bopis

Dined with a merchant captain who told me a curious fishing story about Japan. There the fishermen train young cormorants to fish for them. They take them out at night, tie a string to their legs, put a ring round their necks to prevent them swallowing the fish and then with lanterns to attract the fish set them free from the boat. The queer thing is that the fisherman seems to know by the feel of the string whether the bird has its fill of fish or not. In this way they can fill a boat with fish in a night.

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart
Diary entry
May 23, 2007

Someone was as much a stranger to the land as I was, and I found her crying under the quivering shade of the Dao tree. Lovely. Yet I thought it stupid that she loved the young of the place, but she did. Because I sat with her, she told me what she knew of the elders.

The elders train the young to speak and act, to sing and dance. They take them out at night, whip them with dogma and emotion, put their grades around their neck to prevent them from growing enough brain to protest, and then, with footlights and requirements to fill the seats, they set the young free to pour their hearts out on the stage. Strange, how the elders know the heft of their purse even before a single ticket is sold. Strange, how the cormorants fly all night for props and solicitations and art to swallow nothing. In such a wise the elders gather five figures tax-free.

She was crying, and it was already a well-fed tree as it is, so I spoke to her. Hey look, those young had their pictures taken, and didn’t they smile? They got their memories, didn’t they? They got their precious experience, practicum hours. That’s payment enough for slave labor, I guess. And the marine zoo audience, weren’t they happy? They got their fill of capital A art, didn’t they? So why weep? Only you remain unhappy, I told her. And that’s moronic – please excuse me but it is – because you are an elder, one such fisher of children. Until you have given back what you have taken, you cry stolen tears.

I drank every tear from her eyes until her lashes bristled with fury. It wasn’t acting, and I knew it. I told her, I hear what’s left in you, and I hear you name it righteous indignation. I wish I could tell you you’d been quite precise, I said. She was lovely, and I wished I could tell her she was right on the money. I wished I could tell her she was right, period.

Lunched with folks and sat in their garden. Heard me on the radio doing ‘Desert Island Discs’. Not bad, really. Voice came over a bit common and pouffy.

Kenneth Williams
Diary Entry
May 22, 1962

1. Last week, a few days after a workshop, I finished another story. I had humble little dizzy spells whenever I stood from the seat before the PC. Romantically, I thought it was a writer thing, and that my story of pages had such force to throw me into vertigo. But it could have been the weather.

2. Szymborska hit it sidewise but right on the head when she said in her Nobel Prize acceptance speect that it would not be pleasant to make a movie about the writer, especially if we were going to be authentic with the depiction of the writer in process. I mean, it’s wonderful to watch Ed Harris play Pollock over the expanse of his canvasses. It’s lovely when you see him hit on the idea. But a writer?

3. Everybody hates hearing writers talk. Writers hate this most of all. That is, except when they’re hearing themselves.

4. Great to see dancers, singers, and of course movies about actors (one on Peter Sellers comes to mind). Entertainment value for your money. But a writer? It’s all snot and throwing things and not catching things.

5. Last year, I invented another author just to watch me write. In less than an hour – less, mind you – he dissolved into tedium. To this day, I suspect he uninvented himself. My friend, a sculptor, he said that rather than waste time on a Galatea, he made another Pygmalion in his own likeness. The Pygmalion knelt enrapt at every stroke of his hammer, every choice angle of his chisel. Solid awe. Good for you, I said. But for a writer, what?

6. I finished a couple of pages that agree with me. I nodded at them, they nodded at me. Hung them out to dry in my Friendster blog where they wouldn’t stop nodding. I turned up the volume of the Media Player and, as I suspected, the pages were head-banging. I quit all applications and stood to erase myself with work on the syllabus that waited on the table. What do you know! I lost so much balance I had to pawn my head, and quickly, before I fell. But if it was a gamble, it did not pay off.

7. Good writers, they get their readers to swirl down vertigo. Bad writers, dance by themselves on the way down.

8. Once there was a girl who I forbid to meet me after ROTC training. Even without mentioning Eve and Pandora, you would know she eventually did come to see me. And when she kissed me after my six hours of dust and sweat and odors, the thought of marriage occurred to me. Another girl watched me write. After I cursed her for disrupting the flow, she kissed me. I had brochures, and I most courteously asked her to consider an asylum.

9. It’s bad for writers. They work a great deal behind the reel, but they don’t get to cut a pretty figure out front. Bad for the whole lot of them: but how would I know?

The jerks were asking, “How could you let her go, man?” As if their beer had helped, they kept asking, “How did it happen?” As if they cared, they asked, “You fool, what were you thinking?” My reply was in the order of “Sweltering heat on that late morning hour, on the day we would meet only to part. I was in Laguna, outroads and a highway away from my destination: Festival Mall, the meeting place. Was not a strange song I heard, but sad nevertheless: all meetings were preludes to parting, all songs sing so. Familiar melody: the only bye that ever counted was the last, not a bye good but the bye bes. And so the wind played, the hum of the jeepney motor played, the drums of humps played along, and the hole on the dash that must have been a radio once, it played: we’re minutes away, seconds away from the final hour. I sat in front, the sole passenger. Or behind me there could have been a silent throng, listening as I was to the music, as much a part of that song. Didn’t have it in me to intend the rear view, so I never knew. The song, it played, and I listened well until Calamba Crossing, until a man with a good morning towel turban hailed with high arm and barked from a white megaphone muzzle: SM Southmall! Festival Mall! Alabang! Town! Center Mall! I wanted the passenger seat of the van, but a pair of genderless activists sat there, one in a red shirt and the other in gray, both shirts printed with righteous indignation all over the chest. As they conversed peasantly, their rolled up flag and streamer and academic banter identified them as politically illuminated. On the second row sat what seemed to me a mother and a forty year old son with much luggage. They talked about something that was neither elections nor a family problem. A young couple teaching discipline to their child had the third row. On their right sat a girl who was a stranger to everyone else and was thus pleasant and silent. What were empty were the folding sideseats and the last row. I took the far corner of the last row so I could start fanning myself to sleep without being disturbed by incoming passengers. Prematurely, I gave my fare. Noise when I slept but silence when I woke up at the SLEX, the child and her parents along with most adults were asleep. The man beside me was broad, and so was the newspaper he was reading. He looked like that senatoriable, that Prospero Pichay. All the seats were filled save for the two between the mother and son, they must’ve paid for those to make room for their luggage. I slept again, the drizzle stopped short by the window on its way to spit at my face. Slight vertigo when the van made a turn to Alabang. I woke up, unhappy. A lively tune played on the radio that seemed a cross of Macarena and Dayangdayang. I failed to recognize it, but the volume was low maybe out of consideration of us sleepers. The first voice was the driver’s when he asked: Festival? Disoriented, it took me too long a while to reply. The front of the van was past the street leading to the mall when I said: Yes, Festival! Sorry! Please! The driver braked then pumped on the horn, all madness. Did I make him too angry? Just drop me off here, please, I said. I’ll walk! But the sleepers had woken up, their hair disheveled, their eyes, shot. Then the passengers smiled at each other. The man beside me said: Turn it up then! The driver shot up the volume of the music, and his hand gyrated on its way up to the ceiling light. The light throbbed with rainbow colors and electricity. The son and mother opened their luggage and happily passed around masks and feathers. Everybody laughed as they donned their masks. Each female fished out a lipstick and threw these to the father, who caught each one, not a miss. Both parents painted the face and neck of their child red, laughed at their handiwork face, then threw the child up inches short of the ceiling, only to catch her and throw her up again. She giggled and shrieked and giggled. Stranger lady shouted: Fiesta! Fiesta! A lady sitting on the folding seat beside her, one who looked like Roselle Nava, also began shouting: Fiesta! Then the pair began dancing Itaktak Mo, their heads hitting the roof – nay, pounding it! – one after the other like pistons. The man beside me and his two seatmates rushed to fold sheets of newspapers into party hats. It raced in a contest where everyone was invited to watch but no one had the right to judge. They finished almost at the same time, the one beside me quickest in offering me his hat, almost to my face: Wear this, you wanted a festival! He smiled with fierce dimples. The others pushed him, and they wrestled, their puppet hats laughing all the way to my face: No, choose me, choose me! I pushed against them, trying to lift my leg so I could make my way to the door. But the man who looked like Pichay pushed my knee down and his hat forward, trying to fit it into my bobbing head. Our struggles moved to the beat of the car stereo. The child was still happy, but was gurgling vomit and spattering it out as she was thrown up and down. I could not pass that way, over the heads of those parents. But as I pushed the man’s hand off my knee, I espied the activists between the newspaper hats, they had unrolled the windows, waving their wet flag and equally wet streamer outside as if their revolution had been won so many times over and they just realized it. I took my cue from their radical idea. Speedily, I slid my window forward, threw my bag out, then with all alacrity and force, I threw myself out. I ran to the mall, to the food court where we agreed to meet. It was panting in front of her when I noticed I was wet and thus realized that I had been running in the rain. Of course, she was crying, you didn’t need to ask that. Both wet, we spoke to dry ourselves, but we couldn’t say yes or no at the same time. When it happened that we pronounced the joint word, it ended. And it was in that manner that it happened,” I told those drunkards I had the habit of calling friends.

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