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.

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