bopis

OFW kills self on Gulf Air flight

2010-11-02T11:57:00.001+08:00

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=622779&publicationSubCategoryId=63

Actor mistaken for gunman killed in Philippines

2010-11-02T11:55:00.000+08:00

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/ap/20101101/tap-as-philippines-shooting-3rd-ld-write-fe2a5de.html

Sapagkat Hindi Kaning Basta-basta Iluluwa Kapag Halumanis

2008-08-22T10:27:00.000+08:00

EKSENA: Nagluluto ang Tatay kaya si Neneng ang pinasagot sa telepono.

NENENG - Tay, siya ho uli, yung babae. Hinahanap kayo.

TATAY - Ano daw kailangan?

NENENG - Closure daw po.

TATAY - Ay si Mama mo yan. Sabihin mo umuwi na at malapit nang maghain. Lalamig.

NENENG - E paano na ho yung closure?

TATAY - Sige na kamo! Ako na rin ang maghuhugas.

Dear Silence, p.4

2008-08-22T09:53:00.000+08:00

Are you in league with the wind? How far must the ostrich run to escape extinction? Was it necessary for Marduk to slay Tiamat with an excess of air in order to invent guilt? Will the resurfaced ship dislodge the echoes of her drowned? What color of cat would you take for your own? How do the strands of your hair establish the precise and legitimate minute of their descent? When did remembering ever stop you?

Oras para sa Kumot

2008-08-14T07:21:00.000+08:00

TATAY : Tulog na, anak.
NENENG : Tay, wala ba kayong kwenta?
TATAY : Kwento ba kamo?
NENENG : Kwenta po.
TATAY : May isang bata, babae, pero nanaginip siya na umuulan ng yantok, tsinelas, at sinturon--
NENENG : Panaginip lang ba uli? Gudnayt na lang ho.
TATAY : Gudnayt mahal ko.

Kid Gloves

2008-08-01T11:42:00.000+08:00

EKSENA: Tatay sa kusina, tuloy-tuloy na naghihiwa ng mga sangkap para sa kanyang Bicol Express. Maghihiwa siya sa buong eksena habang ang kanyang anak na si Neneng ay nasa salas, naglalaro, pinahahabol sa mga Bratz ang mas malaki, mas mabuhok, at mas malambot na laruang oso. Sapagkat may pader sa pagitan ng mga tauhan, pasigaw ang buong diyalogong ito:

TATAY - Neneng mahal ko! Ipitas mo ako ng labuyo sa labas.

NENENG - Kayo na lang ho.

TATAY - Mag-gloves ka please. Makati yun.

NENENG - Naglalaro pa ho kasi ako.

TATAY - A, laro bale. Nung bata kami, ang laro namin habulan. Yung taya maghuhugas ng minola. Sa palad. Tas kukuyumos ng labuyo. Pag nahuli ka, lalamukusin niya pisngi at labi mo. Minsan 'nak, maski ilong.

NENENG - (Tumayo) E nasan po ba ang gloves?

TATAY - Mata ang pinanghahanap, hindi bibig.

NENENG - Opo. Nakita ko na ho.

Sa katunayan, hindi pa nahahanap ni Neneng ang guwantes. Nakadungaw siya sa labas ng bintana kung saan naroon ang halamang labuyo at ang mga saluwal ng kanyang ama sa sampayan. Nakabaligtad ang mga shorts at alam ni Neneng na tuyo na ang mga iyon.

Mumbarya

2008-07-17T05:40:00.000+08:00

[A Department Scene]

REAGAN & CALOY - Hahaha haha

DUMLAO - Yan na naman kayo. Bat ba hindi nyo lubayan si Mumbarya? Wala na ngang ginagawa yung tao e!

REAGAN & CALOY - . . .

REAGAN & CALOY & DUMLAO - Hahahahahahahahahahaha hahaha!

[They die. Mumbarya gets all their students, passes GO, collects 200. End of scene.]

Diderot I

2008-07-11T08:55:00.000+08:00

It was night and on a jeepney from a writing workshop when the faux Chinese commented on the volume of my written work (he was poking at my attempts to publish at least two things every semester). He was unaware of my model - let us call him Diderot out of narcissism - against whose books my pages weigh no more than dead insects. I knew he was looking at his own achievements (as all faux Chinese are wont to do), maybe savoring the brilliance of all his unwritten concepts and scenes. Out loud, he said that we LB writers must have so much time in Laguna.

All I get from the highway store is discipline and buko pie, I said, annotating his pedestrian thoughts.

Notes for a Never-Paper on Jollitown,

2008-06-10T17:35:00.000+08:00

The show will be 3 months old next week. It airs on GMA-7, 9:30-10:00am every Sunday. My wife and I have been following it albeit not religiously. It was something done more out of a spirit of fun.

Para sa taong itago na lamang natin sa pangalang "Jovy"

2008-05-13T07:05:00.000+08:00

Darating kaya sa punto - limang taon, sampo, o tatlumpo - na magkikita kayong muli at pagtatawanan lamang ang lahat nito?

Hindi ko alam kung mas mainam sabihin na sana o sana hindi.

Basta totoo na mahusay at nakagradweyt ka na. Dito, at sa napakaraming ibang bagay.

Labor Day

2008-05-06T13:20:00.000+08:00

Dennis, Manong Jerico's, at Pinky na may Neneng. Sa Jerico's Bakery. Mga alas 9, ganun.

Dennis: Manong, may pandesal ba?

Manong Jerico's: Oo, meron.

Pinky: O? Kahit gabi.

MJ: Oo, para bukas.

D: Magkano po?

MJ: 2.50 isa.

P: So magkano? Kwarenta? Ilan kaya yun.

MJ: Teka...

P: 20?

D: Hindi. Basta mga 16, 18 ganun. 2.50 e, hindi dos.

MJ: 16!

P: Kuya, padagdag naman! Para sa buntis, sige na.

MJ: Ha?

P: Dali na Kuya, para sa buntis na naglilihi sa pandesal!

D: Lupit a.

MJ: O ayan nagpasobra ako ng apat, para bente na!

P&D: Salamat po!

D: Ganun-ganun lang yun e. Pinagtrabaho na agad.

P: Sampung piso rin yun.

D: Neneng, chill ka lang dyan!

P: Nakasampung piso ka na, Neneng!

Bandian, Fonte, Crespo

2008-04-20T10:38:00.000+08:00

Three UPLB students from the BACA program published literary works in magazines of national circulation during the last academic year. This entry is for the twin purpose of filing and gratitude.

(a) Congratulations to Timmi Bandian for her short story, "The Blessing," which was published by The Sunday Times Magazine; (b) to Paul Fonte for three of his poems which were published by Pinoy Weekly and more recently by Philippines Graphic; and (c) to Sarah Crespo for her short story, "Hidden Gods (part 1 and part 2)," published by The Sunday Times Magazine. Fonte and Crespo, congratulations also for the long-awaited and suddenly-incoming graduation.

You three, thanks for allowing me the unnecessary and superfluous grace of accompanying you in your literal maiden voyage.

Solo Passage

2008-04-20T10:12:00.000+08:00

Poem published at Philippine Graphic, the April 21 issue.

Only 6 Out of 300 Songs (or, the soundtrack of our eager domestication)

2008-04-08T08:51:00.000+08:00

Wonderful Tonight
(Eric Clapton)

It's late in the evening
She's wondering what clothes to wear
She puts on her make up
And brushes her long blonde hair
And then she asks me
Do I look alright
And I say yes, you look wonderful tonight--
--WE DINE IN HELL!!!

2 Become 1
(Spice Girls)

Candle light and soul forever
A dream of you and me together
Say you believe it, say you believe it

Free your mind of doubt and danger
Be for real don't be a stranger
We can achieve it, we can achieve it

Come a little bit closer baby
Get it on, get it on
'Cause tonight--
--WE DINE IN HELL!!!

Bluer Than Blue
(Barry Manilow)

After you go
I can catch upon my reading
After you go
I'll have a lot more time for sleeping
And when you're gone
It looks like things are going to be a lot easier
Life will be a breeze you know
I really should be glad
But I'm bluer than blue
Sadder than sad
You're the only life this empty room has ever had
Life without is going to be
Bluer than blue
After you go
I'll have a lot more room in my closet
After you go
I'll stay out all night if I feel like it
And when you're gone
I could run through the house screaming
And no one will ever hear me
I really should be glad
But I'm bluer than blue
Sadder than sad
You're the only life this empty room has ever had
Life without you is going to be
bluer than blue
I don't have to miss no t.v. shows
I can start my whole life over
Change the numbers on my telephone
But--
--TANIGHT WE DINE IN HELL!!!

Tonight, Tonight
(Smashing Pumpkins)

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change the less you feel

Believe, believe in me, believe
Believe
That life can change
That you.re not stuck in vain
We're not the same, were different tonight
Tonight, so bright
Tonight--
--WE DINE IN HELL!!!

Saving All My Love For You
(Whitney Houston)

A few stolen moments is all that we share
You've got your family, and they need you there
Though I've tried to resist, being last on your list
But no other man's gonna do
So I'm saving all my love for you

It's not very easy, living all alone
My friends try and tell me, find a man of my own
But each time I try, I just break down and cry
Cause I'd rather be home feeling blue
So I'm saving all my love for you

You used to tell me we'd run away together
Love gives you the right to be free
You said be patient, just wait a little longer
But that's just an old fantasy

I've got to get ready, just a few minutes more
Gonna get that old feeling when you walk through that door
Cause tonight
Is the night--
--WE DINE IN HELL!!!

Can You Feel the Love Tonight
(Lion King, OST)

Timon : I can see whats happening-
Pumba : What!
Timon : And they dont have a clue-
Pumba : Who!
Timon : They'll fall in love and here's the bottom line: our trio's down to two.
Pumba : Oh.

Timon : The sweet caress of twilight
There's magic, everywhere
And with all this romantic atmosphere
Disaster's in the air!

(Chorus)
Can you feel, the love tonight--

LEONIDAS : WE DINE IN HELL!!!

The Nones of March

2008-03-07T09:26:00.000+08:00

It's past lunch. The dinner and tomorrow's breakfast lay in wait I'm still thinking what I should have done this morning. I should have written more about Alexander, his Dionysiac lineage, and the Gordian Knot. Is it good enough luck to conjure denouements?

Or I should have checked the autobiographical narratives of my students. One of them is a father, another is a member of Crucified Thorns Gang (CTG), and one is both Ugly Duckling and Cinderella. A lot of them were valedictorians and salutatorians. Only one has confessed falling in love with her teacher. No one has discussed murder or rape. As if a psychiatrist or priest, I shall not name names. (In fact, I don't know their names. They submitted under their student numbers.) As a fictionist and for the sake of my students, I employ this plus-mask: one of the abovementioned facts is a lie.

Or I should have logged on and chatted some more with my best friend who is in Singapore, suspended in a full and careless understanding of my excitement.

I should have walked, as I have done 11 mornings in my life (or was it 11 lives in a singular, indestructible morning?), along the brown snake that is the Pasig River. And watch the insects and birds whose names I disdained to learn so I could name them myself. And try to fend off trite musings on the invincibility of Heraclitus and "what does it matter if the boy (who was not yet) Rizal did or did not lose a slipper?" In the end Rizal threw the script of shoes away only to walk his ultimate morning in my mind forever.

I should have kissed a parent, an aunt, a brother. Or I should have called her, wished her luck. Ask for her forgiveness because I'm bound name her. Whisper love.

What I did was oversleep. Exactly what I shall not do tomorrow.

After Another Leaping of the Year

2008-03-01T16:52:00.000+08:00

Last week, Ava e-mailed me about the death of her student. I have been selfish with the death of mine. Her death has appeared in my long fiction, in many journal entries, and in one or two of the least disciplined of my lectures. But she's dead just the same. And I keep her death as if an amulet. As if the death were mine at the outset (And if so, at the outset of what? Of her life? Of mine? At the instant of our meeting? At the moment of her final breath?)

Maybe I am only allowed to call Lontoc's death mine if I was there at the time and killed her.

I tried to dispel these thoughts with a handful of fictions I have wrought about Alexander, how his greatness was not merely displayed by but in fact depended on the Gordian Knot. How Aristotle could not have been so myopic to encourage in his ward a singular genius in the customs of terror and neglect to train him in the subtler ways.

How, when Aristotle saw the knot, he immediately saw both solutions: one by heave of blade, the other by dexterity of finger. Upon concluding, in his mind, the weave through which the hand can uriddle the rope, his sword flashed. Thus ended the elegance of long divisions.

Thus also did his bleached face, baring all Alexander's military teeth, severe my speculations.

I remember Atienza, my teacher, whose first name is sacred to me, whose thought allowed me to penetrate the profound hypocrisies of infant formula companies, whose long death drew to a close that December 5, an entirely other death, contrasted against the deliberate clangor of Villanueva's passing. I remember that I must forget, as I had to forget then, December 7, because I had to take the stage (shooting my mouth off on Creative Nonfiction, of all things!), and entertain some applause and questions, and pretend that I could contain him. My hand held the podium like a crutch.

I omit two months, because within it is the eye. The eye that sees cannot see itself. Unless it does what I now undertake - yet also, what I have always been undertaking: pretend that everything else is a mirror.

So February 28, I gave a 20-point quiz. Then this mythology class evaluated my months of teaching through the secret forms of Mrs. Daisy Diola. After she left, we checked the quizzes together. Then I called for the papers so that I could receive them from highest to lowest and thereby ascertain my average: 20? No one.

19? No one.

18? Still no one. But I think by the children had begun to laugh.

Only two of the twenty-seven passed. This fact, they met with increasing laughter - so much laughter. Too much, and so I must have said some words. If I know myself well enough, I must have resorted to anger. Yet I cannot in all honesty recall my words. Did I curse? Did I shout? Did I ascend to bitter Filipino or maintain some level of cool in English?

All I remember was hearing a voice trembling over and over inside my head, mounting as their laughter mounted: "They should have failed you. They should have failed you." It was a female voice. It was young. It was right.

I have tried to create another world where Alexander chose to apply his fingers to the knot. He undid it, but after some thought, he restored complexity to the ropes. He abandoned his campaign to dominate the world, maintained governance of Macedonia with the prudence of three years, then retreated to anonymity disguised as a beggar. His face was soon discovered, so he broke his teeth and rolled the sharpest pieces across his face. He kept the pieces in waxcloth and scarred his face every year for the rest of his life. He lived long, well beyond the age of thirty. He took jobs such as a cattle-driver in Gordium or a porter in the Persian docks. They say he also became a fisherman, but also more than that: a carpenter.

They should have failed you, said the voice.

But I disgress. This world dissolved after he died or was killed. So, I created another. In this world, the great ruler freed the ropes of the Gordian Knot precisely as history tells us. But some Asian legends report that at the eve before each conquest, the royal messenger of the besieged state would be cordially received by Alexander in his own tent. The messenger would bear a knot from the court mages. He solved them all two ways in his mind, but his sword was singular in its reply.

In India, where he was to erect the twelve altars that mark the end of his conquest, he received an elephant's tusk, abominably knotted and naturally imbued with a beauty to keep the King's sword hand at bay. Alexander died within three years of the tusk.

Aristotle died. Atienza. Lontoc.

She should have failed me, I said.

Doubleyou

2008-03-01T14:49:00.000+08:00

Poem published at Philippine Graphic, the March 3 issue.

People Power Anniv Coda

2008-02-27T10:24:00.000+08:00

Naglu-loop na naman ang kapit-bahay ng isang track. Ang lakas magpatutog, kala mo sila lang nasa compound. Nakakadamay na sila. Nakakabulahaw. Aba, sa bahay ako nagtatrabaho ano. Sumosobra na sila. Mapapakain ba nila pamilya ko? Makailang beses na ako kumatok sa pinto nila, minsan may dalang bulaklak, tanke, mga santo-santo.

Hindi ako makakilos ngayon. Hindi makapagtrabaho. Hindi rin naman makareklamo.

Paulit-ulit na lang kasi ang Rihanna nila. Nakikiusap: Please don't stop the music. Music. Music.

Kambal Cliche

2008-02-09T23:36:00.000+08:00

Gabi na naman ng mga librarian. Itinakda ng punong librarian na kumuha kami ng cliche ng pag-ibig at paglaruan ito, baka sakaling maging tula. Kaya ayun, napabaka-sakali tuloy nang di oras.

Sana dalawa

Sana dalawa ang puso ko
Para dalawa silang iibig sa iyo

Hindi ko alam kung nagustuhan nila iyon. Malamang hindi kasi hindi pa ako humihingi ng permiso, piunayagan na nila akong maghanap ng isa pang cliche. Hindi ko rin alam kung nagustuhan nila ang kinalabasan ng ikalawang pagpili kasi umalis ako agad pagkatapos bigkasin ang tula.

Isang Salita

sinabi mo na
kaya’t sabihin mo pa
pabulong at paihip at palagi
na ibibigay mo ang lahat

halimbawa
ang inipit mong pilik-mata
ang nilunok mong dighay halimbawa
ang iyong mga kinupkop
mula sa paghihinuko
ang hindi mo maisuko
sa regla bilang halimbawa

ipagpalagay na nating lahat
at ibulong mo pang “ibibigay”

halimbawa
maliban sa buwan at suntok
maliban sa tala at tadhana
maliban sa daigdig at ikot

bukod pa sa hangin
dahil aking tatanggapin

kada alikabok na ipit
sa kada kulubot ng iyong siko
isa-isa sa sari-saring lansa ng iyong pawis
kada patak
ng iyong hindi pa yumayaong kandila

hanggang magpantay-pantay
ang bawat titik sa nag-iisang tunog
ang la
at ha
at hat

hanggang magniig patungong tuldok
at mahalo sa paglaho
ang kumpleto mong handog

hanggang wala nang “ni isa”
at walang matira
at wala ka na

maliban sa palagi at palaging iihip
na hindi mo ako mahal
at hindi mo ako kailanmang minahal

Sefirot VII

2008-02-09T23:15:00.000+08:00

i. Myopic ang 1/6 ng populasyon ng daigdig.

iv. Sapagkat hindi mapagpasyahan ng taxonomy kung mammal o ibon ang platypus, may proposisyon ang 1 siyentista na “patayin lahat ng platypus!”

vi. Umuusbong na ang fingerprints sa ika-9 na linggo ng tao sa sinapupunan.

v. 8 tumakas mula sa bilangguan sa Cavite.

viii. Bilang kompromiso sa ika-2 Utos na nagbabawal sa pagbuo ng mga imahen ng anumang nasa langit, daigdig, & katawan ng tubig sa ilalim ng daigdig, biniyayaan ng ilang artisanong Hudyo ang mga imahen ng tao ng ulo ng ibon.

iii. Identity ang game show sa Estados Unidos kung saan nanalo ng grand prize na $500,000 ang 1 Filipino.

ix. Noong ika-7 hanggang ika-8 dantaon sa Ireland, ang pagkitil ng buhay ng 1 eskribano ay pinapatawan ng parehas na parusa sa pagpatay ng obispo.

vii. Sortes Vergilianae

ii. Mahina ang kanyang tinig nang tinanggihan ang Jollibee.

Mmm-Bop: The Trouser Song

2008-02-07T11:06:00.000+08:00

They tell me it's bound to get ugly. They tell me I still have time to back out, don't rush into these things. Because these things will prove to be one irrevocable decision after another.

Whenever I hear the word ugly I remember Khojee, da man. I remember his long afternoon.

Khojee's not ugly, facewise. But you know how these things go. I'm not allowed to call him pretty. He was earrings and muscles, was bad genie laughter and a bald head. We loved him as far as love can go in the sergeants' circle of the old university. We loved him even if we never saw him coming, and even if he always popped out of nowhere right into the middle of the tambayan, grabbing one of us by the trousers - usually the thin Mosqueda - and shouting: Gang Rape!

Then we would each grab a limb, in earnest, so that he could rub his knee into Mosqui's groin - or that of anyone of us - and we could then chant Children of the Corny: Gang Rape Gang, Gang Rape Gang! And he could then ullulate.

Then we would be satiated and play magic cards or rehash boy bawang jokes or listen to Khojee detail the latest H-wood object of his masturbation ask Mosqui how life was with a penis as broad and as short as a can of Maling. One day, late in the morning, we were bad-mouthing his penis when Mosqueda got so damn piqued that he threatened to unzip. So Khojee signalled Gang Rape Gang though as far as we were concerned he didn't have to, we were already up and grasping, and Mosqui never wore his pants hiphop style ever since the passing of that day.

Khojee wore hiphop himself, wore it long after most of us gave up on the fashion, wore it loose and low even after I warned him that a stupid Manuela mall-rat was posing hip-hop when he busted his head by challenging a yuppie to a fight in the middle of the food court. The yuppie raised his fists, boxer style, and the Manuela hiphopstah delivered a high kick. His own seams were his undoing. The flight of the right leg pulled the low pant-leg up and snatched the left leg off the ground, wham! Went the head.

But Khojee was da man, and I was still thinking of Kierkegaard with his two horses, one heavenward another earthbound. And the man in the chariot getting torn to pieces.

So Khojee was in his hip-hop get-up, his waist superfluous with abs and belts and chains when he popped up one afternoon. Because he found Mosqueda absent, he said we'd postpone the rape although he was so horny because of this new girl he saw in an MTV, a Claire Danes look-a-like and boy would he like to teach that girl the difference between a daisy and a rose.

Rose. Uh-ohs. We asked him if he'd jacked off already. He said of course, oh god why would he pass her up? He's seen the video several times. He heard the song once standing up on the bus and began rubbing his member on the pole, never mind the sidewise glances of the driver! I was about to ask him how many times he saw the video when Mosqui suddenly appeared and asked Khojee: "You know why Taylor Hanson's flat-chested?"

"Because she's a kid, stupid," Khojee said.

"Because he's a boy, like his brothers in the Hanson brothers who are also as boys as brothers go," Mosqueda said.

He chanted Gang Rape Gang, and I'm willing to bet it was the longest afternoon in Khojee's life, and no one in the sergeants' circle ever wore hip-hop style again. And no one kept in touch after graduation.

Beatitude of the Moment

2008-02-06T10:09:00.000+08:00

Blessed are the judgmental
For in this instant they know
They count not among the blessed

Emo Trip

2008-02-03T19:33:00.000+08:00

At the outset, I should say that this is not my story and will never be my story. This must be said with a healthy dose of vehemence, and maybe only the fly register can serve the purpose of caveat to the hilt: this is so not my story.

As in.

Once there was a couple, the usual hetero, and the girl was in the red so the guy had to content himself with the capitals B and J. They were the wild type, doing the do everywhere but on the bed. There were sheets all over the house but no underwear. Neither of them bothered with underwear unless they had to work or go out to buy some food.

The do. Guy did it for the fun. Girl did it for the exercise. Of course they say it's for love. Three permutations of speaking the love-word apply to them. Before the deed, it's beg. During, it's shout. After, it's whisper. It's the panting, the moaning, and the foreplay: love. A fly syllable. Of course.

It was not their first time with the red. They've had months between them. They've accumulated hours of tongue, so to speak. But in this particular hour, this "once," the guy tried for the throat, past the palate and down the uvula. Or maybe it was the girl who sought the good choke. These are lost details.

What they did not forget is that the girl began to vomit and the guy held fast her nape when it happened because he found it warm. And the girl vomitted some more because she liked him holding fast.

They were all laughter and hoots in the showers. Cheers all around!

They took some of that celebratory spirit to bed and, without knowing it, they fell asleep at exactly the same time. They also did not know that they shared a minute before sleep and it was a minute of wondering. The girl thought: Would he like us to do that again? Would I?

The guy thought: Did she swallow?

Sefirot VI

2008-02-01T07:26:00.000+08:00

iv. Kapag tama ang anggulo & sapat ang puwersa ng sapak sa mababang bahagi ng likod, mapapaputok ang kidney & sa gayong paraan malalason ang dugo.

ii. Nasa kalagitnaan siya ng sobrang galit nang biglang napabahing.

viii. Sagrado ang ibon sa Mesopotamia sapagkat tinuturing ang anumang bakas ng kuko at tuka nito sa basang luwad bilang cuneiform ng mga diyos.

iii. May dila na ang tao pagpatak ng ika-8 linggo sa sinapunan.

vi. Aistheeta kai noeeta

ix. Inaresto ang maestro ng 1 kuwadrang sumo, kasama ang 3 senior na manlalaro, dahil sa pagbugbog & pagpatay sa 1 baguhan.

vii. Ang nasirang si Suharto.

i. Sa gabi naninilo ang karamihan ngunit di lahat ng mga kuwago, & bobo ang lahat ng kuwago kumpara sa ibang mga ibong mandaragit.

v. Dahil sa paniniwala na may pang-6 na pandamdam ang tao kapag siya ay pinagmamasdan, nakaugalian ng mga asesino ang pahilis na pagmanman.

Sefirot V

2008-01-25T23:55:00.000+08:00

iv. Hate the game, not the player.

i. Ayon sa leyenda, linggo-linggo isinasaayos nina Hanani & Hoshaiah ang mga titik ng Sefer Yezirah upang makalikha ng 3 taong baka na kakatayin para sa hapunan.

vii. 3 ang kanyang taghiyawat.

viii. Buntis ang tawag sa baterya ng mobile kapag nasobrahan ito sa kuryente, namaga, & nawalan nang silbi bukod sa pagpapaikot nang parang trumpo sa “tiyan” nito.

ii. Sapagkat tinanggap na pambansa ang utang na P3.798-T, nakapanata ang bawat Filipinong sanggol, tinedyer, & matanda sa personal na utang na P42,656.45.

vi. Sa pag-aaral ng mga asesino sa bibig, nagniniig ang pagkilala sa gutom & paghubog sa gutom ng target.

iii. 4 ang naghati sa jackpot ng Super Lotto na P133-M.

ix. “Diplomasyang pingpong” dahil inimbitahan ng Tsina ang Estados Unidos na magpadala ng kupunan sa Table Tennis Tournament noong 1971.

v. Daga ang watawat ng taong 2008.

Athiopie

2008-01-23T07:28:00.000+08:00

"Kapag maganda ka na,"
Tanong ng pinakalihim
Na Angelina Jolie,
"Kelangan pa bang lumaya?"

Opening Rites

2008-01-23T07:02:00.000+08:00

I said no to the Los Banos students who wanted to be excused from classes to attend the Opening Rites of the Centennial in Diliman. They insisted, so I insisted on my No. They said, But it's going to be historic. Their other teachers said so. The papers. The upperclassmen. The religious groups. The frats. The activists. In that progressive order. I said, Historically, the university brought the Philippines where it presently is. They of course protested. That's what students are for. They said they didn't understand. They said, How can you blame the university? I said, Your type of question leads to another: How can you deserve another century?

Sefirot IV

2008-01-19T09:52:00.000+08:00

iii. Alay ni Richard Wilbur ang mga pariralang “matatas kayong managinip” sa mga makatang Etrusci sapagkat nanatili ang kanilang mga titik hanggang sa panahong wala na, ni 1, ang makahagilap sa malayong wika.

viii. Dinukot ang 5 pinagsusupetsahang nagbabalak ng destabilisasyon ng pamahalaan.

v. Ang kamatayan ng maligalig na henyong si Bobby Fischer sa edad na 64.

i. Kambal ang kanyang tawa & yamot tuwing bumibigay ang kanyang takong.

vii. Ang bibig ng target ang huling hantungan ng mga lasong niluluto ng asesino mula sa mga sangkap gaya ng mga halamang-dagat, puffer fish, almond, sari-saring bulaklak, &bp.

vi. P3,732 kada bariles ng krudo.

ii. 8 crewman ang naligtas sa may Batanes.

ix. Aklat ang uniberso, & ayon sa mga Hudyo susi ang tamang kombinasyon ng mga letra & numero sa pag-intindi sa daigdig & paglikha ng buhay dito.

iv. Nympha vox

Aking Araw

2008-01-18T06:27:00.000+08:00

Makailang beses sa buhay ko, ngunit pabiro, na sinabihan akong "may araw ka din!" Ilang beses na kaya akong pinag-ukulan ng ganitong mga salita nang hindi ko narinig? Na pabulong, o maaaring pasigaw ngunit sa mga lingid na silid ng kongkreto o puso. At sinusino kaya: mga nahirapang estudyante, mga hindi naworkshop nang maayos, nag-iinarteng kaibigan na nakaligtaang himasin ang ego, isang nabigwasang kapatid, nasaling na magulang - ilan kaya sa mga dating kasintahan? - at isang estranghero sa dyip na inabot ang aking pamasahe sa drayber sa kabila ng pagwasak sa kanyang araw ng nagsusumigaw kong anghit.

Bilang sukli, isang walang pangalang "may araw ka rin!"

Sinuman siya, sila, o ikaw, baka ikaliligaya mong malaman. Alam ko na kasi kung kailan.

Bukas.

On Irma Lacorte's "Rigodon"

2008-01-11T12:01:00.000+08:00

This exhibit of pencil drawings opens at 6pm on January 17, 2008 at Art Informal, 277 Connecticut St., Greenhills, San Juan.

i
rigodon as combinatoria

The series is an invitation to storytelling. All by itself one image – a spoon or an ampersand, for instance – strikes as insight. Taken together, the nine frames form a puzzle. But it is a plural puzzle, informed by all the permutations of arrangement and movement within the eye: moving in line as a row or column, or in the zigzags of pairs, or in circles along the manifold possibilities of jumbling the tiles.

Pieced together every which way, the nine images generate stories. The frames extend the dance between artist and medium to involve the whimsy and memory of the artviewer, the artseeker. In the end – or insofar as such a project allows finality – the viewer becomes co-maker.

ii
rigodon as hydra

The heart as a vessel contains dream, object, sign. Live with the ligaments of memory, the series traces the contours of a moment, the texture of fleeting experience.

The images flash in mid-throb. But one image does recur, the headless runner. Rid of much vertical baggage – vanity among them, we may conjecture – she leaps every which way, freed from direction or the need for intent. Concern being the least of her concerns, we find, in the wake of her sprints, our own narratives told and retold, passed on, and thrown away. Lost. Yet always running: our stories, in all ways, regenerating.

iii
rigodon as wika

Speech, in the form of questions, springs from this decapitation. Which story is expendable? Which reading is least valid? Which emotion is of the least significance? Whose life is least worth living? This device of the nine frames takes in all perspectives. Yet, with grace, it refrains from boxing them in. Instead, with contagious exuberance, the frames multiply and deepen human experience in a single visual gesture.

In a primal way, the series offers us idiom. Arbitrary and framed, it carves a language off our lives. The series is a myriad face. Each cardioglyph is a mouth.

Sefirot II

2008-01-05T08:45:00.000+08:00

iii. Bawal ang mga Overseas Filipino Workers sa 4 na bansa.

ix. Walang mga kneecap ang sanggol & nagkakaroon lamang ng ganitong bayugo ang tao sa pagitan ng 2 hanggang 6 na taong gulang.

ii. Bien je mourrais, plus que vivante, heurese.

vi. Ayon sa mga asesino, may 9 na tarangkahan ang sinumang target na maaari nilang pasukin upang linlangin, manduhan, o patayin ito: ang 7 butas ng mukha, ang ari, & ang puwet.

viii. Ang pagiging ama ni Patrick Garcia.

vi. Kabilang sa 32 lihim na landas ang 10 numero o Sefirot & sa pamamagitan ng mga ito nilalang ng Diyos ang mga abstraktong bagay.

ii. P41.02 : $

v. Sapagkat malamlam ang Christmas lights, hindi muna niya ibinaba ang mga ito mula sa pader.

vii. Ika-16 na sunog ng 2008 ang naganap sa Galleria Baclaran Shopping Mall.

oh-8

2008-01-01T15:44:00.000+08:00

News say that, compared to last year, this New Year caused less deaths, less wounds. This is how we take stock. For example, 2008 and there are still six of us. A family. The year of the five will come. Will come.

Sefirot I

2007-12-30T22:32:00.000+08:00

vi - Niyanig ang Laguna & Bicol ng lindol na na nasa ika-5 antas ang lakas.

ix - Kaugalian na ang pagsalubong ng 12 uri ng bilugang prutas sa bagong taon, hal: lanzones, tsesas, melong tagalog, tsiko, kalamansi, dalandan, ubas, mansanas, pakwan, peras, naranha, at melong kastila.

ii - Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitudo

viii - Ang pagpaslang kay Bhutto.

v - Ayon kay Bruce Lee, hindi siya natatakot sa taong 1 beses nag-ensayo ng 10,000 uri ng sipa pero natatakot siya sa taong 10,000 nag-ensayo ng 1 uri ng sipa.

iii - Nasa kanyang tinig ang antok.

iv - Ayon sa Sefer Yezirah ng ika-6 na dantaon, binuo ng YHWH ang daigdig sa pamamagitan ng 32 landas tungo sa karunungan.

i - Mas malaki ang mata ng ostrich kesa utak nito.

vii - P982 kada kilo ang hamon.

A Likely Story

2007-12-28T12:30:00.000+08:00

A former friend had this air about him. As if he invented atheism. I would have told him about a couple of atheists I knew who had much fuller voices, but back then I didn't want him to feel doggone down. See, whenever he's doggone down, he realizes that he's not the center of the world and begins to ask endlessly about my opinion, even take them to task. So, no. He was better off thinking himself the very center. Less irritable that way. You see, there was this one time when he was down, and (as authentic as puppies go) he said, "I'm a rebel. Everybody's supposed to love a rebel, right?"

It was too long ago, so I don't recall if this was a beer-inspired answer: "Don't ask for love, man. It's just not fair." But it was an honest answer, and my occasional honesty ranks number three in my list of why I lose friends. Number four is their silence takes up too much space. Number two is my all-time favorite simile: like I care.

The Un-invites

2007-12-26T08:00:00.000+08:00

I officially have more contacts than blocked people. That's as good an index as any: I've gotten lazy.

Creative Nonfiction

2007-12-03T07:31:00.000+08:00

Department of Humanities
College of Arts and Sciences
University of the Philippines at Los Banos

presents

CREATIVE NONFICTION

a
General Education Professorial Chair Lecture

by
Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo

Venue : Multi-purpose Hall 1, CAS Annex 2
Date : December 7, 2007, 9am-12nn

Mommies Attack!

2007-11-11T13:50:00.000+08:00

Nothing against them, really. Don't get me wrong. I've got one myself and I want to believe I love her dearly. Fact is, it was her life entire that shyly suggested - voicelessly - that I teach. So my pupils may blame her. Voicelessly.

What I find interesting's how moms go with their kids to fetch classcards. Or how they get it themselves, sans the child. And I mean moms - not dads.

Oh. I teach college. I've been at it four years running and I've never seen so much mothering. I don't know how to take it. On one hand, it's all good. Kids honest with their grades and all. Also, I don't mind if they tag along to interrogate my colleagues: "Where did this five come from? My little angel was valedictorian." UP Teachers need all the checking and balancing, what with the liberties in the way of responsibility (that elusive fourth R). These teachers! Ugh, such delinquents like you wouldn't believe.

I don't mind. Maybe children nowadays, eighteen year-old, twenty-two year old children nowadays, they could do with the extra bonding.

Maybe we should consider college-level PTA. And family days.

I've been guessing at many reasons. One foremost: the Tuition Fee Increase must have left the prole kids and has begun cutting from the upper strata. Where the babies are. A hypothesis, nothing more.

Okay. Let me come off honest. I'm just pissed I couldn't get anywhere to eat lunch what with all the students and their friends and their moms crowding the queues, taking in all the aircondition. Matter of national security, my dad would say.

First day on November 14, UPLB. I'm expecting some kids to freak me out, sobbing quietly as I hand them the college tertiary level university coming of age independence day syllabus. How to shoo the mothers with their hands on the windows mouthing goodbyes. Never walking that talk.

Maybe they're mouthing I love you. Puh-lease. Let me chew your children in peace.

Dry Weave Blanket

2007-10-06T23:17:00.000+08:00

I made a blanket out of your pictures
This has been many years in the making
It has been needles and it has been pins
It has been thread across thread across thread
Out of all your photos /See my blanket

Your smile is a thing that’s warm and fluffy
Flat and floating the expanse of your skin
How black the cotton of your scattered eyes
Warm and fluffy how your smile is a thing
Yes I have cornered your face /See how softly

Oh I’m off to the place
Where sands and dreams and salts are framed
And where I’m headed
The moons are square and so are faces
Oh where I’m going
My oceans are always kept in

It has been needles and it has been pins
It has been thread across thread across thread
Warm how your smile is a thing of the past
From all your years I spun out a blanket
It still is needles /Love it still is pins

Oh I’m off to the place
Where sands and dreams and salts are framed
And where I’m headed
The moons are square and so are faces
Oh where I’m going
My oceans are always kept in

Commiserate

2007-09-28T20:54:00.000+08:00

I'm a foreigner and that sounded to me like a long bad word involving the privates of parents, the purported unorthodox sexual habits, the feces of rainbow tropical birds, and the hidden name of the local god. Commiserate. Then the natives explained the word to me, showed me their people, what their people eat and don't eat, what their educated spend for art. They showed me what they killed. They whispered shame. I understood, and I grew the white skin of these natives who said commiserate. I knew that evil needed all four syllables.

The How of Music

2007-09-28T20:17:00.000+08:00

This is how it came
How I earned the dance
Someone had to slip
A boy jumping jacks
Never had the chance

I saw how he stepped up

This is how it came
How I learned to kiss
Someone had to lie
A man mouthing love
When he won my lips

I did not hear him sigh

This is how it came
The how of music
How the song arrived
A tear was whistling
A tune down my cheek

I heard how it survived

Bitter Water

2007-09-28T20:16:00.001+08:00

All nightingales are false
Parrots are blasphemers
The true bird of sorrow
It has no throat for song

Hunger, always and always
I shall never taste your name

The lady of the night?
Or the sweetly sick rose?
That loneliest petal
It spits out no perfume

Hunger, always and always
I shall never taste your name

Neither the salt of tears
Nor the bite of syrup
For the saddest water
Is much too pure to flow

Your eye, your skin, your shadow
Your scent, your spirit, your voice
These, what I shall never know
Here, what I shall never know

Hunger, always and only
I shall never eat your name

Veterans

2007-09-25T18:55:00.000+08:00

(Prof Gemini Lozada, 33, Psychology teacher)

must’ve been a storm of swerves
on a hot night
needing no sirens
on dry screech asphalt

only a van to Veterans’
hospital, AM, one
a freshly dead
a body arriving from bodies in hiding

alive
must’ve been a run
of tire and turbine and eye
of night to night to night

heeding no dawn break
just a long black rolling

must’ve been out and away
from a panic of fingers and hair
of so many small wars within the ribs
of the wet butts of cigarettes

away
from the hailstorm of dreams it must’ve been
bludgeoning scalps down to skulls

swerves of
testosterone and sweat tendon muscle
testosterone and pus

must’ve been a conspiracy of boys
a societal envy of menses
with the cigarette smoke that clings to the hair
of slap happy boys hungry boys becoming

smoke
of a van delivering
up and away
a long gone van to Veterans’
where the mothers shall arrive

and many tiny boys

must’ve been

Glazed

2007-09-08T10:19:00.000+08:00

Already I have forgotten why I did not come. My excuse must have been all-important, whatever it was. Yes, significant. Else, why did I miss her cerveza negra hair? Why forgo the sheen that only my throat could see? One reason or another, I failed to come. Maybe she remembers? Maybe I told her, before or after the fact, hey, I’m sorry I couldn’t come, but did I say because? Would I inflict her with the irritation of things valid? Of course I am sure I apologized, one I’m sorry or other. That cannot be helped. Out of arrogance, absence wants to be noted. All words are things we wear to conceal our skins aging with thirst. We resort to the courtesy of exquisite masks. My thirst for her is a porcelain sigh.

This Calcium Bowl

2007-09-01T04:28:00.000+08:00

What I have for you is the clear soup of my mind. No animal or alphabet noodles. No herb or spice kept secret. None of the poison distilled by assassins from the oil of almonds. You have been a good friend despite your ill-tempered jealousies. You have been a companion even when I detested love. Please understand my willingness to be of service, for it is a full-bodied intent untainted by the wish for graver friendship. The clear soup of my mind is what I have for you. You will find that for all its native heat you will not taste hot water.

The Rhoan Will

2007-09-01T02:49:00.001+08:00

-some-day have connections leading
jobs leading to leader connections
tradition: excellence

-end up marrying a sis
or not marrying a sister
initiation: honor

or not having the courage to confess
his love
tradition: strength

-ascend and sigma
summing up to his diploma
initiation: excellence

-attend reunions at hotels
alumni homecomings
tradition: a heart

at the mothering university
and brotherhood at cafes
initiation: kidneys

-bother to speak of Mendez
or not bother to speak of Cris
tradition: a liver

(Nevertheless, they must possess
the ironed out rites and attires
for this, right? No one is that poor.)

a some-thing that happened way back
when he was seriously being young
initiation: a brain

or leading to leader connections
or not proving courage to confess
tradition: a penis

any-way the Rhoan will
one-day father
initiation.

The Nonfictionist

2007-07-29T10:09:00.000+08:00

Some jokes in mind for the lecture workshop, but the woman in the audience who either glowed like you or was you cut the sidewise tongue. The pink path left me was straight speech and what saved me were the intermittent breaks reserved for the audience to write. These gaps afforded me time to look down and look away. Gracious though they were, maybe I should not have called them ‘audience’. I don’t recall if I did. Out loud, I mean. Maybe I should not refer to an ‘audience’ even in my mind. Perhaps the truer name was ‘participants’. Yet, I wouldn’t ask a word of what they wrote and I wouldn’t gift them the yellow thing in my mind, the memory of a morning. Workshop because we worked, yes, but participants? We participated in nothing. And you weren’t there. Not one person looked like you. I wouldn’t dare offer a joke even if all of them looked like you. I’d taste the auditorium’s laughter only if each of them were you.

Muli, ang Maitim na Dalaga(1)

2007-06-24T23:12:00.001+08:00

Marami siyang kamay(2). May hawak siyang abaka na pantali sa kalabaw, kutsilyo(4), at hasag. Hindi nakasindi ang hasag. Nakatitiyak akong may lamat ito. Tinanong ko siya kung may maitutulong ako. May inabot siya sa akin(7).

Mga Sipi
(1) Dati ko pa itong panaginip. Mula pa noong isang palihan sa Hilaga.
(2) Kadalasan, iniisip kong anim. Sapagkat panaginip, maaaring apat lamang. Maaaring higit sa pito.
(4) Kutsilyong tipong tinatapon-tapon lamang. Tipong nadedekwat mula sa mga sizzling plate combo meal ng mga foodcourt.
(7) May mga ganito akong panaginip, may nakukuha ako na hanggang paggising ay hinahanap-hanap pa rin. Minsan, tulad sa pagkakataong ito, hindi ko na nga maalala kung ano ang bagay, kinakapa ko pa rin sa ilalim ng unan o sa gild-gilid ng kobre-kama.

Hoods

2007-06-13T02:13:00.001+08:00

The failures have been complete everywhere and nobody feels any alarm.

Charles Greville
June 13, 1848
Diary entry

1) They say the election results speak against GMA. I’m not as astute an observer, but I do want to agree. People have been murdered just by thinking different. People have disappeared. Some of us want honesty. Some of us want rest from all wishful thinking: to hell with politics!

Someone wants the Pope bad.

2) I’m three hours of sleep and two hours of ride away from Laguna. I just want to post that the Sunday Times published my story. It came out with a title typo as “The Childhood.” I wanted it out as “The Childhoods.” Although the plural title still fits the bill in my book, maybe it’s better that it was released in the singular. See, another version of the story exists, a bricolage that employs footnotes and has them eat up half the pages (I say another version, but it might as well be another story). Naturally, it’s a layout editor’s nightmare. When the story took that form, I loved it. I killed the prudent man in my head who advised “kill all darlings,” then I gladly embraced the fact that I’ll never get the monster out on print.

Maybe I’ll stick to “childhood” on the one that did get out and retain the plural for the unpublished other, thus marking the difference at least in my files. It’s Alea’s say! I can honor her from time to time.

When I bought the mag and saw the typo, I smiled. When you’ve cut out two-thirds of your story, your threshold expands to interesting proportions. Thanks to the editor for publishing “The Childhood.” The artists, the staff – everybody. Thanks to my workshop group, Naratibo, for beta-testing “The Childhoods.” Sorry Anna (and the others) for the font size. I tried to be considerate, but the footnotes defied me, jumping to the next page if I didn’t size ‘em in right.

Pink, Ava, and Kabesang Tales thanks for showing some love to the ugly beast. And for liking the story as well.

I’m in season-ending mode here because I guess I must keep off the color pens for some months. The red one beckons. School time.

3) Irma of Dasma, best of luck with all those meetings and prayers. You’re going to need it.

4) I read in the papers that the World Bank put some weight behind the bid of the publishing “cartel” that eventually won the contract to make those error-infested textbooks for our dear children. Alea, tell me you had nothing to do with this!

5) Advanced happy birthday.

Independence Day

2007-06-12T19:07:00.000+08:00

Dear Dr Recto:

You may be pleased to know that I’m putting your bureaucracy lessons to good use. At least, I’m trying to. God knows though, “trying” sometimes just doesn’t cut it.

God knows – one or another anyway – how difficult these words come. I just sort of “bit” into the first paragraph. Three sentences spit out, just like that. Then this friction. Each word gets erased even before I put it to pad. But since I’m supposed to be a man of letters, I guess I must push forward. Graduate to phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs. But always, ever and always arrive at the period.

I got a promotion recently. “Of sorts,” really, as those in the know understand that these things only hold currency on paper. Not much weight to that. And not that I welcome any weight, real or virtual. You know, I didn’t notice I had a scowl on when they gave me the official documents. The Dean called my own face to my attention, “why are you frowning?”

You would’ve known the answer better than anybody else.

I see you, you know, as I write this. I never really paid my respects. And so, I see you only now. And we are talking as we used to, about leaders and professors, about the difficulties of hoisting up the PhD program across three colleges, about the state of the nation. About what I can do with what I have. All your whys and wherefores.

I now see your smile and hear your voice.

“Ma’am Mitang,” everybody called you that. Never got the hang of it. You were always Dr Recto. And now my mind astonishes me with a cruel command that breaks into this futile letter: “Doctor, heal yourself!” You’d forgive me my black humor, I know; in many ways, you never seemed to me a UP professor. I mean that as a compliment.

I hear you laughing now, in the Center – my Batcave, marked with guano for life. I try to remember the smell: I can’t.

I finished the degree a year ago. The secretaries told me that you asked about my status when I was on the last leg. Bless you for the thought. Bless you for making my transition to my adviser easy. Dr Santamaria was great help. Also, Dr Sobritchea and Ma’am Michiyo. I wish you were there when I finished. I didn’t care to march. I probably would have if you asked me. And I know that, were you active, you would’ve made sure I was attended. No way to say no.

Anyway, yes, I’m about to begin another semester. Which means another foot into the end of the career; I have a couple of years to move up or out. The others think it’s a needless policy, cruel even. I don’t know. I want it to be my decision when the time comes, but I don’t think it’s too grave an emasculation if I just get myself kicked out. I mean, it’s a sem. It’s some months. I take what I can, push when possible, pull when necessary, one foot always in the end of all things – where both of your feet are now planted.

Dear professor, your book is still with me, the Tao Te Ching. How to return it? I think you’d be pleased to know that I’ve built so much upon that seed you lent me – that which now cannot but be an incontrovertible give.

Neither you nor Lao Tzu would think much of my “progress.”

Well, I want you to know (but what could you know? Maybe, instead, just the plain desire to express this, to you or to the air that is not you nor God nor anything) how I never want to forget your kind face, but I probably will. I don’t want to forget your lessons but what of that desire? Time will eventually thwart it.

Dadufalza, before you. In time, Atienza. In time, F– . In time, my parents.

Obliquely, I discover the wisdom of keeping friends to a bare minimum. It’s not your thought. Surely not the idea of that silly intelligence who proclaimed that a day when one failed to make a new friend is a day lost. Rather, the day you make a friend is the day you fashion loss, the day you condemn your soul. And another’s.

Dr Recto: whether we were friends or not, I declare that I shall not befriend your memory. All your lessons will automatically become mine, no more, no less. I shall forever refuse to accept your memory. And in this manner, I keep you. By always ending you, I forever resurrect you.

This may puzzle you. I try – now – then now – then now – yet, I can’t bring myself to see you perplexed. I never saw your face when confused. I never will.

In conclusion: this impossible feeling that I’ll live to write another day. Damn the everyday conceit of always assuming that you will see a day to its very end. Then the assumption of another stupid year. And another. As if eternity were just as easy as deceiving yourself.

Dear teacher, your smile was more necessary on this earth. Dear mindmother. Still, you ran out of moments. Before I did. In pace requiescat.

The Mirrorball

2007-06-11T23:16:00.001+08:00

After dinner (mollified by a demi-bottle of Sauterne) I read Freud's new book for two hours. Freud can't see straight about sex, but he has discovered a lot about the mechanism of the human mind.

Siegfried Sassoon
June 11, 1922
Diary entry

Yesterday over the phone, I told Pink that the story in the works would employ mirrors, a knife, and a mask. While usual elements behind my pages, I rarely get to use these on the surface. I don't know if all the shiny things will get past drafts. Since school's about to open and work's piling up, I'll have to wait.

She asked about the recent story, the one I'm about to put behind me. Pink asked if I'll show it to F-. I said, "but he's old school!" I then realized that I've never used "old school" in a derogatory sense. I then knew that what I meant to say was "but I'm afraid to show him."

Baby Steps

2007-06-04T02:55:00.000+08:00

The unpleasant part of this illness is the feeling of utter fatigue. Also a tendency to grey thoughts of old age, weakness, death. These somewhat stimulated by reading Arnold Bennett’s Journals – a very sympathetic man, but such a pitiful blind workhorse, self-driven until he dropped. At the end of it all, he could say: ‘I made a plan and I stuck to it.’ Well, that’s something, certainly. But the note of obstinacy is tragic, too. It’s the obstinacy of an insect.

Christopher Isherwood
June 4, 1956
Diary entry

Yesterday dawn, I took a walk to the park. I’d been contemplating the figure of Plotinus, his idea of “mind,” and I wanted to understand his words before writing anything at all about him. Had bluffed before and in my dim youth committed what a friend called “charlatanism.” Older, I stood only with my “I don’t know” before this strange philosopher.

It wasn’t supposed to be the usual way I took ideas out for a walk, carrying thoughts out to the night or the morning to question or push them further. During the most engaged “thinking expeditions,” I would arrive at a destination without little feeling – much less thought – about how I got there.

I didn’t care to take Plotinus out for a spin because, if I got his idea right, the spin itself would induce the knowing. The need called for practice. What would yield Plotinus to me were less his words than the very act of walking. But doing so in a special way, that is, I compelled myself to walk “mindfully,” to focus on the movement, think of nothing else, and feel the press of the foot on the earth. I’m a walker. I cherish my ankles over any car. So I thought there would be nothing to adding some “concentration” to my steps. But that was before I threw my legs out for the stretch.

The thirty minutes of walking humbled me. I felt much closer to Plotinus’s teaching that the supreme achievement of the mind was to escape itself. If I failed to reduce (or, consider: “expand”) my mind to one thing, how could I hope to bring it down to zero (and deeper)?

I’m an intellectual by the mere fact that I feed and cloth myself with the produce of the mind more than the work of muscles. It shamed me when I discovered the difficulty in mindfully doing something I did regularly, indeed something I Thoreau-ly loved.

Yes, I pressed my mind on my feet with almost as much gravity as my feet imprinted themselves on the ground. Yet, not half a minute would pass without my mind leaping monkey-like to some idea or memory or name. Had trained it that way, I know. I encouraged it to “free associate,” jump from box to box then as far outside them as possible, to gain distance then perspective. But the walk revealed to me how little control I had over my own thoughts, I who demanded from my students much attention.

Why mind these simple things: walking or breathing? Why hear the heart beat? What need have we, apprehenders of performative theory, communicative action, quantum mechanics, the lowdown on the Dow Jones? What need, we surgeons and loud lawyers, keen protesters and businessfolk? What, we freethinkers!

Somebody climbed Everest because “it was there.” I mind the walk because “it has always been there.” If the cosmic spheres turn in accord with their harmony, trees drink and breathe following the rudiments of their “animation,” and the mammals employ locomotion with either the graze or the hunt informing their musculature, then I who walk and breathe and revolve must refuse to die mindless.

One

2007-06-02T12:07:00.001+08:00

What a muddle I've been in with girls, in spite of all my headaches, insomnia, grey hair, despair. Let me count them: there have been at least six since the summer. I can't resist, my tongue is fairly torn from my mouth if I don't give in and admire anyone who is admirable and love her until admiration is exhausted. With all six my guilt is almost wholly inward, though one of the six did complain of me to someone.

Franz Kafka
June 2, 1916
Diary entry

1. "Ward, part 1," The Sunday Times Magazine, February 18.
2. "Ward, part 2," The Sunday Times Magazine, February 25 and March 4.
3. "The Kalabaw Caper," Philippine Graphic, April 16.
4. "Woman 19," Story Philippines, volume one of 2007.
5. "The Ivory Spear," The Sunday Times Magazine, April 22.
6. "Seals," Philippine Graphic, April 30.

Ring

2007-05-23T01:51:00.000+08:00

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.

Vertigo

2007-05-22T14:16:00.000+08:00

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?

May Song

2007-05-22T12:53:00.000+08:00

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.

Laptop

2007-04-21T10:16:00.001+08:00

May laptop ako sa panaginip. Maroon ang kulay at kawangis ng katawan ng coleman ang materyal. May istrap ang laptop ko kaya maaaring dalhin na style backpack. Ito lang ang dala ko papuntang Santolan. Kailangang inspeksyunin ang laptop sa bungad ng MRT(7). Nakaaasar sapagkat kailangan kong magmadali. Tahimik lang ako. Pinsan ko ang guwardiya(10). Tinanong niya sa akin kung nais ko talagang sumakay. Sabi ko, oo. Kukuha raw kasi siya ng espesyalista. Pumasok siya sa opisina. Lumabas si Guingona at umupo sa turnstile. Gamit ang mga screwdriver at plais, binuksan niya ang laptop at ininspeksyon ang kada piyesa. Sa susunod na eksena, nagpupusoy kami ng pinsan ko sa hardin sa Odiongan(15). Nakasando siya, saudi gold sa leeg at daliri, at pantalon at bota ng militar. Magiliw kaming naglalaro(19), naghihiwa ng manggang hilaw, at nagmumurahan.

Mga sipi:
7—Kinabahan ako sa bahaging ito, marami akong inisip na excuse sakaling may makita sila.
10—Patay na ang aking pinsan. Hindi siya kailanman naging sundalo o guwardiya. Hindi na umabot ng bente kuwatro, sa pagkakaalala ko.
15—Isang beses lang ako nakabisita sa hardin na ito. Hindi pa ako nagtagal noon, sinamahan lang ang aking ninang na magyosi. Ngayon ko lang natandaan ang isang panaginip sa Romblon.
19—Hindi ko alam kung sino ang nananalo. Okey lang kung siya. Panaginip ko naman e.

Tone Depth

2007-04-17T01:38:00.000+08:00

Again and again, the Botanical Garden. No matter how nature makes me feel at home – like Hey your blood drinks of the same sun, says the leaf, so cheers! – the source connects to me in these “places of nature” in many different ways. For example, the flora of Diliman reeks too much of nostalgia to be considered natural; red seethes so from Mountain Blank – and the green stench hunting ever so near – that my bones cannot rest there and my ears are thrilled even in sleep; Makiling whispers betrayal with clear intent so that even her stones seem to me crystallized hate; and the lake that we called “sea” when we were children by the Quisao shore remains ignorant. Always, in these “pockets of nature,” something that keeps me from a clear voice. I taste nature – more precisely, Nature in Me – on the bus that speeds through the South Luzon Expressway. Tears come to me when I see those trees, all of them strangers. In a moment, even if I already anticipate the moment, I suddenly feel they are kin. Not merely know, mind you. Feel: a more biblical sort of know. My motion and motor somehow connected to the primal stirrings of bark and root, wired to their wind-obscured stillness. The red curtains and the rain-stained glass do not deceive me. They too are nature. This brings me to thinking: maybe I must begin with strangers to understand. The mute trees seem to me most eloquent, while the leafless tree in Lukutang Maliit was etched by a foolish heart – mine, yes – so I fail to hear its throb. The Fertility Tree offers me such density of meaning that I am deaf to the spirit in it that is also me and is also the Big Bang and is also the clouds that sucked water from the bodies of my granderparents. But again, the Botanical Garden. The garden always slaps me with the inviolable presence of the thick date palm under whose shadow a Master denied me tutelage. This rejection is cool water, sweeter to me than love. Still, it remains a dismissal of such substance that the tree, the soil, and most of Laguna stay imperceptible to me.

Static

2007-04-17T00:53:00.000+08:00

Panaginip ng videoke. Malaki ang makina at walang tigil ang kanta at inom.(3) Hindi ko maalala ang imahe sa makina. May away na mula pa sa unang panaginip ko na hindi ko maaaring isulat. May dalang barena ang aking tiyo. Kaaway niya ang videoke na dinuduro niya ng barena. May lupa at ugat-ugat pa sa dulo ng barena ngunit kita pa rin ang tilos ng bakal. Nagstatic ang makina. Tuloy ang kantahan, medyo pabulong na nga lang. Todo ngiti(9) pa rin ang mga humahawak ng bote at mikropono. Galit na galit ang tiyo sa videoke.

Mga sipi:
3—Kadalasang mababa ang tingin ko sa mga kantahan at inuman. Kaya nga masaya ang mga gawaing ito dahil aminadong mababaw. Ngunit hindi ganito ang "saya" sa eksenang ito. Payapang uri ng saya. Malapit sa pakiramdam ng piknik sa maaaliwalas na umaga sa ilalim ng malayabong na puno.
9—Hindi ngiting aso. Tamang inumang ngiti. Hindi wholesome pero ngunit hindi kuntodo bangag. Natutuwa talaga sila sa kantahan. Kung natutuwa sila sa tiyo ko, hindi ko alam. Mula sa pagkakapanood ko, parang okey lang. Parang alam nilang naroon siya ngunit talagang ang kanta ang mahalaga sa kanila.

Mountain Lyric

2007-04-16T09:41:00.000+08:00

Summer, and under the shade of a shut up Carillon, I begin the practice of distance. Beloved will work elsewhere, live elsewhere, leaving her incandescent metaphors. Co-teachers stay, but do they really? Do I know who they will be besides their same names and sane faces? Also, students go. That’s what they’re supposed to do, study and go. What I hear are tricycles and people cooing at their expensive dogs and the wind that hisses and hints at a catalog of all that I do not hear. And will never. Friends stop the flow of words dead and the only way these could live is to say them again and again until I wear the meaning out of them, like how imagine there were once cities back in the day when Makiling held back her volcano words. Then the accursed snakebird brought her a gift, the thought she might one day lose them, these people she loved. Already missing them, she sang her grief and she cried and she sang. It was in this manner of fire that she lost them. It would be 300,000 years before a university was possible. When I entered this university four years ago, there was kapok in the air and a tower could yet sing.

Inquirer A17

2007-03-29T09:46:00.000+08:00

4 UP Los Banos teachers publish own literary works.

Darkfriend

2007-03-17T22:52:00.000+08:00

I do not remember this day.

Dorothy Wordsworth
Diary entry
March 17, 1798

Dear Darkfriend, I ask you if you feel. Do you feel it as I do, how She rises from us or how we fall from Her, the She who is bigger than the sun? Bigger than allsuns, Darkfriend. Do you feel how the earth is merely a tear of Hers, and every day of our waking up and walking around describe the arc of an infinite fall? Do you feel this chill sometimes, this chill wholly, that She may have already forgotten She ever cried? That She who is beyond reason and memory and dream may have already denied that She was once lonely? And She cried forth our earth? Now She looks at this world with amusement – do you still feel her, She of the allfun? – as if it were a surprise toy. As if there were any other Kosmos it could come from, any other One Face. As if She was never alone, never will be, and thus never a mother.

Trilobite

2007-03-04T04:09:00.000+08:00

Panaginip ng swimming pool(1) na nilulumot ang mga tile. Alam kong malalim. May mga nakaumang na tile na hinawakan ko upang makaangkla sa kailaliman. May mga trilobite(4) sa sahig at tila mga gaplatong pagong ang mga ito. Marami ang mga ito. Kapag umuusad ang isa, nakakaskas ang lumot(6) at nakikitang dilaw ang kulay ng tiles. Iniisip(8) kong mukhang helmet ng sundalo(9) ang trilobite. Iniisip ko rin na kapag binaligtad ko ito, masisipsip ko ang laman. Nag-iisip ako ng tinataktak na bulalo(12) sa ilalim ng tubig na paglaon ay dagat na(13). Hindi ko ginagalaw ang mga trilobite at hindi nila ako inaano. May trio(15) na mukhang ipis, mas maliit, at mas mabilis kumilos. Nagdesisyon ako na hindi trilobite ang mga ito at pinag-aapakan ko upang mapuksa.(18)

Mga sipi:
1—Siguro mula sa aking masayang karanasan sa elementarya at hayskul na may nakalaang quarter sa PE para sa mga liksyon sa paglangoy. Sa umpisa, pakiramdam ko nga nasa mater ang lugar.
4—Mula sa maagang pag-ibig sa paksa ng mga dinosaur, napasadahan ko rin ang mga mas sinaunang uri ng buhay. Mula pa sa maagang elementarya ang imahe ng trilobite.
6—Naglalaro sa isip ko habang inaalala ang kilos ng trilobite sa lumot ang mga kampanya sa unibersidad at bansa. Napapangiwi ako dahil ayokong gumawa ng koneksyon na hindi ko naman naisip habang nasa mismong panaginip.
8—Palaisip ako sa panaginip.
9—Helmet ng sundalo lamang at wala kalakip na konsiderasyon sa anumang partikular na digma o kung buhay o patay ang mga may-ari ng helmet. O kung nasaan sila relatibo sa tubig na ginagalawan ko.
12—Quisao o Tagaytay ang naiisip ko habang isinusulat itong nakagawiang sarbey ng mga batis at asosasyon ng mga imahe.
13—Malakas ang pakiramdam sa panaginip na nasa Lian, Batangas ang koneksyon sa dagat.
15—Malamang na hindi lamang tatlo. Maaaring umabot ng walo. Hindi maaaring dalawa lamang at hindi rin naman yata lumagpas sa sampu. Mahina akong magbilang sa panaginip.
18—May tsinelas akong suot. Nagtataka pa ako kung paano nagkatsinelas nang unti-unting nagising. Pagkagising, ang mapaklang pakiramdam na may hindi ako natapos. Bagay pa na parang hindi na ako kailanman magkakaroon ng pagkakataong tapusin ang panaginip.

Confetti

2007-02-17T10:50:00.000+08:00

Nanaginip ako ng sanlaksang bata. Takbo sila nang takbo kahit matindi ang buhos ng confetti(2). Delikado ang hangin at natakot ako na mapigtas at manghagupit ang mga banderitas(3). Tawa lang nang tawa ang mga bata. Sa ikalawang panaginip(5), may isang magulang na baboy(7) sa kural at may halong confetti(8) ang putik. Nasa loob ng kural ang ilang bata. Sinuotan nila ng sinturon(10) ang baboy. May isang batang babaeng nakaunipormeng St. Joseph’s(12). Dumapa siya sa lupa na madamo na at isa nang football field. Marumi ang field, maraming kalat na plastik na baso at paper plate (15).

Mga sipi:
2—Maaaring piyesta dahil sabay-sabay ang mga school fair pati ang alaala ng mga fair.
3—Wala akong maalala ni isang kulay ng banderitas.
5—O sumunod na eksena nitong tinatalakay na panaginip. Depende sa dami ng REM stage, maaaring may apat hanggang limang panaginip ang tao sa isang regular na tulog. May mga taong tumututok sa kanilang panaginip na kayang paghiwahiwalayin ang mga ito. Ang iba, napagsusunod-sunod pa.
7—Higit sa interpretasyon, mas mahalaga para sa akin ang mga pinagkuhanang eksena o teksto ng panaginip. Maraming maaaring pagkuhanan ng baboy. Maaaring ang matagal ko nang namalas na paggilit at pagkatay ng baboy. O ang trak ng mga baboy sa SLEX. O ang Valentine sisig. Puwedeng ang lektyur ko hinggil sa “Babycakes” ni Gaiman ang nakaimpluwensya. O ang tulang “El otro tigre” ni Borges. Puwede rin na noong pinaglaruan ni Nicolas Cage ang kanyang ilong sa pelikulang “Ghost Rider,” ang pumasok talaga sa isip ko ay ‘baboy’ sa halip na ‘bungo’. Pero ang una kong naisip pagkagising ay baka dahil Year of the Fire Pig ngayon. Ikalawa, baka dahil sa muling pagtalakay ng pork barrel. Maaaring wala ni isa sa mga ito. O lahat, pinagsama-sama. (Habang nagtitipa, tumugtog ang Radioactive Sago Project sa isip ko. Ngunit malamang naisip ko lamang iyon dahil sa ginagawa kong pagsasaayos ng tema. Malayo man, baka may naimpluwensya rin.)
8—Hindi ko matanggal sa isip ko ang bird flu habang kinokonsidera ang imahe ng confetti. Hindi ko naman naisip o naramdaman ang anumang pahiwatig ng sakit o ibon habang nananaginip.
10—Itim ang sinturon. Tiyak ako pagkagising ko. Nang isipin ko kung tiyak ako habang nananaginip, hindi ko maalala. Kaya ngayong nagtitipa na, hindi na ako sigurado. (Sa katunayan, nang maisip ko ang pork barrel, dumami ang bilang ng sinturon, naging tatlo. Hindi na rin ako sigurado kung ilang sinturon ang isinuot sa baboy. Ang alam ko lang, suot ito ng bata na hinila mula sa shorts bago isinuot sa baboy.)
12—Hindi ko maintindihan ang imaheng ito. Bagamat nakita ko noong elementarya ang unipormeng St. Joseph’s, hindi ko na maalala ang eksaktong hitsura.
15— Walang katiyakan kung may confetti pa sa hinihigaan ng bata. Wala akong maalala kahit isang kulay ng confetti. Hindi ko maalala ang hitsura ng isang partikular na confetti. Papel ba iyon o plastik o yero?

The Fourth

2007-02-15T23:55:00.000+08:00

Reming’s warnings were up when the three Aguinaldo men went out to watch Casino Royale. One bought the tickets, another shelled out for snacks, and father took care of coffee. I imagined that such a night won’t ever happen again, a night of tropical depression laughter and the nostalgia of elementary school day floods. We made jokes, one about how the storm was more spiritual than anything else. Laughs about the common stupidity: no one brought an umbrella. Then we ran in the rain, laughed some more. But of course, I thought, we had a sturdy roof to come home to. Even if we didn’t catch a jeep or cab and had to walk the whole way, we would have gotten nothing more than chill troubles and fun. What was the place of such a thought as those about the unroofed and suffering at such a good time? It was a night charged with the thrill of some threat yet the solid confidence: we’ll get through, see, we’ve done it when we were younger. Bond always wins. As for this film, one of us liked it, another was disappointed, another half-loved it. Or was it half-hated? I wondered: how would a fourth would find the movie? My son or my brother’s, I mean. Would he ruin the future possibility of such a night, mute our laughs, slow our steps, endue us with much more caution than was happy? Then it occurred to me, maybe we three already achieved some Euclidean equilibrium with the night and the weather. Possibly a balance that a next generation Aguinaldo would have ruined. Still I asked myself: when would we have the young one? Even with the thought of a possibly perfect stretch of years with such movie nights offering a silent spine to us three, I still want this fourth. No matter where it will come from. Even if maybe from the sisters. Maybe better if so. Even if maybe this fourth would drain us of such moments, maybe deprive us of a night as that last with the proper care of the running elder, the ready ear for each other, the well-placed disagreements. Three of us were silent desires. Our fourth, if captive of the rain with us, would have become our center. Our only concern. The fourth would come home the least wet, the most tickled. Great how an unborn possibility could have such bright prospects.

Why every day is a ride

2007-02-15T23:54:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, I went home after classes, lunch with the girl, and my uneventful trip home. Seems always sad to call something uneventful. It’s like I either I didn’t have the eyes to explore the moment or there was no moment to be explored in the first place. Which is more sad? Anyway, maybe I did see some things. Maybe the few migraine pages of Bellow’s The Dean’s December were events in themselves. Maybe that English-speaking swell-breasted youth with a spongebob cap, a short braid, pedal pushers, and sweet-looking calves was an event. Especially because she’s seating across me. Especially because she put her legs up and possessed what should be a seat for three. Her eyes were on the cover of my book. Possibly, if I read this that "Why every day is a ride" six years and eighteen days from now, I would have forgotten the girl’s face. Even forget the flesh of her stomach when she tried to adjust the aircon and failed. There were two people with her, a tot and another girl with no shoulder straps. They sat in the seat in front of hers. With their backs to me, it is possible to forget them. Even this girl with white rubber shoes an arm's length away is forgettable. It is possible to someday say I had an uneventful ride.

Fire Pants

2007-02-15T23:32:00.002+08:00

Found him appalling. Hated the fact that I did, but I did. I mean, I wanted to find as much value as I could in a person. But he thinks that he controls his lies, that his lies are some sort of subversion – political and literary – and we of lesser intellect (and commensurate faith) could not presume to judge his most minute fib. Took me all my energy to keep myself from telling him that he was a compulsive liar, that his lies controlled him, and his lies had little political value because he – despite claims about the military lusting after his cellphone – had as much political value as a singular farmer. And what literary value? I discovered no truth in his claim that he won both fiction and poetry fellowships. Funny how a phone call’s worth of research can annihilate his illusory struggle and move me to view his tearful production of one amber lie. There, I wrote it, and having written my disgust, ceased to hate him. There must be a way to stroke his head as if it were a kitten’s.

About the Ides of February

2007-02-15T00:24:00.001+08:00

This comes to me, this old thing. A smile I have forgotten to wear. Do not look too surprised. See, I tried to shake it off with anger. Tears would have proved useless, so I abstained from squeezing them from my eyes. Then the choice of laughter, the only improbability that still made some sense. Yet there was no denying such an impervious pleasure. Acknowledge: my students have gotten themselves enemies. Hurrah for them. There remain things a friend could never teach them. No matter how perky, how depressed, how hostile.

Nadir

2007-02-09T23:51:00.000+08:00

Started too many things, continued enough. Troubling that I look forward, always forward. Possibly, I am not looking at my most intricate piece so far, my best student, my dearest organization. So far. Possibly I am looking at my last group, friend, and story. All our human grasping entails this. We never see the tip of our fingers.

Now and at the Hour

2007-02-05T01:11:00.000+08:00

Today at the Brebant dinner, we talked about the crushing of the minds of children and young men under the huge volume of things taught them. We agreed that an experiment was being carried out on the present generation of which it was impossible to predict the consequences. And in the course of the discussion somebody advanced the ironical idea that our present-day system of universal education might well deprive society of the educated man and endow it with the educated woman: not a reassuring prospect for the husbands of the future.

The Brothers Goncourt
Diary entry
February 5, 1884

Still here in Makati where I sit in this moment an hour after fiesta and ten hours before of my first class. Guadalupe! One of those nights when I locate myself within a prayer. You see, it was a Sunday of checking a chockfull of essays and poems. Two sets belonged to my two Humanities 160 classes. I usually resort to comparing the classes. But I just finished computing their partial grades and found no cause for contrast. At least, not according to the numbers. The two bore identical ratio of passing to failing students, 14:7 and 20:10. Exactly one damned third of each class failed the first half of my course. Now, if I fail to attract sleep within the next pair of hours – Guadalupe! – give me a bus where I won’t have to stand for the rest of my hundred-minute ride.

Empty Lot a Block Before the Curve

2007-02-04T02:52:00.000+08:00

I know how it will go. A row of resorts will pass, some road, mountain. Buko pie stands, then illegal funeral parlors, and more buko pie. Then come the boiled egg yellow facade of Olivarez. The bus will stop in front of this mall, a gas station where the jeeps that will take the curve lie in wait. UP COLLEGE, UP GATE. But before this mall, some small vending buildings before the station, the bus will pass by a vacant lot the size of a classroom. The viridian grass marks a time that I never experienced, nevertheless the time remains known to me: the greener days of Los Banos. This lot is the green shadow of rising cement. Off-center, I shall find a tree, short like a sidewalk tree, but lush, well-fed by a steady stream of foul waste. A sign on the tree, and I shall read it. Maybe it will announce glass-cutters. Or, like the other times, it will crudely advertise vulcanizing shops. Or maybe, as I read once or twice before, it will speak of keys and duplications. When I pass, this next time, this first time after week upon week of first times, shall I bother to read it? Or shall I sleep thirty seconds more, believe it gives NO VACANCY? There will be miles in my step down from the bus. Too little of this measure will belong to the coming gate.

Bait

2007-02-04T02:32:00.000+08:00

Home by 2am with very aching feet. Who’d be a courier?

Peter Hall
Diary entry
February 11, 1975

A person I knew loved lying as much as he or she hated being lied to. Another person I knew could not express her or his self from a spirit of gratitude. Another person I knew wanted people – people: let’s not call them children encouraged to read her or his blog and write her or him their heartfelt testimonies – to think she or he was against US Capital-I Imperialism. But this she or he was as much a President Arroyo to another Smith. She or he will never even give Nicole an oh so sorry. One of all the people I will ever know was touted a peace lover and would make love with the outrage that would rise from the pit of her or his stomach. Another person I knew would assure him or her, “It is not fear. You are righteous. It was a liar who said Dennis forgave you, you who were loved. Not yet such a thing as quits.” Another person I knew lost a phone and wanted everyone to make the intuitive leap and believe camouflaged fingers took it. Another person I knew would ask this person with kidnapped or hostaged phone, “have you read his blog?” One way or another. One day or another. God knows it is possible she or he would have the mind to do even this. Another person I knew would think I was – all along – writing about her or him.

daughter.rtf

2007-02-04T02:21:00.000+08:00

Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman, I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not a feminine characteristic. A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always on the defensive.

May Sarton
Diary entry
February 4, 1975

Endeavored to write versus the cold. Typed: “You go against a good thing and sometimes the good thing fights back.” Nice to have little need for fury. Just type away, generate heat between the bone of your finger and the plastic key. Type and type until that spark of faith: somewhere there must be fire. Scrolling along the pages I wrote and rewrote, I found something of value. I stroked the letters on the monitor as if they were strands. I traced the font and imagined depressions of an old lost pen. Saw the ink feather out to the white of the screen. I called the file "daughter.rtf" but felt need for a more specific name. Cold usurped my lungs the moment I understood that when I successfully renamed her, I would amount to deletion.

Garden

2007-02-04T02:16:00.000+08:00

Under the reptile scales of the date palm lotus-sat the Botanical Garden Master. Morning and her fingernails caught the sun. Her fingers stood as candles from her thighs. I approached her. Maybe she failed to notice. Maybe she knew so much about me that she did not condescend to care. What issued from her mouth was not the Aum exhale. She was breathing out No. With every long breath, No. In need of confidence, I sat alongside her and meditated on her No. How to accept No to fill life? How to grow content with life by sucking substance from it? No is difficult for artists in search for what is newest, what is – could it be a misnomer? – original. Whybecause No is an old word. A word before mothers and sires. No is especially hard for artists seeking what is oldest, what it is that came first. Whybecause No is an ancient word, but when they ask it if it is the oldest, No says its name like it’s the most recent fruit that suddenly made a garden out of the world. Heady with enlightenment, I said to the Master, "Teach me." She opened her mouth, blew out her answer to my nostrils. I thought of a score of foolish rejoinders, among them “Please, please teach me,” “Please do not teach me,” “Where is this garden,” and “By whose authority do you know all you know?” But the only words my tongue beat from my mouth was “Who then could embrace the No?” Her answer was so thoroughly cloaked in a cough that she could have said anything between All the Just to All of Us. Either way, I disbelieved her and went my way, my back heavy with someone’s laughter.

Ceasefire

2007-02-04T02:15:00.000+08:00

Woke up to a photograph of a mustachioed soldier of a nationality other than Filipino. He was drinking from his canteen, his eyes staring beyond his water, straight out to his front – which at the moment happened to be my left thumb. Rifle slung on his shoulder like a duffel bag of a forgotten wife’s imperishable laundry. He was in side view, so I failed to see what he was looking at. But my next moment cut me with a sense of inadequacy, but I attempted to restore myself by saying out loud to an anotherless morning that it was the picture that was incomplete, flat as it was, and spreading only to the size of an old man’s hand span. Picture ought to stretch to five yards or a mile, depending on what got my drinking soldier’s attention. Picture at a further distance from entirety, yes, if what he was looking at was an animal or an enemy because – unless that it or she was merely returning the soldier’s gaze – the responsible photograph ought to show what that it or she was looking at. For totality’s sake, if that it or she was looking at some other thing with eyes, then we needed rolls of photo paper. Ah me, I did not have a camera. No kilometric photo paper, so I better not blame myself, I said. Out loud. I could not see what my soldier saw. I could only see that he was looking. While drinking. Louder, I said that that was enough vision, given the limitations of white borders. Exactly ss the previous moment gave me a self-incompleteness to defeat, the next provided me a self-loathing to kick or persuade away. The picture, the picture! Hate the picture. The dimensions and nothing else. I said, loud. I looked at the unwilting photograph. I saw the soldier. He was looking out beyond his water. He was drinking from a canteen which seemed to me a grenade, which seemed to me a bloody good French kisser.

Watchbringer

2007-02-03T02:03:00.000+08:00

Thought it would take more than a gift watch to make me this giddyhappy. Thought it would take less. But then, it was given to me so I felt what I felt, and a watch was precisely what it took. Came from a student before I ended the school week, from a not-any-student. One of university’s writers, a hard worker and a consummate girl of letters. One of the few who actually believed in the need to read while writing. Listen while speaking. This fan of Genoveva Edroza-Matute. This high-spirited but quiet girl. This flat one of a human being. Too familiar a face that none of us knew how to say goodbye when she left for one of them States. This pure of dream girl. We had to convert her into a familiar phantom as soon as possible. We still had work to do. The ghost months, and then she returned the morning before closing shop. This sighting. And right in my very cubicle. Bearing news, bearing chocolates, with questions, with watch with face – all of which I had to take then brush away because two students were deeply scheduled for consultation. Work to do. It was all I was or could be. Watch was perfect.

Earthfriend

2007-02-01T14:21:00.000+08:00

Wish you a better day, my friend. Better than the ones you have been having lately. Cold wind out, and we both know how these things of weather can get abused in literary circling. Like a vulture. Don't let it get to you.

Take Smith Back

2007-01-05T04:55:00.000+08:00

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.

Bliss

2007-01-04T23:08:00.000+08:00

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?)

Pochero

2007-01-02T07:52:00.000+08:00

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.

Resolution

2007-01-01T10:52:00.000+08:00

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

2007-01-01T10:46:00.000+08:00

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.

Year's Fifty Plus

2006-12-27T22:02:00.000+08:00

Comic Books and Graphic Literature

1. Zsazsa Zaturnnah, by Carlo Vergara
2. The Bastard: Photostory, by John Jakes
3. Real Stuff, by Dennis Eichhorn and various artists
4. Sandman X: The Wake, by Neil Gaiman
5. Identity Crisis, by Brad Meltzer and artists Rags Morales and Michael Blair
6. Marvel Knights: Spider-man, vol 1, by Mark Millar and artists Terry Dodson and Frank Cho
7. The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore, and artists Brian Bolland and Mark Higgins
8. Batman: Haunted Knight, Jeph Loeb and Time Sale
9. Batman: Dark Victory, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
10. The Forensic Files of Batman, Doug Mench

Plays

1. The Shadow Box, by Michael Cristofer
2. Everything in the Garden, by Edward Albee
3. Bacchae, by Euripides, translated with extensive notes by Paul Woodruff

Poetry

1. Pukinggang, by Emmanuel Villajuan Dumlao
2. Pana-panahon: Isang Tanong, Isang Sagot, at Iba Pang Tula, by Aida F Santos
3. The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, by Cirilo Bautista
4. Angels and Fugitives, poems by Emmanuel Torres
5. Dark Hours, by Conchitina Cruz
6. Poems New and Collected, by Wislawa Szymborska
7. Pessoa & Co. , by Fernando Pessoa, edited and translated by Richard Zenith
8. Harvest Poems, by Carl Sandburg
9. White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, by Allen Ginsberg
10. The Unswept Room, by Sharon Olds
11. The Talking Tree: poems in prose, by Artur Lundkvist
12. Worlds Afire, by Paul B Janeczko
13. Vanishing Lung Syndrome, by Miroslav Holub
14. Fox: Poems 1998-2000, by Adrienne Rich
15. Rilke: Poems, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Fiction

1. Barabbas, by Par Lagerkvist
2. Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman
3. The Light of Day, by Graham Swift
4. In Our Strange Gardens, by Michel Quint
5. Live from Golgotha, by Gore Vidal
6. The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen R. Donaldson
7. The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan
8. An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, by Richard Brautigan
9. Revenge of the Lawn, by Richard Brautigan
10. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
11. Where I’m Calling From: The Selected Stories, by Raymond Carver
12. The Basic Kafka, by Franz Kafka
13. After the Quake, by Haruki Murakami
14. A Model World and Other Stories, by Michael Chabon

Philosophy, Science, and Other Supposed Non-fiction

1. A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber
2. The Tao of Power: Lao Tzu’s Classic Guide to Leadership, Influence, and Excellence, translated by RC Wing
3. Chuang Tzu in a Nutshell, by Chuang Tzu edited by Robert van de Weyer
4. The Use of Pleasure: Vol 2 of the History of Sexuality, by Michel Foucault
5. Natural Theology: Selections, by William Paley
6. Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Castration, by Ivan Ward
7. Words from the Myths, by Isaac Asimov
8. The Rant Zone, by Dennis Miller
9. The Knowing is in the Writing: Notes on the Practice of Fiction, by Jose Dalisay Jr.
10. The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life, by Julia Cameron

I'm

2006-12-27T22:01:00.000+08:00

She likens herself to fruit but which fruit I cannot say. There must remain private things. She likes listening to two songs at the same time, and her metaphor for this was rice and viand. The left earphone stems from her I-pod, the right from the player of her mobile. Not exactly correct to claim that she listens to different songs. For example, the song by Abbasil Valdez. For example, The Beachie Boys. She hates having only one song in the air. She would rather hear nothing. Silence could be many songs at once, she said to me. In turn, I said that there was this cliché I hated reading but always had to anyway – me being a writing teacher with ten fingers having no hold over one hundred and forty ballpens – and that cliché was “deafening silence”. But after I said that, there was silence. What kind of silence, I cannot say. Private things, still. For example, there was once a rose between us that neither of us ever saw before. Also, neither of us knew how to call it anything further than “rose”. I was about to volunteer something like “new rose,” but her suggestion buzzed in like a hungry bee, “Let’s you and me keep its variety a secret!” Okay, I said. It was the best secret too, perfect for keeping because neither of us possessed it. We loved having nothing to betray. But then, after this our more recent silence, she asked me, “How are you?” Me, I thought I knew where the croon in her voice was leading to. I said I was happy. I said it to kill that birdie strain of her voice. “If he’s cheating, leave him,” I said, and then and there, having said more than my happiness, I grew unhappy. “His metaphor for it was side dish,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m happy,” I told her. Felt for me the most honest thing to say. In hindsight, only one sound there ringed the truth: “I’m”. Which “I’m,” I’m not sure. “Me too, also sorry,” she said. Maybe more truth to her sounds. To this day, I can’t tell where her inquiry led to. Wherever it was, I hope she’s there. I know I’m not.

I

2006-12-21T11:37:00.000+08:00

It had been a slow day. It was still a slow day come early afternoon at the Freedom Park. Beautiful and slow. As if the day was posing for a picture and was curiously particular about the bend and angle of its back. And the naturalness of its pout. As if I had all the batteries in the world, all the film rolled into a pocket Mobius strip. But I had, in truth, no camera with me. Took me a long while to consider if maybe the day could instead fancy me writing it down. I decided to buy a pen and pad, the store was just a walk away, out the campus, and the items were not as expensive as a camera. That was what I told myself. Still what I keep telling myself. Costly. Perhaps I should have been less frank and just said that the items were less bulky than a camera, or that I was an idiot even with cameras that had only one button to speak of, or that I was never a thief of souls, or that I was predestined to travel light, lighter and lighter until the shattering of a whiff of air and it would have been more difficult to dispose of a camera than a sheet of sparkling poetry. With candor or none, I had to say something to myself, because it was a beautiful and slow day, because that same store a walk away sold cameras, because after failing to walk back to Freedom with one, I found the day either sighing or swooning – who could tell the difference on an afternoon with bad acoustics? Also because during the second I arrived, the second when a camera with a soul button would have clicked the day in, I had only written “It”. Or maybe just the “I” of that. Probably less. I spent evening until midnight to get it right on pen pad, “It was a slow day.” Then I went from there to several weeks of trying to get it right in one paragraph. Bought more paper for the purpose of my hours. Week upon week of writing and throwing away and trying to get it right and always coming back to Freedom to recapture a single day. But it had swooned or sighed its last. Getting it right does not amount to getting anything. Except older.

Cuz

2006-12-16T06:54:00.000+08:00

God I hate that I should call you Kuya when I do what I have to do, but there's the irony that I have to consider. And the thrill of a long chase. This is not your consideration, I know. Makes your life easier. Makes my life a hell to know yours is easier. Me, I have to write you down while all you have to do is strike. Now that I know I have your eyes, there's a tidbit I should tell you about. I want you to breathe. You ought to feel safe. Now that you let me know that I have your eyes, I can tell you this: you are not as unpredictable as you want to believe. Only the desperate enemy is unpredictable. Even the enemy who desperately wants despair but does not possess it is not really unpredictable. Now I know what she is to you. A shield. A shield, therefore you are not really as desperate as you want to appear, are you? Did you just sigh your relief, Kuya? Because I won't hit someone with glasses on?

Three Hard Cs

2006-12-15T18:32:00.000+08:00

Lighted night when we walked the campus. We were discussing the hypocrisy of transparent Christmas trees in the Philippines when I out and told my friend how much I hate the University’s season design and that I didn’t love her. She said that she actually adored the decorations. For one, the Christmas-lighted and enMangered Carabao Park seemed to her an inside out elementary classroom where each kid is tasked to bring a decor, and the teacher has to make art bloom from the jingle jumble given her. She was never successful. I wanted to offer the word “eclectic,” but I wouldn’t know how to defend three hard C syllables if she decided to shoot them down with yuletide spite. I just said that I couldn’t afford affections for any campus adorned like so. She nodded. Sometimes a person’s nod means that she wants to say something, and she’s cutting you off with her chin to say her something. Sometimes it means that she’s thinking and isn’t paying attention to what you’re saying, but there’s her nod to comfort you into ignoring the fact that she’s thinking outside of you saying. Then the times when a nod means yes. Times like that don’t always amount to holidays.

Had-Been-List

2006-12-11T02:50:00.000+08:00

1. Slept through most of my dreams again. I miss my lucidity.
2. Today's all about editing my current story, checking the twenty sentences times sixty students of Hum160, and reading the pieces for tomorrow's workshop. Must also adjust the lesson plan. I can do some of these things out of the house.
3. Father and his brother out at the bad place.
4. Somebody's sick. I want her out of the bad place.
5. I heard of a monastery in Bukidnon where the monk is an excellent chef and Sunday means hearty - or should I say soulful? - breakfast.
6. Wherever I decide to work today, I won't be there.

To-Be-List

2006-12-10T08:19:00.000+08:00

Room of Once Home

2006-12-10T08:00:00.000+08:00

Students in my cubicle. Many, so I had to Indian sit on my desk. The more perceptive ones asked Why did you leave the previous school? The more audacious ones asked If you loved teaching so much, why did you even leave? Was it because it was only your scratch paper school? Were they guinea pig students? Your colleagues, were they books walking, motherboards talking, Bunsen burners out to blue lunch? Almost a chorus, they asked You wanted all of that shelved? I could not say No. Although technically, those were not my exact reasons. But before I could say what I felt the most convincing among my motivations, they had already allowed the questions to run rampant. Did you just discard it like that? Your scratch paper school in some university wastebasket? Before I could say my indefinite No or my equally irresolute Yes, they had already asked Did your co-teachers dislike you? Did you dislike them? Would you rather they were in glass jars of formalin? Your students, did they mutate? Your guinea pig students, did they mutate right out of your computations like numbers exceeding the Excel sheet, leaking out of the plastic monitor frame, invading the room, your guinea pig students? Did they mutate? Did they die? After they said that, there was a hush, and maybe that meant it was my turn to speak No! Surely, they have not died. That was the last thing they'd do. You see, I left the school because of a delinquent classroom. It just would not cooperate, would play with the lights, never allowed the installation of fans. Room blackened its walls at noon and relaxed its ceiling when the rains came. Played with the acoustics so I had to shout sometimes, whisper sometimes. Room changed board from green to white at will. I had to use a knife to get anything written down. Then the classroom disappeared, a no-show at the final exams. Got everyone expelled, me included. Not an honorable exit for any of us. The door left before I could say goodbye. I said, expecting to end the telling. The more perceptive ones were respectful, let me finish, gave the polite smile. Then they looked at the audacious ones who were squirming with their silence. The glance seemed like a cue. They all began wondering out loud Did they multiply with a drop of your water? Did they develop extra elbows, spiral belly buttons? Your guinea pig students, did they shrink or did they evolve out of reach?

Thank Grind Friday

2006-12-08T19:29:00.000+08:00

Back in Makati, remembering things. That’s what I do. I remember things for a living. Past always grows so I’m never at a loss. If I somehow run out of resources, well, that would be a day to remember. Job and all, time still sucks. Wanted to wake up an hour or, okay, two after midnight. Got up at five despite a series of unsleeping alarms. First on my list of things to do was to write up a list of things to do. Then, answer the phone messages, some almost a week old. One advised me: smile, smile, and not to get too addicted to the work. Followed the first two while I set my other things in order: pen, pad, hot chemicals, sugar. While stretching some, I thought of several replies. None of which would fly. One unhatched answer: the work stays after the people go. Neurotic approach to life, people could say. Sensible observation too. Could do me good, had I time to listen. Listen sounded like a cuddly word to put on the list. So I put it there, right after remember things.

Thursday

2006-12-04T06:11:00.000+08:00

Verge of a new week. Still in Manila but Laguna in a couple of hours. It's December, yes, but there's a taste of watermelons in the air. I sniff some. Turn my head three sixty. My hopes for the week has been standing there, watching what I'm typing about this door to the week. "I'm here," he says. I see you are, I type. "Are you afraid?" he asks. Why should I be afraid of you, you're my hopes? I type and before I realize I just answered a question with a question which sometimes seems intelligent. But how to be intelligent when your hopes is looking over your shoulders, watching what you're doing? It pains me that I just typed another question. I'm this student thinking out loud, one mistake after another. My hopes for the week's beard grazes my shoulder. "What disappoints you more? That your hopes turned out to be old? Or that he's not a lady?" I was disappointed. But since he cushions my morning with questions, I think I can live with him. He'll just be in for a week. I may lose my hopes in the thick of things anyway, maybe by Thursday. Don't mind me, I type. You're a good one, you can watch TV, stay in Makati or Los Banos, I type. Wherever, I type. I can give you fare if you want to go to Rizal. I can... But I cannot. The taste of watermelons is not around anymore. Such a tasteless air. Maybe I should fry danggit all morning. Make lots of coffee.

Nine point exploration of sticky keys

2006-12-02T09:49:00.000+08:00

1. I grow increasingly fond of Taralets (tara tara tara lets!)
2. Lian, Batangas is a breath away.
3. There is a blow to be struck and I’m not supposed to deal it.
4. About a girl.
5. Cancel them sticky keys.
6. A cat came in the house last night smelling the tuna that did not exist until I cooked it into the pasta this morning (with Lian just a breath away). Naturally, I shooed her last night.
7. My packs are bagged, Batangas or not.
8. I got my pillbox, my billfold, the soundless pen-pad combo, the charger without bothering with the phone, and pages of the next book which I hope to drown before it drowns me.
9. The striped tail either belongs to the cat or to the girl.

Friend you are

2006-05-29T06:23:00.000+08:00

Friend you are, keeping your word the way you did. Go read all your feminism books and shove them where the sun does not shine, where nothing shines not even your petty fictions. Oh, you have done this many times to me, and I never let those matter. But to him? And to her? I will not rue the day I met you. The day comes - for this is an old plan - when I will cease meeting you. You - you already know it - will rue that day.

You fear your enemy more than you love your friend. I am not one to go where I am not wanted.

On the other hand, you, friend. I thought you would fail. I feared it with all my heart. Shame on me for even entertaining the idea. You who the enemy counted on to be the soft spot, what solid matter you are made of! Twice this past month, I yielded to your wisdom. I regret neither of my withdrawals. Now, I rejoice in two facts, that you are a good man, and that I know it. My honor that we swallowed the jagged meat together. Now, let us drink the sweet water. If strife should come between you and me - for the future is the future - I swear that I will wound myself twice before wounding you.

This world will make a ruined man out of me, an humbled man because of loud pronouncements such as this, an absurd man because of my strange and futile craft. You will not be there come my fall, friend. I shall not allow it.

Woman Nineteen

2006-05-29T04:57:00.000+08:00

Years before me, Robert Bly, astride his horizon, saw a starfish with nineteen feet. I read this piece of his on my second or third time on the nudist beach. I had gone there enough times to wear the I have seen everything scowl as if it were my true face. Alone, I had roamed there enough times to know that a book in a nudist beach is just another cloth, just like white shirts and whiter toilets, like calculators and cigarettes, like average-wage jobs and go-for-broke vacations, exactly like the cities and the sea.

I stopped bringing books to the beach. I learned to stop measuring the morning sun by how good it was as reading light. Rather, I walked, often jumping from one tree shadow to another rather than wear the practical sandals. Sometimes, I walked long enough to withstand the heat of the sand. Always, I walked my I have seen everything and I have been everywhere walk. Expertly so too, until the summer afternoon when I walked right into something new.

A young man stood four or so trees away from me. He had my back to me as he stared down a woman lying on the shore. Was the woman dead? Thus went my first thought and, with it, the bitter swallowing of the fact that I had not seen everything. Wait. Maybe the man just some greenhorn, standing and staring the way he did? No. Something felt off. He stood too close. Nudist newbies look obliquely and from a distance. Almost all of them wore eyeshades, sitting cocksure, as if they have gone to these places since circumcision or elementary graduation. Whichever came first. Then, he turned his head as if a child caught looking up his mother’s skirt. I was walking toward him when he saw me, then he walked away.

When I came close to the spot where the young man stood, I saw that the still woman who lay on the sand had many, many teats. As my head usually works, I was certain there were nineteen even before I recalled the poem. As my head usually works too, I instantly shrugged the number off pending a proper survey. For in fact, that was a years-ago poem, a bunch of words, but strange flesh lay before me under the same sun, with the same sure waves attending our encounter.

I endowed the manifold breast long seconds of regard. Then a breath before I noticed that I was standing on the same spot where the young man stood and that the position was the nearest possible place to the woman without getting in the way of her sun.

Then I started counting the teats, by the nipple, to be sure. I counted nineteen! Each a finger or a bulbous fist topped with a hazelnut aureole and slightly stronger-hued nipple. However, there lay no equity of sunlight among them. Only five wholly basked in the sun. Five lords of the chest, pillars of the woman earth! Elect by their size and position, these five threw shadows that prevented the full tanning of their brethren.

I counted, and then I counted again. I felt a curious gladness to keep my shadows off her, to preserve her golden chiaroscuro. Even the shadow of my right pointer made sure not to intrude as the finger took its survey. I counted for the fourth or fifth time, until I felt certain that I did not miss a nipple that could have been tucked between an armpit and another teat or count one extra where there could have been a mere fold of skin or stomach.

Nineteen! Somehow feeling full, I left. Promptly, another took the spot as if relieving me of my post. I knew I was one of many who came, who saw, who counted. Then we, each in our own turn, made our way in the shifts of sand and surf.

Did it occur to the young man before me or the faceless man after me or to any of those who came before or after whomever that, hey, maybe we were the ones counted? Nineteen nipples and five of them, interestingly or interestedly, were erect. I cannot know if the thought occurred to anybody else. After having given up print and both sides of the page, I publish this piece to communicate. Please consider this possibility: we were the ones counted!

While I have no way of knowing how they observed or reflected on what they saw, until any one of them comes forth to contradict me, I remain dead sure of three things. One, we all came back to that stripped stretch of shore hours or years after and did not find her; two, we all took for granted that she was alive; and three, not one of us remembers if the woman was smiling.

Empty Lot a Block Before the Curve

2005-11-07T01:39:00.000+08:00

Empty Lot a Block Before the Curve

The swath of light climbs up the skyscraper
Around the corners of white prisms and spikes.
The inside torso stands up in a plug of gun-metal.
The shadow struggles to get loose from the light.
Shall I say I'm through and it's no use?
Or have I got another good fight in me?

Evening Questions
Carl Sandburg

November eight or nine. A row of resorts will pass, some road, then a funeral parlor, buko pie stands here and there, then come the boiled egg yellow facade of Olivarez. The bus will stop in front of this mall, a gas station where wait the jeeps that will take the curve: UP GATE.

But before this mall, some small buildings before the station, the bus will pass by a vacant lot the size of a classroom. The viridian grass marks a time that I did not even experience, nevertheless it is known to me: the greener days of Los Banos. This lot is the green shadow of rising cement. Off-center, I'll find a tree, short like one of those sidewalk trees, but lush, well-fed by a steady stream of gray carbon. A sign on the tree, and I will read it.

Sometimes it says glass-cutters. Other times, crude advertisements for vulcanizing shops. Once or twice, it spoke of keys and duplications. When I pass, this next time, this first time after five semesters of first times, will I bother to read it? Or will I sleep thirty seconds more and believe that it reads NO VACANCY?

There will be miles in that step from the bus. Too few of them will belong to the coming gate.

Will

2005-07-17T20:41:00.000+08:00

Don't tell me
I can eat
you up I
will

Go Again

2005-07-12T11:54:00.000+08:00

And again. Won't we ever come to terms with the diligence of time, weaving and interweaving us until we're all undone?

Then snip. And here we

The Dangerous Pattern

2005-07-11T12:58:00.000+08:00

A man finds a watch partly
buried in the sands
of an ancient desert.
While dying of thirst,
he dreams the possibility of God.

A people finds a voice tape partly
buried in pools
of cloak and red tape.
While cringing from crisis,
the people dreams of being God.