+08:00

I had more fun than I expected. As I told some friends who, unfortunately, couldn't make it to my so-called "debut," it went well—like a blur, actually. My friends from philosophy helped me navigate to the place. It was an eagles' lair, since Mag:Net Café is right in front of the Ateneo campus along Katipunan Avenue. Last Monday night though, Dr. Marj's green contingent invaded it. We so owned the place! (Riiiiight.) For the details—the theme of the program, the list of readers, and why Mag:Net is the happening place for contemporary poetry in the Philippines—please see Joel Toledo's and Marne Kilates' blogs.

When Dr. Marj came in with me in tow, I was completely overwhelmed but trying not to show it. The next day when I ran into my teacher at school, she told me that one of my most admired poets said he liked "the Friedrich poems" (i.e. my poems—a couple of ekphrastic pieces on Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Mists and On the Sailing Boat). These are my earlier pieces which I think tend to be clunky, but I'm fond of them if only because Dr. Marj liked them enough to invite me to read at Mag:Net with her. Now she tells me that a famous poet also liked them. OMG.

Below: My friends Justin, Dennis, Bebs, and I.R., with Dr. Marj

Below: With Raj and Dr. Marj

Seriously, I had an amazing time. I downed a bottle of San Mig Light very quickly before my turn to read. To my slight disappointment, I didn't feel quite as euphoric and giggly like the last time I did that. ;) I was drowsy all throughout the next day, though. And that's why I should have more practice at the ritual of libation.

The following is the text of the poem I read. Many thanks to Dr. Marj who was a champion of this, and who made me realize, through her incisive commentary, that this is really about two kinds of abyss: that of the self, and that of the other.

—oOo—

Two Letters to the Romantic
(Poems for Friedrich)
By Noelle Leslie dela Cruz

I. The Wanderer Above the Sea of Mists

“I must remain alone and know that I am alone, in order to see and feel nature completely; I must surrender myself to my surroundings, unite myself with my clouds and rocks, in order to be what I am.”
—Caspar David Friedrich

I wonder what you see, standing there
your back to me, a pyramid of sharp rocks
under your feet. The solid mass of earth gives way
to the infinity of space, exactly on the spot
where you stand: one foot forward, knee slightly bent,
one arm resting on a walking stick.
The wind ruffles your Teutonic hair.
You mustn’t feel the cold; your black overcoat
fits you well, contains the manly awe inside.
Mist unfurls beneath your feet. Here and there,
mountaintops and trees peek through the wisps.
In the farthest limits of vision, there are heights to scale
where the hidden sun bleeds pink into the blue.

I think I might know how it feels,
sometimes anyway, the vertigo that awaits
at the dead center of your life: Where the wind blows
relentlessly and the abyss calls to your own depths.
A place to forget the world, and the human ties we spin
to form the cocoon of self. You see now
this possibility. You have the choice to jump
(or not), to tear the heart’s artificial swaddling—

and fly.

II. On The Sailing Boat

“It’s a droll business, when a fellow has a wife.... Everything I do now is always done, and must be done, with my wife in mind. If I but knock a nail into the wall, it mustn’t be as high as I can reach but only as high as my wife can reach in comfort. In short, since I became a We, many things have changed....”
—Caspar David Friedrich

Nothing disturbs us here
even the gentle seesaw of our ship
making love to the water
barely registers. We look at the gray city
silenced by the distance, the black
blue expanse of ocean
marooning us. In the corner of my eye
the great white sail rises
reassuringly, a stabilizing triangle
reminding us of something solid
that will always be behind us.

I pray that there will always be
enough air for the two of us,
that your grave presence will not
drain my space. Other than that,
I am fond of the weight
of your bent leg against my knee,
how you assume
the equanimity of a mermaid
staking your claim on a rock
in the middle of the ocean, making
the only sound I can hear—
inviting me to drown.

I pray that I (no, we) be saved.

Going on hiatus

2007-09-01T23:07:00.000+08:00

To family, friends, and others who read this blog

Thank you so much for regularly or occasionally visiting this site. Lately though, I've come to a decision to stop blogging indefinitely. It's more to do with the creative writing program that I'm enrolled in, rather than anything dramatic. ;) It takes a lot of energy to maintain this online catalog of the little events in my life and my insights. Frequently I find I have no more material or momentum for the kind of writing I want to do now. Also, I need to introvert in order to process everything I've been realizing lately, and to find the words for it.

I like to think that I'm in a good place, a place that's full of grace. Often when we encounter such experiences, the most natural response is silence.

Let me leave you with the following passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel (translation by Stephen Mitchell). I feel that it says everything.

I think I should begin to do some work, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight years old, and I have done practically nothing. To sum it up: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad; a play entitled "Marriage," which ties to demonstrate a false thesis by equivocal means; and some poems. Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed in our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

On poetry and the senses

2007-08-20T17:35:00.000+08:00

When We Were Fishes

There is a paradox about how we attempt to describe the vibrant and the fleeting with words, so that we may immortalize them: the sensations, for example the scent of a lover’s nape or the softness of his hair, the emotions you had felt then, which is calm fullness, and the overwhelming urge to preserve. Without the storyteller who distills the event’s essence in a journal, or transforms it into poetry, the memory will eventually be lost. It will not be resurrected until the body chances to remember through a familiar sense, such as smell—the fragrance she used to wear all the time, worn by a passing stranger who has disappeared into the crowd. Suddenly her beloved face looms in front of you, and there the merry lights in her eyes and the playful little smile.

The memory of the body is powerful but whimsical. It cannot be willed; something physical must trigger it. A shade of blue from a passing car reminds me of the sky in New Jersey. A tune from the radio brings me back to a friend’s performance the year before, accompanied by somebody’s acoustic guitar. But decades can go by without recall, and vast tracts of experience are lost forever.

Left: Sappho. This is why words have assumed a magical aura, and poets are sometimes thought of as shamans. Our lofty lives are no different from those of worms in that our existence inevitably ends in death. But we can live on through words. Because several verses have survived history, the poet Sappho’s point of view may exist in other people’s consciousness, even as centuries will have passed. Consider the following lines, in which she describes the effect of a woman’s sweet voice and laughter:

.... yes, that—I swear it—
sets the heart to shaking inside my breast, since
once I look at you for a moment, I can’t speak any longer,

but my tongue breaks down, and then all at once a
subtle fire races inside my skin, my
eyes can’t see a thing and a whirring whistle thrums at my hearing. (Hirsch 23)

Two thousand seven hundred years later, her experience speaks intimately to those of us who have been in love just as violently.

Granted, reading the words is not the same as living the emotion. But it’s the closest we can get to what is permanently gone. Some philosophers, notably Plato, were so enthralled by the power of language that they went as far as to say that ideas are truer than actual objects. After all, the idea of a tree will persist forever, even as all the earth’s forests will have been denuded; and moreover this ideal Tree is perfect: it is not worm-eaten, it does not belong to any particular species, like a mango tree that is neither a sequoia tree nor a pine tree. The idea of a tree—abstract and formless—denotes all trees.

A thousand and a half years after Plato, during the Age of Enlightenment, René Descartes repeats this bifurcation between the ideal and the sensual. Consciousness centers around an “I,” whose existence cannot be doubted because of the very activity of cogitating (and not, we must note, because of smelling or tasting or farting or any of those lowly bodily process). The lofty activity of thinking must not be contaminated by the senses, which often deceive us; the eyes for example are susceptible to mirages, the tongue incapable of taste during illness. The body is a rickety bundle of momentary sensations, none of which can be trusted completely. To get at his fortress of certitude, Descartes retreats into careful reflection, sitting meditatively in front of his fireplace, positing the existence of an evil genius who deliberately deceives him. At the end of all his doubting and shutting out of all the world, he finally arrives at his indubitable thinking ego.

There are still traces of Plato and Descartes in our intuitions today, for example in the notion of the insubstantial, eternal soul inside the dying body—the “ghost in the machine.” We tend to think of the body as a temporary vessel, a lodging place of the true self, which is immaterial. The spirit is often willing, but the base flesh is so weak. And so we think of the true life in terms of the mental or intellectual realm. There is that stereotype of philosophers as otherworldly mutterers who live in their towers of abstraction. But even the non-philosopher has imbibed this traditional paranoia and chauvinism toward the body. The modern person lives in the world of work and the body is just a means to it; it must be fed and allowed to rest, but eventually it must be left behind to achieve philosophy and literature and art. (On a macrocosmic level, this abuse and neglect of the bodily self is mirrored in our treatment of nature as a means to our technological and cultural ends.)

Yet we are reminded that we are body—as opposed to we “have” a body—whenever sensation overwhelms us, bringing us back to the physical earth which is our primordial mother. Sex. The dance. The drawn-out tooth extraction. Yes, there I am: I feel, therefore I am.

The poet reminds us that we are body, because the poet remembers all the way back to the time when we were fishes. Once, before consciousness cleft the world in two—i.e. self and all the rest—we frolicked inside the womb, replete and wordless. But the moment of birth must arrive and we have to live out the rest of this sentence, a lifetime of loneliness. Yet a part of us remembers and longs to go back to that lush darkness.

Like the poets, the existential phenomenologists, who philosophize so poetically, also remember. Martin Heidegger thinks of the conscious self as inseparable with the world: the human being is being-in-the-world. And Diane Ackerman, a poet who attempts a phenomenology of the senses, affirms that there can be no “I” prior to the body’s impressions; there can be no isolated subject.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses—how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit. (xix)

When Ackerman (6) maps the sense of smell, she talks about how our life’s breath is proof of our enmeshment with the world:

Etymologically speaking, a breath is not neutral or bland—it’s cooked air; we live in a constant simmering. There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.

This anti-Platonic theme of being steeped in sensation also runs through the works of one of my favorite poets, Robert Hass. In his famous piece, “The Privilege of Being,” he compares the existence of ethereal angels to that of mortal lovers, and describes how—paradoxically—the angels envy us. The winged immortals have the luxury of eternity in the realm of the spirit, much like Plato’s ideal Forms. But in exchange for this, they cannot appreciate the fullness of human life, whose preciousness derives from its fleeting nature.

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleyways of the novel.

The message of this poem is echoed in Wim Wenders’ 1987 German movie entitled Der Himmel über Berlin, translated as Wings of Desire in the English version. (This film was inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, of whom Heidegger was also a great admirer.) Here, an angel mixes invisibly among the human crowd, reading their thoughts, observing and recording their lives. Despite his privileged point of view, akin to God’s, he feels like an outsider, as though he were missing out on something very vital. Then he falls in love with a circus acrobat, and decides to give up his angel’s wings so he could be with her. It is at this point that the movie, which starts out in black and white, is rendered in Technicolor. Meanwhile, the Hollywood remake of this film, City of Angels (1998), builds on the theme of the sensuous and its priority over the abstract and the disembodied. The angel Seth can move at the speed of thought, read minds, live forever, and of course, fly. But he cannot feel; he does not know the taste of pears or the touch of a human hand. In the end, he gives up eternity for just these things. Below: A scene from Wings of Desire.

In another poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Hass (1801) more fully presents his riposte to Plato’s metaphysics. He begins by alluding to that abstract philosophy:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.

The persona then recalls his feelings for a former lover, concluding that what is true cannot be faceless or formless: it is particular and concrete, breathing, organic.

.... There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hand sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed.....
.... There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

The Platonic longing for eternity, aided by words and abstraction but ultimately thwarted by death, represents our hubris, the sheer arrogance in dreaming that we humans can become remotely like gods. The tantalizing possibility of that comforts us in the face of our finitude, our sentence of loss. Jorge Luis Borges (14) writes that there is “an element of fear” in the Greek truism about our inability to step into the same river twice—a saying attributed to Heraclitus.

At first we are apt to think of the river as flowing. We think, ‘Of course, the river goes on but the water is changing.’ Then, with an emerging sense of awe, we feel that we too are changing—that we are as shifting and evanescent as the river is.

Perhaps this is the hardest to accept of all. Everything is changing in the world; it is tempting to posit the existence of another world, where nothing dies. But to get there, one must give up the body and all that is earthy. However, what if—as Hass and some movies suggest—the angels themselves secretly long to fall? Are we perhaps blind to the truth, which is in the here and now? Ultimately, this is the inherent paradox of the poet’s attempt to describe life’s fleeting vibrancy: The immortalized images of poetry, no matter how lush and sensuous the words, can only be at best a pale reproduction of experience. In this sense, all description fails. The idea is the copy; the object is what’s real. At the highest point of their flight, words shed their numinous wings to plunge back into the primordial waters of the senses.

As a postscript to this essay, let me leave you with a poem that I wrote at a time when I was drenched in sensation. The inspiration for this piece was the last series of storms that disrupted classes for four straight days. It is about water, which is a necessary condition for life, and our communal birthplace. The ancient Greek thinker Thales invented philosophy and science in the West when he asked the first philosophical question: “What is the universe made of?”—to which he answered: Water. In this poem, I write of the strange longing to relinquish oneself in the embrace of the elements, which is a way of drowning and resurrecting as a fish.

Fishbowl
By Noelle Leslie de la Cruz

7 days of rain have fallen on this island,
one of the country’s more than seven thousand.
it is the ocean’s season of reclamation, this ascendance to the
nimbus heaven—pregnant with water & silent. breathe in the city’s
wistful exhalations, the electric air teeming with ions. slide your tongue
out & taste it, the flavor of wordless anticipation. here we can converse like
fishes, exchanging glassy glances & conversational pearls of air softly pop-
ping. let’s speak slippery truths without words, rubbing agile bodies without
question. for this is its ancient purpose, the deluge: so we may drown the
polluted mind, so we all may swim (& pee) together, so I can float like
a dressing gown submerged, translucent as mermaid’s hair—so
that, rising to the surface, we may receive the rain’s bene-
diction, letting the water flow like tears bottom-
less unstoppable & uncomplicated.

References:
Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of The Senses. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Borges, Jorge Luis. This Craft of Verse. Ed. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hass, Robert. “Meditation at Lagunitas.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fourth Edition. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Hirsch, Edward. Poet's Choice. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006.

On poetry and desolation

2007-08-04T16:12:00.000+08:00

Note: For the first time in too long to remember, I feel both empty and whole, if completion means relinquishing everything inside to take the world in. Previously, I walked around not really knowing where I was going, unable to identify what was missing. I am still in transit, but I have learned to savor—actually savor—existence. In short, I am "happy." (Some requisite knocking on wood here.) I like to think that it's because of my discovery of creative writing in general, and poetry in particular. So in acknowledgment of these discoveries, my current series of posts will refer to what I'm studying now. After all, much of my writing these days goes to Dr. Marj's course on Poetry Techniques. (Apologies to my teacher, who will get this essay later than it's posted here!)

* * * * *

Heart’s Underworld

“In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”—Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa”

Of the international selection of works that he has discussed in his Washington Post Book World column, “Poet’s Choice,” Hirsch writes, “Suffering is one of the central elements of these poems, but part of the majesty of poetry is that it works against the suffering it describes. It restores us to what is deepest in ourselves. It consoles us” (5).

To have the heart, and then the words, to write poetry in the first place means that one has suffered. For the Buddhists, for whom the First Noble Truth is the reality of dukkha, the latter arises from birth, aging, sickness, change, separation, frustration—in short, life itself. Among sentient beings, humans are unique in our consciousness of our finitude, and our fundamental estrangement from nature. Albert Camus, the French philosopher and herald of the Absurd, wrote, “If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world” (51). To be human is to long for a rationality that is absent from the world, and to recognize the possibility of non-being or death.

Among word artists, poets are probably the most conscious of our condition, since their remedy for existential malady is the swiftest and most effective. Whenever I read poetry, the burden in my chest eases, as though a balloon of pain has been punctured and all the dark, ineffable things fizzle out, back to the world where everything comes from. The visual arts may evoke emotions, but don’t usually name these as a poem does, with its arsenal of breathing words. My favorite pieces are those that reflect the hybrid colors of my own emotions, dipping into a palette of wistfulness, melancholia, hurt, emptiness, and despair. The finished whole, twice or thrice read, emerges as a startling image of grace.

I can think of several occasions when poetry mirrored my feelings, thereby making them easier to bear. A year ago, I became very close to a person who, not unexpectedly, shattered me. It hurt more than I thought it would, and I malingered in those long months of pseudo-recovery. I realized from the experience how much I had been counting on love to come again, and to last longer than past relationships. Six months later, I would still wake up fearing I might not be able to get out of bed. Or I’d park my car where I work, switch off the engine and pull out the key, thinking I couldn’t even muster a smile, much less get through another day.

In those early days of darkness, I came across the following verse from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”:

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. (487)

I was so moved by these lines, I spontaneously read them aloud to a friend. Some lines so completely capture what we are going through, the words take us leagues ahead in our journey. Rilke’s reference to the coldest season in the Western hemisphere mirrored the blizzard inside me, reminding me that soon enough, spring and then summer will also arrive.

Right: Marjorie Evasco. But first there is the present to go through. I remember how winter felt, from those sojourns to the States where my father lives. The cold would pierce the thickest insulation, even your flesh, attaching to your skeleton so that your soul would twist all over itself and shiver. The biting wind would freeze even the moisture on your cheeks. Fresh from heartbreak and longing for a complete change of environment, I visited family and friends in America, hoping that a vacation from my old life would cure me. And the poetry collections of my teacher, Dr. Marj, flew across the Pacific with me. I would reread a particular poem—“September Fugue”—to the point of memorizing it. The second verse goes,

The viability of wings spanning the light
Rests deep in the long dark tunnel
Where we dream the dream of the ancients
Learning while we sleep how to break
The outer skin and seek the sky. (Evasco 33)

I imagined myself to be the butterfly in the poem, paying the price of sun with part of my lifetime spent in the dark. Dr. Marj’s metaphor helped me understand the necessity of my soul’s winter. It is in that passage of pain that the steel in our spirit is forged, an essential experience that will help us survive future battles.

On an intuitive level, the message of this last poem coincides with the general theme of going underground, which we may find in at least a couple of ancient myths. The first is Persephone’s abduction by Hades, which explains the changing of the seasons—as her absence on earth translates to the winter of Demeter’s loss. The second is the inspiration for Rilke’s “Sonnets” quoted previously, which is Orpheus’ journey into the underworld to try to reclaim Eurydice. These allegories, which are by no means unique to the Greek mind, perhaps point to an archetype of what C.G. Jung refers to as the Collective Unconscious. It is the archetype of the poet as a voyager into the abyss of the psyche. His or her goal is to extract meaning from a brute universe. However, as indicated by Orpheus’ fatal looking back that costs him his beloved, this goal is necessarily always frustrated and never completely finished. In her analysis of this myth, the poet Diane Ackerman astutely muses,

Why did Orpheus look back? I’ve often wondered. Because he didn’t trust the gods? As an all-too-human reflex when he didn’t hear Eurydice’s movements—that is, not even his magical gifts could protect him from his human traits? .... In arrogance, because he thought his music made him more powerful than the gods? Was it a natural oversight linked to his gift (he was a transcendental musician, someone for whom time was fluid)?.... Because no gift can be enjoyed without paying the price? (28)

Above: Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). I assent to her last rhetorical question: for the most beautiful words are those mined from our blackest depths, from our most interminable, insomniac nights. There were nights I lay in bed unable to dive into the comfort of sleep, frozen on the precipice of unconsciousness, watching strange creatures frolic in the mind’s sinister sea. Frequently I found myself wanting to turn off my own thoughts, to not listen to me for one blissful moment. On more than one occasion, I was terrified I was going crazy! Before I delved into creative writing, I would channel my frustrations into philosophy. Predictably enough, it did not comfort me much; perhaps this discourse even took me farther from the “answers.” Recently though, I discovered poetry, and it was as though the bats of my inner night were unlocked. They flew away with a big whoosh, flapping to the rhythm of the words, leaving me empty again. Poetry is my most fortuitous discovery so far, a foothold that takes me closer to the surface, a moment full of grace. I know that when I look back on my sadnesses, as one inevitably does, it will be without regret. I have unified my underworld and my sun.

Right: Dinah Roma. I will end this essay with Dinah Roma’s poem entitled “A Process of Connecting,” which repeats this theme of burrowing into the earth. Our desire for communion with reason or meaning is intrinsic to our being human. From their unique vantage point as explorers of the deep, poets can perceive such connections. Of course the price (and reward) of such a perception, and its translation into words, is the bloody incarnation of the spirit, akin to the pain of birthing.

A Process of Connecting
by Dinah Roma

Dig up a hole, put your hand into it
never doubt your strength as you rummage through earth.
Keep on chanting, you have to keep the bones aware
of your searching. If, in digging, you reach
the hardened stone, the singular stone that keeps
you alone, take it with you, take if to your Temple.
Pound it till dust is its essence,
pound it so nothing lords over your presence.

And if you can, keep on digging
until you can fit your hand and quench its shaking.
Leave it there until songs
careen from the earth’s throng
to pull your hand, lengthen its reach.
Leave it there until you learn to weave silence
in ligaments of sounds
and learn how blood flows
into smug bones underground. (21)

References:

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of Love. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O'Brien. London: Penguin Books, 1955.

Evasco, Marjorie. Dreamweavers: Selected Poems, 1976-1986. Manila: Editorial and Media Resources, c1987.

Hirsch, Edward. Poet's Choice. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006.

Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke. Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library, 1995.

Roma, Dinah. A Feast of Origins. Manila: University of Sto. Tomas Publishing House, 2004.

The poem as a cipher

2007-07-29T20:20:00.000+08:00

I rushed a lot of poems this week, since my deadline for Dr. Marj was yesterday. They say that after finishing a piece, you should leave it in your drawer for a few days, maybe even as long as a week, before coming back to it for revision. That way you wouldn’t be too close to it as to be blind to the flaws. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time—or the emotional intelligence—to do this. Once a work-in-progress is out of me, I read it to death and then post it here proudly. Tsk, tsk. But I’ve been tweaking some of these pieces, and maybe I’d even delete those that don’t survive the critics’ purifying fire this coming month.

Now that I’m done with my entries for the workshop, I can concentrate on the other course requirements—i.e. the journal discourses on poetics or craft, based on our readings. I’ve submitted one already, entitled “The Time of The Butterflies,” after a central metaphor concerning the difference between poetry and philosophy. The poet captures the vibrance of her subject matter in mid-flight, while the philosopher-academician pins its dead wings on a slab for dissection. Each activity requires different skills, but in terms of proximity to Being, Poe certainly trumps Plato. (Though of course, Plato would retort that the poets ought to be banned from the Republic, since the ideas they deal with are just copies of copies.)

Is poetry my medium? I don’t know yet. I certainly had so much fun this month, birthing those lines that I’m sure will get their requisite trampling-upon. ;) Students in the Creative Writing program have a choice of a collection of poems, a novel, or a play for their thesis. I’ve long fancied that I’d concentrate on fiction, because I so admire the existentialists for their novels and short stories—i.e. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky. However, if your prose is choppy or unreadable, you might still turn out a bad book despite that good story in your head. So training in poetry is also good for wannabe fictionists, and for writers in general. My favorite novels are those that are written so lyrically: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (the Stephen Mitchell translation), The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, Written on The Body by Jeanette Winterson, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. You can enter their forest of words and stay there forever, while the rest of the world grows old and decays.

* * * *

There’s a story behind each of the poems I’ve posted, and in revisiting these stories, I marvel at the power of the intuition to generate ideas. I’ve been told that thinking poetically is easier than thinking philosophically. The metaphor serves as an important cipher of life, which otherwise would have remained tragically inscrutable. Poetry conveys its message by describing something in terms of another thing. Thus, a poem reveals where the important images are constellated in our mental sky, helping us make sense of our seemingly disconnected experiences. Perhaps this is why, since I started studying poetry, I’ve been dreaming so vividly.

To explain what I mean, let me talk a little bit about the origins of some of my recent poems.

The Caged Ones came to me one afternoon when my sister and I bought a pair of lovebirds as a birthday gift to my aunt. I remember how depressed I became after touring that pet shop, looking for a prospective purchase. These sentient beings were trapped in such tiny spaces, for the perusal or entertainment of humans—who, in addition, had the power of life and death over them. Anyway, we came home with the birds, whose cage we placed in our aunt’s small screened front yard. I realized that even if they could escape their double prison, chances are they’d just get killed by boys with slingshots.

At that time, I was thinking about the Filipino diaspora and how comparably difficult it is to live in the Philippines. I realized that even the well-to-do in this country enjoy at best only a negative type of freedom. Their money certainly insulates them from hardship, but it doesn’t mean that they can fully experience such intangibles as a clean environment, a sense of nationhood, and freedom of the mind. The youth of the Filipino middle classes, such as my students at La Salle, are like caged birds: They are free from physical want, but they are not free to fly. So my poem was inspired by this frustrated longing to fly away: “In the horizon, the black dot of an airplane/ is flying out of here while the birds that nobody owns/ streak across the sky....”

In the case of another poem, the idea came to me first before the image. The last time I was out with my girlfriends from high school, Maricar brought along her two-year-old daughter, J.K.—the first time she did so. That day I saw a whole new aspect of her: the mother! She skipped bathroom trips and a movie so she could watch her child. I remember looking over my shoulder at them, as our other friend Michie and I walked to the theater with our popcorn and sodas. A lifestyle change can be so insidious, but during moments like this, the trickling of time plays out in slow motion for me. The crowd faded as I focused on this old friend, who was leading her daughter by the arms as they walked past a carousel and videogame machines. Below: J.K. Gabriel enjoys chocolate cake!

I spent the following week reflecting on how sly time is, slipping past us while we’re preoccupied with the routines of each day. The things we take for granted as indestructible—the soul, identity, personality—turn out to be mere sandcastles in the shore of years. We are all changing, and this process is so unique and personal as to be indescribable to another, no matter how close they are to us. That is the measure of our fundamental aloneness, lying in wait for us as we turn the corner of adulthood. I felt such an exquisite emptiness, and I think the sadness showed in the poem I wrote, Tales in The Sand. But since I wanted to end it on a positive note, in the last verse I talked about “the secret of the ocean’s equanimity/ And the millennial wisdom of the rocks:/ Standing faithfully at the water’s edge/ Against the onslaught of wind and brine....” Below: With Maricar and J.K. at Sugarhouse in Glorietta.

By far the easiest to write was a poem I entitled The House of Logic, probably because for a long time, I’d been thinking about the person who inspired it—in particular, his way of communicating. I noticed that every time we talk, the subject is philosophy, and the most nitpicky species of it: analytic philosophy. The latter deals with logic, language, and consciousness. (For obvious reasons, I prefer existential phenomenology, which dares to engage such topics as love and death and freedom. Do let’s talk about the things that matter, that things that make us truly human! ;)) So I was surprised one day when he suddenly opened up about his personal life. For me, that single conversation was worth more than all those scintillating arguments we had exchanged. Two minds can swap truckloads of ideas without actually connecting, which is, sadly, the fate of many philosophers. I was happy that, for a moment at least, he let me in. The resulting dialogue was a lesson in patience and the appropriate response to vulnerability.

In conclusion, these poems are ciphers to my life. At the moment of creation, even at the draft stage, I sense the closing of a circle. I have many such unresolved circles, as I’m in the habit of accumulating them. Poetry helps me move on from black hole to black hole. I also like to think that when others read my works, tracing the circles I drew in their mind’s eye, they might recall similar experiences and emotions. If only during the moment of reading, they might arrive at the same gratifying closure. Perhaps they could also recognize the images from that primordial well we all dip into in our dreams, or what C.G. Jung calls the Collective Unconscious. For these reasons and many others, I am always grateful when the words finally come.

From a last memory of Subic Bay

2007-07-25T22:46:00.000+08:00

Tales in The Sand
By Noelle Leslie de la Cruz

For M.R.G.

Years ago, you didn’t have a daughter yet
all of us in our circle were single, closer to 20
than to adulthood. Our only out-of-town trip
remember, that night-long drive through the forest
passing sentinels of monkeys on the wayside
their lax fingers dragging on the ground
and their tails curling like questions marks.
The sun had sunk behind the mountains
by the time we reached the road’s end
where the beach poured into the bay.

You got out and ran to the water, jumping in
with all your clothes on. We waded ankle-deep
and watched you swim as far out as you dared,
your feet sinking beneath the surface
like the phantom fins of a mermaid.
It was as close to the open as we could get,
the warm, wet sand swirling around our limbs.

I had a sudden sense then of another sea
we were swimming in: a sea of sand that streamed
endlessly through the funnel of God’s hourglass,
where even the fondest girlhood memories
could not moor us. There was sand under my fingers,
sand in my damp hair and ears, sand in my heart
as I watched you swim farther and farther out,
until you were a speck lost in the shifting grains.

Back on the shore, I found unlikely comfort
in the rock cliffs that bordered the beach. After all,
they had assumed their faithful stance for millennia
against the onslaught of wind and brine, yielding
a fraction of a fraction of themselves each year.
Just as these great rocks must surrender
to the elemental encroachment, I realized that
so too must we shed a thousand parts
of ourselves as time passes, until we become
as fine, as wise, as lovely as sand.

2007-07-20T20:22:00.000+08:00

Last evening, on the third day of my illness and still thinking about a stranger of one degree, I wondered: When a conscious being closes her eyes forever, what happens to her point of view? What happens to the intent behind her loving, the alchemy of her words, the wonders she uniquely witnessed? The self that unifies all these may have disappeared, but surely, not the energy itself....

2007-07-17T00:07:00.000+08:00

An article I wrote at the request of the Marketing Communications Office was recently published in 2401, DLSU's official newsletter. I found out about it through a student who told me that the entire thing was posted on a bulletin board somewhere in the ground floor of the LS Building. So I duly passed by there, and was momentarily mesmerized by the picture of The Sandman with his index finger in the air, blazing a shiny white path in space where you can see the letters H-E-I-D-E-G-G-E-R. ;) Is that sacrilegious or what? Hehehehe!

Online, I found this pdf copy of the newsletter with my article in it entitled "Philosophy in Comic Books." See for yourself what nonsense I'm wasting my time on. :p

2007-07-16T17:36:00.000+08:00

Note: I just tried to go back to A.E.N.'s Multiply page, but it's no longer there. Must be due to too much speculation in the comments section. It's a shame though, because her entries and pictures were so heartrending--especially those about diving, the sea, and writing letters to her daughter. Her columns, published in SunStar Cebu and reproduced in her blog, were especially memorable. I loved the one called "Beauty and Sadness and the Moon," though I can't be sure of the title now. I hope her collected writings will be made available to the public soon.--NLGC 20 July 2007

My classes are done for the day and I'm just sitting here behind my desk at the office, feeling glum--though really, that word is so inadequate to describe this resigned listlessness. Perhaps I shouldn't have read all those entries in Ana Escalante-Neri's Multiply account, or looked at all those photos of this once-vibrant girl who loved the sea and poetry and her six-year-old daughter. I told R. this morning, "She had all the things that I've always wanted and figured would make me happy. She went to all these places and she knew all these famous poets in the country. She wrote so poignantly. She had a husband and a child. She even had her own library at home. And she was so beautiful!" But none of these things could save her.

On the way to school this morning, I felt as though a storm cloud followed me around, dark and electric, even though outside the car it was a sunny Monday and students loitered down Agno Walk. They were chatting and laughing and kidding around; some were jogging up or down Andrew Hall's stone steps, others were just walking, sidestepping the traffic of cars and people. Silently, I traversed my usual path from the parking lot toward one of the buildings inside the main campus--through the smiles and waves of people I knew--all the while feeling like a wet, shivering bird chased by thunder. I am introverting again. Does sadness come before poetry, or does poetry come before sadness?

By the way, I read that she had loved Sylvia Plath.

* * * *

On a lighter note, earlier I went to the newly-opened National Bookstore just across Taft to purchase Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. I owned a copy once but it got so battered after having been read by so many. Somewhere along the way it just disappeared (or maybe it's somewhere in those boxes at home). The irony is that just last week, I came across a like-new trade paperback edition of this book with the original cover, for only P200, at Booksale at Harrison's Plaza. It was such a lovely copy, but I let it go--not knowing that in a few days I'd suddenly think of Golden's unforgettable metaphor about grief as a window, and which I would want to quote for a piece. So now I'd had to buy a more expensive copy (at P335) which is smaller and has Ziyi Zhang's face on the cover. Oh well.

It's a book worth keeping anyway, if only for Golden's mellifluous prose.

Inflamed

2007-07-15T22:40:00.000+08:00

Saturday began at around 5 am when the women in my house switched the lights on and hurriedly donned their decent clothes. "May sunog daw!" somebody said. The lightest sleeper, whoever she was (maybe my mom), must have heard the commotion outside. Mechanically, I changed into a shirt and shorts, jogged down the stairs, and started hauling our important stuff into the trunk of the car. As the only one who drives, I had to get our car and all our valuables out of our compound, before the narrow streets became impassable with the neighbors' piled-up furniture and hysterical selves.

This is the third time in four months that this "drill" has happened. I had seen flames gobbling up houses from ten feet away, rooted to the ground while people jostled and swirled about me. It's so existential, that sensation of having to choose which things to save in the 5- or 10-minute window before your escape route is blocked. If the fire ever gets us, I know I'll never save all my books. Or those photos from all the years of our lives. Or the letters from people, collected since I first learned how to write. Who has the time to think of such things, when you're busy lifting electronics and suitcases of important papers?

Anyway, they put out the fire in time. We had worse scares. And I promise that we are moving soon, I hope before the year ends.

Shortly after the fire scare, I got ready for that morning's poetry recital to be held at the Lopez Memorial Museum somewhere in Ortigas. I only knew the place from a map, but my friend R. and I got there without (much) mishap. The anxiety was worth it. The artifacts and native paintings, from the masterpieces of Luna and Hidalgo to the contemporary blasphemies of today's artists, made me suddenly proud of my heritage. And that Rizal alcove and the Friendster account they made for him! It was the perfect statement about the postmodern tendency to fetishize an icon. Later as my classmates read their poetry selections, a realization pooled in some wordless well in my brain, to be verbalized later this weekend, as I googled that young, beautiful, and brilliant protégée of Dr. Marj's who died this week.

I realized that there are worlds within the world I grew up in, and learning to love a place and wanting to live in it means picking up the thread of a conversation, and devoting your years to it. I realized that I want to stay in this conversation, because elsewhere people don't care about these things, much less speak our language. A part of me is already an exile; I don't want to be doubly a foreigner.

Perhaps because of all the excitement--the fire and then the even fierier discoveries--a migraine descended on the drive back home, and I'd had to lie in bed the entire afternoon.

And there, in the dark, all these things crystallized for me.

One understands why people can't leave their house even when it's burning.

2007-07-12T23:27:00.003+08:00

Loved Birds
By Noelle Leslie de la Cruz

Her new birds are lovely
in their jade-blue plumage,
with small beaks and dainty tongues
darting out for a French-kiss.

They flap their wings
and land unerringly
on the same perch in the cage.

Outside the garden, the din
of cars and buses. Uncollected garbage
ripens at the foot of the stone pillars
holding up the tracks

as the train speeds serenely
across the city, above the buildings
with the clothes hanging
out of windows like white flags
of surrender. In the horizon

the black dot of an airplane
grows infinitely smaller
and the birds that nobody owns
streak across the sky,
moving targets for sling stones.

But some birds are loved.
Her pets, for example
in their white steel cage,
their wild little eyes homing in
on the birdseed that fills
their feeding trough.

Wingspan untested
and safe behind bars.

2007-07-07T00:20:00.001+08:00

For the first time this year, it's become warmer in the places I had last gone to in the States than here in Manila. The following temperatures registered in the gadgets on my desktop (ah, the shallow delights of Windows Vista):

Manila, Philippines - 80°F
Scotch Plains, New Jersey - 81°F
Topeka, Kansas - 84° F

We even had a little rain today!

The Western hemisphere had better get ready for the summer that's coming... for the summer that's already there. I bet the leafiness has outdone itself in my uncle's backyard. The burrowing little mammals must be scampering about in their replenished Eden. But even though I'm not with all of my family (I miss you, Dad!), and even though we only have two seasons this side of the world, it is July again in my heart.

It's wonderful to see so many things coming alive. I now understand why one must be patient with seasons.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite poems by my teacher. I've had it in mind since the beginning of the year, when I felt I had to do my own burrowing into the dark womb of the earth, wordless and dead. But now for the first time, my toes are twitching. At last, I can quote her.

September Fugue
By Marjorie Evasco

There is not one person, indeed, not one
living being that has not returned from death.
—Lama Anagarika Govinda

Always, there is a going away
For sun or whatever it is that makes
Monarch butterflies home in on the same pine
And not forget the wingbeat
Of the dead or the nuptial dance.

The viability of wings spanning the light
Rests deep in the long dark tunnel
Where we dream the dream of the ancients
Learning while we sleep how to break
The outer skin and seek the sky.

Any moment now, I shall emerge
Leaving nothing behind but the echoing dark
And the hush of moist wings
Lightly brushing the lifelong path to the sun.

2007-07-01T12:36:00.000+08:00

Is there a name for a condition in which you fear that the people around you think you’re so pathetic? Over merienda a few days back, a surprised friend asked me where this feeling was coming from. I thought hard about it. I said that it’s probably because I haven’t had a real conversation in an inconceivably long time. I hang out with people who are light and funny and loving in their own ways. Yet, in the noisy bubble we move around in, I get the sense that no matter how loudly I speak, I will never be heard. I’m driving myself insane shouting in my head.

So, “pathetic” is when you come home late at night from a raucous party, sit for a long moment feeling so bad, and obsessively relive the last relationship that had ended. How I hate such moments.

I keep going back to the image of Kafka’s guy who turns into a giant insect, one ordinary morning that he’s supposed to get up and prepare to go to work. But all he can see, from where he’s lying down, are his many legs wriggling crazily in the air. From the moment he opens his eyes that unlucky day, people start treating him like thick wet turd they can’t scrape off their shoes.

“The Metamorphosis” is a novella about the pain of alienation. Usually, Kafka’s protagonists eventually realize that they would never fit in, so they waste away and die. That’s the happy ending for everyone else.

I don’t know why the word “pathetic” is what usually comes to mind whenever I think of Gregor Samsa. Other people detest the quicksand of self-pity, so you feel additionally guilty for not being able to raise your arms, your entire body above the sticky weight. You’re in the bottom of a long, dark hole, and above, a ring of judging heads are tsk-tsk-ing.

I realize that the feeling of being pathetic is probably mostly just in my head, the internalized perception of others’ judgments. But while I don’t think anyone is literally pathetic, the emotions associated with it can be very real, based on whatever assortment of issues you’ve acquired over the years. Mine are probably relatively shallow, but again, there’s no objective way to measure emotions. In any case, the crisis usually passes with time. Sometimes, if you’re blessed, the turning point arrives in the form of a single conversation, or what Martin Buber would call a genuine dialogue.

I hadn’t had that in months, until that moment.

“Sometimes true companionship is not in the number of people you surround yourself with, or how many times you laugh in a day. It’s in the force of listening one other person is willing to exert for you. You know? It’s hard to explain,” Impatiently, I raked a hand through my hair, letting my eyes wander glassily around the crowded café. Finally, I focused on my companion. “It’s like you see, really see, the Other, and he or she sees you too. And that's very rare. You don't achieve that with all the people you talk to in a day, no matter how many they are. So I guess... alienation is when you realize you’re still alone even in the midst of a crowd.”

It was a simple conversation over Frappuccinos, one that stretched for two or three hours, in a favored little spot along the intersection of Vito Cruz and Taft. I talked about the things I’ve been reflecting on for weeks, the emotions I’ve donned like favorite clothes, everything in my chest that stopped short of becoming words—at least when I’m with familiar people with the frozen grin on their faces, like graffiti on a brick wall. Why must there be necessarily only a few persons—one or two, or three if you win the lottery—who can hear what you’re saying? Why is it that as you grow older, the moments of connection come farther and farther apart?

Yesterday, my poetry teacher sent our class to a performance by a friend of hers, a handsome woman who's probably in her late 40s, with boy's cut hair and slanted eyes. Strumming her guitar lovingly, she sang ten popular tunes in their original English, and then in Pete Lacaba's Filipino translations. I sat up and became helplessly teary-eyed when she started rendering "I Wish You Love" by Natalie Cole ("Wish Ko Lang" in Lacaba's version). It's the featured song in a recent Uma Thurman movie entitled Prime, which for me is one of the truest stories about modern relationships.

How can I verbalize this melding of language and meaning and poetry and song, in this Swiss restaurant with the rack of old European wines in the foyer, and the high-ceilinged room with the painted tulips on the stone walls? How to communicate the yellow rays of light that illumined the dust motes in the air? How to explain the feelings flapping in some gooey liquid in my chest, much like the mosaic of Mediterranean fish in the front of the room, the contours of their bodies broken up by blue-and-white tiles?

How to murmur this passing tableau that has crystallized in my mind, into the ear of someone who knows how much I had loved that movie and that song, and who had lived the context with me back when I first watched it several months ago? How to wait patiently for the glint of understanding in the eyes of someone who really sees into me, beyond the opaque, limited words that are all that can be said?

How to contain the feelings when there is no such person, or there is no longer such a person?

When you're seated beside pleasant, friendly folks, you smile and nod in companionable understanding. It's not the connection you're missing, but it's a connection nonetheless, undemanding and transient. The song will have to be enough.

* * * *

The long goodbye

My friend Mike is leaving the country this coming week, to teach English in China. Here we are posing as a clingy ho and a straight guy, at a videoke bar in Malate last night. ;)

I’ll miss him, even though no other person I know laughs at me more.

Oh well... He’ll be back before we know it. At least he's an inspiration for those of us who have yet to explore other places. Here's to my brave friend! Cheers! Don't forget us! :)

2007-06-30T10:01:00.001+08:00

Hanged out at Mall of Asia last Saturday with Peej. As usual, he had his trusty camera with him. He took some shots of me as we were lunching. I just love the pictures! As I told him, they made my day (so vain!). I like the way the background faded and how he captured the natural light in the place.

There was a time I thought of taking on digital photography as a hobby. But I ended up whoring in front of the lens rather than taking pictures myself. Hahahahaha! Oh well. Such is life. Some are cam whores and some are cam pimps! ;)

2007-06-29T23:53:00.000+08:00

My car is in the shop again. This happens several times a year. Each time I have to take a combination of rides to and from school--i.e. jeepney, train, taxi, even pedicab!--I get reminded of how driving a car in Manila completely spoils you. I've been a week away from the Honda and I miss it so much (sob, bawl). Can you say that to a car? I miss you so frigging much. It's such a hassle to carry everything (and I carry a lot, my laptop and books and other stuff), sprint to jeeps that are running because they aren't allowed to load passengers at a particular spot, all the while that you're wearing your office heels and wispy clothes. I like my girl clothes, and I'll wear them even if I get rudely stared at at Libertad or face extortion by cab drivers who like to stereotype their passengers.

Tell them to drop you off at La Salle, and you'll get, "P150 na lang po ma'am." Sigh. I can drive better than you! I'm only at your mercy because my car’s radiator broke down and the coolant oozed out and now the thermostat valve has to be replaced. Well, at least being at other people's mercy taught me to appreciate the Honda. When I get her back I'll give her a name and wash her every week.

(Yeah right. But I’m good for the name.)

Another thing that my car-less week has made me realize has to do with our country's poverty. It's funny how you can forget something even if it's right in front of you. If you drive, you can easily choose the scenic routes, or stay focused on the road. Ensconced in your air-conditioned vestibule, you can ignore the squatters' hovels and armies of beggar children whizzing past the window. But if you're walking and taking public transportation, you're right in the middle of this almost thoughtless suffering.

At Harrison Plaza earlier, I was standing by the road waiting for a taxi. These emaciated teenaged boys practically danced around me, trying to flag down a ride for me. When it arrived, I noticed that one of the boys was already in the passenger seat. Apparently he’d run down the end of the street in order to catch the cab. He jumped out and held the door open for me. I climbed in and placed a five-peso coin into his waiting palm.

Five pesos. That’s about a dime. That’s the price of an unasked-for service from an out-of-school Filipino youth.

Some of my friends hold onto their change and refuse services like this—for example, from people who materialize by your side trying to wipe your windshield, or musicians with their tin cans in a street corner raising the noise pollution up a few more decibels. And those ubiquitous ropes of wilted sampaguitas you’d pay not to be saddled with! These are the things I don’t need, but sometimes they cost me anyway... because it costs more to keep my coins and pass by their expressionless faces.

When I get my car back, maybe I’d take a break from this sad reality, at least until she gets sick again. But as a friend of mine observed, she’s quite the loyal soldier. Twice she broke down just as I had eased her inside our gate. Always, she tries valiantly to keep her composure, collapsing only after she has brought me home. Would that everyone in my country had something like her, just like they do in other, infinitely richer places, where—even you pay actual attention to the passing scenery—you won’t have to behold the hideous face of poverty. But we can’t all go there.

That’s why it’s called a frigging brain drain.

2007-06-24T14:16:00.000+08:00

All week, I’ve been looking forward to the chance to write here. Now it’s a Sunday, and I have an hour or two to narrate some predictably inconsequential things—and maybe post some recent pictures ;)

First of all, this term I was given classes to teach every day of the week, and Saturdays I take Poetry Writing Techniques under Dr. Marj. Because of my six-day work schedule, plus chauffeuring duties for my family on Sundays, I have an unusually long list of unfulfilled obligations. I’m almost losing my sense of shame over some broken promises, neglected responsibilities, undone homework… But what can one do?

I wish I could take my students farther, or at least push them harder, because they will only commit to the subject as much as the teacher does.

I wish I could write and do new research and be a productive member of the Philosophy Department, because there’s only so much of my previous writings that can be recycled.

I wish I could advise The LaSallian and read all their issues and critique their fantastic new website, because I can’t feel any guiltier with each monthly release.

I wish I could improve my shoddy performance in the Creative Writing program, because my biggest regret is having the least time for what I want the most.

I wish I could just pick one commitment and do well there, as opposed to doing a uniformly mediocre job.

To keep it all together, I must resolve to: Cut down on days out with friends. Continue the sad hiatus on any sort of pleasure reading. Spend all my free time attacking the most recent shovelful of backlog on top of my mountain of backlog. And finally, cross my fingers for the approval of a proposal I recently submitted. It might—just might—result in the awarding of a research grant and a de-loading of 6 units next term. (While I was idly looking at shelves of comic books in a bookstore at Mall of Asia, P. said over my shoulder, “You read comics? My, how you’ve changed.” “But I’ve always read comics,” I objected. “Wanna hear the subtitle of my new research? ‘An Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Sequential Art.’” P said, “What?”)

See? There’s a way to keep all this together, somehow… And still manage to fill this blog with iridescent trivialities, showing that after all, one can still call it a life even though it feels so empty.

* * * *

Some pictures from last Saturday's graduation rites

(In which my friend Mike was awarded his Master's degree in Communication Arts, major in Applied Media Studies. My colleagues and I donned our Harry Potter robes and attended the ceremony, as is expected of faculty members. At the end of this post, I appended Mike's heartfelt and funny speech delivered for his graduating batch in the College of Liberal Arts.)

Below: At my cubicle at the department, beside my students' paper-mache model of Plato's Cave.

Below: At the Philippine International Convention Center, just before the entrance of the faculty. L-R: Natty, Bebs, Dennis, J.J., me, and Dr. Grips. Nap joins us in the picture after this one.

Below: Mike gets his diploma.

Below: Some pictures taken after the ceremony....

Below: At Gloria Maris near PICC, during the post-graduation lunch for the faculty. L-R: Me, Mike, Denverly, J.J.'s wife Gin-Gin, J.J., and Nap.

Below: Daddy Grips and adopted son Mike. ;)

Below: Mike and me in the bus on its way way back to La Salle, after the lunch.

Below: After Mike's party at J.J.'s place in the afternoon, I met up briefly with my college friends at Ä Venetto's in Makati. L-R: Peejay (who just got back from Japan), Adrian, Joy, and me. Jerome joins us in the last picture.

* * * *

Mike's graduation speech
Delivered 13 June 2007 at the William Shaw Little Theater, DLSU

Sa Wakas!

Kalabisan marahil kung sasabihin kong hindi ko sukat akalain na sasapit ang araw na ‘to na ako ay magtatapos. Akala ko kasi noong una ay madali lang ang pinasok ko. Sabi ko, “siguro sa loob ng dalawa o tatlong taon, may MA na ‘ko.” Aba! Pagkalipas ng tatlong taon, napagtanto ko na talaga palang hindi ako magaling sa Statistics, ang laki ng margin of error ko. Mantakin niyo ba namang abutin ako ng anim na taon? Pero sabi ko muli sa sarili, “ayos lang iyon, ang iba nga dyan sinasagad ang walo o sampung taong palugid.”

Sa tuwing nag-eenrol nga ako at sumasagot ng form, may isang bahagi roon na tatanungin ka, “graduating?” Noong una ay tuwang-tuwa akong tsinetsek ang kahon na “yes.” Pero noong mga sumunod na enrolment, gusto ko nang sagutin, “nangaasar ka ba?” Dapat siguro ay may ikatlong kahon doon na nakalagay “maybe” o di kaya’y “hopefully.” At ngayon, pwede ko nang sabihin, “finally!”

Hindi biro ang anim na taon. Maraming nagbago sa pamumuhay ko. Nakaugalian kong magbasa ng isa o dalawang libro sa loob ng isang linggo, magsulat ng walang katapusang reflection papers at term papers linggu-linggo. At nang ginagawa ko na ang thesis ko, todo ang paghihigpit ko ng sinturon. Lalo na’t kapag panahon na ng bayaran, ginagawa kong pitaka ang sapatos ko. Pilit kong pinagsisiksikan ang naipong salapi sa kadulu-duluhan ng sapatos para hindi mawala. Mabuti na lang at hindi pa nagiging sapatos ang pitaka ko. Ang laking pitaka siguro n’un para pwede maging sapatos.

Ngunit sa haba ng panahon na yun, hindi lang ako naging dalubhasa sa larangan ng komunikasyon, natuklasan kong may mga hidden talents pala ako na natutunan ko ring i-master. At hindi ko natutunan ang mga ito sa loob ng pamantasan, kundi habang ako ay nakatayo at pinanatili ang aking balanse sa loob ng tren.

Una, ang gumuhit ng straight line sa binabasa kong takdang aralin nang hindi gumagamit ng ruler. Ikalawa, ang magsulat ng sanaysay nang hindi nagiging “o” ang letrang “c,” o nagiging “q” ang titik “a,” o di kaya’y nagmumukhang “u” ang “n.” At ang pinaka nakamamangha rito ay nang matuto akong matulog nang nakatayo sa loob ng kalahating oras, habang bitbit ang bag sa kanang balikat, at may hawak na mga libro sa kaliwang kamay, nang hindi nawawalan ng balanse. Dapat siguro ay maitala ako sa Guinness Book of World Records, o di kaya’y magtanghal ng “The Great Balancing Act” sa karnabal.

Ganito pala ang graduate school, parating may adrenalin rush, mahirap na nakakatakot pero masaya. Kailangan marunong ka pa ring ngumiti sa gitna ng mga pagsubok. Para kang nagiging juggler sa circus, kailangan magaling kang mag-focus. Dapat walang mahuhulog sa mga pinaiikot mong mga bagay, at kung mangyari ang di inaasahan, ngumiti na lang. Sabay-sabay mo kasing ginagampanan ang pagiging estudyante mo, ang responsibilidad mo sa trabaho, sa pamilya mo, kaibigan mo, at sa iniirog mo (kung meron man).

Muntikan na nga akong mawalan ng love life dahil sa kaaaral ko. Mantakin mo ba namang pagselosan ng sinta ko sina Michel, Susan, at Judith? Sabi ko, “mahal, sina Michel Fouccault, Susan Sontag, at Judith Butler yun. Wala kang dapat ipagselos o ikagalit.”

Dinibdib ko siguro ng mabuti ang sinabi ng isa kong guro. Sabi niya kasi, ituring daw namin ang mga may-akda ng aming mga babasahin na parang mga bagong kaibigan, na para bang nakikipagusap ka lang sa kanila, para mas maintindihan daw namin ng mabuti ang aming mga binabasa. Pero tinuring ko silang higit pa sa aking mga kaibigan, naging parang mga kasintahan ko sila. Ka-date sa almusal si Negroponte, ka-lunch date naman si Pavlik, at ka-candle light dinner naman si Blumenfeld. Minsan pa nga, kainuman ko ng magdamagan sina Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, Rogers, at Fidler. At nang tinatapos ko na ang thesis ko, sabi ko, pwede na yata akong kasuhan ng multiple counts of infidelity o polygamy.

Subalit sa lahat ng ito, ang pinaka mahalaga siguro na natutunan ko sa pagpasok sa graduate school ay ang tunay na kahulugan ng salitang “commitment.” Kung ako ang tatanungin, hindi dapat “commencement exercise” ang itawag dito, kundi “commitment exercise.” Dahil sa graduate school pala, susubukin talaga ang iyong tatag, tiyaga, at dedikasyon sa pag-aaral. Dito ko rin natutunan ang tunay na kahulugan ng pagiging malaya. Sa graduate school, talaga palang mag-isa ka lang. Oo, nandyan silang lahat: ang mga kaklase mo, kaibigan mo, at magulang mo para suportahan ka, pero pagdating sa dulo, walang ibang higit na makatutulong sa’yo kundi ang sarili mo.

Bilang pagtatapos, sa ngalan ng lahat ng mga graduate students, nais kong pasalamatan ang lahat ng department chairs, vice chairs, mga guro, mga staff, ang ating dekano, Dr. Antonio Contreras, ang ating ikalawang dekana, Dr. Tess Fortunato, at sa lahat ng kumakatawan sa kolehiyo ng malalayang sining, sa kanilang walang sawang pagsuporta at walang pag-iimbot na pagtulong sa aming lahat.

Syempre pa, hindi ko na rin palalagpasin ang pagkakataong ito upang pasalamatan ang mga departamentong kinabibilangan ko, ang mother department ko, ang Departamento ng Komunikasyon na pinamumunuan ni Dr. Angeli Diaz; ang Departamento ng Literatura sa pamumuno ni Dr. David Bayot; at sa Departamento ng Pilosopiya na pinangungunahan ni Dr. Rolando Gripaldo, kung saan nakilala ko rin ang aking “bear family” na sina Les, Boom, Bevz, Dennis, Leni, at Nats. Syempre, hindi ko rin pwedeng kalimutan ang lahat ng aking mga naging estudyante na kasabay kong magtatapos.

At sa puntong ito, nais ko ring pasalamatan at bigyan pugay ang dalawang mahahalagang lalaki sa buhay ko… sa La Salle.

Una sa lahat, ang itinuturing ko nang ikalawang ama, (yun ay kung tuturingin niya akong ikalawang anak,) si Dr. Doy del Mundo, sa kanyang walang patid na pagkakamusta, pagtitiwala, pagsuporta, at pagtulong sa thesis ko sa gitna ng aming paggawa ng pelikula.

At syempre ang ikalawa ay ang aking minamahal na tagapayo, si Dr. Mike Rapatan, kahit umalis pa siya ng bansa, at sa email at text na lang ang aking consultation sa kanya, hindi niya ako iniwan at pinabayaan. Sabi nga ng kaibigan ko nang malaman niyang si Dr. Mike ang mentor ko, “naku, kapag siya ang adviser mo, gaganda ang thesis mo, pero ikaw hindi.” Ngunit pinabulaanan ko ito. Sabi ko sa kanya ngayong tapos na ‘ko, “o, ano’ng masasabi mo? Heto ako, maganda ang thesis ko, at gayon din ako.”

Nasasabik na akong mag-martsa sa Sabado. Sinabi ko na sa sarili ko, “iiyak talaga ako sa graduation day.” Yung parang sa pelikula: medium shot muna ng magulang ko, nangingilid ang luha; tapos dissolve sa medium close-up ko, medyo low angle, tapos habang nagzu-zoom in sa mukha ko, dahan-dahang papatak ang isang butil ng luha sa kaliwang mata. Pero sabi ko, “teka, parang masyadong melodramatic, out of character. Hindi bagay sa ‘kin.” Dapat yung simple lang pero kakaiba. Kapag tinawag ang pangalan ko, medium long shot, susunod ang kamera habang naglalakad ako paakyat sa entablado; medium shot, tatanggapin ang diploma; tapos close-up, ngingiti sa kamera, at sasabihing, “bukas, sasakay uli ako sa tren, pero uupo na ‘ko.”

2007-06-22T00:13:00.000+08:00

Finally, my sister consented to share her blog url with me. Seeing that I'm posting this announcement, she just shoved me (a little too hard). Anyway... *recovering*... I'm pleased to share not just the above link to her Live Journal site, but also her photo gallery. Check out her amazing pictures. ;)

2007-06-19T19:52:00.000+08:00

Reading some fragments from Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, I came across the following passage:

It is hard to fight with one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul.

Whew!

2007-06-11T15:15:00.000+08:00

For weeks now, I’ve been meaning to express some things that occurred to me, especially after I got back to the Philippines. Strangely enough, despite my eagerness to write, I let myself get sidetracked by some schoolwork, but really mostly by House episodes. ;) I also had many pathetic false starts. I realize that all these excuses are typical; they’ve always been handy in explaining away my unproductiveness, thus blunting the associated guilt. But nowadays, the wordlessness has become slightly alarming. Below: The show I missed CSI for!

Before, when a theme or idea occurred to me, I’d let it gestate for a week at most. Then, after some ritual procrastination, I’d finally get around to getting it off my chest. Now, the frustrated impulse to write has been inside me for about a month, and everything in my life has stopped. I couldn’t concentrate on the arguably more important things, and have just been doing my tasks like a robot. If only there were a pill for verbal indigestion, something less painless than actually writing. I’d be addicted to it.

Partly to figure out what the problem was, I reread some things I’d written and posted here. Many of them I’d done when I was much younger. It amazed me how much energy apparently went to these pieces. You have these philosophical discussions branching out from a spine of arguments—actual arguments. ;) Now I wonder how I had found the time, much less the enthusiasm, to write such. Few people have the corresponding energy to read them anyway. Besides, I’ve always had too many commitments at any one time: books, journal articles, and research papers I do have to write, even though I may not want to. That I’d actually kept this blog for two years now, posting borderline scholarly essays, for zero pay and without being prompted by anyone, makes me suspect that (1) I must truly love writing or (2) maybe I do have something to say—or both, as I certainly hope. Because pity the person who is afflicted with either illness without its twin!

Recently, however, my entries have become more personal than theoretical. They’ve evolved into shorter pieces as well, probably much to the relief of some friends. ;) In fact, I’ve been experimenting with narrative as a medium. Often, the long essay I’ve been imagining stops at 400 words, becoming instead a description of an event I had actually lived, rendered into a story. People I know become characters, who may not always say what they had actually meant, because what’s transcribed here is how I choose to understand them. (And yet so far, there have been no complaints. ;))

Writing about the changes in my writing process, I realized that I’ve changed as well. Perhaps this is why the task has become harder--the reason for the "verbal indigestion." On the way to my graduate degrees, I was devoted to a certain way of expressing ideas. My earlier entries reflect that kind of mindset: thematic, coherent, logical, analytical. Now I can't seem to write like that anymore. This is why I’m abashed at other people's intellectual discipline. My younger colleagues are writing their hearts out! J.J. even said he couldn’t sleep at night for the hail of ideas spattering on his skull. Meanwhile, I so lost my research agenda. When he teases me about having been the senior faculty’s star student (riiiiiiiiiiight), I just say—in all seriousness—“Now I bet they’re sorry they hired me.” I’m useless at the Philosophy Department. What’s worse is I know it, and yet I can’t seem to return to my old mode.

A poet friend once said, about working on the last requirement for her Ph.D., “Nakakasira ng linggwahe.” She meant that too much left-brain activity actually kills the creative impulse. I think I understand what she’s saying. The difference between us is that she’s been a poet long before she wrote her dissertation. I wrote mine long before I ever thought I could be a poet. Now I’m in the creative writing program, and my experiences have altered the old plans. Of course, I can’t completely abandon what I already know (read: what I went to school for!). Teaching is still how I make my living, and I'm all-too-familiar with the kind of writing that goes with that--the scholarly type. Yet I can't seem to be productive there. Is this what having two lovers is like? You know you’ll leave one at some point, but not just yet. You are waiting.

For the heart to live out the time that remains.

For the mind to forget the old names.

For the soul to meet the truth of itself.

As in relationships that are transitioning, there will be a few changes here. I probably won’t be writing the mini essays anymore, which no one will likely miss. ;) As to what you’ll find here, I myself am not sure, since I’m still looking for a style and a medium. I just hope the new stuff will be appreciated, somehow.

Why I keep coming back*

2007-06-10T17:43:00.001+08:00

It's been a year since Mall of Asia officially opened, an occasion that I actually wrote about somewhere here. ;) My friends and I went there last week, just to unwind. It was wonderful to feel the sea breeze on my face!

Below: (L-R) Dennis, Beverly, Mike, and me. It took us awhile to figure out the timer button on my digital camera. ;)

Below: Denverly.

Below: At Icebergs.

Below: Manila Bay on a cloudy evening.

I don't think I can live in a landlocked place. Being near the sea--driving by it, for example, or standing by its edge watching the sun set--I keep thinking that my life is open. As long as I can see the point where the sky curves into the water, I can map the distance of my possibilities.

Last month marked the start of the first term of the new school year. From this point on, we probably won't have much time to hang out (outside campus, that is) and go crazy. Back to teaching philosophy. But it's nice to know that some faithful places will be where they are, when you finally come back to them.

* After Marjorie Evasco's "proem," from Dreamweavers.

The prodigal professor reflects

2007-05-26T17:36:00.000+08:00

On my way to school the other day, I idly looked out the window while the light was red. A middle-aged brown-skinned man was slamming a hammer, huge enough to heave behind his shoulders, onto a set of twisted steel bars. Ten feet appeared to have been straightened already, about half its length. As he pounded the rest into submission, his companions stood by and watched. Like him, they had on faded long-sleeved shirts, torn pants, and battered shoes. I imagined that behind their kerchiefs, they were wearing sympathetic expressions—or perhaps resigned ones, as they awaited their turn at the task. After all, it was late morning, and sweltering. Flattening uncooperative, rusty steel, one two three four times to make a single noticeable dent, was not on anyone’s list of practical things to do at that moment. Or any time, for that matter. Unless it’s your job.

As the car in front of me moved, I shifted into first gear and eased away from that busy intersection. I was thinking that later when I get to school, I’d park in the building right across my first classroom of the day. I’d walk to the library to get a multimedia projector, for the Power Point file saved in my laptop. In class, we’d talk about the historical predecessors of existential phenomenology. We’d look at pictures of white Europeans and a map of their continent, showing which countries they hailed from, chiefly Germany and France. After the lecture, I’d leave the air-conditioned room to buy some food, and retreat to my office where I’d lunch with friends.

There, we’d trade wisecracks about each other’s quirks, updates about our research interests, or comments on the latest Shrek movie. After the break we’d go to the rest of our classes where we’d continue along this vein of pleasant pedantries. At the end of the day, not much would have been accomplished, at least in terms of the practical side of life—such as coming up with some kind of response to this uniquely Filipino koan: how in the world do you save a country that’s on a vicious downward spiral?

On the way home I’d drive by the same intersection. Perhaps I'd recall the preoccupied hammerer, aging by the second under the relentless sun. He can gather all his strength, but each blow will be ineffectual. He will never earn more than a fifth of what some needlessly over-educated people make, people who live for ideas and relationships, and who still somehow dream of leaving this place for the sake of a “better” life.

Just FYI

2007-05-22T12:27:00.001+08:00

I heard that The Old Spaghetti House is no more (the La Salle branch, anyway). Why do I always jinx the good things? I raved about this place in my last entry, even including a map to the place and a link to their website, which features their menu. Oh well. I'll miss their clams soaked in white wine, and their pork scallopine with wild mushroom sauce. I'll miss their ornate overhead lamps; the haven of peaceful dimness that they offer, on a day among the sweaty crowd under the bright sunlight; and even my P8.00 discount as a frequent customer. ;) Now I don't have a semi-fancy place where I can take people from out of town. Gone, all gone!

US trip part II: My best friend's wedding

2007-05-12T10:33:00.000+08:00

Prologue

Just before I left for my trip, R. and I had a last lunch at The Old Spaghetti House, my quiet little nook around the De La Salle campus. (I took some friends there once, and the place inspired the idea of a philosopher’s restaurant with a similar ambience. “We’d call the bathroom ‘Plato’s Cave,’” M. joked.) Anyway, I learned a new word from R. that day: bardo. He said I was in it.

It’s an essential term in Tibetan Buddhism, and I was chagrined I didn’t know what it meant. He told me it refers to a transitional state, usually triggered by a crisis. Literally, it's the interval between death and rebirth.

“A lot of people don’t like it,” he said. “It’s difficult to live with a sense of deep uncertainty, of not being at home. You want to move on as quickly as possible. But those who linger and appreciate this state often pick up a lot of insights. There’s an increase in creativity, due to the death of the old self and the lack of anything solid to replace it yet.”

Perhaps I did leave her behind, the old me. Certainly I absconded from that kid professor’s world, where you couldn’t mourn properly for the velocity of the days. But the shriveled heart will do it for you. I’m just glad that now, I can write again, read, you know—do things, instead of thinking thinking thinking, or sleeping to escape the sad thoughts. That was how I learned that unconsciousness makes no difference, because you always wake up to the pain.

I’m suddenly reminded of the essential message of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. The bardo state is similar to Dream’s crisis in the culmination of this comics series. (Spoilers ahead.)

Dream’s old sins, from his millennia of existence as Endless, have caught up to him. He once condemned an old lover to hell simply because she refused to be his queen. He has also ceased talking to his only son, the lyre-playing Orpheus of myth, because the latter disobeyed him. Dream realizes now that he is not happy with the distant and forbidding self he has become.

So he decides to die.

Below: Dream meets his sister Death (a scene from Vol. 9, The Kindly Ones).

In a sinister series of events—in which the Norse trickster god Loki plays a part, as well as Desire, who is Dream’s arch-nemesis, and the Furies—Dream secretly orchestrates his demise. Fittingly, his older sister Death grants it to him. A new Dream emerges, white-robed this time, claiming a continuous identity… and yet, he is not the same. He is warmer, more innocent somehow, more human.

Below: The new Dream pets one of his gatekeepers (from Vol. 10, The Wake).

The Sandman is a highly personal, existential myth because of this message: To be human is to undergo these unbearable transformations. In the course of a lifetime, we have to die many times over. What’s heroic is the final decision to close our eyes and leap. The self that survives the fall, the bardo state, shall fly. “Sometimes when you fall, you fly,” to quote Mr. Gaiman. (For a fuller discussion of this reading of The Sandman, see Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth by Stephen Rauch.)

Any change or transition is scary for me. Unlike Dream, I’m never ready to die, even metaphorically. Just consider my attitude about plane rides, which I’ve been experiencing too many of lately.

Flight

Another airport, another takeoff. I trudged through security, where they x-ray your things and confiscate your toiletries and make you strip your feet. I handed over my boarding pass and headed for my seat. It was a domestic flight this time, so the plane was smaller. There were only two columns of seats separated by a thin aisle. “It felt like flying in a soup can!”, I told Les and her husband upon my arrival in Kansas.

I’ve never liked flying. Les on the other hand loves it. We examined our disparate opinions a week later, when they had driven me back to the airport. My original flight back to New Jersey was cancelled, so I had an hour to kill at the terminal with her.

“I love plane rides—short ones and long ones,” she gushed. “The takeoff, the landing, all of it. The idea of going somewhere new. What a rush!”

“Agh, I hate flying. I’m always scared something would go wrong. And flights across the Pacific? God! An entire day confined in an airplane.” I shuddered. “Plus, the very idea of being transplanted… You know, carrying around all your stuff, hopping from one place to another just when you started getting used to the last one. Not my idea of fun.”

Sometimes I wonder how she and I ended up being friends. I love the things she doesn’t care for, like fresh orange juice and chocolates. Meanwhile, I can’t stand the things that thrill her to death, like roller coasters and horror films. To my credit, I gave the latter two a chance, very reluctantly, during my visit. I still don’t see the point of either, but at least now I know it’s not for lack of trying.

Below is the roller coaster I rode at the Worlds of Fun theme park, with the loop and all. It was supposed to be my warm-up for the more exciting rides. But Les knows what happened after that, in a bathroom stall, to the breakfast of bacon and eggs that had been in my stomach.

Meanwhile, here are some rides I didn’t dare try anymore, because… well… you know.

Maybe I’ll never be truly adventurous. Certainly I’m not there yet, where she is. Getting married and having your own family—for me, that's like riding the tallest roller coaster attached on top of an airplane flying thirty thousand feet above the ground! But hanging out with Les again, observing her new life, and getting caught up in the tiny tornado of her wedding preparations, I realized… this is something I’m not unwilling to try, at some vague point in the future. (Unless I go the way of the French existentialists, like Beauvoir who lived in hotel rooms all her adult life, ate out, never married any of her lovers, and never had kids. Not that I consider her lifestyle, or any other, as “ideal.” It’s just that it’s nice to have an alternative role model, if only in literature. Oh, pathetic!)

For the first time since Les left the Philippines more than a year ago, we saw each other again. She didn’t change much. But her lifestyle did, and I was amazed at the things she can do now. She’d work at the office all day, then come home and cook. We’re not talking TV dinners either, but full-fledged Filipino meals like afritada, kaldereta, and sinigang. She also maintains this complicated Excel file of their weekly household expenses. In other words, she keeps track of their finances and saves, especially now that a new addition to her family is coming in November. During the wedding reception, the couple announced that they’re three months’ pregnant! :)

Here are some pictures from Leslie's and Tony's wedding....

Below: Les and her bridesmaids (L-R: me, Les, Madz and her baby Alexis).

Below: Les and her family, followed by a picture of her with Tony and her in-laws.

Below: At the reception hall. By the way, we decorated the place ourselves and put together the centerpieces. ;)

Below: Check out the way Alexis is smiling in these pictures!

Now, I’m used to best friends getting married and having a baby. But until now, I hadn’t really witnessed the daily details of conjugal life—unless you count living under one roof with my parents. ;) When Les’s friend Madz, who brought along her three-month-old baby, also came to visit, I was immersed in domesticity. Surrounded by grown-ups, I suddenly realized how insulated I’ve been. For awhile there, I identified with Gregor Samsa in that short story by Kafka—I felt like such a useless being who doesn’t have a place anywhere and should just scuttle off and die! But I got over that after awhile. It’s actually part of what I had hoped to accomplish during this stolen vacation, which is to gain a detached perspective on my life. Previously, I focused myopically on philosophy and literature. The frankly stupid romantic land mines I always stepped on took so much of my energy. Now I realize that there’s more to life than that much-vaunted interiority of the poet-philosophers. It’s time I looked—really looked—outward rather than too much inward.

Here are some more pictures of baby love, taken at Les's sister Grace's trailer home. Grace has three kids and another one is on the way.

Below, L-R: Grace, Tony with Grace's son A.G., TJ, Tony's mom Faye, and Grace's husband Charles.

Below, L-R: Les with A.G., Madz and Alexis.

Finally, here are some pictures taken at Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City. The day after the wedding, most of Les's family—plus two bridesmaids and a baby—went to this indoor water park.

Below: Is the bulge noticeable yet? ;)

* * * *

All this is not to say that I’m no longer such a baby. Perhaps, on some level, I always will be. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the reason why I seem to be so difficult to love, most of all by myself. I think about Dream who, overcome with regret, decided to change. He got tired of taking himself too seriously, so he let that old self die. Personally I think that the dark Dream is more of a romantic figure than the white one, and people will always think of him—Morpheus—as the real Sandman. But the white Dream, whose name is Daniel, is infinitely wiser, if only because he has died once.

Below: Daniel's first appearance as the new Dream (from Volume 10, The Wake).

Below: A two-page spread tracking the fall of Morpheus' funeral barge into the abyss (also from The Wake).

I like to think that my trip has been a kind of farewell ceremony to the old self... even though I know something of her will always be in me.

I’ll end this with words of advice from Rilke, addressed to a young admirer (from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell). This is a very long paragraph from the eighth letter, but I felt compelled to quote it in its entirety, highlighting some significant lines. Often when I found myself in a new nadir in this bardo state, wondering resignedly where the bottom really was, I’d turn to Rilke. Then I’d realize I can learn to love the ride.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary—and toward this point our development will move, little by little —that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.