bopis

My teacher on the sickbed – before me or long before me – and I had no idea what to say. Oh, I could think about was the bombing that put shrapnels into his body, then his photographs of a long past fire, stories about a hidden gun, and then my thesis on baby milk commercials. But none of these amounted to anything I could say. But as conversations go, you find things to say. When you attempt to return to conversations with neither tape nor transcriptions, you find that so much was lost. Like waking from a dream before you learned lucidity. And I don’t have a CD burner memory. In this account, I excised a lot of words and gestures, much of the looking and looking away. I deleted the coughs and the critical mass on his throat. “Writing anything?” he asked, and I remembered him sitting up in his office – never in white – my thesis adviser. “You’re too young to be here, sir,” I said. “When you were an undergrad, I taught you how to critique commonsense. Now that you teach your own students, you show me that you resort to mere stating of the obvious?” he said, and his smile was that of a little boy’s. He had been cruel with worse things than words. “It’s something called Take Smith Back,” I said, “I can’t tell you anything more than that.” “Let’s have a look at it.” I showed him my cellphone outbox, the message I saved with all of three words. Yet unsent. “There are at least three things here,” he said. “We shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t even be speaking,” I said. “One,” my teacher continued, “the expression, Take Smith Back, T sub E, let’s call it. But the expression – your expression – yearns to connect with the action: Taking Smith Back. T sub A.” “What’s the third thing?” I asked. “Expression, one, action, two. Third is the yearning of sub E to become sub A. T sub H. The hope to reclaim Smith.” “But Take Smith Back – I mean, T sub E – sounds more like a demand or at least an exhortation. Where’s the hope?” “Demanded, commanded, prettypleased, enjoined, whatever. All just variations in attitude. At the core, there was someone who hoped for the action to happen. The mere fact that it was even expressed already meant that the speaker or writer himself couldn’t do anything and so his T sub E asks, directs, or hopes that someone else will do it. Or help him do it,” he said. “No. It’s something else,” I said. He answered, “But what else? What more than this speaker who hopes – T sub H – for T sub A?” I answered, “I don’t know, but I didn’t mean that.” “How can you mean anything else?” he asked but it was not a plain question, “Look, there’s a reason why we isolated T sub H and T sub A from mere expression. At first, you have the hope that someone or something will restore Smith to the Makati City Jail, right? T sub H translates into expression, for example, these three words as a beginning of a text message or a chain e-mail or an accomplished essay. All the while, what the T sub H wanted was action. Not an accomplished essay but something more accomplishing. T sub A needs more political power than the writer will ever have. T sub A needs a signature but plus a gun. Writer has no gun. So writer creates T sub E, an act of some power, but not nearly with as much effect as T sub A. But wait. You were never one to think well on your feet. Get yourself some coffee then come back to finish this.” I felt too stunned to do anything else. He must have seen my I Don’t Know in the way my spine stood before him. I went home, made coffee, slept, ate the leftovers of New Year, recorded two out of four dreams, lived a day more, and then drank the coffee. “That’s one monster of a vending machine,” my teachers said, still a young boy smiling among gauze and tubes. I begin to say what I came to say. “Your argument falls if the expression is possible without hope. T sub E possible without T sub H? I think so. But also, T sub E must be possible without T sub A. Your definition of T sub H is a vanity. With arrogance, it springs from the generalization that all expressions long to translate into action. My Take Smith Back is pure expression. This T sub E does not hope for the action. But pure expression is too much of an idea for your taste, sir. So I offer a definition via procedure, via method. Via genre. I mean, it is the way T sub E is expressed that would carve its independence from either T sub H or T sub A. Consider for example, sir, if the expresser writes T sub E as a poem.” My teacher thought on it. Then he slept on it. When he awoke I repeated the sentence where I hung my position “...T sub E as a poem.” My teacher, he said, “If I write T sub E in that manner, few will read it. Even fewer will understand. None of them are people in position. But supposing it was made available to them? Who among these people in possession of the position to take Smith back would waste presidential and diplomatic time for it? If by position we also mean the greater mass who could violently claim the position to take Smith back, who among them would have access to my poem? Why would I wish that they stop tilling the soil, turning the gyre of the world, or quelling military fires just to read? Therefore, if your T sub E is inaccessible poetry – and decidedly so – it does not hope to be any part of T sub A. Therefore, saying Take Smith Back is independent of such an action as Taking Smith Back. I am correct, right? About your T sub E?” “Yes, sir.” “If so, then your T sub E is a lie. You say Take Smith Back without really desiring it.” “No sir. I want Smith back. No lie there. I believe he belongs in a Filipina jail. But I also expressed Take Smith Back outside of this desire. How? There is another, a different hope that you failed to take into account. Despite – or because of – my hope to take Smith back, I also hoped that neither I nor my T sub E would in any way contribute to the Philippine reclamation of the prisoner.” “Tell me about this hope,” my teacher said, “For you must be attempting pure hope, this negative hope you suppose you possess. But also, please see this: you have hopes and expressions independent of each other, none would do anything whatsoever to get Smith back. Why even write it?” “Because I hoped. Then I wanted that moment of hoping to last forever. I hoped Smith would be taken back. I wanted that hope despite your criticism versus all claims to universality, versus the bourgeois illusion of infinity. I did not want my hope to become obsolete when the situation changed. I want a hope that lives whether or not Smith is actually taken back. I want this hope alive long after Smith is dead.” “Why?” he asked, “Why deny change?” “There must be such a hope,” I said, “If such a hope were possible, then a true law – or True Law – could be possible. A ground that would not give, that would not ever give. A ground that would pass judgment even at rest. For it rests on the fact that its judgment will never change.” I thought he needed to sleep on that one too, but the passing of years make it easy for a student to underestimate his teacher. “You want it for Nicole, I see,” he said, indelibly cruel. “You see little, sir. I want it for all Nicoles.” “Myself included?” he asked. “Yes, sir,” I said. “But I have been as much a Nicole as a Smith, do you know this?” Yes, I knew his history. I never thought he knew it too. I was afraid of that. “Time for goodbyes,” he said, “Keep in mind that I have trained other critics. Now, say what you came to say in the first place.” “You will not die, sir,” I said, and I wrote, and having written, I returned the sick mass of his throat, the soundless tremors that were supposed to be coughs, and the machine-aided breathing. After this, I included a note about my account and its attendant excisions: before all my editing – if I remember completely – this was a conversation with a man who could not speak.

Etiquetas: woman19

Rapture without end.

Alma Mahler-Werfel
January 4, 1902
Diary entry

a. An artist’s daughter named Alma pursued music.
b. On her January 3, 1902 journal entry, she wrote “Bliss and rapture.”
c. She began writing her journal when her affair with a certain Gustav gave her trouble, threw her into fits of pain.
d. She closed her diary before marriage with another Gustav, the one Mahler.
e. She sought Freud.

I received an account of her life and recast them into these points, sentences according to my chosen cadence and construction. Which of the five was more important? Which was the indispensable fact? Which was the one sentence that, upon deletion, would destroy Alma Mahler-Werfel? Was it possible that I have already erased her by condensing her into a measure of words. But that possibility would only follow contemplation on What I Do Not Have. Because, truth be told, that line of query would lead me to the undeniable fact that What I Do Not Have Is Alma Mahler-Werfel. If I go that route, then it must be fair to state that I only flattened her into a pad of sentences where not one word carried her tune. Rather than that, I valued What I Have, and so found it fine to believe that I extended Ms or Mrs Rapture five sentences farther than the case files of Freud, the letters of Gustav, her sheets of notations, and the wishes of her father the artist. But, again, a spin on the genetic question: given enough time and life to create an offshoot sentence from one of the five, which sentence ought I take as mother? Make a sixth from the first, second, or fifth? I chose. (Would a reader be so kind and choose the most important sentence about a woman’s life?)

Went out and got the papers. The usual load of rubbish, apart from an interesting piece by Philip Toynbee on the boring pointlessness of the writing of Beckett and Burroughs. He should have cast his net wider, to include Osborne. He made the point that this kind of writing treats of despair despairingly. He rightly says that this is a fundamental misconception of Art.

Jimmy Boyle
January 2, 1966
Diary entry

1. Surprised that the lagging Hum160 might catch up with the other class by virtue of its poetry. Still, I discovered some irresponsible students who thought that anything they write would fly. Thought wrong.
2. I expect my back to complain come lunch. I’m bent on finishing the first encoded draft of a thirty page monster. Damn you, brother, the back would say, damn you letting me carry the burden of your inchoate thoughts. The second draft would be written merely to appease my back.
3. A someone tried to ask me about her previous someone. Told her that I have not heard from her ex-someone. Told her that I never want to hear from her ex-someone. I realized too late that I said an unpleasant thing. I preempted any further questions from her about her ex-someone. This could mean that she would never have reason to talk to me. Sad thing on many levels.
4. When I’m through with storytelling and checking duties, I’ll begin wearing my excitement to return to Los Banos. Not a moment too soon either.
5. Never a better pochero than my father’s.
6. I resolved to keep quiet rather than lie.
7. I’m going to miss one helluva party.

New Year’s Day
These are my New Year resolutions
1. I will revise for my ‘O’ levels at least two hours a night.
2. I will stop using my mother’s Buff-Puff to clean the bath.
3. I will buy a suede brush for my coat.
4. I will stop thinking erotic thoughts during school hours.
5. I will oil my bike once a week.
6. I will try to like Bert Baxter again.
7. I will pay my library fines (88 pence) and rejoin the library.
8. I will get my mother and father together again.
9. I will cancel the Beano.

Adrian Mole
Diary entry
January 1, 1983

Ah yes, the former method. I place another diary entry, decidedly foreign in place and time, as preface for my own blog entry. A tangential reference? An indulgence? A device of concealment? Whatever it is, it seems to me like I abstained from this tool for years. It feels like I was away for a long while – studies, skirmishes, whatnot, that haughty business of life – then I return home, dazed, feeling old, wiser and wiser by the day. Until months later when come the inexhaustible, unexhausted wisdom: I am not any wiser. I know it. The I-know-it-in-the-gut type of know-it. Still, I rummage through my room, make a pretense of clean-up, and ignore books already read, expanded lists of disciplines, the more recent weapons. These things don’t tell me anything new. They sing to me, every day in every way it’s getting better and better, which, like all of the greater truths, will eventually unfold into a lovely lie. More and more gets known, I hear, in lullaby rhythms. But it’s new year, it’s morning. Instinctively, I reach above the closet. I find the dusty shoebox. An old toy, a grand comfort, a fathering joy. I play – not as I used to, but as I would – and wholly I recall an allergy to dust.

Happy New Ear

I ask for a pair with an extra curve in the spirals. “It’s ear of the pig,” I say. “I’m ram and thus am entitled to new ears,” I explain the Chinaman concept as best I can with a Tagalog tongue deprived of either Fookienese or Mandarin. But the frowning bodyshop owner just won’t give. “Look,” I say, “I commuted all the way from Makati right after fireworks, I hiked to this shack of yours, I mean why can’t you install a franchise in Alabang, at least, or even just at the foot of Makiling, at the very least. It’s a holiday, I’m miles away from love and family, and here I am, claim-stub-heavy, eligible as hell. Why can’t you give me my new ear?” Bodyshop owner is this lady I may develop a crush on, in fact, the attraction already flowers in me, because of the fantastic thickness of hair, the rich eyebrows, the arrogant chin, the hook of the nose. But, wait, that may be my clue. “Dear, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” I disclaim, “but are you, by any chance, Greek?” She gives me the first smile of dawn. Because of their Platonic discovery of the Golden Section, their Euclidean movement toward the point six one eight so on so forth, because because because they feel in accord with nature’s deep measure of beauty, only the Greeks dare shy from the alteration of shells, flowers, and faces. They invent one democracy or other, interpret dreams, acropolize mountains, debase Gods into gods, but they will not, will most probably never ever give you a fresh start with a pair of ears. “Greek, that explains it.” “Explains what, exactly?” she asks. “You, standing there, looking like a Goddess,” I say. She says “Oh dear, yes of course,” with some shock. “I may have something for you,” she says as she reaches below the counter, gives me a box the size of a three CD case, then smiles me away. Does not even take my claim stubs. I hike down Makiling before opening the box. I find a new set of ears and find them no different from those I already wear. I pick my left ear for wax. Then, with care to insert my other little finger at the same depth, I pick the left ear that lay the box. Both fingers reveal the same make and quantity. Same ears, new ears! I may not be able to say why but I grow extremely contented. Content, also, with my incapacity to explain the contentment. I reach home before anybody else wakes up.

Etiquetas: woman19